Teacher gives $20 to her students with one rule: Use it for kindness www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/20…
— Margie (@paeznyc.bsky.social) March 15, 2025 at 10:23 AM
And I know which one I prefer! Per the Washington Post, “Teacher gives $20 to her students with one rule: Use it for kindness” [gift link]:
Kristina Ulmer’s younger sister, a waitress, worked the breakfast shift just hours before she died in a car accident in October 2014.
Ulmer and her parents were called to the accident scene in northeast Philadelphia, where Ulmer asked a police officer to climb into her sister’s mangled car and retrieve her purse. It contained the tips that Katie Amodei, 29, had earned that morning — more than $100 worth…
In 2018, she settled on an idea.
Ulmer, an English teacher at Hatboro-Horsham High School in Horsham, Pennsylvania, had assigned her students to read “Fahrenheit 451,” Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel about a future dystopian society.
“It’s set in a time when everyone is glued to their screens and society lacks empathy,” she said. “Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? It popped into my head that I could have my students do acts of kindness with my sister’s money.”…
“One student went to a local diner, asked for a glass of water and left the waitress a $20 tip,” she said. “Another girl knitted a bunch of little red caps for babies with heart problems, so they could be easily spotted in the NICU.”
Some students made homemade treats for pets at a local animal shelter, while others used their $20 to buy toiletries and food for unhoused people…
Ulmer now hands out $20 bills twice a year and combines students’ video clips into a montage for them to watch together. Since the project began, her students have spent more than $7,000 on acts of kindness, and the school now has a fund to accept donations, she said…
Ulmer said she often imagines how her sister would have reacted to her students’ acts of kindness.
“I believe she’d be ecstatic about how I used her tip money,” she said. “I personally feel that this helps Katie live on. It’s almost like she’s here with me every semester when I do this.”
On The Road – Dmkingto – SF Bay Area Benches
Baud
Can’t happen here.
Liminal Owl
What a lovely story, and a lovely person. Just what I needed to start the day. Thank you, AL.
Harrison Wesley
I guess love really is the healing force of the universe, isn’t it?
WTFGhost
Kindness and empathy can be contagious.
lowtechcyclist
As the late Glen Campbell sang, you’ve got to try a little kindness.
Ben Cisco
Wow!
Harrison Wesley
And, hey, how about the respect for Medgar Evers? What a pile of filth this country has become.
Glory b
Democrats have hit record favorability lows, while Republicans have maintained their numbers.
It’s a significant change from January, people dislike us more, our favorability is only 29%.
I’m not surprised, the more Republicans do to destroy things, the madder people are at Democrats.
Remember the “Fuck the Deomcrats” chart? It’s now become reality.
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5197910-democratic-partys-favorability-hits-record-low-poll/
Baud
@Harrison Wesley:
Had to look it up.
https://mississippitoday.org/2025/03/17/wwii-vet-medgar-evers-erased-from-arlington-cemetery-website/
If you’re against DEI, you’re against black vets.
Chief Oshkosh
@Glory b: People (and intentionally, the press) are confusing the “Democratic Party,” whose nominal leader just shit himself and everyone within shouting distance of the internet, with us Democrats.
Stay strong. Keep pointing out that eggs are getting more expensive. That a memo just leaked stating that the Republicans are very specifically to killing Social Security. That grandmas and farmers – especially white ones in the kuntry, are being hurt intentionally by Republicans, Trump, and Musk.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
It’s wonderful how teachers impact students in so many ways that can have lasting effects for the rest of those kids’s lives.
Yeah, it’s a trite statement but oh so true. Every one of us can probably point to at least one instance like this even if, like me, we don’t remember the teachers name.
Geo Wilcox
@Baud: And it isn’t just black veterans. They deleted the Code Talkers articles as well!
oldster
Those kids who give away $20?
What losers. They should have kept the cash. Or maybe used it as bait, in a con to rip off old people. Giving it away for nothing? They’re never going to grow up to be president.
Professor Bigfoot
Kindness and empathy are powerful weapons, far more so than threats and bullying. THOSE only work for a short time.
“Beware those in whom the urge to punish is strong.” -Nietzsche
zhena gogolia
@Chief Oshkosh: Because “us Democrats” keep publicly and vociferously dumping on our own elected representatives. As we did to our own incumbent President and nominee last summer.
Baud
@Geo Wilcox:
100%
Lapassionara
@Glory b: This is part of the “only Democrats have agency” phenomenon. Democrats were supposed to prevent Trump from becoming president again. Once Trump became president, Democrats were supposed to prevent him from implementing Project 2025.
In my adult lifetime, Republicans have always been lockstep with their party. If Republicans in office take away the right to choose, Republicans stay loyal. If Republicans in office threaten Social Security, Republicans stay loyal.
Democrats don’t act like Republicans. That’s why they are Democrats.
ETA, Republicans could have eliminated Trump from the presidency when he was impeached after January 6. They chose not to, but Democrats are mad at the Democratic Party. Go figure.
Raoul Paste
@Chief Oshkosh: Yes. The low opinion polls are about Democrats’ perceived reluctance to fight back.
But on topic, teaching the golden rule at an early age has no downside that I can see
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Raoul Paste: “teaching the golden rule at an early age has no downside that I can see”
What are you? Some kind of woke terrorist?
Gloria DryGarden
These moments of kindness, or micro generosity, or of Beauty, they matter so much.
like a diamond of sunlight in a dewdrop, but really more like a spark that rekindles warmth in the heart
all the small connections build into a living fabric, stronger with each thread.
(no, it’s not a poem, but the kindness stories feel very uplifting)
Professor Bigfoot
Why did Kamala Harris lose? Too many Black and brown supporters, thus alienating white people.
“There is no horseshoe. There is only white people who are at best uncomfortable with any power being held in Black hands. Those white people are at all points of the ‘left-right’ spectrum.”
Gloria DryGarden
@Professor Bigfoot: because you’ve mentioned the goddess to me, once, I’ll tell you, this topic calls to mind a large group ritual, where we cast our circle by each person taking the next one’s hand. As we did so, we repeated, “hand to hand, the circle is cast”, until the hand holding made its way around the circle, and we stood together as a symbolic and literal circle of protection and safety, and united intent.
Baud
@Professor Bigfoot:
Where do you see that? This is what struck me.
And this
This should help us if voters are consistent.
Also too, young people are not the future we had hoped for.
Shalimar
@Glory b: It’s an illusion with no depth. Democrats don’t like Republicans and Republicans don’t like Democrats. Just a fact of modern life, so what favorability measures is whether Democrats are happy with Democrats and Republicans are happy with Republicans. And more generally whether people are happy with what is going on now. Republicans are happy with Trump and Musk. There is some damage to MAGA supporters, but it isn’t widespread yet. Whereas Democrats are very disappointed with what is going on now and blame part of it on Dem politicians for not fighting back more effectively.
Gloria DryGarden
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I have a vast wide red and golden carpet of “wokeness” im happy to roll out over the pathways, to welcome everyone,
in a golden rule and inclusion kind of way.
This is only slightly different than my membership in the ladies sewing circle and terrorist society.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Professor Bigfoot: I’d also too many white people are damnable suckers, and believe in the existence of magical flying ponies.
A Ghost to Most
Being kind allowed the fascists to rise.
narya
@Professor Bigfoot: And, to me, this puts the lie to claims that someone wants “justice” or “mercy” or any of the things in the early-morning post. If you want to understand injustice, if you want to explore it and address it, who better to f’king listen to than people who have lived with injustice since their ancestors arrived on these shores in chains?
Soprano2
@Chief Oshkosh: I heard an interview on NPR this morning with Paul Begala and Waleed Shahid about the division within the Democratic Party. Begala made the point that the Democrats in D.C. seem to be divided, while Democrats in general are united that they have to fight FFOTUS and what his government is doing. I wonder how much of the unhappiness with Democrats is Democrats saying they’re unhappy with the leadership. I think Schumer’s messaging last week was not great, that’s for sure.
Soprano2
@Geo Wilcox: These are the people who have been howling about “erasing history” whenever a statue of a Confederate general is taken down, right? I guess there’s only certain history they want to preserve.
Soprano2
@zhena gogolia: I think they’re generally doing a fine job, but Schumer’s messaging last week was an own goal. I think they were counting on the House to stop that bill, and when that didn’t happen they didn’t have a good plan for what to do. He just fucked up, it’s not wrong to say that. He needs to be better.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Soprano2:
Polls are catching up to what many of us have been saying for a while: the Democratic Party left working-class people behind years ago. Today, voters are demanding fighters who will stand up to autocrats & oligarchs instead of being complicit in the dismantling of our democracy.
As UAW president Shawn Fain said earlier this year:
“Trump is president because we have candidates in this party who can’t decide who the fuck they want to represent.”
I’ve argued here that’s somewhat wrong, the Dem party has decided who it wants to represent, thus freezing out or otherwise alienating reachable voters. As RaflW said:
But to win we have to offer — and mean — a better vision.
lowtechcyclist
@narya:
Too many people’s definition of ‘justice’ is ‘those people I already don’t like getting it good and hard.’
Can’t say I hear people on the other side of the spectrum talking about ‘mercy’ except when one of their own gets caught committing actual crimes.
Baud
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
I think we’re lose working class people over culture war stuff. People say they want more economic populism, but they don’t vote that way in primaries or elections. And haven’t in my whole lifetime.
Dman
This teacher and the school are next up on the DEI purge. Can’t have these niceties and generosity these days. /s
lowtechcyclist
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
Biden was more pro-union, pro-working class than any President since LBJ. For all the good it did him.
