Category: Politics

Democratic POTUS Candidates Loosely Ranked, June 2019 Pre-Debate edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

Let’s be clear here: right there in that picture is the ticket I want, and I don’t much care what order their names are in. I haven’t updated this since March, mostly because not a whole lot has happened to change things other than that my affection for Warren and Harris has continued to grow. I once told a phonebanker that I would drag my nuts across a mile of broken glass to ensure that I voted for Barack Obama; I’m not quite at that level yet but I’m certainly getting there. And, really, once you get past these two, there’s not a whole lot of talking to do.

SECOND TIER: In no particular order, Inslee, Gillibrand, O’Rourke, who hasn’t annoyed me in a while, and Castro. I don’t think any of these four will be the nominee but I’d be perfectly fine if it happened.

THIRD TIER: Klobuchar and Booker.

YOU FUCKERS AREN’T EVEN REAL PEOPLE, RUN FOR SOMETHING YOU HAVE A CHANCE TO WIN: de Blasio, Ryan, Hickenlooper, Delaney, Williamson, Yang, Bennet, Swalwell, and that Montana jackass who announced his campaign in May and thinks it’s a sign of a conspiracy that he isn’t in the debates. These folks don’t count at all and they’re a distraction to the process. I only know they exist because I copied their names from the debate lineup and I couldn’t pick any of them out of a lineup. After the first debate they need to all drop out.

HA HA, BYE, ASSHOLE: That Starbucks dickhead, who I think dropped out finally.

STILL DON’T WANT TO VOTE FOR YOU BUT YOU HAVEN’T PISSED ME OFF ANY MORE THAN USUAL LATELY: Sanders and Gabbard.

FUCK THESE GUYS: Biden and Buttigieg, who are probably going to end up being the fucking ticket. Biden, in particular, who I wasn’t excited about running for office but certainly didn’t dislike six months ago, has done every single thing he can to keep me from generating even the slightest whiff of enthusiasm for his campaign, including praising motherfucking James Eastland today. He clearly learned nothing from being Obama’s Vice-President for 8 years and still thinks that Republicans are just misunderstood nice folks who can be negotiated with if we just all come together. Well, they aren’t and they can’t, not anymore, and not recognizing that basic fact about the state of politics in this country right now is disqualifying for the Democratic candidate. Combine that with overt, undeniable sexism and an utter inability to keep his fucking hands to himself and this is not someone I want to vote for. He may even be legitimately lower than Sanders at this point. Plus, he’s getting the same kind of support that that one asshole who lost my most recent Congressional race did– in other words, he’s on top of the polls for some reason but hell if I can find even a single person anywhere who thinks of him as their top candidate. I asked Twitter about this earlier:

https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1141394461488009216

Not one response, other than a guy who said he wasn’t in his top 5. This guy has to have some fans somewhere. Who the hell are they?

Buttigieg, on the other hand, was once right behind Harris and Warren, and has spent most of his time since then basically doing the same shit Biden’s doing except at lower volume and without the handsiness. He’s a step above Biden and Sanders, certainly, but he’s drawing from the same Kumbaya school of thought about where we are right now and I’m not fucking having it. His reluctance if not outright refusal to release anything resembling actual policies is also starting to get on my nerves, particularly when stacked up against Warren, who I think at this point probably has a detailed plan for alien invasion, the Yellowstone caldera erupting, and multiple varieties of zombie attack. He probably doesn’t belong in the same tier as Biden if I’m being honest but I’ve still spent most of my time thinking about him lately being annoyed by whatever he did most recently. Another difference: I know people who are fervent supporters. I know where his people are coming from. Not the case with Joe. Seriously, if you consider yourself a big fan of his, identify yourself. I promise I’ll be nice.

Will there be a liveblog of the debates next week? Yeah, chances are there will.

