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.

We already have an Anglo-Saxon caucus: the Repugnican Party

Associated Press news photo

This single image alone lays waste to the entire idea of white “supremacy.”

Sadly, it’s not shocking to me that at least two U.S. “representatives,” far-right-wing nut jobs Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia (pictured above) and Paul Gosar of Arizona, reportedly are trying to start an “America First Caucus” in the U.S. House of Representatives.

This proposed new caucus widely is being called the “Anglo-Saxon caucus,” since “America First” means white first, of course — even though the first Americans were not white, but were Native American and later, Mexican (indeed, Mexicans don’t cross the southern border; the southern border crossed them).

For the record, I am Anglo-Saxon. I even did DNA testing some years ago that showed my DNA most closely matching the DNA of the predominant populations of Britain and of Germany (not shocking, since more white Americans are of German descent than of any other, closely followed by those of Irish descent and then those of British descent, although the latter are considered to be under-counted).

I am not “proud” to be white any more than I am “proud” to be gay. I am what I am and others are what they are, and that’s all that it is. (To me you can be proud of an accomplishment or an achievement, perhaps, but of your DNA? I don’t fucking think so.)

White “supremacy” always has eluded me, in no small part because those who espouse it, such as Taylor Greene and Gosar, hardly are exemplars of their race. Being “supreme” would necessitate that you’re also not an abject fucktard with apparent mental illness.

And to assert that whites deserve even more representation in Congress is beyond ludicrous, of course.

Per the U.S. Census Bureau, non-Latino whites make up 60 percent of the U.S. population — yet per the Pew Research Center, only 23 percent of those in Congress are not white, meaning that whites, at 77 percent of those in Congress, are significantly over-represented in Congress according to their makeup of the U.S. population. Today’s Congress is the most diverse Congress ever, and Congress keeps getting more diverse, per Pew, but whites still are over-represented in it.

Of course, Taylor Greene, Gosar & Co. haven’t broken with their party as much as they are just breaking the Repugnican Party’s long-standing unspoken rule: be racist, of course, but don’t ever openly, publicly admit it.

Indeed, per Pew, “Among today’s [U.S.] senators and representatives, the overwhelming majority of racial and ethnic minority members are Democrats (83%), while 17% are Republicans.”

That statistic alone speaks volumes about how serious the Repugnican Party is about representing non-whites in the halls of power.

An “America First Caucus” or “Anglo-Saxon Caucus” in the House would be pretty fucking redundant. We already have one: they’re called the Repugnicans.

But I wholeheartedly encourage the Repugnicans to continue along these sick and twisted lines; anything to speed up the approaching extinction of the backasswards Repugnican Party is a wonderful fucking thing.

In the meantime, the rest of us need to continue the ongoing work of making the United States of America a more perfect union — which would mean, among many other things, that “America” or “American” doesn’t mean white, but means only the geographic area of the United States or a person residing in or having come from the United States of America.*

E pluribus unum, bitches.

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*I’m not big on dividing ourselves by nationality, and/or by citizenship status either, but, you know, baby steps…

Dear DINO Princess Kyrsten Sinema: I want my fucking $30 back!

Democrat in name only U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona gives a literal thumbs-down vote on raising the federal minimum wage to $15. We need to give Sinema — who of course never would even try to live on even $15 an hour herself — a thumbs-down vote by giving her a viable challenger from the left when she faces her next primary election in 2024. (The nausea-inducing video of Sinema’s actual princess-like, way-too-fucking-cute curtsy while voting down a more liveable wage for Americans can be seen here.)

I don’t at all understand “Democratic” U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. The Democrats hold only 50 seats in the U.S. Senate, yet she must vote as a Repugnican.

Sinema’s latest outrage is having cavalierly given a literal John McCain-like thumbs-down vote against raising the federal minimum wage to $15. What the fucking fuck?

I lived in Arizona for the first 30 years of my life. I’ll always remember Arizona fondly as one of our most backasswards states, and surely it would have been a slave state had slavery extended that far West. (Indeed, I’m sure that wage slavery reigns there still.)

I fully understand that an Arizona Democrat is nothing like a California Democrat (I’ve lived here in California for more than 20 years now since I moved away from Arizona for good); most Arizona Democrats, even the supposedly most left-leaning ones, are like California’s moderate Repugnicans.

But newly minted U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona, also a Democrat, voted for the $15 minimum wage — and literally displayed a thumbs-up to register his vote.

So why does Kelly feel comfortable siding with the poor and the working class, but Sinema does not? Is she that much of a spoiled fucking princess? (That was rhetorical, but the answer very apparently is a resounding yes. [I mean, the video speaks a million words.])

Sinema also is one of two U.S. “Democratic” senators who reportedly oppose eliminating the filibuster.

If the filibuster — the anti-democratic and anti-Democratic requirement that legislation needs a super-majority of 60 votes or more to pass the U.S. Senate (and which is not provided for in the U.S. Constitution) — is not eliminated, then President Joe Biden will get nothing even remotely progressive passed.

And consequently, the Democrats will lose the U.S. House of Representatives, and perhaps also the U.S. Senate, in November 2022. And former “President” Pussygrabber’s chances of becoming “president” again in November 2024 will be greater than they otherwise would have been had President Biden been able to make America a little bit greater again.

The Democratic establishment sorely needs to have a come-to-fucking-Jesus chat with Sinema.

