Category: Politics

Some bits and bobs

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My head’s all over the place right now, so let’s do a bullet list.

  • Indiana voted on Tuesday. The Previous Occupant managed 79% of the Republican primary vote against an opponent who dropped out two months ago. I remind you that I Know Nothing About Politics before saying this, but it’s amazing how the polls say one thing and literally every other thing about this election says another.
  • Meanwhile, I was assuming my choice for Senate would lose because Indiana would choose the white guy, and they didn’t! Not only did Valerie McCray win, she won solidly, getting about 2/3 of the vote.
  • The sex pest won his primary too, unfortunately. I am probably just going to leave State Senate blank in November. Surprisingly, there is no Republican candidate, but there is a Libertarian running, and not only is he a Libertarian, he’s an engineer, which means he’s a jackass. It is possible to be either and not be a jackass but it is not possible to be both.
  • Today was a better day at school, not least because all of my knuckleheads from yesterday were excluded from class today. Today was the Math NWEA test, too, and for all indications it looks like it … went well? Possibly quite well? I won’t know for sure until tomorrow morning because it takes 24 hours for results to be fully available to teachers but damn near every kid I talked to showed growth.
  • Meanwhile, I’m definitely taking the high school Mathematics Praxis test this summer. My boss hinted that we might have enough 8th graders taking Geometry next year to be able to make a class section out of it, and I will fight anyone who tries to take that class away from me. That means I need to get licensed to teach it, though, so there’s a test to pass and some paperwork to get done. I can take the damn thing from my house, though, which is spectacularly good news.
  • I have chosen violence, and will be wearing a shirt that just says KENDRICK to work tomorrow. I’m expecting fireworks. It’ll be fun.
  • The final meeting of my little club of gay weirdos at school was today. We had a pizza party. I thought I had ordered far too much food. They each turned out to be a million locusts wearing skin suits, and everything I ordered was gone in seconds. I’m really going to miss these kids.
  • We had a fight in the hallway toward the end of the day, and I raised my voice to such a level clearing the hallway that I was hoarse for all of fifth and sixth hour. I’m hoping I can talk tomorrow.

Okay. That sounds good. I’m gonna go read now.

Time to bring this back

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Since my last post was in the Politics category, and I put Biden in as one of the tags, a little wandering around brought me to a lot of 2020 posts. I was not, to put it mildly, especially excited to vote for Joe Biden in 2020, and in fact voted for Elizabeth Warren in the primary even though she’d dropped out by then. Biden was in the midst of sexual assault allegations that, for once, actually proved to be unfounded, and given that I wasn’t convinced by his candidacy anyway I went ahead and voted for someone I actually wanted to be President.

It occurs to me that we really haven’t heard much from Warren since 2020. Maybe I’m just listening in the wrong places.

Anyway, this is mostly an idle thought, but this is further evidence that I Know Nothing About Politics, something I’ve tried to keep in the forefront of my mind since the disaster in 2016. I couldn’t have been any more wrong about what kind of president this guy was going to be. My record of wrongness in presidential elections is pretty stunning over the last eight years, frankly.

Like I said, stray thought, but I’ve spent all day reading (James Islington’s The Will of the Many is so much better than the Licanius trilogy that it’s hard to believe the same guy wrote both) and I don’t have much of anything else to talk about, so … yeah. Grab the image and spread it around if you like; I feel like the left in general is succumbing to savior syndrome again and I’m pre-tired of the next six months.

In which I endorse: 2024 Primary Edition

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This primary kind of snuck up on me. I will grant that my particular style of media and news consumption renders me functionally immune to political ads, but other than a handful of prominent signs for local races near work I haven’t seen a Goddamned thing out there. That said, there’s a race or two worth talking about, and a couple of candidates I’m genuinely enthused about, so here we go:

Joseph R. Biden Jr. for President. This will surprise no one, of course, and Biden is running unopposed in Indiana, so it’s not like there’s even another candidate I can vote for. That said, at least in terms of his impact directly on my personal life, Biden has been the best president of my lifetime and it’s not close. I am both happy and proud to vote for him again.

Valerie McCray for US Senate. There is actually a primary race for Senate this year; both candidates passed my initial smell test, and passed my secondary test of “do you have a website that actually contains useful information about you, and makes me feel like I want you as my Senator?”. Dr. McCray’s is here and her opponent, Marc Carmichael, has his website here. While Carmichael doesn’t seem like an unacceptable choice, my rule is that when presented with two acceptable candidates I vote against the white guy. Right now I’ll be fine voting for him if he makes it through the primary, which, given that this is Indiana, I suspect he will.

