The Fetterman Mystique

Bloomberg/Getty Images news photo

John Fetterman, pictured above at a campaign event in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, last month, is, um, not your usual candidate for the U.S. Senate. And that’s a good great thing.

John Fetterman, Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate for Pennsylvania, won every county in the state in the primary election yesterday.

I’m glad to know that, since I’ve given more than $200 in small donations to him over time.

I don’t even live in Pennsylvania, so why did I do a little bit to help the Fetterman campaign?

Call it The Fetterman Mystique.

Or, as The Atlantic has put it, “John Fetterman Wins on Vibes.” (The tagline is: “The 6-foot-8 goateed Senate candidate prevailed in the Democratic primary less on the strength of detailed policy proposals than on vibes.”)

While “vibes” certainly are part of the equation of Fetterman’s victory yesterday — the voters were fairly starving for a down-to-earth, genuine candidate for political office, I surmise — I think it would be unfair to say that it was all “vibes.”

No, Fetterman is not a policy wonk, from what I can tell, but I am clear on his key political positions, which include (in no certain order):

• He opposes the anti-democratic filibuster, which keeps us enslaved in rule by the right-wing minority, and as a U.S. senator he would vote to abolish it.
• He correctly has called health care a “fundamental human need and right.”
• On that note, he supports a wealth tax. (This is probably the most immediate, most achievable way to seriously tackle our huge problem of insane income inequality, which to me is our No. 1 problem after climate change.)
• He supports a $15 minimum wage (at the minimum…).
• He is pro-choice.
• He is deeply supportive of those of us who are not heterosexual and/or not gender-conforming.
• He supports the federal legalization of marijuana.
• He opposes the death penalty and supports reforming the criminal justice system.
• Environmental protection is a tough issue in a coal state like Pennsylvania, but he supports a transition toward green and renewable energy.

So there is the head stuff — which also would include the fact that the Democrats need to win every U.S. Senate seat that they possibly can in November in order not only to keep the Senate, but also to expand their majority past DINO “senators” Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin in order to be able to kill the fucking filibuster for fucking once and for fucking all — but yes, there is the heart stuff — the “vibes” — too.

The aforementioned Atlantic article begins:

Even if you don’t know a single policy he supports, chances are good that you know what John Fetterman looks like. Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor is larger than life at 6 foot 8, distinctively bald with a salt-and-pepper goatee, and draped in a baggy shirt or hoodie. Oh, and he’s a shorts guy too.

Fetterman easily won [yesterday’s] Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, and will run in November in a race that could decide control of the chamber. (He experienced a stroke on Friday but says he is expected to make a full recovery.) Some people consider it distasteful to focus on a candidate’s aesthetics over their message, but in Fetterman’s case, aesthetics is part of the message, and the message has resonated with Keystone State voters. …

Sure, Fetterman’s appearance is part of the package, whether he would like it to be or not. Not many of us are 6 feet and 8 inches tall and bald, and Fetterman has what some might call quirks that I like, such as his distain for wearing suits (I also fucking hate wearing suits, as I hate the artificiality of it — I always have found the idea that if you simply don a nice suit, you’re suddenly automatically honest, competent, credible, honorable, etc. to be demonstrably bullshit*).

Further, Fetterman is in my age group — he’s 52 (and will be 53 in August) and I’m 54 — and we Gen Xers largely have been shut out of the halls of power, so Fetterman gives me the sense that someone in my generational cohort can have an influence in the halls of power in D.C. for fucking once. (Yeah, um, the 57-year-old Kamala Harris, an awful, do-nothing politician whose approval rating is only around 40 percent, doesn’t count...)

Will The Fetterman Mystique carry John Fetterman all the way to the U.S. Senate in January 2023? We’ll see.

Fetterman overcame the first considerable obstacle, that of the Democratic Party establishment — the corporate whores who call themselves “Democrats” while selling us, the people, out to the highest bidders — to win the primary, and with his populist “vibe” he won every county in his state yesterday, which seems like a pretty good omen for November to me.

P.S. Also in yesterday’s primary elections, Repugnican U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn lost his primary race. He’s a crazy fucking fascist, but at least he’s pretty; I’d be lying if I said he wasn’t at least nice to look at. (Unfortunately, it’s looking like we’re probably going to be stuck with the dog-ass-ugly crazy fascist Marjorie Taylor Greene for another term.)

Cawthorn’s biggest sin, I believe, was claiming that other Repugnicans in D.C. invited him to cocaine-fueled orgies (I paraphrase…). That, apparently, was the only red (white?) line that could not be crossed.

At least Cawthorn, a Pussygrabberian, has not (yet…) claimed that the election that ousted him from power was “stolen.” Maybe that’s not going to prove to be such a great political tactic in the future.

Anyway, I dunno — it seems to me that if nothing else, Cawthorn has a new career in gay porn if he wants it…

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*Here’s a guy in a suit and tie, for instance:

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.)

Green Party’s Jill Stein to the rescue with push for three-state recount

Updated below (on Friday, November 25, 2016)

Although on November 8 she garnered only around 1 percent of the presidential vote — and although she was shit and pissed upon mercilessly by the shameless, anti-democratic, Democrat-in-name-only, “feminist” Billarybots — two-time Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein (shown above) is pushing for a recount in three battleground Rust-Belt states that some experts say Billary Clinton might actually have won: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. And thus far Stein has raised more than $4.3 million for the recount effort while Team Billary, of course, has done exactly nothing.

As has been reported for the past day or two or three, “A group of election lawyers and data experts has asked Hillary Clinton’s campaign to call for a recount of the vote totals in three battleground states — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — to ensure that a cyberattack was not committed to manipulate the totals.”

Deadlines for requesting — and paying for — recounts in these three states are quickly approaching, with Wisconsin’s deadline being tomorrow, according to The Associated Press.

Just as Al Gore essentially rolled over and played dead apparently in order to stay “above it all” (my words) in 2000 when George W. Bush & Co. blatantly stole the White House (with a deficit in the popular vote of more than 500,000), thus far Team Billary similarly pussily hasn’t requested any recount, of course (and the deficit in the popular vote this time thus far is more than 2 fucking million).

To the potential rescue has come Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who, although of course no recount will put her in the White House, has the standing to request recounts in these states because she appeared on their November 8 ballots.

It’s quite possible that the recounts will turn up nothing, but it wouldn’t be surprising if they turned up some surprising shit. Malfeasance or “innocent error” (my words) certainly would explain how the pussy-grabbing Donald J. Trump “beat” Billary Clinton in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, when Wisconsin hadn’t gone to a Repugnican since 1984, Michigan hadn’t gone to a Repugnican since 1988, and ditto for Pennsylvania.

As of this writing, Stein has raised more than $4.3 million in donations for recount efforts in the three states.

Establishmentarians are scoffing, of course, because, just as we were supposed to do in 2000, we commoners are just supposed to shut the fuck up while the White House possibly has been stolen yet again. We’re certainly not supposed to point out that it’s possible that a presidential election still can be stolen, because such information is inconvenient and possibly even — gasp! — unsettling!

Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania together have 46 electoral votes. Should it turn out that Billary actually won them, that would boost her current electoral vote count from 232 to 278 — meaning that she, not Der Fuhrer Donald Trump, won the Electoral College.

Even if it turns out that just one of these three states actually has flipped to Billary, it it puts the entire presidential election into question (as if Billary’s 2-million-plus popular-vote lead hasn’t done that already!).

The recounts are worth it. At the very least, presumably they’d give us some degree of insight into how much we can — or cannot — trust our presidential elections.

I’ve given $20 to the recount effort; I encourage you to give to the effort too if you can.

Stein’s recount fundraising page right now says that the cost of the Wisconsin recount has been covered through the donations received thus far, and says that the recount request deadlines are tomorrow for Wisconsin, Monday for Pennsylvania, and Wednesday for Michigan.

This thing is worth a shot. Democracy — true, actual democracy — is worth it.*

Update (Friday, November 25, 2016): Politico reports that today Jill Stein filed her recount petition in Wisconsin.

Interestingly, though, the Politico writer, a Zach Montellaro, apparently can’t help himself from editorializing throughout his “reportage.” He notes that Stein “barely [made] the 5 p.m. EST deadline,” as though that were relevant (it would have been newsworthy had she missed the deadline), and he feels it important to note all of the fundraising webpage’s changes and updates, even though this (the plan to request a three-state recount) has been a rather fast-moving and quickly changing last-minute development — and even though it’s unprecedented, to my knowledge.

Montellaro also used this slanderous language in his “reportage”: “On the back of a debunked fear of election tampering in key swing states, the Green Party presidential candidate raised nearly $5 million to fund a recount effort.”

“Election tampering in key swing states” has not been debunked, not with actual physical evidence, and while Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com widely has been quoted as having thrown cold water on the idea that some swing states’ reported vote totals are wrong, fivethirtyeight.com actually concluded thusly:

… It’s possible nonetheless that the election was hacked, in the sense that anything is possible. (And the best hackers are experts in erasing their tracks.)

Maybe hackers knew which control variables we’d look at and manipulated the vote in a way that it would look like it was caused by race, education and population driving different voting preferences.

Maybe hackers didn’t manipulate the share of votes in individual counties, but rather the turnout, increasing the number of votes in counties likely to favor one candidate or another.

Maybe some irregularities at the county level in early Wisconsin vote-counting are signs of wider problems. Maybe we’d find something if we dug down to the precinct level, or if we looked at other states with mixed voting systems.

But at a time when the number of voters without confidence in the accuracy of the vote count is rising, the burden of proof ought to be on people claiming there was electoral fraud.

The paradox is that in our current electoral system, without routine audits, seeking proof requires calling for a recount, which in itself can undermine confidence in the vote.

Fivethirtyeight.com got it right there until it totally pussed out at the end for whatever reason or reasons (knee-jerk, self-serving establishmentarianism, apparently, but who knows?).

“The burden of proof ought to be on people claiming there was electoral fraud,” but when they don’t have access to the voting system equipment, computers, ballots, etc. — which are in the sole possession of local governmental entities — how, exactly, can they prove their allegations without being in possession of the physical evidence?

And which is more important: “confidence in the accuracy of the vote count” (which easily could be just blind confidence) or a good reason to have confidence in the vote?

There apparently is a widespread belief (which has persisted at least since the 2000 theft of the White House) that it’s more important to have quick election results that aren’t questioned — you know, so that we don’t “undermine confidence in the vote” — than that we have election results that are accurate, and that’s incredibly fucked up.

Anyway, again, the subtext of Politico’s Montellaro’s “reportage” is to cast aspersions upon Stein, apparently. Among other things, he snidely notes that much of the money that Stein has been raising — more than $5.2 million thus far, per Stein’s recount fundraising webpage as I type this sentence — will go toward lawyers’ fees, as though it were Stein’s fault that you need lawyers to handle this shit and that lawyers, always the opportunists, frequently go on their legal-fee feeding frenzies.

I just gave another donation to the recount effort. That’s what unfair, hypocritical, usually establishmentarian attacks on people who have courage and who are trying to do the right thing often spur me to do.

P.S. Politico does make one interesting, fairly newsworthy note, which it saves for the very last paragraph; it reports that Jill Stein has raised more money for the three-state recount than she raised for her 2016 presidential bid.

I mean, that’s interesting. How relevant it is I’m not sure, but it’s interesting.

But it’s also interesting that enough people have questioned the “official” November 8 presidential election results that thus far they have donated more than $5 million to have the votes in three swing/Rust-Belt states recounted — and that they have done this outside of the partisan duopoly of the Coke Party and the Pepsi Party. (On that note, it recently was reported on MSNBC that the Obama White House encouraged Billary Clinton to concede to Donald Trump quickly — you know, in order to avoid ugliness, because, you know, it’s more important to avoid ugliness and to remain “above it all” than it is to have elections in which the winners, and not the losers, actually take office.)

Again: Democracy is worth it; $5 million is chump change toward what election integrity is worth.

Anyone who has read me for the past year-plus knows that I’m no fan of Billary Clinton, but while Team Billary and the Billarybots totally fucked Bernie Sanders out of the party’s presidential nomination, the fact remains that on November 8 Billary Clinton indisputably won the popular vote by a huge margin, and Trump’s reported wins in the traditionally Democratic Rust-Belt states look suspicious enough to double check.

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*Jill Stein’s fundraising webpage for the recount effort gives this important background information:

In 2004, the Cobb/LaMarche [Green Party presidential] campaign demanded a recount in Ohio. Because of their efforts, an election administrator went to jail. We also exposed the profound problems with DRE machines [link is mine], which helped launch an election integrity movement. That provoked California to engage in a “top-to-bottom” review of [its] voting system, which culminated in the abolition of DRE machines.

The Green Party Platform calls for “publicly-owned, open source voting equipment and deploy it across the nation to ensure high national standards, performance, transparency and accountability; use verifiable paper ballots; and institute mandatory automatic random precinct recounts to ensure a high level of accuracy in election results.”

Election integrity experts have independently identified Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin as states where “statistical anomalies” raised concerns. Our effort to recount votes in those states is not intended to help Hillary Clinton.

These recounts are part of an election integrity movement to attempt to shine a light on just how untrustworthy the U.S. election system is. [Emphasis is mine.]

All money raised goes toward recounts in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. We hope to do recounts in all three states. If we only raise sufficient money for two, we will demand recounts in two states. If we only raise enough money for one, we will demand a recount in one state.

We cannot guarantee a recount will happen in any of these states we are targeting. We can only pledge we will demand recounts in those states.

If we raise more than what’s needed, the surplus will also go toward election integrity efforts and to promote voting system reform.

