Pointed out several months ago that Doug Jones had a real chance against Moore.
Democrat Doug Jones Defeats GOP’s Roy Moore in Alabama Senate Race
Would have been nice to see Democratic turnout at the ’08 GE level, but fortunately for Jones, GOP turnout fell off a cliff.
—-
2017 – more women finding their voice:
I prefer to highlight the 35% of white women that voted for Doug Jones (there has long been many decent white people in AL). And we don’t want to dismiss the fact that half of the AL white GOP voters declined to show up and vote for a creep like Moore.
Regardless of who wrote Trump’s tweet, he didn’t trash either Jones’ voters or all the white Republicans that didn’t turnout for Moore. The latter would be more important to him because Jones’ voters aren’t in the realm of potential gets for him.
How could you be right? Aren’t you some kind of Russian plant on this site? That’s what the clueless neocentrist troops keep saying here.
Of course he had a chance!!! Moore makes Trump look like Gandhi, and Jones makes Moore look like Eichmann. Even Alabamians…who in the deep south are constantly the butt of jokes that resemble the Polish jokes of a couple of decades ago…even Alabamians (some of them, anyway) can see where Moore is coming from, and it ain’t pretty.
I have found this latest hottest-thing-ever #Me Too movement to be mildly amusing in some respects…a perfectly valid point being made in a totally invalid, guilty-until-proven-innocent manner…but if it results in taking down creeps like Moore, it’s really got some legs. I mean…maybe that will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back regarding getting rid of Trump.
Trump finally hung by his own little sexual predator (
peter)…errr, ahhh, I mean petard. How wonderful would that be!!!AG
Had to come back to rec this diary and your comment. Just got back from Alabama two weeks ago. I moved my older sister there to live with my daughter because she cannot live alone any more for both medical and financial reasons. She really perked up when she learned that she made the deadline to register so that she could vote against Roy Moore.
I’ll also add that those misguided Republicans who couldn’t vote (D) directly did their protest thing with the write-ins. Moore stank too bad for them. Many are not bad (some are, true) just misguided and propagandized.
BTW signed my sister up for Medicare Advantage – BlueAdvantage of alabama. Almost every doc and hospital belongs. Poor state, lot’s of poor people on low cost plans.
Goodbye again and keep fighting the good fight, you two. I’m AWOL. (might vote for Pritkzer despite Durbin’s endorsement, HATE that Rauner!)
And even more of them protested by not voting at all.
Alabama needs every new resident like your sister the saint that it can get. A butterfly that landed and flapped her wings.
Thanks for showing up. My ‘mojo’ has suffered greatly since you’ve been on hiatus. Glad to know that you’re okay.
“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”
Thanks for dropping by and reporting in on your Alabama experiences.
Yep Pritzger v. Rauner is a mess of a decision. Good luck to you folks in Illinois. You deserve better politicians.
Thanks, TarheelDem. We don’t miss good politicians because we never had them. I recall that at one point three out of the last four politicians stood trial on charges ranging from bribery to income tax fraud. That last was a Republican governor when I was a boy. I forget his name. His excuse was that his duties as governor took so much of his time that he clean forgot to file a return. For four straight years, the second Eisenhower administration. Bobby Kennedy jumped on him with both feet. Which brings me to Chris Kennedy. As I said to my Irish friend and fellow retiree recently, I would vote for his father in a shot, but C. Kennedy doesn’t impress me at all. Nothing bad. But nothing good,either. He agreed. Lately he has been running commercials about gang violence which is a real problem but not Illinois most pressing problem. It’s probably Chicago’s most pressing problem, but not the rest of the state.
Brings to mind “Law and Order” politics. I’m not a lock them up and throw away the key guy, but a recent news story makes me shake my head. Last year a guy on parole for murder(???) was arrested on the felony charge of carrying a gun while on parole (in Chicago, where it’s almost impossible to get a legal gun). His parole was automatically terminated and he received an additional 4 and a half years sentence on the gun charge. Now, only a year later, he is somehow out of prison and arrested for fatally shooting his ex in front of witnesses. WTF. Just plain WTF. Progressives will be mad at me for saying this but that guy should have fried in the electric chair long ago. I wonder how long it will be before he is paroled yet again and kills a third person or maybe shoots up a school? Mad dogs need to be put down. Stuff like this makes people vote for Republicans.