And not just to pick on Sinema — the other “Democrat” in the Senate who loves the filibuster, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, also needs to decide if he wants to be a Democrat or a Repugnican. If you love the Repugnican agenda — under which the majority of the American people socioeconomically languish while the already-filthy-rich laugh even louder all the way to the bank — then become a fucking Repugnican.

In the meantime, I regret the small donation of $30 that I gave Sinema to help get her elected. (That $30 would have represented two hours of labor under the minimum wage that to Her Highness is just too high.) Sinema was running for the U.S. Senate as a Democrat and I actually believed that she would legislate as a Democrat. I’d love my money back, because the Repugnican-loving princess-bitch-sorority chick fucking punk’d me.

If I pick on Sinema more than on Manchin, that’s probably because we, the people, very probably can unseat Sinema much more easily than we can unseat Manchin.

Manchin’s very red, very backasswards state of West Virginia in November 2020 went to former “President” Pussygrabber, 68.6 percent to 29.7 percent. That being the case, I wish that Manchin would just go over to the dark side already and call himself a Repugnican, since that’s what he already is. (Of course, it would be nice if Manchin would switch parties after the Democrats have a solid majority in the Senate, but if he’s not on board with anything remotely progressive anyway, such as eliminating the obsolete, antiquated and anti-democratic filibuster, what difference does it fucking make if he remains a “Democrat”?)

Sinema’s state of Arizona, however, went to Joe Biden in November 2020, albeit narrowly, 49.4 percent to 49.1 percent. I don’t see that she has nearly the same political pressure to vote like a Repugnican that Manchin does.

And again, Kelly and Sinema go before the very same electorate, yet why is Kelly acting like a Democrat (at least like a moderate Democrat) and Sinema is acting like a fucking Repugnican?

Until and unless Little Princess Let Them Eat Cake Kyrsten does a 180 — which I don’t see her doing — she gets not another penny from me, and if she has an actually Democratic challenger when she is up for re-election in 2024, I will support her most progressive yet most viable challenger.

Thus far I’ve given Mark Kelly $35, and after I post this I’m going to give him another donation of $25.

There needs to be rewards for our elected officials working for the people — and punishments for their treasonously working against the people and for our plutocratic overlords.

That’s the only way for us, the people, to take our country back: We need to say sayonara to the Sinemas.

P.S. Donation of $25 to Mark Kelly made.

You can donate to him also if you wish to; go to ActBlue.com and type in “Mark Kelly” in the search bar, and give to Mark Kelly “AZ-Sen 2022.” Yes, Kelly is up for election again in 2022, just next year, yet he voted yes on a more liveable minimum wage.

P.P.S. To be fair even to DINO Sinema, she issued a statement indicating that her main problem with the vote on raising the federal minimum wage to $15 was that it was coupled with COVID-19 relief and that she thinks that a minimum-wage increase should be pursued via separate legislation.

I am unmoved. Again, her fellow senator for the state of Arizona voted yes and he’s up for election again next year.

In any event, there is no excuse for Sinema not comporting herself like a U.S. senator, but comporting herself — acting and dressing — like a little teenaged bitch-princess when millions upon millions of real people’s lives are on the line. She’s 44 years old and it’s sickening.

And finally, to be fair even to the late John McCain, he was giving a thumbs-down to evil (to abolishing the Affordable Care Act without anything to replace it). Sinema, of course, was giving a thumbs-down to doing the right thing.

Best-case scenario: Dems win Senate, decide next high-court justice

APF/Getty Images photo

Two pussy grabbers in a pod: Brett Kavanaugh and “President” Pussygrabber shake hands after the “president” announced Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court in July.

I never would predict that the Democrats will win the U.S. Senate back in November as well as the U.S. House of Representatives. (Fivethirtyeight.com right now, as I type this sentence, gives the Dems an 81.3 percent chance of winning back the House, but only a 32.6 percent chance of winning back the Senate.)

Still, after our ongoing long national nightmare, I can dream.

I believe U.S. Supreme Court “justice” nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, that back in the early 1980s, when he was 17 years old and she was 15 years old, he drunkenly sexually assaulted her (gee, can we add under-aged drinking to the sexual assault?).

We already have one known sex fiend on the nation’s high court; we don’t need another. (Nor, for that matter, do we need yet another right-wing white man; the court has not been representative and reflective of the U.S. population forever.)

Because of the statute of limitations, it’s too late to prosecute Kavanaugh, but in most cases 17 years old is old enough for an act to be indicative of one’s character, I believe, and because I believe Kavanaugh’s accuser, I believe that he is unfit to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, his radical-right-wing views aside.

Anyone who can’t understand why a victim of sexual assault would remain silent for years (Ford did recount the sexual assault to her therapist in 2012) probably hasn’t been the victim of a sexual assault. Especially if the perpetrator has power and status, of course a victim easily could choose to remain silent, expecting (often if not usually correctly) to be even further victimized if she or he were to report the incident.

The Anita Hill debacle didn’t happen until 1991; she was treated atrociously, including by perennial presidential wannabe Joe Biden (a DINO) and by soulless mercenary David Brock, who went on to work for/with DINO Billary Clinton (because, you know, she’s a feminist).

If it was that bad for Anita Hill in the early 1990s, how much better do you think that it was for Christine Blasey Ford in the early 1980s? Her perpetrator went to prep school and then to Yale. He had a future, you see; hers, on the other hand, was disposable.

