Where do we go from here?

[UNCatTech]

OMG the government mandated that all citizens purchase EVs? Tell me more.

Liberals don't oppose people choosing any school they want. What they do (rightly) oppose is taxpayer money being used for people to go to private (especially private religious) schools. That isn't a restriction on freedom, it's a restriction on use of taxpayer dollars for any education other than public education. Send your kids to private school if you want, just don't ask me to pay for it.

You could have added that liberals also restricted your freedoms by mandating seatbelts and airbags, establishing automobile emissions standards, establishing air and water pollution standards, passing child labor laws and all sorts of other labor standards (40 hour work week, overtime pay and weekends, OSHA regulations, etc), regulating cigarette advertising, etc. Because there's no freedom more important than conservatives than the freedom to die an early death and force everyone else to as well.

The school choice reminds me of the claim that prayer was banned in schools. It wasn't but mandated teacher lead prayer was.

Everyone knows that an individual can and should be allowed to, pray personally.

 

[LeoBloom]

Kind of like marijuana smokers? How about the freedom from marijuana smoke (what happened to the cigarette 2nd hand smoke nazis?) and that awful smell that infects lots of big cities.

I don't follow. Marijuana smokers can toke wherever they want?

 

[finesse]

Kind of like marijuana smokers? How about the freedom from marijuana smoke (what happened to the cigarette 2nd hand smoke nazis?) and that awful smell that infects lots of big cities.

No proof that marijuana smoke is harmful.

 

[Paine]

Kind of like marijuana smokers? How about the freedom from marijuana smoke (what happened to the cigarette 2nd hand smoke nazis?) and that awful smell that infects lots of big cities.

Marijuana is the least offensive smell in big cities.

 

[MOUNTAINH33L]

Specifically, those in the military who lost their jobs for refusing the COVID vaccines.

I get a good chuckle out of this. So these folks went through MEPS and got 17 vaccines, but they draw the line at the COVID vaccine.

 

[MOUNTAINH33L]

Kind of like marijuana smokers? How about the freedom from marijuana smoke (what happened to the cigarette 2nd hand smoke nazis?) and that awful smell that infects lots of big cities.

 

[CFordUNC]

Thought this was a really good and really important read and wanted to share it here.

There Are No Permanent Defeats

What Democrats can and can’t learn from 2024.

www.thebulwark.com

There Are No Permanent Defeats​

"A loss, however painful, is not the end of the world. Every election result is provisional. There are multiple examples in recent memory of the American electorate delivering victories to a party and then swiftly reversing course.

This is not to minimize the seriousness of the mistake voters have made this year, just to keep some perspective. There are many turns of the wheel.

The Democrats will do themselves some good if this loss causes them to reconsider their boutique views on immigration, public safety, trans athletes, and other matters. But the thumping rightward shift in the electorate between 2020 and 2024 suggests to me that this election really came down (mostly) to inflation, with a side of immigration, rather than an embrace of Trump or Trumpism.

Most voters decide based upon their own financial condition. This year, 68 percent of voters rated the economy as “not so good” or “poor.” Yes, the other economic indicators were great, but 75 percent said inflation had inflicted moderate or severe hardship on them. All of the stock market gains, employment, and economic growth in the world cannot compensate for that. Compared with Joe Biden in 2020, Kamala Harris lost ground with nearly every demographic—urban, suburban, rural, you name it. Even among women voters, Harris did worse than Biden, with the exceptions of urban women, senior women, and those with a college degree.

It’s impossible to gauge how big a part racism and sexism played in Harris’s performance—few will admit such motivations. Harris performed a bit worse with Hispanic women than Biden did. Was that closet sexism? Doubtful. Nor does it seem plausible that so many young women who voted for Biden switched to Trump out of misogyny. Fully 45 percent of the electorate said they were financially worse off today than four years ago, which is a greater percentage than any year since the 2008 Great Recession. Only 26 percent of voters were satisfied or enthusiastic about how things are going in the country, whereas 43 percent were dissatisfied and 29 percent were angry.

For all the attention paid to white voters’ affection for Trump, their approval of Trump has declined from 57 percent in 2020 to 49 percent in 2024. And while much is being made, justifiably, about the big swing toward Trump among Hispanics, he remains unpopular among them. Only 42 percent of Latinos have a favorable view of Trump.

