I was subtle and polite, but some of you are too damned lazy to read fifteen hundred words of well-reasoned prose. Here’s the pre-chewed version. Read it and weep.
Eight candidates. One clear leader – Sanders – but The Party doesn’t like him. No single candidate with a decent chance to take him down in the primary.
And so they present you with the illusion of choice: (more…)
Today was a bad day.
We knew it was coming; the fix has been in for weeks. But still, it was disappointing to some few of us that placed our hope in witnesses.
Personally, I think it’s for the best. Lisa Murkowski put it pretty well: It’s a sham trial; there’s zero sense dragging it out, and witnesses won’t make any difference to the result. There’s maybe three people, maybe four, who hadn’t made up their minds before the Senate show began. Right now there might be one. (more…)
How many more of these goddamn elections are we going to have to write off as lame but “regrettably necessary” holding actions? And how many more of these stinking double-downer sideshows will we have to go through before we can get ourselves straight enough to put together some kind of national election that will give me and the forty million people I tend to agree with a chance to vote for something, instead of always being faced with that old familiar choice between the lesser of two evils?
—Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72
Hunter is dead, and I’m not him. Now we’ve got through the bad news, let’s take a good hard look at what’s changed in the past 48 years.
OK; I lied: We’re not through with the bad news. (more…)
Congress hasn’t been this popular since Iran-Contra.
I don’t mean ‘popular’ as in ‘people approve of it’; even the best Congresses rank slightly below pit scorpions on the trustworthiness index. But it’s been the highest-rated show on daytime television, and that’s pretty impressive for a hidebound government institution.
The most recent episode was the televised (more…)
For me, the trouble with writing about politics these days is that it’s too easy to say bad things.
I don’t mean that it’s easy to insult the President and his people. That’s always easy. It’s always been easy, truth be told, which is exactly why the media always does it: They meet their deadlines and win Pulitzers and can still make Happy Hour, and (more…)
The “War On Drugs” has failed, and we lost. We’ve spent billions of dollars annually and trillions overall, and we’ve accomplished two things: We’ve increased the street price of drugs, enriching the cartels in the process, and we’ve imprisoned millions of our own citizens, hopelessly overburdening the criminal justice system by so doing.
We have completely failed to eradicate drug use.
Some of you think I’m nuts already, and that’s fine. I’ll provide a bit of history next and you can decide afterward if the facts justify my statements. (more…)
