One Sentence Description of trump Selecting Gaetz for Attorney General

trump seriously wants to wreck every last concept of justice in America by choosing a guy the Justice Department - and even his fellow congressmembers - exposed as a sex-obsessed statutory-raping drug abuser who has every reason to force our government to never expose Republican crimes again.

Unhappy Thoughts Part One

Currently coping with a swirl of thoughts, most of them unsettling and troubling. There's so many of them that I'm going to have to break them down into bite-sized chunks.

I seriously believe the level of sexism in this nation means we will never see a woman elected to the Presidency. I know that people are pointing to "other issues" as to the reasons why the two major candidates - with Hillary in 2016 getting tarred with "her emails" fake scandal, with Kamala in 2024 getting tarred with "inflation" - lost to a clearly unqualified (and by 2024 clearly criminal) donald trump, but the backlash they both got from male voters can't be ignored. Olga Khazan at the Atlantic makes the case:

In 2016, Hillary Clinton was a former secretary of state and senator running against the politically inexperienced real-estate tycoon Donald Trump. She lost. People would vote for a woman, the thinking went, just not that woman.

In 2024, Kamala Harris was the vice president, a former senator, and a former attorney general also running against Trump, who was by then a convicted felon and sexual abuser. She also lost. People would vote for a woman, once again, just not that woman.

The events of the past eight years might prompt some to wonder: If Clinton wasn’t good enough, and neither was Harris, will a woman ever be good enough to be president? What kind of a woman would it take? According to interviews I conducted with six researchers who study gender and politics, sexism was a small but significant factor that worked against Harris. And it’s going to be a problem for any woman who runs for president. “American voters tend to believe in the abstract that they support the idea of a woman candidate, but when they get the real women in front of them, they find some other reason not to like the candidate,” Karrin Vasby Anderson, a communications professor at Colorado State University, told me. In 2017, she wrote an article about the long odds faced by women running for president. The title? “Every Woman Is the Wrong Woman.”

...In 2017, a study found that about 13 percent of Americans were “angry or upset” about the idea of a woman serving as president. In an experiment that same year using hypothetical political candidates, Yoshikuni Ono and Barry Burden, political scientists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, found that voters punish female candidates running for president by 2.4 percentage points. This means that a hypothetical female candidate would get, say, 47 percent of the vote, rather than 49.4 percent if she were a man. This bias against female presidential candidates, Ono and Burden found, was most pronounced among men and among politically unaffiliated voters—two demographics that Harris struggled with.

There is painful irony that women candidates lost to a man exposed as a vulgarian towards women, a court-adjudicated rapist and confirmed misogynist.

For all the decent - if not great - choices of women leaders in the Democratic ranks like Governor Whitmer or AOC, it is insane that too many men - even among liberals! - just won't consider it.

The Willful Blindness

Update: Steve in Manhattan, thank you again for sharing this blog to Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-up! And to those of you stopping by, can you do me a favor and Follow Me if you can? It's... I'd like to know people out there are supporting each other. P.S. As soon as I can get a selfie of it made, I'm going to quit Twitter with both middle fingers aimed at Elon while I head off to Bluesky Social! Look for me there.

This is the thing driving me insane at this moment, and will likely keep me insane for a thousand lifetimes.

Due to the Republicans' effort to overturn Roe with the Dobbs decision, there were ten states this election cycle that had pro-abortion rights amendments for their state constitutions. The results showed that most of those states' voters - even dominated by Far Right powers - sided in favor of abortion rights (via Geoff Mulvihill and Christine Fernando at AP News):

Voters in Missouri cleared the way to undo one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion bans in one of seven victories for abortion rights advocates, while Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota defeated similar constitutional amendments, leaving bans in place.

Abortion rights amendments also passed in Arizona, Colorado, Maryland and Montana. Nevada voters also approved an amendment, but they’ll need to pass it again it 2026 for it to take effect. Another that bans discrimination on the basis of “pregnancy outcomes” prevailed in New York.

The results include firsts for the abortion landscape, which underwent a seismic shift in 2022 when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a ruling that ended a nationwide right to abortion and cleared the way for bans to take effect in most Republican-controlled states...

