Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

This all day.

I'm sick of going back and forth with Sebby who seems to think his "the robots are coming from us all" is the only message that has merit. As far as I'm concerned, this article sums up pretty much every issue we're having right now. The fact that the national narrative is: Democrats don't understand the white working rural class, is the biggest con pulled on this country within the last however many decades.

Everyone should read the whole article, but it's going to take a lot to convince me that these aren't the problems this country is facing:

The honest truths that rural, Christian, white Americans don’t want to accept and until they do nothing is going to change, are:

-Their economic situation is largely the result of voting for supply-side economic policies that have been the largest redistribution of wealth from the bottom/middle to the top in U.S. history.

-Immigrants haven’t taken their jobs. If all immigrants, legal or otherwise, were removed from the U.S., our economy would come to a screeching halt and prices on food would soar.

-Immigrants are not responsible for companies moving their plants overseas. Almost exclusively white business owners are the ones responsible because they care more about their share holders who are also mostly white than they do American workers.

-No one is coming for their guns. All that has been proposed during the entire Obama administration is having better background checks.

-Gay people getting married is not a threat to their freedom to believe in whatever white God you want to. No one is going to make their church marry gays, make gays your pastor, accept gays for membership.

-Women having access to birth control doesn’t affect their life either, especially women who they complain about being teenage, single mothers.

-Blacks are not “lazy moochers living off their hard earned tax dollars” anymore than many of your fellow rural neighbors. People in need are people in need. People who can’t find jobs because of their circumstances, a changing economy, outsourcing overseas, etc. belong to all races.

-They get a tremendous amount of help from the government they complain does nothing for them. From the roads and utility grids they use to the farm subsidies, crop insurance, commodities protections…they benefit greatly from government assistance. The Farm Bill is one of the largest financial expenditures by the U.S. government. Without government assistance, their lives would be considerably worse.

-They get the largest share of Food Stamps, Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.

-They complain about globalization but line up like everyone else to get the latest Apple product. They have no problem buying foreign-made guns, scopes, and hunting equipment. They don’t think twice about driving trucks whose engine was made in Canada, tires made in Japan, radio made in Korea, computer parts made in Malaysia…

-They use illicit drugs as much as any other group. But, when other people do it is a “moral failing” and they should be severely punished, legally. When they do it, it is a “health crisis” that needs sympathy and attention.

-When jobs dry up for whatever reasons, they refuse to relocate but lecture the poor in places like Flint for staying in towns that are failing.

-They are quick to judge minorities for being “welfare moochers” but don’t think twice about cashing their welfare check every month.

-They complain about coastal liberals, but the taxes from California and New York are what covers their farm subsidies, helps maintain their highways, and keeps their hospitals in their sparsely populated areas open for business.

-They complain about “the little man being run out of business” then turn around and shop at big box stores.

-They make sure outsiders are not welcome, deny businesses permits to build, then complain about businesses, plants opening up in less rural areas.

-Government has not done enough to help them in many cases but their local and state governments are almost completely Republican and so too are their Representatives and Senators. Instead of holding them accountable, they vote them in over and over and over again.

-All the economic policies and ideas that could help rural America belong to the Democratic Party: raising the minimum wage, strengthening unions, infrastructure spending, reusable energy growth, slowing down the damage done by climate change, healthcare reform…all of these and more would really help a lot of rural Americans.

What I understand is rural, Christian, white America is entrenched in fundamentalist belief systems, don’t trust people outside their tribe, have been force fed a diet of misinformation and lies for decades, are unwilling to understand their own situations, truly believe whites are superior to all races. No amount of understanding is going to change these things or what they believe. No amount of niceties is going to get them to be introspective. No economic policy put forth by someone outside their tribe is going to be listened to no matter how beneficial it would be for them. I understand rural, Christian, white America all too well. I understand their fears are based on myths and lies. I understand they feel left behind by a world they don’t understand and don’t really care to. I understand they are willing to vote against their own interest if they can be convinced it will make sure minorities are harmed more. I understand their Christian beliefs and morals are truly only extended to fellow white Christians. I understand them. I understand they are the problem with progress and will always be because their belief systems are constructed against it. The problem isn’t a lack of understanding by “coastal elites” of rural, Christian, white America. The problem is a lack of understanding why rural, Christian, white America believes, votes, behaves the ways it does by rural, Christian, white America.

http://forsetti.tumblr.com/post/1531...nt-the-problem

TM

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

In the good timing department: today we learned that the Trump Foundation filed documents admitting that it engaged in self-dealing in 2015 and unspecified years in the past.

Media sure blew that one up for him before the election, huh?

