new hampshire – Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com

New Hampshire’s happening tonight, and as of this moment there’s about 11% of the vote in on the Republican side and the shitgibbon is ahead, by a fairly paltry amount. I have no sense whatsoever of where in New Hampshire Nikki Haley might be expecting her votes to come from, so trying to drill down at all doesn’t make any sense, and it’s probably a good time to remind everyone that I don’t know anything at all about politics or how people think, because I still don’t understand how this illiterate, atheist con man got the Republican nomination the first time, much less what’s looking like the third.

(EDIT: The AP called the race while I was writing this; at this point, I really feel like all we have left is to hope the fucker dies before the election. Preferably as soon as possible. Tonight would be cool. God’s in the bathroom again, apparently.)*

Meanwhile, Biden– who is not on the ballot– is pulling 74% of the vote against Phillips and Williamson. If this isn’t enough to convince a certain slice of what ought to be the Democratic electorate that there is not actually any desire on the part of actual voting Democrats for any other candidate, I don’t know what the hell could do it. I suspect these people, much like the shitgibbon’s cultists, are similarly impervious to reason, but we’ll see.

(SECOND EDIT: While I was writing the first edit, the AP called the race for Biden, too. Which is deeply fucking hilarious. Time for Phillips and Williamson to go.)

Meanwhile: snow day today, and freezing rain is being replaced by Hell Fog, and I’m fully anticipating a two-hour delay tomorrow, because quarter-mile visibilities and kids walking to school don’t mix. There won’t be a close, but my district has had Fog Days in the past, and two-hour delays don’t count against us the way actual closures do. This might bite me in the ass if I have to go in and plan a day on no notice, but … yeah, I’ll risk it.

* I do actually think Biden can and will beat him again, but I’d prefer to not have to find out if I’m right about that. The fucker exists on cheeseburgers and his brain is made of pudding. Come on, God.

I got out of bed this morning– note that I do not say “woke up”– convinced that I had not gotten even a single second of sleep the previous night, then upon dragging myself into the shower realized that I could not have had no sleep since I remembered at some point having either a really vivid hallucination or a nightmare involving losing track of both my cat and my son at a convention at the same time.

It was a bad night, is what I’m saying, and why I’m sitting in front of my computer with a huge mug of coffee in front of me instead of going directly back to bed like a sensible person is beyond me.

The insomnia lately is starting to really get to me. I suspect it’s a combination of a whole goddamn lot of different things, some I can do something about and some I can’t, but I really don’t want to get to the point where I have to start taking a sleep aid before bed. I experimented with melatonin for a little while but it appears to have stopped working.

The Iowa caucuses are tonight, meaning that I need to figure out a way with my current TV setup to keep CNN on in the background all night. I look forward to the trauma this will cause to my son, who is used to thinking of the TV as a thing that belongs to him; my wife and I never watch any of “our” shows until he’s in bed. I talked about this a bit last week; I find Iowa and New Hampshire’s stranglehold on our electoral process profoundly undemocratic and deeply offensive on a number of levels, and the faster we yank away control of our presidential nomination process from two of the smallest, whitest, most rural states in the country, the better. The Iowa caucuses are particularly odious because they are so complicated and take so fucking long; at least in New Hampshire all you do is show up and vote. The caucuses are designed to keep people away.

I’m making no predictions on either side; the Democratic race is too close to call anyway, and as I’ve said before I don’t particularly care who of the three wins. I don’t have a dog in this fight just yet. The polls seem to indicate that Trump will run away with the Republican side; I am going to require proof that his base understands how voting works before I believe it. I remain convinced that the majority of his fans are people who never vote and that further everyone is better off for them having made that decision.

I mean, consider for a moment that because he lives in Iowa, this ignorant bumblefuck’s vote matters more than yours does:

“He does the national debt on purpose.”

For fuck’s sake.

I blocked his name out on purpose; needless to say, other than that this isn’t an altered image. The article it came from is here, and a more frightening block of ignorance, superstition and assholery you will be hard-pressed to find today.

Their votes matter more than yours do.

Fuck every last bit of the primary process.

Also, just because I feel like mentioning it: if you are among the population of people (loosely known as “nearly everyone who has ever met or seen him”) who thinks that Ted Cruz has one of the most punchable faces you have ever seen in your life and can’t believe that he ever got anyone to vote for him, be aware of this. I did a little bit of research on his (sole) Senate election yesterday. He came in second in the Republican primary, getting 34% of the vote and 479K votes– in, again, Texas, which tells you how tiny the turnout was. There was no candidate with 50%, so there was a runoff between him and the guy who came in first. In the runoff he got 631K votes with Sarah Palin’s endorsement, back when that mattered– but at that point he was the Republican nominee and beating the Democrat statewide in Texas isn’t actually that hard. So, 27 million people in Texas and he got elected because of the votes of literally 2% of them.

So if you’re wondering how an obvious lizard-person like him managed to sneak into the Senate when, again, everyone he knows visibly and openly hates his guts, that’s how: he held an appointed post as Texas solicitor general that got him some visibility, managed to Jesus-nut his way past two percent of the population of Texas, and then people uncritically pulling the R lever got him the rest of the way.