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Solstice 2020 — Hope always rises the next morning

December 21st, 2020

This Solstice piece, like all the others I’ve written over the past twenty years, will deal with hope, always a central theme of the Solstice. But it’s going to be a darn sight easier to write than it might have been six weeks ago, when the outlook was still unremittingly bleak. However, now we see a map to the end of the pandemic, and the end of Trump.

I think it must have felt a lot like this in the autumn of 1944, when it became clear the allies were on their way to victory both in Europe and in the Pacific. There was still a hard slog ahead, and a heavy price to be paid before the final victory, but at least victory was in sight, and the future a lot brighter.

Hope isn’t hard to come by in this dark winter. We have a vaccine. We’ve had an election. Both represent turning points, arresting a dangerous plunge to mass death and horror.

We’re not out of the woods yet, of course. It may be several months before many of us get shots, and at least six weeks before we start seeing the terrifying wave of COVID cases finally begin to break. Even with the shots, a half million people in the US alone will be dead, and millions more—perhaps tens of millions—facing a life of permanent and sometimes crippling medical problems.

I won’t relax about Donald Trump until he is out of the White House and facing trial for his many crimes. The votes have been counted and recounted, the courts have ruled dozens of times, and the few remaining sane Republicans have agreed—Biden won by a huge margin, and Trump needs to leave.

And yet Trump apparently believes he did win, as do his followers—the more ignorant ones, to be sure. He’s ordered the Pentagon not to give Biden any briefings even as the country grapples with the worst security leak in its history.

It’s quite possible that Russia controls our nuclear weapons right now, and there is a suspicion that Trump is complicit, either proactively (setting it up to happen) or reactively (knowing it happened, and doing nothing about it.) Perhaps both. In addition to his deep corruption, cruelty and incompetence, it seems likely that Trump is a gleeful traitor, destroying the country that made him possible, for tawdry profit. He’s even trying to suggest it was China on behalf of his Russian master.

There are fears generated by this despicable man, fears that living Americans have never experienced before. There’s a small but finite possibility that by this time next year, we could be in camps, or fighting for our lives and freedoms in a contrecoup. It’s been 150 years since such thoughts have been anything other than paranoid drivel, and I would love it if I read this a year from now and think of my words, “Jesus. Cut back on the coffee, man!”

What I expect to see, a month from now, is Joe Biden taking office and working hard to be a wise and just president, facing down the daunting problems left by his predecessor. I hope to see the daily count of new cases dropping day by day, and hospitals regaining the ability to handle the influx of sick and dying.

2021 will be a year of recovery. The deliberate cruelties and viciousness of the Trump regime will be reversed, and wanton executions, desecration of national parks and selling of our children and our sick to for-profit entities will abate. We will regain control of our compromised cybernet infrastructure. Eventually we might enter stores, attend parties, hug friends and family without fear of it being a death sentence. The strutting Nazis who make up outfits such as the Proud Boys will be cowering under their rocks, licking their wounds and planning for the next time society is sick enough for their opportunistic moral sickness. The vile acronyms of the Republican Party, MAGA, 6MWE, perhaps even GOP itself, will be consigned to the dustbin of history, along with other such loathsome utterances as “Got Mitt Uns” and “The People and Party are One!”

We’ll always have conspiracy theorists, of course, but by this time next year they may be back in their accustomed position of providing amusement and some puzzlement.

People are free to believe whatever damnfool notions they want, as the saying goes. But they aren’t free to make it public policy.

Chemtrails? Moon Landing Hoax? Poison Vaccines? No such thing as COVID? Your opinions, your right. You can even hold public office with nutball beliefs like those, like the idiot I’m stuck with for my Congressman. But don’t try to make them beliefs WE must live by. We have the right to tell you to go to hell—and we will!

And yes, this includes religious beliefs. Most churches are just conspiracy theories with money.

Perhaps by next year I’ll be marveling that we are in a world where food, shelter, water, clothing, medical care and education are rights, and not something to be begged for from scowling billionaires. Perhaps we’ll be on our way to a world were both billionaires and hunger no longer exist.

Yes, these are scary times. Nobody’s going to dispute that. But these aren’t end times, and history shows that the brightest sunrises happen after the longest night. It’s times like these that lead to human renaissances. Our greatest eras followed the Inquisition, the Black Plague, Civil Wars and Hitler.

I hope by next year I can write pieces, including the Solstice letter, that don’t include politics. I miss writing about Iceland and Elves, Shackleton and Exploration, and other Solstice themes. Let’s resolve to get the miserable creatures of the right off our necks so we can live free and free from fear!

We will overcome the twin plagues of COVID and Trump. We won’t only prevail; we will prosper.

Don’t lose hope. Never lose hope.

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The Jabs — Necessary rush on vaccines sparks concern

December 19th 2020

The vaccines for COVID-19 are rolling out. Pfizer has been out for 10 days, and the Moderna variation will be out next week. Between them, they stand to save millions of lives and protect tens of millions from debilitating aftereffects from this terrible disease.

A lot of people have concerns, and it’s not just limited to the anti-vax nuts. Normally a new vaccine gets five or so years of testing before it’s approved for use on humans, and vaccines specific to the coronavirus family of diseases—yes, there are many of those—are still an emerging medical technology.

So a lot of sensible people are watching carefully to see what sorts of side effects people are experiencing over the next few months. American testing of new drugs is a sad joke, since neo-liberalistic policies have created a situation where most of the testing is done by the companies that stand to profit from the new medicine. This has led to nightmares such as oxycontin, where the family-owned business testing the drug failed to notice it was as addictive as meth and twice as destructive.

If the Sackler family and Purdue were willing to ruin millions of lives for profit, then the motivations of the testers in a situation of genuine crisis have to be watched carefully. If millions of dollars can justify mass murder, then millions of lives can easily justify ignoring dangerous problems. Whenever politicians are under immense pressure to Do Something, they will, even though often as not it’s entirely the wrong thing.