Here are the filing fees and deadlines for each state:

• Wisconsin: $1.1 million by November 25 [tomorrow]
• Pennsylvania: $0.5 million by November 28 [Monday]
• Michigan: $0.6 million by November 30 [Wednesday]

Those are filing fees alone. The costs associated with recounts are a function of state law. Attorney’s fees are likely to be another $2 million to $3 million, [and] then there are the costs of the statewide recount observers in all three states. The total cost is likely to be $6 million to $7 million. …

Still not supporting Billary. Nope.

Reuters photo

Billary Clinton celebrates her presidential primary election win in Pennsylvania tonight in Philadelphia. Seeing Bill Clinton in the background fills me with disappointment and depression and disbelief that the Democratic Party has become so unimaginative and so devoid of political talent that we must rehash the 1990s. Indeed, Team Billary played Prince’s “1999” at the celebration in Philadelphia tonight, when in 1999, Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial was held in the U.S. Senate… And Philadelphia’s history is one of opposing dynastic rule…

So Billary Clinton had a good day today, winning four of the five states that held a presidential primary today, including biggie Pennsylvania. (Bernie won, um, Rhode Island…)

Yes, obviously at this point it’s highly unlikely to impossible that Bernie could go into the late-July Democratic Party convention having won more pledged delegates (delegates won in the primary elections and caucuses) than Billary. And, again, unless something big were to happen, I can’t see the super-delegates giving the win to Bernie over Billary, not when he’d won fewer pledged delegates than she.

Nor should Bernie try to win the majority of the super-delegates if he hasn’t won more pledged delegates than has Billary, very probably. You can push the envelope too far, to your own detriment (and to the detriment of your cause).

Why has Bernie very most likely lost this thing?

Well, there are many reasons. Some of them are, not necessarily in this order of importance:

One, people routinely vote against their own best interests. To wit, Billary Clinton has done better than Bernie in states with the most income inequality — even though tackling income inequality has been the fucking centerpiece of his campaign. Bernie has taken some heat for explaining that by proclaiming that poor people don’t vote, and there definitely is more than just a little truth to that, but it’s also the case that lower income means less education, and less education often means voting against your own best interests.

(Less education and more religiosity, for example, which go hand in hand, easily can have you focusing on “morals,” especially others’, while ignoring your own poverty and other problems and shortcomings, and certainly more religiosity can have you more obedient to authority, which would include, of course, our corporate overlords, especially since capitalism and “Christianity” have become so intertwined — even though Jesus was a socialist. [Very conveniently for the capitalists, “Christianity” often teaches that suffering is Godly and that there will be future reward for it.])

Two, the Democratic Party stopped focusing on income inequality and other socioeconomic justice issues many years ago and has become all about identity politics. Many people, even those struggling to make ends meet, appear to care more about knee-jerkedly defending their identity group than in doing anything to arrest, much more reverse, income inequality.

Tribalism is a powerful, visceral force — to the point that many voters care more about having our first female (and “third” “black”) president than they care about anything else, even the fact that Billary is another Repugnican Lite, a multi-millionaire herself (Bernie isn’t a millionaire; he’s not worth even $1 million) who as president is quite unlikely to lift all boats (unless we’re talking about her doing nothing substantive about climate change because her oily corporate sponsors don’t want her to do anything about climate change, which indeed does lift all boats).

And into this environment of toxic identity politics and rank tribalism, here comes Bernie Sanders, yet another old white guy — even though he’s a secular Jew (and, it appears to me, an agnostic or maybe even an atheist) and even though he’s the furthest-left, most progressive contender for the Democratic Party presidential nomination whom we’ve seen in ages — and the fact that superficially he is yet another old white guy shuts down those tribalists who would lump him, quite incorrectly, with all of the other older white guys in American history (and their wrongdoings).

Three, Billary’s hubby was president from January 1993 to January 2001, giving her supreme name-brand recognition, and it was clear when she carpetbaggingly ran for a U.S. Senate seat for New York in 2000 that she was angling for the Oval Office. (It was clear even before then, actually.)

And, of course, Billary already ran for the White House in 2008, and as of late when you come in at No. 2 in your first bid for the White House, there is the widespread belief within your party, then, that next time it’s “your turn.” This was the case with John McCainosaurus, for example, and for Mittens Romney, when they came in second place in 2000 and in 2008 and then became their party’s nominees in 2008 and 2012.

In the end, in a nutshell, we can say that Bernie Sanders just couldn’t overcome the Clinton brand name — but that as a democratic socialist from Vermont, by doing as well as he did, he sure the fuck exposed how weak the Clinton name brand and the Clintonian Democratic Party are right now, and I expect this weakness to linger over Billary Clinton for the remainder of her political career — and I expect the Democratic Party to return to its progressive roots within the next few presidential election cycles.

For the time being, I hope that Bernie Sanders makes good on his promise to campaign at least through June 7, when my home state of California votes. All 50 states deserve the chance to weigh in on Billary vs. Bernie, because weighing in on Billary vs. Bernie also is weighing in on the direction of the Democratic Party: whether it should remain the same-old, same-old, center-right Democratic Party, as it will/would under Billary Clinton, no matter what the fuck she is promising today, or whether it should return to its progressive roots, not just in rhetoric, but in actual actions and in deeds.

Billary is a weak candidate, which is why her bots have been calling for Bernie Sanders to drop out early (every state that he wins is a state that she didn’t — even Rhode Island) and why they have claimed that Bernie has made poor Billary look bad when, of course, the self-serving, corrupt, center-right, flip-flopping, calculating, triangulating, multi-millionaire Billary has needed zero help in that department, and, of course, rather than admit how flawed, politically weak and widely disliked (outside of the Democratic Party hacks, who are a minority of Americans) Billary is, the Billarybots would much rather turn Bernie into their scapegoat.

I just can’t see Billary having a successful presidency — the Repugnican Tea Party will/would be even worse on her than they have been on Barack Obama, I surmise — and/but, truth be told, if the next Democratic Party president must be a failure, I much would rather that it be Billary (and her brand of the Democratic Party) than Bernie (and the progressive movement).

When I receive my vote-by-mail ballot for California’s presidential primary election next month, I will fill in the oval for Bernie Sanders.*

When Billary is president and it’s disastrous, as was so fucking predictable, don’t blame me.

I voted for Bernie.

—

*In November the Democratic presidential candidate, whichever individual it is, is going to win California and all of its electoral votes anyway, so no, my refusal to support Billary Clinton in the June presidential primary election or in the November general election — not a penny and certainly never my vote — won’t make a fucking difference, so hold your ammo.

Bernie is prepared to take it to the convention in Philly in July, baby!

Wikipedia graphic

This is what the map of the 2016 Democratic Party presidential primary race looks like today. Bernie Sanders thus far officially has won 15 states (shown in green), Billary Clinton officially has won 18 (shown in golden-yellow), and 17 states remain (shown in gray). Bernie has been doing well enough to deny Queen Billary the crown outright, and he is prepared to take the nomination fight to the party convention. (If you have a fucking problem with that, then you are an anti-democratic fuckwad just like Donald Trump.)

