Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

No Justins, No Peace

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

The willow is too close to the house.

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Dear Washington Post, you are the darkness now.

FFS people, this was a good thing. take the win.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

with the Kraken taking a plea, the Cheese stands alone.

If you are in line to indict donald trump, stay in line.

Republicans: slavery is when you own me. freedom is when I own you.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

People are weird.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Donald Jessica Trump found guilty as fuck – May 30, 2024!

If marriage is the equivalent of selling yourself into slavery, women with self respect should reject the offer.

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

We still have time to mess this up!

Balloon Juice, where there is always someone who will say you’re doing it wrong.

Shut up, hissy kitty!

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

It could be worse. Vance could have said “post-menopausal sows.” Waiting for that audiotape to surface.

Every day Vance writes another chapter in the book called “Worst VP Pick Ever”.

You are here: Home / Elections 2024 / Thursday Morning Open Thread: Now We Cultivate Our Own Gardens

Thursday Morning Open Thread: Now We Cultivate Our Own Gardens

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Thursday Morning Open Thread 24

(Clay Bennett via GoComics.com)

For the sake of karma, I have striven to understand the arguments of a great many of my fellow Americans who have proven, again, that they neither want nor deserve our grace. Perhaps a day will come when I return to that philosophy. But for the moment: Let Sekhmet, Goddess of Consequences, give every Trump voter (be they ignorant, deluded, evil, or all three) exactly what they have demanded — good and hard.


I know how lucky I am to be able to choose to live in Massachusetts, and I love this message from my senior Senator:

I will not ask you to look for silver linings.

I will not ask you to feel anything but grief right now. The consequences of this election will be real and devastating.

But I’m reminding myself that on the road ahead, there will still be opportunities to fight back.

I can’t tell you we will win all of those fights. I can’t tell you we will win most or even any of them. But when we arrive at each of those moments, we will face a choice: to give up, or to press forward.

We can’t control everything that comes next. But we can control how we respond.

The far right wants us to feel powerless. Extremists are counting on apathy, cynicism, heartbreak, or all the above to be their rocketfuel. They are counting on us to point fingers at each other and lose trust in our ability to ever, ever make change.

I absolutely refuse to give them the satisfaction. Feeling powerless is the first step toward becoming powerless. By staying united, by refusing to surrender, we give ourselves a fighting chance.

We will continue to fight for each other.

Eight years ago, in the dark days when Republicans took full power in Washington, I thought the Affordable Care Act would be gone with a snap of a finger. But the American people rose up. Activists like the late, inimitable Ady Barkan and countless others put their bodies on the line. They made their voices heard. They saved health care for millions of families.

And a grassroots movement against far-right control took back the House in 2018, the White House in 2020, and the Senate in 2021. Don’t let anyone tell you that those victories didn’t make a real difference in people’s lives. More people could afford to go to the doctor and fill a prescription. More people could go to work. More parents could afford to put food on the table for their kids and buy new coats for them in the winter. Lives were saved. And as the far right works to roll back what we’ve achieved, they’ll hope we won’t have the stomach to push back. But we can choose to prove them wrong.

We need each other. We take care of each other. And please, take care of yourself. Take the time you need right now to be angry, hurt, and confused. Hold your loved ones close. Find opportunities to be in community with others this week. Take social media breaks. Foster your connections. Make new ones. Reach out to someone you’ve lost touch with. Tell them you’re with them no matter what lies ahead.

If the work you do makes a difference for just one person, that would be enough.

I will wake up every morning and choose to fight for our families, our freedoms, and our kids’ futures. I will do everything I can in my position to defend our values and fight back.

And I will always be honored to fight by your side.

Because it is a universal law that Everything Trump Touches Dies, I’m looking forward to a steady trickle of reports on Republican thimblerigging, grift, perjury, and general criminality to emerge between now and January 21st, hopefully starting with this excellent proposal:

Another couple of important Winners I missed yesterday morning:

The arc of history…

And a little earned schadenfreude (ETTD division)…

Reader Interactions

284Comments

  1. 1.

    Betty Cracker

    Oh, that’s good news about Slotkin and Baldwin! I’m seeing it first here because I’ve been too goddamned disheartened to look at any news site.

  3. 3.

    Baud

    I don’t know how we break the cycle where people hate us because of the pain caused by our fixing Republican messes. We could face this again after 2028.

  6. 6.

    narya

    For those who are interested in or already do needlework, re-upping from earlier thread, I recommend Shannon Downey’s Bad-Ass Cross-stitch (on Patreon, where there’s a monthly project) and her book (which I haven’t yet read), “Moving the Needle.” Some projects have included a monthly pattern (she provides it for you to print) that she then works through, teaching people the stitches for the pattern, basket-weaving, small crafts, etc. The book is also (apparently) about activism; might be helpful if you’re looking for a way to make small creative things.

  7. 7.

    TBone

    I have a pill bottle full of Fukitol.

    Next to a full tube of butthurt cream I’m using to salve my thirst for the justice that the ball gargling thunder twat will never see.

    I’m not taking the Fukitol.

  9. 9.

    JMG

    This is what I was talking about on the earlier thread. I don’t think stories on local TV about people being stripped of their citizenship are going to play well with the apolitical. Empathy is in short supply in this country but self-interest either, and a certain percentage of the poorly informed would see such stories and go “hey, that could be me.”

  12. 12.

    HeleninEire

    I was thinking the same thing as that last tweet this morning.

    There is going to be, sooner or later; and I hope sooner, a MASSIVE blowout between Trump and Musk. That relationship is not sustainable.

    🍿

  13. 13.

    Elizabelle

    I like Dana Houle’s tweet:

    Biden should declassify everything he safely can about Republicans’ ties to Russians.

    Yes please.  Media figures and “opinion leaders” and influencers too.

    We in the reality-based community deserve to know.  Don’t let them spew their poison undetected.

  14. 14.

    MCat

    Good morning from California. Thank you all for being there. I don’t know what I would do without all you jackals

  15. 15.

    rusty

    Double whammy for myself.  Not only the national elections, but the Republicans are in complete control of all three branches of our New Hampshire state government by larger margins.  Weirdly we also voted for Harris and both Democrats won for our two seats in the house, all blue at the federal level, all red at the state level.  We can look forward to the relentless force to wreck public education in the state.  “Parents Bill of Rights”, basically beating up LGBTQ kids and outing them to their parents, and giving right wing parents more power to attack the schools and libraries with banning books and curriculum and more.  There will also be more school vouchers, but there is no money to fund them so we should expect yet even more cuts to public education (this in a state that is already dead last in what it gives per pupil to public schools).  Also more “common sense” abortion restrictions.  Sigh.

  20. 20.

    Betty Cracker

    @HeleninEire: IIRC, they tussled in a minor-ish way several years ago, and Trump crudely insulted Musk, but they made up. Like you, I look forward to an eventual blow-up. Two narcissists in the same space are inevitably on a collision course, and I am rooting for the most gruesome injuries possible.

  21. 21.

    Starfish

    @Baud: I think we resist the Republican framing of everything just a little more.

    Biden was starting on that. He sent out money with Infrastructure law and the inflation reduction act. The “Oh no, the deficit” howling was not stopping it.

  22. 22.

    artem1s

    The continuing resolution expires December 20. Those who sat on their hands because ‘reasons’ or opted for the chaos and fascism are about to find out what happens when Speaker Moses decides to make TCF’s dreams come true. Have his newest ‘business’ declare bankruptcy, default on the national debt, end social security, and make Trumpcoin the new FDIC insured national currency.
    Hold on to your butts, your ever soaring Dow and 401K’s are about to nose dive.

  23. 23.

    waspuppet

    Let Sekhmet, Goddess of Consequences, give every Trump voter (be they ignorant, deluded, evil, or all three) exactly what they have demanded — good and hard.

    Unfortunately, when they get it, they will still find something or someone else to blame.

  25. 25.

    Baud

    @Gin & Tonic:

    Ticket splitting is a thing.

    Plus, as I said in the thread below, I think a lot of people just took out their stress and anxiety on Biden, through Harris, resulting in low turnout on our side.

  26. 26.

    rikyrah

    Imma stay in my blue county in my blue state.

    Without Chicago and the collar counties, Illinois would be Mississippi. Those red leeches from downstate can stay mad.  We pay for their lives

  27. 27.

    Harrison Wesley

    Prior to the election there were no political messages around my building.  This morning when I went out to do laundry, one of the cars parked out front was sporting a Trump/Vance sticker.  Not sure why they waited to let their freak flag fly – we’re an old-fart development and not into assaulting our neighbors.  Hope it’s not the folks next door; they’re really nice people.

  29. 29.

    O. Felix Culpa

    Good morning! Woke up to snow in Albuquerque–not unheard of, but not common either. Will go for a walk and contemplate next steps, both literal and figurative.

  30. 30.

    Betty Cracker

    @Gin & Tonic: Yeah, it’s weird, but IMO, that’s more evidence that Harris was collateral damage of the worldwide anti-incumbent rage that emerged during the pandemic. It doesn’t seem to hit pols who represent districts and states like it does national figures.

  33. 33.

    mali muso

    I’m cycling through rage, fear, tears and back to fury in short little bursts.  I was on a call with Indivisible last night with 8,000 others, where the organizers talked through some of the outstanding races that can still use help with ballot curing calls, made space for the emotions everyone was feeling and also noted that there was an average 6% swing to the right across the board, so the fact that organizing work in the swing states managed to keep that shift down to 3% was something to be proud of.  My head can understand that but my heart sure doesn’t.

    I’ve been giving thought to how to best disentangle myself from any connections to anyone who voted for team fascism.  Of course, I don’t have any such people in my close friend or colleague circles, but I’m pretty sure my parents voted that direction. We have a strict ‘no politics, no religion’ discussion rule in order to maintain a relationship.  I keep mulling over the thought of going completely no contact.  A part of me wants to punish them by keeping their granddaughter away from them and letting them wallow in the filth that they decided to choose over their family.  The only thing that is keeping me from it at the moment is that said granddaughter enjoys seeing them the 1-2 times a year that we connect over the holidays and summer.  So I guess we will see.  I certainly won’t be calling them to chat anytime soon.

  34. 34.

    Baud

    @frosty:

    The president is different. Obama won, but a lot of people freaked out about having a black president. Women right now can’t even win.

  35. 35.

    Starfish

    @Betty Cracker: I tried to explain it here.

    There were some people, like my mother, who were very concerned that US policy in the middle east was responsible for famine in Gaza.

    They voted their ballot except for the line selecting President.

    I know it is wild, but that is what they did.

  36. 36.

    MazeDancer

    How can Dems win in states that go for Trump?

    How can there be record registration and turnout, yet 15 million less Dem votes than 2020?.

    The most logical answer is Russia stole the election. Again.

    Nothing will happen.

    Looking for happy and soft ways to take care of myself and others as we face the darkness.

    Looking for ways to break through the media stranglehold and reach illiterate video junkies.

    Reminded that 50+ years ago women who wanted good careers had to move to NYC. It was a refugee city of smart, talented women.

    Maybe refugee states can hold out and we’ll have another election. Maybe.

