Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

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

The choice is between normal and crazy.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

In short, I come down firmly on all sides of the issue.

Nikki Haley, who can’t acknowledge ‘slavery’, is a pathetic shill.

How can republicans represent us when they don’t trust women?

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

People are weird.

Everyone is in a bubble, but some bubbles model reality far better than others!

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

They were going to turn on one another at some point. It was inevitable.

Come on, man.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

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

I have other things to bitch about but those will have to wait.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

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Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Never Give Up, Never Surrender

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171Comments

  1. 1.

    Jeffro

    I’m just waiting for trumpov’s ‘crash’ comments to pop up as an article in the Post or Times, so that I can share them far and wide.

    Related: it looks like much of Biden/Harris’ campaigning (at least, what I’m seeing on social media and in emails) is going to be trumpov’s own words.  Good.  All the low-info voters out there need to see his insanity firsthand.

  2. 2.

    Baud

    Well, as I’ve said before, I’d rather Biden lose because the economy crashed than lose with this economy because of “vibes.”

  4. 4.

    Suzanne

    I love Elizabeth Warren. She was my first choice for the job, I voted for her in the primary, and I still maintain that she’d have been tremendous. But her being a strong voice in the Senate and obviously having deep influence on POTUS Biden is also a fantastic situation, and it speaks well of them both that she is a team player who wants him to be successful, and that he’s listening to the smartest people in the room. This is how good government works.

  5. 5.

    David ⛄ 🎅The Establishment🎄 🦌 🕎 Koch

    Only 2 presidents have lost the White House, the Senate and the House in 1 term: Hoover and Dump

  6. 6.

    Suzanne

    O/T: NYT Headline this morning

    Panel on Boeing Plane May Not Have Been Properly Attached, Agency Says

    You don’t say.

  8. 8.

    Shalimar

    Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft is threatening to remove Biden from the ballot for insurrection.  When asked for details, he cites Ron DeSantis.  Jay Ashcroft is an attorney.  He really should not have a license to practice law if he can’t explain why Biden is an insurrectionist but Trump is not.  This is Law School 101.

  10. 10.

    Anne Laurie

    @Shalimar: Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft is threatening to remove Biden from the ballot for insurrection. When asked for details, he cites Ron DeSantis. Jay Ashcroft is an attorney. He really should not have a license to practice law if he can’t explain why Biden is an insurrectionist but Trump is not. This is Law School 101.

    See my previous post!

  12. 12.

    kindness

    There was a time in my youth when the Republican Party was not over the line crazy.  Or maybe it’s these rose colored glasses I’m wearing.

  14. 14.

    Jeffro

    @Shalimar:Jay Ashcroft is an attorney.  He really should not have a license to practice law if he can’t explain why Biden is an insurrectionist but Trump is not.

    Is Ashcroft allowed to use “anti-Biden vibes” in his explanation?

    That seems to be the whole of his argument.

  16. 16.

    EarthWindFire

    @kindness: There was more self-restraint in Republicans back in the day. Now we’re seeing who they really wanted to be all along.

  18. 18.

    Baud

    @EarthWindFire:

    It wasn’t self restraint so much.  Back in the day, we had a court system and an electorate that wasn’t yet all in on owning the libs as a preeminent policy objective.

  21. 21.

    Geminid

    Big clean energy news, from THE Carlsbad Current Argus:

    11B wind power project being built in southern New Mexico

    ….The wind farm, made up of about 900 turbines, will span Lincoln, Torrance and San Miguel counties, with the 550 mile transmission line running through southwest New Mexico to a termination point in Pinal County in southern Arizona.

    The SunZia project’s wind farm will be built in counties southeast of Albuquerque, while its high voltage, direct current transmission line will connect to the larger southwesten grid at a point south of Phoenix. According to the Argus article, the project will supply “enough renewable energy for 3 million Americans.” The developers have lined up contracts to supply wholesale electricity providers in Southern California.

    The SunZia project made a big splash 10 days ago on the many news sites devoted to the clean energy industry . That’s when developer Pattern Energy announced it had closed on $11 billion dollars in financing, making this North America’s largest renewable energy infrastructure project to date. I’m quoting this particular article because the Carlsbad Current Argus has such a cool name.

  23. 23.

    kindness

    @EarthWindFire: No.  My clan were northeastern Republicans.  They supported abortion rights, welfare & social security.  They were frugal but they weren’t fascists.  Maybe because my father & uncle both fought in WWII against actual fascists.

    Along those lines, it’s curious that the Republican party went fascist after the WWII vets died off, no?

  26. 26.

    eclare

    @kindness:

    Once Republicans went all in on babeez my mom left the party.  If she were still here she would be appalled and furious that Roe was overturned.

  27. 27.

    EarthWindFire

    @kindness: My mother’s side of my family were northeastern Republicans as well. They’re now all Democrats except for the two racist uncles.

    Also, I’m a relative young here (born in the 1970s) so I’ve seen nothing but veiled crazy from the GOP in my lifetime. IMO, a lot of the rank and file may have believed in social security, abortion rights, etc., but those they were electing sure didn’t. I’m glad your experience was different.

    Regarding your question, perhaps the end of the WWII and the Cold War long in the rearview encouraged looking for the enemy within. I don’t know.

  28. 28.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    Running = Pooping

    Also too, the big NM wind farm, while very good news, is also in keeping with energy companies focus on that while still attempting to toss regulatory limits at residential solar development. I’ve got a bud in Santa Fe who works this at the local and state level and he expresses nothing but frustration at how much easier, and beneficial, a revamp of residential solar permitting and capacity could be.  The biggest opponent: energy companies.  Wind power keeps the power generation dollars flowing to them.

  29. 29.

    Geminid

    @OzarkHillbilly: I think the Iraq war cost the Republican party a small but significant cohort of supporters. It also discredited the party establishment among those who stayed, and that helped the Nativist, Isolationist wing of the party get the upper hand. Bush’s stupid war effectively paved the way for Trump to take the party over.

  30. 30.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Suzanne:

    I love Elizabeth Warren. She was my first choice for the job, I voted for her in the primary, and I still maintain that she’d have been tremendous. But her being a strong voice in the Senate and obviously having deep influence on POTUS Biden is also a fantastic situation, and it speaks well of them both that she is a team player who wants him to be successful, and that he’s listening to the smartest people in the room. This is how good government works.

