#while another from the same show is the same ID yet good rep | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

readwithkay · 4 years ago

Text

April Reads [ 2 Books ]

i really was expected to do 3 tests for EACH subject i do & i do 11 subjects :( 0 reading time & by tbr pile is always evolving. at least my local bookstores are opening again! FYI there is a ‘keep reading’ border bc the first book i ready in april has a few trigger warnings :) please skim over that “review” if you are uncomfy

When the Stars Lead to You by Ronni Davis (TW: mention of mental illness, death of a loved one, depression, attempted suicide) (i swear in this review)

(★★)

18-old Devon longs for two things. The stars. & the boy she fell in love with last summer. When Ashton breaks Devon’s heart at the end of the most romantic & magical summer ever, she thinks her heart will never heal again. But over the course of the following year, Devon finds herself slowly putting the broken pieces back together. Now it’s senior year, and she’s determined to enjoy every moment of it as she prepares for a future studying the galaxies. That is, until Ashton shows up on the first day of school. Can she forgive him and open her heart again? Or are they doomed to repeat history

From debut author, Ronni Davis, comes a stunning novel about passion, loss, and the power of first love.

can i just say that ive had so little books rated over 3 stars in the past couple months :(

i really wanted to enjoy this book bc the synopsis sounded good, the title is creative/intruging and i really wanted to get something about the 3 stars i was giving like every book since february

unfortunately, it disappointed me gravely

kinda insta love & this girl wasn’t over this guy she dated for 2-3 months over A YEAR AGO like ????

was expecting to be BLOWN OUT OF THIS WORLD (i think im funny-) but just felt like id been dug an early grave with how boring it was

like we get it you have daddy issues :(

the mental illness rep didn’t strike me as realistic, but i found it commendable that the non-mentally-ill MC went out of her way to do her own research

i liked the POC rep

all of these descriptions of the deep love that devon feels for ashton but it was laid on so thickly that it felt more like being told than shown. at a certain point, the romance scenes became ew—the sheer amount of passages where they were just making out or talking about how they wanted to be together forever (paired with ashton’s extreme wealth) gave me unpleasant fan fiction/wattpad vibes

like 2015/2017 wattpad

not good overall

ALSO THIS BITCH WAS FULLY PREPARED TO DITCH UNI FOR THIS BOY?????????????? my emotionally unavailable self could NEVER

The 57 Bus by Dashka Slater

(★★★★)

If it weren't for the 57 bus, Sasha & Richard never would have met. Both were high school students from Oakland, California, one of the most diverse cities in the country, but they inhabited different worlds. Sasha, a white teen, lived in the middle-class foothills & attended a small private school. Richard, a black teen, lived in the crime-plagued flatlands & attended a large public one. Each day, their paths overlapped for a mere 8 minutes. But 1 afternoon on the bus ride home from school, a single reckless act left Sasha severely burned & Richard charged with two hate crimes & facing life imprisonment. The case garnered international attention, thrusting both teenagers into the spotlight.

i did shed a few tears

fINALLY something above 3 stars !!!!

Based on the real life story of a white Oakland agender teen attacked by another teen while riding the bus, the book is both insightful & balanced.

Sasha (the victim) & Richard’s (the attacker) backstories are fully explored. Oakland itself & Richard’s backstory are paid careful consideration. & after learning about both a clearer picture emerges. 1 where Oakland, 1 of the most diverse & deeply divided cities in the country, & the criminal justice system play a role in shaping events.

dashka slater could have EASILy formed a narrative casting richard as our villain. they didn’t. instead, richard is a goofy, often quiet but smart TEEN who was raised in poverty & who desperatey tries to avoid conflict/getting into trouble. he is NOT a supervillian. he is NOT inherently bad or evil.

BUT the book doesn’t condone/excuse his actions; we’re just provided with the context: a favour not always granted by the media. in this story, the media manipulated both richard & his mother’s words by giving them a differing narrative and ripping away their substance.

this book is also a compelling indictment of the criminal justice systerm, where richard (WHO IS SIXTEEN YEARS OLD) is tried as an ADULT. & in being tried as an ADULT (WHICH HE IS NOT) he loses the protection granted to juveniles: he loses anonymity and a reasonable punishment/sentence. MEANING ADULT PRISON.

like what the actual hell???? THIS HAPPENS IN REAL LIFE PEOPLE. as a teenager, richard is still developing. he physically & mentally has less impulse control than adults who would be imprisoned; YET HE IS TREATED THE SAME AS THEM?

made me very angry but very interested

still, the story does not excuse his actions; it critiques & explores the systems that foster these types of attacks & the legal responses.

IN FACT, sasha (THE VICTIM) & their family PUBLICLY disagreed with the court’s decision to try richard as an adult.

sasha is also provided equal narrative. from the get-go the book educates its audience on nonbinary gender identities & sasha’s journey of discovering their pronouns/gender identity.

not a 5 star bc i wasnt always that keen on the writing style :( still a brilliant book, especially if you want educated on what it’s like to be nb/the justice system

#april reads #april #reads #reading challenge #2021 reading challenge #tbr #books i read in april

2 notes · View notes

theliberaltony · 4 years ago

Link

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.

Poll(s) of the week

In recent days, we’ve seen a number of surveys of high-profile Senate contests. On the whole, the polls indicate Democrats have a real chance of picking up some seats in battleground states. Some of this is thanks to former Vice President Joe Biden’s sizable lead over President Trump (9.5 points), as the current national environment is very favorable to Democrats.

But remember many races could still go either way. And the good news for Republicans is that they’re favored to pick up a Democratic-held seat in Alabama and probably don’t have to worry too much about losing Kentucky. With the GOP holding a 53-47 majority in the Senate,1 Democrats still have to pick up three seats and the vice presidency, or at least four seats without the vice presidency, to take control of the chamber.

Let’s start with the Republican-held seats. Sen. Martha McSally of Arizona has long been endangered, and three new surveys confirm she’s in real trouble. Last week, Democratic pollster Civiqs released a poll that found Democrat Mark Kelly, a retired astronaut, leading McSally 51 percent to 42 percent. Two additional polls dropped on Thursday: The New York Times/Siena College gave Kelly a 9-point edge, 47 percent to 38 percent, and Redfield & Wilton Strategies found him ahead by 15 points, 49 percent to 34 percent. Kelly has tended to attract slightly more support than Biden in Arizona — though they were about the same in the Times/Siena poll — and that’s an especially good sign for Kelly as Biden has led by a small margin there.

In North Carolina, five new polls show Republican Sen. Thom Tillis in a tight race with former Democratic state Sen. Cal Cunningham. The New York Times/Siena College survey of the race gave Cunningham a slim edge, 42 percent to 39 percent, which echoed another poll released this week — Democratic pollster Public Policy Polling had Cunningham up 44 percent to 40 percent. (Both leads were inside the polls’ margin of error.) And a Fox News poll released Thursday evening put Cunningham ahead by 2 points, 39 percent to 37 percent. However, an OAN/Gravis Marketing poll released last Friday found Tillis with 46 percent support, ahead by 1 point. And a Redfield & Wilton Strategies poll released Thursday morning gave Cunningham a 9-point advantage, 45 percent to 36 percent. Still, considering Biden is only leading Trump by 3 points in our North Carolina polling average, this race is likely to be very close in November.

Meanwhile, two recent polls in Georgia suggest that Democrats have a chance of capturing a Peach State seat. A Fox News survey found Republican Sen. David Perdue ahead by just 3 points over Democratic nominee Jon Ossoff, 45 percent to 42 percent, while a Public Policy Polling survey gave Ossoff a 1-point lead, 45 percent to 44 percent. Remember, though, that in Georgia a Senate candidate must win an outright majority or the race will go to a runoff, so there’s definitely a possibility that neither Perdue nor Ossoff win a majority (there’s also a Libertarian candidate running). No news on the state’s other Senate seat, which is a special election with a jungle primary that will also take place this November, though that contest will likely go to a January runoff.

In Kentucky, though, GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will be heavily favored against whomever the Democrats choose (the results of Kentucky’s Democratic primary won’t be known until next week.) A Civiqs survey from the week of June 13 found McConnell led Democratic state Rep. Charles Booker by 14 points, 52 percent to 38 percent, and former fighter pilot and 2018 congressional candidate Amy McGrath by 20 points, 53 percent to 33 percent. The poll also found Trump ahead of Biden by 20 points, so the president’s big advantage should help McConnell down-ballot.

But Republicans aren’t the only ones playing defense. Democrats also have to defend a couple of seats in states that Trump carried in 2016 — most notably Alabama. Democratic Sen. Doug Jones has long been seen as the most vulnerable Senate incumbent up in 2020, but on Monday, his campaign released an internal poll from May that had him down just 3 points, 44 percent to 47 percent, against former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville, who is seen as the favorite over former Senator and Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the July GOP primary runoff.

Of course, this was an internal poll, so take it with a grain of salt, and a mid-June poll from GOP pollster Cygnal painted a much different picture. It put Tuberville ahead of Jones by 14 points, 50 percent to 36 percent, and Sessions ahead by 10 points, 45 percent to 35 percent. The Jones campaign is arguing that Jones’s lead could have grown since their poll, especially since Biden’s standing has improved in Alabama, but in all likelihood, Jones is still a serious underdog. After all, Trump still leads Biden by 15 points in our polling average and is likely to win Alabama by the double-digits in November.

Finally, we also have five fresh surveys from Michigan, where Democratic Sen. Gary Peters faces Republican John James, an Army veteran. James lost the state’s 2018 Senate race, but still performed fairly well in a Democratic-leaning environment. Yet the numbers now mostly augur well for Peters. Thursday’s New York Times/Siena College poll put Peters ahead by 10 points, 41 percent to 31 percent while Redfield & Wilton Strategies had him up by 18 points, 50 percent to 32 percent. And Peters also had double-digit leads in two polls conducted on behalf of right-leaning sponsors: The conservative Restoration PAC and GOP pollster Hodas & Associates put a poll out on Thursday that had Peters ahead by 13 points, 51 percent to 38 percent, while a survey released last week by TIPP on behalf of conservative outlet American Greatness found Peters up by 12 points, 47 percent to 35 percent. Plus, Marketing Resource Group also released a poll last week that found Peters ahead by 6 points, albeit only 36 percent to 30 percent, with 14 percent preferring “someone else” and 18 percent undecided. Bottom line: Peters seems to be cruising toward reelection, buoyed by the fact that Biden leads Trump by about 11 points in our Michigan polling average.

It’s too early to say that Democrats can take back the Senate, but if the national environment remains this favorable for Democrats, they’ll certainly stand a pretty good chance of regaining control in November.

Other polling bites

A new survey from Morning Consult found that 80 percent of Americans believe it’s ��very” or “somewhat” likely that a second wave of coronavirus cases will hit in the next year. Respondents were split as to whether the country could handle the public health impact of a second wave — 42 percent said yes, 45 percent no. But only 33 percent agreed that the country was ready to handle the economic impacts of a second wave, while 53 percent disagreed.

A new poll from Axios/Ipsos suggests that comfort with getting a haircut might signal how safe the public feels about coronavirus cases in their state. In states where the number of new cases decreased from June 9 to 16, the share of respondents getting their hair cut increased from 10 percent to 19 percent, but in states where there was at least a 50 percent increase in new cases, the share of respondents who visited a hair salon fell from 19 percent to 13 percent. States with small increases in cases saw the share visiting a hair salon stay at 18 percent.

A record-high share of Americans — 40 percent — view the death penalty as “morally wrong,” according to a new poll from Gallup. Fifty-four percent still said it was morally acceptable, but that’s the lowest share since the pollster first asked this question in 2001. The drop in support was driven largely by liberals and moderates, who expressed new lows in approval — 37 percent and 56 percent, respectively.

NFL players kneeling during the national anthem to protest racism was once pretty unpopular, but as support for the Black Lives Matter movement has increased in recent weeks, fewer Americans think these protests are unacceptable. A new survey from YouGov found that 51 percent now support sports leagues substituting the phrase “Black Lives Matter” in place of athletes’ names on the back of jerseys. Only 35 percent opposed the idea, but there was a sizable partisan gap: 73 percent of Democrats approved of this compared to just 22 percent of Republicans.

Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that protects gay and transgender workers from workplace discrimination, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that about 9 in 10 Americans think it should be illegal for employers to fire or refuse to hire individuals because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Additionally, the poll found that most respondents think people who are transgender or are lesbian, gay or bisexual face widespread discrimination — 79 percent and 74 percent, respectively.

The Senate has been unable to pass a police reform bill, but majorities of Democratic and Republican voters back reforms like banning chokeholds, training police on de-escalation, creating a national database of police disciplinary records and banning or increasing regulations on no-knock warrants, according to a new survey from Morning Consult. Asked about specific reform plans from House Democrats and Senate Republicans, 48 percent of respondents felt the Democratic plan — which bans chokeholds and no-knock warrants — appropriately addressed police reform, while only 33 percent said the same for the GOP proposal (which discourages the use of chokeholds and no-knock warrants, but doesn’t ban them outright).

Trump approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker, 40.6 percent of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing as president, while 55.2 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -14.6 points). At this time last week, 41.2 percent approved and 55.2 percent disapproved (a net approval rating of -14.0 points). One month ago, Trump had an approval rating of 42.7 percent and a disapproval rating of 53.5 percent, for a net approval rating of -10.7 points.

Generic ballot

In our average of polls of the generic congressional ballot, Democrats currently lead by 8.1 percentage points (48.7 percent to 40.6 percent). A week ago, Democrats led Republicans by 7.9 points (48.6 percent to 40.7 percent). At this time last month, voters also preferred Democrats by 8.0 points (48.2 percent to 40.2 percent).

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Geoffrey Skelley

2 notes · View notes

discourse-is-just-a-pastime · 4 years ago

Text

I’ve got to rant

Y’all know what is one part of tumblr culture I’m tired of? The black and white view of thing, especially with the idea of queer character NEEDING to be pure angel uwu otherwise you just a gross [---]phob.

Like, I have 99 registered characters because I can’t stop making ocs (just means I’v got them in my long list of references, am surely missing some). 81% of them are queer in some kind of way (this include a 3% of them questioning), while 19% are cis and straight (tho at least 2/3 of them are parents of characters).

Are you expecting me to have 81% of my characters being flawless characters who can never ever do anything wrong? For literally any label of the LGBT+ I have characters that could be “bad” and good one, wanna play?

L/G: surprisingly not too bad (at least when I check), but tbf, I have more queer/m-spec/a-spec characters. Some would probably deem not so good, notably one that I went sadistic on for 6 years and who has suffer, and one who is closer to “gay folks always take care of their appearance”, despite his character being more than that.

M-spec: we start having more contrast one. ex: F sleeps around a lot, don’t call back and flirts with anyone he finds attractive -> bad and biphobic. S, his best friend, not flirty, loyal to his partner when he enter a relationship. Like, most of my characters are okay ones, yet I couldn’t make F the way he is because apparently bi folks who act like him have never ever existed?

Don’t get me wrong, I see where the problem is when that’s the only rep you have, but in the same universe as him, you’ve got the exact opposite in his own best friend.

Trans/enby: honestly, am not sure how I could fuck this one up? Since I don’t do caricatural characters. But I guess that the idea of some my enby folks not entering the “androgynous” idea people have of NB people is bad? Or that J isn’t really dysphoric, but those enter other kind of discourse.

A-spec: Some of them are straight up villains, tada, now my characters is consider bad. for my aroace characters, I have such a broad variety of them, yet I would deem bad for making some villains or legit close to emotionless.

Queer: much broader spectrum of them, going from good, neutral to villain I guess. But hey, most would find a characters who’s just queer to be bad in the first place.

