does your personal life include co-workers?

Yeah, see this is where my heads been at on it. I watched all the sources say it'll be a landslide. It wasnt. That there was a firewall. There wasnt. That its ok, approval will decline among the base rapid. It's declined overall, but looks like went from only 40 to 39 since April. That this time he's done. But he isn't.

Then I see the same sources trying to tell me "na, losing a state that's voted D on 2/3 of its senate seats/governor where the candidate was awful enough to assault a reporter is totes fine". So I've been trying to determine if I'm the one that's just doom and gloom, or if they are ones in the middle of the thisisfine.jpg.

Appreciate the posts + link folks. Heres hoping for some good news in Georgia.

Yeah that's a little tougher obviously I'm sure we both work with a decent amount of republicans but I definitely let them know what they think of them when Politics comes up which is fairly often as we spend a lot of time sitting around watching cnbc doing nothing

No evidence of collusion other than the evidence of collusion

WSJ: How Alleged Russian Hacker Teamed Up With Florida GOP Operative

hoya pushing the states rights and cultural homogony angles

secret alt righter?

totally bro

just agree to give the evil white people their own country you're practically there!

Every time I put on Fox it's some Republican moron talking about how divided the country is and blaming Dems for it. Made me realize that the country being divided is not something we should be actively giving a **** about . I think it should become more divided if anything. I think for as long as Republicans continue to be eother proudly stupid, racist, and/or evil there should not be any civil discourse. Democrats should not be working with them on bipartisan issues for the greater good. They should be obstructing EVERYTHING and refusing to acknowledge that the Republican views and way of life are a legitimate thing.

And we can all do that in our personal lives

maybe we should take more time celebrating our sameness instead of our diversity

the sameness is basically like, biological . . . and I found myself wondering if that was even true when I checked out the comments on Breitbart beneath the Breitbart article about the Fourth Circuit upholding the injunction against the travel ban

you see, those LIBERAL JUDGES are just trying to make sure the Muslims kill as many Americans as possible and haven't ever read the Constitution

i'm sure you could find more if you weren't so focused on the differences and your own superiority

Yeah one thing smart liberals need to start doing better is benefitting from how stupid 95% of people are. My first job in the business was cold-calling farmers and small business owners in Nebraska, Arkansas, Missouri, Texas, and Oklahoma straight out of Jordan Belfort playbook literally word for word and wed basically scam the **** out of them and charge them huge commissions. They were so unbelievably stupid. Most of them just inherited wealth from generations that surely dated back to some plantation owner. I never felt bad or guilty about it for one second. But it wasn't really sustainable as a career.

Now I'm much more legitimate (as legitimate as someone in financial services can possibly be) and Im paid a stress free six figures to do basic asset allocation that a 6 year old could grasp in about 10 minutes.

Most of my clients are Trump supporters.

ROLL TIDE!

This.

In Hillbilly Elegy and all these stories - it eventually comes out that these people's primary axe to grind is the see not only other whites, but *gasp* minorities and immigrants getting ahead of them in line. They know they're poor and their local economy sucks. In most cases it's been that way for generations. But the last straw seems to be this upsetting of what they see as the natural order of things.

Now, having said that, I do have sympathy because I don't expect everyone to be an exceptional person or have the gumption to move away from their place of birth. We need solutions for these people other than "Here's some oxycontin and a disability check, knock yourself out". So far the only thing anyone's offered them in generations is snake oil and stoking their anger into a white hot furnace. It's problem.

So I'm first and foremost worried about the practical problem of this ever-more-concentrated distilled sub-society of people who lack the wherewithal to GTFO of ****sville. Primarily I'm concerned that they are wielding their outsized political influence, due to the EC and gerrymandering, to steer us straight towards Idiocracy.

No easy answers.

Some issues, I just don't know how to win. Like the post Namath just made, I don't know how you convince the majority of people in Alabama that supporting what they believe to be their southern heritage is wrong. But for the purposes of progress, I think the Democrats, liberals, progressives, whatever you want to call them need to start picking their battles better, and better articulating their arguments in a way that will appeal to the masses.

