.
.
.
Just when you thought that Halloween was over … your new Attorney General and DHS Secretary!
No, I don’t think that you’re stupid. (After all, you’re here, aren’t you?) It’s a phrasing borrowed from Bill Clinton campaign strategist James Carville during the 1992 campaign, when he famously coined the slogan “It’s the economy, stupid!” In other words, just focus on the big, significant, and easily understood issue: we were in a bad economic recession at that time and Bill Clinton said that he could fix it. (And he did.) Everything else was a distraction.
This year it’s not the economy, it’s not crime, it’s not foreign policy, and to the extent that it’s about character, it’s absolutely unbelievable that Donald Trump remains in the running — although with Hillary Clinton as his opponent of course he does. (Just imagine that I’ve included every piece I’ve for the past 18 months written about how much better of a candidate Bernie Sanders would have been this year — and we can skip my actually including it.) It’s hard to figure out what it actually is this year — and isolated and enlightened California is pretty much the worst place from which to try to figure it out.
But it’s not hard to figure out what “It” should be: “IT’S THE APPOINTMENTS, STUPID!”
I already find Hillary’s executive appointments deeply disappointing — and she hasn’t even made any of them yet. The form and thrust of her Administration is going to be highly moderate — although if Sanders and Elizabeth Warren do successfully pull her chestnuts out of the fire, then perhaps we’ll get a good Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors or something like that, which will be nice. (Futile, but nice.) But Clinton’s Administration will be a lot like Obama’s — middle of the road and mainstream — and we’ve endured it for the past eight years and we can endure it now.
Trump’s Administration, by contrast, would be crazy nuts. Even if Trump himself shows no interest in governing between the times that he’s elected and removed from office over the “13-year-old girl” thing — your choice, Donald, the Senate or the 25th Amendment! — the people whom he appoints will run the government (right into the ground) like a flock of rabid Cheneys. (Look for Liz Cheney) as Mike Pence’s Vice-Presidential appointment, when to time comes, because that is how screwed up our government would be. Pence will want someone who can ignore reality and morality with equal fervor, until our national influence on the world resembles that of Uzbekistan — except that the Uzbekis would be better loved.
Domestically, we’re likely to see an absolute nightmare for libertarians of all stripes.
Imagine Chris Christie as Attorney General — I know, I know, he’s likely to be convicted of crimes, but who’s going to stop Trump from appointing him? Come on, “crimes”? He’ll pardon himself of the state ones and Trump will pardon him from the federal ones. Then no crimes, so shut up! You don’t like it, you shouldn’t have voted for Trump, because, as the history books that remain will quote the new AG’s famous proclamation: “pardons are legal, asswipes, and they cancel out everything!”
And the worst thing is that that’s not the worst thing. Imagine Rudy Giuliani as Secretary of Homeland Security. That’s what makes it the nightmare from which you never awaken. You have no rights that trump (yeah, that’s the right word) the interests of National Security. You don’t like it, talk to AG Christie and the Trump-packed courts. And the first time that someone — on their own, or coerced, or as part of a false flag operation — commits and act of domestic terrorism to protest the new government, that will be the end of debate. It’s not that hard to stir up a casus belli internationally — in fact, it used to be our country’s specialty, enough so for us to joke about doing it — and it’s even easier to stir up a domestic one.
But don’t worry: Trump won’t take away your guns — unless you’re a minority who is not Ben Carson-level trustworthy, or a leftist malcontent. (And being liberal will itself be proof of one’s being a malcontent. So there! Talk to the AG!) The notion that national security allows the Administration to determine that the Second Amendment — and the others — can be curtailed on the basis of race and ethnicity, because (just wait for this one to come out of the Trump-appointed courts) the Fourteenth Amendment cannot be allowed to trump national security. Expect to hear that decision use an out-of-THIS-LARGE-a-context quote from a dissenting opinion by Supreme Court Justice and Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson in Terminiello v. City of Chicago about how “the constitution is not a suicide pact” — brought into majority jurisprudence by liberal Justice Arthur Goldberg in Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez — a case on draft resisters, for God’s sake! — that is the favorite of would be authoritarians anyway. (Most people have no idea how close we came to adopting the principle of a modified “war constitution” — with no expiry date — after 9/11. I was in law school at the time. They literally told us to ignore every decision that had been made about Executive power and foreign policy prior to the 2002 New York Bar exam.)
