In which I endorse

On April 5, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics4 Comments

I’ve been leaning for a while, so it’s not as if this is likely to surprise anyone, but at this point I’ve officially made a decision, and I will be voting for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary. The primary itself isn’t until May 3rd, but I tend to vote early– possibly as soon as next week, since I’ll be downtown a fair amount. I fully expect to also vote for Clinton in the November election, as I’ve expected her to get the nomination for a while now (and will continue to do so regardless of the results of the Wisconsin primary tonight; Sanders will win, but not by enough to make a difference) although I will happily vote for Sanders in November if it turns out that I am wrong about that.

That said, Sanders’ interview with the New York Daily News’ Editorial Board was what convinced me that my vote belonged with Hillary. In general, in Democratic primaries, my vote tends to go to the candidate who pisses me off the least during the primary. Pete Buttigieg earned my vote in his first election, by example, by being the last person in a field of several acceptable candidates to do something I found personally annoying. And, again: should Bernie get the nomination somehow, I’ll vote for him. I would vote for a half-eaten mayo and banana sandwich or something I scraped off the bottom of my shoe before I would allow any of the current Republican candidates anywhere near the White House, honestly.

But this interview. Holy fuck, this interview. It’s bad enough that it should end his candidacy, honestly, and it calls his readiness to run into question in some very serious ways. It’s really, really, really bad. I don’t have time to fisk the whole thing– the post would be ten thousand words long, easy, but here’s a few choice bits:

Sanders: So I think we need trade. But I think it should be based on fair trade policies. No, I don’t think it is appropriate for trade policies to say that you can move to a country where wages are abysmal, where there are no environmental regulations, where workers can’t form unions. That’s not the kind of trade agreement that I will support.

Daily News: So how would you stop that?

Sanders: I will stop it by renegotiating all of the trade agreements that we have. And by establishing principles that says that what fair trade is about is you are going to take into consideration the wages being paid to workers in other countries. And the environmental standards that exist.

This is far from the most egregious part of the interview, but scrolling through it again it was the first thing that jumped out: this man is in the Senate. If he’s not fully aware that “I will renegotiate every trade agreement that we have” is a bunch of crazy nonsense, nonsense I would expect to hear from Donald Trump or Sarah Palin, then … God, I don’t even know. How, exactly, are you going to do that? Because that’s batshittery of the highest order.

It’s the bit about the banks that’s the scariest. It’s a bit too long to excerpt properly, but again, you need to read this interview. Hating on Wall Street is Sanders’ entire schtick, and he reveals in this interview that he doesn’t have the faintest idea what he’s talking about, by his own admission:

Daily News: Okay. Well, let’s assume that you’re correct on that point. How do you go about <breaking up the banks>?

Sanders: How you go about doing it is having legislation passed, or giving the authority to the secretary of treasury to determine, under Dodd-Frank, that these banks are a danger to the economy over the problem of too-big-to-fail.

Daily News: But do you think that the Fed, now, has that authority?

Sanders: Well, I don’t know if the Fed has it. But I think the administration can have it.

Daily News: How? How does a President turn to JPMorgan Chase, or have the Treasury turn to any of those banks and say, “Now you must do X, Y and Z?”

Sanders: Well, you do have authority under the Dodd-Frank legislation to do that, make that determination.

Daily News: You do, just by Federal Reserve fiat, you do?

Sanders: Yeah. Well, I believe you do.

He doesn’t know if he has the authority to break up the banks. He doesn’t know if the Fed has the authority to break up the banks. And, as he reveals later:

Sanders: You would determine is that, if a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. And then you have the secretary of treasury and some people who know a lot about this, making that determination. If the determination is that Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan Chase is too big to fail, yes, they will be broken up.

Daily News: Okay. You saw, I guess, what happened with Metropolitan Life. There was an attempt to bring them under the financial regulatory scheme, and the court said no. And what does that presage for your program?

Sanders: It’s something I have not studied, honestly, the legal implications of that.

He “hasn’t studied the legal implications” of what is probably a test case for his entire reason for existing as a candidate.

How do we break the banks up, an astonishingly fucking complicated task? Underpants gnomes.

