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Having a bit of trouble finding a good topic to write my blog about this Sunday morning. Didn’t write one last night as I was falling asleep in front of the screen. It wasn’t really late, I was just a bit too high. So, it sometimes happens. I tell myself that in the morning, with a clearer head, a topic will present itself.
Usually it works, today not so much. There was an article in the Washington Post, owned by the richest man in the world who hates Bernie Sanders because Bernie Sanders wants him to pay taxes, that directly called Bernie a communist. I wasted about half an hour reading the article and checking a few key points in Google and had a humdinger of a blog ready to go, with zingers at the end of each very short and pointed paragraph, but then noticed that the article was from 2016.
They’re saying the same shit today, but I’ll wait for a more up to date article before attacking on that point.
Should write something about the New Hampshire debate, but didn’t watch it live and haven’t really heard enough about it.
My bright news of the morning was somebody on Facebook (who I should actually know in real life, but have never met), who I’d previously had some discussions with about how she liked Pete, said she was considering Bernie because her children had asked her to.
I imagine that scenario playing out in millions of families across the country, and it makes me feel good all over.

O.K., I suppose it really is time I stopped talking about Iowa and moved on. I’m not going to ‘forget about it’ like some people are suggesting, they would like us to forget any crooked thing the DNC does, but we need to talk about something else, there’s no more to be done or said about it at this point anyway, and Bernie did win Iowa, largely due to the vigilance and perseverance of Bernie’s Iowa people.
But, since it seems to have elevated cheatin’ Pete into an actual contender, it’s totally fair game to scrutinize the Blue Lives Matter former mayor of South Bend, Indiana a little bit closer. Which is why it’s so totally weird that he would do this thing here.

I mean, he must have realized that people would spot that, because Berner’s with computers following the election with the intensity of a computer game is a very real group of people, and kind of out to get him at the moment. Anyway, as per the link, he added applause in the studio, and then aired a little segment of a town hall speech as an ad. But, in the original speech, there had been no applause.
Now, TV uses that all the time, and canned laughter, it’s standard. But when you do it in a presidential election, that is super lame. Back in the days when people expected a bit of a higher standard from their politicians, that would have been disqualifying.
Coupled with Shadowgate, and the thing a while back where he said a bunch of people in South Carolina had endorsed him and they all said “Whoa, hang on there a second, guy, we didn’t endorse you, we never said anything even close to endorsing you and we’re not even sure we like you,” a pattern is starting to emerge. And it isn’t pretty.

Let me start with the positive. Bernie won Iowa. It took a lot of yelling and screaming and fighting with people who are supposed to be in the same party to do it, but Bernie won Iowa. It took him having his own app, built in house, to combat the Shadow app the IDP paid $60,000, and Buttigieg paid $42,500, for, but Bernie won Iowa.
Now for the negative. The worst thing about this whole debacle, in my view, is what it says about the American voters. Pete Buttigieg just got caught, red handed, cheating his ass off, and he got an 8 point bump in New Hampshire.
Now, I’m not too worried about Pete winning New Hampshire, or any future races, but you never know. Voting machines can be hacked, probably even easier than a caucus vote where there are lots of witnesses, but team Bernie is apparently being much more vigilant, and combative, than they were in 2016, so that’s a good thing.
But, Pete cheated. That should be the main thing people remember about Iowa. Unfortunately, only the Bernie people see it that way.

A lot of people seem ready to just forget about Iowa and move on. I’m not, quite. First, it’s not over. They’re up to 80 something percent as I write this, but it’s been two days. Then, since there have been so many questions about Shadow, like what is it, what does it do, how does it do it, and why did Pete Buttigieg pay it $42,500 dollars?, that it seems only fair that they take another half day to compare the figures from Shadow with the paper record from the precinct county chair and see if they match. Maybe then they could all publish these figures online, in a clear format, precinct by precinct, so people who were actually there could compare and if everything matched, computer, paper, memory, then we’d have to say “Well, even if it seems strange that they blocked the Des Moines Register poll, and then that premature victory speech with almost zero reporting, I guess we have to admit that Pete didn’t actually cheat.”
If there are discrepancies, and there will be because there already have been, then they need to be corrected for sure, but also those responsible need to be called out.
Then we need to have this app examined. Tested. Analyzed. Whatever you do with an app to figure out just exactly how it was switching votes.

O.K., the Iowa precinct caucuses were a huge fuck up. There are a couple of silver linings, but I’ll get to those at the end.
The problem, so they say, was an app that didn’t work properly. Now, I admit I don’t know anything about the design and development of apps. Not a computer person. But an app that just registers the number of votes in each precinct when a precinct chairman keys them in strikes me as a pretty simple thing. It’s basically a spreadsheet.
But the Iowa Democratic Party paid a company named Shadow (first suggestion – don’t do business with anybody called ‘Shadow.’ They are actually TRYING to convey an image of shadiness, darkness, secrecy, etc.. Things done in the shadows are not good things) $63,000 for the app, so they wouldn’t have to use the old, primitive (but entirely functional) method of counting the votes on paper and then phoning them in. Oh, and did I mention that Shadow is managed by a bunch of people from Hillary’s 2016 campaign? Probably worth mentioning. Then, Pete Buttigieg also chipped in $42,500. I can’t imagine why a candidate would do that, but I suppose he had reasons.
Then, with less than 1% of the precincts reporting, Pete gives a speech claiming victory. While he was doing that, a lot of precincts were trying to enter their numbers and having no luck, because nobody had thought to actually test the app or anything like that, and when they just tried to phone the numbers in, they wound up on hold for hours.
So, things were looking bad. But, Bernie had had observers in every single precinct. People were recording votes and taking pictures. So, the results were delayed, and aren’t even all in and official yet, but it’s clear that Bernie Sanders has won Iowa. That’s part of the silver lining.
People are angry at the party and many are calling for Tom Perez’ (DNC chairman) resignation. I doubt that will happen, although it should. Also, Pete has been exposed as kind of a cheating low life. I don’t know that he actually did anything illegal and in today’s morally compromised politics, he might not be forced from the race. But, he just might. At any rate, he is going to be known as Pete the Cheat from this point forward. It was bad. The other part of the silver lining has nothing to do with the app, and was not too surprising. Biden got crushed. Didn’t break 15%. And he probably won’t in New Hampshire, either. He’s toast.
So, essentially the race is now between Sanders and Warren, and Warren tends to lose voters as fast as she gains them. Bernie’s going to win this thing.