#I was voting blue no matter who last election cycle so I get it but it is so clearly not working

[antiarcticmonkeys]

This post is meant to spark discussion, not make people fight or to attack anyone, so please keep that in mind even if you don’t agree with everything I say. I’m not here to evangelize, just to give food for thought.

That being said, I’ve seen a lot of people recently propping up the “lesser of two evils” rhetoric on tumblr, and I am going to be honest: it very clearly comes from a place of fear. I understand, the political climate is frightening right now. But if we continue to approach the situation from a place of panic, prioritizing damage control, we are going to be slowly but surely overwhelmed by the amount of damage we are trying to control. We need to fight for overarching change.

Whether or not that change will come from the electoral system is debatable, but clearly voting is an exigent issue at the moment, so if you believe in that system and put your faith in it, I would urge you to consider voting for someone you don’t think is even a little bit evil. I’m not here to judge you if you’re not ready to do so this election cycle, because yes, I understand that actually getting a third-party candidate in the executive branch in 2024 is a long shot. But I really hope that if you truly want and believe in large-scale change, you have the ability to believe that even just the small change of electing a third party candidate is possible.

If you really agree that by-and-large, Democrat candidates are working against us (albeit less so than republicans), I would encourage you to work to make third-party candidates more viable instead of just accepting that you’re going to end up with a shitty politician either way.

There is plenty of time between now and the election after this one. If you want a non-evil candidate, I would urge you to do what you can to lay the groundwork for one now, so we don’t enter our next election cycle with the overwhelming sense that we have only two options and they both suck ass. The only thing standing between us and a third party win is the allure of habit and the work of organization. I would suggest you research candidates you actually like. Campaign for them, post about them, talk to your friends, family, and neighbors about them.

Every time the election cycle comes around again, we get thousands of new voters who aren’t in the habit of voting for the lesser of two evils, who may be ready for a non-evil candidate. There are many, many people who are dissatisfied with both parties. Electing a third-party candidate is not impossible, just difficult.

[theconstitutionisgayculture]

Indefinite hiatus

I was toying with writing up a long post about what running this blog has meant to me over the years and why I'm stepping away for the foreseeable future, but that feels too dramatic for what's really just me saying "I'm not going to be on tumblr for at least the rest of the year". So, I'll just say I'm not going to be on tumblr for at least the rest of the year.

Okay, actually I have a bunch more to say, but it'll be under the cut.

Politics sucks. And paying attention to it, even in the reduced way I've been paying attention to it over the last few years, is hard. You end up spending so much of your supposedly free time thinking about things you can't change, getting mad about things you can't change, and getting depressed when the people who can change things just keep going in the wrong direction. Even when good things happen, it's just a matter of a few days before something bad happens once again. And vice versa. It's an endless cycle of hope, despair, resignation. Rinse and repeat, and triple speed that cycle during an election year. And I'm tired of it. I'm tired of spending every other year worried about what's going to happen on one day in November. I'm tired of hearing a piece of news and automatically composing a post about it or running through 20 different responses I might give to asks I might get about it in my head.

Everyone I know who doesn't pay attention to politics (or at least doesn't run a social media page dedicated to it) seems to enjoy their live a lot more than I currently do. Which sounds way more dramatic than what's actually going on, which is mainly that I want to get to a place where I just don't care. I want the world and its problems to flow off my back instead of weighing it down. I want to stop thinking about what people on the internet might say about something I haven't even posted yet. And that can't happen while I'm tied to this blog. So I'll be staying away from it for at least the rest of the year.

I did have a good time with this blog. I've met a bunch of really awesome people, some who are sadly no longer with us (RIP Blue), and some who I think will carry on the "fight" way better than I ever did. This isn't an admission of defeat, or pessimism about the election. Even if Trump wins, and I truly think he will if we have a fair election, I still won't be back this year. But I'll still vote and I'll still be proud that my silly little tumblr blog had an impact on some people's lives. I may not have the reach of a Tucker Carlson or a Glenn Beck, but I've gotten a lot of messages from people who said they changed their minds about an issue, or even politics in general, because of things I said, and that counts for something. If you guys take anything away from me, I want it to be this: Even the smallest impact matters. It doesn't matter if you only ever reach one person and then stop, reaching that one person is enough. Changing one vote is enough. Changing one mind is enough.

To all my mutuals, you guys are the best. I truly hope you have wonderful lives and I'm sad I won't get to see your names on my dash everyday anymore. To anyone I've ever followed or reblogged from, I couldn't have had a blog without you, so thank you. Yes, even the leftiod psychos, XD. To everyone else, find your own balance and never give into despair and never listen to people who tell you not to try. Even a failed effort is still more meaningful than sitting back and mocking people for trying to improve even the smallest thing about themselves or the world around them.

I won't be logging back in after I post this, so any messages or asks you send, I won't see. I'll still be active (or as active as I ever am) in my discord, so feel free to join there if you want to. It should still be my pinned post, but if it isn't, I'll edit this with a new invite link.

And that's all I've got to say for now.

[gentil-minou]

Hi, I just wanted to say thank you for voting third-party. I know a lot of folks have said third-party votes are wasted, but with the way things are going, I'll probably vote third-party, too, and it's nice to know there are other people out there who care more about following their beliefs than standing by a broken system.

Maybe this will be the election people realize it's not a waste.

(Also, I'm sorry folks are being nasty in your inbox. Hope things get better soon. On all counts.)

<3 <3 <3

Thank you for also voting third party!! I used to do it more back when I first started voting because I actually believed in the democratic process, until I was disillusioned by a rigged system and started voting blue because it felt like I had no choice.

Every year I voted blue I had to convince myself "this is fine. This is better than the other guy" even though I knew their warmongering policies and how they leaned too close to the center for comfort. Voting Clinton and Biden last couple cycles felt like I had to, because I was able to wear the blinders long enough to gaslight myself into thinking I actually wanted them as my president. Because I had to or else I'd "waste my vote"

I refuse to do that anymore. Now I realize I'd waste my vote by giving it to someone who would rather see us dead than lose their money and power. I'd waste my vote giving it to a broken system.

The people shaming everyone to vote blue act like I'm voting for Trump by default if I don't vote Biden, and look i followed the same rhetoric in 2020. I'm sure if you go back in my posts I said the same thing.

But the line was crossed somewhere around the minute I learned my money funded the deaths of thousands, and always has. The line was crossed when I learned the president I called into power cares more about his military pet project than life. The line was crossed when I realized Biden is old enough to remember when Palestine was it's own free nation but refuses to, because he follows the age old American tactic of "This land is my land, actually, not yours"

So yeah I'm done with feeding into a system like that.

And here's the thing about this newest generation of voters: they are soooo powerful and they are so much braver than I was at their age. They know that meaningful movement and cooperation can overtake a corrupted system. The Dems and Republicans are both terrified of them because they know they're not as easy to indoctrinate into their philosophy.

I genuinely believe that if we can use the millions and millions of people who voice support for Palestine to also put their vote towards someone else, like Claudia in the socialist party who I've been keeping an eye on or the representatives that have actually backed up calls for ceasefire, like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar and I'm proud to say my own rep, who are trying to move the dem party to a place that actually represents me.

If millions back a third party candidate, that says something. It says we aren't going to fall into the traps laid by the generations before us. It's says we are going to fight for what we believe in.

Revolution does not happen in a year or two. It takes a lifetime. And if there's anything that I've learned from Palestinians it's that the cause for a truly free world is worth fighting for no matter how many decades it takes.

[jvzebel-x]

Real talk: you would rather a republican president? I know it won't make things better to have a dem president, but it can't make things worse.

real talk: i don't see the difference. &until i am given a reason to see the difference other than, "the other guy is more cartoon-style evil than us so you're a bad person if you don't vote for us", i'm going to hold up my threat to beat the shit out of anyone with a baseball bat who has the balls to try to tell me anything. especially if they cannot provide me with actual proof that they have a right to talk down to me via real life work they've done. because I have put in the work. I have done things other than try to ease my guilty conscience with the only thing the more&more openly fascist government allows us to pretend we have. it will be a cold day in hell when one of these vote-pushing little clowns thinks they can step to me&not leave bloody for their trouble. "can't make things worse". that's the problem with you cunts-- why are you always fucking operating on how much worse things could theoretically be FOR YOU instead of putting in any real effort to thinking about how much BETTER they can be for EVERYONE ELSE? pathetic&self-defeating. lazy&uneducated.

you know how close Oregon was to losing their blue status last election cycle? do you know how much it hurt me to have to push electoralism in my real actual life to keep this stupid fucking state from swinging right? how many people were out who can't even fucking vote because of their status as either illegal or former convict, but were still out pushing for electoralism? well, we fucking won. the state is still blue. since that election, dozens of laws&regulations have been pushed to make life for the unhoused not just unliveable-- actively deadly. just as one example, they have made it illegal to hand out tents on the streets. do you have any idea how much blood these politicians have on their hands just from that one decision?

no. of course not. because people like you don't have any idea what real work looks like, &you have no fucking respect for the people who are willing to put their own problems aside to try to help the greater good. how the fuck would any of you know what that looks or feels like? you get the imaginary image of the orange boogeyman coming for you, &suddenly no one+nothing else matters. your complicity leaves blood on your fucking hands that no amount of "real talk" will ever wash off.

[qqueenofhades]

Do you really hate this county? Or were you just ranting?

Sigh. I debated whether or not to answer this, since I usually keep the real-life/politics/depressing current events to a relative minimum on this blog, except when I really can't avoid ranting about it. But I have some things to get off my chest, it seems, and you did ask. So.

The thing is, any American with a single modicum of genuine historical consciousness knows that despite all the triumphalist mythology about Pulling Up By Our Bootstraps and the American Dream and etc, this country was founded and built on the massive and systematic exploitation and extermination of Black and Indigenous people. And now, when we are barely (400 years later!!!) getting to a point of acknowledging that in a widespread way, oh my god the screaming. I'm so sick of the American right wing I could spit for so many reasons, not least of which is the increasingly reductive and reactive attempts to put the genie back in the bottle and set up hysterical boogeymen about how Teaching Your Children Critical Race Theory is the end of all things. They have forfeited all pretense of being a real governing party; remember how their only platform at the 2020 RNC was "support whatever Trump says?" They have devolved to the point where the cruelty IS the point, to everyone who doesn't fit the nakedly white supremacist mold. They don't have anything to do aside from attempt to usher in actual, literal, dictionary-definition-of-fascism and sponsor armed revolts against the peaceful transfer of power.

