A Proposed AMENDMENT, addressing certain ISSUES pertaining to the SUPREME COURT of these UNITED STATES.

Here's something I've been thinking about for quite a while: how I would fix the Supreme Court. Obviously, I'm not an expert and am quite possibly wrong in many ways, but you have to start SOMEWHERE, right? Here's my proposed Amendment which would fix the Court, with interspersed commentary.

This is long, so it's after the fold.

Dear 45 (an Open Letter to the President of the United States)

As I write this, you are still President, for another 47 minutes. I guess it's time to reflect a bit. Here's part of what I wrote to you four years ago today: 

I do not support you, and I do not expect good things from you. I do not expect good policy choices, nor do I expect good outcomes. My expectations for you are astoundingly, confounding low, because that's where you put them. You did it by appealing, day in and day out, to the very worst instincts in the American psyche, right from your campaign's opening address when you warned us all about the steady stream and rapists and murderers surging into our country from across the Rio Grande.

You did it by lying day in and day out, so much that reporters had trouble figuring out how to report that you were lying. You lied so much that you were eventually lying about having lied in the first place. You ran the most dishonest presidential campaign I have ever seen, and yet somehow you managed to reap the benefit of an opponent whom most people seem to think is also a huge liar, even though she isn't.

You did it by cheering on the expulsion of people from your events of people who don't like you or who say things about you that you don't like.

You did it by several years ago making your first big claim to political fame by pursuing the stupid fiction that Barack Obama was not a natural-born American citizen.

You did it by showing on FOX News repeatedly to scoff at the very idea of global warming and climate change.

You did it with idiotic policy proposals like building a wall between the United States and Mexico, and then compounding this stupidity with the idea that Mexico will somehow be forced to pay for it.

You did it by filling your administration with people who are clearly on the take, people who are clearly going to make out like bandits, people who are obviously going to set to the tasks of destroying the missions of the agencies they are heading, and people who are simply downright ignorant (an Energy Secretary who didn't know what the department even does, or a HUD secretary who believes that the Egyptian pyramids are grain silos).

You lowered my expectations by attacking people left and right on Twitter, by egging on your bizarrely rabid followers, by threatening your opponent with investigations and prosecutions, and by scoffing at one's obligations as a citizen by saying "It makes you smart" that you managed to avoid paying income taxes at one point.

There is literally nothing you have said or done over the last eighteen months that gives me the smallest reason to think that you might be a good President. You have shown no curiosity about issues or insight into them. You have shown zero respect for the work of the job or the norms that surround it. You have demonstrated no foreign policy acumen aside from chest-thumping and Russo-philia. I can think of no issue that stands to improve for your having addressed it, and I can think of no aspect of American life that will be better for your having been President.

And the thing is? You're going to fail. No matter what. You're going to be able to do a lot of damage, and you'll ruin a lot of lives. Hell, if you and your cohorts in Congress repeal the ACA without a "replacement" (and let's be honest, none of you has the slightest idea what kind of "replacement" you'll offer), you might just kill people. But it won't matter. Not in the long-run, it won't. You're not going to reignite American manufacturing so that towns once more have big factories employing ten thousand people. You're not going to be able to push all of the queer people back into their respective closets. You're not going to make the young people like you.

Ultimately, though, I don't even think you care that much, and that may bother me most of all. You seem to expect the Presidency to be this easy thing that you can almost do on a part-time basis, and that your business experience is one hundred percent applicable to the challenges you will confront as President. As to the latter, your business experience isn't the unbroken run of amazing success stories that you often say it is, and that experience is not always applicable. What might be OK in a board room is not OK in a cabinet meeting.

In short, I expect your Presidency to be a time of awful policy making combined with amazing levels of corruption. The last administration that paired deep disengagement in policy and facts with willingness to profit from events did not result in good results. Your judicial appointees will be terrible people, and our Congress will rubber-stamp your stuff and you'll rubber-stamp their stuff. The idea of national government in the hands of you, Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell fills me with many emotions, none of them happy and most of them angry.

