Hekate
Hekate's JournalRegarding your last sentence: that's because most of the population is clustered in the major cities
...and along the two coasts. At least that's how I read it.
I don't know what to do about the rural parts of the country. The vast middle of the continent does not have even 50% of the population. They are not diverse, as we think of diverse (think of Lake Woebegone, where diversity is the Catholics, the Lutherans, and the Methodists, and an ethnic mix of Swedes and Norwegians). They distrust diversity -- they think it's an elitist plot. They think America is supposed to be a white country. Just ask Laura Ingraham.
I apologize to any DUers who live in these areas. I hate saying these terrible generalizations out loud -- it makes me feel like a bigot, but we have a problem. Hillary tried hard to reach out to these areas, and to this day there are DUers repeating the falsehood that she did not even visit or talk about specific rural problems.
Nonetheless America managed to elect both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and it took a terrible act of treason to keep Hillary from the White House.
Our first problem is to deal with the acts of treason. To deal with voting machines that cast your ballot for you and then count it. To deal with gerrymandering.
It is much too early to talk about our pick for president. It is almost too late to talk about the other stuff.
"A face in need of a fist"
Can't remember the lovely German word for that -- someone will come up with it though.
When you say MSM, exactly which organizations are you referring to? CNN is under attack...
CNN's people are resisting. MSNBC's various journalists are fact checking Trump like mad and reporting the ugly truth. Washington Post has rediscovered its Watergate roots. They are not the only ones, either.
In addition a minimum of 100 newspapers are co-ordinating editorials against Trump, slated to appear later this month, all on the same day.
So, there is that.
As for the American people, far fewer than 50% of us voted for the Trojan Horse, and despite the false equivalency of various polls, the number of those who will admit to being Republican is dropping.
At the two recent Unite the Right rallies, alt-right Nazis were pathetically outnumbered by people standing up for decency. At the one in DC they couldn't even fill a bus, and restaurants all over the city had signs up telling them to not bother coming in.
Please rethink.
Jeff Sessions is a sadist.It was watching him talk about taking little kids from their Mamis & Papis
...that set me trying to describe what I saw. Watch:
He quoted the Bible as justification (just like his Old South ancestors were wont to do)
He said the policy was deliberately painful to make desperate people stop doing what they were doing
His eyes twinkled while he was saying all this
And he chuckled while his eyes twinkled
And I thought, "That sonofabitch would have been perfectly happy as a slave master selling mothers away from their little children and babies. He's a sadist."
I am not positive about the goatfucking, though many people are saying that, but I am positive about the sadism. He's way out past the Keebler Elf and burrowing his way to the Gates of Hell.
Meh. She smiled, wiggled her fanny, wore short skirts and crossed her legs in class, tight shirts...
...low necklines...
Need I go on? She developed a few conversational catch-phrases ("In what respect, Charlie? " ) when she didn't know the answer and needed to stall for time. She exploited her superficial charms to manipulate male teachers (or employers) who could be manipulated, and sulked and stamped her foot at the ones who couldn't.
She manipulated women by being the Mean Girl in Jr Hi.
She learned how to bullshit and do a snowjob -- or whatever the modern terms are for writing meaningless fluff to get a C grade. I'm sure she had the attention span of a gnat. She did not need or want to learn anything. She attended 4 or 5 little public colleges before finally earning a degree in something like communications.
No Wharton for her. It takes a lot of family money to buy your way in when you're barely mediocre, and a lot of money to pay penniless grad students to write your papers for you.
Sarah was very clever in her way, but not intelligent. She scorned the nerds and eggheads. She was anti-intellectual as hell.
She became governor of a state with a small spread out rural population, and on reflection was not all that good at it.
Anecdotes versus reality: "A Dire bankruptcy trend among seniors," LA Times today...
Business section, page 1, by Michael Hiltzik
A few days ago, same great newspaper: Growing numbers of seniors living in cars
Ah, good old Joe down at the factory -- which will shortly be closed anyway.
