I voted for Harris, and I can’t help thinking that the reason she lost was that she told everyone that the economy was “going great- just look at the stock market” when a lot of people had been eating shit through both Democratic and Republican administrations, and were worried about their rent. It’s not just her, I get the impression from the way they speak and the way they lead that the leadership of my party don’t personally know anyone who isn’t doing very well.
I would love for it to turn around, but I’ll happily work for a different party if and when people who work for wages get enough of this bullshit. I think 45 years in a party that has become that out of touch is plenty.
I watched the clip of Talib raging against Russell Vought and was highly impressed. I've never been a Talib fan - with my support of Israel - but that support has been tempered by the fact that RW governments everywhere are the issue. When I saw a friend recently and met some new people they were complaining about what is happening in NYC. I told them I would have voted for Mamdani. And we agreed to leave it there. Guttenberg's statement and stance fits with the group I met and know. I still believe the people who didn't vote for Harris due to Israel were shortsighted; Republicans are always far worse in every way. But I could say the same for Latino and Black men who voted for the "man"; the strongman; the one who will put uppity women in their place. Talk about voting against your interests!
This 'you are either with us or against us' binary is harmful to our democracy and insulting to voters. I want affordable prices, wages and health care. I also want to stop the genocide in Gaza and to make sure trans people get the support and dignity they deserve. So by Guttenberg's logic, does that make me, the voter, a cancer on the party?
Seventy-seven million Americans looked at the corrupt, bullying, raping, racist insurrectionist who fucked up a response to a pandemic that killed a city's size worth of Americans unnecessarily and strengthened an antivax movement that will kill untold number more and thought, "Yes. That is what I want more of."
Ninety million Americans could not even be fucking bothered to vote at all.
I have anger towards them all.
I have anger at Democrats for their circular firing squads... their fecklessness... their sometimes cowardice and reliance on public opinion more than principles.
(And yes, I have engaged in circular firing squads when I had my leopard eating faces moment reading about pro-Trump Middle Eastern American voters bemoaning his rather obvious unadulterated support for Israel and its genocide and ethnic cleansing. As good as it felt to scream "I told you so!" at people I've never met or will meet, people are still fucking dying. Kids are still dying of malnutrition. Kind of hard to hold onto that smug anger when bodies are stacking up. I just hope those voters fucking learned something. Of course, knowing American voters, they probably learned to vote third party or some bullshit.)
I have more anger at Republicans. Everything they taught me to believe in was a lie to them: honor, patriotism, fidelity, faith, fiscal responsibility, family. They are the ones making things worse. They are the ones hurting Americans, hurting women, hurting minorities, the ones whose ancestors bled and died fighting for abolitionism. The ones whose ancestors crafted the Reconstruction amendments. They sold Lincoln and Black Americans out and betrayed them. Now they shred the old legacy of their party and adopt a fascist Great Man philosophy of authoritarian capitalism. Fuck them.
I was going to say pretty much what you said, only you said it better and more completely. I don’t care if they were “establishment”, “progressive”, “centrist”, “far-left” or whatever term one might apply to them*. Whatever you call them if they refused to vote in the two most consequential elections of our lifetime (perhaps our history), they were fucking idiots and they bear a certain amount of responsibility for the death and destruction that Trump and MAGA have inflicted on our country. At some point you have to stop blaming the “candidates” and “politics” and place the blame squarely where it belongs, on the stupid-ass voters who refused to vote for the best, most qualified candidate at a crucial moment in the very survival of our Democracy.
*Though I would never call a fellow Democrat a cancer and I can only think of one “Republican” that I might apply that term to.
Yet another example of pro-Israeli and AIPAC extremism. Apparently all of us who oppose the utter destruction of Gaza are anti-Semites, or so the accusation always goes. The US has been completely supportive of Israel for my entire long lifetime (my birth coincides with the political birth of Israel), yet that supposed two-state solution from the ever-present "peace process" has never been further away.