As for your links, did you actually read that second one? I mean, come on. One night's news was dedicated to multiple sexual assault allegations against a presidential candidate, and one single poll asked about it. And this is equated to emails from a campaign staffer on a campaign that had nonstop wall-to-wall coverage of it's emails for more than a year.

That's some great evidence you've got.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

I have no polling, but I don't think swing voters care so much about that issue.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

I think what GGG was saying, accurately, is that when you posted that, you were in the middle of an exchange about something else entirely.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

In Minnesota, cities and counties are not allowed to levy income or sales taxes on their own. The state reserves that power to itself and collects all of those tax revenues, which it then distributes to municipalities in what is unfortunately called "Local Government Aid." There's no "aid" to it. It's the cities' cut of sales and income taxes, but Minneapolis gets more of it than a small town does, so the GOP, which just re-took both houses of the legislature, will again try to slash it. They did the last time they were in charge, leading to significant property tax increases all over the place (counties and cities can do their own property taxes).

To which I want to propose that instead of LGA, we just keep all tax revenues in the cities and counties where they are collected. See, good folks of the red exurbs and rural areas, just how gigantically fucked you guys would be without money from Minneapolis and St. Paul to pay for all your shit. You bastards think it's the other way around, but it's not and it wouldn't take you long to realize it.

We could do the same thing at the federal level as far as I'm concerned too.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Frankly, I'm sick of going back and forth with you. I would question whether you think the negative press Trump generated by himself based on the shit he actually said every single day should be offset by a manufactured "corruption" issue that the press seized on like a dog with a fucking bone. I would question whether you think the timing of (bullshit) negative revelations makes the relative amounts of negative coverage irrelevant. But you'll probably tell me about how the Democrats didn't address robots enough and Trump promised imaginary jobs.

TM

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

I was pregnant with monoamniotic-monochorionic twins right before the Texas 20 week ban was passed. My pregnancy was extraordinarily risky. Basically, the embryo split AFTER the amniotic sac was developed and so both twins were in the same placenta. If I had carried them to viability, they would have been delivered prematurely via C-section at 32 to 34 weeks. But their chances were always very, very small. As soon as I found out what sort of pregnancy I was dealing with, I knew that termination at any point, including past 20 weeks, was something I may have to consider. It was a heartbreaking situation to be in, but it was one that belonged to me and my family with the advice of our doctors. Why the legislature (who didn't even get that their "20 week ban" actually means 22 weeks by thew way we count pregnancy because the first two weeks are BEFORE fertilization) needed to be involved I'll never know.

Fortunately(?), their hearts stopped beating around 9 1/2 weeks and I didn't have to make any decisions other than D&C or wait for natural miscarriage. I went with D&C.

I haven't been able to get pregnant since.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

This is an awful story. I'm sorry you had to experience this ordeal (including thinking about terminating).

TM

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

The bigger point is that whether the press was harder on Trump than Clinton from an editorial viewpoint, it happily gave him lots and lots of free coverage for whatever he was saying, because people watched and read when he was the subject. Trump knew this very well, and was expert at grabbing that attention. Since the mainstream press generally thinks its job is to report, rather than to impose its own views, any editorial bias was de minimus compared to the value of the free time and eyeballs it gave Trump. (And this wasn't initially a Democratic complaint -- look at what happened to Trump's rivals in the primary.)

Now, predictably, Sebby will say that Trump did a better job of playing the media, and that's just how the game works.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Yes, what he said. Very sorry to hear this.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

The Gallup data I suggest you look at goes pretty deep into many of those issues.

The reason Hillary was seen as extreme in your circle is because they are used to people like Cruz lying to them and they believe him: http://www.politifact.com/texas/stat...backs-unlimit/

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Oh, shit, I'm sorry.

My heart goes out to you and Mr. Replaced Texan.

I have a fair bit of rage at those who characterize every D&C as an abortion....

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Relatedly:

"According to the Brookings analysis, the less-than-500 counties that Clinton won nationwide combined to generate 64 percent of America’s economic activity in 2015. The more-than-2,600 counties that Trump won combined to generate 36 percent of the country’s economic activity last year.

Clinton, in other words, carried nearly two-thirds of the American economy."

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

Huh. And, fwiw.

Re: I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused.
 

I am very sorry for your loss.

I have experienced pregnancy loss in several ways: a missed miscarriage after we had seen the heartbeat, an ectopic, one of the chicklets had a twin that we lost towards the end of the first trimester, and more early losses than I can even recall. Diagnosed with recurrent pregnancy loss. Support for those who have experienced pregnancy loss has become one of the primary charitable causes we support.

I didn't make it to my D&C with the missed miscarriage and that was without a doubt the worst day of my life.