Does it matter if you're winning Electoral Chess, when your opponent is playing a different game?

I try to feel hopeful. There are overwhelming numbers of polls showing Team Sanity winning the country by big margins, and the swing states as well. Honestly, for someone who voted Bernie, and even sent him money, I have been fairly impressed with Biden's operation thus far, which HAS been moving leftward, IMO. "Lay low, let Trump keep punching himself in the privates, since he's going to suck all the air out of the coverage, anyway." A few weeks of "Where's Joe?" memes notwithstanding, this is actually the smart move. Winning the Senate seems likely now, where once it was a longshot.

But I can't help but feel disquieted, too. Team Trump and the GOP more generally seem to have totally abandoned the field in terms of the whole: "winning an election by having a better argument for the American people" thing. They're speaking only to their most hardcore supporters. While the Trump/GOP tanks with Independents, women, and suburban voters, and that seems like a good thing for sanity in America, it bothers me that they seem to be playing a different game, entirely. Biden and Democratic leadership focus on "winning an election." Trump and the GOP focus on "maintaining power at all possible costs, election or none." What this looks like is desperate maneuvers to to stop non-Republicans from voting - attacks on the USPS, and purposefully-fomented (still low-level) chaos in Democratic cities. Biden and national Democratic leadership may be clearly outplaying the GOP in electoral chess, but that may not matter that much if Team Trump prefers to hone its "whack-a-voter" chops while ignoring the chess game entirely.

I don't know what's going to happen, and anyone who says they do is a liar. But I do believe the next five months may be the most important five months in the USofA since at LEAST World War II. Activate, energize, volunteer, donate, whatever the hell you can. It's all hands on deck time, folks. We need to be in voting booth, in the streets, and in the halls of power too. It's time to drive a stake through the heart of the vampire.

On Kavanaugh, this guy gets it . . .

Why the hell stick with Kavanaugh anyway?

I think Albert Burneko over at The Concourse gets it:

Brett Kavanaugh Is A Man The Right Can Get Behind

Albert Burneko, The Concourse

. . . Any number of grub-like Yale jurist-ghouls with diamond-edged ‘80s-dad hair and uniformly right-wing ideas about constitutional law could get confirmed to fill the Supreme Court’s vacant ninth seat, and once in that seat could be counted upon to plagiarize Anton Chigurh dialog into incumbent legal precedence for the next three decades. The earth contains no shortage of these. And so, in the aftermath of the discovery that Brett Kavanaugh, the one Donald Trump happened to nominate for the gig, quite likely attempted to rape a 15-year-old girl in the summer of 1982 (and, perhaps less important though no less relevant, almost certainly lied to the Senate about the use of stolen materials to aid George W. Bush’s judicial nominees) and has been living comfortably with this fact about himself for the ensuing 36 years, it should be easy enough to withdraw his nomination and move along to the next crypto-Nazi cottage cheese sculpture in the pipeline. He’d breeze through confirmation, whoever he was: You could pretty much count on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s terminally third-brained centrist Democrats lining up to play themselves. And that would be a success, theoretically: A new, arch-conservative Supreme Court justice, possibly even one not tainted by a credible accusation that he once tried to rape a child.

But that would not be enough. It has to be this guy. It has to be this guy now more than ever. It has to be this guy, now, because he has been accused, credibly, of attempting to rape a 15-year-old girl in 1982—moreover because people believe this should be considered a disqualifying blight on his record. The thing that must happen is that those people must be defeated. That is the whole point. What must be shown to the whole world is that this, even this, cannot stop him.

Aside from the fact that I'm not that familiar with Anton Chigurh, I couldn't have said it any better myself. For the Wrong Wing, it's about "owning the libs." The libs say we can't put a credibly-alleged rapist on the Supreme Court! Eff that! YES WE CAN! We can and we will! Virtually all of RepubliCon public policy in the time of El Drumpfo, (if such a collection of scattered, cockamamie half-notions could be considered a quote "public policy" unquote at all), essentially boils down to: if progressives (and independents these days) are mad, it is good. EVERYTHING, from Obamacare repeal, to gutting the EPA, to this nomination, can be viewed through the four-year old bully's mindset that comes to this, "If those people are upset, than we are happy." They don't actually willfully want dirtier air and water, but they DO want to make libs mad, and if you'll excuse the pun, that trumps everything. Therefore, gut the EPA.

It's mindless. It's devastatingly idiotic, and thoroughly anti-American . . . so you know, quintessentially Republican.

I would actually add here, that if they can confirm this p.o.s. BEFORE the Election, it might actually rile up enough RepubliCon rank and file to seriously mute the effect, electorally, to the point where a little Russian help credibly holds back the so-called “blue wave.” Owning the libs is probably a fairly effective cudgel for these bastards, strategically.