But if what the white working class, particularly white working class men want, is less competition from women and minorities, and to make them and LGBTQ persons less visible like they used to be, we Democrats just plain can’t give them that. And if that’s what they want, then they will vote for Trump and his like. There’s not a damned thing we can do about that, that I can see
ETA: What Baud said @34.
narya
@Baud: I don’t disagree completely, but one of the things that stood out to me when visiting my mom is, once again, the information environment. She watches the nightly news, and it had almost NO information of the sort we discuss here. It was “this car-crash tragedy here” or “oopsie, plane crash” with no mention of the gutting of the FAA. The local newspapers barely exist. I have no damn clue how to fix any of it, but I also think there’s still a lack of awareness, and certainly very little understanding of just how devastating it all is–and that is intentional.
Baud
To be clear, I accept that the majority is not with us. I’m just personally not willing to push the compromises that I think we’d need to get back to a majority. If the economic populists can be successful getting their message out to voters without compromising fundamental values, more power to them. But mostly what I see online is them suggesting to others what they think will work rather than going out and actually winning elections.
Also, I’ll note that when Dem leaders earlier this year starting talking about the economy under Trump, they were criticized online for ignoring how Trump was undermining democracy. We know from the election outcome that protecting democracy is not a winning issue, and people hated that Harris talked to Liz Cheney about that. So I’m out of political advice and I’m not going to provide any.
Our best bet is that Trump is terrible and there’s a backlash. But I don’t see a morally acceptable avenue forward that rests solely on our own initiative.
Professor Bigfoot
@Gloria DryGarden: (forgive me, Blogfather, for I know exactly what I do)
❤️🙏🏾❤️
Professor Bigfoot
@Baud: They never really break out the white vote versus everyone else.
Only white people showed that concern, sufficiently to vote for the white supremacist.
This is why I’m alway on about how white people never look at how whiteness affects their own individual day-to-day decisions and beliefs.
Everyone else HAS to think about it just to survive.
If you’re talking about “the left” and “the right,” you’re almost certainly talking about WHITE PEOPLE.
The rest of us simply do not have that ideological privilege. We’re not going to “shift right” into the arms of people who want us dead.
jowriter
@narya: You’re right. I can’t stomach the MSM, they make me want to throw things through windows, etc., and I find myself listening to the choir (this place, blue sky). So I found a cheap one- year sub. to the Financial Times, which gives something of a global perspective of our circumstances here, and it is helpful and interesting. But there’s still this problem of the media that normies follow. They really have little clue about what’s actually going on, and often dismiss what I tell them as overly alarmist. Gah.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊 😊 😊
Baud
@Professor Bigfoot:
I thought they did. White vote was stable, everyone else moved right. Obviously, turnout was down from 2020, so it’s hard to compare. But basically the article said that Republicans did a good job convincing voters to focus on issues that favored Republicans.
Professor Bigfoot
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: My biggest— really ONLY ask around here is that we recognize and acknowledge that the “people” we so often discuss here are WHITE PEOPLE.
That you really cannot put anyone who is not a straight white Christian into a simple “left-right” frame, because left and right cannot capture the existential nature of our situation.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
narya
@Baud: Okay, a bit of hope among our despair: I’ve been watching Maddow most nights, and she starts nearly every episode with photos of regular folks protesting in what we would regard as unlikely places–homemade signs and everything. She’s also been showing town halls, including ones where democrats are showing up when the republican won’t, and the numbers of people showing up are actually quite impressive. People are pissed, and I don’t think it’s just “our side.” Will that result in the kind of larger, more systemic change that we want/need? Who knows? But, despite my earlier comment just above, some info IS getting through
ETA: Yes, I AM arguing two sides of the same coin. As Galadriel noted, we are on the knife’s edge, and, like Sam and Frodo, we must persist.
Belafon
If that happened here in Texas, parents would complain about the un-Christian lessons being forced on their children.
Professor Bigfoot
@Baud: It’s not possible for everyone else to slide sufficiently “right” to support Republicans.
Without that solid majority of white voters (2/3 of white men!), the rest of us couldn’t blow out a birthday cake.
Once again, ONLY white people gave Trump over 50% of their votes.
Baud
@Professor Bigfoot:
Oh I agree. The white vote is the base of the triangle. Everything else is just about shifting the apex slightly to the right or left when it comes to election outcomes.
JMG
The low polling of the Democratic Party is almost exclusively due to Democrats and sympathetic independents unhappiness with congressional Democrats. The remainder of the decline is due to the fact they lost last November. From the “elites” to the “people in the street,” Americans are very big front runners.
Belafon
@Professor Bigfoot: these are the types of stories that make me want Democrats to nominate a black woman for President in 2028, who picks a woman as a running mate. If people can’t get over their prejudices and pick the most qualified person, burn it to the ground.
Professor Bigfoot
@JMG: White people have been bitching about the Democrats ever since Black people began to ascend to high positions in the party.
The Justice Democrats stated mission was a “hostile takeover of the Democratic Party,” but folks don’t want to acknowledge this.
Belafon
@Belafon: I say this as I keep frantically searching for the one weird trick to get the white conservative voters around me to realize that Republicans are burning it all to the ground.
WereBear
What it actually illustrates is how everyone — somehow — expects the Democrats to clean up all the messes.
We are the “submissive housewife” who actually gets everything done, and the Republicans are the blowhard “family head” who expects a cookie for not hitting anyone today.
Who gets blamed? Mom. Because they know, deep down, the Republicans are abusive “parents.”
They blame the one they don’t fear.
We have to stop the whining because the dead elephant in the room has been ignored far too long, hoping Big Daddy will come to his senses…
We need a restraining order.
Professor Bigfoot
@Belafon: I wish I knew the answer.
I’ve been “embedded” among white folks for most of my adult life; and this rank stupidity seems somewhat endemic.
When Davis X. Machina gave his infamous pronouncement, he was absolutely right: a significant plurality of the white electorate will vote to put themselves in a cardboard box under an underpass, as long as the Black family in the next box over has less.
Ksmiami
@Baud: and don’t forget the so called economic arguments put forth by Republicans were all just lies. From now on, Dems have to articulate a better, more fair and positive vision for the country and blast the GOP as dangerous vandals. It should be made crystal clear-Republicans are against everything good in America. And it’s the truth.
Betty Cracker
Everything sucks, but this morning, I used YouTube videos to fix an extremely vexxing CarPlay issue in the rattletrap Jeep. So now I feel like a fucking brilliant goddess. Gonna enjoy that for a bit, notwithstanding the destination of this handbasket we’re all riding in…
H.E.Wolf
I’m interested in what each of us would spend $20 on, to do something kind in memory of someone who was beloved.
Professor Bigfoot
@Betty Cracker: As much as I despise YouTube for SO MUCH, it has proven incredibly handy at figuring out how to fix stuff.
My jalopy Porsche runs thanks in part to YouTube; and my 3D printers are running well also thanks to YT.
But really, for almost everything, I’d rather READ.
tobie
@zhena gogolia: Some of this is true, but some isn’t. Democrats understand we’re a minority party in govt and can’t do much legislatively. But we want our elected officials to hammer home day in, day out what the GOP is doing to eviscerated the programs and protections that each of us rely on. Chuck Schumer is not that person. He never speaks to or speaks of the base. Instead he talks about the wheeling and dealing he does in the Senate gym. Just recently he praised himself for the conversations he’s had with GOP Senators on exercise bikes. It’s hard to overestimate how out of touch that remark is. We need clear communicators who respect the intelligence of the party faithful and don’t treat us like children.
chemiclord
@Professor Bigfoot: No small part of the problem with white people (disclosure: white man who grew up in what is now Trumplandia), is that we don’t want to feel bad about us and our history. So much of the reactionary push is to deny our history, because it makes us out to be villains (which we were and are).
“Grandpa and Grandma want to erase all the pictures of black students being abused in white schools because they don’t want to explain what they’re doing in those pictures.”
The problem is, we can’t even begin to move forward until we reckon with what our ancestors had done… and since we abjectly refuse to do that, we’re stuck in this disgusting limbo where we get vehemently angry about being called racist while embracing everything that racism has gotten us.
satby
Baud
@chemiclord:
Shouldn’t have voted for someone who is going to create more bad history IMHO.
Elizabelle
@WereBear:
I agree with your take.
Also do not think that Republicans “did a better job getting their message out.”
They tricked voters into believing lies. Again. Social and fake media is deadly.
Betty Cracker
@Professor Bigfoot: Agree — it really is a terrific resource for troubleshooting and repair work. I’m a voracious reader, but instruction manuals make my eyes glaze over, so YouTube is a godsend. I hope it doesn’t get swamped with AI slop! That would be a tragedy.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
I use to to watch a lot of science videos, since I’m a science buff. I enjoy that content and glad YouTube provides it.
Belafon
@chemiclord: and the reason for that is whites want to claim credit for the things other whites have done. “My grandfather died in Normandy, you should be thankful to me. But I’m not responsible for my great uncle lynching that kid.”
WereBear
@Gloria DryGarden: Because they are uplifting. We are social animals, community creatures. We want bonds of trust and love, because it’s how we work.
And it should be what we learn. But our society has become so obsessed with image instead of substance, and bad actors encourage that.
It makes them feel “normal” and “right” but nothing does. Because it’s can’t be. Something is missing.
We all know it. Trust me… so do they. They do long for death, but US FIRST.
JMG
@tobie: Most legislative leaders are creatures of their institutions. But it is a fact that Schumer got to be leader of the Senate Democrats because he promised he would abandon the hardball tactics of Harry Reid and try never to put the members in a risky (i.e., principled) position.
I will now bring down lightning on my head. Schumer’s leadership on the CR was weak and stupid. But his caucus did not have a unified position on using the filibuster, so he had few options. I will note that before the deal went down, the members of this board did not have a unified position either.
Gvg
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Which is why trump isn’t see “woke” as the enemy. Woke really means learning to see from someone else’s eye’s or a kind of empathy. Opposite of selfishness. Teach empathy, and you raise a bunch of non followers of the authority. Of course if the authority wasn’t intending to be such a horrible shit, empathy would not be a threat.
