I’m back after my visit to the rural red Dakotas, and I guess I should have something smart to say about the attitudes in that place, but I have very little to add to what’s obvious to the readers here: a steady diet of Fox News is impossible to overcome. Young and old, most of the people I know in my old hometown believe a bunch of lies and bullshit, and there’s no getting past it. (Here’s a good piece by Amanda Marcotte on that topic, thanks to my brother.)
What’s interesting to me is the stark divisions that the pandemic reveals about the people I know there. The 4th is a big deal in my old hometown, so I ran into a lot of my old friends and acquaintances, many of whom have moved to “the big city”. Almost uniformly, the people I know who are vaccinated have college degrees and/or live in urban areas. The less educated are less vaccinated, no matter their politics. If I saw someone wearing a mask indoors, it was notable. Yet, the COVID hospitalization and death rates aren’t much different from those in New York, which I attribute to a couple of factors. One is that the vaccination rate among the elderly is pretty good. Another is that a lot of the younger people had COVID already and have some degree of immunity.
I still think there are a couple of things that Democrats could do in the Dakotas. The first is to at least decently fund candidates for federal office. A million bucks, or even $500K, guaranteed to anyone who will run for House or Senate is a worthwhile investment, because the local news will cover you if you’re running, and a candidate with a non-zero chance of beating the incumbent will cause Republicans to spend a lot of money that they wouldn’t otherwise. Second, some third party PAC needs to throw some money into anti-Noem efforts. These include funding a lawsuit against Noem for turning the South Dakota National Guard into a mercenary army funded by big donors, and a non-stop social media campaign to highlight her failures. She’s living in a friction-free Fox-powered world, and someone needs to throw some sand into the gears.
Old School
For next year’s Senate races, is there anyone who could challenge John Hoeven or John Thune? There doesn’t appear to be any announced Democratic candidates yet.
raven
MY RWNJ buddie’s cable broke and he could only get HBO. He went on an on about how much he liked not watching the news and how it had lowered his anger. It didn’t last.
PsiFighter37
Would you believe me if I told you that in the summer of 2004, both at-large representatives and all the senators from ND and SD were Democrats? Hard to believe.
Ohio Mom
PsiFighter37:
George McGovern represented South Dakota in the House and the Senate — George McGovern!
Mike in NC
Give the Dakotas back to the original owners.
MattF
@PsiFighter37: And George McGovern (!) was a South Dakota politician. !! . It would be nice to have a plausible explanation for the change. I know, Fox Fox Fox… but that seems inadequate.
ETA: I agree w Ohio Mom. WTF??
Old School
@PsiFighter37: See? Voter ID works!
Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix
@Old School: There’s no state Democratic party to speak of in SD, and no statewide D office holders, but someone runs every cycle.
On McGovern: McGovern re-built the SD Democratic party by traveling the state and putting together lists. He convinced Republicans to vote for him as a person, not as a party representative, and he delivered on issues important to residents (principally agriculture). So, other than Fox painting horns and tails on all Democrats, another factor is the demise of the family farm.
Ohio Mom
MattF @6:
What’s so strange about agreeing with me?
mistermix @8:
This gives me more perspective on the disaster that is the Ohio Democratic Party. At least we have one.
Starfish
@raven: You really should be a good friend and go over and make sure his cable breaks again.
Elizabelle
@MattF: I think Fox, Fox is a lot of it.
It’s designed to look like the big 3 networks evening news broadcasts the (elderly!) viewers grew up with.
It presents a distorted and perverted picture of the world, repeats its lies over and over and over and over, and pretty much brainwashes the viewer.
The reports of [grand-]parents, relatives and friends who returned somewhat to their previous states after the drug — Fox News — is removed is striking.
Fox News amplified rightwing ugliness — there has always been a market for it, in every country. It gave its viewers/believers permission to crawl out from under those rocks and believe there are more of them than exist.
The audience becomes — on purpose — polarized and ungovernable. And now some of the loopiest are actively traitorous. “We’re polarized, what can you do?” say our ridiculous and specious media types.
None of this was by accident.
We cannot afford Fox News and the amplification of lies and evil. You can NEVER teach enough critical thinking to combat it. Never. It is a poison.
It is an evil, and needs to be dealt with. Joseph Goebbels hiding behind the First Amendment is a level of damage that a democracy cannot sustain.
