I’d like to point out that in my first post about the VeepstakesI said in the very first sentence that Kamala was going to choose someone who wasn’t on the list. And I couldn’t be happier with the choice of Tim Walz as Vice-President.
I think, in all honesty, the move with this guy is that after the joint barnstorming tour this week they should put him on a repeating schedule through the Midwest. Go Wisconsin-Indiana-Michigan-Ohio-Pennsylvania-Kentucky, then a day at home to recuperate, then do it again. I really and truly believe we can win all six states, and I’m not kidding.
(At this point I realize this post is going to be a rehash of a bunch of recent Bluesky posts I’ve made, so my apologies if you follow me there. Also, go follow me there.)
So, yeah, I was talking about this earlier on Bluesky, but I kind of want to record it here as something a bit more permanent. The big thing about the VP selection is it’s not supposed to matter, right? There’s always talk– I participated in it– about the pick bringing his home state, if that’s on the table, and beyond that the VP pick is basically just not supposed to fuck up. I was thinking about this this morning, and realized something: in every presidential election save one since I have been a relatively conscious human being, the winning ticket has featured 1) the VP candidate who won the VP debate, and 2) the VP candidate who, in general, was the more competent and energetic choice.
“Prove it,” you say? Sure, I love writing these.
1984: George H.W. Bush vs. Geraldine Ferraro. Bush Sr., if I don’t count Ford, who was only President during the first few months of my life, is easily the most competent and least evil Republican president of my lifetime, and he was enormously qualified to be president, especially in comparison to the loathsome, corrupt Ferraro. I will not pretend to remember the debate or even if there was one, but Reagan/Bush mopped the floor with Mondale/Ferraro, winning all but Minnesota, and a heavy storm in Minneapolis would have meant they won Minnesota too.
1988: This is the one exception to the pattern. If you remember only one thing about the VP debate in 1988, it’s Lloyd Bentsen telling Dan Quayle that Jack Kennedy was a friend of his and Quayle was no Jack Kennedy. Bentsen was also massively more qualified for the job– for any job, really– than Quayle was.
1992: My favorite VP debate of all time, featuring Al Gore, Dan Quayle and Admiral James T. Stockdale, an utter nut who turned off his hearing aid and wandered around aimlessly in the back of the stage for part of the debate. Clinton/Gore won the election, obviously.
1996: Al Gore and Jack Kemp. Four thousand people died of boredom during the debate. You don’t remember a thing about it. You don’t remember Jack Kemp. Jack Kemp doesn’t remember Jack Kemp. Bobdole remembers, though. Bobdole never forgets. Clinton/Gore reelected.
2000: Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman face off in the Politeness Bowl, where Lieberman, a supposed Democrat, couldn’t find a single thing that the most coldly evil man ever to hold federal office said that was worth even mildly disagreeing with. Cheney could have suggested feeding Lieberman’s children to lions and he would have pursed his lips, shrugged, and said that Cheney had a good point. Cheney/Bush won, and that’s not a typo.
2004: Cheney sacrifices John Edwards and his weird tongue tic to Shub-Niggurath and eats his still-beating heart raw on live television.
2008: Joe Biden vs. Sarah Palin, who most of America was already heartily sick of before the debate; it is indisputable that picking Palin was the number one factor in keeping John McCain out of the White House. (Just noticed: I flipped this and 2012 on Bluesky. Oops!)
2012: Biden literally ends Paul Ryan’s entire political career, spending the entire debate laughing in his face at everything he has to say.
2016: I was about to say “I take second to no one in my loathing of Mike Pence,” but I didn’t try to hang him on the Capitol stairs, so maybe I do take second to at least a few people. Either way, he served the purpose of shoring up the evangelicals for Trump. Quick, without looking it up: who was Hillary Clinton’s running mate?
You looked it up, you lying bastard.
At any rate, Tim Kaine is such a nothing-person that still, fully ten hours after writing this as a series of tweets this morning, I cannot recall what the fuck he looks like, or whether he’s still alive. I’m not convinced that he cost Clinton the election, especially with Palin as a recent exemplar of the breed, but it certainly wasn’t a choice that helped at all.
2020:
Also, remember the fly?
2024: I’m already ordering popcorn. I don’t even really know if this debate is going to happen, but I want to be prepared. Walz is going to demolish JD Vance. It’s going to be fucking glorious.
I have mentioned this already, I think, but it’s always worth repeating stories where I’m stupid: in June I bought a bunch of LED light ropes and took them to work and left them in my classroom. I then forgot that I had bought them and bought a different set of LED light ropes in July, and didn’t realize my mistake until emptying my closet in my old classroom last week.