When the US was lead by decent people, even old style republicans (well sort of) they knew better than excusing torture or skipping legal processes. They told President to resign or be impeached.
My list of problem sources is Fox News/fairness doctorine reasons it didn’t apply to cable, Supreme Court allowing unlimited money that was untracked tho they claimed otherwise, undermining education with various vouchers and choice and unscientific testing standards plus probably other things. My nephew says they aren’t teaching about slavery! And that that is not recent. The consolidation of media due to the collapse of profit caused by internet and loss of classified and ad revenues well as non enforcement of anti monopoly laws. The number of generations since we faced a real threat. That is a people thing, and may not be avoidable, but the other things made it worse. Then I have to look for solutions to reverse these trends, even while we try to defeat the facists. I am not expecting democratic leaders to bring these things up right now, but if they mention any of these issues in a campaign I will think they are taking a longer view as well as a short view. And education is often a local issue anyway.
eclare
That made me cry.
Also awesome photo today, WaterGirl.
tobie
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: This is a-grade bullshit. The party that
=>put worker protections and union provisions into the infrastructure bill and Inflation Reduction Act
=>increased SNAP benefits by >40%
=>had a Pres walk a picket line
=>increased small biz loans and shored up Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security
=>established a minimum global corporate tax rate
is NOT a party of oligarchs. It’s hyperbole like this that keeps me from calling myself a progressive. There’s plenty of reason to criticize what Dems do in Congress but saying they only support the rich is a dishonest statement rhetorical sleight of hand designed to do one thing only: strengthen the GOP.
Elizabelle
@Gvg: Good comment.
chemiclord
@Baud: It’s the denial. Trump tells white people they shouldn’t feel bad about their history, and in fact, they should feel proud of it. That’s a very intoxicating message for a lot of white people who don’t want to feel or be accused of being racist while behaving and acting in blatantly racist ways.
WereBear
@Professor Bigfoot: Tell me about it. 53% of white women wanted this, even after Dobbs should have provided a giant flashing clue.
But the history of Confederate women is that of avid collaborators. I was dumped in the small town South in fourth grade, and after a year of college I gave up trying to assimilate and got out.
They would accept me if I accepted my Southern Belle Training, but my body rejected that like a bad organ transplant. The only power Confederate white women were allowed is to make puppets of their men.
Which is sadly simple, since they overwhelmingly get stuck in junior high, a pool no sane woman wants to date in.
Bette Davis in The LIttle Foxes. That was to be my future.
chemiclord
@Elizabelle: I’m going to push back on the idea they were “tricked.” They absolutely were not. Republicans told them what they wanted to hear. And as long as people want to hear, “You aren’t the problem, the problem is [insert minority group here]” the Republicans are going to have fertile ground for their message.
WereBear
@A Ghost to Most: No.
It’s not kind to let them live in a fantasy world where they get to hurt people. When so much of the country is QANON and clinically insane, we need new tactics, not old ones.
JWR
@tobie:
And then there was the time a few weeks ago when he said, “People are aroused. I haven’t seen people so aroused in a very, very long time…”. Aroused? Who talks like that anymore? I’d much rather he say “people are pissed off!” and be done with it. But no, he’s from another time, another age, and I just don’t think he connects with real people anymore.
The Audacity of Krope
But what do people mean when they embrace these labels? I’ve seen numbers like this thrown around my whole life. It’s likely not always the perverted definitions assumed by the lazy, conventional mainstream media discourse.
I’d accept all those labels, think “moderate” and “conservative” ought to be operating in the same space (as antonyms to extreme), and if forced at gunpoint to pick just one label would probably pick the conservative label.
Yet, I’m to the left of most people. Then again, I know what words mean and embrace complexity. I’m sure I’m not the only one.
prufrock
@Betty Cracker: Show always beats tell, which is why YouTube is the repair Mecca.
tobie
@JMG: I agree with much of what you say. I read somewhere that Schumer was banking on one or two GOP defections on the CR bill in the House, which would have stopped it there. But that didn’t happen, and frankly hanging your hopes on that one outcome seems pretty foolish. My point was that we need party leaders who can communicate and part of effective communication at this moment is expressing clearly and relentlessly what Trump’s policies mean in our everyday lives and in the life of the republic. For example, I’m completely freaked out at how the exec branch now claims it can deport anyone it deems a national security thread without review but I’m not hearing many elected officials talk about this.
WTFGhost
@narya: It’s struck me as notable that Black people call only for justice – it’s the white people who feel they must have revenge for entirely imagined slights.
@Soprano2: “So, you were in favor of one man being able to rape your wife and daughters, while you shouted ‘harder, do ’em harder’, or be cruelly tortured, because, by accident of birth, you were a slave? That’s the history you want to celebrate? What kind of sicko are you?”
“Many of us” were saying that when Democrats weren’t slavering over NASCAR, so, borrowing the phrasing to complain about “fighters who aren’t complicit” is really jarring. Seriously, first we’re abandoning working voters by refuting intelligent design, and being
unwelcome to Christian propagandahostile to the role of religion in American life, then by not liking Football and NASCAR, then by ENJOYING Football, then by drinking whatever damn beer we enjoy without worrying about their ad campaigns… seriously, WTF *haven’t* we left the working class behind on, “for many years”, with “polls finally catching up” to someone-or-other’s about-to-be-revealed wisdom?I’m not saying you’re wrong, that workers want fighters, just, damn, man, using the language of the bad guys?
paradox
Hey Betty Cracker, I’m thinking of you and hope things are all right.
WereBear
@Betty Cracker: That must feel good! I can never fix CarPlay. It taunts and teases and I’m left disappointed.
But it plays! I don’t know what it wants!
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: A lot of the more professional-grade science YouTube of US origin may be going away since it relies to some degree on federal public-outreach funding.
Gvg
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: No fuck that shit. Biden and the party have been defending the working class well for decades and the working class has not backed THEM. The minorities have and they tend to be working class, but the working class whites haven’t and this election after Biden got so much progress and Unions started to get more after decades of loss, some of the minority vote eroded (mostly male, some “Latino” even a small amount of black). So some democrats are pretty pissed at that too. Which is a factor in the lack of fight. They don’t have the numbers AND the voters sent a message they didn’t care. Excuse me? Voters? A did you vote for other democrats so we could do anything? How do you think a democracy works?
Voters have been treating the democrats as the party of minorities only for some time even though it’s not true. As a white person with multiple selfish reasons for supporting the Democratic Party as well as moral altruistic ones this frustrates me, no angers me. And as an underpaid person who lost their union recently because they are so weak in Florida, I can only scream idiots at “labor” voters. They aren’t voting labor. They are voting party/cult identity. Not here anyway. Don’t bother to call them labor. That may still exist in some regions but it’s not a thing in this area and I don’t think it has been in decades. You can’t “get” a labor vote. Those people identify themselves as other things and it’s those subgroups that you have to get. If you can.
chemiclord
@The Audacity of Krope: Being “moderate” is seen by a lot of people as the savvy, independent thinker type position, even as their actual attitudes towards policy will lean hard one way or the other.
Truth is, there are very few “moderates,” and even among those that are, it’s more that a mapping of their political positions would look like a incoherent mess. A good chunk of “moderates” are liberals or progressives that simply don’t want the label.
WereBear
@Professor Bigfoot: You really can’t skim a video. I have ONE STUPID THING I’m trying to find… but they don’t make manuals anymore.
Jeffro
thanks AL! made my morning (albeit in a misty-eyed kind of way) =)
WereBear
@tobie: It’s exactly as I’ve suspected: it’s still high school, and they are the Kool Kidz and he has to sit with everyone.
“Time to snow the Senator,” they say as hit the Peloton.
TS
@Baud:
Way too much concentration on “Hard work & common sense and everyone can make it” They can’t – else the country would be 100% millionaires. Education was the key, and the GOP are dismantling it at a fast pace – or making it so expensive only the elite can get there.
Helping others is left to charity, when it should be given by government – no third party should be determining who is entitled to help – and who is not. Capitalism in the extreme implodes and until this is realised the rich will be taking it all.
Omnes Omnibus
@A Ghost to Most: No.
Gretchen
@jowriter: I was reading Sen. Marshall’s (KS) Facebook page this morning. His people are convinced that DOGE is cutting the rampant waste, fraud and abuse in the government and firing all thos lazy bureaucrats. Told that Marshall voted to cut Medicare and Social Security, they just refuse to believe it. Where in the bill does it say that? Marshall says it’s not true. They’ll never believe it until their own Social Security check doesn’t show up.
The Audacity of Krope
Surely the anthrax lasagna will be good, it’s their best seller. Or the tire rim pepperoni pizza? You’ve always liked deep dish…
Matt McIrvin
@WereBear: We try to use the nav/entertainment system in my car with both Android Auto (for my phone) and Apple CarPlay (for my wife’s), and for some reason it’s extraordinarily difficult to get it to connect to the phone you want when both of them are in the car. It usually prefers her iPhone. Sometimes I’ll explicitly tell it to connect to my phone and it will bring up hers.
And then there’s the unwanted auto-play when it’s using the Apple system, which sometimes isn’t even media on the phone, it’s *the radio*! It will turn on the radio for no apparent reason. I have no idea why it does this.
It particularly seems to be associated with the passenger trying to do something on the phone’s screen while the nav is connected through CarPlay. I’ll just be trying to navigate using her phone (because the car refused to connect to mine instead), then she picks up the phone and tries to send a message or read a web page on it, and the car radio suddenly turns on. Over and over.
Professor Bigfoot
THIS.
The sins of the father should not be visited on the son; but the son must see, recognize, and disavow those sins for himself to attain righteousness.
