I’ve defended them myself. We want more participation, not less, and caucuses discourage too many voters. Minnesota switched to a presidential primary election since the last time we did this.

With 85 percent of precincts reporting at press time, nearly 815,000 Minnesotans cast ballots in Tuesday’s presidential primary. In 2016, just 318,000 people participated in caucuses statewide.

Caucuses had long been criticized as being more appealing to party insiders rather than the typical voter. Long lines and slow results also frustrated participants in 2016.

I don’t know that Minnesota was as prepared as they should be. I talked to a few people who live in more rural counties (even more rural than Stevens county, where I live), and they simply had no designated polling places at all — all votes had to be done with a mail-in ballot. They were rather jealous of the fact that I was wearing an “I VOTED” sticker, and isn’t getting that sticker the whole point of going to vote?

But yes, we felt like the turnout was huge in 2016, with chaotic milling mobs at the bar where we caucused, but apparently that was less than half the number who participated this year.

Oh, man, what a nightmare. I dreamt that it was November, and I had just unenthusiastically voted in the presidential election. Joe Biden had swept all the primaries, had picked some unmemorable, faceless white man as his VP, and bumbled his way through a few ugly debates. The Democratic party had successfully doused the flickering flames of progressive activism in this country, inserting their establishment apparatchik into the running for the highest office, and he was prepared to appoint a phalanx of bankers and insurance executives into his cabinet. On election day I voted for that stooge, dreading the next four years of either his toothy smug grin or a repeat of the orange fascist, and, while I was unhappy with either choice, my decision was forced. And now I was just waiting for the election results. I felt exactly as I did on election day in 2016, grim and doomed.

Then I woke up.

My doctor had warned me that my toradol injection would wear off after about 6 hours and I’d have to fall back on ibuprofen for my achey bones, and she was right. Ouch. So I just took some painkillers and am waiting for them to kick in, and thought I’d write up my horrible dream.

It was just a nightmare, right? I’m not going to look at the election news. I need to get back to sleep.

Now Klobuchar is out. My mother will be disappointed — she was planning to vote for Amy. I’m just disappointed because she endorses Biden on the way out the door.

So now there are just five left: Sanders, Biden, Warren, Bloomberg, and…Tulsi Gabbard? Gabbard is still campaigning?

I vote in the Minnesota primary tomorrow, along with lots of people in states all across the country. There is a stultifying mass of punditry hovering over the country: ‘experts’ are all telling you who to vote for based on this mysterious thing called “electability”, on prognostications about matchups next November, on how many other people are voting for candidate X vs candidate Y. Your goal is to get on the winning bandwagon early, because as we all know, whoever guesses which candidate will win tomorrow gets fabulous prizes.

Oh, wait, no they don’t. You win nothing for picking the same candidate the most people pick.

So I have some advice for you. Ignore your friends and families. Never mind the statistics and the odds. Drop-kick FiveThirtyEight into an open sewer manhole. Fuck the commentators on CNN and Fox and MSNBC. Don’t trust me to tell you who to vote for.

Instead, be totally selfish, and think exclusively about which candidate you like best, who supports the policies you favor. The calculus of figuring out who your neighbors and the people of California and Texas will vote for is totally irrelevant. Go into that booth and vote your conscience. That’s all.

Wasn’t that easy?

Then go kick Chris Cilizza and whatever other goofball has been calling the horserace. That’s the fun part.

The New York Times reports that the Pete Buttigieg campaign is done, and he is quitting after his poor showing in South Carolina. I can’t say that I’ll miss him.

Last week, Donald Trump gave a couple of press conferences that were the apotheosis of Trumpian incoherence and inanity — he rambled on in his usual stream-of-consciousness style, exposing the fact that he didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, and announced that the person who was in charge of the COVID-19 response was Mike Pence, who is the opposite of a responsible, informed choice (put him in charge of the Prayer Team, OK?), and later took direct action by announcing a crackdown on Mexican border crossings (our cases of COVID-19 are not coming from Mexico). Yet at the same time, our media blandly treats this as routine.

Wednesday’s briefing was arguably the most abnormal moment yet in a profoundly abnormal presidency.

But top news organizations, rather than accurately representing Trump’s alarming behavior, made it sound like nothing untoward happened at all.

They made it sound like some real news was made: That Trump put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the government’s response to the coronavirus; that the president urged calm.