So it’s reasonable to be suspicious. Sensible, in fact.

Vaccines have saved billions of lives over the past 75 years or so. They eradicated smallpox and all but eradicated polio and many other diseases that killed millions per year.

But like all medical treatments, they aren’t perfect, and don’t work for all people. People react differently, and there are many allergies out there. Should someone who is fatally allergic to eggs take the vaccine? Normally I would say probably not—most vaccines have ovalbumin in them since the killed viruses are grown in eggs. But as I understand it, both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines do not contain ovalbumin or killed virus. Instead, they are based on “messenger ribonucleic acid.” (mRNA) which is a ribonucleic acid fragment that triggers the body’s autoimmune response to COVID-19. It’s a pretty new technology and early results are very promising.

But nobody knows if the immunity is permanent, or if it will work against the inevitable variations nature will provide, such as COVID-20, 21, 22, etc. (“19” refers to the year it was identified; my use of numbers was just to make the point that new coronaviruses show up all the time.)

While there haven’t been any legitimate reports of serious side effects, stay watchful. There are likely to be at least isolated instances, and we’ll all have to weigh the risks in the shots against the certain risks of the disease.

So watch the news carefully, especially foreign news as American news is mostly corporate masturbatory fantasies designed to sell ads. Sensible caution is in order.

Vaccines do have side effects that affect a lot of people. Most people have experienced one of the following from a shot: Injection site pain, fatigue, headache, muscle pain, chills, joint pain, and fever. Nearly always, these are transitory, lasting less than a day, and harmless.

A certain number of people—hopefully in rare instances—will have more serious reactions. Widespread itching, rash, high fever, muscle spasms, or worse, go see a doctor immediately. But hopefully, we’re talking one in 10,000 people here. Hopefully less.

If your head falls off and rolls away into the gutter, don’t bother with a doctor. Call a friend who is already in Qanon instead.

But between the corrosive effects of social media and the large colony of howling hostile nuts on the far right, wild propaganda is already emerging.

This morning one breathless sort on Facebook claimed there had been “7 deaths reported during the Pfizer testing!” She kinda undercut herself by continuing, “and four of them were only taking the placebo!” Someone else pointed out that given the sample size, statistics made it even odds that six people would die during the course of the testing just because people are mortal.

Other wild claims making the rounds: the horrific pictures of gangrenous fingers and toes are real, and yes, they are well-known side effects of COVID. Blood clots form, causing necrosis. The chief of security for Donald Trump caught it, and wound up losing a leg and the other foot. I can’t vouch for every individual image you see, but yes, COVID can cause that, and a whole lot more problems. It is NOT “just the flu”. Over 320,000 people in the US have died from it, and about 30% of the 10 million or so “recovered” have long-term, sometime permanent health problems, ranging from the level of nuisances to completely incapacitating.

If anyone tells you they aren’t getting the shot because Bill Gates or George Soros wants to microchip you, turn about and walk away. Life’s too short to deal with delusional nuts.

This is going to sound heartless, but the people who say they won’t get a vaccine because vaccines are evil, or because COVID doesn’t exist, are doing us a favor. We’ll look back on it as “the great cull” and the average IQ of America will go up ten points.

But in the meantime, be cautious, and a little wary. Talk to people who know what the hell they are talking about, pay attention to the news, talk to medical people you know. You will have to play the odds a little bit—possible drawbacks to the shots versus possibly horrific drawbacks to getting sick.

But think first, react second.

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The Dawn of Hope — No Hope for Don

December 14th 2020

The Electoral College held its vote today under some of the strangest conditions in American history. In some states threatening mobs gathered outside, hoping to intimidate the electors. In Georgia, some goofs presented themselves to the public as “alternative electors” and voted for Trump. In various spots, there were vigils held by people demanding that Trump be given justice by the courts, something he has already had over 50 times over the past six weeks. He lost every one of them, including to a large number of Trump-appointed judges, plus all three of Trump’s appointees to the Supreme Court.

Of course, Trump WILL be given justice by the courts after he leaves office. But that’s different. If it’s bad for Trump, then it can’t possibly be justice.

The thing, dealing with the dead enders who still believe Trump has been given a second term, is that behind all the bluster and anger and moral rectitude is a level of servility that can’t be described. How DARE the voters defy the Lord? No, they didn’t defy the LORD! Evil forces twisted their will! Trump actually won by 600 million votes, because he is the Lord our God. But Satan is everywhere, in the voting machines, in the Republican states, yeah and verily in the hearts of all the judges and all the state governments that solemnly proclaimed Joe Biden to be a winner.

Surely there is a mistake. God can’t lose an election!

It’s one thing to see Republicans who believe they have a right to rule. They are rich, or at least well-connected, and throughout human history the rich have always assumed they had a right to rule. It’s why human history, by and large, is pretty fucked up. Wealth doesn’t buy wisdom or forbearance or a sense of justice. It just buys hangers-on willing to maintain the illusion of such things as they gouge the people.

Trump supporters, by and large, are in the bottom 90% of American income. They are, by definition, a small percentage of that 90%, but they are noisy and arrogant and sometimes violent in defense of a man whose openly stated talent is the ability to cheat and steal. Yes, Trump supporters, that includes you. Trump’s personal history is littered with the corpses of his supporters. That won’t change.

Trump supporters either prop their belief in that wastrel on either absurdities (“Trump will take care of us!”) or flat out ridiculosities (“Trump has earned the respect of the world!”)

They’ve been drawing in the wagons over the past few weeks as more and more of their illusions are shown to be delusions. Liberals didn’t control the vote. If they did, Mitch McConnell would be long gone, and they would have had huge majorities in the House and Senate. They didn’t even control Georgia, where both Senate races went to runoffs next month which will determine who controls the Senate. There was no fraud, and even Trump’s own lawyers admitted there was no evidence of fraud. China didn’t rig the election. Nor did Hugo Chavez or the Canadian government.

