The Blind Eye of the Beltway

Update: Thank you Steve in Manhattan for including this article in Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up! I hope everyone browses the other articles here and gains enlightenment in some form. Also, why the hell didn't Barbie win for Best Set Design?! I mean, they used ALL that pink...! 

One of the reasons for my apprehension about this 2024 presidential cycle is how the mainstream media - the Beltway (Washington) punditry leading the Fourth Estate that overwhelms our awareness - is mishandling the entire thing as a personality horse race: Between an elderly Democratic white guy the Beltway is deeming too old, and an enraged bullying Republican white guy (who's not that much older, and showing more signs of dementia) facing criminal charges across four different court rooms threatening to impose a dictatorship on Day One.

Try to guess which issue the esteemed Beltway expresses a more pressing concern. /headdesk

And try to remember how this all feels so similar to how that Beltway - now older, but still operating with the same hive-mind "Both Sideism" world view - mishandled the 2016 presidential cycle, which proved disastrous. I wrote back in 2017 how the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review evaluated the media's performance and found it biased - obscenely so - towards donald trump and against Hillary Clinton:

In other words, the mainstream media - the Beltway pundits that dominate the political discourse - flipped the real world. They focused more on Hillary's "scandals" - which turned out to be nothingburgers, inflated to inflame the voters against her - than on her policy positions to where I guarantee the average voter didn't even know what her policies were. They focused on trump's "policies" - which was BUILD A WALL, Start a TRADE WAR with China, and Shut Down NATO - while ignoring trump's failures, financial scandals, and sexual assaults.

In short: Hillary got all the bad press, trump got all the good press.

We're seeing it happen again, especially in the national press like the New York Times and Washington Post (not to mention the 24-hour cable punditry like Fox Not-News (obviously), CNN, and yes even liberal-leaning MSNBC). Most of that mainstream media focusing on narratives over Biden "needing to step aside for a younger more winnable Democrat" even as the early primary results have Biden body-slamming his opponents by 80-90 percent. Most of that same mainstream media ignoring donald trump's open calls to put immigrants into internment camps, to destroy NATO as a bulwark against Russia, to operate as a dictator on Day One "to punish" his enemies; even ignoring the recent reports of how trump's White House staff was pumping themselves full of drugs as a dangerous abuse of power.

It's that disconnect - especially at the Paper Of Record the New York Times - that is leaving our whole nation vulnerable to disinformation, misplaced outrage, and misled voters. It's the kind of thing enraging the likes of Lucian K. Truscott IV (a long-tenured reporter and pundit himself) over at Salon:

Two things — check that, three things — appear to have gone off the rails at the paper we used to call the Gray Lady. First, whoever is in charge of the paper’s polls is not doing their job. Second, whoever is choosing what to emphasize in Times coverage of the campaign for the presidency is showing bias. Third, the Times is obsessed with Joe Biden’s age at the same time they’re leaving evidence of Donald Trump’s mental and verbal stumbles completely out of the news.

Let’s start right there. At a rally on Saturday night in Virginia, Trump confused Barack Obama, who left office seven years ago, with President Biden for the third time over the last six months. “Putin has so little respect for Obama that he’s starting to throw around the nuclear word,” Trump said, as his crowd of rabid supporters suddenly fell silent. “You heard that. Nuclear. He’s starting to talk nuclear weapons today.” You won’t find that verbal stumble and the crowd’s stunned reaction in the Times coverage of the campaign over the weekend. You’ll have to read other publications — for example, Salon or maybe the Guardian — if you want to learn how often Trump is losing his way mid-sentence at rallies and just mumbling incoherently.

The Times on Sunday, however, had this headline ready for your morning coffee: “Majority of Biden’s 2020 Voters Now Say He’s Too Old to be Effective.” It’s another grab from the New York Times/Siena College poll they published on Saturday that is so outrageously flawed, a cottage industry has sprung up to pick apart its methodology and point out its glaring contradictions and straight-up bias.

A favorite of poll skeptics is its sampling bias. How did the New York Times come up with a polling sample that included 36 percent rural voters when the 2020 proportion of rural voters was 19 percent? Somehow, the poll’s sample of female voters was equally skewed. The poll found Trump winning the female vote by one percent, when Biden carried women in 2020 by 11 points. The Times wants you to ignore that in between, all three of Trump’s Supreme Court justices quarterbacked the Dobbs decision overturning women’s constitutional right to abortion, followed almost immediately by states banning abortion all over the country, many with no exceptions for rape or incest. The Times doesn’t say how it squares its poll numbers with the fact that women turned out in huge numbers to help win referendums confirming a right to abortion, including in such Republican strongholds as Kansas and Kentucky, and handed every special election to Democratic candidates in the bargain. They just want you to believe there’s been a 12-point swing toward Trump among women, with no evidence except, poof!  It happened!...

Why is the New York Times missing the red flags in its own polls? More important, why has the paper decided to give its own deeply biased poll results such heavy play? I don’t want to bring up but her emails, but for crying out loud, why is the New York Times so clearly making the same mistakes of bias and emphasis they made in 2016 covering Hillary Clinton all over again?... None of the daily drumbeat of manufactured “news” added up to even a pinprick of a scandal, but as the Times did with Whitewater and the rest of the made-up Clinton scandals, the paper simply couldn’t resist filling its front page with negative stories about the Democratic candidate for president...

If I could answer from my spot on the sidelines, there are several overlapping reasons why the Times - and the Post, and CNN, and everybody else with a free pass to the green rooms of every talking head show out there - are making the same mistakes they made in 2016.

One of the most obvious reasons the mainstream media behaves this way is the "horse race mentality" that a political campaign brings to the public's attention. It's the simplest way to frame and cover an election - This Guy vs. That Guy, let's see who wins! - even at the expense of the practical issues. The media wants this to be a personality contest.

But part of the problem is how the media frames this personality contest with a mindset of "Both Sideism" - that both candidates AND the two major parties they represent have to be balanced in some way - to where they will enlarge or over-report any minor issue for one candidate/party - to the point of fabricating scandal where there is no scandal - in order to balance the open and major flaws of the opponent. We're seeing it now where the Beltway elites are whining over the "scandal" of Biden being "too old" (when he's only three years older, and shows signs of being more fit than trump) while papering over the reality that trump is facing up to 91 felony charges in four different court rooms.

This is, by the by, why the House Republicans are still so desperate to dig up dirt on Biden's family: Fresh red meat to feed to a media corps hungry for "Both Sides" scandal reporting.

A less obvious reason the punditry are acting this way is due to their own world views getting shaped during the Reagan Era of "Sunny Conservative" Born Again Americanism. Much like the punditry and journalism of the Sixties and Seventies shaped by those who grew up to the FDR New Deal experience, today's punditry and media leadership came of age in the Eighties and Nineties, which shapes their bias of today. I said this before: 

What we're getting is this ongoing fantasy, this wish fulfillment, among the Far Right pols and pundits desirous for The Return Of The Reagan Heir: the Prince That Was Promised. We're talking about a set of people pining for the days when it was 1985: when Reagan stomped the hell out of Mondale and his dirty hippie librul army of Electoral College no-shows...

Far too many pundits and reporters view modern Democrats as "out of touch" of the "mainstream" American thought, which the media thinks means "Rural" "White" and "Angry". This is the reason why the Times/Siena College polling skewed their sample population 36 percent Rural instead of making it 19 percent like the 2020 vote turnout confirmed. The national media EXPECTS this to be fact when instead its their own bias showing.

This is why the mainstream media keeps wishcasting - thank you, Tom Nichols - for The Next Reagan: this charming, wistful, flag-waving pie-loving patron for that Small-Town America where neighbors knew everybody well enough to leave folding chairs along the 4th of July parade route down Broadway Avenue the day before, because they trust each other enough that nobody will go stealing them.