    Same here. Though in retrospect, I’m glad she didn’t win the nomination.  The misogynists of the FTFNYT and much of the media would have given her the Hillary treatment, and given the thinness of the margins in the states that put Biden over the top, that would have likely swung the election the other way.

    But as you say, she’d have been a fantastic President.

  32. 32.

    Jeffro

    @Geminid: I agree that it was a large part of it, absolutely.

    That + the cumulative effect of decades of the GOP delivering nothing but tax cuts for the wealthy + the “establishment’s” failure to stop Obama’s re-election = huge contingent of fed-up GOP base voters.

  33. 33.

    Betty Cracker

    Mitt Romney is still a self-important, hypocritical douchecanoe:

    “As a Biden campaign theme, I think the ‘threat to democracy’ pitch is a bust,” the Utah Republican told a New York Times reporter. “Biden needs fresh material, a new attack, rather than kicking a dead political horse.”

    Was Mittens not the recent subject of an authorized biography in which he more than hinted that the fascist turn of the party that rejected Himself is a grave domestic and international threat? If the hero on the white horse is not Mitt Romney, it’s a dead issue I guess. What an asshole!

  34. 34.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @Geminid:

    I think the Iraq war cost the Republican party a small but significant cohort of supporters

    Anecdotally, that’s been my experience.  I had a large number of friends in the moronic “fiscally conservative/socially liberal” crowd (which was always an excuse to vote Republican w/o coming out and saying it much) who all bailed during the Iraq War, and that after 20+ years of voting GOP.

    They’ve never gone back, hell, I think some of them are more crawl-over-glass Dems than I am some days.

  35. 35.

    Spanky

    @Betty Cracker:

    What an asshole!

    An evergreen statement when applied to Mitt Romney. And possibly his spawn as well. Hope we don’t have to endure another generation of Romneys.

  36. 36.

    Another Scott

    @Betty Cracker:  In other news, General Tojo gives advice to General Eisenhower on how best to win the war.

    :-/

    Why are we, as Democrats, supposed to take any advice from Republicans??

    Rmoney is still, after all that has happened and continues to happen, a Republican.  That’s all we need to know.

    Grr…,
    Scott.

  37. 37.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @Betty Cracker:

    He’s leaving public service like he entered it, as a complete chickenshit who believes he’s worthy of respect without doing any heavy lifting that’s required to earn it.

    One of my favorite quotes (for all I know I stole it from you) concerning that ass:

    I think Rmoney is mistakenly labeled as smarter than Bush for the fact he can be wrong in complete sentences.

  40. 40.

    BlueGuitarist

    Biden saying that Trump and Hoover are the only presidents who lost jobs, seems to have gotten Hoover into Trump’s word salad. Trump and Hoover both lost their own jobs as president.

  41. 41.

    Geminid

    I live near Albemarle County, which is a relatively affluent area surounding Charlottesville, Virginia. It had a lot of what used to be called “Volvo Republicans.” I guess those that are remain are Range Rover Republicans now.

    Anyway, Albemarle County voted Republican in Presidential elections from the party realignment of the 1970’s right up until 2004. That’s when a majority of Albemarle residents voted Democratic for the first time since 1968. This coincided with the evident failure of Bush’s Iraq invasion, but I don’t think it was merely a coincidence.

  43. 43.

    BlueGuitarist

    @Geminid:

    high voltage, direct current transmission line….I’m quoting this particular article because the Carlsbad Current Argus has such a cool name.

    cool because punning on current?

  46. 46.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @kindness:

    There was a time in my youth when the Republican Party was not over the line crazy. Or maybe it’s these rose colored glasses I’m wearing.

    I’d say the timeline is clear.  The current evil and extreme Republican policy positions were established in 1980, when the evangelicals and plutocrats allied to elect Reagan.  Those have only barely changed, since.

    In the 90s, Republican politicians embraced the ‘Democrats are evil’ public rhetoric already popular with their base, but didn’t change their behavior much.

    In 2008, when Obama was elected, they went scorched earth, total war, no compromise, Cleek’s Law, “Fuck you libtards”.  Policy positions became irrelevant compared to electing the biggest asshole they could find.  Any kind of political cheating was acceptable, nay, a virtue.

    In 2017, after Trump was elected, they felt free to openly say the horrible shit they’ve believed since 1980.

  47. 47.

    Geminid

    @Baud: Bush’s war left Karl Rove’s scheme for a permanent Republican majority in tatters. In 2012, Rove got to see its demise in real time when the Ohio results came in and he was left spluttering on national TV.

  48. 48.

    frosty

    @EarthWindFire: No. Charles Mathias, Bill Scranton, and Nelson Rockefeller were, at a minimum, small “d” democrats. I doubt there’s much policy difference between Scranton and Senator Casey.

  50. 50.

    Matt McIrvin

    @comrade scotts agenda of rage: It seems to me like there are still some of those “fiscally conservative/socially liberal” types in East Coast tech industry though they’re maybe not as likely to put it that way as they used to be. They’re professional-class people who are comfortably well off, think modern Republicans are nuts, but they’ve been taught that non-partisanship is a virtue and they’re always aching to find some kind of conservative who isn’t crazy.

    They have nostalgia for the Mitt Romney of 2002, who they may still believe was the real Mitt Romney. And they think they’re the sensible center of American politics rather than this actually kind of marginal group.

  51. 51.

    Baud

    The best thing about Trump’s comments isn’t that he’s hoping the economy fails.  It’s that he’s being more honest about the state of the economy than the doomers who have been claiming that the Biden economy has been terrible.

    Congratulations, NYT and others. You are less honest than Donald Trump.

  54. 54.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @Matt McIrvin:

    They’re professional-class people who are comfortably well off, think modern Republicans are nuts, but they’ve been taught that non-partisanship is a virtue and they’re always aching to find some kind of conservative who isn’t crazy.

    That certainly describes another subset of acquaintances and at least 2 specific friends.  They all now vote glibertarian. I can talk politics with the others I mentioned (they all basically went thru Cole’s ‘awakening’ if you will) but not these clowns. They always find excuses as to why they won’t vote Dem (despite not voting R) so they’ve turned to a different kind of crazy.