Correction: 3 out of 4 Governors.
I remember the name now, Governor Stratton. So, Stratton, Ryan and Blagojevich.
And I was wrong. Four governors. I forgot Dan Walker.
Walker was rather a bum rap. Lots of people thought they never proved the connection between him and the corrupt aide. And in my opinion there was no smoking gun on Blago. A reasonable man could believe his story that he meant political favors (legal) rather than cash (illegal). I believe that. I might be wrong but I maintain, “Not proven beyond a reasonable doubt.”
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/blagojevich-joins-illinois-govs-bars/story?id=15928257
OK, reading the article again, I see Walker was not convicted in the stationary scandal (taking bribes to throw state business to a particular supplier) but in a bank fraud case after he left office. Since he pled guilty, we have to take him at his word. Politically, he was not bad. Blago had a lot of good programs. Basically he wouldn’t play well others, specifically the established Democratic powers. I guess he was supposed to be the water boy for the machine and he wanted to be the captain.
MUCH rather have Blago than Rauner, who is a true enemy of the people.
Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_corruption_in_Illinois, says Illinois is behind New York and California in political corruption. Damn! Not even second city, third!
How about Louisiana? Have they really cleaned up?
OMG, I forgot Mel Reynolds! I remember Jay Leno, “There’s a Congressman in Illinois accused of multiple crimes, financial and sexual. Financial and sexual – this guy doesn’t know if he’s a Democrat or a Republican!” The jury said they couldn’t lose the mental picture of the Congressman cruising the High school in his black Cadillac.
In friendly spaces like this thread, it’s hard to resist.
LOL. Nah, I’m just a leftie that can recognize and deal with facts. Moore had long been a bridge too far for many Alabama Republicans. However, ‘can’t be something with nothing,’ and that’s where one had to look closely at Jones and recognize that he is far more than nothing.
We can debate whether the revelations of Moore stalking teens many years ago was a factor in his defeat. Perhaps it was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. It couldn’t have been more than that or I wouldn’t have been able to note before the allegations were made that he had a good chance to win. (Allred at the side of one of the accusers did make me nervous. She’s one of those people that wingers love to hate.) Preliminarily and surprisingly, many Moore voters believed that the allegations are true, but still held on to a positive view of Moore.
You write:
I sense that this is exactly the case, Marie.Trump’s popularity is nothing more than a bigger camel than was Moore’s, and it will take more straws to break it.
They’re in the wind, now.
The #MeToo wind.
AG
If you’re correct as to the strength and direction of the wind, there’s still a long ways to go. Biden snuffed it out in ’92 (after nearly two decades of the backlash that kept it at bay) and the whole damn Democratic Party continued to keep it out because ‘must support Clinton.’ My sense is that the wind wouldn’t now be blowing if Hillary had won. Those like Franken can’t claim to be advocates for equality while also finding it funny to fake grope women.
You write:
Mine too.
Of course. How could it arise when the husband of the president…himself an ex-president…has been for at least 35+ years a demonstrably guilty party to the same sorts of crimes that are now…often on the flimsiest of evidence and benefitting from no judicial action whatsoever…forcing people out of office (and out of business) by the simplest whiff of some sort of suspicion. Hell, they even took Garrison Keillor down…and disappeared his reruns as well…because apparently one woman stepped forward and said his hand went up the back of her untucked shirt. That’s not exactly sexual predation, even if it wasn’t the “mistake” that Keillor labelled it, and no one else seems to have jumped on that particular bandwagon either. No mater…he is now non-personed. Not persona non grata, more like persona non persona. He just doesn’t exist anymore.
So…we have HRC’s two-facedness and Trump’s win to thank for all of this?
‘Tis said that God works in mysterious ways.
Yup.
Trump’s next.
Watch.
AG
A few of the allegations seem flimsy, but most have been shocking and yet credible to me. (You’re misinformed on Kiellor — there were several women and it wasn’t a slip of his hand from a back to an ass — but MPR is doing nobody any favors by not disclosing the allegations and we may still find that MPR over-reacted.)
