The inevitable impeachment is great news — and no, Bernie isn’t Jeremy

No, Bernie Sanders does not equal Jeremy Corbyn. For starters, while Corbyn is much more unpopular in the United Kingdom than is Boris Johnson, Bernie Sanders is much more popular in the United States than is “President” Pussygrabber.

I’ve long supported the impeachment of “President” Pussygrabber. He’s not our president; not only was he not elected by the most voters, but he is a mob boss. He simply has continued his life-long criminality into the White House, and to his long list of crimes we can add treason. Plenty of treason.*

That said, I’ve also always known that the Repugnican traitors (redundant) in the U.S. Senate never would remove a member of their own wingnutty party, pretty much no matter what he’d done.

Still, impeachment is necessary if we give a flying fuck about such trifles as the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law.

I’ve only sporadically listened to the live coverage of the House impeachment hearings via NPR. I never felt that I needed to attend to every detail, as Pussygrabber is, of course, as guilty as sin — the transcript of his infamous, treasonous, quid-pro-quo July phone call with the Ukrainian president that the White House itself publicly released amply shows that, and that’s only one of his many crimes — and as the Repugnican-controlled Senate won’t remove him, no matter what.

Listening to Pussygrabber’s Repugnican buttboys (perhaps most prominently Sens. Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell and Reps. Devin Nunes, Jim Jordan and Matt Gaetz) lie for him like pathological liars on crack, however, has been interesting. It’s been a veritable gaslighting marathon: What you have seen with your own eyes and what you have heard with your own ears? You’re wrong! Let us tell you what you have seen and heard!

The Repugnicans will get their short-term “victory” — Pussygrabber won’t be removed from the Oval Office before January 2021, when, very hopefully, the American voters will have done the job — but one does have to wonder what the Repugnican Party’s pathological lying in pursuit of defending a treasonous, uber-corrupt “president” will do for it in the long term.

And of course when Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party did not win the UK election this past week, U.S. “pundits” were quick to say that of course this means that no progressive (that is, Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren) possibly could win the U.S. presidency in November 2020.

Except that this isn’t the UK.

There are philosophical and political parallels between the Labour Party and the Democratic Party and the Conservative Party and the Repugnican Party, of course, but we’re talking about two separate nations with different histories that are separated by a wide fucking ocean.

The United States is not in the midst of anything like a “Brexit,” and while Jeremy Corbyn is pretty fucking unpopular — Boris Johnson has a negative favorability rating in most polls, but Corbyn’s negative favorability rating in most polls is much higher** — comparing him to Bernie (or to Warren) is incredibly sloppy at best.

There has been socialism in Europe, but never has there been socialism in the United States (with the exception, perhaps, of some Native American societies). The historical contexts of the two nations are quite different; Americans cannot point to socialism ever actually having failed in the United States because we’ve never actually even had socialism.

And Bernie Sanders — and all of the top-tier candidates for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination — are significantly more popular than is Pussygrabber. Here is a graph from a fivethirtyeight.com piece from just yesterday:

“Trump remains really unpopular — far more than any of the leading Democratic presidential candidates,” notes fivethirtyeight.com, adding:

But Democrats’ net favorability ratings have taken a hit. As you can see in the chart above, even though Biden, Sanders, Warren and Buttigieg are nowhere near as unpopular as Trump, their net favorability ratings have trended downward recently.

This isn’t totally surprising, though, as my colleague Geoffrey Skelley noted a few weeks ago: Many presidential candidates’ net favorability ratings have been negative or close to zero since at least 2008, a sign, perhaps, of the polarized times we live in.

Of course, there is still time for public perception to change (in either direction) between now and November. But if the polls are any indication, opinions of the Democratic candidates seem much more likely to shift than opinions of Trump. That might be because people’s opinions of the Democratic candidates aren’t nearly as entrenched. …

Again, Corbyn is much more unpopular than is Johnson. As elections still so often amount to popularity contests rather than contests of ideas, that is no tiny detail. (Thankfully, Corbyn is stepping down as the leader of the Labour Party.***)

In the U.S., it is the opposite: the top four Democratic presidential candidates all have significantly higher favorability ratings than does Pussygrabber.

And, again, not only has the post-colonial U.S. never been socialist, but a President Sanders (I love the sound of that!) of course very probably could not usher in a socialist utopia.

If he had both houses of Congress in his party’s control, President Sanders could make some significant improvements in the average American’s life — our Americans’ biggest enemies, after all, are not each other or other nations, but are the treasonous corporations that attack us from within — but within the next few decades we are likely to see, at best and at most, a hybrid of capitalism and socialism, in which basic human needs (medical care, food, water, shelter, education, etc.) are covered by a socialist system while capitalism continues its dominance over pretty much everything else.

But, of course, those who protect the status quo — because they personally benefit from the pro-corporate, anti-individual socioeconomic status quo or because they’re just sheeple who think the way that Faux “News” tells them to think (even if that makes them just like chickens that support Colonel Sanders [no relation to Bernie!]) — want us progressives to give up before the game has even begun.

And one of their “arguments” is that Jeremy Corbyn = Bernie Sanders. Except that that’s complete and utter bullshit.

Where Corbyn failed in the UK, we progressives can prevail here in the United States. We just can’t lie down and allow our enemies to keep walking all over us in perpetuity, as they want us to do.

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*My definition of “treason” is broad, such as dictionary.com’s No. 2 and No. 3 definitions: “a violation of allegiance to one’s sovereign or to one’s state” and “the betrayal of a trust or confidence; breach of faith; treachery.”

**This fact does remind me of the November 2016 U.S. presidential election, in which both Billary Clinton and Pussygrabber were underwater in their favorability ratings. Our “choice” of president was bad (Billary) or even worse (Pussygrabber).

***I haven’t studied Corbyn nearly enough to have a super-informed opinion of him, but clearly, it’s indisputable that he is poison at the ballot box.

And at least we can’t call the ethnically Jewish Bernie Sanders anti-Semitic, as Corbyn has been called, whether he is or not. (Again, I haven’t studied Corbyn much, but the charge of anti-Semitism, whether it is accurate or not, often is bandied about in order to damage one’s political opponent.)

Super-delegate and caucus reforms making the party democratic again

Getty Images photo

The Democratic National Committee voted yesterday to strip the so-called super-delegates of their anti-democratic power. This means that in 2020, should Bernie Sanders decide to run for president again, the deck won’t again be stacked against him from Day One by constant reports of how many super-delegates, the vast majority of them self-serving party hacks, already have promised to vote at the party convention for an establishmentarian, center-right, Repugnican-Lite, pro-corporate, DINO sellout candidate. (Above: Demonstrators urge the DNC to strip super-delegates of their power at the DNC’s summer meeting that just wrapped up in Chicago.)

The best news for the Democratic Party in a long time came yesterday, when the Democratic National Committee overwhelmingly voted to effectively eliminate the power of the so-called super-delegates.

Against the wishes of a minority of dead-ender DNC assholes who had come to savor the fact that their votes for the presidential nominee have counted much, much more than the votes of us mere peasants, the DNC yesterday demonstrated its new-found realization that if the party wants to save itself, it actually needs to be democratic. (Who knew?)

The party is, however, taking baby steps toward reform. “Saturday’s vote officially [bars] the super-delegates from voting on the first ballot to choose the party’s presidential nominee unless a candidate has secured a majority of the convention using only pledged delegates, whose votes are earned during the primary process,” explains CNN. The super-delegates may vote in a second round of voting if no victor emerges with a majority of delegates in the first round, so while their undue influence has been reduced sharply, the petulant, spoiled babies were thrown some pacifier. (The equivalent of super-delegates in the Repugnican Party must vote the way that the people of their respective states voted, so even the Repugnican Party doesn’t have an anti-democratic, aristocratic system of super-delegates.)

And while I’ve written before that presidential caucuses, which are plagued with irregularities (that is, opportunities for cheating), should be dumped altogether and replaced with presidential primary elections, the DNC yesterday also voted to encourage (again, baby steps) states that still hold caucuses to switch to primary elections, and voted to require states that still hold caucuses to allow some form of absentee participation, given that it’s forever been unfair that those who for whatever reason cannot get to a caucus have not been able to participate in the democratic process.

The dead-enders within the DNC (all or the vast majority of them Billarybots) probably view these positive reforms as being for the benefit of Bernie Sanders, and while he did push for these reforms, having been the victim of the corrupt, calcified, anti-democratic DNC himself, these reforms are good for the people and are good for democracy — and thus are good for the party.

On that note, McClatchy reported (in an article titled “Loyal Democratic Donors: We’re Done with the DNC Until They Get Their Act Together”) just a few days ago:

While Democratic donors have eagerly opened their wallets ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, helping Democratic candidates and groups largely outraise their Republican counterparts, one notable exception has stood out: The Democratic National Committee — the party’s signature organization — has posted its worst midterm fund raising totals in more than a decade.

The DNC has so far taken in $116 million before the November midterm elections — $9 million less than it had taken in at this point in 2014 and more than $30 million less than it had taken in at this point in 2010, the last two midterm cycles.

By contrast, the Republican National Committee has nearly doubled the DNC’s haul this cycle, bringing in a total of $227 million. And of the six major federal committees of both parties, the DNC has by far the most debt ($6.7 million) and the least amount in its bank account ($7.8 million).

