Mourning in America - Trump Year One: November '16 to

between this and a couple things in my life this is by far the worst week i've had in about 8 years

― call all destroyer

:-(

one upshot of all this is that even though his cabinet is going to be filled with people who suck like Newt Gingrich, he's going to be constantly firing and replacing them

reflecting on it more it also makes me wonder how the campaign team could have done better to realize what was happening in the field.. i'm really new at this so i don't know how the whole operation works other years, but in early fall at least when you're still trying to gauge where the voters are at & ask them to commit to vote..

the list of doors to knock should be all democrats but anyplace besides philadelphia it was always coming up with a not insignificant number of "we won't say" (which probably means trump?) or straight up "we're for trump"

i assumed this was normal but i didn't have other years to measure response against. i wonder how many of us sounded alarms about this kind of thing on tally sheets because it really wasn't emphasized to note it down in training

Government Apprentice, coming to CSPAN

xp daria I found this interesting and possibly related to yr door-to-door experience, have not seen it yet - the Clinton campaign's reliance on a data simulator named ADA:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/11/09/clintons-data-driven-campaign-relied-heavily-on-an-algorithm-named-ada-what-didnt-she-see/

(I mean, have not seen this mentioned in the election threads so far on ILX)

Not really tbh. He lived a full live and left it with highs most artist would be envious of.
alink
― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 11 November 2016 03:21 (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

RIP Donald Trump :(

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/796900183955095552

― Allen (etaeoe), Thursday, November 10, 2016 9:38 PM (fifty-two minutes ago) Bookmark

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/266034630820507648

Guessing at Trump having a slightly elevated heart rate and somewhat high blood pressure along with age and BMI, it still only looks like he has a 3% of chance of dying of congestive heart failure in the next four years

this guy is a fucking con artist and thug

obama is trying to reassure people for the sake of the country and is biting his tongue. we should not. no matter what he does in office -- if it turns out he compromises or whatever which seems unlikely -- it doesn't matter. he has already put our country through hell with his racist campaign and no one should forget it.

yeah i read that article about the Ada data machine

i don't think you can pin this on any one factor but one thing that tracks with my experience when we were still going after persuadable voters (as opposed to later on GOTV canvassing) was the people who refused to say who they were voting for. how do you handle that in polling? how do you put that into your data model? this is where i feel like there really is a need to be more engaged with these folks because if you are a member of the community and people trust you then maybe you'll actually know who they're voting for and what is happening and be able to persuade them otherwise. intuitively it felt like a cultural thing to me, older white people from rust belt cities/towns who refused to tell you what they thought or who they were voting for, because they didn't know you. i grew up around these people. they voted for trump

I may play the banjo, but I'm a Mexican-American. I have no fuckin' idea what I should feel. It's so weird when you realize just how many people hate people who's skin color is the same as mine. I don't feel safe anymore and every white person is now under suspicion in my mind, which is horribly unfair and which I hate. But the worst thing is knowing that there's a part of me that does feel inferior to white people (I'm 61 years old; there was nothing cool about being Mexican when I was growing up) and that now a small part of me will "know" that I am low-class and worthless always. Right now, I want to pull the blankets over my head and sleep forever. I thought I was done with most of this shit, but apparently I'm not. I'm old and I'm tired and now I'm not good enough to live in my own country.

So is trump going to keep blaming the media for his entire presidency?

unless the Breitbart guy has a better idea

I would stand beside you banjo

banjoboy please post more

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/11/world/europe/trump-campaign-russia.html?_r=0

you're better than at least half the people who vote in this country, that's for sure, banjoboy. you're not worthless, and you have every right to be suspicious of white people.

xp no i was told that his russian connections were just liberal conspiracy theories

i have light skin and i feel tremendous shame about it right now even i don't personally identify in any way w/ "white culture" but it doesn't matter i'm horrified by the way i look.

i don't know what it would look like but i feel like i need some kind of kip thread to help get through all this (not just the above which i think is minor compared to a lot of the other stuff i and others are going thru) and it sounds maybe like some other posters could use one too. like i said i'm not sure exactly what it would be? maybe the solution is i just need a break from thinking about politics for a bit bc i know this isn't healthy bc i don't feel healthy i feel sick and constantly frightened and no matter what is reasonable to expect it would be nice to reduce some of the self-inflicted suffering right now. sorry i don't really have any recommendation really i guess. maybe like i remember we made that thread for looking at pictures of trees instead of clusterfucks? what do ppl think about some kind of thread for pictures + video of like natural world stuff - volcanos and exotic animals and beautiful places on earth and maybe beautiful traditions and ppl and communities. ugh i feel so stupid writing this but i'm going to post it anyway bc even tho i think my idea is dumb maybe someone has a better one? i have a pint of ben + jerrys in the freezer and i'm 99% sure that it isn't going to make me feel better.

