Maine secretary of state bravely fires second salvo in war against fascism

Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows has done a favor to the United States by forcing the U.S. Supreme Court to soon demonstrate once again that when faced between choosing the plain language of the U.S. Constitution and putting a Repugnican in the White House, the corrupt, treasonous U.S. Supreme Court will choose putting the Repugnican in the White House over the plain language of the U.S. Constitution every fucking time.

The Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution reads, in part:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

The language could be clearer, but to me the key words of the amendment in the case of treasonous former “President” Pussygrabber and his attempted insurrection against the United States government of January 6, 2021, and his other felonious and treasonous attempts to remain in office after more than 7 million Americans voters had voted for Joe Biden over him in November 2020, are:

No person shall … hold any office, civil or military, under the United States … who, having previously taken an oath, as … an officer of the United States … to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.

Jesus fuck, Pussygrabber & Co. still give aid and comfort to the mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging criminals who perpetrated J6 when they refer to them as “political prisoners” and the like.

Meanwhile, it’s pathetic and sad that so many Americans claim to love their country so fucking much but are too ignorant of the workings of their own fucking government to understand the actual implications of Colorado and Maine having declared (Colorado via its state Supreme Court and Maine via its secretary of state) that the Fourteenth Amendment makes Pussygrabber ineligible to run for president ever again.

First off, Pussygrabber could be kicked off every blue state’s 2024 ballot and it wouldn’t change the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, since he couldn’t win a blue state anyway and since the Electoral College is a winner-takes-all system in which whichever presidential candidate who gets the most votes gets all of that state’s electoral votes, with the exceptions of only Maine and Nebraska, which divvy up their electoral votes by congressional district. Under the Electoral College, whichever candidate gets 270 or more electoral votes wins the presidency. (Nebraska and Maine, by the way, together have a total of only nine electoral votes.)

Only if the presidency were determined solely by the popular vote — as should be the case in a nation that calls itself a “democracy” (the antiquated, anti-democratic Electoral College, which put the loser of the popular vote into the White House in 2000 and in 2016, sorely needs to be abolished) — could it harm Pussygrabber to be removed from a blue state’s presidential ballot.

But moreover, no state’s Supreme Court or secretary of state is the last word on whether Pussygrabber may appear on that state’s ballot. Of course this will go to the United States Supreme Court, where the “justices,” one third of them imposed on us by Pussygrabber even though then-President Barack Obama treasonously was denied by traitor Yertle McConnell an appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court in his last year in office, will have to pause corruptly taking expensive gifts and perks from their far-right-wing sugar daddies long enough to have to actually decide if the plain language of the U.S. Constitution actually means what it plainly says it means.

And, of course, I expect the U.S. Supreme Court’s “originalists” and “strict constructionists” to rule that of course the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t mean what it plainly says when it comes to whether or not an insurrectionist, treasonous Repugnican presidential candidate may remain on the ballot.

This is why the corrupt, treasonous U.S. Supreme Court’s approval rating is at 36.4 percent, with 53.7 percent of Americans disapproving of it. With an approval rating that low, the current court’s long-term composition just might be in jeopardy (it should be in jeopardy, anyway; no corrupt, anti-democratic court should be allowed to continue to erode a democracy, as that is treason).

Still, just because we have a dysfunctional, treasonous U.S. Supreme Court that is bought and paid for right-wing interests and that never can be depended upon to actually uphold the U.S. Constitution and support democracy doesn’t mean that the rest of us can’t call shit like it is, such as Colorado and Maine have done.

I think it’s great that the U.S. Supreme Court now has to actually fucking do its basic fucking job of interpreting the plain fucking language of the U.S. Constitution.

I fully expect the Repugnican-controlled U.S. Supreme Court to rule in Pussygrabber’s favor on whether the Fourteenth Amendment against insurrectionists being allowed to hold any state or federal office pertains to him — and to thus hasten the end of this illegitimate court’s rule.

If our democracy survives, we will have to thank true patriots like Shenna Bellows and the justices of the Colorado Supreme Court who ruled correctly on whether the Fourteenth Amendment — you know, the rule of law — applies to would-be fascist dictator Pussygrabber.

Wake me up in January 2025

Getty Images news photo

Déjà fucking vu: Former “President” Pussygrabber and future President Joe Biden debate in October 2020. We most likely will see a repeat of this you-kids-get-off-my-damn-lawn bullshit in 2024.

Fivethirtyeight.com right now says that President Joe Biden’s average approval rating is only 42.4 percent — and that former “President” Pussygrabber’s is only 38.6 percent.

Yet it’s most likely that these two will face off again for the presidency in November 2024. WTF?

It gets worse. Reports The Associated Press:

Only about half of Democrats think President Joe Biden should run again in 2024, a poll shows, but a large majority say they’d be likely to support him if he became the nominee.

The poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that 26 percent of Americans overall want to see Biden run again — a slight recovery from the 22 percent who said that in January. Forty-seven percent of Democrats say they want him to run, also up slightly from only 37 percent who said that in January.

The ambivalence among Democratic voters comes as Biden is preparing to formally announce his 2024 reelection campaign as soon as [this] week, according to people briefed on the discussions. The president has been eyeing Tuesday, April 25 — four years to the day since he entered the 2020 race — although no final decisions have been made.

Despite the reluctance of many Democrats to see Biden run for another term, 78 percent of them say they approve of the job he’s doing as president. And a total of 81 percent of Democrats say they would at least probably support Biden in a general election if he is the nominee — 41 percent say they definitely would and 40 percent say they probably would.

Interviews with poll respondents suggest that the gap reflects concerns about Biden’s age, as well as a clamoring from a younger generation of Democrats who say they want leadership that reflects their demographic and their values. Biden, now 80, would be 82 on Election Day 2024 and 86 years old at the end of a second presidential term. He is the oldest president in history. …

It’s a strange time in American politics when only 47 percent of Democrats say they want the incumbent Democratic president to run for a second term — but around 81 percent of them say that if he is on the ballot in November 2024, they definitely or probably will vote for him anyway.

We, the people, have, methinks, finally given the fuck up, finally have been beaten down into full submission after having corporate-friendly “Democratic” candidates shoved down our throats by the DINO elite, from Bill Clinton in the early 1990s all the way to Joe Biden.

I’ve never supported Joe Biden — who belongs in memory care, not in the Oval Office — and I never will. Actual Democrat (that is, progressive) Bernie Sanders was screwed royally by the DINO establishment not only in 2016 but in 2020, and my memory is long.

In the 2024 Democratic presidential primary, thus far I’m supporting Marianne “Woo-Woo” Williamson.

I’m not saying that I agree with every word the woman has ever uttered and every deed she’s ever done — and I’m fully aware of how she blithely is ignored and even erased by mediocre (and often corrupt) people dutifully dismissively deeming her to be airy-fairy and seriously unserious — but her platform is closer to mine than Joe Biden’s ever was or evil will be (or even could be, given the constraints that are on corporate whores, who are most of our elected officials in our pay-to-play “democracy”).

And that’s how it’s supposed to be: You support the candidate whose platform, whose values and priorities, most closely match your own.

