The Bitchy Pundit

That is the question.

I’ve heard lots of opinions on this, and you won’t be surprised to learn that I have some thoughts.

First, I’m going to start with what Mueller says (emphasis mine), “The conclusion that Congress may apply the obstruction laws to the President’s corrupt exercise of the powers of office accords with our constitutional system of checks and balances and the principle that no person is above the law.”

That was page 220 of the report. Mueller clearly stated that Trump was corrupt, and that he believes that only congress has the power to deal with it.

I believe that congress needs to start the impeachment process after they have Mueller testify before them in regard to his report. I think it’s important for the American people to hear from Mueller exactly what he found. I also have a suspicion that Barr may have imposed a time constraint on Mueller in order to help Trump. There are too many things that weren’t addressed in this report: Cambridge Analytica; Trump’s server that was only communicating with Alpha Bank; Eric Prince. There are several others, but you get the point.

Mueller makes clear in the report, that he couldn’t establish collusion because of all of the obstruction: the use of encrypted messaging; the deletion of emails; the destruction of evidence. I think it’s important to have him lay all of that out for everyone to hear. If he was given a deadline by Barr, that’s also something we need to hear, as it would be clear evidence that the obstruction continues.

Why do I think impeachment is crucial? Because if we don’t impeach, we don’t have a democracy. We didn’t investigate and prosecute the Bush administration for their crimes, and now we have Trump. Every time the rule of law isn’t imposed, our democracy disintegrates. The decision of whether to impeach or not can’t be a political calculation because that’s exactly how you get a banana republic.

I’m going to go ahead and address all of the political calculations I’ve heard in favor of not impeaching anyway, even though my key point stands. First let me start with the Clinton comparisons. I have issues with this on so many levels, starting with the fact that making that comparison furthers the republican framing that they’re the same. They’re not remotely the same, and you should stop claiming that they are. Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about an affair. We’re already two fucking affairs and two cover ups into Trump and no one gives a shit. We didn’t give a shit that Clinton lied about his personal life then, and no one seems to give a shit that Trump is lying about his personal life now (myself included, cause I’m consistent that way). This is about working with a foreign government to manipulate our elections and then covering up those crimes.

When you make (or allow) the Clinton comparison, you’re helping republicans in furthering the “both sides are the same” narrative they so desperately need. That’s how you get a disaffected electorate that doesn’t bother to show up to vote. STOP IT! This kind of short term thinking is why democrats need to run preternaturally charismatic candidates like Obama and Clinton in order to win, while republicans win with human garbage like George W Bush and Donald Trump.

If you insist in blowing up the electorate and warping the rhetoric by making the Clinton comparisons, I’d like to point out that you’re doing it all wrong. For one thing, Bill Clinton’s approval ratings were never as low as Trump’s for any sustained period of time. He never stayed under 50% for more than five months. Trump has never even sustained a 45% (his high) approval rating for more than a week. So right off the bat, you’re making an apples to horseshoes comparison. Secondly, republicans were very shrewd in impeaching Clinton and you missed it. They weren’t interested in ending the last year of Clinton’s presidency. They were interested in damaging the democratic party, and that’s exactly what they did since republicans swept the next eighteen years of election cycles either in congress, local and state races or the presidency. Democrats lost nearly 1,000 seats just while Obama was in office. If your argument is, “we can’t impeach Trump because look at what happened to Clinton”, you’re making a completely backward case. Forcing America to talk about Bill Clinton’s sex life for a year caused Al Gore to run away from him, thereby costing him an election he should have handily won. I promise you that republicans don’t remotely regret impeaching Clinton and that they would do it again in a hot minute, and they should. It was a giant win for them.

The next argument I hear is that impeaching Trump will make him so popular that he will definitely win the 2020 election. That is pure conjecture, based in literally nothing, and it’s not a point to be taken seriously (see the Trump approval rating link above). If we’re going to do the utterly baseless conjecture for craven political calculation thing, then here’s what my crystal ball sees: If democrats don’t impeach Trump, then a lot of people will stay home because it will seem like there’s no difference between the two parties.

How’s that for rectally generated political analysis? Was that as good for you as it was for me?

I never realized how much easier it is to talk politics out your ass! Turns out that all of these years of doing research and looking at historical context was a total waste of time. I should have just been making “observations” based on literally nothing this whole time, because people apparently find that more compelling than methodically building an argument to support my perspective.

But let’s go back to my central point: The decision of whether to impeach or not can’t be a political calculation because that’s exactly how you get a banana republic. And that’s it. That’s the entirety of the reason why we should leverage the checks and balances written in our constitution to preserve what’s left of our democracy.

 

Disgusting!

Puh-leeeze. This is the narrative that the establishment democrats are going to peddle in order to smear Bernie. I think it’s a terrible mistake both morally, and as a strategy.

Let’s start with the strategic error. They’re pushing the republican narrative that democrats hate people for being rich. Not only is that bullshit, but it sets republicans up to take the opposite position: loving someone simply for being rich (even if they’re not willing to prove they’re rich). Republicans worship wealth and power so much that they don’t care when that wealth and power is made at their expense. It’s a wholly irrational position, just like loathing someone simply for being rich would be. That would not be the position of the vast majority of democrats, although I fear that it will be soon thanks to what the establishment is trying to do to Bernie. I don’t hate rich people just because they’re rich. I hate it when rich people don’t pay their fair share in taxes. I hate it when rich people game the system in order to take our tax dollars (in the form of subsidies) to add to their already obscene wealth. Nobody hates Steve Jobs for being rich because his wealth came from making things that people wanted to buy. I’m still pissed at him for not paying his damned taxes and robbing the social security trust fund by paying himself in capital gains, but I never hated him for being rich. Nobody hates Warren Buffet. He’s a wholly self made billionaire who didn’t make his fortune on the backs of other people.