  37. 37.

    frosty

    @rikyrah: ​Without Chicago and the collar counties, Illinois would be Mississippi.

    This is the case with every blue state. They aren’t uniformly blue, there’s just more urban votes than rural.

  38. 38.

    New Deal democrat

    First off, the usually incisive Dan Guild makes an important point:

    https://nitter.poast.org/dcg1114/status/1854151028158910587#m

    “Avoid overcomplicating what just happened. The status quo was unpopular, and the incumbent president had an approval rating of 41%. Parties with a President with 41% approval rating do not win many elections.”

    And

    ”I made this point about 18 months ago. My hope was that the return to normalcy would happen fast enough to benefit Biden. Things got better, but not good enough to change people’s perceptions after the inflation shock.“

    Which means (in one minor criticism of Harris, who as I have already said ran a nearly flawless campaign), she should have decisively separated herself from Biden on how she would handle inflation. By way of historical comparison, when Humphrey finally separated himself from Johnson on Vietnam in October 1968, his polling numbers surged.

    Also, via Ernie Tedeshi:

    https://nitter.poast.org/DKThomp/status/1854498882438181265#m

    “For the first time since WWII, every governing party facing election in a developed country this year lost vote share.”

    I expect to have a detailed look at this ready tomorrow. Short take: Jerome Powell and the Fed were big players in killing the Dems.

  39. 39.

    Barbara

    @Betty Cracker: Maybe the simplest explanation is the most accurate.  In this case, the alternative is so toxic and destructive we perhaps thought it would be enough to counter that balance.

    Next up is VA governor.  I’m going all in for that. Seriously considering retirement except I’m kind of scared about the economic fall-out from the loonier aspects of Trump’s ideas. I don’t see any restraining force in the near future.

  41. 41.

    Almost Retired

    Good morning.  Inspirational post, thanks!

    Stayed off the internet, smart phone and television yesterday, opting instead for a long walk and an escapist novel – Terry Pratchett – since Discworld seems so much less strange than our own.  Very therapeutic.  The novel centered on a war-mongering country whose most effective military platoon is composed of women dressed as men.

    Make of that what you will.

  42. 42.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @rikyrah:

    We’re thinking of returning to Chicago someday. For us, it’s imperative to live in a blue state, as well as a blue community. We have that now in New Mexico and will work to keep the state blue. I’m a little concerned about our gubernatorial race in two years because our current final-term Dem governor isn’t covering herself with glory, much to my disappointment (I was an early supporter when she first ran). Hopefully there will not be a backlash, as there so often is.

  43. 43.

    la caterina

    @rikyrah: Could you point me to the thread where you posted thoughts about the election? I would very much like to read your post.  Thanks

  45. 45.

    waspuppet

    @Betty Cracker: It’s not just Baldwin and Slotkin. Josh Stein in NC not only got more votes than Harris; he got more votes than Trump. And yes I know he was up against the Black Nazi, but North Carolina elected a Democratic governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and secretary of public education, and Democrats appear to have gained seats in the legislature, breaking a gerrymandered Republican veto-proof supermajority. But they voted for Trump.

    Actual observers of NC politics aren’t saying any vote counts were tampered with, so I GUESS I’m not saying that either. But I’m not not saying it, and I’m definitely saying WTF.

    Tim Kaine! Tim Kaine got more votes in Virginia than Harris! He was up against a known idiot, and also he’s Tim Kaine! That was an eminently sit-outable race. But that’s not the race people sat out.

  46. 46.

    Layer8Problem

    @Starfish:  And now they get to see what will result.  And then probably come up with a glib answer exonerating themselves.  Actions and consequences.

  47. 47.

    Baud

    @Barbara:

    In this case, the alternative is so toxic and destructive we perhaps thought it would be enough to counter that balance.

     
    Yeah. This last year has brought home for that a lot of gettable voters think of politics with only one question in mind: Are the Dems good enough for me?

    Nothing else about the broader context seems to penetrate their brains.

  50. 50.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @Barbara: Fitting description. Perhaps it is linked to an increasingly ill-informed populace that isn’t able to rightly connect cause and effect.

  54. 54.

    Liminal Owl

    @narya: ooh, thank you. I am interested in learning.

    (And if we are able to move, I’ll need a more portable craft. Beads are small, but the aggregated supplies… are not.)

    If any expats would be willing to contact me privately with tips or comments, I’d appreciate that.  Unfortunately, our budget is relatively small.

  55. 55.

    Soprano2

    @Baud: One of the things I resent the most is that now inflation is finally under control, TCFG is going to take credit for it, and his followers will all believe him! You  just watch, prices will go up and inflation will re-ignite but they’ll either ignore it or say it’s not happening, because they’ve been conditioned to believe that a lie you tell that you want to be true is the same as the truth.

  56. 56.

    p.a.

    I axed (figuratively, although I did consider…) my fascist family members after 2016 (pretty much all my family😂🤨)

    One “this simple trick” I have to lighten the load is: Boaty McBoatface.  Every time I think of that name I smile.  Find something for you.

    Also, get out in nature.

  58. 58.

    Mike S. (Now with a Democratic Congressperson!)

    @Baud: Yep, we can’t let them memory hole the new problems, like the did with 9/11 for W. and the covid response for Drumpf.

    The medis will try to ignore the new troubles, but they need to be tied to the rethugs with steel cables.

  61. 61.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    Voting by race/gender.

    White Men (34% of electorate): 37% D, 60% R

    White Women (37% of electorate): 45% D, 53% R

    Black Men (5% of electorate): 77% D, 21% R

    Black Women (7% of electorate): 91% D, 7% R

    Latino Men (6% of electorate): 43% D, 55% R

    Latino Women (6% of electorate): 60% D, 38% R

    All other races (6% of electorate): 48% D, 46% R

    https://twitter.com/sahilkapur/status/1854295895824802142/photo/2

  63. 63.

    Soprano2

    @Gin & Tonic: I think a lot of white people who voted for them left the top of the ballot blank, because they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a black woman to be in the ultimate seat of power. People will be analyzing this race for years, and I think ultimately that’s what they’ll find. Remember, in WI a black Senate candidate lost when the white governor won.

  64. 64.

    Lapassionara

    I’m going to try to find some good books to read and some soothing music to listen to. Suggestions welcomed.

    I still think Trump’s brain is turning to mush. I’m trying to imagine his inaugural address. Last time it was “American Carnage.” This time I expect an appearance by Hanibal Lector and maybe the dread electric boat.

  65. 65.

    p.a.

    @Soprano2:… inflation will re-ignite but they’ll either ignore it or say it’s not happening, because they’ve been conditioned to believe that a lie you tell that you want to be true is the same as the truth.

     

    Probably they’ll use the magic conservaturd time machine: anything bad during a Rethug admin is because of something Dems did previously (back to FDR😂)  anything good is due to immediate Rethug actions.  And the inverse for Dem admins.

  66. 66.

    Layer8Problem

    @different-church-lady:  I had heard nothing about “just vote for Trump” beforehand, and usually something like that gets discussed among the online paranoid crowd.  I mean it sounds possible, but wouldn’t there have been some mention?  I heard more about the inevitable uprisings from the MAGA crowd in the event of loss.  Whether that would have happened or not I don’t see triumphant militias marching in the streets without having to uprise, so I figure that wasn’t even a thing.

  67. 67.

    Soprano2

    @Betty Cracker: I think that’s the same thing as “The public schools are bad, but my public school is good”. How do you explain NC, where all the Democrats won statewide but TCFG won the presidential vote?

  71. 71.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @Baud:

    We had a chance to defeat Reaganomics. But now we’re stuck with it.

    I disagree.  Reagonomics is baked into a lot of Democrats (neoliberals), a ton of self-professed “progressives” and a lot of Democratic policies.

    Biden was great as far as it went but I wasn’t under any illusions that a Harris Administration would further that agenda with any vigor.  If they had, I would have been ecstatic but wasn’t counting on it.  Good piece from earlier this year on The Normalization of Neoliberalism (aka Reaganomics):

    https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/12/22/2213332/-The-End-of-the-American-Dream

    With the Orange Fart Cloud, it won’t be Reaganomics per se but total glibertarian chaos.  The Peter Theils of this country are licking their chops.

  73. 73.

    Soprano2

    @New Deal democrat: Oh I agree, I think they should have started raising interest rates a year before they did. I think they kept hoping and praying that inflation would recede on its own.

  75. 75.

    The Truffle

    @Soprano2: That’s what I wonder. NC is supposed to be a swing state. What happens when the federal government comes for them

    By the way, I like the perspective from Financial Times: this was a vote against incumbency. Now that Trump is the incumbent, things are going to get bad. Very bad.

  77. 77.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Baud: For Massachusetts this has been true since the colonial era, although they were not really nice to the Native Americans. The abolitionist movement was strong in the area I currently live. Also many Jewish immigrants found a safe haven here in the early to mid 20th century.

  78. 78.

    Geminid

    @waspuppet: I would be very surprised if Tim Kaine did not run ahead of our Presidential candidate. Senator Kaine is the most popular politician in Virginia. Independents like him, and except for a few soreheads, Democrats love him.

  83. 83.

    clay

    @Starfish: No offense to the Palestinians but how the eff did Gaza become a central issue of this campaign?  Foreign policy has rarely been an overriding concern during elections… why did it start this year?  Especially the I/P situation, which has always been a clustermess, and is now a slightly bigger clustermess.  I’m serious here; I don’t really get it.

  84. 84.

    p.a.

    @TBone: let us also not misunderestimate the Postal fuckery wrought by DeJoy.  In PA, he used a heavy hand.  I almost didn’t get my mail ballot, and thousands in Erie County never got theirs at all.

     

     

    Why TF was he still there?  I thought the Biden Admin finally got people on the Postal board who could dump him?  I admit to no knowledge of the procedural rules, all I know is for YEARS I have been getting emails about getting rid of Dejoy.

  85. 85.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Gin & Tonic: In 2020, Biden won in Wisconsin by a whisker.  Mandela Barnes lost by less than a percentage point.  In 2024, Harris lost by a whisker.  Baldwin won by less than a percentage point.  In such a closely divided state, a bit of racism from people ostensibly on our side can be killer.  PA, MI, and NC had somewhat similar patterns in 2024 where Dems did okay in general, but not on the top line.  I wonder how many voted third party.

  86. 86.

    Soprano2

    @Layer8Problem: I think that’s the most likely explanation. As many others here have said, there’s more racism and especially sexism among Democrats and independents than we want to admit. A lot of that could be independents voting for their incumbent senator but leaving the presidential line blank. I don’t buy that a bunch of people voted for TCFG and a lesbian senator!

  87. 87.

    eemom

    @Soprano2:

    they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a black woman to be in the ultimate seat of power.

    This. Not to be a broken record, but this result was about white supremacy and sexism, on BOTH sides. And that is why fucking 2020 Biden voters stayed home.

    (hey, I’m a bothsidesist now, maybe I’ll go work for the media)

  88. 88.

    cmorenc

    @waspuppet:

    Tim Kaine! Tim Kaine got more votes in Virginia than Harris! He was up against a known idiot, and also he’s Tim Kaine!

