This would be a good project to undertake.

Set up a center where people like us can go - to get info, intel, how-to, and other good information.

Frankly ANYTHING would be a good project to undertake. I hope there are hundreds of thousands of projects like this, being launched for this purpose. You can bet boldly that it's EXACTLY like that on the other side.

Welcome to DU, DrBulldog!

Glad you're here! I actually feel sorry for the businesses in Indiana that don't go along with this and try to stand out in the open, serving EVERYONE. But, unfortunately, they may have to suffer too. For the point to be made. You have to ask yourself - HOW did a knuckle dragger like mike pence GET INTO the governor's office? Did he get in there with guns blazing and shooting everybody who stood in his way? Did he drop in via helicopter and Seal Team 6 in the middle of the night? Did he and his minions fly over all of Indiana sprinkling sleeping powder everywhere, so everyone was asleep on Election Day and only his teammates were still awake and able to vote?

HOW DID HE GET THAT JOB?????

It's because enough people voted for him, or failed to vote for his opponent. IT'S THE VOTERS. It ALWAYS comes down to THE VOTERS. One way or other, there were more of them on the bad-guy side than there were on his opponent's side.

Given that, we have to ask WHERE WERE THE VOTERS FOR THE OPPONENT? Did they, as I see so often here, decide they were gonna "send a message" of their unhappiness with their own choice for governor? Didn't like pence's opponent - wasn't perfect enough, so fuck it. I'm staying home. Why should I bother voting? Won't do any good anyway. Both sides the same. There's no difference. They're all on the take from Wall Street. OR - They're all on the take from big business. OR - WHATEVER-THE-HELL the excuse is this week.

Well, THIS is why you get up off yer behind and go to the polls and vote. THIS is what happens when you don't. When you feel the need to withhold voting for whatever reason or rationale. THIS is what you get. THIS is WHO you get. Because, rest ASSURED, the bad guy's team is gonna get off THEIR asses and go vote. They won't fail. They wouldn't miss the chance to do so. AND because THEY KNOW you're gonna get discouraged and stay home so they're free to run the table unchallenged. As a matter of fact - THEY'RE COUNTING ON YOU TO DO THAT. That's what they WANT and HOPE and PRAY you'll do. Because you will effectively HAND THE ELECTION to them without their firing a shot. They're COUNTING on it.

So why do you want to go along with that? Why WOULD you want to go along with that, feed into that, support that, further that, make that happen?

You really want THIS???? SERIOUSLY????? Then by all means, don't vote. Because THIS shit is what you'll wind up with. You'll have the bad guys deciding for you, and you'll have no voice and no recourse. THIS is what you WILL get.

And frankly, how are we to know that some of those businesses who don't go along with this - maybe some of THEM didn't bother to vote, either. Maybe they figured - "naaaaaah. Not gunna happen." Just like my CONservative friend from karate class who was a staunch republi-CON but still supported a woman's right to choose. She was just SURE that "s'not gonna happen. NOT gonna happen." Oh yeah? Look around you. Check the headlines. It's about to! And all the time you sat there and sneered and in your smugness insisted it wasn't gonna happen... the forces behind it were inching closer and closer and closer and nobody's done squat to stop them, and it's about to happen. It's ONE Supreme Court ruling away.

Don't forget Barbara Boxer's words to that idiot james inhofe several years ago, as SHE took over the Senate committee on the environment. And she gestured in his face with what was now HER gavel, stopping him in mid-sentence while he was going on and on, demoted from chairman to ranking member, but still pontificating and showboating about what he thought the committee should be doing (something that had formally just become HER job as of that moment) and said she said "elections have consequences." They sure as hell do!!!!!

I'm sorry - but anything that adds to the sales tax base, in effect, reinforces this shit. We hear often the phrase - "the cost of doing business." Well, here it is. In the flesh. If you have the misfortune to try to do business in a state like Indiana, that pulls shit like this, then that's what you get. That last election has consequences - for YOU, too.

THINK ABOUT IT - next time you assume the best thing to do, to protest what you don't like, is to refuse to vote.

Gotta be. I think ALEC has already made such a move.

I vaguely remember reading something about ALEC undergoing a name change.

WATCH FOR THAT. Blackwater did it, too. They change their name, change their logo, and go on radio silence for awhile, counting on the American public mindset to forget, to get distracted, to move on to some other outrage or curiosity or rumor-mongering or whatever Miley Cyrus or the Kartrashians are up to now. Which makes me happy that Miley Cyrus is actually among the bigger names coming out against this. Good on her!!!

Hey, with operations like ALEC, you HAVE TO be suspicious. You HAVE TO expect the worst. Think about - if it was YOU. Up to no good. And you didn't want to get caught, or get shit in the media or attract enough attention that people start becoming aware of you and what you've been up to, and your Invisibility Cloak is destroyed. What would you do if you were some sneaky-ass greedy outfit that wanted to tilt the playing field as far as it could, for its own financial and access-to-power benefit and the public be damned. What would YOU do? Well, YOU probably wouldn't, because you have morals.

ALWAYS suspect the worst of people on that side of the aisle. Just understand what makes 'em tick:

They can't win on the issues so they try to tilt the playing field and keep the voters against them from being able to vote. THAT'S how they see the way to win.
They have a deep-seated need to keep themselves on top BY MAKING SURE EVERYBODY ELSE STAYS ON THE BOTTOM. Okay, in a capitalist society where competition is damn-near a sacrament, and the Freedom-freedom to compete is sacrosanct, why is there such a hard-on for disabling, dismantling, or destroying the competition so it can't compete with you? So you HAVE no competition? What's with that? How does THAT jell with the whole idea of free market competition? Doesn't competition automatically imply competitors - freely able to compete with you? Or have we now had that revised for us - so "competition" means to RUB OUT the competition?

