A Lot of Empty Space Voted for Cheetoh Twitler

Alan Cole‏Verified account @AlanMColeMore






This map is a brilliant data visualization. Here's a brief thread on why it's so much better than past efforts. https://xkcd.com/1939/

Kill the Electoral College.  Do it now.

No Negotiation

You can't negotiate with people who want you dead.

David Atkins at Political Animal:

Harsh as it might sound to some, the folks who voted for Trump–the folks who actually think White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer is honest–did so with malice aforethought, specifically intending to use government power to bring suffering to those they regard as members of a lesser order. Warren (Setti, not Elizabeth) is fooling himself if he thinks folks who have been propagandized into viewing the Democratic Party as America’s home for welfare dependency, inner-city crime, racial quotas and political correctness will ever give the party a second look. Future Democratic victories can only come from turning out as much of the party’s base as possible on a consistent basis, not by bending over backwards to attract those sympathetic to wingnuts.

SNIP

Those who voted for Trump are Warren’s enemies, whether he knows it or not. Those who voted for Trump are the enemies of Democrats, whether Democrats know it or not. Trumpism cannot be negotiated with, and it damn sure can’t be reasoned with. It can only be conquered via a massive turnout of Democratic troops on the battlefield of ideas–and if that doesn’t happen, Trumpism will continue to prevail politically.

Lessons From North Carolina on Beating Bevin

Call out the motherfucker for fucking mothers. Protest. Protest Louder.  Get Arrested Protesting. Never Stop.

From Political Animal:

* Pat McCrory has finally conceded in the North Carolina Governor’s race. Tom Jensen tells the story about how the opposition organized to defeat him.

Pat McCrory’s now official defeat in the race for Governor of North Carolina has real implications for the progressive movement nationally in the era of Trump.

The dominant reason given for McCrory’s defeat will be the unpopularity of HB2, and certainly that played an important role. In August we found that only 30% of voters in the state supported it, and that McCrory’s handling of the issu

e made them less likely to vote for him by a 12 point margin. If he’d vetoed it, he very well might have been reelected.

But the seeds of McCrory’s defeat really were planted by the Moral Monday movement in the summer of 2013, just months after McCrory took office…

What happened in the summer of 2013 to make McCrory so permanently unpopular? He allowed himself to be associated with a bunch of unpopular legislation, and progressives hit back HARD, in a way that really caught voters’ attention and resonated with them…

McCrory spearheaded or went along with all of this. And he might have gotten away with it without much impact on his image. Most voters don’t pay close attention to state government.

But the Moral Monday movement pushed back hard. Its constant visibility forced all of these issues to stay in the headlines. Its efforts ensured that voters in the state were educated about what was going on in Raleigh, and as voters became aware of what was going on, they got mad.

The People We're Supposed to Make Into Allies

Ain't happening. 

David Atkins at Political Animal"

The fact that 44% of Republicans either think Trump won the popular vote or aren’t sure is disturbing on its own. But perhaps more disturbing is the situational ethics: not only have many Republicans changed their mind about the electoral college, but they know their insistence on it is rigging the election against the winner of the popular vote, and they don’t care.

Currently, 19% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents favor basing the winner on the popular vote, down from 49% in October 2004 and 54% in 2011. Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents already widely favored having the popular vote determine the winner and are slightly more likely to do so now than in the past.

This is all part of the post-objectivity trend in Republican politics. There is no objective truth, no objective morality. It’s only about what it takes to win. The ends justify the means.

We used to define that as moral evil. It still is.

The Mean and Moronic Will Always Be With Us

This is nothing new.  For the 10 millennia of human civilization, reactionaries have harnessed fear and bigotry and stupidity to block or reverse progress. They didn't need the Internet or Fox news or talk radio, and trying to connect our current iteration of Leading by Lies to technology is a snipe hunt.

Progress waxes and wanes, but over time stays ahead of Reaction and increases its lead.  If it didn't, Reaction wouldn't need to exist.

But Progress never advances by persuading the fearful and bigoted and stupid.  Those belong to Reaction always.  Progress advances by expanding the ranks of the Human.