Belafon
@tobie: Who did Democrats want to represent? Farmers, the poor, minorities, gays, trans, women, workers, unions, immigrants, the educated, the uneducated, scientists, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, atheists. And part of Republican’s success was pitting some of those groups against others.
Quiltingfool
@WereBear:
This.
People can comfortably vote Republican, even though they know Republicans want to shred any and all safety nets, because they have seen Democrats fight to protect that safety net.
Well, guess what, Republican voters. No one is going to ride in to rescue you now.
Be careful what you wish for, you might just get it.
Gretchen
@narya: I’m encouraged by the furious people now, but where were they in November?
WereBear
@chemiclord: Not only that, I believe every Confederate has the sworn gawd-given duty to re-enact their parent’s lives, lest they imply there was anything wrong with them, and this goes double for Gramps and Great-Great all the way back…
It’s like the gravitational field of the sun. As an outsider, I saw how they started bright and hopeful but the greatest fear of small towns is the children leaving. Because they all want to.
So by the time they hit high school and could see no way out from the concrete funnel of their parents, I saw them drive drunk and party with bikers because they could not even think about an escape velocity.
Makes them mean.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
I’m concerned about that.
WereBear
@Gvg: The neglect of education still sets me on fire! We should have been campaigning on that constantly!
Sometimes we are too freakin’ nice. Which is why, sometimes, I’m not.
lowtechcyclist
@WereBear:
Who will bell the cat?
I dunno about this framing, or for that matter the whole ‘only Democrats have agency’ bit.
The way I look at it is, the Republicans are the bad guys. They have plenty of agency, and they use it in ways that are bad for the rest of us.
So that leaves us Dems with the question, how do we best use our agency to fight the bad guys? And that’s what we’re really arguing amongst ourselves all the time.
So in those debates, of course the only agency that gets discussed is our own. Because the answer to “what will we do about them?” isn’t “I sure hope they stop being quite so evil.”
And sure, in fora that aren’t solidly Dem, we need to come down hard on the Rethugs and how they’re using their agency. But here on BJ or in similar fora? We all know the Rethugs are evil, the only question is what our side is going to do about it. So of course the only agency that gets discussed is ours.
stacib
@Baud: THIS, 100%. People will pay $20 per dozen of eggs as long as they don’t have to be considerate of anybody that’s not like them.
Matt McIrvin
@TS:
Not even education, though it helps–but I see a lot of people with college degrees not making it.
The problem is, usually, you need hard work and common sense AND a series of lucky breaks, not least of which is being born into the right family. People who do have some success see the work they put in but they can be blind to the lucky breaks they also got.
I think one of the problems is that a lot of middle-class families have some fuckup family members who have managed to torpedo their own lives despite starting with a lot of advantages, and *those* people are the losers who winners have the most contact with. They assume that everyone who’s struggling is like that. No, it’s just your fuckup cousin Pete.
Belafon
@Gretchen: Voting.
While the videos and photos are encouraging, we are a country of over 300M people. We’re large enough that I could find a room sized group for just about anything. These people didn’t just show up.
Know that you’re not alone, but we also need a majority.
Professor Bigfoot
@The Audacity of Krope: I always ask, where are civil rights on the ‘left-right’ spectrum? Where are human rights?
Left and right are about economics first and foremost; and they simply do not capture the complexity of our political environment.
Most Black folks are very “conservative” in their approaches to life— they are the God-fearing, church-going Americans conservatives boast about; but are they in the conservative coalition? Are they on the “right?”
No, because “the right” is currently four-square in favor of bringing back Jim Crow.
”Left” and “right” are as bullshit as the Body Mass Index, which says that every man-jack in the NFL is “morbidly obese.”
Belafon
@WereBear:
Let me give you the answer from my coworker: “Education is better left to the states than the federal government.”
tobie
@Gvg: Thank you for your righteous outrage. The irony of this whole discussion is that if unions were stronger, I think more people working in factories would vote for Democrats. So many members of the “white working class” are sole proprieters of small biz and they complain all the time about how much tax they pay and assume they’re the only ones who face this burden. Fulltime employees just have this deducted at source and don’t think about this.
Quiltingfool
@Baud: My husband follows several you tube channels.
Usually he watches shows featuring heavy equipment operators (he likes to critique their techniques, lol) and tow truck rescues.
Now he watches guys who go around to poor neighborhoods and do free yard work for the elderly or single moms.
It’s amazing that we watch people mowing and weed-eating yards. Personally, I like seeing tidiness replacing disorder, though. Restores my harmony.
Matt McIrvin
@Matt McIrvin: …also, I should add that “fuckup cousin Pete” prrrobably deserves a bit more sympathy too since his underlying problem may be untreated mental illness. A lot of that going around.
WereBear
@tobie: “Don’t print the story, print the legend.”
It’s because they have a near-stranglehold on how “words get out” but they get out anyway.
I don’t know where these polls are coming from but how can anyone think they aren’t BS and PR now, not science? I repeat, no one saw this coming?
Because we are being lied to so much we don’t know up from down.
In the manner of a stopped clock, our “Heath Czar” has thrown out some true statements, but all I think is how he is tainting the very idea of “knowing things.” Pretending we can pull our ‘nads up to our chest and just bluff those viruses out of ourselves.
Measles are real. Dead women are real. Coming up with a war so your own poverty stricken whites don’t unionize and upset the whole cash grab applecart?
That takes a failed state. And we’re going to get some. We’re starting with the biggest one, Texas, who has the biggest problems.
Watch some Red State real estate videos on Youtube, especially those attractive to retirees. Ones really challenged by climate change.
Find out what’s happening there. I don’t believe the polls who say all the Republicans are still thrilled. Because then they wouldn’t be fleeing town halls, would they?
It’s their own making a fuss. We see it. Why are they lying to us?
schrodingers_cat
Bernie Sanders was far more effective in destroying the party than Ralph Nader. Congratulations are in order.
Biden’s governed as the most liberal and leftist president since LBJ but the leftwing of the party continuously crapped on him. He could never win them over. He ended his term as Genocide Joe. This is not about Schumer. IDK how many Americans even know who Schumer is.
@Gvg: Preach.
@Prof. Bigfoot is right. You can see that play out on this blog as well
WereBear
@schrodingers_cat: I like Bernie and he’s out there fighting. I can’t disagree with anything he says, either.
Governor Walz is out there saying the same things, and I’m equally thrilled.
Part of the progressive sweep was with Sanders help, as a long time friend of President Biden, and a clever legislative thinker.
Professor Bigfoot
@Soprano2: I think that’s fair.
Unfortunately, some of us are more forgiven of our mistakes than others.
tobie
@Belafon: Wouldn’t it be great to live in a country where the govt represented all the groups you name and many more? Maybe LBJ was right when he said after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, “The South is lost forever.” The south is now everywhere folks listen to Joe Rogan and watch FOX News.
WereBear
@Gvg: They got many this time by extending “conditional white status” for their vote.
That won’t work twice. I’ve never seen voter regret happen so fast.
Professor Bigfoot
@Baud: WHITE working class people.
If you don’t acknowledge that part, you’re not looking at the real challenge.
Matt McIrvin
@WereBear: I think the boom in Texas and Florida caused by relatively cheap land, while real estate becomes punitively expensive elsewhere, has allowed them to let a lot of problems fester, and institute clownishly tyrannical far-right government in what aren’t demographically the deepest-red states, without running into political trouble.
It’s a bubble and at some point it pops. Notably, both states are more vulnerable than most to climate change and they’ve got denialists running the show and a federal government that seems bent on wrecking NOAA/NWS/National Hurricane Center. That’s not sustainable.
Omnes Omnibus
@Professor Bigfoot: Luckily, I don’t make mistakes. No need for forgiveness here.
WereBear
@TS: Reagan dismantled the Fairness Doctrine and we got hours of infomercials.
That is how it’s been run, since. PR and pretty visuals and ALL YOUR PROBLEMS solved! Hammering on the weak-minded, who have wills of slime.
Taking over legacy media as Fox LITE. When all that hate is upsetting your tum! Watch people talk over your head and feel more informed than the next guy at the snack counter!
frosty
Yay you! Fixing something is great and these days being able to do it is too rare. The last time I tried to change a headlight bulb I ended up taking it to our mechanic.
Gretchen
@WereBear: My CarPlay worked great until I got the newest IPhone. Now it cuts out every three seconds, and the only way to fix it is to turn off the wifi every time I get in the car, turn it back on and let it reconnect. Every time I get in the car.
@Betty Cracker: do you suppose YouTube has a fix for my issue?
frosty
@Professor Bigfoot: I fixed our dishwasher by cleaning out the filters thanks to YouTube!
WereBear
@Matt McIrvin: They fired a lot of programmers. Maybe they’ve lost track of where the bit buckets are, and when they need to be emptied.
Matt McIrvin
@WereBear:
It’s worked many times before, perhaps with different ethnic groups.
Betty Cracker
@Matt McIrvin: You’re 100% right about the Cousins Pete being a factor in many middle-class families’ views on the safety net, etc. Got several Cousins Pete in my family tree, and I know for a fact it colors other relatives’ views of the “undeserving poor.”
frosty
This is a very good point, often lost in the hand-wringing.
different-church-lady
@Elizabelle:
Isn’t it the same thing?
Gretchen
@WereBear: This! My daughter wants me to use her electric bottle warmer when I babysit. It’s got an 8 minute video to watch to learn how to use it, with multiple settings and ability to connect it to your phone. Can’t I just look at the instructions to find out which button to push? No instructions. Spend 8 minutes watching the video while the hungry baby cries. I end up putting the bottle in hot water and feeling stupid being defeated by a bottle warmer.
Matt McIrvin
@WereBear: It’s all a complicated interaction between systems made by Hyundai, Google and Apple, all of them possibly pulling in different directions. In other contexts this sort of thing is the story of my professional life too, so I can sympathize.