A lot of Republicans had already spun off from the party over the past 12 years as madness enveloped the party. Charles Koch is said to have regretted forming the Tea Party, the font from which much of the madness in today’s GOP flows. The joke making the rounds is that “A moderate Democrat is a Republican who realized just how bat-shit crazy his party had become.”

This brings us to a fabulous creature known as the Oozlum Bird. The Oozlum bird, when startled, will take off and fly around in ever-decreasing circles until it manages to fly up its own backside, disappearing completely. The behavior of the Oozlum bird has been famously used to describe the ever diminishing realities of paranoids and cultists as their views of the world are put under pressure by the steady application of facts.

The Oozlum Bird, from “Carry On Up the Jungle”

Trump has basically already flown up his own ass and vanished at this point. And a lot of the party, including the state A-Gs and pitiful congressionals who voted to support Paxton’s ludicrous effort to have Texas nullify the votes of four other states are finally conceding that yes, Biden did win the election, although quite a few are snarling that as soon as some evidence that
Biden stole it does materialize, they’ll be right back in court.

Meanwhile, they’ve declared war on the GOP and Fox News, which tactically makes as much sense as trying to force the oxygen out of the room you are in.

The right wing trash including the outlaw bikers and the Nazis who have been threatening public officials and roaming the streets of Washington DC and Portland looking for Jews, um, Antifa to beat up are starting to notice they don’t have the support of the people, and without that, they are nothing.

It’s all over but the shouting, and that will go on for quite some time, but for all intents and purposes, the Oozlum bird known as the Trump movement has vanished with an effervescent, if somewhat smelly, pop.

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Reigny Night in Georgia — The Trump Dump Continues

Reigny Night in Georgia

The Trump Dump Continues

December 5th, 2020

Trump is in Valdosta, Georgia tonight, still insisting he won and the Democrats cheated. Yes, in Georgia, where the governor, Brian Kemp, is one of the most notorious election cheats in America. Between 2010 and 2018, he purged 1.8 million names from Georgia voter rolls (about 18% of the total population of the state, and in a state that has gone red since 1976, the majority were Democrats. What are the odds that a party that makes up about 30% of the population could result in 12% of the names being purged? That’s over a third of the Democrats in the state! Quite a few of the names were reinstated when it turned out the individuals involved were not dead, in jail or fled to the Maldive Islands. He also managed to prevent between 55 and 85 thousand votes from being cast in 2018, when he was both one of the candidates for governor and the guy overseeing the election. Most Democratic voters, of course.

I laugh at the bozos running around saying Kemp stole the election. Certainly he tried, but it was FOR Trump, not AGAINST him.

This, supposedly, is the evil genius who stole the election for Biden in Georgia.

So if you’re Donald Trump and you think this man stole the election from you, what do you do?

Why, you go to him and secretly ask him to steal the election back! Makes perfect sense, right?

According to the NY Times, “He began the day with a telephone call with Gov. Brian Kemp, ostensibly to offer his condolences to the governor about the death in a car accident of a young man who was close to Mr. Kemp’s family.”

Nothing like exploiting a personal tragedy for political gain. This is the sort of vileness that makes Trump such a fine humanitarian in the eyes of his deplorable followers.

Maybe Kemp was confused, and thought Trump was the Democrat and Biden the Republican, and he was just being loyal to his party. Just a silly typo on one memo, and once Donald convinces Kemp that he’s the Republican, Kemp will flip the Georgia vote and Trump will be King of the Confederacy?

Turns out that Brian Kemp wasn’t interested in committing an act of treason so egregious that he would be at serious risk of being seized by an angry mob and thrown into a dumpster and set on fire, so he politely demurred. He did, however, make a point of leaking the conversation to the press.

The White House declined comment, which was a curious stance for a White House to take when a governor from the same party says that the president in effect asked Kemp to commit several felonies in order to stage a coup against America. Granted, if they did deny it, only the ignorant morons who still support Trump would believe it, or at least pretend to believe it.

The Washington Post did a survey of Republicans in Congress and found that 27 of them admit that a) Biden won and b) should be President on January 20th. Trump’s response, in part, explains the cynical cowardice of the GOP; he demanded the names of the renegades who admit Trump lost the election. In a hilarious response, NewsMax celebrated the spineless dishonesty of Republicans with the headline, “222 Republican Congressmen Won’t Say Biden President-Elect.” OK, granted, Newsmax is a trash right wing website and nothing more, but they don’t realize that come 2022, Democrats will be using that headline to show how morally and ethically bankrupt their Republican opponents were in this time.

Kemp didn’t have authority to audit the vote, let alone override the slate of electors, and I’m sure that entered into Kemp’s calculations. If he did have such power, he would have groveled to Trump and screwed the country. He’s just that kind of dirtbag.

Trump did what he always does in this sort of situation: he lied. “Your governor could stop it very easily if he knew what the hell he was doing,” said Trump. “Stop it very easily.”

Well, you know, Republicans have rigged the vote against Republicans, so there’s no point in voting, and be sure to go out and vote in the Senate run-off races next month.

It’s fun watching Trump screw Republicans because he’s having a hissy-fit. Really, I could watch that all day. I don’t have any sympathy for the Republicans Trump is now attacking—most are corrupt, venal, amoral scumsuckers, no better than Trump himself, and they created this monster for their own gain.

The trouble is, if you hire certifiable lunatics to do your dirty work for you, eventually you lose control of them. And sure enough, we have a party civil war now, crazies against fascists. May they do one another great harm.

I fully expect the extremists supporting Trump to try something awful between now and Inauguration Day. Blow up a school, maybe, or try to arrest the Supreme Court, at least the ones who aren’t religious nuts. Trump seems to be putting stiffs in the Pentagon with an eye to paralyzing the incoming Biden administration, or perhaps to force the Pentagon into an ill advised military action, such as a wag-the-dog operation in Iran, or a fuck-the-libs operation in Portland Oregon.