I’m going to veer off course for a minute to say that I don’t believe that any society should allow billionaires to happen. Billionaires are toxic to a society because they can’t spend a big enough percentage of their money to actually help an economy. Millionaires on the other hand, are great for societies and I’m all for creating more of them. Millionaires are in that sweet spot of having enough money to spend on significant amounts of consumer goods and investing just the right amount to help seed businesses. But millionaires aren’t rich enough to play fast and loose with their investments, since it can all disappear overnight. They are not (for example) rich enough to create mortgage backed securities or naked credit default swaps. I believe that our tax code should be designed to stop anyone from becoming a billionaire, just like it was for nearly forty years. We need a top tax rate of 90% not only to prevent billionaires from happening, but also to force reinvestment in American companies. There’s no point in looting a company if you’re going to have to pay 90% of what you loot back to the government.

Back to Bernie. He made a couple of million dollars by writing books that people want to read. QUELLE HORREUR! You want to know what his tax returns actually show? That he’s an honest politician. Thirty years in congress and until two years ago, he didn’t bring in any money that he didn’t earn in his paycheck. How much is Mitch McConnell worth, and why? How about Dianne Feinstein? Can anyone explain to me how she and her defense industry executive husband are worth $94 million dollars? Bernie doesn’t have any significant income from investments because in thirty years, he didn’t steal enough from you to invest. That’s what his tax returns show, and anyone who tries to spin it another way is a partisan hack.

And the charges of hypocrisy against Bernie are laughable. If Bernie had changed a single one of his positions in order to grow his new found wealth, then he would be a hypocrite and I would be leading the charge in pointing out his hypocrisy. You wanna know who built the middle class in America by betraying his class? FDR. He was a really fucking rich guy who shanked his friends by giving the working class The New Deal.

I’m going to let you in on a secret: I haven’t decided who I’m voting for yet, and probably won’t until after we’ve seen a few debates and some fully formed platforms. I have some hard “NOs” and I’m starting to form a short list, but most of the candidates are on my “maybe” list until I see some detailed agenda items from them. Bernie, who I voted for in the last primary (check my FB or Twitter feeds from July – November 2016 before you get your panties in a bunch) is on my short list. He has a fully baked platform (which includes six different proposals for paying for Medicare For All) that addresses most of my priorities. The fact that he took 43% of the votes in the last primary with no money, no comb, and no tailor demonstrates that he’s very viable, as do his individual contributor numbers from this year. But for some reason (which I’m working out) I find myself looking for reasons to cross him off my short list. I will expand on that when I publish my vetting piece on him in the next week, but that’s where I am right now. So far, no one has come up with anything empirical to help me cross him off my list. And frankly, every nonsense charge that is hurled at him, the more convinced I become that there aren’t any substantive reasons not to support him.

Until that happens, I would be satisfied if democrats could just resist the urge to permanently become the party that hates rich people who earned their money the honest way, just because of how much they earned and not because of how they earned it. This is a position that will stick for decades. It’s short sided, simple minded, and is being created just for political expedience.

You won’t be surprised to learn that I have some thoughts. Thoughts that I deliberated, challenged, challenged again, and then formed.

I want to start by sharing my thoughts on Assange as a person. To bottom line it: he’s not a good guy. He is a narcissist with some serious delusions of grandeur. Like James Comey and Michael Avenatti, he fancies himself the arbiter of all that is true and righteous. That always takes someone down a bad road, and they inevitably get themselves into trouble. But how I feel about him as a person is a separate issue from how I feel about his arrest.

On principal, I’m all for WikiLeaks and organizations like WikiLeaks. Exposing the dirty little secrets of governments around the world is, in the main, a good thing. If we had a WikiLeaks in the early 50s when the CIA was working with MI6 to install the Shah in Iran, the situation in the whole of the middle east would be very different (in a good way) right now.

As with all things, principal and practice seldom align. Assange went horribly, horribly wrong when he picked a team in our (or any) election and started using his platform to affect the outcome. Dumping 40,000 utterly worthless Clinton campaign emails on the day we learned of Trump’s pussy grabbing had no journalistic value whatsoever. There was literally no there there. I know, because I skimmed all of them. 50% – 70% of those emails were daily press clippings. Yawn. Then there was some shit talk about Bernie, and a risotto recipe. There was no news and very little “dirt”. The only purpose of that dump was to sponge up a week or a month’s worth of news cycles with distortions and flat out lies, and to deflect from Trump’s issues.

That was the day that Assange and WikiLeaks turned into yet another craven propaganda outlet. It’s basically Breitbart now.