The media elites kind of know that donald trump cannot be the Reagan figure, he doesn't come from that America - he and his will happily steal or vandalize those folding chairs, and then blame it on immigrants - but the pundits still can't wrap their heads around the possibility that Biden and the Democrats can represent that part of America alongside the 4th of July parade routes down MLK Boulevard in Los Angeles and Chicago and Tampa and San Antonio and Cleveland and every other major metro where most Americans actually reside.

So they chide the Democratic front-runners for not fulfilling their Reaganesque fantasy - even as Biden, as I've noted before, is as close a Reagan (Passive-Positive) figure the Democrats have to lead the nation - all the while promoting less-charismatic Republicans - stop making Rubio happen, he's not going to happen! - or worse providing cover for Republicans representing the racism, sexism, greed and violence of America's darker Id - at the expense of the American voters remaining misinformed and disillusioned.

I'm finishing this up just as the Super Tuesday voting is wrapping up. Both Biden and trump won enough states and delegates to effectively wrap up their respective nominations, but with noticeable differences. Biden - again - curb-stomped his primary opponent Dean Phillips to where in most states Phillips was in third place behind "Uncommitted" (which also tended to be in single digits). trump actually lost a state - Vermont - to opponent Nikki Haley; and while he dominated in several states in most others Haley had secured around 30 percent, which is a significant portion of party voters.

Biden is winning big as an incumbent candidate for the Democrats, while trump is struggling as the incumbent candidate for the Republicans.

And yet you'll never see the Beltway Media frame The Narrative of their horse race in that manner.

The pundits just can't see it that way.

The 2024 U.S. Presidential Primary Checklist

Okay, just to help voters keep track of which Presidential candidate has certain issues and concerns as we head into the thick of the 2024 Primary Season:

	Joe Biden	Donald Trump
Is Old	a	a
Is Showing Signs of Memory Issues	a	a
Is Still Screaming about "Stolen Votes" from 2020		a
Is Threatening to quit NATO		a
Is Demanding Republicans in Congress Block Any Aid to Ukraine In Its War Against Russia		a
Is Gloating about ending Roe V Wade		a
Found Liable of Sexual Assault in a Court of Law To the Tune of $88 Million and Counting		a
Found Liable of Acts of Business Fraud To the Tune of $450 Million Plus Interest		a
Refuses to Let Congress Pass a Border Reform Bill to Keep His Opponent From Benefiting Politically		a
Promoting an Ugly-Ass Sneaker for $499.00 (when it probably costs $49.00 in real life)		a
Is Facing Criminal Trial in New York on 34 Counts for "Election Interference" and Filing False Documents this March 2024		a
Is Facing Criminal Trial in DC on Four Felony Counts Concerning January 6th 2021 Riots as Soon as The Supreme Court Considers an Appeal Over Absolute Presidential Immunity		a
Is Facing Criminal Trial in South Florida on Multiple Counts of Classified Documents Mishandling, Probably by May 2024		a
Is Facing Criminal Trial in Georgia on Multiple Counts of Election Interference and Racketeering Related to a Fake Electors Scheme, TBD		a
Is Winning the 2024 Party Primaries with 90 Percent of the Vote	a
Is Getting Told By National Media Pundits to "Step Aside" or Quit Campaigning to Make Room for the Pundit's Preferred Candidate (TBD) for the "Good of the Party" and the United States	a

 I'm not WRONG, am I?

Painful Way to Kill Your Political Career, Dean

Oh, while I was surviving MegaCon yesterday, apparently the Democratic Party officially started their Presidential primarying in South Carolina, with incumbent Joe Biden stomping hard on his primary opponents with 95 percent of the vote across the entire state (via Asma Khalid at NPR):

President Biden won the South Carolina Democratic primary on Saturday, according to The Associated Press. It is the first official nominating contest for the party, and one that Democrats hope sends a message to Black voters.

As the incumbent president, Biden had been widely expected to carry the primary. Rep. Dean Phillips, D-Minn., and author Marianne Williamson were also on the ballot...

The Democrats are changing up the order of primaries this cycle, trying to shift away from the small populated states like Iowa and New Hampshire that also don't display the demographic diversity of the party itself. South Carolina isn't a major population state like California, New York, or Illinois - Democratic-leaning states - but it's big enough to matter.

Unwilling to play by the new rules, New Hampshire still held an unsanctioned primary last month allowing write-ins to happen for the Democrats while the Republicans held theirs officially. Biden STILL cleaned up there without campaigning a single day there while his opponents Williamson - you might remember her from last time - and Phillips showed up and begged for votes. 

You might notice I haven't run a Character profile - based on Professor Barber's work - on Dean Phillips even though he threw his hat into the Democratic primaries months ago: Mostly because I viewed Phillips attempts to kneecap the incumbent candidate Biden was doomed to failure. In the modern era of presidential elections - I would say turn of the 20th Century with McKinely (not Teddy!) - there hasn't been a successful challenge against a first-term President within the party. Teddy Roosevelt tried to against his successor Taft but failed (running third-party instead). Truman and LBJ technically quit their campaigns for re-election when they saw the writing on the wall, so we can't be certain how those would have turned out. Thing is, Phillips was in no position - he was a literal unknown backbencher congresscritter with no national profile; he lacks the natural charisma any challenger needs to prevail; and Gods know what he was actually campaigning for - to challenge a well-known relatively popular figure like Biden who isn't quitting any time soon. 

If I can quote from Tori Otten at New Republic:

Phillips is running a long-shot campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination against President Biden. If you’re wondering how that’s going for him, Phillips won just 19.6 percent of votes during New Hampshire’s unofficial Democratic primary on Tuesday. Biden won 55.8 percent—as a write-in candidate.

Following his New Hampshire loss, Phillips revealed Wednesday morning on Fox & Friends that he had attended one of Donald Trump’s rallies to try to connect with far-right voters. When his actions prompted backlash, Phillips spoke out against political divisions...

Phillips then tried to point to the 2016 Electoral College map which shows a lot of Republican Red. But he erred by thinking geography matters instead of actual population density: Online critics hit Phillips by pointing out the Democratic Blue places on the map have more people who actually matter ("Land doesn't vote, people do!")

“There was probably a lane for someone to do reasonably well against Biden,” tweeted Osita Nwanevu, a columnist for The Guardian and contributing editor for The New Republic, “but being maximally annoying to every constituency in the Democratic Party at once wasn’t it, obviously.”

I exaggerated a bit earlier when I said nobody know what Phillips is campaigning for: He's actually campaigning on the belief that Biden is old, and that Biden's too unpopular to both the Democratic voting base and the independent voters overall.

Depending on which poll you're looking at, Biden's popularity isn't as healthy as it ought to be - considering the positive economic news Biden keeps generating over the past year thanks to his Infrastructure Bill efforts - but then again polls this far out from November are unpredictable as hell.

And regarding Biden's popularity with the Democratic voting base, those massive wins in New Hampshire (unofficially) and South Carolina - where Williamson beat out Phillips by a percent - ought to bury that particular narrative right quick.

Democratic voters will support their incumbent candidate, especially considering how Biden seems to be the only candidate who can keep donald trump at bay. It's likely - again, no guarantees - that the Indy voters who turned out against trump in 2020 will do so again in 2024 and vote for Joe. Phillips is essentially committing political suicide doing all this.

How Phillips got talked into thinking he could be a savior candidate to outduel Biden and then defeat trump remains a scandal of its own. Approached by a "political strategist" in Steve Schmidt, a campaign advisor most famous for talking John McCain into taking Sarah Palin as his Veep running mate, who claims he's "worried" about Dems relying on an aging President Biden (as though trump is any healthier three years younger and clearly more physically and mentally unfit). You have to look at who's paying Schmidt - deep-pocket "technocrat" billionaires worried about their tax cuts and Biden's pro-union stances - to get an idea of who's really worried about 2024 (and who they really want to win, which is trump). Schmidt basically went fishing for an egocentric millionaire among the Democratic ranks to be the stalking horse to weaken Biden's standing within the party itself.