#REVIEW: The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment, by Thom Hartmann

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, Reading, Reviews4 Comments

Thom Hartmann’s The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment is the second of two books that I was sort of randomly offered ARCs of in the last couple of months. They asked me to have it read and the review ready today, and I’m happy to announce that unlike the last time I’m actually managing to successfully fulfill that request.

To put it mildly, the gun issue is one place where I am pretty consistently far to the left of anyone I ever talk to about it. I want guns banned, period. I want the Second Amendment repealed. When you hear “moderate, reasonable” gun control advocates say things like no one is coming for your guns to the gun nuts? That’s not true, because I’m totally coming for your guns. I’m sick to death of people thinking the Constitution enshrines a right to murder other people, guns don’t ever make anyone or anything safer, and there is no such thing as a “good guy with a gun.” There is only a dangerous idiot who hasn’t killed anyone or shot his own dick off yet.

So now that I’ve pissed everyone off, this is actually a pretty interesting little book. I used to listen to Hartmann’s radio show back when I was commuting to the South Side and back every day in Chicago, so I’m familiar with how he works– and the fact that he kept me listening to a liberal talk show when I have learned over the years that listening to talk radio from people who mostly agree with me is actually not something that will keep me awake during a drive is a good sign for him. Despite the pull quote on the cover, this is actually a history book and not a polemic about gun control, although it does have a few chapters at the end about what people call “sensible” gun control measures, like registering them similarly to the way we register cars, insisting that gun owners carry insurance, and regulating semiautomatic weapons the same way we regulate automatic weapons.

(Wanna fight about technicalities over what a “semiautomatic weapon” is? No problem; I’ll start pushing to ban anything that uses a controlled explosion to fire a projectile faster than a human being can throw it.)

At any rate, Hartmann traces America’s gun culture back to– surprise!– slavery and Native American displacement and genocide, and discusses the history of (and some interesting looks at early drafts of) the Second Amendment in particular, and probably spends 80% of the book’s text discussing why America is different about guns than damn near the entire rest of the world and how our history affects the gun fetishism that infects our culture today.

(Deletes a rant)

This is at all times a clear and readable book; if anything, my sole major criticism of it is that it could be a bit more in-depth. The book itself is less than 200 pages long and most of the chapters are less than five pages, and while there are several pages of endnotes at the end most of them are to websites, meaning that the index and the sources are mostly going to be useless a few years down the road. I went back and forth on whether this was a fair criticism; after all, it’s not like Hartmann wrote a short book accidentally, and the fact that there’s a companion volume of similar length coming in October called The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America indicates that he’s thinking of this as a series and not a one-off. There is certainly a place for cursory looks at American history, but given how … well, revisionist is the wrong word, but certainly nontraditional this look at history is, I wanted a bit more meat on the book’s bones than I got. For example, he devotes a single intriguing sentence to saying that Texas’ declaration of independence from Mexico was over Mexico outlawing slavery. That’s interesting! I want to know more about it, and I hadn’t heard that before! But it’s literally a single throwaway sentence.

(Note that I am far from an expert on Texan history.)

At any rate: The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment is available now at all the places you might buy books. Those of you with an interest in modern politics and American history should check it out; anytime my only criticism of a book is I want more, that’s probably a sign of something that I can honestly recommend. Check it out.

More endorsements: At-Large City Council edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

I did not vote on Saturday as intended, life having determined it had other plans for me– which actually turned out to be good, as I had forgotten that there were ten Goddamn people running for the three at-large City Council seats and maybe I ought to look into that. Therefore, having spent part of my evening browsing campaign websites, and for those for whom my opinion might be relevant:

(My own district only has one candidate running, which is why I’m focusing on the at-large race, for the record.)

In which I endorse: local elections edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

This will be a brief note and not a full post, as I am barely even awake and really need to get myself up and moving, and chances are those of you for whom this is relevant know how to find my in my Clark Kent identity anyway– but I’m planning on voting early today, as is my usual preference, and I’ve decided I am voting for Regina Williams-Preston for Mayor of South Bend today.