This bit here is fun too:

Sanders: No, I wouldn’t say they were in the tank. I’m saying, a Sanders administration would have a much more aggressive attorney general looking at all of the legal implications. All I can tell you is that if you have Goldman Sachs paying a settlement fee of $5 billion, other banks paying a larger fee, I think most Americans think, “Well, why do they pay $5 billion?” Not because they’re heck of a nice guys who want to pay $5 billion. Something was wrong there. And if something was wrong, I think they were illegal activities.

Daily News: Okay. But do you have a sense that there is a particular statute or statutes that a prosecutor could have or should have invoked to bring indictments?

Sanders: I suspect that there are. Yes.

Daily News: You believe that? But do you know?

Sanders: I believe that that is the case. Do I have them in front of me, now, legal statutes? No, I don’t. But if I would…yeah, that’s what I believe, yes. When a company pays a $5 billion fine for doing something that’s illegal, yeah, I think we can bring charges against the executives.

“I believe,” “I suspect.” This man is running for President. How the fuck do you not know?

And then, later on, there’s this:

Daily News: Do you support the Palestinian leadership’s attempt to use the International Criminal Court to litigate some of these issues to establish that, in their view, Israel had committed essentially war crimes?

Sanders: No.

Daily News: Why not?

Sanders: Why not?

Daily News: Why not, why it…

Sanders: Look, why don’t I support a million things in the world? I’m just telling you that I happen to believe…anybody help me out here, because I don’t remember the figures, but my recollection is over 10,000 innocent people were killed in Gaza. Does that sound right?

Daily News: I think it’s probably high, but we can look at that.

Sanders: I don’t have it in my number…but I think it’s over 10,000. My understanding is that a whole lot of apartment houses were leveled. Hospitals, I think, were bombed. So yeah, I do believe and I don’t think I’m alone in believing that Israel’s force was more indiscriminate than it should have been.

I’m sorry, guys: he spends most of this interview sounding like a more articulate version of Donald Trump. And, to be clear, that’s not a compliment, at all. This interview is awful, awful in every way, and it reveals that Sanders just is not prepared right now to take on this job. Is he better than the Republican alternatives? Abso-fucking-lutely, which is why I’ll vote for him if he wins the primary. And, for that matter, he’ll win the general if he somehow gets past Clinton. But he’ll be a one-term President, and not a good one.

(Also: genuinely pissed about the fact that he’s refusing to help down-ballot Dems. That’s basically coming as a coda at the end of a longish piece, and it doesn’t quite fit thematically, but he’s already got little enough chance to get his agenda passed with a Democratic Congress, and he’s not trying to get a Democratic Congress. That’s political malpractice.)

So. Yeah: #Imwithher.

GUEST POST: Science Fiction and 2016, by CompGeeksDavid

On March 21, 2016March 15, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics6 Comments

It’s Monday! And I’m home. At least I hope I’m home. And sleeping. And hopefully not suffering from con crud after spending the weekend in the company of 70,000 ~~unwashed nerds~~ dedicated fans.

I suspect today may be the day where I need a guest poster the MOST, really. And looky! David from Comparative Geeks is here to save me!

(And watch, this will be the post where I have to make sure people behave in the comments. Do not make me smite you while I am crabby and tired.)

(Also, thanks to all of my guest bloggers for saving my butt while I was in Chicago!)

I started blogging back in the last presidential election cycle. And I started out with a crazy thought: what if the candidates presented their positions in the form of a science fiction story? A short tale of what they think the world will look like in 4 – or 8 – years, if they are president. Their stances are great and all, but between the balance of power between the branches, local versus federal, and the fact that they don’t want to fix everything or they’re not going to have anything to run on next time… well, their stances don’t necessarily tell us anything.

Of course, by starting blogging with something like this – without actually having followers – you end up sitting by yourself pondering. And I couldn’t figure out myself what it would all look like. The easier one was actually doing the reverse: thinking of how the parties would write a story of what the country would look like in 4 years if their opponents won… The usual sort of negative politics were sadly easier to consider than a positive vision of the future.

With Jetpacks? Well, we’re in a new cycle, I’m guest-blogging on a blog where there’s been plenty of political talk, and there is a much more interesting presidential race going on… so what might the future look like if the different candidates win?

