oh this is just great...

dennis kucinich dropped out of the presidential race less than a day ago, on friday. so what, you are asking? he had zero delegates and no chance of winning the presidency and was excluded from all the recent debates and got no news coverage. even his dropping out of the presidential race has gotten zero news coverage from any major news network! just a few days ago, fred thompson dropping out of the race was big news! but the corporate media never gave dennis kucinich a chance. check out him dropping out of the race...



now why, you ask, is he dropping out of the race? is it because he had no chance to begin with? no. he never cared about that. he wanted to get some delegates for the convention to help shape the party platform in a more progressive direction and maybe his delegates could throw their support to one of the more popular candidates like clinton, obama, or edwards, in exchange for something. he wanted to help shape the debate and keep it from being some bullshit democratic-leadership-council-style centrist competition for corporate dollars. he probably did help shape the debate and get everyone else in the democratic field to come out strongly against the war in iraq (although it sure took hillary clinton a helluva long time to come around on the iraq issue). anyway, what the flop is going on with dennis kucinich dropping out of the race? guess what: some corporate asshole is challenging him in the democratic primary, not for president, but for congress, in dennis kucinich’s home district of cleveland, ohio. and dennis kucinich is basically the leader of the progressive wing of the democrats in congress. you know, the ones who are willing to stand up to bullshit like giving bush a blank check on the war in iraq. check out what his message is now:



isn’t this just great? the fat cats are trying to buy out the democratic party and keep it from actually doing anything to help working-class people, to make it into another corporate party like the republicans that only cares about the wealthy. they are trying to increase their control of congress, since they already own 100% of the republican party but they are trying to increase the share of the democrats they own, and thereby eliminate any voices of dissent for their plutocratic agenda. they are trying to get rid of the congressman who led the fight against the u.s.a. patriot act from the beginning, led the fight against the war in iraq from the beginning, and led the fight against the bush administration from the beginning. so... now in the presidential race, we really are down to 3 democrats: hillary clinton, barack obama, and john edwards, the only ones the media was giving a fair shot to in the first place. i admit, i have been manipulated by the talking heads in the media, and all of the fighting between the hillary clinton and barack obama campaigns, playing right into the hands of the republicans. well not any longer.

there is no point in saying anything bad about one democratic candidate for president in order to make another look better by comparison. all that does is help republicans. my thinking on this was a bit cloudy before but now i can see clearly. i may not see eye-to-eye with hillary clinton or her husband bill clinton on everything, but we have got to win this thing in november against the republicans, no matter which candidate we choose! among republicans, hillary clinton is viewed as some ultra-left-wing librul extremist who would basically implement communism and have us all reading quotations from chairman mao while she has a tea party with hugo chavez, fidel castro, and kim jong il. on the other hand, i have observed her carefully over the years and found her to be a “triangulator”, that is, a centrist, whose positions on the issues are carefully crafted to appeal to the broadest possible percentage of eligible voters, and have no basis in any sort of ideology, just pure pragmatism and desire for victory. there are some advantages to this approach. unlike president dumbya, she would never ignore the will of the electorate, if mass popular opinion on an issue went in the opposite direction from her policies. she would actually respond to the will of the people, and would probably be doing enough polling so that she knows what we want even better than we do ourselves, since each of us only knows our own opinion and those of a few other acquaintances, but she would have mass aggregate data of everyone’s opinions. the only real drawback to this approach of hers is, sometimes i believe the majority of the public actually is wrong. and during campaigns, people are voting with their money, and the more money you have, the more your vote counts. but wealthy interests are backing all of the major candidates. they are also putting money into the obama campaign and even the edwards campaign. john edwards especially gets support from trial lawyers, and i have never been able to figure out whether that is good or bad. i mean, we kinda need to have a judicial system where there are fair trials in order to have a free country. but all 3 of the democratic candidates left are lawyers who went on to have careers in the u.s. senate. they all have very similar positions on the issues. now i think barack obama makes decisions in a different way from the others, because when he publicly declared his opposition to war in iraq, this was not a very popular view at the time. but