My husband is also working past his sell-by date, I guess. In the past few years all kinds of experienced workers have been tossed overboard one by one from the place where he works, including one woman who'd worked for them for 17 years who was simply pulled from a meeting without notice. But fear not, shareholders, that new plant in India is picking up the slack, and they can get 5 Indian programmers for the price of 1 American programmer, years of experience and knowledge of the product be damned.
We'll be okay, gods willing, having saved nearly every nickel. The woman pulled from the meeting probably not so much: she is raising her grandchildren.
So, you know what? Modern American business practices suck badly. Unions are gone. The social safety net is shredded.
You know what else? THE PEOPLE YOU WANT TO RETIRE AND DIE OFF DID NOT DO THIS TO YOU. Blame the 1% and the GOP, and vote for Democrats.
I've been earnestly giving that advice since 1998. I am so DONE. They don't want school boards...
They don't want city councils. The believers all think they can jump straight to POTUS. The candidates seem to have another agenda altogether.
Here's your major clue: Ralph Nader has run several times. He takes money from the GOP. Jill Stein is a hundred times worse: She takes dinner with Vladimir Putin.
They are ratfucking us Democrats and our big tent.
I am done making excuses for their supposed naiveté and supposed good intentions. Old saying: The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. And after participating in Election 2016, they can go there.
You and H2O Man are giving me a lot to think about. I don't know when I pegged him as an abusive SOB
...but it was fairly early on. There were some articles I read, testimonials from women I found entirely believable as I watched his bullying behavior in public, so by the time he literally stalked Hillary around the stage at the debate, watching him do that made me sick to my stomach. Something is terribly, dangerously, wrong with that man.
For a lot of my life I have questioned my intuition and felt it was damaged in childhood: a combination of abuse (this isn't really happening in my family) and feminine socialization (don't judge a book by its cover; be nice to everyone, and if they aren't nice back ask what you did to deserve it).
Yet the Pole star that saved me from things that snared other people I met over time was my mother's sense of ethics and ethical behavior that she instilled in me. Religious people would have called it morality; New Agey people would have called it my inner guide; but my mother had kind of an 18th century Enlightenment sensibility, and she called it ethics.
Trump is a walking talking violation of -- everything normal and good, and he is dangerous. Likely my intuition isn't as damaged as I thought, because it was not pure reason that got me to my fundamental realizations about Trump.
I'm with Stephanie on this. The problem is with Zuckerberg, who has turned out ...
...to be not so much of a boy genius as an idiot savant. He observes and uses social interactions, but seems to have the personal social consciousness of a clam.
Whether he wants to admit it or not, his company aided and abetted Treason. He scarcely seems able to grasp the harm caused to the nation by his own lack of interest in what entities like Cambridge Analytica hath wrought.
So -- the issue is: How do you get his attention? With a 2X4 upside the head? Or do you grab him where it will really hurt?
I understand a lot of people are addicted to FB, dependent on it, all kinds of stuff. Well, it is a monopoly and very attractive. But it is also a corporation that has harmed and is harming the nation, as much as if it were pouring lead into our drinking water.
Believe me, what Stephanie Ruhle is proposing would assuredly get Zuckerberg's undivided attention.
Putin has a long-term goal of destabilizing all the Western democracies. I forget the name of his
...favorite geopolitical theorist, but the guy is a professor in Russia who writes big fat books that don't get translated into English very much, and are expensive when they do get translated (I looked him up on Amazon back when I first heard about him).
It's scary shit, like everything else about Vlad. It's not a "theory," it is an understood reality. We know now that Putin helped finance and promote Brexit -- and that begins to tear the EU alliance apart. People in the UK never expected it to actually pass -- sound familiar?
There's a wave of far-right anti-immigrant "populism" all around Europe -- Putin's fingerprints all over the place.
The frosting on the cake for me personally was learning that Calexit, the cockamamie idea that California should secede from the Union, was led by an American with an office in Siberia. I'm a Californian, by the way.
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