People always, in the long term, slightly underestimate the probability of change; it’s part of why hubris is the signal character defect in classic tragedies. What they massively underestimate is the possible extent of change once things get rolling, because we tend not to think about how the situation and prospects will look different once earlier changes have already been made. (This is, in turn, part of the classic recipe for farce.) This is part of why legal scholars worry about “the slippery slope” — and in a Trump Administration the slopes will be more slippery, in most (but not all) directions, than they have been since the Civil War.
That’s why swing state voters — I don’t really care that much what undecided Californians do — should support the wretched Hillary. It’s the appointments, stupid! And hers will not court unimaginable, compounded, Constitution destroying disaster.
UPDATE!
I’ve presented my wish to build a website like this for this election, both here and on Facebook, but I couldn’t afford it. I am THRILLED that someone else has done it! Hat tip to electoral-vote.com!
Vote Trading Is Back
In 2004, some people who were worried that Ralph Nader voters would again hand the election to George W. Bush came up with a scheme that enabled the Nader voters to make their point without endangering John Kerry. They set up a vote-trading operation in which Nader voters in swing states were matched up with Democrats in deep blue states. The idea is that the Nader voter in, say, Colorado, promised to vote for Kerry and in return, a Kerry supporter in, say, California promised to vote for Nader. In this way, Nader’s national total would be the same, but Kerry wouldn’t be sacrificed in Colorado. The Justice Dept. took a very dim view of this since federal law prohibits trading a vote for anything of value.
Things changed in 2007 when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Porter v. Bowen ruled that such an arrangement was protected by the First Amendment. Now, vote trading is back. Silicon Valley entrepreneur Amit Kumar has created an app that allows a Jill Stein or Gary Johnson supporter in a swing state to make a deal with a Hillary Clinton supporter in a deep blue or deep red state to exchange votes, thus helping Clinton in a swing state without reducing the overall vote for Stein or Johnson. So, for example, after you log in and identify as, say, a Stein voter in Florida, you might be matched with a Clinton voter in New York and a Clinton voter in Texas, since their votes don’t matter. By allowing a Stein or Johnson voter to get two votes for his or her favorite candidate, the whole deal is more attractive. No proof of voting is required. It works on the honor system. (V)
The article is wrong: vote trading was first attempted back in 2000, when I and a bunch of other (mostly) New Yorkers, who saw disaster coming — people forget that Gore was behind in the publicly available polls going into the election, with speculation bubbling that he might win the Presidency with a minority of the popular vote — tried to drum up support through the Slate.com website (this was before blogs) for us to vote for whoever other people wanted so long as the people in the swing states would vote for Gore. (It should still be in the archives somewhere.) It’s legal — so long as no money changes hands — and it’s smart voting!
This is your Weekend Open Thread, Talk about that, or whatever else you’d like, within reasonable bounds of decency and discretion, while both continue to exist. And have a nice day!
http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/politics/sd-me-church-bulletin-20161102-story.html
If the only way you can get voters to support your candidate is to threaten them that they will burn in eternal hellfire if they don’t, you are probably supporting a terrible candidate.
Good for the Diocese of San Diego for explaining that this is not how Catholicism is supposed to work; now they just have to sack the people who decided to do this.
The trouble with “vote-trading”:
(1) There is absolutely nothing to compel a voter to do as promised. If it were possible to prove to someone how you voted, it would be possible for them to outright pay you to vote a certain way. That’s why it’s supposed to be a secret ballot, and a big problem with the proliferation of voting by mail in recent times.
(2) Any would-be Dem voter in a non-swing state who signs up for the project presumably already recognizes the merit of giving more harmless votes to the “third” party candidate, and would presumably do so without any inducement.
(3) Any would-be “third” party voter in a swing state who signs up for the project already thinks the lesser evil needs to win that state, and has already decided to vote for it.