It never was supposed to be the case that you simply fold and accept whichever corporate whore du jour the party elite shove down your throat, as of course they know better than you ever possibly could.

So as long as she’s on my February 6, 2024, Democratic Party presidential primary ballot here in Nevada (as long as she hasn’t dropped out by then), I’ll vote for Marianne Williamson.

Realistically, the Democratic Party hacks will do everything in their power to make sure that Biden wins Nevada’s 2024 presidential primary election, but if she’s on my ballot, I’ll vote for Williamson nonetheless.

I won’t vote for Biden in the primary, in any event, even if it means voting for no one in the primary.

November 2024, however, could be dicier.

In November 2020, I lived in deep-blue California, where it was obvious that Biden would win the state and all of its electoral votes under our winner-takes-all Electoral College system.* Therefore, it was quite safe for me to vote for the Green Party presidential candidate instead of for Biden in November 2020; not at all was I helping Pussygrabber by not having voted for Biden in California, a state (and its electoral votes, more than any other state’s) that Biden always was going to win.

Now that I live in a swing state, however, come November 2024 there might be more pressure on me to vote for Biden to prevent his Repugnican opponent (I assume that it will be Pussygrabber, not the bumbling, unlikeable, socially retarded Ron DeFascist) from winning the White House.

I’ll cross that bridge if and when I get to it. I’ll examine the polling of my state closely, and if up to Election Day 2024 Biden is leading his Repugnican opponent (again, probably Pussygrabber) in the state substantially, I probably won’t vote for Biden in November 2024.**

If it’s close here in Nevada, however, and it really seems that my general-election vote might actually have an effect on preventing a second Pussygrabber “presidency,” then even I might, in the end, vote for Joe Biden.

I really hope that it doesn’t come to that; I hope that I never feel that I have to vote for Biden for the greater good.

P.S. To be clear, I expect that, as long as he still draws breath and at least can be propped up in a chair, Joe Biden will win re-election. Americans have become wholly politically unimaginative — as well as terrified of taking any political risks, which pretty much is the only thing that can explain why it would be Biden vs. Pussygrabber again in 2024.

And to be clear, yes, it is my opinion that of course a second Biden term would be preferable to any Repugnican winning the White House next year. But of course it doesn’t take much to be better than whoever the Repugnican presidential candidate is.

However, 2028 is just around the corner, and what then?

After another numbing four years under Biden, would the Repugnicans not be at an advantage in November 2028? It seems to me that by November 2028, the American electorate could be fairly starving for something new — maybe even to the point that fascism (such as that of Ron DeFascist) might look good (or at least acceptable).

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*A huge amount of Americans believe that the popular vote determines the presidency — which is why they’ll stupidly tell you that if you didn’t vote for the Democratic presidential candidate, then you helped the Repugnican presidential candidate, even though under the anti-democratic Electoral College, your vote for president effectively is fucking moot in the solidly red and solidly blue states, such as California, New York and Texas.

**Biden won Nevada in November 2020 by 2.4 percentage points. I believe that Pussygrabber will/would do worse in November 2024 than he did in 2020 in all of the swing states, including Nevada (and Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — these four states were the closest four in the 2020 presidential election).

Since Pussygrabber lost the November 2020 presidential election decisively, there not only was the treasonous domestic terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol by Pussygrabber’s brain-dead flying monkeys on January 6, 2021 — which the U.S. House of Representatives’ J6 committee reminded the nation about repeatedly over its several public hearings over several months — but Pussygrabber now faces numerous potential prosecutions.

Criminal indictments might be considered a great thing among Pussygrabber’s base of mouth-breathing knuckle draggers, but a clear majority of Americans who will vote for president in November 2024 do not want the treasonous mob boss back in the White House.

(Indeed, right now PredictIt.org has 47 cents on Biden and 33 cents on Pussygrabber in a Biden-Pussygrabber rematch. [And PredictIt.org also right now has Pussygrabber at 54 cents to Ron DeFascist at 29 cents in terms of which will be the Repugnican Party’s 2024 presidential nominee. Again, if DeFascist doesn’t totally politically self-destruct in the 2024 cycle, he might be a strong contender in 2028, especially after the voters are beyond sick and tired of Sleepy Joe Biden after eight long years.])

How the minority seized the U.S. Supreme Court (and maybe finally sparked the next U.S. civil war)

Five of the current nine U.S. Supreme Court “justices” were chosen by two “presidents” who had lost the popular vote. If it feels to you like the current Supreme Court doesn’t represent the majority of the American people, that’s because it doesn’t: five of the “justices” were picked by “presidents” whom the American people did not actually elect and who thus were illegitimate “presidents” — and President Barack Obama treasonously and anti-democratically was denied a pick altogether.

How did we get to this point today, the day that the U.S. Supreme Court, now solidly dominated — 6-3 — by right-wing nut jobs (actually, they’re fucking fascists; “nut jobs” sounds too innocuous), ruled (5-4) that each state may decide whether or not a woman may obtain an abortion after it was decided in 1973 by Roe vs. Wade that no state may entirely prohibit abortion?

How did the anti-choice minority view — about two-thirds of all Americans support Roe vs. Wade — prevail in this fight for a woman’s basic right to choose what goes on inside of her own fucking uterus?

Let’s go back to the “election” of George W. Bush as president in 2000.

The official popular vote count for the presidential election of 2000 was 50,456,002 votes for Repugnican Bush and 50,999,897 for Democrat Al Gore.

Gore won the popular vote by 543,895 votes, yet, because of the Electoral College — and because of the infamous intervention of the U.S Supreme Court in the determination of a presidential election outcome — Bush, the minority’s chosen candidate, nonetheless became “president.” The pick of the majority of the American voters simply did not matter.

On September 29, 2005, “President” Bush’s first pick to the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts, was confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

You might argue that yes, Bush “won” “re”-election in 2004 — the official popular vote count for that presidential election was 62,040,610 to 59,028,444 in Bush’s favor, a difference of 3,012,166 votes this time.

However, I’d argue that obviously had Bush not been installed as president when he’d lost the popular vote of 2000, of course he never could have been “re”-elected in 2004. Because Bush’s first presidential term was illegitimate — because he had lost the popular vote — I never accepted his second term as legitimate either, because his second term depended on the fruit of the poisonous tree from 2000.

Bush went on to get another right-wing U.S. Supreme Court “justice” confirmed — Samuel Alito, who authored today’s official decision to kill Roe vs. Wade — on January 3, 2006.

Fast forward to the next presidential election in which the loser of the popular vote still became “president”: In 2016, the official popular vote count was 65,853,514 for Democrat Billary Clinton to only 62,984,828 for Repugnican Pussygrabber; Pussygrabber lost even more bigly than did George W. Bush in 2000: he lost by 2,868,686 popular votes.

Yet the illegitimate “President” Pussygrabber would go on to nominate three U.S. Supreme Court justices in just his one (and what must be his only) term.

Former President Barack Obama, who won the popular vote in 2008 and in 2012, put only two justices (Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan) on the Supreme Court during his two terms — and infamously and treasonously was denied a third pick to the nation’s highest court when then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell treasonously and anti-democratically refused to allow the Senate to recognize any nomination to the Supreme Court by Obama in the wake of the overdue death of fascist “Justice” Antonin Scalia on February 13, 2016 — even though Obama had had almost a full year of his presidency left.

