In The Year 2021, Will a Just and Shining Future Finally Be Won

The year 2020 is officially ended, although much of the madness and dread that permeated that long long soul-sucking period of history - such as a trumpian administration sinking faster into corruption before Biden's inauguration - still awaits a future purging.

I still need to make a reckoning of that year - part of me wants to write up a Winners/Losers checklist but it's difficult to finish while the chaos is slipping to and fro - but in the meanwhile we do need to look ahead as Infidel753 does at his blog: 

1. When 2022 and 2024 arrive, most of the Democratic voting base will judge Biden and the Democrats in Congress mainly by results.  Has the pandemic been vanquished?  Have jobs and wages (not "the economy", which takes in all kinds of things, but jobs and wages specifically) recovered?  Has federal legislation to protect voting rights from state-level gerrymandering and vote suppression been enacted?  Has Medicare access been expanded or some other kind of public option been provided?  Have DC and Puerto Rico become states?  If the Democrats achieve results, our voters will care only that it was done, not how it was done.  Conversely, if little or nothing is accomplished, nobody will much care about whatever reasons or excuses are offered...

You need to go to Infidel's blog and read the whole article: It's not so much a checklist of a Liberal To Do List as it is a manual (and warning) of what to expect in the coming political cycle.

Much of what's coming is a pattern of destruction and obstruction we've already seen: The Republicans have already made it abundantly clear they will NOT respect the legitimacy of Biden's Presidency and will do everything to break it (and break the nation in the process). The Far Right media will obviously beat the "Impeach Biden" war drums within a day of Biden's swearing-in: for example, pinning the fault of 350,000+ Americans dead of COVID on his shoulders rather than on trump whose actual malfeasance in the affair was - and still is - the primary culprit in that tragedy.

The Republicans are going to spend 2021 - all of the 2020s decade - doing everything they can to hold onto the corrupt Minority Rule powers they wield. They've gotten to the point of Rule Or Ruin in their world-view, they no longer believe in the ebb-and-flow of power cycling between the major parties like it's done for much of the 20th Century. They're at the point that Republicans are terrified of the future... because the path forward from here follows the Democratic/Liberal ideals, not their own.

Half of what Infidel discusses on his article can only occur if the Democrats hold slim control of both halves of Congress, so with the Senate still on the edge with two Georgia Senatorial runoffs we can't be certain how far the Democratic agenda can go. All of what Infidel suggests is where it SHOULD go, such as the needed inclusions of new states to grant those regions - a broken Puerto Rico in particular - the legitimacy of statehood to stabilize their communities and promote better public service. A lot of what Infidel lists are things that should have been happening for ages, denied or blocked only because a calcifying Republican Party refused to see the merits of such efforts (has it ever occurred to Republicans that a habitually conservative Puerto Rican population could go Red and NOT Blue in future federal elections?) to even compromise or provide bipartisan effort to achieve them.

But Republicans can't and won't compromise any more: Politics is officially a Zero Sum game to them, so it's left to the Democrats to get things actually done anymore.

Which is where this coming decade offers so much potential for getting things done. While the Game of Demographics - the shift from older white conservative voting blocs to younger ethnically open liberal blocs - is still not really there yet for liberals to feel safe about achieving results - in health care reforms, civil rights, wage and employment rights, better education, a more just and loving world - the signs are aligning towards it.

What Biden, Harris, the Democratic leaders in Congress, the GOTV leadership of Democrats in battleground states -not just Stacey Abrams but thousands like her - what they can achieve this first year in a Biden Presidency is the foundation of a Liberal (not yet Progressive, sorry BernieBros) era that ought to repair not only the damage done by a vandal-plagued trump Era but also build past the roadblocks that Republicans have been throwing in our nation's path since 1994.

A lot of this still depends on those Georgia Senate races - the early voting on that (with huge numbers) wrapped up and the official election day for that is coming up next - to where none of us can feel safe about what's ahead. If Republicans can keep a slim 51-seat lead in the Senate, that means Mitch McConnell remains in power and can wield every obstructionist tool at his disposal to delay the Democrats' agenda for another two years at least.

If it comes to that, if Congress becomes a pit of McConnell's hellish desires, Biden and the Democrats can still try to rebuild as much of the federal system they can - while still wary of the conservative Judiciary trump and McConnell have built to oppose the oncoming Blue Path - with a dedicated effort to undercut the corruption the Republicans have been operating with at the state level. 

