1. So the Supreme Court just threw out the Texas lawsuit that wanted to overturn the results of the presidential election and simply appoint Trump to a second term in office because reasons. The Electoral College will vote Monday and barring an unprecedented whole-number multiple of the all-time record for faithless electors the presidential election will be over and – for what may well be the 60th time since November 3rd – Joe Biden will have won. Folks, it wasn’t even close. Biden won the popular vote by over 7,000,000 votes and the electoral college by 74 votes. Trump and his ilk have been decisively rejected and no amount of seditious nonsense will change that.
2. By actively supporting Trump’s campaign to overturn a free and fair election rather than slapping it down as the overt threat to American democracy that it was, the Republican Party has yet again proven itself to be a subversive organization, one that fundamentally does not accept the entire concept of democracy and needs to be disbanded and whose leaders need to be prosecuted for crimes against the United States.
3. If you think I’m exaggerating, bear in mind that Allen West, the Chair of the Texas Republican Party, has openly declared that his state should now secede from the Union because they didn’t get to impose his party’s candidate on an unwilling nation by disenfranchising millions of Americans in states that – I keep coming back to this – were not Texas. Disunion was treason in 1832, when Andrew Jackson faced down John C. Calhoun and South Carolina over the Nullification Crisis. It was treason in 1861 when the South decided to declare war on the United States so they could continue their practice of human slavery and were razed to the ground by Grant, Sherman, and the Union Army. It’s treason now. Mr. West should be aware that the United States has laws prescribing the fate of traitors.
4. In other news, it’s snowing here in Baja Canada, which is appropriate for mid-December after all.
5. So far my campaign to get into the Christmas spirit seems to be failing, which I attribute to a) the general state of the world and the United States in particular (vide supra), b) the fact that it is the end of the semester and I barely have time to start everything I need to finish let alone devote energy to a new project, and c) the fact that I have no idea what if anything will happen on Christmas that will separate it out from any other day of this past year. I’m still out there plugging, though. Maybe it will happen.
6. Kim, Lauren, and I went out last week and picked a Christmas tree from the lot where we got ours last year. It’s a nice tree and it smells good in the living room, though it has yet to relax its branches and at this point I’m kind of resigned to it retaining its arrowhead shape throughout the holiday season. I finally put the lights on it last night and tomorrow we’ll decorate it, and then there will be pictures.
7. Today was the last day of classes at two of the three campuses where I teach (because of the way it structures its classes, the third never really has a last day). I still have about 48 solid work-hours of grading to do, and if I can get my final to work out for my long-distance class I’ll be shocked, but I am really looking forward to a break. I have been running pretty much flat out since mid-March without pause, and while I count myself lucky to be employed in this economy I am very much looking forward to not having much to do at all for a bit.
8. I’ll miss my students – I always do, at least most of them – but given the way this semester’s classes were structured I will actually see most of them next semester in one capacity or another.
9. They’ve started giving out vaccines for the coronavirus now, which means that with any luck we may be back to some semblance of normality in a few months or so. Maybe longer, if the anti-vaccine idiots and the anti-mask lunkheads continue to screw up the world for everyone else because of their ignorant selfishness and boundless stupidity, but even so. The fact that we have not one but several viable vaccines less than a year into this pandemic is nothing less than astonishing.
10. I try to go for walks when I have time, which – as noted – is not very often these days, but so it goes. I need the exercise. Mostly I just walk the mile and a half up to Local Businessman High School and then turn around and walk back, which is a nice route as it involves almost no thought on my part. Once in a while I will pull out my phone and randomly call up some old friend whose number I still know and who might actually pick up – not many people use phones to make phone calls these days, but it’s nice to talk to people live that way. So if I have your phone number, you may well get a call sometime.
Friday, December 11, 2020
Friday, December 4, 2020
Happy Freaking Holidays, Y'all
I got the Christmas lights up last weekend, as noted earlier. Most of them anyway. Every year I put a single strand of blue lights across the front of the house, because I like blue lights – they’re peaceful, and we all know we need more of that these days. Kim reminded me tonight that we also have blue net lights for the front bushes, and I suppose I should find them and put them up as well.