But here’s the thing: in order to protect a free press, we need to accept the fact that with honest journalism comes a significant percentage of propaganda and lies. You really can’t have one without the other. Protecting the press means swallowing some bitter pills. I can’t think of anything more important to our democracy than protecting and advocating for a truly free press. The reality of the situation is that in doing so, we have to protect scumbags like Julian Assange. Let me be clear: I don’t think of Assange as a journalist. He practices precisely no journalistic standards and has no interest in providing context or verifying his sources. I think of him as journalist-adjacent. His proximity to journalism means that he must be protected in order to give journalists all the room they need in order to bring us the news.

The charges that have been brought against Assange are dangerous and I can’t bring myself to root for a conviction, no matter how despicable I think he is. This is about playing the long game, and the short term satisfaction isn’t worth the potential damage a conviction might do to the first amendment.

I will say this though: I took immense pleasure in seeing that Assange, who is a couple of years younger than me, looks at least twenty years older than I do. By the end of this whole thing, he’s going to look like The Doctor in the Doctor Who episode when The Master aged him like 8,000 years. That makes me happy, and it doesn’t hurt my long term self interest so YAY!

I’ve got my already bitchy panties in a bunch this morning so I need to rant. We had a story a couple of days ago of a woman, Lucy Flores who described an inappropriate touching incident with Joe Biden that made her feel very uncomfortable. Here’s what she said:

“As I was taking deep breaths and preparing myself to make my case to the crowd, I felt two hands on my shoulders. I froze. “Why is the vice-president of the United States touching me?”

I felt him get closer to me from behind. He leaned further in and inhaled my hair. I was mortified. I thought to myself, “I didn’t wash my hair today and the vice-president of the United States is smelling it. And also, what in the actual fuck? Why is the vice-president of the United States smelling my hair?” He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head. My brain couldn’t process what was happening. I was embarrassed. I was shocked. I was confused. There is a Spanish saying, “tragame tierra,” it means, “earth, swallow me whole.” I couldn’t move and I couldn’t say anything. I wanted nothing more than to get Biden away from me. My name was called and I was never happier to get on stage in front of an audience.

By then, as a young Latina in politics, I had gotten used to feeling like an outsider in rooms dominated by white men. But I had never experienced anything so blatantly inappropriate and unnerving before. Biden was the second-most powerful man in the country and, arguably, one of the most powerful men in the world. He was there to promote me as the right person for the lieutenant governor job. Instead, he made me feel uneasy, gross, and confused. The vice-president of the United States of America had just touched me in an intimate way reserved for close friends, family, or romantic partners — and I felt powerless to do anything about it.

Our strange interaction happened during a pivotal moment in my political career. I’d spent months raising money, talking to voters, and securing endorsements. Biden came to Nevada to speak to my leadership and my potential to be second-in-command — an important role he knew firsthand. But he stopped treating me like a peer the moment he touched me. Even if his behavior wasn’t violent or sexual, it was demeaning and disrespectful. I wasn’t attending the rally as his mentee or even his friend; I was there as the most qualified person for the job.”

I added the emphasis on that last paragraph. Lucy Flores never claimed that this was a sexual assault. She is describing an incident that she felt was inappropriate and then sharing how it made her feel. And she’s been attacked relentlessly by “liberals” on Twitter for it. Claims that she’s a “Bernie Bro” trying to hurt Biden because she wants to help Bernie, pictures of her with her hands on Bill Clinton have been posted with claims that perhaps she’s the sexual assaulter, and a picture of her with Bernie where he has his hand on her shoulder. It’s all been quite despicable.

I earnestly don’t understand how so called liberals can behave this way. These people are dismissing this woman’s feelings because they’re still fighting proxy wars over the 2016 primary. I can’t think of a more craven reason to demean a woman than that. At least Trump supporters aren’t claiming to be anything but neanderthals, proudly standing behind Trump, Kavanaugh, and Roy Moore. But these people are the ones who claim to be “woke” supporters of #metoo.

Now there’s another woman with another story. Amy Lappos has a similar story that I won’t get into because you can look it up and that’s not the point of this post. I do want to share one quote that I think is important from her, “Biden’s statement in response to Lucy’s article was not only disturbing, it was disgusting.” This is apparently what prompted her to tell her own story.

She’s not going to be the last. Wanna know how I know? Because we’ve seen Biden being too touchy with our own lying eyes. Google “Biden creepy” with a custom date range that starts any time and ends before Lucy Flores came out with her story. You will find several videos. He’s got a history here.

Am I saying that this should disqualify him from being president? No. Am I saying that no one should vote for him because of it? No. You need to make that decision for yourself. But you have to do it honestly, and by acknowledging that Biden is sometimes an inappropriate toucher. He’s just a little too familiar and friendly in his touching for some people. You can’t deny that. Do I think this rises to the level of sexual assault? I personally don’t, but I certainly wouldn’t dismiss anyone who feels that it does.

The truth is that I think that some of this is generational, and that Biden genuinely doesn’t feel as if he’s done anything inappropriate. But that’s my problem: his inability to (after several women have spoken out over the decades) acknowledge that his barometer isn’t the only relevant barometer in gauging these situations. He doesn’t seem to even be considering the idea that his behavior makes some people feel uncomfortable. That troubles me.

None of this may trouble you, and that’s a perfectly reasonable position to defend. But attacking every woman who has had an uncomfortable interaction with Biden because you don’t want to defend that position in an intellectually honest way is just flat out despicable.

Sadly, there seem to be a lot of despicable “liberals” running around who are only “woke” when it’s politically convenient for them.