This underscores the importance of people’s personal financial condition. They will hire a creep if they think he’ll improve their personal prospects. Most voters neither understand nor particularly care about the rule of law or foreign policy (beyond war and peace).

Much will change before the next election—and yes, there will be more elections. The winning party will nearly always over-interpret its mandate and go too far, prompting a backlash at the polls. The president’s party typically loses seats in off year elections, so expect a rebuke in 2026. (One of the most dangerous depredations of Trump 1.0 was undermining faith in elections and attempting to subvert the 2020 outcome, so Democrats must be prepared to fight tooth and nail over interference with any election going forward.)

Democrats cannot just wait for the election cycle to solve their problems. There are a number of lessons they should take to heart from this year’s results: 1) the abortion issue has likely run its course as a motivator in national elections (though it remains potent statewide); 2) Hispanic voters cannot be taken for granted as part of the Democratic coalition; 3) woke postures like taxpayer-funded sex change operations for incarcerated immigrants are toxic; and 4) big federal spending programs don’t deliver immediate political dividends.

Much has been said and written about matters 1 through 3, so let me address 4. Of all people, Joe Biden should have understood that passing big bills like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act would not be noticed by voters in time for 2024. He was vice president when the Affordable Care Act passed and witnessed that not only was Obama not rewarded for it, Democrats lost the House in 2010.

Only much later, after it had been fully implemented and people began to enjoy the benefits (and Republicans failed to come up with an alternative), did the program become popular. Both the IRA and the infrastructure bill, ironically, contain lavish spending for rural and Trump-friendly parts of the country that will begin to come online just in time for Trump to take credit for them. The legislation may or may not have been good policy, but it’s important for Democrats to recognize that passing big bills doesn’t translate into votes—at least not right away.

The Democratic party has suffered a setback, not a wipeout. The country remains closely divided. Democrats still hold nearly half the seats in the Senate and (depending on the races still outstanding) nearly half of the House. Twenty-three states have Democratic governors. Democratic office holders need to gird their loins for the avalanche of lies, scandals, outrages, and betrayals that a second Trump term is sure to deliver. They must prepare to educate voters about the consequences of Trump’s tariffs (which are taxes), deportations, tax cuts, vaccine misinformation, and whatever other insane policies emanate from MAGA Washington.

There’s a place for autopsies and wound licking, but it’s soon time to move forward."

 

[Ramrouser]

You feel like there’s a big difference between the Covid vaccines and the multiple other vaccines members of the military are required to receive?

Yes due to COVID vaccines not going through the normal FDA approval. I took the vaccine but I respect people who decided not to take it given their youth or good health.

 

[superrific]

I should have been clear: COVID vaccine mandates not ordinary vaccines. Specifically, those in the military who lost their jobs for refusing the COVID vaccines.

They are lucky to have merely lost their jobs. They should have been court martialed.

Vaccines are a mandatory job requirement. They are not a matter of personal freedom. Any society that can forcibly draft people to serve in the military can forcibly require people to take vaccines, especially since taking a vaccine is a five minute ordeal that ends up with you living a long life whereas the draft is literally the opposite.

If you don't want to take vaccines, then move off the grid somewhere. It is not your right to jeopardize public health. I swear to God -- why do you people want to take us back to the pre-industrial era? Do you really think life was great back then?

 

[Ramrouser]

No pearl clutching for me as I went to HS and college in late 70s/early 80s so everyone smoked both type of cigarettes. But….go to most West Coast cities and NYC and you cannot escape the smell.

 

[superrific]

Yes due to COVID vaccines not going through the normal FDA approval. I took the vaccine but I respect people who decided not to take it given their youth or good health.

1. They were approved by FDA.
2. Please explain what level of oversight was missing in the expedited process that would have been there otherwise. I mean, you sound like someone who really knows about FDA procedures, given that you just cited the FDA procedure as the entire basis for your position on the COVID vaccine. I await the explanation of why expedited FDA approval is bad but ordinary FDA approval is wonderful.

 

[finesse]

Yes due to COVID vaccines not going through the normal FDA approval. I took the vaccine but I respect people who decided not to take it given their youth or good health.

Does the military customarily go outside the chain of command to question orders without some sort of penalty?

 

[superrific]

But….go to most West Coast cities and NYC and you cannot escape the smell.