So this is what I’m hoping — dreaming — will happen: Brett Kavanaugh will go down in flames, as he deserves. There won’t be enough time before the November mid-term elections for the treasonous Repugnicans to try to ram through the installation of another Nazi on the U.S. Supreme Court with a simple majority Senate vote instead of the historically required 60 votes (as they did with Neil Gorsuch, whose seat on the Supreme Court is stolen property).

Then, the Dems will take back the Senate in November, and one of two things will happen:

(1) They won’t allow “President” Pussygrabber to put another wingnut on the high court — they will stick to the simple-majority Senate vote requirement that the Repugnicans have felt was just fine for Gorsuch and now for Kavanaugh. (Let the Repugnican traitors have a taste of their own bitter medicine; their “nuclear-option” change in the Senate rules should remain in place.)

The best that Pussygrabber would be able to do in this scenario is to put a moderate on the bench, as Obama was willing to do (with the Senate controlled by the opposing political party) with Merrick Garland.

Or (2) if they really find their spines (which is not nearly as likely as is scenario No. 1), the Senate Democrats will simply do what the Repugnicans did during President Obama’s last year in office: simply refuse to put anyone new on the bench until after the next presidential election. (Yertle McConnell proclaimed that democracy demanded that!)

If the Repugnicans did nothing wrong by depriving Obama of the presidential right to name a U.S. Supreme Court justice in the last year of his presidency, then they will have nothing to bitch about.

I tell you what: If the Democrats actually recapture the Senate in November, a feat in and of itself given the electoral map, and then actually refuse to allow Pussygrabber to put another “justice” on the Supreme Court — finally showing that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander — I probably will switch my voter registration back from independent to Democrat.*

The Repugnican traitors shamelessly play hardball while the Democrats cluelessly try to sing “Kumbaya.” Until and unless the Democrats’ spines finally calcify, they don’t deserve our full support.

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*I had changed from Green to Democrat to be able to vote for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential primary, but after the anti-Bernie Democratic National Committee e-mails were released in July 2016, I changed to independent (“no party preference” here in California) out of rage and disgust.

The Democratic Party would have to impress the hell out of me for me to ever join it again.

How many more whacks can the Pussygrabber piñata sustain?

AFP photo

A woman takes a hit at an effigial piñata of Pussygrabber during a protest in Mexico City in October 2016, before our long national nightmare officially began in January 2017.

For better or for worse — now, for worse — the United States presidency was built to be durable. The president, whether actually elected by the majority of the voters or not (tellingly, neither of our last two Repugnican “presidents” were), gets a fairly long term of four years, plenty of time with which to do plenty of damage, and it’s incredibly difficult to remove a sitting president.

Unless the president obviously, unarguably is incapacitated, such as through coma or death, he gets to remain in office, and sure, you can impeach him with a simple majority vote of the U.S. House of Representatives, but to actually remove him from office then would take at least 67 votes in the U.S. Senate. That’s never happened in our nation’s history. (I generally am against super-majorities, especially super-majorities of two-thirds. If we must have a super-majority, to me it shouldn’t have to be higher than 60 percent.*)

When we have a shitty president, our options aren’t many. Ensuring that his party doesn’t control both houses of Congress helps, and I am confident that the Democrats will take back the House in November. (Fivethirtyeight.com right now gives them a 78.2 percent chance of doing so.) That will be yet another significant blow to the Pussygrabber piñata, which has taken many hits so far.

Not that Pussygrabber would flinch all that much (at least publicly) after losing the House; he’s never understood or respected the U.S. Constitution, so he’ll still try to be a dictator. He’ll try; he’ll be slapped down by the checks and balances that the nation’s founders wisely and presciently built into our system of governance.

But, as I have noted before, Pussygrabber does make the cockroach jealous in terms of his ability to survive what should have killed him.

The pussy-grabbing tape publicly revealed in October 2016, for fuck’s sake, should have ended him.

And it’s been nothing but a parade of books about the Pussygrabber White House, first Michael Wolff’s best-selling Fire and Fury, then White House insider Omarosa Manigalt Newman’s Unhinged (which, whatever we think of her, still sits at No. 60 on Amazon.com’s top-100 selling books list as I type this sentence), and now, Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump in the White House — which because of pre-orders right now is No. 1 on Amazon.com’s best-seller list (it officially come outs on Tuesday, which is September 11…).

When people independently are reporting the same things, um, yeah…

There have been plenty of other whacks on the Pussygrabber piñata, of course, including the indictments and convictions and guilty pleas of Pussygrabber associates, most notably of former Pussygrabber “presidential” campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former Pussygrabber personal attorney Michael Cohen (which didn’t happen even a full month ago), and plenty of wholly self-inflicted hits, such as Pussygrabber’s disastrous meeting with Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin in Finland in July, during which he surreally casually treasonously threw the United States of America under the bus.

Old-school Repugnican John McCain got in a postmortem dig by barring Pussygrabber from attending his recent funeral, which was attended by Barack Obama and George W. Bush, as well as by Joe Biden and former U.S. Sens. Russ Feingold and Gary Hart and current U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, all Democrats.

The New York Times last week released that interesting, anonymously-penned op-ed titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration” and tag-lined “I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.”

The op-ed didn’t tell us much that we didn’t already know, wasn’t much new, except that it purportedly was written by someone still working within the Pussygrabber regime (my best guess is that it was lodestar-loving Mike Pence, who would personally benefit immediately upon Pussygrabber’s exit), and of course Pussygrabber made the situation even worse by tweeting:

Does the so-called “Senior Administration Official” really exist, or is it just the Failing New York Times with another phony source? If the GUTLESS anonymous person does indeed exist, the Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at once!