That is fucking exhausting to be aware of all the time, especially with the knowledge that if we miss a single election cycle -- which is exceptionally easy to do with the way the Democratic electorate needs to be wooed and courted and herded like cats every single time, rather than just getting their asses to the polls and voting to keep Nazis out of office -- they will be right back in power again. If Manchin and Sinema don't get over their poseur pearl-clutching and either nuke the filibuster or carve out an exception for voting rights, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act is never going to get passed, no matter how many boilerplate appeals the Democratic leadership makes on Twitter. In which case, the 2022 midterms are going to give us Kevin McCarthy, Speaker of the House (I threw up in my mouth a little typing that) and right back to the Mitch McConnell Obstruction Power Hour in the Senate. The Online Left (TM) will then blame the Democrats for not doing more to stop them. These are, of course, the same people who refused to vote for Hillary Clinton out of precious moral purity reasons in 2016, handed the election to Trump, and now like to complain when the Trump-stacked Supreme Court reliably churns out terrible decisions. Gee, it's almost like elections have consequences!!

Aside from my exasperation with the death-cult right-wing fascists and the Online Left (TM), I am sick and tired of how forty years of "trickle-down" Reaganomics has created a world where billionaires can just fly to space for the fun of it, while the rest of America (and the world) is even more sick, poor, overheated, economically deprived, and unable to survive the biggest public health crisis in a century, even if half the elected leadership wasn't actively trying to sabotage it. Did you know that half of American workers can't even afford a one-bedroom apartment? Plus the obvious scandal that is race relations, health care, paid leave, the education system (or lack thereof), etc etc. I'm so tired of this America Is The Greatest Country in the World mindless jingoistic catchphrasing. We are an empire in the late stages of collapse and it's not going to be pretty for anyone. We have been poisoned on sociopathic-libertarian-selfishness-disguised-as-Freedom ideology for so long that that's all there is left. We have become a country of idiots who believe everything their idiot friends post on social media, but in a very real sense, it's not directly those individuals' fault. How could they, when they have been very deliberately cultivated into that mindset and stripped of critical thinking skills, to serve a noxious combination of money, power, and ideology?

I am tired of the fact that I have become so drained of empathy that when I see news about more people who refused to get the vaccine predictably dying of COVID, my reaction is "eh, whatever, they kind of deserved it." I KNOW that is not a good mindset to have, and I am doing my best to maintain my personal attempts to be kind to those I meet and to do my small part to make the world better. I know these are human beings who believed what they were told by people that they (for whatever reason) thought knew better than them, and that they are part of someone's family, they had loved ones, etc. But I just can't summon up the will to give a single damn about them (I'm keeping a bingo card of right-wing anti-vax radio hosts who die of COVID and every time it's like, "Alexa, play Another One Bites The Dust.") The course that the pandemic took in 21st-century America was not preordained or inevitable. It was (and continues to be) drastically mismanaged for cynical political reasons, and the legacy of the Former Guy continues to poison any attempts to bring it under control or convince people to get a goddamn vaccine. We now have over 100,000 patients hospitalized with COVID across the country -- more than last summer, when the vaccines weren't available.

I have been open about my fury about the devaluation of the humanities and other critical thinking skills, about the fact that as an academic in this field, my chances of getting a full-time job for which I have trained extensively and acquired a specialist PhD are... very low. I am tired of the fact that Americans have been encouraged to believe whatever bullshit they fucking please, regardless of whether it is remotely true, and told that any attempt to correct them is "anti-freedom." I am tired of how little the education system functions in a useful way at all -- not necessarily due to the fault of teachers, who have to work with what they're given, and who are basically heroes struggling stubbornly along in a profession that actively hates them, but because of relentless under-funding, political interference, and furious attempts, as discussed above, to keep white America safely in the dark about its actual history. I am tired of the fact that grade school education basically relies on passing the right standardized tests, the end. I am tired of the implication that the truth is too scary or "un-American" to handle. I am tired. Tired.

I know as well that "America" is not synonymous in all cases with "capitalist imperialist white-supremacist corporate death cult." This is still the most diverse country in the world. "America" is not just rich white middle-aged Republicans. "America" involves a ton of people of color, women, LGBTQ people, Muslims, Jews, Christians of good will (I have a whole other rant on how American Christianity as a whole has yielded all pretense of being any sort of a principled moral opposition), white allies, etc etc. all trying to make a better world. The blue, highly vaccinated, Biden-winning states and counties are leading the economic recovery and enacting all kinds of progressive-wishlist dream policies. We DID get rid of the Orange One via the electoral process and avert fascism at the ballot box, which is almost unheard-of, historically speaking. But because, as also discussed above, certain elements of the Democratic electorate need to fall in love with a candidate every single time or threaten to withhold their vote to punish the rest of the country for not being Progressive Enough, these gains are constantly fragile and at risk of being undone in the next electoral cycle. Yes, the existing system is a crock of shit. But it's what we've got right now, and the other alternative is open fascism, which we all got a terrifying taste of over the last four years. I don't know about you, but I really don't want to go back.

So... I don't know. I don't know if that stacks up to hate. I do hate almost everything about what this country currently is, structurally speaking, but I recognize that is not identical with the many people who still live here and are trying to do their best, including my friends, family, and myself. I am exhausted by the fact that as an older millennial, I am expected to survive multiple cataclysmic economic crashes, a planet that is literally boiling alive, a barely functional political system run on black cash, lies, and xenophobia, a total lack of critical thinking skills, renewed assaults on women/queer people/POC/etc, and somehow feel like I'm confident or prepared for the future. Not all these problems are only America's fault alone. The West as a whole bears huge responsibility for the current clusterfuck that the world is in, for many reasons, and so do some non-Western countries. But there is no denying that many of these problems have ultimate American roots. See how the ongoing fad for right-wing authoritarian strongmen around the world has them modeling themselves openly on Trump (like Brazil's lunatic president, Jair Bolsonaro, who talks all the time about how Trump is his political role model). See what's going on in Afghanistan right now. Etc. etc.

Anyway. I am very, very tired. There you have it.

[chenoehi]

Points about U.S. Election

(As I was typing this, Biden has taken the lead in GA but it’s still not called yet. Trump will undoubtedly demand a recount so if it’s really close a recount could flip it back for Trump.)

Just a little update from my previous post on the election results, although no one cares about my opinion. Rest assured, this is purely for my own sanity.

First thoughts:

1. Arizona being wishy washy throws a real monkey wrench in the wheels of this circus train from the perspective of Biden’s bid. It sounds crazy given how the Associated Press operates when it comes to elections (being very careful to call states too early) but the AP might have fucked up. Ironically, it would mean that Fox News, the only conservative leaning major network news outlet, also fucked up by calling AZ for Biden, an even more confusing fact when we consider that CNN, NBC, MSNBC, and other liberal leaning outlets have NOT called AZ for Biden. It has been amusing seeing conservatives on Twitter (particularly the trollish, nasty, insult-slinging ones—as opposed to normal every day conservatives) say fuck you to Fox News where Republicans have been tuning in to worship at the alter of Trump for the last four years. Politics always drives home what fickle creatures we really are. This is no offense to Republicans honestly. I have little use for broadcasters with their own shows who call themselves journalists. CNN, NBC, and MSNBC are in the tank for Democrats and Fox News is Trumpland. Fox News used to be more moderate when Bush was president but that’s been a lifetime ago. Now politics are even more idealogical than they were before, and the Republican voters are almost embracing Trump now more than they are embracing conservative values. Or at least that’s what I see in my corner of the deep red South, aka Tennessee. I digress. Point is, true journalists report the facts with no outward bias. These people are political commentators. I have a journalism degree. I wrote for my school paper and helped run it. I covered the 2016 election. I’ve met real journalists at AP and newspapers. Those people are not it.

2. In other news, Nevada may not even matter now if Biden can flip Georgia and Pennsylvania (which is happening in GA and may soon happen in PA if Biden can keep the upward momentum). That would make my points in the previous post almost irrelevant now. It goes to show how unpredictable this election has been, more so than expected. If Biden flips GA for good, Trump will have to win every other state (Alaska, North Carolina, Nevada, and Pennsylvania) AND flip Arizona back to gain just 269 electoral votes. If he fails to flip AZ or if he flips AZ and then loses just one other state it’s game over. If Biden wins GA and AZ still flips for Trump  because it was called too early, then his 253 electoral votes (sans the 11 that AZ gives him) will turn into 269. He will still have to win one more state to gain 270. If Biden loses AZ and then doesn’t win any other state outside of GA he has 269 votes, and if Trump wins all the other states (PA, NC, NV, AL, AZ) he has 269 votes. If that scenario happens, neither men will get the needed 270 votes and we are royally fucked. If you think Trump demanding a recount in Wisconsin with a 20k gap (SAME AS HIS OWN GAP IN 2016, TALK ABOUT HYPOCRISY, NOT TO MENTION 2016 ALSO SAW A 10K GAP IN MICHIGAN) is bad, and if you think it’s really bad that we don’t have a President-elect at almost 3 days post election, imagine the horror of a nationwide recount or worse.

3. No one has any fucks to give about Alaska and North Carolina, still. 

4. I really didn’t want to spend energy talking about Trump but I just find it so tragic that he wants the votes to continue to be counted in Arizona where the mail-ins are now turning it around in his favor, meanwhile in Pennsylvania and Georgia he tossed out lawsuits to stop the counting because there’s all this corruption and voter fraud because his lead is slipping due to the mail-ins and absentees. Oh, and he needed to move his people just a few feet closer to observe the ballots being counted, although if they’re close enough to read the language of the ballots then that constitutes an invasion of privacy. But everything is gravy in Arizona. #allvotesmatter. No disrespect to BLM, full stop. I find irony in comparing that phrase to this voting situation because Trump certainly wants conservative votes in Arizona to matter because it means something to him. Whereas, votes incoming from Fulton County in GA (Atlanta) and from Philadelphia, PA, and Detroit, MI—all heavily Black-populated cities—are being scrutinized and declared criminal. I find it tragically ironic, so I use that comparison here and elsewhere. I’m not making light of the movement by doing so (just to be clear).

Now, a break down of this shitshow:

What did we expect to happen?

Both camps thought they could win by a landslide.

Both camps have had their egos bruised.

We expected Trump to make accusations if he didn’t perform well or if he lost.

Trump already set the precedent for this behavior in 2016 when he complained that a loss then would be because the vote was rigged. Turns out, it wasn’t. And his paper thin margins were totally fine and not the cause of voter fraud and fishiness and he didn’t steal the election.