After 2016’s defeat of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton by Donald Trump, many of the group’s most consistent donors are putting their money elsewhere. A McClatchy analysis found that more than 200 donors who had given more than $1,000 to the DNC in each of the past two midterm elections have failed to pony up any cash to the DNC this time around, despite continuing to support other Democratic groups and candidates. …

Indeed, many if not most ordinary (that is, non-super-wealthy) Democratic donors now give through the wildly successful Democratic fundraising website ActBlue, where they — we — can decide ourselves to which Democratic candidates to give money and how much.

I have given almost $4,500 in a series of donations over the past several years through ActBlue (my average donation is $13) because, frankly, I don’t at all trust the center-right, pro-corporate DNC with my money. (The No. 1 recipient of my donations via ActBlue has been Bernie Sanders, to whom I’ve given more than $1,000, and Elizabeth Warren is at No. 3, with almost $250. At No. 2 [$275] is Kevin de León, who I hope unseats DINO U.S. Sen. Dianne “Cryptkeeper” Feinstein in November.)

“The [DNC’s] poor [fundraising] showing could limit the DNC’s ability to provide support, such as direct financial contributions or get-out-the-vote assistance, to candidates and state parties in November. And it puts them at a disadvantage heading into the 2020 presidential cycle where the committee will play an even larger role,” notes McClatchy, but, again, Democratic candidates are getting money via ActBlue, which is a much more democratic venue anyway. (ActBlue’s home page right now reports that since it began in 2004, it has collected more than $2.5 billion in donations to Democratic candidates and groups.)

With ActBlue, we, the people, decide where to put our money. We can bypass the center-right, pro-corporate, anti-democratic Democratic Party bosses, which is wonderful. And that’s how it should work: If avenues are blocked, then we, the people, must create our own, alternate but equally if not even more effective, routes around the obstacles.

For years and years, the DNC weasels took our support, including our money and our votes, for granted. Where else were we commoners going to go? While the DNC continued to rot in order to preserve the undue power of a relatively few weaselly insiders, we, the people, have been doing our own end runs.

Because the DNC and the party establishment as a whole fell asleep at the wheel years ago, we, the people, took over, such as via ActBlue and by supporting progressive (that is, actually Democratic) candidates whether the center-right, Repugnican-Lite party big-wigs wanted us to or not. (Bernie Sanders, of course, is the largest example of that, but there have been many others.)

It has been a long struggle, and it is not over, but we progressives are taking back the Democratic Party, bit by bit. And when — and if — the DNC can be trusted again, its reputation and thus also its fundraising will improve.

In the meantime, yes, it’s time to look to the 2020 presidential election cycle.

A Politico/Morning Consult poll reported last week puts Bernie Sanders against Pussygrabber in a hypothetical presidential match-up at 44 percent to 32 percent, so anyone who says that Bernie Sanders can’t beat Pussygrabber, as he could have and probably would have in November 2016, is, of course, full of shit; Bernie has a double-digit lead over Pussygrabber in the nationwide polling already, just as he had a double-digit lead over Pussygrabber in the nationwide polling leading up to the 2016 Democratic Party National Convention.

Joe Biden also beats Pussygrabber by 12 points in the Politico/Morning Consult poll, 43 percent to 31 percent, so 2020, it seems to me, could be a lot like 2016 if both Bernie and Biden run; it would be the progressive champion against the party establishmentarian.

However, as Biden already has run for the Democratic Party presidential nomination and lost twice (in 1987 and in 2007), I don’t see him as strong a candidate as some would assert. He would be the anti-Bernie vote, but I don’t think that that would be enough. Also, Billary Clinton was the holdover from the Clinton-Obama years, and wouldn’t Biden, as the holdover from the Clinton-Obama years, remind a lot of voters of Billary’s colossal failure in 2016?

In the Politico/Morning Consult poll Elizabeth Warren comes in a No. 3, still beating Pussygrabber but by a much smaller margin, only 34 percent to 30 percent, with 36 percent undecided.

Billary Clinton was within only a few percentage points over Pussygrabber in the nationwide polling averages for a very long time, all the way up to Election Day, and look how that turned out.

If we want Pussygrabber out, we need to select, as the Democratic Party presidential nominee, the one who polls the best against him; we (well, the Billarybots and other zombies) fucked up big-time in 2016 by passing up Bernie Sanders for the candidate who polled much worse against Pussygrabber than Bernie did.

I’ve noted many times that while I like Liz Warren, and would be fine with her as a vice-presidential candidate, I think that as a presidential candidate she’d be painted as a female Michael Dukakis, another clueless egghead from Massachussetts, and I think that while Billary Clinton did not face much actual sexism, Liz actually would.* (That said, if it’s between Biden and Warren, I pick Warren, who is my No. 2 choice behind Bernie. I still cannot support Biden, not for the primaries.)

Also in the Politico/Morning Consult poll, Pussygrabber beats U.S. Sens. Cory Booker, Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, former Attorney General Eric Holder and others by 2 percentage points to 10 percentage points, so unless their polling improves drastically, these second- and third-tier candidates are non-starters for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination for me, and we can’t allow craven identity politics to sink us in 2020 like they did in 2016.

(“Bernie bro,” “brogressive” and the like only backfired, as Billary wasn’t a victim of sexism, but only suffered appropriately and deservedly due to her utter unlikeability due to her inherently corrupt nature and shitty character, which enough voters sure sensed if they couldn’t articulate.)

Methinks that 2020 is going to be a bumpy ride, with identity politics vs. electability once again rearing its ugly head, but at least the road is made a bit smoother because the so-called super-delegates have been defanged and because quaint but corruptible caucuses apparently are on their way out.

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*I agree with fivethirtyeight.com’s Perry Bacon Jr.’s sentiment when he writes:

… How comfortable should we be, as a society, with discouraging members of traditionally marginalized groups from pursuing political office because other Americans might have a negative view of those potential candidates’ gender, race, religion, sexual orientation or other personal characteristics (or some combination of these characteristics)? After all, a candidate can change her ideology if her platform isn’t appealing to voters — but many of these traits are immutable. …

I agree that of course it’s not fair to punish the victim for the voters’ prejudices and biases and bigotry, but when push comes to shove, it does come down to whether or not you want to win the fucking election. In the 2020 presidential election, for a great example, which is more important: booting Pussygrabber from the Oval Office (presuming that he’s still there, of course) or making a point?

And there are plenty of reasons to reject Kamala Harris and Cory Booker that have nothing to do with race, such as their history of coziness with corporations, their lack of leadership and accomplishment in the U.S. Senate, and their lower name recognition and popularity — and thus their lower polling — than the top-three front-runners Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren.

Of the two, I’m more fond of Harris than of Booker, but she has not been in the Senate for even two full years yet, for fuck’s sake. It’s way too early to talk about her being president. As I have noted before, I think I’d be OK with her as the vice-presidential candidate for 2020, but that’s as far as I can go.

In 2016, aside from the copious intra-party rigging that was done in her favor, apparently the idea was to make Billary Clinton the nominee — even she didn’t poll nearly as well against Pussygrabber as Bernie Sanders did — in order to make a point (namely, that the Democrats could nominate a woman [likability and popularity of said woman entirely aside]). How well did that turn out?

If we make that mistake again, we deserve whatever we get.

And I’m no hypocrite; I personally always have disliked DINO Billary Clinton but love Elizabeth Warren, but if it looks like Warren can’t beat Pussygrabber, then we go with the stronger candidate who can. It won’t be enough for me that Warren is a woman.

DNC must return party to progressives or die the death that it deserves

Washington Post news photo

Crooked Billary Clinton and Bernie Sanders appear together at a bullshit “unity” event on November 3, 2016, days before Billary spectacularly blew the presidential election. Former Democratic National Committee head Donna Brazile has confirmed for us further how much the DNC was in the bag for Billary all along.

Former interim Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile’s new book, excerpted by Politico, only confirms what we already knew, only it’s even worse than we already knew: Billary Clinton’s presidential campaign was so thoroughly enmeshed with the financially struggling DNC — which relied upon mountains of cash from the Billary camp to keep going — that of course actual Democrat Bernie Sanders never had a fucking chance.

I suggest that you read the Politico piece by Brazile. No, she’s not perfect — she has admitted having fed Billary town-hall questions in advance — but she is the highest-level former DNC operative to have shed light on the corrupt bullshit that happened.

The DNC not only floundered under the awful former DNC chair and Queen Billarybot Debbie Wasserman Schultz (who had to resign in disgrace), as Brazile details, but it still is in deep shit. Politico reports just today that

The committee’s slow fundraising has been a serious problem for the party since the 2016 election. Skeptical donors have stayed away from the DNC, while giving more to individual candidates and other committees. The party had just $7 million on hand heading into October, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

The DNC raised $51 million from January through September as it rebuilds under new chairman Tom Perez, who took over in March. But the Republican National Committee brought in $104 million over the same time period.

The DNC just fired its head of fundraising, but you can’t blame one individual for the DNC’s inability to raise money. You can blame only the so-called Democratic Party establishment, the self-serving assholes who haven’t really changed a thing since it was revealed well before the November 2016 presidential election that the DNC was in the bag for Billary, whose karmic fucking due was not becoming president. (Being a fucking baby boomer, though, of course she still got a lucrative book deal out of it.)

Who wants to give money to a corrupt party organization? I sure the fuck don’t. I don’t trust the DNC with a fucking penny.

