The left-leaning people who don't vote have to start.

That is, if anything is going to get any better. (Especially needs to change in mid-terms, as we know.)

That means registered Dems (I saw a stat that only 52% voted), and those who are unaffiliated. The latter are the most in need of education. They think calling themselves an Independent means that they have that characteristic. No, it only means that they don't get to have a say in choosing the candidates who will run, because in most states they don't participate in the parties' primary elections.

People have to realize that they have to vote. We have to pressure them to do so. That is simple but hard (to accomplish in sufficient numbers). Every time someone tells us they didn't vote, we have to tell them that THEY are the problem.

It is not acceptable to fail to vote. We have to make it socially unacceptable. (Left-thinkers who tell me they don't vote get told exactly what I think of that! And yes, some of them do then vote -- it's a numbers game, and a matter of repetition.)

And while we're at it... Election Day needs to be a public holiday, after all it is in the public's interest.

When people who think as we do get to the polls, we will win elections. That is the issue, right there. I have seen lots of people finding lots of reasons for losing so many elections yesterday; for me, it all comes down to this one reason.

The other side has the money but we have the numbers, and we have to get those numbers to show up or we will lose. Which is going to prevail -- money, or people? That question is what our elections now, and for the foreseeable future, are all about. It can go either way.

But if we are to turn this around by 2016, we have to begin on starting a groundswell of social pressure, right now. Whenever someone complains to us from now on, we need to say "did you vote?". And if they didn't, they need to be told that they have no right to complain, that they are the problem for the rest of us who are carrying the burden of their FAILURE to get off their ass and exercise the rights which they have proven they in no way deserve.

We spend so much time, and focus so much attention on finding ways to persuade red-thinking perople to think blue. I think that FIRST, before any of that, we should focus on pressuring blue-thinking people to VOTE. That is where we are losing elections. It must stop. We no longer have the leeway to be understanding of people who don't want to vote -- they are threatening our survival and our wellbeing. That is way too much understanding for them to expect or for us to give.

Our people failing to vote should be treated the same as if someone said, "I'm a flagrant lying cheater." Or heroin dealer. Or pedophile. They should know that there will be social blowback for such a thing, that it will be unexcused, that there will be a social price to pay. In my little sphere, I will be shooting for getting that idea to catch on, and spread. Peer pressure can do a lot. But we, not the media, not the PTB, have to decide what it will be directed toward.

Hillary's prayer group beginning in 1993, are you ready for this?

I was shocked.

Susan Baker, wife of James Baker
Joanne Kemp, wife of Jack Kemp
Eileen Bakke, wife of Dennis Bakke (see article excerpt below)
Grace Nelson, wife of Sen. Bill Nelson, she is the leader of the group

Hillary isn't just attending a once-a-year event, the prayer group shows that she is plugged in to this organization on an ongoing, small group, personal basis.

I didn't know this about her before today, but it sure clears up a lot for me.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2007/09/hillarys-prayer-hillary-clintons-religion-and-politics?page=2

...

When Clinton first came to Washington in 1993, one of her first steps was to join a Bible study group. For the next eight years, she regularly met with a Christian "cell" whose members included Susan Baker, wife of Bush consigliere James Baker; Joanne Kemp, wife of conservative icon Jack Kemp; Eileen Bakke, wife of Dennis Bakke, a leader in the anti-union Christian management movement; and Grace Nelson, the wife of Senator Bill Nelson, a conservative Florida Democrat.

Clinton's prayer group was part of the Fellowship (or "the Family&quot , a network of sex-segregated cells of political, business, and military leaders dedicated to "spiritual war" on behalf of Christ, many of them recruited at the Fellowship's only public event, the annual National Prayer Breakfast. (Aside from the breakfast, the group has "made a fetish of being invisible," former Republican Senator William Armstrong has said.) The Fellowship believes that the elite win power by the will of God, who uses them for his purposes. Its mission is to help the powerful understand their role in God's plan.

...

The Fellowship's long-term goal is "a leadership led by God—leaders of all levels of society who direct projects as they are led by the spirit." According to the Fellowship's archives, the spirit has in the past led its members in Congress to increase U.S. support for the Duvalier regime in Haiti and the Park dictatorship in South Korea. The Fellowship's God-led men have also included General Suharto of Indonesia; Honduran general and death squad organizer Gustavo Alvarez Martinez; a Deutsche Bank official disgraced by financial ties to Hitler; and dictator Siad Barre of Somalia, plus a list of other generals and dictators. Clinton, says Schenck, has become a regular visitor to Coe's Arlington, Virginia, headquarters, a former convent where Coe provides members of Congress with sex-segregated housing and spiritual guidance.

...

Unlikely partnerships have become a Clinton trademark. Some are symbolic, such as her support for a ban on flag burning with Senator Bob Bennett (R-Utah) and funding for research on the dangers of video games with Brownback and Santorum. But Clinton has also joined the gop on legislation that redefines social justice issues in terms of conservative morality, such as an anti-human-trafficking law that withheld funding from groups working on the sex trade if they didn't condemn prostitution in the proper terms. With Santorum, Clinton co-sponsored the Workplace Religious Freedom Act; she didn't back off even after Republican senators such as Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter pulled their names from the bill citing concerns that the measure would protect those refusing to perform key aspects of their jobs—say, pharmacists who won't fill birth control prescriptions, or police officers who won't guard abortion clinics.