Ten thousand years ago, Reaction defined "human" as "people who live in my village." Everyone else was not-human.  The Enemy.

Nine thousand eight hundred years later, Progress had expanded the definition of Human citizen-entitled-to-vote to male, wealthy and white.

And while Progress thinks it has since expanded the rights of full humanity to people of color, the poor and women, to Reaction, the non-male, non-white, non-wealthy are still the Enemy.

Reaction always and only appeals to fear, bigotry and stupidity. Progress advances always and only by fighting fear, bigotry and stupidity. Because Progress never has, never can and never will win over Reaction's fear, bigotry and stupidity.

Progress advances only by increasing the ranks of the Human people who vote.

That means we have two fights:

• Stopping voter suppression and ensuring full access to the polls for everyone - ideally, vote-by-mail.  We have to fight this one like rabid ferrets, because this one is literally the life and death of our democracy.

• Turning out the vote.  Anyone who is non-white, non-male, non-rich, non-straight and/or non-christian and who does not vote is a traitor to democracy and to every ancestor who fought, bled and died for that right.  Once you get the right to vote, it's not a right any more.  And it is absolutely fucking not a "privilege."  It's a duty.

Everybody votes.

Or Progress dies.

Pumpkin-Headed Moron Gets Election Backward: Repugs Stopped Millions of Citizens From Voting

Remember, everything the fascist tangelo says is lies and stupidity.

D.R. Tucker at Political Animal:

Considering the controversy over oddities in Ohio during the 2004 Presidential election, there’s nothing wrong with being a little skeptical about just how decisively the Donald won the Electoral College. Investigative journalist Greg Palast observes that the playing field was rigged–in Trump’s favor–long before November 8:

Starting in 2013 – just as the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act – a coterie of Trump operatives, under the direction of Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State, created a system to purge 1.1 million Americans of color from the voter rolls of GOP–controlled states.

The system, called Crosscheck, is detailed in my Rolling Stone report, “The GOP’s Stealth War on Voters” [which was published in August 2016].

On [Election Day], we saw Crosscheck elect a Republican Senate and as President, Donald Trump. The electoral putsch was aided by nine other methods of attacking the right to vote of Black, Latino and Asian-American voters, methods detailed in my book and film, including “caging,” “purging,” blocking legitimate registrations, and wrongly shunting millions to “provisional” ballots that will never be counted…

This country is violently divided, but in the end, there simply aren’t enough [right-wing] white guys to elect Trump nor a Republican Senate. The only way they could win was to eliminate the votes of non-white guys—and they did so by tossing Black provisional ballots into the dumpster, ID laws that turn away students—the list goes on. It’s a web of complex obstacles to voting by citizens of color topped by that lying spider, Crosscheck.

Trumpians Got What They Voted For

Don't ever let them forget it.

Jamelle Bouie in Slate:

Millions of Americans are justifiably afraid of what they’ll face under a Trump administration. If any group demands our support and sympathy, it’s these people, not the Americans who backed Trump and his threat of state-sanctioned violence against Hispanic immigrants and Muslim Americans. All the solicitude, outrage, and moral telepathy being deployed in defense of Trump supporters—who voted for a racist who promised racist outcomes—is perverse, bordering on abhorrent.

It’s worth repeating what Trump said throughout the election. His campaign indulged in hateful rhetoric against Hispanics and condemned Muslim Americans with the collective guilt of anyone who would commit terror. It treated black America as a lawless dystopia and spoke of black Americans as dupes and fools. And to his supporters, Trump promised mass deportations, a ban on Muslim entry to the United States, and strict “law and order” as applied to those black communities. Trump is now president-elect. Judging from his choices for the transition—figures like immigration hardliner Kris Kobach and white nationalist Stephen Bannon—it’s clear he plans to deliver on those promises.