I mean to be certain, there is a parallel between conservative worldview, and the mindset of a rapist. Power is all that matters. Do anything to take it. The agency of those who get in the way should be violently revoked. But I don't think most cons think through things that much, at all.

The point is, the libs are mad. Therefore, it is good.

I find things in strange places . . .

This comes from an interview with former Seattle City Council member Nick Licata, with the indispensable FieldOfSchemes.com, Neil DeMause's fantastic website covering, in-depth, how sports teams fleece cities in direct subsidies from "everyone else" to The Very Rich, via the use of tax dollars to build stadiums.

This is the thing: I’m somewhat of a believer that we’re never going to live in nirvana, okay? There will always be challenges; there will always be things that are not right; there will always be shortcomings to people that you elect to office. But the moment you believe that it’s not worth trying, then it’s like walking away from the game, because the people left at the table playing the game are totally going to get their way, because they’re not going to look out for your interest.

So two things I keep in mind is: One, you have a choice — you have to participate in the game of politics and the game of democracy, because if you don’t someone else is going to run your life. And secondly, you should enjoy that game. It’s like sports. You got to think about it as: This is not just good for everyone and yourself, and not only does it create good, but it’s a good process to go through. That’s why I’m a strong believer in democracy and argue that we have to, if nothing else, protect the vibrancy of our democracy.

Amen sir. Amen.

Unify now! ALL HANDS ON DECK! #MyFiveThings

God-damn.

I really . . . REEEEEEAAAALLLLY didn't want to be right on this one. For about seven months there, I thought I would read this post, and look foolishly upon my gloom and doom from Winter 2016. Along with, well pretty much everyone in America, perhaps even El Drumpfo himself, I was pretty sure that my "Oh Trump Could Win It" phase was just a phase, and that that piece-of-shit-in-shoes would go down handily to a flawed, but eminently more qualified Secretary Clinton.

But I was wrong to change my mind from its pre-ordinance. The unthinkable has happened, and now, as though our presidential elections were a "Who's the Biggest Asshole" Competition, that turd-breathed sleaze, El Drumpfo, is President-Elect of the United States. That happened 12 days ago. I am still somewhat in shock, as Herr Hair lines up his cabinet with the biggest collection of fringe right lunatics you'll find outside a Klan rally, although who knows, perhaps some of these jackals will attend the Klan's victory celebration December 3rd.

The apoplexy on the Left is palpable. We are defeated, and pretty badly. The America we thought we knew turns out to be ephemeral and pretty fucking hateful and irrational, when the mood changes. It's entirely understandable that the nice people at DailyKos are re-litigating the primaries, blaming Hillary, blaming ourselves, blaming the idealists, blaming Bernie, blaming the pragmatists etc.

That's all normal and all that, but it's time to wake the fuck up, get up off the ground, and unify now. We don't have time to kill on blame-games, infighting, or even drawn-out, navel-gazing autopsies. I have my own theories on "What Went Wrong," but I am MUCH more interested in forward-looking solutions, than putting November 8th's horror show on repeat. We lost. Time to get over it. There is work to be done, immediately. We've been badly knocked down, but we ain't dead, not even close to it.

We need to unify now to stop El Drumpfo. Period. We have TWO YEARS until the 2018 midterm Elections. We must organize and RESIST NOW.

Stopping Fascist Trumpblicans (and I don't use the word Fascist lightly) will require both outsiders and insiders; street protesters and those familiar with the halls of power; those living on the margins, and those rational power-players of good will, who are horrified about what Trump represents; community organizers and legislators; black/brown/white/yellow/red/gay/straight/queer/trans and all in between; outsiders who never claimed a political party, and fed up Republicans who have watched their party morph into something unrecognizable; those who voted Democrat, and Green, and Libertarian, and the PLURALITY of voting-age Americans who simply didn't vote in 2016.

Fuck whether you pulled for Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton, or Jill Stein, or Gary Johnson, or just weren't motivated enough to vote in 2016; doesn't matter now. Who cares? If you think Donald Trump's brand of proto-fascist, hate-based politics is wrong, you are welcome aboard the U.S.S. Resistance as far as I'm concerned. Mobilize now. We are putting a stop this insanity.

We ALL have a role to play. For my part, I decided to come up with five actionable things I could do to, in my own small way, to stop the Fascists.

#MyFiveThings

1) I will talk more about current events, and just generally "get more political" in my classroom

2) I will encourage my student poets to get into a more political mode in their art

3) I will engage more with my local Democratic party . . . yes, even in Chicago

4) I will start giving monthly contributions to two organizations who are going to be facing budget axes, or resisting Team Drumpfo and his horde of orc-people - the ACLU, and the Stone Belt Center in Bloomington, IN

5) I will encourage EVERYONE I KNOW to come up with #MyFiveThings lists themselves.