Tyranny of the gun

 

So.

There has been YET ANOTHER mass shooting in the United States of America. This time, the target was a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and the shooter was, apparently, a Muslim-flavored homophobic religious fanatic.

For the FOURTEENTH TIME SINCE HIS INAUGURATION the President of the United States has made a public address in the wake of a mass shooting.

Every year, at least eleven thousand Americans kill each other with guns. If America were being occupied by a foreign country whose soldiers killed eleven thousand Americans at random every year, we would rise up and drive them out of our land to put a stop to such a senseless slaughter. But we can't drive out the brutal occupying army that is shooting us down in the streets every day, because the brutal occupying army is us.

The gun nuts tell us that these deaths are the price of freedom. If a foreign army was shooting eleven thousand of us every year, and we couldn't do anything to stop them, would we call ourselves free? Of course not. Yet, as long as it's our fellow Americans who are shooting eleven thousand people every year, that means we are free. Right?

Of course not. Just because the occupying army is domestic rather than foreign does not mean it is not an occupying army. We are being tyrannized, and just because we're tyrannizing ourselves doesn't make it any less of a tyranny. If some homophobic asshole decides he wants to slaughter a bunch of LGBT people, and he can walk into a gun shop and buy the means to do so, that is tyranny. If some lunatic hears Carly Fiorina spewing bullshit about black market baby parts and decides to slaughter a bunch of Planned Parenthood employees, and he can walk into a gun shop and buy the means to do so, that is tyranny. If some white supremacist decides to slaughter a bunch of black people in a church, and he can walk into a gun shop and buy the means to do so, THAT IS TYRANNY.

But, the gun nuts say, we need guns to protect ourselves from the government. Yeah, guess what? If the government wants you dead, all it has to do is target you with a drone strike, and YOU WILL BE DEAD, and all the guns in your arsenal won't be able to stop them. If President Obama had decided to take out the Bundy militia in Nevada a couple years back, all their guns wouldn't have been able to stop him. THEY WOULD BE DEAD. You know why Obama didn't just launch a drone strike on the Bundy ranch? Because he believes in the rule of law. That's what kept Cliven Bundy and all of his fellow wackaloon guns nuts alive: not their guns, but an idea.

And do you know what would happen if the President of the United States was not constrained by a belief in the rule of law? Consider, for example, Donald Trump, who has openly boasted about his plans to use the government to revenge himself on his enemies. He won't be constrained by any silly ideas about the rule of law. If he wants to carry out a drone strike on someone, he'll just fucking well do it, and anyone who objects can expect a drone strike of their own. YOUR GUNS WILL NOT PROTECT YOU from any government ruthless enough to ignore the rule of law.

But, the guns nuts tell themselves in the secrecy of their hearts, we need guns to protect ourselves from the scary black people. Well, too bad! Your racial paranoia is not sufficient reason for the rest of us to go in fear of our lives. If you don't like living in a country with scary black people, I suggest you move to someplace that doesn't have any. I hear the Kerguelen Islands are available.

Remember, folks, the Second Amendment was not designed to let anyone who wants a gun have one. It was designed to create a well-regulated militia (ie the locally-based Army Reserve units that we now call the National Guard), as the amendment itself states in the part that the gun nuts always leave out. The "personal right to bear arms" is a modern perversion of the amendment promoted by the gun industry and created by corporate-friendly right-wing Supreme Court justices. And what the Supremes giveth, the Supremes can taketh away. The tyranny of the gun is not a permanent part of the United States of America. We can change it ... if we want to.

1860 squared

Republican insiders are desperate to keep Donald Trump from becoming their presidential nominee. At the moment, their efforts are focused on keeping Trump from winning an outright majority of delegates. If they succeed, that would put us in the fabled realm of the "brokered convention", where behind-the-scenes dealmaking would allow the Republicans to deny Trump the nomination and award it instead to a mutually agreeable compromise candidate. The model is the 1920 Republican convention, which was deadlocked among several candidates until Warren G. Harding emerged as an acceptable compromise candidate, receiving the nomination.

The trouble with the "brokered convention" scenario is that it doesn't always work. The most notorious example is the 1860 Democratic Convention. In 1860 the slavery issue haunted American politics like a vast, scary, haunty thing. It had already broken up the Whig Party, and now it was the Democrats' turn. At their convention in Charleston in April, proslavery Southern Democrats were adamantly opposed to the frontrunner, Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas, and they successfully blocked his nomination. However, the proslavery faction were not strong enough to put forward a candidate of their own, and neither side could agree on a compromise candidate. After 57 ballots, the convention adjourned without nominating a candidate.

