Look, I get that there are tens of millions of people who do not want to vote Democrat: libertarian types, free marketeers, climate change deniers, people who just feel a strong tribal attachment to the elephant, etc. What I still can't wrap my head around, after eight years of his BS, is tens of millions of people who still believe the …
Look, I get that there are tens of millions of people who do not want to vote Democrat: libertarian types, free marketeers, climate change deniers, people who just feel a strong tribal attachment to the elephant, etc. What I still can't wrap my head around, after eight years of his BS, is tens of millions of people who still believe the Big Cheeto is America's Best Hope.
It is just too depressing, even on a beautiful August morning.
I would prefer to vote for someone who believes what the old time Republican party stood for: limited government, personal responsibility, fiscal discipline, a muscular foreign policy and devotion to and respect for institutions.
When the Republicans run someone like that, I'll vote for him or her. I'd vote for Chris Christie, Asa Hutchinson, Will Hurd or Liz Cheney without a second thought. Trump? Never. Same for the Trump-lite candidates: Pence, DeSantis, Haley, Ramaswamy. No way.
I like the post because we need your voice here on the site, but even though I'm ex-GOP...I cannot issue a blanket statement about voting for a candidate based simply on who the candidate is...ESPECIALLY with the GOP. The MAGA influence is far more than just the candidate these days...so even with better leadership...their effectiveness will be limited.
Again...I appreciate your perspective because its similar to mine but I have a greatly lessened loyalty to the GOP until they clean up their party from top to bottom.
Stunning and deeply disturbing...the problem is that there are so many right-wing media outlets and elected Congressmen and politicians who won't criticize Trump, even though they know deep down that Trump is deadly to America.
I hope this is a bit of cheer for you: there are left-leaning libertarians out there. I can't see any of them voting for TFG, and if their reasons for leaning left still hold, I think many would be okay with voting for Biden. (In my experience, they tended not to be anarcho-capitalists, but rather minarchists.)
That's a very broad brush you're painting with. Neither Rand nor Ron Paul could reasonably be described as a left-libertarian, which is the subset I was focused on. I considered myself a left-libertarian back in the day; one of the things that pretty reliably separated left from right was bigotry/prejudice.
They don't really believe Trump is America's Best Hope, at least not the America we've all lived in for the last 100 or so years. The America that has done more for global humanity by a hundred fold than any other country in human history. The Big Cheeto is their best hope for destroying that America. That America made no preference for White Christian Nationalists. Everyone was helped without preference. Hence, the unconscionable attacks on PEPFAR.
PEPFAR is Bush II's program to combat AIDS in the third world. It's up for renewal every five years. It's been credited with saving 25 million lives since it's inception. Now the GOP wants to kill it over an unproven, frequently rebutted, conspiracy theory that certain aspects of it are used to fund abortions. The abortion issue has truly become the devil's playground....actually it always has been
Rick Wilson was talking about the 1980's period when St Ronnie was sucking up to the Evangelicals. Rick said it was completely transactional, especially with Falwell and a couple of the other prosperity gospel pond scum. It wasn't about Jesus, it was all about the Benjamins. They essentially paid the Evangelicals to suddenly see the light on abortion.
Reagan buried himself on my shit list over his refusal to see that AIDS was not just a plague of God brought on gay men as a punishment. By the time PEPFAR was passed, HIV/AIDS had some 15 years to romp it's way through straight populations.
The pattern is the same as COVID denial. First deny it exists or is a threat. Then be fatalistic and say it's God's will. Seriously, that's what the right-wing 'religious' folk said about COVID.
The climate crisis has begun to affect the insurance industry. Here in CA where I live insurers are beginning to deny coverage in some areas (wildfire), and rates are going up for many who can still get it (doubled for us). Same for Florida I think (storm damage, flooding). As the CC has bigger economic impacts, denial will be more difficult to maintain. But, unless/until people are personally affected, it's denial.
Even my super-red, MAGA-adjacent CA. Assemblyman tweeted about that today, the insurance. That something should be done about it. You’d he’d make the connection but I doubt he will.
All it takes is one tough winter, a day or two in the negative double digits, and certain people point to that and declaim that climate change/global warming isn't real. Such people don't understand the climate change process and confuse local weather with global warming. Or perhaps worse, they declaim that climate change has always occurred but it's not human-caused so there's nothing that can or should be done about it.