I’ve been seeing tons of posts on social media this morning about a poll that shows that only 29% of Americans believe that Trump has been cleared of wrongdoing, 32% say Trump has been exonerated on obstruction….blah, blah, blah. This is all pointless speculation, and it’s not even based in the Mueller report.

I have no idea what Mueller found, or didn’t find. None. The only concrete thing I learned from the Barr summary is that Mueller didn’t find enough to establish that Trump colluded with Russia to win an election. But that leaves me with more questions than answers. The top-of-mind question for me is how do Fredo Jr’s emails regarding the meeting in Trump Tower not clearly demonstrate collusion? I can accept that they may not, but I need to understand the reasoning there because that always looked like the smoking gun to me. Perhaps I have a fundamental misunderstanding of the law. Perhaps Mueller is looking for a much higher bar. I don’t know. I need to see his report in order to understand where my assumptions went wrong.

I have thoughts about what the report may contain, but those thoughts are (if I’m being honest with myself) purely speculative and conveniently bolster what I’ve believed for the past two years. I do not know what is in the Mueller report and neither do you.

It’s time to stop speculating about exoneration or guilt. The work has been done and with the glaring lack of sworn testimony by anyone in the Trump family, it seems to be a fairly thorough investigation. I am still at a loss as to how this investigation could be complete without the subjects of the investigation giving testimony, but here we are.

We know that we have nearly two years worth of investigative materials to look through. Let’s look through all of that before making assertions. How’s that for an insane idea? I think it’s reasonable to assume that Mueller found a lot that he referred to other prosecutors. It’s not reasonable to insist that you know what the nature of those referrals is. It’s also not reasonable to insist that we have a “total exoneration”. If that were true, Trump would have used his FEMA alert powers to send the full report to all of our phones in lieu of any summary by Barr.

My point is that we just need to focus our efforts on releasing the report to the public. Let’s dispense with the speculation. We need to see the report. Congress has not even seen the report, which is the first step. The truth is that we may never see the full Mueller report, or even a redacted version. The Nixon report wasn’t released to the public until forty years after it was completed. But we need to push for making the full report public because by pressing that issue might get congress an unreacted version in the next few months. That’s realistically the best we can hope for.

At the very least, I would like to see the executive summary that Mueller almost assuredly included with the report. An executive summary that Barr chose to use one (or part of one) sentence from.

Yes, I have many questions, but I don’t have any answers and claiming that I (or you) do just makes us sound ridiculous. Let’s keep our eyes on the prize and get the full report to congress. We can figure out what happens after that.

Not surprisingly, I have a couple of thoughts about this. First off, the guy is a total clown with no plans for anything, except for his plan of not paying more in taxes than he’s paying now. This idiot was given the privilege of getting a huge amount of air time for no other reason, other than the fact that he’s really rich. Before the Iowa caucus in 2016, Bernie couldn’t get on TV to save his life, and he’s been in congress for over twenty-five years. But because this clown has money, he’s on every fucking show that he deems worth his time because everyone was willing to give him air time. Literally the only thing he said was that he wanted to do some serious tax reform. When asked if he favored the republican mythology that cutting taxes for the obscenely wealthy, or the democratic plan of raising taxes a tiny bit to create more jobs, he didn’t want to answer “hypotheticals”. Someone needs to explain the definition of hypothetical to this clown. Only a billionaire would be treated as a serious candidate, when they have only one issue and no idea what their approach to that issue is.

So shame one you again, media for elevating an empty suit. I’ve never seen a more disastrous start to a presidential campaign than this one. Last week he retweeted an article that referred to Kamala Harris as “shrill” and Elizabeth Warren as “Fauxcahontas” and commented that the piece was “thoughtful analysis”. That’s “thoughtful analysis”? Maybe to an 8 year old. Hey Howard, let me apply your standards of thoughtful analysis to you: you’re an assface. In the limited scope of his intellect, that was downright Kierkegaardian in its depth. Moron. He said he liked Ronald Reagan because Reagan never took his jacket off in the oval office. He did, but even if he hadn’t, are you that fucking shallow in your assessments of presidents? Oh wait, Fauxcahontas. I forgot, you already answered that question for us.

That said, I’m glad he announced he’s thinking about running. This shines a light on what the democratic donor class looks like: liberal, unless it costs them a nickel. Sure, you can gay marry or exercise dominion over your own reproductive rights because that doesn’t cost them anything. But if you want guaranteed health coverage, you’re a far left extremist and must be stopped.

They like to crow on about how they’re self made without realizing that every opportunity they had to succeed was paid for by a top marginal tax rate of 91%, at a time when US corporations paid nearly 50% of all the taxes in the country. They now pay 9%. They’re all fucking oblivious to the fact that opportunity doesn’t happen organically: it’s paid for. Hey Howard Schultz: the projects you grew up in were paid for by rich people who preceded you. Oh, and let’s not forget about all of the sweetheart deals you made with different cities who subsidized your mediocre coffee chain through tax incentives. Michael Fucking Dell: go ahead and try to start your company in Somalia, where taxpayers didn’t pay for the infrastructure you relied on to ship your products.

I am so fucking tired of these douchebags with delusions of grandeur and stratospheric greed. They are all nothing without the country that gave them the opportunities they had, and it’s time they start ponying up to pay for those opportunities for future generations because insuring that your kids grow up to be miscreant ne’er do wells who don’t ever do anything productive because they got to keep all of your money isn’t the future of this country.

