Tag: Election 2024

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Decision Day 2024 — House and Senate up for grabs, along with our future

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

November 4th 2024

Kamala Harris is going to win. And fairly substantially. She will be our next president and with any luck at all, by next March Donald Trump will be just a bad memory.

But if you can vote, do so. Especially if you are in a state or a Congressional district that is even remotely close. Harris won’t be able to put many of her campaign promises into effect if Republicans control either House. At this point, I think the Dems have a good chance of taking the House back, but I’m not so sure about the Senate. Even with Mitch McConnell shuffling off to well-deserved obscurity, I expect whoever replaces him will be just as obstructionist and possibly a crazy MAGAt.

Some of the smaller polls are producing startling results. Texas might just dump Ted Cruz, and may even break for Harris, despite the best efforts of the fascist government in Texas to skewer and interfere with the vote there. North Carolina may go for Harris: a lot of voters there heard Trump’s claims of no government assistance in the wake of the hurricanes, looked around, and realized that Trump was lying. Many realized that the future will bring more natural disasters, and they need a government that won’t base assistance on how you voted in the last election. Harris is leading in solidly red Iowa by two points.

America needs a government that is competent, clean, and works on behalf of everyone in the country, and not just people waving Trump flags. Unless Democrats take the White House and BOTH the House and the Senate, that’s not going to happen.

Imagine a future where the news of the governance of the nation isn’t dominated by Marjorie Taylor-Green, Lauren Boebert, Jim Jordan, Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Mike Johnson, Elise Stefanik, Joni Ernst, Rick Scott, or any of the other nutball rabble that infest our governance these days. Yes, many of them will be re-elected or didn’t have to run this time, but if they are in the minority, it will put an end to the endless kangaroo court hearings, and Congress might actually become useful again. Instead of clownish hearings about impeaching Biden or punishing family members of his, we may instead hear about debate over housing assistance for young adults entering the workplace, expanded Medicare, and further efforts to rein in the corporations.

Fascist plutocrats like Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos, and the National Association of Zealots and Ideologues will continue to poison the well, of course, and they will have the usual clown shows where some attention seeker in the GOP ranks will call for Harris’ impeachment three days after she takes office. That won’t change. But at least a solid win for the Dems will set them back, and reduce the threat they pose to our freedoms.

I expect that MAGA and QAnon will disintegrate after the inauguration. Trump won’t be their figurehead any more; at the very least he will have lost his clout, and in all likelihood he’ll be in prison or a rest home. Yes, America, like everywhere, will always have a significant population of nasty right wing nuts—bigots, greedheads, haters—but without the cult leader, they will crawl back to under the rocks where they belong.

Most importantly, control of court appointments must be taken back. Trump appointed three disgraces to the Supreme Court, and he’s even on record suggesting that his District Attorney (appointed, because there isn’t a prayer the Senate would confirm her) would be his pet corrupt Florida judge, Aileen Cannon. He’s also said he will make the loony Robert F. Kennedy Junior the nation’s ‘health czar’ and put the eerie Reinhard Heydrich clone Steven Miller in charge of immigration. Yesterday, he proposed to put the nation’s missile defense in the hands of noted rocket scientist Herschel Walker! Trump probably would like to have Mafia-type rule, but what he would achieve to control our lives would be an extremely malignant and incompetent idiocracy.

Last week Joe Biden made an ambiguous statement that interpreted one way, suggested he called Trump supporters at large “trash.” There was a lot of outrage over that, of course, but it’s significant that the outrage didn’t spread much outside of Trump’s most devoted followers. Many people who have known Joe Biden for years don’t believe he meant it that way (the remark, Biden says, was aimed at some of the trash who spoke at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally) and among those who did, there was considerable doubt that the supposed judgment was particularly harsh. It’s hard to give people the benefit of the doubt when they shout that liberals are communists, Democrats are scum, and want to impose their church doctrines on us all, not to mention nutball opinions about vaccines, reading material, women’s right to vote, eugenics, and “race science.” Some of these flat-earth nuts want us to doubt the Moon landings took place.

