#John edwards

[deadpresidents]

Is J. D. Vance the worst vp pick of your lifetime?

My lifetime has included Sarah Palin, John Edwards, and Dan Quayle, so Vance isn't even in the conversation, unfortunately.

[thepapersnail]

Francis Bacon, Étude Pour Un Portrait De John Edwards, 1986

[lil-als]

Uh… my little elections democracy is magic?

[aestheticjunkyard]

Leah Simon by John Edwards for Heroine Magazine September 2024

[politicalrpf]

2004 political cartoon by Chuck Asay.

[fashionlandscapeblog]

Francis Bacon

Study for Portrait of John Edwards, 1986

Oil, pastel and aerosol paint on canvas.

[fidjiefidjie]

🍂"A walk in the fall" 🍁

Peinture numérique 🎨 de John Edwards de 2018 (Mucha style)

Bel après-midi 👋

[oldsardens]

John Edwards - Twin Template. 1995

[hitku]

Towers in Leeds, by  John Edwards

[doodloos]

I know it's been a while, but here are Felix's siblings! In the top left is Felix's twin sister, Elise. The two of them were very close before his disappearance. She worked her whole life to be an upper class Southern Belle an is now married to the son of a railroad tycoon. To the bottom right is Felix's baby brother John. Their mom died shortly before he turned 13, so for the majority of his teen years, John was taken care of by Felix and his wife. John "works" as a traveling musician, wandering the west and singing in bars anytime he needs money.

Infodump under the cut

Being twins, Felix and Elise have always been incredibly close. Their younger brother is significantly younger than them, so for the longest time, it was just the 2 of them. As they became teenagers, they started associating more with separate friend groups, but they remained very protective of one another. 

While they never grew up considerably poor, Felix and Elise both knew what it was like to not have a lot and grew up striving for success in life. After the death of their father, Felix wanted to get a good job that would allow him to support a family while also being able to provide for his mother if needed. Elise, on the other hand, dreamed of marrying rich and moving to New England. She was an incredibly intelligent young girl who had no interest in marrying for love or having children. All she wanted was to marry into money so that she could become a proper lady, and this would be exactly what she would accomplish.

Elise was married for the first time when she was 19 to a man 30 years her senior, but he was wealthy and owned a prominent whaling company on the east coast. 7 years later, he died, and since he had no children, he would end up leaving everything to her. After this, Elise was married twice more, again to older, wealthier men, and each time they would die leaving all or a good portion of their fortune to her. Over the coming years, she slowly climbed her way up the social ladder, marrying men older than her with the full intention of inheriting their wealth and companies when they died. While she never married for love and never had children, she was perfectly content in her life of luxury…. For the most part.

At this point Felix had been married for nearly 2 decades. Elise had been single and widowed (again) for a couple years, and while she was very wealthy and content in her solitude, there were many men eager to trick her out of or marry her for her fortune. While she wasn’t particularly worried for herself, Felix was and encouraged her to settle down and marry someone closer to her age, if anything just for security. 

Eventually she found a man a few years younger than her (groundbreaking) whose (very wealthy) family had been hounding him to get married. Neither of them were particularly interested in one another. In truth, they kinda hated each other, but in getting married, Elise would be taken care of and allowed to do basically whatever she wanted, and her new husband would get his family off his back. A few months later the two are married and they still hate each other but they just try to avoid each other when they can and try their best to act like a happy married couple in public.

Less than a year after her current marriage, Felix and his family “died” (Felix is obviously alive but she doesn’t know that). This absolutely destroyed Elise, but ultimately is also what finally brings her closer to her husband. Her husband is able to put aside their differences in order to tend to her and help her out of her depression, and over the several months after Felix’s “death” the two are finally able to bond. About a year later, Elise gives birth to their daughter who they name Felicity after her deceased brother.

Felix and Elise’s other sibling is their baby brother John. John was born 10 years after Felix and Elise and only a couple months after the death of their father. John has always been the baby of the family and was therefore able to get away with a lot of things his older siblings could never hope to. Growing up, John was an absolute menace. While his siblings strived for higher places in society, John was constantly causing problems and getting into trouble yet somehow almost always managed to not get caught. In the rare cases that he was caught, Felix was usually the one to either pull him out of it or take the fall himself. This would become a recurring pattern in their relationship.

As soon as he was old enough, Felix took a job in their home town's police department, slowly working his way up to being trained as a deputy by the time he was 20. This would later prove to hinder John in his shenanigans (or more so just cause problems for Felix). 

By the time John was a teenager, Felix was married and had a kid. His wife would be the one to introduce John to his love of music, teaching him to play guitar. John excelled at guitar and singing. He also wrote music, and though it was mediocre at best, we continued writing. The majority of his teenage years were spent playing for tips anywhere that would let him. 

Unfortunately for Felix, the other half of his teen years were spent getting into trouble. Their mom died a little under a year after Felix's wedding, and her death hit them both pretty hard. John was a troublemaker before, but after his mom's death, Felix was constantly taking him in and bailing him out of trouble.

Finally, on his 17th birthday, John has saved enough money and decided he would roam the west in search of adventure, playing his guitar for money. For the first few years, he stayed pretty close by and frequently visited Felix and his family, but as they went on, he was able to visit them less and less. Eventually when he was around 30, John came back home and lived with Felix for a few months claiming he just wanted to settle down and rest for a bit. This however was a lie. 

John has recently run up a debt with a werewolf gang further out west and had been doing very illegal favors for them in order to fulfill it. However, the more favors he did, the worse they got, so he made a run for it. When Felix found out about this, he and John got into a big fight that ended in John being kicked out. He was gone for a few months but decided he needed to go back and apologize. However, by the time he came back, it was too late. When he returned, his brother and his family had (to his knowledge) been slaughtered and the house that he had grown up in was burnt to the ground. Soon after the funeral, his niece’s fiancé, a kid named Martín Fierro, came to him begging for help finding whoever was responsible for this. Stricken with guilt and not wanting this kid to die as well, John agrees to help him and is currently moving westward in hopes of tracking down the people responsible for the murder of his family.