you know what's awesome for a half hour or so is image searching "manul"

i also feel shame walking around (having no job, i've actively avoided it since nov 8 other than walking my dog). i want to wear a "trump is a terrible racist" shirt and somehow exempt myself from association with the vast majority of white people. but as much as i feel that, i know that my anger and shame are not and cannot be on the same level as the real fear that a lot of people of color are feeling. like what banjoboy said, just a few posts up. that's so heartbreaking to read. i can't imagine living it. it makes me so sad and angry.

I have to believe Trump will speak out against this hatred and violence his supports are spreading. I know it might seem like wishful thinking, but if the man has any shred of decency in his bones, he has to. The tweet posted above doesn't give me hope but as things get worse and I fear they will, please I have to think he will.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/and-here-we-go--9

Paul Ryan just announced that as part of repealing Obamacare he plans to phase out Medicare and replace it with private insurance for retirees.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/paul-ryan-says-medicare-privatization-is-on.html

i don't know what it would look like but i feel like i need some kind of kip thread to help get through all this (not just the above which i think is minor compared to a lot of the other stuff i and others are going thru) and it sounds maybe like some other posters could use one too.

Mordy in all seriousness I was thinking that we need a "safe space" thread where people can just freak out and connect and get reassured, leaving the politics talk to this thread and the other ones running.

https://medium.com/@Brocktoon/lexington-c1825d25442e#.qsa7gluua

I live in Trump country currently. Yesterday morning I was walking down the street and I wanted to get my head inside my best approximation of a Trump supporter I could come up with. I imagined the world where the "right order" was restored with white Christian straight men on top, and people of color, Muslims, immigrants, Jewish people, and women lower, in their right place, no longer ascendant under Obama and the SJWs.

It felt ... good in a way, powerful. "This is our world again." No longer have to deal with people who are different because they're firmly in their place again and we've got a "mandate" to keep them their. Comfortable. Peaceful. I got it out of my mind quickly because it just felt evil, like drinking poison. I watched some vines on Twitter of black kids goofing around and it made me miserable to think about what they're going to have to deal with under Trump. That's not the way I want the world to be.

I also received a fundraising postcard for the law school I went to, and it's parent school is a Jewish university. One of my neighbors (we share a mailbox) is a die-hard Trump supporter and subscribes to some sketchy alt-right shit, and that made me a little nervous to think of this Trump guy assuming I'm Jewish.

My heart goes out to all of you who have to deal with this bullshit for real in day to day life now. I know that's worthless from some random internet weirdo, but I don't know what the hell I can do. I'm definitely not becoming one of these Trump legitimizers, though.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clintons-vaunted-gotv-operation-may-have-turned-out-trump-voters_us_582533b1e4b060adb56ddc27?ka603sor

The campaign’s text messaging GOTV effort may have been the worst offender. Volunteers reported as many as 30% of the replies they received from voters they were urging to get out were Trump supporters.

"may have been" is doing a lot of work here without any proof but in general, what was happening in the field wasn't making its way into the data machine. i don't know why - i trusted the process at the time completely, especially because obama 2012 was so successful and david plouffe was consistently reassuring that the structure of the race was unchanged and clinton would win easily

https://medium.com/@Brocktoon/lexington-c1825d25442e#.qsa7gluua

good read, thanks

hillary clinton's approval ratings are going to go back up to like 70% really soon right, and the pundits on cnn will be saying how likable and authentic she is

re: medicare privatization/ryan budget crap, i am HOPING someone like chuck schumer is wise enough to subtly convince trump that paul ryan would get all the credit for this if it passed, the horrible GOP establishment paul ryan who didn't do enough to support his party's nominee

The image I can't forget: yesterday morning, waiting for the intercampus shuttle, I saw a student in the class I was about to head to. She said, "Professor, I'm Mexican. My family is all legal and I'm a citizen. But the new president called us rapists and murderers."

medicare thing is crazy overreach and it will blow up in their face

Hillary Clinton was a bad candidate right off the bat and she did nothing to ameliorate her major issues. The last thing she needed was a robot running her campaign.

one upshot of all this is that even though his cabinet is going to be filled with people who suck like Newt Gingrich, he's going to be constantly firing and replacing them