Because of the corrupt Democratic Party establishment, which has yet to be taken over by us progressives, us actual Democrats, I changed my voter registration to no party and I won’t register as a Democrat again until and unless the party deserves my return.

For years the Democratic Party has acted as though we, the people, owe it, and that it owes us absofuckinglutely nothing.

I still give money to individual candidates, and yes, the vast majority of them are progressive Democrats* — I’d rather castrate myself with a toothpick than cast a vote for any Repugnican — but they’re the candidates of my choosing, not the DNC’s. (On that note, I gave Bernie more than $1,000 in campaign contributions over time. That’s more money than I’ve ever given any other political candidate by far.)

The answer to the DNC’s money woes is pretty clear: People won’t give you money unless they’re minimally excited about you and what you’re doing and they trust you. You have to earn their money. (Who knew?)

On that note, per Wikipedia, through April 30, 2016, Billary raised about $204 million to Bernie’s roughly $228 million. She’d run for president before and he entered the race largely unknown, but Bernie still out-raised her, and most of his donations (as he told us tirelessly) were small ones.

Excite the people and earn and thus gain their trust, as Bernie did, and the money will follow.

But as long as the ghosts of Billary and the other Democrats in name only still haunt the DNC and as long as the establishmentarian DINOs only continue to shit and piss on us progressives — us real Democrats — the DNC can keep on digging its own grave.

We progressives are fine just sitting back and watching that happen. The DNC as it exists today doesn’t deserve our support. Indeed, if it continues to resist returning the party to us progressives, it deserves to die, as it will without us, and we progressives will continue to build for ourselves the party that we deserve.

P.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is the highest-ranking Democrat in office who has stated publicly that of course the DNC was in the bag for Billary.

Among other things, Warren said that current DNC Chair Tom Perez “is being tested now” and that he “is going to succeed by bringing Bernie Sanders and Bernie Sanders’ representatives into this process … or he’s going to fail, and I very much hope he succeeds.”

It is good to hear her say all of this now, but, to be fair and balanced, Warren pretty much sat back and stayed silent while Team Billary’s theft of the presidential nomination via its collusion with the DNC was happening, and only Bernie Sanders had had the courage to oppose the coronation of Billary by daring to run in the primary against her. Warren didn’t dare to step on Queen Billary’s cape.

If Bernie runs again in 2020, he has my full support. He has earned it. He was there and he led.

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*When I give money to a candidate, it’s usually a candidate who actually has a chance of winning, and so yes, I vote mostly for Democrats. Usually my aim is to support the candidate who is the most progressive yet still viable.

That said, the United States sorely needs to adopt a multi-party, parliamentarian system. To collapse the entire American political spectrum into only two main parties, the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party, is an anti-democratic joke. The corporations and our plutocratic overlords love it, but the duopolistic partisan system stopped serving us, the people, many, many years ago.

Trump, the Muscovite Candidate, probably won’t last very long

Der Fuhrer Donald Trump actually isn’t president of the United States of America until and unless the members of the Electoral College vote him in on December 19, but even if he survives that test, Trump, the Muscovite Candidate who lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes, will be a one-term “president” at best.

I haven’t written all that much about Der Fuhrer Donald Trump, and I hope that some haven’t taken that as any sort of admiration of or acceptance of him on my part.

It’s that The Donald is so fucking bizarre, such an anomaly, such a “presidential” fucking freak, that it’s difficult for me to even know where to begin in discussing him.

Let’s see: During the campaign he routinely uncreatively called Billary Clinton “corrupt Hillary” yet he recently settled his Trump University fraud lawsuit for $25 million, to name just one, recent instance of his own mega-corruption.

Another inconvenient, unflattering fact is that “corrupt Hillary” thus far leads Der Fuhrer Trump by 2.8 million votes in the popular vote.

Despite Trump’s wholly unsubstantiated — and treasonous — bold-faced lie that “millions” of people voted illegally for Billary, the fact remains that Trump lost the election by millions of votes; he did not earn the popular vote of the American people, and therefore he is an illegitimate president-“elect,” in my eyes.

Trump’s presidential illegitimacy is different than was George W. Bush’s — and here I never have written “President Bush” but only “‘President’ Bush,” because Bush always was and always will be a quite illegitimate president. (He lost the popular vote in 2000 by more than a half-million votes and was installed in the White House by his then-Florida-governor brother Jeb!, by then-Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, and by the five Repugnican members of the U.S. Supreme Court who stopped the recount in Florida, the pivotal state for Gee Dubya that his brother very conveniently governed, and who thus, with the other conspirators, decided the presidential election for us commoners.)

In that thus far he has lost the popular vote by a significantly larger margin than Gee Dubya did — if we think that it’s at all important that in a democracy the candidate who actually earns the highest number of votes of the people actually is the one who takes office — Trump is even more illegitimate than George W. Bush was, but Bush’s illegitimacy was worsened with the blatantly partisan — and treasonously anti-democratic — involvement of his brother, Florida elections chief Katherine Harris and the wingnutty members of the U.S. Supreme Court.

That said, it still has yet to be determined exhaustively how and how much Russia meddled in the 2016 presidential election to try to get Trump rather than Billary into the big chair in the Oval Office. Arguably, Trump’s having had the help of a foreign government to win the White House is even more treasonous than anything that Team Bush ever did to steal the presidency.

The Washington Post has been all over Trump’s ties to Moscow, with recent news stories such as these:

• Secret CIA assessment says Russia was trying to help Trump win White House
• Kremlin defers to Trump on the CIA assessment that Moscow helped him win
• Moscow had contacts with Trump team during campaign, Russian diplomat says
• Russia has been in contact with Trump team over Syria, senior diplomat says
• Trump and Putin are using the same tactic to deflect questions about the DNC hack

A rather clear pattern has emerged, and it’s pretty fucking funny (in a sick and fucking twisted way, not in a humorous way) that the American right wing, which for decades was opposed to the “evil empire,” very apparently has as its “president” a treasonous piece of shit who has colluded with that “evil empire” in order to win the presidency — with the “evil empire’s” full expectation, of course, that in return, “President” Trump will do its bidding (in Syria and elsewhere).

True, Trump’s die-hard, mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging supporters don’t care even if he’s in bed with Vladimir Putin, perhaps even literally, but these self-defeating dipshits are only a minority of Americans. The majority of us Americans — not just Democrats and Democratic leaners, but also old-school, non-Trumpist Repugicans, too, as well as most so-called independents — take a U.S. “president”-“elect” colluding with a foreign government very, very seriously.

Indeed, The Angel of Political Death looms over “President”-“elect” Donald Trump, its scythe at the ready for swift use at any moment.

If he makes it that far, I don’t see Trump finishing even one term, especially once his ties to Russia are fully investigated and publicized. (Unfortunately, however, even for such blatant treason, billionaires only very rarely are ever put behind bars in our two-tiered “justice” system; only we commoners ever are to be punished, even for petty fucking crimes.)

Even if it weren’t for Russia, our Muscovite Candidate always has done whatever the fuck he pleases — clearly, he’s inside of that billionaire’s gilded bubble from which only a prison cell (perhaps) can release him* — and if it wasn’t his collusion with Russia, it always was going to be something else, some other act of corruption and/or treason, that was going to make his time in the White House short.

There is a reason that Donald J. Trump is only the third person “elected” to the presidency who had not first been at least a governor of a state, U.S. vice president, a U.S. senator, a U.S. representative or an Army general. (Before Trump, William Howard Taft and Herbert Hoover were the only exceptions to that list of five previous jobs that I see. Uncoincidentally, methinks, both Taft and Hoover were one-termers…)

That reason that Trump is the first to have broken these historical norms for the presidency during my lifetime (Lyndon B. Johnson was president when I was born) is that he is uniquely unqualified for the presidency, and the American system more or less has been set up to prevent such an unqualified person from ascending to the White House — which is probably why Trump apparently had an awful lot of help from Russia to “win.”

I’m with Michael Moore on this; it’s possible that Trump won’t even be sworn in next month, perhaps especially with the apparently substantiated-enough allegations that he’s a Muscovite Candidate** swirling about him.

That taint of treason might, just might, be enough to induce the members of the Electoral College to do the right thing on December 19, when they meet for the official election of the next president.***

If not, I expect Trump to hang himself with his gilded rope. If he makes it to Inauguration Day 2017, I don’t see him making it to Inauguration Day 2021.

P.S. Michael Moore, back in July, predicted that Trump would win the states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. In an e-mail to his supporters dated July 23 (I still have this e-mail), he wrote (this is a copy and paste from that e-mail, with only slight edits for style and correctness):

… Midwest Math, or Welcome to Our Rust-Belt Brexit. I believe Trump is going to focus much of his attention on the four blue states in the Rust Belt of the upper Great Lakes — Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Four traditionally Democratic states -– but each of them have elected a Republican governor since 2010 (only Pennsylvania has now finally elected a Democrat).

In the Michigan primary in March, more Michiganders came out to vote for the Republicans (1.32 million) than the Democrats (1.19 million). Trump is ahead of Hillary in the latest polls in Pennsylvania and tied with her in Ohio. Tied? How can the race be this close after everything Trump has said and done?

Well maybe it’s because he’s said (correctly) that the Clintons’ support of NAFTA helped to destroy the industrial states of the upper Midwest. Trump is going to hammer Clinton on this and her support of TPP and other trade policies that have royally screwed the people of these four states.

