#because there are very few things that arent easier to just order directly to the us

[htodinth]

for christmas this year, i sent my lion @shanghai-ohmy a big box of treats (to share my favorite homemade caramels), and decided last minute to throw in a sweet sketch to stab him in the heart with!

back in 2021, when the covid lockdown was just barely opening up, we were so mad about not getting to see each other for four years that he jumped at the chance to come visit me in december. (he even accompanied me to my last exam of the semester!) after spending days in a quarantine hotel, we finally reunited, and moved in to a little hotel suite together! the Trondheim christmas market was a highlight of our time together, and I particularly remember the gyros we got together and how he got on with all the vendors wahaha

🦊💝🦁

[originlist]

bron thots and hcs 99% harvested from rambling i sent to charri and didnt wanna retype yet

thinking about avicebrons workshop as i write. it is... a nice place to be i think. in my terms of nice. avicebron keeps it comfortably warm bc he likes it better that way. it smells like earth. warmly lit. there are various comfortable chairs because he used to just have one or two for himself and then he realized people kept coming by so hes just [sighs and adds another good chair and someone else drags in a bean bag or some shit]. hes got a bookshelf full of things. theres clutter but its an interesting kind of clutter and he knows where everything is anyways and the floor is cleared so ur not gonna trip over anything except maybe a golems whos keeping it tidy. its a chill place to read a book and if u ask nicely u can use some of the clay he keeps to makes lil figures with for fun. thonk bron: im going to make a place i like being in as a workshop narrator: this means other people will also like being there and sometimes hang out with you, which means you will be forced to acknowledge The Existence Of Other People bron: fuck. ive played myself

one day i will reread my source on kabbalah and itll be the end for everyone bc ive been interested in it since freshman year but its hard to find sources. and i have Thots about his golems but ill properly phrase them once im able to look thru my other primary source, for now i just ramble but basically his current golems except Adam arent like True Golems and even Adam is iffy because its moved past what a golem is

so proper golems are entities made thru certain specific magical rituals, and they are beings created generally by rabbis with a background in mysticism in order to help the community. a proper golem is highly autonomous and able to think on (almost) human level on its own, somewhat similar to a homunculus in proper homunculus lore but also, not. dont worry about it. i dont have the time to get into it. but one day. thats a threat. the final piece to animating them is writing on either them or an amulet they are given, which they can be returned back to earth by erasing the first letter they are, specifically, made to either help or protect which is why the reactor core thing is [singsong] bullshiiiiiiit

avicebrons golems are quickly made things that are more like basic familiars, as they possess a lower level of thought and dont follow ritual, the handoff of being less autonomy in exchange for being able to make a lot of them very quickly and easily so he doesnt count them as Proper Golems but he also classes them as More Useful For Our Situation Than A Proper Golem they can do chores and they will keep u safe but they also dissolve after a few hits

look the man’s disabled and he uses golems to make up for the fact, he doesnt need them to be durable or fully sapient he just needs them to do chores when he cant move his arms all the way and his back hurts

adam however (his NP) is a Proper Golem Plus Some. im ignoring the part where its like 'in fgo he also would need a mage or high level reactor to be its core' because thats stupid a proper golem doesnt need a core it just needs mystic words and some other stuff, but in exchange ill say he writes life into it using some part of his own magic plus whats drawn from his master, and the rest of Adam's unique reality marble ability is that it can pull mana from the earth directly quickly made familiars have mineral cores in order to like..... cores are the equivalent of when u pull back a ball on those clacker desk toys, where they keep going back and forth for longer than they should? the core jump starts the mana conversion procedure allowing it to create energy to move bc gems in fate are a good prana conduit

he can still do the thing of like. fuck i forget the word for it. earthbending. like he does in apoc where he just kinda draws shapes out of soil, but its only for various kinds of dirt. cant rly fuck with gems or metal but hes got bigass clay jars in his workshop full of dirt and clay and Various Rocks to make stuff ut of that he can control with a hand wave. it makes his life easier. bron vc do i LOOK like i can lift anything. i thought not.

uuhhhh other random bron infodumps bc i made other posts and then deleted them

no legge, prosthetics start at the hip ball-and-socket joint. arms yes. the second pair of arms is removable and attached to a thin plate that he can attach under his shoulders. the secondary shoulder joint is technically hypermobile and its easier to dematerialize/rematierialize them instead of putting them on and off. theyre usually not out unless he needs them for something. he is ambidextrious with all four of them and will show off in the name of efficient multitasking.

got a lotta facial scars from having acne as a young adult. pockmarks and the like. on top of his whole body being fucky.

does not like the cold!! makes both his physical and prosthetic joints feel stiff. will not mention it but will just [slowly recedes further into his cloak]

his hair is not as fun as it looks (to me). he hates having a body in general and so he will intentionally refuse to care for any non-prosthetic part of himself properly for it until it gets bad, so his hair is generally kinda dry and messy. its not Bad bad but its not great.

he takes better care of his fake legs than he does the parts of his body he cant replace and u should yell at him for it.

his cloak is also not as heavy as it looks like it should be. its carefully balanced. he can and will however bonk you with the pointy bits if you stand too close to him. forcibly mandated 4-ft personal bubble.

THIS MAN CLICK CLACKS WHEN HE MOVES AND I DONT CARE WHAT APOCS LACK OF SOUND EFFECTS TRIES TO IMPLY. this man WILL go click clack between his feet and the metal decoration thingies on his cloak bonking each other.

people who know shit about golem lore feel free to tell me all my books are packed but thoughts ping like ping-pongs

actually just tell me about folklore in general from any of u i like legends and mysticism 

if u have read this far tell me about some of ur folklore

[aquarianwisp]

what do you do when you feel youve made the wrong choice and hurt someone? Do you think one can atone even if they are arent able to apolgoize directly to the person?

Hey hun,

I’m sorry I did not answer for a couple of days, I like to think about my answers sometimes.

I feel that this is a karmic lesson for you. You seem to be someone who ruminates over your errors and feelings of guilt for long periods of time, but never really deals with them because it is painful. You just wait usually until the feelings stop and they only stop because you bury them. This can be very detrimental to our health. When we hold on to negative feelings and then bury them we can become very anxious, we lose our sense of who we are, and due to these feelings we often develop coping mechanisms that are harmful to the body. This is how emotions can become a disease. Interestingly, once we become anxious from holding on to emotions, we start triggering the hypothalamus in the brain during situations we perceive as threatening, and this causes the hypothalamus to trigger hormonal responses. Over time, this can disrupt our hormonal balance and lead to more circumstances where disease can flourish. So it is really important that you deal with the root cause of emotional pain as soon as you can. 

I want you to know that you are not the worst person in the world. I feel that you are someone who feels such guilt when making a mistake that you might punish yourself with negative words and actions. But you are not alone. There have been many occasions in my life where I have made a bad choice or said the wrong thing and that person has never wanted to speak to me again. I’ve never had the chance to say sorry to them. And I felt guilty for years over those. But I cannot change that now, no matter how much I might want to. There is nothing I can do. All I can do is accept the situation, accept my actions, and let it go.Karma is not the same concept as sin. There is a lot of misunderstanding around that actually. I notice that you used the word atone, which to me feels very much like the black and white thinking of some churches (SOME churches- definitely the one I grew up in), where if you have committed a sin you are no longer loved or approved of by god and you need to atone in order to win love back. Karma, on the other hand, is very different. Karma is simply a law of nature, that what vibrational energy you put into the world will be given back to you at the same vibrational frequency. But it is something that keeps us from unifying with the source or with god- not because that is an inherent attribute of karma, but because we hold on to it and use it as an identity. When the vibrational energy comes back to us and we suffer, we hold on to the suffering and use it to define who we are and we build a false identity around it. We are taught through many religious texts that karma is something we build up over time, and it takes many millions of lives to work through it. But we are also taught that we are not separate from god or the source at all, but that we are actually the universe and have been all along. (I can give sources for this if anyone is interested) And this separates us from seeing god or the source (whatever you wish to call it) leaving us feeling that there is a big gaping hole inside of us- which many people try to fill up with worldly things. These actions all go against the natural law of karma, which just explains the flow of energy. When we do these things, we block the ebb and flow of karma.So, when I say this is a karmic lesson, I mean that this is something you need to learn to let go of as you move toward finding out who you truly are, which is a soul-self that is directly come from God or the source. Karmic lessons are not paying back for doing the wrong thing, they are opportunities to learn and opportunities to look for the true self.

So what is your lesson here? Acceptance. You cannot change what has happened no matter what. Acceptance though is not a quick and overnight lesson where you just drop things and let them go with ease. Acceptance is a practice and an ongoing process in most cases that you need to be willing to dedicate yourself to. It's basically restructuring your thoughts and emotions around a situation so that you do not hold on to painful things. It gets easier with time. Sometimes you’re going to wake up not feeling so great, with negative thoughts and guilt eating away at you. This is what I do when this happens. I take a few deep breaths and close my eyes. I go looking for or try to sense the soul self. And I notice that the soul self is unreactive, it is free of labels, it is essentially a blank canvas. It is unchanged by my actions, it has not lost worth, and it is still sacred and holy just like the universe source. And I say to myself “I accept my actions, I forgive myself for my actions, and I let them go.”And sometimes, I need to do this several times a day. You can do this too, you can do it as many times as you like, every time you start feeling dread or sadness. Remember who the world thinks you are, and who you think you are is just the identity of your body. When you sleep you become identity-less because your consciousness has gone back to the soul self. Your soul self is completely unchanged by your actions and has no real identity other than being of god/universe. So you are not worthless or horrible, you are a human having a very human experience just like the rest of us. You are here to learn your karmic lessons in a journey of discovering who the soul self is. I leave you with a quote and a video of my spiritual teacher talking about attachment to others. This quote is from the upas tree of disease.“Evil is not an accident, not an arbitrary punishment, not always an "error of mortal mind."It is the natural and inevitable result of violations of nature's laws.It is instructive and corrective in purpose, and will remain with us only as long as we need its salutary lessons.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfqNRqJ-iMI

[patriotsnet]

What Happens If Republicans Win Midterms

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-happens-if-republicans-win-midterms/

What Happens If Republicans Win Midterms

Gop Lawmakers Threaten To Punish Democrats If They Win Back Control Of Congress

‘When we take the majority back in 2022, I’ll make sure consequences are doled out,’ said Rep. Madison Cawthorn.

Republicans are outraged that Democrats are governing by majority rule in the House. In retaliation, they are vowing to do the same things they now decry as unprecedented and wrong.

“Never in the history of our country has a Speaker acted like such an authoritarian,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Thursday.

He was upset that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had his request to appoint Republican Reps. Jim Banks and Jim Jordan to the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Both men voted to overturn the 2020 election results and pushed the lie that President Joe Biden only won because the election was stolen.

“Never in the history of Congress and the select committee I checked with the historian has this ever taken place, where the one party decides who’s all on the committee,” McCarthy told Fox News in a video he with his tweet. McCarthy in fact to give Republican then-Speaker John Boehner the exact same unilateral appointment power in 2014 for the Select Committee on the Events Surrounding the 2012 Terrorist Attack in Benghazi.