  56. 56.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Baud: If he gets elected he can make it crash!

    Of course the inflation of the past couple of years is the big knock on Biden while Trump is also pushing xenophobic/protectionist policies that would drive prices up.

  57. 57.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    I know some jackals find Maddow annoying, but she lit into the GOP last night, saying the problem isn’t Trump. It’s the Republicans. She compared how the right wing party in Brazil disowned their insurrectionists to how the GOP embraces them.

  59. 59.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @Geminid: Not that it makes sense to even think of proposing to meet all of our energy needs using wind alone, but here’s a perspective exercise:

    According to the article, 900 turbines will supply enough power to meet the needs of 3 million Americans.  3,000,000 Americans/900 turbines = 3,333.33 Americans/turbine. Current US population is, oddly enough, about 333 million. 333,000,000 Americans/3,333 Americans/turbine = 100,000 turbines.

    900 turbines cost $11 billion. So, the cost of 100k turbines would be (100,000/900) x $11 billion = ~$1.2 trillion dollars.

    It’s a lot, but US Treasury’s website says that our total outlay in 2023 was over $6 trillion, so we do spend that kind of money in just one year. I know, apples and oranges.

    But for additional perspective, WWII cost the US over $4T in current dollars and was about 40% of GDP. Our current GDP is about $27T. If climate change is truly an existential threat, devoting 1.2/27×100 = 4.4%, a tenth of what we “spent” to prevail in WWII. Seems like a good deal to me.

    All of these numbers were gleaned from a couple of minutes googling, so they’re suspect. And I didn’t check my math.

    Still…it seems doable.

  60. 60.

    gene108

    @Geminid:

    Bush’s stupid war effectively paved the way for Trump to take the party over.

    His failed economic policies and those of Tea Party state governments, starting in 2011, I think, did more to pave the way for Trump.

    Republicans so called serious policy of unleashing the power of the free market and other talking points ended in disaster in 2008. The serious policy people couldn’t even bullshit their way to credibility after a few years.

    Trump, in 2016, ran on alternating ideas (whatever ran through his head at any given moment) of taxing Wall Street, better affordable healthcare, strengthening Social Security and Medicare, etc. and Republican voters agreed with him.

    Republican rhetoric on how serious and well thought their domestic policy ideas were met reality and didn’t hold up. So what else do Republicans have to rally voter other than racism, nativism, religious zealotry, etc.

  62. 62.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @RevRick: He played a number of roles during and after the war.

    From his Wiki:

    The German invasion of Belgium in August 1914 set off a food crisis in Belgium, which relied heavily on food imports. The Germans refused to take responsibility for feeding Belgian citizens in captured territory, and the British refused to lift their blockade of German-occupied Belgium unless the U.S. government supervised Belgian food imports as a neutral party in the war.[66] With the cooperation of the Wilson administration and the CNSA, a Belgian relief organization, Hoover established the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB).[67] The CRB obtained and imported millions of tons of foodstuffs for the CNSA to distribute, and helped ensure that the German army did not appropriate the food. Private donations and government grants supplied the majority of its $11-million-a-month budget, and the CRB became a veritable independent republic of relief, with its own flag, navy, factories, mills, and railroads.[68] [69][failed verification]

    Hoover worked 14-hour days from London, administering the distribution of over two million tons of food to nine million war victims. In an early form of shuttle diplomacy, he crossed the North Sea forty times to meet with German authorities and persuade them to allow food shipments.[70] He also convinced British Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George to allow individuals to send money to the people of Belgium, thereby lessening workload of the CRB.[71] At the request of the French government, the CRB began delivering supplies to the people of German-occupied Northern France in 1915.[72] American diplomat Walter Page described Hoover as “probably the only man living who has privately (i.e., without holding office) negotiated understandings with the British, French, German, Dutch, and Belgian governments”

    eta: I knew it, too many links in the wiki page. I’ll let Anne or WG free the comment if they feel like it

  64. 64.

    Baud

    @Matt McIrvin:

    No one in 1984 cared about how bad the first three years of the Reagan economy were. And Biden’s economy has been much better than that throughout.

  65. 65.

    Chief Oshkosh

    @Betty Cracker:

    Was Mittens not the recent subject of an authorized biography in which he more than hinted that the fascist turn of the party that rejected Himself is a grave domestic and international threat? If the hero on the white horse is not Mitt Romney, it’s a dead issue I guess. What an asshole!

    It’s all about messaging with them. They don’t even think about the real problems that need actual solutions. There’s something broken in their brains. The real problems are what Biden identified, with the most important being the existential threat to democracy. That’s not a “dead horse,” Mitt, you pompous shit.

  68. 68.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @Dorothy A. Winsor:

    People have been saying that for years albeit without an insurrection to point to.

    One example is from former front-pager Zandar in Dec 2015:

    Trump is not the cause, he is the inevitable result of today’s GOP, and much like herpes the body politic breaks out in overt racism and produces pustules like The Donald time and time again in American history, it’s just a matter of how big they get and how sick we get before they are lanced.

    Establishment Republicans have never been offended by the substance of Trump’s positions and their reaction to the insurrection is proof of that. Rather, they simply have been troubled that he expresses them so baldly, as opposed to the winks and dog whistles they have long used.

    Since 2016, they’ve abandoned any pretense of dog whistles and winks and have de-facto embraced a position (the insurrection) not seen by a major political party since 1860-61.

    Cole’s ‘tire rims and anthrax’ analogy gets truer and truer every damned day.

  69. 69.

    Soprano2

    @Shalimar: Evidently this is about the great replacement theory. They think Biden is letting people into the country so they can register to vote for him. Somehow this is the same as trying to commit a coup. *rolleyes

  71. 71.

    Subsole

     

    @EarthWindFire: I was born just after Reagan took over. My actual conscious introduction to the GOP was pretty much Newt and Rush.

    I may have known a GOP without fascism, or at least overt fascism (though I think the bones were there in my childhood). I have never known a GOP without a seething undercurrent of sullen, vicious, nastiness. In the 90s they seemed to swallow the tinfoil hat whole.

