And the 2016 presidential campaign begins…NOW

The Republicans are always better organized than the Democrats, and they have already identified a clear front runner.

We will now spend four years moaning about the extra-special awfulness of the Republican candidate, pretending that a horrible half of the electorate doesn’t exist, and finally nominating someone notable mainly for their bureaucratic ability to blend in with the Washington beltway crowd. The Republican will still get a substantial percentage of the electorate and come close to winning (if not winning altogether), and then we’ll all wonder about those strange people who weren’t inspired by our lackluster candidate, and voted for the stupid party instead.

Minnesota election news

Suspend your ebullience over Obama’s election last night, and consider instead the more depressing summary of the Minnesota state election results. It’s not all bad; we have a little bit of good news.

  • Our Democratic-Farmer-Labor party senator, Amy Klobuchar, won re-election handily.

  • The DFL retook the state house.

  • The DFL retook the state senate. We now have a DFL governor and legislature.

  • The constitutional amendment that would have required voters to show a photo ID failed. One more Republican attempt to restrict voter rights has been defeated.

  • The constitutional amendment that would have defined marriage as between one man and one woman only was defeated. Minnesota has no gay marriage ban.

  • Oh, yeah, Minnesota’s 8 electoral votes are all going to Obama.

But there was tragic news, as well.

  • Minnesota’s 6th district (not mine!) re-elected Michele Bachmann to congress.

Dammit.

Oh, well, it was a very close race. She’s showing signs of weakness, and we’ll give her the boot next time.

What happened?

I’ve been drinking Ardbeg and working on a talk while studiously avoiding all the news (my wife is watching it, but I’ve got headphones on to block the idiot chatter)…but twitter just exploded and I looked up to see CNN showing a mob of black children dancing, so I guess the election agony is finally over. Yay, Obama.

You’ve got 4 more years to secure a place in history as something other than a backpedaling compromiser. Push. Do something. Something other than killing foreigners, please.

‘Journalists’, feel some shame for your profession

So I checked the lead political story on CNN:

CNN poll: It’s a dead heat

Then I checked the lead political story on MSNBC:

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

Feeling desperate, I even checked Fox News:

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

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

Fuck the media. Only xkcd sees the truth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, look, a November surprise

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

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

Also, Satan.

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

Also, still Satan.

Romney is a very devout man

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

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

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

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

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

Remember this on election day

Look back on Mitt Romney in 2011:

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

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

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

KING: Including disaster relief, though?

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

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