But while House Republicans claim they are being mistreated because the majority won’t let them have their way, they are also promising to retaliate by turning the same actions they criticize now against Democrats in 2023.

TAGS

‘the Beast Is Growing’: Republicans Follow A Winning At All Costs Strategy Into The Midterms

Much remains uncertain about the midterm elections more than a year away including the congressional districts themselves, thanks to the delayed redistricting process. The Senate, meanwhile, looks like more of a toss-up.

House Democrats think voters will reward them for advancing President Joe Biden’s generally popular , which involves showering infrastructure money on virtually every district in the country and sending checks directly to millions of parents. And they think voters will punish Republicans for their rhetoric about the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2020 election.

“Democrats are delivering results, bringing back the economy, getting people back to work, passing the largest middle-class tax cut in history, while Republicans are engaged in frankly violent conspiracy theory rhetoric around lies in service of Donald Trump,” said Tim Persico, executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

But the challenges Democrats face are real and numerous.

They knew they would face a tough 2022 immediately after 2020, when massive, unexpected GOP gains whittled the Democratic majority to just a handful of seats.

“House Republicans are in a great position to retake the majority,” said Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Minn., who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, “but we are taking nothing for granted.”

His rural district had been trending Republican for years. Kind won re-election last year by just about 10,000 votes.

What If The Republicans Win Everything Again

Total victory for the G.O.P. would mean Trump unleashed.

Opinion Columnist

The end of Robert Muellers investigation. The loss of health insurance for several million people. New laws that make it harder to vote. More tax cuts for the rich. More damage to the environment. A Republican Party molded even more in the image of President Trump.

These are among the plausible consequences if the Republicans sweep the midterm elections and keep control of both the House and Senate. And dont fool yourself. That outcome, although not the most likely one, remains possible. The last couple of weeks of polling have shown how it could happen.

Voters who lean Republican including whites across the South could set aside their disappointment with Trump and vote for Republican congressional candidates. Voters who lean left including Latinos and younger adults could turn out in low numbers, as they usually do in midterm elections. The Republicans continuing efforts to suppress turnout could also swing a few close elections.

No matter what, Democrats will probably win the popular vote in the House elections, for the first time since 2012. Trump, after all, remains unpopular. But the combination of gerrymandering and the concentration of Democratic voters in major cities means that a popular-vote win wont automatically translate into a House majority.

I Do Not Buy That A Social Media Ban Hurts Trumps 2024 Aspirations: Nate Silver

All Videos

sarah: Yeah, Democrats might not have their worst Senate map in 2022, but it will by no means be easy, and how they fare will have a lot to do with the national environment. And as we touched on earlier, Bidens overall approval rating will also make a big difference in Democrats midterm chances.

nrakich: Yeah, if the national environment is even a bit Republican-leaning, that could be enough to allow solid Republican recruits to flip even Nevada and New Hampshire. And then it wouldnt even matter if Democrats win Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

One thing is for sure, though whichever party wins the Senate will have only a narrow majority, so I think were stuck in this era of moderates like Sens. Joe Manchin and Lisa Murkowski controlling every bills fate for at least a while longer. 

sarah: Lets talk about big picture strategy, then, and where that leaves us moving forward. Its still early and far too easy to prescribe election narratives that arent grounded in anything, but one gambit the Republican Party seems to be making at this point is that attacking the Democratic Party for being too progressive or woke will help them win.

What do we make of that playbook headed into 2022? Likewise, as the party in charge, what are Democrats planning for?

With that being said, the GOPs strategies could still gin up turnout among its base, in particular, but its hard to separate that from general dissatisfaction with Biden.

The 2024 Presidential Election Will Be Close Even If Trump Is The Gop Nominee

One very important thing we should have all taken away from both the 2016 and 2020 presidential contests is that the two major parties are in virtual equipose . The ideological sorting-out of the two parties since the 1960s has in turn led to extreme partisan polarization, a decline in ticket-splitting and and in number of genuine swing voters. Among other things, this has led to an atmosphere where Republicans have paid little or no price for the extremism theyve disproportionately exhibited, or for the bad conduct of their leaders, most notably the 45th president.

Indeed, the polarized climate encourages outlandish and immoral base mobilization efforts of the sort Trump deployed so regularly. Some Republicans partisans shook their heads sadly and voted the straight GOP ticket anyway, And to the extent there were swing voters they tended strongly to believe that both parties were equally guilty of excessive partisanship, and/or that all politicians are worthless scum, so why not vote for the worthless scum under whom the economy hummed?

The bottom line is that anyone who assumes Republicans are in irreversible decline in presidential elections really hasnt been paying attention.

Republicans Set To Rebound Big In 2022 Midterms Unless

We are just 600 short days away from the 2022 midterm elections, which means it is the perfect time to handicap the Republicans chances to win back the House, Senate and prepare a serious challenge to President Biden

Patrick Joseph ToomeyBlack women look to build upon gains in coming electionsWatch live: GOP senators present new infrastructure proposalSasse rebuked by Nebraska Republican Party over impeachment vote already have Democrats scrambling to flip those seats in much easier electoral terrain.

As I noted in The Hill last month, Republicans are on the hook to defend 20 of their seats in 2022, while Team Blue has just 14 seats to hold, all in states won by Joe Biden in 2020. Since March is a perfect month for sports analogies, a good defense provides for a strong offense when the status quo is Democrats retaining control of the upper chamber. While there is clearly a power in incumbency, FiveThirtyEight suggests that senate vacancies are actually more of a mixed bag. In election cycles since 1974, the party with the most Senate retirements has actually gained seats just as often as it has lost them. For every year like 2008, when more Republicans than Democrats retired and Republicans lost seats accordingly, theres a year like 2012, when a whopping seven Democrats retired yet the party picked up two Senate seats.

How these various Rs play out in the next few months will determine if the Rs are successful in 2022.

Rising Violent Crime Is Likely To Present A Political Challenge For Democrats In 2022

But there are roadblocks to fully enacting Democrats’ agenda. Their thin majorities in both chambers of Congress mean nearly all Democrats have to get on board with every agenda item in order to push through major legislative priorities. And without adjusting or eliminating the legislative filibuster in the Senate, Democrats need 10 Republicans to join them for various legislation a near-impossible task.

Renewable Energy And Health Care Among The Sectors That Could Get Shakeup Due To Midterms

The 2022 midterm elections are already affecting Washington, and the results could shake up sectors such as renewable energy, health care and finance.

As Democrats in Washington work to deliver on infrastructure spending and other priorities, theyre trying to make progress in large part because of a key event thats still more than a year away.

That event is the midterm elections on Nov. 8, 2022, when Republicans will aim to take back control of the House and Senate and become a more powerful check on the priorities of President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats.

What leaders are thinking about, particularly since we have unified party control, is that these midterm elections are inevitably a referendum on the governing party, said Sarah Binder, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a professor of political science at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

In that sense, shrinking time coupled with What is it that Democrats want to run on? it adds pressure on Democrats to get their priorities through the door.

Time is growing short, Binder said, because party leaders often avoid making their members vote on tough issues in the same calendar year as an election, since that can hurt incumbents in tight races. Party leaders often think primarily about what they can get done in the first year of a Congress, as opposed to counting on the second year, she said.

Sectors that could win or lose

Year

Races worth watching

Can Democrats Avoid A Wipeout In 2022

Bidens plan: Go big or go home.

The good news for Democrats who watched Joe Biden unveil a historically ambitious agenda last night is that newly elected presidents have almost always passed some version of their core economic planparticularly when their party controls both congressional chambers, as Bidens does now.

The bad news: Voters have almost always punished the presidents party in the next midterm election anyway. The last two times Democrats had unified controlwith Bill Clinton in 199394 and Barack Obama in 200910they endured especially resounding repudiations in the midterms, which cost Clinton his majority in both chambers and Obama the loss of the House.

Theres a very different strategy this time, David Price, a Democratic representative from North Carolina and a former political scientist, told me. Theres an openness now to the sense that a bolder plan, ironically, might have greater appeal for independents and others we need to attract than trying to trim and split the difference with Republicans.

Read: The GOP cheat code to winning back the House

There is this recognition of this moment and how fleeting it is, and an evaluation that, absent the trifecta of control, it is very hard to move big policy, said a senior official at one of the partys leading outside advocacy groups, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategizing. So you have to take your shot. I think thats part of what undergirds Go big.

What If Republicans Win The Midterms

March 3, 2018

WASHINGTON A sizable portion of the American population has been convulsing with outrage at President Trump for more than a year. Millions of people who previously took only mild interest in politics have participated in protests, fumed as they stayed riveted to news out of Washington and filled social media accounts once devoted to family updates and funny videos with furious political commentary.

Yet public life on the whole has remained surprisingly calm. A significant factor in keeping the peace has surely been anticipatory catharsis: The widespread expectations of a big Democratic wave in the coming midterm elections are containing and channeling that indignation, helping to maintain order.

What will happen if no such wave materializes and that pressure-relief valve jams shut?

The country was already badly polarized before the plot twist of election night in 2016, of course, but since then liberals and much of what remains of Americas moderate center have been seething in a way that dwarfs the usual disgruntlement of whichever faction is out of power. While nobody can know for sure whether Mr. Trump would have lost but for Russias meddling, many of his critics clearly choose to believe he is in the White House because Vladimir Putin tricked the United States into making him its leader.

This November, if the wave turns out to be a mere trickle, we could see the accomplishment of that goal take hold.

Poll: Republicans Set To Win House Back In Massive Landslide

Republicans are set to win back the House in a historic landslide in 2022, according to a poll conducted by NBC News.

Based on all factors, youd have to consider Republicans the early favorites for the House majority in 2022, poll tracker David Wasserman NBC.

Democrats best hope is that Bidens approval rating stays above 50 percent and that Republicans have a tougher time turning out their voters without Trump on the ballot.

reports: The NBC report cites the all-too-predictable trend of the presidents party losing House seats in midterm elections, Democrats choosing not to run for reelection in some cases, and Republicans reaping the benefits of increased online donations, which are now on par with those of Democrats.

It is early, too early, to guarantee the Democrats loss of their slim 220-212 House majority. Voters wont hit the polls for almost 15 months, and things often have a way of changing on a dime in the world of politics. But the early signs certainly arent encouraging for the Democrats, especially as President Joe Bidens approval rating has taken a hit in recent weeks. American voters are being bombarded with images of a completely bungled withdrawal of Afghanistan and headlines about increased COVID hospitalizations and deaths. Inflation is also becoming a growing concern each month, contrary to the hopes of the Federal Reserve, and the crisis at the southern border shows no signs of abating.

Colwell: Republicans Are Likely To Win Control Of The House Next Year But

Three reasons why Republicans are very likely to take control of the House next year involve things over which Democrats have little or no control.

There is, however, one reason why Democrats might be able somehow to hang on to their slim majority. And they do have better prospects of at least holding on to the 50-50 Senate tie.

