Because Elections and Winning Enough Votes

[abbey1227]

Apr 24, 2022 18:32:41 GMT merh said:

A clerk one imagines is rude is nothing compared to say, cutting off a finger or falling 100 ft & surviving.

Real trauma.
Not inconvenience 

Lone my 3 fricken hours of labor on do not recall. Bits, like my husband offering me an ice cube or them bringing in that squat bar, but how there were.that many people in there or what the discussion was, I have no idea. 


There's a picture in the article of a dog bone like milk bone. So you remember you had a dog. You remember it died, but maybe you found it all mangled on the side of the road after it got hit. That part of the memory likely fades/gets blocked. You don't think the dog is still alive.

Real trauma tends to scar people. You can see it in their flinch or their behavior later. I get some supress it to some degree, but there it is under the surface.

Jesus, merh. I'd NEVER forget that horrible discovery.        My religious buddy just had to put 1 of the 3 baby cows his wife bought out of it's misery. It was too sick to feed and was suffering. But the main problem was he didn't really want more animals on their little farmette.......and cows happen to be his favorite. So even though he did it, he was practically welling up just telling me about it.

[merh]

Apr 24, 2022 18:41:54 GMT abbey1227 said:

Apr 24, 2022 18:32:41 GMT merh said:

A clerk one imagines is rude is nothing compared to say, cutting off a finger or falling 100 ft & surviving.

Real trauma.
Not inconvenience 

Lone my 3 fricken hours of labor on do not recall. Bits, like my husband offering me an ice cube or them bringing in that squat bar, but how there were.that many people in there or what the discussion was, I have no idea. 


There's a picture in the article of a dog bone like milk bone. So you remember you had a dog. You remember it died, but maybe you found it all mangled on the side of the road after it got hit. That part of the memory likely fades/gets blocked. You don't think the dog is still alive.

Real trauma tends to scar people. You can see it in their flinch or their behavior later. I get some supress it to some degree, but there it is under the surface.

Jesus, merh. I'd NEVER forget that horrible discovery.        My religious buddy just had to put 1 of the 3 baby cows his wife bought out of it's misery. It was too sick to feed and was suffering. But the main problem was he didn't really want more animals on their little farmette.......and cows happen to be his favorite. So even though he did it, he was practically welling up just telling me about it.

I remember the details of what I did, but I really don't remember how my husband looked when I found him or the exact sound of the thud his head made hitting the floor off the bed (I just remember thinking it sounded horrible) or what it was like doing  cpr on him as the operator directed.

For around a year certain things would make me cry. Now? It's 20 yrs ago.

It is gone so if I needed to perform cpr again (I did take classes every 2 yrs) I could.

So in a year or 3 see if he is as fresh with the tears.

I mean, hell, every time I take a cat to be put down, I am bawling my eyes out. I feel sorry for the vet for all my water works.
But down the road I don't cry.

[abbey1227]

Apr 24, 2022 18:52:51 GMT merh said:

I mean, hell, every time I take a cat to be put down, I am bawling my eyes out. I feel sorry for the vet for all my water works.
But down the road I don't cry.

Yeah, my wife has been really easy to set off for the last week. And she's rarely one for the water works.

I think this one getting to be our sweet 'old lady' .......and the wife getting older herself was just a really heartfelt combo on her part.

It kinda makes you question if you can continue to invest those emotions in more of them in the future, right?

[merh]

Apr 24, 2022 18:58:02 GMT abbey1227 said:

Apr 24, 2022 18:52:51 GMT merh said:

I mean, hell, every time I take a cat to be put down, I am bawling my eyes out. I feel sorry for the vet for all my water works.
But down the road I don't cry.

Yeah, my wife has been really easy to set off for the last week. And she's rarely one for the water works.

I think this one getting to be our sweet 'old lady' .......and the wife getting older herself was just a really heartfelt combo on her part.

It kinda makes you question if you can continue to invest those emotions in more of them in the future, right?