It will (most hopefully) fail, and that will be the end of the Trump movement aside from some whirling nuts in the right wing sections of the web.

Some part of the GOP might survive, but it is tainted with Trump and won’t escape it.

Further, if Biden is humane, determined, competent and compassionate, the GOP will find their usual mix of ersatz moralizing and declamations of fiscal irresponsibility no longer work. Most of America is fed up with that bullshit after four years of craven Republican silence under Trump, and won’t have it.

Keep the countdown going. Forty-six days until Inauguration Day.

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Thirty after Solstice — Major change must occur

November 28th, 2020

Back on November 21st, a user on Doctor Daniel Swain’s WeatherWest posted that in just 30 days, the darkness would begin to recede. Another user posted that for him, the darkness wouldn’t begin to recede for another 60 days. The references were clear enough—30 days to the Solstice, when the days would begin to lengthen, and 60 days until the Inauguration of Joe Biden as the 46th President. Swain is normally death on politically oriented posts, since he has put in thousands of valuable man-hours into creating one of the most important weather and climate resources on the web, and he knows that the political wars could ruin that. That post, however, was allowed to stand, and it’s a pleasant surprise that nobody tried to make something of it. The group simply continued its time-honored pastime of ‘riding the models,’ divining the weather 5 days or 10 days or a month down the road.

Come the Solstice, I’ll be writing my annual Solstice piece, and as always, the theme will be one of hope. Barring catastrophe over the next three weeks or so, the tone of optimism will be easier to attain than in recent years. Trump has been defeated and 30 days after the Solstice will be out of the White House. Vaccines will be in mass production by then, and a possible end to the pandemic will be in sight. (My last Solstice piece didn’t mention COVID-19 for the simple reason that only a handful of scientists were beginning to suspect a new coronavirus was appearing in widely scattered areas). Economic recovery is going to be more problematic. Biden will face bigger economic problems than any incoming president since FDR, plus organized sedition from Republicans who will cheerfully force millions of Americans to starve rather than let the Democrats in particular or government in general take credit for saving the economy and people. Republicans in the 1930s had the same sick delusions that capitalism could address social issues, but this bunch are better organized—and far more vicious. Dead Americans are a good thing, because it will make Democrats and socialism look bad.

The flag-wavers of the right absolutely hate the United States because it is a government, and they hate government. They hate government much the same way that fundamentalists hate science; they see it as a competing ideology, and worse, one that works better.

Control of the Senate won’t be resolved until sometime after January 5th, when Georgia has special elections for both Senate seats. If the Republicans win either of them, it’s game over. McConnell will be delighted to ruin the lives of millions in hopes it will translate to hatred of Biden and give him the control he so desperately wants in January 2023. Then things will get much much worse because fascists are interested in keeping people as units of production and units of consumption, and nothing beyond that. Americans will be reduced to wage and credit slaves, the Republican dream writ large.

How desperate are the Republicans to steal Georgia and therefore the Senate: Brad Raffensperger issued an “emergency decree” yesterday that all new registrants for voting must possess a driver’s license and/or a vehicle registration. Despite being lionized for standing up to Trump’s lies about the November election, he is, at heart, just another GOP fascist asshole.

If the Democrats take control of the Senate, then the future is both more hopeful and more uncertain.

Biden and Democratic congressionals are going to have to be bold, aggressive, and assertive.

The tepid centrist positions of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama will have to be consigned to the dustbin of history. “Reaching across the aisle” may have stood for pragmatic inclusiveness in its time, but now that reaching will invite nothing but slaps from the furious ideological cripples who make up the GOP. Any interaction they make with Democrats will be with the premise that they must damage and stymie them in any way that they can. There is no point in reaching out to them.

Reaching out to their voters, however, is an entirely different story.

Democrats have ALWAYS meant stronger economies, more just societies, and more freedom. For nearly a century, the economy has always improved under Democrats. More jobs, better jobs, with better pay and better working conditions. Republicans can’t make that offer because they serve the bosses, not the workers.

Biden and the party have to make this point, over and over, and rather than rest on its laurels as the party has done since the Reagan era, it will have to make bold, assertive moves to strengthen labor unions, create millions of jobs, and promote millions of new jobs that will address the long deferred needs of society, and the new challenges that are rising.

Corporate centrism will fail. It was a flawed idea during good times, since it merely continued the process of stealing the national wealth from those who created the wealth to an increasingly parasitic and destructive monied class. It’s a horrible idea now, with the country in a depression. If Biden follows that path, his best hope is that he’ll be remembered as the second President Hoover. At worst, he will be a caretaker president, there to watch America’s demise. Progressives understand that the government must be the economic heartbeat of the country as it was in the 30s and 40s if the economy, and America are to avoid a Marxian implosion.

Biden needs to reach out the Republican voters who are suffering as much in this depression as the rest of the American working class. Empty promises won’t do. He has to offer actual jobs, an actual safety net, and other life improvements the Democrats have been ignoring, including true universal health care.

But there is another reason to avoid “reaching across the aisle.” Trump, and most of his administration, are criminals. Ever since Ford pardoned Nixon, Republicans have seen themselves as being above the law, and are ever more criminal as their contempt for the law and for the citizenry of America grows. If Biden and his administration can’t punish the enemies of America, how can they stand for America?

Republican contempt preceded Trump, as in 2016 when they kept repeating the nutball conspiracy theory that Obama wasn’t legally president because he was supposedly born outside of America whilst simultaneous promoting the presidential campaign of Ted Cruz, who actually was born outside of America. Republicans are contemptuous of America and Democrats, and they have given Republicans ample reasons to be contemptuous. This has to end now. The Nixon pardon gutted American self-respect, and the subsequent depredation on the national character by Republicans demanding privilege has only gotten worse.

