In Cold Blood

We were going to express our indignation over an American resident being executed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, but then we were reminded of our indignation over a newsroom being shot up, over massacres in schools and churches, over a woman being run down by a neo-Nazi.

We were reminded of our indignation over children being stolen from their parents by our government, and our indignation over our government’s deliberate carelessness in returning them.

We were reminded that our President once bragged he could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue without losing supporters.

We were reminded that while our indignation is not pointless, it is also not shared, that an electorally significant minority of our fellow citizens support the vicious, bloodthirsty actions of our government, and implicitly condone the ritual slaughters of the innocent.

And that people dare to fret about incivility in the face of all this.

When condoning murder has become an acceptable, debatable policy alternative, incivility is all we have left.

21 Comments

All we can do at this point is flip Congress and ensure that the truth comes out.

Data for Progress, Every District, and Act Blue have teamed up to support Democrats running for state legislatures in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona, etc. This is critical because we can control the redistricting process in the 2020s and ungerrymander the voting districts that are partially responsible for this hellish nightmare if we flip enough state legislatures. We’ve gotta give til it hurts, and we’re soooooo close to winning!

https://secure.actblue.com/donate/givesmart2?amount=80

Reagan: no one paid a price. GHWB: no one paid a price. W: no one paid a price. Trump: this is the time to extract whatever price we can – destroy them. Take their wealth, put them on the street. Let them live like a homeless Vet for a few years. I am done being nice.

@¡Andrew!: Mine’s in the mail today.

I’ve been getting increasingly strident mail about a drilling initiative, how it will be the death of Colorado’s economy, how the nice folks in the extraction industries only have my best interests at heart.

Of course I voted for it. All that money against it, what else could I do?

@¡Andrew!: I put my absentee ballot in the mail today. Another vote for Nancy P!

Dropping off my ballot on my way to my knitting group tonight.

VOTED! Carolyn Long, flip WA 3!

Just voted today. No stamp needed for Washington’s mail-in ballots now. I still suspect turn-out’s going to be in the low 20% range.

@IanJ: Had a discussion about that the other day — apparently San Francisco is also postage-paid. But not San Diego when I was there (still the case; I checked), and not Denver.

I vaguely remember chatter about that when Oregon introduced mail ballots, how postage was equivalent to a poll tax, however slight. The resolution was that they can always be hand-delivered, and while I understood the principle of the objection, I probably thought that postage was a far lesser imposition on the franchise than limiting voting to a single midweek workday.

@IanJ: I pray to the FSM that the forecasts of record-breaking, historic levels of voter turnout are true. If only every state had mail-in ballots standard like Washington, it would solve so many problems.

That said, I feel sorry for those whose job is try to convince all those fucking idiots that voting matters, Jeezus. I can’t do “voter outreach,” because I’m guranteed to slap some imbecile right across their ignorant face.

@nojo: Postage-paid voting is actually new in Washington this year, though supposedly the Post Office would deliver the ballots even without postage before. I use a drop box that I trust, and then I confirm they received it a few days later on their website.

@Mistress Cynica: I’ve got a list of names to be stitched into a quilt if anyone needs it : )

@¡Andrew!: Story out today about black voters in an industrial state who sat out 2016 because Hillary didn’t bother reaching out to them. Y’know, I get the sentiment and the history behind it, the resentment at being taken for granted, but I don’t get the impulse for letting things get even worse.

Update re @ 1: We did it! Not only did we raise enough to help flip state legislatures, we smashed the goal of $150K! Currently, it’s at $166K and climbing. FSM be praised!

@nojo: No stamp has ever been needed for mail-in ballots in Ess Eff as long as I’ve been voting here. Which is a good thing because with all of our ridiculous state and city propositions, the sucker was four or five pages, front-and-back.

@¡Andrew!: Girl, there ain’t enough yarn in the world to knit that list.

@SanFranLefty: Just three pages in Denver. And I don’t miss the California proposition scams.

@SanFranLefty: I did live in SF for a year, down the street from the Painted Ladies, but it was between elections. Got to worry about the Pyramid on 9/11, though!

It’s darkly humorous that the MAGAtbomber is such an ignorant moron that he doesn’t know that none of these people have opened their own mail in decades. As if George Soros trudges down his driveway everyday to check his mailbox for another dunning notice for his light bill.

@¡Andrew!: Tony Soprano always picked up the paper.

“(His) posts are full of misspellings, run-on sentences, and bizarre stream-of-consciousness word vomit.”

So the MAGAtbomber’s just your average, everyday suburban Tdump-humper. That’s reassuring.

Add a Comment
Please log in to post a comment