Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I was promised a recession.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Motown is Joe-Town!

Their freedom requires your slavery.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?

Russia bombs Ukraine’s maternity hospitals; Republicans in the House can’t sort out supporting Ukraine.

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

I’m sure you banged some questionable people yourself. We’re allowed to grow past that.

I also would like a pony to improve my balloon juice experience.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

Bogus polls are all they’ve got left. Let’s bury these fuckers at the polls a year from now.

The revolution will be supervised.

You cannot shame the shameless.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

…and a burning sense of injustice to juice the soul.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

Nothing worth doing is easy.

You are here: Home / Anderson On Health Insurance / GOTV for Health this weekend

GOTV for Health this weekend

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Maine is trying to expand Medicaid. There have been bi-partisan bills that have routinely passed both chambers of the Maine Legislature. Governor LePage (R-ME) has routinely vetoed these bills. That cycle may be broken next week as Maine has a ballot question on whether or not the state will accept Medicaid expansion.

So if you are in Maine or New Hampshire and have some time this weekend, help with the GOTV and help your fellow Mainiacs.

Reader Interactions

45Comments

  2. 2.

    Kay

    Referendums are fun to work on because people will actually talk about the issue – they’re forced to focus on the thing itself rather than their personal feelings about candidates or partisan ID. That lopsided polling is common too if the idea is popular- some of the minimum wage referendums in ’06 passed by 60-65% so we’re not so divided after all!

    If Democrats have a popular ballot question they should add a voting rights measure- just tack it on in the same election. Then one can piggyback the voting rights measure (which fewer people care about) on the popularity of the main ballot question. We did this in Ohio once and it worked.

  5. 5.

    Kay (not the front-pager)

    Other votes for healthcare next week: NJ and VA governorships, and in Utah for Jason Cheffetz’s district. Ralph Northam in VA in particular can use our help. There has been some friendly fire sniping in the final days of the race. And it is particularly important to defeat Ed Gillespie, who has been running an explicitly racist, Trumpian race. If Gillespie wins we can expect overt racism to be embraced by Republicans nationwide. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

  6. 6.

    msdc

    And just think, Maine wouldn’t need a referendum at all if all those people who support Medicaid expansion settled on *one* candidate instead of splitting their votes and electing a governor who can honestly be described as Stupid Trump.

    Virginians, take notice.

  7. 7.

    Elizabelle

    @Kay (not the front-pager): Yes! Democrats for the victory, in VA and NJ, but particularly in Virginia. Northam is a great guy. As are Justin Fairfax and Mark Herring. Enormous stakes.

    Good luck Maine.

    And I like the idea of putting voting rights on the ballot.

    Shame on the Roberts court. Shame. John Roberts is gonna look like Roger B. Taney and Dred Scott. He helmed Citizens United, overturning the Voting Rights Act, and shivved Obamacare. Awful, awful man. Corporations have no souls.

    I hope Roberts and Kennedy realize how badly they fucked up. They may care more about their reputations, but should care about their fellow Americans. They apparently don’t.

  9. 9.

    WereBear

    @JMG: Overt racism will be the entire Republican platform for 2018 whether or not Northam wins (I hope he does). What else are they going to use?

    What else to they have? “We’re stealing your money, but will give you all the racism and sexism you want!”

  11. 11.

    Scotius

    @WereBear:

    We’re stealing your money, but will give you all the racism and sexism you want!

    I wouldn’t be surprised to see that on a poster. A lot of norms have been cast aside in the last 10 years or so.

  12. 12.

    Elizabelle

    @Another Scott: The filthy Richmond Times Disgrace website front page right now. They endorsed the entire GOP ticket. I never read why.

    But here’s what’s up: http://www.richmond.com

    Photo of Gillespie.

    Republican Ed Gillespie: A Reagan conservative tries to appeal and prevail in the age of Trump

    Photo of Northam:

    With quiet sturdiness and a doctor’s touch, Democrat Ralph Northam tries to hold off upset in Virginia governor’s race

    Reagan conservative. Upset in the works. Subtle, Disgrace.

    I voted early in my blood red Virginia county. (Temporary abode.) Nice lady working the polling place: “We don’t like Northern Virginia picking our governor.”

    Me. “mmmmm.”