Six weeks later, the Democrats convened again in Baltimore. This time, the proslavery delegates walked out, and the remaining delegates nominated Douglas. The proslavery delegates held their own convention, where they nominated Vice-President John Breckenridge. Thus, there were two different Democratic candidates, splitting the vote and allowing the Republican candidate, Abraham Lincoln, to win the general election.

Now the Republican establishment is faced with not one, but two outsider insurgent candidates, Trump and Texas Senator Ted "Backpfeifengesicht" Cruz, both of whom are running ahead of their own preferred candidate, Florida Senator Marco "Empty Suit" Rubio. Neither Trump nor Cruz is likely to back down and support an establishment candidate, or each other for that matter. So the Republicans may well find themselves facing their own deadlocked convention.

If we see a repeat of 1860, we could be looking at not two, but three subsequent "rump" conventions. The regular convention reconvenes in Cleveland in August after the Rules Committee has rejiggered the eligibility requirements to ensure a Rubio nomination. Both Trump and Cruz boycott the Cleveland convention and hold their own conventions. The Make America Great Again convention meets in Las Vegas and nominates a Trump-Christie ticket; the Trust in God convention meets in Houston and nominates a Cruz-Huckabee ticket; and the regular convention in Cleveland nominates a Rubio-Kasich ticket.

The result is chaos on an epic scale. Which candidate ends up on which state ballot? It'll be up to each state's Secretary of State whether to put one, two, or all three Republicans on the general election ballot. If Trump isn't on, say, the Pennsylvania ballot, then a lot of Trump supporters will stay home on election day, which would be very bad news for downticket Republicans, especially for incumbent U.S. Senator Pat Toomey's re-election. Multiply that by 50, and you get a nightmare scenario for the Republicans. Losing to Hillary Clinton would be the least of their problems; they might well lose control of both houses of Congress and more state legislative seats than you can shake a short vulgarian finger at.

I'm not saying this is what's going to happen, but I do believe that it might happen, if the Republicans get their "brokered" convention.

Be careful what you wish for.

Schrödinger's vulgarian

Aficionados of quantum mechanics will be familiar with the paradox of Schrödinger's cat, which was posed by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. Since one version of quantum mechanics holds that different outcomes of a quantum event exist simultaneously until the event is observed from outside, Schrödinger pointed out that a cat in a box whose life depended on such a quantum event would be simultaneously alive and dead, until somebody opened up the box and looked inside.

Now consider Donald J. Trump, short-fingered vulgarian and Republican presidential candidate. Trump has been leading polls among Republican voters for the last six months, has won the last three Republican primary contests, and currently has 82 pledged delegates to his name, more than all the other Republican candidates combined. As Trump's chances of winning the Republican primary increase, two possible futures are coming into existence, depending on whether or not he wins the general election in November.

In the Trump-wins outcome, he is remaking the GOP into a right-wing populist party along the lines of Marine Le Pen's National Front and Geert Wilders' Party for Freedom. In this outcome, Trump is a transformative figure, the Franklin Roosevelt of the Right, harnessing the widespread xenophobia of the American electorate to creat a national-populist majority, and altering the contours of the American political system.

In the Trump-loses outcome, he is destroying the GOP by pandering to an extremist xenophobic minority. In this outcome, Trump's extremism leaves downticket Republicans with the equally unattractive choices of either embracing his radical xenophobia, or trying to distance themselves from it, either of which would alienate an important Republican voting bloc and risk handing hundreds of Federal, state, and local elections to the Democrats.

Eight months out from the general election, it's impossible to know which outcome to expect when Trump faces off against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Will Trump end up steamrolling Clinton as he has all of his Republican opponents, or will his tactic of out-crazying his opponents fail against a candidate who doesn't have to be crazy to win votes? One can make a case for both outcomes, and we won't know for certain until November 8 rolls around and the nation actually votes.

In the meantime, Trump the Transformer and Trump the Destroyer co-exist in the person of the blustering candidate. Only time will tell which one we're currently watching.

Iowa never happened

For the last year, the Iowa caucuses have dominated the political discourse in the United States. Presidential candidates from both major parties have poured money and manpower into the state, and traveled there time after time to pay homage to the awesome power of the Iowa State Fair Butter Cow.

