Bibi Has Completely Lost His Mind

So we know that he's a warmongering bigot. But during his speech at the UN yesterday, he actually did this:

God help us when Iran gets to the "final stage" and acquires a fuse for their nuclear weapon.

I Guess Let's All Vote or Whatever

After reading JJ's Guide to Voting from a few days back I think we're mostly in agreement- voting is OK. Makes sense that someone might do it. I do want to look at a few things, though, because I'm still wondering if we've really covered all the ways in which American democracy is a meaningless sham.

I know I'm always tying in China to discussions somehow, and that this can be annoying, but I think it's an instructive example to use when looking at the way American politics works, and also the ways in which it doesn't work. So lets take Chinese elections as our baseline for comparison, as a measure of how absolutely useless voting can be. Did you know it's possible to vote in China? The specifics vary by area, but generally politics on the lowest level, village or locality, allow voting. This is for government positions only though, not Communist Party positions, and the Party controls who gets on the ballot. They're people who have been approved by the Party, and if that means that there's only one name on the ballot, so be it. The Wukan Incident showed that once someone is in office they can remain there for years without any further voting, and a crop of independent candidates who arose to challenge the handpicked Party candidates last year were unceremoniously swept away and harassed, intimidated, or just plain removed from the ballot. In summary: voting is occasionally possible, but the only choices given are people who will back the status quo because their job depends on it. As far as I'm concerned, this is a 100% meaningless vote.

So, my question: to what extent is American democracy more meaningful? Can you advance meaningful positive change by voting in the presidential election?  And before you answer that, think about this: if I give you a candidate who has deported more illegal immigrants than Dubya, who has targeted American citizens for assassination and overseen an extensive drone strike program that has killed piles of civilians in countries around the world, who has backed banks and corporations as hard as he could and given America a Romney-style healthcare reform? If you gave me that description without anything else I'd say 'hey, that sounds like a Republican, it's probably pretty important to vote against him.'

JJ says:

Vote Obama, Green, Romney, or if you're truly undecided, at least vote in all the down ballot elections.

Oh, I'm not undecided. I'm thoroughly decided that both Obama and Romney are ridiculous pieces of shit, and that it a just world it would be a vote for which of them is exiled to a frozen wasteland or desert island or something, not which one of them gets to cackle with glee in the Oval Office while a bunch of Pakistani families get incinerated. These are both objectively bad people, one of whom is a murderer, while the other one merely aspires to become a murderer. But still, as JJ says:

As noted centrist sellout Noam Chomsky said: "Choosing the lesser of two evils isn't a bad thing. The cliché makes it sound bad, but it's a good thing. You get less evil." Sometimes it really is that simple.

And that's true, which is why we're in agreement and why voting still kinda makes sense. But I think we need to spend a bit of time thinking about that, because in the end while we may be voting for the lesser evil, but we're still voting for evil. We're going to vote for a guy and he's going to go out there and do some truly despicable stuff, and in some small abstract way it was our votes that powered it. You see someone with a Bush/Cheney bumper sticker and you're like 'you voted for Bush?!' But hey, I'm about to vote for a guy that does a bunch of the same stuff, so... politics, huh?

There is one point on which I have to disagree with JJ:

As people who read this blog know, I have quite a long list of grievances with Obama and his administration, far too lengthy to get into here. The main question here is: What would be solved by voting for Mitt Romney, voting third party or not voting at all?

Which makes me wonder, these grievances with the Obama administration... are any of them solved by voting for Obama again? None of the issues I have with the Obama administration are going to be addressed by voting for him, the only difference is that the greater evil isn't going to be in quite as good of a position to push their even worse agenda. Let's be clear about this, by stopping Romney/Ryan we're getting better outcomes for a bunch of the blocs they would like to go after. Both parties are good at mobilizing their bases by getting people worried about the things their opponents would do, while minimizing the problems that are still facing America- the end of American industry and labor, harmful trade agreements, the collapse of the middle class, growing wealth inequality and declining social mobility, rising health care costs and the continuation of a violence-based foreign policy that has deemphasized human rights. Democrats might not have the same passion for attacking medicare, medicaid, and social security as Republicans, but they don't have any passion for defending them either. If we can't get real about these problems then America will continue to decline, and voting for Obama definitely isn't going to get us any realer than we are now.

