‘Journalists’, feel some shame for your profession

So I checked the lead political story on CNN:

CNN poll: It’s a dead heat

Then I checked the lead political story on MSNBC:

NBC/WSJ poll: Very close race with one day to go

Feeling desperate, I even checked Fox News:

CLOSING TIME: In Final Hours, Are
There Still Undecideds Left to Swing?

Do you sense a theme? It’s one that we’ve suffered with for the entire election season: news media that are obsessed with the horse race rather than the issues.

Fuck the media. Only xkcd sees the truth.

And tomorrow is the race itself, with non-stop coverage of exit polls, with maps showing trends, and predictions, and declaring that one state has gone to one candidate or the other — it’s all our media live for, I think, is the ultimate orgasm of who wins, rather than the substance of the consequences of electing either of these people.

I hate them. I hate them all. I will not be watching any of those channels, I will not be visiting their websites at all tomorrow: I am going to vote and then I am going to shut out the yammering ninnies for the whole day, and I will check my newspaper for who the winner was on Wednesday. I might be nice and create an election day thread for you all here, but I will not be reading it myself.

The real election campaign is long over. We were supposed to have news that clearly discussed the differences and similarities between the two. We didn’t get that, so now we get numbers filtered out of noise.

Also, Salon’s top two articles on tomorrow’s election are all about the polls…but they also have an article by Robert Reich on Romney’s destructive policies. More of that, please. I don’t give a damn about the polls — the only one that counts is the election itself.

“I vetoed any bill that was in favor of choice”

Tomorrow, one long national nightmare, the election season, ends…and possibly another one begins. Not that I would want to influence your vote or anything*, but here’s an unrehearsed, unstaged moment from Mitt Romney.

How anyone can sit there in all seriousness and babble about prophecies of Jesus’ return and be taken seriously as a candidate is a mystery. No, Jesus is not going to reappear, split the Mount of Olives as a super-duper magic trick, and then rule the planet from Jerusalem and Missouri.

And then he declares that he is more conservative and authoritarian than the Mormon church requires, as a point of pride. It’s not enough for him to be bugfuck nuts, he’s got to proudly gloat that he buggers worms.

Please don’t elect this guy. Elect the other militaristic evangelical Christian who’s a little less demented.

*Heh. Right. Be assured, if you’re voting for anyone with Republican or Libertarian affiliations, you have my withering contempt. Which will dissuade you, right?

Oh, look, a November surprise

Wait, no, I mean a November fizzle. I’m sure Romney was praying for signs of a dying economy, but instead the October jobs report shows higher than expected employment — 158,000 jobs added. It’s going to take a little effort to spin that into a litany of failure. But I’ll try.

The reason we had a substantial increase in jobs was that Obama’s gay-friendly policies attracted a swarm of natural catastrophes that caused a temporary surge of hiring as good, hardworking Republican heterosexuals were forced to hire illegal immigrants to cope with the devastation.

Also, Satan.

Oh, wait. I just learned that most of the growth was in the health and education sectors. Uh…Obamacare! And evilution!

Also, still Satan.

Romney is a very devout man

Mitt Romney gives lots of money to his church! Sorta. It turns out he’s also a very clever man, with a deep knowledge of the tax code, who has cunningly used loopholes to generate the appearance of giving money to the church while keeping most of it for himself.

Romney reportedly took advantage of a loophole, called a charitable remainder unitrust or CRUT, which allows someone to park money or securities in a tax-deferred trust marked for their favorite charity, but which often doesn’t pay out much to the non-profit. The donor pays taxes on the fixed yearly income they get from the trust, but the principle remains untaxed . Congress outlawed the practice in 1997, but Romney slid in under the wire when his trust, created in June 1996, was grandfathered in.

The trust essentially lets someone “rent” the charity’s tax-exemption while not actually giving the charity much money. If done for this purpose, the trust pays out more every year to the donor than it makes in returns on its holdings, depleting the principal over time, so that when the donor dies and the trust is transferred to the charity, there’s often little left. The actual contribution “is just a throwaway,” Jonathan Blattmachr, a lawyer who set up hundreds of CRUTS in the 1990s, told Bloomberg. “I used to structure them so the value dedicated to charity was as close to zero as possible without being zero.”

Indeed, this appears to the case for Romney’s trust as well. Bloomberg obtained the trust’s tax returns through a Freedom of Information Request and found that Romney’s CRUT started at $750,000 in 2001 but ended 2011 with only $421,203 — over a period when the stock market grew. Romney’s trust was projected to leave less than 8 percent of the original contribution to the church (or another charity that he can designate). This, along with the trust’s poor returns — it made just $48 in 2011 — suggest the trust is not designed to grow for the LDS church but just serve as a tax-free holding pool from which annual payments can be disbursed to the Romneys.

If he’s so willing to screw over the god he worships, one has to wonder what he’s planning to do to the country.

Remember this on election day

Look back on Mitt Romney in 2011:

KING: You’ve been a chief executive of a state. I was just in Joplin, Missouri. I’ve been in Mississippi and Louisiana and Tennessee and other communities dealing with whether it’s the tornadoes, the flooding, and worse. FEMA is about to run out of money, and there are some people who say do it on a case-by-case basis and some people who say, you know, maybe we’re learning a lesson here that the states should take on more of this role. How do you deal with something like that?

ROMNEY: Absolutely. Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction. And if you can go even further and send it back to the private sector, that’s even better.

