The ruling: the votes can count, but only if we adjust for the votes as we woulda liked for it to have been instead of, you know...

...the way thing actually are?

There's been a lot of talk about party unity - let's all come together, and put our arms around each other. I submit to you ladies and gentlemen, hijacking four delegates ... is not a good way to start down the path of party unity.
- Harold Ickes

The solution to seating the delegates: since of course we're pre-committed to the idea that Hillary Clinton is not going to be our nominee no matter what, we can seat the delegates with "only" the penalties that the rulebook actually provided for situations like these, but more must be done - because Clinton might actually win.

See, the thing is, rules are rules, but there are times when rules don't count. See, it just wouldn't be fair to Obama for anything to benefit Hillary. So let's rewrite the vote totals to include the votes Obama "should have" gotten.

And the media will allow just a little bit of coverage of the enraged (and freshly insulted) Dem base, but only so long as we emphasize how appropriate that there's a zoo nearby*...

WASHINGTON -- The hotel where the 30 Democratic rule makers met Saturday -- to decide whether rules are rules or whether rules are made to be broken -- was within howling distance of the National Zoo.

Outside the stately Marriott Wardman Park Hotel were clusters of women with "Hear Me Roar" placards in their fists who came from all over the country -- $4 a gallon be damned -- to make what could be a last stand for their Hillary....

...and only so long as we drop in the new meme, that it's unfair to the people who voted but it's even more unfair to the ones who didn't, but could have.

None of that was the voters' fault (did they set the calendar?), and who winds up getting punished? The voters.

And not just the voters who voted, but also the voters who didn't vote -- the ones who might have turned out had they not been told about a million times that their votes weren't going to count. Who knows how they would have spoken.

To the DNC, the key to democracy means tinkering with certified election results as needed to make things...well, "fair"**.

And we have to accommodate all those poor unfortunates who would have voted, if only they...well, had voted.

Harold Ickes, a member of the committee and a top adviser to Clinton, said the panel had "hijacked" delegates belonging to Clinton.

"I am stunned that we have the gall and chutzpah to substitute our judgment for 600,000" people who voted in Michigan, he said. "Mrs. Clinton has instructed me to reserve her rights to take this to the credentials committee."

Ahh, but who cares about legitimacy in elections? Certainly not the media - they've got priorities, and they know who pays 'em. And certainly not the DNC - they made that clear yesterday.

So - time to party, eh***? If you can't win honestly, well - so long as you win.

Democratic strategists say they expect Obama to secure a majority of convention delegates and put the final touches on an historic run for the presidential nomination by the middle of this week. Enough additional superdelegates are likely to ratify his victory over Clinton, once the final primary votes are cast, they said, to put him over the top.

Obama, who said the other day that he expected the general election campaign to start this week, plans to stage a victory rally Tuesday night...

But in the end - Obama won't. Win, that is. And neither will any real Democrats****.

...several hundred Hillary Clinton supporters chanted "Count every vote!" and waved signs announcing "Count my vote or count me out." A smaller number of Barack Obama supporters kept their distance. One woman, passing by a 4-year-old girl and her mother carrying pro-Clinton signs, shouted at them: "Cheater!"

The chaos and vitriol seemed to confirm Democrats' fears that they might blow an election that should otherwise be an easy victory for them. Nor did the party's compromise fit well with the Democrats' oft-voiced commitment to voting rights.

Superdelegates: This is what November will look like

She’s not going to get over it.

You still have a choice.

Do the right thing.

update: reading the comments at firedoglake (apparently where this video originates) and other "progressive" blogs, I am stunned at how the "winning" candidate's backers, the ones who defended Rev. Wright's righteous pulpit-humping, and still support Obama after seeing Pfleger make an obscenity of himself, think this woman (above) needs to be 'more civil'.

Apparently whether your behavior is civil or not, in their world, is not based by how you actually behave, but rather on whether the outrage is justified or not - whether one's opinion matches the Opinions That We Have Deemed Worthy vs. the opinions that people just shouldn't have.

This woman out-and-out suggested that the raving hatred of white women vs. the special rules for black people thing is unfair. This automatically makes her evil and therefore worthy of degrading jabs based on her being (a) old and (b) a woman. (Mother is not supposed to be a dirty word, guys. 'Course we all know you hate your own mommies - because they didn't raise you to be respectful toward them or any other women.)

