Tag: democracy

Postcard, annotated

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics2 Comments

You can probably expect me to keep rattling on about this until these damn things are all done; I managed 35 of them today, and I’m done with almost half of them. My stamina seems to be growing, so I’ll shoot for 40 tomorrow and see what happens to my handwriting at the end.

Anyway, I’ve been fiddling with the message I’m supposed to write on these things as I’ve been going through and I think I’ve settled on the Luther Approved Version. I think I posted this already, but here’s the official text that I’m basing my cards on:

Hi [voter’s first name]! Thank you for being a voter! Your friends and family may need your reminder to vote. Please ask them to vote in the Tues. Nov 5 election! – [your first name].

And here’s my version:

Hi [voter’s first name]!1 Thank you for being a voter!2 Your friends and family3 may need your encouragement4 to vote. Please ask5 everyone6 to do their part7 in the election on November8 5!
-Luther

  1. I kind of wish I had some other way to refer to everyone; every so often I get a name that is almost certainly not what the voter calls themselves, and when I get things sent to me that don’t have my preferred name on them it’s always an immediate turnoff. ↩︎
  2. I don’t mind this formulation at all. I wrote a couple that said “thank you for voting,” but I like “voter” more because even if the person hasn’t voted yet, it’s a subtle push that a voter is what you are and therefore even if you haven’t voted yet you’re going to, because that’s what voters do, right? ↩︎
  3. Again, not a change, but “friends and family” and not “family and friends” because folks are more likely to befriend people who align with them politically and we all know about that one asshole uncle you’ve got. Feel free to not talk to him! I’ve considered tossing “like-minded” in there a couple of times but this is already long enough. ↩︎
  4. I don’t like “reminder,” because it feels hectoring and I’m pretty sure that people know there’s an election coming. If they genuinely don’t know yet I’m not sure getting them to vote helps me any. “Encouragement” feels a lot more active without being nagging and also has the word “courage” in it. That said, do you know how many letters the word “encouragement” has in it? A hundred and fifty-three. ↩︎
  5. Thought about moving “remind” here and didn’t. Ask. ↩︎
  6. “Everyone” and not “them.” Ask everyone. Everyone? Everyone. ↩︎
  7. I feel like the original message overuses the word “vote.” I get why, of course, because repetition is king, but damn it I’m a writer and it’s overused. Plus “do their part” makes it sound like a responsibility and something people are supposed to do, which has the advantage of being completely true. Go do your damn job, reluctant Democratic voters! ↩︎
  8. I dislike two abbreviations in a row and I don’t feel like the “Tuesday” really 100% needs to be there, especially since it’s on the front of the card. November 5 it is! ↩︎

Also, did you know how much a postcard stamp goes for nowadays? Fifty-six cents, which means two hundred of them runs a hundred and fifteen dollars after the handling fee. I had no choice other than “standard” delivery, which had bloody well better get the damned things to me by the 23rd or I’m gonna fight somebody. You’d think the post office, of all places, would tell you specifically how fast “standard delivery” gets me my damn stamps but they don’t.

In which my wrists hurt

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics5 Comments

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.

Writing postcards tonight

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics2 Comments

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.

Fine. Bring it.

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics8 Comments

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.

In which I endorse: 2024 Primary Edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

This primary kind of snuck up on me. I will grant that my particular style of media and news consumption renders me functionally immune to political ads, but other than a handful of prominent signs for local races near work I haven’t seen a Goddamned thing out there. That said, there’s a race or two worth talking about, and a couple of candidates I’m genuinely enthused about, so here we go:

Joseph R. Biden Jr. for President. This will surprise no one, of course, and Biden is running unopposed in Indiana, so it’s not like there’s even another candidate I can vote for. That said, at least in terms of his impact directly on my personal life, Biden has been the best president of my lifetime and it’s not close. I am both happy and proud to vote for him again.

Valerie McCray for US Senate. There is actually a primary race for Senate this year; both candidates passed my initial smell test, and passed my secondary test of “do you have a website that actually contains useful information about you, and makes me feel like I want you as my Senator?”. Dr. McCray’s is here and her opponent, Marc Carmichael, has his website here. While Carmichael doesn’t seem like an unacceptable choice, my rule is that when presented with two acceptable candidates I vote against the white guy. Right now I’ll be fine voting for him if he makes it through the primary, which, given that this is Indiana, I suspect he will.

