MagicShel

I'm not going to be out of house and home (at least I can weather it for a while) but beyond that, we'll just have to see. Used to be I could find a new spot within a week or two, but the market has really turned in the last couple of years.

I appreciate your concern, but my wife is still working, making about half of what I normally do, and we are getting our health insurance through her. We largely live below our means, so we'll be alright for a bit.

You know, unless some crazy dictator comes along and starts trashing the economy..... oh.....

Well, then, just duck your head down and try to survive then, because that's all that's left. The system is what it is and it's not going to change without violence, so it can either be co-opted from within as my suggestion, or we can all sharpen our knives and hope the next government is better rather than worse than this one.

God dammit! I'm going back to sending my ransom notes using cut up words from magazines!

Also from midwest. Same experience, with the exception of a few people who get really cranky when politics comes up and they realize they are working with a bunch of liberals.

No interesting drama because I work from home. I am getting laid off next Friday, though, so that's nice. (Or have been laid off, last day is Friday, whatever makes more sense.)

Magic Shell is an ice cream topping.

I try to make my user names things I have no particular attachment to because I tend to cycle them about every few years. I did it 3 times on Reddit. I'll likely do the same here eventually.

Uh... obviously you can't win an election with only 19% of the vote?

That's exactly my point. No third party candidate will ever do that well again because the environment that enabled him will never exist again. He had 20% of all TVs tuned to his little whiteboard fireside chats in an age when there was nothing else to do.

No third party that isn't self-funded by a multi-billionaire is ever going to have the money to spend like a major party, but even if they did, they would never have 20% doing nothing but watching and listening for 30 minutes, but even if they did they will still fucking lose. Horribly. Without a single electoral vote. Just like Ross.

Guess we'll see. The only thing I've seen Dems (as a party) do in the past month is roll over and show their belly.

I'm not talking about Presidential primaries. I'm talking about state and local. Make it so the Democratic Party is full of progressives, socialists, social democrats, whatever your favorite brand of left-wing politics is. I'd be dammed careful about communists because that word is a fucking non-starter with the American electorate. Hell socialism is as well but it's not as poisonous as communism. When the party is full of... I don't know the proper term because every word I think to use (leftist? Lefties, maybe?) has been co-opted to mean a specific ideology. But make it so the Democratic Party as a whole leans further left, and those people have to be tapped to fill key roles because their presence is so large.

You are absolutely wrong about creating/hacking third party. Ross Perot couldn't pull it off despite spending about 80% what the major parties spent and capturing nearly 19% of votes in a vastly more friendly media environment. In order to achieve just that lofty level of irrelevance, a third party candidate would have to spend about $350 million and buy Fox News or Facebook. Third party isn't going to happen. Presidential primary isn't the place to start.

This is correct. Ultimately, the Democratic Party will only be changed through primaries. Not town halls or performative third party voting, but filling the party up with people who think differently.

It's also entirely possible that at one point they reported as non-citizens and subsequently got citizenship before the election. There are lots of possible reasons for this discrepancy, of which vote fraud is only one. The important thing is it's not statistically significant.

Also, how did states not have access to verify the citizens of voters?

He 100% can affect elections, refute their legitimacy, send in "inspectors," or whatever else. And remember even if you think it's not legal, he can't be prosecuted for anything done in an official capacity, and he can pardon anyone who does break federal law.

He can do fucking anything and our only recourse is the legal system, which will take months or years to play out, and ultimately the Supreme Court is on his side even if they don't agree with everything he does.

But there is the question of if he has the balls to do it, if he can do it all in time, if he makes it that far without choking on a hamberder, and how much resistance he encounters. I'm not defeated, just thinking strategically. We may have to prepare to fight for ourselves because the Democratic Party as a whole really cares more about stability than any ideology (and to be fair, it appears in swing states that might be exactly that their constituents largely want, and ideologues would never have gotten elected in the first place).

Democracy must be defended, constantly. Sometimes with blood. Hopefully we aren't there yet, but I wouldn't expect to be rescued and that doesn't mean we are defeated.