Either they were going by the strawharris in right-wing media, or since the Republicans were so strongly anti-trans, anti-left, that they just assumed that Harris was pro as the default because Harris didn’t talk about those things, and there was no push-back by responsible media. (The things she did talk about were filtered-out in the Trump-centric reporting.)
Either way, awful people.
And also as often as not, She didn’t fit my definition of perfect, so I voted instead for the heaping pile of vomit.
If only Harris hadn’t been different from Trump. If she had been Trump, she would have won. 
I felt the same about the fuckers that voted us out of the EU, the problem with that way of thinking is that the rest of us end up turbofucked as well. We lose either way.
Yep - he’s going to appoint a shit ton of people who couldn’t get confirmed- or pass a background check.
Will they be as gleeful as Rob Ford fans? Asking for a friend…
Two things spring to mind with that comment of his
This.
ETA: Wait a minute. When you parse that, he said it’s harder for him to explain science to someone with an English degree than to explain it to the general public, many who have no degree at all? If that’s not what he meant, maybe he needs to hire an English major to explain it to us…
There’s a lot of mess in there. One thing that comes to my mind is that different subjects have very different ratios of what it takes to understand things versus figure them out. Take something like algebraic topology or quantum field theory and it genuinely is difficult to even explain what you are studying, versus something like insect ecology or Etruscan history. But then you look at how you actually know what you are saying, and the former become incredibly simple, compared to fields with incomplete and often contradictory evidence that needs to be carefully sifted through. I enjoy reading both history and science, and like to think I know a decent amount of both – and of the two, history is the one that I don’t think I could begin to really explain to anyone past the dim outlines.
Also, whenever someone talks about how much easier a subject they haven’t studied is, they’re being a fool.
Every problem seems simple when you don’t know what you’re talking about!
ETA: speling
Bob Brady is not widely regarded as being the brightest bulb in Philly.
Yeah, that’s the problem, of course. There’s no laser-guided karma for these morons. That’s why it’s the small mean part, and not the whole of me.
President-elect says Homan will oversee deportation of illegal immigrants
I get the feeling this happened a lot in the PA Senate race. Democratic Party organizations are calling for canvassers to help with confirming details on provisional and mail-in ballots for Senator Bob Casey:
The deadline is COB tomorrow. 
A lot of Democrats are repeating nonsense like this, unfortunately. And worse. A “friend” on Facebook posted a piece about how if so many black men hadn’t voted for Trump, Harris would have won. And when someone else pointed out only 13% of black men who voted, voted for Trump, the response was, “Well it was only 8% in 2020.” Like…give me a fucking break. About 13% of our population is black. About half of those are men, and maybe half of that number actually voted. And 13% of that half of half of 13% voted for Trump. And a lot of those voters would have been in solid blue or solid red states. They are not why Harris lost. Neither are progressives who declined to vote in protest of the administration’s policies in the Israel/Gaza conflict. There weren’t enough of any of those voters to swing the election, unless all of them collectively voted in higher numbers and all voted for Harris, and that’s just not realistic. Harris lost because white people, and especially white men, voted in huge numbers for Trump. That’s it.
Exactly! And it really doesn’t help to have the non-fox"news" media interviewing almost exclusively the Hispanic, Black, Woman trump voter; with a pretty clear subtext: “you must be nutz to have voted against your interests!” When we were all nutz (misogynistic racist…) equally if ‘we’ voted for trump. @#$!!
It’s Veteran’s Day today. Will they catch the president elect doing a victory standing dance over the grave of the Unknown Soldier perhaps?
I’m tuning out the finger-pointing and tuning in more to next steps:
The meeting with Joe Trippi just finished. He spoke and took questions with about 30 of us for an hour, and it was a firehose of coherent insights into the 
election. I’m still digesting all that, but I’ll post a few (and that’s already a lot, I see) insights that stood out for me. I’ll link to his new Twitter-style social network focused on building democracy, Sez Us, here at the top.