Wow. Let’s unpack that: Saying or reporting anything that “President” Pussygrabber doesn’t want you to is tantamount to threatening “National Security.” Wow. No First-Amendment or whistle-blowing protections for us peasants where it comes to Mad King George!

To equate yourself with the nation (and your ego with the nation’s security) itself is beyond insane. Pussygrabber is not the United States of America; he is an aberration and an abomination. We know this now; indeed, we have known this for some time now, and we don’t need to wait for the historians inevitably to record his “presidency” as such.

And The New York Times is not “failing.” In fact, this never has been true during Pussygrabber’s “presidency,” and Pussygrabber will lie pathologically about anything, will spew even lies that easily are thoroughly debunked.

Forbes reported back in July 2017 of the Times that “the paper enjoys 2.3 million paid digital subscriptions, up 63.4 percent from a year earlier. Its stock is currently trading at a nine-year high, hovering around $20 per share and giving the company a market capitalization of about $3.2 billion.”**

Forbes added: “Like most traditional media organizations, the Times has weathered setbacks thank to falling print subscriptions and ad revenues. But Trump’s presidency appears to have breathed new life into the organization. Since the election, the Times has made itself a must-read, trading political scoops with The Washington Post on an almost daily basis.”

The Times reported 2.9 million online subscriptions last month and published this graphic:

Indeed, I renewed my online subscription to the Times after years of dormancy because I value the Times’ and The Washington Post’s fairly relentless coverage of “our” illegitimate, dangerous “president” (I subscribe to both online, and yes, their current success has a lot to do with the unelected maniac in the Oval Office).

But back to that “presidential” tweet: Most chilling about it, of course, is Pussygrabber’s dictatorial assertion that “the Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her [the writer of the anonymous op-ed] over to government at once!”

Who the fuck does Pussygrabber think he is — Vladimir Putin? (That was [mostly] rhetorical, but feel free to answer it literally.) Although Pussygrabber has done his best to be a human wrecking ball of our republic, in the end, although sometimes slow, such as the Mueller investigation, in the United States of America the rule of law still applies.***

The Times legally does not have to divulge its sources, and the specious “National Security” argument won’t work. Further, at least one federal former prosecutor says that the author of the anonymous op-ed has broken no law at all, either by having provided the piece for publication or by having admitted to any illegal activity within the piece itself.

Another whack to the Pussygrabber piñata is planned to come later this month, when Michael Moore releases his new film on the unelected Pussygrabber regime, “Fahrenheit 11/9,” a twist on the title of his 2004 film about the unelected Bush regime, “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which remains the highest-grossing documentary of all time.

Here is the poster for “Fahrenheit 11/9”:

Pussygrabber’s “win” of the White House was announced on November 9, 2016, and thus “Fahrenheit 11/9.”

True, “Fahrenheit 9/11” was meant to help to deny “President” Bush a second term in the 2004 presidential election and failed to do so, but I’ll take just about any new movie by Moore, and, again, it should be yet another whack on the Pussygrabber  piñata, followed by the Repugnicans’ loss of the U.S. House of Representatives later this fall.

And, of course, Pussygrabber’s approval ratings remain stubbornly stuck around the low 40s, which not only doesn’t bode well for the mid-term elections in November — widely considered to be a referendum on Pussygrabber — but doesn’t bode well for his “re”-“election.”

Pussygrabber’s average approval ratings have been historically low, which is like a constant hitting of the Pussygrabber piñata, weakening it even further and further, if only slowly.

Will there be a final, spectacular, perhaps inevitable blow to the Pussygrabber piñata? And who will strike it? Robert Mueller at any time? The Democratic-controlled House finding its spine and impeaching him? Bernie Sanders beating him in November 2020?

We’ll see, but in the meantime, this will, methinks, remain a fairly slow-moving train wreck.

We’ll probably finally see that piñata spew its contents all over the ground one day, but by the time that comes, we might be too exhausted from our long national nightmare to be able to derive all that much pleasure from it.

—

*On that note, the threshold for a new U.S. Supreme Court “justice” to be put on the bench used to be a vote of 60 or more in the U.S. Senate, until Yertle McConnell changed the Senate rules in 2017 to require only a simple-majority vote for Supreme Court “justices” in order to get Pussygrabber’s picks seated on the court.

The only way for loser Pussygrabber to “win,” once again, was to cheat.

**Forbes does note that maybe Pussygrabber, who is no wordsmith, means that The New York Times is “failing” in its coverage of him and his “presidency,” but most often when Pussygrabber criticizes a company, his criticism is that it is not doing well financially, even though he’s had six bankruptcies.

***It is because there are so many competing different interests within the United States, I surmise, that no one group of people can have power indefinitely, as it is the case in the thugocracy of Russia, which Pussygrabber wants to replicate here in the U.S.

(In March, Pussygrabber remarked that it’s great that China now has a president for life, and that maybe the U.S. will have that too someday. Maybe Pussygrabber was joking, but “jokes” like that aren’t funny. It wasn’t funny when George W. Bush “quipped” in December 2000, “If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.”)

California Democratic Party endorses Kevin de León, snubs Cryptkeeper

Reuters photo

Hopefully, come January 2019, these will be the two U.S. senators for the great state of California, the vanguard of national change that scares the unholy living shit out of the mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging, MAGA-cap-wearing teatards among us.