    One small collateral benefit of having a D back as Va’s governor is that Younkin had deliberately slow-walked implementation of retail recreational marijuana to a standstill.  The Virginia legislature had passed a bill in 2021 legalizing recreational mj and establishing retail outlets, with the details of the implementation of licensing and regulation TBD.  Which Younkin was dragging out indeterminately.

  91. 91.

    AM in NC

    @Baud: Nothing changes until the billionaire-owned media landscape changes.

    We need to be focusing very hard on this issue. And smarter people than I am need to be coming up with alternatives to what we now have.

    Crowdfunding alternate media, and crowdfunding legal funds to go after the liars with continual hits of libel suits might be some potential paths to push back.

    We all need to be Dominion and Smartmatic.  And Democrats in office need to start calling out FOX as explicitly Entertainment (as in saying in every interview – with FOX or not – did you know FOX went to court to be legally classed as entertainment so they wouldn’t be bound by any news ethics or standards of truth?”).

    Go on FOX and own them, like Mayor Pete, and ask them “why did you go to court to be legally classified as entertainment and not news?  Do your viewers know that the word News in your title is a legal lie?”

    And we need to deal with Section 230 because these platforms are absolutely curating content and acting like publishers and need to be regulated as such.

  92. 92.

    No Nym

    @MazeDancer:

    How can there be record registration and turnout, yet 15 million less Dem votes than 2020?.

    The most logical answer is Russia stole the election. Again. Nothing will happen.

    I am right where you are on this. I saw a letter posted online from election officials in Center County, PA, yesterday (no idea how legit, but troubling) saying they were noticing significant discrepancies in counts. I have been alive long enough to not expect that just because something is unfair, someone will fix it. We have plenty of evidence that is not the case.

    It is a bitter pill to swallow.

  96. 96.

    New Deal democrat

    @Soprano2:

    One of the things I resent the most is that now inflation is finally under control, TCFG is going to take credit for it, and his followers will all believe him! You  just watch

    Not only that, but with inflation hitting the 2% target, the Fed will continue to lower interest rates, especially if Trump fires Powell and replaces him with a stooge. Those lower rates will, among other things, light a fire under the housing market. And Trump will smirk.

  97. 97.

    TBone

    In addition to joining the congregation at the most liberal progressive local church, I’m going to the local library, a bastion of woke here in the Pennsyltucky Appalachians, to see what our purple-haired, trans librarian and their compadres are getting together.  Will report back on both soon after I make the excursions.

  99. 99.

    Redshift

    @cmorenc:

    One small collateral benefit of having a D back as Va’s governor

    Tim Kaine was running for reelection to the Senate. Our election for governor isn’t until next year.

  100. 100.

    Soprano2

    @Omnes Omnibus: This was my one concern about Harris being our nominee, that we consistently underestimate our voter’s racism and sexism, especially among independents. I think in 2028 it’s likely that our nominee will be a white man regardless of how many people run in the primary, just because of that. I think even a white man who wasn’t Biden would have had a heavy lift in this election.

  102. 102.

    TBone

    @p.a.: I wish I had the answer, something about their Board prevents President Biden from firing that wily bastard.  But I hope Immune Dark Brandon does it anyway, just for shits and giggles.

  103. 103.

    Soprano2

    @eemom: I think comparing the amount of votes the Senate candidates got to the amount of votes Harris got will tell the tale.

  104. 104.

    ArchTeryx

    @TBone: Great Robin Williams reference.

    Also, you personally should take your neighbor’s leaf blower and shove it up his ass. An example needs to be made to ALL your fascist neighbors.

  106. 106.

    Layer8Problem

    @Geminid:  And not only a good writer but Grant did a great job for someone under the massive stress of:

    • Trying to write something that would be successful enough that it would rebuild his family’s finances.

    • Writing it fast enough to beat the cancer he was dying from.

    He was also renowned for being able to write clear, concise orders during the war minimizing the chance of subordinates screwing things up or misinterpreting his intentions.

    (I am having the devil of a time trying to make the text editor spit out a list, ordered or unnumbered.  Any suggestions?)

  107. 107.

    hrprogressive

    Couple of things –

    RE “Ticket Splitting” – While racism/sexism probably plays some role, anecdotally, I know I saw a number of comments over the year that suggested some people liked the idea of a divided federal government as a “check and balance”. IE, they wanted Trump again, but a Dem Senator was fine. I can’t corroborate it further, but it’s an interesting data point.

    The biggest picture IMO is that the Democratic Party has a massive Gen Z/young man problem.

    The assumption that each successive generation was just going to get more and more liberal is not true, and a lot of young guys feel abandoned and left behind by a Democratic Party that doesn’t care about them.

    I also saw a lot of people indicate they thought the last “truly competitive” Democratic Primary for POTUS was 2008.

    They are mad the Party leaders essentially “forced” Hillary, Biden, and now Harris on them without a chance to choose someone else. Yes, Bernie’s name came up. Yes, I saw a lot of people say “I voted Trump but I love Bernie and probably would have voted Bernie instead because I agree with his populism”.

    If the Democratic Party doesn’t reckon with this yawning disparity, address the wholesale takeover of media spheres by the Fascist right, and doesn’t do anything to address the psyop warfare being waged…

    Yeah.

    Something’s gotta give. Big time.

    I will say

    If BJ definitely wants to help focus on electing Spanberger governor here next year, along with other statehouse races…that’ll be a nice check against any other creeping Fascism.

  108. 108.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @Geminid: It seems like the only reason people love to mock Kaine is to justify blaming Hillary for 2016.  It’s the whole “totally winnable election” bullshit.

  109. 109.

    Elizabelle

    I was so hoping to see Minnesota Governor Peggy Flanagan (current lt. gov).  Because Tim Walz ascended to the vice presidency.

    Foiled, for now.   But am sure she has a bright future.  I shall follow her, with interest.

  110. 110.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @Soprano2:

    This was my one concern about Harris being our nominee, that we consistently underestimate our voter’s racism and sexism, especially among independents. I think in 2028 it’s likely that our nominee will be a white man regardless of how many people run in the primary, just because of that. I think even a white man who wasn’t Biden would have had a heavy lift in this election.

    Yup.  Right or wrong, that’s the most likely main takeaway.

    Nonetheless, I think we should never underestimate the racism and sexism of the electorate

  112. 112.

    Baud

    @cmorenc:

    One small collateral benefit of having a D back as Va’s governor is that Younkin had deliberately slow-walked implementation of retail recreational marijuana to a standstill.

     

    Heh. I remember people here and on Reddit saying that Harris would get young men by promising to legalize marijuana.

  113. 113.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Baud:

    Yeah. This last year has brought home for that a lot of gettable voters think of politics with only one question in mind: Are the Dems good enough for me?

    Nothing else about the broader context seems to penetrate their brains.

    “Only Dems have agency,” example MCMLXVII.

  114. 114.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @hrprogressive:

     a lot of young guys feel abandoned and left behind by a Democratic Party that doesn’t care about them.

    It doesn’t? Really? Is that your assertion or is it theirs?

    ETA: Either way, what does “caring about them” look like?

  116. 116.

    Shakti

    I applaud everyone here who keeps it pushing and continues to have faith in the democratic process. My neighbors voted for sepsis.
    Oh well.
    I just have to make sure the sepsis amendment doesn’t affect me.
    I urged my cousin who is in her 20s to move the hell out of Texas and go practice elsewhere if she sees herself married and starting a family within the next 10 years.

  117. 117.

    artem1s

    @New Deal democrat: 

    ”I made this point about 18 months ago. My hope was that the return to normalcy would happen fast enough to benefit Biden. Things got better, but not good enough to change people’s perceptions after the inflation shock.“

    Hate to say it but I the numbers tell me primary Biden voters made good on their promise to rebel if the Dems switched candidates and overruled the primary voter’s will. That explains why the Dem down ticket races went well and had more votes than the top of the ticket. They don’t trust the national party anymore and honestly the constant, endless money grubbing and celebrating $1B raised as if that’s the goal grated on my nerves. So voters are relying on their local candidates to build safe states. If local state party leaders are smart they won’t encourage anyone to waste money and time on a WH run. We need to get our state level legislatures in order first. Mayor Pete and all the others who just lost their jobs should go back to Indiana or some blue state and run for AG or SoS or governor AND stay there for awhile. Their will always be some penis having good hair candidate the national party feels safe with who will willingly throw women and LGBTQ under the bus and reach across the aisle on things we agree to disagree on.

  118. 118.

    Baud

    @hrprogressive:

    If people thought 2020 was not competitive, they’re just lying to themselves and you.

    Even 2016 was competitive, it was just a two person race.

    Sometimes people just become right wingers. A political party cannot prevent that from happening.

  119. 119.

    cmorenc

    @Omnes Omnibus:

     PA, MI, and NC had somewhat similar patterns in 2024 where Dems did okay in general, but not on the top line.  I wonder how many voted third party.

    NC has a long track record of being a purplish state that ends up coming one or two points shy of turning blue.  Part of the problem here is that blue-leaning population growth of the solidly blue areas like Raleigh-Durham is counterbalanced by a micro-version of the sort of red-leaning in-migration that has turned Florida from swing state to red.  For example, the voting pattern of coastal Brunswick County in the far southeastern part of the state is being pushed redder by retirees from northern states.  They add to the native RW knee-jerks already in the more rural / small-town dominated counties outside the blue Piedmont Crescent running from RDU through Greensboro/Winston-Salem down through Charlotte.

  122. 122.

    TBone

    @schrodingers_cat: I wrote to a friend about my desire to start a ‘haven of safety’ stop along an Underground Railroad using my finished, cozy basement first thing today.  It is currently set up as a bedroom/living room/playroom/

    entertainment center.

  124. 124.

    Baud

    A lot of young men that liked talking about the need for generational change for three years went right over to Trump.

    Stop believing what they tell you.

  126. 126.

    Anne Laurie

    @Baud: Massachusetts and Vermont excepted. Apparently, they have decent rural folks.

    Not to shatter your illusions, but… our MA commonwealth’s ‘swamp yankee’ rural voters have been a deeply racist / misogynistic byword since there’s been a United States.  When a rural Mass county goes blue, that’s a sociological indication that it’s been invaded by liberal retirees & commuters priced out of their workplace cities.

    Can’t speak with the same authority as to the farmers of Vermont — except that, famously, their relatively generous social support system relies *deeply* on the fact that almost every Vermont voter is White.  (See ‘illiberal democracy’, aka ‘left-wing populism’.)

  129. 129.

    Quinerly

    @frosty:

    Imo, misogyny and racism had very little to do with the results.

    The “lived economy” under an administration she was part of did us in.

  130. 130.

    Elizabelle

    @Baud:

    I think a lot of people just took out their stress and anxiety on Biden, through Harris, resulting in low turnout on our side.

    Well, have they got a calm four years coming up.

    I will continue to volunteer locally (Governor Abigail Spanberger next year), but I am done following politics.  And cannot bear to see The Felon’s face and voice everywhere for months on end.  News blackout to continue.

