I keep repeating this and other calming sentiments to myself. Please keep repeating these sentiments to me. As calm and positive as I was yesterday... trying to convince determinedkid to relax.... I'm the one having slightly panicked emotional response this morning. checks and balances. checks and balances. checks and balances. [googles "immigration to Canada"]We survived Bush II. We'll survive this.
We survived Bush II. We'll survive this.
We survived Bush II. We'll survive this.
We survived Bush II. We'll survive this.
Cynically speaking: We now have a chief executive who has spent his whole life surrounded either by people he pays or who adore him because of an image others have cultivated for him. He has no experience with legislation, no experience with negotiation, and his go-to problem solving strategy is "sue the shit out of them until they give up." He will be leading a house, a senate and a judiciary that do not respect him. He is, figuratively speaking, Frankenstein's Monster, a golem of their own creation that has risen up and struck down all attempts to manage and control him. That he ran as a Republican speaks more to the default allegiances of the information-deprived groundswell that elected him than it does of his policies; Trump is effectively done with rallies for a good long while and has successfully won a long and tawdry path of daily briefings and decision making. His camp is currently adjusting to the reality that they need to try and run the country. They've burned a lot of bridges and their figurehead is fundamentally unfit to rule. That's not as big of an issue as people make it out to be - Reagan was demonstrably senile for the last three years of his presidency and GWB was incurious and detached from the process. But both presidents were surrounded by operatives and insiders with party experience going back to Nixon. Trump will have Christie, Guliani and a bunch of media flacks. Regardless of the outcome of this election, whoever won would have inherited the same intractable mess of partisanship and disapproval of the electorate in general. The real question is which party is in charge of it and which is in opposition to it? Had it been Clinton, she would have had the advantage of 30 years of down'n'dirty backroom politics to count on. Trump? Of the people he's known for 30 years, only one or two of them are still talking to him. A clinton landslide would have been less messy but it still would have been frustrating. A Trump landslide? Let all the poison that lurks in the mud, hatch out. -Robert Graves, I, Claudius ________________________________________ There are groups that will be heavily fucked by a Trump presidency. If you became reliant on Obamacare since its introduction you're fucked. If, on the other hand, you hadn't had health insurance before, congratulations. You don't have healthcare again. Coyote? Guess what? Your job just got harder. But really, those were the only two policies Trump had: build a wall, repeal Obamacare, "make America great again." All other legislature is going to come whispering in, and it'll probably end up on Mike Pence's plate. And he doesn't have the mandate Trump does. Liberal policies all over the country got enacted. Citizens United was opposed nearly everywhere. Minimum wage boosts hit in four states. Marijuana is now legal in what? 6 states? I'm too lazy to look it up but those beatniks over at RAND calculated back in 2010 or so that if California were to legalize marijuana, the Mexican cartel system would collapse. Look - there's a bored billionaire about to take the white house. And everybody has to deal with him. But only one side has to be nice to him. Jason Chaffetz can spew all day long about how Hillary Clinton is going to be investigated regardless of the outcome of the election but at the end of the day, he's an elected official and has to do what his constituency wants lest he land on his keister. We know one thing this electorate wants: something else. One side gets to guess what that is. The other side gets to say "you're doing it wrong" for four years. I know which I'd rather be.