Not only was none of this wrong, you somehow managed to be even worse than I expected. I expected George W. Bush levels of incompetence, disengagement, and bad policy, but not only did you manage to crank up the settings on all of those, you added to the mix a casual type of cruelty that wasn't terribly surprising, but it was still unnerving. You seemed to take actual delight in the sufferings of the American people whom you were elected (if only by the deeply bizarre set-up we Americans have where someone with fewer votes can still be elected) to lead and serve.

I never had any expectation of you growing in office, but damned if you didn't seem to shrink to the occasion, each and every time. I knew that your general approach to policy would be terrible, and my only real hope was that things would somehow manage to not get super bad in America by the time we got our chance to vote you out.

Of course, this hope was in itself dangerous, since Americans don't tend to take a very long view of policy, which made it a very real risk that we'd hit 2020 with things just king of bubbling along, like they were for the first three years of your term, and Americans would look at the state of affairs and say, "Meh, he's doing OK, I guess." The inertia of history takes a long time to shift, and it often takes bad governance years to manifest in terrible results that hurt millions. Likewise, it takes good governance years to repair terrible results, which is where America often gets into trouble: we get frustrated when the Democratic Presidents we elect to get America out of the ditch that Republican Presidents like you steered it into don't quite get the job done in 18 months, and then we fill Congress with Republicans who have zero investment in doing anything other than keeping us in the ditch.

But here we are: you put the country in a calamitous position, by pursuing things that were unimportant and ignoring things that were. You ignored the warnings about likely pandemics, and then when one actually arrived, you dithered and you dallied and you ignored experts who were telling you what you didn't want to hear and you installed charlatans who told you what you did, and now here we are, four hundred thousand deaths and counting later, and we're a country that can't get on the same page about something so simple as wearing masks to protect each other.

No, you didn't create the climate in America, but you took advantage of it and you poured gas on its embers and fanned the flames at every opportunity you had. You used the power of your office in the most brazenly and transparently transactional way probably in history, and what of that? You're still heading off to face all manner of legal troubles, and the idea of anyone giving you giant sums of money to build some tall building someplace is laughable. (Maybe Boise will try; you could end up with Trump Tower Boise being the tallest building there, but then, in Boise, twenty floors will get it done.) You gave your ear to the Stephen Millers, Steve Bannons, Seb Gorkas, and Michael Caputos of the world. I expected your administration to be a Rogue's Gallery of the worst people in America, and you certainly met that expectation, head-on.

Meanwhile, our country's economic inequality continues to grow, student loans continue to break the backs of millions, our infrastructure (which of all things I expected you to do something about, even if it was a half-assed grifting something) is still crumbling and well behind the rest of the world, and we have lost another four years that we didn't have to fight climate change. I am not exaggerating when I say that there is no aspect of American life that is better for your having touched it. Yours is a perverse kind of mirror universe Midas touch, in which everything with which you come in contact is either terrible to begin with or becomes terrible because you touched it.

Well, while there is still the enormous problem that many millions of Americans still support you, and that a significant portion of those do so on the basis of irrational nonsense conspiracy crap that wouldn't even make an interesting X-Files episode, I can still take comfort in the fact that of the many problems America is facing today and in days to come, one of them has been definitively addressed.

You, Mr. Trump, are no longer America's problem. May the wind be forever in your face, and may the road crumble before you with each step you take.

Sincerely,

--An American citizen who has no more time or inclination to think about you at all.

One Day More

This is the photo I took on the morning of Election Day, 2016. It seemed like a bright and optimistic day. I captioned it on Instagram: "Looks like a nice morning to make some history happen!"

The next morning, in the midst of reeling with the eventual result of that election, the hulking husk of Bethlehem Steel, the old steel plant on the shore of Lake Erie south of Buffalo, caught fire. The blaze was enormous, and I was able to take this photo of the smoke cloud from the roof of The Store.