Jennifer G. McCormick for Governor. Dr. McCormick was formerly Indiana’s Secretary of Education after Glenda Ritz flamed out, and I swear to God she was a Republican when she was appointed, and I spent more time than one might expect while following her on Twitter wondering how the hell a Republican appointee was getting away with saying the very liberal Democrat-ish things she kept saying. Well, if she was a Republican then, she’s a Democrat now, and I was really happy to hear that she’d decided to run for Governor. She’s running unopposed, which also surprises me, so it’s not like I had a second choice, but I can’t imagine who in this state I might have chosen over her. Sadly, she’ll likely get smoked by whatever rape-enabling troglodyte the Republican primary shits out. But we can hope!

I voted for Lori A. Camp for my House representative; I didn’t have another choice, and I’m going to stop short of calling it an endorsement. Honestly I hadn’t heard of her before going in and the sum total of my research was to make sure that I didn’t have to do any research. I glanced at her website; it’s fine, I suppose. I still want Pat Hackett.

Tim Swager for District 10 State Senator. This is inside-baseball as hell; why am I mentioning it here? Because the incumbent, David Niezgodski, is embroiled in a sexual harassment controversy, and everything I’ve seen about it makes me feel like he’s probably a slimy piece of shit. I am, I admit, a teensy bit leery of Swager as well, who has been spending a lot of money on sending mailers so that everyone knows that Niezgodski is a staffer-harassing asshole who maybe voted against abortion access once or twice– I’m not convinced of this– but said mailers are awfully thin on why Swager himself would be a better choice. His website is also rather thin but contains no obvious red flags, so, sure, you can be State Senator over the creepy married dude who broke into his staffer’s house.

I strongly suspect I’m going to go 0/5 here, if not in the primary than in the actual election, although Niezgodski might be weaker than I think; who knows. But I don’t miss elections. So here we are.

Go vote

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

Vote for the side that isn’t gleefully locking children in cages.

Vote for the side that believes climate change is real, and wants to do something about it.

Vote for the side that believes the coronavirus is real, and wants to do something about it.

Vote for the side that believes that health care, clean water, clean air and healthy food are human rights.

Vote for the side that wants the phrase “preexisting condition” to be something future generations have to have explained to them.

Vote for the side that wants your children to be able to retire eventually.

Vote for the side that doesn’t have actual Nazis and open white supremacists showing up at their rallies.

Vote for the side that doesn’t threaten gun violence every time they don’t get their way.

Vote for the side that believes Black lives matter.

Vote for the side that believes women are human beings and expects them to be treated that way.

Vote for the side that believes people of color are human beings and expects them to be treated that way.

Vote for the side that believes LGBQTIA+ people are human beings and expects them to be treated that way.

Vote for the side that believes immigrants are human beings and expects them to be treated that way.

Vote for the side that understands that trans women are women and trans men are men.

Vote for the side that isn’t represented in government almost exclusively by white men.

Vote for the side that respects knowledge and science.

Vote for the side that knows abortion is health care, and access to birth control is a right.

Vote for the side that doesn’t have racism, sexism and selfishness as the core motivating values of every single one of its policies.

Vote for the side that understands that the minor inconvenience of wearing a mask in public is worth it, because it helps to keep other people safe.

Vote for the side that believes that the ultra-wealthy shouldn’t exist and that the wealthy should pay their share of taxes.

Vote for the side that believes working people should be able to lead comfortable and dignified lives.

Vote for the side that doesn’t think that having a place to live and health care should depend on whether you have a job or not.

Vote for the side that believes access to the vote should be expanded, not restricted.

Vote for the side that believes every vote should be counted.

Vote for the side that doesn’t believe that the police should be able to beat and kill us with impunity.

Vote for the side that respects competence, expertise, and education.

Vote for the side that wants public schools fully funded and high-quality, not strip-mined for resources that could be channeled to wealthy white kids.

Vote for the side that hasn’t had the phrase “death tolls” applied to their rallies by major news organizations recently.

Vote for the side that believes that a healthy news media is a necessary feature of a democracy and not an opposing force to be coopted or silenced.

Vote for the side that believes we should be focusing on helping families during the pandemic, not corporations.

Vote for the side that hasn’t been openly calling on older people to be willing to die so that younger and poorer people can go back to work.

Vote.

On fixing American democracy

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

(Note: this is as close as I’m going to come, I think, to a post about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, mostly because I still can’t think clearly about it. Check my Instagram for a minor tribute to her that I did, though.)

