Tag: politics (Page 1 of 8)

Biden-Harris Victory! 2020!

It’s the end of an era. Our long national Infrastructure Week is over.

Joe Biden is the 46th President-Elect of the United States. He is a man with no commitment to Infrastructure Week but a very deep and passionate commitment to aviator sunglasses, Amtrak, justice, the American Experiment, and hugging.  The Senator from Delaware. A man who has been a fixture in US Politics for 50 years. 

Biden.  An ever-present, sort of like that rug stain we never get around to fixing.  He’s President.  Not someone like departed Edward Kennedy, brother of a President, Lion of the Senate.  No.  Joe Fucking Biden.

I keep thinking about the story where Obama told Biden he didn’t need to do this. “You don’t need to do this, Joe.”  But Biden felt called to duty by his country one more time.

Trump, of course, has rejected the news.  He will never concede the Presidency.  He will die without conceding.  But we will move on past the Trump Era, a true end of an era, and head to the next thing that’s going to happen, whatever that is.  Dear God, I hope it’s not more 2020.

I want to spend a moment reflecting on how momentous this victory is and how difficult it was to achieve.  Only 10 Presidents have ever lost re-election: John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush.  (Chester A Arthur and Grover Cleveland both lost and won re-election — things got weird in the 19th century.) 

Trump joins company with another impeached President, a man once called “Martin Van Ruin” who helped drive the country off the cliff to the Civil War, a hard-core unrepentant racist, and the architect of the Great Depression.   Only the best people.

But out of 46 presidents now, it’s only 10.  And Trump is alone with being the only one to lose the popular vote twice.  He is the biggest of the biggest losers.  He’s even a bigger loser than super racist Andrew Johnson.

Ejecting these people from the presidency was a hard fought war, each and every one of them.  The incumbency advantage is immense.   People would rather stick with what they know rather than change.  People would rather not participate.  Hell, the election of 1800 when Adams lost to Jefferson is often called the War of 1800.  Vote for Burr!

To change people have to go out and vote.  Everyone has to go out and vote.  It’s a big ask of everyone — everyone — to go out and exercise their right.  As we all know, people generally don’t.

So, to lose the Presidency is an immense repudiation, a complete rejection of a way of thinking, doing, and being.* It’s the American People giving you a big middle finger.

On top of it, Biden defeated Trump in a global pandemic when voting itself was imperiled.  The Virus.  USPS.  Messing around with Dropboxes.  Lawsuits.  Moving goalposts.  Despite every single obstacle, Biden still defeated Trump.

When the votes are all counted, I think we’ll learn it wasn’t even that close.  Five days of nail-biting was probably for nothing.  But we had something to worry about — the electoral college gives the GOP an advantage by allowing land to vote instead of people.  (Thank you, Alexander Hamilton, you jerk.) We had the ghost of 2016. 

I am savoring for a moment, but I feel a bit like we won the opening battle but we didn’t exactly win D-Day.  America is undergoing an immense technological and demographic change.  The next two generations are significantly bluer and more liberal than those that preceded them, and they are demanding social justice.  Globalization is a thing that isn’t going away.  We’re about to have a very ugly conversation about a Chinese-style state-controlled future and an American-style capitalist future.  Machine Learning will become bigger and bigger. 

Everything, every forward step, from here on out is going to be a game of inches.  Horrible damage has been done to our country, our institutions, and our core beliefs.   The repairs alone will take years, let alone progress.  We’re still in a giant global pandemic with no end!  

It’s going to awful.  It’s going to be a war.

We need to set our expectations appropriately.  

But one thing to remember — we just elected this guy:

Joe Biden: “Fuck Yeah.” http://t.co/lJax9hEr

— The Onion (@TheOnion) January 22, 2013

I shall now go prep for my Metatopia panel.

*Except Taft!  Taft got screwed by Theodore Roosevelt being a dick and running in the Bull Moose party and splitting the vote.  Taft was later appointed to be Chief Justice of the United States as a consolation prize, so he made out ok.

For the price of a video game or a swanky board game (~$70), you can support two to three organizations helping to fight the insanity trying to pull our country apart.  And there are lots of great orgs to donate to.

Here’s a quick pick list of go-to organizations worthy of your dollars right now:

• American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
• Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
• ProPublica.
• International Rescue Committee (IRC).
• Planned Parenthood (PP).
• Doctors Without Borders.
• Sierra Club.
• National Resources Defence Council (NRDC)
• NAACP.
• The Trevor Project.
• Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
• Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).