    I will check in here, but done with the horse race and politics as entertainment.  Normie looks good.

    I feel this country betrayed Kamala, betrayed Biden, and betrayed me, FWIW.

  133. 133.

    NutmegAgain

    How I miss living in MA. I’m in CT, which is generally not bad politically, but it ain’t MA.

  134. 134.

    Mai Naem mobile

    I finally went to look up some of the Arizona stuff. The counting isn’t done but  we possibly went backwards on the State legislature. There was a possibility of the Dems having a tied state senate and come close on the state house. We lost the Maricopa County recorders office to an election denier. That one is really bad. Gallego has won but Kari Lake is probably going to get 40%- of the vote which is just as crazy as TFG. Batshit crazy and unqualified. Also lost the Maricopa County sheriff  office to an Arpaio underling. Guess people want to pay out more in tax money on prisoner/civil rights  lawsuits against the county. In the US congress races Shah is losing against Schweikert and Ciscomani overtook Engel yesterday evening. I never thought Shah was s good candidate . There were so many better candidates in the primary.

  135. 135.

    RaflW

    Well, crap. It looks like the crazed MN GOP will likely have a one seat majority in the MN House this biennium. I was really hoping we’d keep the trifecta so that we might be able to increase protections for vulnerable folks.

    I’m not much of a silver lining person, but the somewhat tarnished one is that it makes it easier for us to tie the bad shit that’s coming down the pike from Trump to local Republicans. Because I’m confident that the crazed MN GOP will overplay their one seat hand.

    McConnell style obstruction has worked all too well in DC. I don’t think it flies here, but that’s very likely what our Republicans will attempt.

  136. 136.

    cmorenc

    @Baud:

    Heh. I remember people here and on Reddit saying that Harris would get young men by promising to legalize marijuana.

    A dirty secret is that because of a loophole in the Hemp-farming legalization bill, marijuana is effectively, openly, legally available in the form of the delta-8 variant and even delta-9 (after some synthesis and processing of plant material whose native concentration of cannabinoids is under the allowed threshold for hemp.  True in NC, SC, and Tennessee, at least.  There’s a “Hemp Company” store less than a mile from my house openly selling edibles and processed bud (albeit with the THC content re-added rather than being organically present).  The R-dominated NC legislature so far hasn’t exhibited any hurry to intervene to end this – perhaps because it turns out so many of their voters like to get high and relaxed.

  137. 137.

    Baud

    @Elizabelle:

    Yes, me too. I’m done with everyone pretending that I have to do something superhuman to get people to not hate us and take their issues out on us. I’ll continue to vote blue, but if people choose to be evil, I’m not taking on any guilt for their choices.

  138. 138.

    Starfish

    @clay: The US population is getting more diverse.

    The expectation that minoritized groups will vote for Democrats is not really looking at the groups as separate constituencies.

    This time, Gaza mattered because places like Michigan and Wisconsin are swing states with large Muslim populations.

    There seems to be shock every election that the Latine vote is not one ubiquitous thing, and there really should be some better analysis of the various groups in it. And there should be a positive appeal.

  139. 139.

    TBone

    @ArchTeryx: 💙💜💚

    I just reprimanded hubby for disinflating my 7′ tall Gritty and packing away with all of our campaign signs.  Pud Boy rumpy neighbor was not leaf blowing the entire time we had glow in the dark Gritty standing as a beacon and sentry with portable Arlo security cameras.  Also, when President Obama called out that exhausting, loud blowjob violation-of-the-peace behavior at his Convention speech, I had a tantric orgasm.

    I am tempted…

    However, I must see neighbor, not enemy (we still take care of Golden Retriever puppy while they’re at work, doing it soully for the dawg.)

  141. 141.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Baud: Misinformation about macroeconomics is widespread. Its not just a Republican problem. The left end of the horseshoe is as bad or worse. Read this comment section and you will see what I am saying.

  142. 142.

    Geminid

    @hrprogressive: Virginia’s contest for Governor next year will get plenty of attention. It will be closely contested and Virginia’s right next door to DC, so all sorts of national and internation reporters will be checking us out along with our nice restaurants and wineries.

    Abigail Spanberger will raise tons of money and probably won’t need our help. I think she’ll be worth watching anyway. Spanberger has the elements of a formidable politician, and I am looking forward to seeing how she puts them together for a statewide campaign.

  143. 143.

    DougL

    This is the part I’m focused on right now  how do we olds protect whatever meager assets we have.  Could we have an entire thread about that Water Girl? Not sure how to tag her in my comment (I suck at this internet stuff) but I’m sure this is a topic that would be of interest to the broader community.

    And let me add my thanks as an infrequent commenter for all of you here  this sucks so bad but yall help keep me sane

     

     

    @artem1s:

    Have his newest ‘business’ declare bankruptcy, default on the national debt, end social security, and make Trumpcoin the new FDIC insured national currency.
    Hold on to your butts, your ever soaring Dow and 401K’s are about to nose dive.

  144. 144.

    p.a.

    @cmorenc: … a micro-version of the sort of red-leaning in-migration that has turned Florida from swing state to red.  For example, the voting pattern of coastal Brunswick County in the far southeastern part of the state is being pushed redder by retirees from northern states.

     

     

    This has occurred to me as well, but then I wonder: the only northern transplants are right wingers?  The only sunbelt immigrants were bluestate conservatives?  No moderating influence voters retire south?  I guess the proof is in the pudding…

  145. 145.

    Quinerly

    @Baud:

    Yes. Unpopular opinion here and hindsight can be 20/20. Biden should have announced in 2022 that he wasn’t running for re election in 2024. And we would have had a primary. Harris probably would have emerged. She would have had a longer stretch to do this fucking “introduction” that everyone seems to have wanted. I (and I believe Kay too) thought a short campaign would benefit her. Less time to beat her up and beat her down. I was wrong.

    I’m not flouncing off or threatening to pie if there is a pile on on me on this thread. The facts on the ground don’t lie. The country rejected Biden/Harris, Bidenomics, and all a GREAT President TRIED to do. Full stop. The things that are impt to us in our bubbles here aren’t impt to the average 32 yo with 2 jobs and 3 kids in Albertsons grocery buying cereal.

    It would have been a 7 pt bloodbath if Biden had stayed in.

  147. 147.

    Lyrebird

    Thank you Anne Laurie, for everything, AND for bringing the excellent message from Sen. Warren into the spotlight here.
    @Betty Cracker: You-me-same…  And I thought of you.  Managed to make a good Florida friend laugh by saying “hey look at you ahead of the times… soon we’re all gonna live in Florida!”  And I will keep looking for leverage inspired by you and many others!

    FWIW my economic situation is still fairly anxiety- but NOT fascism-provoking, but I am catching up a little, and I just tossed some coppers towards vote counting in AZ, MO, and PA.​

  148. 148.

    Mai Naem mobile

    @AM in NC: i saw somebody on bluesky say the amount of money Harris spent on the campaign could have been spent on buying all Sinclair TV station and have anough money left over for what was spent by Obama for his campaign in 08. That would have had a better ROI.

  149. 149.

    Chris

    @Baud:

    I don’t know how we break the cycle where people hate us because of the pain caused by our fixing Republican messes. We could face this again after 2028.

    And/or people who stop caring and drop out as soon as things are better so Republicans can get back in.  Which, if we’re honest, is at least as much what happened in this election as the other thing.

    Like I said yesterday, even the optimistic takes about how we could get back in in 2028 or 2032 are making me want to punch something, because if the past is any indicator the prospect there is still going for “people beg Democrats to fix the world, barely give them the tools they need for it, start screaming in horror after just ten seconds because the job isn’t done yet, and as soon as they can put the people who broke things back in charge.”  I’m fucking exhausted with being the national maid.

  150. 150.

    Jeffro

    Ok on to other things:

    • Yes, Biden should declassify and release absolutely everything about trumpov and Russia
    • Jack Smith should do the same with everything about his J6 and stolen documents investigations

    Why?  Because fuck trumpov, that’s why.  Biden OWES him a good kneecapping on the way out the door.

    Speaking of which, as one more FU: Biden should resign a week before Inauguration Day, just to make VP Harris President Harris and screw up “47’s” plans.  But before he does…he should secretly print up a bunch of “48” t-shirts, hats, etc.  ;)

  152. 152.

    Baud

    @Quinerly:

    Well, if losing was inevitable, then it doesn’t matter what Biden should have done.

    The things that are impt to us in our bubbles here aren’t impt to the average 32 yo with 2 jobs and 3 kids in Albertsons grocery buying cereal

     

    The things that are important to me are important things, and I’m not going to pretend they are less important because young people have a different viewpoint. I’m happy to work with anyone in good faith, but I’m done denigrating my point of view. If young people find it easier to be in a political relationship with MAGA, then that’s what they should do.

  153. 153.

    Jeffro

    Also, I see in the WaPo today that not even 48 hours after the election was called, 1) the super-serious deficit hawks in the GOP are already lining up to make even bigger tax cuts for the rich their #1 agenda item and 2) Russia is publicly thrilled that their boy is headed back to the WH.

    So there you go, hyper price-conscious grocery shoppers – trumpov & Co are looking out for YOU!

  154. 154.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @Liminal Owl: I’m not an expat, but my friend moved to Mexico, she said they went to the Mexican embassy to start the application process, and find out the rules and requirements.
    i have not inquired, so I don’t know how big the nest egg needs to be.
    my geography instructor often spoke of Uruguay as a good place for expats. I haven’t looked into that either.
    another friend tells me if one works remotely, Thailand is cheap.

    Btw i wrote an epigraph poem from a line in your poem the other day, Monday night or Tuesday I think I put it in a thread.

  155. 155.

    schrodingers_cat

    @Anne Laurie: I live in a semirural county that goes blue. It has plenty of people that have lived here and farmed here for generations sometimes since colonial times. I would say that % of oldtimers is close to 50. I have the granular data from the canvasses we did. And it has been on the right side of history for a long time. So your analysis is not universally valid.

    That’s not to say that they are free of all prejudice. This space is not free of prejudice. BJ valued commenters were absolving white women voting R again because of the way Latino men voted.

  156. 156.

    trollhattan

    @Jeffro: Would the SCOTUS president is immune from everything decision apply to having an Acme® anvil dropped on Donny before January? Asking for a friend.

  158. 158.

    lowtechcyclist

    @The Truffle:

    @New Deal democrat: Who’ll be building those houses? Who’ll they be for?

    This. Low interest rates can’t undo the fundamental supply-and-demand problem in the housing market.  As Suzanne has repeatedly pointed out, it’s going to take years of major new housing construction to fix that.

    All lower interest rates can do in the short run is to increase the asking price when people sell a house.  Same monthly mortgage payment, just with lower interest rates offsetting the higher dollar figure on the contract.

  160. 160.

    ArchTeryx

    @TBone: I’d absolutely see this dude as the enemy and the dog as a hostage. Think he would hesitate to give you and your husband over to the red hat militia? Things are a whole lot more stark in a fascist dictatorship when it comes to living vs. dying.

  161. 161.

    WereBear

    @TBone: Now I’m crying and I know I did the right thing. Thank you.