history proved he was correct to argue against starting a costly and bloody war based on lies against a nation that had not done anything to provoke it. now, it is too late to go back and undo the war ever happening in the first place. hillary clinton and john edwards both voted in favor of authorizing war with iraq, which at the time, seemed like the “safe” thing to do, since it would make them look “tough” on “national security”, an “issue” that democrats are supposedly “weak” on. remember that the vote to authorize the war happened in 2002, just a bit over a year after september 11, 2001, and the public overwhelmingly supported republicans in the 2002 midterm elections on the fake-ass issue of “national security”. it is wonderful that now in 2008 someone like rudy giuliani who is running on 9/11 and national security is getting his ass handed to him on a stick in these elections, and is probably going to lose florida badly, even though that is the only state he has campaigned in for the last month and a half. in 2002 the republicans won the midterm elections by exploiting the public’s fears about terrorism and insinuating that democrats would fail to protect the nation and wound surrender to the terrorists. that is also the technique dumbya used to win the 2004 presidential election, portraying john kerry as a wishy-washy french aristocrat weakling who would surrender to osama bin laden and let al qaeda take over the entire world. both of those elections were about spin and propaganda and bullshit, not about any real issues. and now we have an election where the 3 democratic candidates left in the race have basically the same positions on all the major issues, at least right now. there are a few minor differences, but nothing of any real significance. all of them want to end the war, all of them have the same position on illegal immigration, all of them want a better economy with more jobs that are better paying, and everyone gets a pony. on the republican side this time around, there are some actual differences. john mccain and ron paul both oppose torture, but the other guys think that to be tough on terrorism, we ought to basically set fire to the constitution and ignore the writ of habeas corpus and geneva conventions and everything. rudy giuliani is pro-abortion, mitt romney used to be adamantly pro-abortion when he ran for office in liberal massachusetts but is not adamantly anti-abortion in conservative republican primaries for president, and all the other republicans are adamantly anti-abortion. john mccain opposed the bush tax cuts but now supports them, rudy giuliani supported them from the beginning, ron paul supported them from the beginning, and who knows what mike huckabee or mitt romney thought about those tax cuts? republicans salivate when they hear the name ronald reagan the same way pavlov’s dogs salivated when they heard a bell, whereas to mention the name ronald reagan to a democratic audience elicits disgust and contempt for the former president who left office when i was 6 years old. anyway, each of the republicans running for president is bad, but in a unique way. i saw an interview of john mccain’s mother on c-span and she is just... indescribable. she made a bit of a political misstep by saying john mccain has zero support from the republican party base or the republican establishment. but mostly she just seemed incredibly old-fashioned, but in a way that made her an endearing and likable character. a very old lady who is still vivacious, but not everything she says makes perfect sense (like when she was talking about why john mccain went to the naval academy she became a bit perplexed about why he went there, since at the time he really did not want to go there and she could not remember why he ended up going). she just says whatever she thinks without questioning whether it is a good idea to say it or not, who apparently used to be a very submissive wife but is now quite independent as a widow. i don’t think that she is senile or has dementia per se, but i have noticed that older people tend to get a bit more set in their views and stubborn and outspoken, and not make quite as much sense. like presidential candidate mike gravel on the democratic side, who seems like a pretty stubborn and outspoken fellow who says whatever he thinks and does not care about polls or stuff like that. he was a u.s. senator, like, 100 years ago. and left-wing intellectual noam chomsky (professor at m.i.t. and bestselling author and popular public speaker) is also like that, very stubborn and outspoken. i think that may also be what is wrong with ralph nader; he just has grumpy old man syndrome. but maybe these people are onto something, and maybe the rich corporate bastards are trying to buy out the democratic party the same way they did to the republicans. who knows? since edwards, obama, and clinton have pretty much identical positions on all the major issues, who is writing their position papers, and why do they all end up with the same results? could it be the same wealthy bastards who write the position papers for the republicans? now the candidates all have different rhetoric and campaign styles, and present themselves differently, and have different life stories, different races and genders, and appeal to different demographics of voters. but it is like they are all different-looking boxes with the same exact present inside each box, waiting for