Whether Trump’s election reveals an “inherent malice” in his voters is irrelevant. What is relevant are the practical outcomes of a Trump presidency. Trump campaigned on state repression of disfavored minorities. He gives every sign that he plans to deliver that repression. This will mean disadvantage, immiseration, and violence for real people, people whose “inner pain and fear” were not reckoned worthy of many-thousand-word magazine feature stories. If you voted for Trump, you voted for this, regardless of what you believe about the groups in question. That you have black friends or Latino colleagues, that you think yourself to be tolerant and decent, doesn’t change the fact that you voted for racist policy that may affect, change, or harm their lives. And on that score, your frustration at being labeled a racist doesn’t justify or mitigate the moral weight of your political choice.

Yay We Have Another Chance To Fuck Up Mitch McConnell

For real.  The election is not over.  There is one more Senate race, and you can help the Democrat win.

 

Evan Hurst at Wonkette:

Hey, you there! You are a sad Hillary voter, or you are a person saying arguments to the internet about how Bernie would have won (NO MORE DISCUSSING THAT), or you are protesting in the streets, or maybe you are just curled up in a ball day-drinking and waiting for the end of America on January 21. That’s all fine, and we need to have time to process and mourn and eat our feelings, but it’s also time to get FIRED UP, READY TO GO! for what needs to be the greatest period of libtard/progressive civic engagement in American history, at least since the first time “Arrested Development” was canceled.

And you need a thing to do! And his name is Democratic Louisiana Senate candidate Foster Campbell! No, you perverts, we don’t literally mean you are going to DO him, but you are going to DO whatever you can to get him elected.

The dealio here is that one million and five people were running for the Louisiana Senate seat formerly diaper-stained by gross diaper man David Vitter. Since nobody won a majority of the vote on election day, it’s going to a run-off, which will be held December 10. The Republican challenger John Kennedy got 25% of the vote in the first election, whereas Foster Campbell got only 17.5%, and Kennedy reportedly has a lot of structural advantages and more money dollars. But what did we learn last Tuesday? We learned you either TURN OUT or you gonna get TURNT OUT, you know what we are saying?

So go give Foster Campbell money.

 

You will do this because, if Campbell wins, the Republicans will only have a 51-49 majority in the Senate, which gives Dems just a little bit more power to push back on Donald Trump’s worst plans. It means it won’t be as much of a stretch to try to form majority coalitions with Republican senators who are occasionally decent on specific issues, like John McCain with Russia or Rand Paul opposing Rudy Giuliani and John Bolton for secretary of State. If 49 Democrats can pull a McCain and a Susan Collins across the aisle to oppose Trump erecting a statue of Vladimir Putin on top of the White House, we might be able to at least mitigate Trump’s damage, is what we mean.

So go give Foster Campbell money.

Another reason for why to do this is the 2018 midterms, which we have to start organizing for NOW, so call your mama and call your liberal congressman, and if you don’t have one of those, call your local party to see how you can get involved. The Democratic Senate map in 2018 is tough, TO SAY THE LEAST, so having one more seat filled with a Democrat up there in Washington could make a big difference.

So go give Foster Campbell money.

 

He is a good guy! He’s a cattle rancher good ol’ boy Louisiana dude who just happens to want to raise the minimum wage and go after Wall Street and do something to save Louisiana’s coastline, which, in case you have not heard, is disappearing due to global warming and the oil industry. He wants to fix it with SCIENCE! Doesn’t he sound like a nice new work boyfriend for Elizabeth Warren?

We think so! So give him money. If you have time for a quick weekender, head to Louisiana — WHERE NEW ORLEANS IS — and do some volunteering for him! While you are there, eat at Mandina’s and Cafe Degas and also a million other places, we don’t care, it’s not our responsibility to plan your meals.

If you can’t make it down South, you could always make phone calls for Campbell! And then give him more money. And like him on Facebook! And share this post on Facebook and Twitter and wherever else you share the things!

Any "Reconciliation" is on Trump

From Digby:

Harry Reid speaks for me

He issued this statement:

“I have personally been on the ballot in Nevada for 26 elections and I have never seen anything like the reaction to the election completed last Tuesday. The election of Donald Trump has emboldened the forces of hate and bigotry in America. 