    The Tao advises “appeal the good in everyone” and and it was a tough lift.

    But I have discovered all kinds of people rescue cats. And they specifically targeted cat ladies.

    Local shelters will need help, too.

  162. 162.

    Ramalama

    @Lapassionara: Here’s a short list of books I would normally never read – I don’t like Westerns, sci fi, gaming, but these books are so good they changed my mind.

    Days Without End – Sebastian Barry. The writing is INCREDIBLE. The story just a beautiful and heartbreaking slog through wars and life on the American plains.

    Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow – Gabriel something. A novel about gamers. I loved and loved and loved it.

    Dervish House – by Ian McDonald. It’s set in futuristic Turkey with a backdrop of the ancient. I loved this book so much I bought it 3 ways: novel, ebook, audible.

    Maybe try H is for Hawk. A memoir written by a woman mourning her father so she starts hawking in between academic work. This helped me when my parents died. I think it’s a pretty good time to pick it up again.

  164. 164.

    Belafon

    @hrprogressive: Without a chance to choose Bernie, obviously, considering the 2020 nomination was contested. It’s just that black voters chose their favorite and the non-Bernie people said that’ll work.

  165. 165.

    Elizabelle

    Maybe in 2017, I stayed in an Air BnB owned by a lovely couple, both university professors.  Happy to see they had a Nasty Woman coffee mug, and commented on it.

    In looking at 2016, one of them (a biologist, I think) said the problem was that the stupid had reached too high a level in our society, and that no system could sustain that.

    At the time, I thought it was an ugly and elitist thing to say.  Now I am coming around to it.

    A nation of adolescents, who care more about sports and entertainment, and fall for all manner of crap on social media.  And their cynicism, shallowness, and incompetence dooms us all.

  167. 167.

    Steve LaBonne

    @Jeffro: The hard truth, and the reason why I’m with Baud and Chris in just wanting to disengage emotionally from the whole ever more toxic cycle of Republicans shit on everything / Democrats clean it up / rinse and repeat, is that only a relatively small number of people like us will care about any of that.

  168. 168.

    piratedan

    I don’t care to engage in any kind of blame game.  Everyone has their own self interest and you never know what stupid piece of information is going to stick with a voter to the detriment of everything else, as if one small datum supercedes everything else (see eggs, price of).

    We have a fair number of folks that are easily manipulated and even more that are just fucking ignorant.  That doesn’t make them less than us, it just makes them different.  Their overview of things come down to does it affect me or someone I deeply care about personally and if not, whatever.  Democracy requires a fair bit of engagement that these folks can’t be bothered to muster.

    I’m saying this not as a flounce, but for those that are keeping tabs on jackals, I am likely to be dialing back a bit.  I gotta heal up some, read some books, listen to some tunes maybe watch something on the video box.  Maybe make a change or two.  I enjoy the insight and snark shared here, but I am going to lurk more and vent less (yeah, we’ll see if that actually happens).

  169. 169.

    snoey

    @Anne Laurie: My town down in the cranberry bogs is swamp yankee and white sub/exurbanites. The state is requiring that towns with commuter rail have a multi-family zone near the station. Our selectmen laid out a zone that was an existing condo and unbuildable swamp so no chance of more of “them” moving in. It’s going to go down in flames at town meeting and they are going to throw away a lot of state aid money.

  170. 170.

    Quinerly

    @Gloria DryGarden:

    12 miles outside of Santa Fe after 40 years in St. Louis. Early retired at the end of 2019 at age 58. Very glad to be in a Blue state. It was between here where I had “driven around looking at things with my dog and talking to strangers” on an annual month long trip for 15 years vs going by to my NC coastal roots. Like I said…glad to be in a Blue State.

    I love meeting BJers on my road trips. Or having BJers meet up with me in my neck of the woods. Think I am up to 25 BJers…lots of those nyms seemed to dropped away from commenting. Keep in touch with a few of them on FB/by email. You in Denver? I’m open to a plan. Get my email from Betty Cracker if you want.

    Hope to connect with piratedan in Tucson in Dec. We have been emailing. Great guy.

  171. 171.

    Layer8Problem

    “Never blame the voters” is a typical bromide.

    No, I’m going to blame the voters, at least the ones who vote based on vibes, woo, racism, and sexism.  Either they’re incurious and regard voting as a reality show, or they’re fools who think they’re safe from the tempest.

    I’m going to blame big media too, proclaiming their impartiality and minimizing extremism and lunacy.  Joseph Kahn can fuck himself.

    The person I cohabit with is heartbroken and half paralyzed with anxiety.  I’m having a bit of trouble myself.  We’ll go on, step by step.  “So we beat on, boats against the current . . . “

  173. 173.

    narya

    @Jeffro: I want this sooooo badly.

    @Baud:The things that are important to me are important things, and I’m not going to pretend they are less important because young people have a different viewpoint. I’m happy to work with anyone in good faith, but I’m done denigrating my point of view.

    This.

  174. 174.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @TBone:

    I’ll never understand why Biden didn’t get rid of him via appointing new governors to the postal board to oust him. We had the Senate majority to do it, for fuck’s sake

  175. 175.

    Cheryl from Maryland

    @artem1s: I woke up at 3am just as it was confirmed Trump had won PA.  Did not get back to sleep.  Around 7am, realized as a retired person with a 401K mainly invested in conservative mutual funds, I could be in for it, especially if Social Security and Medicare get trashed.  I have a meeting with my financial advisor next week.

  176. 176.

    Quinerly

    @piratedan:

    I hate the blame game. But Dems have to examine and figure out what went so very wrong. Commonsense.

    No politics talk if we connect next month? Would love to buy you and your wife lunch. You have been so helpful with travel suggestions. I went with Santa Rosa Barrio.

  177. 177.

    The Thin Black Duke

    The Four Horsemen of this Apocalypse were Racism, Misogyny, Homophobia and–most significantly–Indifference. Most Americans put more time into researching which big screen TV to buy than politics and that collective myopia gave Trump the election. It’s a big problem because most Americans don’t know it’s a problem.

  178. 178.

    schrodingers_cat

    People and this includes journalists for prestige publications are innumerate and make terrible decisions based on that. The stupid I see on social media and blogs can be traced to that as well inability to understand basic math like percentages.

  180. 180.

    Jeffro

    @trollhattan: by the mango menace’s own lawyer’s statements to SCOTUS, Biden would be well within his rights and fully immune if he sent Seal Team Six to solve the problem of trumpov’s threat to national security

  181. 181.

    Juju

    @Betty Cracker: it also shows how stupid people are because Trump was the one responsible for the pandemic mess. Biden is the one who did the, literally, best job in the world cleaning up the mess.  Also, I think Sherod Brown should run For Vance’s seat. I will donate money to get him started on that if he needs money.

  182. 182.

    Mai Naem mobile

    @Quinerly: I’ve been wondering if 2020 was the outlier because TFG had done such an awful job on COVID and people were at home and had an easy time voting by mail. There was absolutely nothing great about Biden’s campaign or Biden the candidate. There was just the expected  quiet competency.

  183. 183.

    Sure Lurkalot

    @eemom: The presidential race in my state of Colorado didn’t matter, and in Denver County, 79% voted for Harris (yea neighbors!) BUT the turnout was 47% (FU, neighbors!)

    Sure, the electoral college made voting for president irrelevant here but there were other races and over 20 ballot issues.  Additionally, it can’t be much easier to vote than in Colorado, where everyone is mailed a ballot.

    So, overall I’m pretty disgusted with those stats.

  184. 184.

    WereBear

    @Quinerly: I was forced into early retirement when my industry collapsed, which worsened an existing stress disorder, and the only silver lining is that is not the disability list, which worries me greatly.

    And that I don’t have to go into the office and deal with R co-workers anymore.

  185. 185.

    TBone

    @WereBear: yin does not exist without yang ☯️

    We are truly all in this together.

    Humankind has not woven the Web of Life.  We are but one strand within it.  Whatever we do the web, we do to ourselves.  All things are bound together.  All things connect.

    – Chief Seattle

  186. 186.

    piratedan

    @Quinerly: I am open for whatever, politics can be on the table as well, I don’t believe that we’d be gunned down on the street by MAGA in Tucson. So as far as I am concerned, we’re still on.  Just have to work on specific dates and times and maybe can get really granular on what to try and do and see.

     

    It will be good to meet and greet and maybe we can even find a place that would be welcoming for JoJo to attend as well :-)

  187. 187.

    Quinerly

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    I really don’t want to be right. I am very disillusioned, hurt, and scared. I truly thought we had this this time between young voters, first time voters, women. Rejecting Harris is rejecting Biden.

    Suburban women went 53% for Trump. They want him. And they think they got abortion protections for their daughters by voting in favor of these referendums. They don’t care that they support a man who wants to pardon folks who beat cops at the Capitol with Confederate Battle Flags and smeared shit on the walls. They care about inflation and gas prices for their SUVs.

    We need to face it…the majority of the voters don’t care about most of the things us lawyers on this blog do. They tuned out about Trump’s convictions and don’t have the time nor attention span to follow each and every turn in those cases.

    We are outraged by Trump’s lawlessness. Most simply don’t know or care.

  188. 188.

    Layer8Problem

    @Mai Naem mobile:  I have a nagging suspicion that there was a element of Democrats still butthurt that Biden won in 2020, someone who didn’t deserve to win because he wasn’t Sanders/Warren/Whoever.  I was a Warren person but unlike the rest of those I thought the results spoke for themselves.  There’s also the “Biden made an implicit promise not to run again according to unnamed sources and we’re holding him to that” crowd.  For them this is all on his head.  There aren’t that many of either of these but they’re vocal.

    The choice this year was good versus evil.  A bad choice was made there.

  190. 190.

    Geminid

    @Mai Naem mobile: I think one big difference between 2020 and this year is that in 2020 Trump ran his own campaign with the help of a few amateurs and semi-pros.. This time he had a much better organized operation with professionals in charge. That helped Trump win despite his mental decline.

  191. 191.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Quinerly:

    Imo, misogyny and racism had very little to do with the results.

    The “lived economy” under an administration she was part of did us in.

    If so, I agree with Baud that losing was inevitable.

    The choice for the Biden Administration was simple: (a) less stimulus, but recession, high unemployment, and people losing their homes (but low inflation!) just like in 2009-2010, or (b) a better stimulus, no recession, full employment, but higher inflation than we’d seen in a few decades.

    IMHO, Biden rightly opted for (b).  It’s hard for me to imagine that people’s ‘lived economy’ would have been better under (a), after all we went through that scenario just fifteen years ago, and we never did completely dig our way out of the effects of the hammering we got in the 2010 midterms.

    Plenty of people were obviously doing great under Biden, people were buying big-ass trucks, resort bookings were filling up way in advance, minority unemployment was the lowest ever.

    Yes, inflation was real, but I still believe that the media has a lot of influence with how people perceive things – what they see and think about, and what they don’t.  The job market over the past few years was probably the best of my entire lifetime, but the media rarely said anything about that.  But they were all about inflation, inflation, inflation, with a lot of total bullshit on top of it about how a recession was right around the corner.

