Okay. So you’ve noticed the shitgibbon’s long and abiding relationship with professional wrestling, and you know that wrestlers cut themselves on purpose all the time, and you don’t believe that a bullet fired from an AR-15 can graze someone for some reason,(*) and you think the assassination attempt was faked.
Okay. Fine. You go ahead and do that. Think whatever you like.
But before you spout that shit where I can see it, I’m going to insist that you explain the two dead people and the two injured people. And you’re going to have to do so in such a way that it makes more sense than that a nut job got ahold of a gun, took a shot at someone, barely missed, and the Secret Service, around someone whose single greatest skill as a human being might be his ability to surround himself at all times with utterly fucking incompetent people, fucked up.
Because I’m entirely willing to believe in a world where someone missed a shot and cops fucked up. That sounds just like America to me.
I have nothing else to say about this, other than the paragraph to follow, which is more about math than it is about politics.
(*) If it is possible for an AR-15 bullet to hit someone and blow their head off, and if it is possible for an AR-15 bullet to miss someone, than somewhere in between those two places there literally must be some distance where the bullet does damage– and an ear wound is going to bleed like a bitch even if it’s a small cut– that is not fatal. This isn’t even the first president who didn’t get killed due to amazing fucking luck. Teddy Roosevelt had a bullet basically bounce off a speech in his pocket. Andrew Jackson had someone come after him with two pistols and they both misfired, leading to Jackson beating the hell out of his assailant with his cane. The idea that it is impossible for a bullet to barely miss may be the dumbest conspiracy theory in a wild thicket of dumb conspiracy theories.
I encountered this earlier today on Bluesky and addressed #1 a little bit and now I kind of want to go through the whole thing. Let’s take the idea of Biden dropping out seriously. Why not. Believe it or not, I’m pretty confident about my answers to all of this; that said, feel free to take with salt if you so desire.
I am going to attempt to address each of these questions as neutrally as I can, by the way.
Can Biden be replaced against his will?
Absolutely the fuck not, and I mean that in the strongest terms imaginable. Right now Joe Biden has 3,904 pledged delegates. Everyone else, including “undetermined,” has … 45. He needs a majority. You do the math. While “faithless electors” technically are a thing, most of these folks were picked because they are loyal, and a substantial number of them are legally bound to vote for Biden on at least the first ballot. The idea that nearly two thousand of them would vote for other people on the first ballot is beyond fantasy. It will never, ever happen. And even if this literally impossible thing were to happen, unless those nearly 2000 people chose the same person, Biden would still have a huge plurality. He would absolutely be going back after each and every delegate who had voted against him for the second ballot, and again– he just needs a majority. This just isn’t going to be a thing under any circumstances.
Can Biden drop out?
Yep. He sure can. He could also die. He can direct his delegates to vote for someone else; they don’t actually have to do what he says. He can also simply “release” them and let them vote for who they want.
What if he drops out and throws his support behind Kamala Harris?
One presumes that Harris would be nominated on the first ballot if this happened. It would not be a guarantee but I think it would be very, very likely. The process to find a vice-president would be … interesting. One thing I haven’t seen anyone talking about is Biden throwing his support behind Harris and then becoming Vice-President again. He can do that! It’s happened twice, although neither John Calhoun or George Clinton were President in between the two vice-presidencies. The Constitution only specifies that the VP has to be eligible to become President; Biden has another term of eligibility. There is no legal barrier to him becoming VP again.
What if he actually resigns the Presidency?
This would be an astonishingly bad idea, as Kamala Harris assuming the Presidency would mean that we’d lose the Vice-President and thus lose our tiebreaker in the Senate. A new Vice-President would have to be approved by both the Senate and the House. The House is controlled by the Republicans. They could barely pick a Speaker. We would almost certainly go to January 20 without a Vice-President. You know what else the Vice-President is responsible for doing? Certifying the electoral votes. Regardless of who wins, I cannot even imagine the level of fuckery that could ensue in a situation where the election is close and we don’t have anyone in the position that is supposed to certify that the votes are counted correctly. It would make January 6, 2021 look like a fun day at the beach. I don’t even want to think of it.