It turns out that we are happy to supply massive amounts of aid with arms and cash, and never to demand that they comply with international law or common morality. This accomplishes 2 things: 1) It keeps the US military arms suppliers in wealth and prosperity, and 2) It keeps us one deniable step away from whatever anti-humanity action that Israel undertakes in the middle east with our tacit approval.
Israel manages to mirror the US in several ways. They have a similarly corrupt authoritarian in power who keeps escaping the consequences of his long-standing illegality. That authoritarian is enthusiastically supported by the most rabid religious sect in the country, who keep him in power while he looks the other way as they steal land from their neighbors and he pretends to be working for peace which will never come until all of their neighbors are eradicated. Then Jared Kushner can turn the confiscated property into a mega-resort for the wealthy.
Men continue to be awful to women. Film at 11. Look, she can be for good stuff and not on board for others. Still a Democrat that needs to be supported. Were it a man would he spew the same crap?
And SER the FA was correct. When I flew the last year they started looking for blame when flights were delayed. We often got called out for planes being boarded last because we took too long for our safety pre-checks prior to boarding when the plane took so long to deboard and the cleaners were still on board cleaning. You can’t load a plane with the cleaners. It was stupid and didn’t last long. Mostly it was because people now had to pay for bags so they brought their entire lives on board with them.
Boarding would be much easier if everyone checked their luggage. This doesn’t happen bc most airlines charge for checked luggage and once you’ve packed a bag to get through TSA, you’re less likely to gate check at the last minute. Also, people are terrified of their bags getting lost, which is rare but I can understand the fear. But we usually just bring one small overnight carry on with a change of clothes for all three of us if our luggage is lost. We don’t try the “carry on that is actually big enough for a week’s worth of clothes per person” scam. Even if there is room for them, they are often so heavy and bulky that passengers struggle to get them off the plane so disembarking takes forever.
I will say, there is thievery that happens in screening and on the ramp.
Plus now with so many devices having LiOn batteries those always have to go onboard. And then the excessive bag charge fees really add up a lot. So I get why people do this.
Yeah, it was the price of eggs, which the hopeless MSM kept harping on over and over, plus Biden's age, and when he dropped out, Harris' race and gender, that put trump back in power. I was annoyed with Tlaib and others and the other Uncommitted voters, but understood why they felt that way. Perhaps it was all that they could do to get their message out, perhaps there was something else that they could do to more effectively to get their message out, I do not know.
Back to the reasons voters either sat out the election of 2024, or voted for trump - too many Americans engaged in magical thinking, rather than critical thinking. To think that a guy, who clearly has never cared for anyone but himself in his life would give a damn about ordinary Americans, is an example of magical thinking. Add to that - he had already been president, and botched the response to a pandemic, which led to more people dying than needed to die, and before that, his policies were a disaster, although, thanks to having a few people in his first administration who aren't morons and are more loyal to the Constitution than to him, it wasn't nearly as bad as this one is. Oh, and J6 should have been the deal breaker, no matter how much a dozen eggs cost! Biden and Harris ain't perfect, but only magical thinking people (especially misogynist racists in Harris' case), would think that trump would be a better choice.
So, no, it's not Tlaib's fault, nor any of the Uncommitteds' fault that trump is back in power, destroying the nation and embarrassing us daily. I am disappointed in Guttenberg.
"Yeah, it was the price of eggs, which the hopeless MSM kept harping on over and over, plus Biden's age, which the hopeless MSM kept harping on over and over, and when he dropped out, Harris' race and gender, which the hopeless MSM kept harping on over and over, that put trump back in power."
One quibble—I do think Trump won at least partly due to the “they/them” attack, not because people hated trans people so much but because it enforced a narrative that Democrats were more focused on pronouns than they were on improving the quality of our lives. (A BS attack, but one that I think landed due to a hapless Democratic campaign)
I do think it’s foolish to say “if you’re not on my side on this issue I won’t vote” because it never seems to result in the losing party saying “I guess we need to change to appeal to them now”—instead you just get blamed (unfairly or not) as your opponents within the party double down. But then, how do you persuade them to move more in your direction? Show how doing so can appeal to more disengaged voters? Work on changing the kids of the public, until the powers that be realize they don’t want to be on the wrong side of public opinion?
