Advice For Candidates, Supporters And Successors

What? A post not about my cancer or featuring disco music? WHAAAAA...? It's true, though. I start with a quote:

You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you might find
You get what you need

(The Rolling Stones)

With Pennsylvania and four other states having held their primaries yesterday, Republican Donald Trump and, especially, Democrat Hillary Clinton are both closer than ever to clinching their party's nominations. FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver says that Trump's sweep of all five states makes it likely that if Indiana wants Trump (whether he can go back there or not) the Cruz-Kasich tag-team, formed much, much too late, will be probably be unable to stop Trump from preventing the contested GOP convention they so desperately need.

FiveThirtyEight also says that, barring a miracle, Clinton (winning 4 of 5, including the big prize of PA) will have more total elected delegates than Bernie Sanders, and adding in the superdelegates (more on them in a bit) makes her pretty much the a certainty to win the nomination in Philadelphia in July. (Side note: if health permits I plan to volunteer at the convention here in some capacity.)

So with that, and the comments I'm reading from supporters of both Bernie and Hillary ranging from angry to smug, bitter to ecstatic, desperate for a miracle to anxious to fast-forward to the fall, and too much it nasty, I've decided to spend a few minutes dispensing some advice -- I'm a little more focused on Sanders, any progressive candidates who may come in his wake, and his supporters, many of whom are younger and idealistic -- certainly much younger than myself and somewhat more idealistic. :o . But I'm nothing if not an equal-opportunity advice giver.

A Hillary Clinton Thought

Maybe Hillary Clinton decided to say something nice about Nancy Reagan by talking about her stance on stem cell research, and had a brain fart and said "HIV/AIDS" instead? If so, that was her second mistake. Her first was wanting to pander to the right-wing nuts in the first place.

In a situation like this, where the deceased isn't worthy of adulation but you want to be respectful, all you do is offer condolences to the family. That's it. Hillary, in trying to score points with conservatives -- who will never, ever, show her the same courtesy -- offended many of her core supporters (in November, if not necessarily during the primaries) -- people of a certain age who lived through the days of the despicable Reagan administration. In case you weren't alive then, or somehow have forgotten that bastard, here's Dan Savage's rant.

Nancy supported her husband's evil, reportedly abandoned her friend Rock Hudson when AIDS was killing him, and only started advocating for stem-cell research after Ronnie was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. And her puerile "Just Say No" anti-drug effort, if anything, did more harm than good.

If Donald Trump becomes our 45th President, remember this day.

I'm Feeling The Bern

So this happened over the summer when I was at the Navy Yard taking pictures of the new development (including park space) there...

And then this happened last night on my way home from work...

A few minutes later it hit me: this is why I should vote for Bernie Sanders.

All of this paranoia and the extra "security" that doesn't really protect anyone, all of this crap that began after the 9/11 attacks, annoys me more and more with each passing day. (Well, pretty much everything annoys me more every day, but that's another story.) And, as much as I like her and much of what she's done and what she wants to do, Hillary Clinton -- previously a United States Senator and Secretary of State -- is part of the political machinery that has led to this steady erosion of our freedoms. This has to change, and I don't think Clinton will be as willing to make the needed changes as Sanders.

Make no mistake: I'll vote for whichever candidate the Democrats nominate to go up against the survivor of the RepubliScum Clown Gang Wars. But when Pennsylvania holds its primary (which is so important with the number of delegates at stake, the state schedules it for the day before the first party convention begins) I'm voting for Bernie Sanders.

All he has to do is be competitive and make my vote meaningful. In 2008 I voted for Hillary even though by the time the PA primary occurred it was a foregone conclusion that she came from way ahead to lose the nomation to Barack Obama. At the time I honestly had doubts that he could win in November. Oops. So maybe I shouldn't think this way, but I see no chance one of the GOP clowns can win in November 2016. They've painted themselves and each other into the most extremist corner. None of them (not even John Kasich, who's probably the most sane of the GOP clowns) can escape this when the general election rolls around.

So do your part, America, and make my vote count!

And look up at the sky!

Cropped version:

About Last Night...

I told you I wasn't worried. The chess match played out as I expected. But to be honest, even after reading Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight blog in the closing days and watching President Obama's chance of winning go from about 73 percent on October 29 to 91 percent early yesterday, I was a bit concerned. Not to a great extent, but just enough. I wasn't so worried about the polls -- I find it impossible to take them seriously on an individual basis, the polling criteria are so varied, but summarizing them and determining the trends and such, the Silver calculus works for me. (This will not change my mind about the baseball stat geeks and their Moneyball junk, however.)

My biggest concern was that the GOP would try to steal Florida or Ohio again. Well, if they did try, they failed.

But beyond the Obama victory, other events offer signs of hope. The asinine GOP extremists who opined that there's such a thing as "legitimate" rape and rape that "God intended to happen" both got their asses kicked. Beyond the win in Wisconsin by Tammy Baldwin, making her the first openly gay U.S. Senator, California sends to the House the first LGBT person of color in Congress. And Arizona -- Arizona!?! -- may  have elected a bisexual woman to Congress (the race is still too close to call).

What really stunned me, though, was the results from the four states where marriage equality was on the ballot. The last 32 or so times that voters had their say on the issue in some way, the pro-equality side lost every single time.

I saw a comment from a pundit saying (and I'm paraphrasing) that it would be helpful/important to have two victories out of the four. I guess that would constitute a trend. I was honestly hoping for just one.