Because this year we’re going to need more holiday spirit than usual, I think.
It’s been a challenging year, which is a polite way of saying what perhaps ought to be said a lot less politely, but professionalism and all that. We started off with an entire continent on fire, followed it up with the US Senate actively covering up for the most corrupt president in American history, and then the plague hit. There were lockdowns and quarantines, street protests and Fascist goons in federal uniforms disappearing people from the streets of America. The west coast burned down, the skies turned orange, morons aggressively refused to take the plague seriously and threatened the intelligent people who did, and nobody with more than six working brain cells is going anywhere for the holidays this year because large gatherings are just preludes to large burials. There were murder hornets.
MURDER HORNETS, for crying out loud.
On top of all that, we’re still dealing with a slow-motion right-wing coup attempt that will likely fail only because the people behind it are too damned stupid to subvert a free election effectively, which is a worrisome thing for the future of the American republic when you think about it, and there’s still four weeks left in the year. For all I know there could be an invasion of extraterrestrials on the solstice, though if they ask me to take them to my leader I will advise them to wait a few more weeks until we actually have one.
In this kind of environment, you could go one of two ways.
The easy way would be to ignore the holiday completely. It’s been a long year. Nobody’s in the mood. It would be simpler to curl up with a good book, a movie, a sitcom, a bag of chips, a bottle of wine, a mug of tea, a tin of cookies, or whatever else you need to get you through the night, and just hunker down and wait it out.
Or you could spit in the eye of it all and try to find some joy in the season.
It’s been a long year. I’m thinking I’m going to go with option two.
This is not going to be easy for me. For one thing, I’m from Philadelphia where pessimism is considered a civic virtue. For another, I don’t remember the last time I managed to get into the holiday spirit before December 20th, so gearing up early is going to be a trick.
But sometimes, as Garrison Keillor once said, you have to stand up to reality and deny it.
So this year I’m going to put up the lights and decorate the tree and sing the carols and songs even if all my favorites are the sad and broken ones, and I’m going to bake the things and cook the other things and celebrate with the four of us in my immediate family, and if the only way we can connect with friends and extended family this year is though n-dimensional Zoom screens that look like The Brady Bunch on steroids then so be it.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
Tomorrow we’re going to get the tree and perhaps later this weekend we’ll decorate it.
And won’t that be a time.
Because this year we’re going to need more holiday spirit than usual, I think.
It’s been a challenging year, which is a polite way of saying what perhaps ought to be said a lot less politely, but professionalism and all that. We started off with an entire continent on fire, followed it up with the US Senate actively covering up for the most corrupt president in American history, and then the plague hit. There were lockdowns and quarantines, street protests and Fascist goons in federal uniforms disappearing people from the streets of America. The west coast burned down, the skies turned orange, morons aggressively refused to take the plague seriously and threatened the intelligent people who did, and nobody with more than six working brain cells is going anywhere for the holidays this year because large gatherings are just preludes to large burials. There were murder hornets.
MURDER HORNETS, for crying out loud.
On top of all that, we’re still dealing with a slow-motion right-wing coup attempt that will likely fail only because the people behind it are too damned stupid to subvert a free election effectively, which is a worrisome thing for the future of the American republic when you think about it, and there’s still four weeks left in the year. For all I know there could be an invasion of extraterrestrials on the solstice, though if they ask me to take them to my leader I will advise them to wait a few more weeks until we actually have one.
In this kind of environment, you could go one of two ways.
The easy way would be to ignore the holiday completely. It’s been a long year. Nobody’s in the mood. It would be simpler to curl up with a good book, a movie, a sitcom, a bag of chips, a bottle of wine, a mug of tea, a tin of cookies, or whatever else you need to get you through the night, and just hunker down and wait it out.
Or you could spit in the eye of it all and try to find some joy in the season.
It’s been a long year. I’m thinking I’m going to go with option two.
