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From my sister in Connecticut.

A beautiful read for you guys: my niece’s friend’s mama is a precious pastor in Asheville, NC. She wrote this today:

for you, if today your heart is broken

if today your heart is broken for this country, you are not alone. if you could only open one eye half-way to the breaking of this next day—you are not alone if you are curled fetal in your soul. you are not alone if you are heart-broken for everyone including the crows and the dogs and all the children in the red, white, and blue.

if today you are afraid for this country, for democracy, for what is to come, you are not alone. you are not alone if you fear for our brown skin, our daughters, our queers, our selves.  they/them, you and me, we are not alone.

if today, even more than yesterday, you hurt for the water and the forest, you are not alone. if you grieve today a world that will not be, you are not alone.

and you are not alone if you are holding hot coals of anger for disinformation and the seeds of our division, which can be traced back generations at least to when race became a thing, a construct we lived. we were meant for better - the paleos didn’t make war on each other. if your coals burn for every bomb dropped and each life disregarded (dead children), you are not alone if you are shaking your fist at the patriarchy, the unchecked egos, at a world sacrificed to the bottom line, at whatever god (or none) collects your prayers.

you are not alone if you are so sorry we didn’t listen inside us better and walk deeper into our brokenness and toward one another. you are not alone if you are sorry we haven’t given more for each other and for the future we want for every single child. you are not alone if you are sorry this morning to the whole wide world.

you are not alone if this is not the road you expected or wanted or chose. you are not alone if you don’t want to travel this road, if you don’t want this road for your colleagues or friends or the people that voted it into being. you are not alone if you wanted so much more for your country—more compassion and solidarity. more trees and cleaner water.

if you woke this morning with a broken heart, you are not alone because i am still here with one eye open. and i am not alone because you are next door. later we will be together at the gas station and grocery store and today my son will sit on a school bus next to a kid whose parents didn’t vote like me. those boys will not know what i know, so they will be free to laugh into the moment of their shared humanity which is what i vow to remember this day and every day to come.

if your heart is broken this morning, pray don’t let it harden. we are not alone—we can vow to stay soft, to break even more because breaking can take us to our knees, and sometimes that is a prayer and somedays that is all we have to help us with the truest truth that the enemy is also a construct. we will never distain our brothers and sisters into another way being. with broken hearts, we are still here, and we must still show up for all of us.

November 6, 2024

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Gracias, Beth! You are poetic and caring

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Beth - I live in Asheville and want to go to that house of worship/church/synagogue. could you tell me the name of the place or pastor ? thanks

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the single most important thing to me is to understand why so many dems stayed home compared to 2020, which made all the crucial difference....

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I think it's worth examining whether some stay homers were OK with Harris losing.

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i have to assume some were, but that's why i would really like to know more.

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founding

Welp, some of them actually voted for Trump, or Jill Stein, or some other write-in.

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Racism & Misogyny are powerful forces.

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The economy was doing better, unemployment low, wages were up, the stock market was up, but they were told a lie. Now Trump will enjoy the economy Biden left and claim he did it. Sure groceries were higher but God, people sold their souls for a carton of eggs.

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Okay people I have to quit because I am getting darker and darker. But for the love of God will people quit acting like this is going to be just another administration. It is done folks it is over, we failed to save our republic. He wont even bother with the Orban model, but just go straight to the Putin model with religion.

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This election has laid bare what has always been true: Americans have limited understanding not simply of American government and polity but more importantly, of what constitutes community. It's a culture of individualism, where a vision of the whole is eclipsed by one's personal situation. I get it that people have struggled with inflation. But the tangled issues behind the problem require a modicum of understanding of economics and willingness to think through the issues.

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If it is really the economy, stupid, it should not take too long for buyer's remorse to overtake the T. Rump voters as the long predicted recession takes hold in the new administration. We shall see.

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Don't forget the global tariffs trade war!

