Tag: Tim walz

I voted!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

I did get a sticker, but I got Indiana’s boring one, not any of these cool stickers.

I always try to vote early, but I don’t recall ever voting on the very first day I was legally able to before. This year, though? I wanted that shit over with, and I drove from work directly to Mishawaka’s county services building, arriving about 20 minutes before the doors closed. The line for early voting was out the door, and it took about an hour to get my vote cast.

For the most part, my votes will not surprise you.

These six fine ladies, along with two male ticket members:

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz for President and Vice-President
Jennifer McCormick and Terry Goodlin for Governor and Lieutenant Governor
Valerie McCray for Senate
Lori Camp for US House
Destiny Wells for Indiana Attorney General
Maureen Bauer for State House

(They’re up there as a gallery, so it’s possible the order of the pictures doesn’t match the order of the names.)

I voted for the Democrat in all of the local races with one exception: I did not vote for Dave Niezgodski for State Senate, because Dave Niezgodski is a sex pest and I don’t vote for sex pests. I thought briefly about voting for his opponent, but without knowing anything about him, I decided to refrain; honestly, this will be a small enough turnout contest that I feel like simply withholding my vote is enough. I don’t need to actively vote for the other side.

I got to vote against the loathsome Derek “I have a penis” Dieter again, which always pleases me, because fuck that guy.

Purely voting strategically, I voted to retain all of the judges up for vote. I don’t really like voting for judges, to be honest; I rarely know who any of them are and they don’t campaign, and for some reason the Indiana bar’s survey isn’t out yet despite their website promising it’ll be ready by September 30th. I voted to retain because all of them were named by Mitch Daniels or Eric Holcomb, and if they were drummed out of office Mike Braun will likely be picking their replacements, and Mike Braun is a fucking lunatic. Whoever he picks will not be an improvement, so absent any information of use for any of them, retention it is.

The only thing left is the school board, and … our school board candidates are not exactly covering themselves in glory this go-round. My specific candidate for my district isn’t up this year, so I’m just voting at-large, and … ick.

I ended up voting for Jeannette McCullough and George Jones. I know both of them and I am not especially fond of one of them– in fact, I have suggested voting against one of them in the past– but the other choices are worse. In particular, if you’re local enough that this matters to you, I specifically do not endorse Gabrel Kempf and I really really really do not endorse Marcus Ellison. Please do not vote for Marcus Ellison. I have known him for a very long time and I do not want him on the school board.

Related:

Getting from work to the early voting center I used involved about ten miles of driving on a road that was sporting a surprising number of political signs. They’re really not all that common yet, although I’m sure that will change, probably by this weekend. And after a while something struck me about all those signs: first, that there were quite a lot of Harris-Walz signs, more than I really expected, and that most of the lawns with Harris-Walz signs also had other signs for local or state offices.

The interesting thing was the Republican signs. For the most part– and I may take this route again on my way home on Thursday to take a closer look and maybe do some counting– it seemed like lawns that had Trump signs only had Trump signs, and even more curiously, lawns with signs for any other Republican candidate often did not have Trump signs. There would either be a Trump sign by itself or a dozen local and state candidates and no Trump sign.

At the moment, I’m presenting this only as an interesting anecdote and I am not drawing any conclusions. I just want it noted for the record. Feel free to speculate on your own, if you like.

To the windoooooowwwwwwwww

On 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.

More Veepery & some other nonsense

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, Reviews10 Comments

If you had asked me more than four or five days ago, I would have told you that, at least for me personally, Bluesky (follow me!) was beginning to approach the levels of usefulness of pre-Nazi Twitter, but had yet to even come close to pre-Nazi Twitter in its ability to be funny.

This JD Vance couch-fucking shit has absolutely put that concern to bed. It’s been going on for days, and it’s still funny. It may literally never stop being funny.

This might not be true, but I’m pretty sure it is: every single time in the history of the human race someone has asked “But where’s the ______ for white men?” that person has been a racist asshole. This fact made me at least a little nervous about trying to find out if there was, in fact, a White Men for Kamala Harris group. Why was I wondering so specifically? Well, in the last few days we’ve seen a number of other identity-based groups getting off the ground, and White Women for Kamala Harris broke Zoom, and damn it, I wanna play too! And frankly, given that white men are the other guy’s biggest demographic, I think it’s probably perfectly reasonable to suggest that those of us of that persuasion who are very much not in favor of the fascist felon and his merry band of dipshits should be loud and proud of it.

I’m happy to say that White Dudes for Harris is a thing, and our Zoom call is Monday at 8:00 EST, and Pete Buttigieg is gonna be there, and if you’re also a white dude you can sign up for it here. And you should. We’ve got some numbers to live up to, dammit.

The more I hear about Josh Shapiro the less I like him, and Bloomberg is claiming that the Veepstakes is down to him, Mark Kelly, and Tim Walz. Of those three, I am 100%, unreservedly, whole-chestedly, full-throatedly on Team Walz. Let’s do this right, damn it.

You have at least one book review coming and possibly two, but just in case I don’t get to one or either of them: R.J. Barker’s Tide Child trilogy is really damn good, and unless it utterly fails to stick the ending– I’m about 100 pages out– Rachel Caine’s The Hunter is an absolute return to form on her part and I’m happy as hell to see it.

Also, despite previous reservations, I may actually be seeing Deadpool and Wolverine in theaters tomorrow, marking my first in-theater Marvel movie since 2019. That will almost certainly receive a review if I manage to actually get out to see it.

How’s your Saturday going?

Veepstakes II: I Know Nothing edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

Naturally, USA Today leaked a list of people who, supposedly, have been asked to submit vetting materials to the Harris campaign. I didn’t buy it at first because neither Buttigieg nor Beshear were on it, and naturally now I can’t find the article, but one way or another Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, was on the list.

My immediate response was that he was too old, but he’s 60; I’d have put him a little older than that at first glance. Since then I’ve seen some videos of the guy talking, though, and … yeah, he’ll do just fine, especially if Buttigieg and Beshear are actually out of the running. I found other articles on USA Today while looking for the original one that indicated Buttigieg and Beshear were in the running, so again, I know nothingTM and grains of salt and all that shit, but I can definitely fuck with this guy.

That’s all I’ve got for today; I did a few hours of yard work and I still want to die. Check my man out, though.

(LATE EDIT: I forgot to mention that he was also a high school social studies teacher, in a public school district no less, for ten years. Dare I hope that I might have an administration with sane educational policy before I retire or die?)