Tag: news

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.

Bad mental health night

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics2 Comments

I live in a country where one of the two major political parties is running a rapist for the presidency and basically held a white supremacist rally last night, and where one of the major newspapers has decided to make it its mission to cause the candidate for the other party to drop out, all else be damned.

I fucking hate it here. I hate it here.

One more tiny Biden detail

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

I don’t have a ton I want to talk about tonight, but I did discover a piece of information earlier today that’s relevant to yesterday’s post and the Biden conversation in general. It occurred to me that we haven’t heard any talk about superdelegates during this primary. Now, on one hand, I wouldn’t expect to hear much about them, on account of there’s only one credible candidate and he’s the incumbent. But the fact that I hadn’t heard anything was interesting.

Well, it turns out the rules changed in 2020, mostly, I assume, because of the vast amount of bitching from Certain Parties in the last several elections about the superdelegates. So here’s how this works: I was correct about the pledged delegates. There’s just under 4,000 of them total and Biden needs a majority of them (which he already has) to be nominated for the Presidency on the first ballot.

On the first ballot.

This is the bit I didn’t know: there are superdelegates this year– 739 of them, to be exact, and technically they’re called “automatic delegates” now, but everyone knows they’re superdelegates– mostly, if you don’t know, elected Democratic officials and Party People. The automatic delegates do not get to vote on the first ballot. But if there isn’t a nominee after the first ballot? They can, which means the total number of delegates increases, which means the number of delegates needed for the nomination also increases.

I pointed out yesterday that even if an unwilling-to-leave Biden didn’t win on the first ballot, the pressure campaign on anyone who voted against him to change their vote in Round 2 would be extreme, particularly if he only missed the majority by a few votes. And to be honest, I feel like the sudden injection of hundreds of superdelegates probably works in the sitting president’s favor, meaning if he didn’t win on the first ballot, he’d likely win on the second. This is a big fucking question mark, though, especially for any scenario where Biden does decide to drop out and not immediately anoint a successor.

I promise, unless something staggeringly interesting happens tonight (Jesus please no) I’ll talk about video games or books or something tomorrow.

In which I explain (more Biden questions)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics5 Comments

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.

Maybe you’re wondering, probably not

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

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.

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.

In which Taylor Swift did it again

On By Luther M. SilerIn Music1 Comment

I pre-ordered Midnights, Taylor Swift’s last studio album, only to discover when I got up on release day that she’d released a previously-unannounced deluxe “3 AM” edition with several extra tracks three fucking hours after the base version of the album released. She waited three hours and then released an entire new version of the album while I have to assume the vast majority of the people who had preordered were still fucking asleep and hadn’t had time to even listen to Midnights yet.

When The Tortured Poets Department got announced, with a pre-order available, although you could, if you wanted to, spend $1.99 to download something or another that was eight seconds long, I decided there were probably going to be shenanigans afoot again and decided not to pre-order the thing this time. It didn’t look like she was releasing any singles anyway, and she didn’t.

iTunes insisted that the thing was coming out on the 21st, so I was a little surprised when my wife let me know yesterday that it was out already. And that I’d been exactly right– Taylor had pulled the exact same bullshit move again, only worse— that now the new version was a fucking double album, and was clearly the version that she intended to release, for a dollar more than the original pre-order price, and a different cover, and yep, you can still order the original, half-length version if you want to … and every single person who pre-ordered it got the inferior version, because no fucker anywhere knew the “Anthology” version even existed prior to it being released a few hours after the fake-out version.

I have come around on her music after many years of loathing her, but holy shit, is this a bullshit move, and the people it’s hurting the most are her biggest fans. I can’t believe I’m not hearing more about it; maybe it’s a function of the fact that most people stream nowadays. I don’t know what proportion of her fanbase is still buying digital music rather than streaming it. One way or another, I feel like she– and by definition, Apple, as well as whoever else might have been involved in this– owes her fans either a fucking way to get a refund or a way to buy the extra tracks for a dollar. This is an absolute fucking asshole move.

Never, ever, pre-order a Taylor Swift album, kids.

(I haven’t listened to it yet, by the way. The new Pearl Jam album is, after four more listens in addition to the two in the theater, absolutely fucking phenomenal, and it’s absorbed my attention. I’ll give it a spin this weekend sometime.)

A couple quick thoughts on immigration, for no particular reason

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

I’ve only talked about immigration a few times here, but at least one of those times is the site’s biggest post ever, so I don’t know if that means it counts more? Maybe it does. One way or another, my opinion about immigration, nutshelled, has not changed: Let ’em in. I don’t care why they’re here, I don’t care why they want to be here, I don’t care if they’re in my community or my school because they already are, and I don’t care if it costs me personally some minuscule amount of tax money. Anybody who wants to come be an American should be able to come be an American. That might include some number of bad people. I don’t care; we have plenty of those already so a few more won’t matter. I trust any number of immigrants more than any similar number of Republicans anyway. Let’ em all in.

But that’s not the point of this post, which is really only a minor thing but it popped into my head the other day and I don’t have Twitter any longer so when something like this happens I have no real choice but to put it here: it is really easy to be incredibly disingenuous about immigration if that’s what you decide you want to do, and one specific way people are being disingenuous about immigration keeps getting stuck in my craw.

If we’re using “arrests at the border” as our metric for whether someone is doing a Good Job on immigration or not, the good guys automatically lose. And I’m deliberately phrasing that statement in a nonpartisan manner because it can go either way.

Arrests are up? We’re catching more criminals vs look how many more people are pouring over the border.

Arrests are down? They’re not bothering to enforce our laws vs people aren’t trying to come in illegally any longer because our laws work.

The actual numbers and the actual reality of the situation does not matter one bit when you’re using “arrests” as a metric because you can make any change in arrests good news for your side. 

Let them in, house and educate them, let them have safe, legal jobs, and provide them with a path to citizenship. I don’t care if it costs me money. Put an aircraft carrier on eBay or some shit. Have a bake sale. I don’t give a fuck.

The end.