But even the Pence “news” appears to be a sham, and a clusterfuck: In addition to being basically a fuck-you to the medical community — given Pence’s proud defiance of scientific truths — it was apparently a last-minute decision based on political optics that blindsided Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who at the same time insisted that he was still in charge.

This one really wasn’t hard. It was obvious to anyone listening to Trump’s rambling, often incoherent, self-centered, stream-of-consciousness ad-libbing – much of it straight out of his political rallies — that:

Trump had no real understanding of what he was talking about.

He had no sense of what was required of him as president.

He sees this as being all about him.

There are only so many things that can come out of his head.

No, the New York Times is not pointing out the idiocy of this president.

But at the New York Times, Michael D. Shear, Noah Weiland and Katie Rogers engaged in something even worse than stenography: The cherrypicking of quotes that weren’t incoherent, that in no way whatsoever indicated the true nature of the briefing. They led off:

President Trump named Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday to coordinate the government’s response to the coronavirus, even as he repeatedly played down the danger to the United States of a widespread domestic outbreak.

Nothing in that story told readers what they most needed to know.

Even in a sidebar on Trump’s credibility, Annie Karni, Michael Crowley and Maggie Haberman simply called Trump’s briefing “casual”. Then they punted:

Mr. Trump could face a moment of reckoning. Maintaining a calm and orderly response during an epidemic, in which countless lives could be at stake, requires that the president be a reliable public messenger.

There was also a cutesy sidebar by Katie Rogers about Trump’s self-declared germophobia.

Inexcusable.

It’s maddening. The more serious the media outlet, the more likely they are to pretend the drooling clown at the top of the country as a serious thinker, because the Newspaper of Record would find it beneath their dignity to expose a madman.

Although I will say that I watched a little bit of CNN on Friday night, and they were discussing the reasons we should be concerned about a COVID-19 pandemic, and they did come right out and say that one of the exacerbating factors for this disease is “incompetent leadership”. That ought to be the lead story in every newspaper every day. “THE PRESIDENT IS INCOMPETENT”, 72 point bold font, all the time until he’s run out of town on a rail.

P.S. The president also put Katie Miller, Stephen Miller’s new wife, in charge of all coronavirus communications. He’s not only incompetent, he’s corrupt and handing out jobs to cronies. No one will care.

Cracked identified The 5 Most Garbage Democrats In Congress, and I knew upon reading just the title that my rep, Collin Peterson, would be on the list. He is. He’s #2.

It sure seems like the climate crisis has split American politics straight down party lines, with Democrats with the 99% of scientists who’ve declared it a global crisis and Republicans, as always, with the 1%. But whoever believes that hasn’t met Representative Collin Peterson of Minnesota, who would set the world on fire himself if it would get his farmers a warmer harvest season.

Peterson is one of the last members of the “Blue Dog Coalition,” which sounds like a D.C. garage band made up entirely of dudes in Birkenstocks, but is actually a faction of Dems who are fiscally conservative and socially apathetic — the kind of Democrats whom Republicans vote for when they want their bi daughter to show up for Thanksgiving. And never having a progressive thought in his head is exactly how Collins manages to stay in office as a Democrat while representing one of the thickest parts of Minnesota’s Trump-friendly farm belt. In fact, Collins leans more Republican than some Republicans, being one of only three Democrats who voted against impeachment and one of two who put their names under a letter asking the Supreme Court to pretty please reconsider revoking abortion rights.

But Peterson’s blackest mark is a sooty one, as he’s the only establishment Democrat still firmly in the climate denial camp, the kind of guy who doesn’t believe in global warming because “we’ve just had the biggest floods and coldest winters we’ve ever had.” As the House Agriculture Chairman, Collins is constantly pushing green deals onto the back burner (the coal one he leaves running all day), pretending farmers are being victimized by green activists and running a scorched-earth policy on climate legislation. No really, his solution for solving the wildfire crisis is to destroy every inch of wilderness to protect his precious farms.

And if you’re wondering how many bridges Peterson is willing to flood for his constituents, this is a man who helped pass a bill to cut aid for starving Yemeni children so he could get his hands on farming funds quicker. Real salt of the earth, this guy.

At every election I’m told to do the expedient thing and vote for this jerk to empower the other, real Democrats. I’m not going to fall for that line anymore. If Peterson is a Democrat, then the Democratic party stands for nothing.