The simple fact is that most of the current Democratic mayoral candidates are running on very similar platforms; there seems to be broad agreement about where the city is at and where we should be focusing our energy and our funds in the current years. We have an abundance of good options here. I am voting for Regina because in the years I have known her (through my job) she has built a reputation as a tireless, dedicated and approachable educator and as a member of the City Council she has been the type of public servant who looks for and builds consensus where it can be found. Feel free to seek out some of the national news articles that have been written lately about how she and Pete Buttigieg worked through some of her concerns about the 1000 Homes in 1000 Days program that convinced her to run for City Council in the first place, if you like.

The official election is this Tuesday, and early voting is available downtown right up to Election Day. A mayoral primary in an off year is likely to only draw ten thousand or so votes, so this is literally a situation where every single vote genuinely counts. I encourage any South Bend folks who are reading this to head down to the County City building today or tomorrow and vote for Regina.


In which this is exactly what I’m talking about

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics3 Comments

I say it every time I talk about local elections in South Bend: the actual election is the Democratic primary, particularly with respect to the mayoral race, because the local Republican party absolutely refuses to run anyone with the remotest shred of credibility. In the last several years their candidates include demonstrably crazy people and at least one person who was homeless while running for office. They’ve run exactly one credible candidate since I moved back here in 2007 and he spent his entire race running against the city. Turns out if you think a place is a terrible shithole where no one should live, the voters who live there don’t choose you to run the place! I know, it’s weird.

Seriously, this was an actual mailing by those fuckers. Forgive me, it’s the highest-DPI scan I can find and it’s not great:

… yeah, that’s even worse than I thought. It reads: RIP: Here lies South Bend, a once vibrant city now abandoned by business, overrun by violent crime, and driving people from their family homes because of high property taxes.

Now, put me in charge of this awful place that I obviously hate!

Yeah, good luck.

Anyway, I talked about Republican candidate Sean Haas’ shitty website the last time I talked about the mayoral race around here. I am compelled to let everyone know that I have seen my first Sean Haas yard sign, and this motherfucker, who supposedly is a teacher, has no fucking clue whatsoever how capital letters work:

There are ten total and six unique words on that goddamned sign and two of them need capital letters and don’t have them. I dunno, maybe some of you out there think I’m being superficial, but this is a level of don’t-give-a-fuck that I would find shameful from a middle school student. I have both a former student and a former co-worker in common with Haas, although I’ve never met the guy, and while they both say they won’t vote for him neither of them think he’s a terrible person. So, fine, I won’t cast aspersions upon his ancestry or anything like that. But if your damn lawn sign has two typos and only ten words you do not get to be Mayor. I need people who give a shit in that job, and this guy clearly doesn’t, and furthermore he doesn’t have anyone working for him who gives a shit either or this abomination would never have made it out of Photoshop.

Or, y’know, Paint.

It was probably Paint.

So, yeah: when whoever wins the Democratic nomination wins 70-30 in the fall, this is why: it’s not because South Bend is so monolithically Democratic that a Dem win is inevitable– South Bend is in Indiana, after all– it’s because none of the local Republicans give enough of a shit to actually put up a nominee who is worth the money spent on his campaign.

(EDIT: I think I’ve decided who I’m voting for, by the way, but I think I’ll save it for another post and not step on this one. Needless to say, it won’t be Haas.)

In which I ponder

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics6 Comments

You are probably aware by now, one way or another, that my mayor is running for President. I’ve talked about it around here a bunch, I’ve donated money to his campaign a couple of times, and on my last candidate preference he was in second place. He has spent much of the time since then annoying me, but that’s another post.

Here’s the thing, though: South Bend needs a new mayor! And our mayoral elections are held the year before Presidential elections, so it’s this fall– and I believe early voting for the primary has already opened and the actual primary is May 7. There are, I think, nine Democrats running for mayor. The local Republicans have probably selected a local malcontent of one sort or another; they have not run a remotely credible candidate in something like twelve years, and that guy spent the entire election running against the city he supposedly wanted to run, and lo and behold we decided not to put him in charge of the thing he obviously hated.