Omnes Omnibus
@Betty Cracker: So… Badger is deserving and Pete isn’t? I think that is a terrible attitude. Shame!
different-church-lady
@Professor Bigfoot: Soon the cardboard box will no longer be metaphorical.
Gvg
@WereBear: they don’t neglect education here, they sabotage it in the name of improving it and protecting the kids. Of course right now they are censoring books which people don’t like, but that was mostly after the election. For the previous 30 years it has been more regulations and tests plus tying teacher wages to school test scores. The tests aren’t scientifically proven and the standards are supposed to go up every year as if students of all ages were always able to be better with better teaching. This means good teachers try to get transferred out of poor schools after awhile because they can’t afford the low pay. Poor areas always have poor scores because parents who work multiple jobs don’t have time to help with coaching, may be single parents or not had good schooling themselves, etc. Schools have incentive to try to drive away low scoring students with say a disability instead of helping them, forcing them into online back up schools. Magnet programs get to offer special elite programs to really bright students but they are taught in separate classes with in bigger schools and then their numbers are used to inflate the test scores and also make schools look more racially even than they really are in interaction (causing some resentment I am told). The testing require some poorly performing schools to be closed after a number of years. I am sure the planners thought that would be minority urban schools but the last decade it has been rural schools and the new commute into town must be a pita. The whole thing has made school full of homework from kindergarten on, kids stressed and teachers quit the profession. Also parents act like jerks. It seems to bring out the worst in people.
Testing cannot be connected to wages. The teacher isn’t in control of everything and a low performing school needs more help not less.
Testing needs to be less often and scientific for information not dire results on students like not passing grades on one test. Many people test poorly. School evaluation needs to be more comprehensive and less able to be gamed. I don’t blame the schools for doing it, they had no real choice on an unfair field, but it isn’t helping students enough.
Quit blaming teachers and excusing politicians who do. Put science and facts back in teaching and relax. Let people think. Also pay. You don’t get something good for nothing.
Take all the federal money you can get. It’s a good thing to help poor areas. Cut with the whining.
Belafon
@tobie: When I saw trans and blacks go after each other on bsky when Jemalle (?sp) published an article in the NYT warning about the attacks on trans people, when I saw multiple groups complaining about the representation at the Convention, specifically the lack of or underrepresentation of their group, I could see things falling apart. Democrats are the group of those who get hurt by Republicans. If Republicans really wanted to destroy liberalism here, they would stop being racists because, as Professor Bigfoot said, blacks are conservative. Latinos are as well. Though it really does worry me what women, gay, and trans rights would be like if Republicans stopped being racist.
Old School
Matt McIrvin
@Betty Cracker: A thing that helped me was to hang out with the Puerto Rican and Dominican parents from Lawrence in the waiting room for my daughter’s dance studio when she was a kid. People working, like, three jobs to barely scrape by, and they’re here putting their toddler in ballet class to give them something nice. They had more work ethic than I can even imagine. Lord.
WereBear
@lowtechcyclist: Very true, because the other side is impervious.
My psyche is based on getting information. I read a lot, watch popular culture for fun and learning, and while I no longer manage people, business travel, or much of anything, having been forced to retire on disability… I am still keeping up, which has never been easier. The information I’ve gathered to help my condition, all approved by my doctor, would have taken much longer when I’d have to go to the medical library and go through paper.
But a lie moves faster, now. And so I understand most of the Republicans I know — who DO business travel and handle finances and maybe put up a brand new giant place on the hopes of a Rump presidency — they aren’t doing anything but putting on their best bright face of how THEY are the golden child, so this IS exactly what they wanted.
They are happy. They won. And so is everyone they know. And then we get to the end of the classic short story, “Masque of the Red Death.”
At least, I tell myself, I’m not locked in Abuse Castle.
Betty Cracker
@Gretchen: Have you tried rebooting CarPlay?
Omnes Omnibus
@Belafon: Their racism is, to me, the most important driver of party identification. If they didn’t have that, the other bits wouldn’t be enough.
Booger
Over the weekend I had the misfortune of staying in a crappy little low-end hotel at the corner of Interstate and Interstate.
In the breakfast area, the local news was on—not Fox, but had to be a Sinclair affiliate. They were covering a local anti-Trump anti-Musk anti-DOGE protest at the statehouse, and despite the presence of a crowd that seemed pretty reflective of the country as a whole (including lots of old white guys who would have otherwise looked at home in MAGA caps), they chose to interview two people who fit their stereotypes–a wild-eyed, wild-haired tree hugger type in birkenstocks, and a “cosmopolitan” (wink, wink) right out of Central Casting…doing their level best to portray the protests as just the usual bunch of freedom-hating kooks.
The legacy media model can’t die soon enough.
different-church-lady
@Matt McIrvin: I had a “weird” uncle nobody in the family liked. Nobody was nasty to him, and he wasn’t nasty to anyone else, but he had a strange, lonely bachelor existence in my grandfather’s home.
Eventually the poor guy is in his 70s, starting to act weirder, and all his siblings have passed on. My cousin intervenes, gets him to a doctor. Turns out my uncle has spent his entire life fighting severe but high-functioning Asperger’s.
The get him in a program and after a lifetime of struggle the final years of his life are happier than any before.
My cousin is one of the good guys.
Betty Cracker
@paradox: Thanks — I’m fine!
@Omnes Omnibus: Badger works his ass off and doesn’t expect a handout!
WereBear
@Belafon: They have the reasoning power of the patient in the mental hospital who was insisting he was dead.
“Really?” a bold young doctor said, wiping down a pin with alcohol. “See there? I’m alive, and I bleed.”
“Ok,” the cheerful patent said.
“Now I jab you –” nod — “and see?”
“Well, what do you know. Dead people do bleed.”
rikyrah
@lowtechcyclist:
TRUTH
different-church-lady
@Matt McIrvin: I just sing to myself.
different-church-lady
@WereBear: “You know what dead people do? YAP YAP YAP YAP YAP!”
Omnes Omnibus
@Betty Cracker: “doesn’t expect a hand out” Ha!
WereBear
@Gretchen: Good design give you a leg up. I always managed software upgrades, but now they are a mess.
But I think they are relying on AI now.
schrodingers_cat
@WereBear: He is the patron saint of white grievance but from the left. The DSA is very white despite having some brown faces out front. And there is a reason why he was not able to win the black vote the two times he ran for President.
WereBear
@Matt McIrvin: It was my first career! Know what?
My second career was about the art of persuasion, and it doesn’t glitch as much. People convince themselves more easily than cleaning up code.
rikyrah
@narya:
There is a reason why the rest of the MSM isn’t showing the pictures of the protests 😡😡
Gretchen
@schrodingers_cat: Yes. This comment makes me wonder what would have happened if Bernie had enthusiastically thrown his support behind Clinton the minute she clinched the nomination rather than sniping from the sidelines for weeks. Trump would be a forgotten loser, or maybe a Fox host, covid would have been less of a disaster, we’d have less covid backlash….I know. I’m a dreamer.
Gretchen
@WereBear: Yes, Bernie is doing the right thing now, and I’m loving Tim Walz. I think it’s taken Bernie time to get past feeling like he should be president to join the team and help push everyone in the right direction.
Matt McIrvin
@WereBear: I left out Samsung, Samsung was involved in there too, so a four-way clusterfuck between two American companies and two Korean ones, all trying to yammer at each other over a channel named after a dead Viking.
Professor Bigfoot
@WereBear: Oh, Lord, this. I have sat and snarled at some YT personality exhorting me to “like” and “subscribe” and it’s like “just tell me what fucking size that fucking bolt is you ass!!” LOL
Melancholy Jaques
@Baud:
The engaged ones tend to be, but the normies? I don’t think so. I think they blow in the wind.
Gretchen
@Matt McIrvin: Texas and Florida convinced people they were cheap to live in by not having a state income tax. It takes people awhile to realize that they make up for that with punishingly high property and sales taxes, and, now, insurance costs.
schrodingers_cat
@Gretchen: His supporters booed and heckled her at her own convention. And he sat there red faced, pouting.
In addition to his populism his quite a bit of a misogynist and xenophobe as well. No wonder so many white people love him. He tells them what they want to hear. His voting record on guns and immigration is conveniently forgotten by his acolytes, when he is parading around as the voice of the left
Black people are the smartest voters in the country, he couldn’t win them over. I don’t even think he tried. Most minorities are not taken in by BS.
Matt McIrvin
@Gretchen: Bernie’s been doing fine, also Senator Professor Warren has been doing fine and I’m happy to be one of her constituents right now.
Professor Bigfoot
@TS: I don’t think it coincidence that when women* became the majority of college entrants and graduates, suddenly college “wasn’t important to get ahead” anymore.
(*and Black people and especially Black women)
Spanky
@different-church-lady:
Well, soon no one will be able to afford the stuff that comes in big cardboard boxes, so the supply will dry up.
That’s why I’m hoarding cardboard boxes now. I’ll be rich!
Gloria DryGarden
@A Ghost to Most: what? Pls explain. Why do y say that?
kindness allowed…?
I see Omnes has said no to your thought.
WereBear
so glad to see the words restraining order in print here. I’ve been in a restraining order kind of mood since late January.
tam1MI
When Republicans see something going wrong in America, they blame Democrats for it.
When Democrats see something going wrong in America, they blame Democrats for it.
It’s a problem.
Professor Bigfoot
@Belafon: Pitting the white people among those groups against the others.
And it works.
WereBear
@Gretchen: The older we get, the more we play “What if?” because we have so much more to work with, now.
But then we fall prey to the One Weird Trick that would Turn It All Around. The viral infection everyone ignored, QANON, was freaking people into psychosis, and we ignored that like everyone ignored the fact that the Republican nominee was UNFIT and we worried about bad optics.
None of it would have mattered because we would have done the same things we did. This is Stephen King’s time travel book (very good! BTW) where every effort to undo the Kennedy assassination karma’d back around to be even worse than before.
