I mean, even if it has all been with m'lovely!

 We've all heard the expression, "Those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it."

I'm just wondering if it's okay to ignore the best sex I've ever had.

Oh, so like maybe you have a better idea!?

 

"The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas."

- A. Whitney Griswold, President, Yale University, 1954

So, my fellow Dems, it isn't enough to declare President Musk's ideas as bad.

We need to be clear about what are our better ideas.

So far, I don't see enough of that coming from us.

Yeah yeah, I know I have too much time on my hands

 Here are things I think about...but refuse to Google apparently:

-            Why are some words bad? Bad parenting probably.

-            Why do words hurt? Seems just like getting punched in a sore spot, the more tender you are, the more they hurt.

-            Why do we say things to hurt?

-            Why are there silent letters? That’s just dum.

-            Do antelopes eat cantaloupes?

-            How do trees get so tall just from dirt, water, sun and a tiny acorn?

-            Why do we stop growing? (No fair referencing my belly!)

-            What is it about music that we love so much? 

-            Why doesn’t all our hair grow like the hair on our heads?

-            Why don’t trees leave a massive indentation in the earth where they grow from, after having sucked out all the nutrients?

-            If the water cycle is a fact, how and why can we run low on water?

-            Why do we use big words when little ones will do?

-            How can the US ban the sale of semiconductor chips to China, when we bought them from Taiwan in the first place? And isn’t that ban all the more reason for China to invade Taiwan?

 -            At the equator, the Earth moves at around 1,000 miles per hour due to its spin. And they tell us that we don't feel the Earth spinning because it rotates at a constant speed, and we are moving with it. So why would I fall off the top of a moving car if I'm moving with it?

Discuss:

-            If you had a choice between never feeling emotional pain or physical pain the rest of your life, which would you choose?

-            Do males or females change more (in all ways other than physically) between the ages of 13 and 31?

-            If you add zero to any number, did you add anything to it?

                                        I'm done. I hope I didn't add nothing to your brain.  

A Plan for Winning, not Whining

Updating my list of suggestions for the Democratic Party on how to win future elections.

Democrats will:

1 –Aid and protect you with:

- better access to affordable health care

- free hands-on job-training in the fields of plumbing, electrical, mechanical, HVAC, etc.

- free adult education of any kind, including

    - classes on job-related computer skills, from spreadsheets to coding

    - classes at community colleges or job-training-related adult evening classes at local high schools

2 - Reduce the strangulating power that corporations have over our lives that keep all of us from a better life

3 - Reject corporate welfare (subsidies and tax credits to companies and industries unrelated to the common good)

4 - Incentivize corporations to share their profits with their workers

5 - Cut off the limit on employer contributions to your personal Social Security fund and reinstate the social security tax for earners over $150,000

6 - Put American citizens’ needs ahead of anyone entering our country illegally

7 - Limit the power of investment houses to buy up houses and hold them from the market in order to force an increase in the price of housing 

8 - Pass laws requiring term limits for all federal and state level politicians

9 - Institute age-limits for Supreme Court justices

10 - Nominate justices who will overturn Citizens United reducing the role of money from billionaires and corporations in politics

11 - Only involve our military fighting wars that have an impact on our own national security

12 – Reduce unnecessary overseas military installations and use the money to strengthen our factory towns

13 – Commit to a full audit of the nation’s drinking water systems and make repairs a top priority, giving everyone access to clean water

14 - Oppose hate speech against people who have different political opinions from ours, no matter how much we disagree. Our fellow American citizens are not the enemy within.

15 - Will do everything we can to keep the government out of your life…unless you actually need or want its help. If the private sector can do it better and for less cost, the government shouldn’t be doing it at all.

16 –Will give special attention to supporting small businesses, which create more jobs than all the Fortune 500 companies combined. This includes removing burdensome regulations and unnecessary government-imposed requirements

17 – Will make sure all spending on our national defense is spent efficiently and is directed toward the most up-to-date weaponry

18 – Make sure our veterans have access to free mental healthcare for life

19 – Give incentives to corporations of any size to provide free onsite childcare

And 20th, never forget to remind people how wonderful they are. The best of what makes America great isn’t based on how we vote. It’s what we do every day regardless of our party affiliation: getting our kids off to school, shopping, making dinner, going to religious services, volunteering at the food bank, cutting the grass for a sick friend or neighbor regardless of what their voter registration card says, caring for our elderly parents, and yes, maybe even running for public office.  

As James Brown said, “People feel you before they hear you.” I have plenty of people in my life whom I love and respect, who are thoughtful, loving, supportive people…who vote straight Republican, yes, even including for Donald Trump. We need to validate, and try to understand, their feelings and beliefs, just as we’d ask that they do the same of us. 