You know this because you've been to those cities? LOL LOL LOL LOL

 

[Ramrouser]

They are lucky to have merely lost their jobs. They should have been court martialed.

Vaccines are a mandatory job requirement. They are not a matter of personal freedom. Any society that can forcibly draft people to serve in the military can forcibly require people to take vaccines, especially since taking a vaccine is a five minute ordeal that ends up with you living a long life whereas the draft is literally the opposite.

If you don't want to take vaccines, then move off the grid somewhere. It is not your right to jeopardize public health. I swear to God -- why do you people want to take us back to the pre-industrial era? Do you really think life was great back then?

I’m not personally opposed to COVID vax so lighten’ up Francis.

Taking the COVID vax did not stop the spread - even though Biden did his best to convince us otherwise

 

[finesse]

No pearl clutching for me as I went to HS and college in late 70s/early 80s so everyone smoked both type of cigarettes. But….go to most West Coast cities and NYC and you cannot escape the smell.

The smell wasn't the issue with secondhand smoke. It's provably dangerous.

 

[Ramrouser]

You know this because you've been to those cities? LOL LOL LOL LOL

You know this because you've been to those cities? LOL LOL LOL LOL

Interesting you would make that assumption: Trump supporters all poor, uneducated and provincial I guess.

 

[UNCMSinLS]

No pearl clutching for me as I went to HS and college in late 70s/early 80s so everyone smoked both type of cigarettes. But….go to most West Coast cities and NYC and you cannot escape the smell.

Reluctantly, I find myself in agreement on this issue with Ramrouser. This stuff today is not the same weed that I encountered during my misspent youth. It's a different animal, you know, one that smells like a skunk. It even has some of the same molecular makeup that is found in skunk spray. I purposely avoid skunks whenever possible. I'd like to have the same freedom in public from skunk weed (and guns as well, for that matter).

 

[superrific]

Thought this was a really good and really important read and wanted to share it here.

There Are No Permanent Defeats

What Democrats can and can’t learn from 2024.

www.thebulwark.com

There Are No Permanent Defeats​

"A loss, however painful, is not the end of the world. Every election result is provisional. There are multiple examples in recent memory of the American electorate delivering victories to a party and then swiftly reversing course.

This is not to minimize the seriousness of the mistake voters have made this year, just to keep some perspective. There are many turns of the wheel.

The Democrats will do themselves some good if this loss causes them to reconsider their boutique views on immigration, public safety, trans athletes, and other matters. But the thumping rightward shift in the electorate between 2020 and 2024 suggests to me that this election really came down (mostly) to inflation, with a side of immigration, rather than an embrace of Trump or Trumpism.

Most voters decide based upon their own financial condition. This year, 68 percent of voters rated the economy as “not so good” or “poor.” Yes, the other economic indicators were great, but 75 percent said inflation had inflicted moderate or severe hardship on them. All of the stock market gains, employment, and economic growth in the world cannot compensate for that. Compared with Joe Biden in 2020, Kamala Harris lost ground with nearly every demographic—urban, suburban, rural, you name it. Even among women voters, Harris did worse than Biden, with the exceptions of urban women, senior women, and those with a college degree.

It’s impossible to gauge how big a part racism and sexism played in Harris’s performance—few will admit such motivations. Harris performed a bit worse with Hispanic women than Biden did. Was that closet sexism? Doubtful. Nor does it seem plausible that so many young women who voted for Biden switched to Trump out of misogyny. Fully 45 percent of the electorate said they were financially worse off today than four years ago, which is a greater percentage than any year since the 2008 Great Recession. Only 26 percent of voters were satisfied or enthusiastic about how things are going in the country, whereas 43 percent were dissatisfied and 29 percent were angry.

For all the attention paid to white voters’ affection for Trump, their approval of Trump has declined from 57 percent in 2020 to 49 percent in 2024. And while much is being made, justifiably, about the big swing toward Trump among Hispanics, he remains unpopular among them. Only 42 percent of Latinos have a favorable view of Trump.

This underscores the importance of people’s personal financial condition. They will hire a creep if they think he’ll improve their personal prospects. Most voters neither understand nor particularly care about the rule of law or foreign policy (beyond war and peace).

