President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

Remember when Florida was considered the ultimate purple state?
Blood red now

 

I think the next step for the few who can will be to leave the country completely. I know Joe Jorts doesn't want to hear this but there are countries that offer more freedoms and rights than this coast-to-coast Walmart. The issue is being eligible for citizenship or working visas in those places. You don’t just walk into Canada or Finland and say “hey can you hook me up?”

 

Hard to believe the Republicans are giving up two winnable senate races by selecting a football player with three kids he doesn’t talk to and a quack TV doctor.

 

This would be a sacrifice and a mission. A peace corps of sorts. They’d have to be willing to give up living next to a Michelin-starred restaurant and their favorite coffee shop and live entertainment and their bars might close at 2 a.m. I’m not minimizing that.

But the housing is cheap, remote work is now possible. You can take over large swaths of this country. It’s begging to be taken. Cheaply. And the people here are dickheads, but dickheads largely because they feel abandoned. As Obama showed in 2008 and Trump continues to show, show them the smallest — even fake — attention and they are yours.

I remind everyone that Barack Obama WON INDIANA. That sounds like a fictional sentence in 2022. Remake some mid-sized red state cities and people you don’t think are on your side will suddenly be on your side.

I’m not saying people were wrong to leave here. They had every right. I’m saying they’d be doing their country a service to return.

I understand how out-there this sounds, but the Supreme Court just went rogue on us. These kind of conversations are jumping off points to real strategies to win back this country while the Right pats itself on the back for winning its 50-year war that Reagan began and Amy Coney Barrett ended.

After Obergefell, we fell asleep in a poptimistic era of believing we’d won, that the long arc of history bent towards justice because we tweeted hashtags. Let’s do the same thing to them. They’re going to win in November and get fat and lazy.

 

Therein lies the issue:

The left cares, but not enough to put in that kind of sweat equity.

The right cares and is willing to put in the work.

 

You don’t have to colonize the whole Great Plains. You can make it work by moving enough people into Austin, Houston, DFW, etc.

 

People should move their whole lives to an unpleasant (to them) place to live for your political goals? As always, the natural answer is "you first."

 

That's already happening in Texas, even though it's still gonna be a while, if ever, before Texas turns blue. But I lived in the Buffalo Commons. No freaking way am I going back. And some blue friends who still live there are doing everything they can to get out.

 

Let’s not forget that “the other side” is flocking to places like Idaho, Montana, Nevada, etc. from “socialist hellholes” like California, Seattle and Portland.

Hermes, it’s stunning to me how conservative places like upper Michigan, Wisconsin and even eastern Iowa have become. The brain drain from Those areas has accelerated since Trump was elected.

 

My wife has lived in Spain, Connecticut, Chicago, D.C.

We’ve made our home in Bumblefuck, Indiana, while she does public defense work for $70,000 less than she did in D.C. and runs the county’s community foundation.

I grew up in one of the best school districts in Ohio and worked at a newspaper with one of the highest per capita incomes in the state. I picked up and left my job to work on an assembly line.

We live in Bumblefuck, Indiana, where the average person makes $17,000 a year and is probably using heroin or oxy. The school lunches are free for everybody because no one can afford them. This is where we live.

We’re here, the children of factory workers and public school teachers and stubborn as hell, and we haven’t left.

You can sneer at us from the coast. You’ve been doing it for 300 years.

You’ll wake up and women in your state will still have control over their bodies. And millions here won’t. I’d like to change that.

 

Ada County (Boise) almost went for Biden. Parts of Montana, like Bozeman, are becoming increasingly blue, as is Central Oregon, with the Bend/Redmond area booming. Hell, Biden beat Trump in Albany Co., Wyoming (Laramie).

 

If I wanted to hear poetry today, I’d listen to Leaping Lanny Poffo.