  192. 192.

    TBone

    @ArchTeryx: I have already planned for that if the shit hits the fan in such a way that that cowardly, weak, evangelicuglican thinks he’s gonna fuck with anyone here in my ‘hood.

    I’ve already had to run outside and reassure an older Black lady who walks on our street after he tried to verbally intimidate her.  She’s a nana in one of the TWO Black families that recently integrated in my neighborhood (the toddler dressed in pink is so effing cute!) and I told her my door is ALWAYS open if she ever feels unsafe.  She said, in a heavy accent I couldn’t place, “God bless you” while reaching out and holding my hand.

    Her son who wasn’t home at that moment is TALL and STRONG.

  193. 193.

    Chris Johnson

    @comrade scotts agenda of rage: Thiel’s PRESIDENT, man. For practical purposes.

    I’m very interested to know what that means for stuff, because we’re waaaay off the map. This is not only about what Putin wants anymore. And some of what Thiel wants is the same as what Putin wants, but that doesn’t mean he’s selected Putin as the emperor he thinks should win. Thiel may have other ideas. Maybe he thinks Elon Musk will be a better puppet leader than either Putin OR Trump. We’re way off the map now.

  194. 194.

    Jeffro

    @Elizabelle: A nation of adolescents, who care more about sports and entertainment, and fall for all manner of crap on social media.  And their cynicism, shallowness, and incompetence dooms us all.

    I think this has always been the case – I can’t really think of an era in American history where we were outstanding in our maturity and temperament, LOL – it’s just now there are things like nuclear weapons and runaway climate change.

  196. 196.

    Chris Johnson

    @TBone: My concern about postal fuckery is how useless that system could get if it’s really obliterated. I’ve just ordered a couple synthesizer kits from Thonk in the UK, while I could. The time may be passing where we can get anything mail-wise except for probably ads and propaganda delivered.

    I can foresee selling off some of my music gear, but I’m concerned that shipping stuff through the mail will stop being a reasonable choice.

  199. 199.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @Sure Lurkalot:

    Exactly.  49% turnout given how we have things setup to vote is beyond pathetic.  And some of those state/local ballot issues will have meaningful impacts here.

    That being said, tons of them could easily be seen as “why am I voting on this?” and given the plethora of them, I wonder if that in itself didn’t knock down turnout as in “Ah, there’s too much stuff for me to consider so I’ll pass.”

    Which is just another way of saying what somebody said upthread, we spend more time researching our next big screen TV purchase than we do for voting.

  200. 200.

    Chris

    @Belafon:

    @Baud: The next crisis needs to occur in 2026, not 2028.

    Frankly, the next crisis needs to happen right after inauguration.

    The Great Depression hit Hoover during his first year in office, he did exactly jack and shit to handle it, and Republicans still kept control of the House and Senate during the 1930 midterms.  People had to spend damn year an entire presidential term getting it good and hard before they were finally willing to let a liberal start fixing the mess.

  201. 201.

    Chris Johnson

    @clay: Gaza is a real concern but also an angle for Russian ops. It being an election decider, in which the idea is to refuse to vote for Harris in order to punish Dems for Gaza, is very much a Russian op. Practically, that’s pretty much hosed Gaza, but it wasn’t about practicality.

    These are among the means that you use to get real human people to cast (or un-cast) real legitimate votes in a way that’s not legitimate representation. Gazan blood is on the hands of those who arranged this little operation. I guess it can join the Ukranian blood.

  202. 202.

    Quinerly

    @WereBear:

    So sorry you were forced. I admit I was lucky and fortunate and could leave a profession that I loathed from almost day one. Saved for and organized my escape early. Not having the expense of children and messy divorces like many helped. Will probably die alone since I have no family. Life is trade offs, though. As I grow older, I am very happy about no children and no marriage. I would be horrified having children and grandchildren in this world.

    I am going to engage less re politics during the next 4 years. Just don’t have it in me to follow every thing this administration does. I need to get back to reading more books, watching movies, more hiking, more art openings and cooking. I haven’t thrown a dinner party in a long while. I need to make an effort to meet some new people out here.

    Hang in there. I always try to follow your comments. If ever in NM, let’s try to connect.

  205. 205.

    TBone

    Today I learned we had election bomb threats in both Centre County and Clearfield County, PA causing closures.

  206. 206.

    New Deal democrat

    @lowtechcyclist: @The Truffle:

    This. Low interest rates can’t undo the fundamental supply-and-demand problem in the housing market.  As Suzanne has repeatedly pointed out, it’s going to take years of major new housing construction to fix that.

    True but not decisive for this discussion. There is a chronic housing shortage. It is mainly due to state and local zoning regulations.

    Suppose I want to buy a $300,000 house. Then prices surge by 20%, but mortgage rate decline from 7% to 3.5%. My 20% down payment goes from $50,000 to $60,000, but my mortgage payment goes down by about $500/month. I break even after 20 months and have more money in my pocket for 28+ years thereafter.

    Trump’s tariffs are unlikely to counterbalance lower interest rates.

    And lower mortgage rates are the only way to get builders to build more houses to break through the shortage.

  207. 207.

    Soprano2

    @hrprogressive: But there was a primary in 2020 with a lot of candidates, they got to choose. Those sound like people who are butthurt that they didn’t choose Bernie.

  208. 208.

    Chris

    @clay:

    @Starfish: No offense to the Palestinians but how the eff did Gaza become a central issue of this campaign?  Foreign policy has rarely been an overriding concern during elections… why did it start this year?  Especially the I/P situation, which has always been a clustermess, and is now a slightly bigger clustermess.  I’m serious here; I don’t really get it.

    This.

    Unless you’re Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, or have a deep lifelong involvement in pro-Palestinian activism, my answer to people saying they were deeply concerned about the situation in Gaza is “no you weren’t.”  Israel has been doing a slow-motion ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian territories for fifty fucking years (a lot more if you count the original Nakba), and apart from trying to apply the brakes for maybe a decade in the nineties, the United States has been cheerfully enabling them this entire time.  It’s one of the most disgusting stains on our foreign policy, but it’s not something that originated with Biden or has even been particularly worse under Biden.  So you’ve been blissfully ignoring a slow-motion genocide since 1948, but then in 2024 –  just in time for you to have a principled objection to voting for a Democrat running against a fascist who’s been screaming at Israel to “finish the job” – you finally suddenly discovered that you were very worried about the Palestinian people?  Bullshit.

    The very best interpretation I can give for these people is “I am too clueless and uninformed to find Cleveland on a map, much less Ramallah and Gaza, but my social media feed’s suddenly been filling up with Genocide Joe memes and I just sort of believed them I guess because everyone else is saying Biden’s a bad president anyway.”  Which probably did happen to a few people.  The worst is something else.

  209. 209.

    Soprano2

    @hrprogressive: a lot of young guys feel abandoned and left behind by a Democratic Party that doesn’t care about them.

    I agree that this needs to be dug into more, but as a woman what I hear is “they feel abandoned by Democrats because the party doesn’t center and cater to them anymore, even if they do say over and over they want to address their issues”. I never hear what these specific issues are, only that somehow they aren’t being addressed. I hear a lot of assertions without much real proof.

  211. 211.

    Chris

    @AM in NC:

    @Baud: Nothing changes until the billionaire-owned media landscape changes.

    It would help if people were at least aware of the media landscape.  A ton of the harm the mainstream media does is multiplied simply because of the baked-in assumption that it is either liberal or relatively trustworthy; as a result, every shade they cast at a Democrat is taken as gospel (“it must be REALLY bad if Even The Liberal Media is saying it!”) and whatever shade they cast at Republicans sort of dismissed (“well of course they’re going to say that, they’re the liberal media”).

    That’s just the MSM; the problems with social media are another thing.  To the best of my knowledge that isn’t really perceived in a partisan way (though Musk may have changed that for Twitter specifically), but it’s right-wing as fuck and it’s just as much a way to get bad information into the world.

  212. 212.

    japa21

    A couple things. About Baldwin and Slotkin winning but Harris losing.
    I looked at the figures this morning and as of now Harris received roughly the same number of votes as those two did in their respective states.
    Trump received far more votes than their opponents. IOW, it appears a lot of people just voted for Trump and didn’t vote down ticket.
    I only looked at those two races, but I think ticket splitting may not have been as much as initially thought, particularly in the swing states.

    I can somewhat verify that their was a lot of people only voting at the Presidential level. Working the polls both during early voting and election day, I saw a lot of people who finished their voting very quickly. They really took just enough time to vote on one line and they were done. I believe, without actual evidence, that they were mostly Trump voters. I have a hunch if a similar analysis was done of the 2020 and 2016 results, there would be a similar outcome.

  213. 213.

    Soprano2

    @Starfish: This time, Gaza mattered because places like Michigan and Wisconsin are swing states with large Muslim populations.

    And now Bibi is going to make a peace deal with them because he got what he wants, another TCFG presidency that won’t interfere with his efforts to take over Gaza and the West Bank at all. I hope they’re happy with the result they got.

  215. 215.

    Soprano2

    @New Deal democrat: Well, she pushed the housing thing a lot and it didn’t seem to matter much. Although I think it’s interesting that in the swing states where Democrats advertised a lot the shift to TCFG was a lot less. If she had three or four more months to do that it might have made a bigger difference.

  216. 216.

    Quinerly

    @japa21:

    Interesting. Please continue to post with follow ups. I think we all can agree that we need to know what happened. How and why people voted and why so many Biden voters stayed home.

  217. 217.

    No Nym

    @TBone: They are suddenly now a blue County!

    Well, that is certainly interesting. And that is not to say I don’t fully believe that misogyny and racism are the rot at America’s core.

  219. 219.

    Soprano2

    @Quinerly:  The things that are impt to us in our bubbles here aren’t impt to the average 32 yo with 2 jobs and 3 kids in Albertsons grocery buying cereal.

    The most ironic thing is that the cereal isn’t going to get cheaper just because they elected TCFG. I think a lot of them will be really surprised when it doesn’t. Incumbent governments of all kinds all over the world are being voted out, I think it’s general discontent with inflation and immigration everywhere. Getting elected was a heavy lift for her and the incumbent party.

  221. 221.

    BarcaChicago

    Hello everyone, I know I will need this blog even more to make it through and I’m extremely thankful for it. Been lurking since 2007. I spent a lot of time canvassing in WI, where I’m from though currently live in Chicago. I’m having a hard time correlating what I saw, and what happened. Am I nuts to not understand how much higher than normal voter turnout resulted in 18 million LESS Dem votes? How record small donors and historic voter registration resulted in LESS Dem votes? I don’t get it. And I talked to some R voters who hated Trump and were crossing the line to vote for Harris. I absolutely did not see this coming and certainly not an unprecedented win compared to ’16 and ’20.

    That said, I am in a place of despair and dread that I’ve never experienced before (I know we all are). I don’t see being able to live through the next four years. That is absolutely not a suicide reference – I don’t really know how to articulate it but I just don’t think I can do it. It probably doesn’t help that I’m the caregiver for an emotionally abusive mother that has dementia and whose needs will grow and a father in rapid decline who fights with me over the need for added caregiving help for my stepmom who has advanced dementia.