Gutenberg, who I presume is pro-Israel here, is not being helpful. There’s obviously at least some faction of the Dem coalition (especially in Michigan and especially these days) that is fed up with Israel and our government’s longstanding and very strange fawning treatment of that country. Like it or not this faction has to work with the pro-Israel faction, win by persuasion, and bridge their differences because the alternative is obviously worse (unless you’re a ghoul, even a fan of Israel should be distressed about this administration generally and it’s disastrous war in the Gulf in particular). Save the dehumanizing language for the greasy scumbags running this administration. It’s better for all of us if the public sees people like Tlaib as better than the Republicans, even if they think she’s dead wrong on this issue.
One quibble—I do think Trump won at least partly due to the “they/them” attack, not because people hated trans people so much but because it enforced a narrative that Democrats were more focused on pronouns than they were on improving the quality of our lives. (A BS attack, but one that I think landed due to a hapless Democratic campaign)>>
Oh, I agree. I think it was only effective bc of perceived poor economic conditions. The ad likely would have fallen flat if voters were otherwise happy with direction of the economy. I think it’s why all the “democracy at stake” rhetoric ultimately failed. It’s not simply an issue of campaigning with Liz Cheney, just that nothing about campaigning with Never Trumpers convinced swing voters that Harris was going to improve their material conditions.
Yep—take a spike in inflation with a post COVID/shutdown hangover and a total inability to lay any blame on the guy who presided over what started it all, and you have a near impossible situation even for gifted politicians.
I have to push back a bit on the campaign being hapless though. Sadopopulism is the tactical nuclear weapon of politics. If you are on a playing field where the opposing party is advocating for the elimination of segments of the population—a notion that some people shouldn't exist because they do gender 'wrong'—and that is treated as a legitimate position by media? You've already lost.
We'd indeed already seen it in the basic acceptance of the "blood and soil" in the Republican convention. But if the entire political/media environment treats them as legitimate, up to and including the whole "Puerto Rico is a floating island of garbage" joke [sic], where is your playing field?
So much of the Democratic message too was that "Yes, people who are different belong here and are Americans too." The other party offered fantastic promises with no media pushback that provided a cover for the ethnic cleansing promised via "Mass deportations now." They got to spread racist fanfiction about Haitians. And of course the fanfiction about queer people and claiming that kids pretend to be cats in school as some sort of gender thing.
Sure, the Dems had the media tipping scales for Republicans but what have they ever done to counter this? Certainly not investing in alternative media, or creating local organizations to reach previously unreachable voters, or even loudly and regularly call out the media to their faces the way Republicans have successfully done for decades. So I can’t give them a pass on that. As for the trans issue specifically, maybe rather than a canned “I followed the court orders” line that pleased no one, the response could have been “why are you freaks focusing on other people’s genitals, you perverted weirdos? I’m just looking out for ALL Americans and fixing the mess your child raping hero left us.”
I agree about investing in alternative media! But hell so many Dems do not, because look what happened when people started getting clout lying about Brian Tyler Cohen's Chorus Media. And I also remember in the social media wars, there is this plucky social media platform named Spoutible (which I invested in). Where did the lefty folks go to? Bluesky, helmed by the guy who didn't do anything about the Nazis infesting Twitter at the time. And Spoutible is headed by a left CEO.
Even on top of that, I talk about the rightwing media human centipede so much because it is funded with millionaire and billionaire pocket change. And those funders don't want to fund Democratic initiatives because of Democratic Keynesian policy being redistributive. Democrats use tax money primarily to help people and that's not so good for when you want to hoard wealth (or in some cases, bigfoot your own personal bigotries into the public space).
I voted for Harris, and I can’t help thinking that the reason she lost was that she told everyone that the economy was “going great- just look at the stock market” when a lot of people had been eating shit through both Democratic and Republican administrations, and were worried about their rent. It’s not just her, I get the impression from the way they speak and the way they lead that the leadership of my party don’t personally know anyone who isn’t doing very well.