Like, I know playing only on stereotype is bad, but I make my character 3 dimensional, they are all different and I never play only on that. Alos, it not as if thoe couple of example would be the only queer rep you’d get if I was making a story, I have so many it would be hard to see them as the only rep.

No one can convince me that there is no gay men who’s flamboyante and takes care of his look.

No one can convince me that there is no m-spec folks who are flirty and like to sleep around.

No one can convince me that there is no trans folks who do wear cloths that are more feminine/masculin than their gender.

No one can convince me that there is no enby folks who are not just androgynous with more masc side than fem ones.

No one can convince me that there is no aro folks who like to sleep around.

No one can convince me that there is no aroace who are just bad people.

humans are different and it applies to queer folks. Sure don’t play on stereotype only, but don’t come at me if some do falls under them just because I decided to make one out of ten closer to what would be deem bad.

#queer discourse #lgbtq #queer rep discourse #rant #vent #am tired of seeing if you [enter identity] looks like this [enter overly use stereotype from tv] then your character is bad #or people putting all their attention on one characters being a certain way #while another from the same show is the same ID yet good rep #it like comparing angel dust and vaggie #Angel is deemed a really bad rep yet in the same show you have vaggie who would be deem good lesbian rep #unless now she too is bad

0 notes

clowniconography · 7 years ago

Text

Heyo

for anyone who is having a hard time watching/enjoying dghda after the recent allegations, I thought i’d make a masterpost of pieces of media that are similar! It’s pretty hard to find things that have the exact feel of dghda, but all of these are similar in one way or another!

books

obviously any books/shows/movies/radio dramas involving Douglas Adams

American Gods/pretty much any book or show by neil gaiman–He has a similar leaning towards the supernatural while retaining humor and good character design.

Cloud Atlas– this book has en extremely different aesthetic but follows the same “everything’s connected” idea

the John Dies At The End series/pretty much anything involving David Wong–These books are honestly extremely different and yet extremely similar to dghda, they have a huge spot close to my heart and are good to read if you like sci fi with extremely complicated plots

Howl’s Moving Caste/any books by Diane Wynne Jones–her writing has a very similar feel to Douglas Adams’ books, but for a younger audience.

Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart– Same sort of humour, very witty, and the best plot of any book I’ve ever read, as tight as if not tighter than dghda

shows

The Librarians– another cool show about a group of people from different backgrounds that spans a bunch of different genres and subjects

Pushing Daisies– I’ve never actually watched this one, but I’m told it has an extremely similar aesthetic and main character to dghda

Doctor Who– You Know Why

Preacher– a really cool horror/sci fi/fantasy/etc show that, while not that similar to dghda in it’s themes, has a similar feel of mystery and weird mix of genres!

The Good Place– a comedy that also mixes happy/comedic themes with supernatural/deep ones.

Mob Psycho 100– one of my favorite anime, not all that similar but also has an unwilling/psychic protagonist and a lot of really cool characters.

Stranger Things– Eleven’s background is extremely similar to Dirk’s, and it manages to mix humorous and serious tones in much the same way.

Wyonna Earp– I don’t know a lot about this show but a couple people have suggested it.

podcasts

WTNV– you’re probably familiar to this one, it’s different in a lot of ways but still deals with the mysteries of the universe and has great lgbt rep. The books are pretty great too

The penumbra podcast– this one is one of my favorites and I think it’s kind of underrated, like dghda it stars a detective with a murky past and has amazing queer representation

The Bright Sessions– also contains a group of people with supernatural/esp-related abilities

if you have any other suggestions, please feel free to add! id like to add video games/comics categories so additions are very welcome!

#dirk gently's holistic detective agency #dghda #frenchie.txt #dirk gently season 2 #masterpost

368 notes · View notes

alittledropofheaven · 6 years ago

Link

On the internet, where people become data and popularity is conveniently quantified, it’s easy to learn what a community values most. Twitter embraces celebrities and #brands. Reddit stans for Barack Obama and elaborate pop-culture GIFs. Quora is an asylum of techies questioning their morality and their stock options; its second-most-upvoted answer is a “soul-satisfying” account of a sales bro helping a homeless man.

On the Bodybuilding.com forums, the two most popular threads of all time are not about deadlifts, intermittent fasting, or maintaining motivation. They’re about women. Specifically, women Bodybuilding.com members would “love to pound.” While one thread features pictures of “petite/slim girls” and the other of “athletic girls,” both are an endless stream of lightly Photoshopped near-nudity and predictably lecherous comments. Both have been viewed almost 3 million times. And both are on the lone section of the Bodybuilding.com forums that’s explicitly unrelated to fitness: the Misc.

“Participate at your own risk, some content NSFW,” reads the description of the Misc. on the forums’ homepage. “U Aware?”

The number of people who are Aware, it turns out, is over 16 million. As of January 2018, these members of Bodybuilding.com have made more than 137 million posts on the forums, including 90 million on the Misc. The forums first became active in 2000, a time before Wikipedia and when “Skype” was neither app nor verb. Myspace—Myspace!—didn’t exist until three years later. The Misc., as the predominant section of an internet community with such immense popularity and longevity, has cemented its place near the top of Google’s search results for any query imaginable. To appropriate Rule 34, if it exists, there’s a Misc. thread for it. Online, at least, the Misc. is inescapable.

A cursory scroll through the Misc. reveals what it has in common with the still-popular internet communities it predates, Reddit and 4chan. There are the memes, comics, copypastas, acronyms, and slang recycled endlessly in a digital echo chamber largely devoid of moderation. There are the forum members—Miscers, they call themselves—who post, and post in, intentionally incendiary threads about whether tongue rings scream “cum dumpster” and how “Crossfit is gay,” then fan the flames for entertainment’s sake by doubling down on their inanity. There are moments ofuproarious, absurd, gut-busting idiocy. There are ideology-clarifying usernames (RICHSTRONG, MinisterOfLust, weightsb4dates, WishIWasJawBrah, MericaThatsWhy) and statement-making profile pictures (deliberately titillating yet invariably off-putting abdominal shots, monochromatic selfies, strategically underlit bicep closeups). There are trolls surely seething and/or laughing maniacally, their keystrokes like machine-gun fire, as they launch poorly punctuated ad-hominem attacks and, at their most destructive, encourage people to commit suicide. There are sexists, racists, xenophobes, and homophobes. There is the sense of being in a parochial, patriarchal madhouse where decorum has gone to die.

What emerges, when you spend enough time on the Misc., is a ghoulish portrait of a place that embodies the white, male id currently at the helm of S.S. America. The Misc. is a stone-faced Uncle Sam with Popeye’s forearms and a cocked pistol in each hand. It’s a screeching bald eagle with a foreign Bad Thing in its talons. It’s everything that defines America’s bro culture, magnified and weaponized. But it’s deeper than that.

“Bro-merican” culture is largely defined by the stratification of power and status, both real and imagined. So, too, is Bodybuilding.com, where a power imbalance is embedded in the structure and design of the site’s forums. Unlike on 4chan, where all posts are anonymous and ephemeral, or on Reddit, where the grand sum of a user’s upvotes has little value, Bodybuilding.com members’ reputation points, or “reps,” mediate and deeply influence community interactions. While reps are similar to Facebook likes—weighted such that getting either “repped” or “negged” by a user with hundreds of thousands of reps will drastically affect your own rep count—they function as the Misc.’s de facto currency. Your rep count is displayed next to your every post. It’s like your bank account balance flashing on your forehead whenever you speak.

Bullying by those with power (high-rep Miscers) and obsequiousness by those without it (low-rep Miscers) is rampant. Getting negged by a high-rep Miscer means potentially becoming a “red,” a user with negative reputation points, displayed beneath your username as a gradated red bar as jarring as a stop sign. If you’re a red, you’re a second-class citizen. Your posts might as well come with a disclosure: “I’m a worthless idiot. Please listen to absolutely nothing I say.”

The opinions and caprices of high-rep “green” Miscers, then, dictate the forum’s personality. Any Miscer brave enough to post contrarian ideas—including, and especially, those that are liberal and feminist—is often negged into oblivion. Bad joke misses the mark? Negged. Sincere comment comes off as sarcastic? Negged. The Misc. is an echo chamber in which “greens” are given a megaphone and a gun.

But in contrast with Reddit and 4chan, the Misc. has been filtered through and molded by bodybuilding subculture, a set of beliefs and customs rooted in the many manifestations of stereotypical masculinity: egotism, aggression, hypersexuality, über-competitiveness, entitlement. Insecurity, intolerance, misogyny. Bodybuilding, after all, is not about functional strength but about vanity and surface appearances, how masculinity is projected to the world. It fosters narcissism by trading in cosmetic superlatives: the highest bicep peaks, the most vascular calves, the most extreme V-shaped back.

The Misc. applies this dog-eat-dog frame of mind to every topic. Everything is a masculinity- or dick-measuring contest. Including, of course, the actual dick-measuring contests, because Miscers are nothing if not cripplingly aware of their own inadequate manhood. Swears and slurs are censored but their creatively misspelled phonetic workarounds are not, which makes for a forum full of “kunts” talking “chit” and menacingly telling each other to “pepper your angus” (prepare your anus). The most recurrent insults all concern perceived masculinity, or lack thereof. “U mad bro?,” a popular retort, juxtaposes one-of-the-guys slang with the notion that showing emotion means demonstrating debilitating weakness. A real bro doesn’t get mad, he only gets testosterone-fueled revenge.

Near the bottom of the masculinity totem pole are “low-T beta manlets”—that is, short, shy, effeminate guys. Lower down are “phaggots,” a word that gets tossed around the Misc. like salt at a Sichuan restaurant. Lest any Miscer think you’re a “phucking phaggot,” all posts about personal care, fashion, home decoration, or how to look like a certain actor/model/bodybuilder are appended with “no homo.” Yet shaky Misc. logic dictates that even if you’re a gay man, there’s still someone you genetically out-alpha and who is, therefore, below you: a woman.

While the entire internet is teeming with horny men whose dark loneliness and insecurity wears the cloak of misogyny, they seem to be especially vocal, and in especially high numbers, on the Misc. Every other thread is a depressing question (“Think she’s faithful to him?”) or a charged statement (“Drunk Sex > Sober Sex”) about women—their bodies, hitting on them, their innate tendency to cheat—and sex—where to find it, how to go “no contact” after having it, why she is fucking him.

The Misc.’s ties to PUA (pickup artist) forums and Reddit’s /r/TheRedPill, a perniciously misogynist, anti-feminist Reddit community dedicated to “discussing sexual strategy in a culture increasingly lacking a positive identity for men,” are as well documented as they are unsurprising. One of PUA’s most frequent suggestions is to acquire “inner game,” or self-confidence through self-improvement. Miscers, being on what is ultimately a bodybuilding forum, have inverted that mantra—they’re going from the outside in. Look good, feel good.

Other elements of the manosphere, from cries of societal misandry to sexual techniques like kino escalation and shit-testing, permeate the Misc. All women are “thirsty sloots” to be conquered, their emotions and physical well-being to be toyed with for internet strangers’ entertainment. When, to the forum’s delight, a Miscer posts about a sexual conquest in lurid detail—a surefire way to rack up the reps—the verbs employed are barbaric: “took down,” “smashed,” “hit.” To have “oneitis,” or an obsessive and unrequited crush on one woman, is to be afflicted with a masculinity-destroying emotional disease, one that can be cured, naturally, by sexually subjugating another woman. Regardless of whether a Miscer is successful or is rejected in the pursuit of sex, the response is the same: “Sloots gonna sloot.”

Despite the Misc.’s obsession with women, it has the latent homoeroticism you’d expect of a website devoted to a male-dominated sport in which bronzed, muscled competitors get smeared with oil and put on thongs before preening onstage in front of other men. This is no more obvious than when discussing a “Chad.” While there is a 5,000-post thread asking what, exactly, defines a Chad, the consensus is that he’s shorthand for a tall, built, strong-jawed, big-dicked, thick-haired, financially successful, athletic, confident, funny, sociable man who, because of these eminently desirable qualities, has his pick of the XX-chromosome litter. You look at a Chad and say, “This guy fucks.” (The prototypical Miscer might be a “Sheldon,” minus any TV-driven connotations of high-level intelligence.) Rob “Gronk” Gronkowski is a stone-cold Chad. Chad Johnson of The Bachelor is a Chad, and not just in name. It’s no accident that “Chad” is one of the most generically white and straight names imaginable, nor that archetypal Chads are nearly always white and straight. The etymological origin of the name Chad is the Welsh word cad, meaning “battle,” a fact that would surely delight Miscers to no end.

The Misc.’s resident Chad is an Australian bodybuilder known by his Bodybuilding.com handle, Zyzz. In early 2010, Zyzz began regularly detailing his “aesthetic” lifestyle on the Misc. As the so-called and self-proclaimed “king of aesthetics,” and with the zingy catchphrases “U mirin’ brah?” and “U jelly?,” Zyzz became the preeminent demigod of the Misc., where he and his “Aesthetics Crew,” acolytes similarly lacking in shirts, body fat, and social grace, were #bodygoals and #squadgoals come to life. Pictures and videosof Zyzz fist-pumping shirtless in public, wrapping his tanned arms low around the waists of nipple-pastied ravers at festivals, adopting a Herculean pose while standing in a shopping cart—these were the icons of the Misc. religion. When Zyzz died of a heart attack in 2011 at the age of twenty-two, his death became the sixth-most-searched death-related topic in Australia that year. His Facebook page, still regularly updated, has over 400,000 likes.

Zyzz’s masculinity showed itself in vain but harmless demonstrations of grandiosity, but other headline-making Miscers have expressed theirs through violence and morally indefensible acts. Gable Tostee first became a Misc. star by posting screenshots of his Tinder and text conversations with women he “rooted,” or had sex with; he entered Misc. lore after creating an ill-advised thread titled “Regarding the balcony tragedy” in the wake of news that one of his Tinder dates had been found dead from a fall from his apartment balcony. (Tostee was later acquitted of murder and manslaughter.) A Miscer known as YaBoyDave secretly filmed himself having sex with women—“whale-smashing,” in Misc. parlance—and posted the videos on the Misc.; he served 10 months in jail and is now a registered sex offender.

Still worse was Luka Magnotta, a wannabe model whose desperately misguided attempts at fame led him to asphyxiate kittens on camera and, later, live stream the brutal murder and dismemberment of a Chinese student while music from American Psycho played in the background; he was arrested at an internet café in Berlin, alternately surfing for pornography and reading news stories about himself, and it was later revealed that he’d posted on the Misc. Most infamously, Elliot Rodger, the Santa Barbara shooter, was active on the Misc., starting threads like “Why do girls hate me so much?” and “I’m tired of seeing losers with hot chicks.” In the latter thread, he recalled being “disturbed and offended” by seeing a “short, ugly Indian guy driving a Honda Civic” with a “hot blonde girl in his passenger seat.” It’s the bro’s classic sense of entitlement: Why should someone less masculine than me have what I know I deserve?

Miscers reaching toxic masculinity’s most violent nadir are mercifully few and far between. Yet the obvious connection between these people is one shared by the vast majority of the Misc. They’re young, white men whose social and sex lives are marked by absence or humiliating rejection, and their worldviews have likely been shaped by those failures. Rodger, for one, admitted in his autobiographical manifesto to having “never even kissed a girl.” He was an “incel,” or involuntarily celibate. “Not getting any sex,” he wrote, “is what will shape the very foundation of my miserable youth.”

A pervasive negative sense of self, of disappointment about one’s past and simultaneous anxiety and hopelessness for one’s future, is to the Misc. what the iceberg was to the Titanic: visible if you know to look for it, destructive if you don’t, and lurking below the surface all the same

The running joke about Miscers is that they’re all sad, awkward, forever-alone virgins who don’t lift and are on the only non-fitness-oriented section of a bodybuilding website because they can’t get their shit together. It’s revealing that one of the Misc.’s celebrities—there’s a 24,000-word condensed version of his “saga” on a fan-made website dedicated to him—is a weird, often clueless Everyman. He’s neither egregiously out of shape nor conventionally “aesthetic,” and his videos show a distinct lack of social awareness, a trait cultivated, presumably, by a life spent behind a computer screen and under a barbell.