    I cannot see how Trump, whose cognitive decline has been increasing to the point of total dysfunction, will take office in any shape or form in January. I assume it will be Vance and the group of extremists around him.

    Thank you, thank you, thank you to all for being here. I had some immediate fighting spirit in the late night aftermath but it has entirely disappeared as I try to picture how the camps, national abortion ban, gay marriage ban, etc will play out. I’m so exhausted from the last 8 years that I can’t imagine continuing the fight but now with more unbounded violent fascism.

  222. 222.

    TBone

    @No Nym: add it to the bomb threats phoned in to PA polling places – my Spidey senses are tingling.

    Every real life encounter with the joyous Pennsyltucky public I’ve had in the last 100+ days says that we were bamboozled by R fuckery (R for Russian and Rethuglican).  If you have to cheat to win, you’re still a LOSER.

  224. 224.

    tam1MI

    @eemom: Not to be a broken record, but this result was about white supremacy and sexism, on BOTH sides. And that is why fucking 2020 Biden voters stayed home.

    Not to mention the 2020 Biden voters who stayed home because their own party told them their votes didn’t matter and didn’t count.

  226. 226.

    TBone

    @BarcaChicago: welcome to the best place on the Internet.  My hopes for you include strength, perseverance, and fortitude.  Please keep your inner bitch alive! (Best advice my therapist ever gave me.) We’ll get through this together.

  228. 228.

    RevRick

    Dr. Martin Luther King once preached a sermon, which he titled, “Tough-minded, But Tender-hearted.” He asserted that we need tough-minded, but tender-hearted people for the then tasks of the Civil Rights Movement.
    That still holds true today.

    And that requires us to banish all sorts of wishful thinking. Will Trump screw things up? Undoubtedly! Will we still have ready avenues of redress? We can’t count on that. We only have to look at Venezuela to see what a determined authoritarian can do to hold on to power.
    Trump has already advertised his plans to attack certain institutions and individuals. We know his administration will be filled with lackeys and zealots. He is going to issue his Schedule F scheme stripping 50,000 senior level positions of protection from political interference. Things are about to get ugly and we cannot count on any of the institutions that we have long known to hold. The major news organizations will come under attack. We may well end up having to rely on our own version of samizdat.
    So, our challenge is to ask ourselves, “What institutions do I belong to that meet regularly and can provide emotional sustenance and support? What institutions will I support that do works of care for others and the environment where I can be involved with more than just a check in the mail?”
    If you’re not currently involved in some sort of face-to-face institution, find one and join it. You will need it. None of us will be able to face the onslaught to come as lone wolves, and if you think you can, you will be sadly mistaken. We need to assume the worst and prepare for it.

    We have no way of knowing how long the dark nights that will descend upon our world will last. Maybe we’ll get lucky. But we can’t count on that. Just ask black folks about Jim Crow when the promise of freedom in Reconstruction was snuffed out.

    But even as we plan for the worst, we need to find ways to keep our hopes alive. We cannot let Trump and his minions define our souls. We need to share with others all our resources, both material and spiritual. Which means we need to be fed.
    This blog is a great place, but it is far from enough. We are, after all, mostly familiar strangers at best, throwing our thoughts and opinions at each other. Occasionally, we share personal information, but even then I cannot see you or hug you. You need to be part of a place where you are more than just a nym.
    I will make an immodest plug for religious bodies here. Take it or leave it. But I just want you to know that there are lots of churches and synagogues served by liberal clergy who would welcome you. Yeah, even you self-professed atheists.
    Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian martyred by the Nazis, noted that Jesus said what was two apparently contradictory things. He said, “those who are not for us are against us,” and “those who are not against us are for us.” And as Bonhoeffer explained these contradictions are resolved by context.
    The context of our time is that we will need any and every support we can get. Find it wherever you can.

  229. 229.

    japa21

    The final totals will not a 15million vote difference between Harris and Biden.  The difference will still be stark.  Probably in the 10 million range.  CA, itself, has over 5 million votes to be counted.

  230. 230.

    japa21

    @PJ:  See my comment at 212.

     

    @tam1MI:

     

    Not to mention the 2020 Biden voters who stayed home because their own party told them their votes didn’t matter and didn’t count.

    That may be one of the stupidest comment I’ve seen here. Are you really saying that there are that many idiots among Dems?

  232. 232.

    Ohio Mom

    @BarcaChicago: Please make an appointment with an Eldercare attorney to find out how you can extricate yourself from having to dedicate your life to caring for your demented relatives. That is their expertise, you are not the first in your position.

    Attorneys will talk to you for free — sort of like a kitchen contractor giving you ideas about what can be done and how much they will charge you. The meter starts running when you tell the attorney to go ahead. If you don’t click with the first attorney, meet with another one.

    There are some passable memory care places, even for patients on Medicaid, and you can still visit and keep an eye out on their well-being.

    You should absolutely not risk your fragile well-being on something that has no upside and no happy ending. You deserve to take good care of yourself, and to save your energy and resources for weathering the coming storm of Trumpism.

    Go to it!

    ETA: Sign me, Watching out for a demented friend just placed in a Medicaid facility. Thankfully her sister has POA and takes care of the financials and legal and I think she is making good if difficult decisions.

  233. 233.

    Citizen Alan

    @hrprogressive: Maybe we should just let bernie have the nomination in 2016, so that the Sanders/Nina Turner ticket could have lost by such historic margins that we would’ve already lost our democracy altogether.  At least would never have to here from bernie bro whiners anymore.

  234. 234.

    Quinerly

    @Soprano2:

    Thread dying and this Time piece will tick off some folks. But this caught my eye. Long quote:
    Wiles and LaCivita, political director James Blair, and Trump’s longtime pollster Tony Fabrizo, believed that gender would be key. In 2020, Biden won by holding the same 13-point lead among women that Hillary Clinton had over Trump in 2016, while narrowing the gap among men by five points. “Men cost us the last election,” a top Trump campaign source says. “Our objective became not to let that happen again.”

    Surveys found that men, particularly young men, were turning away from Biden the most, especially over the economy. In a head-to-head matchup, Trump’s lead was the most dominant among unreliable male voters younger than 40. Advisers concentrated on activating this cohort, which, by and large, saw Biden as an elderly man who shouldn’t be President. These young men didn’t get their news from mainstream media and were less concerned with reproductive rights or democratic backsliding. When they did interact with politics, it was mostly through edgy bro podcasts and social media. They appreciated Trump’s brashness and habit of smashing norms. It was a risk to focus significant energy on turning out voters who don’t care much about politics. But LaCivita would often repeat a Winston Churchill line that became a campaign mantra: “To try to be safe everywhere is to be strong nowhere.”
    As Trump pursued the male vote, he also had to avoid losing women by larger margins than in 2016 and 2020—no easy feat after his Supreme Court appointments helped overturn Roe v. Wade and pave the way for abortion bans across the country. Whenever abortion came up, Trump insisted the issue was now up to the states, and pivoted as much as possible to the economy, immigration, and crime—issues the campaign believed triggered anxiety with well-to-do suburban women who were open to backing him.
    https://time.com/7172052/how-donald-trump-won-2024/

  237. 237.

    PJ

    @Quinerly: We disagree on this.  Biden was portrayed as a moderate old white guy, while Harris was portrayed as a “far left” black woman from San Francisco.   Racism, misogyny, and fear of anything labeled “left” in this country are still very strong.   Abandoning Biden was also seen as a sign that even Democrats thought his policies and administration were failures.  Those are big handicaps going into an election.

  238. 238.

    No Nym

    @TBone: add it to the bomb threats phoned in to PA polling places – my Spidey senses are tingling.

    Yes, I heard there were more than 30 bomb threats called in during voting and during counts, all in important swing state districts and  all traced to Russia. One of the things that eats at my soul is how much of this malfeasance goes back to the lack of will for dealing out consequences for rich white men violating laws. As long as people in power benefit from that malfeasance, nothing will stop it. I liken it to raising a child: Children feel safer when there are defined boundaries and natural consequences for violating the boundaries. They learn to self-regulate. I look around and see a whole class of people who have never had to feel the burn of consequences, and Supreme Court that has made sure Mr. Poopy Pants will never be held to account. Looks like all the charges against him are going to amount to nothing, no “grownups” in the room around him.

  239. 239.

    Chris

    @lowtechcyclist:

    Yes, inflation was real, but I still believe that the media has a lot of influence with how people perceive things – what they see and think about, and what they don’t.  The job market over the past few years was probably the best of my entire lifetime, but the media rarely said anything about that.  But they were all about inflation, inflation, inflation, with a lot of total bullshit on top of it about how a recession was right around the corner.

    Yep.

    I’m economically anxious too, have been my entire adult life.  I buy gas and groceries too.  Yes, it’s gone up, and a few times early in the term it really spiked, but it simply isn’t the bank-breaking crisis that people want it to be.  In any sane media environment, the Biden inflation would have been the equivalent of Reagan’s first term recession or the way the economy hit rock bottom early in the Obama years: a problem for a while, but one that turned around long before the actual election year, with voters (those that even remember) mostly figuring that if there was a problem, the government is handling it.

    (There was that one summer when gas prices genuinely were so high that it was really hurting me, for example: but it’s far enough in the past that already that I can’t even remember if that was 2021 or 2022.  Gas prices have been perfectly normal and well within affordable ranges for at least two years).  

    The reason the economy has been treated as a disaster is that the media kept it in the headlines long after it was justifiable and boosted it with outright Pravda-level lies.  (You can, if you squint enough, look at the inflation issue and say “well, they’re just reporting grumbling from real-life shoppers.”  There’s no such justification for the fact that they’ve been running around with their hair on fire screaming “recession!” since ten minutes after Biden was inaugurated).

  240. 240.

    Soprano2

    I just listened to the Pod Save guys post mortem on the election. They touched on a lot of topics, but not once did they mention the possibility that race and gender might have something to do with Harris’ loss. This is a huge blind spot they have, they just don’t want to talk about it. I don’t know why.

  242. 242.

    TBone

    @No Nym: exactly

    Did you see Philly D.A. Larry Krasner’s “Eff Around and Find Out” speech?

    I wish we had a million Larry Krasners, all simultaneously with their toes up the crack of Elon Musk’s ass!

  243. 243.

    Chris

    @Jeffro:

    I think this has always been the case – I can’t really think of an era in American history where we were outstanding in our maturity and temperament, LOL – it’s just now there are things like nuclear weapons and runaway climate change.

    Democrats were in the doghouse for about seventy years after the Civil War, and Republicans similarly in the doghouse for about seventy years after the Great Depression.  (With a lot of ups and downs in both cases, but people forget that George W. Bush was the first time in fifty years that Republicans controlled all three houses – and that previous time was a two-year blip involving President Eisenhower, who had as much to do with Hoover or Dubya style conservatives as Obama did with Grover Cleveland).

    Our politics have never been great, but for a long time they were saner than this.

  244. 244.