That we call our current climate change in progress "global warming" has been confusing, despite the term's accuracy. Yes, the globe is warming; the average temperature of all points on Earth, throughout the entire year, is definitely rising. This does not mean that every place is warmer at all times. What it really means is that there is *more energy* in the overall atmospheric and hydrospheric system that creates local weather patterns. More energy means the potential for more extremes in all directions, and less predictability. Hot and cold waves, drought and flood, storms of all kinds. The natural cycles of various regions (like El Niño, or the Indian Monsoon) will generally continue, but everything will seem to be supercharged.
Your August must be very different from our August in Dallas. Both the weather and the politics are depressing. Still, at some point, our weather will get less depressing, maybe even uplifting, but politics will still be depressing.
Up until a week ago it was very hot and dry (for Wisconsin). This morning when I got up it was sunny and about 75 degrees and the couple inches of rain we've gotten recently makes my garden very happy.
I really do feel for you folks down there. Our next-door neighbors are planning on relocating to Phoenix. I think they're nuts.
Our politics is pretty screwy too, though, again, not nearly as bad as yours. We have a crazy freshman House Rep who screams obscenities at Senate pages and we have Ron Johnson. But our senior Senator is Tammy Baldwin and we had a liberal Supreme Court justice installed today, so we also some sunshine in our politics.
We can hope enough of the can’t vote for a “D” crowd just leave the President slot blank. While not as good for defeating tfg as a vote for Biden, each of those would be loss of a vote for the Republican.
Leaving the president slot blank is the same as voting for whoever ends up with the most votes. Leaving the slot blank says "I go along with what you guys decide." It is not a stand for anything but apathy. Sometimes you do have to vote for the lesser of two evils. What's so hard about that? The LESSOR of two evils is a better choice than the
For what it's worth, I live in a swing state and I know several two time former guy voters who plan to not vote for president in a Trump/Biden matchup. I also think you're going to have a lot of suburban voters continue to peel off from Trump. Even some people I know who don't despise him like I do are beginning to be like "Yea he's too much" or even "I won't vote for him again".
Look, I get that there are tens of millions of people who do not want to vote Democrat: libertarian types, free marketeers, climate change deniers, people who just feel a strong tribal attachment to the elephant, etc. What I still can't wrap my head around, after eight years of his BS, is tens of millions of people who still believe the Big Cheeto is America's Best Hope.
It is just too depressing, even on a beautiful August morning.
I would prefer to vote for someone who believes what the old time Republican party stood for: limited government, personal responsibility, fiscal discipline, a muscular foreign policy and devotion to and respect for institutions.
When the Republicans run someone like that, I'll vote for him or her. I'd vote for Chris Christie, Asa Hutchinson, Will Hurd or Liz Cheney without a second thought. Trump? Never. Same for the Trump-lite candidates: Pence, DeSantis, Haley, Ramaswamy. No way.
I like the post because we need your voice here on the site, but even though I'm ex-GOP...I cannot issue a blanket statement about voting for a candidate based simply on who the candidate is...ESPECIALLY with the GOP. The MAGA influence is far more than just the candidate these days...so even with better leadership...their effectiveness will be limited.
Again...I appreciate your perspective because its similar to mine but I have a greatly lessened loyalty to the GOP until they clean up their party from top to bottom.
Stunning and deeply disturbing...the problem is that there are so many right-wing media outlets and elected Congressmen and politicians who won't criticize Trump, even though they know deep down that Trump is deadly to America.
I hope this is a bit of cheer for you: there are left-leaning libertarians out there. I can't see any of them voting for TFG, and if their reasons for leaning left still hold, I think many would be okay with voting for Biden. (In my experience, they tended not to be anarcho-capitalists, but rather minarchists.)
That's a very broad brush you're painting with. Neither Rand nor Ron Paul could reasonably be described as a left-libertarian, which is the subset I was focused on. I considered myself a left-libertarian back in the day; one of the things that pretty reliably separated left from right was bigotry/prejudice.
They don't really believe Trump is America's Best Hope, at least not the America we've all lived in for the last 100 or so years. The America that has done more for global humanity by a hundred fold than any other country in human history. The Big Cheeto is their best hope for destroying that America. That America made no preference for White Christian Nationalists. Everyone was helped without preference. Hence, the unconscionable attacks on PEPFAR.