This is an excerpt from an email I recently sent to a friend:

I have lots of takeaways about the election. One can correctly blame Biden; Kamala's emphasis on joy while ignoring people's pain; paying Beyonce and Oprah $1m to endorse her; worry about the border (why?!); the Dems fascination with people's identities, from gender to race; along with the list you included above. 

I think it's every single one of those things.

Thing is, we Dems need a candidate who has many of the same goals as the absolute political genius lunkhead in the oval office right now - questioning everything about the way our government works and playing more hardball than many Ds are comfortable with.

What annoys me about the Ds right now is we are doing so much navel gazing, philosophizing, ruminating, discerning and threshing, but not coming up with specific plans instead of general ones, that speak the language of the guy at the end of the bar. Or maybe just the bartender. 

FCNL had a call the other night of actions we can take to fight back. I signed up for it but opted to get the transcript. It's 33 pages long. I've read, or at least breezed through, the first 16 pages and so far, the only thing they've said is to lobby moderate Republicans. Genius! The rest of it is thanking each other and explaining problems we all already knew about. I'm not going to read the rest, but if you do, let me know if it gets more constructive.

I am working on my own list of things that Dems should be pimping left and, especially, right - specifics, that speak the human language, with no references to ad hoc stopgap subcommittee bipartisan bilateral blue ribbon adjunct hardworking American roll up our sleeves best practice bread and butter existential inflection point game changer kitchen table common sense initiatives. (Did I forget anything?!)

 Another home photo I love, taken during a small snowstorm at 2am.

Ruben Gallego for President!

I used to post articles like this, with my comments, on Facebook, but for some reason, I'm just not into doing that anymore. In fact, the last post below this, I put on FB and a few days later deleted it I guess because I don't want and care for, approval from the masses and I don't feel like pushing my political views on anyone anymore. Or at least not to the extent I had been. I still post (political) things there from time, but not generally and definitely not to the extent I had been leading up to the election.

And why I even post them here I'm not entirely sure. My blog data says that anywhere from 5-20 people look at my posts and honestly, as far as I can tell, really only 1 or 2 do: my dear niece Becca, bless her heart, actually truly does read them, though I think my sister Laurie checks in from time to time. So who I'm writing for, I'm not really sure, especially the political stuff. But I enjoy it. Maybe it's for venting. I really don't know.

Anyway, here are the two excerpts from this interview with Ruben Gallego that I like best, with my favorite parts in red:

"You won Latino men by 30 points in an election in which Trump dominated that group. I know men are a very broad group, but what do you think Democrats have misunderstood about them? 

That we could be working to make the status of men better without diminishing the status of women. 

A lot of times we forget that we still need men to vote for us. That’s how we still win elections. But we don’t really talk about making the lives of men better, working to make sure that they have wages so they can support their families. I also think some of this is purely psychological — like we just can’t put our finger on it. During my campaign, I noticed when I was talking to men, especially Latino men, about the feeling of pride, bringing money home, being able to support your family, the feeling of bringing security — they wanted to hear that someone understood that need. And a lot of times we are so afraid of communicating that to men, because we think somehow we’re going to also diminish the status of women. That’s going to end up being a problem. The fact that we don’t talk this way to them makes them think we don’t really care about them, when in fact the Democrats on par are actually very good about the status of working-class men. It was a joke, but I said a lot when I was talking to Latino men: “I’m going to make sure you get out of your mom’s house, get your troquita.” For English speakers, that means your truck. Every Latino man wants a big-ass truck, which, nothing wrong with that. “And you’re gonna go start your own job, and you’re gonna become rich, right?” These are the conversations that we should be having. We’re afraid of saying, like, “Hey, let’s help you get a job so you can become rich.” We use terms like “bring more economic stability.” These guys don’t want that. They don’t want “economic stability.” They want to really live the American dream."

And:

"How do Democrats stand for what they believe in without being seen by voters as outside the mainstream? 

"It’s easier for us to be hit as being extremists if we’re not also known for something, if we’re not fighting to make someone’s life better, to bring down the cost of living, raise wages. 

If we’re not actively fighting for that, it’s going to be easier for people to take the most extreme positions and say, “Well, that’s actually what the Democrats are.” I think most Americans are very much pro-L.G.B.T. I think they are pro-women’s rights. I think they’re more aligned with Democrats than with where Republicans are. But when we aren’t identified as doing something for the grander America, they’re just going to be able to say, “They’re just so focused on these small little niche groups instead of you.” And that resonated.

I know someone’s going to say: “Well, the G.D.P. under Biden was the highest. And we had the lowest unemployment ever. Ruben Gallego is wrong.” Yes, that was all true. But people were not feeling it. People were just not feeling it. If we want to lie to ourselves and say, “Well, things were really good, the economy was really good” when people were telling us it was not, we’re going to continue having this problem. It’s going to be easier for people to take away some of these basic rights if we allow the middle of America to continue to suffer economically."