It was hard even then to not see these two photos, twenty-four hours and some change apart, as some kind of metaphor for what my country had just done...or, maybe if I'm feeling charitable, what my country had allowed to happen through various questionable voting decisions by her citizens and the fact of her simply nonsensical approach to the matter of electing presidents.

I've had various essay-ish thoughts in my mind about the nature of the 2020 election, but obviously I haven't written any of them. Every time I've sat down to do so, I've checked out. While I don't feel a great sense of impending doom just now, I know what America is capable of doing and I know that we still have a chance to snatch epochal defeat from the jaws of hopeful victory.

Suffice it to say that I hope every American who can will vote, and that I hope that when the dust settles, not only has America decided to scuttle the ongoing disaster that is the Donald Trump administration, but that it has also decided to harshly rebuke the party that gave him to us, the party that has been stampeding in this authoritarian and irrational direction for more than fifty years. I know that American voters love to balance things out: "I voted for a Democrat for President, so I'll vote for a Republican for Senate," for example. This is not the time for that. The Republican Party needs to be ruthlessly quashed at every single level for which it can run for things. Every ounce of what is wrong with America can be traced back to either their ill-advised action or their apathetic inaction, and as a party American conservatism needs to be banished to the wilds for years.

I hope that when the dust is settling, America can start to do things like address climate change, the horrible inequities in our economy, the pandemic that holds our country in its tightening grip, our centuries-long struggle with racial hatreds, and more. I hope that the 2016 election will eventually prove to have been a very strange historical accident, not truly indicative of anything other than the last gasp of a political paradigm that has been far too long in passing.

I hope we elect Joe Biden.

[Comments are closed on this post.]

Democracy: I Did It

 Specifically, I did the democracy thing the other day, on Saturday, when early voting started in New York State. I got to the polling place (a local community center) about ten minutes before it opened, and at that point there was already a line, which extended into the parking lot. This was strange; the building is big and is surrounded by very ample sidewalks, and yet the people queued up in the parking lot. It took a cop to come along and tell everyone to queue on the sidewalk instead of the parking lot. People are weird.

I waited in line for probably about half an hour before I finally got inside. The attendants looked up my name and printed my ballot on the spot (hooray to New York for not passing some dumb-assed Voter ID law!), and then I voted. It definitely felt a little bit strange to vote early. With the exception of my very first election, when I was in college and thus had to vote via absentee ballot, I have always voted on Election Day at my designated polling place. It does seem odd, having joined with millions of my fellow citizens in having already voted, and yet we won't have any idea how this all turns out for at least another five days. Here's hoping it's only five days, and here's hoping that we Americans are sweeping the forty-sixth President of the United States into office on the strength of numbers too big to challenge.

We'll see.

Oh, and this was the first time I ever got an "I voted" sticker, so huzzah for that! That sticker is a nice accessory for my overalls, isn't it?

"I've learned so much"

In Larry McMurtry's great Western novel Lonesome Dove, for much of the novel the point of view changes between the main story (a group of Texas cattlemen leading their herds north for selling) and a secondary plot in which we follow the nasty adventures of Dan Suggs and his brothers, who are a murderous trio of guys, killing and robbing their way across the prairie. About two-thirds of the way through the book, our lawful cattlemen meet Suggs and his brothers, and they manage to subdue them quickly and make ready to hang them from the nearest tree. But to their surprise, they find that a friend of theirs, a guy named Jake, has fallen in with the Suggs crew.

Jake is not a bad guy, but he's something of a ne'er-do-well who makes his living lurching from town to town, gambling and drinking and whoring and doing it all some more. It's been a while since I read the book, so I don't remember how it is that he falls in with Suggs and his brothers, but he does, and McMurtry captures his disquiet well as he witnesses murder and crime after murder and crime.