Jennifer G. McCormick for Governor. Dr. McCormick was formerly Indiana’s Secretary of Education after Glenda Ritz flamed out, and I swear to God she was a Republican when she was appointed, and I spent more time than one might expect while following her on Twitter wondering how the hell a Republican appointee was getting away with saying the very liberal Democrat-ish things she kept saying. Well, if she was a Republican then, she’s a Democrat now, and I was really happy to hear that she’d decided to run for Governor. She’s running unopposed, which also surprises me, so it’s not like I had a second choice, but I can’t imagine who in this state I might have chosen over her. Sadly, she’ll likely get smoked by whatever rape-enabling troglodyte the Republican primary shits out. But we can hope!

I voted for Lori A. Camp for my House representative; I didn’t have another choice, and I’m going to stop short of calling it an endorsement. Honestly I hadn’t heard of her before going in and the sum total of my research was to make sure that I didn’t have to do any research. I glanced at her website; it’s fine, I suppose. I still want Pat Hackett.

Tim Swager for District 10 State Senator. This is inside-baseball as hell; why am I mentioning it here? Because the incumbent, David Niezgodski, is embroiled in a sexual harassment controversy, and everything I’ve seen about it makes me feel like he’s probably a slimy piece of shit. I am, I admit, a teensy bit leery of Swager as well, who has been spending a lot of money on sending mailers so that everyone knows that Niezgodski is a staffer-harassing asshole who maybe voted against abortion access once or twice– I’m not convinced of this– but said mailers are awfully thin on why Swager himself would be a better choice. His website is also rather thin but contains no obvious red flags, so, sure, you can be State Senator over the creepy married dude who broke into his staffer’s house.

I strongly suspect I’m going to go 0/5 here, if not in the primary than in the actual election, although Niezgodski might be weaker than I think; who knows. But I don’t miss elections. So here we are.

In which the kids are doing great

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It warms my ancient, withered heart to see the news of all the campus protests popping up around the country lately, nowhere more than at my alma mater, Indiana University. I continue to stand by the position I held when this most recent disaster started back in October: I have absolutely no idea how to solve the problem of Israel/Palestine, but I am absolutely certain that Benjamin Netanyahu should be nowhere near it, and while I don’t know what we should do, carpet bombing Gaza and murdering 30,000 people, half of which are children, is absolutely and unequivocally not what should be done.

Are there people at, and around, these protests who are advocating other policies that I am going to disagree with? Yep. I’m sure there are. I’m also capable of enough nuance to recognize that one guy screaming “Death to Jews” or whatever does not cancel out hundreds of other people suggesting peacefully that maybe their university ought not to invest their tuition money in apartheid regimes. Being anti-Zionist does not equate to antisemitism, but it doesn’t mean that there aren’t some out there.

But, one way or another, this is an example of people using their power to bring attention to an issue that has a chance of achieving the goals that they want. The more pressure that can be brought upon US institutions in general, not just the government, to put pressure on the Israeli government to stop acting like fucking monsters, the better. And the great thing is that it’s clearly working– you didn’t hear squat about any kind of anti-Zionist movements a few years ago, and being openly pro-Palestinian was virtually unheard of. They’re moving their position into the mainstream with these protests, which is what needs to be done in order to effect any kind of systematic change. Good for them. I’m proud.

At least there’s meth?

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I couldn’t pass this up.

Compulsive masturbator and God-botherer Mike Johnson is, according to this brief but hilarious CNN article, having trouble convincing fellow Republicans to come to the House GOP retreat scheduled for next Wednesday and Thursday. Part of the problem, apparently, is that Johnson, who is so addicted to porn that he and his son share an app so that they can monitor each other’s special dinkie times, has booked a deliberately “family-friendly” resort in West Virginia for the retreat. The article does not explicitly say that the House members are pissed because they prefer their hookers to have more teeth than facial sores, but it comes awfully close for something from the mainstream media.