After his win in Wisconsin’s Democratic Party presidential primary election yesterday with 56.6 percent to Billary Clinton’s 43.1 percent, Bernie Sanders stands at 45.5 percent of the estimated count of the pledged/democratically earned delegates to Billary Clinton’s 54.5 percent, a difference of 9 percent. (Billary’s estimated pledged delegate count is 1,302 and Bernie’s is 1,088, a difference of 214 pledged delegates.)

Seventeen states remain on the 2016 primary election season calendar, including biggies New York (247 pledged delegates), Pennsylvania (189) and my state of California (475 pledged delegates, the most of any state; we’re saving the best for last, on June 7).

Billary won’t reach the magic number of 2,383 delegates needed to win the nomination before the party convention in late July, and therefore Bernie Sanders is prepared to take the nomination fight to the convention, which is fucking great. In an actual democracy, no candidate should just be handed the race, but should have to fucking earn it from the voters.

(Der Fuehrer Donald Trump infamously anti-democratically has called for his opponent John Kasich to drop out, so when the Billarybots call for Bernie to drop out, yeah, that very much puts them on the level of Trump.)

The anti-democratic attitude of the Democratic Party hacks is stunning. I’ve seen Bernie Sanders referred to, among many other things, as an “irritant.” Forty-five-point-five percent of the vote in an ongoing race with 17 states left to go doesn’t make you an “irritant,” like a mere fly or gnat or mosquito. It makes you a contender. Perhaps an inconvenient-for-some contender, but a contender nonetheless.

And as Bernie has said many times himself, his candidacy is about much more than him as an individual; it’s about rebirthing the Democratic Party, the party that once was progressive but that over the years devolved into a center-right, Repugnican Lite Party all too happy to sell us commoners out to the DINO politicians’ corporate campaign contributors.

Indeed, the main function of the Democratic Party now, under the “leadership” of DINOs like King Bill Clinton and Queen Billary Clinton and President Hopey-Changey, is to prevent us commoners from rising up with torches and pitchforks and going after our treasonously selfish and abusive corporate overlords who for some decades now have been destroying us socioeconomically, and who, not being content enough with that, have been destroying the entire fucking planet, too.

To a large degree the Democratic Party’s bullshit works, largely though ignoring socioeconomic issues and other substantive issues and employing identity politics in the stead of substance.

Black Americans, for instance, on many measures (such as poverty and income inequality and net worth and incarceration rates) have been no better off under DINO President Hopey-Changey than they were before he took office in January 2009, but it very apparently has been more than enough for the vast majority of them that he is black (black Americans approve of the president’s job performance by around 40 percent more than do all Americans; tell me that race alone has zero to do with that).

And although Billary Clinton’s history gives black Americans no reason to believe that their lives would improve under her presidency any more than they have(n’t) under President Hopey-Changey’s, black Americans for some fucking reason slavishly support Billary as though she’d be our “third” “black” president.

And, of course, Billary also has been playing the “feminist” card — although perhaps not as much as I’d expected her to do in her second go-around for the White House. (This is probably only because the “misogyny” bullshit hasn’t played very well outside of the cult-bubble of the Billarybots.)

Identity politics won’t solve such staggering problems as rapidly growing income inequality and rapid climate change. Identity politics will keep us Americans too divided to fight back against our corporate overlords (which is exactly why corporate-sellout DINOs like Billary employ identity politics).

With identity politics we commoners and serfs continue to fight each other over who may and who may not wear dreadlocks, for instance, while collectively we boil like frogs as our corporate overlords continue to turn up the heat, literally as well as figuratively. Geniuses, we!

Those of us who support Bernie Sanders — and thus far we’re at least 45 percent of the voters in the Democratic Party primary elections and caucuses, no tiny fucking minority — are happy to see Bernie Sanders go as far with his candidacy as he possibly can.

(And a new, reputable poll out shows that one in four of us Berners won’t vote for Billary should she be on the ballot in November. I am one of those. [Call me a kamikaze; that’s fine. Shit more often than not needs to be blown up before it can be rebuilt.])

Over many months I’ve given Bernie a total of hundreds of dollars (if I haven’t hit the $1,000 mark yet, I’m close), so I’m financially invested in his bid for the White House as well as emotionally, intellectually and spiritually invested in it. A better future is worth paying for; it’s worth investing in.

So yes, I want to see Bernie carry the ball as far as he possibly still can.

It’s still possible (although admittedly difficult) for Bernie to win a majority of the pledged/democratically earned delegates, and if he accomplishes that feat and goes into the convention with that feat under his fighter’s belt, the “super-delegates” then will be put in the uncomfortable position of honoring the democratic process by ensuring that Bernie Sanders, the people’s choice, is the presidential nominee — or being typical Democratic Party hacks, giving democracy the middle finger (in the city of Philadelphia, where both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were born) and paying their allegiance to corporate whore Queen Billary because that’s what they’re expected to do as Democratic Party hacks.

This scenario would be quite a moment of truth for the fallen Democratic Party, a moment that is long overdue, and a moment that perhaps only the heroically, historically independently minded progressive Bernie Sanders, whose allegiance is to truth, wisdom and socioeconomic justice — and not to mindless, go-along-to-get-along, pro-corporate/sellout, pandering-to-identity-groups, establishmentarian Democratic Party bullshit — could force.

P.S. Billary’s nationwide numbers are falling. Right now Real Clear Politics’ average of nationwide polls has Billary at only 5.9 percent ahead of Bernie nationwide among Dems and Dem leaners.

RCP has Billary ahead in New York by 11 percentage points.

The Huffington Post’s average of nationwide polls has Billary at only 6.4 percent ahead of Bernie nationally, and HuffPo’s average of New York polls has Billary ahead there by 10.4 percent.

Final polls of Wisconsin on average had Bernie winning there by no more than 3 percent, but he won the state by 13.5 percentage points yesterday, so yes, indeed, winning New York (which votes on April 19) appears to be within Bernie’s grasp. Bernie often has performed significantly better on election day than he had polled right up to election day, and the New York primary is almost two full weeks away, a long time in American presidential politics.

P.P.S. Two more things:

One, I thought that I’d include this graphic from Wikipedia, too. It’s the same as the graphic above, except that it more helpfully gives you a little pie chart for each state showing you what portion of that state Bernie and Billary won:

Note how close many of the states were (especially states bordering the northern states, where Bernie is strong, and the southern states, where Billary is strong): Nevada, Massachusetts, Iowa, Illinois and Missouri (and yes, to be fair, Michigan, which Bernie won).

Secondly, I have to note that an increasingly desperate Billary again is proclaiming that Bernie Sanders isn’t even a real Democrat!

Again, in spirit, if not on paper, his entire life Bernie Sanders has been the Democrat that Billary Clinton never will be.

