The Conceding Conceit

I can’t figure out why whether a losing candidate concedes or doesn’t concede an election gets so much attention in the press. It’s not like conceding a requirement or anything… If I had just been called as winner of some elected position and my opponent was refusing to concede, I’d be like, “Dude, I don’t care because I don’t need your permission. I’m just going to go about the business of transitioning into the office because The People just told me I could. What you think about it no longer matters. Now act like the dildo you are and go fuck yourself.”

OK, I might omit that last part if I was having a good day.

Conceding an election is just a matter of class. One either has it or doesn’t, and for the ones who aren’t conceding their elections now or have unnecessarily delayed, we pretty much saw that coming, didn’t we? That’s the world we now occupy… every election is rigged unless the Republican wins. Heads, I win, Tails, you lose. What else would you expect when a party is led by a carnival barker?

It’s all part of their playbook now: Deny, delay, double down, accuse, excuse, confuse, throw boos, never admit, never concede, never apologize, never back down, and so on. The thought that a Republican was at fault for or wrong about anything is grounds for being canceled from MT Green’s Friends List.

It must be nice to never be wrong. I’m sure that makes life a lot easier that way. I just wonder what their spouses think about being with such epitomes of perfection. I can see it now:

“Why did you leave the seat up?”

“I didn’t.”

“Well I sure didn’t.”

“Are you sure it’s actually up?”

“Yes, there it is… up.”

“I didn’t do it.”

“There’s no one else home.”

“Are you sure? Someone could have come in and rigged the seat.”

“No one was here, I’d have seen them.”

“You could be lying.”

“Why would I lie?

“To make me look bad.”

“Leaving the seat up makes you look bad.”

“But I didn’t leave the seat up.”

“You had to have done it, there’s no one else that could have.”

“Hunter Biden did it.”

“Why would you think that?”

“Rudy Giuliani said so. He found this note on the ground outside the Four Seasons (garden supply and bait store) that said, ‘Hunter, is this your laptop: check YES or NO.’ 

"But it's checked "NO."

"They lied."

Yes, once they convene next year’s Congress, we have a new dead horse to flog: Hunter Biden’s laptop.

Talk about a nothing-burger. It was nothing when it surfaced and it’s still nothing. At this point, more Republicans had their hands on that laptop than on a stripper’s ass at an oil lobbyist’s island junket.

This whole issue is a joke, the next “Benghazi,” specifically engineered to be a zombie scandal that can be trotted out whenever some bad press is needed. Given the deathly silence from Republicans regarding the insane amount of cash with which JarVanka left the White House, they should know better than to bang on that particular drum.

Unless they can explain the difference between these two cases and show why the laptop is worth investigating and the demon spawn’s documented money-grab is not, they need to STFU.

But they won’t. That would require a sense of shame and self-awareness and they have neither.

The "Me" Gap

There was a story out a couple weeks back that exemplifies why Republicans are having trouble reaching anyone besides the rich, the racists, and the religious right. The gist of it was that while Marjorie Taylor Green was taking questions during a local call-in show, inferred that if a woman was no longer having children, she was no longer entitled to an opinion on abortion. (Unless, I presume, she was against it.)

The caller confronted MTG, saying “My body is my body and I don’t want the government telling me what to do with my body." (In other words, the conservative argument against vaccinations.)

“I don’t think you’re having children anytime soon,” she said, apparently based on the sound of the caller’s voice. “So I appreciate your interest in women’s rights, but killing an unborn baby is not a woman’s right, and that’s not health care.”

She went on to say that we “need to focus on the future of America, and that’s our children… and the unborn, they’re our future also… So let’s focus on protecting their lives instead of being focused on the lie that abortion is women’s health care because that’s not health care.”

Green, who if her eyes were any closer together, could use a microscope as reading glasses, dropped off the line as soon as the host went to a commercial break.

The article went on to point out that by these new standards, no man may have a valid point either, nor would MTG herself, so she may not have thought this through. Color me surprised. [Massive eye roll]

There’s a lot to unpack here, and as usual, I’ll start with the obvious point that people calling a grape-sized conglomeration of cells a “baby” is as misleading as it is wrong. But that’s the ploy; to get people thinking about a chubby, cooling little baby and not a tiny organism without a fully-formed heart or brain.

Whether it’s a “person” yet is a highly debatable and moral question without a consensus answer. Having one group of people use their personal religion to claim the answer one way and force everyone else to act accordingly, non-believers and otherwise is selfish, aggressive, and incredibly self-important. And it totally lacks anything close to empathy, other than to the non-sentient clump of cells. I’ll come back to this point in a minute.

When she mentions “the lie that abortion is women’s health care because that’s not health care,” all I can say is tell that to the woman with an ectopic pregnancy, or the girl who’s bleeding inside and has to wait for her doctor to confer with a team of lawyers to figure out if he’s allowed to go in and stop the bleeding to save her life. Or the woman who has any number of health issues that make having a baby dangerous to life. OR the woman who is carrying a baby who will be born with debilitating medical conditions that bode for a short and painful life. OR the woman who just doesn’t want to endure the physical changes a pregnancy will inflict on her body, just to appease some far-off group of people who have literally nothing to do with the people in question. It is absolutely health care, and no religious moralizing will change that.

The real root of the problem, as I see it, is a massively inflated sense of self-worth in conjunction with a complete lack of empathy. They can’t put themselves in the shoes of someone whose life experiences don’t align with their own and are so supremely self-important that they can’t fathom that their own take on the matter isn’t definitive.

“I believe it so YOU have to act accordingly.” That’s what it comes down to.

When you look at it, selfishness and a lack of empathy IS the Republican platform. Name one of their principles that aren’t dripping with it. Wait, maybe we better make that “policy” points… I don’t think they have any true principles left that they won’t violate if a Democrat wants to exercise one. They say they favor States' rights until a state wants to enact some kind of gun control. They say they’re in favor of bodily autonomy in the right not to get vaccinated, but neglect a woman’s bodily autonomy in forcing them to reproduce against their will. They were in favor of insurance mandates up until Obama proposed one.

This was from the 2016 election but is no less true now.