But when our heroes, William Call and Augustus McCray, defeat Suggs and company and get them all tied up in order to mete out cowboy justice, this brief conversation transpires:

Call went over to Jake. Deets [one of their companions] seemed hesitant to tie him, but Call nodded and covered Jake with his rifle while Deets tied his hands. As he was doing it Pea Eye and Newt [two more of their companions] came over the hill with the horses.

"Call, he don't need to tie me," Jake said. "I ain't done nothing. I just fell in with these boys to get through the Territory. I was aiming to leave them the first chance I got."

Call saw that Jake was so drunk he could barely sit up.

"You should have made your chance a little sooner, Jake," Augustus said. "A man that will go along with six killings is making his escape a little slow."

I've been thinking about that passage ever since our President made a video, aimed at his fans, regarding his experience with COVID-19 and his intention to leave the hospital later today. After having spent the last bunch of months spreading all manner of misinformation about the pandemic that is gripping the world, decided to record a video for his fans last night, in which he said, among other things, that he's "learned so much" about the disease.

He's "learned so much".

Imagine that. This many months after the pandemic began, this many months after lock-downs and scenes of horror in New York City, this many months after case spikes and the death rate never going down to zero, this many months of America just existing with this damned thing, arguing over masks and "mah rights"...now our President has "learned so much".

The time to learn so much would have been the beginning, sir. The time to learn so much would have been in the very beginning, when you would have learned so much from the pandemic team the previous administration left in place, had you not dismissed it.

You should have made your chance a little sooner, Mr. President. A man that will go along with two hundred thousand deaths is "learning so much" a little slow.

(Comments are off for this post)

2017: Year of the American Nazis

I don't have anything eloquent or insightful to say on the subject, but I feel that I should say this: to hell with the white-supremacist Nazi subculture that is thriving in my country today, and to hell with anyone who either supports them directly or offers them de facto shadow support by offering arguments like "Sad about what happened but Antifa is worse", to hell with a major political party that decided that its ensconcement in power was a sufficiently worthy goal to ally with such people, and to hell with a moral midget of a President whose election is manna from heaven to these people and in whom they find a father figure.

A Guide to Making Good Life Choices

Whenever you are confronted by an ambiguous choice in life, ask yourself this simple question:

Will my decision make Mitch McConnell make THIS face?

If yes, then do that!

Why #ImWithHer

Because.

I think that she is genuinely the best choice in this election. I believe that she would and will be a good President, and that she also represents the best chance to avoid electing a truly awful one. Her chief opponent has said almost nothing that has made any sense at all and a whole lot of things that are terrible. The "third party" options -- which are generally a giant waste of time anyway -- are all laughable in one way or another, whether we're talking about the loopy Libertarian, the oddball Green, or that other guy who is basically Mitt Romney with a better resume.

That's it. Maybe not terribly convincing, but I don't really feel the need to be.

Third Party Madness

One maddening thing about every single Presidential election cycle is the inevitable cries of "We need a third party!" I always find this concept generically annoying, not because I'm in love with my own party (believe me, there have been many times when I wanted to junk-punch the Democratic Party and/or some of its component parts), but because the two-party system is simply baked into our political system. No, the system wasn't designed for only two major parties, and the Founding Fathers didn't especially want only two major political parties, but you can't always foresee the future, and this is what we got: a system that by its very nature allows only two major parties.

This is all explained very effectively by blogger Christoper Bird, who is very astute about American politics. (This is interesting because he's Canadian. Oh, and that blog is something of a group effort, but he's the Big Cheese there and posts as MGK.)

So, first this (it's a slideshow, so you'll have to, well, slide your way through it):

And then, as follow-up, this (just normal scrolling now):

1. A lot of responses of "well excuse me I believe I will vote THIRD PARTY" and my response to that is always pic.twitter.com/bqmh7u8ykv

— Aaron Bird, Sir (@mightygodking) July 24, 2016

2. The nature of first-past-the-post systems makes third party voting actively detrimental to the goals of people inclined to do it.

— Aaron Bird, Sir (@mightygodking) July 24, 2016

3. If you're disinclined to vote for either candidate *equally*, then sure, third-party voting makes sense. But you almost surely aren't.

