Blog

ouyangdan:

cr1mson5thestranger:

Okay, so…Trump won. And I’m never gonna not be worried about everybody, really.

But I need you all to know that threatening harm to the President of the United States is a class E felony under United States law and can get you investigated by the Secret Service, arrested, put on trial, and even put in jail. Even comments that you make online can carry this punishment. I know everyone’s angry, but please don’t do anything that could get you put in jail.

i forget that some people may not know this. please don’t even joke about it online. they will see it and take that seriously. please trust me when i say i know this to be a fact.

choncegiving:

The electoral college does not vote until December 19th. We have 40 days.

What does this mean?

Right now, the presidential election results are only a PROJECTION of the election outcome. They are PRELIMINARY RESULTS. A candidate still needs to earn 270 electoral votes to win. Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, which means that more than 50% of the voters wanted her for president. The electoral college shouldn’t guarantee an override of the public’s opinion– and it doesn’t have to.

There are 21 states that do NOT restrict which candidate the electors vote for. Out of these 21, Hillary lost the following:

As you can see, these states are worth 166 electoral votes. As it currently stands, Hillary Clinton is projected to receive 232 votes. Trump is projected to win 306. This means that 37 votes need to be taken away from Trump to bring him down to 269. Hillary Clinton needs 38 votes ADDED to win 270. These electoral voters can also abstain, which means that they can refuse to vote for either candidate. If 37 of the voters within these states abstain then no candidate will have reached the required 270. In this case, the vote would be taken to the House.

Trump won Pennsylvania, a state that typically votes blue, by less than 100,000 votes. While it is highly unlikely to get all 20 electoral voters to cross party lines and vote democrat, it also isn’t impossible to convince a few of them to be “faithless electors.” We only need to convince 38 out of the 166. That is 23%. There are SIXTEEN states we need to focus our attention on.

A move like this would be unprecedented. However, as we all saw on November 8th, odds don’t guarantee reality. Trump had a less than 20% winning, yet given the circumstances, enough people came together and made it happen. We can make this happen. 

Ask yourself this: What do we have left to lose? We can stay complacent and accept that this country will be run by a racist, sexist, islamophobic, homophobic, ablest bigot, or we can at least try. 

How?

SPREAD THE WORD. Trend #NotMyPresident to let people know that we do not accept being led by a man who does not care about our wellbeing. Email your professors, email the dean of your colleges. The last thing a university wants is negative press. Millenials can take a stand, but that doesn’t mean we have to be the only ones. Church-led events helped bring a lot of disillusioned voters to the polls. Spread the word in any way possible, whether it be on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or even in person. Stage a peaceful protest. Hand out flyers. Let the people around you know that you don’t accept this man as your leader when he won’t even accept you as a citizen with your designated rights.

These 166 people need to face the consequences of electing this man. 

Do this for the people who couldn’t vote. Do this for the people who live in the very real fear of being deported. Do this for the people who will have to face the rise in hate crimes. Do this for the people who have a very real possibility of losing their rights. Do this for the people who will no longer afford necessities. 

v1als:

A quick note based on my post-Brexit experience in the UK – in the time period after the election, your biggest threat will not be Trump and his government. It will be your newly validated bigot neighbours. After Brexit, hate crime shot up by 60% in the UK nearly overnight and it still hasn’t returned to its pre-Brexit level. I imagine the same will happen in America. Be careful. No matter who they are, Trump voters are not your friends. Be safe. Your biggest enemy right now is the neighbour you went to church with and the people you pass on the street every day. Lock down. Go to ground if you have to. Look out for one another. Please, be careful.

Anonymous:

So if I understand these presidential elections correctly, all that is wrong with Hillary are these emails, while Trump is an openly racist xenophobic homophobic misogynistic pervert who is charged with rape, sexual assault, several frauds, and has no understanding of anything he should know as a future president and doesn’t have any real plans for the country. And yet Hillary’s only barely winning? Americans what are you doing?

athenadark:

what-alchemy:

parentheticalaside:

drst:

freifraufischer:

Okay, let me tell you a story about Hillary Clinton.  She first made national headlines when she was something like 22 and the student graduation speaker at Wellesley College.  Now Wellesley is the most famous women’s college in the United States and at the time when women were not admitted to most of the Ivy League it was considered one of the top schools in the country for a woman to attend.  She used her platform to eviscerate the sitting Senator of Massachusetts, a Republican, for his support of the Vietnam War.  To his face because he was on the stage with her.

She was identified as a future leader of the Democratic Party from when she was in her early twenties.  After law school at one of the top law schools in the country she was hired as a staff worker on the Watergate Commission.  Now everyone in American politics in 1973 knew that the young people who worked on the investigation of Richard Nixon’s criminal activity were the future leaders of the Democratic Party.  

And from that moment, in her twenties, the American right decided to try and destroy her.  As an aside the right has spread unfounded rumors that she was fired from the Watergate Commission, the man who claims to have done it never had the authority to fire her and she worked on the commission until it closed down only leaving when all the staff at her level left, but facts have never gotten in the way of a good demonization of this woman.

She was one of the leading advocates for abused children and legal aid for poor people in the country in the late 1970s and 1980s when she was living in Arkansas and the narrative about her then was that she was the demon feminist who was masterminding letting children “divorce” their parents.  Because apparently there is never a circumstance in the minds of those on the right that a child might need to be emancipated from their parents or that children’s rights might be independent of those with the most power to control and abuse them.