But back to my previous point, every GOP position could be defined as selfishness and lack of empathy:

·         Abortion: You need to have that baby because I think you should for my own religious reasons. What YOU want must defer to what I believe.

·         Birth control: Same language as above.

·         Same-sex marriage: YOU two can’t get married because it offends ME.

·         Immigration: If YOU enter this country there will be too many people, too many foreign-speaking brown people, to continue to function as things are.

·         Assistance to the poor: Why should YOU get help that I didn’t get? Yes, I know I want the minimum wage to stay at $7.25 but if we raise it, you might get a job making what I make. Better for you to work three jobs.

·         Student loan forgiveness: I paid my loan off (or didn’t get one in the first place), so you should have to, regardless that the terms now are much more predatory than they were years ago.

·         Taxes: Taxes should always be rock-bottom and loopholes should be vast. Let the middle class pick up the burden. (So sayeth the top 1% who then convince the non-rich Republicans that it’s somehow better for everyone if the rich avoid taxes, via the media outlets they own.)

·         Health care: Why should I be mandated to get insurance just to bring the cost of everyone’s insurance down?

·         Guns: I want to be able to buy any gun I want whenever I want, which is always immediately. I don’t care how many other men, women, and children get killed, I want a big gun that goes BOOM BOOM BOOM. No background check, no required training, no safety measures, just ammo and firepower. If someone else gets shot, they should have gotten their own guns.

·         War in Ukraine: Why should WE finance their defense against marauding invaders? They’re not invading US… We could use the money to help people here. It’s beside the point that we Republicans never support domestic spending that doesn’t first get skimmed by the rich.

·         Electric cars: I want a car that goes VROOM VROOM. I don’t care what happens to the planet. Climate change is a hoax anyway. Like I care if Florida and the Carolina coasts get wiped off the map. It’s just a natural cycle. I know this because that’s what they say on Fox “News.”

·         Any halfway house, rehab center, mass transit stop, or affordable housing complex: Not in MY backyard.

Sadly, that last response is not limited to Republicans, it may as well be the national motto.

The Red Trickle

I guess we can breathe a sigh of relief now, can’t we? I mean, the worst didn’t come to pass. There was no “Red Wave,” and considering history and expectations, the Republicans got their asses handed to them. We may not keep the House, but it’ll be close, and we already have the status quo in the Senate. If Warnock can pull it out in the Georgia runoff against his brain-damaged opponent, we won’t have to keep sharing committee leadership for the next two years. And we won’t have to worry about any national abortion bans or Social Security cuts rolling out any time soon.

I was worried, though, when I started watching the returns come in after the polls started closing at 8:00. Right off the bat, they announced a handful of Florida districts that were flipped from Blue to Red. Even though they were clear that it was the planned result of an effective gerrymander, it sure looked like a formidable obstacle to overcome. But as the night went on, prospects got progressively rosier.

Things got positively giddy when it first came out that noxious Rep. Lauren Boebert was losing badly. The thought of her washing out after a single term was a delicious prospect, although sadly, she now has a razor-thin lead as of this writing, with several thousand mail-in ballots left to count.

But considering that this Red district had recently been redrawn to make it even Redder, the fact that it’s even close is a real indictment. This race wasn’t even supposed to be competitive.

I think maybe people are tired of being in the sideshow that passes for Republican politics right now, where those who know the least yell the loudest. That, in a nutshell, (and I mean that literally) is the modern GOP right there.

Obviously, the Dobbs decision was another major motivator for people, especially women, to vote Democratic. Personally, you could strip away every other angle in every race and this would be a difference-maker for me. I would never vote for anyone who wasn’t pro-choice, no matter what the office was or what else they brought to the table, and I don’t even have a uterus.

And it’s telling that in every state referendum related to reproductive health, the safeguarding of abortion won big each time, even in a blood-Red state like Kentucky. If Republicans have any shred of political self-preservation, they need to abandon anti-abortionism as an action item. Some, like a few of the pragmatists running things, might. But there are still a great many “true believers,” (like Mike Pence) who will chase this issue into their own political graves.

So the thing is, we have to remember that even if Republicans take abortion out of the foreground, it will still be running in the background. They may not campaign on limiting abortion, but that doesn’t mean they won’t act on it as soon as they get the chance.

Another reason being identified in the media for Republicans’ poor performance, last week, was the “youth vote.” This election season, young people showed up at the polls and voted for Democrats. So what do Republicans want to do about that?

You’d think that maybe they’d try to come up with a message that reaches young adults, something positive, something they can believe in. Instead, the Republican response was to restrict young people from voting by raising the voting age. Granted, this was coming from the lunatic fringe rather than the Senate, but it shows the mindset. And it tracks with their M.O. regarding other constituent blocs with whom they don’t do well. They can’t forbid Black or poor people from voting but they can require IDs that are expensive and hard to obtain and make voting as time-consuming as possible, to deter their votes in more inconspicuous ways.

I saw a news article online where Senator Rick Scott had some thoughts on what happened:

He said: "I think we've got to reflect now. What didn't happen? I think we didn't have enough of a positive message. We said everything about how bad the Biden agenda was. It's bad, the Democrats are radical, but we have to have a plan of what we stand for."

Rick Scott, at his side job.

I hate to break it to the Senator, but he knows they had a plan because he published one, and it included cutting Social Security and Medicare! People don’t like when politicians mess around with their health and financial well-being. In fact, I’m amazed that anyone over 50 would even consider voting Republican.* Not with retirement visible on the horizon…

*Aside from those rich enough not to need Social Security. And even then I’d be surprised that they’d leave unclaimed money on the table. It’s not like they understand the concept of “enough.”

It’s no surprise that the Republicans were shocked by these results. That’s what happens when you start believing your own bullshit. That’s what happens when you only get news from your own little Fox “News” bubble and everyone tells you that you’re right and everyone else is wrong, and there’s no need to investigate any further.

Republicans campaigned on largely imaginary issues, like inflation. Yes, inflation is real but they never came up with any ideas to address it. All they did was blame Biden for it, despite that there is similar inflation in countries all over the world, far from anything Joe Biden ever did.