One thing that personally really gets to me about Obama is his continued silence on Liu Xiaobo, who won the Nobel Peace Prize a year after Obama. That means it shouldn't just be Obama's duty as president of a nation that supposedly supports human rights and freedom of expression around the world to speak out on his behalf, but as someone linked by holding one of the most prestigious awards on the planet. Still, he holds his tongue because, as Hillary Clinton cynically put it, "pressing on those human rights issues can't interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis, and the security crisis." Would public pressure from Obama get Liu out of prison? I don't know, and I guess we don't get to find out. I don't know what else this episode tells us about him other than that he's a bad politician who doesn't deserve my vote, and if it weren't for the overwhelming awfulness that is R-Squared and the Republican Party, he wouldn't be getting it.

Basically, to summarize:
-Voting in China is 100% worthless.
-Voting for the President in America is merely 99% worthless, because you can control the speed of American decline. Hurtling with Republicans, or merely Plummeting with Democrats.
-Still, that 1% makes a difference, so let's all vote! Especially in state and local elections, where there's a legitimate chance that you might find A Good Politician who actually deserves to be voted for.

Credibility is Not An Absolute Value

David Roberts from Grist is one of my favorite writers out there, and this piece could not hit the nail on the head any more if it tried.

Sullivan has the cover story in the latest issue of Newsweek, called “The Democrats’ Reagan,” about the enormous potential of a second Obama term. One of his main arguments is that a decisive defeat for Republicans in 2012 could interrupt their rightward drift. Defeat would cause soul-searching, cooler heads would once again prevail, and the party would tack to the center. Color me skeptical.

Mostly I was struck by this line, which comes in the context of a discussion about immigration:

Under Obama, deportations of illegal aliens are double what they were under his predecessor; and the number of border agents is at a record high. Both give him conservative credibility on the issue, if only the right would acknowledge it.

Read it again. See if you can spot the problem.

In post-truth politics, the basic mistake to see things like “credibility” as objective phenomena in the world. Put high heat to water, you get steam. Put conservative immigration policies to Obama, you get conservative credibility.

Credibility is not like that. It’s what you might call a relational phenomenon; it exists in the relationship between object and subject. Think about a rainbow. (Always good advice.) For a rainbow to exist, you need sunlight and water vapor in the air, but also a subject positioned at a particular angle to the sun and water vapor. A rainbow is just “how the light bouncing off the vapor appears to the subject.” Without the subject, there’s no appearing, and thus no rainbow.

Credibility is like a rainbow. It is relational. “Conservative credibility” is not something that simply happens when conservative policies are enacted or conservative rhetoric echoed. It requires a subject — in this case a conservative subject — to witness and acknowledge it. One must be credible to someone, and to have “conservative credibility” one must be credible to conservatives.

There is no credibility to gain from conservatives. Period.

And that Andrew Sullivan piece is absolutely awful, in case the hacky title didn't already tell you that.

The Wingnuts are Not Handling This Well

Obama is rising in most polls, and has started to take a substantial lead over Mitt Romney in recent weeks. Wingnuts are dealing with this development as rationally as you'd expect, and have created a website that recalculates the polls until Mitt Romney is winning:

I present UnSkewedPolls.com, the best new website on the political Internet. UnSkewed Polls finally removes the “liberal media bias” from every single national opinion poll, and it turns out that “unskewing” them means “making it so that Romney is ahead by a lot.” Rick Perry approves!