Wow.

Last night the leaders of the California Democratic Party “took a step to the left, endorsing liberal state lawmaker Kevin de León for [U.S.] Senate in a stinging rebuke of Democratic [U.S.] Sen. Dianne Feinstein,” reports The Los Angeles Times.

The L.A. Times continues:

… The endorsement was an embarrassment for Feinstein, who is running for a fifth full [six-year] term, and indicates that Democratic activists in California have soured on her reputation for pragmatism and deference to bipartisanship as [“President” Pussygrabber] and a Republican-led Congress are attacking Democratic priorities on immigration, healthcare and environmental protections.

De León, a former state Senate leader from Los Angeles, received 65 percent of the vote of about 330 members of the state party’s executive board — more than the 60 percent needed to secure the endorsement. Feinstein, who pleaded with party leaders meeting in Oakland this weekend not to endorse any candidate, received 7 percent, and 28 percent voted for “no endorsement.” …

The fact that Cryptkeeper Feinstein had lobbied the state party to make no endorsement at all — because she was fearful of losing it (recall that in February, De León came just short of winning the state party’s endorsement) — speaks volumes of her rotten and rotting character. I’m sure that if she had thought she would win the endorsement, she would have had no problem with the endorsement vote at all, because she is a corrupt, craven, self-serving, anti-democratic (and, ironically, anti-Democratic) old bat.

The Times news article continues:

… “We have presented Californians with the first real alternative to the worn-out Washington playbook in a quarter-century,” De León said in a statement shortly after the endorsement was announced.

It’s not clear that the endorsement will have a significant effect on the general election. Feinstein crushed De León in the June primary, winning every county and finishing in first place with 44 percent of the overall vote. De León finished far behind with 12 percent, which was enough for a second-place finish and a ticket to the November election under the state’s top-two primary system.

The endorsement can come with hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign money, which the De León campaign will have to help raise, as well as party volunteers and political organizing assistance. De León needs that support to increase his odds of victory in November. Feinstein had $7 million in campaign cash socked away as of May, 10 times what De León had. …

It is true that in the June 5 California primary election, Cryptkeeper, with her superior name recognition, garnered 44.2 percent of the vote and De León garnered 12.1 percent, but there were more than 30 candidates for U.S. Senate on the ballot, at least 15 of whom garnered around 1 percent or more of the vote.

We will see how the votes for these many other candidates who were on the June 5 ballot resettle in November.

It’s true that Cryptkeeper has an advantage. She’s been around since dirt, so she’s well-known in California, and she is a multi-millionaire, so money is no object for her.

And, because she’s Repugnican Lite — among other things, she voted for the Vietraq War and believes that it’s A-OK for the federal government to perpetrate mass spying upon its own citizens, contrary to the U.S. Constitution; actually wanted to make flag-burning a crime, contrary to the U.S. Constitution; just this year for some reason flipped her position on the death penalty; and in the Senate she votes with “President” Pussygrabber’s agenda 26 percent of the time* — she might win in November if she garners enough of the center-right vote.

California’s Repugnican voters might see Cryptkeeper, quite correctly, as the more Repugnican of their two choices. That said, Cryptkeeper’s political centerpiece always has been gun control — after all, the 1978 assassinations of Harvey Milk and George Moscone launched her political career — and I think that it would be difficult for many if not most of California’s Repugnicans to cast a vote for her, knowing how much they want to keep their home arsenals for “protection” against the supposed endless parades of freedom-hating bogeymen who are out to get them.

Kevin de León made it into the top two after the June 5 primary — and that’s all that he had to do in that election to make it to November’s election — and now that he has the formal support of the California Democratic Party, De León has a real shot at unseating Cryptkeeper, who can’t count on any help from the state party, to my knowledge.

Even if Cryptkeeper ekes out another win, she will be politically weaker than she ever has been, and no doubt she’ll get no more than one more term, not just because of her advanced age (she’s 85 years old) but also because of her rapidly declining political capital here in California. (If she were so fucking beloved here, she would have garnered a lot more than 44.2 percent in the June 5 primary — after all, she has been a U.S. senator “for” California since 1992.)

I’m proud that the California Democratic Party endorsed Kevin de León last night. It’s a step in the right direction for a state that in June 2016 voted for Billary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, 53.1 percent to 46 percent (still pretty close for someone who was supposed to have been as beloved as was Billary!).

Thing is, political change is a long, hard slog. Corrupt, craven, self-serving sellouts like Cryptkeeper Feinstein and Billary Clinton don’t just give up their power. We, the people, have to take it from them, have to relieve them of their self-imposed pressure to act like Repugnicans for their own (real and/or perceived) personal and political gain.

Often, we don’t win the first time.

Case in point: Bernie Sanders started running for office in the 1970s, running for governor of Vermont and for the U.S. Senate for Vermont — and losing badly — and he didn’t win an election until he lowered his sights and became mayor of Burlington, Vermont, by a mere 10 votes in 1981.

Bernie finally made it to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1990, and then made it to the U.S. Senate in 2006. And then, as I’ve noted many times, he came impressively close to Billary “Crown Me Already” Clinton in 2016 when he ran for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, and had it been a fair process, he probably would have won the nomination.

Bernie’s electoral history suggests that he persists and that eventually he wins.

That’s what all of us progressives must do.

