Moderate House Dems Try Big Flex On Pelosi | Talking Points Memo

That is not going to be pretty.

2 Likes

Folks who want a chance to improve their lot generally leave these backwards shitholes where the local DQ and church are the cultural centers, and where instead of accepting reality and embracing new industries, they just sit around waiting for those mid-20th century heavy industry, mining and fossil fuel jobs to come back, and blaming blacks, Latinos and libs for their woes.

The ones who leave may not all become libs, but they definitely become less RW. Reality has a way of doing that to you. By betting it all on the former, the GOP is committing political suicide. Thus the emphasis on stealing elections and suppressing likely Dem votes, literally the only way it can win nationally anymore.

18 Likes

They’ve been hearing it for years from right-wing media.

The question is what have republicans done for them to make their lives better? Promises of a return to the good old days are just that. Nothing has changed, and in many cases, it’s gotten worse.

Unfortunately, as @Ethics_Gradient wrote above, good-paying jobs are not available in rural areas. That’s not going to change.

11 Likes

Yes. But. ::gets on his hobby-horse::

That depopulation of farm country is due to the mechanization and industrialization of farming: more machines>both fewer people needed to work on farms (and fewer people to provide goods and services to those farmers; and ever-larger farms that gradually get bought up by larger outfits rather than passed on to children. This has led to a kind of agriculture that, in the Midwest, anyway, overwhelmingly favors grains over row crops (well over 90% of Iowa’s farmland is given over to corn and soy) and an overreliance on California to provide those crops. This, long term, is not a sustainable model, just in and of itself. Add to that continued soil loss due to all those machines, and you’ve got a system that, if it doesn’t change dramatically, will collapse on itself. And I forgot how climate change is already affecting farming.

We all need and benefit from economically-diverse rural areas. They won’t ever grow as fast as urban areas will, but they become more and more expensive in various ways, and for all of us, as they lose population. Farm policy could do much more to favor smaller farms rather than the big outfits–smaller farms leads to more farmers, and more businesspeople returning to the region to serve those people’s needs. Of course they’ll be more socially, culturally, politically conservative: farming is an inherently conservative business. But even if we were to see a bunch of more-progressive folks willing to go out there and grow food for the rest of us, we’d all still have a vested interest in what’s happening in rural areas.

(Bold type for the people in the back/in Brooklyn/etc.)

:: gets off his hobby-horse ::

27 Likes

Italian sausage! That stuff will sway you to vote Democrat without the need of those Italian satellites to switch 'em for you.

15 Likes

IOW Democrats are in complete control of Metro Denver?

4 Likes

Are these DINOs supposed to be the stealth backstop for the GOP or their rich donors? Glad there outing themselves well ahead of 2022. Say their names, call their bluff, and get them proper primary challengers NOW!

5 Likes

Separate them, for any reason, and it becomes business as usual. Not a good look. To repair the years upon years of neglect takes a bold solution. It is at hand, don’t weaken.

2 Likes

Pelosi is good at powwows.

(Ben Affleck: There IS a Powwow Safe!!)

10 Likes

Absolutely. If you’re a kid in one of these places who is reasonably smart and ambitious, when you graduate from high school you go off to college in the city, and once you’ve seen Paree, you’re never going back.

A corollary of this is that the ones left are the stupid and unambitious*, meaning it concentrates them in the rural areas.

* Yes, I am speaking in generalities, and this doesn’t apply in all cases.

15 Likes

Phil Jackson went from someone who had never seen a movie to…well…Phil Jackson…

6 Likes

Indeed! But where would you rank the folk who frequent the streets of Nederland each spring for Frozen Dead Guy Days?

3 Likes

The arrival of Walmart has also led to loss of smaller businesses in those areas.

16 Likes

More concerned with their own reelections than getting shit done. Fuck em.

6 Likes

Pelosi can simply threaten their committee assignments, instead.

7 Likes

Well you and I and everyone else here has been hearing it too, and yet it hasn’t resonated with us. Why is that? Either they lack the intelligence, or the cultural and intellectual sophistication, to see through the bullshit. Or the desire to see through it. White power has worked for them and they see no reason to change it, and now that it’s ever so gradually being taken away from them, since it’s basically all they have left–by choice, opportunity after opportunity to diversify and adapt being rejected by them–they’re seething, terrified, lashing out, and embracing ever more delusional options, like Trumpism. And now they won’t wear masks or get vaccinated because it would be an admission of guilt and acceptable of reality.

Fuck 'em. Let 'em die, or die out. They’re doing us all a favor.

6 Likes

They’d rather be angry and bitch about it. Not their fault. They’re innocent victims.

Fox and company have been only too happy to feed them a steady diet of anger, hatred and fear.

No solutions.

11 Likes

No, it’s their fault. I don’t buy the victim out. They choose to be stupid, racist and selfish, because that’s who and what they are. There’s always a choice. They chose wrong. Fox & Trump merely exploit it.

10 Likes

They think they’re victims. Then they don’t have to try to figure out what they could do. Reactive, not proactive.

As for dying, refusing the vaccine will help that along.

12 Likes

Exactly. A culture of entitlement. Stupid white racist entitlement. Let it die.

9 Likes