My frame of reference is the WWII generation of men in power in the workplace and not the next generations that came to power after them. Those guys were sexist but had manners and old-fashioned respect for women so well drilled into them that they kept their dirty jokes to themselves and wouldn’t dare to shove a women against a wall and shove a tongue down her throat, much less to drop their pants and masturbate. They were lookers not gropers. Not always comfortable for a woman but there was definitely a line by the late seventies that if crossed and reported, it was appropriately acted on at least until the anti-feminist backlash that began in the 1980s. Clarence Thomas is a good example of crossing that line by the standards of that time.
Socially we USians are coarser and cruder and more impolite than we were back then. And more narcissistic. Also, fewer young women then had and provocatively displayed large breasts (a combination of bigger fatter today and getting those dastardly breast implants for men to gawk at and grope.) There’s a huge difference between sexually assaulting women and offering a tumble on a casting couch.
So far, the allegations against Trump are missing three factors — 1) extreme behavior, 2) implied or explicit threat, and 3) in private where the woman couldn’t get away. (Would tiny hands ever have dropped his pants?) If there are women that he so sexually assaulted, they need to speak up now because this window will get smaller as we move along.
Not a political topic, however part of American culture. The Islamic world of fully covered women has its very own sexual inhibitions and extreme hypocrisy – men enticed by escorts in London or red districts of Amsterdam or Hamburg. Wealth, power and patriarchal order in family organization keep men in a position to grope women at their pleasure.
Hollywood Hype and Sexualization
○ Does empowering women really make men less ‘relevant’?
○ Angry white men and a study of the end of masculinity
○ Masculinity and the end of male dominance in a new century | The Atlantic |
PS My best friend is Jewish and a dear personal female friend is Muslim.
Yes, I should have added the issue of pornography to my comment. It has proliferated over the decades and undoubtedly has contributed to anti-feminism. Research findings are consistent if an apples to apples comparison is done (except for those presented by pro-porn advocates. Should also note that, as with experimental research on guns and violence, it’s difficult to construct and replicate a high quality experiments. Undoubtedly more difficult today as people have access to porn flicks 24/7 on their phones.
While generally text soft-porn isn’t viewed as having a negative impact on attitudes towards women, the best market for romance novels is in the south.
Donald Trump also likes to talk about his Jewish friends, supporters and indeed relatives; do I therefore conclude that he isn’t an anti-Semite?
Do you therefore conclude that he is an anti-Semite? He is simultaneously anti-human and pro-Semite, on all available evidence.
AG
He’s pro-Trump. Everything else is just garb that he puts on and takes off as needed to elevate Trump.
Objectively, Bibi was the most publicly pro-Trump foreign leader during the campaign. (Okay, maybe second to Duterte — but he’s dismissed as a nutcase (for good reasons.)) Putin was far down on that list.
And whose bidding was Flynn tasked with cajoling Russia through its DC ambassador (who probably never declined any meeting request from any US official and quasi-official)? It was Kushner who got the order from one of his Israeli buddies and assigned it to Flynn (not that he got anything for his efforts beyond a phone conversation with Kislyak). (Did Flynn lie about that to protect Kushner?)
Recall from — Exclusive Interview: How Jared Kushner Won Trump The White House
I scoffed then and scoff today at Kushner’s claim to have had “friends from Silicon Valley” in November 2015. Along with his low rent San Antonio ‘data hub’ that still strikes me as being more of a front.
However, Mueller no more wants to go there than the House Benghazi committee wanted to get into the CIA ‘Annex.’ Then there’s that little matter of what the FBI (under Mueller) was doing in NYC when it had an asset working with Trump.
Same frame of reference as mine and pretty much the same evaluation. The other side of the coin were women who used sex to get what they wanted. They weren’t all innocents. A friend of mine was a Mathematics professor at a New York University. He told me a story of a sweet very well endowed coed who leaned over his desk giving him a closeup of her ample lowcut cleavage and said, “Oh, Doctor __, isn’t there anything I can do to get an ‘A’?” My friend replied (since he was an intelligent man) “Well, you could try studying harder.”