I turned eighteen in July of 1994, which means that my first presidential vote was for Bill Clinton’s reelection in 1996. Since I have been old enough to vote– and I am 44– there has been only one election where the Republican candidate for President got a majority of the popular vote. For some reason, though, there have been twelve years in that time where I had Republican presidents– because in two other elections, the winner of the popular vote did not win the Electoral college. And I’m not going to do the math to figure out the exact numbers, but during those years where I’ve been able to vote there has– I will use the word frequently— been situations where the balance of the Senate and the House did not reflect the number of votes received by the elected officials of that party as well.

The Republicans have been given a head start in our democracy for my entire adult life. The Republican agenda does not enjoy popular nationwide support, but their power in our government is aided by the Electoral College and a Constitution that says every state must have exactly two senators– a compromise that might have made sense in 1789 but no longer really does when California literally has nearly seventy times as many people as Wyoming but only eighteen times as many electoral votes.

The following things need to happen:

  1. Washington DC must be granted statehood as soon as humanly possible. Right now residents of our nation’s capital have literally no representation in Congress, and DC has around 200,000 more residents than Wyoming does. This isn’t fair. It needs to be fixed.
  2. Puerto Rico, with a population of 3.2 million, more than 20 states, has a more complicated statehood picture, which I admit I’m far from an expert on– my understanding is that there was a recent statehood referendum that won, but which many opponents claimed was a poor representation of the actual mood of the island. I don’t know if that’s a legitimate argument or not. I just don’t. I will phrase it this way, then: Puerto Rico should be granted the option of statehood, and hopefully we can have a cleaner referendum in the near future to see if they prefer statehood or independence. Either way, they’ve been a territory for far too long.

You may be pointing out in your head right now that this does not precisely solve the problem of the Electoral College, and furthermore does not really reflect the enormous advantage smaller rural states have in the Senate, allowing them to potentially block legislation desired by overwhelming majorities of Americans. This is true, and I don’t see a way to overcome that roadblock short of setting a ceiling for a state’s population and carving a few of the bigger states up, which doesn’t seem super likely. But we can limit the antidemocratic effects of the Electoral College without a Constitutional amendment.

How? By increasing the size of the House.

The Constitution does not specify how many seats the House needs to have, only that the number of citizens per seat should be no less than 30,000. I think we can all agree that a House with nearly eleven thousand members is untenable for a variety of reasons. But there is nothing in the Constitution that requires the number of House members to be 435. It used to be fairly routine to expand or change the number of House members– 21 times between 1790 and 1920, which is the last time it happened.

Which, okay, a lot of those were because we added new states. True! But I feel like a hundred years was a nice long run for 435 members and maybe expanding to, oh, twice that might be nice.

(Be aware, because people seem to think this is a good argument for some reason, that I don’t give one thin damn how many desks there are in the House chamber. That’s a building. We can renovate the motherfucker. We can build a whole damn new one if we want.)

And doubling the size of the House would, in turn, double the number of available Electoral votes, which– again– wouldn’t fix the problem, but would bring the vote of a Californian closer to being fairly counted than it is now.

Now, understand that there is an argument to be made that if California has seventy times as many people as Wyoming then it deserves seventy times as much representation. It’s probably even the cleanest argument, honestly, because everything else boils down to well, California needs to have closer to a truly representative vote … but not that much closer. But even if we just doubled the size of the House– and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to have 8-900 voting members in an organization representing three hundred and twenty-five million people– we would in turn close that distance and the vote of a Californian would be closer to counting as much as it should. It’s not going to be perfect, because of the Senate, and we can’t fix the Senate (or at least I’m not aware of a way) without Constitutional amendments, which is outside the scope of what I’m talking about right now.

Our democracy, such as it is, and believe me part of me wants to put that word in quotation marks right now, needs to be more representative than it is right now. This won’t fix it, but it’s a place to start.

In which I try to rank Elizabeth Warren and a bunch of people I don’t want to vote for

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

The last time I did this was– Jesus— almost a God damn year ago, and since then not only has Kamala Harris dropped out, but so has everyone else I wanted to vote for except for Buttigieg, who has spent most of the last eleven months making me dislike him. I have gone from a Democratic presidential primary where I went through eight people before even entering “meh” territory to one person I want to vote for– Warren– a bunch of people who I despise, and Amy Klobuchar, who I wouldn’t have even considered a serious candidate any longer until New Hampshire, and frankly I probably shouldn’t start treating her for-real seriously until she does better in more than one state.