When Trump stood in the shadow of a Ford Motor factory during the Michigan primary, he threatened the corporation that if they did indeed go ahead with their planned closure of that factory and move it to Mexico, he would slap a 35 percent tariff on any Mexican-built cars shipped back to the United States.

It was sweet, sweet music to the ears of the working class of Michigan, and when he tossed in his threat to Apple that he would force them to stop making their iPhones in China and build them here in America, well, hearts swooned and Trump walked away with a big victory that should have gone to the governor next door, John Kasich.

From Green Bay to Pittsburgh, this, my friends, is the middle of England — broken, depressed, struggling, the smokestacks strewn across the countryside with the carcass of what we use to call the middle class. Angry, embittered working (and non-working) people who were lied to by the trickle-down of Reagan and abandoned by Democrats who still try to talk a good line but are really just looking forward to rub one out with a lobbyist from Goldman Sachs who’ll write them nice big check before leaving the room.

What happened in the UK with Brexit is going to happen here. …

And this is where the math comes in. In 2012, Mitt Romney lost by 64 electoral votes. Add up the electoral votes cast by Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It’s 64. All Trump needs to do to win is to carry, as he’s expected to do, the swath of traditional red states from Idaho to Georgia (states that’ll never vote for Hillary Clinton), and then he just needs these four Rust-Belt states. He doesn’t need Florida. He doesn’t need Colorado or Virginia. Just Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And that will put him over the top. This is how it will happen in November. …

Prescient.

But even if Trump did win Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin fairly and squarely — but the fact that Trump & Co. have sued to prevent recounts and any other audits in the Rust-Belt states that they’re supposedly so certain that they won makes me have to wonder if Russia indeed was involved in the presidential election, quite intimately — Trump still lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes, which is the largest gap between the Electoral College and the popular vote in U.S. history.

That indeed is politically damaging, which is why Trump lied that “millions” of votes were cast illegally for Billary Clinton.

Finally, I want to make it clear that I’m no fan of Billary Clinton. I supported Bernie Sanders, the actual Democrat in the Democratic Party presidential primary, and for president I voted for Green Party candidate Jill Stein (whose recounts of three states I have supported wholeheartedly, even though I don’t think they’re going to go anywhere).

Billary Clinton indeed is corrupt, but her corruption pales by comparison to Trump’s, whose ties to Russia very much appear to have crossed the line from garden-variety political corruption into treason territory.

Everything with Trump leads back to Russia, including his recent twofer pick of Exxon Mobil Corp chief executive Rex Tillerson for U.S. secretary of state — a twofer because it’s yet another corporate weasel guarding the hen house and because Tillerson’s breath, like Trump’s, smells like Vladimir Putin’s penis.

—

*That’s yet another example of Trump’s projection onto Billary Clinton: not only is she “corrupt” but he isn’t, to hear him tell it, but she belongs in a prison cell but he doesn’t.

Indeed, Trump very apparently believes, in typical wingnut fashion, that if he simply accuses others of his own brand of wrongdoing, then that alone magically lets him off the hook.

**For anyone who doesn’t get the reference — shut the fuck up, because there will be some who don’t get it — I’ve morphed Manchurian Candidate (with this definition of that term in mind) into “Muscovite Candidate,” as “Muscovite” is what you call someone from Moscow.

***As Wikipedia notes (links are Wikipedia’s):

The United States presidential election is the indirect election in which citizens of the United States who are registered to vote in one of the 50 U.S. states or the District of Columbia cast ballots for members of the Electoral College, known as electors.

These electors then in turn cast direct votes, known as electoral votes, in their respective state capitals for president and vice president of the United States. Each of the states casts as many electoral votes as the total number of its senators and representatives in Congress, while Washington, D.C., casts the same number of electoral votes as the least-represented state, which is three.

Once the voting for the presidential election has concluded and all the votes for each state have been accounted for, the electors are then advised as to what candidate won the majority in their state. The electors of that state then will cast the vote of that candidate to represent the people of their regions’ majority decision.

However, “Twenty-one states do not have provisions that are fairly specific in directing the electors to vote for the presidential and vice-presidential candidates of their party.” This means that an elector could possibly vote against the majority decision of the state due to there being no law that binds electors otherwise in those states.

In modern times, almost all electors vote for a particular presidential candidate that their states’ majority decided upon; thus, the results of the election can generally be determined based on the state-by-state popular vote.

The candidate who receives an absolute majority of electoral votes for president or vice president (currently, at least 270 out of a total of 538) is then projected to be elected to that office.

If no candidate receives an absolute majority of electoral votes for president, the House of Representatives chooses the president; if no candidate receives an absolute majority for vice president, the senate chooses the vice president. …

I remain of the strong opinion that the Electoral College needs to be scrapped altogether. There is no compelling reason not to go with the popular vote alone, especially since we call ourselves a democracy, and since the Electoral College has failed us twice in my lifetime of not even 50 years, awarding the White House to the candidate who fucking lost the popular vote.

(Well, the Electoral College has yet to confirm a president for January 2017, and while it’s possible that the Electoral College on December 19 will not pick Trump, it strikes me as an outside chance that the Electoral College will deny Trump the victory. Most people tend to fall in line rather than do the right thing, even if the right thing is staring them right in the face.)

To win election and save party, super-delegates should pick Bernie Sanders*

*But they won’t, so they’re going to lose the November election, and the party as it exists today is doomed.

Associated Press photo

Recently leaked e-mails prove that among other things, the Billarybots within the Democratic National Committee cynically discussed emphasizing Bernie Sanders’ religious beliefs or lack thereof in order to harm his campaign and to help Billary Clinton’s, and “neutral” DNC head Debbie Wasserman Schultz flat-out wrote about Bernie Sanders in an e-mail, “He isn’t going to be president.” If Democrat in name only Billary Clinton still actually emerges as the party’s presidential nominee this week, know that she did not do so cleanly, fairly and squarely, but that she did it dirtily and corruptly — and that we now have thousands of pages of physical evidence of this fact. (Above, thousands of supporters of Bernie Sanders protest in Philadelphia today, ahead of this week’s coming Democratic National Convention. I fully share their sentiment about the Democratic National Committee.)

The Democratic Party hacks thought that after the train wreck on steroids that was the Repugnican National Convention of last week, their convention this coming week would be, by comparison, flawless.

They were wrong.

A recent WikiLeaks dump of thousands of hacked Democratic National Committee e-mails shows that top officials and staffers within the DNC, as we knew all along, did their best to help Billary Clinton and to stymie Bernie Sanders.

The wronged Sanders, rightfully, has been quick to jump on this. Reports Yahoo! News today:

Bernie Sanders said [today] that the leak of Democratic National Committee e-mails that show its staffers plotting against him proves Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz should resign.

Shortly after the interview aired, CNN reported that Wasserman Schultz will no longer serve as chair of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, which begins [tomorrow]. According to CNN, she’ll be replaced at the convention by Ohio Rep. Marcia Fudge.

On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Sanders said the e-mail leak proved once and for all that Wasserman Schultz was unfit to lead the committee.

“I don’t think she is qualified to be the chair of the DNC,” the Vermont senator said on CNN’s “State of the Union” [today]. “Not only for these awful e-mails — which revealed the prejudice of the DNC — but also because we need a party that reaches out to working people and young people, and I don’t think her leadership style is doing that.”

“I think she should resign, period,” Sanders said on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” [today].

“I think I told you a long time ago that the DNC was not running a fair operation, that they were supporting Secretary Clinton,” he continued. “So what I suggested to be true six months ago turns out, in fact, to be true. I’m not shocked. But I am disappointed. And that is the way it is.” …

Yes, it goes without saying that Debbie Wasserman Schultz needs to put her slimy tail between her slimy legs and slither away under a rock somewhere already. (In one e-mail, the “neutral” Wasserman Schultz wrote of Bernie: “He isn’t going to be president.”)

But it’s much larger than that one lying, corrupt slimebag. Wasserman Schultz’s slimy head on a silver fucking platter is a great thing, but in and of itself it does nothing to reverse the pervasive corruption within the Billary-controlled Democratic Party, which stopped being a populist, progressive party and instead became a Clintonesque center-right, corporate party decades ago.

If you want to kill the Clinton Beast, you don’t just chop off one of its innumerable slimy tentacles; you have to drive a huge motherfucking stake through its cold, cold, slimy heart.

If the Democratic Party super-delegates were people of integrity instead of worthless party hacks, this coming week at the convention they would throw this thing to Bernie Sanders.

I mean that.

Hell, fuck even integrity; the question becomes whether or not the super-delegates want to nominate the candidate who has the best chance of winning the White House in November, which is supposed to be the No. 1 function of the convention. If the super-delegates have no conscience — and most of them don’t — then the least that they could do is their main job of picking the most likely winner. 

The fact that the widely despised Billary Clinton (56 percent unfavorable rating and only 40 percent favorable rating nationwide) continues to drop in the polls against Donald Trump (Real Clear Politics’ average of recent nationwide polls has her at only 1.9 percent ahead of Trump in a two-way race and only 2.9 percent ahead of Trump in a four-way race), coupled with the physical evidence that of course the DNC did not remain neutral but anti-democratically did its best to handicap Bernie and to boost Billary, gives the super-delegates (who may vote however they please) not only cause, but compelling reason to vote for Bernie Sanders (whose nationwide favorability rating is at 53 percent).