Good news is, that's not working.

Bad news is, we're getting a clearer picture of how the real Political Establishment - not just the deep-pocket billionaires paying for everything, but also the "expert consultant" class and the upper-income media punditry - don't view trump as the dictatorial, openly destructive force that he is.

Gods help us. This 2024 election is going to be a war, with disinformation coming from every media outlet "convinced" that Biden can't win... even though Biden is winning the primaries and proving his popularity with actual voters with barely a finger lifted.

Get out the vote, America. Support Biden. Stop trump (and his billionaire buddies).

And let Dean Phillips crawl back to some state college on a guest lecturer gig for the rest of his life. His political career is toast. If he thinks he can make a comeback in 2028 based on his dismal performance this year, he's more delusional that trump.

The Disaster of DeSantis

I hadn't been paying too much attention to Ron DeSantis' presidential campaigns because quite honestly there wasn't much there to begin with.

I could have kept up with all the reporting about how mismanaged and unfocused his organization had been. I could have spent a lot of time focusing on DeSantis' many failures to even pretend to be a normal human being, given all the reports out there of how he can't even smile properly at rallies and debates.

I did spend time headdesking over how DeSantis - supposedly with this great Ivy League education going to Harvard and Yale - didn't have enough brain cells to spot the word FASCIST in a snowflake a stealth protestor gifted him at an early rally. How the hell did he even get out of Dunedin High with that lack of awareness?

What did matter about DeSantis' presidential ambitions was how he used his role as bully (not governor) to get the Florida Legislature to pass increasingly obscene legislation to ban abortion; attack trans and gay teens across the state; decry studies of racism and slavery as woke even trying to rewrite history to claim slavery had "benefits" (that was particularly offensive); and even go after corporations like Disney because they refused to roll over and play to his anti-gay agenda.

All so DeSantis could pander to the extremist Far Right voting base of the Republican Party and steal them away from donald trump.

Well, guess what Ron.

Those MAGA morons sold their souls to trump ages ago, and they ain't giving him up for some unhappy, wallowing mental midget trying to pretend he's a Machiavellian mastermind. Anybody thinking they were going to steal away trump's support have to be morons themselves. The best chance was to outlast the primaries, keep your name on the ballot at least, and pray to God trump ended up convicted in any of the criminal trials happening this year (or gets barred from the ballot for inciting insurrection under the 14th Amendment).

DeSantis spent apparently $130 million on his presidential bid, and all he got was a terrible second-place finish in a barely-attended Iowa caucus and every sign he was going to lose New Hampshire to Nikki Haley. (this begs the question for a campaign as mismanaged as this where the hell did that $130 million go?)

So of course DeSantis decided today to suspend the campaign and support the monstrous trump (via Jeongyoon Han at NPR):

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose hardline right-wing policies in his state garnered much public attention and made him an early favorite for the 2024 presidential race, suspended his bid for the Republican nomination on Sunday in a video posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. Gov. DeSantis also endorsed the former President Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination...

DeSantis' exit from the Republican presidential nomination field creates a path for former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley as the only conservative alternative to Trump's candidacy left in the race. Trump and Haley will square off in the New GOP Hampshire primary on Tuesday...

There have been real questions about DeSantis' campaign after his distant second-place finish in Iowa. He pledged to continue and focus on South Carolina, but his campaign and super PAC supporting him, which had spent tens of millions supporting him, has spent nothing on campaign ads since Iowa.

DeSantis' main campaign message was that he would be better at delivering the same kinds of policies that Trump would be in favor of, because he doesn't have the same baggage that Trump carries from his numerous indictments and federal charges. He vowed to rid the country of "wokeism," a term he often used to criticize liberal policies, win the presidency by a wide margin, and deliver on issues that Republicans care about — much like how he says he has in Florida...

It turned out attacking "Wokeism" didn't appeal in other states where racism is not as controversial a topic. It didn't help DeSantis that in half of his battles fighting "The Woke" he's lost - or is losing - in humiliating fashion. Getting outmaneuvered by Disney lawyers using British-era "Rules Against Perpetuities" to deny DeSantis' takeover of their Reedy Creek oversight board didn't look good either.

All DeSantis has really done for the state of Florida is mismanage it all - much like his national campaign - focusing on appearances instead of creating actual solutions. While DeSantis has been attacking gays and trans and women and Blacks, he's ignored the growing home insurance crisis. While DeSantis has been warring against Woke, he's been dismantling what had been a growing and successful public university system even turning the honors-level New College institution into a virtual paper mill.

If you think DeSantis' ending his failed presidential bid will make him let up on his arch-conservative governing, don't. He's still a petty little tyrant hoping to get his revenge on all the people who humiliated him on his climb to the top (and arguably thinking about running in 2028 if - Gods help us - trump fails to steal 2024).

All this disastrous campaign proved is that trump is an unstoppable juggernaut within the Republican Party. trump pretty much owns the GOP now. It's just a question of how many Republican voters who haven't bought into the MAGA madness are willing to turn away from that.

Just stop voting Republican, America. Doesn't matter if it's DeSantis or trump or Haley or any of the other would-be dictators waiting in the wings.

What If They Gave a GOP Primary Debate and Nobody Cared?

Update 1/15/24: Thanks again to Batocchio for including my blog in the Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. If you can do me a favor, visit me here as I'm trying to narrow down blog articles to submit to the Annual Royal Palm Literary Awards for 2024, please let me know either in the comments or by dropping me a tweet (yes I know it's dying but I still check it for shits and giggles).

Just for the record, last night the Republicans hosted a presidential primary debate of all the possible candidates trying to usurp donald trump from the front-runner spot heading into 2024.

If it looked like an empty stage, that's because it kinda was.

With trump refusing to show up for these things - having already locked up the MAGA voting base and unwilling to get caught by moderators to explain his pending criminal trials - it's been a parade of second-and-third tier pretenders hoping to be the last one(s) standing if/when trump gets convicted and unable to run anymore or blocked from the ballots.

Or at least it was a parade. The standard attrition process of the primaries saw many of the wannabes who couldn't keep up their fundraising to pay off six-figure consultant fees falling to the wayside.

Remember all the clowns back in August 2023? The likes of Doug Burgum (who?) and Ada Hutchinson (why?) and Tim Scott (this one was actually a personal shock, I thought he had a sugar daddy keeping him afloat) and Mike Pence (ahahahahahahahaha) all trying to appeal to the trumpian base and failing.

The ones that had remained weren't exactly the charismatic types to keep the audiences entertained. Vivak Ramaswamy did his best to mimic trump's raging persona but as a pitiful tone-deaf elitist trying to insult everyone else he was too ridiculous to accept. Chris Christie at least had the bullying persona down to an art, but as his game plan was to attack trump as a danger to the party itself there was no way Christie was going to win over the base (what's heart-breaking is how his message didn't gave favor from whatever moderate anti-Trump voters remain in the GOP). It didn't help Christie's message that he himself surrendered to trump back in 2016 and was last seen staring at the cameras during his "endorsement" of a raving trump with an expression that screamed "my God, I sold my soul to the biggest moron in the nation."

Neither Ramaswamy nor Christie were on the stage, as both couldn't qualify for this round. As such, Christie announced just before this debate he was dropping out. In the process, Christie denounced the remaining survivors as incapable of stopping trump and basically left it all open for trump to win even without being present.

That left the challengers to Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis.

...

...

Yeah, the GOP's screwed. I didn't even have to watch that debate to know how quickly it devolved into direct insults and inability to focus on issues.

Having said that, it becomes interesting to see how the non-trump elements of the voting base come to terms with either backing a nightmarish homunculus like DeSantis who can't even fake basic human emotions or body language, or a pandering Lost Cause supporter like Haley who at least retains some semblance of functioning brain cells. The terrifying thing is that nobody really cares at this point.