We did not expect him to go quietly into that night. The exact opposite of what happened in 2016 is happening now and Trump’s hypocrisy and immaturity is showing full force. Even some of his supporters are saying he’s whack. That’s bad, but then again, many Republicans have had concerns over his Tweets and rhetoric for the last four years and have done nothing about it. Consequently, he’s lost a lot of former supporters and I don’t even know what his cabinet looks like now. I digress.

Everyone expected Biden to carry most of the mail-in and absentee ballots and for Trump to carry most of the in-person votes.

That is exactly what has happened in pretty much all the swing states save for AZ.

Why is that?

Trump encouraged his followers to vote in-person during early voting periods and to turn out big on election day and specifically to not mail their ballots in or use absentee ballots. Meanwhile, Biden encouraged people to mail in their ballots to stay safe.

We always have some mail-ins and some absentees each election cycle but because of COVID this 2020 election means that we have had millions of these types of ballots this year, which are always more time consuming to process and count. 

In Michigan alone, 2/3 of the state cast mail-in or absentee ballots. Michigan was one of the states like Wisconsin where Trump’s early lead was dashed once the in-person ballots were finished being tallied. Unlike in Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania, Michigan has ended up with a gap of nearly 150k votes for Biden and doesn’t yet appear to be subject to a recount. Meanwhile, Wisconsin went to Biden with a 20k gap but will seemingly be subjected to a recount. The former governor of Wisconsin (who is in the tank for Trump) even spoke out initially and said that unless they can uncover a severe degree of voter fraud or mishandling of ballots (transposed numbers, etc) then 20k is a lot to overcome.

What has happened? The Red Mirage and the Blue Shift.

Generally, in-person votes are the easiest and quickest to tabulate. Mail-in ballots and absentee ballots take longer because they take longer to be processed. Then there are provisional ballots, which generally take the longest because these are votes from people who might actually be ineligible to vote (possibly because of residency status or criminal history; for example, if the latter then their voting rights may have been temporarily suspended).

Key swing states like Florida, Texas, and maybe Ohio (but specifically FL and TX) were allowed to start counting their mail-in and absentee ballots early.

FL and TX saw Biden having an early lead before ultimately Trump gained the lead and won as soon as the in-person ballots started being counted. So, mail-ins and absentee ballots tallied first, in-person ballots tallied second in these states. A Blue Mirage, and then a Red Shift.

However, news commentators have long been discussing the following scenario: the Red Mirage, aka, the tallied in-person votes overwhelmingly skewing Republican being counted first and making states appear to be in Trump’s favor when in actuality Biden would win them in the end once mail-ins and absentees were counted last, causing the Blue Shift (aka the current shift we are seeing now in several swing states, but also harkening back to the 2016 election when Trump caused what was dubbed a “Red Wave” when he swept almost all of the swing states. Aka, now a Blue Shift nationwide).

Why does all this matter to the accusations of voter fraud?

Prior to election day, the GOP (conservatives/Republicans) blocked certain key swing states from being able to count mail-ins and absentees early on. That means that all the ballots that were received in certain states during early voting periods and right up to election day (November 3rd) were unable to be counted until the day of the election.

This block happened in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. I don’t know about Georgia, I don’t think this happened with GA but maybe.

So, unlike FL and TX, which leaned for Biden early on and then shifted, the opposite is happening in PA and GA, and we have seen Biden take MI and WI both.

Arizona is an anomaly because although Biden was expected to sweep a majority of the mail-in and absentee ballots, and has to a large degree nationwide, in Arizona it has been Trump who has taken a larger % of those ballots. Arizona is kind of a coin toss because Trump has a lot of supporters there, and it goes to Republicans most of the time. So Biden’s lead (and possible win) is surprising, but Trump is closing the gap slowly.

What are some things that people are forgetting?

One critical thing is that the USPS (U.S. Postal Service) fucking sucks.

It was reported either on election day or the next morning that the USPS misplaced 300k ballots. They were given more time by a judge to sweep their facilities to find these ballots (how tf do you lose 300k ballots in the first place).

The USPS has been noncompliant when it comes to this and other issues, causing several setbacks and problems.

Many ballots were delivered late. Republicans said that was fraud. They wanted to stop the counting of these ballots in some places. But as long as the ballots were mailed (aka postmarked) by election day then they are still valid, legal ballots. The USPS not delivering them on time is a separate issue.

Some of those ballots are for Trump and other candidates. Not all are for Biden. So he’d be costing himself votes too, which is counterintuitive.

Now, Trump has changed his narrative to ‘we want all legal ballots to be counted’. So I guess that means he’s cool now with the ballots being counted in AZ days after the election, just as long as they give him a change to win back the state.

Why are Trump’s accusations “dangerous,” hypocritical, and insulting?

Trump can turn a blind eye to his Hail Mary pass in Arizona and possibly Nevada this year (which he lost in 2016), and he can embrace the fact that he swept the election in 2016, won most of the swing states, many of which were expected to vote Democrat, and he can gloss over his paper-thin margins in 2016, which are eerily similar to this margins that Biden is now securing.

He can do all this because he won in 2016, and because he could win AZ and NV. But, he doesn’t like that he’s losing his lead in PA, and that he lost MI, WI, and currently the lead in GA. And of course it has to mean there was fraud and corruption if he’s losing right, because there’s no way he could lose in a fair election right? Because he’s so well-liked, right?

And I’m sure someone will point out that Democrats complained that the 2016 election wasn’t fair and that the result was influenced by the Russians and etc. etc. So Democrats are now hypocrites for calling Trump out on his bullshit statements with no evidence.

I agree that the “Trump didn’t win a fair race” argument is stupid, and that has been no more evident than it is right now obviously seeing that his popularity was no fluke. Biden is close to winning the race, but by a small margin. The country is extremely divided, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.

However, Trump is not really levying any specific accusations against Biden that I can see. What I’m hearing is Trump making vague accusations against the states, the election commissions, the polling offices, the people counting, and everyone that is specifically responsible for handling and counting the votes.

What is something that no one talking about, something that is incredibly hypocritical of Trump and Republicans to not point out in light of their accusations?

Alaska and North Carolina.

Why is neither Trump nor any conservative not pointing out how Alaska and North Carolina haven’t finished counting, or how NC has stopped counting and updating their votes for a whole day now? Why is no one saying anything about Alaska only having 50% of their votes reported 3 days after the polls opened? Where is the rage and conspiracy theories about those states and their stalled counting? Why aren’t they complaining about possible voter fraud in those states and worried something fishy is going on? Where are the lawsuits in Anchorage and Raleigh?

Oh, is it because everyone (including Democrats) knows Trump is going to win those states? Do we need an #allstatesmatter movement or something to get them to notice that we still don’t have any updates from them? (No offense to BLM, full stop.)

They don’t care about the issues in NC and AL. They only care about slow counting and fraud accusations in the states where their standing is subject to change. Meaning AKA, if the vote ends in their favor by a narrow margin of let’s say 1,000 votes then they’ll praise it as a win but if they lose the state by 20,000 votes like they did in.. oh, say Wisconsin this year, then they’ll claim voter fraud and demand a recount. Also like they have done in, you guessed it, Wisconsin. So, it’s OK if they eek out a win of 20k in Wisconsin back in 2016, and it’s OK if they eek out wins in Arizona and Nevada after Biden’s current lead, that’s not evidence of potential voter fraud, but if Biden gets a 20k win in Wisconsin this year that’s suspicious.

So Trump is fine with overtaking Biden with Hail Mary passes and narrow margins. He’s fine with all the mysterious votes for him that people are “finding everywhere” in AZ now (using his words he used to describe Biden’s gains). There’s no voter fraud going on in AZ where the mail-ins and absentees are still being counted like everywhere else, despite Trump and other Republicans complaining about the fact that votes are still being counted days after the election and that these ballots are bad in general. There’s no fraud in states where Biden initially had the lead after mail-ins were counted but is now seeing saw his lead shrink as in TX and FL, or in AZ where Biden (like Trump now in PA and GA) is seeing his early lead shrink now that mail-ins and absentees are being counted. There’s no fraud in AZ because Trump is the one gaining the advantage. And there’s also no fraud going on in Alaska where there is still only 50% votes reported or in North Carolina where 94% votes were reported before being delayed now a full day.

Quick question: do you see any Democrats or Liberals claiming Trump’s camp or the AZ counties themselves are purposefully locking that state up in his favor with mail-ins and absentees after seeing how many votes were needed for Trump to win it once the in-person ballots were tallied—as Trump so eloquently accused the Democrats and polls in PA, GA, MI, and WI of doing in his press conference yesterday afternoon? Because that’s basically what he said in his press conference. He made the accusation that they looked at the tally after in-person votes were counted, saw what votes were needed for Biden to win the state, and then suddenly they just started finding votes everywhere. Again, where are the watchdogs barking about people in Arizona and Nevada suddenly finding Trump votes everywhere? Suddenly, absentee and mail-in ballots are…good.

A summary of the hypocrisy and bullshit.

Trump wanted people to vote in person.

Trump said there was no way he could lose the election fairly. (Arrogance and also setting the stage for his legal arguments.)

Trump said that mail-ins and absentees were not trustworthy and basically they could be used to rig the election. (Also setting the stage for legal arguments. Again, we have always used these types of ballots in elections and everyone knows they skew heavily Democratic so if Trump says they’re not trustworthy all of a sudden and millions of people vote this way due to COVID, then we got ourselves a huge case of fraud.)

Trump fails to mention that a fraction of the mail-ins and absentees in every state are still for him or Independent candidates and that with each update his vote count also rises along with Biden’s.

He fails to acknowledge that in AZ the mail-ins and absentees are favoring him more than Biden and that they are the reason he’s gaining in AZ now, and he’s more than willing to say that counting should continue there and to take his gains as a sign he’ll win the state. And it totally doesn’t matter that this is a direct contradiction of his statement that mail-ins and absentees are tools for Dems to ‘steal’ elections.

The early Blue Mirage in states like TX and FL, where the mail-ins and absentees were counted early and the first votes leaned Biden, were followed by in-person ballots and leaned overwhelmingly Trump.

The Blue Mirage of Arizona is seeing mail-ins and absentees turn out to be not in Biden’s favor but rather in Trump’s favor, the opposite of what happened in TX/FL (and what’s happening in GA and PA).

All these shifts in Trump’s favor in states where mail-ins and absentees have either been giving the wrong overall impression initially because they were counted first (FL/TX) before shifting drastically for Trump once in-person ballots were considered. Because those states were allowed to count these ballots early and were not made to wait until election day to start counting.