Now onto another interesting part about Shultz announcement: the reaction from the democratic electorate. I find this, “You’re going to get Trump elected again!!!!” rallying cry from die hard democrats puzzling. If you’re “still with her”, love the establishment, think that Bernie should die already because he’s “not a real democrat”, why are you telling everyone that democrats can’t win unless there are no other options?

I don’t believe that democrats are awesome, I like Bernie because he’s too liberal for democrats, and I recognize that establishment democrats sold out the middle class. I wrote a piece on the day after the election in November describing why I believe democrats are fucked. I’m the one that should be freaking out about Howard Schultz’ candidacy. So why are the die hard democrats the ones freaking out? You can’t be freaking out and not want to change anything. That doesn’t make any goddamned sense, and republicans are right (for the wrong reasons) to mock you for your reaction.

You guys really need to make up your minds: either everything is great and democratic establishment candidates rule or it’s time to shake things up in a major way, a la AOC and Bernie Sanders. And you should know that democratic sell-out, and former Obama deputy press secretary, Bill Burton is on team Schultz. He hasn’t actually changed teams or policies. He just has a guy without a “D” next to his name this time around.

Please let me know what you decide, but don’t keep talking out of both sides of your mouth. You sound ridiculous.

I’m going to keep this short and sweet. NO, Ana Navarro, it is not incumbent on democrats to nominate a candidate that you and Bill Kristol approve of. You approved of George W Bush, and never admitted that you made a huge mistake. You already voted for a potted plant (or four), so you should fuck right off with your commentary on the democratic primary.

You don’t get to tell democrats what to do, just because you helped make your party so toxic that you can’t take them anymore. Stay in your fucking lane. You are never allowed to comment on anything other than the republican party. Not ever.

As you know, I’m committed to vetting each and every candidate who announces they’re running in the democratic presidential primary. I plan on vetting every single one with an open mind, and with as much research and information as I can get my hands on.

I am not trying to tell anyone who to vote for. My goal is to provide my readers and followers with accurate information with which to make informed decisions, and to hopefully provide a platform (via my Facebook page) for respectful, intellectually honest debate. With that in mind, I will be posting informative (and most importantly, honest) articles as I find them on each candidate.

These blog posts will serve as aggregate depositories for what I find on each candidate, so I will be updating them as more information becomes available.

That said, let’s start with Kamala Harris. I’ve spent a few days (I’m nowhere near done) looking at her record as a prosecutor. I’m focusing on her record as a prosecutor because she was elected to the senate in 2016, in a minority party situation where democrats are up against Trump. I don’t expect any glaring stand-out votes from any democratic senator under these circumstances, and I didn’t find any with her. I am however, looking for signs of true leadership qualities. In other words, I’m looking for instances where a candidate from the senate has led the party in a good direction, rather than simply followed the pack or followed on an issue where popular opinion leads our legislators. Bernie Sanders is a great example of what I mean: he led on Medicare for all in 2016, breaking from literally every member of the senate. Because of this, nearly all of the candidates who have announced so far for 2020 are supporting Medicare for all. By contrast, Hillary might have been the last person in America to support Marriage Equality. I want a politician who will lead on important issues, rather than to join a bandwagon. That’s just an important quality for me.

At any rate, I didn’t really find and stand out leadership instances from Harris’ short tenure in the senate, with the exception of her performance in questioning Jeff Sessions and Brett Kavanaugh during their confirmation hearings. She did a great job in both instances but I expected that she would because this was a time for her prosecutorial chops to shine. I will say that I find people who have emotionally committed to supporting Harris simply because she was mean to Brett Kavanaugh to be pretty childish. Yes, she was mean to a guy who deserved it, but what else? Well, that’s what I’m trying to learn.

I will say that I’m not generally predisposed to getting excited about prosecutors running for higher office because I understand what they have to do in order to earn the ever important “tough on crime” bona fides they must earn to get reelected. So I did start off with that bias. That said, I’m pleasantly surprised by what I’m finding out about Harris’ record.

Her record is very mixed, to the point of being a little ‘split personality disorder’. I’m not going to go into everything because I happened to (this is rare and probably won’t happen with the other candidates) find an article that takes a very deep dive into her record, and makes fair points about the good and the bad. I’d rather spend my time doing more research than typing out my version if a well balanced piece, so please take the time to read that whole article.

I will point out one facet of her record that resonates in a very positive way for me. She ran on an anti-capital punishment platform. In her first year as San Francisco DA, she got thrown a major test of her platform promises: there was a cop killer case. Everyone, including Diane Feinstein (I’m not a fan) had their pitchforks out, loudly demanding the death penalty. Harris stood up to that immense pressure and succeeded in sparing this killer’s life. This is exactly what I was referring to in regard to the leadership qualities that matter to me. Unfortunately, she wasn’t consistent in her anti-death penalty stance (please read that article!) so there is definitely a major mixed bag situation with her. But, she’s been trying to thread a very difficult needle as a prosecutor with aspirations for higher office. Granted, she’s from California so said threading isn’t as tricky as it would be for (say) a democratic prosecutor from Indiana, but it’s still a very difficult tight rope to stay on. My verdict is that she did about as well as one can reasonably expect.

