9/28 A Vote to Save Democracy & OT
Last week marked the start of Early Voting in my county. I had applied for a mail-in ballot. Should I wait for the ballot, or maybe just go and see how busy the one polling place open is? Was I ready to make my choice for NOTA or a ticket on the ballot?
All summer I deliberated. I live in a state that will vote blue for the most part. Why should I care now that once again, the DNC handed the nomination on a silver platter to a heavily flawed candidate, this time Joe Biden. Second time in a row. I’m still befuddled how Bernie won the first few states, then lost most of the races after that.
Last Monday, I decided to show some support for a down ballot in my district. I e-mailed the Dem County party office, and requested a sign. I got an e-mail saying there was a shortage of signs for a particular candidate (the one running for congress) and would I take another sign instead? They had a dearth of signs until a week ago.
I negotiated instead, making it clear that I live on the edge of a town, and my backyard actually backs up to an avenue where the visibility is good. Moreover, the vote for the person running for the congress seat was crucial to redistricting. I’m glad they didn’t ask if I wanted a Biden Harris sign. Within 2 hours, there was a sign in my yard for Betsy Londrigan. She was not my first choice in the primary, but she almost won last time. The person who wrote me the e-mail took one of the signs from his yard and put it in mine. As it turned out, he was running for an office and was VP of the county party. That indicated to me an “Not me, us” attitude I could get behind.
Clearly, from my numerous criticisms on this site, Biden did not earn my vote, nor did he try to earn other progressives’ votes, other than meeting with them. Like Bernie said recently, if I were young, I’d be very angry.
I am 79, and I am angry.
If I were 18 or 20, I would be veryTwo , very, very angry.
Young people can transform this country. We must do everything we can to ensure they vote in this election. pic.twitter.com/RIeUyphJ2o
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) September 23, 2020
This particular poll station had a gym attached. There were 30 minutes left for the poll to be open. Plenty of booths and they were placed more than 6 feet apart. Each time a masked voter left the booth to go hand it in to be scanned, the booth was cleaned by another election judge or volunteer.
I only had to wait a few min in line. They gave me a ballot but I had to sign an affidavit that I voted early and I will destroy my ballot when it arrives in the mail in the next week. Two younger voters walked in with Biden-KHive shirts on. They were asked to leave as they were informed that they were illegally electioneering. They looked glum, but then I said you could go to a rest room and turn your shirt inside out. One of the election judges agreed. So they left, with the intention to come back.
On my ballot, there were many choices for POTUS. Among them besides Trump and Biden:
- Howie Hawkins/Angela Walker - Green Party
- Gloria La Riva/Leonard Peltier - Party for Socialism & Liberation
- Brian Carroll/Amar Patel - American Solidarity Party
I happened to see the County Clerk on the way out, and gave him some praise. He said over 800 people came in to vote. As it turns out, over 860,000 folks participated in early voting last week.
Over 860,000 Americans have already voted, compared to fewer than 10,000 by this point in 2016 https://t.co/BU8eli13fU
— John Iadarola (@johniadarola) September 27, 2020
However, I decided to vote in person last Thursday as I made up my mind to go ahead with the deed. I did vote for the Democratic Party ticket - from POTUS on down to local races. There was one Republican considered for one of the races, but decided just to vote all Dem. I was very tempted to vote for the Socialist & Liberation party candidate.
I don't expect many birdies to do what I did, but I think we do need to send a signal to Trump and his gross incompetent buddies that he is getting fired for insubordination and domestic terrorism.
Identity politics for electing the highest officer of the federal branch did weigh in just a bit. While I would have preferred Tammy Baldwin, Barbara Lee or Karen Bass for VP choice, I'm hoping that Harris will help Biden bend a bit more if he has truly evolved since the days of that gosh-awful crime bill of 1994. I also want all girls to be able to look up to someone like Harris, who is the daughter of immigrants. I am concerned that the donor money has already infiltrated her political psyche, but at this point, she's agreed to what the party wants her to do, which is help get the ship turned around. I do think she will help the ticket, even more than when Geraldine Ferraro did in 1984 when she was nominated. I was thrilled when Ferraro was nominated, but unfortunately, she had a very weak running mate. Similar situation here, but to be fair to Mondale, Reagan was an effective spokesperson for the GOP.