But it is looking nobody will force a contentious Republican primary. The nature of the Winner-Take-All system that will accumulate delegates at a fast rate will likely honor trump as the winner before Super Tuesday even rolls up by early March. It then becomes a question if the Republican Convention has to scramble and find a replacement candidate should trump get barred from the ballot due to the 14th Amendment.

The insanity will just keep going through to November. Gods help us.

What If: The Colorado Ruling Applies to ALL of 2024 Primaries?

So, let's just say the Colorado Supreme Court ruling that said trump should be barred from the presidential ballot because he engaged in insurrection regarding the January 6th riots goes to the US Supreme Court, and even the majority conservative bench of six Republican jurists rule against trump in some fashion.

It's not a given that the six will rule for trump outright. Doing so would go against their own Originalist opinions the Far Right justices had been arguing over the years. They would have to flush down the toilet the Colorado court's detailed opinions, some of which used a SCOTUS Justice's - Gorsuch - own arguments to make the decision that the states are obligated to defend the electoral process. In some respects, trump is asking the Supreme Court to ignore a constitutional amendment - or interpret it into utter uselessness - which bodes ill for any future rulings that could ignore other amendments to the Far Right's detriment. The justices may feel territorial about holding onto their powers of judicial review, after all.

There could still be some kind of ruling where Chief Justice Roberts can retain some integrity for the high court all the while giving trump what he wants - to stay on the ballot to avoid his criminal fate as much as possible - but that would be threading the smallest eye of a needle in legal history. 

This is as much a YES or NO legal decision as we will see: Either trump committed acts in violation of the 14th Amendment and should be barred from future elected office, or the 14th Amendment section insisting on blocking insurrectionists is unenforceable and trump stays on ballot (they shouldn't be able to argue if trump engaged in seditious/insurrectionist acts to begin with, because the lower court and state supreme court both found trump did, and that it violated the 14th's requirements. The lower court ruled that it didn't find trump was an "officer" as defined by the amendment, which the state court overruled).

So, let's say the Supreme Court rules 5-4 at the least that trump did violate the 14th Amendment, and that Colorado and other states could remove trump's name from the ballots for the 2024 Republican primaries.

Okay, after all the MAGA rioting settles down, what would actually happen?

The most likely thing is that the heavily Democratic-controlled (Blue) states will take trump's name off the ballots. The Republican Party and the media may scream that it denies the voters a choice; but this isn't about the voters this is about the constitution, and the constitution restricts choices all the time (after all, the Natural Born requirement for Presidents is why we don't have a President Schwarzenegger - who was popular nationally - after his stint as California's governor in the 2000s).

It's likely the heavily Republican-controlled (Red) states will ignore the legal efforts to block trump's name, even if the state courts follow through on any lawsuits filed over the matter (it would then be a matter if the state courts will hold Republican elections officials in contempt over this). The question mark will then be the battleground states where governments split between parties for legislatures, courts, and executive branches decide to bar trump as an insurrectionist from the ballots.

How would any of this affect the 2024 elections cycle.

If we look at the primaries themselves, trump can't afford to be blocked from too many state ballots. Based on the information at the Green Papers website tracking the primaries, the Republican nominating process requires a winning candidate lock up 1215 delegates.

Why is New Jersey, a state in the top 20 for population,
stuck with so few delegates?

So let's say the states that we know are solidly Democratic - California, New York, Illinois, about 16 others - and several battleground states that may agree that trump can be barred - New Hampshire, maybe Virginia, maybe Georgia considering all the local opposition from the governor and other state officials going on - take trump out of the primaries? How many delegates will that be? 

Given that the delegate total of blocked states is around 1093 (out of 2429), it looks like trump could still eke out a delegate victory with the remaining Red/pro-trump states and get his name on the Republican general ballot.

This all depends on which states actually follow through on removing trump from the ballot. Some of these states I added may not, and who knows one or three of the Red states may see it happen if their courts rule on it and can enforce those rulings. If enough states bar trump to where he can't reach 1215, he's screwed.

This also depends on if the US Supreme Court rules against trump outright, finding his actions on January 6th are punishable by disqualifying him from every state (or at least encourage all 50 states to do so).

This also depends on if the Republican national leadership doesn't change their own primary rules in case trump does get thrown off ALL the ballots. They could try pulling a last-minute rule change to negate primaries and just go with a convention floor vote in spite of the 14th Amendment's enforcement.

While the state primary ballots are at play now, if trump survives that he still has to deal with a general election where the states that barred him on the primaries can do so again with the November ballot. The Electoral College math is slightly different from the delegate math, and if enough battleground states deny him a spot on the ballot - and refuse all write-ins - he could once again lose enough Electors to face defeat (that he could be barred in nearly half the states will definitely lower his popular vote total across the nation).

This is all speculation, of course. We still have to see how the Supreme Court rules: If they abide by the judicial review process, if they agree with Colorado's ruling, if they find trump accountable under constitutional law. If Roberts' Court gives trump carte blanche, then partisanship wins out and the legal system is truly dead under trump's inevitable misrule.

The one thing we know for certain is that elections matter, that voter turnout matters, and the majority of the nation that dares not let trump back in the White House better fucking show up in 2024 to stop him. Get the damn vote out, Americans. Stop trump, save the world.

Update 12/28/23: I may have misspoke too soon, in that Colorado has not fully removed trump's name from the ballot, as they're awaiting the Supreme Court decision and the Secretary of State won't be doing it for the primary vote.

Michigan's Supreme Court agreed with a lower court to allow trump to remain on their ballot, although I've read elsewhere - need to find that link - that the state would revisit the matter if trump is convicted in the federal case regarding his involvement in the January 6th riots.

In the meantime, Maine's Secretary of State held her own hearing on the matter and determined trump violated the 14th Amendment, so she IS removing his name from the ballot. This will clearly go to the courts as well.

Just a reminder kids that this isn't about the voters' choice, this is about the rules etched into the Constitution itself.

The 2024 Republican Dash to Suck Up to MAGA Voters In Case trump Ends Up In Cell Block Six

There's a Republican presidential primary debate tonight and I don't wanna watch. NO, YOU CAN'T MAKE ME WATCH I DON'T WANNA. /pout 

I do, however, feel an obligation to rate and review the idiotic Republican pretenders to trump's dark throne that are placing themselves on the floor tonight for public humiliation. Only because I did this for the Democratic candidates back in 2019 who were running for 2020, and I ought to maintain a balance of sorts.

Much like I said back then, I am tired already of the constant horse-race mentality of mainstream media that has us overwhelmed with all this partisan posturing in public. We need laws in place to force the political parties - and the goddamned hacks who jump out two years early to start fundraising to fill their pockets with millions in campaign cash - to keep these election campaigns to the calendar year the election takes place (January 2nd, not a damn thing happens before then upon pain of permanent blockage from elected or nominated office). It's the only way to keep this goddamned pandering to a goddamned minimum.

Tonight's debate arguably isn't even going to have the biggest draw for the Far Right Republican voting base: trump decided to avoid attending, partly because he doesn't even need to show up to win (his polling lead is that huge) and partly because he's due in Fulton County Georgia tomorrow for his mug shot and arraignment on his FOURTH pending criminal indictments. This slogfest is going to be made up of the second-tier half-dead wannabes who think they have a shot at the nomination should trump actually be in a jail cell by the time the 2024 RNC Convention takes place. As Mark Leibovich at the Atlantic (paywalled) notes, this will be a tedious affair made up of 'listless vessels':

So why should the rest of us bother? Would anyone watch a Mike Tyson fight if Iron Mike wasn’t actually fighting? Or The Sopranos, if Tony skipped the show for a therapy session (with Tucker Carlson)?...