So “President” Pussygrabber’s first pick for the U.S. Supreme Court — Neil Gorsuch, who was confirmed on April 7, 2017 — clearly had been stolen from Obama.

The unelected-by-the-majority-of-the-American-people Pussygrabber would go on to make two more right-wing-nut-job/fascist picks to the U.S. Supreme Court: Brett Kavanaugh, who was confirmed on October 6, 2018, and Amy Coney Barrett, who was confirmed on October 26, 2020, even though the Repugnicans had told us that Obama couldn’t have a nomination to the Supreme Court so “close” to a presidential election (Barrett was confirmed only about a week [eight days] before the 2020 presidential election, while, again, Obama was denied a pick to the court with almost a full year of his second term remaining).

So under the Repugnicans’ own fucking argumentation in regards to the “required” timing for Scalia’s replacement on the court, Amy Coney Barrett clearly is illegitimate, and, of course, before her, Gorsuch illegitimately was put on the nation’s high court, because that pick clearly had belonged to then-President Obama.

But, even all of this aside, if we believe that only the majority of the American voters should pick the U.S. president, who then should be able to make nominations to the U.S. Supreme Court, then George W. Bush’s picks for the Supreme Court — Roberts and Alito — are illegitimate, since Bush never legitimately became president in the first fucking place. And ditto, of course, for the illegitimate Pussygrabber’s picks to the court, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett.

That’s five current U.S. Supreme Court “justices” who were nominated by “presidents” who had lost the popular vote. That’s five illegitimate Supreme Court “justices” — four of whom voted to kill Roe vs. Wade.

(Roberts did not vote to kill Roe, but of course Clarence Thomas did, because he is Clarence Thomas, who I always believed committed sexual harassment and thus never belonged on the U.S. Supreme Court in the first fucking place; I always have believed Anita Hill. [And, of course, Thomas’ baby-boomer cow of a wife’s meddling in the 2020 presidential election, which should land her behind bars along with the dozens of other traitors who illegally and treasonously tried to overthrow the 2020 presidential election results, alone makes Thomas an illegitimate Supreme Court “justice” — and a prime candidate for impeachment and removal. Thomas bemoans that the American people don’t trust “our” institutions anymore, but look what the hypocritical piece of dog shit Thomas has done: he probably committed pre-disqualifying sexual harassment, he apparently has allowed his wife to try to change the outcome of a presidential election, and he helped to kill Roe vs. Wade — and now he wants to deprive Americans of even the right to use contraception and to have sex with or marry a member of their same sex, although, of course, he’ll keep the right to have a mixed-race marriage intact, not because it’s the right thing to do, but because, being the typical baby-boomer asshole [redundant] that he is, he wants to retain his own rights while cavalierly destroying others’ rights.])

So that’s how we got to where we are today in the United States of America: the tyranny of the minority over the majority. Even though the clear majority of Americans support Roe vs. Wade, which had been settled law for almost five decades, the minority once again has acted against the majority.

Again, the American people had spoken: In 2000 and in 2016, the majorities of them — of us — voted for the Democratic candidate for president. Instead, because of the anti-democratic, obsolete Electoral College, the minority prevailed, and imposed on the American people were two Repugnican “presidents” for whom the majority of us did not vote, and these two fascist “presidents” put five fascists on the U.S. Supreme Court.

This, along with the blatant, bad-faith theft of President Obama’s third pick to the Supreme Court, is how the minority took over the Supreme Court — by 6-3, no less.

While I’d never rule out violent revolution by the majority against the tyrannical minority — if the minority dares to treasonously and anti-democratically tyrannize the majority, the tyrannical minority deserves whatever the fuck it gets — there are some ways that we, the majority of the American people, can take our nation back from the minority, even within our corrupt system of so-called “democracy,” including:

• We need to abolish the Electoral College. The popular vote alone should decide who gets to sit in the Oval Office inside of the White House. It’s supposed to be one person, one vote, but the Electoral College gives the minority in the red states significantly more say in the presidency than their actual population does. This blatantly anti-democratic bullshit must stop.
• We need to get enough U.S. senators to abolish the filibuster so that the U.S. Senate can enlarge — yes, pack, if you will — the U.S. Supreme Court. The number of justices on the Supreme Court is set by the U.S. Congress, not by the U.S. Constitution, so if the Democrats were in control of the U.S. House of Representatives and were in control of the U.S. Senate (and eliminated the filibuster, if necessary, which they could do on a simple majority vote, as the filibuster of course also isn’t in the U.S. Constitution, but is an obsolete, anti-democratic Senate rule, much like the Electoral College is obsolete and anti-democratic), they could add as many Supreme Court seats as they pleased (again, the Constitution fully allows this). After how the Repugnicans brazenly stole seats on the nation’s highest court, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. A situation in which only one side of the divide plays by any rules or norms at all is not tenable.
• We need to radically reform the U.S. Senate, and this would be significantly more difficult than abolishing the Electoral College or finally killing the filibuster or expanding/packing the U.S. Supreme Court. The fact that no matter how tiny its population is each state gets two U.S. senators — while no matter how huge its population is, each states gets only two U.S. senators — clearly is anti-democratic. An analysis by Vox’s Ian Millhiser in November 2020 found that in the current 50-50 U.S. Senate, “the Democratic half [represents] 41,549,808 more people than the Republican half.” This anti-democratic situation no longer is tenable, and off of the top of my head, I’d start with this suggestion: Change the U.S. Constitution so that each state does not get two (and only two) U.S. senators, but, instead, each state gets from one to three U.S. senators, based upon its population, much how the number of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives that each state gets is determined by its population. We could keep it at 100 U.S. senators, but reapportion the number of senators based upon the states’ population (again, with one, two or three senators, based on the state’s population).* If it were necessary, I’d be OK with adding seats to the U.S. Senate (100 senators is an arbitrary number), but in any case, each state getting two senators each regardless of its population must end. Of course, the red states wouldn’t vote to change the U.S. Constitution to give them less representation in the U.S. Senate, even if their current level of representation is unfair (and it is blatantly unfair). It might be that only a civil war — a great fucking reset — could reform the U.S. Senate so that the minority doesn’t get to continue to tyrannize the majority in a so-called “democracy.”

Yes, that’s pretty much where I am: I’m OK with a second U.S. civil war at this point. The treasonous right wing has brought it on by insisting on running roughshod over the majority of us Americans who disagree with their politics and their (theo)fascist “vision” for the United States of America. We Americans don’t even get to vote for U.S. president, for fuck’s sake, not when the Electoral College simply hands the presidency to the fucking loser of the popular vote.

Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — the name of today’s dazzlingly overreaching U.S. Supreme Court decision, in which the minority yet once again has tyrannized the majority — very well might prove to have been the most proximate salvo fired in the Second American Civil War.