Drumpf is of course the one that makes this seem like an easy exercise. Because it’s science fiction, and if there’s something we love in science fiction, it’s dystopias. Because that’s where pretty much every non-Drumpf supporter in the world likely expects his presidency to be headed: global dystopia. Recession if we’re lucky; World War 3 if we’re not. And the most dystopian I can think is a World War 3 with the US and Russia on a side, with Europe and their ally China (maybe?) against. And nukes. Probably nukes.

Good God, ya’ll.

Unfortunately, I could also see – somewhere amidst the Drumpf followers – there being folks who might turn to assassination. I could also see, if one of the other Republicans somehow wins the nomination, that they might pick up Drumpf as a Vice-President, to bring the party together. Meaning, I could see someone “voting-in” Drumpf via assassination. So I’m not liking how things look with a GOP win at all.

Even worse, that same logic applies with a Hillary win. We’ve got people all riled up. And there’s a whole lot of anti-Hillary sentiment, built on 20 years with her in the spotlight. So it’s easy to see dystopia here, too: and the who’s-the-Vice-President here is a bit fuzzier, but important. Unless, in the same logic as above, it’s Bernie…

I’m not sure I see the same result with a Bernie win. But I also see him having a Republican Congress – and not a whole lot happening. But it would open our politics up, so that’s something… and maybe there’s an increasing relationship with Europe, with other socialists.

I think for most people right now, staring ahead at this year… the best result we can hope for might really be for nothing much to happen the next four years. But those are my thoughts. Now it’s open to you – what do you think the country looks like in four years? Whichever candidate. Let’s discuss in the comments below!

It’s Big Mega Hoopty-Doopty Tuesday!

On March 15, 2016March 15, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics3 Comments

elections More primaries today! Let’s wantonly speculate! I’m not getting paid for this, so it doesn’t matter if I’m right!

The Republican race is what it is. I hear Kasich might come in first in Ohio, with Rubio winning in fourth. Whatever. That race is their problem; I’m not worrying about it right now.
Now, obviously, I’m basing just about all of this on the polls, and the polls shit the bed last week in rather spectacular fashion in Michigan. It will be very interesting to see if they’re useful today or not. I suspect part of the problem (PART!) with Michigan was Democrats who thought the election was in the bag for Hillary crossing party lines to vote against Trump. I’m fully aware that anecdotes are not data, but my own aunt did precisely that, voting for Kasich; I’m sure she was not the only one. There was also probably a real late surge in people either switching to vote for Bernie or committing late. One way or another, I don’t expect the first effect to be as strong this time around so I’m suspecting the polls to reflect reality a bit more closely. But we’ll see.
Also, keep in mind that the nature of polling guarantees that occasionally it’s gonna shit the bed. 99% chance of yes means 1% chance of no. That ain’t likely but it’s still gonna happen once in a while.
That said, if I wasn’t looking at polls, I’d say Hillary was in for a sweep today. The Democrats vote in Illinois, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, and Missouri, which are all underneath the currently 86.2% white threshold where Bernie does best– he’s only won two contests in states with fewer white people than Minnesota. Hillary has won eleven. Illinois is 77.7% white, Ohio 83.2%, Florida 78.1%, North Carolina 71.7%, and Missouri 83.7%. Further, Hillary is from Illinois, so I’d expect her to do quite well there.
That said: right now it looks like Hillary is going to win Florida and North Carolina quite handily. Ohio and Illinois are both leaning toward her but are closer, and Missouri looks to be in tossup territory. Illinois surprises me. Best guess: most of the Dem votes in Illinois are going to come out of Chicago, obviously, and Chicago’s a pretty young town. Hillary tends to win young black millennials, but Chicago may prove to be the exception here. We’ll see.
Every single poll aggregate shows motion in Bernie’s direction lately.
Now, here’s the thing: CNN and the rest of the idiots will pay attention to the number of states won here, but this is all proportional. All of it. If Hillary rolls up big margins in FL and NC and it’s close, regardless of the winner, in the other states, that means Hillary wins. Bernie has a gap of about 220 delegates to close, and that’s without counting the superdelegates, who are still hugely in Hillary’s corner but will move if the momentum switches. If Bernie loses two states big and ties or wins slightly in the other three, he still ends the night farther behind. And we’re taking three big-delegate states off the map today. Looking ahead, I see no chance that Bernie wins New York, so that leaves him Pennsylvania, California and New Jersey as states where he could potentially try and run up big margins to catch up. The rest of the states don’t have the delegates to produce big swings in his way even if he wins them. I don’t see how it happens.
But I am wrong all the time.
I just don’t think this will be one of those times. The math really, really isn’t in his favor. But we’ll see how today goes.