The main thing that I knew about Harris before I started my vetting process is that she failed to prosecute Steve Mnuchin and OneWest bank for their egregious ripoff of California home owners who were unfortunate enough to have done business with them. We do have another mixed bag situation with her in regard to prosecuting the powerful, but it’s mostly not awesome. Harris claims that she didn’t have enough evidence to prosecute OneWest. David Dayen (who is a journalist I respect very much) wrote a piece for The Intercept that provides evidence to the contrary. Again, please read that link! So that was bad. On the flip side, she pulled California out of a nationwide mortgage settlement with the five big banks and got a much better settlement than the rest of the country got. Was it a great deal for CA homeowners? Not remotely. Each homeowner basically got less than $2,000. Could she have gotten a better deal? I don’t know, and neither do you.

I have to digress for a minute to tell you something you probably already know, but I still want to spell it out. I’m a flaming liberal. The older I get, the more liberal I’ve become. I consider myself a democratic socialist. That does not make me a doe eyed little church mouse, who has no idea how politics work. Just the opposite. I’m very pragmatic about the situation we’re in. I’m acutely aware of our current system of government, and how it is institutionally designed to crush the working class and minimize any occurrences of justice. I get that the rich run the country and that there isn’t much leeway for justice in our current system. I also believe that we can change the system. So when Bernie talks about getting money out of politics, I can see that (albeit narrow) path. When someone tells me that it’s possible to slap a big enough fine on a big bank to actually hurt them, I don’t believe them because I can’t see that path. I know it’s counterintuitive, and that the money in politics issue seems like a bigger one to tackle, but it’s not.

Back to Harris’ settlement: I don’t know if she could have gotten more. I haven’t seen anyone else get more, so I’m going to put this in the win column for her. Believe it or not, I tend to be more generous with candidates that I don’t start off loving. So I’m going to choose to give her credit for this one.

Now to the money. She has pledged not to take Super PAC money so she passes my #1 threshold. I will not consider a candidate who doesn’t make this pledge. Super PAC money generally only makes up 30% of the total haul in a presidential race, but it’s something and I’ll take it. You can look at her donors here. It’s not terrible. She’s not funded by police unions, which is what I would expect from a prosecutor so that’s good. Her small dollar donations aren’t remotely close to what Bernie’s are but again, I’m realistic and I don’t necessarily expect everyone contribution data to look as good as his do (although I wish they would).

So the bottom line is that with the information that I’ve gathered so far, she is someone who will be on my “maybe” list.

I will be updating this post with more information as I get it, and reshaping to my social media outlets every time I make an update.

Much to my dismay, the 2020 election process is under way. I spent 2018 refusing to discuss 2020 because it’s pointless to discuss “candidates” who haven’t even announced that they’re running for president yet. Our election cycles are already entirely too long. I find the notion of making them longer absurd and painful.

But the election process has begun, so it’s time to start discussing. In so discussing, I would like to lay down some ground rules.

Rule #1 do not make a “viability” argument to me. This is a bullshit argument that is comprised of nothing but projection in favor of who you want to vote for. This is not a debatable topic. There is no empirical evidence that you can point to. So please don’t waste my time with it. Wanna know who is viable? Anyone who wins a (mostly) clean primary in which there are ten or more options. That’s who.

It was clear to me that something was amiss in the 2016 democratic primary when, in a year with no incumbent president from that party, only four people ran. And one of those four was Lincoln Chafee. Something was terribly wrong, right from the beginning. We didn’t find out why this happened until after the presidential election was concluded. That cannot happen again. The primary process is extremely important in vetting and testing candidates. So for everyone who is angry with Bernie for “costing” Hillary the election, please either grow up or shut up. He wasn’t even running in earnest until after the Iowa caucus. He was just in it to get a message out. He still managed to take 43% of all democratic primary votes, even though he didn’t start to build an infrastructure until February, 2016. Also, I don’t know why you all keep ignoring the fact that the democratic party allowed Bernie to run as a democrat. That’s right – he got permission from the party. Ralph Nader made the same request once. He was denied. If you don’t like primaries, you should feel a special kinship with Scott Walker, and every other republican who hates democracy and have therefore stripped power from the democratic governors who won elections. Primaries are good, and they’re the best way we have to vet candidates for resilience and viability. If you prefer to skip the primary process and simply have a coronation for your nominee of choice, you’re doomed to lose the general election over and over again.

Hillary referred to Barack as a child for the better part of 2007:

And then, Sarah Palin referred to him as a terrorist for three months, as Fox “News” had been doing for fourteen months. Nothing was going to stop him, and he had been thoroughly tested to prove it.

So to summarize, primaries are great because they objectively answer the viability question. You should all want a vigorous primary.

Rule #2: don’t tell me that you don’t want someone to run. Why? Why do you hate democracy? You don’t have to vote for anyone you don’t want to vote for, but why would you want to take choices away from others? I want everyone who has presidential aspirations to run in the primaries. More choices are always better, and make for a stronger vetting process. If Ivanka decides she wants to run against her father by throwing her hat into the democratic primary, I say go for it. I sure as shit won’t vote for her, but if her entry into the process more thoroughly tests the eventual nominee, then I’m in because I believe in democracy. For the love of god, think about what you’re saying when you make that point. If you don’t want somebody to run, it’s because you’re not feeling all that confident in your choice. Choose differently, but don’t advocate for limiting everyone else’s choices.