Much will change before the next election—and yes, there will be more elections. The winning party will nearly always over-interpret its mandate and go too far, prompting a backlash at the polls. The president’s party typically loses seats in off year elections, so expect a rebuke in 2026. (One of the most dangerous depredations of Trump 1.0 was undermining faith in elections and attempting to subvert the 2020 outcome, so Democrats must be prepared to fight tooth and nail over interference with any election going forward.)

Democrats cannot just wait for the election cycle to solve their problems. There are a number of lessons they should take to heart from this year’s results: 1) the abortion issue has likely run its course as a motivator in national elections (though it remains potent statewide); 2) Hispanic voters cannot be taken for granted as part of the Democratic coalition; 3) woke postures like taxpayer-funded sex change operations for incarcerated immigrants are toxic; and 4) big federal spending programs don’t deliver immediate political dividends.

Much has been said and written about matters 1 through 3, so let me address 4. Of all people, Joe Biden should have understood that passing big bills like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act would not be noticed by voters in time for 2024. He was vice president when the Affordable Care Act passed and witnessed that not only was Obama not rewarded for it, Democrats lost the House in 2010.

Only much later, after it had been fully implemented and people began to enjoy the benefits (and Republicans failed to come up with an alternative), did the program become popular. Both the IRA and the infrastructure bill, ironically, contain lavish spending for rural and Trump-friendly parts of the country that will begin to come online just in time for Trump to take credit for them. The legislation may or may not have been good policy, but it’s important for Democrats to recognize that passing big bills doesn’t translate into votes—at least not right away.

The Democratic party has suffered a setback, not a wipeout. The country remains closely divided. Democrats still hold nearly half the seats in the Senate and (depending on the races still outstanding) nearly half of the House. Twenty-three states have Democratic governors. Democratic office holders need to gird their loins for the avalanche of lies, scandals, outrages, and betrayals that a second Trump term is sure to deliver. They must prepare to educate voters about the consequences of Trump’s tariffs (which are taxes), deportations, tax cuts, vaccine misinformation, and whatever other insane policies emanate from MAGA Washington.

There’s a place for autopsies and wound licking, but it’s soon time to move forward."

1. The way some of these media are treating the race and sex issues . . . well, I guess the bulwark are former Republicans so I shouldn't expect too much on this score.

2. There are two distinct sets of racism/sexism issues. They are related but non-identical.

A. First, there's the "people didn't vote for Harris because she was a black woman." I believe we will see evidence of that. But regardless, this isn't a claim about 100% of Trump voters or even 95% of Trump voters. It is no answer to say, "nobody refused to vote for Harris because she was a woman because young women who voted Biden also voted Trump." It only takes 1 out of 100 voters to refuse to go Kamala to make a big impact.

It is also just bogus to try to cut and paste the issue out of existence. It can be true that Puerto Rican men refused to vote for a woman, and white women didn't want to vote for a black person. In fact, that is almost certainly true (the only actual question is about the frequency). You can't cut out the sexism from one population, cut out the racism from another, and then combine the two groups to say, "see, it was all clean!"

B. More importantly, the main issue was the substance of the campaigns. Most MAGAs didn't vote for Trump specifically because he was a white man. They voted for him because he is promising vengeance upon brown and black people. Racial animosity remains undefeated as a predictor of Trump support. And we saw the most racist filthy and disgusting campaign in our lifetimes. Hmm. Whether Puerto Ricans swallowed their pride to vote as they did doesn't affect the fact that Trump ran on racism; he won on racism; he is going to govern on racism; and he's probably going to torch the country because of racism.

3. Everyone who votes in the last election in a country is expecting there to be a next election, and that it will be free and fair. Some % of those people are wrong.

4. We're supposed to educate voters? I thought that was the thing we were doing wrong! That we can't explain to voters how tariffs work or how inflation works because that's preachy and dismissive? But now, I see, the Bulwark is back on the explain the world to Trump voters train. Maybe it never got off that train. I read the Bulwark when CFord posts it and not other times.

 

[UNCMSinLS]

I’m not personally opposed to COVID vax so lighten’ up Francis.

Taking the COVID vax did not stop the spread - even though Biden did his best to convince us otherwise

You're getting stupid again.

 

[UNCatTech]

Kind of like marijuana smokers? How about the freedom from marijuana smoke (what happened to the cigarette 2nd hand smoke nazis?) and that awful smell that infects lots of big cities.

In comparison to not being vaccinated and getting others sick, how does this compare?

Can one get high from second hand smoke?
Are there medical concerns?