“White nationalists, Vladimir Putin and ISIS are celebrating Donald Trump’s victory, while innocent, law-abiding Americans are wracked with fear – especially African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Muslim Americans, LGBT Americans and Asian Americans. Watching white nationalists celebrate while innocent Americans cry tears of fear does not feel like America. 

“I have heard more stories in the past 48 hours of Americans living in fear of their own government and their fellow Americans than I can remember hearing in five decades in politics. Hispanic Americans who fear their families will be torn apart, African Americans being heckled on the street, Muslim Americans afraid to wear a headscarf, gay and lesbian couples having slurs hurled at them and feeling afraid to walk down the street holding hands. American children waking up in the middle of the night crying, terrified that Trump will take their parents away. Young girls unable to understand why a man who brags about sexually assaulting women has been elected president. 

“I have a large family. I have one daughter and twelve granddaughters. The texts, emails and phone calls I have received from them have been filled with fear – fear for themselves, fear for their Hispanic and African American friends, for their Muslim and Jewish friends, for their LBGT friends, for their Asian friends. I’ve felt their tears and I’ve felt their fear. 

“We as a nation must find a way to move forward without consigning those who Trump has threatened to the shadows. Their fear is entirely rational, because Donald Trump has talked openly about doing terrible things to them. Every news piece that breathlessly obsesses over inauguration preparations compounds their fear by normalizing a man who has threatened to tear families apart, who has bragged about sexually assaulting women and who has directed crowds of thousands to intimidate reporters and assault African Americans. Their fear is legitimate and we must refuse to let it fall through the cracks between the fluff pieces. 

“If this is going to be a time of healing, we must first put the responsibility for healing where it belongs: at the feet of Donald Trump, a sexual predator who lost the popular vote and fueled his campaign with bigotry and hate. Winning the electoral college does not absolve Trump of the grave sins he committed against millions of Americans. Donald Trump may not possess the capacity to assuage those fears, but he owes it to this nation to try. 

“If Trump wants to roll back the tide of hate he unleashed, he has a tremendous amount of work to do and he must begin immediately.”

 Until he does, all the harassment, all the threats, all the assault, all the deaths are on his head.

What Violent Racists?

Yeah, I remember after election day 2008 all the Blacks harassing and attacking whites and threatening that President Obama would take them out ... oh, wait.

TPM:

A University of Louisiana at Lafayette student was allegedly beaten and had her hijab ripped off in broad daylight during a robbery committed by two men, one of whom she said was allegedly wearing a white "Trump" hat, police and university officials told The Advertiser Wednesday.

The unnamed woman said she was attacked while walking around 11 a.m. Wednesday morning, according to the paper. She was allegedly hit with a metal object and knocked down by two men who exited from a silver vehicle.

An officer with the Lafayette Police Department told the Advertiser that the men "were saying ugly stuff to her," but did not tell the paper what was said. Her wallet was stolen.

Kareem Attia, president of the Muslim Student Association at UL-Lafayette, told the Washington Post that the attack has had a profound effect on campus, saying that Muslim students are "very integrated" into the campus, which is two-thirds white.

"No one wants this to happen, and it's hitting home for us," he told The Washington Post in an interview. "The idea that a person in your community could be targeted just for wearing a headscarf, which is part of our religion, it's disgusting. It's very un-American."

The attack happened on the same day that a Muslim student at San Diego State University was allegedly robbed and may have had her car stolen by two men who made comments about Donald Trump and Muslim people, according to the Post report.

Just arrest all the trump voters and deport the motherfuckers to the Philippines, the president of which makes trump seem like jimmy carter.

Matches

Divine Irony:

As eager as we are to put this election behind us, we must never underestimate the flammable potency of an uneducated and misinformed populace in the hands of a matchbook salesman.

• ↵ Reblogged from sagansense

Dem Legislators Need to Come Out Fighting

Now we've got an all-trumpian state legislature in Kentucky.  Expect rapid passage of laws making sexual assault and rape legal - for white men - and permitting all kinds of discrimination - by white men against non-white non-men - and barring trans people not just from public restrooms but from all public accommodations because cooties and mandating wage cuts for women who earn more than 50 percent of what any man earns and more.