Those are the first set of lights I bought. I have the second set up too; I like these a lot more. That design isn’t meant to be anything in particular but somehow ended up looking sort of like an anglerfish (look on the left) and I’m fully expecting my students to name it. One interesting thing: the lights are from different manufacturers and run on different apps, but it’s clearly based on the same underlying architecture, as the interface is nearly exactly the same. Those lights have thousands of different “special effects” and light patterns– enough that it’s almost too many– and the other set has, like, twelve. I need to see if there’s a way I can get the good app talking to the other lights, or maybe a generic one that can run both. Failing that, I bet I can swap out the controllers; the lights themselves should work exactly the same way.
In other news, I have 200 postcards in front of me, and over the next couple of months I need to handwrite a message to a voter on each of them encouraging them to vote and then mail them all out on the same day. Handwrite a message. This is … insanely intimidating. I haven’t heard anything about being a poll worker yet; I tried a different way to sign up yesterday, so maybe someone will get back to me soon. If not, I’m calling it good and taking Election Day and the day after off anyway.
(Election Day because my students do not remotely deserve the ball of stress and anxiety that I’m going to be on that day, and the one following because no matter how the evening goes, I know good and Goddamned well I’m not getting any sleep on the night of the 5th. I need to figure out exactly how far in advance I can take a personal day so that I can sign up for that shit the second it becomes available. Under normal circumstances the district isn’t allowed to say no to a personal day request if it’s filed on time (and most of the time administrators don’t care if it’s filed on time) but I’m anticipating I might not be the only person wanting to be gone those days, so I gotta get a jump on it.
If they had any sense it would be an e-learning day anyway.
Yes, really, I said that. I have a rule, and I’ve had this rule for, I don’t know, three or four elections now. I do not vote for straight white men if there is an acceptable candidate who is not a straight white man on the ballot. That is, effectively, the tiebreaker.
Y’all, look at my ballot for this fall’s election:
Starting from top left, clockwise:
Kamala Harris, President of the United States
Jennifer McCormick, Governor
Valerie McCray, Senator
Maureen Bauer, State House Representative, District 6
Destiny Wells, Attorney General
Lori Camp, House of Representatives, IN-02
The Vice-President will almost certainly be a white guy and Lieutenant Governor is a white guy. I will vote for both of them, of course. My State Senate representative, Dave Niezgodski, is also a white man, but I will not be voting for him as he is a sex pest. Amazingly, the Republicans are not running anyone for the seat and his sole opponent is a Libertarian (and an engineer, which I find hilarious) so Niezgodski will likely win 70-30 without my help. And honestly the Indiana statehouse is so Republican-dominated at the moment I don’t even care if we lose the seat for a cycle. It genuinely won’t matter.
I’m basically casting six votes here, and all six are either for women or for tickets where a woman is at the top of the ticket. I have never been able to do that before, and it’s fucking awesome. I can’t wait to get into the ballot booth.
If you had asked me more than four or five days ago, I would have told you that, at least for me personally, Bluesky (follow me!) was beginning to approach the levels of usefulness of pre-Nazi Twitter, but had yet to even come close to pre-Nazi Twitter in its ability to be funny.
This JD Vance couch-fucking shit has absolutely put that concern to bed. It’s been going on for days, and it’s still funny. It may literally never stop being funny.
This might not be true, but I’m pretty sure it is: every single time in the history of the human race someone has asked “But where’s the ______ for white men?” that person has been a racist asshole. This fact made me at least a little nervous about trying to find out if there was, in fact, a White Men for Kamala Harris group. Why was I wondering so specifically? Well, in the last few days we’ve seen a number of other identity-based groups getting off the ground, and White Women for Kamala Harris broke Zoom, and damn it, I wanna play too! And frankly, given that white men are the other guy’s biggest demographic, I think it’s probably perfectly reasonable to suggest that those of us of that persuasion who are very much not in favor of the fascist felon and his merry band of dipshits should be loud and proud of it.
I’m happy to say that White Dudes for Harris is a thing, and our Zoom call is Monday at 8:00 EST, and Pete Buttigieg is gonna be there, and if you’re also a white dude you can sign up for it here. And you should. We’ve got some numbers to live up to, dammit.
The more I hear about Josh Shapiro the less I like him, and Bloomberg is claiming that the Veepstakes is down to him, Mark Kelly, and Tim Walz. Of those three, I am 100%, unreservedly, whole-chestedly, full-throatedly on Team Walz. Let’s do this right, damn it.
You have at least one book review coming and possibly two, but just in case I don’t get to one or either of them: R.J. Barker’s Tide Child trilogy is really damn good, and unless it utterly fails to stick the ending– I’m about 100 pages out– Rachel Caine’s The Hunter is an absolute return to form on her part and I’m happy as hell to see it.
Also, despite previous reservations, I may actually be seeing Deadpool and Wolverine in theaters tomorrow, marking my first in-theater Marvel movie since 2019. That will almost certainly receive a review if I manage to actually get out to see it.
