America, 1776-2016

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”

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Well shit.

Is this really happening? It feels like a bad dream right now.

@TJ/ Jamie Sommers /TJ: This is unfathomably bad, and all too real. No point dreading it; save your strength for dealing with it.

Calling out sick RIGHTNOW

@TJ/ Jamie Sommers /TJ: It’s Election come to life. At least Sheriff Joe lost.

Haven’t yet checked MSM to see how they explain why all the predictions were so catastrophically off.

My kid posted, “Which one of you assholes forgot to hit the vote rigging switch?”

I’m still in shock. My friends: Please know that I love you all, and we’ll get through this somehow.

For once, I’m with our students: School should have been canceled today. Our population is majority-minority, very progressive, and most of them feel like they have targets on their backs.

I am not sad right now. I am fucking ANGRY, and I choose that emotion because I do not want to cry. I want to scream.

I am not for reaching across the aisle or what have you. I don’t want to see another commercial on TV from corporate America talking about unity bullshit.

I hope that progressives, liberals, and everyone else on the left give Trump as rough of a time after 2018 as they did to President Obama after 2010.

One tiny silver lining: The state takeover of schools amendment in Georgia failed. But the governor right now is gathering names of members of state teachers’ organizations for reprisal… and school teachers may find themselves subject to pay cuts and/or furloughs next year after the legislature meets in January — regardless of a Trump recession.

I just keep reminding myself that we survived the Civil War and Jim Crow and countless other dark, difficult eras in our history. We are, ultimately, better than this. This is a major setback, and we should allow ourselves some measure of grief, if only to preserve our sanity, but this too shall pass. Cold comfort, but it still beats giving in to abject despair.

Some desperately needed good news: Washington elected the awesome Pramila Jayapal to Congress, replacing retiring liberal lion Jim McDermott. All our top state and federal incumbent Dems won reelection.

Voters also approved Proposition 1 to fully build out the Seattle area’s subway/light rail system. Voters in Los Angeles approved Measure M, a similar plan to build more light rail there. Great victories for the environment, riders, and transit nerds.

About 66 million people voted for a bully, a clown, or a loon. Ugh.

@mellbell: Did Clinton win the popular vote, though? I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch the CBC yet.

Voters also legalized recreational MJ in California, Massachusetts, and Nevada, thus joining Washington, Oregon, and Colorado. We’re all gonna need this medicine.

@¡Andrew!: Clinton leading popular vote by around 200,000. But final counts will be awhile.

@¡Andrew!: Unclear. The lead of approximately 200K that nojo cited is with 98 percent reporting, but I haven’t drilled down into where the outstanding votes are to hazard a guess at how that might shift. But, if so, it’ll just be one more way in which we didn’t learn anything from 2000.

@mellbell: Republicans learned to clutch the Electoral College close to their breasts. And they control more than enough states to prevent an Amendment, never mind getting it through Congress in the first place.

They’re playing voter suppression from all angles. And it’s working.

I live near both a police station and a fire station, and last night one of my friends briefly mistook the sound of sirens for celebration in the streets. I don’t really believe in omens, good or bad, but, yeah.

Additional note on the Popular Vote: In 2000, the Bush campaign rationalized the discrepancy — not unreasonably — by saying a raw popular-vote campaign would have been conducted differently than a state-by-state strategy, with different results.

Which is true, in both directions: In any given state, you simply need to win, not win big. Nobody pays attention to California or New York, or (for the moment) Texas.

That said, the Electoral College remains a travesty of democracy, undermining faith in our system of representative government, whatever the philosophical excuse was in 1789.

@nojo: Theoretically, it’s another mechanism that’s supposed to prevent dangerously unqualified lunatics from seizing control of our country.

@¡Andrew!: Situation Normal, All Fucked Up.

Now 99 percent of the popular vote is in and her roughly 200K lead still holds. Not that it matters.

@mellbell: Odd how all we hear about for months is the “horse race”, until suddenly we don’t.

Less reasonably, Bush partisans also argued that with a popular-vote contest, we would be seeing recounts across the country, Florida on steroids.

Well, yes, sure, why not. We do want to make sure every vote is counted, don’t we?

Well , at least I don’t have to worry about how much our health care premiums are going to go up or whether my employer will pay for some of it. No need to waste time signing up since it will be gone by Jan. 31.

Just think of the great comedy we’re going to get out of the next four years. I mean, not quite four years, they’ll start rounding up the comedians before then, but you know, enjoy it while it lasts.

Courtesy of Jezebel’s fascinating roundup of election-related hate mail: “liberalism is a mental dissorder [sic] . . . . [a]nd trump is your chemo treatment.” So you’re saying his presidency will be a series of small doses of poison? Finally I agree with one of his supporters about something!

@mellbell: Also some scattered reports of racists feeling their oats with grafitti/vandalism.

There’s Trump, and there’s what Trump enables. Neither are pretty.

FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot To Just Sit Back And Enjoy Collapse Of United States

“We have intercepted electronic communication indicating that al-Qaeda members are actively plotting to stay out of the way while America as we know it gradually crumbles under the weight of its own self-inflicted debt and disrepair,” FBI Deputy Director Mark F. Giuliano told the assembled press corps. “If this plan succeeds, it will leave behind a nation with a completely dysfunctional economy, collapsing infrastructure, and a catastrophic health crisis afflicting millions across the nation. We want to emphasize that this danger is very real.”

