Tag: trump

It pains me to say this, but you should probably give Jill Stein money RIGHT NOW

Jill Stein and the goddamned Green Party are collecting money to perform recounts in three states.  She already has the money to trigger a re-County Wisconsin [ed.: in the 24-hours since I wrote that, Stein collected ~$3 million more to support this work] cover recount-request paperwork filing fees in all three states, but she still need another ~$3mil to cover the costs of an actual hand recount.

This almost certainly isn’t going to change the election, but anything worth knowing is worth knowing True and Sure—and facts are always worth repeating:  If you backed him or not, it’s important to reiterate that the President-Elect is the Second-Place Winner.  He doesn’t have a “mandate,” he doesn’t represent a beleaguered “silent majority.”  He isn’t the voice of the “Real America.”  He won on a technicality—which is very much like him—and anyone continuing to put a thorn in his side (and the sides of those who need to strut around spouting his bullshit) is most definitely doing God’s Work.

Just to give you a sense of how truly, absurdly close this election was, and how imprecise election-night numbers are:  Michigan has been counted as a Trump win since Election Night, but we didn’t actually officially declare a winner here until the night before Thanksgiving.  In the day-after-the-election estimate, Trump had won by ~13,000 votes out of ~4.5 million cast—absurdly close.  By the time the true, official tabulation was released two nights ago, that lead had been reduced by about one-quarter, to 10,704 votes; for context roughly 10,000 people buy a dog at any given time Tigers game—and the tigers are sucky unpopular team.  This is the closest election in Michigan history, and the first time the state has gone red for PotUS since 1988.  Also, this is a state where Trump handily lost the Republican primary, and where he sank in the polls immediately after visiting (although, again, I’m not saying there was a fix in Michigan: This is also a state where black turnout was significantly depressed without apparent outside jiggery-pokery, and which had no new obstructions to voting put in place since 2012).

I kicked Stein a few bucks, even though I’m moderately furious with her and the Green Party and how they ran their campaign here in Michigan (short version: They ran against HRC—not against War, or the the Establishment, or Trump, just against HRC.  Like, their goddamned lawn signs said “NO HRC” on them.  Clinton lost Michigan by ~10k votes; Stein got ~50k votes.  i.e., it isn’t hard to imagine that if Stein had maybe–I dunno, run against the Status Quo instead of the Other Woman–maybe Clinton would have scraped out a win here, to the tune of 16 EC votes—still a Clinton loss nationally, but you’d have 4 million fewer broken hearts here in the Mitten.  So, yeah: Fuck Jill Stein and the Green party.  Having lived through this shit twice now, to the tune of two wars and countless tens of thousands of dead in Iraq and Afghanistan, I feel pretty confident when I say that I would sooner vote to have both my hands burned off with molten lead than I’d vote for a Green Party candidate.)  Every last penny you donate via this form goes to recount efforts; none to Jill, none to the Greens, just toward making a colossal fuck-up a touch less wrong.  Excess funds go toward their work on election integrity and voting system reform.  I may think the Greens are a sack of dicks, but I 100% agree with them about election integrity and voting reform, and trust them to do the Good Work on those issues.  ’cause, at the very least, the Greens are ass-hats, but they aren’t crooks.

This election has, quite literally, been a Tragedy:  It was won on suppression and lost on discouragement. On that alone it is an abomination and complete failure of our Democratic System, callously used in a fashion opportunistic and anti-democratic ON ALL SIDES AND BY ALL PARTIES.  This is a small step toward restoring it.  Let’s hold hands, hold our noses, and take that step together. usa-american-flag-waving-animated-gif-26

“A thread for white people considering how to talk to their relatives” via @the_author_

Since it seems highly likely that a non-negligible percentage of you are heading into a hella awkward long weekend with family, I thought this thread from author Bailey Poland might prove helpful: A thread for white people considering how to talk to their relatives

This lil bit, I believe, is an especially solid tactic:

The key takeaway, in my humble:

Use LOGIC to come to your conclusions, but appeal to others’ ETHICS and EMOTIONS to persuade them.  Speak honestly and authentically about your own experience.

Here’s an example of how I might apply this in conversation:

“I totally hear that you feel like the country has made some big, jarring shifts in the last eight years, and you feel left out in the cold. But here’s the thing: I’ve been surprised by the number of Jews I know who’ve taken steps since the election to be sure that they and their children can leave the country in a hurry. But not super surprised, because my wife and I did so, too.  And that didn’t take eight years; it took two weeks.”

