which is named Jeff Merkley, who was Speaker of the House in the OR legislature before being elected to the US Senate. In his very first post first victory interview on national media Merkley made his ambitions plain, and those ambitions don't include a spot on a national ticket. He told the interviewer, and this was before he had ever got on the plane for DC, that the Senate needed to do better at passing legislation. In other words, he wants Schemer's job some day. He has gained the loyalty of progressives for endorsing Bernie in '16--Warren will never be forgiven her endorsement of Killary--and I doubt not he had a hand in the decriminalization referendum this year. All of which is why, in part, Sen Schemer could not, could not allow any progressives, or even any persons of non-milquetoast integrity, to be elected to the senate. I am thinking that there will certainly be a challenge to his leadership, probably not (yet) from Merkley, but from someone of sense whom Merkley decides to get behind.

About the Biden victories in CO, NM, as well as probably AZ and NV, part of that is that there are two issues on the top of consciousness for Western voters. #1 is water, which T-Rump flat doesn't understand, that complicated science stuff, you know, and #2 is public lands. I emphasize PUBLIC, not 'government' lands, because that is what they are, public, places for ordinary people to hike, hunt, fish, camp out, look for rocks, prospect for minerals, and so on, and most Westerners don't think they had ought to be best friends with a billionaire to do those things. There is a reason why presidents who are interested in carrying western states appoint the Sec. of the Interior from that region.

"People of color" is an ACTIVELY RACIST TERM.

In an increasingly diverse society, they are trying to turn it all back into "White VS Black" - good enough for the Deep South, maybe, but certainly NOT for anywhere I've ever lived, not even for my own blood family.

Anybody who thinks African-Americans and Hispanics can just be lumped together doesn't know jack-shit about at least one of those groups - hell, look closely at either of those groups, and they're not even *internally* cohesive. The differences BETWEEN most any demographic don't hold a candle to the differences WITHIN THEM - and that makes them entirely bunk. This is all a delusion of marketing-department hacks who view people as nothing more than numerical data - modern-day Eichmanns.

"Post-Racial America" is NOT a myth - I grew up there. It took a lot of work to get there, but some of us made it. "Race" is the myth ('delusion' would be a better term - and "race-blindness" a nefariously Luntzian inversion of good and bad, like there's something wrong with you if you DON'T see race), and always was, but they are trying to raise it from its deathbed, and deny it was ever dying in a clear contradiction of decades of hard-earned consensus, because it's their beloved Golden Goose of divide-and-conquer.

"If you wish to study a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Cat's Cradle