“Sadly, al-Qaeda has us right where they want us,” the official added, “and at this point, I fear it is too late to do anything about it.”

Responding to the allegations, a spokesperson for al-Qaeda reportedly confirmed the terror group’s plot and praised the American people as martyrs of the highest order.

@nojo: Never heard that phrase before, “feeling their oats,” but I like it. Will have to start working it into my vocabulary.

I read this morning that 53% of white women voted for Trump. OMFG, I feel sick.

@mellbell: I must have caught the tail-end of old-timey language that’s no longer in wide circulation.

@¡Andrew!: White People Suck. We might as well own up to it.

@nojo: I lurve old-timey language. A couple weeks ago I described DC residents with low-number license plates (a sign you have connections with the mayor and/or city council — really) as “muckety-mucks” and got some bewildered looks.

@mellbell: Someone asked on Twitter the other day whether Millennials had heard the phrase “How do you like them apples” before Good Will Hunting.

Consensus: None of them.

I think that one was already archaic as I was growing up — used, but only ironically in comedy bits. “Feeling their oats” has merely disappeared from view. But it has the quality of a good metaphor: Referring to actual behavior in the world — horsies! — and using it to frame human action.

What I really like is discovering a common word or phrase that has long since lost its referent, hundreds or even thousands of years ago. Language began very, very physical.

@nojo: Also fun is watching old episodes of Match Game and seeing what phrases come up in the Super Match segments. Last week one of the prompts was “liver _____,” and I figured the top answer would be “liver spots,” but it was “liver and onions.” A lot has changed in 40 years. I did, however, correctly guess that the answer to “Michael _____” would be “Michael Landon,” so I’ve got that going for me. :)

Deaths in 2016:
* Bowie
* Prince
* Lemmy
* Natalie Cole
* Gene Wilder
* Garry Shandling
* Democracy

Breaking: Homofascist & Benedick’s favorite closet case Congresscritter Aaron Schock is being indicted.

@SanFranLefty: Don’t forget Muhammad Ali, Alan Rickman, Harper Lee, Merle Haggard, Maurice White, and Garry Marshall!

@SanFranLefty: The last line in that article is the real kicker: “Terwilliger said the Justice Department planned to indict Schock last week, but it was postponed because it came too close to a national election.”

@mellbell: I used to say that the only reason I watched the Watergate hearings was because they pre-empted Match Game.

But Match Game is also a great example of the state of (public) language in the Seventies: You couldn’t say shit, so you had to allude to it. (See also “making whoopee” on the Dating Game.) It wasn’t Noel Coward, but it was in his neighborhood. No need for that now.

How’s everybody doing? I’m a little better, doing class observation at Hollywood High. The school is about 79% Hispanic and 85% from underprivileged homes.

But youth is ebbulent, and even the bustle of spirit week is somehow hopeful. Looking at all the beautiful young people- brown and pink and black, in headscarves and cheerleader outfits, a few boys in makeup and some girls in backwards trucker caps, all of them glad to be alive, I realize that this isn’t about one day in November or four years at the beginning of the 21rst century. This is about lifetimes, and lifetimes are long. We will fight and win another day.

If we owe these beautiful kids anything, it is courage and hope. Despair is never an option.

@Tommmcatt Au Gros Sel: Very well put. Thank you for this.

@Tommmcatt Au Gros Sel: (hugz)

Ugh.

@SanFranLefty & @mellbell: And Leonard Cohen!! Fuck 2016.

@SanFranLefty: Sometime between yesterday afternoon and this morning they deleted the line from the article about Schock’s indictment being postponed so that it wouldn’t come too close to the election. Fuck that.

@mellbell: Still there in the tumblr version of the article though.

Fuck me:

Curiously — and, granted, anecdotal — the only arguments I see out there for Hillary are that she’s “electable” (Josh at TPM) or that she’s a woman (Jason Kottke, saying he needs a symbolic role model for his daughters).

Arguments for Hillary, in other words, have nothing to do with Hillary. And soon you can add “not Trump” to the list.

I don’t know how compelling these arguments are to anyone not already inclined to support her — they’re not inspiring, to say the least. And yes, that leads to her greatest weakness: Not folks voting for Trump, but not bothering to vote at all.

February 28. Trump remains below Mitt’s 2012 vote. Hillary is 5 million votes under Obama 2012.

@nojo: Yep. My brother wrote in Obama, one friend wrote in Teddy Roosevelt, and another friend didn’t vote at all. Surely more friends and family followed suit, but those are the ones that I know of right now.

@nojo: Low turn out ultimately did us in. I don’t imagine anything now can overcome most people’s ignorance and apathy.

I took a mental health break from the news about 24 hours ago, and that’s helped a bit. Still feel like hell from the nausea, revulsion, and lack of sleep, though.

@¡Andrew!: The news is really, really hard right now. The facts are bad enough, but they’re clouded in even more bullshit than usual.

This was not a Change Election. A majority of voters did not choose Trump. Stop pretending otherwise.

@nojo: I signed the Change.org petition begging the Electoral College to elect the winner of the popular vote. Apparently, most of them are unbound and have the power to do that. I can’t see them actually doing it given how desperately the Powers That Be seem to wish to normalize this dystopian nightmare, but it’s worth a shot.

@¡Andrew!: Speaking of which, stay tuned. I ain’t letting this one go.