The results of mail-ins and absentees in AZ are not what people expected and have ended up shifting now at the last minute for Trump after in-persons have been counted. No one is claiming that this last minute shift is suspicious.

Democrats will still most likely lose the Senate, where they only gained 1 seat, and their only hope of possibly winning the Senate is if they A. pick up more seats organically and B. if Biden wins then Vice President-elect Harris could cast a vote for the Democrats.

Democrats have not quite swept the House either. They will probably hold onto the House but they have lost 5 (count it FIVE) seats to Republicans and the one lone Independent seat was also lost to the Republicans so at this point the conservatives have gained a total of 6 (SIX) seats. Their representatives are also leading in a lot of places so they will gain bare minimum probably 10 more seats and there are only 34 left (according to AP as of this moment).

All of the Republican Congressional candidates are performing well, whereas Trump (the incumbent Republican President) is losing, and at the very best still performing poorly. Including losing the popular vote by 4 million votes. This is stunning because normally in this situation the congressional candidates would not necessarily outperform the incumbent president of their party.

Basically, if the Democrats really wanted to rig this whole election then they have done a very shit job of it. I would like to speak to a manager.

That’s it. I’m done. If you read all of this, you’re the OG. I hope some of what I said resonates.

[odinsblog]

Know what? In retrospect, I’m actually glad that the DNC allowed Mike Bloomberg into the primaries. I know that he served his singular purpose of shaving off enough delegate votes to block Bernie, but honestly if I hadn’t seen Democrats chanting “Vote blue no matter who” even with a longtime Republican like Mike Bloomberg .... if I hadn’t witnessed that with my own eyes then I never would have known just how thoroughly morally bankrupt the DNC is.

Supporting a Democratic neocon like Biden was and is bad enough, but when DNC surrogates started showing up on tv with the same talking points to sell the public on Bloomberg, that’s when the Democratic establishment proved to me beyond any doubt that they absolutely do not care about their progressive voter base. Not the black ones, not the poor ones, not the women, and not the intersection of those groups. They don’t care about conservative fiscal policy being used against their base. What they care about is getting their preferred Republican candidate elected. They were even willing to (with a straight face) play a round of, “OUR racist Republican candidate is better than THEIR racist Republican candidate.”

These “new” Democrats are socially liberal, but fiscally conservative. Which means they’re conservative.

We all know that the Republican Party is thoroughly and completely irredeemable, but hopefully now everyone clearly understands that the leadership of the Democratic Party has been infiltrated by Republicans decades and decades ago.

The two party system is a joke. The Republican party is the far rightwing fascist party, and the Democratic party is really the center-right, “moderate” Republican Party. Whatever Republican fiscal policies the Democrats reject today, tomorrow they will adopt, rebrand and sell to the Democratic base as “fresh” new bipartisan policies. If Republicans couldn’t sell hard conservativism on the first pass, centrist Democrats will try to sell soft conservatism on the second pass. But it’s all conservatism.

Anyway, the DNC and the DCCC really opened my eyes over the last two election cycles. So thanks for that, I guess.

[arcticdementor]

The hilarious headline in the Daily Beast yesterday read like a cross of Clickhole and Izvestia circa 1937: “Is Glenn Greenwald the New Master of Right-Wing Media? FROM HIS MOUTH TO FOX’S EARS?”

The story, fed to poor Beast media writer Lloyd Grove by certain unnamed embittered personages at the Intercept, is that their former star writer Greenwald appears on, and helps provide content for — gasp! — right-wing media! It’s nearly the exclusive point of the article. Greenwald goes on TV with… those people! The Beast’s furious journalisming includes a “spot check” of the number of Fox items inspired by Greenwald articles (“dozens”!) and multiple passages comparing Greenwald to Donald Trump, the ultimate insult in #Resistance world. This one made me laugh out loud:

In a self-perpetuating feedback loop that runs from Twitter to Fox News and back again, Greenwald has managed, like Trump before him, to orchestrate his very own news cycles.

This, folks, is from the Daily Beast, a publication that has spent much of the last five years huffing horseshit into headlines, from Bountygate to Bernie’s Mittens to classics like SNL: Alec Baldwin's Trump Admits 'I Don't Care About America'. The best example was its “investigation” revealing that three of Tulsi Gabbard’s 75,000 individual donors — the late Princeton professor Stephen Cohen, peace activist Sharon Tennison, and a person called “Goofy Grapes” who may or may not have worked for Russia Today host Lee Camp — were, in their estimation, Putin “apologists.”

…

For years now, this has been the go-to conversation-ender for prestige media pundits and Twitter trolls alike, directed at any progressive critic of the political mainstream: you’re a Republican! A MAGA-sympathizer! Or (lately), an “insurrectionist”! The Beast in its Greenwald piece used the most common of the Twitter epithets: “Trump-defender.” Treachery and secret devotion to right-wing politics are also the default explanation for the growing list of progressives making their way onto Fox of late, from Greenwald to Kyle Kulinski to Aaron Mate to Jimmy Dore to Cornel West.

The truth is, Trump conservatives and ACLU-raised liberals like myself, Greenwald, and millions of others do have real common cause, against an epistemic revolution taking hold in America’s political and media elite. The traditional liberal approach to the search for truth, which stresses skepticism and free-flowing debate, is giving way to a reactionary movement that Plato himself would have loved, one that believes knowledge is too dangerous for the rabble and must be tightly regulated by a priesthood of “experts.” It’s anti-democratic, un-American, and naturally unites the residents of even the most extreme opposite ends of our national political spectrum.

…

Follow the logic. Isikoff, who himself denounced the Steele dossier, and said in the exchange he essentially agreed with Meier’s conclusions, went on to wonder aloud how right a thing could be, if it’s being embraced by The Federalist and Tucker Carlson. Never mind the more salient point, which is that Meier was “ignored by other media” because that’s how #Resistance media deals with unpleasant truths: it blacks them out, forcing reporters to spread the news on channels like Fox, which in turn triggers instant accusations of unreliability and collaborationism.

It’s a Catch-22. Isikoff’s implication is a journalist can’t make an impact if the only outlet picking up his or her work is The Federalist, but “reputable” outlets won’t touch news (and sometimes will even call for its suppression) if it questions prevailing notions of Conventional Wisdom.

These tactics have worked traditionally because for people like Meier, or myself, or even Greenwald, who grew up in the blue-leaning media ecosystem, there’s nothing more ominous professionally than being accused of aiding the cause of Trump or the right-wing. It not only implies intellectual unseriousness, but racism, sexism, reactionary meanness, greed, simple wrongness, and a long list of other hideous/evil characteristics that could render a person unemployable in the regular press. The label of “Trump-defender” isn’t easily removed, so most media people will go far out of their way to avoid even accidentally incurring it.

…

The consistent pattern with the Trump-era press, which also happens to be the subject of so many of those Greenwald stories the Beast and the Intercept employees are complaining about, is that information that is true but doesn’t cut the right way politically is now routinely either non-reported or actively misreported.

Whether it’s Hunter Biden’s laptop or the Brian Sicknick affair or infamous fictions like the “find the fraud” story, the public increasingly now isn’t getting the right information from the bulk of the commercial press corps. That doesn’t just hurt Trump and conservatives, it misinforms the whole public. As Thomas Frank just pointed out in The Guardian, the brand of politicized reporting that informed the lab-leak fiasco risks obliterating the public’s faith in a whole range of institutions, a disaster that would not be borne by conservatives alone.

But this is only a minor point, compared to the more immediate reason the constant accusations of treachery and Trumpism aimed at dissenters should be ignored.

From the embrace of oligarchical censorship to the aggressive hawking of “noble lies” like Russiagate to the constant humbugging of Enlightenment values like due process to the nonstop scolding of peasants unschooled in the latest academic jargon, the political style of the modern Democratic mainstream isn’t just elitist and authoritarian, it’s almost laughably off-putting. In one moment it’s cheering for a Domestic War on Terror and in the next, declaring war on a Jeopardy contestant flashing the “A-OK” sign. It’s Dick Cheney meets Robin DiAngelo, maybe the most loathsome conceivable admixture. Who could be surprised a politically diverse group finds it obnoxious?

During the Trump years conventional wisdom didn’t just take aim at Trumpism. The Beltway smart set used the election of Trump to make profound arguments against traditional tenets of democracy, as well as “populism,” (which increasingly became synonymous with “the unsanctioned exercise of political power by the unqualified”), and various liberal traditions undergirding the American experiment. Endless permutations of the same argument were made over and over. Any country in which a Trump could be elected had a “too much democracy” problem, the “marketplace of ideas” must be a flawed model if it leads to people choosing Trump, the “presumption of innocence” was never meant to apply to the likes of Trump, and so on.

…

By last summer, after the patriotic mania of Russiagate receded, the newest moral panic that the kente-cloth-clad Schumers and Pelosis were suddenly selling, in solidarity with famed progressive change agents like Bank of America, PayPal, Apple, ComCast, and Alphabet, was that any nation capable of electing Trump must always have been a historically unredeemable white supremacist construct, the America of the 1619 Project. The original propaganda line was that “half” of Trump supporters were deplorable racists, then it was all of them, and then, four years in, the whole country and all its traditions were deemed deplorable.

Now, when the statues of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt came down, there was a new target, separate and apart from Trump. The whole history of American liberalism was indicted as well, denounced as an ineffectual trick of the oppressor, accomplishing nothing but giving legitimacy to racial despotism.

The American liberalism I knew growing up was inclusive, humble, and democratic. It valued the free exchange of ideas among other things because a central part of the liberal’s identity was skepticism and doubt, most of all about your own correctitude. Truth was not a fixed thing that someone owned, it was at best a fleeting consensus, and in our country everyone, down to the last kook, at least theoretically got a say. We celebrated the fact that in criminal courts, we literally voted to decide the truth of things.

This new elitist politics of the #Resistance era (I won’t ennoble it by calling it liberalism) has an opposite view. Truth, they believe, is properly guarded by “experts” and “authorities” or (as Jon Karl put it) “serious people,” who alone can be trusted to decide such matters as whether or not the Hunter Biden laptop story can be shown to the public. A huge part of the frustration that the general public feels is this sense of being dictated to by an inaccessible priesthood, whether on censorship matters or on the seemingly daily instructions in the ear-smashing new vernacular of the revealed religion, from “Latinx” to “birthing persons.”

In the tone of these discussions is a constant subtext that it’s not necessary to ask the opinions of ordinary people on certain matters. As Plato put it, philosophy is “not for the multitude.” The plebes don’t get a say on speech, their views don’t need to be represented in news coverage, and as for their political choices, they’re still free to vote — provided their favorite politicians are removed from the Internet, their conspiratorial discussions are banned (ours are okay), and they’re preferably all placed under the benevolent mass surveillance of “experts” and “professionals.”