you to open it. on the outside, these candidates may seem different, but inside, they are all the same. so really, when it comes down to it, i am supporting barack obama because i like the way he is packaged and marketed better than the way hillary clinton or john edwards is packaged and marketed. i am well aware that all 3 are the same product. i don’t think hillary clinton or john edwards has a message and a public image that would do as well in a general election as barack obama. i have observed politics and figured out that image is everything, that making yourself look good and your opponents look bad is everything, and that if people in the media swoon over one candidate and spew venom towards another, the one they are swooning over has a much better chance of winning than the one all the venom is spewed onto. a public figure who is already despised by half of americans and has been well known for years, such as hillary clinton, is not able to position themselves and market themselves in whatever way they choose. someone like barack obama, whom nobody ever heard of until a few years ago, can position themselves however they want and market themselves however they want; however, conversely, there is the danger that their opponents can caricature them in whatever negative way they want, and what really matters is who has a better p.r. campaign, rather than any issues. it is more like a beauty contest or popularity contest than a decision based on any actual issues. that is how george w. bush won 2 presidential elections (although he did lose the popular vote the first time, even though the electoral vote is the only one that matters in picking a president). if any significant portion of the electorate actually gave a flying fuck about the issues, dennis kucinich would be the front-runner for president of the united states, rather than fighting to keep his seat in congress. but what do people care about? nothing but the horse-race, handicapping, predicting, seeing who outperforms predictions and who underperforms, seeing who does the best job portraying themselves well and their opponents poorly, and focusing on any conflicts and magnifying their importance while ignoring any signs of agreement. i have realized that this whole debate about the first female or black or mormon or whatever president is nothing but complete and utter bullshit. i don’t give a flying fuck if the next president is black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, or purple. i don’t care if they believe in god, allah, “bob”, vishnu, the flying spaghetti monster, the invisible pink unicorn, or magic underwear, as long as their beliefs do not undermine their ability to competently govern in the national interest or their ability to be inclusive towards others who do not believe in the same bullshit as them, but rather different bullshit (since everyone believes in some sort of bullshit). i want someone who can win the general election and then take this country’s policies on a left turn without pissing off enough people to lose congress back to the right-wingers. i want someone who can help decrease the amount of people killing other people, whether it is americans and foreigners killing each other in war, or americans killing other americans in crime, or foreigners killing other foreigners in genocide. i want a leader that does not automatically piss off half the people in the country as soon as that person’s name is heard. and i do not want democrats attacking other democrats in an election year such as this one. i have criticized bill clinton recently, which i think might be ok, since he is not running for office and probably never will. but maybe that was a bad move, since it might make his wife look bad. whatever... she already looks bad anyway, and i doubt anyone cares what i think, or would quote from my blog in campaign commercials. i am just an anonymous internet nobody, after all. i just wish we democrats could win, and we could tell the corporate lobbyists the same thing dick cheney told a senator he didn’t like: “go fuck yourself!” i wish people like dennis kucinich had a chance, and did not have to fight so hard for political survival against the monied interests of the rich and powerful, the special interest groups who hate the idea of ordinary americans having a say in anything, who just want more money and power for themselves and don’t care about anyone else. and i wish the republicans would let people of principle like ron paul take over their party, rather than simply catering to the same special interests as usual and ignoring the people. ron paul actually believes in the things other republicans claim to believe in, like smaller government, freedom, etc. the other republicans are just completely full of crap about everything, but crap is what the public wants, and what wins elections, so it is what the public gets. i see commercials on tv for ditech.com advertising refinancing for home mortgages, commercials with the slogan “people are smart”. hah! if “people are smart”, how come the housing and credit markets are in complete collapse? aren’t companies like ditech.com partially to blame for that shit? but shouldn’t some of the blame also go to the “people” who are really not very “smart” after all when it comes to their financial decision-making? and if people suck ass when it comes to dealing with their own money, how on earth do we expect them to be able