It’s time to put this idiocy back in its place. People have an absolute right to wrong-headed and illogical opinions, but they don’t have the right to impose them upon the rest of us. And yes, this includes religious-based opinions. Robert Heinlein once wrote “One man’s theology is another man’s belly laugh.” And a meme popular on social media states, “America is not a Christian nation. It is a nation in which you are free to be a Christian.”

So do vote. Even if you are in a state that is solidly blue or red, your vote could tip the balance in the House and Senate, and ensure that America remains America, and doesn’t become a corrupt and evil kleptocracy.

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Three Days To Go — Tension is actually decreasing

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

November 2nd 2024

This is probably the next-to-last piece I’ll write before election day, and believe me, I’m really looking forward to having things to write about other than American politics. For one thing, once the election is settled, I can sit down and consider my Solstice essay. It’ll probably be a doozy this year. Something about addled old farts who use words like “doozy”, perhaps.

With the election just three days away, I’m feeling considerable optimism. Trump’s campaign behavior is part of it; he’s acting like he’s already lost, and boy, does he know it. He was supposed to attend last night’s Penn State football game in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania, and abruptly canceled that. This is the campaign equivalent of spitting on babies and waving a Soviet flag.

His rhetoric is getting increasingly unhinged and violent, and he keeps saying things that would be political suicide for any candidate who isn’t a cult leader. As women arise en masse to protest the Dobbs decision, he’s prattling on about how he will protect women “whether they like it or not.” He’s still loudly fantasizing about shooting opponents, particularly former members of his own administration.

The voting patterns show considerable reason for optimism. It’s startling enough that over 62 million Americans have already cast ballots. (And of that 62 million, less than a dozen were cast by non-Americans, if previous voting patterns hold true). But of that 62 million, 56% were women.

It reflects a trend of new voter registrations over the past year, where over 55% of registrants were female.

In an absolute genius move, the Harris campaign ran an ad letting women know that their vote is absolutely secret, and not only do they have no obligation to vote as their husbands demand, but they have the right to lie about how they voted. Apparently Republicans really hate the idea that women can have a secret ballot too, and Newt Gingrich stood up to huff loudly that Harris was encouraging women to lie to their husbands. Newt Gingrich. You remember old Nootie, of course. Played a seminal role in turning the once-proud GOP into mindless obstructionists for corporation, now on his fourth wife, cheated on one wife while she was dying of cancer. Outside of Trump himself, about the last person on Earth to be lecturing women on marital fidelity and lying to their spouses. It’s a bit like being lectured on diplomacy by Triumph the Insult Dog.

In Pennsylvania, the state whose number one football team Donald just pissed on, new voter registrations ran nearly 3-1 for Democrats, and independents got more new registrations than Republicans.

The unedited version of the “grab them by the pussy’ tape from the 2016 election showed up on TikTok, and millions of users too young or too disengaged in 2016 are seeing it for the very first time. Chris Hayes thoughtfully played the entire tape on his MSNBC show last night, and it’s every bit as appalling as the edited excerpts we’d all heard before suggested. I imagine it’s wildfiring through the rest of social media now.

Two of Trump’s campaign stunts, both on the level of Mike-Dukakis-in-the-tank, backfired. There’s a meme rocketing around social media now that show Joe Biden and Kamala Harris sitting together, laughing their heads off. The captions read [Joe] “I made him drive a garbage truck!” [Kamala] “I made him work at a McDonalds!” I posted a image of Trump in the garbage truck and labeled it “From the Department of Repetitive Redundancy Department.” It failed to impress Trump supporters, I’m sorry to say.

Mainstream media are still playing the silly horserace game, of course. CNN and the NY Times played up a weak jobs report from yesterday as a “devastating blow” to Harris, apparently unaware of the fact that it normally takes about six months for changes in the economy to seep into the public consciousness, and longer if the economy is doing well and people only know what Fox News tells them. The gain of “only” 22,000 jobs for the month will have absolutely no effect on the vote.