― qop (crüt), Thursday, November 10, 2016 10:24 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm god i hope so

well it'll be an interesting early case bc if he can't privatize medicare he certainly isn't taking on supreme dictatorial power xxp

I hope to God they decide to try that first, privatize Medicare.

also I'm reposting this because it's really good and important imo

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/11/10/trump-election-autocracy-rules-for-survival/

medicare thing is crazy overreach and it will blow up in their face

wasn't it exactly this that blew up in george w bush's face after the GOP controlled both the WH and congress after the 2004 election? social security i think

Medicare scheme would make a great chance for a truly diabolical Trump to surprise-veto some deeply unpopular bullshit from Establishment Paul in the name of The People. They sent him there after Obamacare, now it's Medicare?! He makes a big show of defeating the proposal, approval shoots up, Ryan gets primaried and replaced by a Trumpling. Yay.

The next four years are just a wasteland of no-win scenarios. I hope Trump chokes to death on a loose bone from KFC on January 19.

Privatizing Medicare will either break their stranglehold on old white people or they'll all die from lack of care.

OTOH, my mom starts Medicare in December after pay $700/mo for a bronze plan for the last two years so fuck Ryan with a hot poker.

I liked that article tombot, but as an aside I really hate 'love trumps hate' as a protest statement. feel like there's never been a less appropriate time for cute little puns.

xp

Medicare scheme would make a great chance for a truly diabolical Trump to surprise-veto some deeply unpopular bullshit from Establishment Paul in the name of The People. They sent him there after Obamacare, now it's Medicare?! He makes a big show of defeating the proposal, approval shoots up, Ryan gets primaried and replaced by a Trumpling. Yay.

yeah on some level it might be worse than he's not an ideologue and accidentally can do the right thing once in a while

Fucking hell what a month. Was sick as hell, my parents came to visit and my mom woke me up at 5:30 three weeks ago because my dad was unresponsive, I got to call 911 for the first time, he spent three days in the hospital 70 miles away and ended up with a pacemaker, then I got sick again, and now this. I had the crazy heart beat and four hours of sleep Tuesday night, went to a faculty meeting Wednesday morning that felt like a wake and everyone was crying, and have lived in a haze where I've been cycling through the Kubler-Ross stages since then and have settled on angry for a while.

Today one of my students was losing his shit because somebody spray painted "fag" on his boyfriend's car, and one of my many latino students asked for an deadline extension because of some shit that broke out with Trump supporters. When I got home my friend from Venezuela started texting me in a panic cause he thought he was done with authoritarian bullshit and how fucked we are going to be. Then my kid chucked a block at my head, and the shitty christian band that practices across the street was way louder than usual and I went over and rained hell upon them.

On the plus side all of my students seem outraged, even some of the ones I worried were probably 4chan alt-right assholes, and a bunch of them were protesting on campus. And part of me feels like something like this was inevitable and would probably be bad in a different way had Hilary won, so maybe we can just get it over with now and these assholes will get riled up when they realize high-paying factory jobs won't suddenly appear in Dayton and Youngstown. Assuming everything doesn't end up in smoking ruins or just really really awful first.

Still going to get my son a passport soon just in case; I could make it to the canadian border in a couple hours.

In response to the possibility of the likelihood of Trump dropping dead before his four years are up or getting impeached or quitting before his term even begins, people have been pretty regularly responding that Pence would be worse. But Trump is both malleable and seemingly totally cool with passing the actual president-ing on to Pence anyway, so how exactly would that be worse than Pence as filtered through an unpredictable man baby?

because Pence is focused

Trump, in the past, expressed some not-insane opinions. He's malleable but not bright enough to have a coherent ideology of evil. He's Kylo Ren.

Pence, on the other hand, is Darth Vader.

Ted Cruz is old, melted Palpatine.

seriously spooked by that DJT tweet :(

Uh, yeah. So much for dialing back the crazy after you win the election.

On the other hand, lol @ "Melania and Michelle got along very well"

Who's organizing to keep protests ongoing? We don't need to blow up in an orgy of anger now, protests need to be day-in-day-out for four years to drive him into saying and doing more and more crazy shit. Different city every night, only have to turn out once a month.

I liked that article tombot, but as an aside I really hate 'love trumps hate' as a protest statement. feel like there's never been a less appropriate time for cute little puns.

Absolutely. The first two words are "love trump" and I read it often as "love Trump's hate" which...uh yeah, that's kind of what people are getting on board with