Just hoping that his worst day isn’t all of ours too.
I know little about farm subsidies but did notice you picked “progcode=corn.” I tried a few alternatives and concluded you may have cherry-picked ‘corn’ to make this point. 
Even with the reductions, the federal government spends more on agriculture assistance than it spends on Head Start, Child Care and Development Block Grants, and Child care tax credits combined. But of course all these programs are almost irrelevant to the question Where does all that money go? Defense spending exceeds all other discretionary spending combined. Interest on the debt exceeds $200 billion annually and will double in four years under Trump’s “Plan.”
A good rule-of-thumb is that anyone complaining about government spending hasn’t the slightest clue where the money is actually spent.
And an actual piece of shit lying on my tongue is better than you on your best day. You embody absolutely everything the OP keeps talking about with your complete and utter lack of understanding, knowledge, and interest in learning, and I maintain that the world would be a better place without you and people like you. I mean, holy shit:
Are you clinically retarded? Have you gotten yourself checked recently? Please, I encourage you to do so before you become a Darwin award. Then again, if you haven’t pulled it off by now, I’m not sure why. Maybe you’re just obscenely lucky. Why are you even here? Have you made a single post worth reading, or that didn’t contribute to extreme ignorance, in the last 16 fucking years that you’ve been here?
No, seriously, why is this guy still around? In 16 years, he’s contributed nothing to the fight against ignorance except a case study in how fucking futile it is! He’s either a bad troll or fucking 5 years old.
He’s right wing, so he gets catered to and treated with extra deference.
That’s what we thought 8 years ago. That’s what we’ve thought for DECADES! “SURELY, now after 8 years of a George Bush administration that even Republicans grew to despite, SURELY America has learned our lesson!” Took TWO FUCKING YEARS before Republicans retook Congress again. Then we follow up with 8 years of a guy that despite unprecedented opposition even flipped GLEN BECK?!?!?! Nope! Donald Trump!
Face it. American voters don’t give a shit about truth, or temperament, or decency. If Democrats want to win, we need to reality TV this shit. I didn’t support Bernie in the primary because I thought he was too far out of the Democratic mainstream to be an appropriate choice. I was wrong. Should have chosen Bernie and he should have ran on the platform of a national lottery to shit on the desk of the Wall Street CEO of your choosing. That’s the shit people respond to.
This is what I’d go with. Can’t gerrymander states so Democrats will usually have a chance for power in the Senate but I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re looking at a 20+ year Republican congressional majority basically stymieing any sort of significant Democratic legislation for decades.
Maybe at some point in the distant future liberals will have self-selected out of red states and things will be polarized enough for some sort of split to happen.
I’m not particularly good at math, but c’mon now.
Or maybe he had the last two words’ pluralizations reversed, but that would be a more appropriate unfounded accusation against yet another wuckfit.
You concluded wrong. Here is a graph of all agricultural commodity subsities, and the picture looks even bleaker.
You are missing the point that these people derive some of their personal worth from work and would prefer even subsidized work to handouts, perpetual war, or some nebulous, indirect form of social engineering. I’m not making a value judgment, but preferring to work for a wage is a rational choice, and maintaining food security through surplus production is sound policy.
That question is irrelevant to the point I’m making, which is whether rural white Americans can rightly say that the government is putting their interests, as they see them, at the very back of the line.
You’re reading stuff into that chart that isn’t there. (And that’s for only a single crop.)
Yes, I mentioned welfare reform having taken place 20 years ago in the post you’re responding to. But like I said, what they hear about welfare is from Fox and Rush and the rest of wingnut talk radio. And from listening to them, you wouldn’t know welfare reform happened; they’re still preaching that blacks are lazing around and living large on the white man’s dime.
And this message gets through to rural Americans, how? Is Mother Jones widely read in Nebraska?
No, Rush Limbaugh tells them that liberals look down on them, and they believe it.
So what’s the answer? If the problem is that not enough people are voting for the party that has the best answers to America’s future, how do you suggest we solve it?
Also, learning to communicate and work with people who are in a dramatically different place than you is not “sucking up”, nor is it equivalent to saying, as cuauhtemoc suggests, “calm down, everything’s fine.”
What it is is an answer to the question: “if half the people, for a myriad of reasons, are confused about the right thing to do during elections, how to we help them to see more clearly?”
You, and others in this thread, say that it has proven to be a “wasted effort” to try to reason with the stupid bigoted idiots who make up ~1/2 of the country’s electorate. To that I say “of course!” None of us use reason as a foundation for any kind of decision making, we use feelings.
Of course the idea that if we lay out clear, reasoned facts, people just oughta come around to our position fails, because none of us (very few of us) came to our position that way in the first place; that’s not how it works. This is where ‘traditional’ communication from the Democratic party falls on its face. The problem isn’t stupid Republicans; we’re all stupid. Democrats just refuse to admit that they are too.
Ultimately, we’re never going to be a one party country. There will always be varying sides to a myriad of issues. There will be times when one philosophy is dominant in governance and times when another is.
