I keep hearing how Trump is torpedoing his own campaign, and how President Hillary is looking more and more inevitable. Assuming voters are reasonable, rational people anyway.
Yeah.
So I was thinking: what about this as a Republican strategy: spend the next few months in damage-control mode, and then, if Trump gets elected, immediately impeach him—which shouldn’t be too hard—and let Pence take over.
I’m just putting this here so that, if it does happen, I can say I called it.
Last April I declared that “I voted for Bernie in the primaries, and I’m voting for him again in November. No matter who the “official” candidates are.” Now that the primaries are over, and the candidates are official, it’s time for us Bernie supporters to sit down, assess the situation, and ask a couple very important questions.
The first question is, “Are we going to give up now that Hillary has won?” If so, then fine, let’s take our ball and go home, and vote for Bernie, or Jill, or nobody. We tried to make the world a better place, and we failed, so the hell with it all.
But if we’re not giving up—as I am not giving up—then we need to ask the second and even more important question: under which presidency will we be better able to pursue our struggle and build an even stronger base for the next campaign? [Read more…]
I’m reading various polls and pundits who say Hillary is still ahead of Trump. The margins are fluctuating, and getting scarily closer, but she’s still ahead. And we trust these results, because they’re not just one poll, they’re conclusions reached by analyzing several polls, comparing their methodology to the accuracy of their results in the past, and accounting for known biases. They’re just about as scientific as you can make them.
Except for one thing: they’re measuring the way politics used to work. You get a huge political machine built, you organize your ground forces, and of course you secure a huge cash reserve to spend on media and other campaign expenses. The best machine wins, just like the best machine has always won, and you can predict the outcome of the race by measuring the efficiency of the machine.
Only Trump isn’t building a machine. Pundits and pollsters are gawking at him with bemused contempt wondering when—or if—he’s ever going to get around to running a real campaign.
And he’s within a few points of Hillary anyway. It’s like he’s entering the Indianapolis 500 on foot, and keeping up.
That should scare the hell out of the pundits. I don’t think they’re quite grasping the nature of what they’re seeing. If he’s keeping up, and he’s on foot, then this isn’t an Indianapolis 500 style race. And that means it isn’t necessarily going to be won by the most powerful and efficient machine.
I think what’s going on is that Trump, with his reckless, feckless, unpredictable behavior, has established himself as the first true None Of The Above candidates we’ve ever seen. We, as a nation of both liberals and conservatives, have lost faith in suave, polished glitzocrats and their retinue of handlers and focus groups and marketing know-how. We’re tired of well-funded manipulators treating their electorates like putty to be pushed and prodded and molded according to well-documented sociological techniques. Even die-hard right-wingers, who still respond predictably (and regrettably) to demagoguery, are unhappy with it.
When Trump defies conventional political wisdom, when he does “stupid” things that make experienced politicians roll their eyes in disbelief, he’s putting himself outside their cozy cabal. And that’s what makes him so appealing to his supporters. They probably can’t articulate it, and probably don’t even see it that way themselves, but I think that’s the underlying appeal.
That’s why I view predictions of Trump’s defeat with the same grain of salt I view (in hindsight) the experts who predicted Bremain would win handily. I think they’re all failing to recognize that politics in 2016 isn’t politics as usual. It’s changed drastically since 2012, and I don’t think they’re taking that into account.
PZ Myers says that we should just put aside any controversy over Hillary Clinton’s private email server, since the FBI probe announced there was “no intentional misconduct” on the part of the former Secretary of State. It was “sloppy,” he says, “not criminal.”
What he glosses over there is the fact that “sloppy” is criminal, as a number of others have found. There’s also evidence that her testimony contained a number of false statements regarding her use of an unsecured email server for transmitting classified information, and that at least some of the evidence has been not only deleted from the hard drive, but scrubbed clean with special forensics-defying tools designed to prevent even the FBI from recovering the information.
I have to admit, I don’t have a lot of patience with conservative opinion sites like townhall.com, but this one is so over the top I had to laugh despite myself.
Why Liberals Are So Obsessed With Racism, Homosexuality and Transsexualism
Conservatives care about logic. Liberals care about emotion.
Yup, exactly. That’s why he, as a conservative, starts by assuming that conservative=logical and liberal=emotional, universally. Because that’s such a logical premise. And he’s just getting warmed up.
Oh noes! ChristianToday.com reports that Louisiana lawmakers failed to pass a law that ostensibly would have protected churches and pastors from the non-existent threat of being forced to perform gay marriages against their will. Now the only thing protecting conservative Christians in Louisiana are the First Amendment, a number of federal laws that already protect religious liberty, and a couple centuries or so of legal precedent.
Eek.
The actual article is behind a paywall, but according to the headline and a short snippet, the best way for Hillary to convince people of her authenticity may be—wait for it—talking about her faith. At least, so her “Director of Faith-Based Outreach” is saying.
Burns Strider (right), director of faith-based outreach for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2008, says if she talks about faith, people will see her authenticity.
In other words, if she adopts the same sort of religious pandering the Republicans have been using to manipulate people for decades, she can dominate the “gullible voter” demographic. Lip service to religion is all it takes to convince believers that you are “authentic,” just like Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, and Duck Dynasty.
And the sad thing is he may be exactly right. Says a lot about religion, doesn’t it?
As a preliminary caveat, I think it’s only prudent to say that confrontations—especially with irrational people—have a non-trivial potential for escalating into violence, and we need to understand that and be careful to avoid it. Knowing when to shut up and let the store/security staff take over can be key.
That said, it might be fun to ask, as a mental exercise, what would be a good question to ask a hate-preacher if they happened to storm in to your local Target and begin harassing innocent shoppers?
Via Ed Brayton comes this report that “NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton is blaming the “epidemic” of cell phone videos of police officers committing misconduct and abuse for that misconduct.” Makes perfect sense to me, and it confirms a theory I have that I call “Schrödinger’s Cop.” See, there’s two waveforms present in any police interaction with citizens, and the act of observing this interaction, via a cell phone’s video camera, causes the waveform to collapse. It’s all quantum, right Commissioner Bratton?
Either that or else Bratton is just bullshitting to try and excuse police misconduct. Hmm.
According to a report on NPR, almost a dozen states have joined together to file a lawsuit seeking to protect bigotry and privilege against an onslaught of justice and equal rights for minorities.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, says the federal government has “conspired to turn workplaces and educational settings across the country into laboratories for a massive social experiment, flouting the democratic process, and running roughshod over commonsense policies protecting children and basic privacy rights.”
Yes, a “massive social experiment.” Those evil government officials, with their bubbling test tubes and unstable nuclear reactors, rubbing their rubber-gloved hands together and gleefully cackling, “Let’s take a bunch of innocent, harmless people and see what happens if we mind our own business and leave them alone, MUAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!”