Several states have rather fairly determined districts. In my home state, WA, the 9 congressional districts are pretty reasonable. Just looking at the map, you can see how the uban/rural split works out. The district boundaries don't wander around like a snake pit.

The re-draw in Pennsylvania looks pretty reasonable, too.

It can be done. You can't totally eliminate gerrymandering, maybe, but you can mitigate it if you try. In WA, they have a 3-position panel that outlines the districts, 1 Dem, 1 Repub, and 1 judge (who is hopefully non-partisan).

Turning the Dem party into a bastardized "anti-Repub" party just furthers the evil. We need representation of the people. Even Dems should have to go out and present their platform and policies and get them elected in the court of public opinion.

Trump won in 2016 based on laser thin margins in 3 swing states based on massive voter suppression and electioneering efforts.

I leave out gerrymandering because that in itself would not have a huge effect on the Presidential race, though it would possibly steer people to the polls in partisan fashion.

Thankfully, the judicial system has maintained some resistance to the more egregious actions of the Trump admin. We've won a couple of the lawsuits around districting, and hopefully there will be more.

These recent indictments at least verify, legally, that there was Russian interference and meddling. Even Trump has been forced to admit that in tweets today. He's still denying the 'collusion' of course, but he's been pushed a step back. If this swings a million votes nationwide, it could have a significant effect. Even if it just softens some of the Trump support, it is a good thing.

We still outnumber the Deplorables, and we still have right and justice on our side.

GOTV!

The entire high-end real estate market and international finance needs purging. That's where the swamp gets filled from. Real estate is looking like a favorite way to launder money. American organized crime has well known connections to the building trades and has been a source of RW maligning of unions for decades. Perhaps much of that is deserved regarding those industries. We know that the Teamsters have had their brushes with the RICO laws in the past.

I don't want to start bashing unions, I support organized labor, but like any organization, the larger they get the more opportunities for corruption. My major concern right now is international finance and how Trump has used those channels to launder money for the Russians. The rest of this should come after that. I'm thinking of the Iceland scenario, where some bankers go to jail and the international banking community gets told to clean up their act or get out.

the difference between urban and rural thought processes worked. Imagine a movement to disallow horses in cities, and the outcry that would arise from their country bumpkin fellow citizens. Cutting down on the piles of horseshit would seem to be a good idea to a city-dweller, but to a ruralist it is not really thought of as a problem in need of a fix.

2016 was seen by many as a referendum on the urban/rural divide, and in many ways it was. But keep in mind, that is not a one way street. While urbanites may not understand what country folk are going through and the problems they have, it is also very true that "fixes" that work in small towns outside the "beltway" don't work in the urban/suburban environment either. Guns come to mind. The thought of having more than one gun per person in an area where the population density is lower than 10 people/square mile probably doesn't seem unreasonable. Having that many guns in a area with 100-1000 times that population density is a recipe for carnage.

Fact is, the party is changing. It may not be moving in a direction that some people like, but it is definitely changing.

And yes, in large part it started in earnest on Jan 21, 2017, when women across the country woke up to their own power and marched in the streets. They were joined by their husbands, brothers, uncles, and male friends, but it was a Woman's March in its inception and execution.

Following that, women across the country started investigating how to run for office, how to support others in that endeavor, or maybe just meeting together to show each other support. Networks are being pieced together, power blocs are being formed and Democrats across the country are getting together, including in many places where people didn't know they had kindred spirits so close to them.

Many of the folks I read here and elsewhere seem to want to specify how the Democratic Party needs to change. Everybody seems to have the answer. The truth is that the real answers need to bubble up from the grass roots. They say that "all politics are local." That's what we saw in Virginia and in New Jersey and elsewhere. We won't be successful if the DNC dictates how local candidates have to frame their campaigns in any but a general sense. I certainly don't care what someone thinks our national slogan for 2020 should be now. That will come with time.

We are in a revolution, already in progress, which is being decided organically from below. That's a good thing. As for 2020, I don't join into any speculative threads about that. I suspect, and rather hope that our candidate for Pres in 2020 is someone we don't suspect now, and maybe don't even know. Yes, the "guard" is changing right before our eyes. We can all vote and publish and work to effect the outcome, but it really isn't clear just yet what the near future will look like.

and the usual victim blaming psychology.