    I think the wholesale embrace of conspiracies is what has doomed them. They don’t have to reflect, or reevaluate or entertain the notion of changing course anymore.

  72. 72.

    Matt McIrvin

    @comrade scotts agenda of rage: The ones I’m thinking of now vote Democratic most of the time but they don’t *like* voting Democratic all of the time; they identify as independent and think voting a straight ticket is for idiots. They’re the people who kept electing Republican governors in Massachusetts.

  73. 73.

    Barbara

    @Geminid: I think it’s important to acknowledge that places like Albemarle County, and there are many, are not static.  In the 70s Albemarle County had a lot less population, and since then, people moving in are demographically closer to Charlottesville, which sits in the middle of the county.  In other words, I don’t know that those around in the 70s, to the extent still alive and voting, are voting differently, so much as the place has changed enormously. In Virginia this is true of Loudoun, Prince William and other counties, and I am sure there are many other states that have experienced the same phenomenon.  Republicans used to count on the suburbs, but it’s not like the suburbs impart some kind of mystical pull to vote Republican.

  75. 75.

    Matt McIrvin

    @RevRick: That’s always been my response in these conversations–the Democrats *are* the Center Party they’re wishing for–but they look at me like I have three heads. No, the Democrats went super extreme leftist!

  76. 76.

    Soprano2

    From TPM, first Josh Marshall writing about whether Garland waited too long to start investigating the insurrection – he says yes but. I’m not mad at Garland, but I find his take plausible. Here’s a paragraph:

    Murder has always been the cardinal crime. The need for society to communicate with itself in this way is in some ways even more important with crimes of greater ambiguity or ones in which powerful social actors argue for their acceptability. While rape statutes have been revised and toughened in recent decades, one clear way society used to tell itself that rape wasn’t a serious crime or wasn’t always a crime was that it was rarely prosecuted. Drunk driving is an even more ambiguous case. By waiting so long to bring the machinery of prosecution onto the stage, Garland’s Justice Department told the country in actions that the line separating ordinary politics from criminal conduct in this case was at best unclear. The biggest driver of the normalization of the January 6th coup was the Republican Party’s after-the-fact decision to support it. But in large part the public decided that the actions were acceptable — or at least acceptable enough — because federal law enforcement told them, through their lack of action, that they were. The GOP’s ability to rally behind the insurrection was assisted by that inaction.

    Then there’s this, about how some R’s think they’ve found the “one weird trick” to get Fani Willis booted from the prosecution of TFG.

    The gist is that one of Donald Trump’s codefendants in the state coup prosecution in Georgia has filed a motion to remove Fani Willis as prosecutor. Michael Roman claims that Willis hired a romantic partner (he alleges), Nathan Wade, to serve as special prosecutor in the case. In essence, she hired him as an outside lawyer since it’s a big case and something bigger than the office might normally handle. Roman then goes on to claim that since Willis and Wade vacationed together (he alleges) and that Wade paid for some of those vacations (he alleges), Willis illegally profited from Wade’s work for the DA’s office. He further argues that Willis had no authority to hire Wade in the first place; so basically the whole prosecution falls apart.

  77. 77.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Baud: ​
     

    You still have “moderate Republicans” who win governerships in the Northeast.

    And we have Dem governors in Kansas and Kentucky.

    Governorships seem to be an exception to the usual rules of who can win where.

  78. 78.

    Soprano2

    @Subsole: Believe it or not, a large number of Republicans used to support abortion and Planned Parenthood! It was all about behaving responsibly. I think it’s right to trace their downfall to 1980, when the evangelicals became a force in the party and started enforcing adherence to their beliefs in order to be  ‘real Republican’.

  79. 79.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Soprano2: George H. W. and Barbara Bush were supporters and participants in Planned Parenthood.

    …But I think Nixon in 1972 had already jumped on the anti-abortion bandwagon. The Republicans actually got into it before the evangelicals did, maybe pursuing the conservative Catholic vote.

  80. 80.

    WaterGirl

    @Central Planning: I would gladly take credit for being that clever, but this is Anne Laurie’s post. :-)

    Last week someone showered Anne Laurie with effusive praise for a post I had written, so it all evens out.  And we all appreciate the kind words!

  81. 81.

    Baud

    @Matt McIrvin:

    And there are people on the left who won’t vote Dem because we’re too far to the right.

    People will make their choices and then create a reality to justify them.

  82. 82.

    Geminid

    @Chief Oshkosh: Actually, Sunzia Wind will spend about half that $11 billion on the wind farm. The other half will finance the 550 mile SunZia transmission line. That will share a corridor with a power line from a smaller Pattern Energy wind farm located in the Cline’s Corners area, northeast of Albuquerque.

    The SunZia wind farm will have a generating capacity of about 3500 Megawatts, while the Cline’s Corners project will have a capacity of ~1000MW.

    I have not seen a schedule for the overall project, but the company providing about half the wind turbines says they will start deliveries the first quarter of 2025 and plan to finish commissioning turbines in the first half of 2026.

  83. 83.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Subsole:

    I have never known a GOP without a seething undercurrent of sullen, vicious, nastiness.

    It was there with Nixon, who was also a pretty open authoritarian (and a smarter and more competent one than Trump).

  84. 84.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @Soprano2:

    The modern GOP’s Unholy Trinity:

    Authoritarians

    Fundamentalists

    Free Marketeers

    Ronald Fucking Reagan sold the US a set of narratives to cover for the GOP’s overarching aims: gut the safety net, give the rich anything they want and make Evangelical Christianity the law of the land.  We’ve seen this play out ever since.

  85. 85.

    Quinerly

    @Soprano2: re Willis/Wade….I find it somewhat unbelievable she would use such poor judgement hiring a romantic partner when she knew the eyes of the world would be on her and Trump, et al would be digging around in her personal life from the get go. I am interested in the full story on this.

  87. 87.

    Geminid

    @Barbara: This is very true. Demographic trends including the increase in college-educated voters and first- and second- generation immigrants have helped turn Albemarle County and the rest of Virginia Blue. It was only a matter of time before the county and the state became majority-Democratic. But I think the Iraq war accelerated this trend, and I thought the 2004 election was significant in this respect.