We should not be so terrified of every single fucking election. We did not used to be. But here we are.
ian
I can attest to the power of the fact free Noem world, my sister’s husband’s family is from South Dakota, and she is the most awesomest awesomer who ever awesomed, and her brave stance against evil masks shows the true way forward in a pandemic (how did the Dakotas spend so much time on top of the lists of States with Covid? Fake news…), and the real evil people are the ones stopping the rest of the country from coming to South Dakota to baste in the power of Mt. Rushmore and Sturgis (when did we ban interstate travel?).
If there is an argument that can get through, I do not know it. Alas, it is our duty to keep trying.
“Do not despair, and if you do despair, then continue onwards in despair” -Burke
MattF
@Ohio Mom: I meant ‘WTF’ as a general complaint, not as a comment on our agreement. Sorry about the ambiguity. Gotta watch out for that.
West of the Rockies
Republicans were not always this willfully, spitefully stupid. Fox has taken over as the main chemical agent, but long before Fox there was Limbaugh and his clones. In office was the ZERO-honor-having Gingrich. They bred the enraged, facts-free QOP circus aflame today. Trump saw it and became the ringleader.
Ohio Mom
MattF@13
I get it — a moment of amazement that it really is true, Great minds think alike.
Its been a stressful week here at Ohio Household, I guess I am super sensitive right now.
Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix
@ian: Here’s the difference between Democrats and Republicans when it comes to rising stars. AOC has been taking shit from Republicans for-fucking-ever. Noem gets some attention but nothing like the coordinated campaign launched at AOC. Yet, Noem is not great, and not a lot of non-Fox watchers know her. We can introduce her as an extremist, terrible governor at a relatively low cost, using the lawsuit (for example) and some good social media.
germy
Poe Larity
I fully support the American Holocaust Museum at Mt. Rushmore. Hopefully, our new Interior Secretary can make progress on that.
piratedan
@West of the Rockies: I think we have to understand something really fundamental is in play here… Fox News makes it easy… easy… in a world where if you’re now moving into middle age or have been around long enough to see a couple of generations follow the amount of social and technological change is simply incredible… in my generation, we were cutting mixtapes on cassette to give to girls to share with them the music that we liked… and now, you don’t need any media at all, just a shared list on an online application. You would have to catch the national news followed by the local news, and now, any type of reporting slant you might imagine from anywhere is online and within reach, courtesy of your phone. So… in the face of that, being gay being acceptable, people transitioning between genders slowly gaining acceptance, all of these changes being lived thru, Fox is easy.
You’re white and older and because you were once in charge, Faux believes you should still be and they agree with you and sitting down with them allows these people to long for how things were ( no matter how shitty those days were, its the youngsters who have lost their way, coerced by those evil liberuls). Reinforce ad-infinitum, no topics that would give you pause or brought up or if they are, they’re already nicely framed for consumption where blame is properly assigned to the usual suspects.
Fox is easy, life is hard, give in to Fox and stop thinking about politics because you have bigger problems like why is your granddaughter considering dating that Filipino fella….. and why the bank wants to foreclose, don’t they know you sold out to Aggrofarms a few months ago?
sab
@Ohio Mom: Also too Earl Pomeroy was their Congressman for 20 years. His main interest was preserving Social Security. He voted for Obamacare knowing that it would end his political career. Great guy
ETA Earl was ND, not SD. Same point though. Dakotas have changed so much.
Ksmiami
@Elizabelle: agreed. Take them off the air. Indict and imprison the traitors who run the place.
jimmiraybob
But I thought Fox had gone commie-Marxist liberal woke? Are the Dakotas really that far to the radical-left? (/sarcasm if not obvious)
Ten Bears
It’s like going home to find everyone drunk and strung out on meth.
It’s like body-snatchers or somethin’, they’re not the same people …
Edmund Dantes
@MattF: read Perlstein’s books starting with “before the storm” about the Goldwater campaign
Chief Oshkosh
@Elizabelle:
I think instead of “ungovernable,” it’s that they simply don’t believe in fully-participatory government. They are quite happy to be “governed” by a ruler, told what to do even by a tyrant, as long as it’s someone who allows them to be in the almost-ruling class.
Suzanne
The National Review piece that Marcotte links to underscores the biggest resentment, and Marcotte doesn’t make the point explicitly enough, IMHO…. They believe lies because their relative social status is threatened. The dude is doing nothing but complaining that Trump supporters can’t get social access to high-status women. This is all a reaction to status threat.
