What gets me is how they fully believe that voting Republican is in their own best interests. Perry County is mostly rural, mostly high-school educated, and mostly not well-off, but the Republicans carry the day. Every damn time. Democrats are referred to as sheeple, and it's just nasty. The few Dems don't help the cause by attacking them right back and using invalid arguments from questionable sources. Both sides are not based in fact here. I would love to change that, but I will not put the restaurant in the position of losing business because of politics. It's a real thing that could happen, and it's a damn shame we can't agree to disagree respectfully.

What gets me is how they fully believe that voting Republican is in their own best interests.

Me, too. That KILLS me. I don't understand how anyone other than VERY wealthy old white straight Christian men vote for this current crop of Republicans.

And yet, I do. Republicans have *excellent* PR and are unafraid to lie shamelessly. It doesn't matter if it's a lie, as long as it's what sticks in the public's mind. Obama (for example) HAS NOT TAKEN ANYONE'S GUNS. But my father, along with a fuckton of gun advocates, *still* believes it's going to happen.

I've said since probably 2004 that the Democrats need to step up their PR game, HARD. Shit, they can learn just by studying what's been done to them. But they don't. Over and over, they don't.

I honestly think that people believe they will be rich someday and so they want to have a world in place that will kowtow to them. They're not rich but should be, and God will make it so someday, and they're not going to be rich in a world where "those" people have "gotten away with something".

You have to accept "those" people as being as fully human as yourself and as deserving of basic civilized life as yourself, and lots of people simply refuse to do so.

I wish like hell the Democrats had done more victory laps.

Maybe we define "victory lap" in different ways. But I remember late '08 and early '09 -- it was like the economic world was coming to an end. Yes, things are rough right now. But the Democrats do have a story: We saved America from the abyss.

(Note: Because of my job, I'm not going to express any opinion on whether any particular thing should or shouldn't have been done.)

What I meant was that the Democrats didn't celebrate their successes enough.

I hate the word seminal.

Should we use "semen filled" instead?

Is there anything to be read between the lines that "seminal" means "important" and also something male-specific?

I thought "seminal" meant "the source from which the ideas came forth."

From OED:

Etymology: < French séminal (14th cent. in Hatzfeld & Darmesteter), = Provençal seminal , Spanish seminal , Portuguese seminal , Italian seminale , < Latin sēminālis , < sēmin- , sēmen seed, semen n.: see -al suffix1.

Is there anything to be read between the lines that "seminal" means "important" and also something male-specific?

It's just a literal translation. semen = seed. Seminal = filled with seeds. In its essence, "Seminal" means "the seed from which bigger things grew."

Am I overexplaining? Could I use the word "seminal" more? Tartlets, tartlets...the word has lost all meaning.