  88. 88.

    AWOL

    @Matt McIrvin: Yes. Phillip Roth’s satire on Nixon, “Our Gang,” early-1970s, focused on the criminal’s hypocrisy in bombing Vietnam while bemoaning “the loss of innocent life” via abortions.

  91. 91.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @lowtechcyclist:

    Governorships seem to be an exception to the usual rules of who can win where.

    Living in Kentucky, I believe I understand the dynamic.  The governor is up close and obviously in charge of local conditions.  The direct link between living conditions and who is in charge is closer in people’s minds with the governor than any other job.  So, unlike jobs like Senator where they feel free to unleash their ideology, it’s at least possible to get “We need someone competent or everything goes to Hell, and the Republican options are wildly incompetent.”

  92. 92.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Quinerly: I think you can draw a straight line back to Joe McCarthy and Nixon for a lot of it. The Southern Strategy pulled in the old Dixiecrats, but that was a premeditated strategy that capitalized on the modern culture war spinning up in the Vietnam/civil rights era.

  93. 93.

    Harrison Wesley

    Romney was the last Republican I considered voting for.  Of course, that was George, not Willard.

  94. 94.

    Soprano2

    So our school system cancelled school this morning at 5:15 a.m. based on a forecast of 2″ of snow. I swear, this drives me batshit crazy. If they had cancelled school every time we had a couple of inches of snow when I was in school, we would have been going to school until the middle or end of June there would have been so many snow days! They say it’s because they’re worried about the roads in the afternoon. In this city they take care of the main roads; with such little snow, it might not even stick on the roads at all. They’ll probably start spreading chemicals at 9 a.m. before the snow even gets here; by this afternoon all the main roads will probably be fine. There aren’t any hilly gravel roads out in the country for them to worry about. I’m sorry, but it’s insane to cancel school under these conditions. What’s funny is that then these same people wonder why today’s young people don’t think they have to show up every day for work. Well, we told them when the going got a little harder they didn’t have to show up, we’d just cancel everything for them so they could stay home. Plus, I feel sorry for the parents who had to scramble around at 5:15 a.m. trying to figure out how to take care of their kids for the day. It’s so stupid, the less snow we have the more frightened people are of it, and the bigger deal they make about it. The weather people have been “pimping” this storm all week; I heard people saying it was going to snow 2″ an hour, which as far as I know was never forecast at all. It was super busy at the store on Saturday, probably because people in a city where they plow the streets were scared 2″ of snow was going to trap them in their houses for days! It’s so dumb…. (rant over)

  95. 95.

    prostratedragon

    @OzarkHillbilly:  Hoover deserves regard for the relief and food administration efforts he led during WWI, which included diplomatic attempts to get Germany to allow food distribution in Belgium, a situation that resonates today. TG has tossed rolls of paper towels.

  97. 97.

    Soprano2

    @Quinerly: It’s possible they hired the firm he works for. That would be the most logical thing. It’s Republicans, and they lie all the time, so who knows. That’s why I called in “one weird trick”.

  99. 99.

    Rocks

    @Geminid: Sun Zia is a really big deal.  It’s the largest single renewable energy project yet in the United States.  It will take wind from the New Mexico eastern high plains (some of the most dependable in the US) and turn it into electricity to be delivered in the Arozona metro markets.  It’s estimated that in will supply 3 million residences.  It took 17 years to get permitted, but even though they just broke ground, they expect it to be up and running by the end of 2026.  We’re really happy about it here in the Land of Enchantment.

  101. 101.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Baud:

    No one in 1984 cared about how bad the first three years of the Reagan economy were. And Biden’s economy has been much better than that throughout.

    Never forget the Hack Gap–Biden’s economy will always be bad for about 40% of the electorate simply because he’s a Democrat. They’ll find a reason to dislike it.

  104. 104.

    New Deal democrat

    @Barbara: As a general rule, people form their basic political ideology in their late teens and early 20’s, and vote that way for the rest of their lives.

    One of the reasons for the rightward lurch of the country in the past few decades was the passing from the scene of the extremely blue “greatest generation,” and their replacement by less blue or even red cohorts.

    Almost every cohort since the late Gen Xers has skewed blue, but the oldest of these did not reach the age (late 40’s) when voting rates really pick up, until about 10 years ago. As this multi-decade blue shift gets older, it will help Democrats.

    The one big negative is that those born in the 1960’s, who came of political age during the Carter and Reagan years, skew *very* red, and over time they will become the most active voting group as the purple-ish earlier Boomer cohort dies out.

    (Not to say this is mono-causal; obviously people can change their affiliations. But this is the general rule.)

  105. 105.

    Geminid

    Nature is healing!…sort of. From New York advocacy group Metropolitan Public Strategies:

       This week, ‘BALLY LINKS’ will be displayed on a massive green berm– a symbol of Bally’s Corporation’s acquisition of the golf course from the Trump Organization last fall– replacing ‘TRUMP LINKS.’

    The golf course is located in The Bronx, formerly home to the wise and indefatigable Annie Laurie.

  106. 106.

    frosty

    @Chief Oshkosh: Yes, financially it’s doable. Add to that the fact I read some time ago that North Dakota is the Saudi Arabia of wind and we should be jumping on this yesterday.
    Added benefit of giving the farmers (OK, Monsanto or whoever owns them) a reliable income.​

  107. 107.

    New Deal democrat

    @Baud: There is lots of research that Presidential election results correlate very well with improvement vs. deterioration in the election year economy.

    Note: This does not mean the absolute level of the economy. For example, I knew Obama was going to win in 2012 because the economy was improving, and in October the unemployment rate dropped below 8% for the first time since the Great Recession.

  108. 108.

    Subsole

    @Soprano2:

    I can see that. I’m not sure the two are exclusive.

    I think it all tracks back to something Kay keeps hammering on: the loss of flexibility. These people snapped because they are, at heart, rigid.

    Whether out of dogmatic zeal or the urge to blame every loss and setback on shadowy forces greater than oneself – the Devil or the NWO – (and let’s not talk about how those two concepts became intermeshed in the conservative zeitgeist…), the GOP surrendered its capacity for self-evaluation.

