US POLITICS SPRING 2011: Let's just call off this country.

so glad ego trip is back in the game

he's gettin SO FUCKIN COOL just in time for you slugs to vote for him again

Not much of a drinker, but if I get my work done early, I've sometimes pop two NyQuil capsules and then jelly-belly my way around the office, giving people hugs and whistling "Patience" by G'n'R. There's this one guy I detest, though, and once I found his chair empty so I just gurgled up a nice one and spat on it. Immediately afterwards I got paranoid and rubbed it into the upholstery and walk- sprinted away. As I wiped my finger on my sock I bitterly realized that the whole process probably resulted in me getting more spit on my clothes than on his. Hmmm. I don't want to physically assault him; trying to chip away at him psychologically wont work - he's one of those people so removed from any social loop that nothing offends him (Example: Me: "You're wearing neon yellow suspenders and a sweater your gramma knitted you and your fly is undone you dumb bastard." Him: "Well I'm SOOOOORRY...I guess I don't conform to your standards of "COOOL" and "FASHION", hmph!").
I think I'm just gonna steal his fucking stapler.
-- Ramosi (olafsonski...), February 1st, 2002.

Sadly, that 5 to 4 Supreme Court verdict on behalf of corporations will likely be repeated in the Wallmart case.

x-post- how about this line in that Presidentin' While Black blogpost:

I don't understand how you validate the extremists in the "other" party while always scornfully chiding the so-called extremists (ahem, perhaps actual progressives?) in your own.

Not that it makes sense to suggest that most "progressives" are somehow the leftwing equivalent of birthers, but in my dream world Obama would acknowledge the House Progressive Caucus (and its budget proposal) and others and try to work with them and not just attend fundraisers with Goldman Sachs types. Alas, I will be one of those dupes Morbs rails against and will hold my nose and vote for him again.

Do you live in a swing district? If not, you don't have to vote for him.

well, swing state

even i'm not voting for him at this point.

(i live in oregon though so i can do whatever i want and it doesn't matter)

a token liberal district in Virginia(a state with a Republican governor and a right-wing attorney-general who is challenging the health care law, which went Dem for first time since LBJ last time)

so you're cool then.

My state is so much fun: our latest experiment in lunacy.

Virginia sorta matters

As much as I play mr. 'lol third parties' people in safe states should do whatever they want with their pres vote - I mean it's statistically unlikely but not impossible that alfred's Florida vote swings the election, but essentially impossible that Morbs' New York vote swings the pres election, cause when New York is in play the GOP has already won.

so yeah there is a point where 'your vote doesn't matter' even theoretically

I want swing-staters to withhold their duopoly votes if they plan to save America; everything else is meaningless. If I vote in 2012 and there's no one better than Cynthia McKinney, I will simply skip voting for the CorpoCapo office.

and I want a pony

if you vote for me, I will give iatee a pony

it's not about ponies, it's about having one scintilla more of personal consistency when you refuse to participate in a mass charade. Things are going to have to change from below the POTUS level first. (As I've said before, I don't believe they will. Tra la.)

how come this

I want swing-staters to withhold their duopoly votes if they plan to save America; everything else is meaningless. If I vote in 2012 and there's no one better than Cynthia McKinney, I will simply skip voting for the CorpoCapo office.

is tiresome & old, but this

and I want a pony

is fresh material?

it's a pretty young pony

also DJP U O iatee 2x pony, I have written your name in for prez in both '04 & '08

I am not gonna eat the pony aero

I didn't win, though

unless I'm elected, I won't have access to the resources necessary to implement my "give iatee a pony" platform

actually maybe I will eat one if I get two

I do not support this Eat A Pony program, I thought the whole point was for iatee to demonstrate the viability of alt transportation modes by riding a pony to work

wait, I meant a pony keg

why are all politicians so full of lies

ponies > mules > "be adult and vote for assholes"

iatee to djp: "you cannot front on your constituents by sending this to their doors and demanding the acknowledge that you made good on your campaign pledges"

http://a2.l3-images.myspacecdn.com/images02/51/56589730fc0d4596bcdbf7f3b3a65149/l.jpg