I used to hate how manipulative Disney got in my kid's time. Lilo & stich. Finding Nemo. Ruthless conveyer belt to produce a particular reaction (laugh, gasp, etc) at the right moment. Pixar never did anything for me.
Then Brave. 
Good god. 
I was fighting tears.all over. 
I remember the kid in front of me asking her daddy what was wrong. "Nothing, honey. Daddy's just crying"

 it does feel like more things affect me that way. 
I can see the manipulation, but still have to fight the tears.

Pisses me off.

Don't fake me into crying.

My husband would throw it at me in a fight "go on. Squirt a few tears" I figure it was a taunt his brothers threw at him when he was little.

So I couldn't cry.

"Makeup is a woman's battle gear, Shirei.
You know, Shirei...when a girl wears makeup, no matter what happens, she can never cry. Because no matter how light the makeup, if she cries, her face will become a disgraceful mess."
Story of Saiunkoku

That was another one.
Damn, I knew the bad guy was going to die & he deserved it, but it was my favorite voice actor & he did it so damned well...

We discussed this one. 
I think I got it wrong

"We don't stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing"

Which goes with

"Please do not take life quite so seriously—you surely will never get out of it alive"
Elbert Hubbard.

But there is a second similar one 
“It is well to make the best of this world, for you’ll never get out of it alive.”
The Great Barrington News

You should recognize the name.
I wondered at the similarity to your little anti-covid guys.
Except mine are a century old.


Or this

"TIL that classical music and metal fans have the most similar personalities, based on a study of 36,000 people in more than 60 countries. "Both have the same basic motivation: to hear something dramatic and theatrical, a shared 'love of the grandiose.'"
(Today I Learned)

[merh]

Not to mention the population of France is like a quarter of ours
67,413,000 vs 331,893,745

Wait.
The division comes out 4.92 so almost 1/5th ours

[merh]

[merh]

[abbey1227]

Apr 25, 2022 20:12:58 GMT merh said:

Not to mention the population of France is like a quarter of ours
67,413,000 vs 331,893,745

Wait.
The division comes out 4.92 so almost 1/5th ours

It wasn't until very recently that they lost the ability to count votes.

Blame the educational system? or something more sinister?

[LokisMom]

Apr 24, 2022 11:42:29 GMT abbey1227 said:

Apr 24, 2022 5:03:08 GMT LokisMom said:

The Tea Parties were founded as opposition to any and everything Obama. Remember the man couldn’t even wear a tan suit without him being in the wrong. 

Leave that stupid complaint about the suit out of it.........the TEA Party was about being Taxed Enough Already.

Just because the Left supports big Govt openly, doesn't excuse the blatant lies and support of big Govt by the GOP. They did a pretty fine job of scuttling the Tea Party movement at every turn, too.

Abs, you’re forgetting some history. I don’t remember them talking much about taxes so much as Obama’s tan suit and girly bicycle. 

And where did the Tea Party go? They got the tax breaks they needed? Or were they subsumed into Trump’s base? 

How Big Oil and Big Tobacco partnered with the Koch brothers to take over the GOP

By Jeff Nesbit

The spring of 1993 was a lousy time to be associated with the Republican Party in Washington, D.C. Bill Clinton had just stormed into the White House. The Democratic Party controlled both houses of Congress. Even undersecretaries of powerful cabinet departments from the Bush administration discovered that they were unloved, unwanted, and unemployed in the nation’s capital.

That included me. I’d worked at the White House as the director of communications for Vice President Dan Quayle, an Indiana Republican, during the second half of the elder Bush’s term as president. In 1993 D.C. had few open doors for refugees of the losing Bush White House. Defeat had been sudden and unexpected, and plenty of folks like me found themselves on the street with bleak job prospects in a place that had become a one-party town.

So I did what many others did in that spring of 1993 in the nation’s capital: I began consulting. My first client was a think tank that I’d never heard of—a small outfit with big dreams and a curious checkbook.