The UnSkewed Average has Romney at 51.8 percent and Obama at a mere 44 percent. How does the genius behind UnSkewed Polls go about unskewing all the polls — like, for real, the vast majority of polls — that show the opposite result? Well, Dean Chambers, the polling genius behind the site, simply “re-weights” every single national poll to reflect his belief that Republicans are undersampled, based on right-leaning pollster Rasmussen’s partisan breakdown of the electorate. (Scott Rasmussen blurbs: “you cannot compare partisan weighting from one polling firm to another.”)

And obviously “re-weighting” every single poll to reflect an electorate made up of a plurality of self-identified Republicans also involves a bit of guesswork! Like, for example, sometimes polls don’t include crosstabs, so Mr. Unskewed just assumes they’re skewed with liberal media bias, and corrects accordingly.

. . .

Meanwhile, in reality, Nate Silver says late-September polls have a pretty good track record of predicting the winner of the race, if not the margin. In the cases of the two elections this one has been most often compared to: President Carter was down 3.4 percent in September 1980, and lost by 9.8. President Bush was up 4.5 percent in September 2004, and won by 2.4.

In fact, at this point you have to look pretty hard for examples of underdogs pulling it out: “Of the 19 candidates who led in the polls at this stage since 1936, 18 won the popular vote (Thomas E. Dewey in 1948 is the exception), and 17 won the Electoral College (Al Gore lost it in 2000, along with Mr. Dewey).” But all of those polls and electoral results were skewed, by liberal media bias.

Thought: If you're reduced to making up polling numbers until your guy is winning, that is probably not a good sign.

BUT WHY DO THEY HATE US????

This is happening in our name:

A new study conducted by law professors at Stanford and New York University contends that the U.S. use of drones to target suspected militants in Pakistan has had a "damaging and counterproductive effect" on the country and has killed far more civilians than previously acknowledged.

The study, which was released on Tuesday, relies on some 130 interviews with civilians living in the regions of northern Pakistan where targeted drone strikes have been most frequent. Working with the activist group Reprieve, the team of professors have added to the growing body of literature that argues, contrary to Obama administration claims, that numerous civilians have been killed, and many more traumatized, by the drone strike program.

"Drones hover 24 hours a day over communities in northwest Pakistan, striking homes, vehicles and public spaces without warning," the report said. "Those living under drones have to face the constant worry that a deadly strike may be fired at any moment, and the knowledge that they are powerless to protect themselves."

Relying on data compiled by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the study's authors say that between 2,562 and 3,325 people have been killed in U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan since June 2004, and between 474 and 881 of them were civilians.

Undecided Voters

I hadn't seen very much of the SNL political stuff so far this election season, but this is pretty brilliant:

The Train of Thought Guide To Voting

JN's post from a few weeks back made me want to write something explaining my thinking towards the coming presidential election. Presenting:

Voting

Whatever your thoughts, and no matter how fucked our system is, not voting isn't the answer. Vote Obama, Green, Romney, or if you're truly undecided, at least vote in all the down ballot elections. Republicans are not playing around when it comes to attacking our democracy and the right to vote. This isn't something to be taken lightly. They are literally attempting to make our country less democratic, because they know in the long term they're losing. The country is becoming more tolerant and less white, two things the Republican party is freaking out over because their it means their voting base of neanderthals is moving further and further into america's fringes. Their only option is attacking our democracy. If you don't vote you're doing their work for them.

Obama Vs. Romney

Our two party system, broken government institutions and the influence of money in our electoral system have basically ensured that we will have a Romney vs. Obama type choice in presidential election for some time. As people who read this blog know, I have quite a long list of grievances with Obama and his administration, far too lengthy to get into here. The main question here is: What would be solved by voting for Mitt Romney, voting third party or not voting at all?