The Dems should come out firing on Day One.  Not just voting against all the repug abominations, but loudly and proudly filing bills of their own.  No, they'll never get a committee hearing, but they will get screaming demands from nothing-to-lose dems that the bills do get hearings.

Any Democratic legislators out there ready to fight?  Here are some ideas:

- repeal the gay-bashing marriage amendment in the state constitution

- mandatory background checks and seven-day waiting period for gun purchases

- raise the minimum wage to $15 per hour

- establish the "Right to a Union" outlawing any anti-union efforts on the part of any employer

- double the state tax rate from 6 percent to 12 percent on income above $100,000, and halve the state tax rate from 6 percent to 3 percent on income below $50,000.

- Double the corporate tax rate.

- Outlaw contracting of any state or local public service.  Fund the hiring of thousands of state employees instead.

- mandate unisex restrooms in all schools and public buildings

- build and staff state-supported abortion clinics in each and every one of Kentucky's 120 counties. Free, no-cost, no-waiting, no-questions asked abortions.

 

Bury the motherfuckers in bills that showcase what Democratic leadership really means.

 

Rip the fucking envelope to shreds and scream bloody murder.

Don't Mourn. Organize!

Now we get to work.

We do the door-to-door organizing that is the only thing that really wins elections.

We find candidates to fill every single office from school board up to members of Congress.  We fight for every single seat. The deadline for filing for the 2018 elections in Kentucky is January 30 of 2018.  Fourteen and a half months away.  We're already starting late.

And we remember who we are.  We're the non-white, non-male, non-freakazoid, non-straight majority.  We fucked up because for eight years we thought we couldn't lose. 

Now we have to go back to square one and start over.  One Democratic voter at a time.

We know what they think of us; now we're going to find out who they are.

We're not going to forgive.  We're not going to give in.  We're not going to give up.  We're going to fight.  Fight with the tools the Constitution gives us.  Because that's where our power is.

And we have to do it now, before they take even that away.

Fuck Outreach

They have the right to vote (though they would deny that right to everybody who doesn't look and think like them) and they have the right to say whatever they want (ditto.)

 

But they do not have the right to our toleration, forgiveness or acceptance.

 

They are trump voters and thus beyond the pale.

Bob Cesca, who has been covering the right for a while:

Sure, everyone has understandable grievances. It doesn't mean that Trump voters are sensible and responsible people deserving of the benefit of the doubt. We all hate traffic; we all hate paying taxes; we all think our voices aren't being heard by leadership; we all want more than we have; we all think presidential elections are too long. If we really want it, it's easy to find common ground between you and the worst of the worst. But why the hell would we want to find common ground with people who are inconvincible and completely destructive in their choices -- destructive to my life and yours? I'm sure there are sex offenders who get pissed off about long lines at the grocery store or, if they're civic-minded, they might hate gerrymandering. That doesn't mean they're worthy recipients of an olive branch.

I'll fully acknowledge that I have a deep and entrenched biases against Trump supporters. This includes the rednecks, the white suburbanites, the non-college educated laborers, the grandparents and various points between. Some are worse than others, of course. There are the racists, the woman-haters, the xenophobes, the Second Amendment Solutions people, and there are more than a few Trump people who simply want to watch the world burn. The thru-line that binds all of Trump's demographic subgroups is that they believe this third-world dictator-in-waiting is worthy of being president -- that he'll "make America great again." They're ebulliently voting for candidate knowing that he'll be a berzerker-in-chief, inciting havoc in everything he touches. 

They've listened to his words just like you have. They've heard him discussing the possibility of using nuclear weapons; they've heard him threaten war in Iran; they've heard him threaten journalists with lawsuits and imprisonment; they've heard him parrot many of Alex Jones' conspiratorial, exploitative gibberish; they've heard him accuse the first female nominee for president, Hillary Clinton, of not looking presidential because she's a woman; they've heard him play games with our democratic process, disrespecting it unlike anyone who's come before; they've heard him denigrate and insult POWs and war heroes; they've listened to all of it, and yet they're more convinced than ever that he'd be a great president. Worse, they've cheered for and repeated every last word of it.

