Ignore that presidential campaign over there

I don’t like Obama.

There. I said it. I think he’ll go down in history as a mediocre president — not a bad one, just one who didn’t change a flawed system at all, who was so focused on being moderate and compromising that there was no hope of any significant change. I also think his foreign policy is bloody-handed and disastrous, and if you’re interested in church-state separation and secular government, I’m sorry, but he’s had you all fooled. He’s not a closet atheist, but quite the opposite.

But next week, I’m going to go into the voting both and punch that ballot next to Obama’s name.

I’m not happy about it.

Here’s the problem: we’ve all been played. All of the focus is on the presidential election, in a winner-take-all two party system. And the presidential election is a distraction. It’s been reduced to a numbers game, a horse race where policies don’t matter, and all you have left to do is to pick one out of two. All the work has been done before you enter the voting booth, and that work is aimed at limiting your choices. So this time around, your choice is the evangelical Christian who brags about killing terrorists while making incremental improvements to the economy, or the Mormon robot who’s going to serve as a slave to the bankers and merchants of greed who destroy the economy, or nothing. So you try to pick the lesser of two evils.

I know what people will say. You have to vote on your principles, or nothing will change. When I just look at the issues, I agree: I ought to vote for Jill Stein, whose stand on just about everything agrees with mine. (Don’t tell me about Gary Johnson — I look at his positions and see a selfish moron who’d be worse than Romney). But Jill Stein isn’t going to win, and my vote would be thrown away, and worse, Jill Stein is throwing away her time and effort in a quixotic race that has already been decided. It will be one of two. The two are fixed. Third party candidates are a snare and an illusion.

I’m not saying that we’re doomed, though, just that the presidential race is the wrong place to effect change.

The right place is everywhere else. Maybe the primary campaigns would be better: we need to get candidates in place that don’t require us to hold our noses in order to vote for them. The Republican field is always a race to find the one candidate just crazy enough to satisfy a badly deranged base, while not so obviously crazy as to alienate everyone else, so forget them. The Democrats always seem to be looking for the moderate who won’t really change the system (that would be scary) and who will inspire just enough to squeak into office…but not inspire so much that people will wake up to our problems. I suspect that both parties will fundamentally resist change.

So maybe that’s not even the best place to work on fixing the election system. Especially in this election, the power of incumbency is so great that no one was even going to look seriously at an alternative to Obama.

You know where the elections really matter, where you really have a choice? At the local level. The Green Party is stupid to throw so much effort into a presidential campaign right now — they ought to be focused on building a base. I would vote for a Green for city council or district representative in a heartbeat. And once they’ve built a deep party structure, they become serious candidates for higher office, because they will have the backing of people doing good work on the ground.

This is the same advice we give to people fighting creationism. Run for local school boards, because that’s where you can make a difference. Our opponents know that; these small offices are packed with ideologically conservative Christians who can have an effect far greater than their numbers should allow. While you’re focused on who is running for president, they’ve placed a team of cretins on local government to stymie any progressive, rational efforts towards bettering the country.

Stein has served two terms as a town meeting representative in Lexington, Massachusetts, which is a good start. But we’d have been better served if she’d then moved up to a county or district office, instead of leaping for governor (failed) or president (doomed). She ran for the house of representatives, once, and lost…I’d rather she tried for that again. And I’d rather see Green Party candidates appearing all over the place, on zoning boards and city councils and school boards, rather than gambling on presidencies and governorships where they’ll preside over an army of Democrats and Republicans who’ll feel no loyalty at all to them.

So ignore the presidential campaign. We know we’re going to be stuck with the lesser of two evils, so just get it done. But what we people need to do next, and what we can do in this election, is vote everywhere else for third party candidates who better fit your values, and most importantly, donate and campaign for those candidates. Personally, I know that in the future my political donations (they aren’t much, I’m not a wealthy guy, so I’ll be realistic) will be aimed towards parties other than the Democrats. Any Greens looking for local office? Labor? Socialists? You can have my pennies. Democrats? Not until you acquire the vision to nominate real liberals and progressives. Until you stand for something other than not-Republican.

A bad way to start the morning

I’m sitting in O’Hare waiting for my connecting flight, and I haven’t had much sleep and I’m sweaty and rumpled and I’ve got that queasy feeling deep in my gut from a digestive tract that says, “hell with you, I’m shutting down anyway”, and I’m reading Jill Filipovic’s summary of all the idiotic things Republicans have said about rape. This is not a good combination. I’m going to be taking the stage at CSICon both pukey and pissed off.

Wait. That might just be exactly the right mood to be in.

Oh, jeez. Here’s another summary of Republican rape positions. I don’t know how anyone can vote for these horrible people.

One more reason I have no choice but to vote for Obama

He just dissed Ayn Rand.

Ayn Rand is one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we’d pick up. Then, as we get older, we realize that a world in which we’re only thinking about ourselves and not thinking about anybody else, in which we’re considering the entire project of developing ourselves as more important than our relationships to other people and making sure that everybody else has opportunity – that that’s a pretty narrow vision. It’s not one that, I think, describes what’s best in America. Unfortunately, it does seem as if sometimes that vision of a “you’re on your own” society has consumed a big chunk of the Republican Party.

I read some Rand when I was in my teens, too, and I also saw through it and gave it up when I was older. About 10 minutes older, when I threw that badly written piece of crap away.