Reasons for Republicans winning control of the House:

FIRST: History is on their side. The party out of the White House almost always makes big gains in the first midterm election in a new presidency. In those midterm elections since the end of World War II, the average loss for the presidents party has been 29 seats. Democrats lost 63 seats in the 2010 midterm after election of President Barack Obama. Republicans lost 40 seats in the 2018 midterm after election of Donald Trump.

Because Democrats already lost seats in 2020, even as Joe Biden won the presidency, Republicans need only a net of five seats to win the majority. Democrats cant go back to 2020 to win more seats.

Factors in midterm losses for the presidents party include voters wanting a check on the president and disillusionment over any presidents inability to bring about everything voters hoped for.

SECOND: Redistricting after the census will result in many more safe Republican seats. Thats because Republicans control state legislatures in far more states than do Democrats. Both parties gerrymander. But it is the GOP controlling district drawing in many more states.

Site Map

Republicans In Decent Shape To Win House Majority In 2022

Washington Examiner

It is never preferable to be in the minority party in a legislative body. But as far as minorities go, House Republicans are in a pretty good spot.

Between the trend of midterm elections usually the party that is not in the White House, a closely divided House, and a party apparatus ready to continue their expectations-exceeding 2020 strategy while Democrats rework theirs, Republicans are on track to winning back the House in 2022.

“It has the makings of what could be a good year for the Republicans when it comes to the House,” said J. Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

President Bidens approval rating is around 53%, and while he is not underwater, history indicates he would need to bump that rating up by at least 10 points in order to have a shot at gaining seats. Gallup analysis found that even presidents with approval ratings of 50% during the midterm elections averaged a loss of about 14 House seats from their own party.

That would be enough to bump Republicans back into the majority. Democrats have the slimmest House majority since 1930, currently 221 seats to 210 GOP seats .

Republicans in the 2020 cycle shattered the expectations of analysts who forecasted Democrats to gain House seats in 2020. Not a single Republican incumbent lost the election, and they picked off 13 incumbent Democrats.

But it is not all smooth sailing for Republicans.

Why We Arent Going To Panic

We should all have our eyes wide open as we inch closer to the 2022 Midterms, but by no means should we give up hope. There are plenty of reasons why we can win the midterms.

For starters, Democrats appear to be quite awake to how dangerous the Republican party has become in just the past few years. And since the Republicans dont appear to be any less radicalized with Trump out of the party, I dont think Democrats are going to go back to sleep.

At this point in the election cycle, we dont have a full picture of who is retiring from Congress or who the candidates will be for these seats. Getting great candidates for crucial, must-win seats can energize voters and donors.

Presidential approval seems to have an important effect on midterms and at this point, Bidens approval rating is 15 points higher than his disapproval. If he continues to do good things for Americans and keep his approval rating high, that will help the Democrats a lot.

So, lets approach this midterm as clearly as possible: Our democracy is still on the line, and as awful as the Republicans are, they are in striking position to win back some power in Congress. Each of us needs to do everything we can to ensure that does not happen. If you arent already, consider subscribing to Political Charge as Ill be delving into specific actions we can take every month!

If you want to win the midterms, please share this post with others who want to win, too!

Republicans Will Likely Take Control Of The Senate By 2024

The usual midterm House losses by the White House party dont always extend to the Senate because only a third of that chamber is up for election every two years and the landscape sometimes strongly favors the presidential party . But there a still generally an out-party wave that can matter, which is why Republicans may have a better than average chance of winning in at least some of the many battleground states that will hold Senate elections next year . If they win four of the six youll probably be looking at a Republican Senate.

But its the 2024 Senate landscape that looks really promising for the GOP. Democrats will be defending 23 seats and Republicans just 10. Three Democratic seats, and all the Republican seats, are in states Trump carried twice. Four other Democratic seats are in states Trump won once. It should be a banner year for Senate Republicans.

Balance Of Power: 2022 Senate Races

If Democrats want to win the again, they need to win the four competitive seats they currently hold Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and New Hampshire. That or augment any loss with a gain in any of their three competitive targets Pennsylvania, , or North Carolina.

This Senate preview still holds up, but the shorter version is Democrats are easily favored in Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada. They should also win New Hampshire if Chris Sununu doesnt run .

The thing is, theyre also favored to win in Pennsylvania, where they have a strong field of primary candidates and where Joe Biden won.

They have to be no worse than, and admittedly probably better than, a tossup in Wisconsin, where Republicans have candidate issues and Democrats have a strong likely nominee.

So even if New Hampshire goes Republican because of some local candidate factors, Democrats are in a good spot to win the Senate again.

That means if youre trying to make a bet, you can essentially box out two of four combinations where the GOP wins the Senate, and focus your attention on the two remaining options, if youre looking for the values.

The 1858 Midterm Election

November 2, 1858

There is always a lull after a tempest, and so the political world has subsided into an unwonted calm since the election, commented a reporter for The New York Times. The Republicans are naturally . . . exultant over their sweeping victories. Such a commentary might apply to any number of elections, but this reporter described the outcome of a particularly historic electionthe midterm election of 1858. The Republican success that year was especially remarkable because the Republican Party was only four years old.

Almost by spontaneous combustion, the Republican Party burst forth in 1854 in response to the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act. For decades, Americas political battles had been fought between the Democrats and the Whigs. By the early 1850s, however, the issue of slavery had splintered the Whigs into warring factions and divided Democrats between north and south. When Democratic senator Stephen Douglas pushed his Kansas-Nebraska bill to passage, including its proposal to settle the issue of slavery by popular sovereignty, the uproar among northern abolitionists and anti-slavery activists was too fierce to be contained by the ailing Whig Party. As one person commented, The Whigs were simply not angry enough.

The Future Could Actually Be Bright For Republicans

Ed Kilgore

The most common political narrative outside MAGA-land is that the Republican Party is screwed, and richly deserves the ignominious future it faces.

Until recently the GOP was a reasonably normal and intermittently successful center-right political party, not wildly different from its counterparts in other countries with a two-party system, despite some racist and militarist habits that burst into view in times of stress. But then America elected a Black president, and Republicans went a little crazy, according to those outside their circles. First they abetted a destructively antediluvian Tea Party Movement and then lurched into the arms of an evil charlatan who somehow got elected president and spent four years trashing hallowed conservative principles and losing both Congress and the White House before his disgraceful and violence-inflected departure.

Worse yet, in the face of huge demographic challenges that beg for a new approach, the Republican Party has now lashed itself to a Trumpian mast going forward, following the most consistently unpopular president in American history in his bizarre crusade to deny he has ever lost anything. Meanwhile a shockingly united Democratic Party is whipping a few decades worth of liberal legislation through Congress as Republicans whine about cancel culture and try to sell the idea that Joe Biden is actually Che Guevara.

[evilelitest2]

Thoughts on the recent terrorist attack in London

So long time followers have noticed that I don’t really talk about my in these posts, that is kind of “my opinions” “nonsense I like” and “Objective facts” and most of what you get from me comes from the tone I have and the various insults i use, and the works I recommend (hint hint).  I don’t really talk about myself on the internet and I am not a very personable person when I am not in person (I fucking love that sentence and I am standing by it fuck you).  But my entire life has basically been growing up with the panic of “Random crazy people are going to kill you at any moment” all my life and I’ve gotten kinda normalized to it, so I kinda want to talk about this in response to the terrorist attacks we are seeing in Europe.  

As you can tell by my love of diversity and general attitude, I am a New Yorker from NYC and my mom use to work at the Twin Towers, my family had a friend on one of the planes, and between 9/11 and Columbine, almost all of my life has been under this constant sense of dread and fear about the random violence that makes up  the world and how we can respond to make that fear go away.  I consider it ironic that I was born in 1991 just as the Cold War fell and the US was ready for its “lets relax” phase.  So growing up constantly being told that somebody was trying to kill me is pretty normal and unlike my parents, the person who is trying to kill me isn’t easily recognizable like the Soviet Union or the Nazis for my Grandparents, its “terrorism” this vague undefined nebulous thing that never seems to go away or have a face other than Muslim and middle eastern.  And it says something for the kind of world that I live in that when i read about a terrorist attack in London my initial gut reaction was three simultaneous emotions 

1) Oh no, those poor people

2) Oh goddamnit not again

3) Oh boy, now we are going to go fuck up the war on terror even mroe

    Now some of you might be like “holy shit you monster, you are cynical to this” but yes, yes, I am, because there have been so many of these terrorist attacks that this is normal to me now, despite never actually being the victim of one.  this is my new normal, and as has been observed many times, democracies cannot work if a wartime mentality is the norm rather than the exception.  

   Part of the reason why I am so desensitized is because the entire way we understand terrorism is stupid and motivated by emotions rather than you know...facts.  In the big box of “get people to vote against their own interest” Terrorism is like...the biggest thing in the box, I mixed up my metaphor.  But we totally understand terrorism wrong and part of that is the fact I earlier said that there have been so many of these things but...there actually haven’t.  It seems like a lot but since 9/11 there have only been a few dozen international terrorist attacks in the West, the largest number of terrorist attacks continue to be domestic terrorist attacks by people like Dylann Roof, which we arent’ doing anything about because it isn’t as sexy as a foreign enemy, thanks military industrial complex.  ALso because its easier for us to dehumanize our fellow citizens particularly if they are white men, then it is brown people from countries we can’t find on a map with names we can’t pronounce

    I realize my tone and writing in response to this event is utterly irreverent of the fact that 4 people are dead and at least 20 more are injured, that for those people they were just having a normal day and suddenly found themselves in a war zone, that for the families of those people in the span of five mins their world has come crashing down and all across the UK people are going to be in a state of fear, but I can no longer respond to terrorist attacks without responding to...well the response to the terrorist attack.  Because we spend so much time turning this into a nebulous form of fear and don’t ever try to understand the motivation of our enemies, we always seem to do exactly what they want us to do.

    You know how the right talks about “tough choices” and “making hard decisions” and “looking at things from a military perspective?”  Well lets try that for a second, lets look at things from a cold pragmatic military view point.  4 dead and 20 wounded, in terms of the UK as a whole what does that do to hurt it?  If 4 people had fatal heart attacks and 20 more people got into non fatal car accidents today, would that effect the UK’s ability to function as a country their ability to fight ISIS, their power as a major nation?  No, just like 3,000 people killed in a day didn’t actually harm the US in a major way from a resource level, I mean look at how many people die from automobile accidents per year.  So if you were a terrorist trying to destroy the West, why bother, why kill a few people when it makes no difference? There aren’t enough of these attacks to really add up the numbers, you’d have to have an attack like this every day in the UK to even start to make a difference and that would take years.  So why do terrorists do it?  They are trying to bait us, its a trap.  Bin Laden never though 9/11 was going to destroy America in its, he thought that American would get involved in a long pointless unwinnable expensive war in the middle east and that would destroy America and...hey he was right. Terrorists do attacks like this to try to provoke us into doing what they want, and because we are emotionally upset by the attack and because we refuse to imagine the middle east complexly, we always fall into these traps.  

