That’s bascially my point. Texas was already heavily gerrymandered, so this new one is even more aggressive. Which makes for slimmer margins for some red districts. In a wave election, those margins will likely disappear, as many D voters who may have sat out the last election, will turn out for this one. Hence, Republicans may actually lose seats in the House.
I see another reason the Republicans will lose seats. There’s been a lot of pixels expended by pundits on how young Latino voters moved to the red side in 2024. And the gerrymander was based on the last election. But many of those Latinos were attracted to Trump’s braggadocio; others were attracted by his claim to only deport criminal immigrants. Now that they’ve seen what he’s actually doing (e.g. deporting all immigrants no matter their criminal status), they’re less enthused by Trump. They may have had friends or relatives deported, even if they weren’t criminals. So many of those votes are going to the blue side.
Or an increasing number of MAGA fellow travelers will just not vote at all.
My very Red county (Placer) voted approx 55% No to 44% Yes in the CA Prop 50 election, with only about 50% turnout.
This spread is a lot closer than other recent elections, and coupled with the lower turnout, I suspect that those who are starting to be affected or embarrassed by MAGA just stayed home.
The house is one vote away from voting for the discharge petition, and that vote is waiting to be seated, which Johnson refuses to do until the house reconvenes to end the shutdown. Given this motivation I’m not sure that Trump would agree to reopening it even the Democrats conceeded.
The two newly elected governors are members of the House. They’ll have to resign their House seats before becoming governors, which means the number of signitories to the discharge petition will decrease. Both of these events will happen in January, the first one on the 10th. So if nothing else changes, that’ll be when the House is brought back into session.
There’s two other House seats empty. One is in Houston and a very D district. It’s had its primary but not the general. Not sure when the runoff is scheduled, although one place I read that it would be 13 Dec. If that’s the case, then the House session won’t resume until 17 Jan, when the other governor has to resign.
The other is in Tennessee and is a fairly Republican district. Normally, it would be a safe seat, but a blue wave could upset that. Its general is 2 Dec. An upset here could mess up all these calculations.
Remember when Target bowed to Drumpf’s pressure to scrap DEI? Well, it seems that doing so wasn’t favorable to their bottom line. Thankfully they came up with a foolproof way to help their sales!
I’m reminded of how Safeway has or had the same policy, something I found out years ago when it hit the news that a woman in severe pain from job-inflicted repetitive stress injury was fired when she failed to smile enough.
When an employee smiles at me it makes me feel like I’m participating in some sort of humiliation ritual for them.
Target likes to speak, and it likes to be spoken to
I don’t want any contact with anyone in the store unless I need something. Don’t smile at me. Don’t talk to me. Don’t offer to help me.
Do not misunderstand- I’m polite and friendly to the employees. But I do not go to any store for social interaction, and most of the time I’m on a mission to get the hell out of there as fast as possible.
For the record, Target is nowhere near the first to implement this kind of policy. See, for example, the 10-foot rule (https:// blog.founders.illinois.edu/walmart-10-foot-rule/) at Walmart. And the less you know about the psychotically controlling demands put on Disney staff to ensure park visitors feel pampered and mollycoddled, the better.
I don’t know why Target was singled out for media coverage on the announcement of this policy. Maybe it makes a cute narrative, bookending their stumble on DEI policies.
Point is, it’s increasingly the rule rather than the exception. Although I wonder what the version of this could be implemented at Tesco. “If the customer is within six feet of you, make a cursory effort to briefly veil your contempt behind an expression of theatrical exhaustion.”
I think it’s more “If a customer is within six feet of you, be sure to leave your box cart in the place that will cause the greatest obstruction to them”.