I'm also hoping Anita Hill will get a judicial bench out of this, or advise on a good selection to choose from judicial nominees. The problem is the Dem party has given away too many picks already instead of fighting for them now.
This SCOTUS nominee is extremely smart, but that doesn't make her any less extreme, it just makes that extremism more dangerous. https://t.co/woOyMKWhHm
— Meteor_Blades (@Meteor_Blades) September 26, 2020
Bernie is right in my mind about the threat to democracy. I'm not voting for Biden. I voted to give Democracy an opportunity to breathe and eventually thrive again, and as a Democratic Socialist, I concluded this was the best choice I could make. It's not about me even though it would have been nice if Biden could have tried more to earn my vote.
Bernie held a town hall on FB about rural issues and voters. I'm glad he's still holding town halls, continuing to gather evidence of a progressive agenda.
Democracy is a requisite to every thing we do as Americans; it must win first. It's hard though because we are all exhausted from COVID, forest fires, and tweets. But I'm still DemExit and will criticize the two major parties in order to raise awareness of issues that crumbs aren't enough to fix. We need a transformative government to streamline major resources to prevent the spread of pandemics and to beat back poverty. We pay their salaries and they should be accountable to us.
— Rodney Latstetter 🌹 #LaborParty (@proviewsusa) September 28, 2020
(photo credit: Benny's Bernie 2020 t-shirt)
That's my beef for now. More news, tweets, and videos in the comments. This serves as an open thread.
Fire away….
Excellent diary Benny—basically where I’m at.
The Our Revolution tweet doesn’t make much sense to me.
Trump doesn’t have to steal the election to install the new justice. He has the votes now and unless the dems come up with an effective strategy to delay the hearings (which now seems to be lacking) it will be a done deal before the next Inauguration.
I understood the message to be that if Trump is re-elected, most of the progress we’ve made is likely to go down the tubes. I think we know Amy Barrett is going to be on the court, unless there’s some last minute bombshell. Not likely.
If the tables were turned, the Republicans would never let this happen. Kind a let’s you know that the court will be making those decisions, no matter who’s in office. I would so like to be proven wrong.
https://www.axios.com/biden-democrats-progressives-left-334ed8ba-1405-4c44-96b9-0f399fbb9dba.html
Where’s the mention of climate change?
we’re not being petty
Can the manipulation be any more transparent?
What a moral conundrum. There are no right answers for progressives. Ally yourself with the right at your own risk.
If there is illegality then charge him. But it looks like most of these revelations show legal tax avoidance. Enabled by laws enacted by both Republican and Democratic actors for benefit of themselves and those in their class.
Trump avoided volunteering his tax returns for a good reason, and he p didn’t totally lie about this fact: his tax returns probably were being audited. And remain on audit.
I think the Tax man will nail him, their hoping he loses reelection
Mnunchin is in collusion with Barr and Trump. But one can hope he loses the election.
maybe some fun
a new Borat film
Sacha Baron Cohen Secretly Shot a Sequel to Borat
a revolutionary hiding in plane sight
The Revolutionary Beethoven
In the year of the great composer’s 250th birthday, we can retune our ears to pick up the subversive and passionately democratic nature of his music.
The Sixth and Ninth Symphonies are not just brilliant, iconic pieces. Beethoven’s passion comes through both like a shining bell. His name is living forevermore.✊🎼☮️
Let me add the Seventh Symphony. The triumphal notes that closed the movie “The King’s Speech.”
ty don!
T and R, Ms. Benny!! 😊☮️👍 Excellent read. 👌I will use my POTUS NOTA as a protest vote. Hubster and krewe down here think I’m voting for ByeDone. If I had kids, several clothespins would be on my nose, and I would vote for semi-Braindead. I don’t. This really is a horrendous choice. 🤬🤮
Totally get it, orl. It’s possible the indies will vote Trump out one way or another.
For me, the sooner the goons are voted out, the better.
I will be writing-in Hawkins on my ballot since Greens are not on it but he is qualified as a write-in. I am not in a swing state so am not subject to pressure to do a strategic vote at all.
BTW, for anyone wondering if a given write-in candidate is eligible in their state, here is a resource showing if any third-party candidate is on the ballot or eligible for write-in:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_party_and_independent_candidates_for_the_2020_United_States_presidential_election
Thanks OT for that link.