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t expect this to happen. Above I wrote “If the Democratic Party super-delegates were people of integrity instead of worthless party hacks…”

Of the DNC e-mail dump, perhaps this e-mail exchange (which, per ABC News, occurred in early May) has pissed me off the most. Reports The New York Times:

… “It might may [sic] no difference, but for KY and WVA can we get someone to ask his [Bernie Sanders’] belief[?] Does he believe in a God[?]” wrote [the apparently fairly illiterate] Brad Marshall, the chief financial officer of the committee. “He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points[‘] difference with my peeps.” [Politico reports that Marshall immediately went on in his e-mail: “My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.” Why The New York Times didn’t report that lovely sentence and sentiment I’m not certain.]

Marshall added in a second e-mail: “It’s these [sic] Jesus thing.” [Amy Dacey, the DNC’s chief executive officer] wrote back, in capital letters: “AMEN.”

Marshall did not respond on Friday to an e-mail asking for comment. But The Intercept, a news website, quoted Marshall as saying: “I do not recall this. I can say it would not have been Sanders. It would probably be about a surrogate.” …

Give me a fucking break. This Brad Marshall prick was not talking about Bernie Sanders? OK, so if he was talking about a Sanders surrogate (but he was not; he is a corrupt, fucking liar who, like Wasserman Schultz and many others within the DNC, needs to resign or to be removed), then he needs to tell us, right now, exactly which Sanders surrogate he was writing about.

For the record, as I have indicated before, it is my impression of Bernie Sanders that although he is ethnically Jewish, he is agnostic to atheist (or, at least, secular). No truly intelligent person is not somewhere on the agnostic-to-atheist spectrum, and the only constitutionally and democratically sound way to govern is to do so secularly, not theocratically.

And, as I’ve written before, we in the United States of America have freedom of religion and freedom from religion, and there is not supposed to be a religious test put on the presidency.

And many if not even most of the millions of people who voted for Bernie in the Democratic Party primary elections and caucuses (including yours truly) are somewhere on the agnostic-to-atheist spectrum, so very apparently Bernie Sanders’ religious beliefs, if any, have not posed a problem for them/us.

But to bring up “[the] Jesus thing” when talking about an at-least-ethnically Jewish person — that’s so classy and so not anti-Semitic or anything, and look at how shamelessly cynically the Billarybots within the DNC were willing, ready and able to exploit religion — the “Jesus thing” — for their own political gain (and for Billary’s, of course).

And, of course, with e-mails plotting to exploit Bernie Sanders’ not being a Jeebus-lovin’ Christian, you would think that these were members of the Repugnican National Committee plotting against Bernie, not members of the Democratic National Committee. With “friends” like these, who the fuck needs enemies?

Nothing is sacred to the slimy weasels that have overtaken the Democratic National Committee. Probably mostly agnostics to atheists themselves, they’ll nonetheless gladly exploit the “Jesus thing” to try to help Billary (who probably actually is agnostic to atheist herself) and harm Bernie.

It’s long past due to clean house from top to bottom, every square fucking inch of it, and, again, merely chopping off the one slimy tentacle that is Debbie Wasserman Schultz won’t cut it.

In the wake of the rather copious physical evidence that the Democratic National Committee did everything in its power to help Billary and to harm Bernie, I already have switched my voter registration from the Democratic Party to the Green Party.

I encourage you to leave the Democratic Party, too, if you are registered with it. (I had registered with the Democratic Party only to be able to vote for Bernie in California’s presidential primary on June 7.)

The Democratic Party as it exists today does not deserve the support of those of us who are left of center, and until and unless we deprive it of our support, it will continue to accept our money and our votes while only betraying us time and time and time and time and time again.

If Bernie Sanders now wants to, say, run with the Green Party’s Jill Stein, as she has offered him, I am perfectly fine with that.

I rather doubt that he will, but given the fact that the Democratic National Committee did not run anything remotely resembling a fair presidential contest, but, in fact, quite actively fucked over Bernie Sanders — and, by extension, his millions of supporters (including yours truly) — it is well within Bernie’s moral rights to do whatever the hell he wants to do now.

Bernie, after all, didn’t, so to speak, void any contractual agreement by acting in bad faith; the DNC did that, and it did it big-time.

P.S. Here is the link on WikiLeaks to prick Brad Marshall’s e-mail plotting attacks on Bernie Sanders’ religious beliefs (or lack thereof):

https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/7643

The e-mail is professionally titled “No shit.”

Will Queen Billary’s tainted victory carry her in November’s election?

Maring Photography/Getty/Contour photo

Multi-millionaire Billary Clinton, photographed above at the January 2005 wedding of fellow elitists Donald and Melania Trump, apparently believes that now we commoners will ignore her Repugnican-Lite/Democrat-in-name-only record and policy positions — and her scandalousness — and instead focus exclusively on How evil Donald Trump is! We shall see how that “plan” works out for her.

Progressive writer Glenn Greenwald, whose writing on Salon.com I still miss but who still writes via his newish website The Intercept, summed up this past week’s Democratic establishment coup nicely (all links are Greenwald’s and all emphases in bold are mine):

Last night [Monday night], the Associated Press — on a day when nobody voted — surprised everyone by abruptly declaring the Democratic Party primary over and Hillary Clinton the victor. The decree, issued the night before the California primary in which polls show[ed] Clinton and Bernie Sanders in a very close race, was based on the media organization’s survey of “super-delegates”: the Democratic Party’s 720 insiders, corporate donors, and officials whose votes for the presidential nominee count the same as the actually elected [pledged] delegates.

AP claims that super-delegates who had not previously announced their intentions privately told AP reporters that they intend to vote for Clinton, bringing her over the threshold. AP is concealing the identity of the decisive super-delegates who said this.

Although the Sanders campaign rejected the validity of AP’s declaration — on the ground that the super-delegates do not vote until the convention and he intends to try to persuade them to vote for him — most major media outlets followed the projection and declared Clinton the winner.

This is the perfect symbolic ending to the Democratic Party primary: The nomination is consecrated by a media organization, on a day when nobody voted, based on secret discussions with anonymous establishment insiders and donors whose identities the media organization — incredibly — conceals.

The decisive edifice of super-delegates is itself anti-democratic and inherently corrupt: designed to prevent actual voters from making choices that the party establishment dislikes. But for a party run by insiders and funded by corporate interests, it’s only fitting that its nomination process ends with such an ignominious, awkward, and undemocratic sputter.

None of this is to deny that Hillary Clinton — as was always the case from the start — is highly likely to be the legitimately chosen winner of this process. It’s true that the party’s governing rules are deliberately undemocratic; [that] unfair and even corrupt decisions were repeatedly made by party officials to benefit Clinton; and [that] the ostensibly neutral Democratic National Committee (led by the incomparably heinous Debbie Wasserman Schultz) constantly put not just its thumb but its entire body on the scale to ensure she won.

But it’s also true that under the long-standing rules of the party, more people who voted preferred Clinton as their nominee over Sanders. Independent of super-delegates, she just got more votes. There’s no denying that.

And just as was true in 2008 with Obama’s nomination, it should be noted that standing alone — i.e., without regard to the merits of the candidate — Clinton’s nomination is an important and positive milestone.

Americans, being Americans, will almost certainly overstate its world significance and wallow in excessive self-congratulations: Many countries on the planet have elected women as their leaders, including many whose close family member had not previously served as president. [Way too diplomatic there, Glenn!]

Nonetheless, the U.S. presidency still occupies an extremely influential political and cultural position in the world. Particularly for a country with such an oppressive history on race and gender, the election of the first African-American president and nomination of the first female presidential candidate of a major party is significant in shaping how people all over the world, especially children, view their own and other people’s potential and possibilities.

But that’s all the more reason to lament this dreary conclusion. [Indeed. Billary Clinton being the very first female major-party presidential candidate is fucking depressing.]

That the Democratic Party nominating process is declared to be over in such an uninspiring, secretive, and elite-driven manner is perfectly symbolic of what the party, and its likely nominee, actually is. The one positive aspect, though significant, is symbolic, while the actual substance — rallying behind a Wall Street-funded, status quo-perpetuating, multi-millionaire militarist — is grim in the extreme. The Democratic Party got exactly the ending it deserved.

The AP had, I suppose, the First-Amendment right to pull the bullshit that it did on Monday, but in wanting to be first — the corporately owned and controlled Billary’s coronation was going to be announced by the corporately owned and controlled “news” media the next day anyway — the AP, at the minimum, acted irresponsibly.

There was no reason to wait until after California, New Jersey and the other states had voted on Tuesday for the corporately owned and controlled “news” media to prematurely declare Billary the winner (she can’t get the actual votes of the super-delegates until the end of July, so to say that she already has won the nomination is patently untrue).

The AP beat everyone else to the punch, true, but in so doing it damaged its respectability and its reputation. I hope that the assholes of the AP won’t find it to have been worth it to have flushed journalistic ethics down the toilet.

The AP not only acted journalistically and civically irresponsibly on its own, but the AP knowingly fully enabled the rest of the “news” media to do so, cravenly and slimily claiming that Hey, we’re only quoting the AP! (such as with the screenshot of The New York Times that Greenwald included in his piece).

The AP’s premature coronation of Billary is an excellent case in how members of the establishment and the establishment media work together to advance their mutual interests against us commoners.

The AP is not a corporation, but a nonprofit, but it’s a nonprofit that functions within a corporate atmosphere (first and foremost among other things, it is primarily corporate media outlets that pay for its content and thus expect the AP’s content to be within well-understood if not explicitly stated political parameters), and these days many if not most nonprofits act just like corporations, if for no other reason than that capitalism is our national religion and that corporatism permeates virtually everything within our culture.