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Congress is going to do whatever Project 2025 wants, Trump be damned. Trump was and is a stalking horse for the truly nefarious string-pullers behind him. They may not reveal themselves, ever, but Trump doesn’t matter anymore, probably never did aside from his role as a distraction and shield for everything happening clandestinely. Having served his purpose, he will be put out to pasture (or golf course, as it were).

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They have already stuck him in dump trucks and more stopped the loser rallies.

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For the life of me, I can’t fathom how anyone could think the filibuster is going to survive and be an impediment to anything. If it makes it into the rules package at all in January, it’ll be excised the second after Democrats use it the first time.

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With respect to the House, the article assumes that people actually blame the Republicans for its complete dysfunction (or are even aware of it) rather than on Biden. Particularly since Biden has zero communication skills at this point so everything was essentially a one-sided argument.

Also, Schumer has got to go, like now. You had the House with ridiculous hearings but ones that moved public opinion while the Senate did nothing. I cannot think of one Senate hearing in the past four years that I saw or even heard about. They should have been going after Trump and his acolytes from day one. Now, anything good Biden did will either be reversed or Trump will take credit for it.

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Marco Rubio: "Senate is gonna give great deference to a president that just won a stunning... Electoral College landslide" ???

Biden 2020: 303 electoral votes. Trump 2024: 292 so far, not enough remaining to be that far above Biden's total. How much deference did Republicans in the Senate give Biden? Is it possible Rubio is gaslighting even before Trump is sworn in?

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founding

You expected otherwise?

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Hey, Shrub acted like he won a mandate in 2004, even though he would have lost the White House if he had lost Ohio (and he had 9/11 to thank for even being politically viable). He promptly decided his “mandate” entitled him to end Social Security, and we all know how that went.

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I spend that last 5 months reading Project 2025 in a Democrats Abroad book club. Living in the EU, I know that the largest number of American Expats are in Canada. In 2016 there was a wave of Americans who sent their children to university in Canada to make it easier for them to integrate into Canadian life. I read today that there is a backlog of people applying to update their passports and there are a lot of searches about moving to Canada on Google.

I did not choose this, and while in the EU now, I am not looking forward to returning to the US for Christmas as I celebrate with my family, who misses me. We will try to create a Merry Christmas for the Gen-Zers in our family including one who will be returning from Europe with me. We want them to remain hopeful so they can be the change they want to see in the world. Right now, I feel guilty that our planet has been turned over to climate deniers and more and more will die because of it.

I am expecting JD Vance, another women hating, homophobic racist will be the most inexperienced president in the White House. The people who are expecting to grab power from this, namely the Confederacy have defeated Lincoln finally in this election. Prof. Ruth Ben-Ghiat has a book Strongmen that talks about autocrats and what eventually leads to their demise. Sometimes it is just old age.

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You mean congress will do whatever he wants or else. He is not going to have any patience with congress this time. If they don't agree he will simply do it anyway.

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You guys are acting like the courts and congress will mater. Trump campaigned as an imperial president and I suspect he plans to govern as one.

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The only silver lining is that Trump is fundamentally lazy. He will certainly indulge his anger and resentments, and will want to keep his crush Vladimir happy, but he was never a detail person, and will likely let his minions, like Stephen Miller, Rick Grenell, and Russell Vought, and his Congressional sycophants such as Mike Johnson do most of the work of governing. Trump will of course take credit for whatever seems to be going well, and blame Biden and Harris for anything that goes wrong.

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Maybe not when his actions and policies really hurt their constituents in their pocketbooks. We can only hope.

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You can't be serious when did republicans ever worry about who they hurt.

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If enough of the elected officials’ constituents are very unhappy, to me that translates into—you better care if you want your party to stay in power and you want to be reelected!

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A lot of comments about the new government. Lets not forget the military. Still significant vacancies that there were not filled. If Biden grows a pair he will fill those spots asap.

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I tend to disagree: voters saw the dysfunction in the House, and decided to elect an autocrat who will find ways of governing with only nominal reference to the existing laws and Constitution. Cf. Weimar 1933.

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