This is not going to be easy for me. For one thing, I’m from Philadelphia where pessimism is considered a civic virtue. For another, I don’t remember the last time I managed to get into the holiday spirit before December 20th, so gearing up early is going to be a trick.
But sometimes, as Garrison Keillor once said, you have to stand up to reality and deny it.
So this year I’m going to put up the lights and decorate the tree and sing the carols and songs even if all my favorites are the sad and broken ones, and I’m going to bake the things and cook the other things and celebrate with the four of us in my immediate family, and if the only way we can connect with friends and extended family this year is though n-dimensional Zoom screens that look like The Brady Bunch on steroids then so be it.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
Tomorrow we’re going to get the tree and perhaps later this weekend we’ll decorate it.
And won’t that be a time.
Tuesday, December 1, 2020
Ricotta Pie
Yesterday was Kim’s birthday so we celebrated in a quiet sort of way. With Oliver back at Small Liberal Arts College it was just the three of us gathered around – me, Kim, and Lauren – and since none of us are very good at actually procuring gifts at the specific time required (vide supra, re: movable feast tradition) it was mostly just an evening of good food and good company.
At a certain point that’s really all you ask.
Other than a card and the promise of a birthday present (currently in transit), my main contribution to this was to make the cake, and this year it was a ricotta pie. About twenty years ago my mom collected a bunch of recipes from the various scattered branches of my family and my grandmother’s ricotta pie was one of them. My mom had to translate it out of my grandfather’s directions and there’s a certain amount of wiggle room that comes with that process, but so it goes. As my mom said in the collection, “you’re making a pie, not building a bomb. It won’t blow up if you’re a tad over or under.”
If you’ve never had one of these things, you should. They’re a traditional Italian Easter dessert – apparently my grandmother would make one every year when my mom was younger – and they’re rich in the way that something with two pounds of ricotta cheese and a dozen eggs would be. They’re really, really good.
We have a lot of eggs. Lauren’s chickens have been laying like mad for months now, and while we do the best we can to keep up the fact is that they pile up now and then. This was a good way to use up a bunch of them in a tasty manner. Lauren’s chickens produce wonderful eggs, by the way. I’ve made this pie several times and it has never been that golden yellow before.
The thing about this pie is that it has a genuinely old-fashioned taste to it. There is no way you would ever confuse this for a recipe created anytime in the last fifty years. It tastes like the sort of thing that a society a lot closer to the edge of things than the modern US is at present would make to celebrate the fact that life is good anyway. Eggs. Ricotta. An orange. Two shots of whiskey. Sugar. All things that were often scarce back in the day and treasured for that reason. It is a time capsule in a baking dish.
We didn’t have it much when I was a kid – by then the health mavens had ginned up a ruckus that made people believe that anything that rich was something akin to cyanide and gunpowder stew and scared everyone away from such things – but I do remember it appearing now and again.
There is nothing like good food to remind you of good times and create new ones on a grey November evening.
At a certain point that’s really all you ask.
Other than a card and the promise of a birthday present (currently in transit), my main contribution to this was to make the cake, and this year it was a ricotta pie. About twenty years ago my mom collected a bunch of recipes from the various scattered branches of my family and my grandmother’s ricotta pie was one of them. My mom had to translate it out of my grandfather’s directions and there’s a certain amount of wiggle room that comes with that process, but so it goes. As my mom said in the collection, “you’re making a pie, not building a bomb. It won’t blow up if you’re a tad over or under.”
If you’ve never had one of these things, you should. They’re a traditional Italian Easter dessert – apparently my grandmother would make one every year when my mom was younger – and they’re rich in the way that something with two pounds of ricotta cheese and a dozen eggs would be. They’re really, really good.
We have a lot of eggs. Lauren’s chickens have been laying like mad for months now, and while we do the best we can to keep up the fact is that they pile up now and then. This was a good way to use up a bunch of them in a tasty manner. Lauren’s chickens produce wonderful eggs, by the way. I’ve made this pie several times and it has never been that golden yellow before.