Users of other Bodybuilding.com sections and other internet communities entirely propagate this idea of the Misc. as a cesspool of beta males with hopelessly futile aspirations of being alpha. “They have to be some of the most insecure dudes out there,” a Hypebeast forum user said of Miscers. On another forum, a user wrote that the Misc. is “filled with people [who] make fun of autism, while at the same time they themselves complain about their jobs, women, etc.”

More often, however, the call is coming from inside the house. Miscers reveal their vulnerabilities and problems in earnest with critically self-aware, self-deprecating posts. There are countless threads about “beta” topics like being a virgin (a Google search of site:bodybuilding.com “virgin” yields nearly 70,000 results), undergoing hair loss, not knowing how to normally interact with women, and giving up entirely. The Misc.’sRelationships and Relationships Help sub-forum would be more aptly titled “Sex: Help.” The “Depression Discussion and Support Thread Part III” thread is “stickied” by moderators at the top of the Misc., indicating that it resonates with the community; “Part II,” before it got so long that a new thread had to be created, had 10,000 posts and 1.6 million views. After the two aforementioned pornographic threads of “petite/slim girls” and “athletic girls,” the most-viewed Misc. threads are one about “Beta/cringe” moments of social awkwardness and another that documents the 350-pound weight-loss journey of a Miscer named Wetbreasts. For many Miscers, undoubtedly, browsing those threads is either motivational or like looking in a mirror. Or both.

It might appear counterintuitive that unconfident, sex-deprived, socially awkward young men would congregate—by the millions—on a bodybuilding website. But that paradox is precisely what’s responsible for the Misc.’s enduring allure.

It goes like this: A young guy thinks that improving his body will improve himself, that lifting weights will make him more confident, which will make girls like him more, which will make him happier, which will get him laid. And so on. In search of guidance, he finds Bodybuilding.com, where, after analyzing fat-to-ripped or skinny-to-jacked transformation stories, he ends up on the most popular part of the website: the Misc. But in the Misc. he finds a different kind of self-help: a vibrant, active community of like-minded guys. Guys who’ve felt inadequate and lonely and somehow less than manly, who’ve struggled with women and friends and money and body image, who’ve laughed at internet jokes and self-referential image macros that no one found funny, much less comprehensible, in real life. With a newfound sense of solidarity, this young guy wades deeper into the Misc., a community that gets him, his worldview increasingly shaped by this bodybuilding subculture, his mind warped by the community’s devil-may-care, “LOL, nothing matters” ethos.

It’s this last quality of the Misc. that Miscers themselves most readily use to characterize the forum. They see the stupidity of getting worked up over little green internet squares. They don’t take themselves seriously—it’s a motley crew of dudes on a bodybuilding site, bro—so nor should anyone else. Their attitude, one adopted from the bro culture with which they’re intertwined, is predicated on actions not having consequences. Break shit and someone else will pay for it. Get blind drunk, scream offensive things in public, and your boys will carry you home. Sexually harass or assault a woman, more than one woman, dozens of women, and you’ll still be revered, promoted, elected. You’re just “bro-ing out,” man, be easy, be chill, have a beer, have a protein shake.

“bro that forum is a fucking laugh man, just need a sense of humour,” a Hypebeast forum user wrote, in a thread titled, “The misc section of the bodybuilding forums is full of clowns.” If you’re young, white, and male, with a sense of humor shaped by the internet and a sense of privilege shaped by, well, everything else, the Misc.’s “clowns” can certainly be hilarious. But the further you are from that in-group, the more those clowns start to look like a horde of disturbing, misogynistic Pennywises.

Zyzz was once your standard insecure teenager with bad hair and spaghetti-thin arms. “I remember feeling like a little bitch when I was out with girls, walking next to them and feeling the same size as them,” he said in an interview. Becoming “aesthetic” hid a profound insecurity. His no-fucks-given attitude hid a fierce desire to be wanted.

Miscers see only the mirage. To them, Zyzz was living, walking, flexing proof that an average guy could eventually open the door to the HBB-filled alpha-male kingdom by gaining confidence and an aesthetically pleasing body. But the king is no more. And not every guy in search of personal fulfillment finds the key to that door by picking up a barbell. Not every young, white male who’d otherwise troll Reddit or 4chan becomes, through bodybuilding, the type of bro who doesn’t spend time on internet forums because he’s too busy crushing it, whatever “it” is, in real life. The Misc.—an online fraternity of the average and awkward, a safe space of the resentful and lustful and doubtful—is for the bros still searching.

#masculinity #toxic masculinity #bro culture #sexism #misogyny #male insecurity #article #bodybuilding.com #misc

1 note · View note

patriotsnet · 3 years ago

Text

Are There Any Republicans Running For President Besides Trump

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/are-there-any-republicans-running-for-president-besides-trump/

Are There Any Republicans Running For President Besides Trump

Justices Prepare For Major Lgbt Rights Case As Trump Threatens To Bring Election To Supreme Court

Trump Rallies Republicans For Ex-Rival ‘Beautiful Ted’ Cruz In Texas

Justice Amy Coney Barrett is due to confront her first major arguments at the Supreme Court on Wednesday morning, even as President Donald Trump is threatening to bring a case over the previous nights election to the panel.

Trump said in an early morning address to supporters that well be going to the U.S. Supreme Court, we want all voting to stop. The president did not provide more details, and the nature of such a possible case was unclear. The top court generally hears appeals of lower court decisions.

Trump had for weeks suggested he would contest any outcome that was not a victory and pressed to get Barrett, his third Supreme Court nominee, confirmed before Election Day. NBC News has not called the race, and votes continue to be tabulated.

Despite the prospect of a contested election, the court has a normal if important day of business scheduled. At 10 a.m. ET, the justices will hear arguments in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, a major LGBT rights case.

The dispute concerns a Roman Catholic adoption agency that is arguing that Philadelphias decision to exclude it from the citys foster care system because it will not work with same-sex households is unconstitutional. Philadelphia has said it is simply enforcing its laws against discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation.

Tucker Higgins

Sen Ted Cruz Of Texas

Cruz, 50, could start out a 2024 election campaign in a much stronger position than his first run in 2016, when he came in second. Its not uncommon for Republicans to select the recent runner up to later be their nominee which is what happened to Mitt Romney, John McCain, Bob Dole and Ronald Reagan.

A lot has happened to Cruz since 2016. For one, he became an ardent Trump supporter and grew a beard. But Cruz has also learned lessons from his first presidential run. Should he run again in the 2024 election, hed be a much more experienced campaigner with a more finely tuned message, higher name ID, and a carefully maintained donor base, one Republican strategist said.

Cruz has also faced backlash for objecting to President Joe Bidens Electoral College win. Following the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, seven Democrats asked the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate Cruz and Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., for amplifying claims of election fraud that led to violence. In Texas, the Republican Accountability Project paid for 100 billboards calling on Cruz to resign. Cruz also angered some close to him, like a longtime friend and former campaign chair who denounced him, and his chief spokesperson, who resigned, according to the Dallas Morning News.

Why Are Republicans So Afraid Of Voters

There is no both sides do it when it comes to intentionally keeping Americans away from the polls.

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstandingvalues. It is separate from the newsroom.

As of Sunday afternoon, more than 93 million Americans had cast a ballot in the November elections. Thats about two-thirds of the total number of people who voted in 2016, and there are still two days until Election Day.

This is excellent news. In the middle of a global pandemic that has taken the lives of nearly a quarter of a million Americans, upended the national economy and thrown state election procedures into turmoil, there were reasonable concerns that many people would not vote at all. The numbers to date suggest that 2020 could see record turnout.

While celebrating this renewed citizen involvement in Americas political process, dont lose sight of the bigger, and darker, picture. For decades, Americans have voted at depressingly low rates for a modern democracy. Even in a good year, more than one-third of all eligible voters dont cast a ballot. In a bad year, that number can approach two-thirds.

Why are so many Americans consistently missing in action on Election Day?

For many, its a choice. They are disillusioned with government, or they feel their vote doesnt matter because politicians dont listen to them anyway.

Also Check: Republican Shutdown

Tight Election Adds To Retailers Uncertainty During Already Uncertain Holidays

Retailers have faced nothing short of whiplash this year. And now, one day after Election Day, they face another threat during the all-important holiday season: Americans who may be distracted or anxious as they await results. That could deal a blow to consumer confidence, when retailers would rather shoppers to be centered around gift-giving and decking their homes with holiday decor.

Greg Portell, lead partner in the global consumer practice of Kearney, a strategy and management consulting firm, said the delayed results will absolutely pause consumer spending.

Consumers have been on a great run of spending coming out of the lockdowns, he said. We were looking at a great holiday season. All of that is on pause until we see some clarity on who is going to win.

If history is a guide, at least a temporary drop in spending is likely, according to a recent survey from Adobe Analytics. Adobe found online sales dropped 14% the day after the 2016 election, when Donald Trump;was elected to office. They dropped 6% the day after the 2018 midterms, the firms research showed.

Lauren Thomas and Melissa Repko

Will Texas Republicans Ever Fight For Limited Government

Sometimes when I look around at what Republicans are doing, I dont really know what to do with myself.

Just think about how Republicans were in charge of the U.S. Senate and House and the White House for two years of the first two years of President Trumps term. What did they accomplish? Not much.

Then, what about the last, what is it now, 17 years of Republicans being in charge of all Texas government; the Texas Senate, the Texas House, the Texas Supreme Court, the governors office, all the state agencies? I mean, it is all Republicans running the state yet the accomplishments that have taken place are just not where they ought to be. And you have to ask yourself why.

I think we can find a partial answer to this in an article I ran across the other day about the threatened veto by President Trump on the defense bill. He has said hes going to veto the defense appropriations bill unless Congress puts a provision in it taking away the liability shield from all these high tech companies, such as Facebook and Twitter, that have been seeking to undermine our elections, laws, and democracy.

They lobbied for this provision in law because they said they were going to be neutral providers of content. They were just going to be platforms that people could use and put out whatever information they wanted to.

Recommended Reading: What Did Republicans Gain From The Compromise Of 1877?

In Georgia Runoffs Dems Are Running Hard On Health Care Republicans Not So Much

Why are these elections so important?

In determining control of the Senate, the results will put one party or the other in charge of the legislative agenda. A Democratic sweep would result in a 50-50 Senate with soon-to-be Vice President Kamala Harris being the tiebreaking vote in the chamber.

While there still is a 60-vote threshold to get legislation through, it would be much easier to confirm Bidens Cabinet picks and judicial appointments than if Democrats were in the minority.

Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, who would be presumed to be Senate majority leader if Democrats took control of the chamber, would be in charge of what goes to the floor, including, if it came to it, items like doing away with the filibuster entirely or adding justices to the Supreme Court.

If Republicans won, though, GOP leader Mitch McConnell would be able to largely thwart much of Bidens agenda.

Former Secretary Of State Mike Pompeo

If the 2024 election turns into a foreign policy debate, the 57-year-old Pompeo is in a strong position with his background as former secretary of state and CIA director.

During Pompeos recent speech at the Westside Conservative Club in Urbandale, Iowa, he gave a preview of some of the lines that might end up in his presidential stump speech. He said hes spent more time with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un than any other American, including basketball star Dennis Rodman, and talked about the threat he sees from China. His mention of the U.S. moving its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem during his tenure was met with applause.

Before serving in Trumps Cabinet, Pompeo blasted then-candidate Trump as an authoritarian. Pompeo made the remarks the day of the Kansas caucus in 2016, quoting Trump saying that if he told a soldier to commit a war crime, they would go and do it. Pompeo said the U.S. had spent 7½ years with an authoritarian president who ignored the Constitution, referencing former President Barack Obama, and we dont need four more years of that.

Pompeo served three full terms representing Kansas in the U.S. House before joining the Trump administration. He and his wife, Susan, have one child. He graduated from the U.S. Military Academy and Harvard Law and served in the U.S. Army.

Don’t Miss: Who Taxes More Republicans Or Democrats

Trump Campaign Seeks To Get Involved In Supreme Court Fight Over Pennsylvania Ballots

President Donald Trumps reelection campaign asked the Supreme Court to let it join the fight at the court over Pennsylvanias absentee ballot deadlines.

Jay Sekulow, an attorney for the president, wrote in a filing submitted to the justices that Trump has a direct, concrete stake in the outcome of the case that was distinct from the interests of the state lawmakers and Republican Party of Pennsylvania that initiated the suit.

In the case, Republicans are suing over the Pennsylvania Supreme Courts extension of the deadline for elections officials to receive absentee ballots in order for them to be counted. The state court extended the deadline to Nov. 6 from the previous deadline of Tuesday.

The Supreme Court rejected the Republican challenge in a 4-4 split on Oct. 19. On Oct. 28, the justices refused to decide a second GOP challenge before Election Day but left open the possibility of a ruling favoring Republicans after Nov. 3.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett was confirmed onto the bench too late to weigh in on either decision but her presence on the court is thought to favor the Republican challenge moving forward.

The case at the Supreme Court is just one of the many legal battles that the Trump campaign is pursuing in the wake of Tuesdays election.

Trump has claimed for weeks that he might not accept defeat and would challenge a loss in court regardless of the circumstances.

Tucker Higgins

Consider Candidates Track Record And Party Service In Allocating Debate Slots

2020 Election – 5 Republicans Who Might Run For President (Why Donald Trump will be the GOP Nominee)

For a variety of legal and political reasons, the parties authority over their own debates is constrained.44 Yet debates are very important for introducing voters to the partys candidates. They are an essential aspect of the winnowing process. Selecting invitees is particularly challenging when the candidate field is large, as became evident in the Republican nominating cycle four years ago, when the candidates were so numerous that those who fell below a national poll threshold of 3.5% had to attend an undercard debate instead of the main attraction. One consequence was to favor a reality-television celebrity over veterans like Sen. Lindsey Graham, an expert on foreign affairs who had served South Carolina in the Congress since 1993. That seemed shortsighted and unreasonable at the time, and it seems all the more so in hindsight.

You May Like: Why Do Republicans Still Back Trump

Abraham Lincoln: Campaigns And Elections

The Campaign and Election of 1860:

Going into the presidential election of 1860, the issue of slavery had heated the nation to the boiling point. How were the political parties going to maintain unity in the midst of such intense sectional conflict?

Winning Republican Support

After Abraham Lincoln’s defeat in the race for the U.S. Senate, he spent the next sixteen months speaking and traveling all over the North making campaign speeches for numerous Republican candidates. His style avoided the wordy moral rhetoric of the abolitionists in favor of clear and simple logic. Lincoln was successful in laying the groundwork for his candidacy, since by the spring of 1860, many politicians were indebted to Lincoln for his support. Furthermore, because he was out of office and new to national prominence, he had offended no one in particular within the party. Most importantly, Lincoln had established a solid group of campaign managers and supporters who came to the Republican convention prepared to deal, maneuver, and line up votes for Lincoln. His chief opponent, and the man who was sure that he had the nomination in his pocket, was William H. Seward of New York. However, his front-runner status proved to be his greatest obstacle in that it opened him to political criticism even before the convention delegates had met.