And the result? Both major parties ended up with basically tie votes. Clinton and Sanders were so close that several contests had to be decided by coin tosses. On the GOP side, Cruz, Trump, and Rubio all finished in the low-to-mid 20% range. The arcane caucus rules make it impossible to predict precisely which candidates will come to the conventions with how many pledged delegates, but right now it looks like the two Democratic candidates will wind up with 22 each (plus or minus 1), and the three Republican candidates will all wind up with 7 each (plus or minus 1).

So, as far as determining which candidate will win the nomination in each race, the whole long, complicated Iowa caucus might as well have never happened.

Sigh.

Birthers: a clarification

Back in 2008, when Senator Barack Obama was running for president, a group of Hillary Clinton dead-enders called PUMAs started running with a conspiracy theory claiming that Obama's Hawaiian birth had been faked somehow, and that he was actually born in Kenya, and was thus ineligible to serve as President of the United States. This was despite the fact that the Clinton campaign itself had found Obama's birth announcement in a Honolulu newspaper. The PUMA conspiracy theory quickly spread to various right wing sources, including Joseph Farah's WorldNetDaily, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and, eventually, Donald Trump. The proponents of this conspiracy theory became known as birthers, by analogy with the 9/11 attack conspiracy theorists, known as truthers.

In an amusing sequel to the birther phenomenon, Donald Trump, now himself the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, is claiming that rival candidate Senator Ted Cruz's Canadian birth makes him ineligible to serve as president. Because of the similarity of the claims against Cruz and Obama, and because Trump himself has made the same claim against both men, the term "birther" is being applied to Trump and other figures who are disputing Cruz's eligibility.

This is wrong. The anti-Obama conspiracy-mongers were called birthers because the heart of their conspiracy theory involved disputing that Obama was born in the United States. That is not the case with Cruz. Everyone, including Cruz himself, agrees that he was not born in the United States. Thus, there is no actual conspiracy theory involved; only the legal question of whether Cruz's universally-acknowledged foreign birth disqualifies him for the presidency.

If you want a term for the people who dispute Cruz's eligibility, you might call them "natural-borners", because the issue they raise is whether Cruz is a natural-born citizen within the meaning of the Constitution. Thus, Trump is both a "birther" and a "natural-borner", while Mary Brigid McManamon is a "natural-borner" but not a "birther".

Cruz's current natural-borner controversy is particularly amusing because, had it not been for the birthers making a prolonged fuss about Obama's alleged foreign birth, the question of Cruz's actual foreign birth might not even have come up.

"Trump's Deal" jumps the shark

 "Trump's Deal" famously began in 1984, when NBC approached veteran television producer Stephen J. Cannell about creating a "prime time soap" for them in the mold of ABC's "Dallas" and "Dynasty". Cannell agreed, and that fall NBC premiered the hour-long drama starring Ted Danson as New York City real-estate mogul Donald Trump and Czech supermodel Paulina Porizkova as his wife Ivana. NBC got the backdrop of wealth and high fashion it wanted, but it also inevitably got Cannell's quirky humor. "Trump's Deal" was as much a satire of the prime time soap genre as a member of it. Danson's Trump was a loud, vulgar buffoon who moved among New York's wealthy elite like a rhino among a herd of thoroughbred horses.

The series was not the blockbuster NBC had been hoping for, but it quickly won a dedicated fanbase, and its solid ratings made it a fixture on the network. However, network executives clashed with Cannell over the direction of the series in 1990, and he left the show. Series star Danson took over production of the show, and he made a series of changes to the show that alienated longtime fans, including writing out co-star Porizkova in favor of Shelly Long, with whom he had co-starred in the short-lived sitcom "Cheers".  The series' rating fell sharply, and NBC cancelled "Trump's Deal" in 1992.

The series was unexpectedly revived in 2004 due to a chance meeting between Danson and actor/comedian/producer Gary Shandling. Shandling was best known for "The Larry Sanders Show" (1992-1998), an HBO series in which he played a talk show host, with the series centered around the production of the talk show. Shandling was looking to produce a similar series about a reality show. Danson convinced Shandling to use the Donald Trump character as the host of the series, and the result was the second incarnation of "Trump's Deal". Now the Trump character was the host of a reality show called "The Apprentice" where he tyrannized a group of would-be business executives, firing one at the end of each episode.

"Trump's Deal" was facing cancellation again last year when Danson arranged for the series to move from HBO to AMC, this time with Aaron Sorkin as producer. Once again, the series underwent a radical change in format. Now, the Trump character was running for president in the Republican primary. Sorkin took advantage of cutting-edge CGI to show the Trump character interacting with actual Republican primary candidates, including Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina, and Dr. Ben Carson.