Almost Retired
@piratedan: Very good point, and I agree that much of the appeal of Fox for its viewers is confirmation of their biases and freedom from confronting challenging ideas. But, the “not so easy” part about watching Fox (if you must) is the CONSTANT THREAT OF CRISIS and the OH MY GOD THE BARBARIANS ARE AT THE GATE.
It’s absolutely exhausting to watch. I cannot imagine inhabiting a world in which changing the name of a plastic spud toy augurs the decline of civilization. And for the record, Potato Head’s pronouns are “they, “them,” and “theirs.” That’ll set ’em off.
burnspbesq
@Ksmiami:
Can’t be done. You know it. I know it. Every second you spend thinking about it is a second you will never get back.
The problem with basic freedoms is that either everybody has them or nobody has them. And if nobody has them, then how are we different from Belarus?
Suzanne
@Chief Oshkosh:
Yesssss.
They are emitting the primal screams of mediocre white dudebros. They don’t really have first principles. They have social status interests and that is all.
Nicole
@Elizabelle: I agree. So much destruction done by FOX News. And people commenting on it putting viewers in a perpetual state of anger, which is a very addictive state to be in, are spot on. I had that experience from the left with Olbermann’s show, back when he was the only person on-air criticizing the Iraq War. I initially tuned in because it was such a relief to hear someone telling the truth about what a nightmare it was, but I got hooked on the sense of moral outrage the show gave me, to the point where I was counting down the hours to 8PM every night to get my hit. As it was only one hour a day, I was able to recognize the signs of addiction and stop watching, but I can’t imagine the rewiring that’s happened in the brains of people who have FOX on all. Day. Long. I know I have family members I would give anything to get them to turn the channel from their conservative fixes. (And they know; they change the channel when family comes over. It’s like them running to hide their hash pipe. except they’re not 16; they’re in their 70s)
Ksmiami
@burnspbesq: we can absolutely deal with incitement as having legal ramifications as well as civil penalties. It’s one thing to yell on a soap box that the rapture is coming; it’s another to try to undermine constitutional government every day. And frankly, with cord cutting, we can start demanding that cable companies ditch Fox. It’s this or I do not see how violent civil war is avoided
NotMax
Noem is a sizeable fish in a very small pond and, like Palin, I see her being nibbled into last week’s spoilt leftovers should she deign to venture into vaster waters.
NotMax
@Nicole
Limbic ventameter.
germy
We need all the help we can get.
West of the Rockies
@piratedan: Well said.
way2blue
I agree with your idea of dedicated funds to any viable Democrat running in South Dakota. Democrats need to contest every elected office. If nothing else, to counter Republican messaging which is way to effective and often unchallenged.
One idea I’ve been mulling over is whether Democrats consider voting for moderate Republicans (think anti Trump; anti BIG lie) as a means to push lunatic Republicans out of office. Similar to Lincoln Project working hard last year to prod moderate Republicans to vote for Biden or at least not vote for Trump…
billcinsd
@Ohio Mom: As did Jim Abourezk (at the same time as McGovern 1972-1978). He was an Arab and was an excellent advocate for Native Americans. I believe he was the only Senator at the time who lived solely on his Senate income of $66,000 per year (equivalent to about $250,000 today)
billcinsd
@Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix: There’s no state Democratic party to speak of in SD, and no statewide D office holders, but someone runs every cycle.
The local Democrats here in Rapid City always ran as pro-business moderates — it didn’t help. Mike Huether (former Sioux Falls mayor) who might have had a chance at statewide office, left the Dem party because he thinks it left him. Mike was my friend in HS, but he kind of lost it at that point.
sdhays
@Ksmiami: I suspect that the cable-cutting trend is going to increase Fox’s (and other right-wing crazy channels’) influence in cable because the people who aren’t cutting are more likely to be older people who don’t want to deal with streaming services. A greater and greater percentage of their customers are going to be Fox viewers, and Fox isn’t going to take a hit for a while, unless Newsmax and OAN are able to substantially cut into their viewers.
Cameron
Anybody else miss the Fairness Doctrine? Man, that was so long ago……
Feathers
@NotMax: But the best solution is to dirty her up (note: she is in fact, dirty) before most people have heard of her. Once someone becomes a national figure, it is hard to remove them from that level of prominence. Also, the both siderisms come into play. A governor no one has heard of getting flack for malfeasance in office is an entirely different game and one that needs to start being played.
Democrats need to have the label of “We don’t put up with corruption.” Part of how we got into this mess is the non-prosecution of white collar crime and Republican financial misdeeds. Filing lawsuits against up and coming Republicans who do illegal things needs to be something that is an automatic assumption, to the point that Republicans know it will happen.