Biden absolutely cannot be allowed to resign the Presidency. The good news is I think he’d rather die than quit at this point.
What if he drops out and doesn’t endorse, or endorses someone other than Harris?
There has not been a contested convention for either political party during my lifetime. I believe the last contested Democratic convention was in 1968, coincidentally the year LBJ decided to not sit for another term and then Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. It … didn’t go well. I think it’s still entirely possible Harris wins on the first ballot even without an explicit endorsement. If she doesn’t, who the fuck knows what happens next.
It is probably worth pointing out that if any of the people currently getting tossed about as magical saviors replacement candidates were actually interested in the role, we’d be hearing about them trying to consolidate support behind the scenes. We haven’t, because no one is doing that.
What about a mini-primary?
That’s basically just a contested convention. As I said, one hasn’t happened in a while, but they’re hardly historically unprecedented. Nonetheless, it would be, charitably, a huge fucking mess. I’ve promised to try to be neutral so I won’t go further into that.
What about getting the winner on the ballot in all 50 states?
This, at least in theory, actually isn’t a problem. The Democrats and Republicans both have a ballot line in every state and the various territories that is currently sitting there empty waiting for an official nominee. Whoever the nominee is will be on the ballot. (*)
(*) In a normal year. I can very easily imagine legal fuckery. It would be meritless but the Supreme Court just decided that bribing them is legal and that the President is a king. Those decisions were also meritless. “Meritless” is kinda the Supreme Court’s thing right now. Typically, though, political parties are given wide leeway in determining their own nominees, and I’m not aware (I could be wrong!) of any case of a major-party nominee being seriously challenged in court for ballot access. That says, something ends up on Matthew Kacsmaryk’s desk, who the fuck knows what happens next.
Who takes the money pot?
Hahahahahahaha lol we’re all fucked.
Okay. If Harris/Whoever is the nominee, we’re good. Kamala Harris is part of the Biden/Harris ticket. She should still have access to the funds raised for their candidacy. Note, for the record, that this is the part of this explainer that I’m least confident about, but I’m still confident enough to be writing about it. Presumably they wouldn’t lose a ton of staff over this; there would be some hiccups and some rearranging and such but I don’t foresee any substantial organizational or legal issues.
If the nominee’s name is not “Kamala Harris,” though, we run into some serious shit. The Biden/Harris campaign cannot simply sign those millions and millions of dollars over to some other candidate. They can, after settling the campaign’s debts and dealing with the no doubt huge number of people who want their money back, donate the rest of it to a PAC, or an organization like the DNC, who may spend it as they see fit.
The new candidates would have to start from scratch. They would inherit some infrastructure from Biden/Harris but … Christ. Office leases would have to be renegotiated. TV time, radio, internet and print advertising is still sold … to Biden-Harris. They’d have to staff up almost completely; at the very least everyone who worked for Biden-Harris would have to be rehired, and all of this on no money, at least at first. Website infrastructure. Immense amounts of fundraising, both small-donor and massaging big donors and bundlers, a good portion of whom will probably be pissed that their person wasn’t picked. Email lists. Voter lists. Volunteers. Bank accounts. Fucking candidate scheduling. Across the entire country. All at once.
Oh, and picking a Vice-President, which would also be necessary, and would be a fucking huge mess because that type of thing typically takes months of vetting and carefully examining closets for skeletons. This would make Sarah Palin look like …
… actually, it probably still wouldn’t be as fucked up as picking Palin.
Anyway, part of the reason why we don’t hear anything about Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer getting themselves ready to run for President after the convention is that neither of them are stupid people, and they realize that building up an organization to run for the Presidency is insanely complicated and doing it in three months from nothing is fucking impossible. Neither of them wants to be the person who took the reins from Biden/Harris and then got blown the fuck out of the water because it took a month to even get staffed up.