P.S. More to the point of the majority-illegitimate U.S. Supreme Court ruling that each state may decide whether or not a woman may control her own uterus, while I’m not a woman and so of course won’t ever need an abortion, and while I live in a state that has codified abortion rights into state law, the rolling back of anyone’s rights — perhaps especially by unelected theocrats wishing to impose their backasswards religious beliefs on the rest of us — is disturbing, and, of course, if it’s open season on others’ rights, your rights might be on the chopping block next. (And, of course, the Dobbs ruling might be just the intended first step in the theofascist-controlled U.S. Supreme Court ruling that no state may allow any abortion at all.)

I’m hoping that Dobbs inspires us, the majority, to finally take our nation back from the tyrannical minority — bloodlessly, if possible, but bloodfully, if necessary.

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*Even if my plan to change the system so that each state gets one to three U.S. senators based on its population were enacted, the smallest states still would be overrepresented in the U.S. Senate based on their population, but this still would be a move in the right — that is, the actually democratic — direction.

California’s next governor might take office with a minority of the vote — but wouldn’t be governor for very long

Fascist-Repugnican talk-radio host Larry Elder, shown with his buddy former “President” Pussygrabber in a Tweet that Elder posted himself in July 2018 (and again in October 2020), just might become California’s next governor in the September 14 gubernatorial recall election with millions of fewer votes than the number of votes for current Gov. Gavin Newsom to keep his job — but there’s no way in hell that Elder could win election outright in November 2022, which he’d have to do in order to keep the job.

Having lived here in California since September 1998, I think that I’m qualified to state that with each passing year, I’ve agreed more and more with the assertion that the nation’s most populous state inherently is ungovernable.

Nonetheless, the nation’s most populous state has a governor, and soon, the right-wing nut-job minority of the state might be handed the reins of governance.

California has a gubernatorial recall election — the second one since I’ve lived here — on September 14, and, as two law professors correctly and importantly pointed out a few days ago in a piece in The New York Times, we could see the scenario in which current California Gov. Gavin Newsom loses his job by falling just short of the 50.0 percent of the vote plus one vote that he needs to keep his job. Yet thus far, only 18 percent is the highest that I’ve seen for the candidate who is polling the best of the 46 potential gubernatorial replacement candidates who are on the recall ballot.

This means that even if, say, 49.9 percent of the state’s voters elect to keep Newsom in place, a much smaller amount of voters (say, only around 18 percent of them…) could override the wishes of the much higher amount of voters who essentially had voted for Newsom — and put right-wing nut-job talk-radio host (of course…) Larry Elder (the aforementioned front-runner for Newsom’s job, according to the polling) in the governorship.

This is the dream scenario for the increasingly fascist, increasingly authoritarian, increasingly anti-democratic Repugnican Party: rule over the majority by the minority. (Indeed, we saw this in 2000, when Al Gore won the popular vote yet loser George W. Bush became “president,” and in 2016, when Billary Clinton won the popular vote, yet loser Pussygrabber became “president.”)

Politico reports on this issue: “‘The [recall-election] ballots are out, so I don’t think a judge is going to unwind this [election],’ said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School. A [law]suit could be more ripe after the election, she said, if it turns out that Newsom loses but receives more votes than the winner of the recall.”

Indeed, that’s exactly what should happen if a “new” “governor” is put into place by a smaller number of voters than the number of voters who voted to keep Newsom: it should be challenged in court as unconstitutional, violating the democratic principle that the candidate who wins the higher number of votes is the one who wins the election (any other outcome is blatantly anti-democratic, and yes, for that reason, the antiquated, blatantly anti-democratic Electoral College must go, too).

In the meantime, California’s recall process needs to be fixed so that the will of the higher number of voters always fucking prevails. (Even just requiring a run-off election — instead of allowing a candidate with a small plurality of the vote to become governor — would be an improvement in California’s recall process.) This is, after all, supposedly, a democracy.

Of course, even if fascist-Repugnican Larry Elder becomes the next governor — and his lovely political stances include opposing a minimum wage, opposing the right to an abortion, opposing the idea that there is systemic racism in the United States, and, of course, being a fucking homophobe — he very most likely wouldn’t be governor for very long, and in the quite foreseeable future we even could see the return of Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Why?

Because if Newsom is recalled, that doesn’t mean that he could not run for governor again, even in the next cycle, which is next year; he could if he wanted to. And regardless of who wins the September 14 gubernatorial recall election, whoever wants to be governor as of January 2023 must run in the regularly scheduled June 2022 gubernatorial primary election and be one of the top-two vote-getters in that primary election to be able to move on to the November 2022 gubernatorial general election — and then must win that election, too.

I don’t see any Repugnican doing that, not in a state whose voters are 46.5 percent Democratic to only 24 percent Repugnican at last count. Indeed, so deep blue is California that Newsom won election in 2018 by 62 percent to his pathetic Repugnican challenger’s 38 percent, and Joe Biden won California by 63.5 percent to Pussygrabber’s 34 percent.

Despite these daunting numbers, however, fully expect the fascist-Repugnicans to claim that if Newsom keeps his job, as he probably will, it was only because of “election fraud.” (An election is legitimate only if the fascist “wins,” you see; that is a central tenet of fascism, as we’ve seen played out as Pussygrabber & Co. still fascistically, treasonously and anti-democratically claim that Pussygrabber actually won the 2020 presidential election despite having lost it by more than 7 million votes.)

Newsom could lose his job in next month’s recall election, though; for quite a while now California’s voters have been run through the fucking wringer, as California experiences perhaps an unprecedented number of big problems all at the same time, including wildfires (mostly in the northern part of the state, along with Oregon), recurring drought, a serious lack of affordable housing and rampant homelessness* and, of course, probably first and foremost in most voters’ minds, the never-ending novel coronavirus pandemic that probably would have been over by now had the mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, MAGA-cap-wearing fucktards** not have tried to turn efforts to beat the pandemic (such as by the use of the three available vaccines and the use of face masks) into some backasswards tribal, political statement.

I mean, it’s ironic that the Repugnicans help to create the problem, such as the wholly unnecessary and wholly preventable extension of the COVID-19 pandemic, and then seek to benefit politically from the problem that they helped create, but we’ve seen this page from the fascist’s playbook before, such as with the Reichstag fire (and even with the 2003 California gubernatorial recall election, in which Repugnican Arnold “Baby Daddy” Schwarzenegger had had a secret meeting with Enron — and then used Enron’s raping of the state via a manufactured electricity crisis to get himself into the governorship in that recall election).

Whatever California’s big problems are now, however, under a fascist-Repugnican like Larry Elder (who wholeheartedly supports former “President” Pussygrabber, of course), the state would get even worse.

Therefore, of course I’ll be voting “NO” on Gavin Newsom’s recall, probably within the week (I should receive my vote-by-mail ballot within the next few days and probably will mail it back within a day or two).

I’m not wild about Gavin Newsom — I’m a “Bernie bro,” not a Democratic Party hack (indeed, I’m registered as an independent because I have real fucking problems with the pro-corporate, income-inequality-loving-but-nauseatingly-“woke” Democratic Party establishment) — but right now Newsom (for whom I did vote in November 2018) is our best bet to be at the helm of the nation’s most populous state (which, because it has the highest number of people, of course should have the highest number of problems…).

If we Californians think that we have it bad now, all that we need to do is to allow a Repugnican to take the reins — even if for only a relatively short period of time.