Trump and his accomplices must stand trial. Republicans need to learn that their bad faith and cynicism ends here.

Barrett’s nomination to the court must be annulled. The Republicans deliberately and knowingly broke the law by voting her out of committee without a quorum. Kavanaugh must be impeached for deliberate and known perjury during his nomination.

If Democrats don’t have the guts to do that, they don’t have the guts to govern. They have to learn to fight.

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The Collapse of Trumpistan — The diminutizing of little people

November 11th 2020

Like most folk, I spent the past few weeks wondering a) If Trump was going to stage a coup, and b) if his followers were going to rise up and wage war against the United States in the name of Amurka. Yes, a lot of those clowns love America and hate the United States. It takes a special kind of stupid to be a Trumpkin.

We’re a full week after the polls closed (yeah, seems longer, I know) and four days since the election was called for Biden. Trump has responded about the way everyone expected (memorably likened by one commentator to a toddler who has just been informed it’s time to leave Chuck E. Cheese) with tantrums on twitter and otherwise holing up in the schlupfloch formerly known as the White House.

His lawyers filed a veritable snowstorm of suits, most of which amounted to little more than despairing wails. At last count, he was 0-14 in court, with the closest thing to a victory being one judge who agreed GOP observers could stand six feet from the tabulators instead of the agreed-upon 10 feet. Didn’t change the results any.

The closest thing to a viable suit was one in which a postal worker alleged widespread vote tampering in making postmarks match before the election date. It collapsed when the same worker, in a sworn affidavit, admitted he made the whole thing up. Since his initial allegation was ALSO a sworn affidavit, he is prima facie in jeopardy of a charge of perjury, and he can probably kiss his PO job goodbye. And if someone in the Trump organization offered him money for the false testimony, he can probably kiss that goodbye, as well. Maybe they’ll let him keep the MAGA hat.

A large majority of people have decided that Trump’s protests are without merit and he should concede and gracefully allow President-Elect Biden to proceed with the transition. That’s eighty percent of voters, including 55% of Republicans. As the courts reject suit after suit, and state after state formally certifies their results, that number will change in Joe Biden’s favor. By December 9th, the day after “safe harbor” reporting of final results, that same poll is likely to show 95% support for Biden, with 85% of Republicans agreeing. There’s only three states where Trump qualifies for an automatic recount, and he doesn’t have any realistic hope of winning any of them. An error rate of 0.1% would be considered extraordinarily high, and the narrowest difference he’s contesting is 0.5%.

Most of his antics are delaying tactics and red meat for his base, a base that is steadily shrinking as it becomes clear just how hypocritical and self-serving Trump’s arguments have become. Even Fox News has given up on Trump and are now urging him to just concede already and let the nation move forward. That leaves only the lunatics who faithfully follow OANN, Breitbart, Newsmax, Qanon, and the right wing cesspool known as Parler. That social media site looks like a kindergarten on psilocybin. I might just create a fake account and go over there and commit acts of Polemical Judo. Nothing drives right wingers into a bigger frenzy than a calm, reasoned recitation of provable, salient facts, and a suggestion that perhaps a friendly wager on some of them might be in order. Just drives them nuts. You’ll learn things about your manners, morals, ancestry and post-life destination that you would never have guessed in a million years.

There isn’t going to be a widespread, or even significant uprising on Trump’s behalf. Even amongst the most resolute of Trumpkins, there is unease that stems from the fact that Trump flat-out said he would attack the integrity of the election process if he lost, praise it if he won. Coupled with court loss after loss after loss, and growing public anger, his support is eroding. There’s an old saying, “If you can’t decide if the whole world is right or you are, it’s likely the world is right.” When Trumpkins are reduced to considering the entire United States to be just a conspiracy to suppress Donald Trump, there won’t be many of them left, because crazy can only take a movement so far.

The Trump movement will die a well-deserved death. Well, OK, cults never die entirely, and there will always be a few True Believers, but there will never be enough of them to matter. For the vast majority of people, Trump will find his historical level: a bad joke that nearly destroyed a country.

The militant right, which piggybanked on Trump as a way to advance their aims, are another matter. They are, for the most part, neo-Nazis and other vile extremists who don’t mind using terror and violence to get their way. They are, and will remain, a danger. My best guess is some McVeigh amongst them will commit an atrocity that will finally persuade the American public that they are a bigger problem than Islamic extremism (and in fact they already are) and far far worse than the imaginary threats posed by Antifa and Black Lives Matter. Under Biden, I expect intelligence agencies will be allowed to resume infiltrating and monitoring these outfits, and preventing another OKC.

Trump’s going to do a fair bit of damage between now and January 2021. He’s trying to steal everything he can and move as many levers as possible to soften his landing, although I doubt any decent person is in any mood to let him just walk away from his crimes. He’s panicked and anxious, and well he should be.

But don’t worry about the crap he’s pulling with the military. His appointments are all civilian, not in the chain of command, and the military has already made it clear it isn’t going to go to war with America in the name of Donald Trump.

So hang tight. We’ll get through this.

 

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Happy Days — Following a bathetic twilight

Happy Days

Following a bathetic twilight

November 8th 2020

David Brin, the futurist and SF author, gave me an earworm yesterday. Normally that’s an annoying thing, but not this time: the song was “Happy Days Are Here Again.” I’m sure you know it. “…the skies above are clear again, let us sing a song of cheer again, happy days are here again.”

The song, popularized in the 1932 FDR campaign, became the unofficial anthem of the Democratic party up until about 1980, when centrists took over the party and decided they could win more by appealing to corporations than they could appealing to people. The thinking was that if they behaved like Republicans – back then a sane if wrong-headed party – they would attract Republican voters, or at least get right wing Democratic voters back. It didn’t work, of course, and we didn’t see a Democratic president again for 12 years. Bill Clinton wasn’t interested in evoking FDR, but came up with a cheery anthem of his own: “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.”