Most of the people who are advocating for Biden to drop out have not thought about any of this. I’m pretty sure I have a good idea why; I promised to be neutral, so I won’t talk about it. Look at yesterday’s post for an idea, if you like. This is all magical, underpants-gnome thinking of the worst kind, and I would appreciate it if people acted like they have some fucking sense. Please.
I haven’t said a word, at least in this space, about the current New York Times-driven media frenzy to get Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race. There are a couple of reasons for that; you can probably predict most of them without me saying anything.
I can’t do anything about it and I have enough fucking stress in my life right now;
I find the entire thing hideously, insanely, diabolically stupid;
The people calling for Biden’s ouster fall into one of two categories: media-aligned chaos agents, by and large who should be lined up against a wall and shot, and frustrated Bernie types who still think the DNC somehow used their magical election-fixing powers and forced millions of fucking people to vote for Biden. The former are actively for Trump (the NYT never gets another dime from me) and the latter will not be satisfied with anyone the Democrats replace Biden with anyway;
Not one in ten of these people have actually thought through how complicated it would be to replace Biden with anyone other than Kamala Harris, and again, the people who have been calling Harris “Copala” for the last six years, again, are still gonna be mad. Fuck ’em.
There’s been some horseshit about Parkinson’s disease lately; there is no way that the legislation Biden signed this week about Parkinson’s disease could have resulted in Parkinson’s experts showing up at the White House, right? Nah.
Ultimately I will literally vote for Biden’s corpse, or Harris, or Bernie fucking Sanders, or a cold pile of bloody vomit in November, whatever is running against Trump. I give no fucks. President Cold Pile of Bloody Vomit will be an adequate replacement. I don’t have the mental energy to war-game this out; it’s the exact same bullshit as But Her Emails or Kerry’s Purple Hearts or Obama being from fucking Kenya. The news media has to have a big lie for every Democratic president. Ultimately, I’m gonna vote for the old guy with the stutter, even if he gets sick a couple more times between now and the election, and anyone who doesn’t want to do that can literally die in a fire for all I care, and that’s all the fuck I have to say about it.
Enjoy the obligatory birthday selfie; I did remember when I got dressed this morning that for both of the previous birthday selfies I had the same shirt on, and I considered putting that shirt on for the third year in a row and rejected the idea. 48 is entirely too fucking close to fifty for my comfort and I don’t like it one bit. I had to get my drivers license renewed earlier this week and dear god the only way I could look more like a white supremacist in that picture is if I had an actual swastika tattooed on my face. See how I’m clearly holding the camera above my head and looking up? That’s my angle. They made me look down for the DL picture. It did not go well.
Anyway.
We went to Indianapolis today; we went to the IKEA in Fishers and the Lego store, and I fought back against my advanced age by spending entirely too much fucking money for Lego sets that I don’t have anywhere to put once I build them. We’re going to ignore the fact that I can only afford the Goddamn toys I bought today by virtue of being an old person.
Oh, and we found a Tesla overflow lot, completely by accident:
It is genuinely difficult to convey just how much fucking uglier these things are in person. They’re absurdly large, the interior is shit, and the whole thing is so snub-nosed that even if it weren’t designed like a PS1 car brought to life it would still look ridiculous. Also, while I admit I have never once in my life complained about “build quality” on any other vehicle, it took less than a minute of looking at the car in the picture to notice this:
Those pieces of trim are more or less flush on the left and you can get a finger in the gap on the right. It’s not the angle of the picture, I swear. Those are the pieces that keep blowing off of the car at high speeds, too. Also, we got there just after a rainstorm, as you can see, and I’m wondering if anyone has to come over from the dealership to wipe the rainwater off the damn cars so they don’t rust.
Anyway. I’d say “on to 49,” but let’s try surviving through November first.