Unfortunately, Sorkin's own liberal political ideology has turned "Trump's Deal" into a travesty. The loud, vulgar buffoon has been transformed into a loud, vulgar racist ideologue. And not content with having Trump run as a Republican, Sorkin has him leading the candidate field by a large margin. The result is a bizarre alternate version of the Republican primary, with frontrunner Bush reduced to a pathetic also-ran, Dr. Carson parodied as a somnolent know-nothing evangelical Christian, and Fiorina launching a series of defamatory attacks on Planned Parenthood.

Sorkin clearly intends to continue the series by having the Trump character win the Republican nomination, and rumors from the production suggest he intends to have Trump win the general election. Sorkin apparently seeks to turn "Trump's Deal" into a dark mirror-image of his celebrated NBC series "The West Wing" (1999-2006), showing a crazed Republican administration under Trump. We can only hope that AMC has better sense than to renew the series for a second year.

The trouble with Joe

Media critic Jay Rosen talks about why the Trump candidacy has been so confounding for journalists. They point out that he's lying, and it doesn't matter. Not only does he refuse to admit to his lies, he keeps doubling down on them, and his constant lying does nothing to reduce his popularity. In fact, it actually makes him more popular among Republicans. The reason Trump is able to do this goes back to a technique for manipulation that is known in sports as "working the refs".

Working the refs is when a team tries to intimidate the referees by constantly challenging their decisions, accusing them of making bad calls. The idea is that if you keep it up long enough, the referees will either A) start to question their own judgment, or B) decide to take the easy way out and just do what you want. Either way, the result is the same: the referees will start shading their calls to favor your team.

In a democracy, the media are our referees. Their job is to penalize politicians who break the rules. Conservatives are basically contemptuous of democracy, and constantly seek ways to subvert it, so in the early 1980s they started working the refs hard, initiating a campaign accusing newly-elevated CBS Evening News anchorman Dan Rather of "liberal bias". From there, the campaign expanded to include every media outlet. The finishing touch was the creation in 1996 of Fox News Channel, a conservative propaganda mill that insisted that it was unbiased, and that all of the real news organizations had a liberal bias.

And it worked like a charm. The establishment media became utterly terrified of conservative accusations of "liberal media bias", and they bent over backwards to avoid it. The way they did so was to basically stop being referees. Instead of telling the truth, the new goal of journalism was to maintain the appearance of objectivity by refusing to point out when one side in a controversy (invariably the conservative side) was lying. The result was the spread of the "he said-she said" style of political reporting, which David Roberts aptly summarized this way: "Quote this one, quote that one, opinions differ, done."

Roberts notes that conservatives gave journalists an alibi for abandoning the referee role by creating an entire alternate universe of think tanks and media outlets that journalists could quote for their he said-she said stories. This gave journalists an excuse to stop passing judgment on dishonest policy claims, and focus on trivialities like "Al Gore said he invented the internet" or the minutia of John Kerry's Vietnam War record, or Hillary Clinton's remark that she once landed in Bosnia "under fire."

What Trump has done is refuse to provide journalists with any pretext for ignoring his lies. He doesn't rely on any studies, even bogus right-wing think tank studies, to back up his claims. He simply makes them, and dares journalists to call him on them. Then journalists do, and discover that nobody cares. And the reason nobody cares is that journalists have made it their business to ignore important lies; therefore, any lie they take notice of must ipso facto be unimportant.

Rosen, meanwhile, has proposed a way for journalists to start to reclaim their referee roles. They can begin, he says, by distinguishing between realities and appearances, and between facts and arguments. Rosen created the grid at the top of this post showing how news stories can be placed into one of four categories: reality-based factual stories, reality-based argument stories, appearance-based factual stories, and appearance-based argument stories.

However, there is a flaw in Rosen's proposal which he doesn't allow for, and doesn't even seem to be aware of. The flaw is that Rosen's proposal assumes that journalists are actually capable of distinguishing between facts and arguments, and between appearance and reality. But why should they be?

If this was a new situation, it would be a simple matter for journalists who were familiar with those distinctions to resume making them. But, as I've noted, this is not a new situation. This situation has been going on for over thirty years. I would argue that in that time, a whole generation of journalists has grown up for whom the ability to distinguish between appearance and reality is not only irrelevant, but actually counterproductive. After all, a journalist who doesn't know he's doing anything wrong has an advantage over one who does know, and has to fight the desire act on his knowledge.

