{"id":35376,"date":"2024-08-13T10:45:34","date_gmt":"2024-08-13T15:45:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=35376"},"modified":"2024-08-13T11:01:52","modified_gmt":"2024-08-13T16:01:52","slug":"35376","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=35376","title":{"rendered":"Early reading on Primary day"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m not being set free today but I feel like it. There is an election, once again, that I filed for and that I was hopelessly unable to wrap my arms around and it is coming to an end. I have not updated my campaign webpage or put much in the blog for the three weeks that this primary day has been on my countdown. I&#8217;m hardly wracked by guilt at letting down the folks I chatted with as I pushed my boulder up the hill that Sisyphus couldn&#8217;t master either. It helped however to have come to a plan of action for what will follow the General election early this November.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll get to that in a later post but now I&#8217;ll iterating some of my early primary day reading. <\/p>\n<p>I woke up at 7:30 having switched from watching some French programing to seeing what was on my Tik Tok connection. Its probably algorithmically sending me what I want to see but I&#8217;ll admit it was both heartening and addictive. There were a passel of short takes on the campaign that pretty well eviscerated the GOP camp. They did much better in their few short seconds than my turgid eight-minute-reads of explaining the Trumplification of America. Americans with today&#8217;s shorter attention spans will make the Republican Party struggle to hang on them when they become the majority voting bloc. No wonder the fear of China&#8217;s doing to America what the anti-Lincoln Republicans have done has required Trump to curry Tic Toc&#8217;s favor by saying nice things about the online venue. Not that Tik Tokers have reciprocated.<\/p>\n<p>I turned on NPR as I read the New York Times. Before the Internet I would have spend an hour or two reading the Duluth News Tribune. If I spent an hour a week perusing the DNT today I&#8217;d be surprised. I&#8217;ll eventually look at the Washington Post as well but I read <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2024\/08\/13\/opinion\/russia-ukraine-west-war.html?smid=nytcore-android-share\">a sobering assessment of Putin&#8217;s success in making America cower<\/a>. I read excerpts of an interview with today&#8217;s best analyst of political Polls Nate Silver. I read a column about the future of the Republican Party if Trump loses. I sent a heavily graphic article to my email for later reading on <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/interactive\/2024\/08\/12\/climate\/canada-wildfires.html?smid=nytcore-android-share\">the massive destruction of Canada&#8217;s vast forests through fire<\/a> that is racing ahead of its replacement by nature.<\/p>\n<p>These stories led me to additional reading. The Nate Silver interview led me <a href=\"https:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/forbeswealthteam\/article\/elon-musk\/#anchorTag-4-632a2ebab9415a0001e6d4d6\">to google of how it was that Elon, I love Donald Trump, Muskmellon became rich<\/a>. Silver speaks from the gambling perspective about Venture Capitalists and told a story about Peter Thiel the gay Christiany billionaire who was in a very pricy half million dollar car of Musk&#8217;s racing off to the deal that would create Paypal that is the basis of both men&#8217;s super fortunes. The car <a href=\"https:\/\/cars.mclaren.com\/us-en\">a McLaren<\/a> is the same kind that Wisconsinite Mrs. Walton has a half dozen of. Mrs. Walton has been in Duluth&#8217;s news for buying up the tail end of our Park Point for a pickle ball Mecca. She scotched that idea when Duluthians didn&#8217;t like getting pushed around by the mega rich. I only care about cars getting from Point A to Point B so I&#8217;m not interested in cars eight times more expensive than Maseraties. And I can&#8217;t recall the Wisconsinite&#8217;s name at the moment. You can google it with pickle ball and Park Point but I&#8217;m rather pleased to have forgotten a billionaire&#8217;s name. (BTW I just read that <a href=\"https:\/\/www.advocate.com\/politics\/peter-thiel-stops-donations-2024\">Thiel will not be supporting Trump<\/a> because of all the culture war on trans kids coming from the rapist&#8217;s mouth)<\/p>\n<p>The columnist who wrote about the end of Trump years mentioned a book I was immediately interested in. It was called the end of the Whigs. I was going to order it until I saw it was 1250 pages long. But that got me interested in reading a summary and <a href=\"https:\/\/networks.h-net.org\/node\/9997\/reviews\/10548\/huston-holt-rise-and-fall-american-whig-party-jacksonian-politics-and\">I found one I&#8217;m still chewing on.<\/a> <\/p>\n<p>All of this reading took me about 2 hours and fifteen minutes. While I was listening to NPR I heard about buying tickets for the very funny NPR show Wait, Wait, don&#8217;t tell me that Claudia and I often catch on weekends. It&#8217;s coming to Minnesota at the end of the month. I suggested buying tickets and now that I don&#8217;t have to campaign&#8230;&#8230;although I&#8217;m not done with this election&#8230;..we bought tickets. I must say I don&#8217;t go to shows much these days and the roughly $250.00 cost per person was sobering. My first thought on hearing the price tag was <em>holy mackerel<\/em> there are a lot of people with money out there buying tickets to Taylor Swift concerts. I&#8217;m sure our tickets were a pittance in comparison. <\/p>\n<p>I did minimal proofing as I wrote this. I finished my coffee and enjoyed some malted milk balls. Soon I&#8217;ll cast my ballot for the primary. Later I&#8217;ll start storing all my political stuff for this campaign out of sight except for the stuff I intend to keep passing out. I think I&#8217;ve settled on keeping my finger in the political waters. It may no long be possible to reincarnate Abe Lincoln but I started my journey in Duluth fifty years ago to bring something of his spirit to the GOP. I saw a bit of it last night on Tik Tok where someone posted John McCain being booed by his voters when he told them Obama was a good family man and they wanted to believe the newly elected president was an Arab terrorist. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m not being set free today but I feel like it. There is an election, once again, that I filed for and that I&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,25,149],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35376"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35376"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35376\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35381,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35376\/revisions\/35381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35376"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35376"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35376"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}