What I have been saying for the last several months remains true: this race is still Biden’s to lose, despite his poor performance in Iowa and New Hampshire, because unless the poll results have shifted radically in the last couple of weeks he’s still the only candidate with a serious base of support in the black community, who are still the base of the Democratic party and who haven’t had a chance to vote yet because of how fucking stupid our nomination process is. I have heard tell that those numbers are starting to shift, though, and if they are, Biden’s fucked, which is kind of fine because I think he’s slowly losing his shit and I don’t really want to vote for him.

But … God, I don’t want to vote for any of these fuckers other than Warren, and every time I try to think seriously about ranking them, I spend most of my time pondering the inevitability of death instead. I mean, to be clear: I’m voting for the fucking Democratic nominee in November, full stop; I don’t give a fuck who it is. But I really don’t like any of them beyond Warren, and I remember enjoying being able to vote for candidates who I wanted to hold office, damn it.

So.

2. … Klobuchar, I guess? Who is an asshole, and a moderate, and she’s shitty to her staff, but that’s all I’ve got and she hasn’t managed to personally piss me off yet? Plus, she’s a woman and she doesn’t have one foot in the grave or any obvious decline in her mental facilities? So, yeah, sure, Klobuchar’s second, I suppose, mostly because someone has to be.

3. Buttigieg. I have voted for Pete Buttigieg literally every single time he has run for office, and I don’t want to ever vote for him again. Yes, in March I was somewhat enthusiastic about his candidacy. And he’s spent damn near every second since then trying to drive me away with his Jesusiness and his Kumbaya approach to “working with” people who would literally rather see him dead than in office. But much like Klobuchar he has the advantages of not being senile or nearly dead, and I’m not convinced he’d be a shitty President, and he’s smart, if perhaps not as smart as he thinks he is, and if he made a sensible pick for VP he might not be a disaster as a President, although of the current group I think he’s the one most likely to run for a second term and lose.

4. Fuck it, Biden. Who is running an absolute shit campaign, and who is perhaps not as senile as I thought he might have been a bit ago (I was unaware until recently that he has battled a stutter his whole life, and that explains a couple of things) but is still noticeably not as sharp as he was a decade ago, and has run for President three times now and so far still has not ever managed to finish higher than third in a primary. And he clearly doesn’t understand the nature of the opposition he’s facing, either, because he’s competing with Pete for the Kumbaya naïveté awards. But at least he’s not either of those other two assholes, and of the group of three he’s the one most likely to have some fucking sense and not run for a second term in the first place. Leaving me with …

Bernie and Bloomberg, and fuck both of ’em, I’m not ranking them. I loathe Bernie Sanders. I like his policies but Warren’s are every bit as good as his and she’s not a garbage human and she’s actually got some accomplishments in her life, unlike Mr. Myocardial Infarction Where The Fuck Are Your Taxes, whose life’s work boils down to not having a job until he was 40, naming a couple of post offices, and exactly three black-and-white photos of him being a massive civil rights hero on par with Malcolm X, Jesus and Martin Luther King combined. He will be a desperately shitty President and nothing will be accomplished during his single term in office, if he even lasts that long without dying, because who the hell knows what kind of condition his God damn heart is in; his campaign has lied about it endlessly and he’s refused to release his medical records. Which is not fucking forgivable even before you get to the part where he’s basically a cult leader and I cannot tolerate the idea of an America where the Bernie Bros have political power.

(Am I calling every Bernie voter a cultist? No. I am explicitly not doing that, and if you are a Bernie person and I know you I am also explicitly not calling you personally that. But I stand by the statement nonetheless, particularly in the context of the vile hordes of his people I have to deal with online.)

Bloomberg, on the other hand, is a racist piece of shit and a blood-gorged tick on the nuts of humanity, and he’s carefully and clearly exposing every single thing wrong with what we are still calling our “democracy” for some reason. I have no idea why anyone would ever choose to vote for him, and the fact that he’s registering in the polls at all is a sign of how dangerously and completely fucked we are. If somehow the race is down to these two by the time the Indiana primary rolls around I’m probably just not going to vote. Again, I’ll vote for the nominee even if I hate him, which is looking more likely by the day, but I’ll be damned if I endorse either of these fuckers twice if I don’t absolutely have to.

(EDIT: When and if Bloomberg turns out to be a serial sexual harasser and/or a rapist, which I’m figuring even odds on, he immediately falls off the list altogether. That would be one thing that would definitively shove him under Sanders for me.)