The canonical example of this has to be Joe Klein of Time magazine. Back in November 2007, Klein wrote a column called "The Tone-Deaf Democrats" in which he claimed that a Democratic bill to reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act “would give terrorists the same legal protections as Americans.” It turned out that Klein had been played by GOP Representative Pete Hoekstra. Hoekstra had fed Klein a line of bullshit about the bill, and Klein gullibly took his word for it without bothering to ask any of the bill's Democratic authors if it was true. When Klein's stupidity was exposed, he notoriously insisted that "I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right."

Mr. Rosen, I hope I'm wrong about this, but I think it's too late for American political journalists to start acting like political journalists again. They don't know how.

The relatively moderate candidate

Amanda Marcotte worries that Donald Trump will make it easier for the eventual Republican nominee to win the presidency by making him seem moderate by comparison. Marcotte admits that her scenario assumes that Trump crashes and burns at some point, and one of the other candidates (probably Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz) wins the nomination.

Marcotte is careful to admit the possibility that Trump might not crash and burn at all, and might win the Republican nomination himself. However, I think that even if Trump doesn't win the nomination, his candidacy will make a GOP victory less likely rather than more. Over the course of Trump's campaign, I've noticed that his success in appealing to the worst instincts of the GOP base has had the effect of goading the rest of the Republican candidates into emulating him. It's reached the point where alleged moderate Ohio Governor John Kasich is now promising to create a new federal agency to promote "Judeo-Christian Western values" in the Middle East.

What this means is that even if Trump does drop out of the race at some point, the rest of the GOP field will already be so over-the-top crazy trying to keep up with him that they won't be able to stop. Trump has already established that that's the way to win, and which of his competitors will dare try to change that winning formula? By the time the Republicans hold their convention in Cleveland in July, the nominee (whether it's Trump or someone else) will be committed to a full-bore racist agenda. Everyone in the country who isn't a straight-up racist will be voting Democratic, and Barack Obama proved that there are enough Americans out there who aren't straight-up racist to ensure a Democratic victory.

An open letter to Representative Glenn Thompson (R-PA)

Dear Representative Thompson,

You have been my representative in the U.S. House since I moved to Centre County, Pennsylvania back in August. As a constituent, I would like to discuss your recent vote in favor of the American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act of 2015. While I certainly sympathize with your desire to prevent more right-wing religious fanatics from moving to the United States, I don't think this bill was the proper vehicle for doing so. For one thing, making it harder for victims of Painful Rectal Itch to immigrate seems counterproductive, since Painful Rectal Itch is itself a fanatical right-wing religious organization, and it tends to target people because it doesn't regard them as fanatically religious enough.

For another thing, even if the act succeeded in preventing members of Painful Rectal Itch from settling in the United States, that would do nothing to alleviate the many problems caused by the tens of millions of right-wing religious fanatics who already live here, such as attacks on women's reproductive health, hindering the civil rights of LGBT people, and attempts to corrupt the teaching of science in public schools. It seems to me that instead of hindering the settlement of refugees in the United States, your efforts to protect us from right-wing religious fanatics would be more productive if you voted for legislation enforcing the civil rights of sexual minorities and rolling back restrictions on reproductive health care.

I hope you will take this advice into account in your future legislative activities.

Best wishes,

Johnny Pez
Bellefonte, PA
November 2015

A tale of two countries

In the wake of the Painful Rectal Itch attacks in Paris, the governors of various American states have been falling all over themselves in their eagerness to pander to the cowardly xenophobes who make up the Republican base. As of 6:19 PM Monday night, the governors of 27 states have announced that they will not be allowing Syrian refugees to be resettled in their states. This despite the fact that state governors have no power to dictate who can and can't move to their states.

Meanwhile, back in France ... you know, the country where the terrorist attacks actually happened ... French President Francois Hollande told a gathering of French mayors that “30,000 refugees will be welcomed over the next two years. Our country has the duty to respect this commitment,” while adding that “France will remain a country of freedom" and stating that “Life should resume fully. What would France be without its museums, without its terraces, its concerts, its sports competitions? France should remain as it is. Our duty is to carry on our lives."

All of which raises the question: who are the surrender monkeys now?

Stop the satire, the liberals want off

There's a satirical liberal Facebook group called Stop the World, the Teabaggers Want Off. The group seems to have decided that conservatives shouldn't have all the fun when it comes to attributing fake quotes to public figures. As Politifact notes, the group's fake quotes have been spreading among liberal FB users who think they're genuine. One of the group's fake Ben Carson quotes has even made its way into a Daily Kos piece (it's the one heading the piece).