First let's address the third party question. Our system now is set up to make it as difficult as possible for third parties to gain any political power. This is awful, and once of the worst things about our political system. With that said, voting for one of these parties during a presidential election does not seem to be an effective ways of changing our predicament . Spending time supporting things such as fusion voting in New York or other projects that make third parties more viable at the state level seems like a much better way of changing this paradigm. No clue if I'll feel the same way in 4 years, the landscape might have changed, but right now it seems like the only third party candidates with any real support come from places like the plutocracy now movement and other self funded billionaire vanity projects. This isn't to say there isn't value in movements to try and reach the 5% federal funding threshold for third parties, but until we can change the structure of this process, a third party vote at the presidential level does not strike me as particularly useful.

People who have made arguments to not vote for Obama (Glenn Ford of the Black Agenda Report comes to mind) do so by game theory-ing out a future where a Mitt Romney presidency has done something to reinvigorate a "real" left or something along those lines. Personally, I just have much less faith in my predictive powers to base my vote on that type of forecasting. That's not to say that it isn't possible that Obama could continue to do terrible things that wouldn't be possible under President Mitt Romney, it's just that I think it's really hard to predict what will happen with any kind of certainty that far down the road.

Additionally, a Romney Administration + Republican House and Senate could easily be worse than the Bush administration. That isn't to say that we won't see horrible things from the second term of the Obama Administration + Republican House and Senate. We will most likely see them push cuts to social security and medicare, the TPP, and I'm sure more yemen bombings, with potentially the extrajudicial killing of an american citizen thrown in for good measure. With Romney we could see the Ryan budget, national right to work, Israel bombing Iran, maybe even a land war for old times' sake! While this is all guess work (especially cause Romney has held opposing views on most issues at various times), but I'm decently confident that a Romney Administration gives us a much higher potential for evil.

As awful as spending the second Obama term fighting a worse trade agreement than NAFTA and cuts to our social safety net, it's worth my vote to prevent the second set of alternatives. I really do believe (well, hope at least) we are heading to a war for the future of the Democratic party, but I don't think the election will have an effect on that one way other the other.

As noted centrist sellout Noam Chomsky said: "Choosing the lesser of two evils isn't a bad thing. The cliché makes it sound bad, but it's a good thing. You get less evil."

Sometimes it really is that simple.

Giving Money

First and most important rule: Don't give to money to the presidential race. I'm pretty sure no one reading this blog has enough money to make a difference in the Presidential race, and bragging someone  has x number of donors literally does nothing. You have limited resources, so give to places where it might actually make an impact. Obama will sink or swim without or without you. (Seriously, he will. Their goal is to raise a billion dollars. Your $20 is what percent of that? There is a better candidate somewhere who needs it more)

The best place to give money is to primary challengers, but it's too late for that this cycle. Give money to house and or important senate races. For an even greater impact, give to local races further down the ballot.

Volunteering

I've done a decent bit of canvasing and phone banking over the years, and the 2009 I reached my breaking point. A friend/co-worker of mine was rounding up people to canvas for Creigh Deeds in the Virginia Governor's race. Deeds had just spent the previous month claiming he would op Virginia out of health care reform, cap and trade, EFCA and would strongly defend their right to work laws. The conversation went like this:

Friend: Help us canvas for Creigh Deeds, he needs our help!

Me: Did you hear what he's said about literally every issue we care about over the last month?

Friend: Are you aware of how terrible Bob McDonald is?

Me: I honestly don't care. If I lived in Virginia, I'd hold my nose and vote for Deeds, but I sure as hell am not wasting my free time helping his sorry ass.

Ever since 2009, I've felt better and better about that decision, and it's now my rule. Go all in for people who have your back, or where the race is really, really important. Fuck everyone else. I worked my ass off for the Donna Edwards campaign, and would do so again in a heartbeat. The same goes for  Kweisi Mfume in the Maryland Senate primary and others. It may not seem like it, but there are plenty of people out there like them around the country who a really worthy of your free time and political activism. But fuck people who aren't on our side. Hold your nose and vote for them, but don't waste your time and energy helping them in the slightest. They just aren't worth it.

Anyhow, just my thoughts, feel free to print out this concise list of recommendations and carry it into the booth with you!