The Supreme Court ruled last week that it was legal to bribe them and today ruled that the President can legally order them killed, so I’m investigating just how the fuck I can get out of this miserable fucking shithole that we’re pretending is a functioning country. I’m going to do the paperwork today to get my passport renewed; my wife and son need theirs for the first time, and I’m going to have to talk my dad into getting his as well.
I think I can apply for German citizenship via descent from German nationals, and it has not escaped my notice that fleeing to Germany to avoid the Nazis is … somewhat ironic.
Anyway, the good news is that I unofficially passed my Praxis test; the score was 182/200, which is a quite comfortable margin. Higher than both of my practice tests, too; I was especially pleased to discover that several of the questions I specifically made sure to review had analogues on the official test, so I absolutely picked up some points during the studying process.
Oh, and in the process of showing off my drivers’ license to my online proctor I discovered that it was expiring in four days, and I went and got it renewed at the DMV in less than 20 minutes this afternoon.
The bad news — because of course there’s more bad news — is that despite the entire test being multiple choice, my official score report won’t be available until August 9, because ETS is the scum of the Earth. There is literally no reason this should take more than a couple of hours. It’s fucking 2024. This means that it’s unlikely that I’ll have the licensure in hand by the time school starts. Will that matter? Maybe, maybe not; the class I’m getting the licensure to teach in the first place hasn’t been confirmed yet, so all of this may have been for nothing. Right now I’m not stressing about it.
Oh, and check this fuckshit out:
Now: those two supplementary monitors are disconnected from the computer, because it won’t let you start the testing software if it detects that you have more than one monitor running. Was that good enough for my proctor? No! I had to point them away from me and cover them with towels. The disconnected monitors, which were not capable of receiving a signal from my computer. I also had to show the camera my glasses and confirm that I wasn’t wearing earrings, because … I guess I might have been wearing Google Glass and had secret spy earrings or some shit.
Don’t miss the whiteboard there; you aren’t allowed to use paper while taking the fucking test. I blatantly violated two of these assholes’ rules; one, I made no attempt whatsoever to disconnect every device in the house other than my computer from the internet, because give me a fucking break, and two, I discovered in the fine print of the rules I was agreeing to in order to take the test the requirement that if I was in a room with a door, that the door must not only be closed (fine) but that the computer I was testing on be placed in such a way that the closed door was visible to the proctor at all times.
Which would require wholesale rearranging of my office, and again, was not a requirement that anyone told me about prior to five minutes before taking the test. I was fully prepared to lie about this one if necessary, and had he given me any bullshit about it, I’d have removed the fucking door from the hinges. Christ, I fucking hate ETS. Like, the Supreme Court ruled today that the President is a king and I still think I hate ETS more than I hate them.
That said, it’s legal for Biden to order Roberts, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Thomas and Alito executed and Trump sent to Guantanamo Bay now, and I think he should strongly consider it.
Monthly Reads is still coming later today, if (yeah, right) you’re waiting for it.
ETS, the company behind these fucking Praxis tests, is one of the worst organizations in the history of the entire fucking planet, and by “organizations” I’m including the Nazis, the KKK, the Republicans, and whatever flavor of Communism might be most on your nerves at the moment. I hate these people to a degree I’m not entirely able to explain, at least not without the FBI taking a closer look at me.
I passed another practice test today, by a larger margin than the first one, and decided, fuck it, I’m going to go ahead and schedule this thing. The last time I looked I was able to schedule an exam the next day, so you can imagine my surprise when I logged in and discovered that I can’t get in before July 1 any longer. Which … fuck. This blog is already turning into the All Math Test All The Time website, and now I have to wait three more weeks? I’m ready now, motherfuckers. Let’s do this.