At the time, no one knew much about Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE). When I’d asked about funding for CSE, it had taken a while to get a clear answer. But, eventually, it became obvious when Rich Fink showed up at critical strategy sessions and spoke with unblinking certainty about what Charles Koch was interested in and wanted done without question. Though few have heard of Rich Fink, he’s been in the inner circle of the Koch brothers’ movement-building efforts for decades, influencing the creation and actions of Koch-funded front groups.

CSE was, in effect, a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, the second-largest privately owned company in the United States, with interests in manufacturing, trade, and investments.

But what I didn’t know when I began consulting for Citizens for a Sound Economy was what any of the connections between CSE and the Koch brothers were really all about. What was the endgame? Today, we know.

Charles and David Koch—who, if their individual fortunes were combined in one place, would quite possibly represent the wealthiest person on earth—have almost certainly spent or raised more than a billion dollars to successfully bend one of the two national parties in America to their will. The long rise of the Tea Party movement was orchestrated, well funded, and deliberate. Its aim was to break Washington. And it has nearly succeeded, as America saw in the debt-ceiling debacle of 2011, prompted by the Republican Party’s demand that the president negotiate over deficit reduction in exchange for an increase in the maximum amount of money the US Treasury is allowed to borrow. There are no mistakes or accidents in the Tea Party movement. Its leadership has made certain of that.

One of my first assignments as a consultant for CSE was to join the CSE leadership on a New York fund-raising trip to meet with a huge corporate partner with vast experience in building real political muscle who could help CSE reach beyond Koch oil money for their new grassroots efforts. We visited Philip Morris’ headquarters in New York.

We were met by several of Philip Morris’s state-based government affairs experts, all of whom had significant experience in building coalitions with an eye toward blocking regulations they didn’t like at the state level. The concept that CSE put on the conference table, which was quickly taken up by the Philip Morris staff, was a bit shocking to me. They proposed an unholy alliance—Philip Morris money commingled with Koch money to create anti-tax front groups in a handful of states that would battle any tax that moved. It would make no difference what kind of tax—the front groups could battle cigarette excise taxes in the Northeast and refined-oil fees at the coasts. Any tax, for any purpose, was bad—and these front groups would tackle them all, with Philip Morris and the Kochs behind them.

It made good business sense—and good political sense as well. You could relabel just about anything as a tax, and heaven knows the American public hates taxes. This, at its core, was the beginning of the American Tea Party revolt against the power of the government to pay for its programs. They could recruit average citizens from a variety of ideological groups to their cause. They would work side by side with corporate-directed workers and employees, providing real boots on the ground when enough activists weren’t readily available. And no one would be the wiser—or even care— that these “grassroots” anti-tax groups would be jointly created and funded by the largest private oil company and the largest cigarette company in the world.

What didn’t become public until nearly 20 years later was that these themes of a Tea Party anti-tax, anti-regulation, and antigovernment revolt were then developed almost simultaneously by two of the largest tobacco companies—Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds—under the guise of political and business coalitions to fight excise taxes of all sorts, including cigarette taxes. In successive phases in the 1990s, with the Kochs’ CSE as its core mobilization network partner, Philip Morris and RJR helped create state-based anti-tax and anti-regulation propaganda campaigns such as Get Government Off Our Back, Enough is Enough, and Citizens Against Regressive Taxation.

Over the years, Rich Fink, Charles Koch’s political adviser, and his various Koch protégés have occasionally talked publicly about what would be needed to take over one of the two national political parties from the outside and place Libertarian, free-market principles at its center. It would take:

• an extensive academic network to support it intellectually;

• policy networks in every state to draw on that intellectual underpinning from hundreds of American universities;

• a true political grassroots alliance that extended to all of those state capitals and worked closely with the academic and policy network;

• a propaganda arm that could bring tightly controlled messaging and narratives to the fore in the state networks in a way that looked
like in- dependent journalism;

• and a national coordinating group that could enforce discipline in what would otherwise be a chaotic, unruly, wildly disconnected political
network that ran the gamut from the patriot movement to American exceptionalism.