—

*California has only about 12 percent of the nation’s population, yet has about a quarter of the nation’s homeless. The fascist-Repugnicans like to say that this is because California is an inherently failed state, but no, clearly, homeless people are coming to California from other (I surmise mostly red) states, knowing that much if not most of California not only has a more favorable climate that do most other states, but that California isn’t nearly as mean-spirited toward the homeless as most other (supposedly “Christian”) states are.

**Indeed, it seems to me that Afghanistan right now is being overrun by its own type of teatard/Pussygrabber-loving/Q-Anon/anti-vax animals. Indeed, the only difference between the members of the Taliban (“Islamofascists”) and the “Christo”fascists here in the United States is the content of their backasswards religious beliefs. Otherwise, they’re remarkably similar, including their hatred of democracy, science, logic, reason, human rights, actual religious freedom, etc.

AfterBern redux

That’s about how I feel.

Bernie Sanders is a bit of a sad figure to me these days.

I still get his long e-mails about what a piece of shit the “president” is (no, he’d never use that kind of language, of course, but the meaning is the same) and all of the steep challenges that face us (it’s not always, um, uplifting to read his e-mails).

Thing is, Bernie is fairly political powerless, at least in terms of presidential politics. I give him credit for still doing what he can, but he ran for president twice and I don’t see him running a third time. (Hidin’ Joe Biden ran three times, but he put a lot of years in between his runs: 1988, 2008 and 2020.)

Bernie is, I think, too nice, too conciliatory. I don’t think that that works in today’s political environment, perhaps especially given how craven the so-called Democratic Party has become.

No, Bernie never had to be an asshole like “President” Pussygrabber, but he could have stood his ground more forcefully. Yes, Billary Clinton’s illegal shadow e-mail set-up was something, was not nothing — and although he gave her a pass, the Billary-led Democratic National Committee fucked Bernie over anyway — and Bernie also was way too nice to Joe Biden, and the result of that was that right before Super Tuesday, Biden & Co., center-right corporate-whore assholes all, suddenly closed ranks in order to tank Bernie’s campaign; no way could these sellout turncoats allow an actual progressive to win the Democratic Party presidential nomination.

In politics, probably especially presidential politics, politeness does not pay.

I get it that after the 2016 and 2020 Democratic Party presidential primary contests, Bernie has had to return to the U.S. Senate, so he couldn’t annihilate his bridges in his quest for the Oval Office. But he has been too damned nice, and in today’s presidential politics that is perceived as weak.

You can be strong without being an asshole — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is an example of that. She takes a lot of heat from the wingnuts but she gives it right back — better than it was thrown at her.

I don’t regret that I supported Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020, including having donated hundreds of dollars to him and having voted for him in the presidential primary elections. I believe that Bernie has laid the groundwork for a progressive takeover of the corporate-whore Democratic Party.

Sometimes you have to look at the big picture. Wingnut Barry Goldwater lost big-time in 1964, but few who are knowledgeable disagree that he laid the groundwork for the “Reagan revolution” of the 1980s (which began the downfall of the United States of America).

It’s possible, if not probable, that what’s going to be required for the Democratic Party to ever become progressive again is that all of the center-right old fucks who call themselves Democrats (most of them baby boomers, of course) will have to die off, and year after year they’ll be replaced by younger Americans who subscribe to progressivism.

Indeed, the United States’ youth and young adults, having been set up to fail at birth, and realizing very personally how very fucked up it is to screw over the generations that are following yours, might save the nation that the baby boomers and those older than the boomers have destroyed out of their bottomless selfishness and greed and incredible short-sightedness. From the ashes might rise a United States truly made great again.

And while Bernie Sanders probably won’t live to see that promised land, if it materializes, he was instrumental in its creation. He will have been a founding father of the new nation.

In the meantime, while I still respect Bernie, he is not my boss.

I get Bernie’s e-mails encouraging me to vote for Hidin’ Joe Biden. I will not vote for Biden.

Again, I live in California, one of the bluest states there is; there is no question that Biden will win California and all of its 55 electoral votes.*

Again, if you live in one of the swing states — Arizona, Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin* — then I encourage you to vote your conscience, but I have the luxury of not having to worry about helping Pussygrabber get a second term, since it’s a foregone conclusion that Biden will win my state and all of its electoral votes.

(No, I don’t give a fuck about the popular vote, since it doesn’t determine who becomes president. It should, but it doesn’t. Bragging rights about having won the popular vote don’t give you the presidency and the political power that comes with that. Ask Billary Clinton.)

If I had to put money on it, I’d say that Biden will beat Pussygrabber in November, for several reasons, but primarily because of COVID-19 and its socioeconomic effects. The economy tends to be the No. 1 factor in a president’s re-election (“re”-election, in this case), and I don’t see the train wreck that is the United States improving nearly enough between now and Election Day for Pussygrabber to pull out a win, even just an Electoral College win, as he did in 2016.

Also, lucky Biden is benefitting from being able to use COVID-19 as an excuse, valid or not (mostly valid, probably), to not have to run a traditional presidential campaign. Less campaigning means fewer of Biden’s, um, senior moments. Less campaigning means that voters largely will be voting for the Joe Biden of yesterday, not of today.

What would I expect a Biden presidency to look like? Much like the Obama presidency looked like: nice words, little substance, negligible improvement in the average American’s life.

Barack Obama for the most part was a caretaker president, and after the Repugnicans won back the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2010 midterm election (and kept the House until the 2018 midterm election), there was no way that they were going to allow Obama to have any progressive victories. You don’t even try to negotiate with terrorists like the Repugnicans, but the naive and probably arrogant Obama did so right out of the gate — probably the No. 1 mistake of his presidency — and the rest is history.

I expect a Biden administration to make the same mistakes that the Obama administration did. (After all, stuck-in-the-past Biden thinks that parents still routinely use record players for their children.)

If the Democrats win back the White House, the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House in November, which is quite possible, I expect them, “led” by Biden, to squander their political capital with their bipartisan “Kumbaya” bullshit, just as Obama did when, in the first two years of his presidency, the Dems controlled the White House, the Senate and the House — and utterly wasted all of that political capital when the stars don’t align like that (having control of the White House, the Senate and the House) very often.

Indeed, last week’s sad Democratic National Convention, in which much more love was shown to moderate Repugnicans than to progressive/actual Democrats, doesn’t bode well for a progressive agenda being passed through should the Dems once again win the White House, the Senate and the House.

Were I to vote for Biden, to me it would mean that I supported the continuation of a center-right, Repugnican-Lite, corporate-whoring Democratic Party — when I didn’t even have to, since I live in deep-blue California.

And I’m still not sure which would be the better longer-term outcome: Pussygrabber gets a second term, perhaps demonstrating amply, for once and for all, that the center-right, sellout campaigns of the likes of Billary Clinton and Hidin’ Joe Biden don’t work anymore, inducing the Democratic Party to, at long last, return to its progressive roots; or that Biden wins, and that this center-right, sellout bullshit under the banner of the Democratic Party continues indefinitely. “President Harris” gives me nightmares.**

In the meantime, it’s hard to describe the feeling that I have whenever I get one of Bernie’s e-mails or see him in the news. I still respect him — he is not dead to me, as self-serving, pseudo-progressive snake Elizabeth Warren is — but today Bernie makes me feel like a deflated convention balloon.