Add the total absence of a sense of humor and the inability of “moral clarity” politics to co-exist with any form of disagreement, and there’s a reason why traditional liberals are suddenly finding it easier to talk with old conservative rivals on Fox than the new authoritarian Snob-Lords at CNN, MSNBC, the Daily Beast or The Intercept. For all their other flaws, Fox types don’t fall to pieces and write group letters about their intolerable suffering and “trauma” if forced to share a room with someone with different political views. They’re also not terrified to speak their minds, which used to be a virtue of the American left (no more).

From the moment Donald Trump was elected, popular media began denouncing a broad cast of characters deemed responsible. Nativists, misogynists and racists were first in line, but from there they started adding new classes of offender: Greens, Bernie Bros, “both-sidesers,” Russia-denialists, Intellectual dark-webbers, class-not-racers, anti-New-Normalers, the “Substackerati,” and countless others, casting every new group out with the moronic admonition that they’re all really servants of the “far right” and “grifters” (all income earned in service of non-#Resistance politics is “grifting”). By now conventional wisdom has denounced everyone but its own little slice of aristocratic purity as the “far right.”

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

The Democrats’ best chance at maintaining control of the House in 2022 is to admit Puerto Rico as a state immediately.

When a new state is added, they automatically get two senators, but only one representative until the next redisticting cycle, briefly bringing the total number up from 435 to 436. Well, the redistricting cycle is upon us as we speak; the 2020 census data has been collected and the state legislatures will draw up new maps this year to be used in the 2022 elections. Republicans have an advantage in drawing maps because they control more state legislatures and the Supreme Court recently announced that gerrymandering is totally legal (most blue states have bipartisan committees which draw fair maps, but red states gerrymander to their hearts content, it’s completely at the states’ discretion as to how they decide to run themselves).

If Puerto Rico becomes a state right now, then they get to have full proportional representation in 2022; the population is 3.2 million, so they could probably get 4 seats in the House. Because it’s unlikely Democrats would expand the House beyond 435 seats, this means those 4 will be coming from other states, completely shifting the dynamic of Congress. But if they don’t get admitted RIGHT NOW, then they’d be stuck with only one representative until the next redistricting, which isn’t until after the 2030 census and the 2032 elections.

It’s now or never. The Democrats can give themselves two solid blue senate seats and 4 purplish blue house seats (Puerto Ricans are ideologically split; on the one hand they’re Hispanics, who typically skew Democratic, but on the other hand they’re super Catholic, who skew Republican. Right now, Cubans are the only consistently conservative Hispanics, but Puert Rico is hardly a liberal stronghold). On top of this, Puerto Rico’s parties aren’t direct analogs to the ones on the mainland.

The Popular Democratic Party is centrist and wants to maintain status quo as a territory rather than a state. They have slim majorities in both houses of the Puerto Rican legislature.

The New Progressive Party skews slightly more to the right (though it has member affiliated with both Democrats and Republicans on the mainland), but explicitly fights for statehood. They control the governorship.

Both parties hold 47% of the vote on the island, so depending on how the legislature decides to draw the map it could either split with 2 red and 2 blue seats, or 4 competitive seats that would probably go blue this time around because Biden and the Democrats are the ones fighting for statehood in the first place.

Democrats openly support Puerto Rican statehood, and Republicans nominally don’t oppose it. What does that mean? The Republican platform says it’s open to Puerto Rican self determination; they believe it’s up to the island to decide whether it wants to be a state or not. Well, in 2020 they voted 52-48 to become a state. In 2017 they voted 97-3 to become a state, but with only 22% turnout so the results were invalid. This time, turnout was 55%, which is above average for most states (national turnout last year was a record high of 66%, so 55% is more than legally binding). This means the Republicans should technically support Puerto Rican statehood, or rather they shouldn’t technically oppose it, but we all know they will for partisan reasons. They’ll make up some procedural excuse to vote against it, but no matter what they say the real reason is that they don’t even want to give the Democrats free seats in Congress. They don’t care about Puerto Ricans, it’s despicable.

Back in 1959, President Eisenhower pushed for statehood for Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico, but only the first two went through. It’s high time to give the Puerto Ricans representation and admission on equal footing. They’re natural born American citizens, they have to follow American laws and pay American taxes, but the constitution doesn’t totally apply to them because they’re unincorporated. With the results of the referendum, it’s clear that they want to be admitted, so it’s up to Congress now to vote and make it official. It’ll just barely eke by in the House, but it could very well be blocked in the Senate. It would almost certainly require 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, and I don’t think there are 10 Republicans willing to do it (I can see 5 or 6, tops). The only way it could be passed with a simply 51 majority vote would be if it was eligible for reconciliation, but that only applies to budgetary matters. Democrats could nuke the filibuster to ram it through, but Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona have both come out against nuking it.

Democrats need to get creative if they really want to hold onto power.

[jackawful]

Look I've voted in every major election and every midterm and every state primary I've been eligible for. On top of that, those votes have been in an agressively conservative area for most of my life - one where we would celebrate when the democratic candidate got over 40% of the vote as opposed to 30-something.

This is where I am coming from when I say that I'm seeing a lot of people in the Vote Blue No Matter Who crowd really, really not understand anti-electoralism on the left.

So, you've got the concept that how much your vote matters depends on where you live. You remember how the electoral college screwed us over in 2016, how we won the popular vote but not the election. What you might not get: this happened before, with George W. Bush, in 2000. By 2004, he had the rally-round-the-flag effect on his side because of 9/11 and the war. Leftists, even moreso than liberals, especially older leftists who were on the left pre-Bernie, tend to see issues as systemic AND remember this shit.

You have to put these puzzle pieces together.

I know you're worried because Russian interference & cambridge analytica bullshit contributed to the map last election. I get it. What you have to get: those campaigns were highly geo-targeted at moderates in certain swing states. The leftists who are skeptical of voting right now? I'd be willing to bet a very large sum of real money on them mostly not being the same people, in the same places, as those who were targeted by last cycle's electioneering.

Voting Harder Than The Right is an individualistic solution to a systemic problem (the electoral college & gerrymandering), and it did not work in 2016. It didn't work in 2000. So a lot of leftists look at this and say "fine, I'll vote but I won't be happy about it" and a lot of them say "fuck it" and a LOT of them would rather spend their time & energy & voice pushing toward action that targets the systemic issues, rather than pushing others to vote in an electoral system that has repeatedly betrayed them. A lot of them are very, very frustrated with you because they don't feel like they're being heard when they bring up the systemic issues they're worried about.

What Vote Blue No Matter Who is coming off as? What it sounds similar to when you're hearing it on the left? It sounds like "just get a better job" or "if you hate America so much you can leave" or any number of other individualistic bootstrap-pulling bullshit the left hears from conservatives all the time. More importantly, it sounds like you're blaming them for the loss in 2016 when that loss was squarely the fault of the system, not individuals.

A lot of this was prompted by a post that boiled down to "if you criticize Biden/Harris you have to include a disclaimer telling people to vote for them anyway" and I'd like to turn that around: if you want to push leftists specifically to vote for Biden/Harris, you have to include a disclaimer about how having the majority of the popular vote doesn't matter & listing competitive electoral college states. Because otherwise? You're just gonna make people mad & further distance them from your opinions.

[bigenderbefriender]

It’s approaching midnight here in Oklahoma on November 2, 2020, and before election day begins in earnest, I wanted to write out a few of my thoughts.  I don’t know how much analysis I’ll actually do; this is mostly a record of how I feel, how the world is, and how I perceive it.  Maybe a year or two down the line, I’ll be able to look back on this and shore up some memories, though hopefully I won’t ever forget what I’ve seen over the past four years.

Let me start with this, then.  No one knows what’s going to happen.  The perennial discourse about the electoral college is in full swing, and as usual, Republicans are blocking it because they benefit massively from the rampant conservatism (racism) of rural states such as my own.  All the news talks about these days is the election cycle and COVID; I can hardly blame them.  It’s almost all I think about, too.  That said, half of Oklahomans went without power this week due to a massive ice storm, including most of my social circle, and it didn’t even make a blip in the national news.  Likewise, Hurricane Zeta tore a path through Louisiana then up the East Coast last week, and it only got a cursory mention, despite being the fifth such hurricane to make landfall in Louisiana this year.  The destruction there is nigh incalculable.

Texas governor Greg Abbott has been in a campaign to suppress voters in urban areas in this election cycle, his most egregious success being to limit the number of polling places per county to one, meaning large cities that fall under one county must all vote at the same place.  This will inevitably lead to a number of citizens being unable or unwilling to vote, predominantly in those large cities where lines will be several hours long, and the risk of COVID will be high.  Texan Republicans have also tried to throw out drive-thru ballots on the order of 120,000 votes, but this was blocked by Andrew Hanon.  The voter suppression is quite likely because for the first time in several elections, Texas is legitimately competitive this year.  I don’t think it will flip to the Democratic Party, but if it does I would be quite happy.

Other states have also been engaging in voter suppression, but there are people working against it.  Stacey Abrams, after her narrow defeat (1.4%) in the 2018 gubernatorial race in Georgia, has continued her commitment to ending voter suppression there, and she claims that she has done so quite successfully.  I suppose that remains to be seen, but I am hopeful.  Little news is coming out of places like North Carolina, though, and that’s scary, since voter suppression there is so prominent and so ugly.  In addition, Trump has been calling on militias, whom I will not name so as to keep them away from this post, to enact stochastic violence against voters whom they believe will vote Democratic.

In truth, that’s only the tip of the iceberg.  Since the summer, Trump has been questioning the legitimacy of mail-in ballots, certainly in an attempt to provide precedent for his contesting of the election results.  If they go in his favor, I’m sure he’ll love whatever the election says, but much like with Hillary Clinton, it looks like he’ll lose the popular election.  Experts are predicting a “blue shift” over the course of the election cycle.  That is, Republicans by and large are ignoring the threats of the coronavirus, which means they’re much more likely to vote in person on November 3.  This means it will appear that Trump has won the election on Novemeber 3, but as mail-in ballots get counted, the electorate will begin to sway towards Biden.  I may make a prediction here, though it is a grim one.  I believe that Trump will try to call the election on November 3 proper, and he will use his newfound influence on the Supreme Court (aka his nominee and now justice Amy Coney Barrett) to halt the count of mail-in ballots that might prove him wrong.  Many people say our democracy is in crisis, but quite honestly, I think this is a natural conclusion to the way that politics have been going since basically the Clinton era.