 (For the curious, here’s something I wrote about being a Jew in 21st C America one year before all this crazy “white nationalist” election crap kicked off.  Spoiler alert: Shit hasn’t gotten better in 28 months.)

“It’s Rigged, I Tells Ya! *Rigged*!!!” Redux

So, there are things I want to revisit about this post from October 20—specifically, as pertains to the sentence “this [election] hasn’t really been close for a year or so”, I’d like to punch the guy who typed that in the nuts until such time as his eyeballs fill with blood—but I stand by the gist of this:

Here’s the thing: at the national level the U.S. election system—being a bass-akward county-by-county patchwork with little network connectivity and lots of different paper trails—is broadly unriggable. Yes, many pockets are vulnerable to manipulation, but that can only tip a close election

And would like to draw your attention to the added emphasis in the final clause—because this was a very close election, and it was tipped.

But I do not believe it was “rigged.”  Check out this brief essay from Bruce Schneier for reassurance of this.   If you don’t know Bruce, you can take my word that he is the guy to listen to on this.  He wrote the bible of modern cryptography, vetted a lot of the documents Snowden obtained, and is basically unimpeachable in his writing on security, and on the grave threats posed by a surveillance state.  I’ve been personally following Schneier’s career for almost two decades, and absolutely believe that his call in these matters is solid.

So, in terms of hacked voting machines and manipulated voter roles and Russian machinations, this election was not rigged.

But was the outcome of this very close election tipped by gerrymandering and voter suppression?

Well, let’s consider Florida—just hypothetically:

  • About 9 million people voted in Florida this year
  • Florida’s population is about 37% black and brown (almost a quarter of the state is Latinx)
  • Clinton lost FLA by about 120,000 votes

So, let’s say that people of color represent just 30% of Florida’s voters—and that these voters strongly favored Clinton (which a large number of polls indicated).  How much suppression of the black and brown vote does it take to shift Clinton from winning that race to losing it by 120,000 votes (keeping in mind that you must win FLA by more than .5% in order to avoid a recount)?  A little math, and we discover it’s:

7%

If you prevent just 7 in every 100 voters of color from voting in Florida, you get the flip we saw.

Hypothetically.  Just sayin’

Now, could 7 in every 100 voters of color be discouraged by three hour lines, or confusion about what ID they needed, or fear of prosecution for unpaid tickets, or misled about what day they were to vote or if they could do so online in advance?  Could 7 in every 100 voters of color have their ballots discarded as spoiled, or set aside because there was something wrong with their registration, or forced to vote a provisional ballot that would never be counted unless the final tally was less than .5% in favor of one candidate?

I have no idea.

But I’ve seen folks discouraged by less, and cheated out of more.  And I’m sure you have, too.

And such very mild suppression—just a few percent here and there, out on the edges of cities where the Blue urban core sprawls out into the Red Suburbs—is nationally amplified by the electoral college.

Not that I’m saying that such fuckery is what happened, or that any such systemic tom-foolery played part in how we wound up with the the Guy Who got Second Place as our President-Elect.

I’m just sayin’, is all.  Just sayin’  usa-american-flag-waving-animated-gif-26

And all of that said, I still think you should watch the video I posted way back on October 20 (and embed again below)—because what that video warns us is the most important bit of all right now:

Twilight Zone – The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street from Kevin on Vimeo.

It’s Rigged, I Tells Ya! *Rigged*!!!

Seeing lots of concerns about a “stolen election,” not just from the Nativist Right (e.g.,  Trump himself speaking in Novi, MI last month and repeating at basically every whistle-stop since, it his inability at the third debate to commit to honoring any election outcome other than his own unlikely victory), but also from broad swaths of the Progressive Left (e.g., That viral image showing #TrumpWon starting in Russia is fake, #TrumpWon? trend vs. reality, Troll armies rig polls to deceive you into believing Trump won first debate, Trumpism Is the Symptom of a Gravely Ill Constitution, concerns of voter suppression via Trumpian “poll watchers,” etc.) and the Rational Center (largely around the possibility of Ruskie agitators: FBI Says It Has Detected More Attempts to Hack Voter Registration Systems, Newsweek Website Attacked After Report On Trump, Cuban Embargo, The Russian Hack of U.S. Election Systems is About Delegitimizing, Not Changing, the Result, and It Feeds Trump Vote-Rigging Claim)

Here’s the thing: at the national level the U.S. election system—being a bass-akward county-by-county patchwork with little network connectivity and lots of different paper trails—is broadly unriggable. Yes, many pockets are vulnerable to manipulation, but that can only tip a close election—and this once hasn’t really been close for a year or so.