And I look to our younger generations to get us out of this abyss. They shouldn’t have to, but it has been forced upon them to, and they just might prove to be our next greatest generation.

—

*One of the most helpful graphics that I’ve seen is fivethirtyeight.com’s “snake chart,” which you can see here. The extreme two ends of the “snake” represent the states that are going to go to Biden or to Pussygrabber without doubt. As we progress toward the center of the “snake,” we see which states are less solidly blue or red, and which states appear to be the swing states. The 10 states that I’ve listed above as swing states are the 10 states that make up the middle area of the “snake,” which is the 270 electoral votes that must be won in order to win the White House.

**If Kamala Harris were a progressive, instead of just another centrist corporate whore who takes whatever political positions she deems most likely to help her political ambitions right now, a la Billary Clinton, I’d be happy to have her as president. That she’s a woman of color would be the icing on the cake. But there has to be some fucking cake.

Tyranny of the minority will not stand

I’ve been waiting to use this great meme for a while now. Now is the time. The right-wing, batshit-crazy push to prematurely open up the nation’s churches (and other public spaces) during a lethal pandemic exemplifies this meme.

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.

But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

— Matthew 6:5-6:6

Gee, was Jesus Christ himself for social distancing and for staying at home to pray?

I say that only in half-jest. Indeed, today’s “Christians” rarely actually follow the teachings of Jesus Christ as they readily are available in black and white in the New Testament.

Indeed, today’s “Christians” — at least the “President” Pussygrabber-loving kind — are the demonic that they claim that they oppose. They certainly have a death fetish if not a death wish.

Despite a plethora of church attendees and church officials already having contracted and having become ill or having died from the novel coronavirus, the “Christians” and their “leader,” “President” Pussygrabber, are demanding that all of the nation’s places of worship be opened up immediately.

Pussygrabber is wrong about just about everything and represents only the minority, wackadoodle viewpoint on just about everything, including “treating” the novel coronavirus with a household disinfectant and with bright light somehow introduced inside the body. (Maybe just shove a very bright flashlight up in there?)

Of course, for Pussygrabber, everything these days is about his “re”-election*, such as his jihad against voting by mail, even though voting by mail is supported by almost two-thirds of Americans and will go on nonetheless at least in those states that are not paralyzed by anti-voting Repugnican “leaders,”** since Pussygrabber has zero legal authority to prohibit voting by mail anywhere in the United States.

Pussygrabber is pushing for the re-opening of churches right now — something else that he has zero legal authority to do — only because he wants the churchgoers’ votes in November. He is perfectly OK with many “Christians” dying from the coronavirus, because all that is important to him is his “re”-election. Marinate on that fact for a while.

To me, ever since January 2017 it’s been like we don’t even have a president at all. It’s like a vacancy in the White House. I mean that entirely. And, of course, in the most important sense of what a president should be, should not be, should do and should not do, we do have a vacancy, a gaping vacancy, in the Oval Office.

I believe that people who believe in God — and it’s almost always a God who hates everyone they hate and who likes everyone they like, and otherwise always agrees perfectly with them on everything, isn’t it? — range from being incredibly immature and gullible to being mentally ill, but I do believe in the First Amendment right to believe whatever cray-cray you want to believe; it’s the item in the Bill of Rights that Americans seem to exercise the most.

A right that Americans do not possess, however, is the “right” to harm others. The Second Amendment allows you the right to own a firearm for your own actual self-protection; it does not grant you the right to go around shooting people with whom you might have any issue or dispute.

Similarly, the First Amendment allows you to gather for religious purposes, but what happens if by so doing, you endanger all of those around you with a potentially lethal infectious disease? Is your “right” to infect other people with a potentially deadly pathogen absolute?

No, when it comes to the prevention of the spreading of illness and death, your constitutional rights that certainly are protected under normal circumstances may be — and should be — curtailed. You have rights, we all have rights, but it’s not actually all about you. You are a social creature, and your actions and your inaction routinely affect others.

But how great it feels to pretend that one is standing up for Jesus Christ and for God and for freedom and for liberty, blah blah blah, against that

But we don’t have modern-day martyrs. We have modern-day dipshits. A true martyr would care about not sickening or even killing others. Today’s “Christians” don’t give a fuck about that at all. They are, as I have said, in a word, demonic.

And what these demons want is total control over the United States of America. They want theocracy — their theocracy, a “Christo”fascist theocracy — as much as if not even more than do those who supposedly want to impose “Sharia law” on the United States of America.

Yes, this nationwide shutdown does suck. It affects all of us in some ways to different degrees. But thus far, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we’ve had about 1.6 million apparently confirmed cases of infection with the novel coronavirus, and we are approaching 100,000 deaths from the virus.

Many more Americans will continue to die of the novel coronavirus, whose future course is unknown, and if you want a comparison, each year for the past decade, an average of about 37,000 Americans have died from the flu.

So while no, the novel coronavirus’ body count thus far has not been like that of the plagues that decimated huge swaths of the populace in world history, the novel coronavirus is not just like the flu. The flu, with rare exceptions, such as the 1918 flu pandemic, doesn’t wipe out this many people.

There is, therefore, not just a public-health justification for trying to impede the transmission of the novel coronavirus, but there is a public-health obligation to do so.

From what I can tell, the batshit-crazy “Christians” (redundant…) in the United States are too few in number to do much more than ludicrously claim to be persecuted “Christians,” you know, just like in the days when Christians were tossed to the lions.

Their deluded fantasies of being able to use national catastrophes like 9/11 and the novel coronavirus pandemic for instituting their own brand of theocracy on the entire nation are just that: deluded fantasies.

But, should these “Christo”fascists ever actually pose a threat, we can fight the coronavirus and these nasty viruses who call themselves “Christians.”

I might say that I’d be happy for the “Christians” to give each other a lethal disease by refusing to take sensible precautions — I remember how giddy most of these “Christians” have been over us gay men having died from AIDS (just like Jesus Christ taught them to be!) — but it won’t be only the “Christo”fascists who will be infected with the coronavirus should the nation’s churches return to business as usual right now. (And it sure is a business, isn’t it?) It will be probably tens of thousands of innocent people dying, too.

We, the majority of Americans, who aren’t batshit-crazy “Christians,”*** have the right not to allow a minority to cause actual harm to the rest of us. Our constitutional, human right to stay alive and well supersedes the “right” to infect others with a potentially lethal virus.

—

*To me, if you didn’t win the popular vote, as Pussygrabber did not and as George W. Bush did not before him, then your entire “presidency” is illegitimate.

Democracy means that only the candidate who won the most votes should fill that office. Otherwise, it means nothing.

**To clarify, the Repugnicans just don’t want you to vote if you have a propensity to vote for Democratic candidates. They’re A-OK with you if you’re going to vote for them.

***Per Wikipedia, only 6 percent to 35 percent of Americans are evangelical “Christians,” but I’ll be generous and go with Gallup’s finding that 41 percent of Americans say they are.

That’s still a minority of 41 percent of Americans to a majority of 59 percent of Americans.

The majority must rule again in the United States of America — including having a president who is elected only by an actual majority of the American people. (Yes, the Electoral College must go.)