Others, in business, frankly had lovers who screwed up constantly but we had to cover for them because they were sleeping with the boss.
Ah, fond memories of my red knit dress. Except it revealed nothing. Didn’t even qualify as form fitting through the long sleeves, v-neckline, and bodice. It skimmed and slightly flared from the waist down to the bottom of my knees. But it was a dress that a woman could work because in motion it always hinted at becoming more revealing and only offering a glimpse of the knees and a couple more inches of leg. Not ashamed to admit that there were occasions when I worked it because it was way too amusing to observe the response.
One of those occasions was with a conservative professor — after I’d completed his stupid course and he couldn’t deny this leftie the A I’d earned. He didn’t touch but was nearly salivating as I left the meeting.
I assure you that this is more provocative than full nudity. The male imagination is a wonderful thing. Or a disgusting thing, depending on your point of view.
It rather reminds me of a dog we used to have. We would bury her heartworm pill in a blob of liver sausage. one day my wife didn’t put on a thick enough coating and the dog got wise and spit out the pill after licking off the liver sausage. I solved this by teasing her, holding out the blob then pulling it away when she came for it, and flipping it from hand to hand until she was in a total feeding frenzy. Then I would flip it up into the air. She ALWAYS leaped, snapped, and gulped it down. She couldn’t help herself. Instinct.
Not saying men are dogs, but …
Full nudity? That dress covered more than a long-sleeved t-shirt and bermuda shorts. Admit I did somewhat chuckle at the claims that Trump walked in on the ‘half naked’ contestants of his beauty contests. The band-aid and throng they wear today on stage for the swimsuit portion is almost completely nude. (Not that his behavior isn’t creepy.)
I feel sorry for younger women today. Must be difficult to be playfully flirtatious and safe with their breasts half out and skirts barely covering their crotch. Even harder for hookers to dress and clearly communicate what they’re selling. (That’s not an endorsement for prostitution — no human beings should have to sell their bodies in that way.)
???? I remember High school in the ’60s. Uniform of the day was a beehive hairdo, tight tight angora sweater (sometimes the kleenex stuffing was apparent) and the microskirt. To quote Bob Seeger, “Lordy! I remember!”
We, in turn, wore tight black pants and Italian knit sweaters over white shirts. Our hair (just as ridiculous as the girls?) was long but elaborately combed, not messy, swept back on the sides and swept up in a pompadour, all plastered in place with pomade. except the jocks who all had crewcuts. My best buddy was a clothes horse and had a whole closet full of Italian knits. He was half Italian and half Polish. It gave him good looks and clean skin. The girls were crazy about him.
But this was Illinois, not California.
Definitely not mid-sixties California. (It was the Beach Boys era followed by The Beatles.) Mini-skirts were just coming into fashion, but the dress code required skirts be no shorter than the middle of the knee. Gym class every day; so, none of the girls even wore heavily padded bras. (There were some greasers — and perhaps their girlfriends wore tight sweaters — but that was more to reinforce their outsider status than for style.)
Chicago near suburb public school 1959-1963. What you describe sounds more like Catholic school. Since I think you’re younger than me I was expecting hippie clothes and shoulder length hair on the boys in California. I remember one girl who liked to sit with her knees wide in the cafeteria, no undies. Boys would sit across from her and somehow also were clumsy with their utensils, always dropping a fork or knife. A female teacher once noticed and sent her home to get underwear. Today she would probably be sued for violating freedom of expression. Kids ran the gauntlet from religious (usually the few with the long skirts) to randy as porn queen. Guys covered the same range but with the preponderance on the satyr side. The sexual revolution was in full swing. Wouldn’t surprise me if the wildest girls slept their way into management. What did surprise me was that some of the seeming wallflowers were secretly wild women.
You are right, mini-skirt. The micros stand out in my memory. Most skirt lengths were halfway to the knee. The shortest were micros, the length of shorts. Some, like the daughter of the local Presbyterian minister actually wore ankle length skirts and bobby socks, but that was sooo 1950’s. BTW, could have floored me when aforesaid blond Scandinavian minister’s daughter married a Catholic Sicilian hell raiser from our class (no, not me, this guy was REALLY a bad boy), proving once again that opposites attract. Hope it worked out. Viva la melting pot.