What I mean by that is to say that Trump’s presidency has done an excellent job of exposing long-lasting structural issues in American society, and Democrats have made #resist into an aesthetic to win their re-elections rather than actually leveraging the power they do have.  I’d say it must be hard, against someone who’s as much of a political opportunist as Sen Maj Ldr Mitch McConnell (R-KY), but the truth is that all of these people are perfectly content to campaign on decorum rather than on fixing any of the actual issues facing the US.

It’s not all bad; Biden has been pushed quite a bit to the left by the growing progressive wing of the Democratic Party, organized in part by the Justice Democrats and represented by Sen Bernie Sanders (Ind. VT), Rep Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D NY), Rep Ilhan Omar (D MN), Rep Rashida Tlaib (D MI), and Rep Ayanna Pressley (D MA).  The latter four are colloquially referred to as “The Squad,” and they fight alongside others for progressive policies out of the House of Representatives.  I would hate to go through an entire post about my feelings on national politics without mentioning the few good things we do have going for us.  In addition, voters have come out in record numbers this year.  As of this morning NPR reported that four states have had more early voting than total voters in 2016.  In a democracy, one of the major challenges is to stimulate citizen participation in government; citizens are certainly participating this year.

Also, this year has been a year that will be remembered for its social movements.  The Black Lives Matter movement came back into full swing, and the role of the police is now a legitimate question in many people’s minds.  Of course, this is a frustrating thing to talk about, too.  The demands of Black Lives Matter as a movement are so simple, yet over and over again, police show that they are more dedicated to violence than to justice.  In addition, white people across the country have shown that they are more dedicated to law and order than to making a country in which everyone can live.  This seems odd to me, though I know that it is specifically racially motivated.  It’s not like I’m just having this realization now; my grandparents are Party Republicans, and I couldn’t convince them to vote to kick Walmart out of their town, even when they know exactly how it’s screwed them.  To ask them to empathize with a Black person, even a Black neighbor?  Believe me, I’ve tried.  Still, we did see (are seeing) a lot of good from the protests.  Colorado basically ended qualified immunity, which means that police should be a lot more accountable for their actions in the future.  We also saw several experiments in what a society could look like without policing.  The Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle was the most famous of these, though it fell apart in part due to its popularity.  Others that did not have the spotlight on them did not fall apart so spectacularly (though I have to speculate that all of CHAZ’s sisters have been disbanded by now).

That said, there’s a lot to fear in the coming days.  The only thing we know about this election is that we won’t know the result for days or even weeks after polling closes.  Because of that, many fear that protests will break out across the country on election day.  The protests themselves aren’t the bad thing, I think.  What’s bad is that the protests will be the targets of white supremacist violence (if the protesters are pro-Biden) or the perpetrators thereof, especially now that Trump has condoned militia violence against citizens.  Over the summer, Trump also used a secret police force (under the Department of Homeland Security, specifically Customs and Border Patrol) against protesters in Portland, Oregon to quell unrest.  Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work, since the protests were against police brutality.  However, the system is now there for him to use, and CBP is only growing bigger by the day.  If protests do break out in the weeks following the election, I have no doubt that CBP will be there throwing people into unmarked vans and jailing them without due process.

I have so much more to say.  I haven’t even gotten into the border wall, or family separation, or the assassination of Iranian dignitaries, or attacks on abortion rights, or Mitch McConnell’s stalling of the Senate, or the individual stages of failure of the COVID-19 response and how I learned about them, or the use of said COVID-19 to grant ICE carte blanche to deport people without trial, or any of the myriad other political issues of which I’ve become aware over the past four years.  I also haven’t even begun to write out my thoughts on my local politics or Oklahoma politics specifically (quite honestly, I think local politics will forever stay offline, seeing as though I’d really rather not give out too much identifying information here).  But I think this post has gone on long enough.  Perhaps I will write more on those other topics in the future.  I am afraid for tomorrow, and I am afraid for the months and years to come.  I do not wish to live in interesting times, but it seems I am cursed to do so.  At least I can say I was a witness.  It is now 12:40 AM, November 3, 2020.  The election is in 6 hours, and I am scared.

[aileruaa]

What worries me is that I’m already seeing a lot of extreme anti-Biden posts being circulated on this site. And while i understand the frustrations of many bernie supporters about the prospects of a more moderate candidate being chosen for the nomination, I am also seeing a lot of “If Biden gets the nomination im not voting at all/im voting for trump because it doesnt matter”.

This is exactly what happened with Hillary 4 years ago. And many (not all, but many) of the blogs on Tumblr that promote this “my way or the highway” mentality are spambots/troll blogs specifically geared to split the Democratic vote- just as they did last cycle. This is NOT the time to fall for the same tricks as last time. Don’t let the negative rhetoric affect your vote- if you don’t vote blue, we will have Trump for another four years. WE WILL HAVE TRUMP FOR ANOTHER FOUR YEARS. We will have another four years of Trump appointing crooked judges onto the Supreme Court, promoting racism and xenophobia, limiting immigration policies, attempting to pass unjust laws and undo just laws, and dividing the country. If you are a democrat and would rather have Trump for another four years, you’re in the wrong party.

I’m personally voting for Biden in the primaries (was a hardcore #Yanggang before he dropped). And yes, I still laugh at memes making fun of Biden. Politics is not black and white; you’re allowed to be aware of your candidate’s shortcomings and still stick by who you are voting for. And if Bernie gets the nomination in the end then I will most definitely be voting for Bernie. We should not have this divisive attitude so early on in the game, because it WILL affect the elections come November. I know many people don’t like the phrase “vote blue no matter who”, but if you choose not to vote because your ideal candidate did not get the nomination, you’ve voted red. And you’re ultimately responsible for what comes after.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

The 2020 election will be the COVID-19 election. Voters will almost certainly be asked to condemn or endorse President Trump’s handling of the pandemic — and quite possibly while the virus is in the midst of a fall relapse.

Any year would have been a bad year for a pandemic. But a presidential election year makes it even worse. As elected officials at all levels of government scramble for resources and weigh complex decisions on how to respond, the electoral implications introduce a thorny calculus: How will it all play in November?

Here is the crudest of calculations: If Democrats can successfully associate the substantial harm wreaked by COVID-19 with Trump, they win in November. But if Trump and the Republicans can deflect enough blame elsewhere and Trump gets credit for making things less bad than they could have been, Trump will win.

Democrats have done the obvious so far: Pin all the blame on Trump by highlighting how he initially downplayed the virus and blasting his subsequent stumbles. They’ve also tried to position themselves as the party of good governance. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, for instance, announced the formation of a new select committee that will oversee how the Trump administration manages the $2 trillion economic stimulus package, with a focus on waste, fraud and abuse.

It’s also possible that some traditional Democratic constituencies will be simply hit harder by the virus, too, which could make the fallout of the virus more personal and a stronger point to campaign on. For instance, in blue states and cities like New York City, the virus has hit especially hard, including in poorer and less white neighborhoods. And as the harm becomes clearer, we will almost certainly see echoes of Hurricane Katrina, with its disparate racial and class impacts, but on a much larger scale. These inequalities might reverberate with Democrats’ long-standing criticisms that Trump is a racist — and could yield record turnout along with a persuasive fundraising message.

And don’t underestimate the power of negative partisanship. In 2016, many Republicans held their noses and voted for Trump because they wanted to keep Hillary Clinton out of the White House. That same logic could apply in 2020. If Democrats hit Trump hard enough, unified disdain for Trump might matter more than anything former Vice President Joe Biden promises, bringing Democratic voters together after another fractious primary. Though negative partisanship has been building up now for several election cycles, it thrives on frustration and anger, and 2020 will likely offer plenty.

For Trump and Republicans, much of their 2020 strategy seems to be focused on putting the blame elsewhere — Democrats, the “mainstream media,” China and even some of America’s governors.

Let’s start with one of Trump’s favorite punching bags: the media. In what may be a preview of a Republican electoral strategy to come, Sen. Marco Rubio recently tweeted that “Some in our media can’t contain their glee & delight in reporting that the U.S. has more #CoronaVirus cases than #China.” This argument probably sounds familiar, as many conservative pundits have pushed it since the beginning of the outbreak in the U.S. It’s still possible that the ultimate death toll undershoots the current worst-case scenarios. If so, Republicans could eventually point to the high predictions as fearmongering. But many experts still think the situation could grow much worse, so it’s also a very risky strategy at this point. (Ironically, if the death toll is lower than predicted, it may be because the higher projections themselves scared politicians and citizens into following social-distancing guidelines.)

As for pinning the blame on Democrats, Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have argued that impeachment was a major distraction during a critical time in February. (Never mind that he was reportedly first briefed on the spread of a deadly virus in China in November or that, after his acquittal in the Senate on Feb. 5, Trump spent much of February downplaying the threat of a pandemic.)

Trump and his allies have also found a scapegoat in China, arguing the Chinese government engaged in a massive cover-up that allowed the virus to spread, which blindsided the Trump administration. The U.S. intelligence community has found evidence that China underreported its outbreak, so this could resonate with voters, especially considering both Democrats and Republicans agree that the Chinese government bears some responsibility for the spread of the pandemic. And if Republicans do pursue this strategy, it builds on a persistent theme of Trump-era Republican campaigns: Blame the outsider. After all, in 2018 Republican campaign strategists ran an aggressive anti-immigration campaign because they believed it was an issue that would help them win. So expect a possible replay of this in 2020, with China replacing the “migrant caravan.”

Trump has also pointed his finger at Democratic governors for failing to stockpile their own supplies. The political gambit appears to boil down to this: Trump thinks he could benefit electorally if he pushes governors — particularly Democratic governors — to say what a great job he’s doing.

Consider Trump’s tussle with Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, who complained her state wasn’t getting the medical supplies she needed from the federal government. Trump responded, “I don’t know if she knows what’s going on, but all she does is sit there and blame the federal government … We don’t like to see complaints.” Michigan, after all, is likely to be a key swing state in 2020. This could certainly backfire, but this is the kind of high-stakes political gamesmanship that a pandemic in a presidential election year engenders.

Then finally, we come to the most dangerous hot potato of all: the administration of the election itself. In order to ensure a safe and fair election, jurisdictions across the country will have to rapidly transition to voting by mail and/or expand early voting.