Repugnicans’ war on women is also a war on justice, decency and democracy

So very apt.

I am not a blind feminist — I refused to support Repugnican Lite Billary Clinton for the presidency just because she’s a woman, for instance, and being called a “Bernie bro” by so-called “feminists” did not shame me into giving a penny or my vote to a Repugnican Lite female candidate, and, on that note, I oppose rank misandry posing as “feminism” — but I am a feminist in that I believe in equality for women, who continue to be held down by a patriarchal society.

And, of course, as a gay man I am intimately familiar with how our patriarchal society denigrates and oppresses anything and anyone considered to be feminine, and how it blindly obediently vaunts all things “masculine.”

The fight over the nomination of drunkard and sex criminal Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court is not just about the allegations of his sex crimes in and of themselves, of course, but is part of the ongoing “culture war” in which the right believes that right-wing, straight, “Christian” white men should continue to subjugate the rest of us with impunity.

So important is it to the right wing that stupid white men continue to rule that even Repugnican women (who universally are afflicted with Stockholm syndrome) are now said to be more fired up to vote in next month’s midterm elections than they were before the Kavanaugh fracas.

This is some sick and twisted shit, of course, but then again the Repugnicans are a fucking sick and twisted lot, a true basket of deplorables (I have to agree with Billary on that, although I find her plenty deplorable her-presidential-nomination-stealing-self).

That said, we must continue to fight against the fascists, which includes voting on November 6. They will vote for evil, as they always do; we must vote for good.

And we can take some solace in the fact that the Repugnicans must cheat in order to “win.”

The Repugnican presidential candidate won the popular vote only once since 1992 (Gee Dubya “won” “re”-election in 2004 by only 50.7 percent of the popular vote; he had lost the popular vote in 2000, and Pussygrabber also lost the popular vote in 2016).

The majority of the American people prefer a Democrat over a Repugnican, which is why the Repugnicans must do everything in their power to subvert democracy and throw elections their way, be it via widespread voter suppression or via such fascist bullshit as Bush v. Gore, in which the Repugnican-appointed “justices” of the Supreme Court, not the American people, picked the U.S. president in 2000.

And look how much the Repugnicans have had to cheat brazenly in order to shove Kavanaugh through. First, they had to pave the way by reducing the confirmation vote for a Supreme Court “justice” in the U.S. Senate from 60 votes to only 51 votes, which they did for Neil Gorsuch — after they had denied President Barack Obama the right to name a replacement for bloated piece of shit Antonin Scalia even though Obama had had almost a full year left of his presidency.

In addition to his white-male privilege, Kavanaugh has benefited not only from the anti-democratic Electoral College that gave us Pussygrabber and from the craven new simple-majority vote requirement for a Supreme Court “justice” in the U.S. Senate, but also from a fucking sham of an FBI “investigation” into his sex crimes, in which the “investigation” was done within only a few days and in which key individuals weren’t interviewed by the FBI at all.

Just as I never will consider George W. Bush nor Pussygrabber to have been legitimate U.S. presidents, I never will consider Gorsuch or Kavanaugh to be legitimate U.S. Supreme Court justices. Never.

How you got there fucking matters.

What we, the people, need to ensure now is that the Repugnican minority no longer can treasonously cheat its way into dominating us, the majority.

The fascist traitors “win” because thus far we have let them. Indeed, they always have counted on us to do so, because while they are shameless, violent and craven, we lean toward conscience, peace and decency.

We already have the majority; the only question is how much we’ll fight for it.

Have hope; mad kings come and go

Image from Cher’s Twitter feed

I haven’t written much about “President” Pussygrabber, and that’s in no small part because I never have accepted that he legitimately is the president of the United States of America (because he isn’t a legitimate president).

That’s for many reasons, but mostly, it’s because millions more Americans voted for his opponent in November 2016 than voted for him — and that was even with the help of Russia. (If there were no “there” there, the many concurrent investigations into the very apparent collusion with Russia very probably wouldn’t be ongoing.)

Also, of course, Pussygrabber not only is an abject moron and an ultra-tacky flim-flam man, but he had lost me well before the presidential election. He had lost me with his hateful, ignorant, racist anti-Mexican comments of June 2015 during his official “presidential” campaign announcement, and with the October 2016 release of the recording of him bragging that “when you’re a star, they [(attractive) women] let you do … anything,” such as “Grab them by the pussy.”

“Trump is toast,” I declared in October 2016, as I truly had believed that no one running for high office could survive having bragged, on tape, about “grabbing” women “by the pussy,” but here we are.

(Hey, again, he did lose the popular vote — substantially, which is why he has lied repeatedly about actually having won the popular vote. The anti-democratic [and anti-Democratic] Electoral College has got to go; we tell people how important it is that they vote, and then the candidate who won the highest number of votes doesn’t even take office, but the fucking loser does.)

Aside from his illegitimacy, Pussygrabber’s abysmal behavior in office disallows me from considering him to be the real president of the United States of America. Just this past week in post-hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico, for instance, “President” Pussygrabber (in no certain order):

• Of course made it all about his baby-boomer self and his fucking “ratings.” He praised the governor of Puerto Rico for having sucked up to him dutifully, saying, “this governor did not play politics, he didn’t play it all … he was giving us the highest grades.” This good gubernatorial behavior of course was in contrast to the bad behavior of the valiant female mayor of San Juan, who for very good reason does not give Pussygrabber the highest grades (and who no doubt would destroy him should he even try to grab her pussy).
• Of course let the people of Puerto Rico — who are (largely brown and black) American citizens — know how inconvenient they are. He actually told them, “Now, I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack, because we’ve spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico.” For once he apparently realized fairly immediately what a colossal fucking prick he sounded like, so he added obviously insincerely, “Which is fine.”
• Of course made the devastation wrought by hurricanes into a competitive television “reality” show. He actually told the Puerto Ricans that Hurricane Katrina, as opposed to Hurricane Maria, was “a real catastrophe,” and indicated that Puerto Rico’s “16” dead was better than Katrina’s body count of “thousands.” Yay, Puerto Rico, you win! (Actually, Puerto Rico’s body count from Maria now stands at more than 30, and Katrina’s official body count, while way higher than it ever should have been — under the other unelected and thus illegitimate Repugnican “president” — never reached 2,000, so “thousands” is incorrect, but we all know that Pussygrabber never troubles himself with facts.)
• Of course had to keep the “reality” TV show thing going by actually having thrown rolls of paper towels to Puerto Ricans:

Reuters news photo

Because when your nation has been destroyed by a natural disaster, your No. 1 need is paper towels. (And the paper towels that Mad King Pussygrabber so generously deigned to toss to the rabble of Puerto Rico weren’t even the quicker picker-upper, which you would need after a hurricane.)

Seriously, though — look at that Reuters news photo above for a long time and then tell me that I should accept this fucking imbecile as my president, even if he actually had won the fucking presidential election.