CaseyL
I don’t see any benefit to spending Democratic resources in places like the Dakotas. PACs would be a more effective use of money, selling not candidates but information people aren’t likely to get otherwise.
I think ads aimed at letting people know how Democratic Party-passed legislation is helping them directly, and reiterating that their own elected officials tried to stop that legislation, would be a good thing.
NotMax
@Cameron
Irrelevant. Never was applicable to cable nor any other media which did not use the public airwaves.
Feathers
@Ksmiami: A big part of the issue is that Fox gets more dollars per subscriber than any other network does. This is what allows them to be profitable without needing major advertisers on board.
If you have cable, you are putting money into Fox’s pockets. I would be very interested in local campaigns to demand Fox free cable TV. Cable TV is a local monopoly, voted on by town, city, or county government. Somebody has to be doing it.
billcinsd
@way2blue: viable is the key here because there are fewer than 5 Dems that have been within 20 points of winning statewide since 2008 when Tim Johnson and Stephanie Herseth both won statewide. I’m hedging with 5 because the only two I recall are Billy Sutton in 2018 and Stephanie Herseth in 2010 who both came close to Noem
jimmiraybob
It’s not just Fox News and all the other hate-rage media, it’s also the rise of far-right Christian supremacy/nationalism and their war on empirical facts, intellectualism, liberal-Democracy and pluralism in general.
Religious extremism has always been about waging holy war on modernity and the “other.” Josh Hawley epitomized Medieval thinking in his commencement speech given at King’s College in 2019 when he declared a crusade against modern freedom, especially the acts of freedom of thought and freedom of choice. Scratch a MAGAnista and out it will come.
Martin
States like WV and SD could carry Dems because of the residual association of Dems being champions of labor and farming. That’s still true for labor, but labor is so weakened as to not be able to overcome larger forces. Farming is completely different now. Farmers are land owners that want their subsidies and rent their land out for others to do work on. There are exceptions of course, but not many. Or does anyone think that Devin Nunes is out there milking cows. Ever. That puts them in the same alliance as other land barons – low taxes and wanting to be the biggest fish in their local towns pond. I suspect CA might be the only state with enough of a farm labor pool to constitute a real voting bloc, and most of them aren’t citizens.
So, the association of labor to political power is basically dead. Doesn’t mean it can’t be restored, but that’s going to take a while. Biden’s EO invalidating non-competes is a nice simple step in that direction, btw, and a bigger deal than most people realize. It’s basically the engine behind CAs tech sector since non-competes are unenforceable in CA. It allows industry to congregate and compete for workers which is necessary for start-ups and good for workers.
So we’re stuck in this situation where race and class are associated with power, and so states like SD and WV are mostly lost causes for now. But re-establishing labor and power should be possible at the local level in places that naturally lead into that. I suspect it’s less about the kind of democrat as we might evaluate them but whether you have a democrat that can lean into this longer term strategy and credibly sell it to their community. John Fetterman might be the gold standard of what that looks like.
Martin
They’re the same thing. Even if we could defund Fox, the Christian nationalists would find a way to fund them because they need them as a propaganda outlet.
LibraryGuy
I like both your ideas.
Given the billions sloshing around in Dem coffers in the last two cycles I love to imagine Repubs abruptly realizing they have a fight on their hands.
Martin
@billcinsd: I don’t think you can start at the state level. I think you need to start at town/city/county level and build up. That’s what the GOP did. Hell, they started with school boards.
dr. bloor
@CaseyL:
If you’re not going to invest in candidates, an ad campaign pointing out the malfeasance of their current representatives is going to be of limited value.
Feathers
@Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix: Demise of the family farm or consolidation of America’s landed aristocracy? Feudal Europe was also “family farms.” Our current agriculture system is terrible for the environment, doesn’t produce the food we need, is a drain on the treasury, and breeds right wing nuts living on government handouts. Don’t have a solution, but paying alleged family farms money hand over fist isn’t a good way to feed the country. Making farms actually give a shit about being profitable would be a start. There are so many people who want to be farmers and would be good at it, but fourth and fifth generation yahoos own all the land and get paid to keep owning it.
Feathers
@Martin: This. People don’t realize that a large part of the reason companies hire “illegal” workers is because they can’t vote in local elections and challenge the good old boy network.
