Nah, just not a fan of Current Year Man.

Can the Sailor Senshi stop the evil plans of the FAKE STARS?

If the states weren't jerrymandered as fuck it wouldn't matter.

The GOP has been engaging in a country-wide campaign of gerrymandering and minority voter suppression.

No, it's because 47% of eligible voters didn't vote. Don't blame it on gerrymandering, don't blame it on voter suppression. It was all about liberals sharing videos like this instead of voting because "he can't possibly win"

Republicans vote. The Left looks for reasons not to vote. The process rewards the former.

Gerrymandering is a problem, but it gives Republicans only a 5%-10% advantage in any given district -- gerrymandering works best when as many districts as possible have a barely sufficient advantage. Gerrymandering is beatable just by the Left bothering to show up. In any event, it has no impact on the Senate or the Presidency.

Voter suppression is a real thing, but Republican voter suppression efforts started in 2013, and the 2014 numbers sure as fuck don't illustrate progressives being up-in-arms and doing a damn thing about it.

There are a whole lot of reasons why this happened, and the truth is that just about all of us have some share of the responsibility, so we should all look at ourselves before we start pointing fingers. That includes YOU, Berniebros!

And then we should all buck up. As Homer Simpson might say, this is our CRISITUNITY, and I intend to embrace mine.

Left center Democrats don't want to keep conservatives from eating dinner together and going to church. Right center Republicans don't want the oceans to rise and swallow up coastal cities. We have been hoodwinked into believing the most ridiculous things about each other. Rush Limbaugh says that we're living through a new civil war. If it's true, that makes it a great time to be Rush Limbaugh.

>>>It was all about liberals sharing videos like this instead of voting because "he can't possibly win"

Fuck you. I'm the one who submitted this video, and I fucking voted.

AH,

Your argument falls apart because Hillary won the popular vote by over two million votes, almost three million.

Voter suppression and gerrymandering are most effective in lower-population districts where the majority of people tend to be older Christian white people with more conservative (read "repressive") social views. In other words, traditionally Republican voters.

Younger people, LGBT people, non-Christian people, non-Whites, all gravitate towards major urban areas. These people tend to be more liberal and traditionally vote Democrat. It's harder to gerrymander or suppress votes in these places.

That's why the electoral map looks like isolated islands of blue in a vast sea of red. Just remember, that sea is incredibly shallow and those islands are densely populated.

popular vote doesn't mean shit. Gerrymandering doesn't mean shit. If your voter turnout is high enough; all of the excuses Democrats use to shift blame do not mean shit.

You're both right, since the Republicans wouldn't have been able to gerrymander districts so far up the ass if Democrats had shown up to vote in 2010.

The problem, JHM, is that you can't convince a bunch of Democrat voters to move out to the sticks.

I'm a blue in a red state. There are a lot of others here like me. Again, though, they're concentrated around the urban areas. We do show up at the polls, but we are way outnumbered no matter what we do. And since America allows the winning party to draw up the voting districts, there's not a lot we can do.

The good news is a lot of Republican voters are starting to get pissed off. I live in Florida and some of them are starting to realize our state economy depends on immigrants. A lot of them also didn't realize Obamacare and the ACA are the same thing. Now it's not just "whiny" liberals showing up at their "town hall" style meetings. It's angry seniors and struggling blue-collar workers whom they can't ignore.

Good point Binro, so does this sudden turn around on these key issues come from the theory that the wide GOP voter base is simply getting all pre-election data emotionally spoon fed from sources like Fox News, Alex Jones and Breitbart and are only now seeing the real consequences behind the curtain? (as alluded to in this segment)

Gerrymandering in WI is a bigger impact than 5-10% (13%, 17%? I can't recall exactly). But still, Democrats had MORE VOTES in the state legislatures, and yet the Republicans have a supermajority. Because they drew the maps.

This link says 12% - 13%:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/us/wisconsin-redistricting- found-to-unfairly-favor-republicans.html

Okay that's a little harder to beat than 5% - 10%, but in low turnout elections it's by no means unbeatable The Left just needs to pretend that midterm years are presidential election years, and show up in force.

Sorry, that was 17.4% for Yemen. They have it great over there.

42% number is probably formulated by a right-wing agitprop idiot that factored in kids, the disabled and the retired.

PUT AMERICA'S KIDS BACK TO WORK!

(also that number is used when they need to deflect from how the rich aren't paying their fair share of taxes...'42% of americans don't pay any taxes!!! hurmf!')

No one who gave the video one star explained why. There's nothing wrong with that, you don't have to like anything, and you don't have to explain anything. I just hope you don't think that you're making a point. In order to have an argument, you need to have an arguement.

Videos are important because they're sharable, and this is the most lucid breakdown of the most frightening and pathological aspect of this frightening pathological government. I keep learning things from John Oliver, even when he's not funny, and I learn things from Samantha Bee. If Samantha Bee's monologues were a book, I'd read it.

One thing you can take heart in, most Trump voters don't believe his bullshit, either. This was all about trolling the liberals.

This is revenge for telling them they can't use hurtful language without repercussions anymore. It's revenge for attacking their fantasy land narrative where White Christian Men are the saviors of mankind. It's revenge for telling them they have to share.

