Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

The headline read “Daily Kos Presidential Primary Poll: Corn-Free Edition” and the picture showed the table where the kernel poll – in which everybody over the age of 18 can vote by putting a kernel of corn into a glass jar- was taking place at the Iowa State Fair, and it was pretty obvious that Bernie was kicking butt.
So, I clicked on the article. After opening with a few disparaging remarks about corn and the great state of Iowa, where I’m from, they got to “Here at the Daily Kos we count clicks and not kernels,” as if that’s any better, and they showed the results of their own poll.
They never once mentioned the results of the kernel poll, which I thought was kind of bullshit, because they made it their headline and headline picture.
So, I looked at a couple of other sources, where they did not have Bernie winning the kernel poll either, again in contradiction to the picture. Technically possible, I suppose. Buttigieg’s jar had almost as many kernels as Bernie. You couldn’t actually see Biden’s or Warren’s jars in the photo. But, I suspect they just fiddled the results, because they’re doing that all the time, blatantly now.
Then there was the New York Times reporter, who wrote that ‘Bernie walked around the fairground and didn’t talk to anybody,’ which was obviously not true. His speech drew a bigger crowd than any other candidate. I suppose maybe she meant he didn’t stop and have individual conversations with a lot of people, but I saw a video where he was talking to a reporter, and there was a huge crowd of people walking with them.
It would be nice if we had ethical, unbiased sources for our news, but at least we should have a media which is not flat out lying to us all the time.

But, we don’t.

The DNC and the MSM seem absolutely determined to keep Tulsi Gabbard out of the next debate. First, they raised the requirements. After she got her 65,000 individual donors, spread across the correct number of states, to get into the first debates, and after she knocked Tim Ryan out of the race and totally eviscerated Kamala Harris, they decided to raise the standards again, saying that candidates must poll above 2% in at least four ‘qualifying’ polls, but I guess the DNC determines what is a qualifying poll, and they’ve only had one of them since the debates, both of which ended with Tulsi Gabbard being the candidate most people searched on Google.
Now, there could be a couple different reasons why she was the most searched on Google, admittedly. Not everybody that searched is automatically going to vote for her. It could be they searched because she was a candidate they’d never heard of before, which right there is a sign that the MSM is not doing their job. It could be she was the most searched because she was the best looking woman on the stage, and a lot of people think like that. Or, it could be she was the most searched because people heard what she said, liked it, and wanted to know more about her. That’s why Google suspended her ad account, so that people who googled her wouldn’t see any of her ads, and that’s why she’s suing Google for $50 million.
So, it’s pretty clear that there is some bias against Tulsi among people with serious money and power.
Which brings us to the polls. Why aren’t the polls done on a regular, predictable schedule, by reputable and accountable agencies who aren’t beholden to one party or the other, who publish their numbers and methodology and are totally transparent?
How can they say “You have to break 2% in 4 polls,” and then not have any polls.
And how in the world did people like Amy Klobuchar and Corey Booker qualify? I don’t see any huge, grass-roots movement for them like I see for Tulsi. I don’t see them putting forth any message that would get people excited. Quite honestly, it seems to me that these constantly changing requirements are designed specifically to knock her out of the race.
If Tulsi is not on the next debate stage, and Kamala Harris is, there will be rage.

I have a lot of visual artists as friends on my Facebook page, partly because for a while I had a project going where I would use paintings as prompts for my poems, and the page still exists although I haven’t worked at it actively for quite a while. Partly also because I seriously admire people who can paint, or draw, or sculpt, because those are things I’m not good at. I also have an admiration which borders on reverence for musicians, for the same reason.
So, this morning I saw a painting of a door and the artist said this was the 3rd time she’d painted that door, several years apart. My first thought was ‘why?’ but she explained that, saying she ‘saw something different in it every time. It was an old door, to some kind of shed, on a farm, maybe. Peeling paint, some of the wood worn away from the bottom.
I wanted to leave some relevant comment, because I always do, and the best I could come up with was ‘a door is always a metaphor,’ which is true. Doors are portals into hidden spaces, doors get slammed in our faces, doors separate one reality from another, closed doors are what secret deeds get done behind, and then there are the doors of perception.
There are lots of things, like doors, that get used as metaphors for lots of different stuff. Windows, for example. Mirrors. Streams. Trains. Stars. Roads.

You name it, really, everything is a metaphor for something else.

Nobody is mourning him much. He had an enviable life, if not a good one. He got to fly around on his fancy private plane, live in mansions, eat in the best restaurants, and boink lots of super hot teenage girls.
People I know seem to be of two opinions: either he was murdered in his cell (the best comment I’ve seen was “If you’re surprised by Jeffrey Epstein’s suicide, imagine how surprised HE must have been”), or that he was whisked away to a desert island somewhere, to live out the rest of his life in peace and comfort, like a witness protection program for billionaires.
I doubt we will ever know. Of course, authorities could dispel the desert island notion with a thorough autopsy and a DNA comparison with any living relatives, which would be quite different than they did when Obama “killed” “Osama bin Laden” and just threw the body overboard somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean, because that’s “Islamic tradition.” But, I’m sure they won’t.

Among those who think he was murdered, some are blaming the Clintons, partly because of the extremely long list of people who have committed suicide or accidentally died or been mysteriously murdered (which murders always went unsolved), and some are pointing out that Trump was also a close friend of Jeffrey Epstein, and thus had motive.
I don’t really care. No Clinton will ever hold office again and we’ve got so many more immediate, more important things to condemn Trump on.
So, let’s have a good laugh, let’s have some fun with conspiracy theories, and then let’s get back to talking about how to save the Earth, close the concentration camps, give everybody health care, and make the world a better place for everybody in it.

Normally, I don’t like to beat up on a politician over a misstatement, and it is possible to interpret Joe Biden’s latest gaffe “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids” as an innocent error, perhaps even a good thing just wrapped up in the wrong words.
After all, it’s true that many poor kids are bright and talented and deserving of a better chance than they are getting in America’s public schools, and it’s true that a lot of those kids are black. (although there are poor white kids as well, who are not going to the best schools they could be)
If I felt that Joe Biden were actually reaching out and talking about improving our school system to give children better opportunities, I might actually be more supportive.
But, he’s not. He was a Senator forever, and vice president for eight years, and he didn’t make a name for himself as a fighter for education. Instead, he is the guy who wants to lock everybody up for smoking marijuana. He is as bad as a Republican when he suggests that violent computer games are a cause of mass shootings.
Come the general election, if Joe is the nominee, it will not just be ‘a vote between the lesser of two evils’ but a vote between ‘who is the stupidest old man likely to say stupid things in public?’ and it is a tossup who would win.
A tossup is not good enough odds. It is critically important that senile old Joe not be the candidate.