— Aaron Bird, Sir (@mightygodking) July 24, 2016

4. You, like almost everybody, are probably closer in policy preferences to one of the candidates than the other.

— Aaron Bird, Sir (@mightygodking) July 24, 2016

5. For sake of argument, let's say you're likely closer to Clinton than Trump. (If not, why are you reading this? Go watch monster trucks.)

— Aaron Bird, Sir (@mightygodking) July 24, 2016

6. Now let's say "you" is actually "a subset of voters like you, say 1% of the electorate."

— Aaron Bird, Sir (@mightygodking) July 24, 2016

7. If you vote third-party instead of Clinton, there is a set of possible outcomes. *None of them include the third party winning.*

— Aaron Bird, Sir (@mightygodking) July 24, 2016

8. Because FPTP systems are two-party systems, by definition. It's not because of corporate collusion. It's because of *math*.

— Aaron Bird, Sir (@mightygodking) July 24, 2016

9. You are not the first person in history to say "well gosh how about a third party." This is not an original thought you have had.

— Aaron Bird, Sir (@mightygodking) July 24, 2016

10. The reason third parties don't work in FPTP systems is because the system creates two parties with broad bases.

— Aaron Bird, Sir (@mightygodking) July 24, 2016

11. Aside: Canada is a two-party state (the Tories and Liberals) with two smaller parties that split left-wing votes https://t.co/QD303rYeq3

— Aaron Bird, Sir (@mightygodking) July 24, 2016

12. Anyway, mathematically speaking, it makes sense for parties to capture as much of the popular vote as possible.

— Aaron Bird, Sir (@mightygodking) July 24, 2016

13. So FPTP usually creates a political landscape with both parties trying to ensure the support of "51% of the electorate" as possible.

— Aaron Bird, Sir (@mightygodking) July 24, 2016

14. Whatever the reason, conservatives usually all line up in one major party; liberals are more inclined to subdivide.

— Aaron Bird, Sir (@mightygodking) July 25, 2016

15. (This is pretty reliable for FPTP systems across the world, incidentally. It happens again and again.)

— Aaron Bird, Sir (@mightygodking) July 25, 2016

16. (Australia is the major outlier, and their "two" right parties are really just one party for all intents and purposes.)

— Aaron Bird, Sir (@mightygodking) July 25, 2016

17. The result of this is a steady worldwide progression towards more conservative policies, because *conservatives don't split their vote*.

— Aaron Bird, Sir (@mightygodking) July 25, 2016

18. Because conservatives vote with "their" party reliably, the conservative party in Country X With FPTP caters to their preferences more.

— Aaron Bird, Sir (@mightygodking) July 25, 2016

19. And because center-left parties across the world know that the far left is not a reliable vote, they dismiss them to chase the center.

— Aaron Bird, Sir (@mightygodking) July 25, 2016

20. So: if you're voting Green because you don't like Hillary, my posit to you is this:

— Aaron Bird, Sir (@mightygodking) July 25, 2016

21. Voting Green will mean the following things WILL happen.

— Aaron Bird, Sir (@mightygodking) July 25, 2016

22. Firstly, the Democrats are less likely to win, because a voter who is largely aligned with their policy goals isn't voting for them.

— Aaron Bird, Sir (@mightygodking) July 25, 2016

23. Which in turn means: secondly, you increase the odds of a Trump victory, which I assume you *don't* want even more.

— Aaron Bird, Sir (@mightygodking) July 25, 2016

24. Thirdly, if Hillary *does* win, she will be less likely to pursue policies you *would* like, because *you did not vote for her.*

— Aaron Bird, Sir (@mightygodking) July 25, 2016

25. So, by voting third party, you're making every outcome you actually want *less likely*. Which is why voting third party is stupid.

— Aaron Bird, Sir (@mightygodking) July 25, 2016

26. The one thing you *will* get from voting third party, to be sure, is a feeling of satisfaction. (Remember what I said about narcissism?)