Guys, come on, leave the fake quotes to the wingnuts. It's bad enough to have David Broder-wannabees in the media claiming that "both sides do it." Don't make it true.

Killing Time

History's greatest monster.

Another flatcar has jumped the track in the trainwreck that is the Republican presidential primary. Jeb "Can Fix It If It's An Election" Bush was boasting that he sure as hell would go back in time and kill Baby Adolf Hitler if he ever got the chance. And this isn't a case where some dimwitted reporter decided to ask a presidential candidate a dimwitted question. Jeb himself raised the matter, so the only dimwit involved is Jeb.

Now, I don't mean to boast, but the fact is that I am uniquely qualified to discuss this question, because I have actually killed Baby Hitler. Admittedly, I used my mad alternate-history skillz rather than a time machine, and I didn't murder Baby Hitler so much as I posited an accidental death for him, but a dead Baby Hitler is a dead Baby Hitler, and I'm prepared to put my claim to expertise up against anyone else's.

The dead Baby Hitler question is complicated by the temporal nature of the problem. Time, as others have noted, is not so much a linear progression of cause to effect as a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff. The human consciousness exists in the present, and it remains in the present whether the human involved lives in the year 2015 or travels back to 1889. For the time traveler, being in 1889 cancels out all subsequent events. To the person-in-1889, there is no Nazi Germany, no World War II, and no Holocaust. There's just 1889. And this baby lying in his cradle hasn't done anything wrong; he's just a newborn baby.

On the other hand, the person-in-1889 has, simply by appearing in 1889, created a new reality. Every die that rolled and coin that flipped in the history that led up to our 2015 now has to be re-rolled and re-flipped, with the outcomes yet to be determined. Thus, our time traveler has eliminated the existence of everyone who will be born in the 20th century, an act of mass-murder that makes the Holocaust pale in comparison.

So, it's basically a trick question. The only way to kill Baby Hitler is to snuff out the existence of billions of people,* which pretty much negates any possible positive results from removing Adolf Hitler from history.

Bottom line: Hitler only killed Anne Frank. Jeb Bush would eliminate her from history altogether.

--
*Unless you do it the way I did it, via a thought experiment.

Dr. Ben Carson doesn't care what you godless heathens think of him

And neither do his millions of right-wing Christian supporters. In fact, the more all you liberal, atheistical, buttsex-having media types attack him by pointing out differences between what he says and your so-called objective reality, the more fervently they support him. Carson himself claims to have raised $3.5 million in donations since the biased media started attacking him with their "facts" and "science". Mind you, this claim itself may simply be Carson doing more reality-creation, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that Carson's supporters want it to be true.

Right-wing Christians are the heart of the modern GOP: they donate tons of money, and they vote reliably in both primary and secondary elections. The man who controls the right-wing Christians controls the GOP, and right now, that man is Dr. Ben Carson. Unfortunately for the GOP, it looks as though Carson isn't actually running for president. His operation looks more like a direct-mail grift than an election campaign, with a whopping 55% of donations being used for more fundraising. In other words, Carson seems to be doing a Palin, pretending to run for president in order to cash in.

So the big question here is, what will Dr. Ben Carson do when his grift runs its course? Will he drop out of the race and endorse one of the other candidates? Or will he try to keep the grift going by running as an independent or third-party candidate? If it's the former, then it'll just be business as usual for the GOP, as the right-wing Christian bloc holds its nose and votes for the establishment candidate. But if it's the latter, then the GOP will be in big trouble, with its biggest voting bloc being surgically removed, so to speak, by Dr. Carson.

Ben Carson Wikipedia

The Arthur Treacher's Fish & Chips restaurant chain was founded by King Arthur of Camalot, and the chain is still owned by the British Crown. Because of this, all Arthur Treacher's store managers are required by British law to be members of the Church of England.

After the Constitution was ratified, George Washington had a Presidential Crown created with the words "BY THE GRACE OF GOD, PRESIDENT" inscribed on it. Every President except Barack Obama has worn this crown during his inauguration. Obama's failure to do so means that he was never really President.

Three quarters of the dams in existence today were originally constructed by beavers.

The enemy of the good

Back in July, I pointed out that Senator Bernie Sanders, for all his popularity, faced an insurmountable barrier to gaining the Democratic presidential nomination. It's been exactly four months since then, and I have had no reason to revise my conclusion. As much as I admire Sanders' stands on the issues, there's just no way for him to overcome that fatal handicap, and I've resigned myself to the fact that Hillary Clinton is going to be the Democratic nominee.To any Sanders supporters out there who are inclined to reject my conclusion, I invite you to read my original analysis from July. The reasoning is, unfortunately, indisputable.