(Which is another point in my long line of reasons to never vote for Republicans. Republicans believe that government is worthless and cannot do any good. Why, then, would I ever put one in charge of government? They will prove themselves right!)

Anyway, whoever wins the Democratic primary is going to be the new mayor. I don’t know who the Republican candidate is, but there’s only one and he’s gonna be some flavor of lunatic and about 20% of the population will vote for him and that’s gonna be it.

I have no idea who I’m going to vote for. Our local newspaper has been running profiles of the various candidates and is about halfway through them at the moment. I know two of the candidates personally (if you live around here, and you’ve ever seen a picture of Oliver Davis in a Santa suit, that’s my Santa suit) and have met a third a handful of times, which is really weird. Those three, plus the guy that Buttigieg has actually endorsed, are the four I’m looking at most closely right now, but I’m going to be paying attention to the Tribune profiles on the other four.

There has been no polling that I’m aware of. My gut tells me that James Mueller is probably the frontrunner just because of Buttigieg’s endorsement, but maybe not? I dunno. He sent out a pretty comprehensive mailer about his plans and ideas a week or so ago, and I liked what I saw, but I also feel like it’s time for South Bend to have a black mayor, and the other three candidates I’m looking at– Oliver Davis, Regina Williams-Preston, and Lyn Coleman– are all African-American.

So I’ve got some work to do. Road signs are starting to pop up all over town, so I need to start scouting out townhall meetings and seeing which candidates have credible websites and such. It’s a weird feeling, to really have no idea which of these four I ought to be pulling for. I mean, the presidential primaries don’t start for months and you go seven or eight candidates deep before I start getting into folks I don’t have opinions on. I need to hold the mayoral candidates to the same standard, I think.

UPDATE: I had a brief moment where I felt like maybe I was being unfair to Sean Haas, the Republican candidate. After all, when I wrote that paragraph up there I didn’t even know his name. So I looked him up, and this is literally the first thing that you see when you look at his website:

Two typos in your opening text is too many typos, and the rambling article that follows is an ungrammatical bloody mess. If you can’t find a proofreader for your website you don’t get to run my city. So. Bye, dude.

MARCH UPDATE: Democratic presidential candidates, loosely ranked

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics3 Comments

_103871624_tv048545996I’m … probably not going to actually do this every month until the election?  And, well, actually, it doesn’t even make sense to say that, because there won’t be 1000 candidates for the nomination for very long.  So this won’t be a regular feature for long enough to become annoying.  But what the hell, it’s fun and helps me organize my thinking a little bit.  So.  Again, don’t take the specific rankings all that seriously.

Also, I’m removing the two minor candidates who I went a month and didn’t hear anything from.  I’ll put them back in if they ever start making any noise.