But Trump and Republicans have already indicated they will be loath to support such measures, as they argue it would hurt Republicans at the ballot box. Democrats, meanwhile, have said that expanding vote-by-mail efforts is the only way to mitigate risks from in-person voting. Political scientists haven’t found any clear partisan advantage to voting by mail (if anything, it seems to encourage participation among more habitual voters). But Wisconsin’s beleaguered primary — which saw partisan fighting over whether to delay the election — could be a harbinger of the difficulties to come.

And if that is the case, November will be a mess in states that don’t get their act together soon — especially in battleground states with divided governments, like Wisconsin.1 (Other likely swing states have divided governments, including Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Minnesota and New Hampshire.) It’s unclear where this fight is headed, but it is likely to be a high-stakes battle that echoes long-standing partisan grievances over how best to ensure access to voting. And given the logistical difficulties of implementing electoral changes, delays could actually be an effective tactic.

If it’s relatively clear how ugly the tone of the 2020 COVID-19 blame campaign will be, it’s much harder to say how all this will impact the actual outcome of the 2020 election. Trump’s approval rating has remained remarkably flat over the last three years despite the ups and downs of his presidency, largely because of how polarized American politics has become. In other words, very few events move the needle on public opinion anymore. Even the coronavirus crisis has given Trump only a relatively small boost, compared to those of other world leaders and most governors.

Ultimately, the blame games might offset. In our highly polarized era, most voters made up their mind long ago — hence Trump’s consistent approval numbers. But in an escalating arms race of blame, one-sided disarmament would be folly. So brace yourself.

In another world, or at another time in our history, a common threat like a pandemic might have brought Americans together. However, in this hyper-partisan presidential election year with so much blame to go around and so much pre-existing animosity to draw on, that might not be the case.

Instead, the months to come will test not only our health care system and our economy, but also our democracy and our ability to cooperate across party lines to win a novel kind of war against a novel kind of virus. If the road feels bumpy now, the path ahead looks like nothing but an obstacle course. Buckle up.

[jadejedi]

The Young Queen

Padmé Amidala, as seen through the eyes of media across the galaxy, from her election as Queen until after her death. 

This fic came out of my deep, enduring love of Padmé Amidala, Naboo, and also third party POV fics. I used a conglomeration of Legends and new canon, as well as a lot of my own world building. Most of the Nubian politicians are some version of canon, except for Padmé’s successor as Princess of Theed, who I made up. Unbeta’d. 

Find it here on AO3

--

THEED TIMES

Princess Amidala of Theed Wins Election Against Veruna

By Suballé Tanvoll

The current Princess of Theed, Amidala, was elected the third youngest ever monarch of Naboo last night. While a fourteen year old political prodigy, who has only served as an elected official for a little over a year, beating an older, more experienced fourth term incumbent, might be surprising to off-worlders, it comes as no surprise to the Naboo. Amidala’s ani-corruption, pro-arts, and pro-social programs platform has become extremely popular in the wake of King Veruna’s recently discovered corruption in the dealings with the Trade Federation. 

Amidala was elected as Princess of Theed last year, having served previously in both the Refugee Relief Movement and the Legislative Youth Program. After one year in office as Princess, Amidala had an approval rating of 89%, and is seen as a thoughtful, compassionate leader. For the Age Exception Political Aptitude Test (AEPAT), Amidala scored amongst the 90th percentile. Her intelligence was made obvious to the public in her time as Princess of Theed, where she spearheaded improvements to the capital’s infrastructure, and helped Theed as it continues to transition to a more industrial based economy by passing laws that strengthened unions, imposed stricter regulations on landlords, and ensured the health and safety of industrial workers in and out of the workplace.  Amidala won the election against King Veruna with 67% of the votes, a very comfortable majority. The Queen- Elect had the support of Governor Bibble as well as Senator Palpatine. 

While she gained popularity as Princess of Theed through her social programs and focus on infrastructure, her campaign largely rested on her harsh criticism of King Veruna and the corruption of his administration. King Veruna, now in the fourth term of his rule, is the longest serving Nubian monarch in over a hundred years. While he is popular with some for his expanding Naboo’s galactic influence by exporting plasma through the Trade Federation, and his founding of the state-of-the-art Naboo starfighter corps, he has lost much of that popularity in recent months. Recent revelations about his involvement with Damask Holdings involving side deals with the Trade Federation have caused outrage both amongst several of his elected advisors and the public at large. 

Amidala will step down as Princess of Theed at the end of the galactic month, and then two weeks later will be crowned as Her Royal Highness, Queen Amidala of the Naboo, in the Palace of Theed. In her victory speech last night, Amidala emphasized her desire to fight corruption and move Naboo forward into prosperity. 

“For too long our politicians have forgotten that we serve the Naboo. It is the duty of politicians to always seek the best interests of their people. Today, you have spoken. You have told this corrupt government that the Naboo will no longer tolerate a leader who thinks of himself before he thinks of his constituents, and who involved Naboo in risky deals at the cost of our precious ecosystem. I promise you that I will defend Naboo’s honor in rooting out all corruption, and that this will once again be a government for the people.”

--

“Welcome back to the Planetary Broadcasting Network, Alderaan’s most trusted news source. I’m Cair Pash, and I’m here with my co-host, Yvonne Utelu.” Both hosts smile serenely at the camera.

“Before we get to our main story of the afternoon, Yvonne has some interesting news from the Mid Rim this afternoon.” The good looking, olive toned news anchor turned to the brunette sitting next to him. “Isn’t that right, Yvonne?”

The woman smiled blindly at the camera. “Absolutely, Cair. Today, the planet Naboo, a small Mid Rim world with relatively small galactic significance just shocked the galaxy by choosing a fourteen year old girl in favor of the incumbent, King Veruna. The Queen Elect is a young woman by the name of Amidala, currently the Princess of Theed, their capital city. Despite Naboo having a long history of youth involvement in politics, Amidala’s election is unusual even for them, by being their third youngest ever monarch!”

Cair shakes his head. “Truly amazing that the entire planet would trust a mere teenager to rule them! I understand that this might happen in a hereditary system, such as ours here on Alderaan, but to willingly hand over a planet to someone so young? What seems to be behind this?”

“Well, there has been much dissatisfaction with the current King lately, as he has become mired in several corruption scandals involving Damask Holdings, loosely associated with the Banking Clan, the Trade Federation, and Naboo’s rare natural plasma deposits. Not to mention, Naboo is a very small, peaceful planet, with a heavy focus on art and education. The Naboo place a lot of emphasis on intelligence and purity of heart, rather than age or experience. 

“While it is an entire planet, there is still relatively little at stake for the newly elected Queen Amidala, as Naboo has little galactic significance.”

“Hm,” Cair hummed thoughtfully. “Still, a very interesting story. Thanks, Yvonne for that look out into the Mid-Rim.” He turned and faced the center camera. “Now, let’s turn to our main story for the day, also involving a corruption scandal, and this time with Chancellor Valorum…”

--

“Hello, and welcome to everyone joining us for the coronation of Queen Amidala,” greeted a dark skinned human woman in her forties. Rather than being in a newsroom, as per usual, she was standing in the courtyard of Theed Palace. “I am Nira Strellan, your host, and I am here with NPBC’s Palace correspondent Iarás Thal, as well as the Coruscant Daily’s Mid Rim correspondent, Jak Rils.” 

The younger woman and the thirty-something Zabrak man both smiled at the camera. Both women wore elegant, yet reserved Nubian gowns and hairstyles, while Jak wore more typical Coruscanti business wear. 

“We are here to bring you coverage of the day’s festivities live from Theed, eventually culminating in the coronation of our new Queen,” continued Nira Strellan. “The mood here in Theed is one of both hope and relief, as Amidala’s election a month and a half ago was seen by many as a sharp turn away from the corruption that mired the previous administration.” 

Iarás nodded in agreement. “Absolutely. I think that those can both be used to describe the mood of the whole planet right now. In Theed, I would say there is also a sense of excitement surrounding this coronation. Amidala was Theed’s Princess for over a year before her election, after all.”

Nira nodded and turned to her co-host. “Irás, why don’t you tell Jak and the viewers at home not familiar with our culture what we can expect from today?”

“Well, right now we are about an hour away from the start of the coronation ceremony,” Iarás began with explaining with a smile and a smooth voice. “Amidala is currently in Theed’s temple of Yena with her advisors that were also elected and re elected this election cycle, including Senator Palpatine and Governor Bibble. Yena is one of Naboo’s four deities; she is the goddess of politics and governance. It is this deity that Amdiala, like all monarchs, will associate most heavily with during her reign.”

“Now, what does it mean that she will “associate” with Yena?” interjected Jak.

“Generally, in our culture, people choose one of the four dieties based on their life at the time, and honor that god or goddess in the way they dress, worship, and in the way they conduct themselves,” Iarás explained. She motioned to the green gown that she was wearing, and to the tan and gold gown that Nira wore. “We both associate with Civ, the god of industry, and so we favor greens, golds, and neutral tones, especially for formal occasions such as this.”

Nira nodded in agreement. “Exactly. So Amidala will most likely be wearing either blue or possibly black or white, all colors associated with Yena, as blue represents the pure waters of Naboo, and therefore a purity of heart, and white represents transparency and integrity, and black represents determination and honor. All attributes that Amidala will certainly want to project, considering whose administration she is following.”

Jak nodded in understanding, and Iarás continued with her explanation of the day’s festivities. “So, while Amidala is in Yena’s temple, King Veruna and other members of his administration not re elected await inside the palace for the exchanging of power.” Iarás motioned out of the courtyard to the street that extended in front of them and into Theed. “Until the beginning of Amidala’s procession from the Temple to the Palace, street vendors have lined the streets and people have gathered for food, art, and games.”

“From what I understand, Amidala is extremely popular here in Theed, isn’t that right?” asked Jak to the two Naboo hosts. 

“She certainly is,” Nira agreed with a bit of a grin, clearly proud of the new monarch, despite her professionalism. “She has served as Princess of Theed for over a year, and very effectively at that. But, it isn’t just in Theed. No matter where you go in Naboo, from Varykino to Dee’ja Peak to Moenia, Amidala won every major settlement. We here on Naboo value, above everything else, intelligence and purity of heart in our leaders. The people no longer saw King Veruna as representing those values.”

“Here on Naboo, we see politicians as intermediaries between two parties,” Iarás explained, both to Jak and to the camera. “Our Senator intercedes on behalf of the monarch to the Galactic Senate. The Governor intercedes on behalf of the people to the monarch. The role of the Monarch is to intercede on behalf of the people of Naboo to the Galaxy at large. She is who will represent us and be the face of our planet to the galaxy. That is why royals on Naboo choose regal names, because they no longer belong just to their family, but to all of Naboo, and why they wear ceremonial make-up, to present not their own face, but the face of Naboo and our traditions.”