Again, while she’s worth around $25 million, Bernie is worth around $500,000. In 2014, Billary raked in around $28 million to Bernie’s $206,000. Billary has supported only a $12-an-hour federal minimum wage, while Bernie has supported the $15-an-hour federal minimum wage that California and New York just adopted. When she was old enough to know better, Billary was a Young Repugnican and was a “Goldwater girl” in 1964. Bernie Sanders, by contrast, never has supported the Repugnican Party.

I could go on, but that’s more than enough already.

Yes, Billary has been a dedicated Democratic Party hack, and has been instrumental, with her husband, Barack Obama and many others, in making the once-great Democratic Party resemble the Repugnican Party more and more with each passing year, but to me and to millions of other voters, the obvious, no-brainer answer to the question, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the most Democratic of them all?” is Bernie Sanders.

Um, yeah.

Looks just like her — scowl, crown and all.

Anyway, Evil Queen Billary’s claim that she’s the real Democrat in the race probably is just meant as a distraction from the fact that Bernie Sanders continues to do significantly better than she does against both Repugnican Tea Party frontrunners Donald Trump and Ted Cruz in the match-up polls.

If the idea is to keep the White House in Democratic hands come January 2017, then we can quibble about who is and who isn’t the “real” Democrat in the race (even though it’s crystal fucking clear that millionaire Billary is the pseudo-Democrat), or we can look at who is more likely to actually win the White House.

The polls say, and have been saying for a long time now, that that candidate is Bernie Sanders.

Repugnican losers are trying to rig the game

Widespread talk of how the Repugnican Tea Party was going to “reform” itself after two national rejections in a row has been a fucking joke. We have our answer already: Of course the traitors have no interest whatsofuckingever in changing their ways.

Now, the Repugnican Tea Party traitors are trying to have the electoral votes in some purple states with Repugnican-Tea-Party-majority state governments changed from winner takes all (which is the case in 48 of the 50 states) to divvying them up (like only Maine and Nebraska do) — but only in those purple states in which this change of the rules would benefit the Repugnican Tea Party traitors, of course.

They’re not talking about divvying up the electoral votes of such deep-red, winner-takes-all states as Texas or Arizona or Georgia. They’re only talking about divvying up the electoral votes of such purple states as Virginia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — states that Barack Obama just won (and that he won in 2008).

It seems to me that this violates the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment — at least in spirit, if not in the letter — because it gives the voters in some states a right that voters in other states do not: Namely, to have their votes make a difference in the Electoral College.

I’ll even play devil’s advocate here: The Repugnican Tea Party traitors’ new scheme, if it had been in place in our last presidential election, would have meant that, for instance, someone who voted for Mittens Romney on November 6 in, say, Virginia or Wisconsin or Pennsylvania still would have had his or her vote count in the Electoral College as long as he or she lived in a congressional district that Mittens won, even though Barack Obama won the majority of all of the votes in those states — but someone who voted for Mittens in, say, deep-blue New York or California, would not have had his or her vote count in the Electoral College, because in those winner-takes-all states, Obama would have received all of the states’ electoral votes.

Is that fair — to give voters in some states more say in the Electoral College than the voters in other states? Shouldn’t every voter’s presidential vote count equally?

Of course, the Repugnican Tea Party traitors, being traitors, aren’t about fairness and equality and democracy. They’re about “winning” at all costs — fairness and equality and democracy be damned.

Of course, the best course of action would be to eliminate the Electoral College altogether, to amend the United States Constitution to abolish it and to replace it with a straight-up popular vote for the presidency.

In a so-called democracy, there is no good reason not to choose the president of the United States based on a popular vote. (“But that’s the way we’ve always done it!” is not a valid argument, since it replaces reasoned analysis with mental laziness [a.k.a. “tradition”].)

The winner-takes-all Electoral College method effectively means that those blue voters in red states and those red voters in blue states have no voice at all, but to have one of the two duopolistic political parties pick and choose which states are to be winner-takes-all and which states are to divvy up their electoral votes — only in order to benefit that party’s presidential candidates — is even worse.

It is unfair as it is that even Nebraska and Maine divvy up their electoral votes when the other 48 states do not, but this hasn’t been a huge unfairness problem thus far, since both states together have only nine electoral votes (at least 270 of the 538 electoral votes are necessary to win the White House).

If the Repugnican Tea Party traitors are successful in rigging the entire Electoral College to benefit themselves, however, millions of voters will be disenfranchised.

The good news in all of this is that if the Repugnican Tea Party were strong, it wouldn’t need to cheat in order to “win” presidential elections, as it did in 2000 (and probably in 2004 as well), and as it is trying to do now.

The bad news is that sluggish, complacent, lazy Americans have a way of just allowing the Repugnican Tea Party traitors to get away with their blatantly anti-democratic bullshit, such as stealing presidential elections and launching bogus wars.

I considered the blatantly stolen presidential election of 2000 to be the biggest blow to American democracy during my lifetime, but what the Repugnican Tea Party traitors are cooking up now, if realized, would make even that seem like child’s play by comparison.

P.S. (Friday, January 25, 2013): My bad: Add Ohio and Michigan to the list of purple states that Obama won in 2008 and in 2012 but that now are controlled by Repugnican Tea Party traitors who have at least talked about divvying up their states’ electoral votes in order to rig future presidential elections for the Repugnican Tea Party.

Prick finally takes a hint

Reuters photo

Prick Santorum’s wife Karen cries today as he announces in Pennsylvania that he has dropped his bid for the presidency. This piece is about Prick, not his wife, but I think that this news photo is pretty fucking funny.

So apparently Prick Santorum didn’t want the additional embarrassment of losing his home state of Pennsylvania to Mittens Romney on April 24, so he dropped out of the race for the 2012 Repugnican Tea Party presidential nomination today, declaring, “This game is a long, long, long way from over. We are going to continue to go out there and fight to make sure that we defeat President Barack Obama.”

Didn’t Herman Cain say pretty much the same thing, that he wouldn’t drop from sight? Where has he been lately?

History will record Prick Santorum as the candidate who tried to drag the Repugnican Tea Party so far to the right — among other things, espousing the ideas of banning contraception and so-called “obscene” pornography, which have been with us for more than four decades now — that he ensured President Barack Obama’s re-election.

Prick’s “Christo”fascist jihad was pointless from the beginning. There was little question that the multi-millionaire Mittens would win the nomination, so all that Prick accomplished in his run for the nomination is having made the most insanely far-right members of the Repugnican Tea Party hate Mittens the Mormon from Massachusetts even more than they already did, and having turned off the so-called “swing voters” (the majority of whom love their birth control and their porn) by the millions.

And the women’s vote may be, in the end, what dooms Mittens, whom intrade.com gives less than a 40 percent chance of beating Obama in November.

Salon.com reports on a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll that shows that women support Obama by 57 percent, with only 38 percent of them supporting Mittens, a gap of 19 percent. (According to the poll, Mittens has 52 percent of the men’s vote and Obama has 44 percent, a gap of only 8 percent.)