I supported Bernie in the last primary. That doesn’t necessarily mean that if he announces he’s running again, that he will be my choice again. I am going to wait for the last candidate to announce before I decide which candidate best represents my self interests. He was the right candidate for me in the last primary. That doesn’t mean that he’s going to be the right candidate for me in this primary. I plan to carefully vet each candidate as they announce that they’re running so that I can have all of the information I need to make my decision when the last candidate announces. I am not wasting time vetting anyone who hasn’t announced yet. So right now, I’m vetting Richard Ojeda, Elizabeth Warren, and Julian Castro because they’re definitely running. Warren announced that she was launching an exploratory committee. For those who don’t understand how politics works, she announced this so that she can get two news days for her candidacy. She’s running. Castro announced that he’s going to announce on the 12th for the same reason.

These are my choices right now, so these are the candidates I’m vetting. It’s okay to rule people out before everyone has announced, but you have to do it objectively. Create a list of your three most important issues and vet the candidates against those issues. My number one issue is corporate money in politics. I will not support any candidate who is taking big dollar donations from corporations in the primary. That is a hard line for me. That said, if all of the candidates are taking large corporate contributions, I’m going to have to move that hard line and settle for looking at candidates who aren’t taking super PAC money. You have to adjust your criteria as the situation on the ground changes.

My second issue is Medicare For All. I don’t plan on supporting a primary candidate who isn’t vocal in their support for Medicare For All. My third main issue is the regulation of banks. I’m not going to be particularly enthusiastic about anyone who isn’t coming out hard for regulating all industries, but particularly the banks.

You need to make up your own list, and start your own vetting process. Please don’t talk to me about candidates who aren’t running yet. When you do that, it tells me that your mind is closed and that you’re not taking this election seriously. If you can’t tell me something seriously troubling about the candidate that you’ve chosen to support, then you’re telling me that you haven’t done any vetting at all.

When I chose Bernie in 2016, I did so knowing that his record on gun control was completely anathema to my views on gun control. And by the way, I never defended his record there because I’m not a child and he’s not my daddy. I made the calculation that his stand on corporate money in politics was going to solve our issues with gun control. Without the NRA buying out politicians, sensible gun control laws become totally viable. That was my conclusion. I did it like an adult, by acknowledging the problem and deciding if it was a big picture deal breaker for me.

When Bernie conceded the primary to, and endorsed Hillary, I advocated for her in the general because my options had changed. You cannot be so emotional about these candidates, that you’re willing to cut off your nose to spite your face. Hillary was clearly the better (by far) choice in the general election. Unfortunately, she wasn’t sufficiently vetted for viability in the primary. She wasn’t a strong candidate, which is why the propaganda against her worked. Propaganda only works if people are receptive to it. As I said earlier, nothing was going to stop Obama. So please stop relitigating 2016. It’s over. She lost because she didn’t run an effective campaign since she didn’t have to. She cock blocked any real competition in the primary, and therefore wasn’t sufficiently tested for viability. Biden didn’t even run – that should have told you that something stinky happened there. Get over it and move on. We have another election to focus on.

So let’s get on with it. Let’s look at all the candidates, and all of our priorities and make some intellectually honest and vigorous arguments advocating for the candidates we like.

I will be sharing information I find through my vetting process for each candidate so that you can decide how that information effects your decision. I will not be making my primary choice until (probably) during the summer, when everyone who is going to run is actually in the race.

My last post was about the wildly popular grifters who are capitalizing on the resistance by peddling simple minded (and almost entirely fabricated) pablum for Trump haters. This, my last post of the year is about “Never Trumpers”. If you’re not familiar with the term, it refers to both former and current republicans for whom Trump is just a bridge too far.

They have joined the resistance to speak out against Trump, and they have been embraced by the left for doing so. Why? I mean, I kind of get why but I don’t understand the (in my opinion) unearned credibility that is being showered upon them. These are a group of people for whom Willie Horton was completely acceptable. If you’re not familiar with the background on the infamous Willie Horton ad, please take a moment to read this very well written piece by Eugene Scott. Now that you know the background, here’s the infamous ad:

Every single Never Trumper saw this unfold with George HW Bush, thought it was swell, and decided that this was the political party for them. I was a fucking teen-ager when I saw this, and I was appalled. They all watched Reagan explode the deficit, thought it was fine, and crowed on about how republicans are the party of “fiscal responsibility”. They saw that Poppy Bush had to raise taxes because Reagan’s trickle down utopia was completely untenable and kept on pushing the virtues of trickle down economics in order to trick their voters into making their very wealthy donors obscenely wealthy. They all enthusiastically created a narrative in which we can’t have nice things like free education and universal health care because a brown person would be stealing from fine white folk if we did that.

This is who Never Trumpers were, and who they still are. With the exception of two people, none of them have done any sort of mea culpa and admitted that they were wrong about everything, and that they fucked over the middle class in order to make themselves rich. I’m sorry, but until you can demonstrate that you’ve reflected on your past and realized what you’ve done, you get no credibility from me.