Wheeeee!

I keep thinking…

On March 12, 2016March 12, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics3 Comments

…that I should have something to say about the protests at UIC last night. Other than the obvious, which is that I have never been prouder to be a UIC alumnus.

Then I keep seeing this:

…and I just don’t want to. Because it’s fucking exhausting and it’s depressing and it’s horrible.

And, honestly, because my meds just got switched again, and I’m deep in the “constant exhaustion” phase of changing medications.

But mostly because of the depressing.

On Michigan

On March 9, 2016March 9, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics4 Comments

First of all: Wow. Polling actually is a science, guys, despite how much people like to gripe about it, but crazy shit can and will happen anytime measuring people happens. And hooooly shit did they get Michigan wrong. Congratulations to Senator Sanders on the big win. A combination of facts and wanton speculation follows:

How have I lived in Indiana and Illinois for my entire life, visited Michigan frequently during that time (I have a fair amount of family up there) and I don’t recognize their state flag? Also, that’s a crazily complicated state flag.
Independent voters were about a third of both the Democratic and Republican vote. On the Republican side they mostly voted the same way the Republicans did, but there was a clear split on the Democratic side– registered Democrats voted for Hillary by about the margin predicted by the polls, but independents went 71-28 for Bernie. That right there is probably the difference.
You may think “Oh, he’s going to gripe that the real Democrats voted for Hillary now!” Nope. I’ve said “Them’s the rules” to enough Bernie supporters this election (and, notably, to a ton of Clinton supporters in 2008) and now it’s Clinton’s turn. Them’s the rules. Independent voters get to vote in Michigan. Deal widdit.
I felt like Bernie won the debate on Sunday night, but didn’t think it was a blowout victory, and his worst moment (“Whites don’t know what it’s like to be poor”) was worse than her worst moment (hemming and hawing about fracking.) That said, it clearly created some serious momentum for Sanders. I do think the independents were what propelled his win, but he also did much better than previous states among black voters (30%) and he won solidly in Dearborn, indicating that Arab & Muslim voters are choosing the candidate who hasn’t been killing their relatives back in the old country recently. There are a lot of “OMG Arabs voted for a JEW!” articles floating around; they’re dumb and presumptuous– as if every Arab is automatically an anti-Semite. It’s not hard to understand why the Muslims might choose the more dovish candidate, guys.
CNN appears to not have polled on when people decided who to vote for, which is too bad. I’d love to see how much of a break toward Bernie there was among late deciders, and how many there were.
All that said, and while the win is certainly a reason to celebrate for the Sanders fans among us: Sanders is now farther behind than he was last week, because he never bothered to go to Mississippi at all and Clinton ran up the score something scary there. When Bernie Sanders gets beat in the 17-29 age group by 62-37, he’s gotten clobbered, and while winning Michigan is definitely a good thing, he won close, and the delegates are awarded proportionally. Even if he ends up closer in the big three states on the 15th, or even if he wins one or two of them, he’s still got 200+ delegates to make up before we worry about the superdelegates.
Shut up about the superdelegates. If he manages to generate enough momentum that he closes that gap (and I still think it’s virtually impossible) they’ll come around. Same thing happened in 2008.
Hillary’s campaign, while mostly well-oiled, has shown the occasional tendency to panic. She should probably try her damnedest to reign that impulse in this week, and make sure all of her spokespeople keep their damn yaps shut and don’t say a bunch of dumb shit either. If Lynn Forester de Rothschild is still alive, tape her mouth shut and drop her in a ditch somewhere until after the primary is over.
(Fact: two of her three most assholish surrogates from 2008, Harriet Christian and Geraldine Ferraro, actually are dead.)