to decide who to entrust with dealing with billions of taxpayer dollars? it turns out the financial wizards of the big banking companies were actually major league dumbasses when it came to these mortgage-backed securities, a complicated scheme that was supposed to eliminate risk, where they completely miscalculated everything, assuming housing prices would never, ever decrease, among many other boneheaded assumptions. the same types of miscalculations and secret financial shenanigans led to the downfall of enron and the accounting firm arthur andersen. and perhaps, complicated financial shenanigans by unscrupulous politicians could lead to the entire united states government going bankrupt. for crying out loud, the only candidate who actually understands what the federal reserve system is is ron paul, and his view is we have to get back to the gold standard, although perhaps his view is a bit out there. but we have other politicians saying that federal reserve chairman ben bernake was right to cut interest rates by 3/4% the other day. why do we even have a central bank in the first place? centralized control of the economy, or a command economy, is a prominent feature of communism. now we have a mixed economy, neither capitalism nor communism... true capitalism can never really exist because there must always be a government to protect the wealthy from the poor, and collect taxes for this purpose. under anarchy, people would simply steal whatever they want, and property and theft would be one and the same. property is theft and theft is property. it takes a government to keep property in the hands of one person and out of the hands of some other person, by making theft into a punishable crime and protecting property rights. law enforcement requires taxation to pay for it. the primary purpose of government is to subjugate the masses with a complex set of laws and regulations that favor the rich and powerful. and the corporate media is trying to divide the democratic party by race, by gender, and by class, and promote divisions in order to help the republicans win, since republicans always are on the side of big corporations. and by the way, big corporations have nothing to do with capitalism. big corporations are protected by the government from competition by upstarts who wish to compete. if it weren’t for the government, big corporations would not exist in the first place, and they are dependent upon the government to continue rigging all the laws and regulations in their favor, and continue funneling them taxpayer money. now john edwards is very vocal in his opposition to big corporations, and i agree with him completely. however, i do not underestimate the big corporations at all, and i think someone with a message like him has no chance in a corporate media that controls the debate, so if he were to get the nomination, the media would stop at nothing to make sure he loses the general election. big corporations would never allow a president who openly opposes them, unless they are sure that it is just bullshit, just meaningless pandering that will not be accompanied by any action against them. who was the last president to stand up to big corporations? theodore roosevelt. in fact he was the only president who ever really stood up to them. and he was a republican! however, he did end up leaving the republicans and founding his own party, which he called the progressive party. and today, we liberals like to call ourselves progressives, in that proud progressive tradition going back to the first decade of the 1900s. that was when we first had child labor laws, workplace safety laws, food safety laws, antitrust laws, and other sorts of good laws that actually protect people from the corporations. but one of the biggest problems nowadays is the decline of labor unions. i have never been a part of a labor union, nor have i ever had the chance. are labor unions becoming unnecessary, a relic of the past? or is it more important than ever that more workers in more industries unionize so that they can collectively bargain with their employers for better wages, benefits, and working conditions? free-trade agreements are making jobs go to countries that don’t have labor unions, and the entire labor union system is collapsing. without labor unions, the democratic party will be in a much more weakened position, and the corporations will be able to dominate the economic policymaking in both political parties. and the republicans will always end up winning in the end, since the people with all the money will spend a lot of their cash on advertising to make the rest of us support the same candidates as them, giving us a plutocracy. just look at mitt romney and how he, a wealthy businessman, has attracted so many donations from other wealthy businessmen. he is the most corporate of all candidates, by far. he changes his message every week, and his speeches always sound like advertising pitches thought up by someone on madison avenue who writes commercials. he spent most of his career as a management consultant for large corporations. it is very obvious whose side he is on. we already have a c.e.o. president and his name is george dumbya bush, and look at where that has gotten us. by the way, the wealthy corporate interests would never let mike huckabee win, because he uses economic populist rhetoric just like john edwards. if he is the nominee, they will make sure the democrat