I'm not saying that Sanders' supporters should give up. Even though he can't win the nomination, Senator Sanders has been taking the Democratic Party where it needs to go. Stay involved! Go out there, attend your rallies, make your donations, and when the primaries start, knock on those doors, man those phone banks, and get as many people out to the polls as you can manage. All I would ask is that you resist the temptation to demonize Secretary Clinton. She is not a DINO. It's true that her foreign policy views are way too hawkish for my taste, but her feminist credentials are impeccable, and if she hasn't been breaking ground on LGBT or economic issues, she hasn't lagged behind either. And let's face it, after the Benghazi hearings, there's no denying that she has what it takes to be the Democratic Party's leader, and the nation's as well. If she isn't your first choice, she should definitely be your second.

Choices

I didn't realize it at the time, but I reached a crucial turning point in my life when I chose "Johnny Pez" over "Augustus Sol Invictus" as my online pseudonym.

An open letter to Donald Trump

Dear Mr. Trump,

You certainly put a scare into the GOP when you told The Hill on Thursday that "absolutely" you would consider an independent presidential run if you thought the Republicans weren't being "fair" to you. You went on to say that you "want to do what’s right for the country — not what’s good for special interest groups that contribute, not what’s good for the lobbyists and the donors.”

Well, Mr. Trump, if you want to do what's right for the country, then an independent presidential campaign won't be enough. If you win (which of course you believe will happen, because you say what all Real Americans believe in their hearts), you'll be a man without a party, trying to govern through a Congress controlled by the two established parties. How much could you accomplish then? Not nearly as much as you'd like to, that's for certain.

The answer is obvious. Mr. Trump, running for office all by yourself isn't enough. You've got to think big (which has never been a problem for you in the past). You need to recruit like-minded men and women to run for all those congressional seats that the two major parties hold. A quick look at Wikipedia reveals that there are currently 469 seats up for grabs: all 435 House seats, and 34 out of 100 Senate seats.

You're a man of vision, Mr. Trump, so I know you won't be content to preside over a government controlled by your opponents. You're also a man with vast monetary resources at your command, so I know that you can recruit and fund 469 congressional candidates while running an independent presidential campaign. You probably won't win them all -- you may not win any of them -- but you ought to be able to draw enough votes away from the Republican candidates to cost most of them their seats, and that's what you really want, isn't it? To make the GOP sorry for how unfair they have been to you. Because that's the kind of man you are.

Think about it, Mr. Trump. If you want to do what's right for the country, this is the way to do it.

Sincerely,

Johnny Pez

Political reality

The race for the Democratic presidential nomination is in full swing, even though the primaries don't start for another seven months. The two leading candidates are former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton of New York and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Sanders is a longtime favorite among liberal activists; he has been outspoken in his opposition to the invasion of Iraq, the national surveillance state, the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, and other policies supported by centrist Democrats and Republicans. Clinton is a former U.S. Senator and former First Lady. She notoriously voted for the invasion of Iraq, which arguably cost her the Democratic nomination in 2008. Since entering the 2016 presidential race, she has focused on economic populism, in stark contrast to her history as a founding member of the centrist, pro-corporate Democratic Leadership Council.

Although Clinton has a massive fundraising and name-recognition advantage, Sanders has been drawing enthusiastic crowds to his campaign events. At a rally in Madison, Wisconsin four days ago, nearly 10,000 supporters showed up, the largest crowd attracted by any candidate for either party. Polling shows Sanders running neck-and-neck with Clinton in the early New Hampshire primary.

However, there is one factor working against Sanders that nobody is willing to talk about, and that will, I believe, cost him the Democratic nomination: the presidency of George W. Bush.

The Bush presidency has been the worst for the country in the last 150 years; arguably, the worst ever. He lied the country into an illegal war in Iraq, severely curtailed civil liberties while presiding over a massive increase in surveillance, and made the torturing of prisoners a key military policy. And while it is irrational and wrong to hold all white men to blame for Bush's actions, the public is unfortunately prone to allow emotion and prejudice to dictate its actions.

Let's face it: after the disasters Bush inflicted on the country, no white man is going to be allowed to become president for a long time. Bernie Sanders is making a valiant effort, but in the end, the prejudice against white men that Bush has instilled in the American public is too great to overcome. The Democrats know this, and that's why Hillary Clinton has been the frontrunner, and why she will, ultimately, win the Democratic nomination and the presidency next year.