When her husband was running for president she was attacked for her looks (and for the looks of her at the time twelve year old daughter).  Her career as a lawyer and as a law professor was used against her and the reason we have a “first ladies cookie recipe contest” every presidential campaign is because she had the audacity to say she was busy having a career and not baking cookies.  By the way this humiliating exercise is one she won both times when her husband was running and the magazine didn’t think that perhaps when she was running for president this little 24 year old personal attack exercise against her should be retired when she was making history.  Bill submitted the same recipe she won with in the 1990s.

And then the investigations started immediately.  

• She lost several hundred thousand dollars in an investment scheme and she was accused of insider trading.
• A personal friend committed suicide and she was accused both of having an affair with him and of killing him.
• She was routinely accused of sleeping with … basically any female friend of hers.  Because making someone a scary lesbian wasn’t yet out of fashion in the mid 1990s.
• She was attacked for trying to keep her family together as she was humiliated daily on national television.
• And she was attacked for being mad at her husband as she was humiliated daily on national television.
• They even attacked her cat because proper presidential families have dogs and it was clearly her witchcraft familiar.

The Republicans in congress have been launching fishing expeditions against this woman for the last 22 years and that’s not even counting the smear attacks that started in the late 1960s.  Today the Republicans in the House have spent more time and money investigating the attack on the embassy in Benghazi when she was secretary of state then was spent investigating the attacks on 9/11.  Ignoring that attacks on American embassies have occurred under every presidential administration for the last six decades and there were far more of them under George W Bush and for more people died in them under Ronald Reagan.

Oh.  And she was mocked in the late 1990s for daring to say there was a vast right wing conspiracy against her and her husband.  Because a woman should never acknowledge … you know… a provable fact.

So of course the average American voter has trouble distinguishing the truly horrific facts about Trump from the noise about Clinton.  We’ve been fed a steady diet of it for 45 fucking years with the express purpose of making sure this woman was never president of the United States.

The fact that she is going to be anyway isn’t a condemnation of my country.  It’s evidence of how strong and smart and resilient Hillary Clinton is.

Worth nothing that the email thing the Republicans are trying to hang her with? Her Republican predecessors (Colin Powell) set up their email the same way. The previous Republican president’s staff used a private server. This is literally “It’s OK If You’re A Republican” (IOKIYAR) in action. And the emails that are under investigation were never hacked. The Wikileaks crap is from the DNC hack, not from the State department.

The paid Russian trolls are still pushing the evil lesbian thing, btw, but the memes have shifted to paint her as a pedophile lesbian, because just “lesbian” isn’t enough to scare people anymore. And Trump keeps bringing up her husband’s infidelities because everything that happens in her life is somehow her fault (she stayed, so she’s a bad mother. If she’d left she’d be a disgrace who didn’t stand by her man).

Considering how many liberals dislike, disapprove of, or are suspicious of Clinton, it turns out devoting thousands of man hours and an incredible amount of money to discredit someone can be pretty effective! (Misogyny helps too.)

and if you don’t believe that’s true

No criminality in Clinton emails – FBI 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election-us-2016-37892138

But in Sunday’s follow-up, Mr Comey wrote: “Since my letter, the FBI investigative team has been working around the clock to process and review a large volume of emails from a device obtained in connection with an unrelated criminal investigation.

“During that process, we reviewed all of the communications that were to or from Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State.

“Based on our review, we have not changed our conclusions that we expressed in July with respect to Secretary Clinton.”

So basically the director of the FBI [after that stunt he probably won’t be for long] wrote to congress – who are not in any way involved with these investigations – about a case that they had closed in July FOR NO DISCERNIBLE REASON OTHER THAN DERAILING CLINTON’S LEAD

shadesofmauve:

prokopetz:

I’m not going to dispute that a lot of charities are total scams, but some of the charity callout posts I’ve seen circulating on Tumblr lately have revealed some pretty bizarre expectations about how charities operate.

Like, I just ran across one banging on about how a particular cancer research charity was obviously a scam because its public filings revealed that only 65% of the money it took in was ultimately spent on cancer research. I mean, that’s not great, and certainly, some charitable foundations manage to break 90% some years, but research-oriented charities always have higher administrative overhead than those that focus on providing services or performing community outreach – 65% is actually fairly reasonable for a research foundation.

In particular, folks seem to routinely get up in arms about the fact that this or that charity is paying its officers a salary – like, not the amount of the salary, but the fact that there’s a salary at all. I mean, what did you expect? Only the smallest charities can rely entirely on volunteer administrators; any foundation of any significant size has gotta have at least a few full-time organisers onboard, and, well, they’ve gotta eat. If you see a charity whose full-time organisers aren’t drawing salaries, I guarantee you you’re looking at a bunch of trust fund kids – which is not necessarily who you want in charge for some causes, y’know?

I mean, I totally get wanting to make sure your donations are well-spent, but a lot of folks simply don’t have a realistic picture of what’s involved.

THIS.

Trying to run an organization of any size with volunteers is generally a disaster. You know who needs a LOT of organizing? VOLUNTEERS. If you want any stability, which is directly related to longevity as an organization which is directly related to how efficient you can be with your money, you need paid staff. Those people shouldn’t be setting the new record for annual salary, but they should be fairly compensated for the work they do.

brutereason:

I wonder from where so many Americans get the idea that voting is supposed to be some expression of your deepest, most beloved values and virtues rather than a pragmatic, political move meant to shift your country as much closer to your ideal as possible. This strikes me as another example of extreme individualism. Voting isn’t about *you*. It’s about your city, state, and/or country. It doesn’t have to feel transcendently good deep down in your bones. It just has to *do* as much good as you can do, in this particular moment in time.