Even if Kevin de León doesn’t win in November — at this point, now that he has the state party’s endorsement, I give him at least about a 40-60 chance of winning — he has accomplished something significant, something to build upon.

P.S. I support Kevin de León primarily because he’s progressive (he’s not perfect, but he’s progressive), but it’s an added bonus that if he were elected in November, the largest racial/ethnic group in California, Latinos, who outnumber whites in the state, finally would be represented in the U.S. Senate.

Latinos have been underrepresented in California and elsewhere for years and years.

 

—

*For comparison, Kamala Harris votes with Pussygrabber 15 percent of the time, Bernie Sanders 11 percent and Elizabeth Warren 9 percent.

Cryptkeeper’s support low for an incumbent in new statewide poll

Could 85-year-old “Democratic” U.S. Sen. Dianne “Cryptkeeper” Feinstein finally be forced into a long-past-due retirement? She polls at only 36 percent among the state’s electorate, with a whopping 46 percent of the voters still undecided, and only she and actual Democrat Kevin de León will appear on the November ballot, due to California’s “top-two” primary system.

This is interesting: Back in February, only 37 percent of the delegates to the California state Democratic Party’s annual convention endorsed Dianne “Cryptkeeper” Feinstein, who has been a U.S. senator “for” California since 1992 and who seeks yet another term now even though she just turned 85 years old.*

The state-party delegates much preferred Cryptkeeper’s challenger, state Sen. Kevin de León, who recently completed a stint as the president of the state Senate; the delegates voted for him by 54 percent. (Unfortunately, to nab the state party’s endorsement, De León would have had to have garnered 60 percent of the vote, too high a bar, in my opinion.)

The establishmentarian/Repugnican-Lite set claimed at the time that De León’s win over Cryptkeeper (at least percentage-wise) at the convention was among only party nerds who skew to the left and that Cryptkeeper’s paltry 37 percent would be much higher among the general, not-all-Democratic state electorate.

Yet a USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll taken from June 6 through June 17 shows that only 36 percent of the state’s voters right now intend to vote for Cryptkeeper in November, while 18 percent prefer De León, and a huge chunk of them, 46 percent, are undecided.

It seems to me that the delegates to the state party convention had their pulse on the mood of the state’s electorate far more than they were given credit for.

Thus far in the vote count for the June 5 California primary election (the election won’t be certified until July 13), Cryptkeeper has garnered 44.2 percent of the vote to De León’s 12 percent, indicating that Crytkeeper was more popular among those who voted in the primary than she is among the state’s electorate overall, and that the opposite is true for De León.

Yes, polling at 18 percent, De León still has a long way to go against a candidate who has millions more dollars than he does and who has the advantage of much greater name recognition, having been in office significantly longer than newly minted 18-year-old voters even have been alive.

But as The Los Angeles Times reported, “Though Feinstein is ahead [of De León] by nearly 20 points, it’s a low level of support for such a long-serving incumbent, said GOP strategist Mike Murphy, an analyst for the poll.”

Yup. The state’s voters aren’t enthusiastic about Cryptkeeper anymore, and methinks that that is because for years and years now, the state’s voters simply have been resigned to having no other choice. Cryptkeeper is a lot like Billary Clinton: the center-right “Democratic” candidate (both of them voted for the Vietraq War, by the way) who should have hung it up years ago but who refuses to go the fuck away and whom the Democratic Party establishment is going to shove down our throats anyway.

Don’t get me wrong; I hope but I don’t predict that De León will win in November, but with 46 percent of the voters still undecided, he still has a shot. Again, with Cryptkeeper having held on to “her” Senate seat with a bony death grip since 1992, her measly 36 percent in the recent USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll should have her shitting her Depends.**

What will be interesting will be to see if Cryptkeeper actually faces De León or if she does what she does best: runs and hides. The Sacramento Bee notes that the last time that Cryptkeeper agreed to debate an opponent was in 2000, almost two fucking decades ago, so I don’t expect to see Cryptkeeper actually deign to debate De León even once.

Such a move should be fatal for her (recall that Billary Clinton cravenly backed out of a final debate that she’d already agreed to have with Bernie Sanders — again, if it weren’t for their age difference, I’d surmise that these two Repugnican Lites were separated at birth); but Cryptkeeper hasn’t been held accountable for the past several elections now, so we’ll see if she can continue her cakewalk that her overabundance of privilege always had made possible for her — thus far.

P.S. I’ll note, for some reason, that his past week I passed by Kevin de León on my way home from work (I work near the state Capitol and thus I sometimes see state politicos). It was the first time that I’d ever seen him in person.

Not knowing what else to say, and not wanting to interrupt his schedule (he was walking with someone else and presumably had a destination and a purpose), I simply ejected, “I hope you win!” “Thank you,” he replied, and I kept walking, again, not wanting to detain him.

He strikes me as a genuinely nice guy.

You’d never see Her Highness the Cryptkeeper walking about in public, vulnerable to the rabble.

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*Fuck you; no, I’m not “ageist.” (I do, after all, still support Bernie Sanders for president, and he’s 76.) Even though to me Cryptkeeper often has appeared to be addled on camera because of her advanced age, even if she has no severe age-related cognitive issues (I can give her the benefit of that doubt), she was born in 1933, for fuck’s sake, and that fact, coupled with the fact that she’s a multi-millionaire, has meant that she has been quite removed from the vast majority of her constituents.

She could only guess as to what our commoners’ lives are like, but that’s an exercise in empathy that she probably avoids as much as possible.