What this latest paranoid politico-cultural tulip mania really puts me in the mind of is the classic Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street“—minus the last 2 minutes are so.  Just watch this video, stop at ~22:40 seconds, and you’ve got our current predicament (of course, keep going and SPOILER ALERT!!! you’ll discover that the episode’s Big Bad Alien looks distressingly like a young Vladimir Putin—but I’m positive that’s just a coincidence).

Twilight Zone – The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street from Kevin on Vimeo.

I Want to Thank Donald J. Trump… [UPDATED]

… for being a good role model to boys—or, more precisely, an excellent cautionary tale.

art by DonkeyHotey https://www.flickr.com/photos/donkeyhotey/
(art by DonkeyHotey)

I watched most of the debate with my 10-year-old son last night (he bugged out ~20 minutes from the end because “it’s getting boring and just repeating itself.”)  Overall, he was baffled and appalled, and more than a little embarrassed.

I think we all saw the embarrassment coming (including the good folks who advised not letting children watch): Talk of the #TrumpTape had my kid covering his head with a blanket (in part this owes to the boy being a tad non-neurotypical; the concept that someone might purposefully touch someone who didn’t want to be touched is sort of existentially dreadful to him).

As for the bafflement, my kid just couldn’t get his head around anyone wanting anything to do with Trump, based on what he was seeing on the screen, let alone thinking the man would make a good president.

And the idea that he might ever be considered to anything like that man?  That appalled him.  In his own words, Trump was “not responsible, reliable, or trustworthy.”

So, if nothing else, we’ve at least got a new and effective bogeyman, a debased, debasing bad-touching Struwwelpeter of the soul:

“Dammit, kid: Wash your hands, do your chores, then help the lady next door by shoveling her walk—or else you’ll turn out like Donald J. Trump!”

UPDATE Oct 11, 2016: Another debate nugget that just came to mind: When the issue of Trumps “ban on all Muslims entering the country” was raised, my kid shot up, aghast, and shouted “But that violates core democratic values!”  (He has a class at school called “Core Democratic Values”—which is basically, content wise, the class we called “Civics,” but that clunky phrase, latched to his very real and visceral distress, really cracked me up, so I thought I’d share.)

Vote Early, Vote Often, Vote Glass-Eating Clown!!!

Jelly Boy the Clown
Jelly Boy the Clown

What with the news and all, I was recently reminded that I at one time advocated voting for extreme clowns:

For the average citizen, the voting conundrum is born of finite time and imperfect information: You don’t have the time or resources to actually meet and research each candidate yourself, and thus must rely on second-hand research of dubious provenance.

…

As such, you may be better off relying on a heuristic of your own making. My preferred rule of thumb is this: Always vote for the glass-eating clown.

I stand by this obtuse position.

(Just to clarify: This is an endorsement of electing possible alleged murder clowns.  This is not an endorsement of Donald J. Trump–although I do wholeheartedly endorse him eating glass, if he so chooses.)

“That’s Democracy!” (a short film about you and me, America)

I don’t know what to think of this. It starts out feeling pretty cheap and emotionally manipulative, but I think it’s ultimately a sort of spot-on indictment of how we all—as Americans, left, right, and center—deeply buy into the Murder Business. 

Continue reading ““That’s Democracy!” (a short film about you and me, America)”

Even George W. Bush Had His Moments

Imma level with you: That dude was not a PotUS I dug in the least—I spent almost his entire two terms on a travel watch list, bought a house that lost much of its value in the economy he destroyed, watched civilizations crumble and collapse in response to his foreign adventures—but I was still moved to tears of gratitude one night, driving home from the grocery and listening to NPR, when I heard him stand up for American Muslims following 9/11.  He was not a good President, and I have every reason to believe he is not a particularly good person, but he still had his moments.

‘course, by contrast to where we’re at now, GWB was a fucking statesman nonpareil:

and

… and on and on and on.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve been on the right side of every issue since November of 1999—if you’ve voted right and protested right and written the right letters to the right reps and given the right donations to the right charities to do the right things for the right people.  

This, here, today is still the country that we have all made, together, for better or worse.  Like it or not, GWB was my president, and Obama is my president, and whoever—or whatever comes next—will be my president, too.  God have mercy on my soul.