Naturally, USA Today leaked a list of people who, supposedly, have been asked to submit vetting materials to the Harris campaign. I didn’t buy it at first because neither Buttigieg nor Beshear were on it, and naturally now I can’t find the article, but one way or another Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, was on the list.
My immediate response was that he was too old, but he’s 60; I’d have put him a little older than that at first glance. Since then I’ve seen some videos of the guy talking, though, and … yeah, he’ll do just fine, especially if Buttigieg and Beshear are actually out of the running. I found other articles on USA Today while looking for the original one that indicated Buttigieg and Beshear were in the running, so again, I know nothingTM and grains of salt and all that shit, but I can definitely fuck with this guy.
That’s all I’ve got for today; I did a few hours of yard work and I still want to die. Check my man out, though.
(LATE EDIT: I forgot to mention that he was also a high school social studies teacher, in a public school district no less, for ten years. Dare I hope that I might have an administration with sane educational policy before I retire or die?)
The way this week has been going, I fully expect that by the time I’m done with this post Kamala Harris will have announced a running mate and it will be none of these people. But what the hell, let’s speculate. To be clear, I don’t have super strong feelings about any of these folks, and a lot of them I don’t know a lot about, so take all of this with salt as usual, and remember that I know nothing about politics. That said, let’s start top left and go clockwise.
Josh Shapiro: Brings Pennsylvania with him, I think, which makes him the most immediately attractive candidate on the list at least in terms of electoral votes. I am a little leery of putting a strong Israel supporter on the ticket; I don’t know a ton about Shapiro but what little research I’ve done indicates that AIPAC should be pretty fond of this guy. And, yes, I mean “strong Israel supporter” and not “Jewish person,” and if you don’t recognize the difference, I invite you to go talk to Bernie Sanders about Benjamin Netanyahu.
Andy Beshear: One of my best friends lives in Kentucky and she is absolutely ecstatic about the idea of him becoming VP. Brings Kentucky with him, potentially has a strong positive role in Ohio and Indiana as well. Probably the best direct comparison to JD Vance, and I get the feeling he absolutely despises him, which will be fun. Vance is basically Beshear’s Wario anyway. My wife’s choice.
Roy Cooper: Bringing North Carolina over would be cool, but he’s too old. I want this ticket to radiate youthful energy, damn it.
Pete Buttigieg: My horse. Easily the best communicator on the list and another person who absolutely personally despises JD Vance, who just said that he wasn’t a parent today. He has two adopted kids. Not sure if it’s the wisest move in the universe for the Presidential candidate to be a Black woman and the Veep to be a gay guy but I’m also not sure I give a fuck at this point. I didn’t like Buttigieg’s 2020 candidacy because he wanted to be a Kumbaya guy; I think four straight years of being hauled in front of Congressional committees to be preached at by belligerently ignorant assholes has probably cured him of that. I’m not convinced he brings any states with him, though.
Gretchen Whitmer: Has already stated that she’s not interested in leaving Michigan; I really don’t see Harris picking another woman anyway. She’d be great but it’s not going to happen.
JD Pritzker: No thank you. We already have Illinois and I don’t need a billionaire on the ticket.
Gavin Newsom: Meh. We already have California. Really viscerally hates Trump, though, which is nice.
Mark Kelly: An astronaut VP would be cool, but I’d kind of rather have him in the Senate. There would have to be a special election to replace him and the Senate is just too damn close right now to fuck around. Too old and we’re never electing a bald guy to the Presidency.
I thought about including a few people who aren’t in the picture– a few people have tossed Beto O’Rourke’s name into the mix, which … ehh— but I’m pretty sure our next VP is in that picture somewhere. Again, I’d be fine with any of them except maybe for Pritzker, and I’m not even all that sure, other than the billionaire thing, why I dislike him as much as I do. I don’t think he’s really in the running anyway. The three best choices are Buttigieg, Shapiro, and Beshear, and probably not in that order.
Gonna hit Publish and then go find out that she chose Mr. Beast. The post about him can be tomorrow.
Okay. So. Biden’s out. And, at least right now, it looks like the party is doing the sensible thing and coalescing around Harris, although I’m still waiting to see endorsements from a few notable sources– Obama, Newsom, Whitmer, Jeffries and Pelosi chief among them. We are not doing a fucking underpants gnome primary, people. We just aren’t. The candidate was Biden until a few hours ago and now it’s Harris. Get with it so we can move on.
I have not donated money to any political candidate yet this cycle. As soon as I finish this post, I’m going to send Harris some money. You should too.
