Christmas/Hannukah open thread

Can we get a little help here, please?

I thought this sounded like an interesting campaign strategy.

Joe Biden should come out & publicly offer President Putin a deal: you publicly release everything you’ve got on President Trump, & I’ll commit to unilaterally withdrawing all sanctions on Russia when I take office.

Let’s see if the GOP still argues bribery doesn’t matter.

— Robb Smith (@RobbSmith) December 5, 2019

Weekend wind-down

Notes from a failed Municipal campaign

I'm still licking my wounds after a second failed attempt to win a seat on our Town's Board of Aldermen, so it might have been wiser to wait until some of the bitterness fades to talk about it. But if I were one of those "wise course" people, I probably would have won. And therein lies the crux of the problem: Honesty and a genuine desire to inform the voting public might sound like a winning approach, but the average voter uses reductive reasoning in choosing candidates. They're often not looking for reasons "why" to vote for you. they're looking for reasons "why not" to choose your name on the ballot. Follow me below the fold, if you can stomach it:

There's always that one guy who has to spoil it for everybody...

Strange times: Should the NC Supreme Court get involved in veto-gate?

Depending on whom you talk to and when, North Carolina is

a. on the cusp of a constitutional crisis
b. an object lesson in how to cheat and get away with it
d. yes, and then some

No matter what you call it, these are strange times. A week ago, a trial court declared the districts that gave us the current legislature to be illegal and ordered new maps. This was an extraordinary ruling, appropriate to extraordinary circumstances. The GOP legislature began cheating out of the blocks, using forbidden maps to guide their work. The court will need to intervene again.

And this week, our illegally constituted Republican assembly has used deception and trickery to override the governor's veto. It's brass-knuckled politics, straight from the party of Trump. Maybe not criminal, definitely sleazy. So now what.

First and foremost, uphold the veto in the Senate. It's going to be a close vote, with every Republican voting to cheat.

Next, litigation, Take Tim Moore to court, even if we stop things in the Senate.

A new reason to defend the planet...

I don't care

I don't care if you want to stay home and make babies.
I don't care if you want to breastfeed.
I don't care whether you marry a man or a woman, no matter who you are.
I don't care if you're a stay-at-home husband.
I don't care how many guns you have, as long as they're not machine guns.
I don't care if you have an abortion.
I don't care if you go to church.
I don't care if you home school your children.
I don't care if you decide to end your own life.
I do care if you fail to protect children.
I do care if you don't pay your taxes.
I do care if you try to control my body.
I do care if you exploit your public office for personal gain.

Rage

I was going to write about rage this morning, about the toll it takes when you're mad so much of the time. But when I looked up the definition, I found "uncontrollable anger."
Hmmmmm.

Is there such a thing as controllable anger? Can I borrow some?

None of these guys should resign

For all my extremism, I don't call for elected officials to resign because of their pasts. Democrats and Republicans alike, they got elected being the persons they are today. If we didn't learn their dark histories, that's a due diligence problem on our part. And if we're dumb enough to elect known dirtbags, we deserve the consequences. As a rule, we should defer to the will of the electorate.

None of these guys should resign. It's up to us to fire them.

BlueNC

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