  1. Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren (TIE).  This may very well be a function of the way I consume news nowadays, but it seems like for the last few weeks every time I turn around Warren’s campaign has been announcing some bit of policy that I like, and I feel like Harris has been mostly quiet.  This is more a function of me learning more about Warren and liking everything I see than any drop in my admiration for Harris, but at this point I’d be perfectly happy with either of them.  Put a gun to my head and I still probably vote for Harris but I feel like I want to recognize how much happier I am with Warren than I was a month ago.  So: tie.
  2. Pete Buttigieg.  I know I’ve been talking about Buttigieg a lot more than any of the other candidates, but that’s because he’s still such a longshot.   He’s raised enough money from enough people to qualify for the first debates, and his townhall on CNN went phenomenally well.  Right now I still kind of hope he’s running for VP, though; I’d drag my nuts over a mile of broken glass to cast a vote for a Harris/Buttigieg or Warren/Buttigieg ticket– and in Warren’s case, this would go a long way toward calming my concerns about her age.
  3. Jay Inslee.  I’ve seen a few interviews with Gov. Inslee in the last month, and I really like what I’ve seen from him.  He’s currently at the top of the “I don’t know much, but I like you” pile.
  4. Kirsten Gillibrand.  Whose name I spelled correctly on the first try, thank you very much.
  5. Julián Castro.  Another who really hasn’t changed positions much from last month.
  6. Amy Klobuchar.
  7. Cory Booker, and at this point we’re edging into “Ehhh … I will if I have to but I’d really rather not” territory.  Most of everything I’ve seen from Booker this month has caused me to roll my eyes and/or groan, and I was already not super hot about his candidacy in the first place.
  8. (A fairly wide gap, not represented by any single candidate)
  9. Beto O’Rourke.  Beto talks a good game and can be inspiring at times, but I had a moment where I realized just how much he reminds me of John Edwards, and … no, thank you, let’s all move on.  Another friend of mine compared him to the male professor who teaches classes on feminism and is secretly sleeping with several of his students.  He’s kind of a douchebag and I don’t really know how much he believes anything that comes out of his mouth and a guy who couldn’t beat 10,000 slugs pretending to be human in a poorly-fitting suit does not get to then go “Oh, never mind, I’ll just be President instead.”  Plus I feel like he’s stealing oxygen from Buttigieg, who would be a vastly better President.
  10. John Hickenlooper.  Who I initially forgot all about, but ends up low on the list because of his dumbassed “Why aren’t we asking women candidates about white male VPs” comment.  We don’t need you, dude.
  11. Tulsi Gabbard.  Still hasn’t made enough of an impact to give me a reason to move her down, also has given me no reason to move her up.
  12. Bernie Sanders.  I’ve said my piece about him any number of times and it’s not really necessary to repeat it again.  But he’s not last anymore!  Because of …
  13. Andrew Yang.  He keeps popping up on my radar on Twitter, and every time it’s because he’s being dumb one way or another.  That said, he makes most of the second- and third-tier candidates on this list look like frontrunners in terms of his chances of being elected, so I probably don’t even really need him on the list at all.
  14. Howard Schultz.  Also probably shouldn’t be here because he’s not a Democrat in any way I’m willing to recognize– not even in the half-assed way Sanders is–  but still, fuuuuhuhuhuck this guy.

In which I fundraise: another Pete Buttigieg post

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics5 Comments

The blog is starting to slide into all-Buttigieg-all-the-time territory, and that’s not really where I want it to go, but I feel like this is important enough that I’m doing it anyway: I don’t know how many of you watched last night’s townhall on CNN, but I thought the guy hit a grand slam. Buttigieg was funny, personable, full of good ideas, and he showed the scary-smart that I always want and don’t always get from my presidential candidates. The national response appears to have been extremely positive– I mean, hell, any Democrat who watched that and didn’t come away with a much higher opinion of Buttigieg and his chances in this race either isn’t a Democrat or wasn’t actually watching. Tulsi Gabbard, who for better or worse has a substantially higher profile than Buttigieg does right now, had the hour before him. Everyone is talking about Buttigieg; I’ve seen no one talking about Gabbard.

Interestingly, it turns out the whole thing is on YouTube. I’ll embed it here; we’ll see how long it lasts. If you haven’t watched, you really should:

I skipped around a bit and it does look like the whole thing; I don’t know what the deal is with the placeholder image.

At any rate: while I’m completely sure that donations have ticked up substantially in the wake of this performance, Pete needs 65,000 individual donors at any amount in order to secure an invitation to the formal Democratic debates, and if that threshold has been reached they’ve not updated the website to tell us about it yet. I’ve donated, and I’ve had two friends who watched last night tell me they have as well. We want this guy on stage, y’all. So if you haven’t watched the townhall yet, there’s another opportunity right there, at least until CNN pulls the video, and the link to donate– again, literally any amount adds you to the total– is here. Please consider it.