I'd say attacking this woman for being old and female should be out, we should stick to the issue, but that appears to be the issue. People should be young and beautiful and should obey the rules for what looks good. Old women violate everything Obama's "movement" stands for.

These people also blame Hillary for Obama's total unelectability. They still don't see anything wrong with him, or with what happened. They don't see any disconnect at all between their own raving raging hatred of old white women on the one hand, vs. their expectation that these old white women should fall in line like worthless old white bats just ought and vote for the candidate they're goddamned told to goddamned vote for.

(shudder)

I am working on a way to define the difference between "angry" vs. out-and-out "hateful". I don't want to be the way they are. I think I might start with a list of what I object to most about them - for instance, the hypocrisy of calling people bigots even as you jeer at them for their age, cheer the rancid lady screaming about "white trash", and laugh at the misogynistic jokes. Maybe after I write down all the things that make me dislike them so much, I can get control over how they are infesting my reality, and the immune system can get a grip. But I do not want to be serene. I think there is a time for anger - it exists for a reason, it really does. And the key to me is to articulate what is actually wrong (vs. just hating on the other people), and what needs to change - the first step to fixing something is setting good goals....

It has to come back to ethics. Real ethics. We need to rediscover integrity. We really really do.


___________________________________
* "hear me roar" - Helen Reddy song, "I am woman, hear me roar" - put them next to the zoo, because feminists are like animals - DID YA GET IT? DID YA GET IT?

** on the bright side, at least we won't be hearing much more about affirmative action "never hurt anyone".

*** or is that time to crash the party?

**** our votes were stolen, suppressed, manipulated, minimized. "With friends like these, who needs enemies?" Something to think about when you read press coverage of those enraged Obama supporters calling us "cheaters":

Our candidate is running on the idea that votes need to be earned.

The other candidate is the one relying on the idea that votes are something to demand, steal, suppress, manipulate, minimize, and in the end, declare oneself entitled to.

election games

the civil war in the Democratic party:
Donna Brazile admits on CNN that her new plan for the "new" Democratic party involves "not needing" core Democratic constituencies. For some reason, even though people heard her say it - the transcript starts after that particular quote, right at the part where someone is asking her what the heck she means.

Not that it's really much of a secret to working class voters - or to the other core constituencies that Brazile intends to boot from the party. Of course when Obama means 'change', he means we are what needs to 'change'. Right? Unity means everyone is united in anger against America - meaning scapegoats standing in for America's sins. Right? Obama's "new kind of politics" means the novelty of seeing a Presidential candidate openly insulting America and its people - which is touted as "calling things the way they really are". (Of course, it's no way to govern - but who ever said Obama actually cared about governing? I mean, have you seen his voting record?)

The closest we have (yet) is the part right after the offensive statement - where she revises what she said:



Gary, IN:
Wolf Blitzer tries to get the mayor of Gary, IN to explain why he's holding on to the votes (the two obvious possibilities: 1. because he is trying to manipulate news coverage of Hillary's win, or 2. intention to tamper with votes.)

give us our due

We're all very different people. We're not Watusi, we're not Spartans, we're Americans. With a capital "A", huh? And you know what that means? Do you? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We're the underdog. We're mutts.

- Stripes, 1981

There's a history in this country that Barack Obama never seems to have heard. It is usually called 'the immigrant experience', and its basic assumptions are at the center of why Obama is so incapable of connecting with working class white voters.

The majority of "whites" in America are not descended from the Mayflower. Our people came here through Ellis Island. We mostly weren't considered white when we first got here - in fact, some of the earliest IQ tests proved "scientifically" that we were subhuman (which is largely why we ignore jerks who publish books like The Bell Curve).

But we were proud to become Americans. And now peoples' definition of whiteness has expanded to include our features.



We are not passive beneficiaries of the slavery system. We had to fight for our place in America's prosperity, and we are aware (acutely aware, this election) that we are already losing what we've gained.

The first of us got here just in time to fight the Civil War (on the Union side), and after that the rich whites used us like disposable tissues in and on their factories and railroads and mines.

Cities like New York were so crowded with dirt-poor immigrants that the only way to get a job was to literally sell your body, signing away all rights. Conditions were terrible - sweatshop conditions. Immigrant labor made other people rich, but the workers lived terrible lives.

