Yeah good to see you guys too. I had to take a break from the forum but I'm working on fighting this from the top down, the bottom up through community building and relationship building, and economically through increasing my own position in the economy.

This is a shock to the system that was much needed. We need to make The Resistance go viral. Our system was way sicker than we wanted to admit, and now we have this monstrosity.

I have a sweet bridge made of Rearden Steel to sell this dude.

The fish make the game easy to win: if everyone else is too lazy to write their congressperson, your letters have an augmented influence.

HOL UP GOOFY A WHITE MAN'S OUTTA WORK WE MAYBE BETTER CALL THE WHOLE THING OFF

How many letters actually find their way into congress(wo)men's desk? I'm going to guess a very low amount.

This is BS. Hillary was a lifelong democrat, who was registering latinos in Texas in college and working on education and healthcare as First Lady. We should be so lucky that a candidate like that is forced down our throats once every four or eight years. It's on the rest of us democrats to figure out how to win local and state elections, and actually deliver progressive policies to the working class, rather than letting republicans block it.

Welcome back einbert.

Another thing is boycotts. A lot of companies are going to need boycotting. Obviously anything a Trump owns, but also Trump slappies, people who do business with Trump businesses, people who stay at his hotels or play golf on his golf courses.

I know he'll grift enough to make up for this, but he should be toxic and his competitors and the businesses of his opponents should be rewarded.

Keith Ellison would disagree somewhat, saying it's up to the DNC to focus messaging and help support down ballot races

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politi...dnc-ezra-klein

Really good article, lots of strategy, seems like the guy that should probably lead the party.

I would think/hope they are looked at by staff and tallied in some way if they are simple, like "please vote no on X".

I never said she wasn't. What I'm saying is the DNC trying to appoint her the presidency as opposed to having free and fair primaries cost the democratic party the election, and should cost pretty much every DNC leader and most super delegates their positions. They cannot be trusted to make good decisions going forward. Also we are not lucky to have a candidate like her forced upon us every 4 or 8 years when there are much better options that would beat her if allowed to run.

You are honestly telling me with a straight face that there were only two people in the democratic/independent parties that wanted to run for the democratic nomination for president?

Also you are wrong about saying it's on the rest of the democrats to figure out how to win local and state elections. That is a massive party failure that needs a complete revamp. You need new and capable leadership. The republicans are a complete joke, the bigger joke is you can't beat them. Protest and revolt against your leaders that allowed this to happen.

Yeah I get that leadership needs to show how and what. But the rank and file actually need to vote in all elections, and show their own initiatives to keep us informed and engaged. It's not like this stuff is hard. I admit I walk past the nature conservancy people on the street and don't sign the petitions or give them money, but if there is stuff and I can start doing, it pretty easy to find. E.g. I can see myself tacking onto a school board campaign. Or even council or state rep campaign. Of course I live in a liberal state that haas many good candidates already. I got some crazier ideas as well, like taking a sabbatical strategically around voter registration and election deadlines, and going to red precincts to help democratic campaigns.

Im also starting to engage my niece and nephew politically. Bought them ACLU memberships. Probably going to help them find charities or causes to join. Talk to them about calling out racism or other deplorables when they see it. They will be voting in 5 years.

Thanks! So apparently there is an organized effort going on to keep track of which companies to boycott (and which to support) through #GrabYourWallet on twitter.

https://twitter.com/hashtag/grabyourwallet

It's something to keep an eye on for sure.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-...-bill/586?r=13


H.R.586 - To provide that human life shall be deemed to begin with fertilization.


Call your reps about this tomorrow!

Why would anyone in the DNC run when they know hillary will? She is an obviously a more experienced and better financed candidate than anyone else as soon as she announces. Not everyone is a phenomenon like Obama 2008 who pulled an upset. which btw hillary accepted like a pro and immediately supported him for that historic accomplishment. think about that. Why should they lose their jobs? They put forward the most qualified democrat in decades, and they didn't wait to score headline points by waiting to pledge their vote.

But back to getting more candidates in the primaries. The only guy who tried was someone who felt strongly enough to call himself an independent for 40 years until he figured it's now or never, which by the way is stupid. He was in line for chairman of budget committee. That's about as powerful as an independent is going to get, and he WOULD have made a big difference at that post.

No one cheated bernie. He had a weak moment and pouted too hard, and himself drank the koolaid that a bunch of single-issue millennials are somehow wise beyond their years, having never shown up to vote or run for office anywhere. Sorry, I don't buy that if we nominate a slightly more liberal guy who calls himself a socialist, that young people are suddenly all going to become good progressives. Hillary is inspiring a ton of girls age 10-18. Bernie is inspiring baristas with enviable beards and hippies. I'll take the former.