In this election, Trump relied more on music than did the Biden campaign, but it was severely undercut that Trump used the music without permission and usually over the vociferous objections of the artists involved.

“Happy Days Are Here Again” is apt, not because Biden is a populist leftist, but because his inauguration will bring about one of the great gusts of hope that occasionally punctuates American life. That happened (obviously) in 1932 when the nation was in the verge of collapse. We saw it again in 1960, when the New Frontier pointed to a rosy future. In 1980 Reagan was there to restore America’s reputation as the Shining City on the Hill. Clinton offered tomorrow. Obama offered Yes We Can.

This one is a bit different. Biden didn’t offer a grand vision or a great sense of optimism. He was a return to normalcy ofter four years of the most loathed and incompetent president in American history. Oh, that’s happened before: two of the gusts stemmed from a public view of presidents who were seen as weak and/or unable to do the job, Hoover and Carter. (Both went on to become public heroes after their political lives ended, but that’s not going to happen here). Biden didn’t have the charisma of a Reagan or an Obama, and time will tell if he has the boldness and courage of the seemingly affable “go-along-to-get-along” Franklin Roosevelt, but he steps over an aching void left by his predecessor. He’ll have to seriously screw up to not have the support and well-wishes of a majority of the American people, including sane Republicans.

There is a way to screw it up, of course. There was jubilation similar to what we’re seeing today when Nixon left office, and it lasted for several days before Ford preemptively pardoned Nixon. Ford may have hoped it was a step toward reconciliation and forgiveness, but it had the opposite result. Most of the goodwill that Ford had gained from simply not being Nixon vanished, and it set Republicans on a poisonous path where they believed that the law and basic morality no longer applied to them, and they could do what they wanted and get away with it. It lead to the excesses of the Reagan era, and the undermining of justice by Bush’s midnight pardons on his last day in office. We saw increasing contempt for those values under Bush the Lesser, before Republican ethics and morality collapsed entirely in the age of Trump. Both Clinton and Obama undermined their own administrations by trying to reconcile with thieves and liars.

Biden must not be another Ford, or Clinton, or Obama. I don’t think he would do anything as fantastically stupid as pardoning Trump preemptively, and I suspect he won’t “negotiate” half his sought-after policies away before negotiations even began, as Obama did with the public health initiative, but it isn’t enough not to coddle the crooks of the Trump administration or to be weak in negotiations; he must show the Republicans that he isn’t fucking around and undo much of the damage that has been done.

Biden needs to annul every XO Trump signed on day one. If there are any that had any merit, he (or Congress) can revisit them. Biden’s tax reforms are laudable, but he has to work with Congress to revoke the Trump giveaway.

He and the Senate must work together to annul the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett. It was passed out of committee despite a lack of a quorum, and the woman is dangerously unfit for the job. Nor is just ignoring quorum rules trivial; it is a bedrock of democratic procedure.

Biden has got to be hard-nosed about this, and show Republicans that he means business. Republicans need to learn that the tactic of holding the country hostage for their mad fringe wants will no longer be tolerated. The age of Newt Gingrich ends now. No more blackmail. He may even attract Republican support on the Barrett issue, since most were coerced into voting for her by the McConnell/Trump sledgehammer and may feel emboldened now.

I hope Biden will have the vision and courage to do, not just the easy things, but the difficult things. He might, but he will need the support of people like us—strong, vocal, steadfast support. He might be a great man, but as a president, he can’t do it alone.

On a more humorous note, there were three events that sort of summed up the mindlessness, the incompetence, and the utter lack of class of the Trump era.

First, there was the very strange press conference Giuliani and a team of lawyers staged at the Four Seasons in Philadelphia. Not the fabled hotel; a landscaping business in one of the seedier parts of town, located (as many of us are) between a porn shop and a crematorium. That may have been the absolute end of Giuliani’s carrer. We may hope.

Kimberly Guilfoyle offered a lap dance to the big-ticket fundraiser who gave Trump the most money. No, really. In some states, that would be formal grounds for a charge of prostitution. Gavin, count your blessings.

And finally, they had a strange “Trump vigil” in Redding, California yesterday. As the reporter (who kept calling it a “visual”) spent 8 minutes telling us little or nothing, Trumpkins stood somberly, Trump flags draped over shoulders, bemoaning the fact that godless communists were coming to take their guns, their god, and no doubt their expensive private medical insurance. The cult of Trump is a doomed one, but like all cults, will survive until the last member dies or forgets who Trump was.

And finally, to quote a popular Facebook meme, “I’m so glad Rush Limbaugh lived to see this day.”

 

 

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Three Days Later, It’s Still Tuesday Night — The election that won’t end

Three Days Later, It’s Still Tuesday Night

The election that won’t end

November 6th, 2020

I imagine millions of other people are doing the same thing I’ve been doing today. Oh, not working with a friend on the siding and enclosure on my porch, or getting my flu shot, or ordering the T-day turkey and special ordering a leg of lamb for the Solstice. Those were just the distractions.

Every hour or so, I would pull up the electoral map on my computer or my phone, sometimes just to see if any of the pale states had switched from rose to powder blue, or [gawd forbid] the other way. About every third time, I would pull up the vote totals and compare the changed tallies to the distance between the candidates, and do a rough estimate on who might be ahead when all the ballots are tabulated.

There’s five states everyone is watching right now. Nevada, which is a crap shoot, fittingly enough. Arizona had been called for Biden, but that might be premature as votes come in from Maricopa county and the consistent 59% for Trump suggests a virtual tie when the counting stops. North Carolina is close enough to be interesting but will, I believe, remain in the Trump column.

People are thinking of the Ray Charles song. Georgia is very much on everyone’s mind. If it were THE deciding state this year, it would be in the role of Florida in 2000. At this hour, only 1,720 votes separate the candidates, with about 50,000 left to be counted. But people aren’t watching Georgia all that closely. Hanging chads and improper Supreme Court decisions may lay in Georgia’s future, but that’s something for another day, a battle that might be fought after other battles are decided.