As luck—or careful, strategic planning—would have it, just such a highly leveraged network with these very pillars was in place as the Tea Party movement appeared to emerge from nowhere at the start of President Obama’s first term in office. That Tea Party movement looked an awful lot like the efforts the Kochs’ CSE had led in the Clinton and Bush years—just with more money, broad state-based causes, better-trained leaders, and a willingness to integrate and coordinate more efficiently with each other.

According to publicly available IRS records, the five essential pillars of just such a Tea Party movement network were all funded and in place by that spring of 2009—the Sam Adams Alliance to direct grassroots efforts; the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity to direct propaganda efforts in state capitals across the United States; the State Policy Network to coordinate funding and free-market policies at state-based think tanks; hundreds of grants from the Koch foundations to American universities that were linked in through SPN; and, of course, CSE’s successor, Americans for Prosperity, built to coordinate the effort nationally.

All of them saw their budgets expand significantly as Obama ran for the White House and then took office—months or even a full year before the Tea Party movement erupted into public view. This explains why the Tea Party movement was able to mobilize, spread, and network so rapidly, as if by magic.

Adapted from Poison Tea: How Big Oil and Big Tobacco Invented the Tea Party and Captured the GOP, copyright © 2016 by Jeff Nesbit. First hardcover edition published April 5, 2016, by St. Martin’s Press. All rights reserved.

time.com/secret-origins-of-the-tea-party/

Feels shitty to be lied to. 

[merh]

Apr 26, 2022 2:38:28 GMT abbey1227 said:

Apr 25, 2022 20:12:58 GMT merh said:

Not to mention the population of France is like a quarter of ours
67,413,000 vs 331,893,745

Wait.
The division comes out 4.92 so almost 1/5th ours

It wasn't until very recently that they lost the ability to count votes.

Blame the educational system? or something more sinister?

So all these Republicans won their races legitimately,  but the presidential section was fake?

[abbey1227]

Apr 27, 2022 8:38:29 GMT merh said:

Apr 26, 2022 2:38:28 GMT abbey1227 said:

It wasn't until very recently that they lost the ability to count votes.

Blame the educational system? or something more sinister?

So all these Republicans won their races legitimately,  but the presidential section was fake?

They haven't perfected stealing them all. Just the highest office was the priority this time around  

[merh]

Apr 27, 2022 9:33:27 GMT abbey1227 said:

Apr 27, 2022 8:38:29 GMT merh said:

So all these Republicans won their races legitimately,  but the presidential section was fake?

They haven't perfected stealing them all. Just the highest office was the priority this time around  

A larger margin in congress wasn't a goal?

[abbey1227]

Apr 27, 2022 10:39:59 GMT merh said:

Apr 27, 2022 9:33:27 GMT abbey1227 said:

They haven't perfected stealing them all. Just the highest office was the priority this time around  

A larger margin in congress wasn't a goal?

I think they're happy just keeping the same old, same old Establishment types in place. it's really ONE party, not two

[merh]

Apr 27, 2022 10:49:32 GMT abbey1227 said:

Apr 27, 2022 10:39:59 GMT merh said:

A larger margin in congress wasn't a goal?

I think they're happy just keeping the same old, same old Establishment types in place. it's really ONE party, not two

That's why Build Back Better breezed through congress?

Oh yeah, it didnt.

[abbey1227]

Apr 27, 2022 15:54:09 GMT merh said:

Apr 27, 2022 10:49:32 GMT abbey1227 said:

I think they're happy just keeping the same old, same old Establishment types in place. it's really ONE party, not two

That's why Build Back Better breezed through congress?

Oh yeah, it didnt.

Has the spending been reigned in? Has the foreign aid and meddling stopped? Has the border been locked down?

Oh, yeah........business as usual.

[merh]

Apr 28, 2022 1:44:13 GMT abbey1227 said:

Apr 27, 2022 15:54:09 GMT merh said:

That's why Build Back Better breezed through congress?

Oh yeah, it didnt.