**Yeah, that probably is ageist, but it was spontaneous and I found it at least mildly funny, so I’m keeping it…

Sen. Cryptkeeper to announce positions on horseless carriages, child labor, iceboxes, moving pictures, etc.

California U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who turns 85 years old this month, and who is pictured above, I’m pretty sure, suddenly conveniently supports things that she long used to oppose, which, she assures us, has nothing to do with the November election.

In Tuesday’s primary election in California, I wanted, above all else, only two things: for actual Democrat Kevin de León to make it into November’s election for U.S. senator against incumbent Repugnican Lite Dianne “Cryptkeeper” Feinstein and for Repugnican Lite Antonio Villaraigosa not to make it into November’s election for governor against Gavin Newsom.

I got both wishes.

Stick a fork in Villaraigosa; he’s done. Thus far he is at a distant third place in California’s top-two (a.k.a. “jungle”) primary system (in which the top two vote-getters advance to the general election, regardless of their party affiliation), well behind the No. 2 candidate, a Repugnican whose sorry ass Newsom will hand to him on a silver platter in November.

Don’t get me wrong; Newsom is competent but imperfect, and we’ll see how he governs the state. I am hopeful, but I make no starry-eyed predictions.

The real race for November in California, then, is between Kevin de León and Cryptkeeper, and, sadly, if I’m to be honest, it might take Cryptkeeper’s death to take De León to D.C., because Californians stupidly stubbornly remain attached to Cryptkeeper.

Thus far, Cryptkeeper has 44 percent of the primary vote to De León’s 11.5 percent, with a mostly unknown Repugnican in third place, approaching 9 percent.

Very apparently November’s will be the second U.S. Senate race in California in a row in which a Repugnican wasn’t on the ballot, but in which two Democrats were. (In 2016, it was Kamala Harris and the awful DINO Loretta Sanchez, who never was serious competition against Harris, who won largely by just not acting insanely, as Sanchez did routinely.)

Cryptkeeper has advantages that De León does not: She’s been around since the invention of dirt, and thus her name recognition in California is incredibly high, and, being a multi-millionaire, she has millions of her own dollars that she is pumping into her race (at least $5 million thus far).

She also, of course, has the staunch, blindly obedient support of the so-called Democratic establishment, the very same fucking geniuses who thought that it was a great idea to run the widely despised Repugnican Lite Billary Clinton — instead of the wildly popular genuine populist Bernie Sanders — against Pussygrabber.

Also, because Cryptkeeper is far more like a moderate Repugnican than an actual Democrat (that is, progressive), my guess is that many of California’s Repugnican voters, lacking a member of their own party on the ballot for U.S. Senate, will hold their noses and vote for Cryptkeeper, believing, correctly, that she’s far better for them and their treasure chests and their backasswards social and socioeconomic views than is the actual Democrat in the U.S. Senate race, Kevin de León.

When I say that it might have to take the death of the soon-to-be 85-year-old Cryptkeeper to put De León in the U.S. Senate, I’m being at least half-serious.

In the meantime, it’s nauseatingly amusing to see the new policy positions that Cryptkeeper is taking now in order to try to fend off any threat that De León might pose to her.

Cryptkeeper just recently reversed her stance on the death penalty, which she used to staunchly support but now conveniently opposes, and just recently conveniently reversed her stance on the use of recreational marijuana (only after the majority of the state’s voters approved it in November 2016).

There has been no news yet on how Cryptkeeper feels about other social issues and technological developments, such as indentured servitude, indoor plumbing, child labor, horseless carriages, electricity, penicillin, The Pill, and even whether or not we should allow women to vote.

It will be exciting over the next five months to hear how she has “evolved” on issues on which she always should have been leading, not fucking following, since she first was elected to the Senate way, way back in 1992.

Californians who vote for Cryptkeeper in November, if they incredibly lazily and stupidly give her yet another term, will get exactly what they deserve: only even more of the same old, same old. Literally as well as figuratively.

Kevin de León denies Sen. Cryptkeeper state Democratic Party endorsement

California State Sen. President Kevin de León (pictured above left) yesterday won 54 percent of the vote of the delegates at the annual state Democratic Party convention in San Diego, a crushing blow to Sen. Dianne “Cryptkeeper” Feinstein (above right), whose name depressingly and oppressively has been on the ballot for the past 25 years. Cryptkeeper won only 37 percent of the delegates’ votes — 485 fewer votes than de León won.

Wow. For a little while I was a little worried about Kevin de León’s bravely insurgent campaign for the U.S. Senate seat for California that the ancient, Democrat-in-name-only Dianne Feinstein — whom I lovingly think of as “Cryptkeeper” — has held with a death grip since 1992.

No more.

Not only did de León recently win the endorsement of the nation’s largest state’s largest public-sector union, the Service Employees International Union (for once the Billary-Clinton-loving union to which I belong got a political endorsement right), but yesterday at the annual state Democratic Party convention, de León handily denied Cryptkeeper the state party’s endorsement.

It’s a high bar to win the state party’s endorsement — a vote of at least 60 percent of the delegates to the convention — but not only did de León deny Cryptkeeper that 60 percent, but he blew her out of the water: De León won 54 percent of the delegates’ votes to Cryptkeeper’s 37 percent.

Again: Wow.

The Los Angeles Times calls it “an embarrassing rebuke of” Cryptkeeper and notes that “Though de León did not get the endorsement, his success in blocking Feinstein from receiving it shows that his calls for generational change and a more aggressively liberal path have resonated with some of the party’s most passionate activists.”