There was a move back in the day to take any workplace found to have multiple “illegal” workers and subject them to an immediate audits from OSHA, the EPA for environmental rulebreaking, an IRS corporate audit, and a full investigation for wage and labor violations. Companies don’t just break the law in one area. They hire disempowered workers so that they can get away with bad behavior elsewhere.
Whenever we do get serious about a path to citizenship, it really does need to be matched with a drive for labor rights and corporate responsibility. The mood of the country has really shifted on the issues. Biden and the Democrats would be well advised to take move on employee mistreatment in every way they can.
MomSense
@Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix: She came to our state last summer, held a rally which violated our Covid rules, insulted our Governor, and caused several outbreaks. Our Governor was asked about it and here it is
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=miB8pAf0aZA
rikyrah
Dr. Elizabeth Sacha Baroness Cohen (@alixabeth) tweeted at 7:12 AM on Wed, Jul 07, 2021:
I keep thinking about one aspect of the Nikole Hannah-Jones news. When you don’t inherit structural power at birth you spend a lot of time observing & understanding how power really works.
That should scare the hell out of a lot of people who never had to earn their power.
(https://twitter.com/alixabeth/status/1412746216631275524?s=02)
NotMax
@Cameron
In addition to what was mentioned above, it should always be pointed out that both Nixon and Reagan were elected (twice) while the Fairness Doctrine was on the books.
Geminid
@billcinsd: I see that Kristi Noem beat Democrat Billie Sutton in 2018 by only 11,500 votes out of over 335,000 cast, or 3.4%. So she seems beatable. I wonder how much Noem’s national activities and ambitions help and hurt her with South Dakota voters. What do you think?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Even without the Ass-Clown Right wing media circus the Dakotas aren’t going to go blue. The real policy divide is between Urban and Rural. The reason why the Right is ungovernable is because their media market is over developed and all these conservative outlets are trying to out troll each other in the hopes of surviving the Invisible Hand of the Free Market. It isn’t just Fox News.
Eventually the Boomers and their Peter Pan 70 going on 14 mindset will fade out, eventually the Right Wing media will consolidate.
Kathleen
@Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix: Plus he was WWII vet and I’m sure that helped him in the 70’s. The good old days when people were respected for fighting Nazis.
Kathleen
@Ohio Mom: Pepper was a disaster.
billcinsd
@Geminid: She is definitely beatable in the right circumstances which 2018 definitely was. The question is whether her Covid actions are seen as more of a positive than what she did with the National Guard and installing a TV studio on the taxpayers dime to get on Fox more
Kathleen
@Edmund Dantes: Old enough to remember when Rethugs threw John Chancellor out of the 1964 convention.
JoyceH
Whatever happened to the advertiser boycott aimed at Carlson-Fox? That seemed to just peter out. I’ve see so many personal stories about the toxicity of Fox and how loved ones can be returned to normal just by removing Fox from their viewing, that it seems to me there needs to be a sustained effort to make Fox unprofitable.
Consider – both Smartmatic and Dominion have sued Fox for defamation – one lawsuit for 2.6 billion and the other for 1.7 billion. I don’t know the overall value of Fox News, but 4.3 billion is a fairly substantial chunk of change. If you’re an owner looking at that kind of potential liability, hung around the neck of a network that is losing money, that could make you stop and think.
When your car is involved in an accident and it would cost more to repair than the car is worth, that car is called ‘totaled’. We need to total Fox News.
Geminid
@Feathers: I think the Democrats are serious about comprehensive immigration reform, and will introduce legislation later this year after they pass the first set of initiatives on their agenda.
Immigration reform is a winning issue for Democrats that they will not pass up. Besides reasons of justice and equity, comprehensive immigration reform will have a positive effect on funding the Social Security system.
And immigration reform is very much a wedge issue for Republicans, pitting the “populists” against the Chamber of Commerce wing. The populists will win, but they will be putting their party on the wrong side of broader public opinion on this question.
Geminid
@billcinsd: Noem’s travels in the state jet have also attracted the wrong kind of attention. Maybe Democrats can tag her as a “jetsetter who is using South Dakotans stepping stones.”
Another Scott
@NotMax: They may not be licensed to use a specific channel in a particular region, but they do use the public airwaves (FCC-regulated satellite frequency bands). They also use FCC-regulated cellular and Wi-Fi bands. It’s not a slam-dunk, but there is an opening there for “public interest”-type regulation, I think.
Cheers,
Scott.
mrmoshpotato
Take a look at these two completely unrelated screenshots! Absolutely no way they could be related to each other!
