Monday, November 05, 2018

1: Beauty Helps (Waiting is HARD!)



20 comments:

  1. Well, I was so intently reading the last thread and popping to Alan's links, that I never noticed I had somehow missed setting a photo for today! So it's about a half hour late, but here at last.

    I am not impressed with Fresno's article, though, as it says more R's sent in absentee ballots than Dems. Hmmm.

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  2. I sincerely hope that when this election is over I'll be able to sleep again.

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  3. It took me a while this morning to realize that this is not election day.

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    1. I went ahead and deleted the two “removed by author” posts. But I have to tell you that I laughed as I came across them. Given the post just before each, they read almost like you’d maybe posted something bleep-able and decided to remove the bleepy comment. LOL!

      BTW, when you go to the “delete” page, before you click the delete button, look to see if there is a tiny square below it to check to “remove forever” your comment. If so, and you check it and then click “delete”, your comment with be completely gone with no note left behind.

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    2. Thanks--I am new to this way of posting. I think one of the deletes was an error of syntax, and the other a defective link. No bleeping bleepables! [I usually get rid of those before posting.]

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  4. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/04/the-american-civil-war-didnt-end-and-trump-is-a-confederate-president?CMP=share_btn_fb&fbclid=IwAR3rAfasz5iq6OJ5AmiSEJ8wgPKwlYFwtrF1iZC_5yFqaQFg8jj5aLicxq8

    "We had an ardent Unionist president for eight years, and now we are 21 months into the reign of an openly Confederate president, one who has defended Confederate statues and Confederate values and Confederate goals, because Make America Great Again harks back to some antebellum fantasy of white male dominance. Last weekend might as well have been Make America Gentile Again. And then came the attack, last Tuesday, on one of the signal achievements after the end of all-out war between the states: the 14th Amendment, which extends equal right of citizenship to everyone born here or naturalized."

    "We never cleaned up after the civil war, never made it anathema, as the Germans have since the second world war, to support the losing side. We never had a truth and reconciliation process like South Africa did. We’ve allowed statues to go up across the country glorifying the traitors and losers, treated the pro-slavery flag as sentimental, fun, Dukes of Hazzard, white identity politics. A retired general, Stanley McChrystal, just wrote a piece about throwing out his portrait of Robert E Lee that he’d had for 40 years, and why a US soldier should celebrate the leader of a war against that country says everything about the distortion of meaning and memory here."

    "Its premise appears to be that protection of others limits the rights of white men, and those rights should be unlimited. The Brazilian philosopher of education Paulo Freire once noted that “the oppressors are afraid of losing the ‘freedom to oppress’”. Of course, not all white men support extending that old domination, but those who do see themselves and their privileges as under threat in a society in which women are gaining powers, and demographic shift is taking us to a US in which white people will be a minority by 2045."

    YES! "losing the "freedom to oppress", really resonates as truth with me.

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    1. Thanks for sharing this, Susan. Fear of losing the freedom to oppress. Yes, that's it exactly. Society has to change the way it raises and acculturates its children, to help them feel valued and valuable without the need to devalue others. But it's hard to counteract most of human history.

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    2. Such a good article with much food for thought! Thanks, Susan!

      I hope we can all sleep tonight because we’ll be up all night the next night awaiting returns. And, as you elude, if it doesn’t go well we may never sleep again!

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  5. Andrew C. White

    Final Cook House ratings.

    There are 3 Democratic seats that are toss-up or worse. There are 47 Republican seats toss-up or worse.

    If every Lean/Likely/Solid race were to break as expected, Dems would need to win just 8 of 30 Toss Ups (27%) to win the majority.

    By contrast, Republicans would need to win 23 of 30 Toss Ups (77%) to keep theirs. Not impossible, but difficult.

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    1. Bodes well.

      I hope the young people of this nation come out in droves and truly Rock the Vote! Oh, I soooo want one seat more than the Rs in the Senate, too.

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    2. Fifty-one is a nice round number; fifty has its attractions as well.

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  6. Senate Toss Ups Usually Break One Way[Click]
    Jennifer Duffy: “One interesting phenomenon in Senate elections is that the races in the Toss Up column never break down the middle; one party wins a majority of them.”

    “Going back 10 cycles to 1998, the lowest percentage of Toss Up seats one party won was in 2002 when Republicans won 67 percent (6 of 9 races). In 2004, 2006 and 2014, one party took 89 percent of the contests in Toss Up. In 2004, Republicans won 8 of 9 races, but in 2006, Democrats took 8 of 9 races. In 2014, Republicans won 8 of 9 contests. That there were nine races in Toss Up in all three years and there are nine this year is purely a coincidence.”

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  7. An Ugly Watershed
    Josh Marshall

    CNN, NBC, FB and now even Fox News have either refused to run or dropped the President’s closing ad for being too racist.

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    1. This made the BBC front page. Big stuff. It floors me about Fox News. The ad must be pretty baldly atrocious for *them* to drop it. I haven't seen the thing, and don't want to.

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  8. Remarkable
    Josh Marshall

    There are now three states in which the total “early vote” is larger than the entire vote (early and election day) in 2014. Those states are Texas, Nevada and Arizona.

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    1. Yes. And as memory serves me, all three have senatorial elections in progress that might be pretty close.

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  9. Here's what PhD*Son recently wrote in response to someone expressing concern that the Caravan might include some unsavory types.

    "There may be some violent people mixed in. Human nature being what it is there would likely be in any group of 100,000 people. Just check out Boston on any Friday night. But as I stated, there is a process for vetting applicants. Will some get through who shouldn't? Probably. But we will also be helping thousands of families in desperate need. I don't buy into this culture of cowardice and cruelty that is promoted by the president and his followers. Maybe these people are trying to come to the US because we are constantly saying it's the greatest country in the world. Cowering behind walls and troops doesn't seem all that great. Being strong enough to lift up people in need seems a little greater."

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