To use another famous saying, this time one ascribed to Lincoln – you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, you cannot fool all the people all the time.

I say the Democrats figured they could fool enough of the people enough of the time, but then they ran out of time.

“If progressives have a politics that says all white people are racist, all men are toxic, and all billionaires are evil it’s kinda hard to keep them on your side. If you’re chasing people out of the party, you can’t be mad when they leave.”

That’s amazing you actually worked for Novell! Thanks for sharing your experience.

Huxley, I stand corrected.

Dave Cutler was the wild man genius systems architect whom Microsoft hired away from DEC to do Window NT.

Cutler was interviewing secretaries. Being a wild man he was prone to foul language. He asked his applicants how they felt about the F-word.

One said, “It’s my favorite word.” Cutler hired her.

Halcyon days.

Rufus T. Firefly:

I recommend “Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft.” A cracking good read!

https://theceolibrary.com/showstopper-breakneck-race-create-windows-nt-next-generation-microsoft-4983.html

Novell started as a LAN manager on top of MS-DOS. Great for file and printer sharing across a network, great stuff in its time, but it was never a full-featured, stand-alone OS and certainly not for everyday personal computer users.

Windows NT did the network stuff and multiprocessing and multithreading from the ground-up plus a graphical user-friendly interface like Windows 95.

Windows NT was a huge breakthrough.

https://notthebee.com/article/tim-walz-lost-his-home-county-to-trump

An interesting compilation of losers.
Maybe the people who know them best just didn’t like them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_major-party_United_States_presidential_candidates_who_lost_their_home_state

If you watch these videos, you’ll see how terrified these people are of Donald Trump … the billionaire NYC celebrity famous for reality TV, cameos in “Home Alone 2,” and Pizza Hut ads.

They got this way because the media has lied to them for a decade with increasingly ominous tales of doom that ratchet people’s anxiety to the max. If we’re going to point fingers, let’s start with the talking heads that drove these people crazy so the elites could keep political power.

This is why we are trying to undo the brainwashing through humor ?

Somehow, my comments look a lot shorter when I’m composing them than they end up when posted.
Sign.

https://thedailyscroll.substack.com/p/nov-7-did-obama-have-a-plan

?As Democrats enter the election postmortem phase, we’re seeing a lot of discussion of what one might refer to as the “Joe Rogan Question”—i.e., why the Trump campaign, but not the Harris campaign, was able to successfully utilize the world’s most popular podcaster. The Nation’s Elie Mystal, for instance, declared on X that rather than court Rogan, liberals needed to “BUILD THEIR OWN ROGAN,” as if one could simply order one from IKEA. Slightly more realistic was Ezra Klein, writing this morning in The New York Times:

The Democratic Party had spent years kicking people out of its tent. … It wasn’t that many years ago that Rogan had Bernie Sanders on for a friendly interview. And then Rogan kinda sorta endorsed him. Rather than celebrate, online liberals were furious at Sanders for going on “Rogan” in the first place. I was still on Twitter then, and I wrote about how of course Sanders was right to be there and this was one of the best arguments for Sanders’s campaign. If you wanted to beat Trump, you wanted to win over people like Rogan.

Liberals got so angry at me for that, I was briefly a trending topic. Rogan was a transphobe, an Islamophobe, a sexist, a racist, the kind of person you wanted to marginalize, not chat with. But if these last years have proved anything, it’s that liberals don’t get to choose who is marginalized. Democrats should have been going on “Rogan” regularly. They should have been prioritizing it—and other podcasts like it—this year.

All fair points, in a sense … except that it wasn’t really “online liberals” (as annoying as they may be) who were the problem, but the party leadership and donor class.
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[AF: whose playbook was to try and cancel Rogan]
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?Speaking of Psaki, the former White House press secretary and current MSNBC host helpfully gave us an idea on Monday of the bullet we dodged on Tuesday. In her monologue on the day before the election, Psaki said:

Even if Trump is defeated tomorrow, he has exposed during his time out there some serious limitations within our system, and it may be time to ask ourselves things like, whether social media platforms should have the freedom to operate at a lower level of accountability than local television networks in terms of the lies they can spread.

It seems we’re living in a different reality than Ms. Psaki, because from what we can tell, television networks can spread lies with very little accountability at all.

?And in other dodged-bullet news, Jonathan Last of “The Bulwark,” the never-Trump Republican webzine dedicated to “defending democracy” and bilking large checks out of gullible liberal donors, expressed regret, as the results came on Tuesday night, that the Biden administration hadn’t been more “radical” in rigging the system against Trump. Here’s Last, as transcribed by Tom Elliott on X:

[The Biden Admin] should have been quite radical. They should have made D.C. a state, they should have actually expanded the Supreme Court, they should have done a whole bunch of stuff that would have been deeply unpopular, but … would have restructured the framework in such a way as to make it harder for the next authoritarian attempt.

That’s certainly a perspective, though we’d argue that the administration was in fact quite radical in attempting to place the entirety of English-language social media under government censorship and then, when that failed, to launch four criminal investigations against its opponent and sue to get him taken off the ballot.
…

?But maybe the Democrats’ problem wasn’t Joe Rogan. Maybe it was … Gaza! That was the argument from Peter Beinart in a Thursday New York Times op-ed, in which he argues, without evidence, that Harris lost because she didn’t listen to Peter Beinart about opposing “what prominent scholars call a genocide.”
…
?So what really did Harris in? Our guess is that she was screwed no matter what, given inflation and three years of an open border, but both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have published excellent postmortems of the campaign, both of which we’ll link below. A few highlights:

Trump ran a lean, efficient, startup-style campaign, according to the Times, which turned its fundraising deficit into an advantage in agility and creativity. It outsourced the “ground game” to allied PACs and focused instead on where the campaign could get the most value in return for its spending: e.g., low-propensity male voters and nontraditional media such as podcasts. The Harris campaign, by contrast, racked up massive fixed costs with its on-the-ground infrastructure and with expensive, highly produced celebrity events. After raising more than $1 billion, Breitbart’s Matthew Boyle reported on Wednesday, the Harris campaign finished more than $20 million in debt while suffering the worst defeat for Democrats in two decades.

Related, the Trump campaign appears to have relied on Trump’s instincts as well as a small handful of capable operatives, including campaign co-managers Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles and political director Jason Blair, who were able to make risky bets even amid criticism from other veteran campaign operatives. (Most of these criticisms were aired in the liberal press, which continued to insist up until election night that the campaign was inept, demoralized, and chaotic.) Harris, on the other hand, assembled a bloated amalgamation of her own staffers, inherited Biden staffers, and Obama veterans who joined the campaign in its closing months, with no clear lines of authority. The result appears to have been a sort of suicide-by-committee in which the campaign regularly struggled to make difficult decisions (e.g., whether she should go on Rogan) or settle on a message.

Finally, the Harris campaign made the mistake of all recent losing Democratic campaigns: not listening to Bill Clinton. When Trump began dropping ads highlighting Harris’ support for taxpayer-funded transition surgeries for illegal aliens—with the tagline “Kamala Harris is for they/them. President Trump is for you”—Clinton immediately recognized it as a problem, despite the received wisdom among liberals that “anti-trans” ads didn’t work. Clinton urged Harris to rush out and clarify that she would not support such a policy as president, but was told that the ads were “not necessarily having an impact.” But ad testing by Harris’ largest PAC, Future Forward, found that the trans ads were among Trump’s most effective, with one of them shifting viewers 2.7 points to the former president.