This is FORCES, like the tulip bulb craze. All these people, denied mental help by religion or culture or poverty or red state indifference… they all went crazy at the same time.
And stayed that way. Has the crazification factor gone UP? Sadly, I think so.
Matt McIrvin
@Gretchen: The Massachusetts/NH border in my neighborhood is that in microcosm. So many people moved out of Taxachusetts to southern NH as some kind of tax protest move, but NH funds the state with high property taxes and highway tolls. And some of these people still have jobs in Massachusetts, so they have to pay Mass. income tax anyway, and sometimes the highway tolls on top of it.
But they may be making it up just in lower real-estate prices, which also softens the blow of the property tax.
WereBear
@Matt McIrvin: I just have my podcast playing when I get in and turn on the car. Then no one touches the window!
Works like a charm, then.
Melancholy Jaques
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
This is just not true. We have two parties.
One does things for the working class. Maybe not as much as it could or should, but every Democratic administration this century has done things for the non-rich. Biden did more than anyone since LBJ.
The other party never does anything for the working class.
Does it strike you as odd that the only working class people who claim to be left behind by Democrats are white people?
Gretchen
@Betty Cracker: not sure how to do that, but I will find out and try it. Thanks!
WereBear
@Professor Bigfoot: I’ve scared the cats leaning into the screen. “The Button!” and deblurring still shots to see what it SAYS on it.
They won’t tell.
cain
@Belafon: That’s my thought.
schrodingers_cat
@Melancholy Jaques: This.
When the media says working class, white is silent.
Professor Bigfoot
@Omnes Omnibus: And that, Counselor, is why I want you (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) on retainer! :D
TS
@Professor Bigfoot:
I wasn’t thinking of college/university to any great extent, but I do see the hatred of too many when other than white men are getting access to higher education.
I was thinking of educating people in school to be able to think and understand. The parents of most boomers wanted their children to have the education they never had, and that started at school level. If they made college great, but if not, they still knew how to read, think, listen, interpret. Now too much education seems to relate to what CANNOT be taught, rather than what can be taught, the GOP wants to hide reality from the children, which is why too many are not reaching any potential whatsoever.
Scout211
@Gretchen: My CarPlay works best when the iPhone charging cable is plugged into my UBS port in my car. Have you tried that?
WaterGirl
@tobie: thanks for writing all that! We did a lot of great things with Joe Biden as president and I can’t figure out why some of us want to just pretend that those didn’t happen. Did he do everything we wanted? No. Did he solve every problem? no. did he fuck up a couple of things? yes. Big things? Yes. but he was a damn good president. Probably the best of my lifetime even though. I love Barack Obama more.
schrodingers_cat
@Professor Bigfoot: Yep. Even here, there is a reluctance to admit the damage the leap year Democrat in Vt has done to the Democratic party.
WTFGhost
@different-church-lady: I know I’m responding to a rhetorical question, but, it really isn’t.
I saw Lindsey Graham – a man who mars the name of a goldurn *cracker* by association, and I do mean ASS – explain how “we believe” the DOJ was “politicized by the Biden administration,” and, it’s like, “no.”
“No, Graham, you do not believe that. You do not even truly profess it. You *lie* that. You make that claim, knowing it is false, because unless people believe that horrible, despicable, claim, you, Graham, look like a total monster, for defaming the DOJ for a perfectly valid investigation. You know Trump wanted Pence to throw the election to him, and you know Trump held SCIF-only secrets in the MAL-crapper.”
“They got their message out,” makes it sound like their “message” held actual *data*, or even a single datum (other than “Republicans want you to believe this BS”), whereas, “they were inveterate liars” is an honest, objective appraisal.
Um. I feel like I should offer to make tea, or share cookies, when I go all grumpy over a rhetorical question, but I’m kinda short – leftover Hawaiian pizza?
Gretchen
@Matt McIrvin: Yes, Bernie’s been doing good work once he set aside his own ambitions. Senator Warren has always been one of the best. She’s the counter-example when people say older politicians should make way for younger. I think she’s got years of good work left.
Ohio Mom
@Gvg: Thank you. It’s irritating to me when people zero in on blaming Democrats, conveniently forgetting that large swaths of this country are marinated in Fox News and AM radio,
forgetting the voter suppression achieved by the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, gerrymandering, and one-offs like Florida’s work around to prevent formerly incarcerated people from voting,
And forgetting Citizens United.
Then there is the unique situation this time around, Netanyahu jerking Blinken and Biden around so that Trump would have a better chance.
I’m not saying white people aren’t a problem, or misogyny and racism aren’t problems when it came to running Hillary and Harris, or that Democrats don’t toot own horns enough, oranything else everyone here has described so clearly.
Just that let’s look at the larger picture and cut ourselves some slack.
WereBear
@Gretchen: THIS.
I have told smug NYers my whole adult life about the difference, but they are captivated. And just when a person needs services, which they already paid for, by living in a blue state, they retire to a red one.
It’s insidious, because raising the state tax is incremental by its nature. But they can double & triple taxes and fees in as many years. While relying on a fixed income.
Gretchen
@Scout211: I have not tried that but I will! Thank you!
Miss Bianca
@Omnes Omnibus:
Right on! Team Pete! :)
JWR
@Matt McIrvin:
I thought about that this morning as I listened to Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt (R-state of denial) probably quietly screaming for help from FEMA after overnight tornadoes, one an EF-4, tore through his state.
WereBear
@Gloria DryGarden: I’ve gone folksy, and my mood is:
“If I’d a shot ya when I met ya, I’d be out of jail by now.”
tam1MI
Biden was more liberal and leftist than LBJ. If you had asked LBJ about LBGTQ plus sign rights, he would have given you either a blank look or some very salty language that amounted to,” Hell, no! “. And lbj had huge thumping Congressional majorities to help him push through his priorities, Biden had to do it with only a sliver of a majority for 2 years, and a hostile House in the second two.
Matt McIrvin
@Gretchen: She’s not perfect–while her “break up Big Tech” position was years ahead of its time and now seems super relevant, it sometimes leads her to bad positions like her co-sponsorship of a web censorship bill that Republicans probably want to use to take out LGBT sites.
Professor Bigfoot
@Belafon: Unfortunately for them, I just don’t see a movement literally built on neo-Confederate ideology EVER giving up white supremacy.
MORE than their patriarchal misogyny.
Straight white Christian male supremacy and domination.
WereBear
@JWR: And this will spread the measles. Disasters means more mingling.
Miss Bianca
@Professor Bigfoot:
It is not coincidence.
Matt McIrvin
@JWR: I expect the federal response to be some kind of push to mandate that insurance companies ignore the science and cover people building in climate doom zones. And then when the insurance companies start to fail, it’ll be whocouldanode.
Professor Bigfoot
@Omnes Omnibus: You are absolutely correct.
White male Christian supremacy is core to their entire worldview.
tobie
@Matt McIrvin: @Gretchen: Antitrust legislation has found supporters among Dems across the ideological spectrum. Amy Klobuchar published a book Anti-Trust in 2020 or 2021 and she worked hard to get an antitrust bill passed but the late Senator Feinstein among others would not support it.
chemiclord
@schrodingers_cat: There’s a degree that the “damage” that was done was self-inflicted by a caucus that really didn’t want to be shaken out of its comfort zone. A caucus that had gotten a little too used to Clintonite “Third Way” politics.
Now, that said, Bernie did handle his loss horribly. His “rigged” narrative was eagerly embraced by Donald Trump, and gave Donald’s claims credence among the general public that it wouldn’t have had.
To that extent, words matter. A bunch of donors deciding you would be a big problem to their bottom line is certainly shitty, Senator Sanders, but it’s not “rigging.” No one in the Dem primary electorate had to buy the arguments. They did so because, like people in general, it told them what they wanted to hear.
Redshift
@tobie:
Facts not in evidence. People like us who follow legislative procedure and donate to primaries understand those things, but I don’t get any sense the vast majority of people out there crying “Doooo something!” have any understanding that our elected Dems have almost no direct power. And I get that more directly from my younger coworkers.
They cheer AOC and Tim Walz taking it to Republicans, but anyone who is perceived as having any power gets a stream of “why are you just talking, why aren’t you stopping it?” Hell, even here, when I pushed back on people trashing “the Dems” for the failure to block the CR, I got a “talk is cheap” response about the ones voting the right way.
WereBear
@Professor Bigfoot: Which has been steadily losing ground the more we had free and fair elections. The better informed the populace — at the time was allowed to know — was when our news started with the Fair Use doctrine.
How much fun would Fox be now?
They had to encourage and support cults and pull in the desperate and already indoctrinated, and they did.
If that’s not a weakness to be exploited, we’re all doomed. They would have overwhelmed the earth by now. Because that’s what they do.
WereBear
@Matt McIrvin: Oh, these days, insurance companies pre-fail and leave with the money.
WereBear
@Professor Bigfoot: It’s what the cult is based on, certainly.
But it also clings to its inherent weaknesses, such as immaturity, impetuosity, sadism, and highly blackmail-able hobbies.
And cowardice. Any culture that makes such a fuss…
I’m saying when are we going to stop talking about economically insecure voters when we are really talking about emotionally stunted cultists?
That’s something no one has tried yet.
Professor Bigfoot
@WereBear: OH yeah, agreed, eventually the sonsabitches will be put paid to… but as some wag once said, “in the long run we’re all dead.”
sentient ai from the future
TSLA getting kicked in the jimmies does good things for my mental health, as well as my wallet (I bought a put options on Friday when it was recovering about half it’s losses from the previous week)
I’m not a gambler by nature, but I will put some bets down when the odds look good and they comport with my value system
Redshift
@Soprano2:
I think highly engaged Democrats are howling about the failure to block the CR (and general refusal of Senate Dems to use the rules to slow everything down), because we know they don’t have much power, but we want them to use all of it. And I think a lot of less-engaged Dems think the elected Dems must be able to save us somehow, and interpreted the howling to mean the Dems had a chance to do that and didn’t.
