Tuesday November 8, 2022 is Election Day in the United States of America. In addition to Congressional "midterms" at the federal level, many state governors and other more local offices are up for grabs. Given how things shook out over Election Day 2020, things could get a little crazy.
...or, perhaps, not! But here's the Megathread for if they do. Talk about your local concerns, your national predictions, your suspicions re: election fraud and interference, how you plan to vote, anything election related is welcome here. Culture War thread rules apply, with the addition of Small-Scale Questions and election-related "Bare Links" allowed in this thread only (unfortunately, there will not be a subthread repository due to current technical limitations).
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Notes -
Alien vs Predator 3: No Matter Who Wins, We Lose.
Some final thoughts and commentary on this race, focusing mostly on the campaign ads. I had wanted to link the ads I'm seeing as I discuss them, but there does not seem to be any easy repository. Some of the Oz ads, or similar clips, are available on his website and Youtube channel. Fetterman has a much more expansive listing of clips on his Youtube channel, but they don't seem very similar to the ads I'm actually seeing FIVE TIMES EVERY COMMERCIAL BREAK. Note that this is all in the Philly market.
Let's start with this Fetterman ad which is not one I've ever seen on TV, though there are some similar themes, and some glaring omissions. The ads I see do hit that note about wanting to "cut taxes for working families", but I have never seen a Fetterman ad say one word about the minimum wage. His ads talk about how Oz has 10 mansions, but Fetterman wants to cut taxes and make sure no community gets left behind and he definitely wants to fight crime and get more stuff made in Pennsylvania.
He still plays this like he's an anti-establishment Republican; you could be forgiven for thinking he was a moderate Tea Partier. Zero references to progressive or left-wing causes, he is nativist, vague on actual policies, but he is definitely One Of Us, not like that Turk.
On a related note, Josh Shapiro has a spot running where is also in favor of cutting taxes, and promises to put parents on the state education board. Taking in the tenor of these campaign pitches, I would be very morose if I were a leftist.
Fetterman does also have another ad running a lot, with a very positive, uplifting tone, where he doesn't say anything negative and ends by "respectfully asking for your vote".
Oz has a parallel one (unfortunately, it evades my Google-fu). In it, Oz expresses gratitude on behalf of himself and his family for "your kindness, and your grace". Just a strong positive note from both of them to end on, only mostly ruined by the shitflinging from the last few months... and their other ads... and all the ads being run by affiliated groups.
Oz has this ad, or one very similar running all the time. Oz stresses that he is like, amazingly super compassionate, and that the real problem is extremism on both sides. His ads position him as a moderate, who just want solutions gosh-darnit by listening and working together and building a reality-warping engine from a condensed singularity of generic moderation.
Both men have allies running harsh attack ads. CRAZY JOHN FETTERMAN WANTS CRIMINALS TO RUN WILD. He also, I hear, MOOCHES OFF HIS PARENTS. It must be nice to actually work for a year, and be so upset about it that you have daddy buy you a political office that is supposed to be extremely part time instead. There is another pair of ads featuring black people ripping into Fetterman for the whole situation where he heard gunfire, grabbed a shotgun, and held up the first black jogger he saw. Obviously a brutally negative ad aimed directly at the black community in Philly.
The other side has ads running against Oz, but almost more at Republicans in general. Republicans want to BAN ALL ABORTION even in cases of RAPE AND INCEST. Look at this 10 YEAR OLD GIRL who could be FORCED TO CARRY HER RAPISTS BABY. Republicans apparently also are going to DESTROY SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE. These ads focus less on attacking Oz directly, and more on the logic that as a Republican vote, he'll enable the other more extreme Republicans, which is an interesting bit of raw tribalism/game theory. They make a bit of hay out of Oz's statement at the debate that abortion should be between "a woman and her doctor and local politicians", but not as much as is made of Fetterman's performance. One ad just runs this clip, almost without commentary. Another has a bunch of Very Concerned People discussing how much Fetterman's debate failure changed their opinions, because he clearly can't do the job. One line effectively pings off a previous Fetterman ad where he bizarrely talks about how grateful he was to get to spent time with his family while recovering, by saying that he looks like he should be resting with his family instead of running for Senate. Oz is also going to RAISE YOUR TAXES (lolwut?), including one little snippet that should win an award for dishonesty, where the name "OZ" is pasted above a newspaper headline style snippet reading "CUT MEDICARE" and "RAISED YOUR TAXES", clearly implying that he has already done so, in spite of his never having held office before.
So, I want to talk about the REPUBLICAN PLAN TO DESTROY SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE. I went to look and see if this is something that anyone is actually talking about, but what I'm mostly finding is onion links in partisan outlets that link to stories that link to stories that link to stories that have that one time in 2010 that Mike Lee said we were going to have to do something about SS going insolvent. Are there any actual, current plans by actual Republicans to do anything that could reasonably be called "gutting SS/Medicare"? My impression is of desperate, disingenuous fearmongering, but I only have so much tolerance for digging through Dark Hinting from the outgroup, and I'm not entirely discounting the possibility that there is something serious in there.
Finally, some Kabbalah. I find it delightful that his support for releasing criminals has been an albatross around the neck of a candidate named Fetter-man. Unfortunately, the surname apparently has no linguistic connection to fetters, it's actually an old Germanic nickname/insult for "the fat guy", which again is odd because John looks like he has lost a bunch of weight, all of which went to his hideous neck goiter. "Mehmet Oz", OTOH, apparently just means "praiseworthy courage", which is so bland and boring and inappropriate I can't even make fun of it.
"John Fetterman" has a gematria of 1065, which is the Return of Partnership Income Tax form. "Mehmet Oz" has a gematria of 728, and Luke 7:28 reads "I tell you, among those born of women there is no one greater than John; yet the one who is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.” The Khabbalistic implications of this are obvious, but I cannot find anything saying if Oz was a C-section or not. If Fetterman wins, this should be a critical attribute of the next Republican challenger in 2028.
If there is some hidden message in their names that will reveal the winner, it eludes me. But I can say with confidence and joy that 48 hours from now I will be 5+ years away from seeing a single ad for either of these fuckheads again. May God have mercy on us all.
I don't think you could have looked very sincerely if you're mostly seeing quotes from 2010.
For example, in August, Ron Johnson was saying regarding social security:
“If you qualify for the entitlement, you just get it no matter what the cost,” Johnson said. “And our problem in this country is that more than 70 percent of our federal budget, of our federal spending, is all mandatory spending. It’s on automatic pilot. It never — you just don’t do proper oversight. You don’t get in there and fix the programs going bankrupt. It’s just on automatic pilot.”
“What we ought to be doing is we ought to turn everything into discretionary spending so it’s all evaluated so that we can fix problems or fix programs that are broken, that are going to be going bankrupt,” Johnson said. “As long as things are on automatic pilot, we just continue to pile up debt.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/03/ron-johnson-medicare-social-security/
Now I'd say that it's a bit hysterical to call this destroying social security, but making social security discretionary would dramatically change how secure that program is.
Maybe Google just wasn't showing me paywalled results, or my phrasing was selecting for outlets like Rawstory.
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