Same with crime as an issue. Yes, there’s crime, but there always was and always will be, including in Red states (which had some of the country’s highest crime numbers.) But what did they say they were going to do to fight crime? (I’m assuming the universal answer was “more police, more guns, longer jail sentences.”) A lot of us remember that over-policing has been a bit of a problem in some areas.

Republicans campaigned on a house of cards and were surprised when it all collapsed. Go figure.

Senator Scott needs to also consider that his team likes to run idiots for office. Nice, young, obedient idiots who will attack on command and then reliably do what they’re told when it’s time to vote.

I think Republicans assume that their clientele wants to vote for people just like them. Personally, I want the people running things to be vastly smarter than I am. Sure, it’s fine if they’re “down-to-earth,” but I’d rather they know what the hell they’re doing. I’d like them to know where countries are, who our allies and enemies are, and how to glean the salient points from complicated issues. I don’t care if they seem cold and aloof, as long as they can get shit done. (Preferably the kind of shit that makes society better for all, rather than merely for a select few.) The people in the highest offices should be the smartest in the room, not “Norm” from “Cheers.”

And now for an episode of One Minute Debunkery:

Arizona knows full well how to count. It’s just that you don’t like the result. When you’re counting on 2 + 2 = 5, you’re bound to be disappointed.

Now bring in the vague conspiracy theories about voter fraud in 3…2…1…

Last Minute Debunkery

We may be only a day away from Election Day, (as of this writing) but the BS never stops. Its very existence highlights why we need to stuff the Republicans back into their caves.

I neglected to mention it at the time but this sound bite from the Fetterman/Oz debate was spine-chillingly evil.

I like my local political leaders but I wouldn’t want them anywhere NEAR the decision-making process for my health care. The party of “less government” couldn’t be more clear that they really only want “less” of the stuff that interferes with their designs on power. They’re taking their little orange flags and waving the government right into our doctor’s offices, bedrooms, and personal lives, like a jumbo jet into its parking spot on the tarmac. Just as long as they stay out of rich people’s gilded lives, I guess. Can’t have them making sure the air is breathable and the water doesn’t kill you. That would hurt the quarterly statement!

Also, with the possibility of Republicans running one of the houses of Congress, we have their petty revenge to look forward to. I saw this headline last week from our idiot cousin to the south, MTG:

She wants to investigate companies that stop donating to Republican campaigns. How sinister is that? They’re not “donations” anymore, they’re protection payments. What’s she gonna do, send a couple of goons over to Apple?

“Youse better get your checkbook out, if youse knows wut’s good for ya. Don’t make me have to come back here again or else my associate, Vlad, here, might help someone accidentally fall out of a 7th-floor window.”

This is in addition to impeaching President Biden at least a couple of times, just on principle. And that principle has nothing to do with justice, only revenge. Playground-level tit-for-tat.

Maybe if we’re lucky, The Lord will break his more than two thousand years of silence and speak to her:

(I’ve been waiting since April to use this!)

It’s obvious that the Republicans only want to run on a couple of choice things. And even the stuff that’s in their wheelhouse, they have to lie about. You’ve probably already seen the stories about how crime is the highest in the country in red states, yet they want to scare you with the prospect of Democrats letting criminals out of jail to run wild on your block. And there’s always their immigration scare tactics to fall back on, even though it’s really a nothing-burger. See, if there’s immigration from the south, it’s a problem for Republicans. They keep yelling about illegal immigration because they presume that it’s ALL illegal. They don’t even know what the legal process IS. They just see Fox “News” panic stories from the border and that’s all they need. Then they produce bullshit memes like this:

First of all, it’s “why AREN’T the 2 million people…” If you can’t speak the language, you should go back where you came from, right?

Here’s why it’s not an invasion, Gomer. The people coming up from the south aren’t arriving in tanks or firing rockets, blowing up buildings and power plants. They aren’t conscripting their own citizens and forcing them to join the fight. They’re not annexing territory. They’re just showing up to try to escape violence and find a better life.

We can pick nits on the best way to do that (MAGA view: go somewhere else,) but there is nothing in common with the Russian invasion of Ukraine other than there is a border involved. All this meme does is amplify the degree to which MAGAs consider brown foreigners to be subhuman.

Their logical fallacies don’t get any better when they turn their eyes to domestic issues:

The giant, raging fallacy at play here is that Twitter employees didn’t tell Keystone Pipeliners to do anything… If anyone said such a thing, and that’s a big IF, that would be Twitter users. Twitter’s coders and technicians had nothing to do with it. Users create the content so this is completely off base. Pipe workers can find other pipes to build and Twitter workers will find other companies. Life will go on. 

But Republicans love to pretend that the Keystone pipeline getting canceled has something to do with the price of gas. Which is hogwash, of course. The Keystone pipeline was for exporting oil abroad, not for us to use. There’s zero bearing on our current gas situation. But those are just more pesky facts from those good-for-nothing fact-checkers.

It always makes me laugh when I see my conservative friends passing around memes criticizing fact-checkers. I mean, it’s a complete self-own. Yes, I agree… it’s much easier to pedal bullshit when no one calls you on it. Don’t like it? Don’t spread verifiable lies.

The BS isn’t limited to politics anymore either. A couple weeks back, I debunked a football meme about Tom Brady. Wouldn’t you know, here comes another one. Maybe it’s just his people trying to make him feel better after his divorce, but you’d think they’d be able to do better when their source material will go down as the greatest ever. This is the latest:

There are two areas where this is lacking. First of all, the attention to roughing penalties has greatly increased in recent years. Mahomes and Allen play in a completely different environment than when Brady and Rodgers started.

But more importantly, this graphic doesn’t differentiate from the ticky-tack penalties that Brady seems to draw, versus when quarterbacks get seriously clobbered. It’s not just the penalties Brady draws that invite derision, it’s that the contact is minor. This graphic treats all roughing penalties equally.

Refs have always treated quarterbacks differently. Some get the living crap kicked out of them with no calls; others like Tom Terrific draw penalties from a hard glance.

So yes, the numbers for total calls look damning, but they only tell a slice of the story. A slanted slice.