Instead of thinking in the federal budget, what we should cut — we should ask ourselves the opposite question. What should we keep? We should take all of what we’re doing at the federal level and say, what are the things we’re doing that we don’t have to do? And those things we’ve got to stop doing, because we’re borrowing $1.6 trillion more this year than we’re taking in. We cannot…

KING: Including disaster relief, though?

ROMNEY: We cannot — we cannot afford to do those things without jeopardizing the future for our kids. It is simply immoral, in my view, for us to continue to rack up larger and larger debts and pass them on to our kids, knowing full well that we’ll all be dead and gone before it’s paid off. It makes no sense at all.

You know he’s not going to do a thing to slow the advance of global climate change (or does he think that can be done at the level of individual states, too?), and he doesn’t support federal emergency services. Why should he? Disasters like this don’t discomfit the rich.

Ignore that presidential campaign over there

I don’t like Obama.

There. I said it. I think he’ll go down in history as a mediocre president — not a bad one, just one who didn’t change a flawed system at all, who was so focused on being moderate and compromising that there was no hope of any significant change. I also think his foreign policy is bloody-handed and disastrous, and if you’re interested in church-state separation and secular government, I’m sorry, but he’s had you all fooled. He’s not a closet atheist, but quite the opposite.

But next week, I’m going to go into the voting both and punch that ballot next to Obama’s name.

I’m not happy about it.

Here’s the problem: we’ve all been played. All of the focus is on the presidential election, in a winner-take-all two party system. And the presidential election is a distraction. It’s been reduced to a numbers game, a horse race where policies don’t matter, and all you have left to do is to pick one out of two. All the work has been done before you enter the voting booth, and that work is aimed at limiting your choices. So this time around, your choice is the evangelical Christian who brags about killing terrorists while making incremental improvements to the economy, or the Mormon robot who’s going to serve as a slave to the bankers and merchants of greed who destroy the economy, or nothing. So you try to pick the lesser of two evils.

I know what people will say. You have to vote on your principles, or nothing will change. When I just look at the issues, I agree: I ought to vote for Jill Stein, whose stand on just about everything agrees with mine. (Don’t tell me about Gary Johnson — I look at his positions and see a selfish moron who’d be worse than Romney). But Jill Stein isn’t going to win, and my vote would be thrown away, and worse, Jill Stein is throwing away her time and effort in a quixotic race that has already been decided. It will be one of two. The two are fixed. Third party candidates are a snare and an illusion.

I’m not saying that we’re doomed, though, just that the presidential race is the wrong place to effect change.

The right place is everywhere else. Maybe the primary campaigns would be better: we need to get candidates in place that don’t require us to hold our noses in order to vote for them. The Republican field is always a race to find the one candidate just crazy enough to satisfy a badly deranged base, while not so obviously crazy as to alienate everyone else, so forget them. The Democrats always seem to be looking for the moderate who won’t really change the system (that would be scary) and who will inspire just enough to squeak into office…but not inspire so much that people will wake up to our problems. I suspect that both parties will fundamentally resist change.

So maybe that’s not even the best place to work on fixing the election system. Especially in this election, the power of incumbency is so great that no one was even going to look seriously at an alternative to Obama.

You know where the elections really matter, where you really have a choice? At the local level. The Green Party is stupid to throw so much effort into a presidential campaign right now — they ought to be focused on building a base. I would vote for a Green for city council or district representative in a heartbeat. And once they’ve built a deep party structure, they become serious candidates for higher office, because they will have the backing of people doing good work on the ground.

This is the same advice we give to people fighting creationism. Run for local school boards, because that’s where you can make a difference. Our opponents know that; these small offices are packed with ideologically conservative Christians who can have an effect far greater than their numbers should allow. While you’re focused on who is running for president, they’ve placed a team of cretins on local government to stymie any progressive, rational efforts towards bettering the country.

Stein has served two terms as a town meeting representative in Lexington, Massachusetts, which is a good start. But we’d have been better served if she’d then moved up to a county or district office, instead of leaping for governor (failed) or president (doomed). She ran for the house of representatives, once, and lost…I’d rather she tried for that again. And I’d rather see Green Party candidates appearing all over the place, on zoning boards and city councils and school boards, rather than gambling on presidencies and governorships where they’ll preside over an army of Democrats and Republicans who’ll feel no loyalty at all to them.

So ignore the presidential campaign. We know we’re going to be stuck with the lesser of two evils, so just get it done. But what we people need to do next, and what we can do in this election, is vote everywhere else for third party candidates who better fit your values, and most importantly, donate and campaign for those candidates. Personally, I know that in the future my political donations (they aren’t much, I’m not a wealthy guy, so I’ll be realistic) will be aimed towards parties other than the Democrats. Any Greens looking for local office? Labor? Socialists? You can have my pennies. Democrats? Not until you acquire the vision to nominate real liberals and progressives. Until you stand for something other than not-Republican.

A bad way to start the morning

I’m sitting in O’Hare waiting for my connecting flight, and I haven’t had much sleep and I’m sweaty and rumpled and I’ve got that queasy feeling deep in my gut from a digestive tract that says, “hell with you, I’m shutting down anyway”, and I’m reading Jill Filipovic’s summary of all the idiotic things Republicans have said about rape. This is not a good combination. I’m going to be taking the stage at CSICon both pukey and pissed off.

Wait. That might just be exactly the right mood to be in.

Oh, jeez. Here’s another summary of Republican rape positions. I don’t know how anyone can vote for these horrible people.