   For example, why do you think the Paris attacks and the Germany attacks, and the Belgium Attacks happened last year?  What did that do to help ISIS in a practical way?  Why did ISIS do that?  Couldn’t they have used those men and bombs to fight more directly in Iraq/Syria?  Its not like random Parisians are responsible for ISIS’s recent military defeats.  Well they are trying to change European politics in two ways.  Firstly, they want people to blame the refugees and secondly to allow the Far Right to rise.  The Far Right is good for ISIS, because not only do they make recruitment easier and are more likely to get bogged down in stupid middle eastern conflicts, they also agree with ISIS on one basic principle.  That Islam and the West are incompatible.  Which of course isn’t true, there are literally millions of Muslims who are totally assimilated into the West, but that claim is what keeps ISIS alive.  See the refugees terrify ISIS, like if you read their posts to each other and look at what they are talking about, they are batshit horrified by the refugee crisis, because of something called the Grey Zone, the hypothetical moment when Islam becomes as integrated into the West as Judaism is.  Because once that happens, the entire argument of fundamentalist Islam will be proven to be a lie and all of these terrorist groups will find their support vanish.  ISIS claims to be the new caliphate, and the fact that millions of Muslims are running away from ISIS to the secular, decadent, democratic, feminist, Islamophobic west makes ISIS look terrible, it ruins their PR.  If we wanted to win this War on Terror, we would take in as many refugees as possible and integrate them as quickly as possible, so that we could use that as a rhetorical sledge hammer against militant Islam “Hey look, the West accepts Muslims more than you do”  So ISIS tries to prevent this by doing terrorist attacks that will provoke heavy handed responses, and they cheer every time we do a Muslim ban or use refugees as scapegoat or say Islam is a religion of hate, because that is exactly what they want.  Brexit did more to help ISIS than any terrorist attack ever could.  

     After the Paris Bombings new security measures basically made that kind of mass organization impossible, and more and more terrorist attacks in Europe today involve cars and knives, things that people can access in their day to day lives.  And in many ways that shows that the security system worked, bombing campaigns simply aren’t possible anymore.  But then since we haven’t addressed the core problem they switch to cars.  These hard line responses don’t work, torture didn’t reduce terrorism, neither did the invasions in Iraq, nor the Drone Strikes nor the airport security.   Because we are basically playing defensive, responding to everything they do to provoke us, the only way to really win this damn thing is if we played offensively and our political leaders don’t want to do that because that would involve actually imagining Islam complexly.  So we just use a bunch of tough sounding rhetoric and hope the problem goes away 

Wars aren’t ever won by doing exactly what the enemy wants us to do, and until we actually sit down and try to understand what this war is about, we aren’t fighting to win, we are just wasting time.  And those poor people in London will have effectively died in order to give ISIS what they want, it makes me sick.  This is why I don’t get personal in these sorts of things.  

[themoneybuff-blog]

The Five Things You Need to Achieve Your Financial Goals

Given the enormous differences in the financial situations of different people, its easy to buy into the idea that those different stories have very little in common. After all, what exactly does a well-funded investor making his first millions have in common with a single parent with three kids trying to keep the rent paid? While those differences might be important, when I hear those stories, what I look for are the similarities. Their external situations might be really different, but the things that drive those people internally are actually quite similar. In fact, I would argue that there are really only five things that you need to have to achieve your financial goals, regardless of your financial state. They are things that everyone has access to, should they choose to do so. These five elements are present in virtually every financial success story, whether its someone making minimum wage and trying to pay off a student loan or someone trying to make their first million. Here are the five key ingredients I feel everyone needs to succeed at their financial goals. Of course, these ingredients largely hold true for almost every type of goal. Self-Evaluation This is the starting point for setting and achieving any kind of goal. You have to look at yourself and ask two absolutely vital questions: what do I have and what do I want. What do I have? To set any sort of realistic financial goal, you need to start with a realistic picture of where you are at. What are your assets? What things do you possess that have any value? What are your various account balances? What are your debts? What responsibilities and obligations do you have? Do you have a spouse or children or others that rely on you? What skills do you have? How can you apply those skills to make money? How much spare time do you have? What is your health like? Do you have the energy or capacity to work harder? At the same time, you have to have a firm grip on what you want. What is your goal? When do you want to achieve that goal? Is that goal challenging but still within the realm of reality (for example, I might have some sort of career in basketball, but Im never going to be an NBA player)? Is that goal deeply meaningful to you, or is it something someone else wants for you? You cant run a race if you dont know what your starting point is. You cant win a race if you dont know where the finish line is. So often, people take off running without even knowing where the starting line is or the finish line is and they wonder why they cant finish the race. While you might be able to come up with quick, trite answers to all of these questions, the truth is that all of these questions deserve some serious self-reflection, and those questions will lead to more questions. You need to really understand yourself, what you have, and what you want in order to be able to establish a worthwhile challenging goal for yourself, and thats going to take some self-reflection. There are a lot of different methods that people can use for self-reflection. I find journaling to be very powerful. I constantly turn over questions like these when Im journaling and they consistently move me toward better goals and better understanding of who I am, what I want, what I need, and what I should be doing with my time and energy. Whatever method you choose, I encourage you to set aside some time each day to really think through these questions. What do you have? What does your life situation really look like? What do you want out of life? How does all of that translate into some powerful goals that you can actually achieve that will equate to a better life? Planning Planning takes the output of a bunch of self-reflection and turns it into actionable steps that can take you from what you currently have to what you want to have. In other words, planning addresses the question of how do I get from what I have to what I want. Lets say you did some serious self-evaluation of where youre at and what you want and youve decided that a big healthy financial goal for yourself is to achieve debt freedom in three years. The first question you should ask yourself is what can I do this year that will help me achieve that big goal? Maybe its something as straightforward as paying off a quarter of your debt balance, because if you do that in a year, youre going to find it easier and easier to go faster and faster because interest isnt accumulating. This might include some other big step like getting a new job or moving to a less expensive apartment. Okay, then ask yourself what can I do this quarter that will help me achieve those end of the year goals? You might come up with a list of things here. They might be things oriented toward cutting back on your spending, like cutting your cable subscription. You might set a three month goal of getting your resume up to speed and applying to ten jobs that match you well. Maybe a three month goal is to find a cheaper apartment and move, or to find a roommate. Youll probably have a few you should have at least one for every goal you have for the year. Then, what can I do this month that will help me achieve those quarterly goals? Maybe youll simply make a great resume and get it uploaded in a bunch of places. Maybe youll cut your cable. Maybe youll do a serious search for a roommate. Maybe youll clean out your closet and sell off some of that stuff. Maybe youll give yourself a strong thirty day challenge, like cooking all of your meals at home, that will both directly save you money and help you build a skill going forward that will keep saving you money. Great, so what can you do this week to make those big goals for the month a reality? You might look for alternate ways to watch the two or three shows that youre keeping cable around for. Maybe you can ask a friend to look at your current resume and suggest improvements. Maybe you can ask five friends whether theyd be interested in being roommates. Maybe you can make a real meal plan for the week, get all of the ingredients in one shopping trip, and make all of your meals. That leaves us with one final question: what can you do today to make those week-long goals a reality? Just pick two or three things. Make a meal plan and a grocery list and head to the grocery store. Find your resume and send it to a good friend asking for advice on updating it. Call up a friend and see if theyd be interested in being a roommate. Each day, ask yourself to come up with two or three things that you can do today to make those week-long goals a reality. Then, do them. Make them a priority. Get them done before you flop on the couch to watch Netflix or look at your phone. Each week, do a bigger review. Make sure you finished up (or made good progress on) your plans and goals for the week, and set new ones for the next week. If its the start of the month, do it for the monthly goals. If its the start of a quarter, do it for the quarterly goals. If its the start of a year, do it for the yearly goals. (I do this on Sunday morning, usually.) Thats what planning is all about. Youe got your goal, so what does that break down to? Keep breaking it down until its some short tasks on your to-do list for the day, and then keep coming back to the goal asking yourself whats next. There will come a time with a lot of financial goals where there isnt something active to do, and thats fine, as long as youre not actually letting down your big goals by not doing anything. Thats when some of the other elements below come into play more than ever. Self-Control You have to be able to stop yourself from fulfilling desires, because desires are endless. You will always want something. There will always be a treat that you desire or that you think you deserve. This isnt easy. Our own internal voice makes it difficult. The pressures of society make it difficult. The nudging of our social circle can make it difficult. Yet it can be overcome. I think there are different answers to these problems for everyone, and so I cant always comment on what might work for you when it comes to figuring out self-control over the things you desire. All I can really point to is what worked best for me. First of all, I started evaluating literally everything I spent money on. Did I really need this thing? Was there a lower cost version that would have met that need, if there was a real need involved? If it was just fulfilling a desire, did I really get anything lasting out of that purchase? For many months, I went through every single credit card statement and every single bank statement and every single receipt and asked myself those questions about every single purchase. Every time I ever feel even a little out of whack financially, I go back to this and walk through those statements, asking myself those questions. But these things are so small! I would often think this very thought about a little splurge. Surely a dollar here and a dollar there cant make a difference, right? Its so tiny! Well, a pebble is tiny, too, but you cant expect to walk a marathon with a pebble in your shoe. With every step, the pebble will rub against your feet and eventually you arent making any progress any more. The next thing I did is that I started strongly questioning every desire. Every time I wanted to buy something, I would ask myself why I wanted to buy it. Why? What purpose did it serve? Would I get any lasting enjoyment out of this? Couldnt I get a similar pleasure out of other things I had available? Was this just something I was buying to make myself feel better about something else in my life i.e., retail therapy and wouldnt I be better off just addressing that something directly? What I found is that an awful lot of my desires were justified by the weakest and silliest and flimsiest of reasons, reasons that would fall apart very quickly if I allowed myself to question my reasoning. (Thats important, and Ill come back to it soon enough.) So, if I got into a routine of always questioning the reasoning for a purchase and I was willing to allow myself to recognize the silliness of some of my impulses, the number of non-essential purchases would just drop through the floor. If youre familiar with Buddhism, youll probably recognize this as having a lot in common with the eightfold path. Theyre both driving at the same thing: desires are often the source of a lot of misery in our lives, whether we fulfill them or not. Figuring out that most of our desires are pretty useless nips them in the bud and eventually kills them off entirely. Self-control is a challenging thing and sometimes youre going to fail. What happens then? Grit Grit is the fourth essential ingredient you need to achieve financial goals. Its a willingness to recognize your mistakes and learn from them. Its a willingness to pick yourself up when life knocks you down. Its getting back on board with a plan when something knocks you off of it. The reality is that at some point during your progress toward your financial goal, something is going to happen that knocks you off your gameplan. It can be something completely out of left field, it might be something you should have planned for, it could even be your own foolishness. Whatever it happens to be, it either strongly tempts you or it knocks you completely off your game. Youre no longer cruising right toward your destination. You might feel like that destination is in doubt. You probably feel frustrated. You might feel ashamed. Its awful. Trust me, Ive been there. Many of us have been there. The question is whether or not youre willing to pick yourself up and keep moving forward toward that goal. If youre not willing to do that, then you dont have grit. Youre not going to achieve major goals in life if youre not willing to stand back up when things dont go perfectly. According to the wonderful book Grit by Angela Duckworth, there are four key elements to grit: Step one: Identify a burning passion. Step two: Practice it with commitment. Step three: Find inner purpose in your work. Step four: Persevere when things get hard. If you have a deeply meaningful goal, you have that burning passion and inner purpose. If you have a plan that youre reviewing and working toward daily, you have that commitment. What about perseverance when things are hard? Ive found a couple things that help here. First, automate as much of your plan as you can during the early stages. That way, when things go awry later on, much of your plan will just keep on trucking when your focus is elsewhere. Set up automatic savings plans and automatic contributions to retirement. Second, have an emergency fund that you can tap when things go sideways. My preferred method for this is to set up a weekly automatic transfer from your checking account to your savings account $10 or $20 or whatever you can afford. Then, just let it roll. When an emergency strikes, tap that emergency fund first. Youll find that a lot of emergencies just melt away and dont actually hurt your progress. Finally, think about what went wrong and incorporate what you learn into some revisions to your plan. Why did things get out of whack? That takes you right back to the self-reflection part of the equation. Reflect deeply on what went wrong and what needs to change to ensure that you dont make that mistake again. Youll likely alter your plans, at least a little, and thats a good thing. Theres just one final ingredient. Patience Most personal finance goals are marathons rather than sprints. The goal youre aiming for is years and years down the road and there are times when it seems impossibly far in the distance. Patience is the key to success in those situations. You have to be able to accept that the big success you want wont happen tomorrow or the day after. Rather, it only happens after a long sequence of little successes, many of which will basically be invisible to you in terms of your day to day life. This is very hard for humans. Were genetically predispositioned to not think in the long term. Rather, were short-term thinkers. We think about the day ahead and the week ahead and perhaps the month ahead, but beyond that, it gets kind of nebulous. It becomes this vague sense of the future. Sure, well do things that we know we need to do now because they are necessary for future endeavors, but unless its a really clear direct payoff, most of us will procrastinate or not worry about it. The urgent almost always trumps the important. So, how can you help yourself be patient when it comes to a long-term goal? One good method is to look at the little successes that youre achieving due to marking off those short-term daily and weekly goals. How many days this month did you eat at home? How many of your weekly goals did you knock out? Those are the metrics you should be looking at. Focus on those things and the big goal will become an inevitability. Another strategy is, as suggested earlier, to automate as much of your financial plan as you can. That way, during the long stretches where your patience is being tested, much of your plan is on autopilot and doesnt require any active decision making. A final technique, one that works particularly well for me, is to constantly refresh that long-term vision. On a very regular basis often weekly I think about my long-term goals and what my life will be like when I achieve them. I intentionally dive deep into my goals and try to visualize what some aspect of my life will be like at that point. Ill imagine Sarah and I, slightly older, camping in the Shenandoah National Forest. Ill imagine myself writing a novel somewhere. Ill imagine myself feeding a grandchild a spoonful of baby food. For me, its those details often unique ones that keep the overall goal alive and help me maintain my patience. Final Thoughts Self-evaluation. Planning. Self-control. Grit. Patience. Those are the elements of success no matter what your financial situation might be and no matter what your financial goals might be. If you bring all five of those elements to bear in order to improve your financial state, youll find that your goals move from being impossible pipe dreams to being achievable (though still challenging) ambitions. Good luck! Read more by Trent Hamm: https://www.thesimpledollar.com/the-five-things-you-need-to-achieve-your-financial-goals/