    It can no longer admit what doesn’t work, so it can no longer change what doesn’t work. All it can do now is cheat its ass off while accusing everyone else of cheating as prejustification for cheating.

  109. 109.

    TBone

    @Baud: I cared.  My dad escorted me, the lone protester, when Rayguns appeared on the Court House steps in Media, PA when I was 15 y.o.  With the history of someone breaking into the offices of the opposition in Media, Dad knew there would be snipers on the rooftops.  My protest sign said “Education is our best defense” in opposition to his loony Star Wars B.S.  Now we have Space Farce.

  110. 110.

    Subsole

    @Matt McIrvin:

    I have heard that. Nixon was a bit before my time, but my elders are pretty uniform on what kind of guy he was. The kindest descriptor was ‘genius, but mildly unstable’.

  111. 111.

    Soprano2

    @Subsole: This is true. They like the world a certain way, and don’t want anything to change. In some ways I can sympathize with that – see my rant about schools closing here today in this thread. Things aren’t bad just because they’ve been around or true for a long time. I think they’ve lost the capacity to judge whether ideas are still useful and relevant or not. My point is that if you go cancelling school every time a snowflake drops from the sky, don’t then complain when kids think they can stay home from work every time the weather is bad. LOL

  116. 116.

    AM in NC

    @Matt McIrvin: I had this conversation visiting my aunt in New Orleans over Christmas.  Life-long Republican voter whose friends all still vote GOP, but who voted for Bel Edwards-D for Gov and against Trump as Prez.

    She said she and so many people she knows just want a real centrist party, so I said, well, the policies Biden actually advocates for and passes ARE centrist and asked her: isn’t the Bi-partisan infrastructure bill centrist, and she agreed.  Isn’t supporting Ukraine and also fighting against Putin centrist, and she agreed. Isn’t trying to keep a particular religion from becoming our law centrist, and she agreed.  Isn’t on-shoring chip manufacturing and re-building our industrial base centrist, and she agreed.

    I feel like the specifics of what Biden/Democrats are actually getting done are getting lost in the shuffle.  But I think I made progress with her to get her to shift her thinking a bit.

    The media narrative is always to play on GOP turf (social issues), and Democrats need to be making the economic case constantly that we ARE the centrist, economically responsible Party.

    (In addition, of course to not hating on everyone who isn’t white, male, rich, and straight).

  117. 117.

    Geminid

    @Rocks: People will see a lot of wind turbine blades being trucked down I-25 from Colorado. There’s a big manufacturer in Pueblo. A lot of the steel for the pylons will be produced in Pueblo also.

    I traveled to New Mexico by way of I-20 in early 2019, and I was struck by how the wind generators that were so plentiful in west Texas were missing in New Mexico. Yet, Santa Rosa Lake State Park was by far the windiest place I had ever camped at. The wind there made the winds at Cape Hatteras seem like gentle zephyrs.

    So I was very glad to see that Governor Michelle Luhan Grisham had campaigned and won on a clean energy platform in 2018. The the following year she signed legislation putting much of that platform into effect. This will enable the giant Four Corners coal electrical generation plant to be closed by 2032. Astronauts could see the smoke plume from the Four Corners plant when they orbited Earth in the 1960s.

  118. 118.

    gene108

    @OzarkHillbilly:

    The high watermark for Hoover’s professional accomplishments, like a few other Presidents, John Q. Adams comes to mind, was not his term in office.

  119. 119.

    Geminid

    @New Deal democrat: I have a theory that Ohio and Virginia politics moved in opposite directions this century because Virginia’s economy was dynamic and Ohio’s was static. That’s one reason I am optimistic about North Carolina turning blue this decade.

  121. 121.

    Joey Maloney

    @EarthWindFire: Also, I’m a relative young here (born in the 1970s)

    Cripes, do we skew that old? I’m 1961 and my political consciousness started with the Watergate hearings. Nixon was a crook but he wasn’t insane. He believed in a working government, he just also believed in getting his beak wet. Though there was that spot of treason in the runup to the ’68 election, so maybe he was just better at keeping the mask from slipping.

  122. 122.

    gene108

    @Baud:

    You still have “moderate Republicans” who win governerships in the Northeast.

    Having lived through two terms of Christie as my governor, he was “moderate” because the Democratic controlled legislature wouldn’t allow his anti-abortion tax cutting freak flag to fully fly like so many other Tea Party governors with Republican legislatures.

  124. 124.

    Jeffro

    @RevRick:There is a sensible center in American politics. They’re called moderate Democrats.

    or just “most Democrats”, but yep – amen to this!

  128. 128.

    EarthWindFire

    @frosty: These people all predate the Reagan era in which I grew up. Bill Scranton was UN Ambassador when I was five.

    I’m glad you’ve known Republicans who weren’t crazy but I mostly haven’t. The only sane Republicans I’ve known were either trotted out for conventions and never seen again, became Independents, or have been kept in check by Dem majorities in their states. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

  129. 129.

    Quinerly

    @frosty: I actually liked the Goldwater one more. Feel like I learned more, as I recall. Nixonland was the first one I read. The Reagan one is the one I got a few chapters into and then never got back to. That’s the period I truly felt like I had lived thru. Reagan came into office when I was in undergrad and still around thru law school.

  130. 130.

    EarthWindFire

    @gene108: he was “moderate” because the Democratic controlled legislature wouldn’t allow his anti-abortion tax cutting freak flag to fully fly like so many other Tea Party governors with Republican legislatures.

    Living next door to MD governor Larry Hogan, I’d say the same about him.

  131. 131.

    Quinerly

    @Geminid: it’s excellent. Was required reading for my undergrad Political Science BS I actually still have my marked up copy from a class in 1980. And, somehow it made it from a college dorm room in NC to retirement house in NM.

    I just think a lot of what I call the evilness of the modern Repug Party came thru starting with Reagan. Maybe even with the kick off of his campaign in Philadelphia, MS. I think there is a direct line from Reagan to Trump.

  132. 132.

    Geminid

    @Jeffro: More generally, today’s economy employs more college-educated workers. Some are moving in from out of state or out of country, and some are natives who are first-generation college grads.

    There has also been a political shift among the cohort of college educated voters. Fifty years ago, a majority of this group voted Republican. That has changed in recent decades and now a majority of them vote Democratic.