Addendum. My wife is a blonde of Scandinavian descent, but a janitor’s daughter not a minister’s daughter. (I’m a machinist’s son.) And I wasn’t really a hell raiser. I just faked it for status.
The Reincarnation of Evil-Merodach (2 Kings 25:27)
Nebuchadnezzar’s vigorous rule in Babylon was finished in 562 B.C. He was the last great Chaldean ruler, and at his death the empire’s decline was rapid. The Babylonians’ own wickedness brought swift decline. Nebuchadnezzar was followed by Amil-Marduk (called Evil-merodach in 2 Kings 25:27) (Biblical Hebrew: אֱוִיל מְרֹדַךְ, translit. ʔĕwîl-mĕrodak), who ruled for less than two years. Neriglissar, a brother-in-law to Evil-merodach, ruled for only four years. Labashi-Murduk, son of Neriglissar, was deposed after nine months. Nabonidus, a leader of the priestly party, ruled for sixteen years, from 555 to 539 B.C., but he spent most of his time at the Oasis of Teima in Arabia. Affairs of state in Babylon were left in the hands of Belshazzar, the son of Nabonidus. Under Belshazzar, even the people of Babylon became disgusted with their corrupt nation.
😉
I expect people to jump all over me for this, but I mourn the loss of the Art in these cases. Garrison Keillor’s work lost to humanity and Bill Cosby’s as well. Although Cosby’s actions were far worse than Keillor’s. IMHO, Keillor deserved a slap in the face and no more. Cosby’s were true criminal offenses as were Elvis’, but I still hear Elvis’s music on the ’60s XM station. In Cosby’s case, pulling the re-runs also deprives the other actors of their residual payments. We have to separate the art from the artist, IMHO.
There is probably a much better way to deal with this issue than the way we’re going about it. Censorship is a heavy hand that should be used sparingly for that which is totally offensive, inhumane, and/or illegal. Censorship of performances/art totally unrelated to transgressions by the creator treats the people like two year olds.
I don’t want to comment further on Keillor because we don’t have any information other than the fact that there are been allegations that MPR decided warranted removing him completely. What I think we want is men to admit publicly what they did/have done, acknowledge how wrong it is/was, vow never to do it again, work to prevent others from doing it, learning how to value women as autonomous and equal human beings, and turn over all but meager portion of their assets and earnings to those they’ve harmed and non-profit equal rights advocates.
Let their artistic products speak for itself.
Not defending Clinton. I hate his infidelity unless they had an open marriage but kept it quiet for political reasons which is pretty sneaky. However, my impressions was that Gennifer Flowers and Monica Lewinsky were consensual with Lewinsky being the instigator by her own testimony. In the case of Paula Jones, I don’t recall any retaliation or threat of retaliation from Bill Clinton. So I wouldn’t call him a predator, just a philanderer. Let’s not trivialize assault and predation by equating to what 95% of the straight male population would like to do if society or personal codes didn’t forbid it or at least frown on it.
I love this “of course he had a chance” style of analysis. What’s next? When the sun rises tomorrow, are you going to gloat about how you told us that would happen?
By the way, you forgot to write “bet on it” and “STFU”.
As for this: “Moore makes Trump look like Gandhi, and Jones makes Moore look like Eichmann.” You’ve really lost your mind now, Arthur. Moore seemingly thinks that the Book of Leviticus ought to form the basis of our legal code. I write seemingly because I’ll be damned if I know whether he’s sincere in that belief or just says it to manipulate the evangelical Christians.
Trump, on the other hand, seems not to believe in the rule of law at all put rather to favor something like an absolute monarchy. Gandhi was certainly a believer in the rule of law and in the idea of equal justice before the law, not the racially based justice of British colonial rule. And Eichmann was an architect of genocide who like Trump scorned the rule of law. So the hyperbolic comparisons you’re making just do not make any sense.
The lesson I take away from the Alabama special election is that 48-1/2% of Alabama voters considered their options and then voted for the reanimated corpse of John C. Calhoun.