Like Greenwald does, I recognize that from Day One, Billary likely was going to emerge as the nominee. As Greenwald wrote, yes, Billary ultimately garnered more votes than Bernie did, but what does that mean in light of the fact that it wasn’t just a plethora of thumbs on the scales, but it was body-slams on the scale, every step of the way?

There is overt, big cheating and then there is Cheating Lite: There were thousands of decisions by thousands of Clintonista sycophants throughout all 50 states who were in positions to make decisions (big, medium and small) regarding the primary elections, caucuses, delegate allocations, party rules, etc., and at thousands of junctures their decisions benefited Billary. And the super-delegates, too, of course, who, as Bernie has pointed out, had already declared their allegiance to Billary even before the first primary election or caucus had even taken place.

Even though winning California, even by a large margin, probably wouldn’t have been enough for Bernie to emerge as the victor, it still would have enabled him to go into the convention with more political capital, and so the Democratic establishment closed ranks in order to ensure that even that wouldn’t happen.

In his piece Greenwald also comments on how we Americans are patting ourselves on the back for finally having our first female presumptuous presidential candidate of the Coke Party or the Pepsi Party, and he notes that many other nations already have had female leaders.

Hell, naming just one, the odious wingnut Margaret Thatcher, prime minister of the United Kingdom during the Reagan era, is enough to demonstrate that (1) the United States finally having a female president (whenever that actually happens) is, in the big picture, no big fucking deal, and that (2) merely being a woman doesn’t make one a good (an ethical, a compassionate, a competent, etc.) leader.

When the first female U.S. president does finally come, it will be fairly anti-climactic, even for the femi-Nazis who, incorrectly feeling somehow especially empowered, will be ready to castrate every male within sight when it does.*

It’s funny, because as a male supporter of Bernie Sanders I have been branded as a “Bernie bro” by the ironically sexist Billarybots/femi-Nazis, even though I’m gay and even though I voted for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein in November 2012, while the vast majority of the Billarybots/femi-Nazis voted for DINO President Hopey-Changey’s re-election in November 2012.

Yes, even though to the Billarybots/femi-Nazis I’m by definition “sexist” for having been born with a penis and testicles (and for not loathing myself because of that), I already have voted for a woman for president.

True, I knew that Jill Stein wouldn’t and couldn’t win the presidency in 2012, but the rise of the self-serving, center-right, sellout Billary Clinton demonstrates more than amply that the mere possession of the XX chromosomes is all that fucking matters, so guess what, Billarybot bitches? I voted for a woman for president before any of you sorry pieces of shit ever will! Ha! In your faces!

And come this November, there is a very good chance that I’ll vote for a female president again — no, absolutely not for Billary, but for Jill Stein again.

I voted for President Hopey-Changey in 2008, but once it became crystal clear even fairly early into his first term that we progressives had been punk’d again, that we’d elected a DINO who only had used us progressives to get into the White House, there was no way in hell that I could vote for President Hopey-Changey again, so in 2012 I voted my conscience and Stein won my vote. That she is a woman and women have been sorely underrepresented throughout our nation’s history was a bonus, but I didn’t vote for her because she’s a woman, but because she’s a progressive.

Elizabeth Warren’s recent belated endorsement of Billary — Warren was the last female Democratic U.S. senator to endorse Billary, which is, I’m sure, telling as to how Warren really feels about Billary, and, along with President Hopey-Changey and Veep Joe, Warren waited until all 50 states had voted before she finally endorsed Billary — means less than nothing to me.

As I’ve written before, even if Billary were to make Warren her running mate (which, per Politico, is unlikely to happen, given the believable report that Billary hates the-late-to-endorse-her Warren’s guts), that wouldn’t be enough to induce me to vote for Billary, as amusing as it is that Team Billary condescendingly and patronizingly believes that we progressives are that fucking stupid (perhaps some to even many of us are, but not all of us are).

My No. 1 problem with a Billary-Warren ticket is that Repugnican Lite Billary Fucking Clinton is anywhere on the ticket. If I want to vote for a Repugnican, I will. But I don’t fucking want to, so I won’t.

And, as I’ve noted before, as vice president, Elizabeth Warren would be completely neutralized within the Clinton 2.0 White House; Bill Clinton would be the de facto vice president (if not the de facto president).

I’m fine with two women on the ticket, and I’d be excited about a two-woman ticket, but only if both of them were actual Democrats — that is, actual progressives.

In the meantime, I agree wholeheartedly with Matt Taibbi’s take on what the Democratic Party will do now: more of the same, i.e., nothing. He writes (link is Taibbi’s and emphases in bold are mine):

… This was no ordinary primary race, not a contest between warring factions within the party establishment, á la Obama-Clinton in ’08 or even Gore-Bradley in ’00. This was a barely quelled revolt that ought to have sent shock waves up and down the party, especially since the Vote of No Confidence overwhelmingly came from the next generation of voters. Yet editorialists mostly drew the opposite conclusion.

The classic example was James Hohmann’s piece in the Washington Post, titled, “Primary wins show Hillary Clinton needs the left less than pro-Sanders liberals think.”

Hohmann’s thesis was that the “scope and scale” of Clinton’s wins Tuesday night meant mainstream Democrats could now safely return to their traditional We won, screw you posture of “minor concessions” toward the “liberal base.”

Hohmann focused on the fact that with Bernie out of the way, Hillary now had a path to victory that would involve focusing on Trump’s negatives. Such a strategy won’t require much if any acquiescence toward the huge masses of Democratic voters who just tried to derail her candidacy. And not only is the primary scare over, but Clinton and the centrist Democrats in general are in better shape than ever. …

Indeed, that’s how the establishment Dems no doubt are viewing this: “the primary scare” is over, so let’s get back to the status quo. That already happened on Monday, in fact, when the establishmentarian AP obediently declared that the status quo once again was safe.

Taibbi continues:

… If they had any brains, Beltway Dems and their clucky sycophants … would not be celebrating this week. They ought to be horrified to their marrow that the all-powerful Democratic Party ended up having to dig in for a furious rally to stave off a quirky Vermont socialist almost completely lacking big-dollar donors or institutional support. …

But to read the papers in the last two days is to imagine that we didn’t just spend a year witnessing the growth of a massive grassroots movement fueled by loathing of the party establishment, with some correspondingly severe numerical contractions in the turnout department (though she won, for instance, Clinton received 30 percent fewer votes in California this year versus 2008, and 13 percent fewer in New Jersey). …

Democratic voters tried to express [their] frustrations through the Sanders campaign, but the party leaders have been and probably will continue to be too dense to listen. Instead, they’ll convince themselves that, as Hohmann’s Post article put it, Hillary’s latest victories mean any “pressure” they might have felt to change has now been “ameliorated.”

The maddening thing about the Democrats is that they refuse to see how easy they could have it. If the party threw its weight behind a truly populist platform, if it stood behind unions and prosecuted Wall Street criminals and stopped taking giant gobs of cash from every crooked transnational bank and job-exporting manufacturer in the world, they would win every election season in a landslide.

This is especially the case now that the Republican Party has collapsed under the weight of its own nativist lunacy. It’s exactly the moment when the Democrats should feel free to become a real party of ordinary working people.

But they won’t do that, because they don’t see what just happened this year as a message rising up from millions of voters. …

Yup.

And let’s face it: Most of Billary Clinton’s supporters are baby boomers. Billary and her boomer cohort’s primary concern is to keep the sick and twisted status quo going for as long as possible, because the status quo has been very, very good for them. What happens to the generations that follow them never has been their concern; for them it’s always been about what they can get for themselves while they still can.

Boomer Billary has eked out a victory for now, but it wasn’t a clean victory — nothing about the Clintons is clean — and we’ll see how she fares in November, without the support of me and millions of other voters whom the Democratic Party has alienated over these past many months, believing that our support is either inevitable or at least expendable.

—

*My definition of “femi-Nazi,” by the way, is Wikipedia’s first definition: “a term used pejoratively to describe either feminists who are perceived as extreme or radical, women who are perceived as seeking superiority over men, rather than equality, or in some cases, to describe all feminists.”

While it was Rush Limbaugh, unfortunately, who coined the term (or who at least brought it into prominence), I don’t subscribe to a definition of the term that includes all feminists. (Indeed, to me, a femi-Nazi by definition isn’t an actual feminist at all.) I understand Limbaugh’s definition of the term he coined to include all feminists.

My definition of the term “femi-Nazi” is something like this: “a woman who calls herself a feminist but who actually is just a rank misandrist who isn’t interested in equality of the sexes, but who wants women to dominate men, as ‘justified’ revenge for the wrongs done to women by men in the past.”

The term “misandrist” pretty much captures all of that, but “femi-Nazi” is a lot more fun, and while I see the term written as “feminazi” on the Internet, I’ll stick with my own “femi-Nazi” rendition of term.

My definition of a “feminist,” by the way, is something like this: “a woman (or a man!) who believes in the sociopolitical equality of the sexes, and who opposes the mistreatment of or the discrimination against or the preferential treatment of anyone based primarily or solely upon his or her sex.”