But in the end, Pennsylvania is the state that will decide this. Biden now leads by 25,000 votes with about 300,000 to be counted. And those outstanding votes are all from precincts that normally are heavily Democratic. Pennsylvania by itself can put Joe Biden over 270 electoral votes, and make the vote counts in the other four states still being contested moot.

Nobody expected it to be this close. I warned people that when they went to bed Tuesday night, Donald Trump might be leading, but not to panic because the mail-in ballots had to be hand counted. I figured we would know who won by Wednesday afternoon, evening at the worst. And I expected it to be Biden, by a comfortable margin.

Where I blew it—where nearly everyone blew it—was in underestimating the number of people willing to throw away all ethics and common sense and vote for Trump. He got 62 million votes in 2016, which was pretty disgraceful. Surely, I assumed the past four years wouldn’t attract any new voters for Trump. I looked at the voting rate and turnout and assumed (correctly) that Biden would get nearly 75 million votes—by far the most any candidate has ever received. I further assumed Trump would get about 62 million votes. His presidency has been shameful and catastrophic. How could he even keep the people who voted for him the first time?

Trump will finish with nearly 70 million votes, an astonishing indictment of nearly 20% of the American population.

The good news is that even right wingers will have trouble claiming that liberals jiggered the vote in some way. Voter suppression obviously failed, no matter which side you think was engaging in it, and if liberals were controlling the vote somehow, McConnell sure as fuck wouldn’t have won.

Yes, I knew that about 42% of Americans proudly and loudly self-identified as deplorable. I always assumed that a lot of them were just enjoying taking a dig at the rest of us, and most realized the damage Trump and his cronies were doing.

I overestimated the intelligence and morality of American voters by some ten million votes. Most Trump supporters really are swine. They love the lies, the chaos, the cruelty. Kids in cages? No problem. Just point to a handful of brief incidents ten years before and say Obama did it too, because jaywalking and murder are pretty much the same thing. People dying from COVID. Just some blacks in the cities. Who the fuck cares? And when COVID inevitably spread to Trump country, it a) was a hoax and b) a liberal conspiracy to kill decent hard-working Trumpkins. Destroying freedom and democracy? Freedom just means ideas Trumpkins don’t like and Democracy means people with those ideas might get elected. Much better to cheat, lie, steal and rob in the name of Donald and Jesus.

Biden is going to win this. McConnell and his few toy Nazis in the Senate might paralyze the government and hope the utter destruction of America will result in people embracing fascism, but we’ll deal with that in January. But McConnell looks like a dying man. He may solve the problem he presents to America on his own.

For now, we just have to clean that moral disease out of the White House.

And to everyone who voted for Trump after all we’ve seen and heard over the past four years: Fuck you. You’re shit Americans and crap human beings. I just hope you live to see how vile you’ve become.

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It’s Here – Election time

It’s Here

Election time

10/30/20

There’s going to be an election next Tuesday.

People who read me are more woke and aware than the common rabble, so chances are many of you already knew that. Anyone who didn’t know that, drop everything and start doing a lot of reading over the weekend. Prepare for some nasty shocks. Yes, Donald Trump is the incumbent. Believe it or not, it goes downhill from there.

So, what should we expect from this election?

The signals from the polls are significantly stronger this time then they were in 2016. The polls are narrowing in the final days, but a) over half the population have already voted and b) it’s still over 8 points.

There’s been a lot of propaganda about how the polls are meaningless, and of course, polls taken more than a couple of weeks before an election generally are meaningless. And there are a lot of crap polls out there. Rasmussen is little more than a GOP cheering squad, and Zogby doesn’t even qualify as a bad joke. We all remember one poll that nobody had ever heard of before (or since) that showed McCain leading Obama a few weeks before the election by 20 points.

But the legitimate polls are accurate. Those showed Clinton winning the popular vote by 2-4 points, and she won by 2.5 points. Well within the range of error. The polls are narrowing in the final days, but a) over half the population have already voted and b) the Biden lead over Trump still over 8 points.
I’m expecting that come Wednesday morning, Trump may actually be leading in the electoral college count. The reason for that is that early voting has been mostly Democratic, and come election day, as many as 100 million people may have voted. That would be nearly as many who voted in total in 2016.

Now, if we wake up Wednesday morning and Trump is leading in all fifty states, then it’s safe to assume that Putin and/or the people conducting the cyberattack on hospitals this week have taken over counting the votes, in which case the question you have to ask yourself is not “Who won?” but rather, “Will I still be alive three months from now?” If Putin does scramble the election results, it won’t be because he has our best interests at heart. No, Donald, not even your best interests. He isn’t your buddy. He would find an America in chaos and severe civil strife most amusing as he started swallowing eastern European republics like they were popcorn.

But if you wake up that morning, and the electoral maps on the TV are similar to those of 2016 and show a Trump win, don’t panic.

There is a tidal wave of blue votes yet to be counted. Remember all those banana-republic type eight-hour lines to vote we’ve been seeing for the past month? That’s the early voters—85 million of them as of yesterday. Most of them are Democrats, and there’s a fair number of Republicans who are furious at the party for fucking up the mail service, messing with their ability to vote, and jamming their nasty little fascist theocrat down our throats that they decided to make a protest vote.

But all the early votes get counted—by hand—starting when the polls close. Those will take days, and even weeks to tabulate.

And that’s OK. It used to be that it was normal to have to wait a month or two to find out who won the presidential election, and it was the reason why the actual transfer of power took place four months after voting day. As recently as 1960, it wasn’t clear from the voting who the president was by New Years’. It may have taken a few weeks to determine who won the election in 2000, were it not for a decision by the Supreme Court that was so illegal they make the unique stipulation that Bush vs. Gore never be used as a precedent. (Kavanaugh the Klueless proceeded to try to do that just last week, of course.)