It’s just more clickbait, Voice. Let it go its own way. It will fade.
Think about his:
If you were a normal man or woman of any sexual preference and growing up at any time in human remembrance until very recently, at some time in your life you violated the quite stringent, very recent #MeToo rules.
Only the famous are getting busted, and only the males. The woman that Al Franken got busted for? Leeann Tweeden? Check out the images that come up on Google when you google her name. Or try “Leeann Tweeden nude.” She was a model. Yeah. A soft porn model. Her whole gig was her sexuality. Why was she on that armed forces tour? It wasn’t because of her familiarity with Shakespeare!!! Bet on it. She was there to titiilate the troops, nothing more and nothing less. Should Franken have groped her? If he really did? No. He’s always been something of an asshole. hat’s how he made his living. Was she “asking for it?” Hell yes. She made a living out of asking for it!!! And from my own extensive experiences in he showbiz world, more than likely not just asking for it. She saw an opportunity for some heavy press and she went for it. Bye, bye Senator Franken!!! (No great loss, really.)
It’s all clickbait, all the time now.
Fuggedaboudit and move on.
Do you really think that redneck lechers ike Roy Moore…or showbiz lechers of lechers of any prominence whatsoever…will stop their lechery beyond the run of his latest clickbait thing?
Not ever in human history.
Ever.
Now?
Not likely.
AG
No woman asks to be groped by anyone other than an intimate partner. Most women don’t find being groped funny or something for a man to use in a comedy routine (a routine that always disparages the woman and not the groper).
If publicly busting male celebrities is the only way that can be communicated to all men — gropers and fantasy gropers alike — sobeit. Men need to put a sock in their whining whenever women object to being treated like property and inferior beings.
Personally, I don’t think Franken should have resigned, but do appreciate that he was exposed as a man that denigrates women and therefore, his public policy advocacy for women is shallow and hollow. There are better people for equal rights men and women to elect than Franken.
Got to go with Arthur on this one. The showbiz culture is different. There still are men who go too far, but the line of demarcation is a lot farther than in the businesses you and I worked in.
On sexual harassment, misconduct, and assault, I don’t think the demarcation line is that different. More offers/opportunities for aspirants to ‘sleep’ their way to job/success in showbiz than in other industries, but even I knew of women that did that. (Never read “Sex and the Single Girl”? Gurley Brown said, “Why discriminate against the boss?”)
An amusing and true story. I was once stuck in a job with an almost totally incompetent boss – Ill call Carol. It mystified me (and everyone I asked, including the asst. manager) how she ever got the job in the first place. The best anyone could come up with was that she and the CEO went back a couple of decades. A year into the job, the CEO came to town and took the manager, asst manager, and me out to dinner. Sitting next to me, the CEO spontaneously offered for my ears only, “I want you to know that Carol and I have never had an affair.”
Obviously the mystery had preceded me and been widespread and the CEO had heard the speculative conclusion of some. Don’t know what the true story was, but no way had that woman advanced (that she didn’t enter until her mid-thirties and may not even have graduated from high school and at a time when women above the level of clerks were exceedingly rare) in the industry on her professional merits.
Could have been connections. Could have been money. I knew a guy who bought himself a supervisor job in the Postal service by “lending” a senior manager with a gambling problem $3,000 and “forgiving” the loan. The guy who bought it (a parts clerk) was a much better manager than the senior manager. He had brains and was sensible enough to know that his position didn’t automatically make him superior on technical matters. A rarity, he could tell when he was getting a snow job and when he wasn’t. I had no problem working for him.
One of the operations supervisor was widely reputed to be sleeping with several managers. She certainly went up like a rocket. In more ways than one. She was a real b-word as a boss and one day left me so angry I felt like quitting and damn the financial consequences. If a man had talked to me like that I would have punched him and damn the zero tolerance.
The next night we were in the elevator together and she smiled spritely and said “Hi, Tony”,waving like nothing had ever happened. I thought, “Whoa this woman is WAY too volatile.” The women hated her more than the men. They were the ones telling me about her sleeping her way to the top. The PO is a little Peyton Place and Jeanie was a rare beauty.