Tonight’s pageant of also-rans must go on too. The Republican National Committee has decreed this kickoff debate to be a landmark event, sanctifying August 23 as a key date in the 2024 cycle. (“Cycle” feels like an especially apt cliché here—events spinning hypnotically in circles.) Never mind that Trump upended the traditional presidential campaign cycle years ago, and that it is now dictated by whatever whim he decides to follow at a given moment. No matter how much thunder Trump steals from this proceeding—by skipping it, counterprogramming it with Tucker, and potentially following it up with a morning-after mug shot—everyone else is still required to treat this spectacle as some big and pivotal showdown.

As such, the media will swarm into town—because this is what we do and what we love (and because datelines impress). The host network, Fox News, will hype the clash—the “Melee in Milwaukee,” or some such. One-liners are being buffed, comebacks polished, and umbrage rehearsed. And no matter how effective certain gambits are deemed to be in practice, the absence of the GOP’s inescapable front-runner will only underscore how impotent the rest of the field has made themselves...

Even so, tonight’s contest will inevitably suffer from two basic structural flaws. The main point, theoretically, of a political debate is to try to persuade voters to support your campaign instead of the other candidates’. But that presupposes a constituency of voters who can be persuaded by hearing a set of facts, or are open to being educated. This, on the whole, is not the audience we have here. A large and determinative and still deeply committed portion of the GOP electorate—the MAGA sector—has been more or less a closed box for seven years now...

The other structural defect involves the likely self-neutering of tonight’s putative gladiators. Ideally, a debate features participants who actually want to win. That generally requires a willingness to attack their biggest adversary, whether he’s participating in the event or not, and especially when he holds a massive lead over them. Other than Kamikaze Christie, whom Republicans will almost certainly not nominate, most of the remaining “challengers” on the stage seem content to play for second place—running mate or 2028...

Seriously, none of these suckers will be trump's running mate: trump reportedly wants a woman Veep candidate to counter Kamala Harris, and most of these candidates already know working for trump will put them in the crosshairs with trump AND the MAGA base should they step out of line to protect their own asses like Pence did on January 6th. Haley, the only woman on-stage tonight, ought to be too smart to volunteer for that shit-job. I also doubt Pence will volunteer a second go-around as a whipping boy. Back to Leibovich:

Whether intentionally or not, DeSantis actually coined something memorable the other day when he chided Trump’s supporters for mindlessly following his every pronouncement—“listless vessels,” he called them. (He later said that he was referring to Trump’s endorsers in Congress, not voters.) This struck me as sneaky eloquence from DeSantis, or whoever wrote the line for him. But again, the phrase carried a strong whiff of projection as DeSantis prepared to lead the real parade of listless vessels to Milwaukee, content to bob along in the wake of the Titanic.

DeSantis has truly been a terrible campaigner, losing financial backers and stunning his few attendees with unsettling, almost-inhuman behavior at his rallies. He's performing much in the same way the flame-outs of 2016 performed, like Scott Walker and Jeb! Bush before him: Lacking any true charisma and unable to generate enthusiasm. The rest of the field has been equally unmemorable save for Christie - whose bullying always delights the punditry - and newbie businessman Vivek Ramaswamy - whose conspiracy-addled gaslighting has made him into this year's Mini-trump.

In the meantime, here's a scorecard of the likely Republican assholes candidates (the highest office currently known, and the state they represent) vying for their party base's vote when the state-by-state primaries do take place. Doing this in alphabetical order because HAHA trump you're in last.

Doug Burgum: Governor, North Dakota

Role as: The Guy Who Bribed Republican Voters Into Donating To His Campaign With Gift Cards So He Could Qualify For This Debate (no, seriously).

Funny thing is, Burgum has to call in sick with a "leg injury" during a basketball pick-up game (???) and may not attend his own political funeral, uh this debate. Otherwise, he'd have to spend most of the evening explaining where North Dakota even IS on the map. Update: Burgum decided to show up after all, so he's not THAT cowardly.

Burgum Can Win the Party Nomination If: trump is sitting in a jail cell convicted on any number of charges by June 2024 and the Party holds an emergency vote at the Convention.

Burgum Can Win It All If: The gift cards he promised to voters in the general election were all $5000.00 per person Actually, that would be illegal. And it's unlikely he'll ever get a general voting population defending the conservative agenda he's pushed at the state level and will threaten to inflict on America.

Chris Christie: Governor, New Jersey

Role as: The Guy Who Claims He Likes Bruce Springsteen (but doesn't seem to understand the lyrics railing against HIM and his fellow greed-heads).

Christie is the one most prepped and pumped for the debate stage if only because it gives him the chance to play out his role as Bully, one of the few things he does well. The last time he primaried in 2016, he was the one who nuked Marco Rubio from orbit and destroyed the Beltway Media's fair-haired alternative to trump. If the audience is tuning in tonight, it's to see how quickly Christie gives the likes of DeSantis an atomic wedgie. 

Christie Can Win the Party Nomination If: trump is sitting in a jail cell convicted on any number of charges by June 2024 and the Party holds an emergency vote at the Convention.

Christie Can Win It All If: He can successfully recall Bruce's lyrics to "The Ghost of Tom Joad" and tearfully recant his un-Boss-like ways. Otherwise, the general voting population is going to reject his bully tactics for the more congenial Biden.

Ron DeSantis: Governor, Florida

Role as: Anti-Woke Thin-Skinned Racist Sexist Disney Villain

DeSantis is the candidate who has done the most damage to his own state in pursuit of MAGA voter support, and the candidate who's done the least to actually get any MAGA voters to flip to him. His ROI is terrible. Any early lead he's had at the beginning of this horse race has dwindled to where a virtual noob like Ramaswamy is neck-and-neck. And Christie's going to be there to pounce and make DeSantis grind his teeth like never before.

DeSantis Can Win the Party Nomination If: trump is sitting in a jail cell convicted on any number of charges by June 2024 and the Party holds an emergency vote at the Convention.

DeSantis Can Win It All If: Gods help us if he does. DeSantis' behavior governing Florida - the mismanagement masquerading as leadership, the self-destructive micromanaging, the short-sighted mistakes - will all be transferred to the federal level where his governing style of harassing critics and destroying institutions to give his cronies power and leverage will be on a Jacksonian scale. While any of the Republican candidates will be ideological nightmares if they get into the White House, DeSantis is genuinely terrifying in that he will replicate trump's efforts to seize and maintain power no matter what, with a better idea of how to actually succeed at it.

Nikki Haley: Governor, South Carolina

Role as: The Pollyanna Trying to Campaign as Reagan But Messaging Like Ann Coulter

Haley is jumping into this campaign arguably to present a figure who is known for a certain level of competence and savvy, but she's still saddled with a GOP platform that will force her to support incompetence, fearmongering, and tax cut greed. She's also campaigning to a political party that still can't handle any woman in a legitimate leadership role, which is going to force her into some uncomfortable public stances if she can make it to the general election stage.

Haley Can Win the Party Nomination If: trump is sitting in a jail cell convicted on any number of charges by June 2024 and the Party holds an emergency vote at the Convention.

Haley Can Win It All If: She can truly motivate a dying, out-of-power moderate base that she could appeal to. Problem is, there are no true moderates left in the modern Republican Party, and she's not going to rally enough of them to a primary race that's been alienating them since 2008.

Ada Hutchinson: Governor, Arkansas

Role as: The Guy From Arkansas Who's Not as Creepy As Mike Huckabee

Hutchinson is someone who barely made the cut for tonight's debate, which tells you how low in the rankings he's already playing at. While he can appeal to those who like experience in their presidential candidates, Hutchinson doesn't have as great a national profile as the others and will suffer as a result. He's not going to offer anything any different from what Christie, DeSantis, Haley, Burgum, or Scott are going to offer.

Hutchinson Can Win the Party Nomination If: trump is sitting in a jail cell convicted on any number of charges by June 2024 and the Party holds an emergency vote at the Convention.