(Oh, and as if he hadn’t made a big enough of a baboon’s ass of himself when he was in Puerto Rico earlier this week, during a speech for Hispanic Heritage Month at the White House yesterday, Pussygrabber very apparently adopted a mocking Spanish accent when he repeatedly said “Puerto Rico.”*)

Alas, despite the mind-blowing image and the beyond-pathetic information above, I do have hope for the United States of America. “President” Pussygrabber isn’t the first idiot in chief whom we have weathered (even though he does make even George W. Bush look presidential). We probably will survive him.**

And no, I don’t buy the oft-repeated argument that Pussygrabber is just the logical outcome of what most Americans are. No, he isn’t representative of most Americans. (Indeed, let me say it again: Most Americans did not vote for him; in fact, Billary beat him by 2.1 percentage points, or almost 3 million more popular votes.***)

Pussygrabber certainly is representative of his narcissistic and rapacious generation, the baby boomers, but not of all Americans. Indeed, Pussygrabber probably represents the last, pathetic gasp of rule by the baby boomers and rule by stupid white males (I can’t call them “men”).

I can’t see our socially conscious young adults of today, when they become presidents in the future, acting anything like Pussygrabber routinely does. No, Pussygrabber is an anomaly, the occasional illegitimate, mad king that we’ve seen throughout history.

He will pass.

Yes, it feels like passing a fucking kidney stone, but it will pass.

And our history books (the honest ones, anyway) will record “President” Pussygrabber as just another bad blip, just another blemish on our history.

P.S. Two things: One, Pussygrabber still can’t reach an approval rating of even 40 percent in most nationwide polls. This doesn’t bode well for his “re”-election. Don’t become complacent, but take some comfort in that fact.

Two, if you want to help out the people of Puerto Rico — whom you should want to help whether they are U.S. citizens or not — you can do so by giving what you can afford to give to the Hispanic Federation, as I have, and/or to another reputable aid organization.

—

*As I have noted, the anti-Latino Pussygrabber is doing to the Repugnican Party on the national level what anti-Latino former Repugnican California Gov. Pete Wilson did to the party here in California (for his own short-term personal and political gain, Wilson planted the seeds that later would decimate his party here in California).

As Latinos are the fastest-growing group of people in the United States, I encourage the Repugnican Party to continue to alienate these voters.

**As far as nukes and nuclear war go, Pussygrabber is an abject idiot, but I don’t think that he’s suicidal. No vampire wants to die, but wants to continue to suck the blood of its victims for as long as possible.

***Don’t get me wrong; as I’ve written here a million times, it was a colossal fucking mistake for the (so-called) Democrats to make Billary Clinton, (with Pussygrabber) one of the most unpopular candidates for U.S. president in history, their presidential nominee. (As I have noted, I am not a registered Democrat and will not register with the Democratic Party again until and unless it becomes the progressive party that it once was.)

With their heads planted firmly in their rectums, the “Democrats” all pretended that Billary isn’t the widely despised, corrupt harpy that she is, and we have them to thank in no tiny part for “President” Pussygrabber.

The so-called Democrats had a winning candidate in Bernie Sanders, but they decided to coronate Repugnican Lite Billary instead because it was “her turn,” you see.

We’ll see if they learned their lesson. I much doubt that they have.

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.

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*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.)

That wasn’t a debate — it was a debacle (or: Trump is toast — Part 2)

Donald Trump spent much of Sunday night’s debate shit show creepily stalking Billary Clinton. Oh, well; at least he didn’t try to grab her by the pussy…

In case you were wondering, I did watch the second presidential debate on Sunday night (I did not live-blog it). Afterward I wanted to take a scalding hot shower and scrub myself with a wire brush.

That, of course, was mostly the uber-slimy Der Fuhrer Donald Trump’s fault. Team Trump’s having Bill Clinton’s alleged sex victims present in the debate hall (as though Billy Boy were running for a third term, which he kind of is but isn’t actually) wasn’t at all clever or effective; it was mind-blowingly sleazy, even for El Trumpo. And from promising to imprison his political opponents should he become president to declaring that Muslim Americans must police each other in a paranoid, anti-Muslim police state, it’s crystal fucking clear what fascist demagogue Trump’s agenda is: unabashed fascism, turning the United States of America into Nazi Germany 2.0, with him in the Hitler role.

When cornered on his 2005 comments about grabbing women by the pussy (made when he was just a young lad of 59 years — you know, locker-room banter [even though he wasn’t inside of a locker room]), Trump essentially stated that Hey, the members of ISIS are worse than he is!

I want to see poor people of color try that “defense” in our courts of law when they have been charged even with misdemeanors. It’s interesting how power and privilege (in Trump’s case, brought about by his biological sex, his race, his generation and his wealth [assuming that he even really is all that wealthy]) rear their ugly heads.

Only Donald Trump is so fucking sleazy as to make the corrupt, pay-to-play, political human weather vane on crack Billary Clinton seem like an angel by comparison. The widely despised Billary is very lucky that her opponent is the worst candidate that the Repugnican Party has put forth in many, many years, if not in all of U.S. history.*

Anyway, it’s clear that Trump must never sit in the Oval Office.

Of course, he very most likely will not; fivethirtyeight.com right now gives him no more than a 16.7 percent chance of winning to Billary’s 83.3 percent chance.

I still plan to vote for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein, since fivethirtyeight.com puts Billary’s chances of winning my home state of California (and thus all 55 of its electoral votes) at more than 99.9 percent.

I’ve heard the argument that those of us in the deep-blue states should vote for Billary even if we don’t like her, since Trump and his treasonous, fascist followers will have a talking point should he actually win the popular vote but lose the Electoral College, like Al Gore did in 2000. (Well, Gore probably won Florida and thus the Electoral College also, but whatevs.)

Um, (1) that very most likely won’t happen** (Trump will lose both the popular vote and the Electoral College by a decisive margin, I am confident), and (2) even though Al Gore won more than 500,000 more popular votes than Gee Dubya Bush did in 2000, we weren’t to question Dubya’s presidential legitimacy, so fuck the Repugnican Tea Party traitors’ predictable pissing and moaning should Billary actually win the Electoral College but lose the popular vote.

It wasn’t at all a national issue when that happened for Gee Dubya, so the treasonous hypocrites could go fuck themselves until they bleed to death.

P.S. Every time that Trump mentions Bernie Sanders’ name, as he did at least three times in Sunday’s “debate,” he should get a new malignant tumor. Trump isn’t fit or worthy enough to feast on Bernie’s feces.

It’s wonderful when Trump thinks that he’s exciting Millennials by mentioning Bernie, thinks that he’s going to inherit anything like a sizable chunk of Bernie’s supporters, and when he pretends to give a shit that democratic socialist Bernie was fucked over by the Democratic National Committee.

Yes, Bernie was fucked over by the DNC, which is one of many reasons why I won’t vote for Billary and why I switched my voter registration from the Democratic Party back to the Green Party, but anyone who remotely grasps what Bernie stands for never could vote for a fascist flaming piece of dog shit like Donald Trump.

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*No U.S. president in my lifetime of almost five decades had not first been vice president, a U.S. senator or the governor of a state before ascending to the White House. A shitbag like Donald Trump, who proves amply that no amount of money can buy class, always was very unlikely to break that pattern.

**Fivethirtyeight.com gives the scenario in which Billary loses the popular vote but wins the Electoral College only a 0.6 percent chance of happening.