    O. Felix Culpa

    @New Deal democrat:

    Those are good things AND they were front and center of KH’s platform.  So the OPer’s claim that young men’s (and young women’s) needs were ignored by the Dems is incorrect.  Somehow young women are better able to assess who will actually help them.

    Of course,  the Fed sets interest rates,  not the Dems. But I wouldn’t expect the common clay, young or old,  to know that.

  245. 245.

    Citizen Alan

    @Soprano2: the biggest reason I hate bernie so much is that he and his most devoted followers clearly do not believe in democracy. As with the trumpists, any election outcome other than “my guy wins” is obviously the result of corruption and cheating.

  246. 246.

    SomeRandomGuy

    guys look on the bright side: -Trump is trying to find ways to strip immigrants of their citizenship and deport them -Elon musk likely worked in the US illegally at some point – the two have a long history of spectacular falling outs

    Listen, friend: I might be a lonely voice calling out in the wilderness, but that kinda smoke blown up asses didn’t really help in 2016, either. YES, Musk worked in the US illegally. No, that’s not going to hurt him. And this time, we know that the corruption goes all the way up, down, and sideways.

    Or, maybe it’s actually funny, and I’m too depressed to see it. But it’s like crowing that Trump is sure to be impeached – big whoop, Republican Senators don’t believe in justice.

  247. 247.

    Chris

    @Soprano2:

    The most ironic thing is that the cereal isn’t going to get cheaper just because they elected TCFG. I think a lot of them will be really surprised when it doesn’t.

    They won’t even notice, because all of a sudden all the people who have been talking about inflation are going to stop talking about it.  By this time in 2025, they’ll be convinced that the price has always been this way.

  249. 249.

    Chris

    @Citizen Alan:

    @hrprogressive: Maybe we should just let bernie have the nomination in 2016, so that the Sanders/Nina Turner ticket could have lost by such historic margins that we would’ve already lost our democracy altogether.  At least would never have to here from bernie bro whiners anymore.

    If you think we’re in danger of turning back to DLC politics now, imagine how the party would’ve been after a Sanders loss.

  252. 252.

    Geminid

     

     

    @O. Felix Culpa: Young people also need good employment opportunities. The Biden administration delivered a strong economy, the strongest I’ve seen in my adult lifetime.

    But I’ve lived through three recessions, the last one being the worst. Young people haven’t lived through one recession, and that made it easier for them to take this strong economy for granted.

  254. 254.

    tam1MI

    @japa21: That may be one of the stupidest comment I’ve seen here. Are you really saying that there are that many idiots among Dems?

    10 to 15 million Biden voters stayed home rather than vote for the woman he was forced to step aside for*. There was absolute fury among them about the shabby way the person they gave their vote to was treated by his own party. Posters here tried to warn other posters that the Dems were playing with fire when they went for that cute little maneuver, but they were shouted down. They got told their votes didn’t matter and didn’t count, and they took that message to heart.

    * – None of that was Harris’s fault, but furious people don’t think straight.

  255. 255.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @tam1MI: If you remember, I was as pro-retain Biden as anyone here.  I strongly disagree with your assessment.  And, yes, I am still mad about the way July went down.

  256. 256.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @tam1MI:

    Biden only ever had a 40% approval rating for most of his term. He was never going to win, not with everything else dragging him down, including his disastrous debate performance, which turned out wasn’t a fluke. He just didn’t have the energy anymore, sad as it is to say

  259. 259.

    Layer8Problem

    @Goku: Nice work there.  Really helps all of us out.  Tack in a little “Many people were saying . . . ” and I’ll bet someone will give you a <chef’s kiss>.

  260. 260.

    tam1MI

    @Chris: If you think we’re in danger of turning back to DLC politics now

    Oh, the Dems are going to move to the right, that is an absolute certainty. It’s just a matter of which group they decide to throw under the bus.

  261. 261.

    Chris

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    Oh, well that, yes.  Trump is going to do all kinds of shit that are going to make things worse and, eventually, get so bad that even regular voters can’t fail to notice them.

    But the original point was specifically about people being surprised and disappointed when the cost of cereal didn’t go down, and… no.

  262. 262.

    Archon

    @O. Felix Culpa: if we had just offer free healthcare and collage to that 30 year old white man who lives with his parents and spends his free time listening to podcast telling him his undesirability is someone elses fault, he definitely would have voted for the Dems…

  263. 263.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Come on, it caused a huge freak out for a reason. It reinforced people’s perceptions of Biden as being too old, something they’d been hearing for a year by that point. And he never really improved that much afterwards. There was a noticeable physical decline

  265. 265.

    tam1MI

    @Omnes Omnibus: If you remember, I was as pro-retain Biden as anyone here.  I strongly disagree with your assessment.  And, yes, I am still mad about the way July went down.

    You and I and the other Retain Biden folks here had the advantage of the good people here who put in the effort to talk us down and bring us around to see Harris’s very real strengths. Other Biden supporters didn’t have that. All they saw was a deeply unfair process that resulted in an unvetted, untested, and (to their minds, not in reality), unqualified candidate they had no voice in choosing. And let’s not forget that that the candidate in question was a black female, and misogynoir exists in our party as well as anywhere else. July was when we lost the election to Trump. Harris was just the sacrificial lamb left holding the bag.

  269. 269.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @Omnes Omnibus: I know a bunch of people who were pissed off about Biden being pushed aside, but every single one of them managed to still be thrilled about Kamala.  I don’t know any that I suspect of sitting out the election on Tuesday.  If I had to hazard a guess as to who did that bullshit my money is on the people who spent the past year threatening to do so (and encouraging others to do so as well) over Gaza.  I don’t think we ever get real solid #’s on who didn’t vote and why, but the latter group seems much more likely to have done what they promised, publicly, ad nauseam, to do.

  271. 271.

    RevRick

    @TBone: Thank you for awarding me the gold cup. I wasn’t sure anyone would notice. As usual, I am a day late and a dollar short in articulating my thoughts.

  272. 272.

    SomeRandomGuy

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Is there a reason you’re being deliberately inflammatory, bringing up old fights that provide no light, but might provide heat in the form of flames?

    Seriously: WE KNOW PEOPLE FIND THE ELDERLY DISGUSTING.

    You don’t need to remind us of that. Again. ‘kay?

    (Did I SAY that YOU found the elderly disgusting? No. I don’t know you do. I just have cause to think you do.)

  273. 273.

    tam1MI

    @Omnes Omnibus: Lambs don’t have thumbs.

    They could hold the bag in their teeth! 😉

    Thanks for giving me a sorely needed laugh. It’s one of the reasons I love this place. 😊

  274. 274.

    tam1MI

    @UncleEbeneezer: If I had to hazard a guess as to who did that bullshit my money is on the people who spent the past year threatening to do so (and encouraging others to do so as well) over Gaza.  I don’t think we ever get real solid #’s on who didn’t vote and why, but the latter group seems much more likely to have done what they promised, publicly, ad nauseam, to do.

    Except that those people had a candidate they could vote for to show their displeasure with the Gaza situation – Jill Stein was right there. And she got no statistically significant votes. There is only one group I can think of in the Democratic coalition that is big enough to reach 15 million and mad enough at the Dems to have stayed home.

    On the other hand, of you are correct, the time irony here is that by the time the next Presidential election rolls around, Gaza will no longer be an issue. Mainly because Gaza and the people who live there will have been wiped off the map.

  275. 275.

    Chris

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    I’d believe this was true if Trump had experienced anything like the same thing.  More so than Biden, the man is, clearly, in physical decline.  I don’t mean that he says crazy and outrageous things that don’t make sense, which he’s always done.  His basic ability to string words together and his energy are both way down in exactly the ways we were told Biden was – the man spent the last month canceling damn near every event he had scheduled, and when he does show up, he doesn’t even sound like “Hitler at Nuremberg” so much as “Uncle Colm from Derry Girls.”  He has a Biden Debate Moment every fucking week.  Other than his supporters, who don’t care, and a few blogs like this one, no one seems to have even noticed.

    The difference?  Trump didn’t have every single newspaper headline in the nation screaming “Biden Senile, Must Resign!” for an entire month, and if he had, Republicans would have known better than to repeat it.

  276. 276.

    Soprano2

    @Geminid: Young people haven’t lived through one recession, and that made it easier for them to take this strong economy for granted.

    Anyone who lived through the 1970’s and early 1980’s should know that it can be a whole lot worse even than 2008-2009. How easily people forget the past. I agree, though, that they have no idea what a really bad economy looks like. They may be getting ready to find out.

  277. 277.

    Soprano2

    @Chris: If they’re not angry and upset when grocery prices don’t go down that kind of puts the lie to what they said is the reason they voted the way they did, doesn’t it? If they noticed inflation since 2021 surely they will notice it in 2025, right? If they don’t complain about it, then they’re lying about why they voted.

  278. 278.

    UncleEbeneezer

    @tam1MI: I don’t think Gaza is the sole or even main reason for low Dem turnout.  I was just pointing out that that would make a hell of a lot more sense than assuming it was people bitter about Biden stepping aside

    I suspect interest in Gaza is going to plummet and protests are going to be fairly uncommon now that Harris has lost.  A lot of Russian bots have already moved on since their mission was accomplished.

  279. 279.

    Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony

    @JMG: If they see those stories. You can’t assume they will.This is why what they are doing is so insidious.

  280. 280.

    Quinerly

    @PJ:

    You tell me how an incumbent Pres gets re elected when over 60% of the country when asked say the country is on the wrong track?

    His approval ratings never hit 50% or over except right after inauguration and I think after he stepped aside.

    And if the Dem Party knew the stakes and stayed home and pouted because they were so loyal to him then it’s not much of a party and these folks get off on sabotage. Not buying it. For what it’s worth, most of the people I hang with in my new place are normies. Everyone supported Harris. Many said if Biden had stayed in they probably wouldn’t even vote. Not scientific….just normal, mildly engaged Dems.

  283. 283.

    BarcaChicago

    @TBone: Thank you, TBone. I’m already feeling better after spending time talking with friends today. We are all TOTAL bitches :-)

     

    @Omnes Omnibus: Thank you, Omnes. Lots of emotional states to travel through… but this community and others are the key to getting through.

     

    @Ohio Mom: Thank you, Ohio Mom. I SO appreciate your support and resources. I actually managed to get both healthcare POA and financial POA completed (getting my mom to sign that took years off my life :-/), got monies from a temporary federal grant to pay someone to come over 3 times a week (ends in April), and I live in Chicago in a newly purchased tiny place while she lives in the family house in Madison, so I go there 2/3 times a month to take care of things and am in charge of all of her needs: finances/healthcare/services/companionship/plans for options going forward. I will be meeting with a “care navigator” to research potential residence options when needed. I have a sibling but he’s just crap at this stuff. Anyway, people get through this. I definitely am going to connect with support groups, I think that will be crucial. My elderly father, with the advanced dementia wife (who I dearly love and do caregiving for with pleasure), does have financial resources so I will need to ask him for help – I dread that, but there it is. There is no way I could live with her, with the emotional abuse (caveat: I love her but most of her is no longer present so that has moved to the foreground). Not feasible. But I can keep caring for her in all other ways. And thank you again :-))

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