Hutchinson Can Win It All If: Somewhere between winning the GOP primary (or the emergency RNC vote) and the November general election he can somehow gaslight his way past the anti-abortion, racism, tax-cut deregulatory bullsh-t he's been selling as both governor and primary candidate.

Robert Kennedy Jr: Democratic Asshole, New York

Role as: Conspiracy-driven Anti-Vax Trojan Horse sent by Republicans to undermine Biden's incumbency run

I know Kennedy's running as a Democrat and he's not on tonight's debate list, but if you're getting most of your campaign funding from REPUBLICAN backers then goddamn you: You're running as a Republican. Go to hell, Junior.

Mike Pence: Vice President, Indiana

Role as: The Scapegoat who can't admit he got suckered and victimized by trump 

Pence is either genuinely clueless that most of the Republican voting base views him as a traitor for failing to cheat the Electoral count for trump back on January 6th, or he's running to validate his own self-worth convinced he's the true future of the Republican party once trump is behind bars. Either way, Pence has no true charisma that appeals at a national level: Another Scott Walker leading himself to primary humiliation.

Pence Can Win the Party Nomination If: trump is sitting in a jail cell convicted on any number of charges by June 2024 and the Party holds an emergency vote at the Convention. Seriously, if this emergency vote happens, Pence is one of the few party leaders with any backroom power to get the party to risk it all on him (if the leadership convince themselves the betrayed MAGA base will change their minds).

Pence Can Win It All If: This is one of the most unlikely things even if Pence navigates his way to the top of the GOP ticket. As mentioned before, Pence is a laughing stock to the voting public at large, and either has to carry the baggage of being associated with trump's ill-run presidency or coping with an angry MAGA voting base that will refuse to turn up next November.

Vivak Ramaswamy: Businessman, Ohio

Role as: The Next CEO Galtian Asshole Who Thinks He Can Run Government Like a Business

Ramaswamy is coming from a proud Republican tradition of at least one financial figure - Forbes, Cain, Foriana, in some respects Dubya and Mitt - jumping into the primary race thinking he's reinvented the wheel when it comes to governance. Instead, he's shilling the same deregulatory tax-cutting damage as before campaigning on a top-down Unitary Executive agenda to turn the White House into a dictatorship (gee, we've heard that before), while making a hard case of going "anti-woke" in ways that make DeSantis look like he's mumbling.  

Ramaswamy Can Win the Party Nomination If: trump is sitting in a jail cell convicted on any number of charges by June 2024 and the Party holds an emergency vote at the Convention. Or if he can sway the MAGA base with his 9/11 Truther, anti-abortion, racist, sexist, fearmongering messaging to back him before the party leaders can choose among their own.

Ramaswamy Can Win It All If: he can make voters look past the reality he's a first-generation son of immigrants bashing the very system of multicultural that allowed him to become a businessman and presidential candidate in the first place. The scary thing is that his rise in the polls this cycle mimics the similar rise that trump enjoyed in the 2016 primaries: Meaning if trump is truly eliminated from the ballot due to a slight case of JAIL, Vivak could replace him among MAGA voters willing to look past his ethnicity and embrace his conspiracy-driven gaslighting.

Tim Scott: Senator, South Carolina

Role as: The Anti-Obama Beard

Arguably one of the few candidates on the stage tonight who actually HAS a political career of some success (and none of the baggage that Christie has), Scott is most often the GOP figurehead that the racists in their ranks point to and say "Look, we vote for him, clearly we're not racist!" even though Scott parrots many of the same anti-affirmative action talking points and supports many of the same social conservative issues that most voting Blacks don't.

Scott Can Win the Party Nomination If: trump is sitting in a jail cell convicted on any number of charges by June 2024 and the Party holds an emergency vote at the Convention. If Pence doesn't appeal to the backroom party bosses looking to replace a convicted trump, Scott is the next most likely who will.

Scott Can Win It All If: Scott can actually appeal to general voters in spite of his conservative bona fides. In my humble but ill-informed opinion, he might actually be the one candidate who could give Biden some trouble in the general election on matters of race relations. Scott will have problems appealing to voters if abortion is the major topic, and he is going to get stuck defending a GOP platform that will be racist towards immigrants and sexist towards women.

Donald Trump: Indicted Loser of the Popular Vote (Twice), Ugh do I HAVE to List Him as Florida

Role as: The Eternal Shitgibbon. If you prefer, The Guy On Four (AND COUNTING) Criminal Trials Involving His Misconduct in Both Business And the Presidency

Trump Can Win the Party Nomination If: Gods help us, he's already polling in the lead, and there is still solid evidence that Republicans will vote for a convicted trump. However, if trump is sitting in a jail cell convicted on any number of charges by June 2024, the Party has every reason to hold an emergency vote to field a replacement choice.

Trump Can Win It All If: he cheats. Again. If he can get the Russians to meddle like he did in 2016, if he can get the FBI to spring another October Surprise like Comey did on Hillary weeks before the general election, if he can get Red state legislatures in states voting for Biden to nullify the Electoral count like he wanted to in 2020, if he can get a Republican-controlled branch of Congress to refuse a Biden Electoral win... Then it's chaos. And trump is ALL ABOUT THE GODDAMN CHAOS.

Among these choices, I dare not make a recommendation. My track record predicting these things have been horrendous: Backing Edwards in 2008 (before knowing his adultery), Backing Harris (and then Warren) over Biden in 2020), Thinking Romney had the nomination in 2008 (instead of McCain, whom I did favor but didn't think would win primaries), Thinking Walker had it sewn up in 2016 (he didn't even make it through the 2015 debates).

If I can say anything, it's that above all DO NOT VOTE trump. He's not worth it. He's going to get convicted one way or another and it will - fairly - drag the rest of the Republican ticket down with him. In general, I've been screaming to NOT VOTE REPUBLICAN at all for decades now, but you've seen how little influence I've had there (grrr).

In the meantime, don't watch any of the debates. They're boring and dull and the highlight reel on YouTube easier to digest. Gnight, krewe.

P.S. Cmon Tampa Bay Rays reclaim the AL East lead into the postseason!!!

Four for the Fourth 2023: Second Thoughts About DeSantis' Flailing

So the Governor of Florida Ron DeSantis is running around, campaigning - rather badly at it - for the 2024 Republican nomination for the presidency, and his biggest message is "let's make America like Florida" selling his argument that he's turned the Sunshine State into a bastion of FREEDOM against "woke" librulism.

The thing is, DeSantis hasn't really done anything for freedom in Florida. He's supporting book bans and whitewashing of racism from our history books. He's cutting back on social services that could free rural families from poverty. DeSantis even went out of his way to use the line-item veto power to slash at budget items to punish fellow Republicans who refused to back him in his presidential campaign, not a very liberating thing to do.

But it's been two big political items that DeSantis committed that are coming back to hammer him. Above all, his harsh stance on immigration that drove him to push for and sign legislation attacking migrant workers and their employers. Digby has the current dirt on that:

It’s a super great idea to crack down on immigrant labor during a time of full employment and a building boom in a big agriculture state. So smart. And that’s what Ron DeSantis has done so that he can pretend he’s a tough hombre in a border state (which he isn’t.)

I should mention that's a sarcasm font. Digby then quotes from a recent Wall Street Journal report:

Florida’s agricultural and construction industries say they are experiencing a labor shortage because a new immigration law that took effect July 1 is leading migrant workers to leave the state.

The law, signed in May by Florida Gov. and GOP presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, seeks to further criminalize undocumented immigration in the state. It makes it a third-degree felony for unauthorized people to knowingly use a false identification to obtain employment. Businesses that knowingly employ unauthorized workers could have their licenses suspended, and those with 25 or more employees that repeatedly fail to use the E-Verify system to check their immigration status can face daily fines. 

Business owners and workers alike say the ranks of laborers in Florida have grown noticeably thinner.