There's so damn much perversion of what's considered good and proper and beneficial for all. It's just sad. But we HAVE TO be on guard ALL THE TIME. We are up against a VERY sneaky-ass bunch. When you hear the "they'll stop at nothing..." then you need to be ON YOUR GUARD. Don't trust, Don't stop your vigilance, and above all, DON'T assume some problem's solved just because "Blackwater" technically doesn't exist anymore. It just changed its name (at least TWICE by now - it's not even known as "Xe" anymore), went underground, and continued with business as usual. I'm wondering if ALEC did the same thing.

ALEC may not be able to enjoy support by all those big-funding corporations and business interests. But what it's changed into, or what it now calls itself INSTEAD of "ALEC" - enables it to stay in the game and keep on being UP TO SOMETHING. They haven't given up and gone away. They've just gone underground and kept at it with what sneaky-ass shit they were up to all along. Don't think the boycotts will get rid of them. It'll force them to try to create their own Invisibility Cloak so they can continue what they were up to before. They're just not doing it out in the open so much. Think cockroaches. Think ANY predator who's already had a few meals and wants more, and no matter what you do, they'll always be clawing at your door trying to get in at you. Because they've had a taste already, and they'll be hungry again soon. And they WILL see you merely as their next meal, sooner or later.

Sometimes I wish I did, too.

Seems like a good idea to me. An updated version of "Don't buy books by crooks."

That was the big takeaway from the Watergate era. All those multiple felons from the White House who rightfully and deservedly went to prison. Many of them wrote memoirs and found Jesus and wrote books about that and went on the lecture circuit and made a very nice living when they finally earned their release thankyouverymuch. We citizens were advised to keep our money in our pockets when they set out on these book tours and the publicity machine was all cranked up and they were there on the "Today" show and the early "Good Morning America" and later, after 1980, on CNN and Larry King and MORE. And more and more and more. It's like - "don't feed the animals at the zoo". Don't reward or otherwise reinforce bad behavior! Don't support these businesses that want to jam their particular Christianist cult down YOUR throat. Chances are, they're not following the true message of Jesus - which is to "love thy neighbor and treat thy neighbor as thyself."

The way I learned it in Catholic school, there were TWO basic commandments endorsed by Jesus Christ. Pretty much boiled down from the traditional ten. 1) Love God. And 2) Love thy neighbor as thyself. And Commandment #2 seems to me the Biblical version of the Golden Rule - "Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you."

Would THEY - ANY ONE OF THEM - wish to be treated as they profess now to have the right to treat gays? And does it stop there? Or do they thus now have a license to extend that to - mixed-race marriages? Who's next? Blacks? Latinos? Women they consider somehow slutty? Single moms with kids they're raising alone, trying to make it on food stamps? How far does this go - as this approach has now been rewarded by the decree of a governor's signature on a bill making it law - where does it end? Where does it go next? What ELSE will they try to sneak past common decency and non-discrimination and that whole "created equal" thing? Where does it stop? Where is the line that denotes that enough is enough by now?

Let's see now... How does that old poem go?

Martin Niemöller (1892–1984) was a prominent Protestant pastor who emerged as an outspoken public foe of Adolf Hitler and spent the last seven years of Nazi rule in concentration camps. Niemöller is perhaps best remembered for the quotation:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007392

Welcome to DU, litouch!

Glad you're here! I'm glad you're here on DU, that is. While I've enjoyed being part of DU for years, I just joined this Hillary Clinton group, so I'm pretty new to presume to be welcoming you to this group. But - what the heck, so be it!

She isn't perfect, certainly. But she's the best prospect out there. EXPONENTIALLY better than what the other side can come up with!!!

Well, isn't that the truth? He has been a very good President.

SOMEHOW getting some important things done - even in the face of opposition of the kind we have never seen before in the history of this country. I don't EVER remember any such opposition confronting any other President before him. Hell, even the Secret Service statistics prove it - that this President has faced as much as a 400% increase in threats against his life, compared to any other President for whom they've kept such records.

Even their obstruction and relentless opposition to President Clinton wasn't NEARLY this vile.

Ours against bush/cheney never got traction because our side was NOT listened to. Our side was not only NOT listened to, we were muzzled. We didn't even have the chance to make points that could be ignored. When I think back to all the talking heads who got face time on TV and cable, I can't even remember ANY voices coming in from the left, invited onto the panel discussions, to deliver truth about these bastards LYING us into a war that didn't need to be fought and shouldn't have been waged. I don't remember ANYBODY - except maybe, on occasion, Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution - who was the ONLY figure I remember even being remotely passed off as a voice from "the left." And shit - come to find out he's a PNAC signatory too.

http://www.publiceye.org/pnac_chart/pnac.html

And I was promoting other reagan voters - how?

Seems to me you and I are making the same point, Bluenorthwest. How that side of the electorate can be so easily snookered. Stupid, malicious, and greedy. Fits BOTH our assertions, seems to me.

TOTALLY.

Nothing more we can say. That's THEIR 47%. The 47% our side is concerned with are the poor, the struggling middle class, and the generally overlooked because they're not rich, influential, and/or important. THEIR 47% are power-mad backstabbers, Sore Losermen, and TRAITORS.

PERFECT.

I thoroughly enjoy using that one as often as possible. PRESIDENT Obama. I know somewhere, some teabagger is gonna be reaching for the Maalox bottle.