Politics

Politically, I’m very liberal — about as far left as one can go without sliding into Libertarianism.

The Propaganda of Resistance

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The NYT “Part of the Resistance ” piece is strategic conservative propaganda, not self-promotion.

This strikes me as an astute analysis of the letter (thinking about tone and intended audience). So much about this letter has been bothering me, and this is a chunk of it.

(Another chunk is that the letter author is describing a shadow/puppet government, which further abandons the in-built checks and balances in a dangerous undermining of our system, putting the underlying health of our country even more at risk than it already was.)

This is NOT the administration falling apart. It’s A+, live action storytelling with a controlled demolition, and it’s actually really dangerous. Behind the structure of the NYT piece lies the strategy for how the republican party plans to catch the pieces as they start falling.

Now is the time we need to get ahead of this. Instead of sitting back and watching the pieces fall, or flipping out and calling for the writer to resign, in the next few days we need to pre-empt this new narrative and have conversations with the significant voters in our lives now.

Constitutional Crisis

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“Impeachment is a constitutional mechanism. The Twenty-Fifth Amendment is a constitutional mechanism. Mass resignations followed by voluntary testimony to congressional committees are a constitutional mechanism. Overt defiance of presidential authority by the president’s own appointees—now that’s a constitutional crisis.

“If the president’s closest advisers believe that he is morally and intellectually unfit for his high office, they have a duty to do their utmost to remove him from it, by the lawful means at hand. That duty may be risky to their careers in government or afterward. But on their first day at work, they swore an oath to defend the Constitution—and there were no ‘riskiness’ exemptions in the text of that oath.”

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2018-08-27

Testing the Sunlit app for posting photos. A small selection from last week’s vacation trip to Lake Coeur d’Alene. I can’t imagine doing the lakehouse-and-boat lifestyle full-time, but it was fun to try it out for a few days!

2018-08-28

2018-08-29

2018-08-30

So Tired of the Greenies

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Great rant from The Root: Enough With the Shit, Green Party. The Coming Midterms Are Too Important for Your Shenanigans.

In theory, the Green Party is vitally necessary for a two-party system with party platforms so rigid and legacy-laced that not all potential candidates can get with either of them. I get it.

But in practice, the Green Party has become a catch-all for wackos and faux-Democrats who wouldn’t have a shot in hell in winning the dominant parties’ bids to continue fucking up the country for the rest of us.

Ohio’s congressional special election on Tuesday between Republican Troy Balderson and Democrat Danny O’Connor is so close that less than 1 percent separates the winner from the eventual loser. While the race is essentially a practice run for November midterms, it was a prime opportunity to send a strong message to the Trump administration. A Democratic victory in Ohio, a state Trump won handily in the 2016 presidential election, would signal to Trump that America is tired of his bullshit.

Enter: Green Party candidate Joe Manchik.

Who is Joe Manchik? Who the fuck knows. He’s just a white guy with a braided ponytail who gave this disastrous interview while wearing a peace symbol T-shirt, in which he couldn’t even remember what a debit card is and had trouble articulating how to donate on his own campaign website.

Joe Manchik couldn’t even remember his own fucking website! And yet, Joe Manchik is also responsible for winning over 1,100 votes, or some 0.6 percent of votes that probably would have gone to O’Connor.

And that’s my biggest beef with the Green Party; your LaVar Ball-ish sideshow shit is taking votes from viable Democratic candidates who are actually trying to implement change.

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“If women were the only ones who voted, races that are closely contested now would turn into Democratic blowouts, today’s safe Republican seats would turn into toss-ups, and Democrats would win the House popular vote nearly every time.”