The vast majority of these Never Trumpers have a very shallow opposition to Trump. They don’t actually disagree with most of his policies (except for the recent troop withdrawals). They fucking loved the massive tax cuts for the obscenely rich because they refuse to acknowledge that we now have a mountain of evidence to prove that trickle down is a giant load of crap. No, their issue with Trump is stylistic. The Southern Strategy was okay with them. The giant dog whistle that Reagan blew when he made his second campaign stop of his (third) presidential run in Philadelphia, Mississippi which is only known for one thing. Willie Horton (btw, he never went by Willie but that made him sound scarier and blacker): peachy. Sitting idly by while millions of Americans dies of AIDS: nothing wrong with that. George W Bush’s vicious attacks on basic human civil rights for the LGBTQ community: meh – we gotta win, right? These are all things that Never Trumpers were on board with and helped to cultivate. Their primary issue with Trump is that he’s a little to crass in his delivery. He’s a little too impolitic for their taste. They preferred it when George HW Bush hid behind the very thin veil of pretending that Willie Horton was all Lee Atwater’s doing so he wasn’t the crass one. Let me repeat: I was a fucking teenager when I was able to identify the source of the crassness.

Their track records are what we used to refer to as credibility. We don’t do that anymore, apparently. Now, when they say mean things about Trump, we gift them credibility. As I said, the majority of Never Trumpers have never apologized for their part in building the foundation upon which Trump’s viability was built. Nicole Wallace: no apology. Rick Wilson: no apology. Steve Schmidt: no fucking apology. I can do this all day, so for the sake of being concise, let me tell you who did apologize: Jennifer Rubin and Max Boot.

I apologize, I can’t find Jennifer Rubin’s mea culpa to save my life, but here’s Max Boot’s. The majority of reactions to this article on Twitter were vicious attacks. Mine was not:

I share that to let you know that I am not an unreasonable person. I’m actually a sunny optimist, which is why I’m so bitchy. Bitchy people are bitchy because they’re constantly being let down by the world. Happy people are the ones who are deeply jaded, and whose expectations are constantly being met and therefore have no reason to be bitchy. You laugh, but this is really my theory. Anyway, I digress. My point is that the mea culpa is the gateway to the road of credibility. It is not instant credibility, but it is the necessary first step toward eventually building some. Anyone who skips that step is merely a craven opportunist, looking to build themselves a lifeboat because their livelihoods can’t survive staying on the sinking ship that is the GOP.

So people like Nicole Wallace, Steve Schmidt, and Rick Wilson have zero credibility. They are “resisting” only to save their miserable careers. They have not joined our movement: they’re here to usurp it. Please do not make the mistake of believing otherwise because they are snakes who will most certainly bite you someday, and you would be wise not to elevate them in a way that gives them more power to do so. The absolute worst among this pack of life boating wolves are Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. These are two vapid, star fucking scumbags who can’t even apologize for their part in lionizing Trump. And on top of all that, they’re not very bright. I was on a business trip a few months ago, so I was staying in a hotel. I turned on the TV in the morning (something I never do when I’m home because I find cable news to be totally worthless) for some background noise and in the hope of getting at least some news. I landed on Morning Joe and I swear that listening to them for an hour actually made me dumber.

A couple of snakes have already emerged to undermine liberals and liberalism. Wanna know who they are? Max Boot and Jennifer Rubin. If you clicked on those links, you would see that they went right back home the first chance they got. Lionizing George H.W. Bush as some sort of honorable statesman clearly demonstrates a lack of understanding of the foundation that Trump was build on. Reading those articles made me super bitchy.

You wanna know who else has undermined liberals and liberalism? Liberal commentators like Rachel Maddow who allow people like Nicole Wallace to occupy a seat at the discussion table, when that seat rightfully belongs to a long list of people who were on the right side of politics all along. That seat should be occupied by someone with credibility (i.e. a track record of being on the right side of history). Perhaps Thom Hartman, Sam Seder, or Amy Goodman? How about Phil Donahue who was fired by MSNBC for opposing Bush and Cheney’s Iraq war at the very moment that Nicole Wallace was helping to make it happen. How’s that for an idea? Color me crazy, but I would prefer to hear the opinions of someone who has been right about most things over the past twenty years, than to hear from someone who started being right about one thing two years ago. Credibility is important. In some ways, the liberals who aid and abet the life boating of republican snakes are the most destructive members of the media.

I am not saying that Never Trumpers have no value, but I am saying that they have no credibility and that you should understand that they’re not really with you. They should be regarded as tools to be used by those of us who have been on the right side of history all along, to achieve our goals. Once those goals are achieved, they should be discarded because they’re only tools. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t listen to them, follow them, or share their content. You should. Some of them like Rick Wilson are delightful reads. He is extremely intelligent lots of fun to read but he’s a tool until he does a true mea culpa. And every time you share their work, you should remind people that, “the guy (or woman) who thought George W Bush was awesome has this to say about Trump”. Keep them in the tool box where they belong, lest they escape and hurt more people.

Steve Schmidt should not feel emboldened enough to tell democrats what to do. When I hear him comment on Bernie Sanders and how socialism isn’t the right path for the democratic party, I want to punch him in the face with every fucking thing he did to build a party that embraces Trump so whole heartedly. Hey Steve, you can take your advice and shove it up your ass! Maybe you don’t give democrats any advice until you’ve successfully fixed the republican party?

So that’s my final rant of the year. I would like to wish all of my readers and followers a very happy new year. I appreciate your support more than you will ever know. As an aside, I believe that 2019 will be a very good year, full of tasty treats like Michael Flynn’s court appearance a couple of weeks ago. I genuinely feel good about 2019 but then again, I’m a sunny optimist.