Primarily, Twitter was a place for like-minded people to come together and talk about shared interests. It wasn’t necessarily political unless you wanted it to be. I came for Astros talk, Houston sports in general, and a little politics on the side. I am not a right wing person. I have many of those in my life. There are some I love very dearly. One of the great things about life and about Twitter is that I had the power to control my exposure to those ideas.

Musk removed that power. He set up the app to switch us from our own feed to something he called “For you.” Ostensibly, the idea seemed to be to share other ideas and profiles that they thought you would be interested in. That concept seems fair enough. I enjoy reading new perspectives and finding new friends. That is clearly not what “For You” became. It became a way to project right wing hate and trolling behavior. This is not an indictment of right-wing beliefs or people. Remember, some of them are my friends and family. I have no desire to censor ideas or remove people’s platform to project those ideas unless they are promoting violence or promoting insurrection or revolution. In many instances, those are the same thing.

My only desire was to limit my own exposure to those ideas. I want the power to choose what I watch, read, and listen to. I don’t want my television randomly changing the channel to Fox News or Newsmax because it is obeying an algorithm called ‘For You.” I may not be the smartest man on the planet, but I think I am reasonably intelligent enough to choose what I want to read, watch, and listen to.

Instead, I get one woman that calls herself a terrorism survivor but somehow a lover of everything Trump. She posts pictures of him wearing camo, colonial gear, or worker clothes and asking us why we don’t appreciate everything he has sacrificed for us. Maybe it is because he is nowhere remotely close to any of those things. I see other profiles that continue to harp on the obvious election fraud in 2020.

So, the development of Twitter afforded me a few unappealing options. I could keep my profile and simply not go. However, that would leave even just a few people hanging. I could go and engage with those bozos, but again that would grow their brand and accomplish what they are out to do. I could simply read and not respond and seethe about it if even for one minute, or I could pull the plug.

My joy comes first. There is so much going on in our lives that I don’t want to waste one minute doing something that doesn’t make me or the people in my life happier. Good people will sacrifice their happiness for others. Great people will sacrifice so much more than that. Contemptible people purposefully go out of their way to suck joy out of life. I don’t want to silence them. I just don’t want to hear it if I don’t want to.

Rick Santorum put up one of those statements on Newsmax that was equal parts brilliant and asinine all at the same time. Of course, it is only brilliant if he was fully cognizant of what he was saying. If he’s not then it is the most ironic statement of the year as it pertains to elective politics.

The video you see above summarizes the GOP in a nutshell. For those that don’t want to go down the rabbit hole, Santorum is essentially saying that the Democrats only won because they put sexy issues like abortion and marijuana on the ballot. That statement highlights the electoral issues that the GOP has in one sentence.

The first part of the statement basically admits that the GOP counts on low turnouts to win. So, a large part of the irritation is that they brought out voters by putting those measures on the ballot in Ohio. This is what all of the voter fraud stuff is all about. They can’t really justify taking voters off the rolls that they want to remove without a built in excuse. So, we will talk about fraud.

Absentee balloting has been a thing for over 100 years in this country. The states have combined to prosecute fewer than 1000 people for voter fraud. That’s in over one billion ballots cast. My calculator says that is somewhere around .01 percent of ballots cast. I’m overestimating it in fact. Voter fraud is not a problem. In other words, if you can’t get the voters to choose you then you choose your voters.

Of course, the issues themselves are obvious. He was admitting that a majority of the population is for abortion. We could parse out exactly what that looks like. It all depends on what conditions you put on it. The right always puts it in extreme forms. They always want to bring up partial birth abortion because that is the one form of abortion a majority is against. No one in the Democratic party is banging the drum for partial birth abortion. It really isn’t a thing in terms of a talking point on the left. So, when you boil it down to its basic level, a majority of the population wants some abortion rights.

A majority of the population wants marijuana legalized in some form. You could call it decriminalization. You could call it medicinal marijuana. You could simply say it is legally available but heavily regulated. Any way you slice it, a majority of the population is over heavy criminalizing marijuana use. So, Santorum is saying it is the fault of the Democrats for putting something on the ballot that the people find popular.

So, in that statement Santorum is admitting that the GOP is on the wrong side of those issues and that they only win if people don’t vote. Imagine the honesty and direct analysis that we are getting there. I don’t think he has the self-awareness that such a statement would say he does. He is blissfully unaware of what he just said.

If you look at Republican politics since 1980 they have been about two things: abortion and tax cuts. They have been remarkably successful at both. They have played the long game on both. They have packed the courts and played the grassroots game about as well as it could be played, but you are talking about two issues that are losers with the changing demographics in the country. That’s the whole point and the whole ballgame. Thank you Rick. I couldn’t have said it better myself.