Mittens himself didn’t really push the anti-contraception bullshit — Prick Santorum and Grand Dragon Rush Limbaugh and others did — but Mittens, not wanting to alienate the far right, didn’t distance himself enough from it, and he has been tarnished from the fiasco nonetheless, as his party is known now as the party that has declared war upon America’s women.

Even if he kept any misogynist views that he might have (well, probably has) to himself, however, what does it say about Mittens’ worldview that he belongs to the staunchly patriarchal Mormon cult, which teaches that women’s primary role in the world is to support men and to raise men’s children?

(That’s what Prick’s Catholic cult and Mittens’ Mormon cult have in common, by the way: rigid hierarchy and patriarchy, misogyny and homophobia, to name three. It’s no surprise that the two cults teamed up to push Proposition H8 here in California; they love to persecute non-heterosexuals as well as women ,and they want to dictate to all of us what we may and may not do with our own genitalia.)

Again, Prick Santorum wasn’t going to beat Mittens Romney anyway. But what he did accomplish is having made millions within his party dislike and mistrust Mittens even more than they already had, and he has trashed the Repugnican Tea Party’s national brand name.

Prick’s brand of wingnuttery sells well in the reddest states, but that’s not nearly enough support to win a national election. Indeed, for a while now, Prick Santorum has had the support of no more than about a quarter of the members of his own party.

He should have quit when he was behind, but his apparent stubbornness and ego and lust for power apparently kept him in the race.

Oh, well. Because of Prick Santorum I don’t see that I’ll feel the need to give Barack Obama another penny or another vote.

Obama very apparently has it in the bag, so I can save some money and cast my vote for the person I’d truly like to see run the nation: the Green Party candidate, most likely.

Assorted shit Sunday!

On Cuba, Pope Palapatine just hates the competition

Reuters photo

A Cuban woman on Friday sits under a banner in Havana announcing the impending visit of Pope Palpatine. If the Cuban government were as evil as Palpatine claims it is, it probably wouldn’t let him set foot on the island in the first fucking place. Palpatine proclaims that Marxism is dead, yet it’s backasswards Catholicism that is dying in the more developed nations of Europe and the United States, and Latin America remains the last bastion of the dying Catholic empire.

“Today it is evident that Marxist ideology in the way it was conceived no longer corresponds to reality,” Pope Palpatine decreed of the government of the nation of Cuba on Friday, in advance of his scheduled visit there tomorrow.

I love the apparently unintended irony of that statement: “Marxist ideology in the way it was conceived no longer corresponds to reality.”

Um, what about Catholicism?

Here in the U.S., we have far-right-wing Catholic nutjob Prick Santorum telling us that as president — as Pope Palpatine’s puppet in the White House — he would support banning contraception, abortion, same-sex marriage and “obscene” pornography (which would be pretty much all pornography).

The U.S. Supreme Court in 1973 (in Roe vs. Wade) ruled that abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy is always legal, and the same year essentially ruled (in Miller vs. California) that the porn that we see today that widely is considered to be legal is protected free speech (and not “obscenity”).

The far-right-wing Pope Palpatine, however, views the mildly progressive reforms of the Catholic church of the 1960s as having gone too far, and believes that the church should revert to the “good old days” before the 1960s.

But Marxism is outdated?

In order to remain relevant any ideology needs to change and grow with the times — which the patriarchal, misogynist, homophobic, anti-science Catholic church refuses to do, which is why its membership is hemorrhaging in the U.S. and Europe — but with rampant global capitalism destroying the planet at record pace, Marxism is even more relevant today than it was when Karl Marx was still kicking around, when the greedy, selfish capitalists’ ability to destroy the entire fucking planet wasn’t nearly what it is now.

Pope Palpatine’s real problem with the government of Cuba, of course, is that he fucking hates the competition for the minds, hearts and souls of the masses.

It long has seemed to me that the people of Cuba have been far better off under Fidel Castro than they ever would be under the tyranny of capitalism, which sees the masses only as a means of making a tiny few obscenely richer in such noble names as “democracy” and “freedom,” or under the theocratic tyranny of the Catholic church, which, like a virus, only wishes to subvert the time, energy and money of the masses from their own benefit to propping up the decaying carcass of the Catholic church, an all-male hierarchy that should have met its extinction long ago.

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Prick Santorum still stuck on his Etch-A-Sketch bullshit

Associated Press photo

Prick Santorum lamely still waves an Etch-A-Sketch Friday in Shreveport, Louisiana, a state where such retarded tactics apparently work.

The anti-Mittens “Etch-A-Sketch” thing wasn’t worth exploiting in the first place, since its exploitation was based upon wildly twisting its source’s rather obvious intended meaning, but Prick Santorum, having nothing else to offer, continues to use the lame tactic that ultimately only is hurting his own fucking party.

On CBS’ “Face the Nation” today, Prick declared, “Even though a lot of folks are saying this race is over, the people in Louisiana said, ‘No, it’s not.’ They still want to see someone who they can trust, someone who’s not running an Etch-A-Sketch campaign, but one who has their principals written on their heart, not on an erasable tablet.”

Really, how much mileage does Prick believe that he’s going to get out of this retarded diatribe?

Of course Prick won Louisiana yesterday and previously won some other Southern states (including Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee): The Southerners are all a bunch of mouth-breathing inbreds to whom Prick’s preaching about the supposedly Jesus-Christ-based hatred and oppression of self-respecting women, gay men and lesbians, non-Christians, non-whites and many others appeals. Truly: The Prick Santorum voters’ mantra must be: “We love him! He hates everyone we hate!”

Actually, the Repugnican Tea Party presidential race is over. According to The Associated Press, Mittens Romney thus far has more than twice as many delegates as does Prick Santorum, 568 delegates to 273. Newt Gingrich has a paltry 135 and Ron Paul an even paltrier 50, and even if you gave those 185 delegates to Prick, he still would trail Mittens by more than 100 delegates.

The next big state on the Repugnican Tea Party presidential primary season calendar is Wisconsin, which votes on April 3. Even if Prick should eke out a win in Wisconsin (he did win neighboring Minnesota and Iowa, but Mittens won neighboring Michigan and Illinois), Mittens should clean up in April, with several Mittens-friendly states on the calendar, including New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware, and if Mittens actually wins Prick’s home state of Pennsylvania on April 24 — and remember that Prick lost his 2006 U.S. Senate re-election bid in Pennsylvania by 18 percentage points — then we probably will see Prick actually toss his Etch-A-Sketch prop into the garbage for good.

By that time, though, Prick will only have further damaged Mittens, whose lack of charisma, whose alleged opportunistically changing political positions — accurately and fairly or inaccurately and unfairly — are criticized by the members of his own party as well as by the members of the opposing party, and whose exalted status as a multi-millionaire in a nation whose commoners still struggle economically — as well as his membership in the Mormon cult — never made him a strong candidate against Barack Obama anyway.