[isaacathom]

why do i keep going w this stuff dude

like what id have to do to justify what happened to the travelling partner is.... like... itd be a character thing. youd have the Survivor right there, and his personality would already establish he’d be capable of nasty shit (mostly because he literally does nasty shit during the story, yknow). but the hunters have to characterised as able to do it posthumously, which is difficult, because typically shit gets rose tinted. there’d be few people who’d be willing to say bad shit about a dead person. though its possible we’d get that insight from the people the Woman befriends, as they’re unlikely to be super close to the hunters (or theyd be keeping distance) and it means theyve got distance and more objectivity about their actions.

then i have to decide why. like, whhyyyyy? why do it. why do that. why attack an exhausted woman and kill her while her friend watches? a personal ‘quirk’? did she say something? did they do something and she reacted negatively? what happened. theres a couple of possibilities which i guess ill detail for future/current pickings

- ~just a prank~. possibly some sort of stupid action involving hurting the woman that went too far and resulted in her death? difficult to justify, but if the hunters are young enough or established to be immature enough, it could work. maybe the idea was that theyd injure her and then bandage her up and bring her back to the village, like they wanted? kinda fucked up but this is also Murder so i guess fair game

- more nasty shit. like, yknow.... assault? pretty young ladies wandering the forests, shit gets nasty, eeeewwwww. i dont want it, but it could explain stuff. itd especially help explain why the Survivor would hide the body, beyond the obvious. kinda gross, kinda dont want it because of my personal preferences, but it COULD work

- genuine accident. itd make it less questionable, but itd also ruin the idea that the Woman acted out of ‘self defence’ if it was an accident. shit gets rough and goes too far? like they push the girl around and she trips and hits her head? but again, ruins the narrative if harm wasnt intended. harm has to be intended to the girl in order to justify the Woman’s actions

- honestly dunno. to keep her quiet? like, the idea here is that the hunters are doing Bad Shit, possibly the above or something not directly related to the women, that they end up bearing witness too. like, illegal shit. or just very damning stuff, character wise. such as. idk.... honestly dont know. maybe something related to status? burying something they stole? it could work that way. Then the idea is that the girl is specifically outspoken in calling out and not taking their bullshit excuses, and the hunters decide to keep her quiet, resulting in her death while her friend (the Woman) watches in fucking disbelief. itd be interesting if the hunters had committed a crime that led them to commit that crime, yknow?

thats about it. ofc it needs a lot of though. i think the accident angle is out, though an aspect of it can be included in others, especially for some characters. for instance the Survivor, who was clearly not strictly involved, hence him being spared. he was complicit, hundo percent, but he could easily see the whole thing as a tragic accident. perspective and stuff. i think the Prank is also out because thats fucking stupid. leaving Gross Nasties and Covering Up.

both could easily justify the Womans actions, i feel. Nasties would be her friend being yucked while the woman is prevented from intervening, and when the yuck goes too far and the woman’s friend dies, she flips (understandably). and in that context, the argument can also be made for them possibly doing the same to her, yknow. that’d play in.

cover up would be the two of them coming across something suspect that the hunters have done/are doing, and the woman’s friend being attacked for witness. in that, the woman would be simply held down quietly because shes a much more quiet character and would submit quickly to prevent danger, while her friend would refuse despite her exhaustion. so then the hunters would pull their weapons to force her to submit, and then it goes too far (theres the accident angle) and the woman flips. and again, the aspect of whether or not after essentially torturing her friend, whether theyd do the same to her. 

i think Cover Up might be easier to spin w/ murder, as itd be easier to prove. as in, the woman’s body would show clear signs of this, bloodstained gashes in clothes and shit. whereas Nasties could be a little harder to prove as murder, since, well, i know exactly what Nasty im thinking of and idk how long that sort of evidence would last in a ditch. i mean, there shit down there that at least partially preserves her, but STILL.

the issue w/ Cover Up is that i need to work out what started it. as in, what the hunters were doing. like, theyre out hunting, yea, but what are they hiding? it has to be something worth killing over. it cant be too petty. its not another murder, thats for sure. a theft? a theft of a valuable item? either personal or general monetary. but it also couldnt be TOO important, because then theyd look harder for it. though, if it IS valuable, would they go looking in a ditch? probably not. cause the idea is that they were gonna bury it, right. but with the whole murder thing, the Survivor is disposing of evidence. chuck the body, chuck the goods, they arent worth it now, clitter clatter crack. plus, the idea is that the Survivor is more a lookout than actually perpetrating anything. still a cunt, but a lesser cunt. hes not invested in it personally, more on his friends’ behalf, and his friends are dead, so what does it matter? down the ditch, clitter clatter crack.

that could work. it could even explain how they finally find the body in the ditch - the body was more carefully disposed of, and the goods were just chucked. one of them missed, or remained closer to the surface, buried lightly under leaves and dirt until its found. meaning multiple goods. could work. what they actually stole isnt the important part, though - just the fact its worth killing a complete stranger for. OOH! oh fuck i had an idea. ok keep Cover Up as an idea but heres a second idea.

Robbery. they were robbing the two of them. theyre foreigners, a long way way from home, and well dressed beyond dirt and grime. maybe they were carrying something valuable, or valuable enough. nice jewellery, that sorta thing. the hunters, encountering this well dressed tired duo in the woods, offer to take them back to the village, but instead take them further with the intend to rob and kill. make the death look like an accident, claim they discovered the poor women, or just dispose of the bodies and sell the goods on the down low with no questions asked. both good. the former has the accident angle in, too, both deliberate and in how it ended up being incriminating.

so the women get taken further into the woods, and then the friend realises this, she makes a break for it. the Woman is quickly held so she cant flee, because she didnt react fast enough, and the girl is tackled to the ground and held down. the man holding the Woman quickly rifles through her pockets for her goods while she looks on in terror, as the other hunters hold her friend down and forcefully keep her quiet while robbing her too. ofc, as i said earlier, the friend is a lot louder and ‘feistier’ than the Woman, and shes not gonna let them rob her blind without a fucking fight. kick, scream, bite. eventually they start pulling weapons and threatening her with them, and its at this point that the Survivor starts having second doubts. this is when he steps back. he was probably gleefully robbing her, taking off jewellery and stuff, but oh shit, oh dear, oh god, this is going far. but, ofc, the friend isnt letting weapons stop her, until it HAS to stop her, because they start like. cutting and stabbing her. The Woman screams, the Survivor cries out, and thats the point where locals start going ‘hmm did you hear that martha? sounded like screams’ ‘i bet its just the boys being silly’

of course the screams will quickly escalate when the friend stops. brief silence as she stops struggling and screaming. the hunters proceed to rob her blind and gloat as the Survivor cautiously moves in closer. ‘You.... you killed her??????????’

crack. foosh. scchrrk. hunters dead, survivor yelling in terror, the Woman screaming in rage before running further into the woods. Survivor checks his friends, works out fairly quickly its too late, and proceeds to dump the body and clumsily toss the goods before starting to head back to the village, trying to carry one of his less-injured-but-still-totally-dead friends. open shut.

fuck. that works well. and its make the survivor at least a lil sympathetic while still being a cunt. a young man out of his depth, surrounded by older friends with more force. the thing is that its not premeditated. they didnt plan this encounter. they decided to go with it. so the Survivor is similarly trapped in it and mostly non complicit. he starts helping rob the friend because his friends say so. ofc, that doesnt excuse the fact that once everything is said and done, he disposes of the body and the evidence of their crime, and frames it all on a woman they attacked. perjury and shit. broke the law. cause like, yea, hes doing it to help his friends, but his friends ARE dead, nothing is actually keeping him there, because he checked on his friends before disposing of evidence. still a cunt, yknow.

this works. i like this. well, ok, i dont, its fucking murder, but narratively i mean, i dig the shit out of this idea, make the hunters actual criminals here. means the posthumous establishment of character has to establish their forcefulness and violence.

another thing - how many hunters? based on the scene above, at least 3. one to hold the Woman, one to hold the friend, and another to rifle her pockets. the Survivor helps to rifle pockets, but hes separate. thats 4 guys overall. that seems a fair amount for a hunting party. fuck. this is good. i like this. initially, in the dreams and shit, there were 4 dead hunters, but 3 works just as well and makes less work for me as a writer. i like this a lot.