Nobody is named, Chatam House rules apply. I like my invitation to these. Please, don’t shoot the messenger (I know it’s tempting), I’m trying not to editorialize.
A participant from DC noted that the city feels PTSD, and quiet, and that the assumption that there will be a middle class of neutral government administrators feels like a strong (i.e. wishful) assumption to make right now.
Trump got the same vote in 2020 and 2024; this year, basically, 7m to 8m people simply did not vote. Black men, younger men, Latinos generally, shifted towards Trump. Why? There is some part of it which is not wanting a woman president, but that wasn’t identified as the dominant reason.
The pro-democracy vs authoritarian networks were a big theme in the analysis. The authoritarians own their propaganda channels (Fox, Sinclair, X, etc), and these are vastly more powerful than the pro-democracy networks. Democrats just don’t understand how powerful the right-wing propaganda engine is. Conventional journalism, underfunded or not, has no chance. The [Dd]emocratic side has to rent time on these networks. This means the authoritarians own the local reporters who, in the end, are more trusted than advertising or interviewees.
The authoritarian messaging triggers “fight or flight”, which the customary mode of pro-democracy messaging counters with “reasoned discussion” and loses. “Build the wall” is simple, engaging and visceral; a discussion that reasons about how immigrants are important to the economy, not so much. That’s fundamentally hard to counter. See the new book “Nexus” by Yuval Hariri, which was repeatedly emphasized as a very important analysis of the problem.
Watching UFC? WWE? You’re probably a T—p voter, likely younger and male, and right along side the event was messaging about how horrible the pro-democracy candidate was. Messaging exploited the loss of place that younger men are feeling, as well as into other, less economically integrated groups who have the gut feeling that democracy is just something that pesters them on the door once every four years.
Democratic Party “ground game” is a “dark ages” political operation. People respond poorly to strangers on the door, phone calls, and 5 emails a day for fund raising. Apparently the Democratic party campaign, particularly the consultants, are an insular group and resistant to change.
There was very little discussion about the Democratic Party candidate’s suitability. Whomever wins the primary in 2028, which will be the key vote, will be brutally roasted in the right wing networks before the next day is over. The key will be how to counter well-financed, well-integrated communication networks that the authoritarians own. The authoritarian message sticks, even if it is outrageous. Example: Obama’s birth country, which was authoritatively addressed only years after he was elected, and his birth certificate was still rejected by the authoritarians as a forgery.
Democrats consistently failed to address the obvious, outrage-generating, dis-info events. There was a Democratic assumption that people largely would discount this dis-info as unbelievable. Apparently the Lincoln Project screamed at them to address this, but the Democrats were too afraid of offending some of the base to risk a message that some group would take offense to; Dem organizers felt it was better to say nothing. This was the wrong response.
The best case right now may be for the Rep party to win the House. That way, when T—p has to walk back a promise, the administration doesn’t have Dem obstruction as an excuse. Otherwise, T—p the King will spend at least 2 years simply complaining that his agenda has been blocked.
This is not the end of the American experiment. That happened a while ago. There are lots of countries that have the veneer of democracy, and with the removal of mail-in and drop-box ballots, “tightening voting” etc. the will join them. This makes it fundamentally hard to remove the authoritarians by election. This has been the authoritarian plan for over 40 years, and it has always been a waiting game. Each election is democracy’s to lose.
Biden said that his presidency was a chance to prove democracy works, but in the end he spent 4 years proving that it doesn’t.
DogeCoin is the poor-man’s bitcoin. BTC and ETH are out of reach for most. Elon Musk was promised the position of “Director Of Government Efficiency”. The messaging was, not so subtly, “buy DogeCoin and vote Republican, and it will make you rich”.
Finally, there is a new Twitter-style social network Sez Us, with algorithms that promote building trust and conversions we need to preserve democracy. Supporters of democracy are encouraged to post and cross-post. If you have money to invest, they’d love to talk to you.
“enby” ?
