Rounding ’em up.
Well, we’ve gone and done it again.
I’m not quite sure why. Perhaps to avoid the full moon/total lunar eclipse on Election Day? Cthulhu only knows who — or what — might turn up at the polling place come Tuesday.
“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!”
“He sure does, Gustav old scout, and let’s hope he stays there.”
Of course, we could’ve just skipped voting entirely. Plenty of people do.
Others pick losers and then claim the game is rigged, try to tip over the table, send the cards and chips flying.
You pays your money
and you takes your choice.
Clearly these knuckleheads have never been to Las Vegas. There are always losers. If there were not, the Paiutes would still hold the mortgage on the place.
And has anyone else noticed that when these gardeners spreading their fertilizer around the Tree of Liberty actually win, they’re totally cool with it?
“Huh? ‘Stop the steal?’ How’d you like to stop some lead, fella? Looks like Hillary forgot to hit ‘save’ after she had the Illuminati reprogram the Dominion machines for the Chicoms, huh? (singing) Gonna hang George Soros from a sour apple tree. …”
And the game continues.
There are times when it feels that it’s not the arm you’re working on that cherry-popping bandit in Uncle Sam’s Casino. But it’s the only game in town.
And what the hell? If you don’t play, you can’t win.
Mad Blog Media 
November 3, 2022 at 11:21 am |
Hillary never had time or patience to rig the ballot counters. She was too busy with those quarter million buck a pop influence peddling talks. Still, I put the clothespin on the nose and voted for her because the alternative was….you know who.
So I take it you disagree with George Carlin?
November 3, 2022 at 12:05 pm |
I dunno what else one can do. I’ve marched against various wars, done some light rebellion with the Socialist Workers Party, the October League, and the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist). Voted for Democrats, socialists, independents, and Libertarians. Never once a Republican.
And of course I own and operate this little corner propaganda shop here, after years of mouthing off from soapboxes at other people’s properties.
I fear the country is too big and its citizens too uneducated, harried, and distracted for anything approximating “democracy.” The folks who own the casino want our money but they sure don’t need our bullshit. They let us watch a two-team Super Bowl every so often from the cheap seats in a stadium that we financed, built, and maintain.
You can ignore it, and take whatever comes as a consequence. You can participate and likewise. And raising a stink is mildly entertaining, though, god damn, it seems like I’ve been doing it all my life. Since the Yippies were a thing, anyway.
As for overturning the established order, well … I’ve long thought that Americans could get used to a dictator or a king. But a comrade? Nyet, tovarisch.
November 3, 2022 at 12:27 pm |
I think elections can sometimes work on the local level but with turnout so low, it is easy for the privileged, at least up here, to guard their rice bowls. I do my civic, ahem, duties on a couple of city committees up here in the City Indifferent (Public Safety Committee and Bicycle/Pedestrian Advisory Committee), and have been known to wander over to the Roundhouse if I know something about a bill above and beyond the surface B.S. But I don’t have a checkbook to hand out gifts.
Once the office is higher than a local district, I think George Carlin is right: the casino is all bought and paid for and elections are well, as Carlin said, hand me the Kleenex box. As you say, and as Larry’s wife agreed (anyone remember Larry?), people are stupid, as shown by some of the clowns who win the primaries. Chicken or fish?
Even local elections are getting ridiculous. The gerrymandering of the house districts in these parts would make a Trumpublican proud. I looked up the legislators from this area once on the Secretary of State page and found out who pays them off. Not ordinary citizens, and that is for the Democrats. You couldn’t get a Republican up here to get elected to clean latrines.
I still trudge to the polls every election day. But I can’t say I am the energetic voter I was thirty years ago. I think the Clinton v Trump debacle took all the wind out of my sails.
November 3, 2022 at 11:49 am |
Our early in person voting started October 12th. We voted the following week. Done and dusted as Sherlock would say. Two out of three county supervisors and the county recorder where we voted are loyal to a man not the constitution. But our county head of elections is a no nonsense lady who don’t take no shit from those bozos. So, it will be OK this year. Next time, quien sabe?
November 3, 2022 at 1:48 pm |
Did you get any of those armed “poll watchers” in your neck of the woods? I read that a Federal judge had to tell them to fuck off.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/11/02/arizona-ballot-clean-elections-liburdi/
November 3, 2022 at 1:54 pm |
None here that we have heard of. The ballot drop box in Bisbee, where we walk in early vote, is in the county complex along with the sheriff’s department.
November 3, 2022 at 2:15 pm |
Voting here went smoove like butta. The polling place is a pleasant milelong walk from El Rancho Pendejo and I was able to stride right in, give my particulars, and start filling out my ballot.
The poll worker who checked me in said the joint had been ticking right along since early voting began and she foresaw no ending to it.
I did my bit, thanked everyone I dealt with for doing the good work, collected my “I Voted” sticker, and marched on home.
November 3, 2022 at 12:49 pm |
Well, notayahoo won in Israel it seems. so, right wing religious nationalism one, democracy zero. Fuck a buck of Palestinian and Arab citizens. Constitution? They have the rights we give them, nothing more. I think Israel can go pound sand.
November 3, 2022 at 1:47 pm |
One thing Carlin was right about is that individuals are swell — but when they gather in clusters they tend to develop marching songs and clothing styles and lists of people that they intend to visit in the middle of the night.
Says the NYT: “[Benjamin Netanyahu’s] decision this time to ally only with far right and ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties, untrammeled by any centrist or leftist forces, takes Israel into unmapped territory. It remains to be seen whether that frees Mr. Netanyahu to pursue purist policies he secretly always dreamed of, or if it forces him to act as a brake on his allies’ most extreme excesses. …
“Currently standing trial on corruption charges, Mr. Netanyahu says that he will not use his authority to upend that process. But some of his coalition partners have said they will push to legalize one of the crimes he is accused of committing, or even to end the trial entirely.”
