chasfh

Then prison.

The true reason there are no third parties is because the system is designed for only two parties, and the reason for that is the way the president is chosen. The president must be elected with at least 50% of specially-designated Electoral Votes which roughly correlates to the popular vote. If no candidate achieves that, there is then a one-state-one-vote special election in the House to choose the president, a solution designed to favor incumbent parties over upstarts, since there are no third parties in Congress to support the third candidate. Since there is practically no chance a third party can put a president in the White House, almost no rookie politician would choose to go into a third party in the first place. A third party may align better ideologically with the rookie, but politicians are more practical than ideological, and, notable exceptions notwithstanding, any person choosing politics as a career who wants to have any influence within the system at all will have to be on one of the two big teams. The only way I can see a third party getting a seat at the adult’s table, within the current system, would be through a mass defection from one of the two current parties, and that would result in a power shift from the dying party to a second big party, rather than becoming a true power-sharing arrangement with a major third party. The only other way, if America ever truly wanted more than two major parties, would be to ditch our current system in favor of a parliamentary democracy, which would require a complete rewriting of the Constitution.

If Trump is done and gone, then he’s taking a few million voters with him, because there must be at least that many who vote only for him. The question then becomes how many of those lost votes might be offset by moderate conservatives coming back to the party, those who used to reliably vote Republican but reluctantly went Democrat or stopped voting because the party went nuts. If the Mitts were to become ascendant again, how of those exiles many would come back? If it’s a 1:1 ratio coming back, Republicans might be OK, or even better off if the ratio is more than 1:1. I don’t think it is, though—I think Trump energized the voting process and drove more R voters to the polls, and Republican pols must agree, because otherwise why would they have been so eager to debase themselves by publicly fawning all over him? A complicating factor, though, is how the Republican base has become fractured among three distinct constituencies I can identify: the exiled Mitts; the ride-or-die red hats; and a faction that digs the cruelty and the fascism Trump unearthed in his base but without all the crazy acting out—those are people who would gladly vote for DeSantis or Abbott over both Mitt and Trump. That’s probably where the religious right will park their votes. If Trump gets spun out, finally, can the party reconcile the remaining two factions? Who caves for the other? I think it’s more likely the Mitts cave for the Christo-fascists, which they will justify because tax cuts, because they really don’t care or think about the social issues much. That would not only be sad, that would make it harder for Democrats to run against and win.

1931-32 was divided by one I think?

Oh, this all is getting good …

Good god it’s really happening, isn’t it? Honestly, I’ve been starting to look forward to Trump running in 2024 so they could drag the party down then, too.

Yeah, I’m with you on that to the degree that one’s politics is real to each person, and to anyone who believes wokeism is the biggest existential threat to the human race, it’s heart attack serious. But when it comes to the sum total of politics for everyone altogether, I think wokeism falls practically off the list of serious problems facing America.

Twice in a row!

Great time to finally sack Fields.

All this does is set up the Bears to score on the last play of the game. 🦆🦆🦆

The grift continues apace …

Brushcuts bitching about wokeism is not de facto proof of wokeism. BTW, love the term “brushcut” because that’s what my dad insisted we boys wear until I was at least 12.

So you’ve had Drag Queen Reading Hour at work? 😏

I agree with this characterization in that all of these are basically interchangeable hypothetical concepts to hammer liberals with, and that have no direct bearing on the lives of practically anyone you hear railing against them.

I think anti-wokeism is at least ten times the force that people imagine wokeism to be. The only reason the average person knows about wokeism at all is because of how much conservative media and certain comedians hammer it.

Oh my god, Goff found an open man in the end zone. Alert the media.

I don’t buy that so-called “woke-ism” is a problem just because Bill Maher has hopped on that hobby horse. So they’re going after comedians. So the fuck what. Instead of whining about it and giving it oxygen, how about rising above it and starving it?

How could she have possibly known lol

Whether the dishonor will remain for Republicans once Trump is gone, as alleged by Liz Cheney.

That’s right, boys, keep up that “voters are stupid” messaging all the way through 2024. And share it with your brethren in other states while you’re at it. https://www.chicagotribune.com/politics/elections/ct-illinois-gop-future-uncertainty-20221113-bovtlji5izdn5oj55y7t3lgj3u-story.html

Both our recent posts could be true and perhaps even feed off each other.

I texted my buddy right after the monologue that it will go down as an all-time classic.

Will it? I don’t know … Americans have short memories, aided by sophisticated media messaging …

The old board might have been two-thirds Republicans when I first joined. Those were the second-term Bush years. The only time I ever voted Republican was in a grade school mock election. I voted for Nixon because my mom was for Nixon (three times!), so I wanted to be on her team. But my crush at the time voted for McGovern, which made me re-evaluate my own vote. As far as adulthood was concerned, I was out on Republicans during the first Reagan years. He came in talking like a warmongering cowboy who was going to get us nuked by the Soviets, and that was all confirmed for me when he invaded Grenada. All the Republicans supported it, the only senators who did not were Democrats, and practically every US ally condemned the invasion. That was the cherry on top for me.