wins, unless the democrat is john edwards. mike huckabee’s plans like the “fair tax” would actually benefit the wealthy, but since he promotes his plans using rhetoric that appeals to lower-income people, the wealthy are very distrustful of him. and if the wealthy actually believed in capitalism they would support ron paul, but it is obvious that they want big goverment around, to help out big corporations with corporate welfare and with regulations too complicated for small businesses to comply with. big business might lobby against regulation, but really, regulation is the best thing that ever happened to large corporations, because it makes it impossible for small businesses to compete with their larger counterparts, even if that is not the intention of the regulation. everything is quite paradoxical in a way, and each of the candidates in both parties is a paradoxical mystery wrapped in a riddle hidden in a secret encoded message in a language that doesn’t exist. nobody can really tell what any of the candidates would do if they became president. but we do know what dennis kucinich has been doing in congress for years, and we know that he needs to stay there and keep fighting the good fight inside congress for the rest of his life, until he dies of old age, many, many years from now. locally in upstate new york we have a similar progressive democrat with a very, very impressive voting record for years, who has turned out to be right about pretty much everything, and his name is congressman maurice hinchey. i am in the district of a newer congressman, mike arcuri, who has just been in congress for 1 year so far, and he has a voting record that is sort-of progressive, and he joined the blue dog coalition right at the time he entered congress, which is considered a coalition of the most conservative democrats in congress. mike arcuri, a democrat, replaced sherwood boehlert, a republican, in the 2006 elections. and rep. boehlert was one of the most centrist or even left-wing republicans in congress, perhaps the 2nd most left-wing republican after rep. chris shays of connecticut. our local congressman maurice hinchey has pretty much the same voting record of dennis kucinich on everything, since they both represent what howard dean called “the democratic wing of the democratic party”. anyway, we need to stop letting the media dissect the public into different racial groups, genders, age groups, and religions, when looking at voting results. and the media should stop being provocateurs that try to stir up trouble between the candidates. the whole aim of the media is to control who we vote for by telling us what to think and what to believe about each of the candidates. i am sick of this whole expectations game! hillary clinton winning new hampshire was only a big surprise to people whose expectations were way out of whack after iowa and a few polls showing barack obama having a bounce, but her win there should not have been a surprise to anyone, given the fact that she had held a major lead in the polls there for many months prior to less than 1 week with obama ahead. and there is no such thing as a “must-win” state for any candidate. candidates can stay in the race as long as they want, and to hell with any pundits who tell them to drop out of the race. we do not need people in the media prejudging the outcome of elections before the elections even happen. how about just reporting on things that actually happen, for a change, instead of having wild speculation? leave the wild speculation to bloggers like me! i predict barack obama will win south carolina today, hillary clinton will be second, and john edwards third. i predict john mccain winning florida, mitt romney second, rudy giuliani third, mike huckabee fourth, and ron paul fifth. see? i can make wild predictions too! both of those will probably turn out to be wrong, since i predicted way too much, especially on the republican race in florida! oh, and i also predict rudy giuliani and john edwards will both drop out of their races, before any other candidates in either of their parties. of course all of my predictions here are bullshit and i just made them up and they have no relevance to reality whatsoever, and are no better than fortunetelling or horoscopes. but all it takes to be a pundit is to be able to make shit like that up, out of thin air, and have some sort of silly justification for it, so i am eminently qualified. oh, and as for dennis kucinich’s race to be re-elected to the u.s. house of representatives? he will win. easily. yet another prediction i am making, based on my pure gut feeling, rather than any solid evidence of any kind. maybe i could go on cnn to replace james carville or paul begala, who were both kicked off recently for being clinton supporters. (cnn’s reasoning: they cannot be trusted to provide objective analysis of the campaign if they openly support one particular candidate. cnn wanted to have pundits who, like wolf blitzer, are capable of at least pretending to be neutral.) i can pretend to be neutral too. i am completely neutral about president george w. bush. is he a good president or a bad president? i have no feelings one way or the other. i would make a perfect objective news pundit! which is worse: racism or sexism? i don’t care, because i am completely neutral about everything, and i am probably from switzerland because i am so goddamn neutral! make me a pundit already, cnn!