For me the sad news is that Florida's pro-abortion amendment didn't pass, but only due to a super-majority (60 percent) requirement for state amendments. It still received 57 percent support, showing a clear number of residents - including other Republicans! - wanted women to have that right to abortion based on medical and psychological needs. If only 3 percent more had any more understanding of how rape victims and women suffering miscarriage are now burdened - or worse, forced to die - because Amendment Four didn't pass.

But what's driving me insane is how many of those same voters - here in Florida, and in Missouri, and Montana, and several others like Kansas and Ohio that saw pro-abortion support in voter referenda - went and voted back into office the same Republican bastards who took away abortion rights in the first place.

It's like those voters refused to pay attention to who caused this problem with women's rights. They didn't blame donald trump for appointing three anti-abortion Justices to the Supreme Court that passed the Dobbs ruling. They didn't hold accountable the Republican Senators who approved those Justices, and in fact gave the GOP control of the incoming Senate term. And they certainly didn't vote out of office the state-level Republicans who are so partisan in their Far Right agenda that they will ignore, obstruct, or defy those state amendments however they can.

In Florida's case, the pro-abortion amendment's failure is likely going to encourage DeSantis - that bastard - and the legislators still controlling Tallahassee to pursue even harsher measures such as going after birth control. They are going to double down on punishing women for being women, I guarantee you this.

How self-defeating can you get? Did ANY of you pay attention?

It wasn't just on abortion that the majority of American voters showed this schizoid desire to support relatively liberal positions while voting into office extremist conservative SOBs.

trump and the Republican Party pretty much campaigned on demonizing immigrants, not just the illegals crossing the border but lawful migrants like Haitians. For the love of God, trump held a last-minute Hate Rally in Madison Square Garden where Puerto Ricans - official citizens since 1917! - were insulted to their faces. And yet more Latinos ended up voting for trump and Republicans, in spite of the reality that trump and the likes of Stephen Miller are openly planning to attack birthright citizenship and attempt "denaturalization" of those who already cleared legal hurdles to citizenship. It's as though those Latino voters - and American voters whose communities rely on migrant workers to survive - don't believe the leopards will be coming to eat their own faces.

Most of the voters' ire towards the Democrats revolved around the high inflation that hit the nation in the Post-COVID economy. Nevermind the fact President Biden passed an Inflation Reduction Act that generated jobs and worked - slowly, alas - to reduce the inflation rate. And those angry voters sided with trump who wants to replace our income tax system with high tariffs that will create WORSE inflation - we're talking Great Depression levels - than we've ever known.

And in spite of the relative success of the ACA (Obamacare) that aid most Americans with their health care costs, those Americans just gave power back to a Republican Party eager to repeal the whole thing (and this time with no clear Replace plan to offer). The same Republican Party that literally DID NOTHING this past term of Congress (the lowest level of legislative activity ever seen).

This isn't about me being some "elitist" liberal snob - I'm barely middle class, goddammit - wondering why my fellow Americans just won't vote the way I want them to. This is me genuinely wondering HOW my fellow Americans haven't paid attention to who (evangelical Far Right greedheads) - and what (racism and sexism) - are causing the problems and turmoil that do affect them as much as all of us.

This is why I'm screaming into the void anymore. The willful blindness of my neighbors and even some family members to the real problems out there and how the Republicans they just voted for are the cause of those problems looking to double down on that madness.

It's like nobody among those 73 million trump voters remembered the madness, the cruelty, the broken acts of poor governance that trump and his Far Right cohorts brought about the first time around between 2017 to 2020. It's like they refuse to remember how since 1988 every time a Republican-led government broke things - Bush the Elder's recession, Bush the Lesser's failed wars and financial meltdowns, trump's excessive tax cuts and refusal to handle the COVID emergency with ANY level of competency or compassion - their partisan extremism made it impossible to solve those crises and were disastrous AND deadly for our nation.

What the hell, America. Seriously. Did you pay ANY attention at ALL?

The Void In Me

I went back into my blog to cross out all the hopeful things I had posted leading up to Election Day.

Gods. A nightmare.

My personal mood is stuck between Despair and Fatigue.

I've stopped playing a lot of video games. I've stopped watching television. I've stopped going to movies. I'm finding it harder to read any books now. 