Still, Mittens is the best that the Repugnican Tea Party traitors have got, which apparently even they increasingly are recognizing, as evidenced by the fact that Mittens these days is polling in the low 40s in the Gallup daily tracking poll, while Prick can’t even break 30 percent.

And most national polls show a much tighter race between Obama and Mittens than they do between Obama and Prick. Even a Faux “News” poll taken earlier this month puts Obama at only four percentage points ahead of Mittens, 46 percent to 42 percent, and a whopping 12 percentage points ahead of Prick. (A Bloomberg poll taken around the same time has Obama and Mittens tied, at 47 percent each, and Obama six percentage points ahead of Prick.)

The good news in all of this is that the “Christo”fascists, with whom the Richie Riches of the old guard Repugnican Party struck an unholy alliance because the 1 percent can’t win elections on their own, these days apparently are more of a drain than a help to the GOP, at least presidentially.

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Wild West bullshit needs to be made illegal in all 50 states

I haven’t weighed in yet on the apparent race-based murder of Trayvon Martin —

Associated Press image

— the 17-year-old who apparently was gunned down in Florida late last month by a vigilante named George Zimmerman who claims that he shot the black teen in self-defense, even though the teen reportedly was “armed” with only a bag of Skittles and some iced tea.

I will get this out of the way, though: As a blue-eyed white guy, I’m happy that George Zimmerman looks like this:

Reuters image

— and not, say, something like this:

Associated Press photo

— or this:

(That’s a photo of the Archie-Bunker-like Andrew Breitbart that was taken before he went to hell early this month and a photo of “Joe the Plumber” and some other yahoo with a dead bear that I found on the Internet. [I’m sure that it was a fair fight with the bear, you know, mano a mano, because those right-wing white guys are so fucking tough!])

Seriously, though, when I read the name “George Zimmerman,” I’d thought that yet another stupid whitey had gunned down someone for the crime of breathing while being brown or black, and I was, admittedly, at least a little relieved to discover that Zimmerman is half-white and half-Latino.

However, that fact is of no consolation to Trayvon Martin’s family, I’m confident, and what can you say about such a senseless slaughter that very apparently was race-based to at least some degree (and probably a large degree)?

The news today on the Trayvon Martin case is that Zimmerman and his family and friends are fearful for his safety, and so he is hiding at an undisclosed location.

Jesus fuck — is this another right-wing attempt to make the victimizer into the actual victim here?

The Trayvon Martin case screams for us to examine (at least these) four social phenomena (in no certain order): The one in which the victimizers claim to be the actual victims; the one in which many right-wing Latinos, perhaps especially in backasswards Florida, think that the ticket to being accepted by whites is to join whites in their oppression of blacks; the one in which armed-and-dangerous fucktards think that it’s OK for them to play cops and robbers with real guns and real bullets; and the phenomenon, the cancer, of the gated community, which is sick and fucking twisted and probably not what Jesus Christ had in mind, that the rich, who can only become rich through exploiting others, should barricade themselves in ritzy neighborhoods while everyone else slowly dies from poverty.

Most of the focus on the Trayvon Martin case seems to be around the race of the slaughtered and the slaughterer, and while of course the evil of racism still is alive and well in 2012 (the incredibly racist “Don’t Re-Nig” anti-Barack-Obama-re-election bumper sticker is one of many examples that I could give), it seems to me that not enough attention is being focused upon the fact that Zimmerman slaughtered Martin while Zimmerman was volunteering on a neighborhood watch — The Associated Press notes that “Martin was shot dead after Zimmerman, 28, a white Hispanic neighborhood watch captain, believed the young man walking through the gated community looked suspicious.”

Since when did neighborhood watches involve vigilantes gunning people down in the streets? 

The American empire indeed is crumbling all around us, but is this what we have come to — the return of the wild West?

States (like Florida and more than a dozen others) that have so-called “stand-your-ground” laws, which allow people to cap other people in the streets willy-nilly — and which make you wonder if certain paranoid, fearful, gun-loving individuals want to find “reasons” to cap other people in the streets willy-nilly — need to repeal these laws voluntarily or the federal government needs to step in and nullify them, as these woefully misguided laws blatantly violate the United States Constitution.

You have the constitutional right to defend your home from actual grave threats (that is, threats that might actually put you in your grave…), and you have the constitutional right to own a gun, but I have the constitutional right to be able to walk down the street without fear of you blowing me away because you, for some fucking reason, deem me to be a “threat.”

‘Christo’fascist agenda? Over THEIR dead bodies!

The Associated Press reports that “Christo”fascist presidential hopeful Prick Santorum “has said that he wouldn’t try to take away the birth control pill or condoms but that states should be free to ban them. He told a Christian blog last year that as president he would warn the nation about ‘the dangers of contraception’ and the permissive culture it encourages. He’s also questioned whether women should be in combat and said that ‘radical feminists’ have undermined the traditional family by ‘convincing women that professional accomplishments are the key to happiness.'” Oh, and he believes that Roe vs. Wade should be overturned (which 72 percent of Newser’s users have deemed “scary”) and he recently declared that as president he would try to “overturn” any U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of same-sex marriage — even though the U.S. president of course may not “overturn” the nation’s highest court, something that a high-school freshman should know.

Wow. What does it say about the Repugnican Tea Party — and its presidential chances in November — that Prick Santorum has been leading Mitt Romney in national polls of Repugnican Tea Party presidential preference this month?

True, in these recent polls Santorum has been leading Romney by only two to four percentage points, but still: Santorum’s last gig in U.S. politics was losing his re-election bid to the U.S. Senate in 2006 by 17.3 percentage points. Wikipedia notes that Santorum’s 2006 Democratic opponent, Bob Casey Jr., enjoyed a “margin of victory [that] was the largest ever for a Democratic [U.S.] Senate nominee in Pennsylvania, and the largest margin of victory for a [U.S.] Senate challenger in the 2006 elections.” And Pennsylvania often if not usually is a presidential swing state, which indicates that its voters are pretty much in line with the nation’s voters as a whole.

Yes, wingtards, please make Prick Santorum your 2012 presidential nominee. Please!

The Associated Press reports today that Santorum proclaimed to “tea party activists and evangelical voters in [swing state] Ohio … that [President Barack] Obama’s agenda is ‘not about you. It’s not about your quality of life. It’s not about your jobs. It’s about some phony ideal. Some phony theology. Not a theology based on the Bible. A different theology.’”

Wow. So, according to Prick Santorum, a U.S. president should govern based upon “a theology based on the Bible.”

I don’t want a U.S. president governing based upon “a theology based upon the Bible” any more than I want a U.S. president governing based upon the Koran or the Torah or the Book of Mormon or any other backasswards, patriarchal, misogynist, xenophobic, homophobic, militaristic book written by ignorant men who lived and died (with the exception of the newbie Mormons, of course) centuries and centuries ago.