The long-term objective of breaking the Republican Minority Rule needs to focus on the insane level of Gerrymandering the Republicans commit at the state level in battleground states - Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida especially - and that the Far Right will keep deploying to suppress future Democratic voter turnout. There have been successes in weakening the Gerrymander efforts, but our nation has yet to find a way to kill those damn things outright. With the chaos trump infused into the 2020 U.S. Census efforts, it's likely the Republican-controlled states will use skewed numbers to Gerrymander even more to prevent Democratic majorities - even slim ones - in those states to elect honest proportional representation.

That's just one thing I can think of that Biden and the Democratic Party needs to be doing. Infidel's list of To Do's - again, go to that link - lists a whole lot more. Every one of them a necessary act to recover from this pandemic, from this economic malaise, to repair this collapsing edifice we know as the United States of America.

We should see an end to the trump years like the fading nightmare it's all been.

We are going to wake up to a busy decade of hard work. That shining future is just the morning sunrise. Get some coffee if you need it.

Go Read Infidel's The Choice

There's a lot to write about so I want to post something quick about the 2020 Election and WHY IT MATTERS so here's Infidel753 on "The Choice," read it in full and understand WE NEED TO VOTE THE REPUBLICAN CROOKS OUT NOW. Pass it on.

Ten Years Blogging And All I Got to Show For It Is a T-Shirt

Well, as sold on CafePress and what not... ahem. I should focus here.

Infidel753 over on his blog announced he had completed ten years of crazy blogging and took a moment to look back at his biggest reads. Blogger.com tracks viewership stats, country of linkage, and search terms used to bring up the blog.

He pointed out how Pinku-Sensei over at his blog had done the same thing, and I got to thinking that hey, it wouldn't hurt to look back as part of the Ten Years Gone sentiment and see what was popular among the eight regular readers and occasional guests...

10) There's a book on suggested amendment ideas! Oct 23, 2007
1135 Pageviews

This is a hold-over from the days where I wanted to focus my blogging on amendment reforms and ideas, when the blog was Amendments We Need and... almost nobody read it. But this picked up a lot of traffic because of the keywords: the word "amendment" and the name "Larry Sabato," a well-known Constitutional scholar and political pundit. Sad thing is, there's nothing to this entry. It's barely two paragraphs, mostly noticing there's a book on suggested amendment ideas. It's kind of sad how the Google search algorithms work.

9) Democratic Debate Drinking Game for October Oct 1, 2015 7 comments
1144 Pageviews

This is part of a phase on my blogging when I couldn't take the then GOP Primary debates of the 2015-16 news cycle. So to cope, I wrote a series of mocking, almost horrifyingly accurate drinking rules for people watching the debates.

This isn't even the highest ranking drinking game mockery, just one that eked into the top 10. I will say more higher on the list.

8) The Danger of Trump's World View Apr 29, 2016 5 comments
1245 Pageviews

The biggest reason I get a lot of recent traffic is that somewhere around 2012 (2011?) I came to the attention of Batocchio, blogger at Vagabond Scholar, who placed links of my articles at Crooks & Liars newsblog under the Mike's Blog Round-Up daily share. Since then, other guest managers of MBRU like Tengrain and Infidel would link me as well, kicking up my traffic from fourth-tier to... um, maybe second-tier infamy.

This affected me in two ways. One, it increased how often I would blog because before then I would post something maybe once a week: Nowadays I try to blog something of interest once a day. Two, it made me try to write things of genuine thought and intellectual worthiness to make the grade for the MBRU notice.

This actually wasn't one of my more intellectual works. Borrowing a lot from Adam Silverman's more scathing attack on Trump's world-view from Balloon-Juice, all I did was add on my views of Barber's Presidential Character traits and let it out there. It had a lot of the emotional urgency - due to it pointing how dangerous Trump would be, period - which I guess made it a popular article to link. It not only got the C&L treatment, I also got linked to Infidel's individual weekly wrap-up as well as a link from Skippy the Bush Kangaroo!

7) Florida Ballot Amendments 2012: The Big No Oct 12, 2012 1 comment
1257 Pageviews

One thing I noticed from the analytical information is how I get traffic from other nations. I get readers flocking in from places like Russia and Japan for certain articles. Sometimes because the Russians were trying to hack me, probably, still I shouldn't be too paranoid. Ahem...

This was HUGELY popular in places like Japan and France, and the reason why was that I was blogging about a rare thing: the statewide amendments on the Florida ballot in 2012. There must not be a lot of other people who spend the time - at least back then - to go over each amendment in detail and offer up a suggested "vote this way". I must pop up high on the search engine results whenever someone wants to know "hey, what's Amendment 7 about" and "should I vote NO on this amendment on tax exemptions for war veterans?"