The thing about this pie is that it has a genuinely old-fashioned taste to it. There is no way you would ever confuse this for a recipe created anytime in the last fifty years. It tastes like the sort of thing that a society a lot closer to the edge of things than the modern US is at present would make to celebrate the fact that life is good anyway. Eggs. Ricotta. An orange. Two shots of whiskey. Sugar. All things that were often scarce back in the day and treasured for that reason. It is a time capsule in a baking dish.
We didn’t have it much when I was a kid – by then the health mavens had ginned up a ruckus that made people believe that anything that rich was something akin to cyanide and gunpowder stew and scared everyone away from such things – but I do remember it appearing now and again.
There is nothing like good food to remind you of good times and create new ones on a grey November evening.
Saturday, November 28, 2020
News and Updates
1. We’ve had a pretty quiet Thanksgiving break so far, since we had our big meal before it officially got started and nobody with more than six working brain cells is hosting or attending large gatherings these days. I have to say I’m enjoying the quiet. It’s been nice to sleep in as much as the cats would let me. It’s been good to have a day or two where I could put aside the grading and all of it, although it was hard not to do that anyway. I’m enjoying the rest.
2. We did have an East Coast family Zoom call on Thursday which was nice – it’s good to see people, even if they’re just pixels on the screen. Still working on the Midwest family Zoom call, but as noted (repeatedly) in this space, holidays happen when you have time.
3. I do have to get back to the grading and such, though. I sat down last night and figured out how much needed to get done for my various appointments, commitments, and requirements, and then I had to go lie down.
4. Quick: how many conservative judges ripping the Trump Campaign a new asshole does it take for the two-time popular vote loser in the White House to accept reality? Answer: apparently more than have done so already. If you haven’t yet read the opinion by US District Court Judge Stephanos Bibos (a Trump appointee) regarding Trump’s baseless claims and at this point borderline-criminal election tampering in Pennsylvania (“The Campaign’s claims have no merit.”) you should do so. The fact that Bibos was writing for a unanimous panel of three Republican-appointed judges in order to confirm an earlier opinion by a judge who was put forward by the GOP senator from Pennsylvania and is a lifelong Federalist Society member (“This is simply not how the Constitution works.”), is just icing on the cake.
5. I’m also getting more pleasure than perhaps I should over the fact that Trump paid Milwaukee $3 million to recount its votes and ended up losing by an even bigger margin than he had originally. Every day he loses again. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
6. Speaking of gifts, we’re deep into our own holiday gift-giving season here – everything from birthdays to anniversaries to the more usual holidays happen in our family between October 31 and December 31 – and I have to say that at this point in my life I’m just not sure we really need anything. This is a remarkably fortunate place to be.
7. It’s also cluttered, as Lauren is at pains to remind us frequently. We have not yet succumbed to her Euro-minimalism, but perhaps some editing might be in order.
8. We need to start working on our Christmas card, but somehow we haven’t taken many photographs this year – and none of the four of us together, despite the fact that we spent March through August locked down in the house with each other. Not really a "Kodak Moment," I suppose. I suspect the annual letter will be brief. I did get our usual strand of blue lights up today since it was warm enough to do that without gloves, and I suppose we’ll see if it actually lights up soon.
9. After the Great Cat Piss Episode last month I went out and got a can of air freshener for my office because there is only so much grapefruit essential oil one can tolerate. I found one that is supposed to be “Wood” scented, and it does in fact vaguely smell of cedar. It’s pleasant, and I find myself just spraying it about randomly these days. One does what one can to make the days more enjoyable.
10. Kim and I watched the final of The Great British Bake Off last night, and now we are fully caught up on Bake Off shows, much to my dismay. I need another show to watch, which is a problem since I still haven’t quite managed to find it in me to sit through 99% of what’s on television these days, even though much of it is, objectively, high quality stuff. We’ll see how it goes.
2. We did have an East Coast family Zoom call on Thursday which was nice – it’s good to see people, even if they’re just pixels on the screen. Still working on the Midwest family Zoom call, but as noted (repeatedly) in this space, holidays happen when you have time.
3. I do have to get back to the grading and such, though. I sat down last night and figured out how much needed to get done for my various appointments, commitments, and requirements, and then I had to go lie down.
4. Quick: how many conservative judges ripping the Trump Campaign a new asshole does it take for the two-time popular vote loser in the White House to accept reality? Answer: apparently more than have done so already. If you haven’t yet read the opinion by US District Court Judge Stephanos Bibos (a Trump appointee) regarding Trump’s baseless claims and at this point borderline-criminal election tampering in Pennsylvania (“The Campaign’s claims have no merit.”) you should do so. The fact that Bibos was writing for a unanimous panel of three Republican-appointed judges in order to confirm an earlier opinion by a judge who was put forward by the GOP senator from Pennsylvania and is a lifelong Federalist Society member (“This is simply not how the Constitution works.”), is just icing on the cake.
5. I’m also getting more pleasure than perhaps I should over the fact that Trump paid Milwaukee $3 million to recount its votes and ended up losing by an even bigger margin than he had originally. Every day he loses again. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.
6. Speaking of gifts, we’re deep into our own holiday gift-giving season here – everything from birthdays to anniversaries to the more usual holidays happen in our family between October 31 and December 31 – and I have to say that at this point in my life I’m just not sure we really need anything. This is a remarkably fortunate place to be.
7. It’s also cluttered, as Lauren is at pains to remind us frequently. We have not yet succumbed to her Euro-minimalism, but perhaps some editing might be in order.
8. We need to start working on our Christmas card, but somehow we haven’t taken many photographs this year – and none of the four of us together, despite the fact that we spent March through August locked down in the house with each other. Not really a "Kodak Moment," I suppose. I suspect the annual letter will be brief. I did get our usual strand of blue lights up today since it was warm enough to do that without gloves, and I suppose we’ll see if it actually lights up soon.
9. After the Great Cat Piss Episode last month I went out and got a can of air freshener for my office because there is only so much grapefruit essential oil one can tolerate. I found one that is supposed to be “Wood” scented, and it does in fact vaguely smell of cedar. It’s pleasant, and I find myself just spraying it about randomly these days. One does what one can to make the days more enjoyable.
10. Kim and I watched the final of The Great British Bake Off last night, and now we are fully caught up on Bake Off shows, much to my dismay. I need another show to watch, which is a problem since I still haven’t quite managed to find it in me to sit through 99% of what’s on television these days, even though much of it is, objectively, high quality stuff. We’ll see how it goes.
Wednesday, November 25, 2020
Silver
Today is our twenty-fifth anniversary.
In an ordinary year we probably would have had a party sometime this weekend to celebrate, invited friends and family, made an event of it.
This is not an ordinary year, though, and for that reason the day will pass quietly. Maybe we’ll have that party sometime down the line when it’s not a life-threatening thing to get together with people anymore. We do believe in moveable feasts, after all. A celebration is always welcome. Kim has a trip planned that we may yet get to take, depending on how things go, or we may move it to a later time and celebrate then.
But in a way the idea of staying home and just hanging out is sort of appropriate.
So much of a relationship is just doing the ordinary things together, year in and year out. I knew very early on after we started dating that I was going to ask Kim to marry me – it was a profoundly ordinary moment on a spring evening in Wisconsin, but something in that moment told me that I could spend a lifetime accumulating moments like that and so far I have.
We underestimate the ordinary.
It has been a quarter century of moments both ordinary and extraordinary. We traveled. We finished degrees and found new jobs. We bought a house. We raised a family. We found new friends and lost old ones. There have been cats.
All of those moments, and every day more of them. Meals. Tasks. Hanging out. Ordinary moments made extraordinary simply by sharing them with someone you love.
Here’s to another twenty-five years of moments, ordinary and otherwise.
In an ordinary year we probably would have had a party sometime this weekend to celebrate, invited friends and family, made an event of it.
This is not an ordinary year, though, and for that reason the day will pass quietly. Maybe we’ll have that party sometime down the line when it’s not a life-threatening thing to get together with people anymore. We do believe in moveable feasts, after all. A celebration is always welcome. Kim has a trip planned that we may yet get to take, depending on how things go, or we may move it to a later time and celebrate then.
But in a way the idea of staying home and just hanging out is sort of appropriate.
So much of a relationship is just doing the ordinary things together, year in and year out. I knew very early on after we started dating that I was going to ask Kim to marry me – it was a profoundly ordinary moment on a spring evening in Wisconsin, but something in that moment told me that I could spend a lifetime accumulating moments like that and so far I have.
We underestimate the ordinary.
It has been a quarter century of moments both ordinary and extraordinary. We traveled. We finished degrees and found new jobs. We bought a house. We raised a family. We found new friends and lost old ones. There have been cats.
All of those moments, and every day more of them. Meals. Tasks. Hanging out. Ordinary moments made extraordinary simply by sharing them with someone you love.
Here’s to another twenty-five years of moments, ordinary and otherwise.
Monday, November 23, 2020
An Unexpected Thanksgiving
We have a movable feast tradition in my family. Holidays happen when you have time for them.
People matter more than calendars, and if you can get people together on one date instead of another then that’s when you should celebrate. It makes things much more relaxed and less worrisome. We can go months from the scheduled calendar date if need be. It’s all about getting people together.
Which is why we had Thanksgiving yesterday.
We really weren’t planning to do much for Thanksgiving, since the current plague has ramped up exponentially over the last few weeks and every responsible leader in the nation has been emphasizing to us commoners that getting a large group of people together for Thanksgiving is a great way to get a large group of people buried by Christmas. Oliver was going to stay at Small Liberal Arts College and Kim, Lauren and I were going to hang out at home.
But Oliver had a doctor appointment that couldn’t be changed easily, and since he and Dustin have been essentially quarantined since September (SLAC is a pretty small place and was recently held up by the New York Times as a national success story in how to hold a college semester without creating a coronavirus outbreak) and we’ve been mostly holed up at home for months now, we figured a small group like that would be okay. So he and Dustin drove up Saturday and we spent most of Sunday getting ready and then we ate and talked and it was a grand time.
People matter more than calendars, and if you can get people together on one date instead of another then that’s when you should celebrate. It makes things much more relaxed and less worrisome. We can go months from the scheduled calendar date if need be. It’s all about getting people together.
Which is why we had Thanksgiving yesterday.
We really weren’t planning to do much for Thanksgiving, since the current plague has ramped up exponentially over the last few weeks and every responsible leader in the nation has been emphasizing to us commoners that getting a large group of people together for Thanksgiving is a great way to get a large group of people buried by Christmas. Oliver was going to stay at Small Liberal Arts College and Kim, Lauren and I were going to hang out at home.
But Oliver had a doctor appointment that couldn’t be changed easily, and since he and Dustin have been essentially quarantined since September (SLAC is a pretty small place and was recently held up by the New York Times as a national success story in how to hold a college semester without creating a coronavirus outbreak) and we’ve been mostly holed up at home for months now, we figured a small group like that would be okay. So he and Dustin drove up Saturday and we spent most of Sunday getting ready and then we ate and talked and it was a grand time.
I am thankful for many things, even in this weathered old world, and at the top of that list is my family. The fact that we could be together, however briefly, is a gift to be savored.
They go back to SLAC as soon as the doctor appointment is over, and on the calendar date for Thanksgiving we don’t really have much planned. We’ll try to whomp up some Zoom meetings with the rest of the family on the various sides because that’s better than not seeing them at all, and we’ll hang out at home and not do much of anything – a nice break after eight straight months of frantically trying to figure out how to teach college level classes and advise students in a pandemic.
But it was a lovely Thanksgiving, and we were grateful for it.
Sunday, November 15, 2020
Final Thoughts on the Election
It’s been nearly two weeks and I’m hoping to put this election to bed now, even if the squatter regime in the White House and its deluded supporters continue to argue otherwise. It’s time to move on. But here are some final thoughts.
1. So far it looks like der Sturmtrumper’s attempts to overthrow the US government and install himself as our permanent tribune have been handled as competently and effectively as everything else he’s attempted (how’s that wall going? Mexico pay for any of it yet?) which is perhaps the only saving grace of his entire regime. The next Fascist will be more talented, and if we don’t take steps to make sure that such human refuse is never allowed near power in this country again we may not get a chance to vote them out.
2. We have never had a sitting president refuse to recognize the legitimate and obvious results of an election before, and if that doesn’t worry you then you’re not thinking clearly. He will be gone in January, but he can do a lot of damage in the meantime – not least by encouraging the same kind of dead-end fanaticism that we still see in pockets of the former Confederacy more than a century and a half after that moral and political skidmark was cleansed from the surface of the earth. It took this country decades to pacify the die-hards after the Civil War and if we’re not careful we’ll end up back in that situation again.
3. He’s never going to concede, you know that. He’s not that connected to reality. He can’t handle anything less than sycophantic adoration. And in three months he will be facing a list of state charges that he can’t pardon or bully his way out of. He can’t afford to concede. Fortunately he doesn’t have to. At 12:01pm on January 20, 2021 he becomes just another trespasser in the White House and can be removed by the Secret Service – bodily if necessary. I suspect it won’t come to that, but I won’t lie and say I wouldn’t pay money to see it if it did.
4. I love the fact that it says right on the donation web site that any money sent to the “legal fund” that der Sturmtrumper is supposedly going to use to overturn the will of the American people actually goes into his campaign coffers to pay off debts. And people are still donating! Trump supporters make the best marks. Not only are they fully aware they’re being conned, they’re proud of it.
5. A few facts for the die-hards:
Joe Biden won this election by over five million votes. The last time a Republican did that was 1988. Democrats have done that four times since then (1992, 1996, 2008, and now 2020) and missed the clean sweep in 2012 by less than 19,000 votes.
The Republican candidate has won the popular vote exactly once in the last thirty years, when George W. Bush did it in 2004. It is literally a once-in-a-generation event for a Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote. The only realistic hope a Republican has of winning the presidency is by gaming the Electoral College, which is why they will never agree to change it. They are a minority party, and their accelerating slide toward authoritarianism reflects that.
Joe Biden won 306 electoral votes, which is precisely as many as der Sturmtrumper won in 2016 except that Biden also (see above) won the popular vote.
Der Sturmtrumper is the first president since Benjamin Harrison in 1888 to lose the popular vote twice and still manage to serve a term in office. John Quincy Adams also managed that feat in 1828. All of these presidents were one-term failures.
The Department of Homeland Security has publicly stated that there was no significant voter fraud and that this was the most secure election in American history. A team of international observers invited by the State Department said the same thing, and every state government – Republican and Democrat – has agreed. Der Sturmtrumper can take it up with them.
6. Yes, I’m enjoying his humiliation. Of course I am. I can be petty too. For four miserable years der Sturmtrumper has run roughshod over everything that makes the United States worthwhile. I have watched my country weakened, corrupted, coarsened, and made pitiable by the callous cruelty, shortsighted stupidity, open graft, and destructively subversive actions of this criminal regime and every fiber of my being rejoices to see this regime come crashing down and a decent, law-abiding administration stand ready to take over, and if one of the side effects of this is watching the abject humiliation of a terrible person and a worse administration then I guess I’m okay with that. I'm not proud of that, but I won't deny it.
7. Apparently there was a “Million MAGA March” this weekend that fell short by a scant 950,000 or so participants, which amuses me no end.
8. Seriously – I want to know who at Four Seasons Total Landscaping answered the phone when der Sturmtrumper’s minions called to set up a press conference in their parking lot and thought, “Fuck it, why not” and then told them to go ahead and set it up. Give that person a cigar.
9. You know what I really want? I want politics to be boring again. I want a president who isn’t a criminal and an attention whore and won’t be in my face all the time with damn fool ideas or destructive urges. I want a government I can ignore for days on end, secure in the knowledge that the grownups are in charge. It’s been four long years since that happened, and I’m looking forward to it again.