    Such a gorgeous rural area. Took a drive and then a long walk after that one.

  14. 14.

    JMG

    @Elizabelle: You don’t have to take that. A simple “everyone in the state is a Virginian” is non-confromtational and true. If she wants to take it further, it’s on her.

  15. 15.

    satby

    @Elizabelle: that’s rural people everywhere in this country: seething resentment against the urban areas. Not just because more minorities live there, but often also because that’s where the smarter of their offspring left to go live too. Nothing makes it clearer to them that the future for rural areas is kind of bleak than their own children choosing to live somewhere else.

  16. 16.

    Another Scott

    @Elizabelle: J and I are in NoVA and just got back from a short vacation to Monticello, hiking McAfee Knob, and driving and hiking along the Blue Ridge Parkway and Skyline Drive up to Front Royal. We were planning on hiking Old Rag but heard about a woman who broke her foot/ankle along the 1/2 mile scramble over boulders (and had to be rescued), and decided we weren’t up for that this time… :-/

    I was expecting to see more “Protect our Monuments and our History”-type stuff, but I only noted one sign like that. There were few overt political signs, and Northam did have some representation (though Gillespie was ahead there).

    It was our first time in those places, so I don’t have any way of making comparisons. But we saw, much, much more Trump stuff in Gatlinburg TN last year. So I’m taking the lack of (apparent) enthusiasm for the Teabaggers and Trump’s minions to be a good thing.

    Fingers crossed!!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  19. 19.

    WereBear

    @satby: Nothing makes it clearer to them that the future for rural areas is kind of bleak than their own children choosing to live somewhere else.

    And it does not have to be this way. The Web has decoupled location and work in some ways. You can have a high tech career in a rural area. They could revitalize their towns by adapting.

    But that is what they are refusing to do.

  20. 20.

    JMG

    One minor but annoying aftereffect of the 2016 election is that the MSM and many Democrats (!) assume that the Democratic candidate is bound to lose any election that’s even close to close. And Northam might! Close means close! But he could win for the same reason and nobody in the elite political world sees it that way,

  21. 21.

    Elizabelle

    Interesting story from The Daily Progress in Charlottesville (from their Lynchburg, VA affiliate): Democracy Vineyards closing after Thanksgiving

    I’ve seen their wine in local grocery stores, and won’t buy it because I assumed the owners were right-wing conservatives with their own personal tax shelter. Red, white and blue labels. Funny how the right-wing appropriation of actually good words — Freedom, Liberty — will do that.

    Anyway, the name was part of their problems. (It seems their most insurmountable was location.) Anyway:

    Prokop and Turpin mentioned multiple reasons for deciding to close the vineyard, including location, branding, decisions they made regarding winemaking and promotional opportunities not being sufficient to sustain or grow the business.

    Democracy Vineyards is off U.S. 29 on Mountain Cove Road, but many of the county’s other wineries, breweries and cideries developed in the western side of the county along Route 151.

    “We’ve enjoyed being in business here, but we just never really got a local foothold. We were too far from Charlottesville, and the Charlottesville people were going over to 151. We just never really got enough traffic to sustain the operation,” Turpin said.

    …. Naming the business Democracy Vineyards also might have played a role into why the business didn’t do as well, they said in the newsletter. They chose the name because they’re “history buffs” and “thought it would be fun to decorate the tasting room with our collection of historic and international campaign stuff and play off that theme in our name, Democracy,” they said.

    “It didn’t occur to us that some folks would have a negative reaction to that name until we encountered that repeatedly at wine festivals and from comments by some customers. By then, it was too late and too costly to re-brand,” they said.

    They should have rebranded. Their customers were warning them.** Ah well. Sound like nice folks; they learned a lot, and it’s a cautionary tale.

    Here’s their website with link to the newsletter.

    ** or so I’d assume. The GOP is all about “democracy.” They just don’t want Democrats to actually, you know, vote.

  22. 22.

    Elizabelle

    And. The Democracy Vineyards owners are Democrats. Mrs. used to work for Marcy Kaptur.

    And my being repulsed by the red white and blue labeling is probably an exhibit of confirmation bias. I wonder how much that happened, and how much seeing “Democra…” in the label was a problem.