I am, having had a few hours to think about it, of two distinct minds about this news. First, I’ll remind you that I was a vocal Kamala Harris supporter in 2020. Harris was my horse until she dropped out, and I was ecstatic when she was named Biden’s running mate. In the abstract, Harris being the Democratic nominee bothers me not in the slightest. I thought she’d be a great President four years ago and I think she’ll be a great President right now. I will cast my vote for her with pride and glee.
(I note that in the 2020 primary I voted for Elizabeth Warren, who had already dropped out. I have not actually had a chance to vote for Harris for President yet, only VP.)
I think in a lot of ways Harris is the perfect anti-Trump candidate. Running a Black woman and a former prosecutor against that felon rapist sonofabitch is about as clear a distinction for the two parties’ visions of the future as I can possibly imagine. And if you want to read into the image above for further preferences on the ticket, you go right ahead and do that. There’s no “two sides of the same coin” bullshit going on here. These are radically different candidates.
So yeah. I am, in some ways, not at all disappointed about this, and I’m substantially more excited than I thought I was going to be under these circumstances a week ago.
That said.
Matter of fact, lemme put a separator here.
We have effectively just watched a soft coup against the American President, led by a bunch of shitheel billionaire donors, a handful of elected cowards, and the New York Fucking Times, and I’m not happy about that at all. In fact, I am viscerally fucking angry about it, because Biden has been the best President of my lifetime (and it’s not close) and he didn’t deserve this fucking bullshit.
There are eleven years and well over a million words of posts here; feel free to read through the archives to see what I’ve had to say about mainstream media in the past, and understand that when I say I would not cry a single tear were the NYT brass to be lined up against a wall and shot that this is very much a new feeling for me. I have never seen the media more brazenly put a thumb on the scale the way they have been in the last couple of months, and the way the NYT in particular, an organization that even now is calling for an underpants gnome primary, has gone fully all-in for Trump has been at various times alarming, frightening and disgusting.
The Republicans were literally calling for pogroms last week. They printed out signs for their delegates to wave around calling for mass deportations. The numbers they’ve been throwing around keep getting bigger– I’ve heard as high as thirty million,which is nearly ten percent of the population of the entire fucking United States.
And these people get mad when we compare them to Nazis? We literally had a four-day white supremacist rally on national TV just now. This guy’s running mate compared him to Hitler once.
No, Trump’s “striking a softer tone.” Is he really? No, not even a little bit. But the truth doesn’t fucking matter to these fucking scribblers.
But Biden’s old. But her emails. It’s the exact same fucking thing. Pay no attention to the fact that Trump is in every single way in worse shape than Biden is. Biden old Biden old Biden old.
Fuck the fucking New York Times, and fuck the national media. I have been pushing back on people for years about anti-media tirades. There’s no denying it. They want the country I live in to degenerate into a fascist hellhole, and they want a man elected whose agenda literally and specifically includes putting people like me in jail. And they just turned up the hysteria and kept turning it up until they got what they wanted. It won’t be a week until they settle on their line of attack against Harris. There’s been a bullshit lie for every Dem candidate since Kerry; Harris will not escape unscathed, it’ll just be more brazenly racist and sexist than previously.
And yet.
I’m not Joe Biden. I’ve never met the man; I’ve never even seen him in person. And obviously I don’t know if we’re about to find out about some sort of recent medical diagnosis or something that would have made it clear to him that it was time to go. Fuck the Goddamn debate; he’s 81 and he may have just genuinely realized that he wasn’t up to the stress of campaigning and running the fucking country at the same time any longer. It may be that even without the events since the debate he’d be dropping out today anyway. Hell, he just got Covid for the third fucking time. Every adult has the experience of some family member who was elderly and perfectly healthy and sharp until they just … weren’t any longer. My own mother’s decline at the end was shockingly quick. And I’m sure everyone reading this who is over 30 can come up with a similar example. One fall, one broken hip. One illness. Bam.
It may be that he genuinely thinks he can’t do it any longer and it may also be that he decided fuck it, I’ve given everything I have to this country and I’m ready to be done. I’m very, very fucking angry right now, but I’m not angry at Biden. He was damn near my last choice for President in 2020 and he has been successful beyond my wildest dreams. Perfect? Of course not. Not close. I’m a grown-ass Goddamn man and I know better than to expect perfection from any elected official. They’re all going to piss me off and/or let me down at some point. I don’t even think that’s a cynical thing to say; it’s a simple fact of existence.
But fine. He’s made his decision, and he’s made it in a way that I can’t find any reason to criticize; I had initially thought that he’d passed on endorsing Harris, because I was out of the house when the announcement was made and all I saw at first was the letter, and not the subsequent endorsement. I do think he should use the time he has left in office making the Supreme Court absolutely miserable; the thought of Dark Brandon unleashed for a few months makes me very happy.
One way or another, the rest of us have got a job to do. Get in line and start pushing, motherfuckers.
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