Your dollars help pay for lawyers to win in court, help people in need, help fight for us to have clean water to drink and air to breathe, and help defend our privacy. If we all donate, we will win so much we will get sick of winning.

Also, Matching Donations will help hook you up with people willing to double your donations to the ACLU, the IRC or the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR).

It’s election ramp-up time!  We’re mumble months out and the commercials have begun.  So let’s talk about politics!  Yay!

I can’t much care about politics on a Federal level in the Midterm elections because the Federal Government has turned into an Insurance company protected by a large and well-funded standing army.  I cannot vote to get the US Government to represent my views on Basic Research or Climate Change or anything so I’ve just sort of table flipped there.  On the local level, though, my vote still carries a teeny tiny bit of weight.

In my old age, on the state level, I’ve become a single issue voter.  I used to pay attention to the postures and positions of the various candidates and vote liberal anyway.  But now a days, I only care about one issue: roads. 

Here’s what I want out of my representatives and government who take my state and county taxes:

• Build roads
• Fix bridges
• Fix potholes
• Maintain roads
• Employ our friends, Civil Engineers

Here’s what I don’t want out of my representatives and government on the state level: much anything else.

My thinking works like this:

… if you’re super into building and maintaining roads …

… you’re probably super into building roads that go useful places or get people to useful places …

… so you might even be interested in those useful places and the people who work there …

… so you might like, oh, say, schools and hospitals and ambulances and the ability for police to answer 911s …

… you might even be interested in some more interesting things like electric car charging stations or running municipal fiber at the outside …

… so, in general, you like modern human civilization.

And thus, I will vote for you.  A vote for roads is a vote for a city, county, and state that is not a crumbling heap of post-dystopian life.

I’m getting to the point where I actually send campaigns emails asking about the candidate’s stance on roads.  Do you like roads?  How do you feel about roads?

As far as I can tell:

Libertarians are morally opposed to roads in any form.  They never leave their homes and teleport from place to place in Ayn Randian teleportation devices.

Republicans, who used to be very pro-road — after all Eisenhower built the freeway system — have crammed their heads up the butts of the abortion/contraceptive/rapey rape caucus.  They no longer have time to stop their moral umbrage to fix a road.  Besides, roads cost money and they no longer pay for things when that money could be going to their buddies.

Greens never build roads.  Why aren’t you walking or riding a bike?  You don’t need a road for a bike.  You can use a mountain bike.   Roads destroy the environment.  Just stop using roads entirely.

This leaves me with the occasional Democrat since we don’t get Independents.   Even they are weak sauce on roads but they do fix an occasional pot hole or fix a bridge.  That’s something.  But if the Democrat won’t fix roads either…

On the local level, I offer my hands in the great greeting of also becoming a single issue voters.  I could care less where a candidate stands on gay marriage or abortion.  All I care about is this: if I elect you, will you ensure that some hole in the freeway won’t destroy my suspension?  That’s what I want to know.

“If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don’t bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don’t bullshit yourself that you’re not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.” 

– David Foster Wallace, Up, Simba!

The quote was about John McCain and the 2000 South Carolina primary but it still holds truth.

Sorry, political post, but this has been jostling around in my brainmeats for the last few weeks and I’m finally tossing it up on my blog. It started with the Bill Simmons interview with Barack Obama on sports fandom and why it pushed certain buttons in my brain and percolated into this itch. 

I like my leaders to be sports fans.  I don’t know why. I don’t have a rational reason.  Their sports fandom or lack thereof does not impact their ability to make decisions on foreign or domestic policy in any conceivable way.  But it’s one of those things I like.  I like sports, they like sports, even if we hate each other on every other topic we have a common ground to share.  I want my leaders to be honest rabid fans of something.  I want to read their diatribes in interviews.  I want to know they care about stuff I care about.  It’s a thing.

I’m not the only one and it is not only this election year.  Frex, Nixon was a notorious rabid professional football fan.  Here’s an old clip from a Hunter S. Thompson interview about Pat Buchanan, Richard Nixon and football:

Oh, boy. The Raiders were playing against the Packers, which was Nixon’s team, and nobody else on the press bus could talk about it, they were afraid of Nixon on football. He was known to be a hard rocker and very involved. And (press secretary) Patrick Buchanan — I’ve always liked Patrick Buchanan — he was looking for somebody to ride with the boss and talk football, and these other guys, political wizards, nobody volunteered. I was the only one on the press bus who volunteered.