It may take a few weeks to know definitively who won. The Republicans will do everything to stop the counting, including trying to get their toy justices to rule that Trump is God because GOP. Those six clowns will have to decide whether they want to please Donald and lose their credibility and authority forever, or take a stand and prepare for a miserable couple of months compared to risking their lives betraying their country.

Oh–and even if you live in a state where the Presidential race is all but settled, such as California or Kansas, vote anyway.  The downticket races are a lot more fluid, and this year especially, more important.  Its a Census year, and your vote now determines the influence your vote will have over the next ten years.

There’s a lot of speculation about post election violence, but I don’t really see that happening while it’s still being decided who won. After that, well, we’ll just have to see. Hopefully the results will be clear enough, and have enough legitimacy, that the losing side will feel a patriotic duty to accept those results.

When the dust settles, probably around the 15th, Biden should have 350 of the 270 EVs needed to win. And the US will have taken its first big step back toward being a free and democratic republic.

Then we have the next nightmare to endure: a panicked, furious, frightened Trump. Let’s just hope he doesn’t decide the world must pay for failing to adore him.

 

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Intimidation – Voters getting nasty emails

Intimidation

Voters getting nasty emails

October 21st, 2020

Voters have been reporting that they have been getting threatening emails that if they vote for Biden, great harm will come to them and their families. It isn’t just campaign persiflage; these are direct, criminal threats of physical harm Apparently the threatening emails are fairly widespread, and today the DNI director and the head of the FBI had a press conference that was an exercise in strange behavior from a strange government.

According to them, foreign actors—Iran and possibly Russia—had gotten hold of voter registration rolls and run mail merge to mass send these emails. It’s isn’t technologically difficult—the polls can be requested at the offices of most country clerks, and any junior in a high school computer class to convert the listings to a database file and mail merge them. It’s a bit surprising it hasn’t happened before now, really. I remember in 2004 it crossed my mind to do that sort of thing—not to threaten and intimidate anyone, but just as a get-out-the-vote thing. But back then a lot of voters didn’t yet have emails, and those were the very ones the Dems wanted to contact to vote. Now, of course, both local Parties are presumably maintaining emailing lists for legitimate purposes.

At least some of the emails claimed to be from the Proud Boys, although at this point there’s no evidence that they were involved.

The DNI director, John Ratcliffe, made the somewhat odd assertion that the threats were meant to harm the Trump campaign. Adam Schiff flat out wondered it that was “Ratcliffe spin or the assessment of the analysts.” The New York Times was of the opinion that the emails were more general in nature, meant to scare voters and undermine the entire voting process. It might be illuminative to determine which voters were targeted, and in what numbers. If all the emails started with “If you vote for Biden…” then it’s safe to assume that the people behind the emails were working on Trump’s behalf. Trump supporters might argue that it was a false-flag effort designed to make Trump look bad, but since when did Trump mind looking bad in the name of deceit?

But for now, we don’t know, and we should just assume that it’s nonpartisan fuckery. The truth will come out in due course. As for who sent the emails, I’m guessing the true address would be something ending in “.ru”. That would explain why Trump himself hasn’t had anything to say about the mailings.

There’s supposed to be a second debate tomorrow, but it’s anyone’s guess if Trump will show up. Apparently he’s furious that they’ll be using a mute button so he can’t simply try to scream down Biden. Each candidate will be muted during his opponent’s two minute response to the moderator’s questions. Trump can’t imagine American peons making him behave.

Senator Chuck Schumer announced that the Dems will boycott the committee voting on the Barrett nomination, denying the Republicans a quorum. Chances are McConnell will just steamroll over the Senate rules in his mad drive to put any old nut on the court who will negate the power of the people. Barrett’s cult, People of Power, is so toxic that even the magazine that represents the National Catholic Churches said she was a poor choice for the Court and asked the Senate to hold off until after the new government is seated in January. That vote is supposed to take place tomorrow. In the meantime, new allegations of trauma and sexual abuse appeared against Barrett’s cult. Vicious stuff, Jim Jones-type stuff.

And the fuckery continues. In Florida, the most corrupt state in America, the Republican government announced a new sweep of the voting rolls, designed to eliminate anyone who had any debt to anyone related to a felony conviction. This despite a state law that forbid removal of anyone from voter eligibility within 40 days of an election. Republicans, former Americans, don’t give a shit about the law; they just want to maintain power.

In one of the weirdest twists of an already psychotic year, Rudy Giuliani apparently was conned into a compromising position with a woman he had been persuaded was an underage girl. The movie, released later this week, apparently shows him fondling himself in front of a supposed minor. Or at least he thought she was a minor. She’s an actress, Maria Bakalova, who is supposedly the daughter of Borat (Sacha Baron Cohen) and Giuliani is seen reaching down his pants and playing with himself, and Borat bursts in on the pair, shouting, “She’s 15. She’s too old for you.” Sigh. America’s mayor has seen better days, it has to be said.

And Barack Obama hit the campaign trail on Biden’s behalf, blistering Trump, pointing out that he’s not going to protect America from COVID when he can’t even protect himself. He noted that if Biden and Harris were in the White House, Americans wouldn’t have to worry about what crazy bullshit our leaders pulled today. (Yes, I’m paraphrasing Obama on that one. He actually said “crazy things they said every day.” Not the most flattering thing anyone’s ever said about the leader of the free world, right?).

The national polls are holding steady with Biden showing a 10+ point lead. State polls are more muddied, partly because they have smaller pools of voters, and as a result the MoE can be from 3 to 5 points. And voter intent in those polls can be less certain as well, especially in swing state.

No matter what you get in your email, no matter how much your republican state governments try to mess with your right to vote, no matter how bad the polls look, vote. If Trump can’t steal your country, he can’t steal your life.