I put addresses on the last two and a half pages of postcards today, and got 25 written with full messages– those are the ones that are in the rubber band. If I can keep up that pace I’ll have them all done by the 19th, well in advance of the mailing date on the 24th. And since tomorrow is Sunday and I don’t have any grading to do, I figure I can get at least two days’ worth done and get ahead.(*)
I dunno. I’ve gone door-to-door on Election Day, I’ve done voter registration, and now this, and of the three I think I like voter registration the most as a pro-democracy activity. The Election Day I spent canvassing for John Kerry did not result in a single extra voter being sent to the polls but did result in at least two people threatening my life and one threatening to sue me, and I just don’t have a ton of confidence in the messages they’re asking me to put on these cards.
Part of it, I suppose, is I fundamentally don’t understand the mind of the non-voter or the reluctant voter. I vote in every fucking election. I don’t have to be asked or talked into it. It’s part of my damn job. This particular year required probably the largest investment in time I’ve ever had to make in order to vote and I was probably in line for about an hour. I know that in some places the lines can be horrendously longer, and things can go wrong, and sure, there are good reasons why some people aren’t able to vote. Fine. But just … choosing not to? I don’t get it and I never will, and the notion that you might be a nominally Democratic enough voter to get on one of these mailing lists and still need a postcard reminder in order to vote just doesn’t make any sense to me. Like, I want to see the screening methods they used to generate these lists.
Blech. I’m gonna do it anyway, obviously, because I can either do something or I can go insane, and I don’t have the temperament for phone banking and I’m never doing door-to-door again, so voter postcards it is. I just wish I could convince myself that this was actually going to make some kind of difference.
(*) And it occurs to me that I have parent/teacher conferences on the 21st and 22nd after school, and I’m absolutely certain I’ll be in no shape to come home and write postcards, so I probably ought to get these done well in advance. Maybe I’ll do 30 a day instead of 25.
I’m sitting here writing addresses on a stack of 200 postcards, and I can’t decide if I’m proud of myself for starting so early– they want them mailed on October 24th– or pissed that I put it off for so long, since I’m sure they’ve been sitting on my desk for a month by now. Probably a little bit of both?
At any rate, I’m more or less taking the night off tonight, because every time I touch something electronic I start doomscrolling and I don’t need it. I can’t do anything about anything that happens in Florida tonight, and watching the utter idiots who appear determined to livestream themselves drowning in their own homes tonight is not helping my mood or my mental health. Therefore: postcards, and once my handwriting starts to suffer I’m going to spend the rest of the night with a book. I’ll see you tomorrow.
I did get a sticker, but I got Indiana’s boring one, not any of these cool stickers.
I always try to vote early, but I don’t recall ever voting on the very first day I was legally able to before. This year, though? I wanted that shit over with, and I drove from work directly to Mishawaka’s county services building, arriving about 20 minutes before the doors closed. The line for early voting was out the door, and it took about an hour to get my vote cast.
For the most part, my votes will not surprise you.
These six fine ladies, along with two male ticket members:
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz for President and Vice-President Jennifer McCormickand Terry Goodlin for Governor and Lieutenant Governor Valerie McCray for Senate Lori Camp for US House Destiny Wells for Indiana Attorney General Maureen Bauer for State House
(They’re up there as a gallery, so it’s possible the order of the pictures doesn’t match the order of the names.)
I voted for the Democrat in all of the local races with one exception: I did not vote for Dave Niezgodski for State Senate, because Dave Niezgodski is a sex pest and I don’t vote for sex pests. I thought briefly about voting for his opponent, but without knowing anything about him, I decided to refrain; honestly, this will be a small enough turnout contest that I feel like simply withholding my vote is enough. I don’t need to actively vote for the other side.
I got to vote against the loathsome Derek “I have a penis” Dieter again, which always pleases me, because fuck that guy.
Purely voting strategically, I voted to retain all of the judges up for vote. I don’t really like voting for judges, to be honest; I rarely know who any of them are and they don’t campaign, and for some reason the Indiana bar’s survey isn’t out yet despite their website promising it’ll be ready by September 30th. I voted to retain because all of them were named by Mitch Daniels or Eric Holcomb, and if they were drummed out of office Mike Braun will likely be picking their replacements, and Mike Braun is a fucking lunatic. Whoever he picks will not be an improvement, so absent any information of use for any of them, retention it is.
The only thing left is the school board, and … our school board candidates are not exactly covering themselves in glory this go-round. My specific candidate for my district isn’t up this year, so I’m just voting at-large, and … ick.
I ended up voting for Jeannette McCullough and George Jones. I know both of them and I am not especially fond of one of them– in fact, I have suggested voting against one of them in the past– but the other choices are worse. In particular, if you’re local enough that this matters to you, I specifically do not endorse Gabrel Kempf and I really really really do not endorse Marcus Ellison. Please do not vote for Marcus Ellison. I have known him for a very long time and I do not want him on the school board.
Related:
Getting from work to the early voting center I used involved about ten miles of driving on a road that was sporting a surprising number of political signs. They’re really not all that common yet, although I’m sure that will change, probably by this weekend. And after a while something struck me about all those signs: first, that there were quite a lot of Harris-Walz signs, more than I really expected, and that most of the lawns with Harris-Walz signs also had other signs for local or state offices.
The interesting thing was the Republican signs. For the most part– and I may take this route again on my way home on Thursday to take a closer look and maybe do some counting– it seemed like lawns that had Trump signs only had Trump signs, and even more curiously, lawns with signs for any other Republican candidate often did not have Trump signs. There would either be a Trump sign by itself or a dozen local and state candidates and no Trump sign.
At the moment, I’m presenting this only as an interesting anecdote and I am not drawing any conclusions. I just want it noted for the record. Feel free to speculate on your own, if you like.
Does it seem to anyone else that everything, and by everything I mean everyfuckingthing, has gotten significantly more evil and stupid recently? Like, just in the last couple of weeks? I probably just need to stay off the fucking Internet for, I dunno, the rest of my Goddamned life, but between JD Vance literally spreading a blood libel against his own fucking constituents, admitting that he’s lying about it but that it doesn’t matter, various developments in AI technology including an app that lets you have your own completely fake social media network, and whatever the merry fuck is going on with the North Carolina governor’s race right now, I just want to tap out of everything for a couple of weeks. I do not want any further news, thank you, and I would like consumer technology to simply stop.
Just saw a clip of the previous guy talking about how the audience was so completely behind him at the last debate. In public, he said this. There was no audience at the debate. No one pushed back on the claim. It’s just another fucking lie to toss on the pile; truth doesn’t Goddamned matter anymore, even the shit that we literally just saw happen a couple of weeks ago with our own damned eyes.
(I refuse to know what’s going on with Puff Daddy. Put him under the jail, or free Puff Daddy, whichever is more appropriate. Don’t tell me. Also, if Laura Loomer is pregnant, I’m going to kill the person responsible for me finding out about it.)
Brace yourself, by the way; Indiana is probably about to elect someone even dumber and crazier than Mark Robinson as our Lieutenant Governor. I’m so, so excited for it. We haven’t been obviously the worst in the country at anything for a while.
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.
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