Democratic Disunity

Constitutional Union Party

White-Hot Campaign Trail

Impact of 1860 Election

The Campaign and Election of 1864

Vicious Campaign

Political Realities

Confidence Interval: Republicans Will Win Back Congress In 2022

natesilver: Good pick.

nrakich: Yeah, Pence has led almost every 2024 poll so far that hasnt included Trump. It goes back to what I said earlier about name recognition a lot of the time, the early front-runner wins and you dont have to overthink it.;;

geoffrey.skelley: Pence was my No. 2 pick for these reasons. Plus, vice presidents who run for the presidency have a pretty good history of winning nominations! Think of Joe Biden, Al Gore, George H.W. Bush, Walter Mondale. As Nathaniel wrote back in 2019, its often been a successful stepping stone to the presidency.

alex: Not bad, Sarah! But to play devils advocate: If Trump doesnt run, but the GOP is still the party of Trump in 2022 or 2024, would someone who didnt overturn the election go far?

sarah: Excellent point, Alex, which brings me to my second pick. Pence isnt the most charismatic, and as has been pointed out, the idea that the GOP moves in a more moderate direction might not be the direction the party is interested in heading in. And while I know some like Geoffrey are convinced that Trump is gonna pull a Cleveland and run again as I said up top, I dont buy it I think Republicans are going to be OK with someone else at the top of the ticket as long as they stick to Trumps agenda. And if Im right, who better than Trumps eldest son, the heir apparent?

Its grievance politics 2.0 that maybe has the potential to win back Republicans in the suburbs.

geoffrey.skelley: Oh man. DJTJ?

Also Check: What Percentage Of Republicans Are White

Dire Rhetoric Used To Describe Democratic Political Opponents Whats At Stake In Country

During the second impeachment trial, the core of the House impeachment managersâ case was this: Trumpâs extreme rhetoric about the presidential election being âriggedâ incited a mob to storm the U.S. Capitol.

Every Democratic senator and seven Republican senators bought the argument, voting to convict Trump. In both the House and Senate, even Republicans who did not vote to impeach or convict Trump, respectively, criticized his rhetoric and actions surrounding the election.

But at CPAC, while there were few mentions of Jan. 6, several speakersâ rhetoric was similarly inflammatory as they described political opponents in extreme terms and painted a dire picture of a nation led by Democrats.

During his speech, freshman Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., delivered a line eerily similar to one Trump gave on Jan. 6, when the former president said, âIf you donât fight like hell, youâre not going to have a country anymore.â

âIf we sit on the sidelines, we will not have a country to inherit. If we do not get involved and say that it is our duty to make sure that our country is responsible, that our country doesnât take away our liberties, then my friends, we will lose this nation,â Cawthorn said. âThe Democrats, my opponents and adversaries on the other side are brutal and vicious and they are trying to take away all of our rights.â

Democrats Weigh Next Options As Senate Republicans Filibuster Voting Rights Bill

They dont even want to debate it because theyre afraid. They want to deny the right to vote, make it harder to vote for so many Americans, and they dont want to talk about it, Schumer, D-N.Y., said on Tuesday. There is a rot a rot at the center of the modern Republican party. Donald Trumps big lie has spread like a cancer and threatens to envelop one of Americas major political parties.

Vice President Kamala Harris, who has been tasked by the White House to work on voting rights, presided over the Tuesday debate in the Senate.

The legislation is cosponsored by 49 Democratic members of the Senate. The one holdout, Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., said Tuesday hed vote to begin debate after receiving assurances that the Senate would consider a compromise version that he has said he can support.

Today I will vote YES to move to debate this updated voting legislation as a substitute amendment to ensure every eligible voter is able to cast their ballot and participate in our great democracy, Manchin said in a statement, while adding that he doesnt support the bill as written.

Well keep talking, he said after the vote. You cant give up. You really cant.

Schumer said the vote was the starting gun, not the finish line in the battle over ballot access and vowed that Democrats will not let it die.

He told reporters on Tuesday that the state-led system held up well in the 2020 election.

It has been rejected by top Republicans as a nonstarter.

You May Like: Will Any Republicans Vote To Remove Trump

0 notes

markjsaterfiel66 · 6 years ago

Text

Enginursday: A Beginner's Guide to Sourcing from Alibaba

Alibaba is the Wild West of product sourcing - a freewheeling, international bazaar offering low-cost bulk parts and products that range from the mundane to the, well, bizarre. Here, the risks are high but the potential benefits manifold. You may seek your fortune reselling low-cost goods (or finding low-cost parts for your widget), but you may find yourself flim-flammed, hoodwinked and yes, even bamboozled. But oh, the rush when your diligence pays off!

It seems excited.

I will begin with an important disclaimer: at this stage in my procurement career (and in SparkFun’s history), sourcing from Alibaba is basically the last resort. SparkFun has worked hard over the years to develop a list of trusted vendors. Many of these companies have locally-based representatives, knowledgeable sales contacts and field application engineers we can meet with face-to-face to discuss all our latest needs and quirks. Others are vendors in China, Taiwan and other countries whom we discovered via Alibaba eons ago, and have since built long-standing relationships with.

If you already have a supplier with whom you have an established, trusting relationship, love and cherish them all the days of your life. Understand also that their capabilities may extend far beyond what’s reflected in their catalog or line card. If there’s something specific you need, ask your existing contacts. At the very least, they may be able to provide you with a referral. I also highly recommend ThomasNet as an alternative starting point for finding reliable, quality sources for components, hardware, equipment, you-name-it.

That said, onto the fun. If you’re starting from scratch as we once did, or you simply like to walk on the wild side, you may be ready to plunge into the wacky world of Alibaba. Let’s begin with the search bar.

Don't look at my search history.

This part is pretty straightforward. Here, you can search for parts by keyword or toggle the little arrow to search for particular suppliers. As with any search, you’ll want to find that sweet spot between specificity and generality. It’s also important to know what that thing you’re looking for is called! That seems obvious enough, but keep in mind that there are different synonyms out there for the same type of product (e.g. “coin cell” vs. “button cell”), and businesses in other countries might have different naming conventions than you’re used to.

You can also browse items by market (at left) if you have a vague idea of the type of things you’re looking for and just want to peruse the marketplace. There’s also a new image search feature (the camera icon at the right). As it turns out, you can even search for products based on the current status of your life:

Time to hit the gym!

Once you’ve honed in on a thing you might want to buy in quantity, you’ll see on the product page a handy little pricing scale, info about shipping charges and lead time.

How many horse masks will you require today?

Great, right? Well, ignore it. IGNORE IT ALL. It could be accurate, sure, or it could be that the supplier just put random information in there because honestly-who-really-knows. If you want to know how much the thing costs, ask.

But first, try to learn a little about the supplier by clicking on the supplier name at right and perusing their company page. Alibaba is far less Mos Eisley Cantina-ish than it once was. They have a variety of verifications and certifications to help you sort out the legit from the sketchy, although there’s always some risk regardless. I like to see a high customer satisfaction rate, “Gold Supplier” status (multiple years is always a plus) and a decent rate of response.

Lookin' good.

Once you’ve achieved that nice, warm, fuzzy feeling, feel free to message away. At the bottom of the page you’ll see the box you can use to send a message to the supplier. I cannot stress enough how important it is to keep this first message as simple as possible. I’ve found that I’m far less likely to get a response if I include multiple questions, customization requests, lists of products, sample inquiries, etc. I know, it’s hard to imagine that somewhere a sales rep is perusing their inbox and smashing that delete button every time a message is more than three sentences long, but there it is. Here is the basic template of what I send:

Dear Mr/Ms [rep name], Hello, this is [name] with [company name]. Please quote me for [quantity] pcs of your [product name or part number]. Thanks and kind regards, [name] [email address]

That’s it! This is not to imply that Alibaba suppliers won’t send you samples, customize their product, give you quotes for multiple pricing tiers and multiple products, discuss terms, etc. This simple first email jus gets the conversation going, and you can feel free to move on to all those subjects and more once the wheel has begun turning. Alibaba has a messenger feature, but I always include my email in the signature of the first message to emphasize that I’m okay with them emailing me directly. Personally, I prefer to communicate this way, but to each their own. If you do include your email, you will eventually get spammed, so be ready. You can also make a “business card” on Alibaba, which includes your contact information, and you can choose whether to share it or not with each message you send.

Yes, there is such a thing as too much squid.

You may find you’re not satisfied with a quote or minimum order quantity (MOQ). $1,400 per ton of giant squid tentacles may be more than you are willing to pay, or perhaps you only require 10 tons of them instead of 25. Again, ask away. Alibaba reps often have room to haggle. If you have other quotes or retail pricing to show them for comparison, go for it. Just don’t be a jerk about it. Consider what you might be able to offer them to make it worth their while.

If an MOQ is higher than you’re willing to commit to, it doesn’t hurt to see if the supplier has some flexibility there, too. Maybe they can lower it if you commit to purchasing multiple different products (giant squid eyeballs?). You might also consider committing to multiple smaller orders spaced out over the course of a year, assuming you’re confident in your volume projections. If you have a slew of questions, I recommend putting them in a numbered list to avoid important details getting lost in a big block of text.

I always request at least one sample before agreeing to purchase an item in quantity. Usually, suppliers with whom you do not have an existing relationship will expect you to pay for the sample, and that’s quite understandable. Sometimes they’ll just request that you cover the shipping. I usually ask them to send an invoice with a PayPal ID/email, but you can also pay directly via Alibaba. It’s important when requesting a sample (as with a full order quantity) to confirm what it is you’ll be receiving before committing to it. Some product pages display multiple products, or have multiple versions of a single product available with varying specs. Requesting a datasheet, manual, or any other supporting documentation is crucial.

This may require some vetting.

Once you’ve received, evaluated and approved a sample, you may be ready to commit to a full order. I won’t dive too far down the rabbit hole of payment terms, but most Alibaba suppliers will expect money up front, often via bank wire transfer (“T/T”) or PayPal, at least for your first order. Be wary of Western Union, as it offers relatively little protection against scams.

Alibaba also offers its own Alibaba Secure Payment platform. I haven’t personally used it for more than small dollar (usually sample) transactions, but it does offer a path for disputing transactions. You will also want to work out your shipping method and terms with the supplier. That is yet another topic that could be a post unto itself.

No, we don't make scooters.

A final word of caution: be wary of copyright, trademark and patent infringement. Even companies that are generally open source still aren’t exactly thrilled with companies impersonating their brand. It’s one thing to build off an existing design, but it’s another thing entirely to copy it and slap another’s logo on there. Knockoffs tend to hide quality and reliability problems behind the mask of others’ hard work and diligence. And they leave the real companies’ support personnel scrambling to field questions about products that end up having nothing to do with them. So once again, don’t be a jerk.

Moreover, should you choose to be a jerk nonetheless (or inadvertently stumble into jerkhood), customs often stops shipments of knocked off products, and you as a reseller are potentially liable for the things you choose to put on the market. Some violations are harder to spot than others. Did you know you can trademark a vague color combination? Well, neither did we!

Which leads me to another thing: educate yourself on product compliance issues (RoHS, CE, FCC, Prop 65, etc.), export restrictions, etc., or consult with someone who can get you on track in that vein. There’s a whole prairie full of rabbit holes there.

Anyway, if you want to source on Alibaba, just remember the five Ds:

1) Don’t take anything for granted 2) Documentation, documentation, documentation 3) Don’t be a jerk 4) Do do do due diligence 5) Dkeep it simple

And here is my Comprehensive List of Things Not to Buy on Alibaba:

ICs (take our word for it)

Uranium (this happened)

Human hair (because yikes)

Endangered species

Stuff that will get you sued

Things you otherwise can’t legally resell

Bulk mayonnaise (I mean why)

Doll heads (self-explanatory)

This cannot be unseen.

Be careful out there, folks. Take my timeless wisdom into consideration, trust your instincts and you will (probably?) do just fine. If you have any questions, please feel free to leave a comment and I will emerge from my meditation cave to reply as soon as the Alibaba oracle bestows her answers upon me. Happy hunting!

comments | comment feed

0 notes

fcklifeex · 8 years ago

Text

Remember the Name - Chapter 2

oo2

Hazel

Around 3am arrived at the hotel for the show in Dallas tomorrow. I knew I'd be paying for it in the morning but after two weeks non-stop on the road, I needed a few days off to just be with the family and get some much needed sleep in my own bed.

Pulling the rental into the parking lot, I grabbed my luggage and walked to the front desk where an employee waited with a smile.

“Hi, i’m Hazel. I called earlier about my flight arriving late.” I said, sitting my carry on bag up on its wheels and resting my duffle on the floor so i could pull my wallet out from the pocket of my Hoodie.

“Ahh, Ms. Decker. My manager told me you’d be coming late. No worries, I’ll just need an ID and a card on file.” He said, typing my name into their computer.

I nodded, handing over my ID along with a card. While he entered in my information, I took out my phone, looking for any emails from Stephanie regarding tomorrow’s staff meeting. Before each show, corporate liked to bring everyone in for a meeting to make sure we knew our time slots and allotted times for practice before letting us go to catering and maybe hit the gym. Apparently today/tomorrow’s would be at 8am.

“Fuck me.” I muttered under my breath.

It was already 3:30 and if I was lucky, I’d get 4 hours before I had to be up and ready.

“Is there anywhere I can get a beer before bed?” I asked him as he handed me my cards back.

“I’m afraid not at this time, ma’am but there is a stocked mini-fridge in your room with a few other liquors. You’ll be in room 402.” He said, handing me a room key.

“Thanks.” I nodded, throwing my bag over my shoulder and pulling my carry on into the elevators down the hall.

“Hold the doors!” I heard from the hallway, followed by hurried footsteps just as I pushed the button for my floor.

“Shit.” I said, putting my arm in between the doors to hold them from closing all the way.

The footsteps got closer until Seth jumped through them. With a sweat soaked workout tank and basketball shorts, he inattentively thanked me as he pushed the already lit button to the fourth floor.

“Oh, shit!” He said when he finally noticed me. “Hey, you just getting in?”

“Yeah.” I nodded towards my things. “Took a late flight out. Just wanted to spend some time in my own bed. Hadn’t been home in a few weeks.”

“I get that.” He chuckled.

“Why are you up this late anyway?” I asked as the doors opened to my floor, the both of us stepping out.

“Got in a workout, couldn’t sleep. You on this floor too?” He asked, walking with me down the hallway.

I nodded, looking at my keycard. “Room 402.”

“You’re next door to me.” He laughed. “I’m 404. You heading straight to bed?”

“Probably. I’m going to be living off caffeine tomorrow as it is.” I laughed, unlocking my door.

“Alright, have a good night, Haz.”

“Night, Seth.”

---

“47...48...49…50! That's a wrap!” My trainer yelled out. “50 handsprings then we'll jump in the ring for a quick set of aerials.”

I came down from my handstand. My arms and shoulders feeling the pain from push ups in that position, but it was well deserved since I had skipped all the hard workouts on my mini-break.

After a sip of my water, I wiped the sweat off my forehead with the hem of my tank-top and started on my handsprings from one end of the room to the other. Although I was told my workouts are unconventional, I had been a trained gymnast since I was three. This type of training worked for me. Plus nobody in the ring could compare to my speed and stamina because of it. It was reason I was a crowd pleaser before anyone even knew I was Lita’s niece.

The doors opened but I couldn't let myself lose focus. Only 15 more and I could take a break before aerials in the ring. Then breakfast.

Eggs. Bacon. Maybe some fruit of any had been left behind. Mm and some coffee.

Goddammit, I was fantasizing about food again!

“50! Good job!” Tara clapped, tossing me a towel and my water bottle.

“Damn, that was pretty impressive Haz.” A familiar voice sounded behind me again and I turned to see Seth adjusting his weights for squats.

Never before had Seth and I ran into each other this much. Even when we were both in Florida we each had our own programming and our schedules never meshed, now lately it seemed like I was running into him everywhere.

“Thanks.” I managed to say between heaving breaths, stopping only to take a drink from my bottle.

I could tell my face was red as a beet and I hated the fact that this is how he caught me but I couldn’t do anything about that. The work of keeping up your physique, especially in this business, wasn’t pretty.