***

So, OK, off we go to the next election. I’m hopeful that by my next writing, we’ll know whether sanity reigns across the land or a significant portion of the population has sold off their personal freedoms and a democratic system of government for the illusion of paying less for a gallon of milk or gas.

We have to realize that the Republicans have no viable plan to combat inflation. And if they DO have a plan, I bet it looks a lot like a quid pro quo.

We know that while prices are high, corporate profits are also at long-time high marks. So it’s not the cost of supplies, materials, or labor, they’re just jacking up the prices because they can. And in fact, I’m sure they’ve noticed that they can price-gouge their brains out and the President is getting the blame for it. And the big companies like that, because if they can prod voters into blaming Democratic politicians and get Republicans back into power, they will gladly lower prices in return for getting their taxes cut and environmental and safety regulations rescinded. That’s the plan.

Although it wouldn’t surprise me if they accepted the political largesse and kept the prices high anyway. It’s not like the Republicans would care; they’d just find a new way to blame the Democrats.

Halloween Memories

Since my blogging day falls on Halloween this year, I figured I’d put politics on hold for a week and thaw out and doctor up an old post I wrote in 2009, about my best Halloween memories and adventures. It's not as scary as having your house broken into and getting beaten with a hammer by a crazed enemy of your wife, but... oops, there's politics again.

Hallowed Wieners

I’ve always loved Halloween. As a kid, it was just the candy and costumes.  As a grownup, it’s a chance to remember the candy and costumes of youth, plus stick a thumb in the eye of the religious right that thinks it has something to do with Satanism or evil doing. (Once again, “God’s Chosen” are on the lookout in case someone, somewhere, might be having fun.)

Unfortunately, the neighborhood I live in does not appear to participate in Halloween. I’ve lived in this particular apartment for 11 years (at the time of original writing, and 10 more after that) and have never had a single trick-or-treater, or seen anyone in costume in the streets. I can’t say I’ve ever seen a house decoration up either.  My particular area of Baltimore is home predominantly to Orthodox Jews, but I don’t know if that’s the root cause. All I know is that Halloween is a big goose-egg here.

On the bright side, there is always a lot of good candy on sale the day after Halloween.

Back when I lived (as a grownup) in Albany NY, we had some very good years with Halloween. The best was the year I also worked at a crafts store that sold all kinds of good seasonal stuff. I did up the front of the house with spider webs, a black light, glowing red eyes in the window, and a CD player hidden under the stairs that played creepy music. 

The killer, though, was the Scream Mat. You plug it in and set it in front of the door, so when someone steps on it, there’s an ear-splitting shriek. That’s a good way not to miss any trick-or-treaters because there would always be at least two screams… one from the mat plus one (or more) from whoever stepped on it.    

The Scream Mat belonged to the (ex) wife. I suspect, but cannot prove, that she was also the voice model.  All I can say is that it sounded awfully familiar.

It’s really too bad that kids now can’t enjoy Halloween the way so many of us used to. Once I got to be in maybe 5th or 6th grade, my friends and I would take off on our own and work the neighborhood until we dropped or everyone turned out the lights. I had the fortune of living in nice little suburban neighborhoods back then, so it was just block after block of families. We never used those plastic pumpkins to hold our goodies, either. We used pillowcases! Gotta aim high, after all. We also had to pay my dad the Milk Dud Tax. He’d always say, “Remember, your Milk Duds go to the house.”

I don’t remember too many of my costumes from the early years. I was a tiger in 1^st grade, and a devil, in 4^th, but I can’t recall much else. Then in 7th grade, being heavily into Cheech and Chong, (aka the funniest shit I’d ever heard, at that stage in my life), I went out as a hippie. I had this big, fake, black, beard and I wore an old T-shirt and ripped-up jeans. I only mention this costume because it actually scared a little kid that answered the door. The parents said he was afraid of the beard, but I swear the little shit was anti-hippie. He’s probably a regional RNC leader right now.

In college, I went to a party dressed specifically as Tommy Chong. (I had a real beard, by then.) The kicker was, well, does anyone remember the Cheech and Chong album, “Big Bambu”? It came with 12” long rolling papers. I took those papers and rolled a big fat joint made of chewing tobacco and carried it around with me. You should have heard the cars beeping at me as I walked down the street to the party! In retrospect, I’m pretty lucky none of those cars had any red and blue lights on them, or I’d have had some ‘splaining to do. I'd have to hope the officer in question could tell chewing tobacky from wacky tobacky 

Yes, I know that’s Cheech and not Chong, but it’s the only pic I could find with that big joint.

Remember back in the early ’80s when generic packaging was popular? They’d have these goods with white packaging and black lettering that said what the product was. Like there would be a plain white can that just said “BEER”. Or if you were minding your generic calories, you could opt for “LIGHT BEER”.  Nothing like having generic options!  

I went to one college party as a Generic Man. This was another easy homemade costume.  I just wore plain black and white and labeled everything I wore or carried.  There was SHIRT, HAT, BELT, SUSPENDERS, SNEAKERS, etc.  Obviously, I brought generic BEER, which I, unfortunately, had to then drink.  My favorite bit was the white jeans with a little emblem on the back pocket that said, in a fancy cursive font, “DESIGNER JEANS”. 

Halloween of 1988 came with a tough choice. I was managing a record store in Cleveland at the time, and I could either go to our district Halloween party, or I could use the free tickets and backstage pass I had to see Joan Jett open for Robert Plant. That one was a no-brainer. First I went to the party, in another cheap but effective homemade costume, using nothing but the cardboard collar insert to a new dress shirt, and put it on a black button-down shirt. Shazam, I’m a priest!

Then after spending a couple hours at the party, I went to the show. (Yes, I changed first.) No way was I turning down a chance to see my queen. 

I hung out with her and the band backstage, caught her set, and then dashed back for the rest of the Halloween party. Screw Robert Plant… I was never a big Zep fan and I thought his new solo album was lame.

My “Best Halloween Ever” (that doesn’t include hanging out with rock stars) was my last year of trick-or-treating when I was in 8th grade. My buddy, David, had an aunt who worked with Civil Defense. I don’t know if they do this anymore but back then, Civil Defense used to stage these elaborate mock disasters designed to test emergency readiness. They would simulate a massive car wreck, train derailment or airplane crash and have the EMTs come and do triage, “treat” us and sometimes take us in the ambulance to a hospital. 