Has the spending been reigned in? Has the foreign aid and meddling stopped? Has the border been locked down?

Oh, yeah........business as usual.

The border has never been locked down, dude.

The foreign aid can't be stopped. Buying friends.

How many politicians on DC?
Senators, representatives...each with their constituents/donors tugging on that sleeve?

Mosaddegh had sought to audit the documents of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), a British corporation (now part of BP), in order to verify that AIOC was paying the contracted royalties to Iran, and to limit the company's control over Iranian oil reserves. Upon the AIOC's refusal to co-operate with the Iranian government, the parliament (Majlis) voted to nationalize Iran's oil industry and to expel foreign corporate representatives from the country. After this vote, Britain instigated a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil to pressure Iran economically. Initially, Britain mobilized its military to seize control of the British-built Abadan oil refinery, then the world's largest, but Prime Minister Clement Attlee (in power until 1951) opted instead to tighten the economic boycott while using Iranian agents to undermine Mosaddegh's government. Judging Mosaddegh to be unreliable and fearing a Communist takeover in Iran, UK prime minister Winston Churchill and the Eisenhower administration decided in early 1953 to overthrow Iran's government, though the preceding Truman administration had opposed a coup, fearing the precedent that Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) involvement would set. British intelligence officials' conclusions and the UK government's solicitations were instrumental in initiating and planning the coup, despite the fact that the U.S. government in 1952 had been considering unilateral action (without UK support) to assist the Mosaddegh government.

So we were supporting our ally Britain who was supporting an oil company.

[abbey1227]

Apr 28, 2022 9:40:42 GMT merh said:

The border has never been locked down, dude.

The foreign aid can't be stopped. Buying friends.

How many politicians on DC?
Senators, representatives...each with their constituents/donors tugging on that sleeve?

Mosaddegh had sought to audit the documents of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), a British corporation (now part of BP), in order to verify that AIOC was paying the contracted royalties to Iran, and to limit the company's control over Iranian oil reserves. Upon the AIOC's refusal to co-operate with the Iranian government, the parliament (Majlis) voted to nationalize Iran's oil industry and to expel foreign corporate representatives from the country. After this vote, Britain instigated a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil to pressure Iran economically. Initially, Britain mobilized its military to seize control of the British-built Abadan oil refinery, then the world's largest, but Prime Minister Clement Attlee (in power until 1951) opted instead to tighten the economic boycott while using Iranian agents to undermine Mosaddegh's government. Judging Mosaddegh to be unreliable and fearing a Communist takeover in Iran, UK prime minister Winston Churchill and the Eisenhower administration decided in early 1953 to overthrow Iran's government, though the preceding Truman administration had opposed a coup, fearing the precedent that Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) involvement would set. British intelligence officials' conclusions and the UK government's solicitations were instrumental in initiating and planning the coup, despite the fact that the U.S. government in 1952 had been considering unilateral action (without UK support) to assist the Mosaddegh government.

So we were supporting our ally Britain who was supporting an oil company.

Not even during this time of the world's deadliest virus EVER? I guess we'll never have any real border security then.

That's correct.......we'll keep bribing other people to be our friends with borrowed money.

And there it is, just one example of the meddling we get up to overseas and in other countries' business. Hurray for the CIA. No wonder Kennedy wanted it busted up.....and no wonder his brains got splattered

[merh]

www.yahoo.com/news/mcconnell-unnerved-bidens-child-tax-192909409.html

McConnell was unnerved about Biden's child tax credit becoming too popular for the GOP to kill, book says
Joseph Zeballos-Roig
Sun, May 1, 2022, 12:29 PM

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
McConnell was anxious the Biden child tax credit would be too difficult for Republicans to dislodge.

A book from two New York Times reporters reveal McConnell's unease with a key part of the stimulus law.

The one-year child allowance expired due to opposition from Manchin and Republicans.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell never backed President Joe Biden's stimulus law, which passed with only Democratic votes early last year. But one of its social programs seemed to alarm him in particular

McConnell was unnerved by the expanded child tax credit, according to a forthcoming book "This Will Not Pass" from a pair of New York Times reporters. Insider obtained it ahead of its May 3 release.