They're completely deranged.

All told, they're willing to let millions upon millions of people die or lapse into poverty by electing the most dangerous candidate to ever make it this far. They're willing to sacrifice our democratic way of life without fully understanding the long term damage to the republic he's already manufactured.

We're supposed to seek communion with these horrible people?

Bullshit.

This isn't just about racism or misogyny. This is about 40 percent of the voting public believing, in some cases as a matter of providence, that this unapologetically malevolent circus peanut, with all of his childish outbursts and catastrophically unpredictable psychoses, is the most qualified American to hold the office. It's a staggeringly bizarre point-of-view revealing a deep sickness among nearly half of all voters. It represents a willingness to hubristically embrace ignorance, incompetence and lies as political dogma. And knowing how many Americans and non-Americans alike will be irreparably harmed by the votes of these Trump supporters with whom we're supposed to find common ground, it's impossible to see any other course of action beside vigorously marginalizing them while working with reasonable members of both sides to return the process to the grown-ups.

Knowing what we know about Trump voters, there's no indication that they're willing to accept or reciprocate the outreach. It's wasted time. It's fighting that alt-right Twitter troll with the egg avatar and "Deplorable" in their handle. They're irredeemable, and they don't deserve your sympathy, especially knowing how they clearly don't give a shit that you'll lose your healthcare, or that you'll be forced to birth your rapist's baby. They don't care that your sons and daughters will be sent to fight an overseas war because the Shah of Whatever insulted Trump's tiny fingers. They don't care that merely by supporting Trump they've done severe damage to the rules and traditions that bind our constitutional system together. 

Some people are simply unworthy and disqualified from being taken seriously. It's both surprising and not surprising at all that certain lefties in the media and elsewhere believe they should be.

Defending Your For-Clinton Vote

There are literally no persuadable voters in this election, so trying to pull repug voters over to the dem side is a waste of time and energy.

Preventing Trump from getting within a light-year of the presidency is more than sufficient justification for a vote for Hillary Clinton, but if you need to defend your vote from a positive perspective, Political Animal has what you need:

Clinton has a whole array of proposals that would actually benefit white middle and working class Americans.

If you are unemployed, she has a plan to create thousands of new jobs via an investment in infrastructure.

If you aren’t earning enough money to make ends meet, she wants to raise the minimum wage.

If you want to go to college or are weighed down with college debt, she has a plan to make college debt-free and to allow former students to refinance their debt.

If you are elderly and trying to make it on Social Security alone, she has a plan to shore up the Social Security Trust Fund and increase benefits to the elderly poor.

If you are raising a family or taking care of elderly relatives, she has a plan for paid family and medial leave.

If you need affordable child care, she has a plan to make pre-k universal and ensure that no one pays more than 10% of their income on high-quality childcare.

If you are living in poverty, she has a plan to change the refundability threshold of the child tax credit.

If you live in coal country, she has a plan to revitalize your community.

Beyond that, a President Clinton would continue the executive orders issued by President Obama on things like overtime pay and the fiduciary responsibilities of investment advisors.

Turnout. Turnout, Turnout, TURNOUT. Nothing Else Matters

So Kentucky, like a lot of other states, now boast record-high voter registration.

It doesn't matter unless all those registered voters actually get to the polls.

That's the goal now.  Forget everything else.

From the Herald:

A record number of Kentuckians will be eligible to vote on Election Day, according to Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes.

More than 3.3 million people are registered to vote in the November election, an increase of more than 50,000 from the primary election.

Grimes said 106,000 voters have registered since March, when the state unveiled its online voter registration system.

About 30 percent of all new voters registered online, with younger voters using the online system the most.

“I’m really proud of the work that we’ve done to launch online voter registration,” Grimes said. “It’s an enormous success in Kentucky.”