For all these exercises, they needed volunteers to be made up like accident victims. That’s where my friend and I came in. We probably did 3 or 4 of these things and while there, learned some tricks of the “horrifying makeup” trade. So for our last hurrah, his aunt got us some supplies and we both made ourselves up to be accident victims. 

I used putty to build up “tissue” on my forearm and stuck a chicken bone in it, to simulate a compound fracture.  My buddy spread putty over half his face, hollowed out a spot where an eye would go, and stuck a few little sticks into it. I also used rubber cement to layer on my arms, then lifted up the “skin” and stuck “bloody” cotton balls underneath it. This nicely simulated a serious burn. And of course, we covered ourselves with loads of fake blood. (Recipe: cocoa, Karo syrup, and red food coloring… we had to repeat it at every stop.)

We went out and just had a blast. Everyplace we’d go, whoever answered the door would go back and drag out anyone that was home.

"Go get Grandma to come see these boys!”

We'd have the whole family peering through the door at us like we were some kind of biological experiment gone wrong. When people asked what happened to us, we’d usually say something like, “we were chasing parked cars.” I damn near filled the pillowcase that year, boy. I think I stretched that candy out until at least December. And Dad was flush with Milk Duds.

I wasn’t allowed to go out anymore after that… I was too old for it, my parents said.  So I got to stay home and hand out candy. And from my brother and sister, collect the Zagnut Tax.

I would be remiss if I didn’t at least mention one of my favorite costume ideas I’ve seen, which was pulled off many years ago by my sister and her husband. She wore a life jacket and carried an oar. He wore thigh-high fishing boots. They went to a Halloween party as Row vs Wade. I suppose if they tried that again now, each would have to have a dagger hanging out of their backs.

When I first moved in with Sweetpea, we’d get two or three trick-or-treaters, max. Since COVID in 2020, there have been exactly zero. But that doesn’t stop Sweetpea from buying at least three bags of candy every year. I keep telling her that one bag will be more than enough, but she wants to be prepared. I’m like, “Then at least buy the good stuff, OK?”

I was hoping for Snickers and Reese’s, but she got Twix, Butterfingers, and a bag of various Tootsie items. I can live with that though, which is good because I know whose job it’s going to be to eat this stuff. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it.

She’ll say, “I can always give it away…”

And I’m like, “Well, let’s not be too hasty… We don’t want to give anybody cavities…”

The Home Stretch

 Here we are again, approaching the next Most Important Election of our Lifetimes. Early voting has already begun in many places; I dropped off my ballot at a drop-box on Friday, so my deed is done. So it’s time to talk about this election in “now” time, rather than in some amorphous future.

What happens with this election is going to send the country careening in one direction or another. Or possibly several.

The Republicans aren’t even hiding their intentions anymore. They’re explicitly saying they want to enact a national abortion ban, overturn the right to same-sex marriage, further restrict contraception, and cut back on Social Security and Medicare.

All of those scare the piss out of me because there’s no reason to think they won’t try to do what they say they’re going to do. Many people thought Republicans would never really kill Roe v Wade, but here we are. They put the right religious nutjobs in place and they did what they intended to do all along. We should not have been surprised.

Granted, they’re not exactly running on all those points. You won’t see many commercials saying “Hey, I want to take your (or your parents’/grandparents’) social security check away, vote for me!” No, they’re busy trying to scare you about crime and inflation. Fear… it’s what works.

That their threats are hollow doesn’t matter. They know most people won’t learn that the highest crime states are the ones that went for TFG two years ago. And they know that inflation is a global phenomenon, with many countries worse off than we are, but they don’t care. Nor do they have any kind of plan to reduce inflation themselves. They just blame Biden and the Democrats.

The funny thing is that the new British Prime Minister just got yanked out of office when her tax cuts and supply-side economic plans torpedoed their economy, the same idea Republicans enact every chance they get.

I suppose they could always ask their wealthy business-owning donors to do them a favor and stop price-gouging so hard for a little while. But I doubt they’ll even do that because they don’t give a shit. Do you think Mitch McConnell gives a rip about how much milk costs? Not a chance. He’s too wrapped up in setting a price for how much a Congressman costs.

So these are the ads and memes we’re seeing this week. Prices are high so vote Republican. Crime is still here so vote out the Democrats.

For me, the situation is numbingly simple. Assuming that the Dems really are at fault for high prices, (and I don’t believe for a second that they are), I’ll gladly pay a few more bucks for gas and groceries if that will buy half of our citizens the right of bodily self-determination, Social Security and Medicare gets shored up rather than cut down, everyone can love whomever they choose, use whatever birth control they choose, and the rest of the government takes climate change as seriously as the military does. Prices go up and down and always will, but you can’t put a price on basic human rights. And the right of rational people not to have to abide by the fever dreams of religious wingnuts is supreme.

I do think there may be enough votes out there to keep Congress under Democratic control; I just worry about how far those people who have weaseled their way into positions of influence over elections will go to ensure the outcome they desire. What are all those hired to “watch” and “challenge” voters going to do? How many state legislatures, who have gerrymandered themselves into permanent positions of power, will seek to overturn legal results that they deem fraudulent, for no other reason than that they don’t like the outcome?

We only survived the last election with a degree of sanity because there were so many people of high integrity, from both parties, who were running things. Unfortunately, many of those principled individuals have been driven from the position by harassment and death threats, making room for the aforementioned weasels. I think the aftermath of this one is going to be bad. Like, “democracy-killing” bad. If we’ve learned anything in the last two years, it’s that it doesn’t take much to get a crowd of idiots to take up arms against the government, out of “patriotism.”

Vote Early, Count Early

Sometimes I can find arguments to pull apart on Facebook like they grow on trees, yet other times the trees are bare. But today I had one fall right into my lap. Someone dropped an Anonymous comment on my last post that just took my breath away. There were so many faults there I barely knew where to start with a reply.

It was completely off-topic for a post about legalizing pot, which is a reliable indicator for a troll with an agenda.