Making America a better place is not about ensuring that Republicans never win office. It’s about ensuring that whoever is in charge is able and willing to have compassion for those who are not. It’s about ensuring that, regardless of who is in power, we try to build communities where all the members are willing to live in relative peace together.
Sometimes this means the ‘losers’, minorities, disenfranchised, have to do the work of pulling things together and building the bridges; we’re the ones with the most to lose, and whose interest is most directly served by doing so. It’s maybe not “fair,” but it is eminently practical.
So again I say, how are you going to get your ideas represented in your government? If you think calling your neighbors stupid bigots is going to do the trick, have at it, but I think you’ll find that that strategy continues to “fail utterly.”
Bill Clinton was the only man with the magic to appeal to both minorities and working class white people. I don’t know if anyone else can do it at this time in our history. I think it’s very possible that there’s a big chunk of working class white people who are reflexively hostile to anything that benefits minorities and gay/trans people, and will not vote for such candidates no matter what.
But the good news for Democrats is that we don’t need to, at least at the presidential level. All we need are inspiring and politically-skilled candidates to win at the presidential level. An A-level candidate like Obama won huge in '08 and big in '12 on the strength of motivating minorities, young people, and liberal white voters. A B-level candidate (maybe John Edwards without his scandal?) would still have won easily in '08 and solidly in '12, most likely (a C-level, like Hillary or Kerry, would have only won in '08, I think). That’s all we need to win. But we need good candidates to win them – not just experienced and solid public servants, but charismatic and inspiring campaigners.
Early possibilities for '20 – Bernie (despite his age); Liz Warren; Cory Booker; Kirsten Gillibrand; Kamala Harris; Xavier Becerra; Al Franken (a TV vet to take on Trump); and many others. I hope they all run. I think it’s doubtful that any of them are A-level candidates like Bill Clinton or Obama, but hopefully there are a few B-level folks among them.
Good Democratic turnout would have won this year. We just need better candidates. I was wrong about Hillary and I want to learn from my mistake, hopefully other Democrats and liberals do too.
So these people are OK with subsidized work? Reminds me that one of the first Reagan-era cuts was to exactly that sort of program, CETA, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act. And Lord knows that the urban equivalent of the CCC has been proposed enough times, and smacked down by conservatives enough times, to make me conclude that their attitude is ‘my subsidized work is right and good, but those people’s subsidized work is a handout.’
Why do you have hate in your heart?
Horsey sauce. Clothahump is a brazenly ignorant, shallow-minded dunce who represents the nadir of the common denominator and is treated exactly as such.
This election appears to have snipped your last gossamer tether to reality. Hope you float somewhere nice.
Beyond “possible” - definitely.
It’s not that LBGQT and others are “getting something,” it’s that the middle of the working class in most areas feel that they aren’t getting anything - that all the change and economic fixes and Obamacare and so forth haven’t addressed any of their problems. Never mind that they probably live better lives for most of these programs, it’s only a matter of “still above water” and not “improved.” As long as they see other groups getting things that appear to improve their lives, they’re going to be resentful for being just propped up in dying/dead industrial areas where the jobs evaporated. Their kids have to win a tight job lottery or leave - and I understand their pain here. It wasn’t supposed to be like that.
I agree with the general sentiment in this thread that it’s time to stop trying to placate this segment of the voters; they can either figure out that their boats, too, are largely lifted by the same policies that benefit those in more flourishing areas and job markets, and that the blame lies far beyond the current administration or any potential next one; either that, or just sulk and vote for meaningless promises (and against all “worthless incumbents”) cycle after cycle. But they are - or need to be made - irrelevant to national governance. (I guess they can fuck up their own town/county/state as much as they care to, and hello Kansas.)
I think DT was interpreting “No, seriously, why is this guy still around?” as “How is it this guy has not been banned”. I think that’s a reasonable interpretation of that statement, and DT has longed claimed the mods here are biased towards conservatives.
Not that I disagree with your second paragraph…
A series of 5-year-olds, getting a new one each year.
Because of people like Clothahump, the world is a worse place. Not just a little worse, but potentially a lot worse, in ways that he should have been smart enough to figure out (god knows most of the rest of the world was), but somehow wasn’t. His stupidity and the stupidity of people like him has essentially destroyed my homeland’s reputation, and may very well destroy a whole lot more in the next four years. And you wonder why I hate him and what he stands for.
This is not exactly true; Democrats and Republicans both have been happy to enrich themselves on the backs of working- and middle-class voters for decades.
What’s wrong with the idea I proposed? I will post it again.
To be explicit, the demographic groups I’m talking about are African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Muslims, college students, recent immigrants, LGBT, and educated whites. These are groups that are the least susceptible to anti liberal bias. Voter turnout was not as high it could have been from these groups too, and that is why Trump won.
Why does it seem I’m having to point this out a million times on this board? It’s not like the election results don’t show this pretty clearly, so I don’t know why the topic of conversation hasn’t moved past white rural voters yet. America’s fixation with this group is adding to the surreality of my reality right now.