The 2000 election was enough reason for me never to stunt vote (or not vote) ever again. I mean, I'm in one of those states that they just mark blue before counting has even begun. There's no question where Illinois will go. But I'm a big fan of amassing as many "surplus" popular votes as possible, should the other side try to pull a fast one. Again.

lots of new voter restriction laws happening on a state level

er, being proposed, for the time being

even in 'safe' states; there's one in the works up here

http://minnesotaindependent.com/80819/republicans-introduce-voter-id-constitutional-amendment

perhaps a lot of democrats will have the choice to stay home in protest made for them!

in the Things More Interesting than Republicrat Presidents Dept, Taibbi talks to Spitzer on sweetheart loans for Wall St wives:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/talking-real-housewives-of-wall-street-with-eliot-spitzer-20110422

is minnesota still considered safe?

Minnesota hasn't been safe for 6 years or something ridiculous like that

i was thinking today it would be fun if we had a king or a queen so we could have a royal wedding

Sadly, that 5 to 4 Supreme Court verdict on behalf of corporations will likely be repeated in the Wallmart case.

Nice to know that sucking up to corporations trumps states' rights federalism for these guys.

My state is so much fun: our latest experiment in lunacy.

― My mom is all about capital gains tax butthurtedness (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn),

I haven't shelled out for an online Times pass, so clicking on this link counted against my 20 free ones for the month. Might be time to start ID-ing links in posts as NYTimes articles? I would have asked for Cliffs instead of clicking on it if I'd realized it was a Times article.

if you ever hit your limit just go up to the address bar, delete everything after the "?" character, and reload

is it really that easy after they talked it up like that

yeah there are so many ways around it that I think the goal is just to make you feel guilty

and hey that worked for the music industry, right?

haha

i think their idea - probably correct - is that the percentage of people who will think to do that, or know to do it, will be more than offset by the amount of money they'll be making from everyone else. in a way it makes everybody happy. the geeks - who might complain the loudest - still get everything for free, and everybody else has to cough up.

if you ever hit your limit just go up to the address bar, delete everything after the "?" character, and reload

― 40% chill and 100% negative (Tracer Hand), Thursday, April 28, 2011 9:48 AM (8 minutes ago)

cool, TY TH

I believe if you use a diff browser u get another 20.

anyway in the perennial people who think voting for obama is an unacceptable capitulation vs. people who think not voting for obama is an irresponsible sulk debate i am pretty much on the first side and would say that it's not really about being so ideologically pure you have impossible expectations, it's about the obama administration not meeting the ones you had.

like, anyone of national political prominence is obligated to corporations to the point of employment and thus we're not going to get anything else anytime soon in terms of deference to "wall street", but i'll still vote for one of these guys if they seem like they'll offer tinkery social reforms--reproductive rights etc (which is pretty much all the american "left's" accomplished since 1964)--or like they'd offer some kind of opposition to the DoD's decadent-imperial-phase surveillance-state domestic-counterinsurgency Vision For America (although like i recognize that we are small and at the mercy of powerful forces and everybody's gotta Ride The Beast or w/ever). obama's obsessed with the strategy of political concession so there go the social reforms and when someone asked him if the conditions under which bradley manning was being held were appropriate he said "the pentagon has assured me that they are" so there goes the other thing. plus i mean i am not a "scotus" guy and i don't know to what extent this was in obama's hands but the justice department seems to just be plowing on in its rush to recognize powerful sociopathic robots as protected-class human citizens. so it is not all that fun to vote for him anymore, and the short-term worst-case of a republican being in office for four years is not as bad as the long-term worst case of this kind of "centrism" continuing to be as far left as this country's government is willing to go because it gets "realistic results".

BUT ALSO i am pretty confident at this point of his winning a second term so there's that too.

obama's obsessed with the strategy of political concession

this, succinctly, is my biggest issue with Obama

Except for a depressing article I read six or seven weeks ago, I haven't heard much about Obama's progress in appointing federal judges – I can't believe an adjunct professor of constitutional law doesn't understand the importance of preserving your legacy. I'm reading now about how Eisenhower, no lawyer, personally interviewed and vetted federal judge appointees because he wanted to preserve Brown.