6) Florida 2014 Election: Sample Ballots and Reminders Oct 12, 2014 8 comments
1380 Pageviews

As noted with 7), my Florida-based evaluations of the sample ballots and amendment votes are a big hit with the search engines. This one got slightly better traffic, and even got more heated commentary, because of the key races for Governor, the Medical Marijuana vote, and the Pasco County Mosquito Control Board (sadly, there wasn't enough information on that year's Mosquito Control candidates, which led to a lot of angry readers). This year, I hope I get a good showing for the general election recommendations...

5) American Income, American Injustice Mar 6, 2015 2 comments
1503 Pageviews

This one is one of my prouder achievements. Building off of the examinations from better writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates and Chad Staton, I delved into our nation's nasty little secret of police-driven extortion in the form of Asset Forfeiture, and how it was keeping poor communities broken and feeding into the cycle of mistrust between law enforcement and the citizenry needing their service. I consider it one of my better calls for reforms I've written.

4) Whatever happened to the Port-O-San Cleaner from Woodstock Aug 15, 2009 7 comments
1569 Pageviews

If the previous article is my proudest work, this is my most personal fave.

I've been a fan of Woodstock Festival 1969 ever since my high school years studying modern history, and so every year every August I find myself gushing over the event. In particular, I came to respect the man who showed up in the classic award-winning documentary working on keeping the Port-O-Sans clean for 500,000 (!) attendees, and so in 2009 I dedicated a researched blog article about Mr. Taggart, the Hero of Woodstock.

Where most of these articles are ranked high thanks to traffic links from Crooks & Liars and other bloggers, this one does not. And yet it made the Top 5 all on its own, based on search engine requests from hundreds of other people trying to find anything on the "guy who cleaned the Port-O-Sans at Woodstock." Every day I see one, three, five, eight people hitting this article - sometimes not even near the anniversary - all because they want to find any info on him too. Such is the legacy Mr. Taggart has left to us: there are so many who watch the documentary and are touched by the man's story and who want to know more...

And I'm still waiting to hear from Mr. Taggart's son! C'mon man, I need to hear your story...

3) The Long October: The Ambitious Damage of The Hollow Men Oct 15, 2013 2 comments
1969 Pageviews

This was me, waxing poetic during the big Republican Shutdown effort of 2013, what I called "the Long October." This made a big impact on the MBRU page the week I wrote it, and I later considered it for Batocchio's Annual Roundup at his Vagabond Scholar site, which added to the traffic.

2) And Iran. Day Six Jun 18, 2009 2753 Pageviews

I was one of hundreds of people blogging about the Iranian Green Revolution back in 2009, hoping at the time that the people's uprising might lead to good things.

Sadly, it didn't.

I still got a lot of traffic for this entry, most of it from France, probably because this one had photos to it, some I had created on the I Can Has Cheezburgr site using the Demotivational Poster tool. And ouch, the links have actually gone bad. I need to go in and fix those...

In the meantime, the Iranian uprising had been quashed in one way but had retained life in another: the Iranian people still vote for the most moderate, global-minded candidates they can in spite of the Ayatollah's efforts to push hardliners into office. Granted, the moderate officials can't do much, but the votes are still a major denouncement of the religious leadership, and they've led to better foreign relations that can lead to a kind of peace that the Ayatollah cannot ignore.

1) It Has To Be Done: GOP Debate Drinking Game 2016 Jul 22, 2015 17 comments
3879 Pageviews

I will admit: This one was too easy to make.

The early polling for the Republican slate of Presidential candidates was making it clear that Trump was dominating the set, and that the upcoming televised debates starting that August were going to be barn-burners (in a bad way). At one point I tweeted to Oliver Willis if he knew of any drinking games that were going to be in play for at least the first debate, and then I decided "You know what? F-ck it, I'm writing my own."

Even though I personally do not drink alcohol of any kind. I *am* keen on the microbrewery process as a purely intellectual / cooking /chemistry interest, but that's it. I'd be drinking flavored tea where I could (and hell, even drinking water to excess is toxic, so any drinking game carries a risk...)

By creating that drinking game list in July, I had gotten ahead of a couple of other bloggers (and professional writers) who were trying the same thing before the actual August event. By getting in early for the search engine parameters, I ended up at the top of the results pages for a lot of people looking to get buzzed - or drowning their sorrows - during what turned out to be the Worst of Times and the Blurst of Times.

Adding to the fun was getting Pinku-Sensei showing up, plugging in his suggested drink recipes for each GOP candidate, and which helped spike interest.