“The employee who wants to work on the farm is not available anymore,” said Hitesh Kotecha, owner of a produce packaging facility in South Florida who leases land to farmers. “How are we going to run the farms?”

At downtown Miami’s construction sites, the story is the same: Workers have fled. Others are waiting to see what happens.

In Miami’s booming construction market, developers, construction companies and construction workers say the change happened as soon as DeSantis signed the legislation this spring. Workers at several construction sites in South Florida say a quarter to half of their teams are gone, exacerbating an already challenging labor shortage across the industry...

It's not just the employment:

In addition to increasing penalties on employers and workers, the new law requires hospitals that accept Medicaid to question a patient’s immigration status, and invalidates out-of-state driver’s licenses issued to people unauthorized to be in the U.S. It makes it a third-degree felony to knowingly transport into Florida a person who is undocumented and illegally entered the U.S. The law also adds $12 million to the amount of money the state has earmarked for its migrant-relocation program, bringing the total to $22 million this year. 

This is something that affects medical care, and people relocating to Florida for family/personal reasons. In the push to get at illegal immigrants who have fake IDs, we're going to see an increase in legal migrants having their IDs challenged and facing penalties for laws they're not breaking. This could even affect natural-born Latinos some of whom come from families that have been in the United States since before the goddamn siege at the Alamo. Wanna bet how quickly a Peruvian-American family at Universal Orlando or EPCOT visiting from Utah gets tossed into jail all because their dad's driver's license fails a "papers please" checkpoint on I-4?

It's a nightmare. There is no freedom here, only Republican cruelty.

And it's not just the Latinos suffering. White women are waking up to the reality that DeSantis just gutted their rights to alimony.

The way divorce works in the United States is messy, but alimony was a system that provided women coming out of a failed marriage some economic stability, based on the economic realities divorced women are more likely to fall into poverty after separation. Alimony can be a headache for the ex-husband, but it was a way to ensure women couldn't be forced by economic uncertainty to stay in a marriage that was broken (and likely violent/abusive).

What DeSantis passed ended "permanent alimony" and shifted the system to an adjustable format that uses a more complex and possibly confusing scaling system that undercuts any fiscal stability divorcing women could find. Here's some of the details (via NBCMiami news site):

Along with eliminating permanent alimony, the measure will set up a process for ex-spouses who make alimony payments to seek modifications to alimony agreements when they want to retire.

It will allow judges to reduce or terminate alimony, support or maintenance payments after considering a number of factors, such as “the age and health” of the person who makes payments; the customary retirement age of that person’s occupation; the "economic impact” a reduction in alimony would have on the recipient of the payments; and the “motivation for retirement and likelihood of returning to work” for the person making the payments.

The bill will set a five-year limit on what is known as rehabilitative alimony.

Under the plan, people married for less than three years will not be eligible for alimony payments, and those who have been married 20 years or longer will be eligible to receive payments for up to 75 percent of the term of the marriage.

The new law will also allow alimony payers to seek modifications if “a supportive relationship exists or has existed” involving their ex-spouses in the previous year. Critics argued the provision is vague and could apply to temporary roommates who help alimony recipients cover living expenses for short periods of time...

Everything I'm seeing so far becomes either a greater risk that women will lose alimony they were promised, to where they won't get any alimony at all.

For lower-income women, this merely ensures they will have no safety net should they try to escape a bad (violent) marriage. For upper-income women, this is going to ensure they are sliding down into lower-income status while their rich ex-husbands stay rich.

This is not going to bode well for women in Florida, who are already coping with the harsh anti-abortion laws DeSantis and the Florida GOP dumped on them. And it ought to horrify all the women across the United States where DeSantis is threatening to make America just like the hellhole he's making right now.

If there's any joy to be had, it's that for all of DeSantis' pandering on Far Right issues - to stake an early primary lead against donald trump - he has failed miserably. Everything DeSantis does in Florida isn't impressing the MAGA base voters that he needs to secure a primary win by June 2024. The way things are going, DeSantis could summon a special legislative session to pass laws giving MAGA voters everything they desire - Florida criminal charges against Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, criminalization of the Democratic party, mass arrests and deportation of everyone NOT White or Male or Obscenely Rich - and he'll still be losing to trump just sitting there whining about how unfair the world is towards himself.

It'd be tasty schadenfreude except for the reality that DeSantis is actively bullying, punishing, and harming Floridians all so he could prance on stage.

The quicker DeSantis loses the primaries and the quicker the federal courts undo half the damage DeSantis' laws are inflicting on us, the better.

This Stopped Being Funny in 2015: The Primary Buildup for 2024

Ugh.

I don't wanna start up the bloody horse-race comparisons of Presidential primary candidates again.

Not for the Republicans. I wasn't enticed by the 2012 lineup - the Upper Class Twit lineup - and the 2016 lineup all crashed and burned against the nightmare juggernaut of the Shitgibbon campaign.

But we've seen Ron "Anti-Florida Man" DeSantis essentially start up his campaign this year by pushing the most painful set of laws - against trans and gays, against our schools, against libraries, against immigrants, against women - on his state in order to impress the Culture War wingnuts, and there's been a number of other desperate hopefuls starting off their campaigns - like Tim Scott this week - in the mad belief that they'll be standing when donald trump gets indicted on 108 different criminal investigations (I may not be exaggerating at this point) this summer. Even Chris Christie - one of the 2016 flame-outs humiliated by trump - is thinking "Hey, now it's MY turn to humiliate HIM."

Please.

I've already pointed out that trump being indicted - hell, trump possibly being IN JAIL by next year - isn't going to stop trump being on the ballot. The Republicans - hell, the entire Presidential election process - don't have that restriction blocking any jailed felon from their ballots. And we've already witnessed the way trump violates the law of gravity in that every scandal and revelation only increases his rabid MAGA fanbase support. Any photo of trump in handcuffs becomes a rally poster, and he's going to win every GOP state primary in 2024. Republicans WILL vote for a convicted trump. It then becomes a nightmare scenario where trump and his GOP state allies can rig the broken Electoral College system to steal 2024 like he stole 2016.

This is enough to drive a sober librarian to drink. Except the drinking game gag I tried writing in 2015 quickly turned sour and unfunny the minute it became clear a monster like trump was going to win the Republican nomination. It REALLY stopped being funny in November 2016 when the broken Electoral College failed all of humanity.

I've said this before as well: There are no saviors, no moderates, no Reagan-esque figure coming to rescue the Republican Party. They have been taken over by conservative extremists hell-bent on authoritarian rule against a majority of Americans they no longer view as fellow citizens. donald trump's campaign and Presidential misrule demonstrated how cruelty and fearmongering can lead the GOP to power and control, and there's no alternative for that party to emulate.

For the Republicans ever since that fateful June 2015, it's just trumps all the way down.

There's nothing else TO say about the impending primary clown car that's about to crash over the cliffs. Again.

Gods help us.

Florida Primary for 2022 Midterms, It's On

In some Florida counties they've already started early voting, but by today (Saturday August 13) they all should have the Early Voting setups for the party-level Primaries for this year's midterms.

SO GET THE VOTE OUT, DEMOCRATS AND LEFT-LEANING INDY VO... well, the thing about Florida is that the primaries tend to be closed to party-only, but there WILL BE items on the ballot - non-partisan races and local referenda - that Independent voters should cast ballots for as well.

You need to check your county's Elections website (check the state's elections directory here) and find out where the Early Voting polls are located. It helps to vote early to make sure you avoid the long lines that tend to form on August 23 for the Primary, and then November 8 for Election Day itself (for that, YOU NEED to be registered to vote by October 11 in Florida, so git 'er dun). 

Your county Supervisor should also provide Sample Ballots - search your Precinct info - so you can plan ahead (read up on the ballot issues and on the non-partisan candidates because they may actually be very partisan off-the-record).