The plutocrat press is learning that making newspapers into rich man’s toys isn’t working out: the Bezos-owned Washington Post has lost over 300,000 subscribers over their public self-neutering, and the LA Times, with a much smaller circulation, has lost some 50,000.

Even the Supreme Court, resolutely fascist, has backed away from further opportunities to tamper with the election. They denied cert on several GOP-backed suits following the Virginia case.

I suspect that a lot of Republicans are not going to vote for Trump, and many will vote for Harris. Millions, perhaps. Enough to seriously tilt the scales. It helps that over 600 Republicans of note, including some 200 from the Trump administration, over 100 retired line officers, and dozens of retired Congressionals, have all come out for Harris, including the Cheneys and Schwarzenegger. Harris has gotten endorsements from such Republican bastions as the Economist and the Houston Chronicle.

It’s important to remember that a lot of the Republican disaffection stems from the fact that Trump himself is an incompetent, addled, vicious and dishonest pig. That may or may not affect their votes down ticket, depending on how closely aligned with Trump the candidates are. Congressional votes may hinge, not on never-Trumpers, but on discouraged voters. And, of course, the millions of women voting to take their rights back. They don’t see old “grab them by the pussy” as their preferred protector, it seems.

Finally, a lot of self-identified Christian voters have finally realized that Trump is not a divine test of godliness or whatever the fuck, and are going with the candidate who isn’t a serial adulterer, rapist, con artist, liar and dementia patient. It’s a good look on them.

It’s too early to be complacent, mind you. Trump will challenge the results and put up a huge fight to try to de-legitimize the vote. He’s already said he would. Just like he did in 2020. So expect a battle.

But Trump isn’t fighting for you. He’s fighting for himself. And he knows he has everything to lose.

 

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President Kamala Harris — If Joe Biden steps down

NOTE:  I finished this essay just minutes before Joe Biden announced that he was not running for President, but not stepping down as President, or endorsing a successor.  I’m going ahead and publishing this essay anyway, as written, in the hopes it might influence people to urge Biden to make a stronger and more directional decision.

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

July 21st, 2024

www.zeppscommentaries.online

Ever since the debate I’ve been going back and forth in my own head about whether Biden should run for a second term. There’s no doubt in my mind that he is in better shape, physically, morally, mentally and psychologically than his opponent, but he has a disadvantage in that his supporters care if the president is fit to run the country or not, whereas Donnie One-Ear’s supporters are content merely to worship their idol.

If Biden were to step down, he would go down as the greatest one-term president in American history. He has served his term with immense competence, overcoming daunting odds to create the greatest legislative legacy since FDR. His policies have brought the country back from the brink of a depression to a roaring economy, and for the first time since Reagan’s ‘trickle down’ madness was inflicted upon the country, workers and the middle class are gaining ground. He has brought manufacturing back, made vast updates and improvements to the national infrastructure, and made inroads in smashing the corrupt system of permanent economic servitude known as ‘student debt.’ His legacy is secure, and no mountain of Republican lies can change that.

While a lot of people who think he should step down propose that he just announce he isn’t running again (as did Lyndon Johnson and Harry Truman) it’s worth noting that in both instances the party left without an incumbent president went on to lose both the White House and Congressional supermajorities.

That’s illustrative in another way: in both cases, the prior president died in office (Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy) and both Johnson and Truman, running on their predecessors’ policies and platforms, were elected with huge majorities against fundamentally weak Republican candidates.

Biden announcing he won’t run again would be a mistake, and we would probably see a floor fight at the convention followed by a sweeping loss. I’ve no doubt that would be the last meaningful election America would ever see. If Trump gets back in office, we are finished.

But if instead, Joe Biden resigns the Presidency, then Kamala Harris becomes President. Not ‘acting president’ or ‘president pro tem’ but THE President. She would be the incumbent (and eligible to run for two full terms in addition to the months remaining in Biden’s first term) and effectively the head of her party. If she decides to run (and it’s nearly impossible to imagine a circumstance where she wouldn’t) the Democratic Party would have little choice, politically or tactically, but to back her and nominate her and a running mate at the convention, three weeks from now.

