Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Whew! I’ve just spent 12 hours internet free, and I did not like it. It went down yesterday evening, which is my excuse for not having written a blog yesterday evening, but also I found myself with nothing really to do. The internet was down, and so was Netflix. I had no idea if this was just us, or a wider phenomenon. Thoughts of apocalyptic movies flitted through my head.
Woke up this morning, and not only was it still offline but my IT department (that is, my wife) left town for a few days at 6 a.m., she’s going with her mom and a whole bunch of family, and Isabel, to Poland. So, I asked Sam to take a look at it but he couldn’t get it back.
So, just now I tried again, with no real hope of success, and voila, there it is.
Are we too attached? Probably. But there’s no turning back.

There is no doubt that the deck is stacked against Bernie Sanders. All of the billionaires oppose him, all of the biggest corporations oppose him, the press opposes him (because they are big corporations), the Republicans oppose him, and the DNC, the reigning faction of the Democratic party, opposes him.
Nonetheless, he keeps on fighting. He is fighting for the 99% of the American people who are not billionaires, who are not on the board of directors of a large corporations. I believe he will win, but it’s still an uphill battle.
I read an article the other day, and I’m not going to link to it because it’s a bullshit article, about how Warren’s supporters and Sanders’ supporters are completely different demographics. O.K., that’s a thought I’m willing to entertain.
They said that Sanders supporters tend to be young, and fewer of them have college degrees, and they are less wealthy than Warren’s supporters. Also, that women tend to favor Warren, and men tend to favor Bernie. That rankled me a bit, because Bernie has a lot of support among women, and is probably a stronger women’s rights candidate than Elizabeth Warren. He supported Roe v. Wade before Roe v. Wade had even happened, and while Elizabeth Warren was still a Republican.
But, here’s the quote that truly angered me:

Mike Gravel thinks like I do. He has heaped words of praise on Tulsi Gabbard, and obviously thinks she would make a fine president, but he has given his official endorsement to Bernie Sanders.
That’s the way I see it as well. I think that’s the way most Tulsi supporters see it. We are Sanders supporters, too. And most Sanders supporters also like Tulsi.
As I like to say, if your only objection to Bernie is that he’s too old, or you don’t like the way he talks, or you think it is time we had a woman president, you should be supporting Tulsi. If you love Tulsi, but don’t think she can win for one reason or another, you should support Bernie.
If Tulsi drops out of the race, I expect she’ll throw her support to Sanders as well.

If creepy old Joe Biden, unable to get the women’s vote due to the way he treated Anita Hill, drops out of the race he’ll probably endorse a fellow conservative like Kamala Harris. If Kamala Harris eventually drops out of the race, which she really should do after the evisceration she received at Tulsi’s hand in the last debate, she’ll probably endorse Biden, or maybe Warren because the ladies have to stick together. With Warren, it’s a bit of a lose/lose. If she drops out and endorses somebody like Biden or Harris, we Berniecrats will see it as a confirmation that she always was the neoliberal snake we say she is, but if she endorses Bernie…. well, she may gain our forgiveness, but she’ll probably be giving up any aspiration of ever sitting in the oval office, ever. She’s not that young, either. When Buttigieg drops out (yes, I said when, not if) he will probably endorse whoever the DNC wants him to, which will certainly not be Bernie or Tulsi.
When Bennett, Delaney, O’Rourke, that guy from Colorado whose name sounds like chickenfucker, Klobuchar or Gillibrand drops out, nobody will pay too much attention to who they endorse, because they’ve never polled higher than 1% anyway.
That’s all speculation, though, and largely irrelevant. The only endorsement needed is the endorsement of the American people. And I think either Bernie or Tulsi can win that.
Thank you, Mike Gravel, for speaking the truth.

Donald Trump again, because it is a day, has come out with something mind bogglingly stupid, when he offered his condolences to the people of Toledo, Ohio, on their recent mass shooting. He meant Dayton.
But, this time he’s not likely to receive too much criticism for it, or too much press attention, because if you point out that Trump said Toledo instead of Dayton, you have to point out that Joe Biden offered his condolences to all the people in Houston and Michigan (as opposed to El Paso and Ohio).

Joe has had a reputation for gaffes his whole career, and I don’t necessarily think a slip of the lip or confusing one city or state for another should be disqualifying. If that kind of thing happened with a candidate I actually liked, I’d be justifying it and making excuses for them. All American cities look alike, sort of. Ohio is right next to Michigan. Easy mistakes.

But, it does point up a serious problem with him as a candidate. We won’t be able to laugh as long or as loud at Trump’s misspellings and incoherent statements, because Biden makes them, too. We’ll mention one, they’ll mention one. People will be so busy arguing about which one is the bigger drooling moron that Health Care will barely be mentioned.
Just like the whole notion of Trump being a sex craved pervert will not be mentioned as much because there are all those videos of Joe Biden sniffing hair and laying his old man hands on little girls who were kind of skeezed out.

The Democrats need to nominate somebody who is as different from Donald Trump as possible. And Joe Biden is not it.

I am confessing right off the bat that this will be one of my less original blogs. Caitlin Johnstone, a writer and pundit I seriously admire, has already gone into this in more detail than you’re going to see here.
Still, I am going to add my two cents worth, because that’s just the kind of guy I am.
These words were actually spoken, on air and in public, by Bill Maher, who I used to think of as a pretty smart guy. “I’m sick of hearing that Democrats need to excite the base; Trump excites the base. It’s the fatigue, stupid. Let’s make it hard for Donald Trump to play on voters’ fears and let the fatigue win the election for us. We’ll get to the revolution, but remember: put on your oxygen mask before assisting your child.”
That was part of a much longer spiel in which he said we should all get behind Joe Biden even though nobody is enthusiastic about him.
The logic is bizarre. We do have candidates in the race who get people excited. Bernie and Tulsi. Even Elizabeth Warren gets people more excited than Joe Biden, and she’s not really very exciting at all.
Let fatigue win the election for us? When has that ever happened. When has just coasting, and taking no chances, ever won an election? When has it ever won a sporting event, or a war, or the heart of the one you desired? It is not a winning strategy. It is the opposite.
It’s what the Democrats tried in 2016. Hillary didn’t get people excited, even her rabid supporters were urging us to vote for her by saying “a turd sandwich beats a bunch of ground up razor blades.” And, as we all can confirm just by a quick glance at the news, she is not president. She never became president.
The way I see it, there are three candidates on the D side who get people excited. Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, and Andrew Yang.
Yang, with no record at all of elected office, is probably not a good choice. He should run for congress somewhere first, and work his way up.
I’d be happy with either Bernie or Tulsi as the nominee.