“Alright, no time for chats, in the ring Decker!” Tara yelled again.

Seth

I watched her slowly pick herself up from the floor, her chest still rapidly moving up and down from her last workout but she took another sip of her water and climbed into the ring.

“Alright,” her trainer yelled out, tossing a dummy on the mat. “top rope, give me a triple full from the front, land on your stomach.”

Just as she was told, she did a triple front flip from the top rope, getting more air than anyone I’d seen before, landing full force on the dummy. How had I never watched this woman perform before? If Divas matches were anything like this, I'd watch way more often.

She looked my way and I averted my eyes to the ground, getting back to my workout when she looked over at me, but through my peripherals I could still see her, red faced and fine as hell as she climbed the rope again to do the same backwards.

“Alright, 3 more and you can get stretched.” Her trainer said.

It was a workout in it’s own keeping my eyes to myself after that. Between the moaning and grunting of her hitting the mat and then the stretches of her legs in splits the arches in her back, I was just surprised I was able to keep from blowing in my pants.

“How was breakfast?” She finally turned to me, patting the sweat on her chest with a towel.

“I - uh - I” I stuttered momentarily, clearing my throat before answering. “I haven’t gone yet. Had a few things to take care of after our morning meeting, figured I’d hit the gym while it was still empty. I’m surprised to see you here though. Didn’t think you’d even make it to the meeting.” She laughed, throwing the towel around the back of her neck and holding it. “Yeah, I got into the few of the nips in the mini-fridge just to get some sleep, figured I’d work all the alcohol out of my system before the show.”

With a chuckle, I nodded in understanding. “I’ve been there.”

“You almost done with your workout? I’m sure there’s still some food left in catering if you want to join me. Besides, didn’t you already work out this morning when I got to the hotel?”

“Yeah!” I said way more excitedly than I should’ve. I’d been wanting some one on one time with this woman for weeks now and she always had something better to do. “Yeah, I could eat.”

“Alright, I’m going to jump in for a quick shower. Meet me at catering in like 20?” She asked, walking backwards towards the locker room doors.

“I’ll be there.” I promised, not passing up the chance.

Just as soon as I finished my last rep, I jumped in the shower before heading up to the catering hall. At this point only one or two people were still in the but a few trays were still out with food. Hazel was nowhere in sight yet though.

I decided to grab a plate of food already, some runny eggs and whatever bacon was left before taking a seat at one of the empty tables. Not that I minded eating alone, but breakfast with a very beautiful, very flexible woman would've been better.

“Hey!” Her cheerful voice eased my anxiety.

“Bout time you showed.” I said with a smirk. “I was starting to this is I'd been stood up!”

“Ah.” She waved me off, filling her plate. “I'm sure someone would've taken my place in no time.”

Cocking a brow, I looked up at her as she took a seat next to me. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“Come on, if it wasn't me it’d be one of the other girls. You're like a total babe. The girls around here love you.” she answered nonchalantly, taking a bite from a piece of bacon.

She wasn't wrong. The Divas were always somehow near me but Hazel barely gave me a second look most days.

“Whatever, I can't be that popular if you barely even hang out with me.”

“You have a point there. I am pretty cool.” She said jokingly.

“Yeah yeah.” I laughed. “Are you going to the bar with everyone tonight?”

“Yep.”

“Good, then maybe you'll hang out with me.”

Her phone rang before she could reply and she answered with a mouth full of food. “Hello… yup… be right there.”

Damn, she literally just got here.

“Champs gotta go get ready.” she said, finishing a second strip of bacon before looking at me as she stood. “I’ll be sure to hangout with you tonight. Promise.”

“I’ll hold you to that.” I replied as she gave an adorable half smile and walked out.

---

After a successful match between the shield and the Wyatt family, I hung around to watch Hazel’s match with Paige. It was obvious to see that the company favored Hazel over their Paige who was a longtime favorite. Lately it was starting to seem like it was just one PR mess after another with her, but to see a company so coldly turn their back on someone like that was cautioning.

The women's match was intense. Aside from a near tap out on Hazel's end, Paige couldn't keep up with her. Between Hazel flying off the ropes to her hits, it was clear she wasn't going for a submission, she wanted a knockout pin.

That's exactly what she got after using one of Lita’s classic finishers, the DDT followed by a beautiful corkscrew jump off the top rope onto Paige.

“That girl is an absolute maniac in the ring.” Roman said, breaking our silence from the intense match.

“Crazier than me?” Dean asked and we rolled our eyes.

“Crazier than any of the women we've seen so far. Think about it, Lita was the last one to pull of stunts like that. You should've seen her in the gym this morning.”

“I see her all the time man.” Dean said. “She's usually in the late at night when it's empty.”

“Probably because she needs all that room for her flips and shit.” Roman laughed.

“You ain't wrong.” I replied. “She's coming out with everyone tonight.”

“You think Renee’s gonna be there?” Dean asked, trying to sound casual.

“Probably.” I laughed.

#seth rollins #seth rollins fanfic #seth rollins fanfiction #wwe seth rollins #wwe #wwe shield #remember the name

9 notes · View notes

thisdaynews · 5 years ago

Text

The danger of running as a Bush in the Trump era

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/the-danger-of-running-as-a-bush-in-the-trump-era/

The danger of running as a Bush in the Trump era

Top party strategists believe his profile as the CEO of the largest Big Brothers Big Sisters affiliate in the country, and his family’s long-standing cachet in Texas, is precisely what they need to hold on to the state’s rapidly diversifying suburbs.

But first he has to make it through two rounds of GOP primaries in Donald Trump’s Republican Party, a test of the public’s appetite for a Bush — even in Texas — at a time when his family name has been disparaged by the president.

His predicament is an extreme version of the conundrum plaguing the party in swing districts: The candidate who’s perhaps best positioned to win sometimes struggles to gain traction in a system that rewards blindfealty to the president.

The open-seat race Texas’s 22nd District, which spans the southern suburbs of Houston, has drawn a massive field of 15 Republicans. Most private polling indicates a fierce three-way battle to advance to a runoff from the March 3 primary, and a very real chance Bush gets boxed out.

His biggest competition: Kathaleen Wall, a Republican megadonor who has dumped millions of her own moneyon TV ads that heavily feature Trump and her slogan that “This Wall Will Build the Wall,” and Troy Nehls, the sheriff of the largest county in the district, who made national news over a Facebook post in whichhe appeared to threaten disorderly conduct charges against the driver of a car with a profane anti-Trump bumper sticker.

Bush, 33,is facing questions about his level of commitment to Trump and the party’s agenda, fueled in part by his family’s fraught history with the president. He has made clear he is supportive of the president, though his political foes are quick to question the depth of that loyalty.

“It’s an honorable family, this and that,” Nehls said at a campaign fundraiser this month. “But again to try to come into a district that you haven’t lived and to try and convince people that you’re the one that’s going to go up and help Donald Trump accomplish his goals and objectives — I don’t think the people are buying it.”

Bush, who recently moved into the suburban district,has a carefully calibrated message about using conservative ideals to expand opportunity, fight socialism and find a way to ensure the GOP appeals to the changing demographics of the state and the district.

“When my uncle George ran for governor of Texas, nobody thought he could win. And he won by outreaching to all corners of the state,” Bush said in an interview, noting that in his uncle’s 1998 reelection campaign, he garnered nearly 50 percent of the Hispanic vote in the state.

“The guy embodied what it meant to be a compassionate leader, and someone who is really conclusiveand understood that we have to be a big-tent party,” he said. “And, I don’t know — I just fundamentally believe that we have to embody that same strategy again.”

Bush is adamant that his political worldview — and Texas’s lurch to the middle since 2016 — is not a rejection of Trump. He is quick to heap praise on the president’s economic record and job creation and predicts he will be handily reelected in November.

But looming over his campaign is the question of the staying power of the Bush brand, even in Texas. And his grandfather’s and uncles’ open distaste for Trump puts him in somewhat of a bind.

While canvassing one weekend this month in Pearland with his wife, Sarahbeth, and their Instagram-famous dog, Winston Moose, it took only a few minutes for Bush to run into a voter who called his grandfather “a good man.” But, he said, he would not be supporting any Republican for Congress.

“He was a good man, but why can’t you vote for us?” Bush asked.

The reply: “Because I don’t support the individual at the top.”

Bush takes family comments in stride and has a polite and friendly campaign-style. (He apologized for asking people to talk politics on a recent Saturday, gives his cell phone number to voters and leaves notes on campaign literature at houses where no one is home.)

Later, in another neighborhood, Bush knocked on the door of Jason Franco, a veteran who said he was “full Trump” and alluded to the Bush family’s skepticism of the current president. “Every family, though, has their own opinions,” Bush told him, prompting agreement from Franco.

Bush’s Republican opponents suggest his support for Trump is disingenuous. Some have highlighted a Facebook photo he posted in January 2017 that shows Bush and his sister at a New York march protesting Trump’s immigration policies.

Knowing that Trump would handily win Texas and out of concern about the tone of the 2016 race, Bush did not cast a vote in the presidential election but voted straight Republican down the ballot.He has since been very impressed with Trump, he said, particularly his economic achievements. He called Trump the right president for the current political climate —just as Ronald Reagan was the “perfect president” to bring down the Soviet Union, and his grandfather was “the perfect person” to end the Cold War.

“I think we needed a disrupter,” he said.

As for immigration, Bush said at a forum earlier this month he was against religious litmus tests when Trump first unveiled the “Muslim ban” but noted the policy had been reformed several times since it was first implemented. He defended Trump, citing his access to classified intelligence about the threats facing the country. “I’ve been honored to be close to some presidents during some really tough times, and the people that are in those rooms needed to be trusted,” he said.

But voters in this former GOP bastion are more skeptical of Trump, and Democrats see an opportunity to pad their House majority and inch closer to potentially putting Texas in play statewide. While Mitt Romney won the district by 25 points in 2012, Trump carried it by just 8 four years later. In 2018, Sen. Ted Cruz won by less than a point, and Rep. Pete Olson, the incumbent, is retiring this year after watching his victory margin fall from 19 points in 2016 to just 5 points last cycle.

Sri Kulkarni, a former foreign-service officer, is running again after a narrow loss and is redoubling his efforts to turn out new Democratic voters. Only 41 percent of the district’s residents are white, and Kulkarni has taken a particular focus on reaching out to new immigrants. In an interview after a meet-and-greet event, he suggested Bush was straddling an impossible line.

“You’ve got to choose whether you agree with the direction the Republican Party has gone, or not,” Kulkarni said. “You can’t just say, ‘Well, I 100 percent support Trump, and I’m inclusive.’ Those two things are not mutually compatible.”

Bush leans heavily on his non-profit background to set him apart in a crowded race. He joined Big Brothers Big Sisters Lone Star as a volunteer before rising through the ranks, and the Houston Chronicle touted his leadership of the group as part of the reasoning behind their recent endorsement.

Yet some prominent Houston Democrats who knew him through nonprofit circles said they were taken aback by his strong praise for Trump and his TV-ad pledge to “deport criminal illegals.”

“I’ve met him on more than one occasion — and, frankly, it’s been a surprise to me to hear his views on some stands knowing his Big Brothers Big Sisters sort-of philanthropic side,” said Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas), a long-time Houston politician who endorsed Kulkarni. “He has said some things that are concerning. It appears to be, like, out of character.”

Still, Bush clearly has a rapport with many of the immigrant communities in the district and appears to conduct more outreach than his leading rivals. He spent a recentSunday bouncing between events hostedby two different minority groups.

Privately, some Republicans worry neither Nehls nor Wallwill be able to gain traction in such a diverse district. Democrats plan to exploit both as immigration hard-liners. Nehls, the Fort Bend County sheriff, boasted in an interview of his record “of locking over2,500 criminal illegal aliens in our jail and holding them for ICE.” Wall is attempting to position herself to Nehl’s right on the issue.

But both have perhaps a clearer shot to the runoff than Bush, who didn’t enter the race until just before the mid-December filing deadline. Wall has substantial name ID after a failed 2018 run in a neighboring district, and Nehls has a formidable base in Fort Bend.

Advocates for all of the top candidates have pitched people in the president’s political orbit on an endorsement, according to a source familiar with those conversations, though Trump has stayed out of the race thus far.

Bush’s path to victory is likely to raise the turnout in the March 3 race beyond the GOP activist class, and an early-vote analysis conducted by the Bush campaign found that 20 percent of Republicans who have early voted so far are participating in a Texas GOP primary for the first time. He also benefits from a super PAC advertising on his behalf.

Throughout the campaign he has deployed uncle George W. Bush’s refrain that he gained half of his father’s friends when he entered politics as the son of a president — but all of his enemies.

The question now is how many friends remainin the Trump era.

At a recent crawfish boil fundraiser for Nehls, Mike Richards, a former state senator and radio host, said he was a longtime supporter of both Bush presidents, but that he could not endorse “the progeny” after the 2016 election.

Richards said he could no longer even bear to display a photo of him and his wife with George H.W. Bush.

“When he said that he voted for Hillary Clinton,” Richards said, “I took that picture down.”

#Foreign #Politics #running #Trump

0 notes

theliberaltony · 5 years ago

Link

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Democrats running for president in 2020 are faced with a choice when making their pitch to voters: make attacking President Trump a key part of their message or ignore him and focus on introducing themselves and their ideas.

On the one hand, criticizing Trump could help candidates convince primary voters that they’re able to defeat him, but depending on what shots they choose to take, they could risk alienating voters in the general election. So we wanted to see how the candidates tackled this choice by looking at one of the most direct ways they regularly communicate with voters — their emails.

Lindsey Cormack, who runs the DCinbox project, a public database of email newsletters sent by members of Congress, says emails, like tweets, can give us insight into how politicians try to brand themselves. “They don’t have to deal with editors at the paper. They don’t have to deal with booking an agent to be on a TV or radio program. They can really say anything they want.”

So to get a better sense of what the candidates told their followers about Trump, we subscribed to the mailing list of every candidate that FiveThirtyEight considers “major” and looked at all the emails they sent in the month prior to the first Democratic debate. (Though, for a variety of reasons — including email targeting practices, engagement testing techniques and the fact that we haven’t given money to any of these campaigns — we may not have received all the emails sent by all the campaigns.1)

Overall, the candidates have taken very different approaches. Some candidates, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, seem to be ignoring Trump almost entirely, while others, like former Vice President Joe Biden, are heavily peppering their emails with invocations of Trump. Even some lesser-known candidates like Montana Gov. Steve Bullock are going all in on Trump — every email we received from his campaign during this period contained a reference to the president.2

Biden’s emails contained the second-most mentions of Trump. In total, we received 27 messages from his campaign that referenced the president by name. This strong focus on Trump seems aimed at portraying Biden as a strong general election candidate, which makes sense, as his perceived “electability” has been a central argument of his campaign.

In his emails, Biden has attacked Trump’s campaign tactics, his policy stances and his values. Biden has even sent an email that, rather than concentrating on his campaign, asked readers to sign a petition to “tell Donald Trump that welcoming foreign interference in our elections is unacceptable.” Even many of Biden’s fundraising emails are all about Trump, asking readers to “imagine the shock on Trump’s face” when they hit their fundraising goal and collect enough to “compete with Trump’s fortunes.”

While Biden mentions Trump often, his emails completely ignore the rest of the primary field — none of his messages mention another Democratic candidate by name. Another thing Biden never mentions? Impeachment.

Biden also sent the most emails with “Trump” in the subject line.

And that’s a telling omission, because many other candidates have called for Trump’s impeachment and are renewing those calls in their emails. The move could help them in the primary election, as impeachment is popular among Democrats, but could prove risky in a general election because most polls find that more Americans oppose impeachment than support it.