[aaliyahunleashed]

I revisited the reading with Diane from John Edwards and this part reminded me of that book claim that she was brought on against her will : " I feel like she could have been taking a nap, she could have had her headphones on, she could have been reading a book, whatever. There’s all this hustle and bustle happening. She’s getting whooshed off, like I feel like i’m being whooshed, like I have to go to [my] next place." What do you think about that claim anyway? Sorry if previously discussed.

The reading that Diane got, I remember this when it happened years ago and fans were all over the message boards talking about it. It was sad.

We can only go off what is presented to us. I’m glad it came out, because being a teenager when she died and hearing all these claims that she was “being a diva” and “demanded her things go on that plane”, I knew in my heart it wasn’t true.

It was absurd to believe that anyone would understand the dangerous life-threatening magnitude and still demanded to fly; not only as a passenger but as a pilot as well. No rational person would do that (the pilot unfortunately was not in his right mind because of drugs); therefore, I don’t believe the airline company is being honest with what took place that night. Let’s not forget the FAA inspector took his life a month afterwards.

Anyhoo – I’m glad things came out that Aaliyah DID NOT want to board that plane and that she was not a part of this supposed “argument” between the airline and the entourage.

To anyone reading this that want to reach the FULL thing go to my Sis' page:

[deadpresidents]

What was wrong with the Kerry Edwards ticket in 2004? I'm not really old enough to remember it properly.

Oh God, where do I start?

First of all, it was an immensely winnable election for the Democrats because there was a big segment of the country just asking for a reason to vote for someone other than George W. Bush. The Iraq War was going terribly, the Abu Ghraib scandal was very fresh, and there was very little confidence in Bush's ability to lead and possibly even tie his shoes.

When the Democratic primaries started, there was some real energy and excitement behind former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, who built an online campaign that was ahead-of-its-time and was running on a progressive platform that set him apart from many of the Democratic candidates who had long been part of the Washington establishment like Kerry, Joseph Lieberman, Dick Gephardt, etc. However, Dean's campaign was torpedoed because, in a moment of excitement during a speech following the Iowa Caucuses, Dean made a weird scream. In an example of how insane American politics has become in just 20 years, Howard Dean made an awkward noise and that basically disqualified him as a candidate for the Presidency.

John Kerry, who was extremely qualified for the job of President of the United States yet virtually nobody's first choice (or second choice or third choice or fourth choice) for the Democratic nomination, basically had an open path to the nomination from that point. As I said, Kerry was undoubtedly qualified -- and few people really wanted to vote for him. Then, Kerry started campaigning and energized almost nobody for the next 10 months. He was just not good at campaigning. He was uninspiring, he was corny, he had a record that was easy to run against because of his long Congressional career and the frequent "evolution" of many of his beliefs over the years. It wasn't good.

Kerry picked then-North Carolina Senator John Edwards as his running mate. Edwards was still in the midst of his one (and only) term in elective office at that point. Some people thought he was smooth and charismatic. But he was (and is) a piece of shit. He came across as an overly ambitious, former ambulance-chasing lawyer -- because that's basically what he had been during his legal career. He seemed like the type of guy who would cheat on his wife while she was dying of terminal cancer and then try to convince a campaign aide to tell people that the child he fathered out of wedlock (while his wife was dying of terminal cancer, in case that wasn't clear) belonged to the campaign aide, not him. He seemed like that type of guy because that's 100% what he did when he ran for President four years later. Edwards is one of the slimiest, most contemptible major party candidates for President or Vice President of my lifetime, which is really saying something. He was also utterly unprepared for the Presidency or Vice Presidency. This whole post could be about John Edwards, but I'd have to take six showers after writing it.

But the biggest problem of all was John Kerry's inability to energize voters. Most people thought that he won the three debates between him and Bush, but despite all of Bush's many, many, many faults, George W. Bush was really good at connecting with people on the campaign trail. He might have said some goofy things and usually made people think he was flat-out dumb, but he wasn't. Bush knew that people underestimated him and he weaponized that, and people forget that he was pretty solid at retail politics. Kerry was not even a little good at that part of campaigning, and it was obvious. When some Bush supporters "swiftboated" Kerry -- making an ultra-unfair and untrue campaign ad criticizing Kerry's military service during the Vietnam War -- it definitely hurt Kerry's campaign, and Kerry's communication shortcomings made it difficult to respond to such attacks.

This is just a quick overview because there's obviously a lot more that could be said about the 2004 election and Kerry's campaign, but the point is that he was the wrong guy at the wrong time and he lost a very winnable campaign.

And the crazy thing is that John Kerry still almost won in 2004! That's why it was such a missed opportunity. Bush won the Electoral College vote 286-251, and won the popular vote by just over 3 million votes nationally (still the only time a Republican has won the popular vote in a Presidential race in the 21st Century). If Kerry had won Ohio -- which Bush won by 2.1% in 2004, but Barack Obama won by 4.6% just four years later -- he would have defeated Bush and won the Presidency.

[lil-als]

People who I shouldn’t hate as much as I do:

- John Edwards

- Jay Leno

[aestheticjunkyard]

Aliza Jarmon by John Edwards for Heroine Magazine September 2024

[politicalrpf]

Door hangers from the 2004 Kerry/Edwards campaign.

[fashionlandscapeblog]

Francis Bacon

Study for a Portrait of John Edwards, 1988

Oil and aerosol paint on canvas.