I’ll add more stuff later if something else comes to mind. For now, yell at me in comments if you feel so inclined.

Some bullet-pointed nonsense

On March 8, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

A few things for y’all:

My teaching memoir Searching for Malumba: Why Teaching is Terrible… and Why we Do It Anyway is gonna be free for the next couple days. Go grab a copy.
I am not, I think, going to the pool today. I felt great last night until around bedtime, when every muscle in my body realized at once that they’d been used. I’m still achy as hell from the waist up, and lifting my arms above my head is kinda dicey. We’ll do every other day until we don’t feel like we have to. Should take a week or two.
Note that that last point should not be taken as complaining. This is good pain. I earned it and I intend to enjoy it, I just don’t want to go make it worse.
I expect Hillary to win big in Mississippi today and somewhat less big in Michigan. I’ve said this before; Sanders’ campaign is over, he just hasn’t realized it yet. Saying things like “White people don’t know what it’s like to be poor” at debates really isn’t going to help him very much.
Next week, we have Ohio, Florida and Illinois all on the same day, and Hillary will win all three. Sanders’ people are still pretending that the calendar gets better for him after March 22. They are right, but the contest will be decided for all but the most deluded of his fans by then. His big wins this weekend (three of four states!) closed the delegate gap between him and Clinton by one percent. It’s over.
I’ll repeat this again, too: I’d like him to keep pushing her to the left, so I won’t be bothered too much if he refuses to admit how math works, although it’ll probably get on my nerves from time to time.
One way or another the Republican race will continue to be an embarrassing clusterfuck.
I may have to start doing Walking Dead recaps again after yesterday’s episode. I’m beginning to think it’s possible that they’re just going to kill the entire damn cast at the end of this season and then just let Fear take over the timeslot for good.
It’s gorgeous and wonderful and warm outside for the second day in a row, so I fully expect fourteen inches of snow by Saturday.
C2E2 is coming!!! Who’s gonna come see me at booth 228 in Chicago????

It’s Super Tuesday!

On March 1, 2016March 1, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics2 Comments

I’ll not bury the lede: Sanders’ campaign is done. It died in South Carolina. You cannot be the Democratic nominee for President if you lose black voters 86-14. It’s just not going to happen, under any circumstances. I’ll refrain from speculating on why black voters are rejecting him so thoroughly; there are plenty of black writers out there who can provide their own assessment. But you cannot win a Democratic primary if black people are only giving you twice as many votes, percentage-wise, as they gave Mitt Romney.

Now: that said, I’d prefer Bernie stay in the race for a while. He’s got plenty of money (the man can fundraise like nobody’s business, that’s for sure) and I feel like Hillary still needs an opponent to her left as the campaign goes on. He’ll win a couple of states today; Vermont certainly, and my understanding is that Massachusetts, Colorado and Minnesota are either tossups or leaning his way. But Clinton will sweep the South, and the delegate math does not start looking better for Sanders as the election rolls on, and is going to become mathematically impossible very quickly even without the superdelegates. Clinton’s lead spiked in South Carolina during the few days before the primary; if we see similar movement toward her across the Super Tuesday states, his road to the nomination may actually become functionally impossible today.

Which means, the Dem side mostly wrapped up, we sit back and watch in horror as the Republicans confirm every single bad thing I ever said about them as they declare an open fascist and racist as their nominee, which is also going to happen today. I’ve talked about the “kill a puppy” test on this blog before, right? Where you ask someone if <insert preferred candidate here> killed a puppy on live TV, would you still vote for them?

The way you determine whether you’re dealing with a sane individual is that the answer to this question is no, 100% of the time, no exceptions. Drumpf has conclusively shown that, yes, he could kill a puppy on live TV and his followers would cheer him for it. Furthermore, the Republican establishment would make noises about how such a thing Just Shouldn’t Be Done and then come around anyway. Marco Rubio himself referred to Drumpf just the other day as “a lunatic trying to get ahold of nuclear weapons” but says he’ll vote for him if he’s the Republican nominee.(*)

Drumpf will not win a general election. Hillary will crush him; so would Sanders. America is not white enough any longer to elect this creature President. It would be nice if our news media got off their asses and began describing him correctly; at this point any article about him that does not use the words “racist” and “fascist” is lying by omission. This is how far gone the Republican party is:

Ccbg-dUVAAA0HyZ.jpg-large CcbiBM6UEAAbEoa.jpg-large

Yeah. Their previous Presidential nominee basically says “Hey, uh, the KKK is bad, okay?” and two prominent Republican commentators call him a liberal.