They've crunched the timeline on Early Voting to where you get only a week to do it, otherwise plan ahead to stop at your local precinct to vote and get your choices known.

DO IT, FLORIDIANS. VOTE. These elections matter. Holding corrupt Republicans who haven't done a thing for our environment or our schools or our lives since the 1990s: That all matters. Ballot referendums regarding our schools and our health care and our rights: That all matters. Please get out the vote, and PLEASE for the LOVE OF GOD stop voting Republican.

The 2020 Democratic Primaries End But the Fight Against trump Remains

Given the intensity of the last two months focusing on the ongoing nightmare of trump's failed responses to coronavirus, the importance of yesterday's announcement from Bernie Sanders' campaign wasn't the top news it deserved to be. And yet, attention must be paid (via Scott Detrow at NPR)...

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders suspended his 2020 presidential campaign Wednesday, bowing to the commanding delegate lead former Vice President Joe Biden established.

"I wish I could give you better news, but I think you know the truth. And that is that we are now some 300 delegates behind Vice President Biden, and the path toward victory is virtually impossible," Sanders told supporters in livestreamed remarks, shortly after he had broken the news to campaign staff.

What this does is leave Biden on the Democratic primary ballot without a serious challenger, pretty much guaranteeing he secures the delegates for the nomination. All that's left now are the Choosing of the Veep and the Recriminations of the Utopian Idealists Who Can Never Accept a Moderate Centrist And Will Openly Threaten to Vote A Second Term Of The Shitgibbon As Our Punishment.

I hope I am kidding about that second part.

A quick postmortem about how Sanders failed to win in 2020 when he had done so much better in 2016 should look at these factors:

It is turning out - especially when you saw Sanders winning Michigan in 2016 but getting nuked in 2020 - that Bernie did better in 2016 because he was the Not-Hillary candidate. A lot of us, myself included, knew Hillary was hated but never understood how hated she was even among Democratic voters. And not because she was more pro-business than the Progressives would like: A lot of that hatred was on a personal level, pure vitriol towards her as a target for rage. As a result, Sanders got more votes and delegates than he would have gotten had a more popular candidate run back then. By 2020, thinking he was more popular than he truly was, Bernie jumped into this primary cycle thinking he was the front-runner, and to some extent he was (besting other genuine Progressive opponents like Warren and Inslee), but he just wasn't as popular as Biden.

Biden winning this primary cycle violated a couple of campaigning norms: He once again did a weak job organizing his campaign, was floundering at fund-raising, and hadn't even done a lot of advertising to promote himself. Bernie beat him at each of those factors. What Biden did have was the endorsements: The benefits of a party elder is that a lot of people owe you at least one favor, and you don't even have to call those favors in because they'll still back you because you're a known - and well-liked - factor as a leader on the stage. Those endorsements - especially Jim Clyburn who personally turned South Carolina into Biden's biggest victory - carries a lot of weight with much of the party base. Bernie - still marketing himself as the Outsider - couldn't even beg an endorsement from any other major players (he did get several, but only from some of the freshmen Progressives like AOC).

And even with Biden's shaky record on civil rights, women's rights, and other questionable votes as U.S. Senator, he had the marquee name by now, something he didn't have in 1988 nor 2008. He ran essentially as "Uncle Joe" from the Onion satires and people went with that.

That "well-liked" aspect for Biden helped him and hurt Bernie. I've mentioned it before - I will live and die by Professor Barber's Character Chart - that Biden is Passive-Positive as opposed to Bernie's Active-Negative. For all the outreach Sanders' campaign tried to do with the larger voting blocs of the Democratic Party - Southern Black voters, College-educated Whites - he still could not win them over on a personal level. His personal abrasive and uncompromising nature was still in full effect this cycle. It's telling that when Warren dropped out last month, rather than give her endorsement to Bernie as the most likely Progressive to defend her many plans, she refused to give any endorsement at all (whereas the major Centrists who dropped out - Buttigieg and Klobuchar - both heartily endorsed Biden within hours).

That Passive-Positive nature for Biden - his congeniality - means that he has a better skill set in building coalitions, which a lot of the Democratic leadership - and enough of the party voting base - see as more necessary in an election cycle where turnout and unity are key. Given how he's not as focused on forging agendas, he's actually in a good position to absorb and promote the agendas of other party figures. It's expected that he's going to take all the good and popular ideas that Warren, Buttigieg, Harris, Klobuchar, and even Sanders offered this primary season and merge them into a Big Tent platform.

It did not help Bernie that yet again he was campaigning on a platform of Revolution: Changing the American system from Capitalism to a Euro-style Democratic Socialism. Primarily his push for a Medicare-For-All system that would overturn the privatized health care system currently in place. Change frightens people, and are only receptive to it under the proper conditions. In 2016, a lot of Liberal and Progressive voters - having been burned out by Obama's pragmatic Centrist agenda limited by Republican obstructionism - did feel the need to break the system to enact greater left-leaning solutions. But a lot has changed in four years of horrifying misrule by trump and his Republican cronies. Right now, the mood among Democratic voters is desire for Stability, not Revolution... no matter how much the Progressive Left can argue the merits (and there are a few) of that Revolution. Biden offers the nostalgia of the more sane, more calm Obama years, not the uncertainty and possible chaos that Sanders offered.

One last thing was how Bernie Sanders and the Progressives overall were hoping for a large Youth voter turnout to secure enough primary wins. For all the talk and even solid evidence that the younger, Millennial-age bloc was solidly Far Left on major issues... not a lot of them turned up at the primaries when it mattered. This is less a criticism of Bernie than it is a criticism of our nation's failure to treat voting rights serious enough. Unlike other nations that employ Universal Voter Registration, the U.S. - supposedly the Home of Democracy - makes our voting voluntary, you have to go out of your way to register. And in that regards, not enough young voters do (a combination of decades of failed civics lessons in school, the reality of young people moving enough times to not keep a current address to register which also adds to GOP voter suppression efforts, and perhaps a sense of futility among the young that they will never be taken seriously as a bloc anyway).

Put that all together and you have Bernie Sanders being disastrous in 2020 where he did better in 2016, even without any changes to his persona or his platform, even if his platform could have appealed to enough Democratic voters if only Bernie made himself more amenable about his Idealism.

Now it's all pretty much Biden vs. trump.

Right now with Biden there's not much of a platform, but then again 2020 isn't going to be about the issues. This election cycle for Democrats is about one thing: Getting rid of donald "Shitgibbon" trump. It's going to be about the mismanagement, the corruption, the inaction in the face of crisis, every last failure of trump's regime. It's about trying to rise above the open voter suppression the Republicans are bound to use as obstacles across half the states, not just hacked ballot machines but voter roll purges and negative social media psych-ops stuff.

For all the cheating the Republicans are bound to do this November, the best solution to stop them is to overwhelm them with turnout. They can only deny so many voters, they can only undercount (or even override) so many ballots. If the Democrats can jump the voter turnout up by 8 points compared to 2016 across every state - the way they were able to in 2018 - the Dems ought to clear enough Electoral College numbers to win.

This is where Biden - with the help of Harris, and Warren, and Buttigieg, and Klobuchar, and Booker, and Beto, and Castro, and Bernie - needs to step up the voter turnout efforts. He may not be good at it but he better hand off that job to someone - someone like Howard Dean who pushed the successful 50 State voter drive in 2006 - who CAN ensure every left-leaning Moderate/Centrist and every solid Liberal and every Far Left Progressive are united in showing up and kicking trump and Mitch and every other Republican bastard out.

Turnout matters, people.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AND FOR EVERY LOVED ONE YOU HAVE, AMERICANS - especially today as trump crows about a COVID-19 body count that a more competent leader WOULD HAVE avoided - PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE REGISTER TO VOTE and PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE VOTE DEMOCRATIC STRAIGHT UP AND DOWN THE BALLOT.