Professor Bigfoot
@WereBear: Slobodan Milosevich.
Fed Serbia the same steady stream of “Serb grievance,” eventually engendered ethnic cleansing and civil war.
I’m no longer sanguine we’re not going to get to that point.
EDITED TO ADD: I’m not disagreeing with you; I’m just not sanguine that even engaging them as an “emotionally stunted cult” will have any effect in our current zeitgeist. I don’t know how that message is even going to get out to the white “normies” who are, let’s be honest, “trump curious” most of the time.
Matt McIrvin
@tobie: Antitrust is an area where I can genuinely see the liberal-leaning professional class not caring about it as much as they should, or being actively suspicious. What, break up Google or Meta? How would you even do that? Wouldn’t it make their products work worse by breaking the integration?
Yeah, it would. It also contains the damage when a company like this does a massive Bond villain heel turn, which we’ve been seeing happen recently.
Scout211
@Gretchen: if you have a new iPhone with UBS-C you may need a new cable for CarPlay, unfortunately.
. . .
WereBear
@Professor Bigfoot: Since they are cultists, and two attempts to replace the Cult Leader have failed miserably (Vance and Musk) and the Cult Leader himself has sabotaged attempts to be usurped by offspring, they are holding a time bomb.
How long will this thing last? With Trump so constantly being torn down. Diminishing with age and arrogance and some rich white man medical magicking reaching the limit.
Generally speaking, four basic outcomes when a cult leader dies: continuation, dissolution, schism, or reform/revolution.
We have to be ready with our own pry bars this time.
Mr. Bemused Senior
Good move. Don’t get cocky 😁.
Matt McIrvin
@Redshift: That “other divide” between people with low vs. high political engagement is something I’ve seen a lot of discussion of lately, from people like Teri Kanefield. I do think it’s very important.
She also mentioned a further subdivision, between people who have high political engagement but it’s about traditional electoral politics (very interested in voting), and people who have high political engagement but are suspicious of voting and elections, and consume a lot of para-political and fringe stuff. There’s a lot of that on the right right now; Trump reached those people on the right. But it also exists on the left, especially in the Very Online world.
Scout211
Has anyone read this Vox interview with David Shor, a data analyst? Looking at the voting statistics from the November elections and his analysis may surprise you. web archive version.
These two stood out for me.
and
Glory b
@Redshift: I think too many people didn’t take civics and don’t understand how this works.
Schumer had 2 bad choices. If he allowed a shutdown, I have no doubt that the Republicans would let it go over 31 days, after which they’d have the force of law behind their raping and pillaging of the federal government, cutting off appeals to the court as a card to play in what is a very weak hand.
But it’s not presentable in an easy soundbite. And I have no doubt that a lot of the protest is fueled by the DSA/Justice Dems, who, as has been said, make it clear that they couldn’t care less about the party, and want a “hostile takeover,” not a coming together.
WereBear
@Glory b: They don’t. I remember explaining to a college sophomore, not a dull person, but she didn’t get that “Obama’s not a king. There’s a process.”
schrodingers_cat
@Gretchen: I am not her fan either. She is tone deaf except to her base of college educated white women (and some men).
She is Bernie Sanders lite. That daily tweeting about how Biden could cancel everyone’s student loans did a lot of harm. She acted as if the Supreme Court did not exist.
I did not agree with her advocacy in canceling the TPP either. And these are just two examples.
When the Supreme Court stopped Biden’s student loan forgiveness EC, that gave the horseshoe left another chance to crap on Biden.
suzanne
@Scout211: Anecdotally, what Shor is saying matched what I observed. The most outspoken FFOTUS supporter I encountered this cycle was the dad of one of the other little girls on Spawn’s soccer team. A young-ish Black man who would not stop talking about how excited he was about Trump.
This also confirms what I’ve been thinking about:
Readers of the WaPo and the NYT are voting for Dems. But there’s political-adjacent content mixed into lifestyle and sports and comedy and beauty/health content, and that is a bigger problem for us.
Interesting Name Goes Here
@Glory b: I watched a DSA follower/advocate pick a fight with a black writer on BlueSky last night. Yes, the advocate was lily-white. Yep, it ended about how you’d expect on BlueSky.
I have been questioning calling myself a progressive in recent years, even though I agree with just about everything they do. My viewpoint, particularly when it comes to people like Bernie Sanders, is that given the opportunity too many of them would be ultimately no different from their counterparts on the Right; the one thing that might make them “better” would be the presence of some kind of conscience.
schrodingers_cat
@Scout211: Not a fan of Shor. He wants the Ds to throw minorities under the bus. His data analysis is not objective. It starts with a premise and then he uses data to say what he has already decided it should say. I can connect the dots differently using the same data.
Chief Oshkosh
Today’s message to my electeds:
Please help Democratic leadership articulate a clear position against Musk and Trump breaking Social Security and then handing the money and brief to cronies. Democratic leadership MUST at least LOOK strong and cohesive on this. The Republicans have grabbed the third rail. Make it painful for them.
Professor Bigfoot
@WereBear: From your keyboard to God’s monitor.
tam1MI
As much as I agree that Schumer has got to go, I worry that his fuckup will hurt in those crucial elections coming up in a couple of weeks, especially Wisconsin.
Old Man Shadow
Someone is cutting onions in here, and I don’t like it…
Feelings… ugh… gotta stuff those back in the pit…
WereBear
@suzanne: It self-sorts. The more you know, the better you understand your choices.
They act like kids who can be lured into a van with candy.
Belafon
@Professor Bigfoot: Completely agree. And, just to make sure, this is not to lay the blame on women, but women who are so racist that they’d rather settle for 40% self-determination under white men than everyone being treated equally just makes me twitch.
schrodingers_cat
@Interesting Name Goes Here: RWNJs want to kill us (minorities) LWNJs want us to tell them how awesome they are or STFU. I am afraid they would kill us too if they had that power*, if we don’t give them the fawning reception they think they deserve.
*See for example, Mao and Pol Pot
Historically minorities have not fared all that well in Communist countries either.
suzanne
@WereBear: Yeah, it does. But political alignment based on “lifestyle” factors would be a really bad thing, because most normies care a lot more about that stuff than they do about politics, and it would thus be much harder to make inroads. We’re already seeing it around educational attainment. Other things like pop culture fandoms and pro sports and cars/trucks and even beauty standards are now pretty right- or left-coded, and that’s not going to be good for Dems.
Matt McIrvin
@Scout211: None of this surprises me, but I think we go around in circles here on the old confusion of the difference between a function and its derivative, especially when it comes to voting behavior by race.
Republicans gained the most ground among minorities in 2024, BUT their support is still overwhelmingly white and that has not changed. Both of these things are true.
They were winning minority votes from a low base (and those were probably also the voters most likely to have instant regret when Trump got in). What this reminds me of a bit is 2000.
Nelle
@Professor Bigfoot: This isn’t abstract to my neighbors. The father of the man around the corner was killed in the massacre in Srebenicia. The family across the street is from Srebenicia. When I moved here, I found that I had moved into a neighborhood of Bosnian immigrants.
Baud
Captain C
@suzanne:
Despite those rags’ best efforts.
Gretchen
@Scout211: Thank you. I will try one of these.
WereBear
@suzanne: They are looking at voting like shopping. No, dammit, it’s still a gamble!
WereBear
@Matt McIrvin: Oh yes, the stolen election.
Hildebrand
The move away from the Dems in the presidential is seen in the stark rise of open racism and misogyny.
Look at the numbers, men are moving right. That’s not because of the economy, its reactionary knavery that is being pumped into the body politic by a whole bunch of men who fear being identified as mediocre assholes – Trump, Musk, Rogan, and all of the rest of right wing manosphere.
Men don’t want to have to work hard to be masters of the universe, they want it handed to them, and so they just whine about not getting what they want.
Kamala lost because she is a deeply talented Black woman – and that scared too many men, mostly white men, and those who want to pass as white.
Captain C
@Baud: The next person who sincerely tells me that Lone Skum is for free speech, well, I’m going to have a great investment opportunity for them, one that is so good they should liquidate all their assets and hand me the cash proceeds. Sorry, can’t tell you the details, but it’s going to make a ton of money*.
*For me, not them.
Matt McIrvin
@WereBear: That happened at the margins. But what I’m talking about is that George W. Bush made a concerted effort to get minority votes, particularly from Hispanics and Arab immigrants, and he got some. He massively won the American Muslim vote! And then 9/11 happened and there was this massive move to punish immigrants for it, and there was a lot of regret at that point.
Trump isn’t even waiting for that. He got all these new non-white votes and then it’s like, we’re going to put Nazis in the Cabinet and crack down on anyone who hires non-whites! I *think* they’re screwing themselves over here, but only if one assumes democratic elections still matter and the people who are regretting their votes will be allowed to vote in the future. Bush won reelection in 2004, but that time, it hinged on 9/11 trauma and the white reactionary Christian vote.
Heidi Mom
@Baud: I’m glad to see someone say this out loud (so to speak). There have to be some moral boundaries beyond which we won’t go. Thank you!
Baud
@Heidi Mom:
I consider myself the moral boundary that people of decency should not go past.
NutmegAgain
Such a great story, thank you! I think part of what makes it so good is how the kids picked their own project & recipients.
Old School
@Baud:
Baud
@Old School:
Ah, thanks. I hate misleading headlines. Worse than normal click bait
Paul in KY
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: There are a whole lot of stupid white people. Too many of them vote for TFG or would vote for us but are too lazy to get to the booth.
Paul in KY
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: We have some very rich people, company owners and the like, who donate to us. They have to know that we have to bust on them hard to win. Nothing personal, etc. etc.