And so they elected someone who they know distresses us and will continue to distress us. It's a tweak to our collective nose. They don't care if he runs the country into the ground. They don't care if they suffer, too. They got one over on us and they're as giddy as any Internet troll who gets someone to lose their shit online. That's why they still wear the "Make America Great Again" hats and sip coffee from mugs labelled "Liberal Tears." They know he won't make America great again. They just know we hate him and it amuses them to upset us.

It's laughing at someone you don't like having a bucket of piss dumped on their head even though you're standing right next to them and are getting soaked as well.

Actually, I guess a better analogy would be setting fire to a building then laughing at everyone around you as they panic and try to put out the fire.

That's a good summary.

But some of them were under the delusion that he wouldn't do the horrible things he promised (that would hurt them), and you may just be lucky enough to see when reality dawns on them and see the color draining from their faces.

Yeah, there were some like that.

And I already got to see the "Oh shit" look on their faces.

It was not comforting.

What I love are those who deliberately wanted to see angry liberals, and are now seeing angry liberals at town hall meetings, not to mention the women's march.


Remember that oppressive regimes only need to break the consensus of reality to prosper. They don't need to have us all believing the same thing.

This is revenge for telling them they can't use hurtful language without repercussions anymore. It's revenge for attacking their fantasy land narrative where White Christian Men are the saviors of mankind. It's revenge for telling them they have to share.

No, it's revenge for "BLACKPRESIDENTGATE" When they talk about making America great again, this was the point where America stopped being great, and what they're talking about is having white people in charge.

I'm fifty-nine years old, and I grew up believing things about America, and a lot of my beliefs were challenged when Trump was elected. It was the most traumatic political experience of my longer-than-most-of-y'all's life.

One thing I learned from this is what it must have felt like to be a 60 year old racist, and to see Barak Obama elected president. The wrongheadedness is undeniable, but so is the pain.

I would never say that it was wrong to elect Obama because he's black, but the right managed to make us feel their pain. It was a shitty, stupid, self-destructive use of political power, but if revenge is what they wanted, they got it.

No matter what happens, let's NOT take revenge for Trump. Politically, it's to everybody's advantage to not inflict pain on each other. We need to work toward something resembling a compromise, a two-state solution.

What's wrong with everybody? I've talked to feminists, young women in their 20s about how I believe sexism ruins men's lives, how we all could have common goals, and it offends them. They don't want solutions; they want victory. Or maybe they want to keep trolling each other forever?

Trump's election was America's Triumph against the forces of reason and intellect.

It was the point when Americans drew a line in the sand and yelled "WE WILL NO LONGER BE BOSSED AROUND BY THE IDEAS OF SMART PEOPLE!"

JHMF - what Binro and you are saying about Republicans voting for Trump solely to stick it to liberals, is the most optimistic interpretation I've heard. Show me a person who actively agrees with all of Trump's agenda and I will show you a monster. If the deal with most of his supporters is that they're assholes but not monsters, well, there is at least hope. At least assholes can get it out of their systems sometimes, at least they are occasionally capable of regret.

I am not sure the panic they were feeling was the same as what I'm feeling, though. When it's make-believe threats you kind of know. Like when Alex Jones was standing outside whatever federal building daring the g-men to take him, and the most attention he got was a security guard giving him a confused look ... deep down Alex Jones and his supporters knew it was theater and he was perfectly safe. Jones would never have tried the like in a genuinely repressive state, nor would his followers dare to follow him on YouTube (which could almost certainly reveal information about them to the authorities).

"The election shook my deepest faith, my belief that, in America, reality always wins."


Wait, what led you to believe that in the first place?

Genuinely curious.

I immediately knew that I was going to wind up issuing some sort of clarification for that one. So here it is. Objectively, that's clearly bullshit, and you're right to call me on that.

I believe History moves forward. And for a moment it seemed to move backwards. It was genuinely terrifying. But I think history knows where it's going. (Not really. Let me have some fucking poetic license, okay?)

"I can only assume this comes from the "both sides are equally horrible"-people, who -usually- are a useful force for self-reflection on both sides."

Nahh, they're never a useful force because both sides AREN'T equally horrible. If you're going to declare your side horrible whether or not they deserve it, how can your side possibly improve to your satisfaction? You end up voting for Jill Stein, and the nation goes to shit because the pretty-good-albeit-imperfect side didn't get the support it needed.

I'm all for criticism of the Democrats, but I also draw a distinction between what I'd like them to somehow accomplish and what I can reasonably expect them to accomplish.

Most of them are our racist right wing lurkers

Five stars for Tim and Eric and nothing else

Well, most of our racist right wing lurkers are some of them. It's a sentence that defies clean phrasing.

The thing I've noticed is, these people are so hell-bent on painting the Democrats as terrible, they'll lie about them just as much as Republicans do. Countless times I had to correct the record about the public option, Honduras, or whatever other "betrayal" the Left has seized upon to justify their hatred of the Democrats. Then they complain that the Democrats aren't doing enough to win them over. How do you win someone over who is dead set against it?

I immediately knew that I was going to wind up issuing some sort of clarification for that one. So here it is. Objectively, that's clearly bullshit, and you're right to call me on that.

I believe History moves forward. And for a moment it seemed to move backwards. It was genuinely terrifying. But I think history knows where it's going. (Not really. Let me have some fucking poetic license, okay?)