Life in the Cheese Drawer

bernie sanders was the progressive i’d been waiting for. everything he stood for, i stood for. 
but the cartoon above is right. liz and i went to see him early in his campaign on his first stop in rochester. the best part of his entire speech was at the end when he finished with “i can’t do this alone. if you want to change to happen, you will need to stand up and effect that change with me.” he was HONEST about it. none of this “i’m going to do this for you and this for you and this.” it was a “we” all along. 
after DT’s comments on women, i had hit the last straw with my dilly dallying over who to vote for. i finished off my absentee ballot by filling in the circle next to clinton/kaine. i didn’t feel good about it. i didn’t seal the envelope, just in case. i felt kind of dirty. 
*****
this weekend, jane and i went to nerdcon, where we sat in at a live recording of “unattended consequences,” a podcast by author pat rothfuss and cards against humanity creator max temkin. they talked for an hour, and limited their political talk to three points each (otherwise, they said, they would talk about politics the entire hour). 
at this point, i’m still not feeling 100% about my vote for hillary – maybe 75% ok with it. but they talked about hillary, and what they said really made me come around for HC. 
in comparing DT to hillary, pat said that he wants a president who can make a deal. who can compromise and make stuff happen. hillary is that person – moreso that bernie even, i believe. (absolutely moreso than DT) she’s the most qualified person to run for president in a long time (martin van buren was apparently pretty well qualified). 
then, in example, max laid out all hillary had done to secure the nomination, things that i’d considered shady: she paid for services from companies who would print campaign items, even if they never printed a shirt, so that the competition couldn’t. she was the first to get to certain sponsors, clinching them so no one else could. ultimately, that’s good politics and securing a deal before anyone else could get to it. 
considering the above, it’s absolutely FANTASTIC how well bernie did in primaries. i’m really sad he lost, but looking at how hillary secured everything she needed to become the democratic nominee, i’d say that’s a pretty well-prepared person. and would know how to do that sort of thing when she’s president and representing the US. 
after that, i jumped from 75% ok with hillary to about 95%. i will never be at 100% because of bernie. his hopefulness for the future and for the country will always be there, hanging on to that 5%.
or maybe it’s my 5%. thank you, bernie.
*and still maintains that your third-party vote is not a throw away. IT IS NOT A THROW AWAY VOTE. it is yours; you do with it what you will. don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

i registered to vote. 
and tomorrow’s the first presidential debate. i am at two extremes on this: one the one hand, i am a little excited to see how this is going to turn out. bring out the popcorn; on the other, i am ready to facepalm my way through this whole. omg.
oh, and i’m going to vote absentee! because (hopefully) i’ll be in california at harry potter world!!!

i have to say, i have never gotten this far into a presidential election cycle and not known what i’m going to do when i get to the polls. usually i’m like – yea! john kerry because bush sucks! yeah obama! he’s awesome! yeah obama because i guess so, even though he’s been ordering all those drone strikes and is actually kind of not doing a ton for the environment and…but i guess he’s better than mitt romney?
but this year. omg. bernie’s pretty much out unless the fbi DOES indict hillary (unlikely). which makes me supremely sad because he and i were like best buds, yo. trump? what a joke. joke. joke. joke. like, roll my eyes and sigh versus get angry and throw things like i did with W*. i still feel like he’s gonna pull a “gotcha!” and do something weird. 
i can’t decide if hillary is who i should vote for. on the one hand, she’s better than trump, and she’s got a crap-ton of experience. she’s probably the most qualified to be president. but everything she’s done just seems so two-handed. one plus out of her presidency: she would appoint liberal-ish judges to the supreme court. versus god knows what the donald would appoint.
so is this the year i vote green party (jill stein)? do i vote libertarian (gary johnson)? (personally, i would go green because with a stinking earth, what good are all these other freedoms we have?)
*remember his blasé “now watch this drive” line? omg. *eyeroll*