I wrote a short reply anyway, knowing I could flesh it out in today’s post because there are multiple fronts for dissection:

·         This is a complete, raging, logical fallacy, as there is obviously zero correlation between the quality of any candidate and when the votes are counted. That right there is enough to dismiss it from serious consideration. Whether you count it before or after Election Day, a legal vote is a legal vote. Period.

·         The commenter, of course, is passing on the conservative trope that some kind of nefarious, liberal, monkey-business going with mail-in and drop-off voting. Not that anything has been proven or even reliably demonstrated. It just is because they want it to be. It’s the only way they can rationalize that their point of view is not dominant throughout the country.

·         Explain how when using the same methodology, there is less “Trustable, reliable, secure” counting going on before Election Day than there is after? Is he charging that there’s a completely different set of rules for counting votes prior to Election Day? (Probably, despite the fact that the idea is ludicrous.) They won’t recognize that Republicans (mostly TFG) engineered the high likelihood that most of the late-counted votes being Democratic, by exhorting their own people to vote in person. If TFG didn’t rail against mail-in voting like he did, the late returns would have come in more evenly. Obviously, it wouldn’t change the count, it would just rearrange the order of the returns. Note to Election Deniers:

o   1+2+3=6

o   2+1+3=6

o   3+1+2=6

o   2+3+1=6.  Etc.

See, in any order you count it, you still get the same result. Biden won.

TFG and his minions had a pretty good idea that he wasn’t going to win, so he created the very set of circumstances he then used to contest the result. That’s fine for a Banana Republic dictator, but it doesn’t fly for the President of the United States.

·         If you want the results on (or near) Election Day, in 2022, you’d better start counting them early. There are far too many mailed and dropped-off votes in play to only start counting after the polls close, without severely delaying the results. Maryland is expecting over 400,000 of them. And remember, until this election, Maryland state law decreed that they can’t even start counting the votes until the Thursday after Election Day! Weren’t Republicans also complaining about counting votes that far past Election Day? (Answer: yes they were. They even went to court to stop the counting, (in places they were ahead, of course).

This guy is on it.

·         This line of complaint is in sync with Republicans’ overall messaging, as relayed by Fox “News” and other such open-air sewage systems, that mail-in voting is inherently corrupt. This is despite there being zero evidence of any widespread malfeasance, or even just enough to tip a single election, despite there being several states who have used mail-in voting extensively for ten years or more, without incident. And in some of these states, especially rural ones, Republicans have been mailing in their votes too.

What it comes down to is that mail-in voting is just too easy. It allows the common people a much faster and easier method of voting, and that’s the LAST thing the rich Republican donors want. Rich people don’t want poor people voting, because it might cost them money, especially if the poor realize how badly they’re getting ripped off. So they want long lines. They want fewer voting machines in more populous areas. They want to require the specific IDs their opponent’s voters are least likely to have. They want to make it more expensive and time-consuming to get those IDs. They want it to be inconvenient to vote so that the huddled masses STAY HOME and let the well-to-do keep carving up the country’s resources for themselves.

On a Lighter Note…

I might have stumbled onto a more entertaining way to deter Jehovah’s Witnesses and other doorstep pests:

If this catches on, I just may have to invest in that front-door surveillance camera system that I’ve been avoiding.

Also, how long before someone claims “Devil Vagina Magic” as the name for their all-female punk band?

High There

I trust you saw the good news over the weekend: President Biden is pardoning all those with federal marijuana possession convictions? I understand it doesn’t really cover that many people; I read there are only between 6000-7000 people that have such convictions and none are currently in jail. But it’s still an important step to sane weed laws.

First of all, it does help those 6000+ people by wiping a serious conviction off their records. Often employers want no part of hiring anyone with a prior arrest, no matter what it’s for.

When I used to manage record and video stores, it was an automatic disqualification if that box was checked on the application. No matter how perfect the candidate may have been for the job, I was forbidden from hiring them.

Secondly, and I think most importantly, it sets a signpost for governors to do the same. That’s where the real numbers kick in. Most pot busts come from the state or local level, not from the feds. The president leading on this issue can get a lot of people back into the legitimate workforce.

Granted, I don’t think anyone but Blue State governors will bite, but every little bit helps. And if it becomes a campaign issue in Red States, all the better.

It strains the brain to realize that even now, marijuana is still categorized in the same bracket as heroin and cocaine. Seriously. Even when I was back in college, (where I first encountered that little tidbit), I couldn’t believe it.

While I don’t think many people support giving the shit out as party favors on the playground, it can at least be treated on par with alcohol or regular cigs. And the tax windfall should be huge. What government is going to pass up such a lucrative area of taxation? It may even be enough to tempt the Red States. Then they can gain more operating money on the backs of the common people and leave the corporations alone, just like they always do. Although based on recent history, I do expect to hear the following argument from the Right:

"Hey, I took my pot bust like a man. I accepted my consequences. Everyone else needs to suffer like I did or else it won't be fair to ME."

The thing is, no amount of government propaganda and scare tactics are going to convince anyone who’s smoked pot, or even been around someone who’s smoked pot, that it’s some kind of heinous pharmaceutical boogieman. We’ve all seen it. Most of us have survived it, none the worse for wear. That’s why I’m sure that marijuana legalization is going to pass with flying colors in next month’s Maryland elections.

Those like me who grew up in the 60s and 70s will welcome the chance to decriminalize it. The people who are hard biased against weed are probably those who grew up in the 40s and 50s, and are aging out. Or maybe not.

My dad, who was always highly anti-pot, eventually softened his stance once he got older and began experiencing chronic back and leg pain. It was keeping him from sleeping until he tried THC oil. He’d put a few drops on a pizzelle before bed and it was lights out. He eventually got himself a medical marijuana prescription for it. So maybe the old anti-reefer people will come around once they see what it can do for them now.

I got my ballot over the weekend, which reminded me that legalizing pot is even being voted on. I completely forgot. The state legislature is ready to legalize, but wanted the voters to give them the cover of a mandate. I’m pretty sure they’ll get it.