  135. 135.

    New Deal democrat

    @Geminid: The DC metro area is the fastest growing by population in the country. The combined DC-Baltimore area will probably overtake Chicago as #3 metro in the country in the next few years.

    NC has been on the cusp for quite a while. The dam will probably break all at once.

    There are 2 other, currently very red small population States, likely to come into play in the next 10 years: SC (Charlotte exurban spillover) and WV (DC and Pittsburgh exurban spillover). As I’ve noted a number of times, KS is probably already there.

  136. 136.

    Geminid

    @Quinerly: I like to play with history, so I sometimes trace the line to Trump back through Reagan, and then on through Barry Goldwater, Robert Taft and Calvin Coolidge all the way back to the American (“Know Nothing”) Party of the 1850’s.

    The American Party dissolved itself in 1860 and most of its members aligned with the Republican Party. Their racist, reactionary Nativism has infected their new party ever since and is now ascendent. Trump is like the ultimate Know Nothing politician.

  137. 137.

    EarthWindFire

    @Geminid: With the exceptions proving the rule that are Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, this is a great summary of the GOP.

  138. 138.

    Barbara

    @New Deal democrat: Yes, this tracks with the analysis I did after Obama was elected through a GWU project that makes demographic data and voting patterns publicly available (at a high level).  Even though my demographic cohort suggests I should be voting Republican, I think that I am probably squarely in one of the subgroups that tends to vote Blue despite having come of age during Carter/Reagan administration, because of educational attainment and gender.

    My husband and his siblings are also in the demographic group who might be primed to vote Republican but have been turned off by one issue or another, and this is probably due again to education, gender, and possibly occupation (professor, environmental biologist).

    One quibble is that I don’t think the so-called greatest generation was the “bluest,” rather, their parents and older siblings were — the generation that voted for Roosevelt — and the fact that so many of them were still living and voting in 1992 is a key reason why Bill Clinton won against GHW Bush.

  139. 139.

    Barbara

    @Soprano2: I bet when you were in school you didn’t have little buses going into cul de sacs to make sure that everyone, including those with special needs, could make it to school.

  140. 140.

    artem1s

    @Soprano2: ​ 

    because federal law enforcement told them, through their lack of action, that they were.

    So just because the POPO don’t immediately arrest someone for a bank robbery, all bank robbers can assume that bank robbery isn’t a ‘serious’ crime anymore and they can proceed to rob as many banks as they want. This is bullshit and completely ignores the complexity of these cases and the fact that it’s highly likely that 2/3rds of the government were actively engaged in throwing out any cases that the DOJ might bring. Of course they need to be legally solid – but somehow if it takes time to prosecute a serious crime it means Garland is telegraphing it’s not a serious crime? And don’t forget the fact that the former AG and his staff were engaged in a massive coverup and enabling the insurrectionists right up to the inauguration. The whole department had to be restructured from the ground up so Barr’s moles wouldn’t be fucking up or leaking info to the GOP. Just because Garland wasn’t leaking everything to the press doesn’t mean nothing was happening.
    Grand jury proceedings are secret in accordance with Rule 6(e) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.
    The Biden administration, AG, and DOJ was never going jump the gun and run kangaroo court cases just because the MSM wants clicks or the xhitterverse wants heads to role. Screaming ‘lock him up’ is not evidence you can submit to a jury or a judge.

  141. 141.

    Soprano2

    @Barbara: No, I lived in a small rural town with lots and lots of rough, hilly country roads. We also didn’t have snow plows that cleared the main road, or started spreading chemicals and/or salt even before the event started. The mid-sized city I live in (metro area around 300,000) has that. In fact, if they’re in the county they clear ALL the roads, not just the main ones. My small, rural town would not have cancelled school on a day like this, when 2″ or less snow was forecast. I’m not sure what this has to do with going into cul-de-sacs, anyway. On these roads 2″ of snow is not going to keep any bus from navigating. If it were over 6″ I’d be saying something completely different.

  142. 142.

    bjacques

    “Fiscally conservative/socially liberal” is basically the generic version of “thoughts and prayers”. “Socially liberal” gets credit for supporting all sorts of rights, but “fiscally conservative” means their tax money won’t go to ensuring those rights can be exercised, enforced, or defended.

  143. 143.

    Geminid

    @New Deal democrat: Besides Northern Virginia, the Richmond and Hampton Roads areas of Virginia are also growing.

    The only parts of Virginia that are not growing are the Southside and the Southwest. Southside is running into a demographic barrier to growth: its aging population. Last year, when the Martinsville lost the competition for a new Hyundai plant to an entrant from the Savannah, Georgia region, economic development analysts pointed to a significant demographic disparity: the median age in the Martinsville area is around 46 years old, while that of Savannah’s region is ten years lower.

    This is because many of Martinsville’s younger generation move away to metropolitan areas like Richmond and Hampton Roads, or Greensboro and Charlotte.

  145. 145.

    Barbara

    @Soprano2: Kids with disabilities are at higher risk if the bus gets stranded.  This is clearly what motivates decisions on closure in suburban districts. Getting a wheelchair to a bus, for instance, is pretty challenging to begin with.  When we were in school those kids weren’t.

  147. 147.

    Subsole

     

    @Soprano2: Yeah. I am actually a pretty conservative guy, at heart. I like routine, I like slow. I am exceedingly cautious. If the GOP hadn’t stuffed itself with lobotomites and poltroons, I might have ended up in there…

    I think Waco was when I saw the mask really start to slip. I did a project in HS on the various conspiracy theories around it, which clued me in on the militia movement. Took one look at them, noped out.

  148. 148.

    Brachiator

    I met with a group of scholars and historians in the Oval to get their viewpoints on ongoing threats to democracy – at home and around the world.

    I love that Biden is doing this. It was crazy to see some of the stupid and toxic comments on Twitter from people who just don’t get it and who love Trump and the GOP.

  150. 150.

    Geminid

    @EarthWindFire: Eisenhower’s wing of the Republican party was able to maintain the upper hand over the Taft Republicans, but the intra-party tension remained. I think what changed the balance of power within the party was the accession of the Southern Democrats in the 1970’s and 80’s. These new Republicans were natural partners for the Know Nothings, and now their alliance dominates.