Maybe in another sixteen or twenty years, the public will be ready for another white male president. But for now, it's too soon.

Why Do They Care?

Last Friday, after the Supreme Court ordered everyone to get gay married, Duncan "Atrios" Black at Eschaton asked a good question: why do they care? Specifically, why do conservative Christians spend so much time and effort angsting over gay marriage? "No one is making you get gay married. No one is telling your pastor he has to have God bless this legal arrangement established by the state." Black figures that they're running out of people to hate, and without someone to hate their lives will have no meaning.

I think the answer is a lot more evil and cynical and terrible than that. To find out why, you'll have to go back in time about forty years to the Disco Era. Some conservative Christians back then decided that what they really needed was a lot of political power, and the way to go about getting it was the usual way conservatives go about getting political power: find an unpopular minority group, and demonize the fuck out of it.

So these conservative Christians gave the matter some thought, and they finally settled on homosexuals as the perfect group to Hitlerize. For the next forty years, they devoted a lot of time, effort, and money to the project, and they succeeded. The result is what we have now: a whole generation of conservative Christians, tens of millions of them, who have been brainwashed into believing that homophobia is the core of Christianity.

In vain will you point out to them that Jesus didn't so much as mention homosexuality. They don't care. Forget about that whole Jesus dying on the cross thing. As far as they're concerned, the REAL point of Christianity is hatin' on the gays. That's why, whenever they talk about "religious liberty," it refers exclusively to discriminating against homosexuals. Deny them their sacred right to discriminate against LGBT's, and they act like you're feeding them to the lions in the Colosseum.

And that, to answer Black's question, is why they care. Because they've been raised to follow a cynical, evil creed that replaces worship with an Orwellian Two Minutes' Hate.

So how will this turn out? It seems to me that the congregation of the Church of Homophobia have three options: some will decide that the Christianity = homophobia equation is false, and they'll find their way out and back to mainstream Christianity. Some will decide that the equation is true, but that homophobia is wrong, and they'll reject both. And some will stick to it to the bitter end, part of an ever-dwindling minority drowning in their own hate.

The problem of centrism

Earlier this week, the people of Greece gave Syriza, formerly a far-left fringe party, a plurality of seats in their parliament. Syriza is now the leading partner in a coalition government, and its triumph is a testament to the dangers of centrism.

Centrism is an ideology that declares itself to be above ideology. It is an article of faith among centrists that partisanship skews the worldviews of all non-centrists. To a centrist, only centrists understand the true nature of reality, since only centrists are untainted by partisanship. Thus, to a centrist, the ideal type of government would be one where, after an election, the winning side and the losing side get together to negotiate a bipartisan compromise. That way, no matter which side won the election, the same centrist policies would be enacted. It would be the next best thing to not having any elections at all.

Which brings us to Greece. Since the restoration of democracy in 1974, Greece has been dominated by two major parties, the center-right New Democracy and the center-left PASOK. The two parties took turns ruling Greece until the financial meltdown of 2008 caused the country to enter a major recession. The recession meant that the enormous debts that the Greek government had run up during the boom years could not be repaid unless the country was bailed out by the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission (the three of whom are collectively known as the Troika). The Troika insisted that the bailout be accompanied by harsh economic austerity: savage cuts in government spending, in pensions, and in healthcare.

Unfortunately for their country and themselves, New Democracy and PASOK decided that the austerity program ought to be beyond politics, so both parties pledged themselves to support it. Thus, no matter which party won power, the same austerity policies would be enacted. It was the next best thing to not having any elections at all. It was the platonic ideal of centrist government.

Needless to say, Greek voters soon grew tired of voting for two identical parties. The result was that support for both major parties plunged, and fringe parties that opposed austerity suddenly found themselves turning into major parties. The two main beneficiaries of the centrist collapse were Syriza and the fascist Golden Dawn party. The fascists, being fascists, had a tendency to commit political violence, and that cost them support. That allowed Syriza to win big in the last election, and form the next Greek government.

There's another country in Europe where all the major parties have decided to embrace austerity: the UK. And the same thing is happening in the UK that has happened in Greece. The pro-austerity centrist parties are seeing support collapse, and that support is moving to the fringe anti-austerity parties. In the UK's case, the fringe parties that are seeing the biggest gains are the nativist UKIP and the Green Party.

The next elections to the UK parliament are scheduled for May 7.