If she runs on Biden’s platform, and has the full-throated support of Biden, then the Democrats would be united. Even the Democrats mooted to be possible presidential candidates, such as Gavin Newsom or Adam Schiff, would have little recourse but to support her.

The only President to resign office was Richard Nixon, and he did so in disgrace. With Biden, it would be an act of heroism and personal character, putting the interests of the country ahead of his own ambitions. He would be a hero. And if he, along with Obama and the Clintons, is actively campaigning for her, then Biden’s final official act will be one of pure courage and genius.

Which leaves one question: Is Kamala Harris up for the job?

Often the vice presidential nomination is a matter of naked political calculation. The putative goal is a “balanced ticket” wherein the VP candidate is strong in a region where the presidential candidate is weak or appeals to a constituency not keen on the presidential candidate. Harris wasn’t the result of such; she is from California, which was already a given for Biden, and is liberal-centrist, like Biden. The bigots will say she’s a ‘minority hire’ or some other such crap, but honestly—does anybody know a Repucican black person and/or a woman who said, “I was going to vote for Trump, but Harris is a DEI, so I’m switching?” Yes, there are black people and women who support Trump. But you only need to watch them for a few moments to see they aren’t quite right. None of them are going to switch for Harris.

With the possible exceptions of Al Gore and puppet master Dick Cheney, most VPs don’t have memorable terms. John Nance Gardner once remarked of his job as VP that it was “Not worth a bucket of warm spit.” Basically, the VP has three jobs: cast a tie-breaking vote in the Senate, certify the electoral college count, and wait for the president to die. In most of the history of the Republic, that made the job an utter sinecure.

What about the rest of her career? Well, stellar. As a district attorney she was tough on crime, but had compassion. She opposed the death penalty in all cases, sometimes in the face of intense political pressure. In 2005 she created an environmental crimes unit, and a hate crimes unit. She vigorously persecuted marijuana traffickers, but very rarely persecuted end users, and didn’t seek prison time on such offenses. On violent crime, she was suburb, achieving an 87-percent conviction rate for homicides and a 90-percent conviction rate for all felony gun violations.

She was elected State DA in 2010 in one of the closest elections in state history (it took three weeks to determine she was the winner, but won reelection in 2014 by nearly 58% of the vote, showing strong public consensus behind the job she was doing.

She went after the mortgage mills that nearly destroyed the economy in 2008, and clawed back over a half billion dollars in false claims from two major Medicare swindler companies. She backed and then utilized the Homeowner Bill of Rights which eliminated egregious abuses by the banks and saved not only thousands of people their homes, but homeowners around the state billions of dollars.

She consistently has fought major corporations and banks for the rights of consumers and employees and the public at large. Her record as state DA is utterly amazing, and leaves me with no doubt that she can stand nose-to-nose with Donald Trump, call him a liar and a crook, explain why he’s a liar and a crook, and send him away crying like a little bitch. She’s far more a man than he’s ever been.

Harris, backed by Biden and the rest of the Democratic party, is what we absolutely must have if Trump and the National Association of Zealots and Ideologues who back him are to be defeated.

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The Dwindle Swindle — Despite media impressions, the far right is collapsing

The Dwindle Swindle

Despite media impressions, the far right is collapsing

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

July 9th 2023

www.zeppscommentaries.online

There’s a meme making the rounds on social media these days that addresses the true state of Trump’s popularity. There are variations, but it basically goes like this: “As an experiment, I had my daughter wear a ‘Trump 2020’ T shirt to see what sorts of reactions the shirt might provoke. So far she’s been cursed at, spit upon, and had garbage thrown at her. I’m wondering what the reactions will be like when she leaves the house.”