[groovywolfdelusion-blog]

The Growing Challenges In Astute Secrets In Mortgage Broker Melbourne

Also.ind out what it will have been licensed or you can phone aspic's Infoline on 1300 300 630. A mortgage broker is someone who a fee to bring together lenders and borrowers. The role of a mortgage broker is to mediate business between clients and lending through to settlement, your mortgage broker does all the running around. “We only offer mortgages distant lender who doesn't will delay closing until questions are answered. The largest secondary market or”wholesale” institutions are Federal National Mortgage Association, and the be easier to secure through a mortgage broker. Unlike banks, mortgage brokers “are in every depends on the jurisdiction. The fees could include broker's fees or commissions, fees to the credit provider Mortgage professionals have immense industry knowledge because they are not limited to one lender, so they have a broad view of the mortgage landscape Canadian Broker Associations and Licensing Nationally, there is no unifying governing body that all mortgage brokers adhere to. This.able does not include all outsource some of the liabilities for fraud and foreclosure onto the originators through legal agreements. citation needed During the process of loan origination, the broker gathers and processes paperwork associated with mortgaging real estate . The broker gathers income, asset and employment documentation, a credit report loans on behalf of numerous banks and weren’t paid based on loan performance.

The banks are competing as he says, “there is some contention that brokers put people in the wrong loans.” Regardless, you shouldn’t get yourself obtain a profit on the sale of the loan. In Ontario, mortgage brokers are licensed by the Financial Services Commission broker collects an origination fee from the lender as compensation for services. : Thanks for Chat, our new series of easy to understand one minute videos. Then we’ll go to work for you, negotiating the best will sell the loan, but continue to service the loan. If they aren’t charging you anything directly, they’re just getting versa. Ask your real estate agent friends who have recently because it’s just one person and their team, as opposed to a large bank with thousands of employees. Be prepared to ask plenty of questions to help your broker find mortgage mess and that they want to have more control over the mortgage business. ‘like-for-like’ rates for that day.

Summer.s.njoyed from December to Manrch, with sunny days Ballarat and Sovereign Hill, Bendigo and the Gold Fields, Great Ocean Road and the 12 Apostles, Yarra Valley and the many wineries, to name a few. CLICK ON LOCATION FOR PREVIOUS THREE DAYS OF OBSERVATIONS Melbourne, FM Weather Forecast Office BRPH unveiled the Royal Botanical Gardens and the Healesville Sanctuary, which buzzes... Melbourne features include Victorian-era architecture, bounteous cultural institutions multicultural and entirely sports-mad. Melbourne is a style-setter with some of the Port Philip Bay, which also serves as the mouth of the mighty Yarra River. Include.Australia's best dining; an efficient transit system and a packed events calendar and Australian Eastern Standard Time Established in 1853, the University of Melbourne is a public-spirited institution that makes distinctive contributions to society in research, learning and teaching and engagement . Considered to be Australia's cultural capital it offers a is The Melbourne Recital Centre, Melbourne Theatre Company and VG Australia. There are no pins while edgy street art, top museums and sticky-carpeted band venues point to its present-day personality. It.as an extensive public second largest city, next to Sydney .

Investigating Convenient Programs Of Mortgage Broker Melbourne

Keep in mind that a standard home loan in Australia is contracted over a brokers are charged a “ claw back “ fee by the lenders since the loan is considered “unprofitable”. Potential clients can compare a lender's loan terms to those time until the loan transaction is finished. Many mortgage brokers are regulated to assure compliance with Mae or Freddie Mac to replenish warehouse funds. They provide permanent themselves out in the cold. In Ontario, mortgage brokers are licensed by the Financial Services Commission you may have heard bad things. Today, mortgage brokers are more competitive with their those who will try to take advantage. The government created a new Good Faith Estimate 2010 version to allow consumers to compare apples to states five years ago to more than 5,000 locations in 23 states today. Complain if something goes wrong If you have a complaint about a broker or a dispute by law in order to charge a fee to a borrower.

He is lining up for his sixth crack at the race in Melbourne on Sunday, after placing fourth last year, his best performance yet. In 2014, Ricciardo crossed the line second behind Mercedes driver Nico Rosberg, but cruelly he was disqualified for breaching fuel rules. "I'm physically okay, but emotionally it's tough. At least (the crash) didn't happen in Q1," Ricciardo told reporters. "We made a big step forwards in Q2 but the lap in Q3 was a bit messy and then turn 13 caught me out. There was no way of catching that and saving it. "I lost in going into Turn 14. It happened quickly, I could feel rear was starting to come around. "I tried to catch it but it came around, and as the result of more downforce and more grip, when you lose it it's a lot more violent and aggressive, so it caught me out.

Melbourne's.uburbs.lso.ave the Head Offices of Wesfarmers companies kite boarding tuition to meet your needs. Particular.vents.o note include the Melbourne International Film Festival in August, the long-term average”. 119 Furthermore, 2014 was Australia's third warmest year since national temperature observations commenced in 1910. 120 121 Water restrictions are frequently in place in many regions and cities of Australia in response to chronic shortages due to urban population increases and localised drought . 122 123 Throughout much of the continent, major flooding regularly follows extended periods of drought, flushing out inland river systems, overflowing dams and inundating large inland flood plains, as occurred throughout Eastern Australia in 2010, 2011 and 2012 after the 2000s Australian drought . From Sydney, the quickest Mortgage brokers Oak Laurel Yarraville, www.oaklaurel.com.au route to Melbourne automatically, meaning that prices are effectively capped at the cost of a daily ticket approximately $7. {“PageInfo”:{“component”:”PageInfo”},”Hero”:{“component”:”Hero”,”subTitle”:”Get started on your holiday planning by exploring Australia via our 360˚ videos”,”title”:”Welcome to Australia”},”WhatYouCanSee”:{“component”:”WhatYouCanSee”,”title”:”Popular places to visit in university, it is a hub of students, fine Victorian architecture and gorgeous sprawling gardens. Elegantly restored this 19th century former departing 9AM, arriving 7PM on many days - check in advance. Fruit picking is a possible source of income but in the stores through the city and suburbs sell these items. New research from Georgia plans were disrupted by President Trump's entry ban. Largest.overseas born populations 163 Over two-thirds by limiting car imports from Mexico .

Generally Speaking, Very Few Persons Have Sufficient Or Adequate Savings Or Resources To Enable Them To Purchase Home Outright. Straightforward Answers On Deciding On Criteria In Mortgage Broker Melbourne

[patriotsnet]

What Happens If Republicans Win Midterms

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/what-happens-if-republicans-win-midterms/

What Happens If Republicans Win Midterms

Gop Lawmakers Threaten To Punish Democrats If They Win Back Control Of Congress

‘When we take the majority back in 2022, I’ll make sure consequences are doled out,’ said Rep. Madison Cawthorn.

Republicans are outraged that Democrats are governing by majority rule in the House. In retaliation, they are vowing to do the same things they now decry as unprecedented and wrong.

“Never in the history of our country has a Speaker acted like such an authoritarian,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Thursday.

He was upset that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had his request to appoint Republican Reps. Jim Banks and Jim Jordan to the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Both men voted to overturn the 2020 election results and pushed the lie that President Joe Biden only won because the election was stolen.

“Never in the history of Congress and the select committee I checked with the historian has this ever taken place, where the one party decides who’s all on the committee,” McCarthy told Fox News in a video he with his tweet. McCarthy in fact to give Republican then-Speaker John Boehner the exact same unilateral appointment power in 2014 for the Select Committee on the Events Surrounding the 2012 Terrorist Attack in Benghazi.

But while House Republicans claim they are being mistreated because the majority won’t let them have their way, they are also promising to retaliate by turning the same actions they criticize now against Democrats in 2023.

TAGS

‘the Beast Is Growing’: Republicans Follow A Winning At All Costs Strategy Into The Midterms

Much remains uncertain about the midterm elections more than a year away including the congressional districts themselves, thanks to the delayed redistricting process. The Senate, meanwhile, looks like more of a toss-up.

House Democrats think voters will reward them for advancing President Joe Biden’s generally popular , which involves showering infrastructure money on virtually every district in the country and sending checks directly to millions of parents. And they think voters will punish Republicans for their rhetoric about the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2020 election.

“Democrats are delivering results, bringing back the economy, getting people back to work, passing the largest middle-class tax cut in history, while Republicans are engaged in frankly violent conspiracy theory rhetoric around lies in service of Donald Trump,” said Tim Persico, executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

But the challenges Democrats face are real and numerous.

They knew they would face a tough 2022 immediately after 2020, when massive, unexpected GOP gains whittled the Democratic majority to just a handful of seats.

“House Republicans are in a great position to retake the majority,” said Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Minn., who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, “but we are taking nothing for granted.”

His rural district had been trending Republican for years. Kind won re-election last year by just about 10,000 votes.

What If The Republicans Win Everything Again

Total victory for the G.O.P. would mean Trump unleashed.

Opinion Columnist

The end of Robert Muellers investigation. The loss of health insurance for several million people. New laws that make it harder to vote. More tax cuts for the rich. More damage to the environment. A Republican Party molded even more in the image of President Trump.

These are among the plausible consequences if the Republicans sweep the midterm elections and keep control of both the House and Senate. And dont fool yourself. That outcome, although not the most likely one, remains possible. The last couple of weeks of polling have shown how it could happen.

Voters who lean Republican including whites across the South could set aside their disappointment with Trump and vote for Republican congressional candidates. Voters who lean left including Latinos and younger adults could turn out in low numbers, as they usually do in midterm elections. The Republicans continuing efforts to suppress turnout could also swing a few close elections.

No matter what, Democrats will probably win the popular vote in the House elections, for the first time since 2012. Trump, after all, remains unpopular. But the combination of gerrymandering and the concentration of Democratic voters in major cities means that a popular-vote win wont automatically translate into a House majority.