And then I went through their list of “requirements,” and …
… look, God damn it, I need these fucking testing companies to understand that their shit is not that fucking important. The fucking NSA doesn’t protect their shit as carefully as standardized testing companies do. They won’t let me have scratch paper for a fucking math test. I have to use a fucking whiteboard, which can be “erased in front of the proctor,” because … what? I might share questions with somebody? So the fucking hell what? Every test is fucking different, and you sell practice tests, you stupid dicks. Which is the actual reason, by the way, because extorting $120 out of me for the fucking test isn’t enough; they need more money from anyone who wants to study for these fucking things, like the blood-sucking rent-seeking fucking parasite scumbag shitstained vermin they are.
Make sure any other devices in my home that use the internet aren’t running?
Are you fucking kidding me? I’m not even going to try to do this. Avoid wearing jewelry? Fucking why? And what’s “dressed appropriately” mean? Are people seeking teaching licenses likely to have their dicks or tits out while testing, so likely that they need a rule about it?
Elsewhere, I am told that I am expected to be able to show the proctor “all four walls” in the room I am in, presumably because any wall they can’t see is obviously covered with posters explaining how to do the questions on the test. My webcam is part of the fucking computer, though, and I’m not sure how the fuck they expect me to point the Goddamn monitor at the wall behind it.
(Also, remember: approximately zero percent of teaching involves blind recall of facts in the complete absence of resource materials. If I forget anything I’m supposed to be teaching, I can literally look it up right in front of the fucking kids if I want to. These things should be entirely open notes; what I have memorized is completely irrelevant.)
I was able to successfully get myself up out of bed and showered before 8:30 this morning. I had a cup of coffee and screwed around on my phone for a while, then spent an honest to goodness solid hour studying, and managed to successfully regain at least some of my knowledge of trigonometry in the process. I think what I’m going to do this week is spend the next couple of days filling obvious holes in my knowledge (“obvious” meaning “I remember knowing this, and now I don’t,” as opposed to, say, calculus, which is an entire domain of knowledge that I never really had a grasp of) and then take a practice test on Thursday. (Why Thursday? It’ll take a while, and Friday’s going to be busy. I’ll have time to study but not for an entire practice test.) If I do okay on the practice test, I may go ahead and take a shot at the real test next week and see if I can just knock it out. I only need like a 60% to pass, I think? If I do crap on it, I’ll stick with the original plan and study through June or until I can pass a practice test solidly. I don’t want to have to pay for this thing more than twice, and ideally, only once. I’ve also literally never failed a standardized test so I have some pride on the line here too.
In other news, school is out, and I’m finding that I don’t have a lot to say about that. This was a pretty good year, all told; it had its moments, like they all do, but my honors class was awesome enough to carry through the rest of the year and even my most annoying kids continue to pale in comparison with what I’ve had to deal with at previous schools. That said, I think I’m due for another round of reevaluating classroom procedures; everything I’m doing right now is still very COVID-informed and I’m seeing signs that certain policies may be starting to bite me in the ass a bit. I didn’t really try to reinvent the wheel when I changed districts, but I’m comfortable enough in the new place now that I think I can tweak some things. We’ll see.
I’ll end on a question: certain sectors of American society have been claiming that attempting to impose any sort of penalties or punishments for the obvious criminality of certain individuals was going to cause widespread civil unrest. Locally, I am aware of one (1) house that is now flying a very small (comically so, in fact) American flag outside their house, upside down. Is anyone reading this aware of any civil disobedience or protests literally anywhere other than the tiny little group that’s been outside the courthouse in New York since the trial started? Any downtowns flooded with fash lately? Trucker rebellions? Anything at all?
I have to admit that I thought that finding out that the Previous Occupant had been convicted of 34 felonies would make me happier. Instead, I just find myself hoping he owns a gun. I want this bastard to face some fucking consequences for something, God damn it. And that pants-shitting waste of my oxygen got to walk out of the courtroom and bitch about the trial being rigged again, so this ain’t it yet.
In other news, the last day of school is tomorrow, and I am not literally too tired to live, at least insofar as I am quite clearly still alive, but I could probably convince myself otherwise. Tomorrow will go by quickly, and then year 20 (21? I may need to recount) will be in the books.
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