UncleEbeneezer
@zhena gogolia: Right?! If all anyone hears FROM BOTH SIDES is how OMG Dems Suck, ad nauseam, guess what the result is gonna be in the minds of most voters…it’s really not that complicated. Putin certainly understands how this all works. And he’s been feeding the worst impulses of people on our side since at least 2014. Until we learn that sometimes the best move is to STFU and keep our precious criticisms of Dems to ourselves, we will reap what we’ve sown.
Paul in KY
@Belafon: I personally would not like a woman nominated in 2028. I am sure that misogyny is what doomed VP Harris and Sen. Clinton. We MUST win in 2028 and if it takes having a man at the top of the ticket, then so be it.
Matt McIrvin
Meanwhile, Trump’s disapproval keeps creeping up:
https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-silver-bulletin
Notice what’s happening here. His approval rating has only inched down a little, but the low-engagement “not sures” are polarizing against him. And it’s important not to read too much into this–these people probably hate Democrats way more than they hate Trump.
So for this to translate to electoral wins, even if there are free elections, there has to be something else happening, somebody who we might not have even heard of has to seize the moment. And Trump is doubtless going to try to throw that person in jail, whoever it is.
It sounds like the 2028 presidential nominee is going to be Donald Trump, Jr., running as “Donald Trump” with the understanding that it’s really Donald Trump’s third term, so we can’t necessarily count on term limits saving us.
Belafon
@Paul in KY: And while I want to save things, we never truly will until people get over their bigotry.
Paul in KY
@chemiclord: Very good point, unfortunately.
Citizen Alan
@Professor Bigfoot: I’m a straight(ish) white male who was at least raised Christian. And I agree with you 100%. I was at dinner last night with friends and the topic of how racist the Clovis area is. And I sighed and explained to them who Emmet Till was and why they had to put bulletproof glass over the road sign memorializing him.
Citizen Alan
@Belafon: Well what do you expect after 4/5 of evangelicals took the Mark of the Beast?
Paul in KY
@tobie: IMO, Pres. Biden did not bash the rich enough.
Matt McIrvin
(I would like to see a demographic breakdown of regretful Trump voters, but I haven’t seen anyone attempt to do that. The stories about them are very anecdotal.)
Professor Bigfoot
@Nelle: I’m curious— do they see the same things we see?
I’ve heard from folk who lived in/families fled from authoritarian regimes sound the alarm, I wonder if your neighbors are feeling it.
Citizen Alan
@The Audacity of Krope: I think the overwhelming majority of that 40% conservative cohort would be perfectly happy with Scandinavian-style Socialism so long as minorities could be prevented from sharing in it. They loved everything FDR did so long as it had carve outs to keep black folks at the subsistence level.
Mike E
Gee, I wonder what was happening in the media environment around that time (::cough::Fox News::cough::).
Ignoring the rampant propaganda from Rush Limbaugh et al and the corporate capture of media overall is quite a miss there by Vox…but Prof Bigfoot is essentially right (as usual!)
Paul in KY
@different-church-lady: At the bottom line, it is (once again, unfortunately)
Citizen Alan
I am still shocked and disgusted that Newhouse and Valadeo, who both vote to impeach the bastard, now vote lockstep with the House GOP on making him dictator!
p.a.
The W admin ofter allied with Muslim nations in UN and international org votes, even after 9/11 I believe, in attacks on abortion, birth control, other women’s rights and health.
Citizen Alan
@tobie: There was something I read here a few weeks ago that shocked and offended me at the time but I later realized it was absolutely true. A poster suggested that most “small business owners” only became “small business owners” (a) because they inherited the business and, more importantly, (b) because they were such assholes that they wouldn’t be able to hold a job without pissing off coworkers and getting fired, so they needed an employment position where they were always in charge and could bully employees.
It offended me because I used to be a small business owner in the sense that I was a solo practitioner for about 10 years and didn’t think that applied to me. But then, I thought about it and realized that it kind of did. I mean, it wasn’t an inherited business and I don’t think I’m an asshole (or at least not that kind of asshole). But I went solo because I took a good hard look at the culture in most firms where I would be an associate otherwise, and I just wanted to vomit at the thought of doing that for 10-15 years in hopes of someday becoming partner.
Citizen Alan
@WereBear: Sanders was very helpful once the leader of the Democratic Party became an older white male. Funny that.
Citizen Alan
@different-church-lady: It is when they are crafting lies that the majority of the country wants to believe.
Matt McIrvin
@Citizen Alan: I never tried to start my own business in part because the thought of having to manage the business parts of a business revolted me.
Of course there are people who will handle a lot of that for you. And now I’m looking at hiring the analogous kind of people to manage my (eventual) retirement finances, which is like being a small-business owner in some ways.
Citizen Alan
@Gretchen: I just bought a Fitbit and promptly lost the instructions (which weren’t helpful seeing as they were in a microscopic font). Luckily, it somehow syncs with my personal trainer’s app so it still tells me my heart rate and how much I slept the night before without me having to ask. Otherwise, it’s a $99 paperweight stuck to my wrist.
Citizen Alan
@Gretchen: I will never forgive Bernie for picking his 2016 convention delegates seemingly based entirely on how loudly they were willing to boo every time Hillary’s name was mentioned, including during the presentation given by the BLM Mothers.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Gvg:
Longtime and vocal Biden supporter here. There’s no argument about what he did.
But both sides of this can exist and do exist within the Dem party.
WaterGirl
PSA: Wil, I can’t contact you directly because none of the email addressed you have used here is valid.
If you are reading this, please get in touch with me about your status as a commenter on Balloon Juice. watergirl at balloon-juice.com
u
“large swaths of this country are marinated in Fox News and AM radio”. Well, yes. But it’s important to understand that nobody is forcing people at gunpoint to watch and listen to that shit. Those “media” companies make money because they are feeding to stupid, hate-filled people the shit that they want to see and hear. If those people were a little more intelligent and a little more decent as human beings then the right-wing media companies would just go out of business. The underlying problem is the fact that at least 30% of Americans are just shit people.
Timill
@Citizen Alan: I find that instructions are often available online, so that you can expand them into an actually readable format.
Citizen Alan
Well, I wasn’t actually very good at the business parts, which is why I struggled financially until I won the brass ring and got another fed clerkship.
Mike E
@u: their media footprint is overlarge and given deference; this gets them more listeners/viewers by saturation and conditioning, people whom are persuadable and not just white assholes by default. Otherwise, I agree and one third may be low-balling it.
stacib
@Paul in KY: It had better be an old, white man or we (Democrats) will still be on the outside looking in.
Matt McIrvin
@Citizen Alan: Sanders is a Senator from one of the most anomalous regions of the United States: this little sliver where there’s such a thing as rural white leftism. (And I’m told that really it’s less anomalous than you might think, more that the state is dominated by the college town of Burlington, but the environment does continue down into the Berkshires of western Massachusetts).
That’s given him a perspective that most of America’s liberals haven’t been able to afford, but it also gives him weird blinders.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Baud: As one of the 40% of moderates, I have frequently felt like Cassandra explaining to my very liberal and leftist friends that the country only sort of agrees with them on some things. If they aren’t will to compromise, they will get nothing because their aren’t enough of them to be anything but election spoilers. Biden lost support catering to them, and they didn’t value it at all
Miss Bianca
@Chief Oshkosh: Good message. I may just swipe it.
Paul in KY
@WereBear: Read a short story once where someone manages to go back in time to 1938 and whacks Hitler. They return and find out that Reinhard Heydrich took over as Nazi leader and was ever so much worse and competent.
Paul in KY
@WaterGirl: Joe was a fine President. Had a great heart. Just undone a bit by age catching up to him, economic forces beyond his control, and some messaging mistakes, IMO.
Paul in KY
@Hildebrand: True dat.
Paul in KY
@Matt McIrvin: The Lurlene Wallace of his era. Feel sad for Mrs. Wallace being mentioned in same breath with the scum that is TFG Jr.
Betty
@JMG: I forgotten that bit about Schumer making that promise to members. Give me Harry Reid, especially in the era of Trump. I understand Schumer maintains his position because of fundraising and his ties to Wall Street.
Betty
@stacib: I think a young Andy Beshear would be a good bet. He checks all the boxes.
Paul in KY
@p.a.: I always thought that was a bunch of marketing hooeey from Batshit McChimpy and Darth Snarly. To sorta polish his Compassionate Conservative ™ shtick.
Paul in KY
@Citizen Alan: Ha! Gotcha :-)
Paul in KY
@Citizen Alan: That is strange…
Paul in KY
@Betty: If Gov. Beshear does have any ‘fire in the belly’ for it, he needs to think in a ‘campaign’ manner about every freaking thing he does or says! Sounds exhausting and it is, but that’s the kind of I dotting and T crossing you need to do if you want to be President.
EDIT: At least when you are running as a Democrat…
WTFGhost
@Betty: He’s defending himself by saying “we have to win in 2026” but, damn… doesn’t that mean he should be whip or minority leader emeritus? We need a leader, not just a “strategist”.
@Matt McIrvin: Cokie Trump can’t match the long, droning, so true, so true, the long, long, unbelievably long, longer than anyone ever imagined, lots of people are saying it’s unprecedented, droning and salad words, like groceries, just things you eat, I never talked about that, but now I talk about it all the time. Or drones, which are very important, and the noise of drones doesn’t give you cancer like the noise from windmills. Anyway, patriots and lovers of America, you have to understand that guns are what protect you from cancer, and that’s why you only hear liberals talking about that. Not us! We’re tough! We have immune systems!
Seriously: try reading that in a coked-up voice, and…
Okay, that was all a trick to see if I could get you reading that in a coked up voice, I admit it.
Uncle Cosmo
A lot less “funny” with that bit of just possibly pertinent information added, innit?