To the windoooooowwwwwwwww

On August 7, 2024August 7, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

I’d like to point out that in my first post about the Veepstakes I 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.

A minor but extremely important point

On October 15, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

Yes, it is both minor and extremely important, shut the hell up. I know how grammar works.

You may be aware that there was supposed to be another debate tonight, and that a certain party dropped out when it was made clear that the debate was not going to be held in person, where he could spread diseases to people.

For some fucking reason, the notion that the debate was not going to be held in person led to an absolutely astonishing number of people who literally appear to believe that the debate was going to be held over Zoom, or some similar computer meeting type of shit.

This is fucking stupid and you should be ashamed of yourself if you ever thought it. And, God help you, if you’re thinking well, how the hell else are they going to do it? right now, you need to slap yourself silly, because your brain is stuck in 2020 in a really alarming way and you need to take a moment to reorient yourself with how literally everything ever happened before the world ended.

There are these things called TV studios, guys, and we’ve been using them to hold conversations between multiple people who are not in the same place for generations. Multiple Goddamned generations. Walter fucking Cronkite interviewed people who weren’t in the same place as him. Kennedy and Nixon held a debate where they weren’t in the same place in 1960. That was sixty years ago.

The Goddamned debate wasn’t going to be held over fucking Zoom. Please get your shit together, all of you.

I’m not going to go back to reporting numbers every day, but today was the worst day for new infections nationwide since July 31 and Indiana had their worst day for new infections ever. The US will likely start setting new records again next week. So, once again, yes, let’s definitely reopen schools. Because we definitely have not tried ignoring this shit hard enough.

For my part, I just completed my second day of “hybrid instruction,” and honestly I’m not doing enough differently to be this damned tired. I only worked two days this week so far, for crying out loud, and I can’t convince myself that I don’t actually have tomorrow off. The kids are all home, but all that means is that tomorrow is like last week, not that I’m not doing anything.

On predictions

On October 8, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Politics1 Comment

I did not watch the debate last night, and I have, I think, more experience with Mike Pence’s peculiar brand of affectless sophistry than most, but not in a million years did I think insects would compose a substantial portion of the discourse the day afterward. And if it wasn’t the insects, it was what appeared to be pinkeye, a twin to his boss’s nearly swollen shut eye in his drug-induced, semicoherent frenzy video from yesterday.

I have no idea if this dude has Covid or not. He was supposed to be in Indiana tomorrow to vote; that’s been abruptly cancelled and he’s been recalled to DC. I am refraining from guessing what that might be about, as I suspect there are plenty of utterly boring reasons why the Vice-President might have to cancel a purely optional trip to attend to something else in DC. There are a bunch that aren’t boring, too, but I’m utterly done trying to predict what is coming next, ever.

I had a brief text conversation with my brother earlier today about Nate Silver, who is currently predicting that Biden wins the election. Frankly, everyone is predicting that Biden wins the election, and we are at least edging into “but by how much?” territory. I saw a poll today that had Biden up by sixteen points. This is what an eighteen-point win looks like:

… so, good news, right? Nah. I’m not predicting a god damn thing. I still haven’t voted, but I’ll attend to that as soon as I can; it’s only a suddenly somewhat more complicated schedule that has kept me from doing it already, since my wife for various reasons isn’t able to work from home as much as she has been recently. That’s what I can control. I’m going to vote, and I’m going to make sure everyone I have even the slightest influence over also votes, and then I’m going to do my best to stop worrying about it. I’m making no predictions of any kind. I’m barely even allowing myself to be hopeful. I’m gonna vote. I’m gonna tell you to vote. And I’m probably going to take the day after the election off, no matter what, and I’m gonna make sure I’ve got a supply of emergency brain meds laid in.

And that’s all I can do right now.

Three mini-posts

On September 30, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn Music, Politics, TeachingLeave a comment

I did, unfortunately, end up watching most of the “debate” last night, giving up at about the 2/3 mark when it became clear that the Beast was not going to stroke out or have a heart attack while I was watching. It was every bit as horrible and depressing as everyone says it was; there simply should not be further debates while this person is in office. There’s no goddamn point. There have been some rumblings that the rules are going to change from the debate commission, but if they’ve provided any specifics I’ve not seen them yet. Basically unless the moderator has the power to cut microphones there’s no further point in entertaining the exercise any longer.

We missed the sadly predictable moment where he refused to condemn white supremacy. Which … no one should have been surprised. White supremacists, the Klan, and the Nazis are clearly his people, and there has been no reasonable doubt about that for quite some time. He’s not going to condemn them because he’s one of them. That’s all there is to it. And yes, you are a bad person if you continue to support him. It’s not up for debate.

I think it is still the case that I own every album-length release Public Enemy has put out, including their live album. I generally find out about them by accident now, though, and while it’s kind of depressing it’s been true for a while that the band’s best days are behind them. The fact that they continue to mine the well of songs from Yo! Bum Rush the Show and It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back after all these years is … well, it’s a choice, is what it is, and true to form this release has three or four different tracks that pull material from those two albums, plus a remake of Fight the Power with a bunch of new verses by non-PE rappers.

That said … I think I”m on my seventh or eighth listen already, and I just discovered it on Tuesday, so they’re doing something right. I mean, it’s PE. It’s Chuck D and Flavor Flav, despite the fact that Flav has been kicked out of the band at least seven or eight times by now. I’m enjoying it.

I got an email from Human Resources this afternoon, late enough in the day (no doubt on purpose) that there was no real point in asking for any clarification, informing me that my request for a length-of-the-pandemic e-learning job had been approved. (I assume it’s length of the pandemic. How long this job is slated to last was not mentioned, and honestly I can’t criticize them for not knowing.)

This rather portentous paragraph was in the message:

As we begin to start school back next week, please be aware that your grade level, subject, or building designation could change based on the demand for eLearning in the school corporation. We will continue to modify based on student attendance, eLearning requests, and building needs.

Now, next week is the last week of the quarter, so my assumption is that I still have my current job next week. But I literally have no idea what they will have me doing the week after that. None at all. I mean, I’ll probably still end up teaching math in my current building, because seniority, but I have no idea.

And, I suspect, neither do they.

The pandemic started in March, y’all.

So that’s fun.

Just a thought

On September 28, 2020 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, TeachingLeave a comment

There have been years– not a lot, but they’ve happened– where I spent more on my classroom than the person in the White House did in Federal taxes in the year he was elected.

I’d like to think that these recent revelations are going to make a difference, but I’m not surprised by anything in them and I doubt many other people are either. That said, the article is worth a read, if you can handle the inevitable explosion of hatred and anger while you’re reading it.

I don’t generally miss presidential debates, even if I don’t liveblog them, but I really might have to skip this one.

In which we need your vote

On June 26, 2019 By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1143909759822811136

There will be a post later tonight one way or another, I think.

In which I fundraise: another Pete Buttigieg post

On March 11, 2019 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics5 Comments

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

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKTlVH2EKIg

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

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