Matt McIrvin
Doing those red state/blue state comparisons over the course of the whole pandemic often makes the liberal Northeast look bad because we got hit so incredibly hard in the initial wave of spring 2020, when ideas about how to treat or prevent COVID were in their infancy and nobody could possibly have done well.
The Dakotas seem to have had way more cumulative cases, per capita, than New York (and it’s probably an understatement because of undercounting), but fewer deaths in part because their big wave was later. Also, of course, it’s possible that some states are seriously undercounting COVID deaths as well; there’s a lot of misattribution that you can see in excess death rates (waves of death attributed to diabetes, stroke and heart disease that follow COVID infection rates), and the amount varies from state to state.
OldNPLer
I’m a lifelong North Dakotan.
In my opinion, this place is too far gone to save for at least a generation- if not more.
Rebuilding any sort of effective left/centrist party infrastructure is going to be multi-decade project, and even if done with incredible competence, it still might not work.
The only way this place is going to get better is one six foot dirt nap at a time. And by the time we’ve had enough demographic turnover to make change possible, there might not be much left to save. Oil and coal are the uncut smack of this state, and like any junkie, they’re going to keep shooting up until they hit bottom.
The only question that remains is whether hitting bottom will be fatal, or allow for something to be salvaged.
As for me, I’m looking to get out. There has to be more to life than this flat, cold purgatory.
theturtlemoves
I was just back there myself a couple weeks ago, out in the Black Hills for my 30th high school reunion. I drove past a Trump store on Highway 385 between Lead and Hill City. I waved at it as I passed with one finger and so did my father in law.
Ken
@Matt McIrvin: According to Alexey Kovalev writing in Foreign Policy (quoted in yesterday’s roundup from Anne Laurie), Russia’s also reported few COVID deaths, but had a mysterious pneumonia epidemic that killed tens of thousands. This is slightly more plausible than that the Dakotas have been hit with a wave of deaths from diabetes, strokes, and heart disease.
Miss Bianca
@way2blue: I’ll tell you what happened when we tried that in my rural county – the wingnuts freaked out, started a recall election, and got rid of two out of the three moderate Republican County Commissioners we managed to vote into office. The last one in office not only left office, but left the state afterwards (surely a coincidence…). Now we’re left with three hard right-wingers who are, frankly, too dumb to be feeding themselves with a fork, much less running the county.
Not saying it can’t work, just saying that you can never, never underestimate the power of white grievance politics.
J R in WV
@NotMax:
Actually, all sat services use the public airwaves… even Faux.
James E Powell
Is SDak governor really out of reach?
Noem won election with 51% of the vote – a margin of ~11,500 votes.
OldNPLer
@Ken:
“Deaths of North Dakota residents last year jumped 20% over 2019, with COVID-19 the third-leading cause of death.
2020 also might be the deadliest year on record for the state…
2020 has the highest number of North Dakota resident deaths in electronic reports going back to 1937, Barth said. Reports before then date to 1924 and are physical copies, but “I can tell you those years did not have death numbers as high as 2020,” she said.”
https://bismarcktribune.com/news/state-and-regional/govt-and-politics/north-dakota-resident-deaths-jumped-20-in-2020-potentially-deadliest-year-for-state/article_441a0983-e9bd-5ce0-a0ec-419632f42c1d.html
NotMax
@J R in WV
To clarify, then, make that licensed to use the public airwaves. Fox, unless it owns and operates its own satellites and associated up and downlinks, is not the designee of any such licensing.
Commenting at Balloon Juice since 1937
As someone who volunteers for non profits with no paid staff, I hear these kind of suggestions all the time. Someone needs to do something but it isn’t the person offering the suggestions. The east side of Rochester is full of people who prefer other people get their hands dirty.
Matt
@way2blue:
There are no “moderate” Republicans; there are wingnutz and there are liars.
Anyone who’s still willing to be a member of that party is hopelessly morally compromised, full-stop. If they aren’t fucking you over at this exact instant, it’s only because they’ve decided it’s more profitable to do it later.
Procopius
@CaseyL:
Sounds like Rahm Emanuel’s reason for ending the fifty-state strategy in 2007. I’m not persuaded PACs are more successful than hired ward heelers on the ground. Mitch McConnell just made a public announcement that he voted against the infrastructure bill, which brought money and benefits to his electorate, and told them he is going to fight as hard as he can to make sure they don’t get any more. I haven’t seen any indication, yet, that he is going to suffer for this. He certainly is educating the voters.