Prick Santorum told his crowd of KKK’ers in Ohio today that Barack Obama’s agenda isn’t about them, but Prick Santorum’s agenda isn’t about the majority of the rest of us Americans, who reject his “Christo”fascist, far-right-wing agenda, who believe in the individual’s right to use contraception, which Prick Santorum, a puppet of Pope Palpatine, is on the record as opposing; who believe in a woman’s right to govern her own uterus; and who believe in the right of any two adults who wish to marry each other to do so. (Yes, nationwide polls show that a solid majority of Americans favor giving same-sex couples some legal status, if not full marriage equality, and even then, many (if not most) nationwide polls show that those who favor full marriage equality rights for same-sex couples have broken the 50.0 percent mark.)

History has demonstrated that theocracy results in violence and bloodshed between different religious factions, and that secular government is the best kind of government to prevent this.

Is this what the “Christo”fascist Prick Santorum and his “Christo”fascist supporters want, I wonder — a bloody jihad against those of us who refuse to submit to their Bible-based bullshit? Just like we see with the Taliban?

You say Rick Santorum, I say American Taliban.

The “Christo”fascists in the United States of America have the freedom to live their lives as they wish. If they believe that contraception and/or abortion are evil, then they do not ever have to use contraception or ever get an abortion. Neither contraception nor abortion is forced upon them by the government. If they believe that same-sex marriage is evil, then they don’t have to marry a member of their own sex. The government doesn’t force them to marry members of their own sex, either.

The “Christo”fascists are free to believe whatever insanity they wish to believe, a right that they exercise to the fullest. The government does not force them to believe in evolution or global warming, and if they want to shield their offspring from facts and science and sanity, then they may school their little spawn at home. (That’s child abuse, in my book, but they have that right.)

What really rankles the “Christo”fascists is not that they cannot live their own lives as they see fit, despite their ludicrous claims of victimhood, their ridiculous propaganda about a supposed “war on religion” when, in fact, Americans are free to pray at home and in their places of worship of their non-existent, Zeus-like deity, and are free to express and to disseminate their ideas about this non-existent deity, and U.S. churches remain untaxed, may with impunity blatantly discriminate against individuals based upon their sex and race and sexual orientation and gender conformity (and, of course, based upon their religious beliefs), and, despite their untaxed status, still the churches blatantly insert themselves in the political process (like the Mormon cult’s and the Catholick church’s involvement in Proposition H8).

U.S. churches long have had special rights and privileges and immunties that we non-“Christo”fascists do not possess (try not paying your taxes, or blatantly discriminating against women or non-whites or those whose religious views differ from your own in your workplace, for example), yet they cry “victimhood.”

No, what really rankles the “Christo”fascist minority is that there are tens and tens of millions of us Americans who reject their Bible-based bullshit, and, because the “Christo”fascists’ backasswards worldview doesn’t survive the scrutiny of reality and logic and reason, they need as many converts as they can get in order to be comfortable in their bullshit, backasswards beliefs.

And I have little doubt that if they couldn’t convert us, they would kill us, if they could. Just like the Taliban.

So — preventing a “Christo”fascist like Prick Santorum from ever getting into the Oval Office is, literally, a matter of life or death, and the majority of us Americans who reject the “Christo”fascist agenda need to stand up to the “Christo”fascist minority and proclaim: Over your dead bodies will we go back to the Dark Ages to which you believe you can drag us.

I fucking HATE Billary Clinton

Associated Press photo

Former Arkansas Gov. Billary Clinton pals around with DINO U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln in Little Rock today. Billary hates the democratic process, as evidenced by the fact that he believes that progressive candidates shouldn’t run for office when he doesn’t want them to run against centrist asswipes like Lincoln. Billy Boy has outlived any usefulness and he really, really needs to get himself a hobby. And/or maybe some Viagra, because he has way too much time on his hands.

When people learn that I fucking hate the fucking Repugnicans, they assume that I’m a Democrat (I’m registered with the Green Party) and that I must like Billary (Bill and/or Hillary) Clinton.

I fucking hate Billary Clinton.

Today in the news is the report that Mr. Bill himself tried to urge Rep. Joe Sestak from running against Democrat-come-lately Sen. Arlen Specter in the Democratic primary race for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania.

How deeply anti-democratic it is to try to strong-arm anyone from running for office. If it isn’t illegal, it certainly is sleazy.

Despite Billary Clinton’s sleazeball attempt to keep Sestak down, Sestak ran in the primary anyway and beat the fossilized Specter’s ass.

It’s called DEMOCRACY, Billary.

Get over it.

And get over yourself.

Billary also today slammed those on the left who have been trying to unseat DINO (Democrat in name only) U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Billary’s home state of Arkansas.

Voters in Arkansas recently gave Lincoln’s Democratic primary opponent Bill Halter, the state’s lieutenant governor, enough votes to force Lincoln and Halter into a run-off on June 8.

Politico reports that during an appearance for Lincoln today, Billy Boy

…pounded the podium with Lincoln at his side, warning that national liberal and labor groups wanted to make her a “poster child” in the June 8 Senate run-off to send a message about what happens to Democrats who don’t toe the party line.

 “This is about using you and manipulating your votes to terrify members of Congress and members of the Senate,” Clinton said in the gym of a small historically black college here [in Little Rock].

Oh, fuck you, Bill Clinton.

One, you need to just go the fuck away. I fucking hate it that the baby boomers — the very same ones whose infuckingcredible incompetence and greed have pushed our nation to the edge of the abyss — refuse to leave the stage, thinking that we still need or that we still want them.

Two, Billy Boy, obviously you are out of touch with what the voters want. You believe that the voters should want whatever you want. Although you’re used to having your ass kissed — and your dicked sucked (by young female interns) — it doesn’t work that way, Boss Tweed. The voters tell you what to do, not vice-versa.

Finally, don’t fucking lecture anyone about “using” or “manipulating” others. I personally experienced the Clinton political machine chugging at full speed after John Kerry won the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination and it suddenly became all about fundraising and demands that the Clintonesque “Democratic” line be toed.

That whole experience turned me off so much from doing anything for the Democratic Party that I did very little for the Obama campaign four years later other than to give the campaign some money with the hopes of knocking Mrs. Bill out of the Democratic primary race because I really, really didn’t want to see her as the Democratic presidential candidate.

Billy Boy, if the voters still loved you so much, they would have picked Mrs. Bill as their candidate instead of Barack Obama.

Billary, you’re old hat. Yesteryear’s news. So over.

It’s long past time for you to go the fuck away. Far, far away.

And that Team Obama still keeps the Clinton relics around is just one more reason that I very most likely won’t cast my vote for Barack Obama again in November 2012.

P.S. I just gave Bill Halter a $25 donation. (Thank you for the inspiration, Billary!) If you, too, want to help Halter get rid of DINO Blanche Lincoln, you can click here.