As is my longtime practice, I never stay post election day at the family homestead (just 9 miles west of The Pahk), so we left last night on an 8 pm flight to PDX. I just can’t be present when good things happen, like Obama being elected, or Joe Biden and Kamala Harris being elected. My poker face would have left the building. My happy dance would have gotten me banned from the house for eternity. And in 2016, I needed to be safe at my own home, overconsuming adult beverages while watching those results come in. We arrived back in the Gorge at 1:30 am PDT (4:30 EDT). I did NOT check election results during my wind down glass of wine (to counteract the effects of that coffee I had on the last beverage call so I could keep the mister awake for the hour drive home).

Imagine my complete delight to soak in today’s headlines. I hope all those negative polls keep on firing up our voters. In my old hometown, the mayor (completely disliked by my mother, I can’t say hated because hating is a sin) won her reelection. My mother did not bother to get an absentee ballot, and wasn’t going to vote for her anyway. I like that strategy. Please, don’t vote. Meanwhile, I’m going to find a nice little campaign button to sneak onto the damn Trump Bear in the living room, a gift from her caregiver. The one wearing one of her CROSSES around his neck. I am not kidding. The seven deadly sins apparently do NOT apply to him. During the 2022 election season, I stuck Penzey’s ‘I will vote 11.8.22, Remember January 6’ stickers on the back side of the long red tie and collar points, just for grins. Yes, that’s the cross under the tie. And yes, they were discovered and removed by the time I visited again. These days, Mom keeps track of ‘the trial’ (or should I say ‘trials’) via that reliable source Newsmax. Maybe I should knit up a little orange jump suit for him for my next visit.

It was a great night for Democrats all over the country.  As Jeff Tiedrich so aptly put it, “well, that was one satisfying bloodbath. Republicans just got the living shit kicked out of them in Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia and elsewhere.”

Ohio passed a measure protesting abortion rights and also legalized weed.

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear handily won, giving Democrats a reason to dance nakkid on the back porch.

And Virginia, holy cow!, in Virginia Democrats swept the table.

Democrats will win full control of the Virginia legislature, CNN projects, expanding their foothold in state government and effectively ending Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s hopes of governing with Republican majorities and enacting his conservative agenda.

Virginia Democrats will flip the state House while retaining their majority in the state Senate.

Watching Youngkin get beat so badly that his grandchildren will be born with a black eye was a perfect delight to behold.

And a small but perfectly lovely race in Pennsylvania, it was close but close don’t count for diddle squat.

Screw the polls.  Seriously.

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One of the most fascinating concepts in politics is the concept of gaps. It is a difficult concept to put into words, but it is a natural phenomenon that occurs in any number of areas. Essentially, there is a gap between perception and reality. Occasionally, there is a gap between how people feel about something depending on what it is called. If you simply describe the Affordable Care Act you’ll find that the individual planks that make up the law get very high approval ratings. Usually, the law itself gets solid marks for favorability if you use the specific label of the ACA. If you call it Obamacare then it suddenly tanks. We’ve seen this for years. It isn’t a new thing.

There are countless examples of people screaming “keep the government out of my Medicare!” Either way, the favorability for the ACA is at nearly 60 percent presently. Yet, many of those same people are screaming at their representative to repeal Obamacare and replace it with something better. We can dwell on this and I could be mean here, but we will just leave that here as an example of what we are talking about.

Liberals, progressives, and leftists have been dealing with this for years. The greatest example would be the scourge that is socialism. Most people would tell you they hate socialism and think that everything evil is socialism. Yet, when you break it down brick by brick you suddenly find that they support the individual aims that many socialists support. Even when we aren’t talking about socialism itself, the challenge is fighting against the overwhelming perception of what we (whatever you want to call all of those groups collectively) support. For one, we* are not the same. We do not support the same things no matter how often right leaning politicians want to paint us that way.

The challenge for the Democratic party in general and for each of those groups specifically is to find a way to convert people’s approval of the ideas into approval of the platform in general. If you support a majority of the aims within the platform then you support the platform. That seems overly simplistic, but sometimes we need to make things simple.

All politicians label their opponents. It is blood sport in Washington and at the statehouse. Yet, conservatives have been better at it. Somehow a collection of common sense suggestions have become socialism. Socialism has somehow become a Venezuelan hell scape where everyone goes hungry and all of your freedoms get suspended. Most of Western Europe is socialist. The only thing happening there is that people have a robust safety net. Their college education is paid for. Their health care bills are taken care of. They get help with family leave. Their retirement benefits are better. It sounds like hell on earth.

I am not an expert on messaging and that sort of thing. Maybe I could have become a speech writer if I had gone another direction in graduate school. What I know is that we got here through a very targeted and purposeful campaign by conservatives and right wing media. They played the long game. I know that people left of center tend to look at these faulty perceptions and assume that the folks are just stupid. We have to start the slow and painful process of repeating the truth over and over again. Maybe people will start waking up and supporting the things they actually say they support.