(Yes, preferential treatment of someone based on his or her sex, race, age, sexual orientation, religion, etc., is just the other side of the discrimination coin. That you’re benefiting someone, that is, discriminating for someone instead of discriminating against someone, doesn’t make it any better, because you’re just engaging in “good” discrimination, which is still engaging in discrimination, which you can’t say is OK only when it benefits you or those whom you wish it to benefit.)

A lot of the Billarybots don’t fit my definition of “feminist” above. This “Bernie bro,” however, considers himself to be a feminist. Just not a femi-Nazi.

On minimum wage alone, Billary Clinton deserves to lose NY and CA

Today the states of California and New York, the most populous and the fourth-most-populous states respectively, enacted legislation to raise, gradually, their minimum wage to $15 an hour, the highest minimum wage in the nation.

(The federal minimum wage is a paltry $7.25 an hour. As of today, 39 states’ minimum wage is less than $9 an hour, and 11 states’ minimum wage ranges from $9 to $10; and 21 states’ minimum wage is $7.25 or even less.)

I am glad — and proud — to be a Californian!

Of course business owners and those who love them — cold-hearted, greedy, treasonously selfish motherfuckers who never would be remotely content to live on as little as $15 an hour themselves — have cried DOOM! for the two states’ economies because of their minimum-wage increases to $15.

Bullshit. If you truly cannot pay your employees a livable wage, then your business isn’t viable — and it should go under. (Of course, most business owners well can afford to pay their workers significantly more; they just lie that they cannot so that they can keep buying those expensive cars and yachts and other toys and bigger and bigger mansions and otherwise hoard our nation’s wealth while income inequality only continues to worsen.)

The Democratic governors of both populous blue states, Jerry Brown and Andrew Cuomo, today signed the $15-an-hour-minimum-wage pieces of legislation for their states.

Interestingly, an Associated Press news story today notes that “[Billary] Clinton joined … Cuomo as he signed the law that will gradually boost that state’s pay rate and she predicted the [$15-an-hour-minimum-wage] movement will ‘sweep our country.'”

Yet there is no mention at all in the AP news story that Queen Billary all along in her latest campaign for the White House has supported only a $12-an-hour federal minimum wage, whereas Bernie Sanders all along has supported a $15-an-hour federal minimum wage.

Yet here is Billary appearing with Cuomo in New York City today, taking credit by association for New York’s minimum wage increase to $15 an hour, claiming “victory for New York families”:

New York Daily News photo

Fucking shameless. Way beyond shameless.

But it’s how Billary operates: She jumps on board only after others already have done the hard work — and pretends that she was on board all along.

Billary leads from behind, whereas Bernie Sanders always proves to have been ahead of the curve.

Leaders lead the herd. They don’t follow the herd.

Billary deserves to lose the New York primary on April 19 and the California primary on June 7, on this issue and her craven, self-serving, flip-flopping posturing on it alone.

(Billary is worth around $25 million, by the way, whereas Bernie is worth around $500,000. I’d love to see Her Highness Billary be forced to live on $12 an hour! No doubt it’s because of her fat-cat campaign contributors that she has supported no more than $12 an hour for us commoners. She must do their bidding — if she wants the millionaires’ and billionaires’ money to continue to flow to her and her family and her cronies.)

Thankfully, Real Clear Politics right now has Billary at only 11 percent ahead of Bernie in New York and only 9 percent ahead of him in California (The Huffington Post right now similarly has Billary at 10.4 percent ahead of Bernie in New York and 8.8 percent ahead of him in California), and Bernie has enough time to catch up to and overtake Billary in both states.

Of course Billary could lose both California and New York to Bernie and still win the presidential nomination by garnering more delegates than he, but the optics of Billary Clinton losing the two most populous blue states would be incredible.

It would demonstrate further how weak she is within her own fucking party, and how weak she would be going into the White House — should she actually manage to win it with her favorability ratings (among all American voters, not just Democratic Party hacks) that are upside down — by double digits.

And let’s not get it twisted: Billary Clinton inherently is a weak “Democratic” presidential candidate because she is craven and corrupt. Let’s not blame Bernie Sanders for her remarkable shortcomings and for her wrongdoings; she has harmed herself, and neither she nor her Billarybots correctly can blame Bernie or anyone else for weakening or harming her second campaign for the nation’s highest elected office.

We should thank Bernie Sanders for shining the spotlight on the cockroach that is Billary Clinton, and fuck us if we choose to ignore what we see in that spotlight, believing that willful ignorance is bliss; the consequences of our own such fucktardation would be entirely on us.

Update/possible correction (April 5, 2016): The Associated Press news story that I linked to above, in its last paragraph, now states:

Sanders has made the $15 wage a foundation block of his candidacy, while Clinton backs Senate legislation that would enact a federal minimum wage of $12 an hour, with the ability of individual cities and states to set a higher threshold.

The AP routinely updates/revises its news stories, and so I’m not sure whether I missed that last paragraph (I rather doubt that I did, but it’s not impossible that I did) or whether AP updated the news story after I first linked to it.

Mittens insults Poles by telling Polak joke

Reuters photo

Mittens Romney, flanked by wife Ann, tells a Polish woman a Polak joke today in Gdansk, Poland, swiftly bringing the wrath of the Polish press upon him during his visit to Poland. Undeterred by the negative press, Mittens publicly guffawed, “How many Polaks does it take to bring down my presidential campaign?” Ann steadfastly defended her husband, telling the Poles, “You people don’t know a great leader when you see one!”

OK, so I made all of that up*, but fuck, it’s what you’d expect on the last leg of Repugnican Tea Party presidential wannabe Mittens Romney’s Rainbow Tour (Poland), which has been as disastrous for him as Eva Peron’s was for her.

First, Mittens insulted the Brits by proclaiming that their preparations for the Olympics were insufficient.

Then, in Israel, his second stop on his world tour, Mittens yesterday first declared that Jerusalem, not Tel Aviv, is the true capital of Israel, which apparently comes from Mittens’ own “Christo”fascism and/or his wanting to please the Armageddon-minded “Christo”fascists — from the theocratic mindset, and not from political reality or from sanity or from fairness.

What the fuck?

As president, would Mittens proclaim that the capital of the United States actually is Salt Lake City?

Then, also in Israel, according to The Associated Press,

Romney’s latest trouble stemmed from a speech he gave to Jewish donors in which he suggested that their culture was part of what has allowed them to be more economically successful than the Palestinians.

Kind words for Israel are standard for many American politicians, but Palestinian leaders suggested his specific comments were racist and out of touch with the realities of the Middle East.

Mittens’ pronouncement of the Israelis’ supposed cultural superiority understandably pissed off the Palestinians, whom Romney apparently was calling lazy or untalented or unmotivated or some combination of these things, but shouldn’t it have pissed off Israelis and other Jews, too? I mean, isn’t the economically successful Jew a fairly offensive stereotype?

But if we’re to discuss it seriously, well, it certainly helps Israel that Israel long has been a big recipient of U.S. foreign aid. Notes Wikipedia: “Since 1985, [the U.S. government] has provided nearly $3 billion in grants annually to Israel, with Israel being the largest annual recipient of American aid from 1976 to 2004 and the largest cumulative recipient of aid since World War II.” (Emphasis mine.)

So it’s not that Israel has received more $$$ from the U.S. taxpayers than has any other nation since World War II.

No.

It’s the Israelis’ culture, you see, that has made them so much more successful than are the Palestinians, whose lands the Israelis occupy, and whom the Israelis treat like the white South Africans treated the natives under apartheid.

Silly Adolf Hitler had it upside down, you see. It’s the Israelis who are the master race.

Politicians from both the corporately owned and controlled Coke Party and the Pepsi Party (a.k.a. the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, or the Democratic Party and the Republican Party — I can’t tell the difference between the two) routinely kiss the asses of the Israel-firsters, who have the powerful Israel-first lobbying organization AIPAC to do their bidding, whereas the typical American has no lobbyists working for him or her.

The Israel-firsters are those who proclaim that the U.S. government should continue to staunchly lopsidedly support Israel, regardless of the costs to the people of the United States (such as blowback for such lopsided support for Israel, such as 9/11, and such as how a lot of our own fucking tax dollars sent to Israel sure the fuck could be used here at home).

The craven politicians of the partisan duopoly want the campaign contributions from the Israel-firsters and they don’t want to be accused by the Israel-firsters of being anti-semitic for suggesting that it’s probably actually not in the best interests of the average American for the U.S. government to so blatantly show so much fucking favoritism to Israel over the other nations of the Middle East, and that do so does not make the average American safer, but makes the average American much less safe by further destabilizing the region and by increasing the likelihood of retaliatory anti-American terrorist attacks.

However, there is an awful fucking lot of money for oneself to be made by maintaining the status quo. Not only do the corrupt politicians continue to get their campaign contributions from the Israel-firsters, but these bought-and-paid-for politicians then rubber-stamp the U.S.-taxpayer-funded military invasions, like the Vietraq War, that benefit Big Oil (and other corporations, like Dick Cheney’s war-profiteering Halliburton), and the traitors who comprise the military-industrial complex get to keep stealing trillions of our tax dollars by making sure that we keep making more enemies in the Middle East and elsewhere, which then become “national security threats.”

It’s a sweet gig, if you can get it, to create a problem and then to take money for “solving” the problem that you created, to perpetually perpetrate the problem, and then to perpetually claim that you need perpetual funding to “solve” the perpetual problem that wouldn’t be perpetual if you weren’t perpetually perpetrating it.

I digress, but this is what Mittens Romney clearly promises us: More of the same. He now talks about war with Iran.