I would love for it to turn around, but I’ll happily work for a different party if and when people who work for wages get enough of this bullshit. I think 45 years in a party that has become that out of touch is plenty.
I watched the clip of Talib raging against Russell Vought and was highly impressed. I've never been a Talib fan - with my support of Israel - but that support has been tempered by the fact that RW governments everywhere are the issue. When I saw a friend recently and met some new people they were complaining about what is happening in NYC. I told them I would have voted for Mamdani. And we agreed to leave it there. Guttenberg's statement and stance fits with the group I met and know. I still believe the people who didn't vote for Harris due to Israel were shortsighted; Republicans are always far worse in every way. But I could say the same for Latino and Black men who voted for the "man"; the strongman; the one who will put uppity women in their place. Talk about voting against your interests!
Dehumanizing those you don’t like is wrong, leads nowhere good, and, as far as I’m concerned, is why America has never lived up to its potential.
Othering bogs us down in bullshit.
This 'you are either with us or against us' binary is harmful to our democracy and insulting to voters. I want affordable prices, wages and health care. I also want to stop the genocide in Gaza and to make sure trans people get the support and dignity they deserve. So by Guttenberg's logic, does that make me, the voter, a cancer on the party?
Seventy-seven million Americans looked at the corrupt, bullying, raping, racist insurrectionist who fucked up a response to a pandemic that killed a city's size worth of Americans unnecessarily and strengthened an antivax movement that will kill untold number more and thought, "Yes. That is what I want more of."
Ninety million Americans could not even be fucking bothered to vote at all.
I have anger towards them all.
I have anger at Democrats for their circular firing squads... their fecklessness... their sometimes cowardice and reliance on public opinion more than principles.
(And yes, I have engaged in circular firing squads when I had my leopard eating faces moment reading about pro-Trump Middle Eastern American voters bemoaning his rather obvious unadulterated support for Israel and its genocide and ethnic cleansing. As good as it felt to scream "I told you so!" at people I've never met or will meet, people are still fucking dying. Kids are still dying of malnutrition. Kind of hard to hold onto that smug anger when bodies are stacking up. I just hope those voters fucking learned something. Of course, knowing American voters, they probably learned to vote third party or some bullshit.)
I have more anger at Republicans. Everything they taught me to believe in was a lie to them: honor, patriotism, fidelity, faith, fiscal responsibility, family. They are the ones making things worse. They are the ones hurting Americans, hurting women, hurting minorities, the ones whose ancestors bled and died fighting for abolitionism. The ones whose ancestors crafted the Reconstruction amendments. They sold Lincoln and Black Americans out and betrayed them. Now they shred the old legacy of their party and adopt a fascist Great Man philosophy of authoritarian capitalism. Fuck them.
I was going to say pretty much what you said, only you said it better and more completely. I don’t care if they were “establishment”, “progressive”, “centrist”, “far-left” or whatever term one might apply to them*. Whatever you call them if they refused to vote in the two most consequential elections of our lifetime (perhaps our history), they were fucking idiots and they bear a certain amount of responsibility for the death and destruction that Trump and MAGA have inflicted on our country. At some point you have to stop blaming the “candidates” and “politics” and place the blame squarely where it belongs, on the stupid-ass voters who refused to vote for the best, most qualified candidate at a crucial moment in the very survival of our Democracy.
*Though I would never call a fellow Democrat a cancer and I can only think of one “Republican” that I might apply that term to.
100%!
Yet another example of pro-Israeli and AIPAC extremism. Apparently all of us who oppose the utter destruction of Gaza are anti-Semites, or so the accusation always goes. The US has been completely supportive of Israel for my entire long lifetime (my birth coincides with the political birth of Israel), yet that supposed two-state solution from the ever-present "peace process" has never been further away.
It turns out that we are happy to supply massive amounts of aid with arms and cash, and never to demand that they comply with international law or common morality. This accomplishes 2 things: 1) It keeps the US military arms suppliers in wealth and prosperity, and 2) It keeps us one deniable step away from whatever anti-humanity action that Israel undertakes in the middle east with our tacit approval.