Of course multi-millionaire Cryptkeeper, one of the wealthiest U.S. senators, has more campaign cash in the bank (including at least a cool $5 million that she gave herself) than does de León, and of course because of her name recognition (she has been around longer than has God), Cryptkeeper is polling better right now than is the much-less-known de León, but de León’s big wins — such as winning the majority of the state party delegates’ votes and winning not only SEIU’s endorsement but also the California Nurses Association’s — demonstrate that not only is de León a serious contender, but that plenty of Californians have had it with the plutocratic Cryptkeeper’s center-right bullshit and wish her gone.

I expect de León’s coffers to fill soon, and I expect his poll numbers to climb the more that Californians realize what a winner he is. And I expect more labor unions to endorse him, and without labor unions’ help, I can’t see Cryptkeeper winning. Her big money alone won’t be enough; she’ll have to actually earn enough votes.

The 84-year-old Cryptkeeper could have saved herself this embarrassment and stepped down, but she’s been tone-deaf to her constituency, who is to the left of her on many if not most issues, for years. The only reason that they’ve been re-electing her is that this is the first time that a viable alternative has emerged.

Cryptkeeper is no longer inevitable, and that’s great news not only for the people of California, but for all Americans who are affected by Cryptkeeper’s center-right votes in the U.S. Senate.

P.S. Also yesterday, California gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom (who also has been endorsed by SEIU) garnered more votes for a state party endorsement than did any other candidate, with 39 percent.

While DINO Antonio Villaraigosa and Newsom have been in the top two in polling, yesterday Villaraigosa came in at fourth place in the endorsement vote, garnering only 9 percent. (The second-place winner garnered 30 percent and the third-place winner garnered 20 percent, and because there are so many Democratic gubernatorial candidates, it wasn’t expected that any one of them would reach the 60-percent mark necessary for an endorsement from the state party.)

I expect Newsom, who is my imperfect-but-preferred candidate, to become California’s next governor.

Some are saying that these votes for state party endorsements reflect only the wishes of party insiders, but these so-called party insiders are dispersed throughout the state and they are opinion leaders. These state party endorsement votes aren’t meaningless, even though both de León and Newsom fell short of 60 percent (which, in my opinion, should be reduced to anything above 50 percent).

P.P.S. I should note that under California’s top-two primary system, the top-two vote-getters (regardless of party) in the state’s June 5 primary will move on to the November general election, and I expect the top two to be Kevin de León and Cryptkeeper. (In 2016, there were only two Democrats on the ballot for U.S. Senator for California, Kamala Harris and a nut job who didn’t stand a chance against Harris.)

Some have posited that because Cryptkeeper is center-right — that is, Repugnican Lite — the state’s Repugnicans will vote for her, figuring (correctly) that she’s closer to their political orientation than is de León.

But I don’t know about that. I’d have to see a poll or polls of registered Repugnicans that asks whether or not in a de León-vs.-Cryptkeeper race they’d vote for Cryptkeeper or not vote at all. I surmise that most of the state’s Repugs wouldn’t vote for a Dem, not even DINO Cryptkeeper.

In any event, for de León to win, it’s going to take grassroots support. He doesn’t need as much money as Cryptkeeper does, but he does need those of us who are left of center to vote.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein running again

I have yet to see it reported in the mainstream media, but it’s clear that “Democratic” Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California (pictured above, I’m pretty sure) is going to run for a fifth six-year term.

I voted for the center-right, mostly irrelevant Feinstein exactly once, in 2000, when I was still pretty new to California and didn’t know much about her. Over the ensuing years I learned a lot more about her, such as how her war-profiteering husband profiteered from the unelected Bush regime’s illegal, immoral, unjust and unprovoked Vietraq War that she voted for, and therefore I haven’t voted for her since.*

Feinstein, whose net worth exceeds $50 million (yeah, she’s just one of us!) and who at age 8fucking3 is the oldest (apparently still living) member of the Senate, could step aside and vacate the seat that she has held since 19fucking92, giving a younger, fresher, much more relevant face a chance to represent the great state of California, but why do the right thing?

I knew that Feinstein was running again when fairly recently I started receiving e-mails from her again. (I am on her e-mail list.) Seriously, I can tell you that this is her pattern: It’s radio silence from her for several years, and then, when the next primary election for her approaches (it will be in June 2018), you’ll hear from her.

The e-mail that I received from Feinstein’s campaign today contains this mediocre logo —

— and has small print at the bottom that reads “Paid for and authorized by Feinstein for Senate 2018.”

Sadly, as long as she still lives, Repugnican Lite Feinstein will win re-election. Californians are pretty fucking dumb where it comes to re-electing her.

Hell, they’d probably vote for her corpse, which they essentially have been doing for a while now anyway.

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*Feinstein also supported the unelected Bush regime’s unconstitutional mass spying on Americans, and still supports unconstitutional mass spying by the federal government; called for the immediate extradition and arrest of patriot Edward Snowden for having exposed the unconstitutional mass spying by the federal government that she wholeheartedly supports; supports the death penalty, since millionaires like she never have to worry about ever facing so-called justice; and actually supported the unconstitutional attempt to make the “desecration” of the U.S. flag a criminal act, although the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the First Amendment protects it (duh).

Feinstein is a real over-privileged, out-of-touch, authoritarian, plutocratic piece of shit.