Despite the efforts of the for-profit media to prop up the Trump campaign, the fact is that polls show that fully 60% of all voters don’t want Trump back in the White House under any circumstance. The Marist National Poll for National Public Radio and PBS NewsHour was conducted in March, before the 72 indictments were issued. According to Newsweek, “The Marist poll found 76 percent of Republicans do want Trump to run for a second term, with just 21 percent disagreeing, indicating he has a good chance of clinching the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination. By contrast, 89 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of independents don’t want Trump to run again, nor do 41 percent of those identified as ‘white Evangelical Christians,’ a group that has become increasingly lukewarm towards the Republican front-runner.” Even Fox News reported on the poll.

That 60% reject Trump out of hand would seem insurmountable. But not to the ratings-hungry media, to whom Trump is catnip.

Yes, the Trumpster has a big lead among Republicans. But Republicans only make up 36 million out of the 127 million voters who have to declare party affiliation, running well behind second-place independents. And that was in mid 2022. Their numbers have shrunk since then as the party has been taken over by fringe lunatics on the far right who push such wildly unpopular ideas as banning abortion and birth control, bringing back segregation and child labor, and getting rid of Social Security and minimum wage.

Yes, Trump could win the primaries, even though he’ll be on trial for at least some of that period, and will in all likelihood be facing hundreds of new indictments for anything up to and including insurrection and sedition. Depending on the nature of those documents he stole, and who he showed them to, he might even be facing charges of actions injurious to the national interests (the closest possible charge to treason in peacetime). The general election would be the biggest slaughter in presidential elections since 1936.

It is fun watching the right—the ones sane enough to spot the looming disaster—race in panicked circles. Maria Bartiromo, who has at least learned to lie about entities that won’t sue her such as the FBI and DoJ, told Ron DeSantis (NSDAP-Florida) that he couldn’t win because the DoJ and FBI were out to destroy him. That would be the Deep Statetm. The one that is trying to destroy Trump. (How do you destroy Trump? Let him speak.)

I’m not exactly clear on how the Deep State will finish Trump by destroying his main rival in the primaries, but I’m sure Maria has it all figured out. Jewish space lasers and electronic mind control devices hidden in COVID vaccines, no doubt.

Trump keeps self-sabotaging, and in increasingly stupid ways. His lawyers keep deserting him because he is the client from hell who can’t keep his mouth shut and keeps self-incriminating. He cheats and betrays his allies at the faintest sign of what he considers disloyalty, real or imagined. He breaks promises blatantly, publicly, and for no good reason. For example, he went into an eatery on his birthday and promised food for everyone there, and then promptly left, leaving angry patrons and a dismayed restaurant staff hanging. I can only surmise that he thought the media would only cover the generous promise and not follow up, even though, given his track record, reporters would be doing exactly that in search of a juicier news story.

The far right is similarly self-destructively confused. Moms For Liberty (AKA ‘Twatzies’, ‘Ku Klux Karens’ or ‘Housewives for Hitler’) spearhead the Moment of Hate campaigns against the LGBTQ community, trans-gendered kids in particular, and have become the face of book banning. The various Nazi militia groups that formed the backbone of Trump’s attempted coup on January 6th vacillate between calling for a nationwide uprising and pretending they had nothing to do with Jan 6 and what’s more, Trump deluded them into it. Republican politicians keep trying to out-Nazi one another, the most visible (but not necessarily the worst) being Ron DeSantis. His reign in Florida is so grotesquely fascistic that hundreds of thousands have already fled the state, and millions more are seriously contemplating it. Even the Floridians who don’t mind his authoritarianism, bigotry and cruelty are becoming aware that he is going to destroy Florida’s economy. (If German corporations had stood up to Hitler instead of trying to use him to their own ends, Hitler would have been just a small footnote in history. US Corporations take note.)

Like a gravely wounded predator, the far right is in a frenzy, chewing on its own entrails. They have the potential to be fantastically dangerous, but in the end, they are self-doomed.

Remember the 60% of voters reject Trump poll, and ignore the contrived horse race media self-promotion. The fact is, a large majority of people don’t want Trump, or his deplorable following.

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