Biden was never running, you are dreaming.

If you want to abolish superdelegates, have fun with a repeat of 1980 DNC, or 2016 GOP primaries. It's not pretty. That's how you get a bunch of radicals fighting against the progress we already made. It's even worse if you think you NEED a field of 10. That's a recipe for BAD candidates taking up TV time and making democrats look like idiots.

If you want to abolish superdelegates, that means you don't care about the very democrats who have dedicated their entire lives to the cause. Results of the election notwithstanding, I still trust Howard dean and Elizabeth warren and Keith Ellison for that matter. You want to take away their status, that's going to shorten the bench of good leadership and make it a free for all popularity contest. That's a recipe for populist demagogues, not good social policies.

The Congressman is generally informed if the staff gets lots of letters or calls on a topic. Most congressional staffs pay attention to calls, it's considered good politics to be "responsive to your district".

I don't know whether you should care, but Congress dislikes receiving snail mail because it has to be screened for anthrax, which takes weeks.

I was wrong when I ignored or didn't follow up on the democratic party's pleas to go vote in local/midterms. I am not wrong that's it's not on them to make it happen every time. I need my leaders to be in actual government and write good policy legislation, not think about how to get some stoned college kids to think about something other than themselves, like immigrants/migrants/refugees or single parents on welfare or even the working class. Talking to people like that is actually on me, since I know a few of them and can dedicate the time to talk to them personally.

As an intern, I used to respond to the letters for a senator and I feel pretty confident saying the number is under 1%. There would be one person in the office to take a quick look at the email and then assign it to the appropriate staffer to respond to, the staffer who responds has a database of letters that are pre-written and approved by someone higher up and there is (almost) never personalized responses. If there was a message from someone who had power/influence, it would be sent directly to the senator's email which would be read by his scheduler/secretary and then another higher level staff member before it even makes it to his desk.


Of course, the whole office is aware of the overall situation of the topic at hand, the general public's opinion, and the senator's opinion. I was there for 5 months, and in that time I don't think any of the organized phone call or letter sending movements changed the mind of the senator that I was interning for. For phone calls, there is a software that the staff assistant is supposed to enter the info of the caller into, their name, address, phone, and their opinion on a certain topic. When there was a rush of calls this process would often be ignored and the person answering would say something like "Thank you for calling and sharing your opinion, I will be happy to pass it on to the senator" without even writing anything down.

That said, I still encourage you to send and call as much as possible. The senator I was with was popular in the state and had a very small chance of losing his seat so he didn't need to feel threatened, but the same is not true for everyone.

Remember kids: if Ashley Judd or Madonna say mean things, that's why Trump won. It's their fault. It's all of us libtards' fault. We made the Ins0's of the world vote Trump out of sheer spite. We have no one but ourselves to blame.

But if Richard Spencer gets punched, it's not because he supports genocide. It's because some dude in a hoodie is a violent thug. Whether or not it's Spencer's fault is irrelevant. That Spencer got punched for his abhorrent views is that is not the story. That Spencer would re-implement the Holocaust if his ilk ever get real power again is not the story.

No, the story is about manners and civility and the lack of any place for violence in proper society.

So keeping an undemocratic nomination process is fine but having the electoral college is not fine.

It just reinforces the simple truth that this is all about having power. You want your party to be in charge and just give lip service to believing in democracy.

Cool. Their website has the lists and reasons. I'm not much of a shopper and pretty much never hit any of the stores on their boycott list. Amazon is the only one and not often for them either. They are a super ****ty company anyway. I'm also not going to Exxon. Hopefully before too long I'll be able to boycott all gas stations.

It's a weird line to take -a special kind of false equivalence going on. Spencer's views do encourage people to oppose the right.

He and people like him are very much responsible for liberal activism but that's a silver lining not a cloud.

The point is about what the story is in each case. The same people who want to blame Madonna for Trump winning want to talk about anything but what a neo-nazi might have done to bring getting punched onto himself.

This passage should be read aloud before anyone on earth has a discussion about Richard Spencer:



The story here is that someone who openly supports genocide of the black race has been empowered to national prominence by our incoming president. Why is the person who wrote the passage above even being interviewed for television and not shunned into the shadows? Why are we normalizing violent racist ideology? That imo is the ONLY story we should be talking about when Richard Spencer's name comes up.

We're having the discussion in another place. It's totally understandable why someone would punch him. I'd like to punch him. I'd also want to see him arrested. None of that makes punching him a good thing or something we shouldn't object to (or more to the point - object to the support for it)

nah punching him was hilarious.