In the month leading up to the first debate, Sen. Kamala Harris, former Cabinet secretary Julian Castro, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Sen. Cory Booker, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and former Gov. John Hickenlooper all sent at least one email entirely devoted to calling for Trump’s impeachment. O’Rourke, for example, sent a long email on May 30 explaining why he thought Trump should be impeached, and then a punchier one about two weeks later with “Donald Trump” as the subject line and “… should be impeached” as the only text in the body of the email, with a link to a petition.

While Warren was the first 2020 Democratic candidate to call for Trump’s impeachment — she publicly embraced that stance after the April release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election — we didn’t receive any emails from her campaign that mentioned the topic in the month before the first debate. Likewise, Sanders has also called for Trump’s impeachment, but didn’t send us any impeachment emails during the period we looked at.

Some candidates largely avoided talking about Trump at all in the month before the debate. For example, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg only mentioned Trump in one email, when he called Trump’s tariffs on Mexican goods “politically-motivated gamesmanship.” Warren also was largely silent on Trump in this period. Of the 56 emails she sent us that month, only four mentioned Trump, and of those four, only one focused on him for the bulk of the message.3 That email explained, “Our campaign isn’t about Donald Trump. That’s because he’s just the symptom, not the cause, of the crises we face as a country.” And Rep. Tim Ryan, who sent us 78 emails — the most of any candidate — didn’t mention Trump even once, although he, too, has called for Trump’s impeachment.

Bullock, on the other hand, mentioned Trump in every single email, often as part of a formulaic reminder to subscribers that he is the only presidential candidate to have won statewide office in a state Trump won.4

Candidates who have a harder time making an “electability” argument than Bullock varied widely in the tenor of their emails that mentioned Trump. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, for example, sent us fewer emails in the month leading up to the debate than most candidates, but he mentioned Trump in five of the seven emails he did send us. (And one the two that didn’t mention the president’s last name still used the hashtag #ConDon, which showed up in six of de Blasio’s emails and is meant to imply that Trump is a con man.) In many ways, De Blasio seemed to be trying to out-Trump Trump, aggressively attacking him and using name-calling tactics that the president is known for. In one email, for instance, he called Trump a “New York con man who’s just been made to smell his own BS” and referred to Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer, as Trump’s “lapdog,” whose insults were “even lamer than his boss’s.” But unlike de Blasio, most of the Democratic contenders seemed to have heeded former First Lady Michelle Obama’s advice to “go high” when their opponents “go low” and are trying to strike a different tone than the current president, rather than trying to outdo him.

So what does this tell us about how Democrats are crafting (or not crafting) their campaigns around Trump? Well, a few candidates, like de Blasio, Bullock and Biden, are at one extreme — mentioning Trump at practically every opportunity — and a few, like Ryan and Buttigieg, are firmly planted at the other extreme, remaining largely silent on Trump. But perhaps unsurprisingly, most candidates fall somewhere in between, striking a balance between talking about Trump and focusing on their own message. It’s early yet, though, and some candidates’ communication strategies might change as the primary progresses. Still, with so many Democrats running, the party will have collectively tried out many different avenues of attack before the general election. Ultimately, however, there will only be one Democratic nominee, and whoever that is, he or she will have a wide pool of pre-tested approaches to draw from.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Dhrumil Mehta

7 notes · View notes

technicalsolutions88 · 5 years ago

Link

It’s true, you’ve got the Galaxy Note to thank for your big phone. When the device hit the scene at IFA 2011, large screens were still a punchline. That same year, Steve Jobs famously joked about phones with screens larger than four inches, telling a crowd of reporters, “nobody’s going to buy that.”

In 2019, the average screen size hovers around 5.5 inches. That’s a touch larger than the original Note’s 5.3 inches — a size that was pretty widely mocked by much of the industry press at the time. Of course, much of the mainstreaming of larger phones comes courtesy of a much improved screen to body ratio, another place where Samsung has continued to lead the way.

In some sense, the Note has been doomed by its own success. As the rest of the industry caught up, the line blended into the background. Samsung didn’t do the product any favors by dropping the pretense of distinction between the Note and its Galaxy S line.

Ultimately, the two products served as an opportunity to have a six-month refresh cycle for its flagships. Samsung, of course, has been hit with the same sort of malaise as the rest of the industry. The smartphone market isn’t the unstoppable machine it appeared to be two or three years back.

Like the rest of the industry, the company painted itself into a corner with the smartphone race, creating flagships good enough to convince users to hold onto them for an extra year or two, greatly slowing the upgrade cycle in the process. Ever-inflating prices have also been a part of smartphone sales stagnation — something Samsung and the Note are as guilty of as any.

Samsung’s Galaxy Note gets even larger (and smaller)

So what’s a poor smartphone manufacturer to do? The Note 10 represents baby steps. As it did with the S line recently, Samsung is now offering two models. The base Note 10 represents a rare step backward in terms of screen size, shrinking down slightly from 6.4 to 6.3 inches, while reducing resolution from Quad HD to Full HD.

The seemingly regressive step lets Samsung come in a bit under last year’s jaw dropping $1,000. The new Note is only $50 cheaper, but moving from four to three figures may have a positive psychological effect for wary buyers. While the slightly smaller screen coupled with a better screen to body ratio means a device that’s surprisingly slim.

If anything, the Note 10+ feels like the true successor to the Note line. The baseline device could have just as well been labeled the Note 10 Lite. That’s something Samsung is keenly aware of, as it targets first-time Note users with the 10 and true believers with the 10+. In both cases, Samsung is faced with the same task as the rest of the industry: offering a compelling reason for users to upgrade.

Earlier this week, a Note 9 owner asked me whether the new device warrants an upgrade. The answer is, of course, no. The pace of smartphone innovation has slowed, even as prices have risen. Honestly, the 10 doesn’t really offer that many compelling reasons to upgrade from the Note 8.

That’s not a slight against Samsung or the Note, per se. If anything, it’s a reflection on the fact that these phones are quite good — and have been for a while. Anecdotally, industry excitement around these devices has been tapering for a while now, and the device’s launch in the midst of the doldrums of August likely didn’t help much.

[gallery ids="1865978,1865980,1865979,1865983,1865982,1865990,1866000,1866005,1866004"]

The past few years have seen smartphones transform from coveted, bleeding-edge luxury to necessity. The good news to that end, however, is that the Note continues to be among the best devices out there.

The common refrain in the earliest days of the phablet was the inability to wrap one’s fingers around the device. It’s a pragmatic issue. Certainly you don’t want to use a phone day to day that’s impossible to hold. But Samsung’s remarkable job of improving screen to body ratio continues here. In fact, the 6.8-inch Note 10+ has roughly the same footprint as the 6.4-inch Note 9.

The issue will still persist for those with smaller hands — though thankfully Samsung’s got a solution for them in the Note 10. For the rest of us, the Note 10+ is easily held in one hand and slipped in and out of pants pockets. I realize these seem like weird things to say at this point, but I assure you they were legitimate concerns in the earliest days of the phablet, when these things were giant hunks of plastic and glass.

Samsung’s curved display once again does much of the heavy lifting here, allowing the screen to stretch nearly from side to side with only a little bezel at the edge. Up top is a hole-punch camera — that’s “Infinity O” to you. Those with keen eyes no doubt immediately noticed that Samsung has dropped the dual selfie camera here, moving toward the more popular hole-punch camera.

The company’s reasoning for this was both aesthetic and, apparently, practical. The company moved back down to a single camera for the front (10 megapixel), using similar reasoning as Google’s single rear-facing camera on the Pixel: software has greatly improved what companies can do with a single lens. That’s certainly the case to a degree, and a strong case can be made for the selfie camera, which we generally require less of than the rear-facing array.

The company’s gone increasingly minimalist with the design language — something I appreciate. Over the years, as the smartphone has increasingly become a day to day utility, the product’s design has increasingly gotten out of its own way. The front and back are both made of a curved Gorilla Glass that butts up against a thin metal form with a total thickness of 7.9 millimeters.

On certain smooth surfaces like glass, you’ll occasionally find the device gliding slightly. I’d say the chances of dropping it are pretty decent with its frictionless design language, so you’re going to want to get a case for your $1,000 phone. Before you do, admire that color scheme on the back. There are four choices in all. Like the rest of the press, we ended up with Aura Glow.

It features a lovely, prismatic effect when light hits it. It’s proven a bit tricky to photograph, honestly. It’s also a fingerprint magnet, but these are the prices we pay to have the prettiest phone on the block.

One of the interesting footnotes here is how much the design of the 10 will be defined by what the device lost. There are two missing pieces here — both of which are a kind of concession from Samsung for different reasons. And for different reasons, both feel inevitable.

The headphone jack is, of course, the biggie. Samsung kicked and screamed on that one, holding onto the 3.5mm with dear life and roundly mocking the competition (read: Apple) at every turn. The company must have known it was a matter of time, even before the iPhone dropped the port three years ago.

Courage.

Samsung glossed over the end of the jack (and apparently unlisted its Apple-mocking ads in the process) during the Note’s launch event. It was a stark contrast from a briefing we got around the device’s announcement, where the company’s reps spent significantly more time justifying the move. They know us well enough to know that we’d spend a little time taking the piss out of the company after three years of it making the once ubiquitous port a feature. All’s fair in love and port. And honestly, it was mostly just some good-natured ribbing. Welcome to the club, Samsung.

The headphone jack dies not with a bang, but a Note

As for why Samsung did it now, the answer seems to be two-fold. The first is a kind of critical mass in Bluetooth headset usage. Allow me to quote myself from a few weeks back:

The tipping point, it says, came when its internal metrics showed that a majority of users on its flagship devices (the S and Note lines) moved to Bluetooth streaming. The company says the number is now in excess of 70% of users.

Also, as we’re all abundantly aware, the company put its big battery ambitions on hold for a bit, as it dealt with…more burning problems. A couple of recalls, a humble press release and an eight-point battery check later, and batteries are getting bigger again. There’s a 3,500mAh on the Note 10 and a 4,300mAh on the 10+. I’m happy to report that the latter got me through a full day plus three hours on a charge. Not bad, given all of the music and videos I subjected it to in that time.

There’s no USB-C dongle in-box. The rumors got that one wrong. You can pick up a Samsung-branded adapter for $15, or get one for much cheaper elsewhere. There is, however, a pair of AKG USB-C headphones in-box. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: Samsung doesn’t get enough credit for its free headphones. I’ve been known to use the pairs with other devices. They’re not the greatest the world, but they’re better sounding and more comfortable than what a lot of other companies offer in-box.

Obviously the standard no headphone jack things apply here. You can’t use the wired headphones and charge at the same time (unless you go wireless). You know the deal.

The other missing piece here is the Bixby button. I’m sure there are a handful of folks out there who will bemoan its loss, but that’s almost certainly a minority of the minority here. Since the button was first introduced, folks were asking for the ability to remap it. Samsung finally relented on that front, and with the Note 10, it drops the button altogether.

Thus far the smart assistant has been a disappointment. That’s due in no small part to a late launch compared to the likes of Siri, Alexa and Assistant, coupled with a general lack of capability at launch. In Samsung’s defense, the company’s been working to fix that with some pretty massive investment and a big push to court developers. There’s hope for Bixby yet, but a majority of users weren’t eager to have the assistant thrust upon them.

Instead, the power button has been shifted to the left of the device, just under the volume rocker. I preferred having it on the other side, especially for certain functions like screenshotting (something, granted, I do much more than the average user when reviewing a phone). That’s a pretty small quibble, of course.

Bixby can now be quickly accessed by holding down the power button. Handily, Samsung still lets you reassign the function there, if you really want Bixby out of your life. You can also hold down to get the power off menu or double press to launch Bixby or a third-party app (I opted for Spotify, probably my most used these days), though not a different assistant.

Imaging, meanwhile, is something Samsung’s been doing for a long time. The past several generations of S and Note devices have had great camera systems, and it continues to be the main point of improvement. It’s also one of few points of distinction between the 10 and 10+, aside from size.

The Note 10+ has four, count ’em, four rear-facing cameras. They are as follows:

Ultra Wide: 16 megapixel

Wide: 12 megapixel

Telephoto: 12 megapixel

DepthVision

That last one is only on the plus. It’s comprised of two little circles to the right of the primary camera array and just below the flash. We’ll get to that in a second.

The main camera array continues to be one of the best in mobile. The inclusion of telephoto and ultra-wide lenses allow for a wide range of different shots, and the hardware coupled with machine learning makes it a lot more difficult to take a bad photo (though believe me, it’s still possible).

[gallery ids="1869716,1869715,1869720,1869718,1869719"]

The live focus feature (Portrait mode, essentially) comes to video, with four different filters, including Color Point, which makes everything but the subject black and white.

Samsung’s also brought a very simple video editor into the mix here, which is nice on the fly. You can edit the length of clips, splice in other clips, add subtitles and captions and add filters and music. It’s pretty beefy for something baked directly into the camera app, and one of the better uses I’ve found for the S Pen.

Note 10+ with Super Steady (left), iPhone XS (right)

Ditto for the improved Super Steady offering, which smooths out shaky video, including Hyperlapse mode, where handshakes are a big issue. It works well, but you do lose access to other features, including zoom. For that reason, it’s off by default and should be used relatively sparingly.

Note 10+ (left), iPhone XS (right)

Zoom-on Mic is a clever addition, as well. While shooting video, pinch-zooming on something will amplify the noise from that area. I’ve been playing around with it in this cafe. It’s interesting, but less than perfect.

[gallery ids="1869186,1869980,1869975,1869974,1869973,1869725,1869322,1869185,1869184,1869190"]

Zooming into something doesn’t exactly cancel out ambient noise from outside of the frame. Everything still gets amplified in the process and, like digital picture zoom, a lot of noise gets added in the process. Those hoping for a kind of spy microphone, I’m sorry/happy to report that this definitely is not that.

The DepthVision Camera is also pretty limited as I write this. If anything, it’s Samsung’s attempt to brace for a future when things like augmented reality will (theoretically) play a much larger role in our mobile computing. In a conversation I had with the company ahead of launch, they suggested that a lot of the camera’s AR functions will fall in the hands of developers.

For now, Quick Measure is the one practical use. The app is a lot like Apple’s more simply titled Measure. Fire it up, move the camera around to get a lay of the land and it will measure nearby objects for you. An interesting showcase for AR potential? Sure. Earth shattering? Naw. It also seems to be a bit of a battery drain, sucking up the last few bits of juice as I was running it down.

3D Scanner, on the other hand, got by far the biggest applause line of the Note event. And, indeed, it’s impressive. In the stage demo, a Samsung employee scanned a stuffed pink beaver (I’m not making this up), created a 3D image and animated it using an associate’ movements. Practical? Not really. Cool? Definitely.

It was, however, not available at press time. Hopefully it proves to be more than vaporware, especially if that demo helped push some viewers over to the 10+. Without it, there’s just not a lot of use for the depth camera at the moment.

There’s also AR Doodle, which fills a similar spot as much of the company’s AR offerings. It’s kind of fun, but again, not particularly useful. You’ll likely end up playing with it for a few minutes and forget about it entirely. Such is life.

The feature is built into the camera app, using depth sensing to orient live drawings. With the stylus you can draw in space or doodle on people’s faces. It’s neat, the AR works okay and I was bored with it in about three minutes. Like Quick Measure, the feature is as much a proof of concept as anything. But that’s always been a part of Samsung’s kitchen-sink approach — some combination of useful and silly.

That said, points to Samsung for continuing to de-creepify AR Emojis. Those have moved firmly away from the uncanny valley into something more cartoony/adorable. Less ironic usage will surely follow.

Asked about the key differences between the S and Note lines, Samsung’s response was simple: the S Pen. Otherwise, the lines are relatively interchangeable.