I don't think I will ever experience true joy in my life. The brief moments of any kind of happiness I experience end quick, and I have so few people in my life within reach to share that happiness. I know what it's like to be in love, but I also know what it's like to never share it, to never figure out relationships, to figure out other people, to be normal. The only thing I know about love is the shape of the void it makes in my life.

My writing interest is waning. My short story submissions keep getting rejected and I can't find any other places to submit my work. I'm at the point of "why bother?"

After having all my blog articles for the Royal Palm Literary Awards ignored for FWA, it's just piling onto my despair of spending all these years raging against the madness of motherfucking trump and changing none of it. For all the limited views, for all the brief bumps I get from Crooks & Liars traffic, it's not worth it, is it? Anything I write is meaningless against the fear and hatred that a majority of Americans revel in today.

My chronic depression eats away at me. My social anxiety makes it harder and harder to even try and find people near me I could find friendship, or comfort. And it's hard already being stuck in a Deep Red county in a damned Deep Red state to find people who share my world-view.

If this reads like self-pity or wallowing, it probably is. But I've got nothing else to offer right now.

This is all I am: a tired, aging, emotionally broken nobody.

Screaming Into the Void

I went to bed early on Election Night because I didn't want the stress to get the worst of me.

I wake up to a goddamn nightmare.

I thought the worst case nightmare of a trump "win" was that he was going to fight legal challenges all the way up to the Supreme Court. I didn't consider even the possibility trump would claim more popular votes than Harris. trump lost the popular vote in 2016 by three million votes, and lost it more by seven million in 2020. trump had done nothing to improve his favorability numbers in all that time, and yet... what the hell?

And it's not that trump's winning by garnering a higher count than the 74 million he got in 2020: his current total is below that (last saw it was 71 million) and even after all the final tallying is done by this weekend it doesn't look like it'll be any higher than that 74 million from last time.

What's horrifying is how Kamala's vote total - based off the 81 million Biden got earlier - dropped off a literal cliff down to 66 million(!). That total should increase slightly during the final ballot counting, but there's no way she's finding 15 million votes hiding away under a sofa or something to regain the popular vote or flip the Electoral College. This is... wrong. This is broken.

WHERE THE HELL DID 15 MILLION DEMOCRATIC VOTES GO?

This was after all the reports of increased voter registration, this was after all the early voting reports of higher turnout. Pennsylvania and Florida in particular were reporting big turnout overall. There were few signs that the turnout numbers were favoring trump or Republicans. If anything, most of the turnout numbers were matching - if not exceeding in some states - 2020 numbers. AND YET. There's 15 million votes unaccounted for.

This can't be right.

By all accounts, Harris ran the final stages of the campaign - taking over from President Biden when he dropped out from media pressure to do so - just right. She fundraised better than trump. Her rallies drew bigger crowds. The ground game was knocking on every door in the battleground states and then some. There weren't any signs from the voting base itself that they disapproved of Harris (other than the pro-Palestinians fearing the year-long war Israel was inflicting on the Gaza and West Bank citizenry).

There wasn't any evidence that turnout was going to drop this bad. Where the hell did 15 million voters from 2020 go?

Other than grappling at the conspiracy train of thought that the voting machines were rigged - across every battleground state, even the ones where Democrats held local control - the only other thought is that all that voter turnout was a mirage, or that voters avoided marking off a choice for President on the ballots either way.

Looking at the results nationwide, it's not as though that 15 million votes went towards the Libertarian or Green candidates (the Libertarians had barely 540,000 votes, and the Greens got 611,000). Those 15 million votes are just... gone.

What the hell happened to the 81 million voters who showed up for Biden where 15 million of them refused - in an election that could have stopped a known felon and sex offender in trump - to show up for Harris?

This is both frustrating and alarming as hell.

And now we're stuck in hell.

I am regretting ever getting this emotionally invested into my nation's own well-being and survival against the forces of darkness that trump (and his BFF Putin) represent.

For a long time, I thought the Far Right was too extreme, too cruel, too corrupt to truly represent what the United States could be (even with all the racism and sexism dripping through our history books).

I believed the Republican Party wasn't truly reflective of the majority of Americans - not since the 1990s when the sheen of Reaganism fell away - and that they were really a minority party surviving on gerrymandering and voter suppression. The possibility that massive voter suppression happened last night is there, but on this scale? Considering how so many Americans ARE happy voting for a known criminal felon, tax fraud, and sex offender in trump, the only honest reality is that GODS HELP US a majority of Americans are truly this blind, truly this cruel, truly this spiteful towards their own communities and families.