Israel manages to mirror the US in several ways. They have a similarly corrupt authoritarian in power who keeps escaping the consequences of his long-standing illegality. That authoritarian is enthusiastically supported by the most rabid religious sect in the country, who keep him in power while he looks the other way as they steal land from their neighbors and he pretends to be working for peace which will never come until all of their neighbors are eradicated. Then Jared Kushner can turn the confiscated property into a mega-resort for the wealthy.
Men continue to be awful to women. Film at 11. Look, she can be for good stuff and not on board for others. Still a Democrat that needs to be supported. Were it a man would he spew the same crap?
And SER the FA was correct. When I flew the last year they started looking for blame when flights were delayed. We often got called out for planes being boarded last because we took too long for our safety pre-checks prior to boarding when the plane took so long to deboard and the cleaners were still on board cleaning. You can’t load a plane with the cleaners. It was stupid and didn’t last long. Mostly it was because people now had to pay for bags so they brought their entire lives on board with them.
Boarding would be much easier if everyone checked their luggage. This doesn’t happen bc most airlines charge for checked luggage and once you’ve packed a bag to get through TSA, you’re less likely to gate check at the last minute. Also, people are terrified of their bags getting lost, which is rare but I can understand the fear. But we usually just bring one small overnight carry on with a change of clothes for all three of us if our luggage is lost. We don’t try the “carry on that is actually big enough for a week’s worth of clothes per person” scam. Even if there is room for them, they are often so heavy and bulky that passengers struggle to get them off the plane so disembarking takes forever.
I will say, there is thievery that happens in screening and on the ramp.
Plus now with so many devices having LiOn batteries those always have to go onboard. And then the excessive bag charge fees really add up a lot. So I get why people do this.
Yeah, it was the price of eggs, which the hopeless MSM kept harping on over and over, plus Biden's age, and when he dropped out, Harris' race and gender, that put trump back in power. I was annoyed with Tlaib and others and the other Uncommitted voters, but understood why they felt that way. Perhaps it was all that they could do to get their message out, perhaps there was something else that they could do to more effectively to get their message out, I do not know.
Back to the reasons voters either sat out the election of 2024, or voted for trump - too many Americans engaged in magical thinking, rather than critical thinking. To think that a guy, who clearly has never cared for anyone but himself in his life would give a damn about ordinary Americans, is an example of magical thinking. Add to that - he had already been president, and botched the response to a pandemic, which led to more people dying than needed to die, and before that, his policies were a disaster, although, thanks to having a few people in his first administration who aren't morons and are more loyal to the Constitution than to him, it wasn't nearly as bad as this one is. Oh, and J6 should have been the deal breaker, no matter how much a dozen eggs cost! Biden and Harris ain't perfect, but only magical thinking people (especially misogynist racists in Harris' case), would think that trump would be a better choice.
So, no, it's not Tlaib's fault, nor any of the Uncommitteds' fault that trump is back in power, destroying the nation and embarrassing us daily. I am disappointed in Guttenberg.
"Yeah, it was the price of eggs, which the hopeless MSM kept harping on over and over, plus Biden's age, which the hopeless MSM kept harping on over and over, and when he dropped out, Harris' race and gender, which the hopeless MSM kept harping on over and over, that put trump back in power."
FTFY :-/
And the price of eggs wasn't due so much to Brid flu as it was collusion between the largest egg producers: https://apnews.com/article/egg-prices-collusion-settlement-d32b05892541613df3f4e4932109ee0c
This is really awful to see happen. I'm really sad that Fred Guttenberg has gone so scorched earth. Probably no coming back from this.
Very disappointed to read this about Fred. Thank you for casting a light on this.
One quibble—I do think Trump won at least partly due to the “they/them” attack, not because people hated trans people so much but because it enforced a narrative that Democrats were more focused on pronouns than they were on improving the quality of our lives. (A BS attack, but one that I think landed due to a hapless Democratic campaign)
I do think it’s foolish to say “if you’re not on my side on this issue I won’t vote” because it never seems to result in the losing party saying “I guess we need to change to appeal to them now”—instead you just get blamed (unfairly or not) as your opponents within the party double down. But then, how do you persuade them to move more in your direction? Show how doing so can appeal to more disengaged voters? Work on changing the kids of the public, until the powers that be realize they don’t want to be on the wrong side of public opinion?