I made another drinking game for September, building off the success of this one, but by the October one I realized the gag wasn't that funny anymore and that people were likely getting drunk over the realization that Trump was winning the Republican ballot. I don't think I will create another election-based drinking game again.

Unless Ted Cruz and Marco "No-Show" Rubio make comebacks for 2020.

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So there you have it. My ten most viewed articles in the first ten years of this blog.

Of the articles I'm most proud of that didn't make the list, a popular article on Presidential Character for Woodrow Wilson deserves honorable mention. I also get a lot of traffic for the MegaCon comic book conventions, but that's about it.

I do encourage you all to of course read every article. :)

That Moment When You Realize An Argument Is Going the Wrong Way

I woke up this morning to find that Infidel753 has been so upset by the reaction he's seeing online about both the Pulse shooting and the Brexit vote that he's walking away from blogging (he's also coping with real-world physical pain and surgery, so there's that) at least for now.

I've got this sinking feeling in my gut that I'm one of the ones who pushed him off the ledge, so to speak.

By his reaction - his complaint of people berating the British voters for speaking their mind - I think he's pointing at the bit in my "You Tossers" rant a few days ago where I blame the voters for being short-sighted and ill-informed. Well, here's what he wrote:

No one seemed to have any knowledge or awareness of the actual issues -- restoration of national sovereignty and independence (however sacred if it were a Third World country involved), the desire to return power from an unelected oligarchy to an elected government, the economic devastation wrought by the euro currency and the EU's enforcement of (very Republican-like) austerity policies on already-weak south European economies -- or the implications of the fact that polls show support for the EU plummeting in all its member states, not just in the UK.  That's hundreds of millions of people who have been living under the damn thing for decades.  Which is more likely -- that they are totally misreading their situation, or that you are totally misreading their situation?...

Bloggers who should know better rushed to ridicule the democratic decision of the British people (soon likely to be replicated in any EU member state where the public gets a chance to vote on its own future), based apparently on some combination of received opinion from the popular media, the fact that Donald Trump approved of the decision (remember the old adage about a stopped clock being right twice a day), and, bizarrely, a perceived similarity between Trump and Boris Johnson, based on a slight physical resemblance and a tendency toward iconoclasm.  I always knew Americans tend to be ignorant about the outside world, but this is astonishing.  Is it really impossible to look at other countries' politics except by ridiculous, shallow analogies to something American?

Even stupider have been the efforts to legitimize this reaction by zeroing in on one individual who was quoted as saying he didn't think his vote would count (every population includes a few idiots), Google searches about what exactly leaving the EU will involve, and suchlike, in an effort to depict the British people as naïve fools who didn't know what they were doing.  Trust me, they knew.  This contemptuous disdain for the will of the people when they vote against the rule of a self-appointed oligarchy is exactly the kind of thing I'd expect from the authoritarians who support, well, Trump -- or worse...

Infidel has a valid point in that the Europeans have a better sense of what's going on with their situation that we (or I) do over here on this side of the pond. That the Leave voters had sensible reasons for cutting ties with a bureaucratic system and economic coalition that had little transparency, accountability, or understanding of how their ongoing Austerity measures were cutting into people's lives.

And I don't want this argument to get any worse or cause further divide. If only I can make one point of my own here.

My biggest concern was and still is that the Leave voters honestly didn't realize that the chaos they've voted for is going to be just as traumatic as staying under an EU system that wasn't working as intended. And that it is going to be chaos now not only in the United Kingdom but across all of Europe, which is going to affect everything else in this global economy. And chaos isn't always a good thing.

I want to argue in favor of greater push for reforms, not outright rejection. That's what they should have voted for (and I noted Cameron was an idiot for not framing the referendum to include a "stay but reform" option).

And if I came across as angry and petulant or uncaring of the British voters' right to express themselves, for that I apologize. (It didn't help that the ones I saw pushing for Leave the most - Farage and the UKIP - were shilling a racist anti-immigrant argument as well as lies about what benefits leaving would bring)

I DO respect the right and power of people to vote. I want people to show up to vote (and dammit, just don't vote Republican... sorry, I had to... you know...) because as every election has proven, every election and every vote matters. I just get frustrated - A LOT, this is what I get for living in Florida - when people seem to vote against something for what I see are the wrong reasons.

I know Infidel is going to be busy with real-world stuff right about now, and it sounds like he should, especially if he's prepping for major surgery. I wish him well and that he comes out of that healthy and improved. I don't want him leaving in a foul mood. I respect his opinion and his values, and if I crossed a line with him, that's on me and I got to do better than be flippant and angry all the time.

...Just one last thing. I'm with the Scottish voters on this point (warning NSFW): Trump's still an idiot.