PEPFAR is Bush II's program to combat AIDS in the third world. It's up for renewal every five years. It's been credited with saving 25 million lives since it's inception. Now the GOP wants to kill it over an unproven, frequently rebutted, conspiracy theory that certain aspects of it are used to fund abortions. The abortion issue has truly become the devil's playground....actually it always has been
In God's or history's final judgement of George W. Bush, Pepfar is the great credit to be set against his sins in and around Iraq.
Rick Wilson was talking about the 1980's period when St Ronnie was sucking up to the Evangelicals. Rick said it was completely transactional, especially with Falwell and a couple of the other prosperity gospel pond scum. It wasn't about Jesus, it was all about the Benjamins. They essentially paid the Evangelicals to suddenly see the light on abortion.
Reagan buried himself on my shit list over his refusal to see that AIDS was not just a plague of God brought on gay men as a punishment. By the time PEPFAR was passed, HIV/AIDS had some 15 years to romp it's way through straight populations.
Between the "heat dome," and continuing droughts in the southeast, I don't understand how anyone can still deny climate change.
The pattern is the same as COVID denial. First deny it exists or is a threat. Then be fatalistic and say it's God's will. Seriously, that's what the right-wing 'religious' folk said about COVID.
The climate crisis has begun to affect the insurance industry. Here in CA where I live insurers are beginning to deny coverage in some areas (wildfire), and rates are going up for many who can still get it (doubled for us). Same for Florida I think (storm damage, flooding). As the CC has bigger economic impacts, denial will be more difficult to maintain. But, unless/until people are personally affected, it's denial.
Even my super-red, MAGA-adjacent CA. Assemblyman tweeted about that today, the insurance. That something should be done about it. You’d he’d make the connection but I doubt he will.
All it takes is one tough winter, a day or two in the negative double digits, and certain people point to that and declaim that climate change/global warming isn't real. Such people don't understand the climate change process and confuse local weather with global warming. Or perhaps worse, they declaim that climate change has always occurred but it's not human-caused so there's nothing that can or should be done about it.
Global warming causes tough winters!
That we call our current climate change in progress "global warming" has been confusing, despite the term's accuracy. Yes, the globe is warming; the average temperature of all points on Earth, throughout the entire year, is definitely rising. This does not mean that every place is warmer at all times. What it really means is that there is *more energy* in the overall atmospheric and hydrospheric system that creates local weather patterns. More energy means the potential for more extremes in all directions, and less predictability. Hot and cold waves, drought and flood, storms of all kinds. The natural cycles of various regions (like El Niño, or the Indian Monsoon) will generally continue, but everything will seem to be supercharged.
Thanks for explaining how climate change effects winter also.
Your granddaughter is why we can't give up. The best time to aggressively attack climate change was 50 years ago. The second best time is today!
Your August must be very different from our August in Dallas. Both the weather and the politics are depressing. Still, at some point, our weather will get less depressing, maybe even uplifting, but politics will still be depressing.
Up until a week ago it was very hot and dry (for Wisconsin). This morning when I got up it was sunny and about 75 degrees and the couple inches of rain we've gotten recently makes my garden very happy.
I really do feel for you folks down there. Our next-door neighbors are planning on relocating to Phoenix. I think they're nuts.
Our politics is pretty screwy too, though, again, not nearly as bad as yours. We have a crazy freshman House Rep who screams obscenities at Senate pages and we have Ron Johnson. But our senior Senator is Tammy Baldwin and we had a liberal Supreme Court justice installed today, so we also some sunshine in our politics.
We can hope enough of the can’t vote for a “D” crowd just leave the President slot blank. While not as good for defeating tfg as a vote for Biden, each of those would be loss of a vote for the Republican.
Leaving the president slot blank is the same as voting for whoever ends up with the most votes. Leaving the slot blank says "I go along with what you guys decide." It is not a stand for anything but apathy. Sometimes you do have to vote for the lesser of two evils. What's so hard about that? The LESSOR of two evils is a better choice than the
GREATER of two evils.
Exactly! What's wrong with less evil?
For what it's worth, I live in a swing state and I know several two time former guy voters who plan to not vote for president in a Trump/Biden matchup. I also think you're going to have a lot of suburban voters continue to peel off from Trump. Even some people I know who don't despise him like I do are beginning to be like "Yea he's too much" or even "I won't vote for him again".
"From your mouth to God's ears," as they say.