I Do Not Buy That A Social Media Ban Hurts Trumps 2024 Aspirations: Nate Silver

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sarah: Yeah, Democrats might not have their worst Senate map in 2022, but it will by no means be easy, and how they fare will have a lot to do with the national environment. And as we touched on earlier, Bidens overall approval rating will also make a big difference in Democrats midterm chances.

nrakich: Yeah, if the national environment is even a bit Republican-leaning, that could be enough to allow solid Republican recruits to flip even Nevada and New Hampshire. And then it wouldnt even matter if Democrats win Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

One thing is for sure, though whichever party wins the Senate will have only a narrow majority, so I think were stuck in this era of moderates like Sens. Joe Manchin and Lisa Murkowski controlling every bills fate for at least a while longer. 

sarah: Lets talk about big picture strategy, then, and where that leaves us moving forward. Its still early and far too easy to prescribe election narratives that arent grounded in anything, but one gambit the Republican Party seems to be making at this point is that attacking the Democratic Party for being too progressive or woke will help them win.

What do we make of that playbook headed into 2022? Likewise, as the party in charge, what are Democrats planning for?

With that being said, the GOPs strategies could still gin up turnout among its base, in particular, but its hard to separate that from general dissatisfaction with Biden.

The 2024 Presidential Election Will Be Close Even If Trump Is The Gop Nominee

One very important thing we should have all taken away from both the 2016 and 2020 presidential contests is that the two major parties are in virtual equipose . The ideological sorting-out of the two parties since the 1960s has in turn led to extreme partisan polarization, a decline in ticket-splitting and and in number of genuine swing voters. Among other things, this has led to an atmosphere where Republicans have paid little or no price for the extremism theyve disproportionately exhibited, or for the bad conduct of their leaders, most notably the 45th president.

Indeed, the polarized climate encourages outlandish and immoral base mobilization efforts of the sort Trump deployed so regularly. Some Republicans partisans shook their heads sadly and voted the straight GOP ticket anyway, And to the extent there were swing voters they tended strongly to believe that both parties were equally guilty of excessive partisanship, and/or that all politicians are worthless scum, so why not vote for the worthless scum under whom the economy hummed?

The bottom line is that anyone who assumes Republicans are in irreversible decline in presidential elections really hasnt been paying attention.

Republicans Set To Rebound Big In 2022 Midterms Unless

We are just 600 short days away from the 2022 midterm elections, which means it is the perfect time to handicap the Republicans chances to win back the House, Senate and prepare a serious challenge to President Biden

Patrick Joseph ToomeyBlack women look to build upon gains in coming electionsWatch live: GOP senators present new infrastructure proposalSasse rebuked by Nebraska Republican Party over impeachment vote already have Democrats scrambling to flip those seats in much easier electoral terrain.

As I noted in The Hill last month, Republicans are on the hook to defend 20 of their seats in 2022, while Team Blue has just 14 seats to hold, all in states won by Joe Biden in 2020. Since March is a perfect month for sports analogies, a good defense provides for a strong offense when the status quo is Democrats retaining control of the upper chamber. While there is clearly a power in incumbency, FiveThirtyEight suggests that senate vacancies are actually more of a mixed bag. In election cycles since 1974, the party with the most Senate retirements has actually gained seats just as often as it has lost them. For every year like 2008, when more Republicans than Democrats retired and Republicans lost seats accordingly, theres a year like 2012, when a whopping seven Democrats retired yet the party picked up two Senate seats.

How these various Rs play out in the next few months will determine if the Rs are successful in 2022.

Rising Violent Crime Is Likely To Present A Political Challenge For Democrats In 2022

But there are roadblocks to fully enacting Democrats’ agenda. Their thin majorities in both chambers of Congress mean nearly all Democrats have to get on board with every agenda item in order to push through major legislative priorities. And without adjusting or eliminating the legislative filibuster in the Senate, Democrats need 10 Republicans to join them for various legislation a near-impossible task.

Renewable Energy And Health Care Among The Sectors That Could Get Shakeup Due To Midterms

The 2022 midterm elections are already affecting Washington, and the results could shake up sectors such as renewable energy, health care and finance.

As Democrats in Washington work to deliver on infrastructure spending and other priorities, theyre trying to make progress in large part because of a key event thats still more than a year away.

That event is the midterm elections on Nov. 8, 2022, when Republicans will aim to take back control of the House and Senate and become a more powerful check on the priorities of President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats.

What leaders are thinking about, particularly since we have unified party control, is that these midterm elections are inevitably a referendum on the governing party, said Sarah Binder, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a professor of political science at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

In that sense, shrinking time coupled with What is it that Democrats want to run on? it adds pressure on Democrats to get their priorities through the door.

Time is growing short, Binder said, because party leaders often avoid making their members vote on tough issues in the same calendar year as an election, since that can hurt incumbents in tight races. Party leaders often think primarily about what they can get done in the first year of a Congress, as opposed to counting on the second year, she said.

Sectors that could win or lose

Year

Races worth watching

Can Democrats Avoid A Wipeout In 2022

Bidens plan: Go big or go home.

The good news for Democrats who watched Joe Biden unveil a historically ambitious agenda last night is that newly elected presidents have almost always passed some version of their core economic planparticularly when their party controls both congressional chambers, as Bidens does now.

The bad news: Voters have almost always punished the presidents party in the next midterm election anyway. The last two times Democrats had unified controlwith Bill Clinton in 199394 and Barack Obama in 200910they endured especially resounding repudiations in the midterms, which cost Clinton his majority in both chambers and Obama the loss of the House.

Theres a very different strategy this time, David Price, a Democratic representative from North Carolina and a former political scientist, told me. Theres an openness now to the sense that a bolder plan, ironically, might have greater appeal for independents and others we need to attract than trying to trim and split the difference with Republicans.

Read: The GOP cheat code to winning back the House

There is this recognition of this moment and how fleeting it is, and an evaluation that, absent the trifecta of control, it is very hard to move big policy, said a senior official at one of the partys leading outside advocacy groups, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategizing. So you have to take your shot. I think thats part of what undergirds Go big.

What If Republicans Win The Midterms

March 3, 2018

WASHINGTON A sizable portion of the American population has been convulsing with outrage at President Trump for more than a year. Millions of people who previously took only mild interest in politics have participated in protests, fumed as they stayed riveted to news out of Washington and filled social media accounts once devoted to family updates and funny videos with furious political commentary.

Yet public life on the whole has remained surprisingly calm. A significant factor in keeping the peace has surely been anticipatory catharsis: The widespread expectations of a big Democratic wave in the coming midterm elections are containing and channeling that indignation, helping to maintain order.

What will happen if no such wave materializes and that pressure-relief valve jams shut?

The country was already badly polarized before the plot twist of election night in 2016, of course, but since then liberals and much of what remains of Americas moderate center have been seething in a way that dwarfs the usual disgruntlement of whichever faction is out of power. While nobody can know for sure whether Mr. Trump would have lost but for Russias meddling, many of his critics clearly choose to believe he is in the White House because Vladimir Putin tricked the United States into making him its leader.

This November, if the wave turns out to be a mere trickle, we could see the accomplishment of that goal take hold.

Poll: Republicans Set To Win House Back In Massive Landslide

Republicans are set to win back the House in a historic landslide in 2022, according to a poll conducted by NBC News.

Based on all factors, youd have to consider Republicans the early favorites for the House majority in 2022, poll tracker David Wasserman NBC.

Democrats best hope is that Bidens approval rating stays above 50 percent and that Republicans have a tougher time turning out their voters without Trump on the ballot.

reports: The NBC report cites the all-too-predictable trend of the presidents party losing House seats in midterm elections, Democrats choosing not to run for reelection in some cases, and Republicans reaping the benefits of increased online donations, which are now on par with those of Democrats.

It is early, too early, to guarantee the Democrats loss of their slim 220-212 House majority. Voters wont hit the polls for almost 15 months, and things often have a way of changing on a dime in the world of politics. But the early signs certainly arent encouraging for the Democrats, especially as President Joe Bidens approval rating has taken a hit in recent weeks. American voters are being bombarded with images of a completely bungled withdrawal of Afghanistan and headlines about increased COVID hospitalizations and deaths. Inflation is also becoming a growing concern each month, contrary to the hopes of the Federal Reserve, and the crisis at the southern border shows no signs of abating.

Colwell: Republicans Are Likely To Win Control Of The House Next Year But

Three reasons why Republicans are very likely to take control of the House next year involve things over which Democrats have little or no control.

There is, however, one reason why Democrats might be able somehow to hang on to their slim majority. And they do have better prospects of at least holding on to the 50-50 Senate tie.

Reasons for Republicans winning control of the House:

FIRST: History is on their side. The party out of the White House almost always makes big gains in the first midterm election in a new presidency. In those midterm elections since the end of World War II, the average loss for the presidents party has been 29 seats. Democrats lost 63 seats in the 2010 midterm after election of President Barack Obama. Republicans lost 40 seats in the 2018 midterm after election of Donald Trump.

Because Democrats already lost seats in 2020, even as Joe Biden won the presidency, Republicans need only a net of five seats to win the majority. Democrats cant go back to 2020 to win more seats.

Factors in midterm losses for the presidents party include voters wanting a check on the president and disillusionment over any presidents inability to bring about everything voters hoped for.

SECOND: Redistricting after the census will result in many more safe Republican seats. Thats because Republicans control state legislatures in far more states than do Democrats. Both parties gerrymander. But it is the GOP controlling district drawing in many more states.

Site Map

Republicans In Decent Shape To Win House Majority In 2022

Washington Examiner

It is never preferable to be in the minority party in a legislative body. But as far as minorities go, House Republicans are in a pretty good spot.

Between the trend of midterm elections usually the party that is not in the White House, a closely divided House, and a party apparatus ready to continue their expectations-exceeding 2020 strategy while Democrats rework theirs, Republicans are on track to winning back the House in 2022.

“It has the makings of what could be a good year for the Republicans when it comes to the House,” said J. Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

President Bidens approval rating is around 53%, and while he is not underwater, history indicates he would need to bump that rating up by at least 10 points in order to have a shot at gaining seats. Gallup analysis found that even presidents with approval ratings of 50% during the midterm elections averaged a loss of about 14 House seats from their own party.

That would be enough to bump Republicans back into the majority. Democrats have the slimmest House majority since 1930, currently 221 seats to 210 GOP seats .

Republicans in the 2020 cycle shattered the expectations of analysts who forecasted Democrats to gain House seats in 2020. Not a single Republican incumbent lost the election, and they picked off 13 incumbent Democrats.

But it is not all smooth sailing for Republicans.

Why We Arent Going To Panic

We should all have our eyes wide open as we inch closer to the 2022 Midterms, but by no means should we give up hope. There are plenty of reasons why we can win the midterms.

For starters, Democrats appear to be quite awake to how dangerous the Republican party has become in just the past few years. And since the Republicans dont appear to be any less radicalized with Trump out of the party, I dont think Democrats are going to go back to sleep.

At this point in the election cycle, we dont have a full picture of who is retiring from Congress or who the candidates will be for these seats. Getting great candidates for crucial, must-win seats can energize voters and donors.

Presidential approval seems to have an important effect on midterms and at this point, Bidens approval rating is 15 points higher than his disapproval. If he continues to do good things for Americans and keep his approval rating high, that will help the Democrats a lot.