— Aaron Bird, Sir (@mightygodking) July 25, 2016

27. Anyway that's enough, I wanna watch wrestling now, Bayley is wrestling and that's very exciting

— Aaron Bird, Sir (@mightygodking) July 25, 2016

Comments on this post are deactivated.

Conventional Reactions

My reactions to the Republican National Convention have been pretty evenly divided between these two videos:




That's about all. This is just about the weirdest damn thing I've ever seen. I can't even fathom how one whole segment of American politics has become like this.

And just think -- if trends continue, and they don't somehow win with this shitshow this year, in 2020 they'll come back even crazier.

UPDATE: I wrote this post before I read the leaked text of Trump's acceptance speech, and jee-sus, that is some messed up shit. That speech may be the single most twisted thing I've ever read, full of half-truths, twisted facts, and outright lies all used in service of maintaining the notion that white Americans should be cowering beneath their beds in the face of the dystopic hellscape this country has become.

I thought Atlas Shrugged was the most twisted thing I'd ever read, but whoever wrote this speech has topped it. My prayer now is that this election represents the death-throes of a particularly ugly strain of thinking on the American right, and after this they'll start swinging back toward rationality and reality again. A country cannot prosper when so many of its people think like this.

Gummint Bad. Oogh.

Politics below the fold.

Pursuing Capital

A bit of politics here, after the break. Keep scrolling if you don't want one of my rare bursts of liberalism in this space!

On we go....

Dear Mr. Romney

[politics below the break]

Scratching my political itch

I'll get this bile out of my system below the break:

Delusions of Electibility

Seen on Facebook earlier:

AT LAST!!! Newt Gingrich drops out, so now it's down to Romney versus RON PAUL! Let the Revolution begin!!!!!

Of course, this same fellow is a 9-11 Truther, a JFK assassination conspiracy theorist, and apparently a believer that you can somehow declare yourself a 'sovereign citizen' in order to get yourself out of various legal troubles. In short, your typical Ron Paul supporter!

Ayup.

(via)

A random opinion

I have to admit, folks, that I am entirely simpatico with the things that motivate the "Occupy" folks. I loathe the corporatization of America, the concentration of wealth at the very top of society, the notion that this concentration is a good thing that will one day lead to prosperity for everybody, the notion that increasing taxes on this crowd one penny in the hopes of making certain aspects of life easier for the rest of us somehow represents a deeply immoral encroachment upon some perverted definition of 'freedom', and all the Ayn Rand bullshit that has led to this.

What I simply don't understand is how spending week upon week camping in the middle of a city is going to somehow translate into any kind of societal change or shift in public policy. Can someone connect these dots for me, please?

(And lest anyone misread this, I'm questioning the Occupy movement's goals and strategies here, and not endorsing the rather terrifying police actions against them. I'm very much disturbed by the idea that municipal police forces are morphing into municipal armed forces.)

Who are we?

Political comment below the fold....

A thousand words, indeed

occupy PPB, originally uploaded by ocmsrzr1.

Talk about a photo saying it all....

Occupations

Kevin Drum has a great post on Occupy Wall Street. Here's the money shot:

None of this is easy. But the truth is that it's increasingly impossible to sell people transparently self-promoting fairy tales that plainly don't reflect how the real world works. If you want them to believe that hard work and discipline are important, then hard work and discipline have to really be important. Not just modestly helpful. Not mere drops compared to the obviously undeserved piles of so many of the super rich. If we want people to believe, we have to believe too. We have to believe that America should be a country where everyone prospers, not just the cognitive elite and the super lucky. Until we all believe this — until conservatives believe this — the notions of responsibility and discipline that conservatives talk about so much are probably going to continue fading. In recent decades they've simply dedicated too much of their lives and too much of their energy to patent unfairness to be surprised any longer that belief in being fairly rewarded is on the wane.

That's the lesson of Occupy Wall Street.

Read the whole thing.