We got to the polls as soon as they opened…and there was a line! In Morris! I got my ballot immediately, but then actually had to wait half a minute for a voting booth to open up.
I was voter #5 at my polling place. Millions more will pour in today.
I hope they all vote as well as I did.
I felt the same way about the recent Trump rally — he knows nothing about this state. Betsy Hodges expressed it beautifully, though.
Donald Trump, you need to know a few things about Minnesota that your ignorant tirade in Minnesota today revealed you do not know and I fear you are incapable of understanding:
1) You say “don’t let them roam our communities” like you have already created the fascist state you are hoping to turn this country into. This is America, Donald, and the Somali people of Minnesota and Minneapolis are not *roaming* our communities, they are *building* them.
2) Minnesota has problems, that’s for sure. All states do. There is poverty, and violence, and despair, and those have consequences – in every group, in every community, including the people you addressed today. But we aren’t like you, Donald. In Minnesota we respond to those challenges with kindness, not hate; by pulling together more rather than less; by appreciating one another more rather than less; and by working harder, not by giving up on one another. Everything you’ve done in your life – from your business practices to your sexual assaults to your Islamophobia to your constant blaming of others for the problems you’ve created yourself – betrays your ignorance of those values. But they are Minnesota values and we will vote them on Tuesday.
3) Minneapolis is a better, stronger place for having our Somali and East African immigrants and refugees in it. It is a privilege and an honor to be mayor of the city with the largest Somali population in this country. Your ignorance, your hate, your fear just make me remember how lucky we are to have neighbors who are so great.
4) You did get one thing right today, though. “Four years, you can forget it,” you said. Indeed. You can forget it.
Exactly right.
I took the Pew Quiz just to check my views with my party affiliation — you never know, maybe I’m actually a Republican deep down inside, and I’ve been voting incorrectly for the past few decades. It was disappointing.
Hey, is that arrow labeled “YOU” a few pixels shy of the left edge of the scale? And is the average member of the Democratic party actually what I would consider a horrible conservative?
She seems to have been a successful advocate for science and mathematics, and for education in general with a great track record since her days in Arkansas.
I was a child in Arkansas while Hillary was empowered to make a focused effort on improving outcomes for children. From fourth through ninth grade, I attended a “gifted and talented education” (GATE) class, a program built as part of Hillary Clinton’s reforms by the Standards Committee. The classes were loosely structured, with no rigid testing schedules or rote memorization, but they encouraged critical discourse and embraced creative divergence. GATE opened my eyes to a world of opportunity.
Hillary Clinton’s educational reforms were year-round. From seventh through 12th grade, I was able to attend multi-week, residential summer learning programs at small universities across Arkansas that offered middle- and high-schoolers immersive camps in fields like mathematics, theater, geology and more. Charismatic professors taught all of the programs. Most importantly for my family, they were provided by the state of Arkansas at no cost to students. The programs, known as “Academic Enrichment for the Gifted in the Summer” (AEGIS) started in 1984, a year after Hillary Clinton assumed the chair position of the Standards Committee. By the 1990s, AEGIS had ballooned to more than 25 programs serving thousands of students every summer. The program would not have existed without Hillary Clinton’s leadership.
Mathematics and sciences (or what we call “STEM” today) were of particular importance to Clinton. In a 1983 interview with the Associated Press, she remarked, while suggesting that Arkansas had overemphasized athletics, “I think it’s time for getting a little fanatic about math and sciences.” STEM is the foundation of today’s technology industry, and only a handful of pioneers in the public education space had the foresight to appreciate its value for future members of the workforce. By far the most significant impact Hillary Clinton’s educational reforms had in my life was through her work to create a free public boarding school for math and science nerds like me: The Arkansas School for Mathematics and Sciences (ASMS).
That also explains why the Republicans hate her so much. She fought ignorance, which is the core of the Republican party platform.
So, Donald Trump paid a visit to Minnesota today, which was odd and pointless. This state is pretty much a lock for Clinton, but he flew in, claiming that there’s going to be a surprising upset in the state. He drew a few thousand deplorables to cheer him on, like this fellow:
I don’t think that’s the kind of appeal that will work here, and it’s kind of delusional of him to think so.
He also spent a lot of his time raging about those horrible immigrants in Minnesota.