Samsung’s return of the stylus didn’t catch on for handsets quite like the phablet form factor. They’ve made a pretty significant comeback for tablets, but the Note remains fairly singular when it comes to the S Pen. I’ve never been a big user myself, but those who like it swear by it. It’s one of those things like the ThinkPad pointing stick or BlackBerry scroll wheel.

Like the phone itself, the peripheral has been streamlined with a unibody design. Samsung also continues to add capabilities. It can be used to control music, advance slideshows and snap photos. None of that is likely to convince S Pen skeptics (I prefer using the buttons on the included headphones for music control, for example), but more versatility is generally a good thing.

If anything is going to convince people to pick up the S Pen this time out, it’s the improved handwriting recognition. That’s pretty impressive. It was even able to decipher my awful chicken scratch.

You get the same sort of bleeding-edge specs here you’ve come to expect from Samsung’s flagships. The 10+ gets you a baseline 256GB of storage (upgradable to 512), coupled with a beefy 12GB of RAM (the regular Note is a still good 8GB/256GB). The 5G version sports the same numbers and battery (likely making its total life a bit shorter per charge). That’s a shift from the S10, whose 5G version was specced out like crazy. Likely Samsung is bracing for 5G to become less of a novelty in the next year or so.

The new Note also benefits from other recent additions, like the in-display fingerprint reader and wireless power sharing. Both are nice additions, but neither is likely enough to warrant an immediate upgrade.

Once again, that’s not an indictment of Samsung, so much as a reflection of where we are in the life cycle of a mature smartphone industry. The Note 10+ is another good addition to one of the leading smartphone lines. It succeeds as both a productivity device (thanks to additions like DeX and added cross-platform functionality with Windows 10) and an everyday handset.

There’s not enough on-board to really recommend an upgrade from the Note 8 or 9 — especially at that $1,099 price. People are holding onto their devices for longer, and for good reason (as detailed above). But if you need a new phone, are looking for something big and flashy and are willing to splurge, the Note continues to be the one to beat.

[gallery ids="1869169,1869168,1869167,1869166,1869165,1869164,1869163,1869162,1869161,1869160,1869159,1869158,1869157,1869156,1869155,1869154,1869153,1869152"]

from Mobile – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/30bjXb9 ORIGINAL CONTENT FROM: https://techcrunch.com/

#Technical Solutions #SEO #Online Earning #Youtube Marketing #Android Developer

0 notes

sheminecrafts · 5 years ago

Text

Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ review

youtube

Samsung’s Galaxy Note gets even larger (and smaller)

[gallery ids="1865978,1865980,1865979,1865983,1865982,1865990,1866000,1866005,1866004"]

Courage.

The headphone jack dies not with a bang, but a Note

As for why Samsung did it now, the answer seems to be two-fold. The first is a kind of critical mass in Bluetooth headset usage. Allow me to quote myself from a few weeks back:

Obviously the standard no headphone jack things apply here. You can’t use the wired headphones and charge at the same time (unless you go wireless). You know the deal.

The Note 10+ has four, count ’em, four rear-facing cameras. They are as follows:

Ultra Wide: 16 megapixel

Wide: 12 megapixel

Telephoto: 12 megapixel

DepthVision

That last one is only on the plus. It’s comprised of two little circles to the right of the primary camera array and just below the flash. We’ll get to that in a second.

[gallery ids="1869716,1869715,1869720,1869718,1869719"]

The live focus feature (Portrait mode, essentially) comes to video, with four different filters, including Color Point, which makes everything but the subject black and white.

Note 10+ with Super Steady (left), iPhone XS (right)

Note 10+ (left), iPhone XS (right)

[gallery ids="1869186,1869980,1869975,1869974,1869973,1869725,1869322,1869185,1869184,1869190"]

youtube

That said, points to Samsung for continuing to de-creepify AR Emojis. Those have moved firmly away from the uncanny valley into something more cartoony/adorable. Less ironic usage will surely follow.

Asked about the key differences between the S and Note lines, Samsung’s response was simple: the S Pen. Otherwise, the lines are relatively interchangeable.

[gallery ids="1869169,1869168,1869167,1869166,1869165,1869164,1869163,1869162,1869161,1869160,1869159,1869158,1869157,1869156,1869155,1869154,1869153,1869152"]

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://ift.tt/30bjXb9 via IFTTT

#IFTTT #iraidajzsmmwtv

0 notes

alexdmorgan30 · 6 years ago

Text

Zero Coping Skills: How Jackie Monahan Found Peace of Mind for the First Time

I grew up being told over and over, “We are only given what we can handle.” I took that to mean, “If I flip out about the little things, nothing really bad can ever happen to me.”It has been said that if you have an alcoholic parent, the odds are good you will become an alcoholic. I had two. They say if you start drinking at 21, you might be okay. I did the inverse and started drinking at 12. I had a long run. I was surrounded by enablers. My mom still wants me to drink; she and my ex say things like “You weren't this temperamental when you drank.”I want to be the best example of the program anyone has ever seen, but I am far from there yet. I have always been easily frustrated, and have always had zero coping skills, other than alcohol.My soul wanted to solve problems without alcohol, but I didn't even know where to begin. If I got anxious for a second, everyone rushed to put a drink in my hand. It worked. I remember the one day in college that I didn't drink. I was mad and yelling at all my roommates, wanting them to be as quiet as a mouse because I wasn't drinking. Meanwhile, every other night I came home either with a party or from one, loudly.I entered parties saying, “You can start now, I am here.” I would black out and then yell at everyone the next day for letting me drink so much. They would say they had no idea I was blacked out; I was so funny and fun, they didn’t see what the problem was. I did. My life was getting really busy with stuff I wanted to do, and when I did have free time I wanted to enjoy the moment and remember it.My parents were functioning alcoholics. I say “were” because they are no longer functioning very well. My dad was far worse than my mother, but both are shells of what they could have been. They couldn't get rigorously honest if someone paid them all the money in the world. I had to accept that at a very young age.There was never a way to know what I did to set my parents off. When either of them went into a rage, it was brutal. They were cheerful, cheerful, cheerful… then rage! They mostly raged when they were sober and it would come out of nowhere. I watched their tantrums work for them: with one another, with me, and with the unfortunate people who got my mother on the phone. You would think Colleen from Time Warner had stabbed her in the face. My mom unloaded all her marriage frustrations, alternately screaming at and belittling the customer service rep. And it worked every time — instead of getting overcharged, she got money off and reduced rates. She flew off the handle at everyone and got her way, then bragged about it.My parents would always say, “God made whiskey so the Irish could not rule the world.” Then they would laugh and laugh like they had something over on the rest of us. Meanwhile, I remember thinking, “Rule the world? How about trying to get through the week without throwing a plate?”With all this and more, it never even occurred to me not to drink. Of course I would drink, but I vowed to never be an alcoholic like you see on TV, or even a semi-functioning one like my parents. I could clearly see how their thinking was backwards, so backwards that my messed-up perception went undetected. They may have been successful financially, but their morals and values were out in space.In 2011 I made an independent movie and was too busy to drink. My wife at the time pointed out that I didn't drink for two weeks. She was impressed with my work ethic. I was working 12-hour days because it took so long to put on and take off a bald cap for my role as an an alien. I couldn't be hungover, so I wasn't.A few years later I thought, “I wish another 12-hour a day project would come along to quit drinking for.” Now I know this should have been a red flag. But nope, instead I had an idea: “Wait, why don’t I make me the project. I will be sober for a while for me.” I was just going to do 11 days, until the Independent Spirit Awards. I would have to drink then. There would be free expensive wine and celebrity parties.The awards show came and went and I still didn't want to drink. I felt almost addicted to being clear-headed. It felt euphoric. Then I was determined to tape Last Comic Standing sober. I was 33 days sober and I did great, but I just wasn’t myself. I wasn't loose. I told a comic backstage who had five years sober that I didn’t feel comfortable. He said I was crazy, that he didn't feel normal on stage until he had a year sober, and that I should have just had a drink. Looking back, he was right and I knew it. But I couldn't drink. I liked being in my body so much. I hated blacking out.And I refused to do AA: I 100 percent thought it was run by the Catholic Church and I couldn’t go back there. I was a member of the CIA: Catholic Irish Alcoholic. I survived 12 years of Catholic school: priests living in a mansion with gorgeous antique furniture and driving fancy sports cars while the nuns lived in poverty, in what were basically jail cells. One nun siphoned gas—so she could sell the 20-year-old station wagon she had just filled—and accidently swallowed some of the gas. That same day, Father Zino threw a lit cigarette out of his brand-new Porsche and it hit me. It got caught in my coat.I had no intention of going back to the Catholic Church and saying yes to things I knew to be wrong. They told us not to lie, then made us lie.I had friends in AA, but they all seemed miserable and unhappy. I would rather drink than be miserable. And I had quit drinking on my own before: once for 90 days (I was proud because I hadn't intended to go that long), and then for 200 days (I was disappointed I hadn’t made it to a year). Both times, when I finally drank, it was because of things happening that I couldn't bear to feel. I called my friends and said, “I don't want to drink but I can't bear the pain anymore.” They said, “Just drink. Drink and don't beat yourself up about it.” So I drank. I didn’t have a choice.Then I made a new friend who was in AA and thriving. She seemed genuinely happy. When I told her I could quit on my own but couldn't stay quit, she said that happens to a lot of alcoholics. That was the first time I thought “Hey, maybe I am an alcoholic.” She also said “You don't have coping skills.” Coping skills!?! I must have said those two words a million times since then. Coping skills sounded like exactly what I needed. I didn’t have coping skills. I’d never even heard of them.I said I wanted to give it a try. I really wanted to make it to a year without drinking, and I was willing to do anything. Once I made that commitment to myself, I gave myself over to the program and my higher power. That was a critical tipping point, and my life changed. I got a sponsor who I knew would kick my butt: she knew when I was lying. I wanted what she had—not the dream car, home, partner, killer style, and beauty (all impressive, considering she had been living on the street). I didn't need any of those things. I did not have the same goals at all.What I did want was her close relationship with her higher power, her program, and her unquestioning belief in both. These qualities make her absolutely, positively unflappable and a force to be reckoned with. She gets annoyed by things, but as soon as she feels an ounce of anger, she takes a breath and realigns with her higher power and the solution.My sponsor knows I had major resentments, and that I had a lot to be resentful about, but she showed me how to let go of them, for myself. I am now two years sober and I have peace in my mind for the first time in my life. I wouldn't trade this gift of sobriety and serenity for anything in the world. I treat it like a gem that I hold safe. I guard that gem with my life.Contrast in life is inevitable, but I'm learning that I do not have to have conflict. I don't have to flip out because I got in the wrong line somewhere; I don’t need to make my poor planning everyone else's emergency. I didn't even know how anxiety-riddled I was. I thought I had ADD, and doctors were treating it as such, with Adderall. What I actually have is PTSD and chronic anxiety. That medication combined with those diagnoses was like treating schizophrenia with acid.All my life, I never wanted to be like other people. Even though my life was messed-up, I loved being me. I always wanted to live, but I really didn’t know how. I felt like I was improvising constantly, while everyone else had a script. It made me a great improviser, but I now have the ability to turn that side of me off. I feel like I am getting a new, revised version of my script every day. If something happens, I no longer go into fight or flight mode. I get upset, of course, but now I respond instead of react. I am proactive instead of reactive. I can have contrast without conflict. I can go into solution mode and stop focusing on and feeding the problem.I made a decision to be the change I want to see in the world—which is peace. To see peace, I first must be peace. Alcoholics do not have the luxury of a negative thought. A resentment can kill us. If someone hates me, that is on them. I cannot control how someone feels about me, but I can control how I feel about them.I feel safe for the first time. For a long time I hid my fear from everyone, even myself. Feeling safe, in the moment, in control, is better than any feeling in this world. I wouldn’t trade the solution for anything.Jackie Monahan appears in Wild Nights with Emily, in theatres on April 12th. Her album "These Lips" is streaming everywhere and on Sirius.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8241841 https://ift.tt/2U1BF1Q

0 notes

emlydunstan · 6 years ago

Text

Zero Coping Skills: How Jackie Monahan Found Peace of Mind for the First Time

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8241841 https://www.thefix.com/zero-coping-skills-how-jackie-monahan-found-peace-mind-first-time

0 notes

avanneman · 6 years ago

Text

John McCain, Paul Ryan, and the Myth of the Virtuous Republican

John McCain is one of those guys who, when he dies, people say “he was the last of a dying breed.”

No one will ever say that about Paul Ryan.

John McCain was a genuine war hero, a man who preferred to face hardship, torture, and even death rather than abandon his comrades. Paul Ryan has the suit, haircut, and soul of a TV personality. Yet both ended their careers kissing Donald Trump’s ass. Strange! More than strange!

It could justly be said—and often was—that John McCain approached politics with the mindset of the fighter pilot he used to be, an adrenaline junkie who wanted to see every issue as a struggle of good against evil, or at least us against them, which, in his mind, constituted the same thing. He was always wanting to go to war, wars in which, he was sure, the good guys always won and everyone’s problems were settled once and for all. My most vivid memory of McCain is video showing him striding around Baghdad in an armored vest, surrounded by heavily armed troops, with assault helicopters circling overhead, and proclaiming “Mission Accomplished”.

McCain made himself a national figure in the 2000 Republican primaries by wowing the national press corps with his war stories, young men and women stunned to be in the presence of a man who’d seen and endured things they, with their pampered backgrounds, could not even begin to imagine. This was a man!

And so he was, but as a senator he wasn’t so much. McCain was furious—well beyond furious—at George Bush because he believed, with some reason, that he’d been done out of the Republican nomination by some seriously subterranean backstabbing during the South Carolina primary, which may well be true, but one can also wonder how deliberate noncombatant Georgie W. beat a war hero in what is often regarded as the most militaristic state in the union.

McCain continued to cultivate the press in defeat, playing the beloved role of “maverick”, charging like a bull at a variety of issues, but never really succeeding at anything. For McCain, the passionate display of “passion” was its own purpose and end. His was not to reason why, and he never did.

Yet however harshly one wishes to criticize McCain, his ultimate obsequiousness to Trump remains baffling. Trump publicly ridiculed McCain’s heroism. Why wasn’t McCain at the Democratic Convention, standing beside Hillary Clinton, whose foreign policy views were almost identical to his own, and proclaiming her “America’s Choice”? What kept the proud maverick in such humiliating harness?

Well, as I say, I’m baffled. Perhaps he was intimidated by the Republican base, which had shifted so heavily against the “free trade, open borders” orthodoxy to which he had always subscribed.

But, in fact, there was always a bit of smoke and mirrors when it came to McCain’s “bipartisanship”. He had a knack for choosing issues, like campaign reform and immigration reform, that never, or rarely, managed to make it into law.1 On tax and spending issues, he almost always voted the straight party line, never giving an inch to either Clinton or Obama, though he did draw back a little from the “burn the house down” efforts of the newly elected Tea Party Republicans to drive the federal government into default—though probably more because he was worried about the possible impact on defense spending, which was the only fiscal issue he really cared about.2

But as for “leadership”, McCain was almost always absent. He voted in favor of removing President Clinton from office and, most infamously, brought Sarah Palin and her brand of “Americanism” into the national spotlight for the first time. And when the country really needed some bipartisan leadership, during the first onslaught of the Great Recession when Obama took office, McCain said, and did, nothing.

What’s remarkable about Paul Ryan is that, for a long time, he received press almost the equal of McCain’s, with far less substance. While McCain’s warrior ego was always front and center, deciphering Paulie’s slippery humility has always been a chore. He eagerly promoted—and the press eagerly bought—his Wisconsin Boy Scout demeanor. His incessantly repeated claim to be a “wonk” was, I think, deliberately designed to insulate him from the continuing bro-ha-ha3 over “social issues”—abortion, homosexuality, the “war against Christmas”, etc.—that so obsessed most ambitious Republicans. Paulie always looked east, towards Wall Street, but I’ve never been sure of his motivation. Was he gunning for the presidency? Then why stay in the House?