You know, Gerald Ford played Center for University of Michigan. Ronald Reagan played 4 years of college ball, did sports broadcasting, and played Knute Rockne in the biographical movie (thus “The Gipper.”) Bill Clinton never met a golf ball he didn’t like — dude still sponsors the Bob Hope PGA Classic every year. And George W. Bush, say whatever you want to say about the guy, was some sort of Rhodes Scholar of Baseball. Guy could go in depth on the impact of All Star games from the 40s and 50s on how they play ball today. Hate the guy’s politics, I’d totally listen at his feet for his Baseball Wisdom.  He’s like the Baseball Buddha.*

Obama is a basketball super-fiend.  I keep hoping, when he’s done being President of the United States, he gets a rotating spot on ESPN Sportscenter.  When he was running in 2008, I appreciated a completely random rant on the BCS and why it should die in fire.  I thought, okay, on this, man, we are totally on the same page.  McCain’s responses to the BCS were weak and flaccid but Obama?  Dude thought about the Greatest Issue Facing Us Today and had OPINIONS.  Say what you want, but when it comes to sports, well, I don’t agree with Obama on his love for the Tar Heels and I’m not as big into the Bulls but hey, we can’t have everything.  (I picked the Wildcats to win Tourney.)

When I see stuff like this  I just wince.  Romney, after gaffs about “knowing NASCAR team owners” and “knowing the owner of the Miami Dolphins” coughs up this gem:

The Republican presidential candidate said Tuesday he won’t fill

out a bracket — an annual tradition for tens of millions of Americans — because he hasn’t been playing close enough attention.

“I’m not plugged in well enough this year to do that,” Romney told reporters in Missouri.

He said that in Missouri where Missou is a #2 Tourney seed.  I’m running around going dude stop now.  It’s bad enough he sounds like Richy McRich, but he couldn’t even find some intern on his staff to fill out a bracket for him and brandish it around showing University of Missouri winning.  To even pretend.  For Christ’s sake, dude! And I get from him that in his gilded, closeted life, the guy has no passions about anything — and he went to BYU, a legitimate basketball school.   And Stanford.  And Harvard.  From none of this did he get one ounce of love for Tourney.  The mind boggles.  He is a Rombot.

I have no idea if Santorum or Gingrich watch sports or like sports or even conceive of An Exciting Sporting Event.  What would I talk to these guys about?  As much as I deride the whole “I could have a beer with the President,” I couldn’t have a beer with these guy.  I just… don’t… know.  Do they watch Sportscenter?  Do their eyes glance over the Sports Illustrated page or try to call up one of various apps to get the scores while on the road?  Would they do that sort of thing?  I just don’t know!

What I’m saying in a roundabout manner is that this stuff is important.  I like the passion.  I like the interest in something other than the job.  When they talk about “connecting with voters,” it’s this kind of thing.  It’s NCAA Brackets.  It’s having a Super Bowl party.  It’s Dubya choking on a pretzel during a Rangers game.  It’s being Nixon on the bus terrifying people with his insane football Eyebeams.  

* Buddha was neither short nor fat.  Just so you know.

I have been ignoring politics for the last several weeks to focus on learning Objective-C and knit and read giant security tomes and generally doing other things.  Tonight I made the mistake of reading the blogs.  So let me get this right:

1. Republicans hate ObamaCare because of the universal mandate to buy health insurance.  Fair enough.

2. Republicans have just offered a budget that….

a. Cancels all of Medicare except for those already enrolled in it.

b. Replaces Medicare with a universal mandate to buy health insurance except…

c. It is only for seniors and…

d. It is subsidized by a voucher system paid out of everyone’s 15.3% FICA tax.

Oooookay.  No one listens to themselves speak, I guess. Also…

1. Obama puts down universal mandate.  This is called socialist, communist, Islamofascist (??), atheist, and evil.

2. Republicans put down universal mandate.  It is called courageous, brilliant, and daring.

At this point, I am going back to knitting and learning Objective-C.  Someone can tell me when it’s safe to come out of my hole again because this is more crazy than I can handle.