Trump charged that too many Somali immigrants were admitted with faulty vetting and later recruited by radical elements. “A Trump administration will not admit any refugees without the support of the local communities where they are being placed,” he said. “It’s the least they could do for you. You’ve suffered enough in Minnesota.”
We’ve suffered? Hang on there — we have a lot of Hmong and Somali immigrants here, and they don’t make us suffer. They’re good people. I’ve got a fair number of them in my classes, and they do as well as the third and fourth generation immigrants (like almost all of us) and as well as the native population. I don’t resent them at all, I’m glad to have them here…so what is this bullshit with a loud-mouthed New York millionaire tax-dodger flying in to tell us who belongs here and who doesn’t?
The person I’d like to kick out is a certain ranting orange thug. You know, the kind who encourages his fans to murder people.
Isn’t it great how the Republican Party and this election have cooperated to drag the reputation of our nation down into a shemozzle?
Lynna is your curator. I don’t think this thread will run dry for a long time.
I got a solid 10 hours of sleep last night — I’m hoping that has cleared the last wisps of fog from this chaotic week out of my brain. I have decided I’m also not going to worry about this election any more: it’s out of my hands because I know who I’ll be voting for, the monstrous orange nincompoop has been wrecking the support of minorities and women, and they’re the ones who are going to decide this year, and most importantly, I have learned that Beyoncé is campaigning for Clinton. Game over, man.
I will worry about the aftermath later, but I think our homegrown candy-floss Hitler has effectively put a bullet in the brain of the Republican party, and there may be long-drawn-out and furious thrashings to come (it never used that brain much, so it’s not an insta-kill), but we’ll deal with those as they arise. Not even going to try and guess what the world will be like on Wednesday.
For now, I’m going drink some coffee and retire to my happy place. Even though that happy place is full of papers I need to grade.
It sounds so well-meaning — Prop 60 would require all porn films to use condoms. That’s got to be good for the actors and actresses, right? If I walked in cold to a voting booth and saw that idea, with no prior research, I’d probably say “yeah, sure” and punch in “yes”. Only it turns out that you really should listen to the people it affects the most, and the porn stars are all dead set against it. I’m not even a consumer of porn, so my opinion shouldn’t matter at all, and this bill seems to be designed to cater to the prejudices and ignorance of us straight unkinky vanilla people.
Proposition 60 looks great at first glance. I wouldn’t fault anyone who doesn’t know anything about it for voting “yes” if that’s all they knew about it. I can easily imagine myself getting suckered into voting for it if I didn’t have such strong connections to the sex worker communities. But the fact is, it’s a lousy law, the latest in a long string of attempts by the AIDS Health Foundation to profiteer off the fear of sex and the stigmatizing of sex work. I want to talk about why it’s a lousy law here, but I want to do more than that, too: I want to use it as a demonstration of why it’s important for everyone in this country who works for a living to pay attention to the organizing efforts of sex workers and support them.
It’s also good to look at who the law rewards, and who it punishes. Even if your well-meaning idea is to protect poor sex workers from their choices, like any good Puritan, maybe you ought to rethink the proposition when the consequences are to do further harm to those you piously wish to “defend”.
Where Proposition 60 is concerned, this reality isn’t just a matter of optics: It determines who the law punishes. Performers who shoot and distribute their own material are subject to prosecution under the law if condoms aren’t visible in their films. The limited media coverage of this point has focused on the argument that married couples who make porn in their own homes could be sued for not using condoms. That’s a legitimate example, but it misses one of the most important points: The porn workers who are most likely to be targeted by such a clause aren’t going to be married, hetero cisgender couples, but those with the most marginalized identities.
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Besides who it targets, the enforcement mechanisms of Proposition 60 are weird and poorly thought-out. If the state doesn’t act on a reported violation, any Californian is able to act as plaintiff and sue the producer for not showing condoms in their film. If the lawsuit is successful, the plaintiff — who again, can be any Californian who watched a porn film and didn’t see condoms being used — gets 25% of the judgement. Fines can go up to $70,000 for repeat violations, which is a pretty strong motivation to sit around watching porn that doesn’t turn you on.
Oh, no. That’s all we need — a financial motivation to let yet another collection of straight-laced people to pruriently spend their time watching pornography so they can get the added thrill of passing judgment on others. Getting paid for being prudish and judgmental? Win-win for awful people!