Once it’s passed, I expect our next governor to follow Biden’s example and pardon/waive/forgive all simple marijuana possession convictions. (Assuming it’s not Dan Cox, GOP nominee and TFG’s Maryland ball-licker-in-chief, who I expect to lose by at least 20 points. I expect he’ll just do whatever TFG tells him to do.)

For my part, I’ve never been much of a pot smoker. I can probably count on my fingers the times I’ve indulged and still have some left over. Most of those times, usually when I was in my teens or early 20s, I was already so drunk I couldn’t tell the difference after taking a hit. But the biggest reason for not doing it is that I don’t like smoking anything. Regardless of any benefits of mellowing out, I end up coughing my face off trying to get rid of the tightness in my chest. Who needs it? I’d just as soon have a couple of drinks and call it a night.

But the big change that legalization would present to me is making edibles available. I’m very keen to try copping a buzz via eating a light snack. If I like it enough, I may just quit drinking. There will be fewer calories than alcohol and it will be much easier on my liver. Of course it may be so expensive that drinking remains the go-to vice. So we’ll see what happens.

And speaking of health, I hit a new high on my Fitbit from last week. I got my best sleep marks ever!

Sure, my daily steps have cratered since I stopped going into the office, but at least I can still rack up the sleep!

I wasn’t really having much trouble sleeping before but for some reason, the Fitbit would delay when it started tracking me as asleep. I’d get up from a good night’s sleep, check my stats and it would only have shown me as asleep from 1:30 AM on, when I was out cold by 11:15. Anyway, I had a very good week not only with time spend asleep, but the quality. I think it was because it finally turned cool at night, and there’s nothing like burrowing down under the covers on a chilly night.

And now, a word from Herschel Walker and every other Republican Congressman and Senator:

 

Read the Labels

I know it seems like we hear about elections all year long but now it’s heating up in earnest. There’s only another month left until the mid-term elections, where either Republicans take one or more houses of Congress and grind bill passage to halt, or the Dems hold on and we continue the possibility of making incremental changes. Granted, it’s technically possible that Democrats not only hold on but gain enough seats to make Manchin and Sinema irrelevant, but hardly anyone thinks that’s likely.

I’d like to think that there will be enough anti-Anti-Abortion sentiment to surprise everyone like Kansas did, but we have to remember, that was a vote on an issue. It’s one thing to vote for or against an issue proposal, but another to vote for a member of the rival party, who your own party has been condemning as subhuman, Satanic, Communist, baby-killing, pedophiles. The abortion referendum didn’t have an “R” or a “D” next to it on the ballot, so there’s philosophical cover there.

Still, I have hope that enough people will be practical enough to disregard labels and vote their interests. But it’s hard to overcome the messaging.

I realized that Republicans running for office right now are taking notes from the Supreme Court nominees. SCOTUS noms will come in and dance around every hypothetical and specific, trying to say as little as possible about what they’d do on the bench, and then once they get in, they vote the way their nominator and the Federalist Society put them there to vote. They preach “stare decisis” right up until they start shit-canning all the prior decisis that gets in their way.

So few congressional hopefuls (outside the deep-red Bible belt) will come out and say that they favor a national ban on abortion. Instead, they’ll pay tribute to the “sanctity of life,” and other bullshit they don’t really mean, or can even define, and hope that by soft-pedaling it, the election goes the way it was gerrymandered to go. Then, they’ll be free to vote with the rest of the party on that abortion ban, cutting or privatizing Social Security, cutting Medicare and Medicaid, and rolling back regulations on pollution.

Or in other words, they’ll say whatever it takes to get elected and then go do whatever they wanted to do in the first place.

In theory, people in their district or state can vote them right back out, but that doesn’t happen very often. When you see polls about how low the regard is for the institution of Congress, it’s always, “Well, I like MY guy but the rest of them suck.” Then multiply that by the people in the other 49 states, and you have the reason why so many incumbents coast to victory every time.

But if the threat of a national abortion ban doesn’t mobilize people, women in particular, I don’t know what else it could possibly take. It doesn’t seem like the charge towards authoritarianism is moving the needle. Even the highly publicized and televised J6 hearings have barely made a dent. I don’t think they changed many minds. The court case deciding whether state legislatures can overturn elections isn’t getting much play either, and I find that terrifying.

You can see the drip-drip-drip of revelations from Republicans… national abortion ban, restricting contraception, hell, even repealing the amendment that gave women the right to vote… and that’s just what’s been said out loud (before getting shooshed by their more polished brethren, who know not to speak of such things in public until they’ve been elected. Or even then, only when absolutely necessary, like when casting their vote.) But just imagine the things that go unsaid. Women have to be getting nervous about their status in this country. If they’re not, they must not be paying attention, and are about to become very surprised when they wake up one day and realize they are second or third-class citizens, with fewer rights than cadavers.

For all the problems we have locally here in Maryland, they really do “voting” properly. Early this year, I signed up for mail-in voting, in perpetuity. And I don’t even have to mail the ballot back; there are drop boxes all over the county. We have one about a mile down the road from us.

Last week I received an email from the Board of Elections:

They also email me a confirmation when they’ve received my ballot. I like that transparency and it gives me confidence that things are running well somewhere. Although getting them counted on time is still an issue. Like I mentioned a couple posts ago, the GOP nominee for Governor filed suit to stop drop-off and mail-in ballots from being counted before Election Day. (Actually, the current law says they can’t start counting these votes until two days after Election Day. It’s a remnant from before the demand for mail-in voting exploded from COVID.)

His suit was thrown out, but he is appealing the decision. Of course. That’s how far they’re prepared to go, just to maintain an excuse to challenge results they don’t like. And I’m confident they’re not going to like this one. When the sitting Republican governor of a deep blue state refuses to endorse his party’s nominee, it just shows how far from center this guy is.

One idea that keeps getting tossed around is making Election Day a holiday, to facilitate voting. On the surface that might sound fine, but it would be an ineffectual gesture, especially if the goal is to provide easier voting opportunities to those who need them.