In which I skipped Super Tuesday

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I have paid less attention to this election, at least in writing, than any election since probably Bush/Gore. The reasons are probably pretty obvious; first, that the outcome is more or less predetermined no matter what foolish children on TikTok or Dean Phillips think and second, I don’t enjoy the existential horror that rears up every time I contemplate the idea of the Beast getting a second crack at the White House. It doesn’t help that I’m holding firm to my stance that I Know Nothing About Politics, and it also doesn’t help that the polls seem to be pretty clearly saying one thing, and every other aspect of reality appears to be saying another thing, and those two things are not the same.

(Almost starts a rant, aborts)

Anyway. Today was an e-learning/meetings day, and tomorrow and Friday both ought to be pretty calm. Ought to; we’ll see, as e-learning days can really screw up the rhythm of the week and it’s entirely possible that I’m going to get a loud and annoying Monday-Tuesday cycle (Tuesday is reliably the worst behavior day of the week) for the second time this week instead of the usually more sedate and chill Thursday-Friday. We’ll see what happens, I suppose.

A reminder that I know nothing

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New Hampshire’s happening tonight, and as of this moment there’s about 11% of the vote in on the Republican side and the shitgibbon is ahead, by a fairly paltry amount. I have no sense whatsoever of where in New Hampshire Nikki Haley might be expecting her votes to come from, so trying to drill down at all doesn’t make any sense, and it’s probably a good time to remind everyone that I don’t know anything at all about politics or how people think, because I still don’t understand how this illiterate, atheist con man got the Republican nomination the first time, much less what’s looking like the third. 

(EDIT: The AP called the race while I was writing this; at this point, I really feel like all we have left is to hope the fucker dies before the election. Preferably as soon as possible. Tonight would be cool. God’s in the bathroom again, apparently.)*

Meanwhile, Biden– who is not on the ballot– is pulling 74% of the vote against Phillips and Williamson. If this isn’t enough to convince a certain slice of what ought to be the Democratic electorate that there is not actually any desire on the part of actual voting Democrats for any other candidate, I don’t know what the hell could do it. I suspect these people, much like the shitgibbon’s cultists, are similarly impervious to reason, but we’ll see.

(SECOND EDIT: While I was writing the first edit, the AP called the race for Biden, too. Which is deeply fucking hilarious. Time for Phillips and Williamson to go.)

Meanwhile: snow day today, and freezing rain is being replaced by Hell Fog, and I’m fully anticipating a two-hour delay tomorrow, because quarter-mile visibilities and kids walking to school don’t mix. There won’t be a close, but my district has had Fog Days in the past, and two-hour delays don’t count against us the way actual closures do. This might bite me in the ass if I have to go in and plan a day on no notice, but … yeah, I’ll risk it. 

* I do actually think Biden can and will beat him again, but I’d prefer to not have to find out if I’m right about that. The fucker exists on cheeseburgers and his brain is made of pudding. Come on, God.

A couple quick thoughts on immigration, for no particular reason

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics

I’ve only talked about immigration a few times here, but at least one of those times is the site’s biggest post ever, so I don’t know if that means it counts more? Maybe it does. One way or another, my opinion about immigration, nutshelled, has not changed: Let ’em in. I don’t care why they’re here, I don’t care why they want to be here, I don’t care if they’re in my community or my school because they already are, and I don’t care if it costs me personally some minuscule amount of tax money. Anybody who wants to come be an American should be able to come be an American. That might include some number of bad people. I don’t care; we have plenty of those already so a few more won’t matter. I trust any number of immigrants more than any similar number of Republicans anyway. Let’ em all in.

But that’s not the point of this post, which is really only a minor thing but it popped into my head the other day and I don’t have Twitter any longer so when something like this happens I have no real choice but to put it here: it is really easy to be incredibly disingenuous about immigration if that’s what you decide you want to do, and one specific way people are being disingenuous about immigration keeps getting stuck in my craw.

If we’re using “arrests at the border” as our metric for whether someone is doing a Good Job on immigration or not, the good guys automatically lose. And I’m deliberately phrasing that statement in a nonpartisan manner because it can go either way.

Arrests are up? We’re catching more criminals vs look how many more people are pouring over the border.

Arrests are down? They’re not bothering to enforce our laws vs people aren’t trying to come in illegally any longer because our laws work.

The actual numbers and the actual reality of the situation does not matter one bit when you’re using “arrests” as a metric because you can make any change in arrests good news for your side. 

Let them in, house and educate them, let them have safe, legal jobs, and provide them with a path to citizenship. I don’t care if it costs me money. Put an aircraft carrier on eBay or some shit. Have a bake sale. I don’t give a fuck.

The end.