No Quarter

I want to know if the bleeding hearts dems who handed $13,000 of their own hard-earned money to the racist motherfuckers of the North Carolina GOP have ever actually met a trump voter.  Or an actual repug.  Because those of us who have know better.

Rude Pundit:

So we're facing a party that is trying to prevent people from voting, with a nominee that is actively inciting people to possible violence in order to undermine the very democracy that got him this goddamn far, and has elected officials who have made it their jobs to simply undo the will of the majority of Americans. I ain't playing nice with shitheels and ratfuckers, and I won't abide pompous blowhards and the fools who follow them.

The Pure Distillation of Republicanism

Do not let the repugs in your life get away with repudiating the Orange Menace. He is their creation. They are to blame. The repug party is now and forever more the Trump Party.

 

Steve M:

Donald Trump is the real Republican Party stripped of phony civility and fake high-mindedness. He represents his party better than John McCain and Mitt Romney ever did. He's the genuine article. If you're shocked by his campaign, you've had your head in the sand for a long time.

And that's because, as Tristero writes:

Paul Krugman, in the wrap up to today's column:

Assuming that Mr. Trump loses, many Republicans will try to pretend that he was a complete outlier, unrepresentative of the party. But he isn’t. He won the nomination fair and square, chosen by voters who had a pretty good idea of who he was. He had solid establishment support until very late in the game. And his vices are, dare we say, very much in line with his party’s recent tradition. 

Mr. Trump, in other words, isn’t so much an anomaly as he is a pure distillation of his party’s modern essence. 

[Emphasis added.]

Absolutely true. He is the ultimate standard bearer for modern Republican ideas. He is also the ultimate standard bearer for modern Republican behavior, behavior which is racist, sexist, paranoid, vindictive, greedy, and takes pride in its ignorance.

Yes, he is sickening to watch, but he is not the real problem. The modern Republican party is the problem. The short term solution is to deliver a resounding national defeat to the party - and not just at the presidential level. The party has begun to realize just how disastrous this election could be:

...senior party leaders privately acknowledged that they now feared losing control of both houses of Congress.

The long-term solution will require fundamental changes to the GOP. I'm not holding my breath.

Answer Yes or No

Just one question for every repug candidate - for dog-catcher on up - who is seeking your vote:

"Do you support Donald Trump?  Yes or No."

Don't let him or her utter any other syllable.  Just "yes" or "no."

Because thanks to Donald Trump and the repugs and conservatives who created him as their perfect candidate over the last 40 years, that's the only question that means anything this year.

So, Rand Paul and Andy Barr and Hal Rogers and James Comer and Thomas Massie and Brett Guthrie: Yes or No?

All the repugs running for Kentucky house and state senate seats:  Yes or No?

Rob Rothenberger, a bought-and-paid-for repug in Shelby County:  Yes or No?

And just for shits and giggles, Governor Matt Violence-n-Lawbreakin' Bevin:  Yes or No?

Bevin's Personal Vote Suppression

Speaking of voting, Governor Lying Coward has been caught lying about his accomplishments.  Again.

Tom Loftus at the Courier:

 During his campaign for governor and since his election, Matt Bevin has said he supports restoring civil rights to nonviolent felons who have completed their sentences.

Yet through his first 10 months in office, Bevin has not restored the civil rights, which include the right to vote, to a single person.

Bevin’s record on rights restoration contrasts with his two immediate predecessors, according to records of the Kentucky Secretary of State, where the restoration orders are filed.

Democrat Steve Beshear issued an average of 1,190 restorations of civil rights per year during his eight years in office.

And Beshear’s Republican predecessor, Ernie Fletcher, averaged 277 restorations per year during his 2003-07 term.

“My basic reaction is outrage,” said Rep. Darryl Owens of Bevin’s failure to issue any restorations. “You have a number of people who want to vote, who have requested the right to vote, who for no apparent reason are being denied that right by the governor. It’s heartbreaking. It’s frustrating.”

No, Rep.Owens, it's not frustrating.  It's the standard unconstitutional behavior of elected repugs. 

And the reason they're denied is because Gov. Racist Motherfucker thinks they're likely to vote Democratic.