We did benefit from wealthy whites who were horrified at what we were subjected to. There is no simplified narrative like the one Rev. Wright gives us, where you can tell who the villain is by something as easy to check as skin color. If rich whites were as bad as some people seem to think, immigrants and blacks would still be living the way they did in 1904. It is crude and simplistic and insulting to suggest that you can divide people into moral categories of good and evil in such a fashion. There were activists who spoke out and who worked to end horrific conditions and we owe them something. And it's petty and ungracious to refuse to acknowledge that debt.

But although we had help, we also fought and died ourselves for what we gained: minimum wage, forty hour workweeks, child labor laws, workplace safety regulations.

Obama is probably familiar with the Illinois Pullman strike.

(Do Americans realize that once upon a time it was legal for employers to pay wages in "scrip", that is, company credit?)

We fought for rights such as the right to not be kept locked into the building, after 146 teenage girls died in a fire (started because the building was not well kept).

I have heard a lot about how unions "overpay" their employees. What they don't realize is that working in a blast furnace is like working in Hell. It's hot and it's dangerous and it's hard work. The shifts are often crazy, ten or twelve or fourteen hours at a stretch, working through weekends and holidays, very frequently on a rotating schedule that seems designed to make sure nobody ever gets a good night's sleep. The "big bucks" usually comes from overtime, not base wages.

...of three men at J & L who fell
when a catwalk buckled
to the crucible
and how their screams melted...

- excerpt, Open Hearth, by M. Lisa Shattuck
from Youngstownsteel.com

Factory workers dying on the job isn't something from last century. Even with all the nearly obsessive focus on safety, people still die, and factories still post those Days Since Last Accident signs. In a way, it kinda bugs me that those signs don't count the most pernicious danger: falling asleep behind the wheel - I wish someone would do something about back-to-back shifts. However, before there were unions, fatal accidents were not only common, but the surviving spouse usually had to pay the company for any damage done to the machinery.

Fighting those excesses in power is, to me is the essence of what the Democratic party stands for. I'm the so-called labor vote and my first interest is a decent life for anyone willing to work hard and play by the rules. This has two parts:

1. a decent life: this is what the labor movement fought for. It's what conservatives don't get/don't want to talk about. Americans had to fight hard to win a good standard of living because the sweatshop is what capitalism looks like in its natural state.

Just as our system works on the principle of checks and balances, so too economics and politics need to check and balance the other. Economics without politics leads to corruption and tyranny; politics without economics leads to stagnation. Either way, the end result of extremism is collapse.

2. willing to work hard and play by the rules: this half is important. It's the part liberals don't get/don't want to talk about. Working stiffs live in that world economists are describing when they speak of "competition for scarce resources". Scarcity is reality and it means life is naturally harsh. Civilized life means banding together to make life a little less uncertain. A little less painful.

The working class works hard and plays by the rules and wants to be recognized and rewarded for that. Some of us take it as a personal affront when our tax dollars, instead of supporting things that benefit us, are instead diverted to the sort of handouts that reward people for rejecting our ethical code.

Personally, I really like the idea of a safety net - but I resent that so many safety net projects specifically exclude white people; they should be open to anyone who has a legitimate need. I want to hit something when I hear it suggested that reverse discrimination never hurt nobody; of course it does. It's just that nobody listens to the people who actually carry that burden.

And lots of people resent programs that destroy incentive and undermine the work ethic.

There's been a lot of shaming going on for the past several decades. People aren't proud to be an American anymore, and they don't want to speak the language, and expecting people to assimilate the way my own people assimilated is considered somehow insulting.

To become affluent too often means leaving behind your immigrant roots. In today's America, if you started from working class white stock but you're moving up in the world, you either become a conservative, or you disown your heritage and take on the peculiar identity of the latte liberal - the self-hating white, the America-hating privileged American.

Many liberals seem happy to do this. They are only too pleased to have an excuse to be angry with their small town origins. I guess it's fun to mock their parents' culture. They get to be better than, and smarter.

"The place where I come from
is a small town
They think so small
they use small words.
But not me
I'm smarter than that..."

"...and my Heaven will be a big Heaven
And I will walk through the front door."

- Peter Gabriel, Big Time

I won't vote for Obama because he doesn't understand that we don't share his identity crisis - we have our own identity, and we don't particularly want to renounce it so that we can become latte liberals. Or so that we can become free trade conservatives. Or so that we can become...whatever the hell it is he is offering us. (Kos Libertarianism?)

Once upon a time, the underprivileged stood together. The blacks (and other minorities) have legitimate grievances, but they are making a big mistake in letting their leaders turn their anger against "America", which too often means against the labor vote (divide and conquer).