Hey, saying "He knew what he was getting into" is not uncommon among vets/career military. It's not really meant to be victim blaming or insensitive. Kelly, as a career Marine, has experienced both sides of that. Hell everybody is a "volunteer" these days. But it is "tough guy" talk.

The problem is that civilians don't think that way. To intrude that kind of "tough guy" talk into the grief of a wife/mother/family member is despicably insensitive. Once again, the problem is that people who lack empathy cannot alter their approach to fit the people they are talking to. Trump has demonstrated this every time he tries to act like he gives a shit. He cannot be genuine in those situations because he has no geniune feelings for anybody or anything outside of his own personal meat sack. Apparently Kelly shared with Trump and Trump thought it sounded good. As usual, he was out of line and has no clue why.

usually it is fraudulent religion. Repubs and radical conservatives have adapted their religious bent to all things political, especially in the "faith trumps facts" area. When you believe, what good is truth?

You can tell who they are. Their biggest argument is always a projection: They think science is just another belief system, or in simple terms another religion, which is of course false. They are only allowed one religion, and when you paste that label on anything else it automatically makes it "fake" as their hero likes to say.

You can have fraud without being a cult, I guess, but all cults are based on fraud.

Repubs can't survive without a major target for their hatred. They thrive on it. Last election was decided as much by the decades long hatred of Hillary built up by Repub propaganda as anything else, even Russian interference. The last two mid-terms were anti-Obama exercises in futility for Dems. The propaganda again had a very visible, high level target they could aim at and convince people to vote to undermine. For years, Nancy Pelosi has been a target.

Obviously, they love to focus on women and people of color, but any "liberal" would do if high profile enough.

One of the reasons, and I just realized this, that I don't enter into any 2020 discussions and don't even bother reading very often, is that what is happening is a huge fishing expedition, trying to figure out who will be the next "high profile" Democrat to hang their animus on. Repubs want to nationalize the '18 election as a defense of conservatism, but they need a scary adversary to hang their angst on. Walt Disney always said that the secret to a great movie was a really, really good villain.

Hillary is gone. Obama is gone. Nancy is kind of in background since she lost the speakership.

Bernie is the nation's most famous screaming liberal in their eyes, but he's not really in any position of power in the Senate, and while he has held great progressive ideas throughout his career, he's not really a very scary guy.

Kamala is the conserves wet dream, of course. She's a strong woman of color and quite popular, but as a junior Senator, she doesn't have a lot of power yet. One could say she is in a position similar to where Obama was before '08, but we'll see if she can put together some support.

I suspect some of the shit-stirring among Dems is being triggered more by bots and trolls than serious voters.

Y'all go ahead and argue about 2020 and who is the titular "head" of the Dem party. Me? I'd just as soon we didn't have a real "leader" of the party for the Repubs to congeal their hate around just yet. Me? I'll not contribute to feeding trolls around here.

Peace out.

The hardest thing about freedom is giving it to someone else.

Mostly, the RWers of the past few decades have proposed a very jingoistic, authoritarian kind of freedom.

Trump is laboring under a misconception. He still thinks he is in campaign mode, and that "his" media is still dominant. The problem is that his Twitter and Alt-Right support probably at most gets read by the same number of voters reflected in his poll numbers, about 35-40%. He's a salesman at heart (nice word for a con man, I know ). But now that he's in the office, he's got nothing to sell beyond the captive audience of his Twitterbots.

Now that the M$M is reporting on him, even as soft as some of the coverage has been, now his likeness and antics are being sent out to millions more folks around the country. Given his constant attacks on the press, it is not surprising (well, it is a little) that the HQ (honesty quotient) has actually gone up, along with the Factuality of it all.

The "real" media might be obsolete, but not quite yet, I think. They definitely dropped the ball in the election cycle, but there have been promising signs that they are picking up the pace since November. Trump may get lots of likes on social media, but now, as the only one out there he is losing the battle with the press.

Now the real task at hand for us: Tying Trump's abysmal numbers to Congressional Repubs. Theirs is the agenda we need to fight.