Somebody give that man a geography lesson

Who in their right mind would trust Romney with foreign policy? In last night’s debate, he claimed that Syria was “Iran’s route to the sea”, which is just plain weird.

Making it even weirder, he has made this claim multiple times while campaigning, and has been told many times that it makes no sense, but he’s never bothered to look at a map?

Using MittLogic, Central America better watch out, because Canada is eyeing Mexico as its route to the sea, too.

My worry is that Romney is preaching his garbled version of geography to Americans who are about as ignorant of what a map looks like as he is.

Romney lied, again

I tuned out last night’s debate — my wife watched it, but I put on my headphones and listened to some industrial rock to drown out the drone. I knew I’d be able to get the highlights the next day.

And I did! Apparently Romney was asked about his role in hiring women, and he claimed to have worked hard to bring more women into leadership positions.

ROMNEY: Thank you. An important topic, and one which I learned a great deal about, particularly as I was serving as governor of my state, because I had the chance to pull together a cabinet and all the applicants seemed to be men.

And I — and I went to my staff, and I said, "How come all the people for these jobs are — are all men." They said, "Well, these are the people that have the qualifications." And I said, "Well, gosh, can’t we — can’t we find some — some women that are also qualified?"

And — and so we — we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet.

I went to a number of women’s groups and said, "Can you help us find folks," and they brought us whole binders full of women.

Nice story. Good for him. Except that it isn’t true.

What actually happened was that in 2002 — prior to the election, not even knowing yet whether it would be a Republican or Democratic administration — a bipartisan group of women in Massachusetts formed MassGAP to address the problem of few women in senior leadership positions in state government. There were more than 40 organizations involved with the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus (also bipartisan) as the lead sponsor.

They did the research and put together the binder full of women qualified for all the different cabinet positions, agency heads, and authorities and commissions. They presented this binder to Governor Romney when he was elected.

…

I will write more about this later, but for tonight let me just make a few quick additional points. First of all, according to MassGAP and MWPC, Romney did appoint 14 women out of his first 33 senior-level appointments, which is a reasonably impressive 42 percent. However, as I have reported before, those were almost all to head departments and agencies that he didn’t care about — and in some cases, that he quite specifically wanted to not really do anything. None of the senior positions Romney cared about — budget, business development, etc. — went to women.

Secondly, a UMass-Boston study found that the percentage of senior-level appointed positions held by women actually declined throughout the Romney administration, from 30.0% prior to his taking office, to 29.7% in July 2004, to 27.6% near the end of his term in November 2006. (It then began rapidly rising when Deval Patrick took office.)

Third, note that in Romney’s story as he tells it, this man who had led and consulted for businesses for 25 years didn’t know any qualified women, or know where to find any qualified women. So what does that say?

The man is great big smilin’ bag of lies, isn’t he?

You can tell a lot about a neighborhood by its…

…ads.

It’s another travel day for me — there have been too many of these lately, and no respite in sight — and I just now got off the road, the usual I94 to the Minneapolis/St Paul airport, and I noticed a remarkable change in the character of the billboards as I passed Albertville and entered the outer ring of middle class suburbs that surround the city. Suddenly, in addition to the usual billboards advertising gas, food, hotels, and the evils of abortion (seriously, people, don’t get too excited about those sporadic atheist signs, because Pro-Life Across America has saturated the rural Midwest, at least, with Smilin’ Baby ads), I saw jewelry stores, Colorado ski vacations, and cosmetic surgery ads everywhere. I had entered Michele Bachmann’s district.

The place was also full of billboards touting the perfidy of Amy Klobuchar (Democrat, don’t you know), urging me to vote for the anti-gay marriage amendment, and even more irritating, ads claiming that Minnesota is number one in voter fraud, and we must do something about it. The ad didn’t give specifics, but I wondered how many handfuls of cases it takes to reach #1.

What bugs me about those ads is their frothing rabid indignation at the thought that a few people, not enough to make any significant difference, might place a vote they are not entitled to…in the complete absence of any concern about the tens of thousands sanctioned Republican voter fraud might disenfranchise. But at least you can see where the priorities of Bachmann’s base lie.

Hypocrisy alert

Representative Scott DesJarlais of Tennessee is a fanatical Tea Party Republican who campaigns on his fanatical pro-life stance and his fanatical ‘family values’ who fanatically touts the importance of traditional marriage.

You know exactly where this is going, don’t you? I could just stop writing right here and you’d be able to fill in the rest of the story.

Yep, his marriage fell apart thanks to his philandering, and now we have a recording of a phone call with his ex-mistress in which he’s urging her impatiently to get an abortion. The only thing we’re missing so far is a gay fling and voting “yes” on a Democratic health care bill to confirm his demonic status.

Not that it matters. He’s still leading in his election campaign. The Tea Baggers don’t actually give a damn about their so-called values — you don’t have to live them if you just shout them angrily enough.

Give me more politicians with this kind of passion

I’m off to another long day of meetings, but at least I begin inspired by Julia 'badass' Gillard. This is so awesome.

Please. Someone tell Barack Obama to sit down and watch this speech a few dozen times until he realizes that this is the tone he must take in his debates with Romney. Gillard not only addresses endemic misogyny, but rebukes Tony Abbott for the actions of his whole party: “Has he taken any responsibility for the conduct of other members of his party?”