Listen, I am far from any fan of the current narcissistic man-baby occupying the Presidency. In my opinion he is a conman, corrupt, dim-witted, mean, lying and morally reprehensible. The sooner he can be removed from this position and someone of general competence installed the better for this nation and yes for the world. The current pandemic illustrates perfectly why there is always someone to vote against and that the office of President of the Unites States of America is not place for On-The-Job training.

That said attacks on his weight are offensive and stupid. The man’s corruption and incompetence are a factor of his BMI. People who would consider themselves sensitive to marginalized communities will still, gleefully, share memes and gifs that are hurtful far beyond their target of the man-baby president. These attacks belittling him due to his size are no better and in my view equivalent to Trump’s mocking of a disabled reporter. Is that really the company you want to keep?

I also despise the food snobbery people direct at Trump and indirectly at others. Food is one of the purely personal pleasures in life. I’m not going to judge you by what you eat to make you happy and if that’s what you do to others then in that instance, you’re the asshole.

I’ll vote for a potted palm to get this cruel, petty, dishonest, conman out of the office but I will maintain my morality while I am doing it.

 

We are living through a global pandemic and to gather in large crowds is to take a risk to your life a risk that grows greater with your age. Wisely, many states, though not all, have issues orders and guidelines for the population to stay in their homes, to avoid close proximity to other people, and take other precautions to void becoming infected or passing the virus to others. 2020 is also an election year and recognizing the importance of both our electoral and health civic duties many states have postponed their primary and other elections while also instituting procedures allowing people to vote by mail ensuring that both duties are honored.

Except for Wisconsin.

Wisconsin held an election this week, April 7^th, 2020 to be precise. The Governor, Tony Evers, a Democrat, had called the legislature into a special session to deal with the electoral issue during their pandemic crisis. The Republican controlled body gaveled themselves into session and then immediately disbanded the session without taking any action or debate at all. They were equally unwilling to make voting by mail any easier even as the virus continues to spread throughout the nation and their state. Milwaukee normally has 180 polling station for an election, due to people fears of coming out and gathering in large numbers so many volunteer polls quit that the city was forced to conduct its election with just five polling stations.

The GOP sees this election as critical. The state is filling a spot on the Wisconsin Supreme court and if the conservative can win the seat it will cement a conservative majority on the panel. It is axiomatic for conservatives that low turnout elections benefit the Republican party and apparently, they are willing to do anything to depress turnout and win including placing the voting population in peril of a deadly infectious disease.

Here is Wisconsin Speaker of the Assembly Robin Voss and how he appeared at a polling station to advise the public it was ‘incredibly safe’ to show up to vote.

This portends badly for the November elections. The popular vote has been trending against the GOP for several elections and rather than adjusting their stands to conform with the public they would rather disenfranchise and kill voters. I hope this blows up in their face. I hope that in Wisconsin the voters brave enough and committed enough to show up and stand for hours with other people are the ones dedicated to seeing the perversion of democracy ended. Only time and the vote total will tell.

The Corona Crisis is upon us and it remains to be seen just how bad it will become. Indications are that the pandemic will continue to spread straining and stressing healthcare system around the world and here in the United States where just in time supply chains and significant dependence upon Chinese manufacturing create an additional economic danger to our already fragile systems.

It is possible that this may ‘burn out’ quickly and the effect may be less severe than they currently appear but it would not be wise to bet the farm upon such an outcome. People are modifying their behavior this past weekend I was at a small convention and the men in the restroom were more diligent about washing their hands than I can ever remember men behaving so.

For Trump the Corona Crisis represents a threat that cannot be defeated with the three Bs of his usual arsenal, Bullying, Bullshitting, or Blocking.

The virus is immune to taunts, nicknames, and intimidation so he cannot bully his way out of danger.

Trump’s propensity for bullshit works perfectly fine in the arena of politics where preferred reality is accepted over actual reality with regularity but emergency rooms are not spin rooms and no amount of clever language or outright lies will change a single infection to a healthy person. Viral Pneumonia doesn’t care what you told anyone, it will do what it does including spreading and killing.

The Senate Republicans have been Trump’s political protectors, covering up his crimes, blocking investigations, and transforming his guilt into innocence, but against a pandemic they are powerless. They cannot table the matter or refuse to take it and make it disappear by denying it airtime in the news cycle. People are going to get sick, people are going to die, and radio talk show hosts calling it a common cold will do nothing to change that reality.

If this burns out quickly and if the effects on the economy are brief and mild then Trump may escape through luck, but if the gets worse, if it returns stronger in the fall, then his golden ride may finally be over.

 

No, this is not an argument that the landscape of the general election favors Senator Sanders. If Sanders heads the ticket, I think this election will end up turning on a handful of votes in just a few states, much as the 2016 contest did ad that means it either candidate’s presidency is in the cards. What I want to expound on is why is the ground favorable for Sanders to win the nomination, what has made his candidacy viable at all.

The GOP unintendedly tilled and cultivated the ground for Trump for years before the 2016 election and I think that this was also a factor in the rise of Sanders.

Throughout the two terms of the Obama presidency one clear and consistent theme was that the GOP would do anything and everything to block, hinder, and undermine the Democrats in everything they did and everything they passed. The general thinking at the time, and it still holds true today, is that there is no electoral downside to playing an obstructionist role. That the electorate would only punish a party holding the presidency for failing to achieve things rather than notice the dedicated obstructionism. Electorally this has been proven to be fairly accurate. However, I think there are second order effects at play that many have failed to consider.