  151. 151.

    FelonyGovt

    Just getting here on the West Coast so forgive me if this has been posted already- a really good rant highlighting all the deranged and terrifying things Trump has said and done in just two weeks. Hope Dems use these things to our advantage.

  152. 152.

    Geminid

    @FelonyGovt: Trump says some very strange things at his rallies. The short passages I see make me want to watch one of these rally speeches straight through to see what the rest of the speech is like. Fortunately, I am out of high-speed data and it would take too long.

    I have a friend who used to watch long portions of these speeches, but he’s taking a break so I can’t ask him about Trump’s general presentation. In the parts I see though, it’s like the guy is skipping without a rope.

  153. 153.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Soprano2: School here was cancelled on Monday, but it was because we got about 16 inches of snow, falling well into the evening, and a lot of the local streets were still really snowy on Monday morning. Plows were getting stuck. I think they did get a sand truck onto our street at some point but more snow fell on top of that–getting out was kind of hairy.

    Today, we had school operating with normal hours. My daughter overslept and missed the bus, so I had to drive her in, which was nontrivial. But this is how it usually goes in these parts.

  155. 155.

    wjca

    @bjacques: “Fiscally conservative/socially liberal” is basically the generic version of “thoughts and prayers”. “Socially liberal” gets credit for supporting all sorts of rights, but “fiscally conservative” means their tax money won’t go to ensuring those rights can be exercised, enforced, or defended.

    Sometimes.  On the other hand,  “fiscally conservative” in California can mean opposing the boondoggle that is our high speed rail project.  Or, in the Bay Area, being furious at the fiscal incompetence of the BART Board of Directors.

    If money wasn’t being wasted in stuff like that, it would be available for things like education, expanding MediCal, etc.  Quite a ways from “thoughts and prayers.”

  156. 156.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Geminid: Goldwater thought the religious-right-oriented conservatives of the 1980s and 1990s were nuts. But I don’t think he really realized the extent to which his movement birthed theirs. Opposition to the Civil Rights Act was really the connecting thread.

  158. 158.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Joey Maloney: Nixon believed in government, he just didn’t believe in democracy.

    I said he was smarter than Trump, but I’ll never completely understand why he went so hard with the dirty tricks in 1972, an election he was bound to win in a crushing landslide anyway. I think it was just a kind of reflex. He couldn’t help himself.

  159. 159.

    JML

    @Geminid: don’t give any credit to Eisenhower, who is spectacularly overrated at this point. While the creation of interstate highway system is a real accomplishment, it was also done at the expensive of poor and minority neighborhoods in the cities they ripped through, and one of the best things he did for the country (appointing Earl Warren Chief Justice and William Brennan to the court) he regretted, did for craven political reasons, or both.

    Sorry, I don’t like Ike. I’m mostly fine with the northeastern republicans in the senate and the house from that era, who would all be Democrats today, especially if it meant they didn’t have to put up with ratbag “southern democrats” from the 40’s and 50’s who didn’t flee with the Dixiecrats like Richard Russell and his ilk.

  162. 162.

    Geminid

    @JML: Here we get into a common theme on this forum: anything that remotely suggests that any Republican has done anything remotely good must be firmly refuted.

    But I made no representations as to Eisenhower’s worth. I just gave my analysis of his historical place wthin the Republican party. I guess I should have followed it with a disclaimer:

    But not one cookie shall I give Ike!

  163. 163.

    Soprano2

    @Barbara: Look it’s 1:30 p.m. here. I just looked outside and the pavement is wet. This is a big city where emergency services are 5 minutes away at most. It’s not a blizzard, it’s not 5 degrees outside; it’s like it’s raining, and they cancelled school! They’re scared of snow here now; this isn’t the first time they’ve pre-cancelled school based on a forecast. I feel badly for all the parents who at 5:15 a.m. this morning suddenly found out they were going to have to make arrangements for their kids today when there isn’t even any snow on the ground and the forecast says 2″ or less. One time they pre-cancelled and it didn’t snow at all!

  164. 164.

    Soprano2

    @Matt McIrvin: Well 16 inches of snow no question they cancel. Shoot, a lot of people here wouldn’t go to work if there were 16″ of snow. That’s a completely different situation than what I’m talking about.

  165. 165.

    wjca

    @Geminid: Here we get into a common theme on this forum: anything that remotely suggests that any Republican has done anything remotely good must be firmly refuted.

    I think it’s fair to add “since Teddy Roosevelt”.  Suggesting that Lincoln did something good wouldn’t get that knee-jerk response.

  166. 166.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Soprano2: It was enough to drive me to take a slightly later bus downtown!

    Sounds like tonight we’re going to get torrential rain and high winds and it’ll spike up into the 50s. That’ll melt it off but we’ll probably have some flooded streets. Fun times!

  167. 167.

    Geminid

    @Matt McIrvin: Is bus service in your area improving any? Are there prospects for improvement? The Infrastructure bill had a good chink of money for mass transit, $10 billion for New York City’s MTA alone. I’m wondering if any has come your way.

  170. 170.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Geminid: We got some money, but the MBTA’s troubles are legion.

    This bus is actually not the MBTA, it’s an odd duck–I drive out to Salem, NH to catch this bus into Boston. It’s a semi-private service that is subsidized by the state of New Hampshire as part of the environmental mitigation plan for some highway widening they wanted to do.

    (This is *slightly* more convenient for me than riding the commuter rail since that goes into North Station and I want to go to South Station–I’d have to switch to the perpetually b0rked Orange Line or just walk the rest of the way. The MBTA commuter rail is cursed in many ways by the absence of a direct link. It comes to about the same extra time and the parking for the bus is free.)

    My city is actually part of the Merrimack Valley Transit Authority (MEVA) which recently made all of its local buses free to ride! It’s impressive, but I’d have preferred if they increased the frequency–they only come once an hour around here.

  171. 171.

    Geminid

    @Matt McIrvin: One of the problems here is that Boston grew up as a seaport. It’s really handy if you want to sail your schooner to New York or England, but if you want to go 25 miles inland it sucks.

    But hey- have you ridden any electric buses yet?

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