For many years, Ryan was sort of a hero—or perhaps fig-leaf—to many Republicans. In fact, to “recovering Republicans” like (former) conservative broadcaster Charles Sykes (author of How the Right Lost Its Mind), WashPost columnist and long-time Literature R Us whipping boy George F. Will, and former Republican strategist Rick Wilson (author of Everything Trump Touches Dies), who, unlike the first two, is deeply disappointed in the “new Paulie,” Ryan is (or was) a true hero. Nonpartisan centrists like Josh Barro are also deeply disappointed in the Ryan reinvention, which I will demonstrate—at length–is not new at all.

Sykes, in his book, gives us a taste of the true Paulie believer:

Whatever you might think of his policies, Paul Ryan is inarguably the most formidable intellectual leader the Republican Party has had for decades. For years, he was known for his dogged advocacy of budget and entitlement reform in opposition from his party’s establishment. His rise from conservative backbencher to Speaker could have been seen as one of the great success stories of the conservative movement. “I spent more time, I’d say, in the backbench than the leadership,” Ryan told me during a conversation on my last radio show. “The party really tried to isolate me a number of years ago and tried to explain to our members, ‘do not touch what Ryan is talking about, don’t deal with these fiscal issues, these entitlements, it’s political suicide.” And I just decided instead of trying to win the argument internally, I tried to win it externally, and that took hold,” he explained. “What happened, really, was the 2010 election, I think. The 2010 election brought all these, sort of Tea Party conservative Republicans into office.”

I suppose it’s possible to pack more self-serving nonsense into one paragraph than Paulie (and Sykes) just did there, but it isn’t easy. Ryan was always an eager self-promoter, though, as I say, it’s a bit of a mystery—again with the mystery! Republicans are mysterious!—exactly who Ryan was trying to sell himself to. Ryan has spent nearly all his adult life working in politics, either as a legislative aide or a congressman, and has claimed that all he wanted was to be chair of the House Budget Committee, but I don’t quite believe that. He has always appeared to me to have national aspirations, but for what? If you want to be president, you have to get out of the House, and, as far as I know, Ryan never showed interest in running either for governor or senator. If he wanted money, sure, a Budget Committee chair can retire after five or six years and make $2 or $3 million a year as a big-time lobbyist, but why bust your ass in your fifties for $2 or $3 million a year when you could have been making $20 or $30 million a year on Wall Street in your twenties?

So is Ryan telling the truth when he claims that he’s just a wonk, just wants to make the world a better place via free-market capitalism? No, he isn’t. To coin a phrase, he’s a big fat liar. Ryan lists the late Rep. Jack Kemp as his mentor and role model. Kemp was perhaps the most passionate advocate of the holy gospel of supply-side economics this side of George Gilder. Both men believed that the absolutely unfettered free market would solve all of mankind’s ills. Ryan was/is also a disciple of the legendary Ayn Rand, the Queen of Mean, saying that he frequently reread Ayn’s exercise in übermenschlichkeit, Atlas Shrugged, but, grudgingly aware that Ayn’s atheism and frequently expressed hostility to the Catholic Church (Ryan was raised a Catholic) didn’t sit well with the evangelical set, pulled in his horns just a bit, so to speak, and more recently pronounced himself a big fan of supposed big thinker Yuval Levin, who celebrated the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 2010, so hailed by Ryan as essentially his work (“I just decided instead of trying to win the argument internally, I tried to win it externally, and that took hold”), with a piece for the National Interest entitled “Beyond the Welfare State”.

According to Ryan, Levin “does a very good job of articulating why these are good ideas and the right way to go and how they’re philosophically connected with one another and consistent.” Indeed, Levin has made a career out of pretending to be a student of Edmund Burke, but back in 2011 he sounded a lot more like Herbert Hoover, making a multi-pronged assault on the welfare state: “The reason is partly institutional: The administrative state is dismally inefficient and unresponsive, and therefore ill-suited to our age of endless choice and variety. The reason is also partly cultural and moral: The attempt to rescue the citizen from the burdens of responsibility has undermined the family, self-reliance, and self-government. But, in practice, it is above all fiscal: The welfare state has turned out to be unaffordable, dependent as it is upon dubious economics and the demographic model of a bygone era.”

Despite his “the bottom line is the bottom line” pitch, Levin was not at all shy about making Randy/Hooverian generalizations about the welfare state as the source of modern-day moral collapse:

This is the second major failing of this vision of society [the first is that it is grossly inefficient] — a kind of spiritual failing. Under the rules of the modern welfare state, we give up a portion of the capacity to provide for ourselves and in return are freed from a portion of the obligation to discipline ourselves. Increasing economic collectivism enables increasing moral individualism, both of which leave us with less responsibility, and therefore with less grounded and meaningful lives.

Moreover, because all citizens — not only the poor — become recipients of benefits, people in the middle class come to approach their government as claimants, not as self-governing citizens, and to approach the social safety net not as a great majority of givers eager to make sure that a small minority of recipients are spared from devastating poverty but as a mass of dependents demanding what they are owed. It is hard to imagine an ethic better suited to undermining the moral basis of a free society.4

In other words, it is not only means-tested welfare programs that are morally corrupting—and it is these that the general public thinks of (and often resents) as “welfare”—but Social Security and Medicare as well. In fact, they’re the really bad ones!

Unsurprisingly (but predictably) Levin doesn’t have the courage to follow his own argument and simply eliminate Social Security and Medicare. Instead, he’d make them means-tested. Most people would still get some retirement assistance (but why wouldn’t this still be “bad”?), but most people—the middle class in particular—wouldn’t get as much. And everyone would have to buy their own health insurance, with some assistance from the federal government to cushion the blow: “This approach would seek to let people be active consumers, rather than passive recipients of benefits — which would be good both for the federal budget (since consumer pressure in a free market keeps costs down far better than price controls) and for the character of our nation.” Naturally, the less expensive social programs, such as Head Start, would be trimmed and, ultimately, one could hope, be eliminated, since they simply waste money and make us more dependent.

It’s “interesting” to look both backwards and forwards with regard to Levin’s manifesto, looking backwards first to Ryan’s own conduct in office when, as he pictured it, he was more or less howling in the wilderness, rejected by the Republican establishment and forced, basically, to take it to the streets. Because what did Ryan do? He voted for every budget-busting Bush proposal, starting with the massive, and massively unnecessary and counter-productive, Bush tax cuts, which turned a $172 billion surplus in 2001 into a $210 billion deficit in 2002 (using 2014 dollars), and continuing through all the “unnecessary” (not to mention morally corrupting) social programs like No Child Left Behind, which added billions in education spending, through the ultimate budget-buster, the disastrous invasion of Iraq (the bold Mr. Levin makes no mention of defense spending at all in his manifesto) plus the ultimate outrage, a new entitlement program, adding billions to the Medicare tab yearly to cover prescription drugs, with no provision for funding whatsoever! Mr. Ryan, one has to say, believes that words speak louder than actions.

Supposedly, the 2010 election brought “Paul Ryan” Republicans into Congress. This is nonsense. As Ryan and Levin surely noticed, the Republicans’ ace in the hole in the 2010 election was Barack Obama’s decision, via the Affordable Care Act, not to talk about cutting Medicare, but to actually cut it—something that, of course, neither Ryan nor Levin ever talked about. Over and over again, Republicans promised never to cut “a dime of Grandma’s Medicare”, and of course they never did. Ryan and Levin “proposed” to cut Medicare 10 years down the line, which is rather like promising to go on a diet in 10 years,5 but as for the present, hey, nothing’s too good for Grandma! And Social Security, presumably the most corrupting program of all, at least in Levin’s philosophy, would never have lost a dime under Ryan’s proposals.

The one entitlement Ryan was always willing to cut was, of course, Medicaid, cutting spending for the poor, not to balance the budget but rather to hand out tax cuts to the rich, which was always the first priority of all.6 Ryan produced a variety of budget plans that were supposed to produce a balanced budget in X number of years, but they were always phony, with the popular provisions, like reduced tax rates, spelled out, while the unpopular ones, like “base broadening” (elimination of tax exemptions and other “loopholes”) left for further discussion. Medicaid would be cut immediately (it was somehow “fair” to cut benefits for the poor immediately, but not to do the same to the middle class, i.e., “Grandma”), and further spending cuts would be made in “domestic discretionary spending”, which had expanded enormously under Bush from 2001 through 2008, under legislation for which Ryan had repeatedly voted. But these cuts, like the “base broadening”, were left unspecified, to be worked out in further negotiation. In other words, Ryan would spell out the popular provisions, which would, in fact, expand the deficit dramatically, and the leave it to the Democrats to repair all the damage he had created. It would be the Democrats who would have the responsibility for balancing the budget, not Paul Ryan.

It was all a shell game, as Paul Krugman and others repeatedly pointed out, a mere partisan hustle, but it made moderate Republicans like Sykes and Will and Wilson proud. We’re serious! We’re fiscally responsible! We’re still the party of ideas! We’re not like those crazy Democrats, who are turning us into Greece!

Well, that was then. When the era of Trump dawned, Ryan was clearly in a quandary. His Wall Street buddies, whose willing servant he had always been, had no use for Trump’s bad ass, xenophobic, race-baiting populism. But Trump had the votes, so Ryan caved. And once he started, the caving never stopped.

To be fair, Ryan caved to everybody, everybody with power. He finally got his chance to cut Medicaid in the course of overturning the Affordable Care Act, but in his eagerness to both help the rich, by eliminating one of those opprobrious Obamacare abominations that actually increased taxes on innocent millionaires/billionaires, and stick it to the poor by denying health insurance to millions, he overreached himself. “It’s curious,” Republican health care maven Avik Roy opined, “that extending tax cuts [to the rich] was a higher priority for the House than addressing the fact that the bill will make insurance unaffordable for millions of Americans.” Actually, it isn’t, but fortunately the naked hypocrisy of it all caused three Republican senators, including John McCain, greatly to his credit, to gag and Obamacare was granted another day.

Yes, Paulie was denied on that occasion, but he was not denied on his tax bill, where the hypocrisy was even greater, but with so much money on the table, well, what’s a little nudity among friends? I mean, this is the way God made us!

As originally crafted, Ryan’s tax bill was revenue neutral, thanks to a “controversial” provision, a “border tax adjustment” that would have brought in $1.5 trillion over 10 years, that was furiously opposed by most corporate outfits, including Koch Inc. Ryan could have said to them, “okay, guys, you don’t like my proposal. So how are we going to make this thing revenue neutral?” But he didn’t say that. Both Ryan and the Koch folks, who had been shouting, shouting, shouting “It’s the deficit, stupid!” for eight long years, turned around and added a cool $1.5 trillion to the deficit at a minimum7 and celebrated! And then followed that up with a budget-busting spending package with both massive and entirely unnecessary increases in defense spending and equally large increases for “domestic discretionary spending”, which Republicans supposedly hate!

Charles Wilson (remember him?) at least had the honesty to be openly ashamed. Writing in his book Everything Trump Touches Dies, Wilson wrote

The bill does nothing to reduce the complexity, expense, opacity, and general brain-frying shittiness of the tax code for ordinary Americans. So much for our “Do your taxes on a postcard!” rhetoric. The tax code, baroque and ludicrously convoluted before, is even more baffling unless you can afford a fleet of corporate tax attorneys and consultants.

A prominent tax lobbyist I know wrote, “This is almost too easy. Even I feel dirty.” This person literally sat in the majority leader’s office crafting parts of the tax bill, laughing all the way to the bank. The members of the House and Senate who voted for this 479-page bill had only a few hours to consider it. I asked this lobbyist at the time what the job-creation effect would be from the corporate tax cut, and he replied, “How the fuck do I know? Something? Maybe?”

This is the legislation Paul Ryan “crafted”, or at least put his name to, and this is the legislation that John McCain voted for, a massive change to the U.S. tax code to which the U.S. Senate, the world’s greatest deliberative body, had zero input. The bill was written for them by Paul Ryan and a gaggle of lobbyists, and they contributed nothing. Decades of lying and deceit came to their full fruition. This was Paul Ryan’s achievement, and John McCain’s submission made it possible.

For whatever reason, the election of Bill Clinton to the presidency in 1992 essentially drove the Republican Party mad. Both the elite and the base were seized by a compulsive need to destroy Clintonism by any means necessary. The base seethed with paranoid rage against blacks, Hispanics, feminists, homosexuals–“the other”–while the elite sought to manage the monster and perpetuate itself first with tax cuts and “culture war” then with the intoxicating self-righteousness of a real war in the Middle East.8 But the elite discredited itself with disasters both home and abroad, and the triumph of the Tea Party signaled the collapse of elite power. For eight long years during the Obama Administration Paul Ryan served as the mask of Republican corruption. But now we see–as if it were hidden before–that the mask is as corrupt as that which it concealed.

McCain first became an advocate of campaign reform perhaps as an ass-covering measure, when he was identified as one of the “Keating Five”—five senators who aggressively promoted the interests of savings and loan hustler Charles Keating. Later, after his defeat by George W. Bush in the 2000 Republican presidential primaries, McCain was widely, and accurately, suspected of wanting to “get” evangelical groups who helped Bush defeat him. On immigration reform, McCain, like both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (and, pretty much, myself), was a strong advocate of the “open borders” approach favored by Wall Street. The same could be said of Paul Ryan as well, but Ryan did not dare cross the rabid Republican base—much stronger in the House than the Senate—on this one. ↩︎

In what was very likely a fit of pique rather than common sense, McCain voted against George Bush’s 2001 tax cuts. It was rare for McCain to care about deficits, unless a Democrat was in office. ↩︎

Word accepts this spelling, because it accepts “bro” as a word (as well as “ha”). I find it hard to believe that I typed “bro-ha-ha” but apparently I did, if only because Word will correct “brohaha” to “brouhaha” rather than “bro-ha-ha”. I guess I was really drunk. ↩︎

Levin, who is Jewish (he was born in Israel), titles his discussion of the shortcomings of the welfare state “The Passing of an Illusion”. In 1927, Sigmund Freud published a withering critique of Christianity under the title The Future of an Illusion. You don’t have to be a Freudian (cause I sure ain’t one) to suspect that Levin unconsciously—but not consciously—echoed Freud’s title. ↩︎

Back in the eighties, when Ronald Reagan introduced Americans to “modern deficits” (Reagan doubled the size of the entire national debt in eight years, in constant dollars, although an expanding economy meant that as a percentage of GNP the increase was only 43%), Congress enacted several elaborate deficit reduction packages. All of them employed the same strategy: cosmetic cuts to get Congress through the next election, followed by “real” cuts afterwards. Inevitably, after the next election, the new Congress would “discover” that the “real” cuts were in fact “crazy” ones, and rewrite the legislation to push the new “real” cuts to after the next election. The notion that the Congress elected in 2010 could “force” the Congress elected in 2020 to make massive, and massively unpopular, cuts in Medicare is ludicrous. ↩︎

Levin, in his paper, briefly explains that he wants a simplified federal tax policy, with low rates. Despite his supposed obsession with soaring deficits, he doesn’t even discuss the possibility of raising taxes to reduce them, probably because he knows that would work, as it did under Clinton, and he doesn’t want to balance the budget on the backs of the rich. ↩︎

The bill made tax cuts for the rich permanent but set the tax cuts for the middle class to expire in 10 years. Now Republicans are “proposing” to make them permanent. This is probably an election-year gambit, but if it works, what are they going to do? Say they were lying? ↩︎

For many evangelicals, the events in the contemporary Middle East are a direct continuation of the events of the Bible–God’s Will in action. ↩︎

#John McCain #Paul Ryan #Republican Party #Lyin' Paulie Ryan

0 notes