Shortly after the law's passage in March 2021, the Kentucky Republican privately confided to a friend that it was among the numerous social benefits that could prove too popular for Republicans to dislodge even if they regained control of Congress.

"If Americans grew used to the benefits in the new law, he suggested, it would become politically untenable for Republicans to repeal its most popular measures," wrote Times reporters Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin. "The country, McConnell lamented, might cross a point of no return toward becoming a European-style social welfare state —exactly the outcome he had spent his career arguing against."

A spokesperson for McConnell didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

The bulked-up child tax credit expired four months ago due to opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Republicans spearheaded by McConnell. Democrats initially wanted to extend it for at least a year under their Build Back Better legislation. But Manchin sank the House bill in part due to his resistance to the benefit.

Biden recently conceded that the child allowance is unlikely to be revived anytime soon. Manchin has also tried squashing any attempt to revive social spending initiatives in a smaller version of the bill. Democrats are mounting a last-ditch effort to pass a slimmer package with his approval in the 50-50 Senate.

But tax cuts for the rich?
Perfect!

[abbey1227]

May 2, 2022 21:19:18 GMT merh said:

www.yahoo.com/news/mcconnell-unnerved-bidens-child-tax-192909409.html

McConnell was unnerved about Biden's child tax credit becoming too popular for the GOP to kill, book says
Joseph Zeballos-Roig
Sun, May 1, 2022, 12:29 PM

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
McConnell was anxious the Biden child tax credit would be too difficult for Republicans to dislodge.

A book from two New York Times reporters reveal McConnell's unease with a key part of the stimulus law.

The one-year child allowance expired due to opposition from Manchin and Republicans.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell never backed President Joe Biden's stimulus law, which passed with only Democratic votes early last year. But one of its social programs seemed to alarm him in particular

McConnell was unnerved by the expanded child tax credit, according to a forthcoming book "This Will Not Pass" from a pair of New York Times reporters. Insider obtained it ahead of its May 3 release.

Shortly after the law's passage in March 2021, the Kentucky Republican privately confided to a friend that it was among the numerous social benefits that could prove too popular for Republicans to dislodge even if they regained control of Congress.

"If Americans grew used to the benefits in the new law, he suggested, it would become politically untenable for Republicans to repeal its most popular measures," wrote Times reporters Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin. "The country, McConnell lamented, might cross a point of no return toward becoming a European-style social welfare state —exactly the outcome he had spent his career arguing against."

A spokesperson for McConnell didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

The bulked-up child tax credit expired four months ago due to opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Republicans spearheaded by McConnell. Democrats initially wanted to extend it for at least a year under their Build Back Better legislation. But Manchin sank the House bill in part due to his resistance to the benefit.

Biden recently conceded that the child allowance is unlikely to be revived anytime soon. Manchin has also tried squashing any attempt to revive social spending initiatives in a smaller version of the bill. Democrats are mounting a last-ditch effort to pass a slimmer package with his approval in the 50-50 Senate.

But tax cuts for the rich?
Perfect!

It's a number game, merh

How many rich are there to give tax cuts to? Now compare that to how many poor with kids there are to give child tax credits? Who ends up buying more votes?

[merh]

May 3, 2022 3:53:46 GMT abbey1227 said:

May 2, 2022 21:19:18 GMT merh said:

www.yahoo.com/news/mcconnell-unnerved-bidens-child-tax-192909409.html
But tax cuts for the rich?
Perfect!

It's a number game, merh

How many rich are there to give tax cuts to? Now compare that to how many poor with kids there are to give child tax credits? Who ends up buying more votes?

So better to give millionaires favors hoping they'll give the politicians donations than give $300/kid to poor?

Its the GOP style.
They don't have a replacement for the ACA  because they don't want poor to get used to getting stuff like that from the government.  Only millionaires deserve corporate welfare.