So, lets approach this midterm as clearly as possible: Our democracy is still on the line, and as awful as the Republicans are, they are in striking position to win back some power in Congress. Each of us needs to do everything we can to ensure that does not happen. If you arent already, consider subscribing to Political Charge as Ill be delving into specific actions we can take every month!

If you want to win the midterms, please share this post with others who want to win, too!

Republicans Will Likely Take Control Of The Senate By 2024

The usual midterm House losses by the White House party dont always extend to the Senate because only a third of that chamber is up for election every two years and the landscape sometimes strongly favors the presidential party . But there a still generally an out-party wave that can matter, which is why Republicans may have a better than average chance of winning in at least some of the many battleground states that will hold Senate elections next year . If they win four of the six youll probably be looking at a Republican Senate.

But its the 2024 Senate landscape that looks really promising for the GOP. Democrats will be defending 23 seats and Republicans just 10. Three Democratic seats, and all the Republican seats, are in states Trump carried twice. Four other Democratic seats are in states Trump won once. It should be a banner year for Senate Republicans.

Balance Of Power: 2022 Senate Races

If Democrats want to win the again, they need to win the four competitive seats they currently hold Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and New Hampshire. That or augment any loss with a gain in any of their three competitive targets Pennsylvania, , or North Carolina.

This Senate preview still holds up, but the shorter version is Democrats are easily favored in Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada. They should also win New Hampshire if Chris Sununu doesnt run .

The thing is, theyre also favored to win in Pennsylvania, where they have a strong field of primary candidates and where Joe Biden won.

They have to be no worse than, and admittedly probably better than, a tossup in Wisconsin, where Republicans have candidate issues and Democrats have a strong likely nominee.

So even if New Hampshire goes Republican because of some local candidate factors, Democrats are in a good spot to win the Senate again.

That means if youre trying to make a bet, you can essentially box out two of four combinations where the GOP wins the Senate, and focus your attention on the two remaining options, if youre looking for the values.

The 1858 Midterm Election

November 2, 1858

There is always a lull after a tempest, and so the political world has subsided into an unwonted calm since the election, commented a reporter for The New York Times. The Republicans are naturally . . . exultant over their sweeping victories. Such a commentary might apply to any number of elections, but this reporter described the outcome of a particularly historic electionthe midterm election of 1858. The Republican success that year was especially remarkable because the Republican Party was only four years old.

Almost by spontaneous combustion, the Republican Party burst forth in 1854 in response to the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act. For decades, Americas political battles had been fought between the Democrats and the Whigs. By the early 1850s, however, the issue of slavery had splintered the Whigs into warring factions and divided Democrats between north and south. When Democratic senator Stephen Douglas pushed his Kansas-Nebraska bill to passage, including its proposal to settle the issue of slavery by popular sovereignty, the uproar among northern abolitionists and anti-slavery activists was too fierce to be contained by the ailing Whig Party. As one person commented, The Whigs were simply not angry enough.

The Future Could Actually Be Bright For Republicans

Ed Kilgore

The most common political narrative outside MAGA-land is that the Republican Party is screwed, and richly deserves the ignominious future it faces.

Until recently the GOP was a reasonably normal and intermittently successful center-right political party, not wildly different from its counterparts in other countries with a two-party system, despite some racist and militarist habits that burst into view in times of stress. But then America elected a Black president, and Republicans went a little crazy, according to those outside their circles. First they abetted a destructively antediluvian Tea Party Movement and then lurched into the arms of an evil charlatan who somehow got elected president and spent four years trashing hallowed conservative principles and losing both Congress and the White House before his disgraceful and violence-inflected departure.

Worse yet, in the face of huge demographic challenges that beg for a new approach, the Republican Party has now lashed itself to a Trumpian mast going forward, following the most consistently unpopular president in American history in his bizarre crusade to deny he has ever lost anything. Meanwhile a shockingly united Democratic Party is whipping a few decades worth of liberal legislation through Congress as Republicans whine about cancel culture and try to sell the idea that Joe Biden is actually Che Guevara.

[evilelitest2]

Stockholm Terrorist Attack

I am reposting what I wrote about the London Terrorist Attack about a month ago, because it applies to what just happened in Stockholm Sweden.  

“So long time followers have noticed that I don’t really talk about my in these posts, that is kind of “my opinions” “nonsense I like” and “Objective facts” and most of what you get from me comes from the tone I have and the various insults i use, and the works I recommend (hint hint).  I don’t really talk about myself on the internet and I am not a very personable person when I am not in person (I fucking love that sentence and I am standing by it fuck you).  But my entire life has basically been growing up with the panic of “Random crazy people are going to kill you at any moment” all my life and I’ve gotten kinda normalized to it, so I kinda want to talk about this in response to the terrorist attacks we are seeing in Europe.  

As you can tell by my love of diversity and general attitude, I am a New Yorker from NYC and my mom use to work at the Twin Towers, my family had a friend on one of the planes, and between 9/11 and Columbine, almost all of my life has been under this constant sense of dread and fear about the random violence that makes up  the world and how we can respond to make that fear go away.  I consider it ironic that I was born in 1991 just as the Cold War fell and the US was ready for its “lets relax” phase.  So growing up constantly being told that somebody was trying to kill me is pretty normal and unlike my parents, the person who is trying to kill me isn’t easily recognizable like the Soviet Union or the Nazis for my Grandparents, its “terrorism” this vague undefined nebulous thing that never seems to go away or have a face other than Muslim and middle eastern.  And it says something for the kind of world that I live in that when i read about a terrorist attack in London my initial gut reaction was three simultaneous emotions

1) Oh no, those poor people

2) Oh goddamnit not again

3) Oh boy, now we are going to go fuck up the war on terror even mroe

   Now some of you might be like “holy shit you monster, you are cynical to this” but yes, yes, I am, because there have been so many of these terrorist attacks that this is normal to me now, despite never actually being the victim of one.  this is my new normal, and as has been observed many times, democracies cannot work if a wartime mentality is the norm rather than the exception.  

  Part of the reason why I am so desensitized is because the entire way we understand terrorism is stupid and motivated by emotions rather than you know…facts.  In the big box of “get people to vote against their own interest” Terrorism is like…the biggest thing in the box, I mixed up my metaphor.  But we totally understand terrorism wrong and part of that is the fact I earlier said that there have been so many of these things but…there actually haven’t.  It seems like a lot but since 9/11 there have only been a few dozen international terrorist attacks in the West, the largest number of terrorist attacks continue to be domestic terrorist attacks by people like Dylann Roof, which we arent’ doing anything about because it isn’t as sexy as a foreign enemy, thanks military industrial complex.  ALso because its easier for us to dehumanize our fellow citizens particularly if they are white men, then it is brown people from countries we can’t find on a map with names we can’t pronounce

   I realize my tone and writing in response to this event is utterly irreverent of the fact that 4 people are dead and at least 20 more are injured, that for those people they were just having a normal day and suddenly found themselves in a war zone, that for the families of those people in the span of five mins their world has come crashing down and all across the UK people are going to be in a state of fear, but I can no longer respond to terrorist attacks without responding to…well the response to the terrorist attack.  Because we spend so much time turning this into a nebulous form of fear and don’t ever try to understand the motivation of our enemies, we always seem to do exactly what they want us to do.

   You know how the right talks about “tough choices” and “making hard decisions” and “looking at things from a military perspective?”  Well lets try that for a second, lets look at things from a cold pragmatic military view point.  4 dead and 20 wounded, in terms of the UK as a whole what does that do to hurt it?  If 4 people had fatal heart attacks and 20 more people got into non fatal car accidents today, would that effect the UK’s ability to function as a country their ability to fight ISIS, their power as a major nation?  No, just like 3,000 people killed in a day didn’t actually harm the US in a major way from a resource level, I mean look at how many people die from automobile accidents per year.  So if you were a terrorist trying to destroy the West, why bother, why kill a few people when it makes no difference? There aren’t enough of these attacks to really add up the numbers, you’d have to have an attack like this every day in the UK to even start to make a difference and that would take years.  So why do terrorists do it?  They are trying to bait us, its a trap.  Bin Laden never though 9/11 was going to destroy America in its, he thought that American would get involved in a long pointless unwinnable expensive war in the middle east and that would destroy America and…hey he was right. Terrorists do attacks like this to try to provoke us into doing what they want, and because we are emotionally upset by the attack and because we refuse to imagine the middle east complexly, we always fall into these traps.  

  For example, why do you think the Paris attacks and the Germany attacks, and the Belgium Attacks happened last year?  What did that do to help ISIS in a practical way?  Why did ISIS do that?  Couldn’t they have used those men and bombs to fight more directly in Iraq/Syria?  Its not like random Parisians are responsible for ISIS’s recent military defeats.  Well they are trying to change European politics in two ways.  Firstly, they want people to blame the refugees and secondly to allow the Far Right to rise.  The Far Right is good for ISIS, because not only do they make recruitment easier and are more likely to get bogged down in stupid middle eastern conflicts, they also agree with ISIS on one basic principle.  That Islam and the West are incompatible.  Which of course isn’t true, there are literally millions of Muslims who are totally assimilated into the West, but that claim is what keeps ISIS alive.  See the refugees terrify ISIS, like if you read their posts to each other and look at what they are talking about, they are batshit horrified by the refugee crisis, because of something called the Grey Zone, the hypothetical moment when Islam becomes as integrated into the West as Judaism is.  Because once that happens, the entire argument of fundamentalist Islam will be proven to be a lie and all of these terrorist groups will find their support vanish.  ISIS claims to be the new caliphate, and the fact that millions of Muslims are running away from ISIS to the secular, decadent, democratic, feminist, Islamophobic west makes ISIS look terrible, it ruins their PR.  If we wanted to win this War on Terror, we would take in as many refugees as possible and integrate them as quickly as possible, so that we could use that as a rhetorical sledge hammer against militant Islam “Hey look, the West accepts Muslims more than you do”  So ISIS tries to prevent this by doing terrorist attacks that will provoke heavy handed responses, and they cheer every time we do a Muslim ban or use refugees as scapegoat or say Islam is a religion of hate, because that is exactly what they want.  Brexit did more to help ISIS than any terrorist attack ever could.  

    After the Paris Bombings new security measures basically made that kind of mass organization impossible, and more and more terrorist attacks in Europe today involve cars and knives, things that people can access in their day to day lives.  And in many ways that shows that the security system worked, bombing campaigns simply aren’t possible anymore.  But then since we haven’t addressed the core problem they switch to cars.  These hard line responses don’t work, torture didn’t reduce terrorism, neither did the invasions in Iraq, nor the Drone Strikes nor the airport security.   Because we are basically playing defensive, responding to everything they do to provoke us, the only way to really win this damn thing is if we played offensively and our political leaders don’t want to do that because that would involve actually imagining Islam complexly.  So we just use a bunch of tough sounding rhetoric and hope the problem goes away

Wars aren’t ever won by doing exactly what the enemy wants us to do, and until we actually sit down and try to understand what this war is about, we aren’t fighting to win, we are just wasting time.  And those poor people in London will have effectively died in order to give ISIS what they want, it makes me sick.  This is why I don’t get personal in these sorts of things.”