Gutenberg, who I presume is pro-Israel here, is not being helpful. There’s obviously at least some faction of the Dem coalition (especially in Michigan and especially these days) that is fed up with Israel and our government’s longstanding and very strange fawning treatment of that country. Like it or not this faction has to work with the pro-Israel faction, win by persuasion, and bridge their differences because the alternative is obviously worse (unless you’re a ghoul, even a fan of Israel should be distressed about this administration generally and it’s disastrous war in the Gulf in particular). Save the dehumanizing language for the greasy scumbags running this administration. It’s better for all of us if the public sees people like Tlaib as better than the Republicans, even if they think she’s dead wrong on this issue.
One quibble—I do think Trump won at least partly due to the “they/them” attack, not because people hated trans people so much but because it enforced a narrative that Democrats were more focused on pronouns than they were on improving the quality of our lives. (A BS attack, but one that I think landed due to a hapless Democratic campaign)>>
Oh, I agree. I think it was only effective bc of perceived poor economic conditions. The ad likely would have fallen flat if voters were otherwise happy with direction of the economy. I think it’s why all the “democracy at stake” rhetoric ultimately failed. It’s not simply an issue of campaigning with Liz Cheney, just that nothing about campaigning with Never Trumpers convinced swing voters that Harris was going to improve their material conditions.
Yep—take a spike in inflation with a post COVID/shutdown hangover and a total inability to lay any blame on the guy who presided over what started it all, and you have a near impossible situation even for gifted politicians.
I have to push back a bit on the campaign being hapless though. Sadopopulism is the tactical nuclear weapon of politics. If you are on a playing field where the opposing party is advocating for the elimination of segments of the population—a notion that some people shouldn't exist because they do gender 'wrong'—and that is treated as a legitimate position by media? You've already lost.
We'd indeed already seen it in the basic acceptance of the "blood and soil" in the Republican convention. But if the entire political/media environment treats them as legitimate, up to and including the whole "Puerto Rico is a floating island of garbage" joke [sic], where is your playing field?
So much of the Democratic message too was that "Yes, people who are different belong here and are Americans too." The other party offered fantastic promises with no media pushback that provided a cover for the ethnic cleansing promised via "Mass deportations now." They got to spread racist fanfiction about Haitians. And of course the fanfiction about queer people and claiming that kids pretend to be cats in school as some sort of gender thing.
Apparently they want to go after the Chinese now and re-introduce the exclusion act. Frightening.
Gilded Age 2.0! "This time we have no excuse!"
Sure, the Dems had the media tipping scales for Republicans but what have they ever done to counter this? Certainly not investing in alternative media, or creating local organizations to reach previously unreachable voters, or even loudly and regularly call out the media to their faces the way Republicans have successfully done for decades. So I can’t give them a pass on that. As for the trans issue specifically, maybe rather than a canned “I followed the court orders” line that pleased no one, the response could have been “why are you freaks focusing on other people’s genitals, you perverted weirdos? I’m just looking out for ALL Americans and fixing the mess your child raping hero left us.”
I agree about investing in alternative media! But hell so many Dems do not, because look what happened when people started getting clout lying about Brian Tyler Cohen's Chorus Media. And I also remember in the social media wars, there is this plucky social media platform named Spoutible (which I invested in). Where did the lefty folks go to? Bluesky, helmed by the guy who didn't do anything about the Nazis infesting Twitter at the time. And Spoutible is headed by a left CEO.
Even on top of that, I talk about the rightwing media human centipede so much because it is funded with millionaire and billionaire pocket change. And those funders don't want to fund Democratic initiatives because of Democratic Keynesian policy being redistributive. Democrats use tax money primarily to help people and that's not so good for when you want to hoard wealth (or in some cases, bigfoot your own personal bigotries into the public space).
It’s fucked for sure. We needed to be starting our long term fix a while ago.