One of Joe Biden principal arguments for his election is that he can ‘work with Republicans,’ a plea to return to a sense of bipartisanship where the parties may differ but can set aside their differences to work for the common good. The problem is that there is zero evidence that the GOP is interested in that sort of arraignment and plenty of evidence, see the Obama years, arguing that the GOP be totally obstructionist to any Democratic administration.

Faced with this history and this likely future a common refrain from Democrats is that it is a fool’s errand to give any ground to the GOP on anything. Like Charlie Brown and Lucy, the roles are set and nothing, they believe, is going to change that. Given that starting position it makes logical sense to go with a candidate unwilling to compromise. Sanders of a rational reaction to the GOP obstruction. The thinking goes, they won’t work with us, they won’t respect any compromise, then we should just go for all out and not even bother with half measures.

Should Sanders will the White House, not as unlikely as some believe, the GOP will have played a major factor in

The news has reported that in addition to interfering in the US presidential election in favor of Trump the Russian effort is also working to elevated the chances of Sanders winning the Democratic contest for the nomination.

Trump responded to the reports that the Russians are assisting his re-election by dismissing his Director if National Intelligence and replacing him with an ‘acting’ Director reports out a line that is pleasing to his boss’s ears.

From the Sanders’ camp the reaction has varied from accusation that he information was leaked to damage him ahead of the Nevada contest, and if that was the objective it would seem to have failed, to familiar cries of ‘misinformation!’

It bears remembering that the Russians interfered on Trump behalf during the 2016 Primaries and also did the same for Sanders. Setting aside the question if the Russian government finds Trump easier to manipulate the choice of the candidates that the Russians support if quite consistent with this sort of operation.

The goal is chaos. The goal is conflict, using fractures that already exist in our society and culture to set us at each other’s throat. You cannot achieve that with middle of the road candidates but rather with people from the extremes, ideally with polar opposites set against each other. Which is exactly what Trump vs Sanders creates.

So what do you as a supporter of one of these two men do?

The absolute best thing you can do is be calm, be civil, and treat those on the opposing side with respect and courtesy. This is far from easy. I do not count myself as a Sanders supporter and I consider Trump to be a threat to our system of government. He is corrupt, he undermines and violates the rule of law, he exists only for his own enrichment and aggrandizement but that does mean I have to be nasty, cruel, or insulting to those who do not agree with me. I know conservatives who are willing to risk everything I listed above for their personal political objectives, be that gun, god, or gays. They are wrong in assessing the threat that Trump represents and while I will fight to defeat him in November but his supporters I will not disparage and I will not be a Russian asset in their attack on my country. I implore everyone to b the same. Be for Sanders but treat Trump supporters, Biden Supporters, and everyone else honorably and you will be doing your part in defending our country from Putin’s power play without compromising your principals.

It is clear that for Democratic voters the number one priority is defeating Donald Trump in this November’s general election. A great deal of analysis, anxiety, and argument has been devoted to the topic of which candidate has the best odds of achieving that goal. It is naturally a stressful proposition. There are no test runs, no objective measurements that can answer the question ahead of time. There will be one and only one election and the Democratic candidate will either win the required electoral votes or they will fail. People who insist a particular person is the only one that can win the election are engaged at the very least of motivated reasoning, finding the arguments and evidence that produced a desired result versus any sort of analysis that might produce an answer contrary to their already preferred outcome.

The 2016 election turned on less than 100,000 votes in just three states. The Democratic candidate gathered nearly three million more votes from the electorate but only the archaic electoral college decides the victory. If Hillary Clinton with 30 years of political baggage can outperform Trump when he was still principally an unknown, then any of the leading candidates in this cycle can win the White House. Trump has not enlarged his voting coalition and has no grown in the public’s approval. This election may turn on a relative handful of voters in a few key states. It is also possible that the election will not be close, between many people’s distrust of Hillary Clinton and the unwarranted opinion that her victory was a certainty the last elect may have well been lost by the voters who did not bother and who this year may not repeat that error.

I do have an opinion as two which two Democratic candidates are most likely to lose if it is a close election, the two polar opposites, Sanders and Bloomberg.

Sanders as the candidate runs the risk to activating the negative partisanship of Republican voters who are apathetic to Trump but still live in the cold war with its terror of Socialism. Sanders has repeatedly put forth the argument that his candidacy will energize new voters and expand the electorate but so far the numbers do not bear out that point of view. He is doing well but he is not crushing it. There are those who are certain that a Socialist candidate will go down to a crushing defeat, but I think partisanship is a more powerful force and example number one if the Presidency of Trump. Side note: The GOP since the 80s has decried every Democratic candidate and president as a ‘Socialist,’ and now that a self-described one has a real shot at winning the White House their overuse of that attack has blunted that particular sword.

Bloomberg presents the exact opposite danger from Sanders. The Democratic electorate has no taste for billionaires buying the election. With Bloomberg at the head of the ticket there is a very real chance that Democratic enthusiasm will be suppressed with voters staying home or writing in candidates out of protest. If the swing states are close those few voters could, as they did in 2016, by their inaction give the victory to Trump. The unresolved question here is which is the stronger force, the hatred of Trump or Bloomberg.