The problem is that those who need the time won’t be the ones off work. Look at our biggest holidays… Christmas and Thanksgiving. Are there still stores open? Some are. Gas stations are open. Convenience stores are open. Many restaurants are open. Now consider that this will in no way as big as Christmas and Thanksgiving; it will probably be more like Veterans’ Day or MLK Day. What is closed on those days? Government and banks. All stores, gas stations, and restaurants are open. I bet Bezos doesn’t shut down his Amazon facilities, not while people are at home (or work) buying stuff online. Those are the people who need the time to go vote.

And yes, employers are obligated to make sure their staff has time to vote. And that works out for office workers like me, (back when voted in person.) I always had time to go vote, which I’d do first thing in the morning, on my way to work. If I was late, it was cool. I had my “I Voted” sticker. But picture the person who has two or three jobs. Each employer says “You have the whole rest of the day to vote, just make sure you’re here on time,” regardless of the fact that the worker then has to go to the next job, or just home to take care of the family.

So yeah, it’s a nice idea, but it’s pointless. Unless the point is to make it easier for those who already have it the easiest.

A Confidence Man

Did you see this headline about Sen. Lindsey Graham from last week? I wonder if he really believes his own bullshit here…

Oh, he’s confident, is he? Seriously? Is that because millions of American women are so hair-on-fire mad at Republicans for pushing for women to have fewer rights than dead people? Is that because a referendum on the same subject got trounced in blood-red Kansas? Is that because other Republican colleagues of his are all, “Hey Lindsey, shoosh with that, will ya? Yer gonna get us killed, or worse, not re-elected.”

Unless he’s talking about his local church coffee klatch, I’m confident that a mass majority of Americans would absolutely NOT support a national ban on abortion. It makes me wonder where he’s getting his information. Is he looking at a poll of Federalist Society members? Otherwise, his statement reeks of desperately wishful thinking.

You have to wonder that when an idea is this unpopular, why would any politician go near it? That’s why prospective justices bob and weave and do anything but reveal their true intentions regarding how they would rule on abortion cases. Then after they’ve been appointed for life, they can get on with reducing American women to the level of “breeding livestock.” But they don’t lead with that, for Pete’s sake. It’s bad for business.

The Universal Kibosh

As I’ve often said, whenever conservatives want to squash an idea, they just drag out the issue of homeless veterans… not to provide homes, obviously, but to use them as a blockade against anything that costs money or benefits someone they deem undesirable. So here we are again:

I saw this posted on Facebook. I’m not sure if it’s a patch or a doormat, with the latter being applicable to the way Republicans figuratively step on veterans to prevent anything beneficial from happening to anyone else.

My usual reaction is that this isn’t a binary equation. There’s no reason the government can‘t do something for both veterans AND asylum seekers. We don't have to decide on one over the other.

Republicans had two years of unrestricted power. If they wanted to do something for veterans, they could have. But what did they do? They passed a massive tax cut for the richest among us and made it permanent. Then they tossed some tax cut scraps to the rest of us, and set it to expire after seven years. And that’s about it. They did diddley-squat for homeless veterans when they had the chance.

And hell, Republicans had to be shamed into supporting health care for veterans and 9/11 first responders last month. Their initial action was to shoot it down as payback for the Democrats having the gall to pass a bill Republicans didn’t like. Then Jon Stewart raised enough of a ruckus about it that they had to turn tail and reverse themselves.

This ties in with the Republican trope of using people’s lives as pieces on a board to play an inhuman game of chess. On one side, homeless veterans; on the other, asylum-seeking immigrants, locked into a perpetually stalemated game that no one ever wins. Except for the rich, who rigged the board in the first place, keeping us moving against each other while they pad their bottom lines.

I guarantee you this. If the Democrats ever proposed something to provide housing to every homeless veteran, (and they should!), Republicans would find a reason to block that too, probably while ranting against handouts and socialism. They’d accuse Democrats of political gamesmanship because they only recognize the games they’ve already fixed.

Here’s another angle on why providing homes for homeless vets would never fly: It would be unfair to the rest of the veterans who already bought their own homes. In fact, we may have already heard this argument a time or two, haven’t we?

Why Can’t We Just Go Straight to Jet Packs?

One of my conservative FB friends posted this on her timeline:

I just wonder where this even comes from. Is there a bloc of people raging against the A/C? I’ve never heard such a thing. I’m pretty sure it’s not coming from the mainstream.

But regardless, this is still another example of the Fossil Fuel industry sowing the seeds of misinformation to be spread by conservatives, to try to stamp out the momentum driving toward electric cars. They always seem to want to point out that it takes energy and possible earthly harm to create machines that reduce or eliminate emissions. And I’ll even concede that point, to an extent.

It takes energy to make both a gas-powered car and an electric one. See, both are on an even footing. But then take a look after the cars are built. One operates far more fuel efficient and the other continues to emit exhaust into the atmosphere and continues to require fuel that has to be pumped from the ground and highly refined, which also carries environmental harm.

Yes, electric cars require electricity, but that can be made with far less damage done to the atmosphere. There’s wind, solar, and even nuclear, that when done properly, are more environmentally friendly than drilling for oil and refining it into gasoline. But that’s the last thing the Fossil Fuel industry wants you to think about. They know they’re on the way out and they’re doing everything in their power to delay that from happening.

America needs to get off its collective ass and make progress with creating renewable energy sources. The tech is there, the conditions are there, we just need the collective will to make it happen.

Taking the News by Storm

I love it when hurricane season brings storms with the same name as people I know. I remember a while back when there was a famous storm with the same name as my ex-wife. I was totally on the lookout for clippings I could send her as the storm-ravaged her home state. But I never found anything compelling… most headlines referenced “Hurricane X” or “Tropical Storm X” rather than just “X Destroys Valuable Beachfront Property.” I was probably better off without it though. I doubt she would have accepted the clippings in the spirit I would have intended.

But this morning, I found a headline that I could use on someone else, so I tagged my cousin with it on FB.

That cracked my shit up as soon as I saw it this morning.

Ian appreciated it and wrote back about something similar his family had done regarding his father:

It’s even funnier because his dad is probably 150 lbs of bone and gristle. He could have had a fine career as a spy because he’d only have to turn sideways to he’d disappear from sight.

Lastly, just because this bluzdude has a birthday coming up this weekend: