Vote by Mail

Everyone in the great state of Washington votes by mail.  Thank God our state capitol Olympia did away with the caucus system.  Ditto for Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, & Utah.  California allows everyone to vote by mail but also allows those who prefer to go to a polling place to vote.  No need to apply for a mail-in ballot, all registered voters get one.  No need to prove your inability to travel to the poll.  No need to prove you are out of state. 

There are checks in place to prevent fraud.  Sure, Junior can fraudulently vote for his senile parents.  But incidents like that are onesey-twoseys.  Large scale fraud is easy to spot via statistics, or by suspicious journalists or political analysts of any party.    Public election officials can easily prove or disprove fraud by checkin signatures. 

There is a system in place to insure secrecy & privacy of your vote.  It increases voter turnout.  It provides a legitimate backup record for recounts.  It lowers the expense to states and counties for holding elections.  What is not to like?

Reportedly two thirds of the country would prefer to vote by mail.

Pegging the Moron Meter

Yesterday we finished voting in our "special election" in northwest Oregon.

I've been following this little treasure mostly as a way of checking on the credulity and stupidity level of voters in the Portland metro area, and the final readings of the Moron Meter are now in.

First, on the issue of fluoridation of Portland's water supply, a bizarre coalition of looney Left and looney Right defeated fluoridation because...well, because fluoride isn't natural. God alone knows what these people - about 85,000 of them, by the way - think about pasteurization, immunization, the Germ Theory of disease, and quantum mechanics.

At least we're safe from those goddamn polio monkey serums.

I should note in passing that there are about 446,000 registered voters in Multnomah County, Oregon. And this election was, like almost all elections in Oregon now, done by mail. You didn't have to devote any time or effort to it. You opened the envelope, filled in the little ovals on the form, stuffed the thing back in another envelope and shoved it in the mailbox.

Only about 36% of the electorate - about 160,000 people - even bothered.

But aside from the usual non-interest in the election the real red light on my Moron Meter was pegged to these two guys:

First was a gomer named Lasswell who was running for a position on the Multnomah Educational Service District. Leaving aside the actual role of and value of the MESD, the part that caught me about this guy's ad in the Voter's Pamphlet was is complete and utter incompetence for anything relating to education or any other sort of political administration, for that matter.

The giveaway was his observation about how he was gonna do to the MESD what he'd done in the city of Anfal when he was a'servin' of his Country in Iraq. Because, as we all know, an impoverished Third World city rife with sectarian strife in a former Ottoman province now devastated by war is exactly the political equivalent of the Multnomah Educational Service District.

This goop got 25% of the vote.

Got that? This means that of the some 93,000 people in Multnomah County engaged and motivated enough in the political process to register AND to actually vote in this contest, one in four - 23,382 theoretically-sane individuals - were equally unable to make the same distinction Lasswell could not, between a smashed city in a Muslim state in the Third World and the educational administration of a mid-size American city.

One in four, people. One in four.

But wait; it gets worse.

This goof, name of Morrison, a genuine full-on, rubber-room, unapologetically whackadoodle bull-goose looney whose only issue as a reason for running for Portland Public School board was because WiFi makes your brain all funny (and I tend to agree that someone's brain was all funny here but not that WiFi had anything to do with that) got 18.7 percent of the ballots cast.

Almost 19 percent. Of the people who are probably in the uppermost quintile of engaged and politically aware and socially motivated citizens in the People's Republic of Portland. Nearly one in five. 12,165 people - more than were in the crowd attending that Thorns match I went to watch Sunday.

Voted for a complete and utter tinfoil-hat-grade lunatic.

You can say that, well, fine; the "process worked". The loonies lost.

But think; these are people who shouldn't have gotten anyone's vote. Lasswell, yeah, okay, maybe a handful of people who liked the idea that he was an ex-GI. But Morrison? For fuck's sake, people, the man is certifiable. Around the bend. Ripe for a canvas sportjacket with wraparound sleeves. And yet more than twelve thousand of you fuckers voted for him!

And then you complain about how we can't have nice things.

This is why, people. This is fucking why.

Because a critical minority of you will vote for absolutely goddamn anything no matter how idiotic.

Think about it; if almost one out of five of the most well-informed, motivated, and civically-engaged people in a nationally-known hotbed of social progressivism and intellectual liberalism will vote for a lunatic who is mumbling about electrical radiation melting his brain what the hell is going on out there in places where they think people like Limbaugh, Imhofe, Palin, and Bachmann have a functioning cerebrum?

Jesus wept.

We Are So, so, so, SO Fucked.

Vote Herman Cain in South Carolina

Borthers and Sisters, in times like these, when sin and corruption surround us like the Immigration Fence around the SouthWest Rump of America, God has raised up before our eyes two young heroes to counter the Forces of Evil that beset us day and night!

God may have shut the door in our faces when He forbade Stephen Colbert's name to be placed upon the ballot of the God-Fearing State of South Carolina, but He opened a window in the back porch for Colbert to climb in to steal Evil's Cookies!

Vote Cain!

Raise Cain, South Carolina, raise Cain!

Update: For a "million cool points", who said this?

"Andrew Jackson had a pretty good idea about what do with America's enemies: Kill them."

Update #2: Chief is the proud recipient of "Million Cool Points" prize. Congratulations, Chief. It constantly amazes what a tiny bit of research can do! :)

Stephen has another video out, narrated by Samuel Jackson.

Lots of Jacksons here today. Stonewall, Andrew & Samuel.

bb

Backside to the Future

(Being A Mere Diversion, And a Personal Rumination on The State of the Nation and the Upcoming Election Year)

With the ludicrous Ames Iowa "straw poll" it appears that the 2012 campaign season has officially begin...15 months before the actual election.I can't begin to express how this irritates me.

Glenn Greenwald explains better than I can how the combination of endless "election" coverage combined with the rapacious cable news 24/7/365 cycle hammered down into the simpleminded "tell the masses what they want not what they need" paradigm of the corporate news (and, of course, sprinkled with some commercial gottasellsomeads! pixie dust) goes in one end and emerges a Möbius band of idiocy that ties misinformation into disinformation with plain, good old fatuousness for a sort of fractal stupidity; refracted infinitely to where any hope of extracting simple, sane understanding of the people and their ideas has vanished.

But at least on one hand the tale told by one of the idiots - while set about with sound and fury signifying nothing (that is, the usual folderol involving gays, guns, and God - fodder for the gossip columns and the prayer breakfasts but nothing more than a magnetic sticker on the bumper of the People Who Matter in our electoral "process") - is simple enough.

No new taxes. In fact, no taxes at all, or as close as possible.

Small government. Teeny, tiny, eensy-weensy leetle government (except the part that blows up Scary Brown People, but that's the cool part, anyway).

Freedom for the Job Creators! Deregulate everything regulatable!

Free Markets! (meaning; deregulate even MORE stuff!)

Plus some other truly crazy shit; abolishing the Fed, returning to the gold standard, protection for precious rapist-babies...but you know the drill - that's just to give the loonies a shiny pretty to play with.

Here's the thing; this is nothing new. Nothing. We've already been there, done that, and got the crinoline and the Arrow t-shirt.

Low taxes? Freedom for the magnates? Utter deregulation and a complete lack of federal anything?The Gilded Age.

Seriously.

And, if I have to be scrupulously honest, if I was in Forbes 400, if I was one of the rich and the powerful...why not?Hell, the pre-Depression United States was a paradise for a rich man (woman? enh...not quite so much). Mansions? Servants? Senators appointed at your whim? Entire federal administrations in your pocket? Ask the Doles how that Hawaii thing worked out for them, the Rockefellers how the Standard Oil gig payed off before those meddlesome Progressive trustbusters elbowed in.

And let me be honest about this, too; the United States works perfectly well as an open oligarchy. It did from about 1870 to 1930, and don't kid yourself; some pigs are still more equal than others and always have been. Tell me that you get the same meal ticket emerging from the Oregon Episcopal School versus Jefferson High School here in Portland.

Henh. Right.

But I'm not here to argue equality of outcomes.

I'm here to talk about next year.

It's becoming painfully clear that the GOP is going to nominate someone whose positions on things like federal regulations and spending are closer to those of John D. Rockefeller than his grandson. And if they win - and the continuing Great Recession makes such a win highly plausible - they will do their very best to return this country to the Gilded Age they by their words and deeds so seem to yearn for.

I consider this a very Bad Thing, largely because me and mine are unlikely to be among those included in the Four Hundred. We will not be robber barons; more likely we will be among the robbed. Mojo and I had a lovely saunter about our graceful Pittock Mansion this sunny Sunday, and I observed that had we been alive then our only glimpse of the beautiful appointments and spectacular vistas would have been as we carried the dirty linen down the stairs or brought master his cigars.But I have to accept that it would not necessarily be a Bad Thing for the nation. More nations have thrived and grown in wealth and power as oligarchies than as democracies, simply because of the late arrival of popular democracy on the historical scene. The nation as a nation might do quite well.

And it is unlikely that even the most teabaggiest Republican government would be able to go full public-be-damned on us. The welfare state is deeply ingrained in U.S. society, and there would come a point where even the most Galtian overlord would draw back from reintroducing a world of match girls and breaker boys even if it helped bring back the Gibson Girl and the Arrow Shirt guy.Make no mistake; "reforming" the entitlement systems now in place mean simply throwing people out of them. Some of those people will find ways to live without their dole money; the American people had all sorts of ways of coping with poor, sick, old parents and injured relatives before 1933 and they can reinvent those ways again. Families will return to the multigenerational homes of the past, where retired grandma cares for the grandkids while mom and dad work, in return for food and a bed. There are ways, there are ways.But.

And this is a big "but"...

Two things have changed enormously since the last time we tried to live this way, assuming that the GOP experiment goes forward. And I'm not sure whether they've really thought this out.

First, in 1911 the U.S. was a burgeoning industrial power; work was there - not always good work, often dirty, hard, low-paying, dangerous work - but it was there. And it was work that needed people; vastly manual, even when skilled. The factories of the Gilded Age needed lots of poor people to work them.Second, there was still a hell of a lot of "open" land, and "open" places, for people to go to try and start again. The frontier only officially closed in 1890, and even in the Fifties there were lots of places that were still booming and enjoyed a boomtown's need for people.And both of of those "safety valves" are gone.

If the Great Recession and the thirty years of deregulation, outsourcing, offshoring, downsizing, and deunionization have proved anything to the people Who Matter in business and politics, it's that Henry Ford's old paradigm - pay the workers better so they will buy more stuff - has been broken. The "old economy" here in the U.S. - the economy that depended on American working people working to make stuff that other American working people bought - is tanking, HAS tanked, and I don't think anyone knows how to put all those people back to work in any sort of work that pays a living wage.And there's nowhere to "go". The frontier really IS closed, and there's no hope for people to take up forty acres and try and make a go of it. Oh, sure, you can try an start-up a little company, make cute glass cups or design webpages or invent a new application for a cell phone...but working for yourself is a backbreaking task, and especially in the corporatist U.S. of 2011 there are so many ways that a bigger, more powerful competitor can dry-gulch you. My wife is a "contractor" and I've seen the sausage-making up close. They're right - it's not pretty. And it's not going to get you into the parlor at Pittock Mansion, either.

So assuming that the Gilded Age Project largely succeeds, we can assume that it will result in a fairly large group - larger than we have dealt with in living history - of relatively permanently unemployed or under-employed people, people who not only don't have work but for whom the IS no work, no work that can't and won't be done by someone in Bangladesh or Uruguay for a fraction of what that American would need to make to live even at poverty levels in this country. That among this group will be many old, sick, and old sick people. And that if there IS a way out of that throwback to the future it is something that not only is unapparent to us now, but even potential precursors are not apparent.

The old economy is failing. The new economy - whatever that may be - has not yet emerged, if it ever will emerge in any form that will help those knocked down by the fall of the old economy to their feet again.

And one major political group in U.S. politics believes that the best response to this is to return as closely to the conditions of 1889 as possible.

So.

I'm not sure what is in store for me, for my family, for you and yours. But I suspect that even if we don't end up turning back down the road towards the past we're in for some hard years ahead.

And if we do...well...

If the U.S. Army taught me one thing, I learned how to mop a fucking floor.Hopefully when I get laid off I won't be too old to get a job cleaning up at the Big House.

Exciting Times in Wisconsin

The previous 2 posts below this have produced comments about the capability of our fellow citizens to govern themselves, their intelligence and quality of character. As I wrote in my last post about propaganda down below in the basement, our citizens do not have consistently honest media and there is no strong consistent push to investigate and set the record straight.

I was particularly struck by Ranger's story of his encounter with a gun-owner recently. He attempted to set the record straight about the history of gun control to a fellow he met by chance in a shop, who revealed his weapon and growled "I don't speak to liberals!"

The answer to the obvious question here, how did this fine patriotic fellow get to the point where he feels he needs at least one weapon to carry around in public and where he has closed his ears to clear-as-crystal historical, factual truth, is without a doubt the constant drumbeat from the NRA and Fox that the government wants to take weapons from Americans, to deprive us of our rights.

It is curious, that this one amendment to the Constitution, about citizens and weapons, seems supreme above all in some circles.

The people of Wisconsin have found out the true nature of the people they elected to state office last November, they have learned how the people they voted for, or didn't vote for, for all intents and purposes, flat-out lied about their plans for the state and its people.

Wisdom comes to us from 2 sources: Actual Experience and Communicated Experience.

I hope this election tomorrow shows the rest of us how to take back our society from elements among us who do not have the best interests of our country at heart.

Go Wisconsin!