 

i am a big proponent of voting: do your civic duty. however, i’d never participated in a caucus until tonight. i wouldn’t even call what i did tonight participating because circumstances led to me leaving directly after turning in my ballot. but i cast my ballot tonight in my first caucus ever, because for the first time in my voting life, i actually feel like there’s a candidate who’s worth the effort.
anyone who knows me knows i’m a bleeding heart, tree-hugging hippie, so it’s no surprise that i’m supporting bernie sanders. he’s got the right views for me as far as social causes, environmental causes, big bank causes, corporation causes, and even seems a little on the fence as far as gun control, which is pretty much how i feel. on top of that, his campaign was funded entirely by people’s individual donations, not money from superpacs or big corporations or lobbyist groups. from you and me ($35 here). 
i would love a woman president. i really would. but i put what a candidate stands for before i ask what gender she is. if hillary were as pro-environment, anti-corporation as bernie is, there is no doubt i would vote for her. if she weren’t kind of shady and elusive, i would vote for her. if she told the people that she couldn’t do this alone – that the populace will need to get involved in order to make real changes in politics, i would vote for her. but as fate would have it, bernie is all these things, not hillary. i’m voting on the issues, not the gender.
“If we don’t fight hard enough for the things we stand for, at some point we have to recognize that we don’t really stand for them.”
this is from paul wellstone, late, great minnesota senator who was champion of the people. i think if paul were alive today, he would endorse bernie. 
enough political talk for a while. it’s getting to be gardenblog time soon, and i know people are tired of me bringing up politics. gardening is pretty non-combative. 

today i got an email from al franken’s office saying he supports hillary and to get out the caucus for hillary. this made me a little bit sad, especially for a guy who holds paul wellstone up as a beacon of emulation. 
i sent his office a nice email saying thank you for the reminder on the caucus, and i will be going to my first caucus ever next week in support of bernie sanders. i also said he was probably well aware of the reasons that bernie is the better choice for president, and that if hills is the candidate, i’m voting green. my guess is that the dem senators are supporting hillary because of money reasons. which is really unfortunate. i’m all for a female president, but i think we need to look for the best person for the job – the one who’s going to look out for the american people (not corporations).
“Politics isn’t about big money or power games; it’s about the improvement of people’s lives.” – mr. wellstone himself
 
anyway, all this to say, go bernie. i am eager to go to the caucus and report on how that went. 

i know we are not to speak ill of the dead, but i didn’t feel one iota of dismay when i heard the news that supreme court justice antonin scalia died today. in fact, i felt a slight moment of elation, then a moment of dread when i realized that republicans are going to drag out obama’s justice appointment as long as possible in hopes that a republican president is elected. (IF a repub is elected.)
scalia was one of the most conservative justices. here’s an oddity of the court: all the justices are either catholic or jewish, both types of religious people the populace tends to veer away from in an election. four of the five catholics are conservatives (they are also men). as such, his type of catholicism was of the pre-vatican II type – in that he wishes we would go back to that time and has searched for churches that lean toward keeping the spirit of pre-vat alive. 
so, scotus is the end-all be-all of laws. congress can make them. people can break/challenge them. scotus figures out if the law is constitutional or not. and all court cases involving that topic basically look to what the highest court ruled previously (whether it’s district, scotus, state supreme, etc). when the supreme court rules on a subject, that’s it. there’s no more appealing after that. if they don’t want to hear a case, then the court it came from is the rule. [i love law. it’s researching rules. can’t beat that.]
our court leaned conservative, but with scalia’s death, obama’s appointment, which will hopefully be quick-ish, should heave the court toward a more moderate or liberal view. 
now let’s take a break from my disjointed post and look at a few of scalia’s great quotes:
“Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.” (think about that one.)
“The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.” 
“I and my court owe no apology whatever for Bush versus Gore. We did the right thing. So there!”
 

i’ve always been a big proponent of voting on regular elections, but this year i might actually check out what the caucus system in minnesota is like. 
states either have primaries or caucuses (i think primaries are more prevalent). a caucus is sort of a representative system versus a voting system. this year it’ll take place on march 1 (super tuesday). i’ve already checked out where mine is (the st charles high school), and i’d go and sit in the back to watch how it works. and maybe raise my hand for bernie.
this election cycle may turn out to be very interesting. trump is a blowhard who’s going to alienate a lot of people, and if bernie gets the dem nomination, his lenient view of gun reform may just pull over a few republicans. (although he’s pretty socialist in other views.)
i’ll report back after march 1 and let you know how the system works!
while we’re here, i want to remind myself to spend a blog post looking at the militants in oregon (what exactly is going on? what’s the deal?) and another to express my extreme ambivalence on gun control (literally can’t even make a decision). 

i was looking up gubernatorial candidates for minnesota today since i haven’t heard much about it. i was mostly wondering who the independent candidate is because i tend to vote for that person over the other two major parties in the governor race (IP peeps tend to be fiscally conservative and socially liberal). 
so i ended up looking at the wikipedia page for the MN race, and much to my surprise, in addition to the major parties, IP, and libertarian pary, there is actually a political party called the “legalize cannibis” party. 
anyway, i will probably vote IP again.