It’s been an endless stream of reports of scandal and cruelty since 2016. How could you not get desensitized? The alternative would be to go insane.

I don’t think it’s exactly a matter of appealing to progressives, but an inherent difficulty in trying to appeal to a wide variety of people with a wide variety of interests. You end up having to make vague promises in order not to offend anyone, which comes across as being boring or disingenuous, like you are only saying stuff in order to get elected and not because you actually belive in it. Conservatives can have much simpler and more straightforward messaging because their base is much more homogeneous.

I know who my wife is voting for, but even if she voted differently, I would love her the same. It would hurt if she lied about it though, because it would imply a lack of trust.

Yeah it’s in the toothpaste, but is also in the city water. Problem is there are many cities with way more than the recommended limits. It’s one of those situations where the fringe weirdos may actually have had a point.

That’s an absolutely trash take about adopted kids. Get out of here

Dang, Trump is now a threat to all of life on earth? Man you gotta settle down with the rhetoric.

She had adoptive parents lined up for him before he was even born, but then decided to keep him. Seems like he would have been better off with parents who wanted him instead of a biological mom who would secretly resent him for everything she thought she should have achieved in life. Did you read the article or just get stuck on the click bait headline?

She could have given him up for adoption, and had even set the stage for it, then decided against it. She had options, but made the decisions that she made. It isn’t healthy to channel regret about what could have been into your kid or into political movements that hadn’t even happened at the time when she made those decisions.

Of course, boy do i feel silly…

The way you phrased that made it sound like political rhetoric and fears about the end of democracy are at least partially self serving to further the interests of one political party, and that the truth of their claims may be exaggerated. Now that we know you hate America, and are a dangerous threat to democracy if not outright treasonous, fascist, communist, and a bot also, who is paying you? Thanks in advance for responding.

Illegal immigrants are being paid outside of the system and raising minimum wage only increases demand for employing more of them, continuing exploitation of them. You can make an argument for minimum wage increases, but it doesn’t benefit illegal immigrants.

Conservatives are trying to deport illegal immigrants and stop allowing them in, which may have a motive, but exploitation is not it.

That wasn’t so hard, was it? People tripping over themselves to find a gotcha and forgetting to use a little common sense.

Our economy depends on a base of low cost labor that used to be from kids or young people. It’s almost like Democrats have decided to fill that void with immigrants while Republicans are trying to get back to the low cost labor being from having more kids. It makes sense if your goal is to keep the machine running the way it was designed, or at least how it evolved to operate. Social security, insurance, fast food, service industries, construction would all need overhaul to function without low cost labor being their base. Seems like you could reduce consumerism in general to compensate for the reduced low income work force, but that would hurt the economic numbers and cause an overall contraction in the stock market. Tough pills to swallow for everyone who has accumulated any significant amount of wealth in this system.

Do you remember when the media had a fit about Trump being racist for blocking the flights to countries with high covid rates? How about the two weeks after he announced operation warp speed to develop a vaccine and everybody swore up and down that they wouldn’t take Trump’s vaccine? Trump bears a lot of responsibility for the toxic political culture, but it wasn’t just him.

Well it does pledge to the republic and to the values of the republic. Which is appropriate for a republic.

There is currently no voter registration card where I’m from. All you have to do is say your name and they check you off. If you aren’t registered in the area, you can bring a piece of mail with your name and address to prove you live in that precinct, or someone to vouch for you, then you are given a ballot and they add you to the registration for next time. But yes it sounds like there is a lot of variation in how states implement or assure the integrity of their elections, and all of them are prone to certain kinds of abuse, whether it’s discouraging voters or vote harvesting or some other illegal mechanism for influencing elections in favor of the established powers.

But you can’t ignore very real problems with increasing the pool of ignorant voters, since whoever has the most access to that pool will have an advantage because these ignorant voters can be taken advantage of simply because they are ignorant. Should people be voting if they don’t know how the system works or what the candidates even stand for? If you can’t be bothered to care about it enough to go through minimal requirements, do we need to go out of our way to shove a ballot in their hands?

And yes, I acknowledge that the kind of thinking I outlined above can be used to repress voters as well. I guess my point is that these policies cut both ways. It’s not such a clear cut answer as “give everyone a ballot”, because that can (and has) very very easily turn into “give them a ballot and suggest who they should vote for”.

ID and citizenship requirements seem like pretty basic requisites to voting, what’s wrong with those?

If you take credit for every good metric and blame all of the bad metrics on your predecessor, it makes me a little suspicious about the motives. They all do it, as long as I can remember.