Clinton has championed federal funding of faith-based social services, which she embraced years before George W. Bush did; Marci Hamilton, author of God vs. the Gavel, says that the Clintons' approach to faith-based initiatives "set the stage for Bush." Clinton has also long supported the Defense of Marriage Act, a measure that has become a purity test for any candidate wishing to avoid war with the Christian right.

...

But the senator's project isn't the conversion of her adversaries; it's tempering their opposition so she can court a new generation of Clinton Republicans, values voters who have grown estranged from the Christian right. And while such crossover conservatives may never agree with her on the old litmus-test issues, there is an important, and broader, common ground—the kind of faith-based politics that, under the right circumstances, will permit majority morality to trump individual rights.
...

How about an excerpt from her own book?

I don't know this reporter, but it's on the Daily Beast, and it's from February of this year.

I always figure that whatever *can* be done, *is* being done.

I don't need to have someone discover it and report it to me (although I am glad that the ACLU and others are doing so).

It long ago became clear to me that there is no such thing as restraint or limits anymore, or "enough" anything, as a concept. More is better, period. That goes for government, corporations, and little private individuals as well.

Accordingly, people today think that whatever they can get away with is a-ok, unfettered by archaic things like ethics or morality, or even the law as we used to know it. (And this is why we can't have nice things -- like rights and privacy, the homes we used to own, an education, a viable planet into the future, the list goes on... )

The theme of *white liberals are racists* continues...

Is this DU thread right here in GD by the very same poster a misunderstanding and/or coincidence too? Or is it once again making the same point? Personally, I don't think benefit of the doubt stretches that far, to believe that the two threads at the same time are just a coincidence.

A History of Liberal White Racism

Apparently now, as we learn from this thread, some nobody white racist Democrat in Mississippi makes FDR racist by association too, and all of his programs count for nothing now. Does the article linked there specifically say that? No, it doesn't dare to, but that meaning is assumed by most posting in the thread nonetheless. Progressivism is racist, and Liberalism is racist. Oh and we already knew that the Founders count for nothing because some of them had slaves at that time.

What a load of bigoted hooey.

(And no, before they even go there, I wasn't the one who alerted on that thread.)

Two questions

Could we possibly have a one-click "Trash Thread"? As it is, it takes two clicks, the little box on the thread title, and then the "Are You Sure" popup... but Firefox adds yet another click box, making the total 3 steps to trash each thread. Then to make the thread actually disappear, the page has to be refreshed, bringing it to 4 steps.

No, it isn't a big thing, but it would be very cool especially when a feeding frenzy is going on over something-or-other, to be able to just click the little thread title square. Could it at least be a setting option that people could choose, to trash without the reconfirm? (It would also be very cool if the trashed thread disappeared without having to refresh the page too... just poof! gone right away. Don't know if that would be too much work to arrange, but if both of those changes could happen, it would amount to a big time-saver for some of us, and make the big forums much less work.)

I like to not trash by key word because that is more drastic than trashing each thread individually. Sometimes there can be one specific thread containing the key word that I do want to see, and with key word trash that wouldn't be visible to ever know about it. People using key word trash don't have to manually reconfirm each time, so why should manual trashing have to be so cautious, when it's the more cautious way to trash already?

Second question... could we have a "beating dead horse" smilie? I don't have one to offer, but I've seen them. We really, really, really need that one.

Thanks for considering my requests.

"But you don't get to control what others care about."

And you continue...

K&R

The mysterious reason why people managed to come together in a big way now and then, to actually get some things done when us old people were younger:

Same here, and I think the same things JDP.

What would this ancestor or that, think about this (whatever it is). Sometimes I almost feel like I can sense them watching "over my shoulder" at whatever is going on, I get the feeling there would be a lot of head shaking. But not only that, because they would know our DNA too and that we have our great moments as it always is.

Your OP reminded me of a favorite quote, oddly enough by Winston Churchill. But he was speaking with his American half, I think, when he said this:

We have not journeyed all this way across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy. (Dec 30, 1941)

You wrote what I was thinking

but didn't have the patience to post.

Judging content by its source is a very RW thing to do, anyway. They train themselves to think in terms of who said something, not whether it was true or valid. They look for people to "trust" and once trusted, then by definition, whatever that source tells them is true. It can be ludicrous nonsense, and they will still insist that it's true because it has been defined as true by their standards. This is why they don't have to care about facts or reality. They don't have to bother to think, and they like that.

I look at it this way: if the worst person in the world made a true statement, would it still be a true statement? And if that true statement is opposed and/or discarded because of who said it, then where does that leave us? It leaves us pretty much where the RW is, with truth by popularity or "trust rating" (based on nothing, usually a "feeling&quot , where meaning has left the building.

I'm not suggesting that we should have a flood of crap sources here, I'm advocating for developing the judgment to evaluate content on its own. Even people who are good at that kind of judgment can always develop better. It's something that should be exercised, all the time. I thought that was a large part of the purpose of this site -- for people to consider things, and decide what they think. Yes, considering the source is one element in judging content, but it is only that -- one element, a beginning point.

People try to categorize other people, and they try to categorize facts/ideas the same way, and it just isn't applicable to either. It's lazy, and it isn't valid.