I'm despairing for the poor, for the Blacks facing law enforcement crackdowns to serve trump's obsession for violence against them, for the Latinos and Arabs about to suffer hardships under a vicious anti-immigrant regime, for the women who are about to lose even more rights to an evangelical mob, for the children about to see their personal lives and their safety violated by anti-trans and anti-gay haters.

I'm not despairing for America though. Those sons of bitches voted for a monster about to blow everything up to feed their fear and hate, and they will get caught in the chaos and destruction they thought was going to inflict everyone else.

Goddamn us tonight. History and humanity will never forgive us.

Everybody Hold On Tight Election Day 2024 Edition

Update: Goddammit.

This is what we know going into Election Day this November 5th.

There is a gender gap in the voting trends, with more women showing up to vote than men.

There is a Dobbs Effect, where a number of deeply-held Republican states are seeing a massive shift of votes towards Democratic candidates and pro-abortion state referenda after the Dobbs ruling in 2022 allowed those Republican states to enact harsh anti-abortion laws. What we don't know is how massive those shifts will be and if they will flip enough Red states Blue.

There will be a harsh rebuke from Latino voters - especially Puerto Rican voters - towards Republicans in key battleground states Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Florida. When you have 85 percent of Puerto Ricans telling pollsters they're siding with Harris, that's a huge voting bloc numbering hundreds of thousands in each state giving Democrats advantages in places that were decided by mere thousands of votes.

The governors and Attorneys General in some of the Red states are going to do everything they can to block federal officials from the Justice Department to oversee vote counting, because they dare not let honest tallying take place. So we know the Republicans are going to try and disenfranchise voters they don't like as much as possible.

trump will claim he's winning in every state, and then when a state's counting starts shifting to Harris he will scream "Stop the Steal" and that there's mass voter fraud in that state. Then again, he did this LAST time during the 2020 count, and he threatened to do it in 2016 before that election, so this was going to happen anyway. trump can never admit he's losing.

What people should know going into tomorrow's election: When you get in line before the polls close, STAY IN LINE. It helps to get there as early as possible. Bring your own bottle of water or something because some of the Republican-controlled states banned people from providing drinks and health aid for people stuck in long lines.

If some Proud Boy asshole challenges your right to vote, defend your vote (and see if the precinct security guard can charge that SOB for election interference). If a poll worker challenges your right to vote, demand a provisional ballot. Bring a friend - go with a group of neighbors or family members who can vote at that precinct with you - so you won't be alone and easy to intimidate.

Do be prepared for the craziest election day our nation's ever seen: Crazier than 1968, more chaotic than 1876, and - oh gods, help us - probably more violent than anything (and it's shocking how many violent elections - at least at the local level - we've had).

Stay safe. Use your power to vote. And here's hoping for a strong Blue Wave to wash trump and his criminal ways from our land.

I Need to Blog Something to Open This Month of November So...

I don't want to stress.

I don't want to stress.

I don't want to stress.

I don't want to stress.

(grabs a Gatorade and guzzles it all in one gulp)

via GIPHY

I DON'T WANT TO STRESS.

I AM PERFECTLY FINE.

via GIPHY

ALL THE EARLY VOTING REPORTS AND FINAL WEEK OF POLLING, I DON'T CARE ABOUT ANY OF THAT.

(stops self from writing a prolonged blog essay freaking out over the post-election scenarios)

I AM AN OASIS OF CALM.

I'M FINE. I'M PERFECTLY FINE.

GODDAMMIT WILL WE JUST CONFIRM KAMALA HAS 99 MILLION VOTES ALREADY AND BE DONE WITH THIS?!

(slap)

via GIPHY

Okay. Okay. Whew. Better now.

(grabs the edge of the computer monitor to scream at the nine blog readers here) GET THE DAMN VOTE OUT FOR KAMALA AND EVERY DEMOCRAT ON THE BALLOT! GET IT DONE! 

via GIPHY

As Spock would say, "Party hard, you Vulcan motherf-ckers."

We're gonna need ALL the Romulan Ale by Tuesday night.