Some easy examples:

Gun control - This is a losing battle. Even if you have 70% of Americans supporting this, the other 30% are casting their vote solely on this issue. We need to stop talking about anything that can be twisted into an argument of taking away their guns. Instead any talk of gun control should be focused solely on improving gun safety and awareness. Working to keep children out of harms way of guns, and working to keep guns out of the hands of people who are criminals or have a history of being diagnosed with mental health issues.

Environmental issues - This sounds crazy, but to make progress on this issue we need to stop talking about climate change. It allows the conversation to be dragged into a false argument of whether or not climate change is real and the stupid liberals that believe in this hoax. Instead, the discussion on this issue needs to be focused on clean water to drink, clean air to breathe, and create sources of energy that we can lead the world in and eliminate our dependence on other nations for our energy needs.

Abortion - The core of this issue is around health privacy and health access. This is the only way that this discussion should ever be allowed to be framed. The conservatives are simply trying to take away your access to healthcare and your right to privacy in your healthcare decisions.

There are others, but those are three easy issues to fix right away. So much is just that the Democrats are so smart about issues that they've become really dumb in terms of their messaging.

We're taking away their disability check suzzer, time for some good old fashioned boot strapping time

One of the ads Gianforte ran against Quist said Quist supports a national gun registry. Who knows if it's even true - but that's gotta be the kiss of death.

Of course Quist ran his own ads shooting things with guns. But that national gun registry man - ugh. Problem is even the Dems kill it Republicans will just make it up.

I'm on record as predicting that never happens. Too politically toxic for both sides. No one wants to see those people back on the unemployment rolls.

Also disability is vague enough, and varies per region, that you can favor white people with it. Win - win for the Trump camp. My stepdad worked as a mechanic his whole life missing an eye and with a wooden leg. When he felt like retiring at 60 or so, a doctor friend got him on full disability.

My friend lost lost most of the sight in one eye and had bad cataracts in the other. She applied for disability, got denied, which is normal. My uncle who worked as a computer programmer got denied after a stroke that seriously limited his cognitive ability. He won on appeal. My friend out here got a free lawyer, went through the whole appeal process - they told her she could work at a car wash.

Now whether or not she could have worked is up for debate. But if you've ever been to a car wash in LA - aint no 40-ish white women with all kinds of health problems out there washing cars. They basically told her to **** off. There seems to be a ton of wiggle room in the requirements.

Now compare to what's going on in this article:

This whole article is just heartbreaking. I grew up in a poor blue collar part of Independence MO where had a junkyard against our backyard, and ditches running along the road instead of sewers. I went back after my stepdad died, nothing has changed except all the houses look 20 years older. A bunch of my old neighbors are on disability or some kind of govt assistance. As was my stepdad's dirt poor family from SE Texas. Only difference is the MO people were morbidly obese whereas the Texas people looked like dried-up shoe leather.

One thing is for sure once you're on disability, almost no one ever goes off. There's no facility for making sure people are still disabled. They basically have to voluntarily give it up.

Disagree completely with Meb's post. 70% should never let 30% control them. It's that weakness that allows them to dominate your team time and time again. Get in power with the smallest majority u need to be and then be belligerent and dominant. Make laws, gerrymander, amend the ****ing constitution do whatever you gotta do.

If you have an issue where 70% support one side but give it minor importance and 30% support the other side and are single issue voters based on their support, the 70% is the losing side of that issue. Intensity of support matters.

The issue isn't the percentages per se, it's that the 30% will vote 100% of the time while maybe 50% of the 70% will vote 40% of the time.

Strongly disagree with all of this

Then they deserve to get what they want and you should be blaming the people not voting against their self interest rather than those who are voting against their self interest out of stupidity.

I've talked to one real estate developer that said he's started saying resilience instead of sustainability when discussing planning issues with Republican politicians simply because it isn't as associated with climate change despite being basically the same thing in practice. Apparently it has worked well.