Jak shook his head. “That is truly fascinating.” He turned back to the camera. “ I’m Jak Rils from Coruscant Daily, here with Nira Strellan and Iarás Thal here covering Queen Amidala’s corunation. There much more to come in this ceremony, after the break.”

--

YOUNG NABOO

Amidala Coronated- The Young Will Lead Us

 By Jorvol Brinn

Yesterday at the Theed Palace in a ceremony full of pomp and circumstance, Amidala, former Princess of Theed, was coronated as the third youngest ever Queen of Naboo. The citizens of Theed lined the streets from Yena’s Temple to the Palace, eagerly awaiting their new monarch. 

Beyond just the planning for the ceremonial coronation and exchange of power, there is a lot that goes into the arrival of a new administration. From the handmaidens, chosen from both the Royal Guard academy as well as scouted for specific talents, these individuals are chosen the moment the new monarch is elected and trained intensively the six weeks leading up to the coronation. There is also an entire royal wardrobe to create individually for the incoming monarch, which has to incorporate artistic beauty, Nubian tradition, and practicality, as every outfit that the monarch wears is not only for looks, but for safety. The most important part of this six week transition period, however, is of course the change over of power, as yesterday’s ceremony was largely symbolic. Amidala has been in constant meetings with both the newly elected Princess of Theed, Modlora, as well as now-former King Veruna and the advisory council, both new and old. 

Many outside of Naboo question how someone as young as Amidala, who is only fourteen, could possibly be trusted with so much responsibility. We here on Naboo know that age is not what matters, but it is what is one’s heart and in one’s mind that truly counts. In the process of running for Princess of Theed almost a year and a half ago, Amidala gave up her birth name in favor of a new regal name. She has claimed all of us as her family and as her priority. In her speech announcing her candidacy for Queen last year, she said, 

“When I first entered public service, I believed that everyone who served did so for the same reasons that I did: to make Naboo a better place for not just its citizens, but for the planet as a whole. Since then, I have learned that I was wrong. But that does not make me naive. It means that we have not held our leaders to high enough standards. Our leaders cannot put personal gain above the good of the people. When I ran for Princess of Theed, I chose this name, Amidala, to show that I choose all of Naboo as my family and as my duty, and King Veruna did the same when he ran for King. He has forgotten this. I will not. Together, we will make a government for the people.”

 She has shown again and again that she is a leader of wisdom and integrity. Her youth is not a hindrance to her leadership, but an advantage. She is not bogged down by the same cynicism that poisons so many politicians. She has proven that she doesn’t see what can’t be done, rather she sees what hasn’t been done yet. 

As young people here on Naboo, we are fortunate to live in a society that encourages us to reach as high as we can from an early age. Queen Amidala is an example of the best of our society, and proof that our age is not something that can stop us from making our world a better place.

[thepoliticalpatient]

The Fifth Circuit ruling on the ACA

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals released its ruling on Texas v. US today. Here’s some background on that case if you’re not familiar.

Here’s what their ruling said:

The plaintiffs do have standing. There was question about whether the lawsuit was valid in the first place, because the plaintiffs had to show that people were “injured” as a result of the toothless individual mandate. Some argued that no one could possibly be injured by a $0 fine, and certainly not more injured now than they were before the repeal when the fine was >$0.

But the Fifth Circuit says that citizens can reasonably interpret the unenforcable mandate as a law that they must follow - after all, someone who is a big rule-follower might believe that they must follow every law just because it is a law, even if there is no punishment for not following a particular law, and might therefore purchase insurance they do not want, and be financially injured as a result.

The individual mandate can no longer be interpreted as a tax. This was not surprising - in NFIB v. Sebelius, the individual mandate was found to be constitutional only because its penalty was considered to be a tax. Now that the penalty is $0, it cannot be considered a tax, so it isn’t constitutional anymore.

Some portions of the ACA are probably severable from the individual mandate, but they’re returning the case to the lower court to decide the details. If the individual mandate must go, do other portions of the ACA have to go with it? Are there other aspects of the ACA that are so closely intertwined with the individual mandate that they can no longer continue to exist without it? This is the question of “severability.”

Some argue that the individual mandate alone can be struck down and the rest can stay in place. Others, such as Judge Reed O’Connor, the judge who ruled on the ACA in the district court, believe that the entire ACA is inseverable from the individual mandate and so the entire law will have to go down.

The Fifth Circuit is arguing for a position somewhere in the middle - they said that Judge O’Connor’s decision that the entire ACA is inseverable from the individual mandate was too aggressive, and that most likely, some peripheral portions of the law - they offered up as an example, the portion of the ACA that required restaurants to make calorie counts publicly available - are not closely linked to the individual mandate and can continue to stand.

They also called out the fact that some portions of the law went into effect before the individual mandate did - for example, the ability for adult children under the age of 26 to stay on their parents’ insurance - and challenged O’Connor to defend his position that these were inseverable from the individual mandate, given this proof that they can and have existed without it.

However, they refused to themselves make a determination about what is and isn’t severable from the individual mandate - rather, they’re handing the case back to O’Connor to decide that. This isn’t great, as he’s very far-right and wanted to strike down the entire ACA when the case was in his hands before.

They questioned whether the decision can be applied beyond the states who are suing. The plaintiffs in this case - the people who are arguing that they are being injured by the individual mandate - are representing several red states. The Fifth Circuit called into question today whether the ultimate decision of the case - such as an injunction requiring the government to stop enforcing some or all portions of the ACA - could legally be applied federally, or would have to be restricted to just the states claiming injury. They are also asking Judge O’Connor to reconsider this question.

This might sound like good news for people who live in blue states, but it’s not great for a few reasons. The first reason is that it might give O’Connor reason to say that the defendants no longer have standing. Remember, the defendants in this case are representatives of several blue states, so he could argue that an injunction in only the red plaintiff states will not injure those blue states, which would prevent them from being able to continue defending the ACA in court. The second is that striking down the ACA in part of the country would create massive shockwaves through the healthcare system, which would cause chaos in the markets that would absolutely affect everyone including people in states not affected by the injunction.

In short, this decision was not really a decision. The court refused to make their own decisions about much of anything, instead throwing it back to Judge O’Connor to reconsider, but the general gist of their decision was not friendly to the ACA, and putting the case back in O’Connor’s hands isn’t good news either, because he’s no friend of the ACA at all.

What happens next?

Nothing changes, for now, in the way the ACA is enforced. Judge O’Connor will reconsider the case and come back with anther ruling, which will most likely look very similar to his first ruling - he’ll try to invalidate as much of the ACA as he possibly can. From there, the defendants - if they still have standing to do so - will escalate by appealing to the Supreme Court. It’s very unlikely this case will be resolved before the 2020 elections.

A couple notes

Some readers might be asking themselves, why should I care about the ACA? I want Medicare for All.

I want Medicare for All too, but we don’t have it yet, and the political reality is that we almost certainly won’t get it in 2020 either even if Democrats win big. In the meantime, the ACA is the only thing preventing 130 million people with pre-existing conditions from being utterly fucked by insurance companies, so it’s very important that we keep defending this law, imperfect as it is, until we have something more comprehensive on the books. Lives literally depend on it.

I also want to note that I do not believe it is a coincidence in the slightest that this decision was released today, the same day that the House votes on impeachment. The Fifth Circuit has been sitting on this case since July. Repealing the ACA and removing its very popular protections for people with pre-existing conditions a politically suicidal move right now, so the conservative judges on this panel wanted to sneak it through during a new cycle dominated by “bigger” news.

This news is a reminder of why elections matter. The Fifth Circuit clearly has some wacky far-right judges on it based on the outcome of this ruling. It was a three-judge panel; the two who ruled against the ACA were appointed by George W. Bush and Trump. SCOTUS will eventually hear this case, and it has two new Trump appointees since the last time it considered a challenge to the ACA. If Ruth Bader Ginsberg dies under a Republican president, we are 100% fucked. There are so many reasons why the 2020 election is of existential importance, and judicial nominations are absolutely one of them.

-----

https://twitter.com/nicholas_bagley/status/1207419700625448960

[odinsblog]

Look, just to be absolutely positively clear here: Vernon Jones is a sellout and a coon. Also, any “Democrat” who explicitly supports Trump or tells people to vote for Trump is not to be trusted. Not. at. all.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, this right here is what you get when you always “vote blue no matter who”. You get Republicans wearing the letter “D” behind their name. And I can almost promise you that Representative Jones supporters, at some point in the election cycle that got him elected, said, “He’s black! And we might not like all his policy positions, but he’s a Democrat, so we gotta vote for the lesser of two evils.”

And now look at the absolute fucking mess they have.

Vernon Jones is hardly the first conservative Democrat to support or openly endorse Trump over the last few years, but he is probably the best example of how centrist Dems successfully weaponize race (and in Hillary’s case, gender, and in Pete Buttigieg’s case, sexual orientation) in politics, where one aspect of a person’s identity is their only purity test.

Being gay didn’t make Mayo Pete any less conservative. Being a woman didn’t make Hillary any less conservative. Being black didn’t make Vernon any less of a sellout. But when the DNC uses weaponized identity politics, they will say things like, “disliking Hillary means you are a sexist,” or “disliking Pete means you’re homophobic”. As if our dislike of them had nothing to do with their conservative ideology, or their terrible political track records.

YES, attributes like race, gender and sexual orientation absolutely positively ARE important. They are. But they should never ever be more important than a person’s history of what they’ve said, done and supported.

I’m black. And I am here to tell anyone who will listen that even though he is also a black man, Representative Vernon Jones does not have black people’s or anyone else’s best interest at heart. Not even close.

“Vote blue no matter who” is a terrible mentality. It’s lazy thinking, made for sheeple who don’t wanna kick the tires or look under the hood before spending all their hard earned money on buying a new car.

It’s like a not-so-secret password that the Republican foxes have learned, and use to gain entry into the Democratic henhouse. Effectively, all a Republican has to do is call themselves a Democrat, and then they get the full backing of the DNC and centrist Democratic voters.

If you have any questions how harmful adhering to the #VBNMW okie doke is, please remember, it wasn’t even 30 days ago that people were seriously considering voting for people like Mike Bloomberg, and many many many prominent black, women, and gay Democrats immediately endorsed Mr. Stop-and-Frisk.

I’m telling you, #VBNMW is an establishment scam. And if nothing else, this election cycle should have proved just how successfully conservative “Democrats” (ie, Republicans) have used it.

Link: https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/492724-georgia-democratic-legislator-bucks-party-with-trump-endorsement