1. So far it looks like der Sturmtrumper’s attempts to overthrow the US government and install himself as our permanent tribune have been handled as competently and effectively as everything else he’s attempted (how’s that wall going? Mexico pay for any of it yet?) which is perhaps the only saving grace of his entire regime. The next Fascist will be more talented, and if we don’t take steps to make sure that such human refuse is never allowed near power in this country again we may not get a chance to vote them out.
2. We have never had a sitting president refuse to recognize the legitimate and obvious results of an election before, and if that doesn’t worry you then you’re not thinking clearly. He will be gone in January, but he can do a lot of damage in the meantime – not least by encouraging the same kind of dead-end fanaticism that we still see in pockets of the former Confederacy more than a century and a half after that moral and political skidmark was cleansed from the surface of the earth. It took this country decades to pacify the die-hards after the Civil War and if we’re not careful we’ll end up back in that situation again.
3. He’s never going to concede, you know that. He’s not that connected to reality. He can’t handle anything less than sycophantic adoration. And in three months he will be facing a list of state charges that he can’t pardon or bully his way out of. He can’t afford to concede. Fortunately he doesn’t have to. At 12:01pm on January 20, 2021 he becomes just another trespasser in the White House and can be removed by the Secret Service – bodily if necessary. I suspect it won’t come to that, but I won’t lie and say I wouldn’t pay money to see it if it did.
4. I love the fact that it says right on the donation web site that any money sent to the “legal fund” that der Sturmtrumper is supposedly going to use to overturn the will of the American people actually goes into his campaign coffers to pay off debts. And people are still donating! Trump supporters make the best marks. Not only are they fully aware they’re being conned, they’re proud of it.
5. A few facts for the die-hards:
Joe Biden won this election by over five million votes. The last time a Republican did that was 1988. Democrats have done that four times since then (1992, 1996, 2008, and now 2020) and missed the clean sweep in 2012 by less than 19,000 votes.
The Republican candidate has won the popular vote exactly once in the last thirty years, when George W. Bush did it in 2004. It is literally a once-in-a-generation event for a Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote. The only realistic hope a Republican has of winning the presidency is by gaming the Electoral College, which is why they will never agree to change it. They are a minority party, and their accelerating slide toward authoritarianism reflects that.
Joe Biden won 306 electoral votes, which is precisely as many as der Sturmtrumper won in 2016 except that Biden also (see above) won the popular vote.
Der Sturmtrumper is the first president since Benjamin Harrison in 1888 to lose the popular vote twice and still manage to serve a term in office. John Quincy Adams also managed that feat in 1828. All of these presidents were one-term failures.
The Department of Homeland Security has publicly stated that there was no significant voter fraud and that this was the most secure election in American history. A team of international observers invited by the State Department said the same thing, and every state government – Republican and Democrat – has agreed. Der Sturmtrumper can take it up with them.
6. Yes, I’m enjoying his humiliation. Of course I am. I can be petty too. For four miserable years der Sturmtrumper has run roughshod over everything that makes the United States worthwhile. I have watched my country weakened, corrupted, coarsened, and made pitiable by the callous cruelty, shortsighted stupidity, open graft, and destructively subversive actions of this criminal regime and every fiber of my being rejoices to see this regime come crashing down and a decent, law-abiding administration stand ready to take over, and if one of the side effects of this is watching the abject humiliation of a terrible person and a worse administration then I guess I’m okay with that. I'm not proud of that, but I won't deny it.
7. Apparently there was a “Million MAGA March” this weekend that fell short by a scant 950,000 or so participants, which amuses me no end.
8. Seriously – I want to know who at Four Seasons Total Landscaping answered the phone when der Sturmtrumper’s minions called to set up a press conference in their parking lot and thought, “Fuck it, why not” and then told them to go ahead and set it up. Give that person a cigar.
9. You know what I really want? I want politics to be boring again. I want a president who isn’t a criminal and an attention whore and won’t be in my face all the time with damn fool ideas or destructive urges. I want a government I can ignore for days on end, secure in the knowledge that the grownups are in charge. It’s been four long years since that happened, and I’m looking forward to it again.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)