    They needed to name their winery “off the beaten path” or something … the memorabilia could be a surprise when visitors arrived ….

  23. 23.

    MomSense

    Thank you so much, Richard. We are working so hard on this issue but of course horrible ads are hitting that really distort the issue.

  25. 25.

    Elizabelle

    @Amir Khalid: Yes. That’s true.

    Am laughing, because Satby mentioned “confirmation bias” in the previous thread, and it would seem these vineyard owners literally got hit by “both sides” on this one.

    When people could find them at all.

  26. 26.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Elizabelle: Funny how the right-wing appropriation of actually good words — Freedom, Liberty — will do that.

    I don’t know if it’s still the case, but as of a few months ago, the Sirius/XM channel that features Hannity and his ilk was the “Patriot” channel.

    Made a google to see if this was still the case. Not only is it still true, one of their “Patriots” is the NRA “news” show

  27. 27.

    frosty

    @Elizabelle: At least she didn’t call it “Occupied Virginia” which was something I heard years ago in Richmond when I was working for Arlington County.

  28. 28.

    kindness

    And the bonus for all the Mainers out there? You get to kick LePage in the butt one more time really good before he’s tossed out the door.

  29. 29.

    Amir Khalid

    @Elizabelle:
    “Democracy” is a loaded word no matter where you are on the political spectrum. People have been fighting over their idea of it for millennia. Were it my winery, I might have played it safe and not picked that name.

  30. 30.

    MomSense

    @satby:

    That is such an important insight. As long as I can remember the lament has been that our best and brightest leave our state because they can’t find good jobs in their fields. The problem is that it’s usually the Republicans who cynically deploy this problem as the justification for policies that caused the problem and that now make it worse.

    The University of Maine has one of the best engineering programs in the country. There are not enough jobs here for them because of the austerity programs we have had since long before there was the term austerity. You go to a rural town meeting and people will show up to vote against a playground because they did chores when they were kids. They didn’t have playgrounds and the kids these days won’t learn the value of work if they are given free time to play.
    This same attitude is applied to repairing/replacing schools, bridges, roads – every damn thing we ever try to do. Then they wonder why the civil engineers leave to work in places where people want to build things.

  31. 31.

    Elizabelle

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: Patriot! That’s the other word I was trying to remember. Also, Opportunity. And now “Access” is code for: look, but don’t touch.

    @Amir Khalid: They are sadder and wiser.

    I wonder if the wine is any good. Might buy a bottle. If it’s not pricey, since it’s an unknown ….

  34. 34.

    satby

    @MomSense: I saw it in the part of Michigan when I lived there. They continually voted for Republicans, continually lost ground in standard of living, and watched the smarter kids leave for better lives in more urban areas. And resented the cities for “stealing from them”.
    By the time I left, after living there 8 years, they were ripping up paved roads and letting them go back to gravel because paved roads required money they didn’t have for maintenance. Just fucking nuts.

  35. 35.

    Elizabelle

    @satby: We need to beat back the rightwing news machine, and especially Fox News.

    It’s making the Murdochs rich, and turning swathes of red America into ungovernable and inhospitable places. Which is a shame, because we live in a beautiful country, and most people have their good points.

    It’s sad to see something making people so damned backwards. For profit. On purpose.

  36. 36.

    FlipYrWhig

    @Elizabelle: Sometimes I feel like the whole country is devolving into jocks vs. nerds. And I’m losing interest in what happens to the jocks. Their lives are sad? Too fucking bad.

  38. 38.

    Redshift

    @Elizabelle:

    I voted early in my blood red Virginia county. (Temporary abode.) Nice lady working the polling place: “We don’t like Northern Virginia picking our governor.”

    Yeah, terrible how the places with way more people get more votes, right?

  40. 40.

    frosty

    @Elizabelle: Yep. Athough there are People’s Republics all over the place: Chapel Hill, Austin. etc. I liked “Occupied” because it had that Civil War (oops, War of Northern Aggression) touch as well.

  45. 45.

    neldob

    I like to co-opt patriot, freedom, liberty, family. Reclaim them from the fools, confuse the enemy. Once had someone tell me I couldn’t be a patriot if I was a progressive. Watch me. They offer me a flag pin after 9/11, I took 5. Heh. It doesn’t take much to confuse em.

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