I’ll probably vote Carroll that way my down ballot will count for sure.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/28/stunning-new-revelations-about-trumps-taxes-also-expose-hidden-weakness/?utm_source=reddit.com
Anyone outraged by this but not protesting the legal loopholes making it possible is driven more by TDS (“Trump Derangement Syndrome”) than by economic inequality.
ethnomethodology and the body politic
this comment is a reading
in the last year or so I have seen more connections to biology and ecosystems
this is from an article in a book which is an event set up by Bruno Latour and the event happened in 2017. The entire book is on line, over 300 pages with articles and the dialogue that followed. The particular selection concerns cells which have become important actors with Covid
appologize for strange line feeds since this is copied from a pdf. From the text page 89-90
Sem(b)iosis and the Political Economy of
Nature
Mike Lynch
On my flight over from the United States a few days ago, in order to get
some relief from thinking about this session, this talk and this Dialoghi, I relaxed
and read the latest issue of The New Yorker Magazine and, lo and behold, there
was an article by Siddhartha Mukherjee (8), on cancer, and it is related, I think—
somewhat different, but related—to what Scott has just told us about. The article is
called The Invasion equation. Mukherjee is a doctor, an oncologist, who deals with
cancer patients and he’s talking about a woman who is diagnosed with a tumor in
her breast. He says:
“… we have no clue how these tumors, the ones found incidentally, behave in
real life. Would the alliances formed between the woman’s tumor cells and her tis-
sue cells enable widespread metastatic dissemination? Or would these encounters
naturally dampen the growth of the tumor and prevent its spread? Nobody could
say. … It was a classic denominator problem but my response seemed supremely
unsatisfactory.”
The “denominator problem” is that he is faced with the patient, the woman who
has a positive diagnosis for this tumor, but he doesn’t know how many others who
were not in his presence, not having been diagnosed, would have very similar cells
in their bodies. He quotes a specialist on cancer research Rusian Medzhitov, who
wrote of the “new rules of tissue engagement.” Mukherjee says:
“Medzhitov believes that all our tissues have ‘established rules by which cells
form engagements and alliances with other cells.’ Physiology is the product of these
relationships. … Medzhitov’s point is that cancer cells produce cancer—they get established and grow—only when they manage to form alliances with normal cells.
And there are two sides (at least) to any such relationship.”
Mukherjee uses two common analogies to open up this question about the en-
vironment in which cancer cells, which are found ubiquitously in bodies and in the
blood, grow. One analogy is with seed and soil, and he is concretely looking into
soil. The other is with invasive organisms and he speaks about something that is
very familiar to those of us who live in upstate New york: zebra mussels (Dreisse-
na polymorpha), a species native to the Caspian and Black Seas that colonized the
Great Lakes and also the Finger Lakes near where I live, with thousands of them in
a square meter. And, again, the issue is why is it that these creatures, with predators
in their own habitats, are in some sort of balance and are not considered a hor-
rendous pest, but when they move to a new environment they just proliferate and
become, sometimes for quite a long time, predominant. So, what I find interesting
about this article, which I just happened to come across, is it alludes to just the
kinds of things that Scott has shown to us with his very wonderful slides. you start
seeing this everywhere, and I don’t think there’s any need to search for the politics
of science, particularly of genetic science and biology; the politics is in the language
used to describe them, incidentally: the cancer cells disseminate and encounter
normal cells, they engage with the tissues and form alliances. It is as if Mukherjee
and Medzhitov had been students of Latour (and maybe they were). Politics, in
this case, is not an addition to cellular physiology and pathology from some other
domain that affects or somehow changes the science; it’s part of it, it’s part of its
language, it’s intrinsic. Though in this case the politics is part of the way pathology
is described, we saw many cases from Scott’s talk in which it is not a pathological
way of informing and elaborating biology. Scott has treated us to a holobiontic
political economy of nature, and I suggest that it’s also ‘sembiontic’ in the sense of
being a kind of portmanteau between symbiosis and semiotics where we can pay
attention to the language in which biology is expressed, not just as incidental lan-
guage, but as the very opening up of discovered domains for further research and
clinical practice.
https://www.cini.it/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/BODY-POLITICS-complete-Online.pdf
interesting. hope my cells are ushering the other ones right on by. i had no idea they were ubiquitous. 🌸
TY, Benny🌺
Whoopie.
The gospel according to the Borg named Bezos. Screw him. 🙁
Another guy who doesn’t pay taxes and screws his employees out of safety equipment during a pandemic.