Generic 2016 US Election Cycle Recycling Bin

I was doing as I promised and digging through results as they closed and happened to stop by Texas. I didn’t realize how much ground the Democrats have gained there, and that a Texas seat in the house is poised to be taken by an incredibly tight race that is still being counted.

It has caught me off guard.

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Any thoughts about Keith Ellison or Howard Dean as DNC chair?

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I got an email from the “Our revolution” that grew out of the Sanders campaign and it was advocating for Ellison, FWIW.

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Yeah, Ellison is close to Sanders (first congressman to endorse him?) - whereas Dean is a lobbyist for big pharma.

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Wowwwwww . . . people are wrecking shit in downtown Portland right now. The majority of protesters are peaceful, but there’s a small group that’s working on getting them all teargassed :fearful:

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Duchess sent me!

“You dropped something…”

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This is how movements die. Despite how I feel, this is going to deeply affect my willingness to attend an action such as this in the future.

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Turning out and waving a placard might be visible, but it isn’t the only form of protest. Plenty that can be done without even leaving the house. Don’t let the dickheads rob you of your passion or make you lose your focus.

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I just got out of the shower and checked to see how it’s going–pretty well, actually. The police are trying to separate the peaceful protesters from the ones who just want to break stuff. The state police are still there looking scary, and some people have been arrested, but no pepper spray so far. Peaceful protesters are still being allowed to do their thing. Remarkable, especially considering that this is the third night in a row they’ve shut down I-5.

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Anti-democracy protests in the United States of America. They are protesting the outcome of a vote.

I didn’t think it would come to this, although certainly the worst elements of the Republican Party have been prepping for it since Reagan was in office.

Violent rebellion against elected government gives the president the ability to declare a “national state of emergency” and, if Congress agrees, a legal pretext for declaring martial law and sending the army into the urban centers and slaughtering all “those people” (nudge nudge wink wink) under the Insurrection Act.

If protests were triggered by something other than an election, like if people waited until the new President actually did something, the situation would be quite different.

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Are they denying the result?

Trump lost badly in cities and amongst the young. There are going to be protests his whole presidency. He’d best get used to them.

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Perhaps some are touchy that the candidate who got fewer votes won? Funny kind of “democracy.”

Maybe they’re touchy that a white Christian majority voted to take away the rights of others?

There’s much more I could say but little point in saying it.

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Not having had to live through Nixon, I always found him fascinating, in a horrible way. I guess we get our own turn now.

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I lived through Reagan who was a teflon Nixon, but wasn’t old enough to really get just how absolutely vile his admin was. I expect we’ll have another incompetent figurehead like we had with Reagan/Bush Jr., with a similarly corrupt apparatus running the show. Not looking forward to the coming horrors, not one bit, esp. with a GOP Congress and soon a GOP SCOTUS.

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I wasn’t aware the protests were to remove term limits.

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I feel their despair. A large portion of my country (or maybe not my country) just told me to get fucked. If I were younger, not in the middle of a PhD and family rearing, I’d be out there with them, maybe.

Lots of people in this country do not care about me or my daughter. How am I supposed to square that? When do I get to be pissed about that? When do I matter as much as white nationalists misogynists?

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Yeah, I remember Thatcher, but she was just what I thought Prime Ministers were. I grew up in a Conservative, Torygraph reading household, so I don’t remember Kinnock being portrayed positively. I do remember my first political thought was to support him for his anti-nuclear weapons stance though.

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I never thought I’d say thank God for the police in my life. Thank you Portland police.

These fools are playing into a trap that’s been waiting since Ford was in office. Read Wikipedia’s write-ups on the Insurrection Act and Federal State of Emergency. Protesting democracy is a worse mistake than running Clinton was. Civil war isn’t a parlor trick.

I was in Kindergarten when Nixon went down. I do remember being in 1st grade and knowing about Pres. Ford. I wondered if he was related to the cars and kind of assumed you named cars after presidents since my dad drove a Ford and my mom drove a Lincoln. My parents were very pro Ford (and very anti-Carter, and very pro-Reagan) and I had no perspective other than theirs. I remember vilifying Carter, and making fun of Amy Carter with the kids at school, and the kids bullying the Iranian kid whose parents fled the revolution (I’m glad I was nice to him, but that’s mostly chance). My mom blamed unions, liberalism, and Satanism which were roughly interchangeable for all the wrongs in the world. It took a good while for me to see just how warped that all was.

I hear about the schoolkids today chanting “build the wall” in cafeterias and throwing down the various racist slurs their president-elect has been throwing down, and seeing video of kids screaming “Trump that Bitch,” and I have a 100% sympathy for protestors.

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