With the last Repugnican president, we were told that war with Iraq was necessary. Now, here is Mittens telling us that war with Iran is necessary.

Look how much the average American benefitted from the Vietraq War! Yes, indeed, the spoils of war trickle down, don’t they?

Except that they don’t. Since the unelected, treasonous Bush regime launched the illegal, immoral, unprovoked and unjust Vietraq War in 2003, the average American has gotten poorer and the filthy rich have gotten filthier.

The average American sure the fuck foots the bill for the wars for our plutocratic overlords’ profiteering, but the average American’s own economic situation only worsens — not to mention the number of lives lost to the plutocrats’ treasonous wars for their own personal fortunes.

I, for one, don’t feel like dying in a wholly preventable nuclear World War III because of Mittens Romney’s own lunatic “Christo”fascist beliefs and/or because of his desire to appeal to the “Christo”fascists lunatics’ belief that Israel is critical to bringing about “the end times,” which they want to do.

(This interesting paper on this topic notes:

Pentecostalists have inherited and modernized the fundamentalist end-time system that believes the end of the world will come with the establishment of Israel as a geographical entity, with borders very similar to what was outlined in the Bible, the turn of the Jews from exile, and Armageddon – a final war between Israel and all its enemies.)

By far, Mittens’ visit to Israel has been the scariest stop of his Rainbow Tour. When he rattles the saber against Iran, I believe that he’ll use it.

After all, treasonous plutocrats like Mittens Romney never pay the costs of the wars that they begin.

We do.

P.S. Speaking of King Mittens and Queen Ann, I saw this Photoshop job on Joe. My. God. today and busted up. (You need to know the story of poor Seamus Romney to understand the joke, though.)

—

*Well, the news photo actually was taken in Gdansk today. That part is true.

To protect and to serve — the 1 percent

Associated Press photo

Treasonous taxpayer-funded thugs in Seattle — a.k.a. the cops — recently pepper-sprayed this tiny 84-year-old woman in the face.* Cops don’t deserve non-violence from the people they are paid to protect and to serve but instead brutalize. They deserve to be brutalized right back. It’s called karma.

If it wasn’t clear by now, it sure the hell is now: Law enforcement in the United States of America has been corrupted to serve the interests of the rich and the super-rich, and no longer serves the interests of the vast majority of the rest of us (the 99 percent, you might say).

Law enforcement has been bastardized from protecting and serving us, the people, to protecting and serving the 1 percent, to serving as the private security thugs for the rich and the super-rich. And to rub the fascistic salt in our wounds, we, the taxpayers (and the rich and the super-rich are tax evaders), pay for these thugs to oppress us for the rich and the super-rich.

(Similarly, trillions of our tax dollars go to their bogus wars for their war profiteering and their corporateering. The U.S. military also has been corrupted — it stopped being about national defense and started being about corporate expansion and bloated-beyond-belief, unnecessary military spending in the noble names of “national security” and “spreading democracy” and the like decades ago [and especially in the Middle East for at least the past decade].)

This is the deal: If you are part of the 1 percent, you most likely are a traitor to your fellow Americans, the 99 percent of the rest of us. You don’t become filthy rich because of hard work. You become filthy rich only by paying your workers much less than the value of their work — you get filthy rich off of others’ hard work — and by charging your customers much more than the value of the product or service that you provide (which, under capitalism, is just legalized thievery).

When you harm your fellow citizens in order to try to satiate your own insatiable fucking greed — such as by launching illegal, immoral, unjust and unprovoked wars on other nations for your war-profiteering and corporateering cronies based upon your bold-faced lies (that you later blame on “faulty intelligence”), or by being a Wall Street weasel knowingly bilking others out of their money for your own lust for obscene amounts of money, or by knowingly polluting the environment and contributing to global warming and medical conditions such as cancer — then you are a traitor.

There is nothing American about knowingly seriously harming other Americans for your own fucking selfish gain. If you commit treason, then you deserve to hang.

And if you support the 1 percent in their treason, such as being one of their thugs in law enforcement or in the U.S. military who fights their unjust battles against the people for their profits (including their war profiteering), then you are a traitor also.

Cops who brutalize people who peaceably are expressing their First Amendment rights deserve to be brutalized right back. There is no other way that bad, self-serving cops will learn that we, the people, vastly outnumber them and that they are accountable to us, and they don’t deserve that we, the victims of their treasonous violence, should turn the other cheek like a bunch of pussies.

Non-violence is bullshit. The 1 percent use violence against the 99 percent of us (at home and abroad) all the fucking time — only because the 1 percent are too pussified and too weak and too few to fight their own battles, they must recruit dipshits into the U.S. military and into law enforcement and brainwash these dipshits into believing that they really are doing anything more noble than serving the interests of the 1 percent.

The worst nightmare of the 1 percent that a good chunk of the 99 percent of us wake up and stop taking it.

You hear the traitors within the treasonous Repugnican Tea Party “leadership” in Washington talking about the specter of Americans turning against Americans — precisely because this is what they most fear: that we Americans whom they turned against long ago at long last will turn the table on their sorry, treasonous asses.

Class warfare? Real Americans (the vast majority of us) against “Americans” (the 1 percent and those who aid and abet their treason)? I say: Bring! It! On!

We’re long overdue for another civil war.

It probably is the only thing that will save what’s left of this nation.

—

*Reports The Associated Press:

Seattle — A downtown march and rally in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement turned briefly chaotic as police scattered a crowd of rowdy protesters — including a pregnant 19-year-old and an 84-year-old activist — with blasts of pepper spray.

Protest organizers denounced the use of force, saying that police indiscriminately sprayed the chemical irritant at peaceful protesters.

The Occupy Seattle movement released a written statement late Tuesday expressing support for “a 4-foot 10-inch, 84-year-old woman, a priest and a pregnant woman who as of this writing is still in the hospital.”

Dorli Rainey is an activist who has supported liberal causes in the Seattle area for decades. A photo showing Rainey being cared for by fellow activists in the immediate aftermath of the police incident appeared on news websites around the world.

Seattle police spokesman Jeff Kappel said he didn’t have specifics on the Rainey incident, but he said pepper spray is “is not age specific. No more dangerous to someone who is 10 or someone who is 80.”

He added, that if it were harmful, “we probably wouldn’t be using pepper spray if that was the case.” …

Pepper spray is no big deal? Then surely our treasonous cops won’t mind when we pepper-spray their treasonous asses right back!

Cry us a river, Barry!

AFP photo

President Hopey-Changey’s apparent response to Occupy Wall Street is that we should feel sorry for him and stick with him, even though he allied himself with the Wall Street weasels years ago.

Predictably, after having pissed and shat all over his base since January 2009, and seeing that in response to his utter presidential ineffectiveness the Occupy Wall Street movement has grown long, long legs, President Hopey-Changey is acting contrite these days. (Contrite for him, anyway.)

Obama has whined to ABC News: “I guarantee it’s going to be a close election because the economy is not where it wants to be, and even though I believe all the choices we’ve made have been the right ones, we’re still going through difficult circumstances. That means people who may be sympathetic to my point of view still kind of feel like, yeah, but it still hasn’t gotten done yet.”

And it’s never going to get done. Not under Barack Obama.

It’s too late for Obama to change course. Against the advice of progressive economists like the Nobel-Prize-winning Paul Krugman, Obama early in his presidency allied himself with the Wall Street weasels, and there is no going back from that. And any actually progressive, substantial economic policy changes that he might enact now — but he would never do that — would still take many, many months, at the minimum, to improve the nation’s economy.

Obama had his chance to push through a progressive agenda in 2009 and 2010, when he had the nation’s good will and both houses of Congress controlled by his party — and when he got to decide what his national economic policy would be.

Obama blew it. Big time. And it’s too late now.

There are no do-overs for the U.S. presidency. You get one shot to get it right. And the rare alignment of the Oval Office and both houses of Congress being held by your party is an opportunity that you don’t fucking squander.

Barack Obama — who is arrogant, not audacious — has given us progressives absolutely no reason to believe that his second term would be a substantial improvement over his first.

So cocky is Obama that I surmise that he truly believes that despite his do-nothing presidency, he is so fucking charming that he is going to co-opt the Occupy Wall Street movement. We progressives have broken up with him, and because he is naught but a rock obstructing the stream, we are flowing around him — witness the Occupy Wall Street movement — but he refuses to acknowledge those facts.

Even if Obama’s current contrition were heartfelt — it isn’t; it’s purely political — it isn’t nearly enough. Obama’s displays of contrition don’t make up for the fact that over the past three years average Americans — 53 percent of whom voted for President Hopey-Changey — have continued to lose economic ground, not gain it, while the rich and the super-rich have been doing just fine.

The only kind of person I can see voting for Barack Obama in 2012 is the type of person who believes that his or her alcoholic, abusive mate is going to turn things around! Really this time! And that his or her alcoholic, abusive mate is the best that he or she can do, and that staying with his or her abusive, alcoholic mate is better than being alone.

The rest of us, who have some fucking self-respect, prefer our solitude over our continued abuse at the hands of the “Democratic” Party establishment elites, who, instead of actually doing anything for us, only offer us excuses for their ineffectiveness and more empty promises that they’ll do better in the future if only we continue to support them.

The spirit of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that of the person who finally has left his or her abusive partner. He or she doesn’t know what the future holds, but he or she knows that it has to be better than more of the fucking same.