Hey, that’s three troubles, not one! Luckily, none are insurmountable.
(1) Yes, there’s nothing to compel people to follow through. It’s called the “honor system.” The ballot remains secret. In my vision, people would be able to, for example, examine each other’s social media history before pairing (or in the case of this site, “trioing”) off. (Is “trioing” a word?)
(2) No, you’re wrong. I was willing to do it without inducement, but I know many others of my stripe who weren’t. They would have welcomed something like this. Now, you do hedge by saying “presumably” — but this is one of the instances where I’m better situated to judge than you are, and I’m telling you that your presumption is wrong.
(3) I know third-party voters in swing states who essentially want to maximize the support for — oh, let’s say at random — the Green Party. (And they don’t much care where.) The brilliant two-for-one voting scheme offered here is to their advantage. Why not take advantage of it? At the least, they’d feel better about their vote, on a net basis!
As an added bonus — if this became popular enough then the howling from the center might fuel a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Electoral College, although my bet remains that jockeying among Faithless Electors this year might do the job. (If it’s clear that Hillary can’t get a majority, and Trump doesn’t either, I could imagine California’s entire slate voting instead for a respected moderate Republican like Bill Weld, to head Trump off at the pass. (Goddamned Republican-favoring Twelfth Amendment!)
*The event at the Trump ralley in Reno is simply wine from the teaspoon but we are
very hopeful that we will have a very well managed and well organized vote on Tues.
Let us also hope that gross stupidity will not rule the day…..
The latest Michael Moore movie:
“There’s probably no time left to try and convince Trump voters of the error of their ways. But there IS a job we all must do this weekend: get the nonvoters to vote! Give our young people a reason to vote”
It’s called “Michael Moore in TrumpLand” and it’s #1 in the country online and streaming!
You can get it right now on iTunes by clicking here:
http://www.itunes.com/trumpland.
Or you can get it right now on Amazon by clicking here:
https://amzn.com/B01M4OX2AY.
“TrumpLand” has been referred to by one commentator as “already historic in its impact.” The New Yorker magazine simply says it’s “majestic.”
I’m going to post a Facebook exchange I just had with one of the real good people in DPOC about the Presidential election, because it demonstrates a real divide within the Democratic Party right now. (I’ve eliminated the writer’s name, as I’m using their words without permission.) It’s a continuation of long conversation we’ve been having about this topic:
To which I replied:
Lefties will accuse me here of “sheepdogging” for Hillary: no, I’m not. Sheepdogging — herding people into a pen where they will vote for Hillary — implies an ulterior motive, using people instrumentally, and a general lack of candor. My motive is: I think that we can survive four years (if that much) of what will already be a substantially chastened Hillary and I don’t know that we can survive even four months of a rampant Donald Trump. My friend from DPOC would LIKE me to sheepdog — not to acknowledge any weaknesses in Hillary and convince people to clap for her like it’s what’s necessary to keep Tinkerbell alive in “neighboring states.” Nope. I’m looking at the situation rationally, looking at both candidates, giving an honest assessment, and respecting people enough to think them capable of doing the same.
Want to guess what our most viewed post was yesterday (Sunday)?
Hint: it was published a year ago.
http://www.orangejuiceblog.com/2015/10/brett-murdock-to-challenge-ed-royce-for-congress-democrats-get-the-guy-they-wanted/
I don’t know if polls are picking it up, or if it’s something peculiar to our readership, but for whatever reason there seems to be an inordinate amount of interest in Brett Murdock’s campaign against Ed Royce in the 39th Congressional District. It’s not like we’ve been boosting it much — it’s just happening!
This race doesn’t seem to be on the maps of political prognosticators, but — given the figures I see here — give me decent odds and I’d lay some cash on a Murdock upset. Coming out of nowhere, as it would, this would be incredibly huge. I guess that people (1) DO like his witty and punchy signs, and (2) DO NOT like Donald Trump, to whom he’s tying Ed Royce, or (3) the pretty damn brilliant Josh Newman campaign against Ling-Ling Chang may be changing minds not only about her, but about the senior Republican officeholder in the area as well!