These people are soul-fucked. It is time for the Republican party to die, folks, because any organization that produces people who mock condemning the Ku Klux Klan is too corrupt and evil to be tolerated by the rest of us. Drumpf has exposed beyond any further chance of obfuscation or denial what the rest of us always knew about the GOP; that while their leaders may be businessmen and money people, their base is authoritarians, fascists and racists, all the way down. Those of you who consider yourselves Republicans but don’t feel like you’re included in either of those categories should think very carefully about your behavior over the next seven months, because “I voted against Hitler in the primaries” is simply not a sufficient defense. In 2020 nominate someone sane and make Hillary a one-termer. You’ll survive for four years under Hillary Clinton. But America dies the second Drumpf is elected.

(*) I’ve seen an extended version of that clip, and I’m actually considering removing this sentence, because I don’t think it’s completely clear that Rubio is referring to Drumpf and not, say, Sanders or Cruz or Clinton. He does go on to specifically reference him a few sentences later, and doesn’t reference any other candidate at all, though, so it’s probably a sound inference but not 100%.

In which I used to like these

On February 24, 2016February 24, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics4 Comments

Snow day today, the kind where there’s no visible precipitation of any kind in the early-morning hours where school is cancelled, but it happens anyway because people look at the weather forecast and see this coming:

Screen Shot 2016-02-24 at 8.20.29 AM.png That’s heading northeast, so we’re getting the long axis of it. Last night before I went to bed they were suggesting we’d get 12+ inches of snow during “Wednesday” and another 1-3 “Wednesday night,” but both of those estimates have been revised downward a bit since I went to bed. Still all sorts of nasty coming, though; we’ll probably have a foot of snow by bedtime tonight.

At any rate, Hogwarts cancelled, so I’ve got the boy home with me, and it’s even less likely that I’ll get anything done today in what has already been a monumentally unproductive week. My former district did not cancel, nor did any of the other big districts in the area, so they’ve decided to catch crap from getting the kids home inevitably late, because most of the bullshit today will be toward the end of the school day– there are some flakes falling right now but no accumulation, but it’s supposed to get genuinely nasty after noon. It’s a no-win situation either way and I’m really glad I’m no longer required to either participate in or defend it.

(I’d have cancelled, if it were up to me. Or at least started with a two-hour delay to get better information.)

Last night was a night heavy with politics; I watched (and live-tweeted) the entire Democratic town hall event and then went to bed once I discovered that the Nevada caucuses wouldn’t even start reporting results until after midnight. It’s looking like the fascist has finally managed a clean win; this was the first contest where #2 and #3 combined didn’t blow him away, and in fact Rubio and Cruz together still lost, implying that either Nevada is stronger territory for him than most (which makes a lot of sense, given the number of casinos) or that Bush’s people mostly migrated toward him. I am beginning to come around to the idea that this racist hairpiece is going to win the nomination, if only because either Rubio or Cruz needs to drop out right now for someone to beat Trump and neither of their egos (Cruz’s in particular) will allow them to do that.

I continue to believe that whoever wins the Democratic nomination will beat this shitpile like a rented mule in the actual election. Obama got the lowest percentage of the white vote of any winning candidate in history and still won resoundingly; white voters are a smaller portion of the electorate than they were in 2008 or 2012 and the asshole’s open, unapologetic, undeniable racism will get even fewer votes from people of color than Romney did.

This is the candidate you deserve, Republicans. He’s what you’ve been working towards for 30 years. If you’re horrified, maybe you ought to reconsider your affiliation, because courting the worst parts of American society has been the core mission of the Republican party for decades. This is what happens. You can’t pretend to not notice anymore. This is the election where you either have to embrace the fact that your candidate is literally a fascist or work to burn your party to the ground and hope that you can build something that isn’t made of racism, ignorance and hatred from the ashes.