Huh. Sound like anyone we know, a little closer to home?
November 3, 2022 at 1:50 pm |
Anyone we know? Trumptenyahoo?
November 3, 2022 at 2:12 pm |
Another corrupt nationalist con man. I also doubt we have heard the last from bolsanaro. He is probably talking to the grapefruit goombah right now. “How do I attack the capitol?”
November 3, 2022 at 4:38 pm |
Here’s what I simply cannot grasp no matter how MUCH wine I drink. Rethuglican candidates pretty much do nothing but kvetch about how everything from crime, to inflation, to school kids getting dumber by the minute on the Dems. Yet they NEVER put forth what they will do to fix these things. And lo and behold, once in office they do nothing whatsoever about the very things they harangue the libs for. The Rethuglican Platform is as follows;
Blame Hillary, Biden or especially Obama for everything
Make sure you inform the masses that their lives suck.
Remind the masses that libs will take away your guns and allow diseased rapist to swarm over the border and head straight for your house!
November 3, 2022 at 8:12 pm |
I think that what’s happening is this:
The rich know we’re fucked and they’re planning to split. Leave Earth, maybe the solar system, perhaps the galaxy. Anyway, they’re out, and they need to exhaust the planet’s remaining resources to make it happen.
The right knows we’re fucked and they’re funneling those resources up to the rich in hopes of getting consulting gigs and business-class seats on the starship.
Meanwhile, their base is slowly getting the idea we’re fucked and figure that if they just beat on the left hard enough they might get jobs as deckhands, stewards, gofers and grunts on the starship and their very own bunk for eight hours in every 24.
And finally, the left knows we’re fucked and has some ideas about how to unfuck us but they can’t get them past the focus-group stage. But for sure they won’t sign on with the rich because management exploits labor, the starship uses fossil fuels, Elon’s gonna charge them 20 quatloos per lunar for Twitter Blue, and Zuckerberg’s Metaverse sucks so hard.
November 3, 2022 at 9:19 pm |
Might be worth getting rid of them if I never had to hear anything from or about Musk again. On the other hand, I do have a newfound appreciation for Amazon. Used to use them to get favorite items the grocery stores had dropped, but since I managed to break an ankle, the truck’s been making regular stops here. My cat is also appreciative of the food and litter deliveries. Always trying to bum rides gets old quickly.
November 4, 2022 at 6:53 am |
Did an O’Grady, did you? Which ankle? The adult daughter of the neighbors to our west broke a foot and was hobbling around in a boot on Halloween. I hate it when the landing gear goes haywire.
Another neighbor had a knee replaced and had been catching rides here and there with me and a couple other neighbors until he regained enough mobility to drive his own truck. Man, was he glad to get going under his own power again.
November 4, 2022 at 11:52 am
Right side, of course. If it’s the left, there’s the option of removing the L crank arm from the trainer bike, but nooo, of course not. I don’t remember which side you picked? It’s remarkably quick and easy to become functionally twenty years older. Great for the modesty, too.
A scant few years back one of my riding buddies had both (!) knees replaced simultaneously (pick your poison). He was back on the bike before he was supposed to be – shoutout to you, Larry – and has since hiked up Kilimanjaro. It’s great to have examples like that, even when it puts an embarrassing dent in the vigor of my whining.
Getting those orthopedic boot enterprises on or off is like a graduate engineering project at the Velcro Institute. Beats the old plaster casts hands down but still incompatible with a stick shift. Of course.
November 3, 2022 at 10:39 pm |
If the faculty lounge intellectuals (Paul Begala’s line, not mine) on the Left ever managed to unfuck themselves and win the confidence of the working class, esp those in Rust Belt and Flyover states who might some day realize they are being spit roasted (sorry for the porn term, but I think the shoe, er or whatever…fits), the left might actually get something done. Instead, I keep seeing the left act as though they hired Howard, Fine, and Howard Political Consultants to do their party platform, focus groups, and public relations.
Daniel Lipinski, a Dem from the faculty lounge who actually worries about the working class, says it well.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/patriotism-unity/democrats-must-return-to-being-the-party-of-the-factory-floor-not-the-faculty-lounge
November 4, 2022 at 8:33 am |
For fairly dispassionate analysis I like to read Thomas B. Edsall at the NYT. He and Kevin Drum (formerly of Mother Jones) have argued that the twin pandemics of mechanization and artificial intelligence will see to it that today’s blue-collar have-nots have even less going forward, and that white-collar workers who think they’re immune from such “progress” have another think coming. The capitalists no longer need your services, either, Todd and Skyler.
I grew up in the West so I didn’t see the fabled “good jobs” in manufacturing that people recall so fondly (while hating on the unions that made them bearable). But I did see some skilled trades vanish in the newspaper game. As Linotype operators and other backshop types got frog-marched off the properties by “cold type,” i.e. computerized typesetting, we copy editors used to make the tee-hees, like “How many mom-and-pop print shops does one town need?” Then they came for the copy editors and it wasn’t quite so high-sterical.
Democrats are not going to win many elections as more people get shoved into the deep end of the rage pool with a hundredweight of debt chained to their ankles. But the Donks have a bigger tent with more clowns to feed. All the Repugs have to do is yell, “God, Guns, and Guts!” while shoveling what remains of the American Dream upward to people who already have too much of it.
And yes, I’m looking at you, Cerberus Capital Management, d.b.a. Albertsons, Safeway, Vons, etc. And so is Sen. Elizabeth Warren, according to NYT’s DealBook newsletter. The dog with many heads is a real big eater, and it thinks it can shit wherever it pleases.
November 4, 2022 at 1:43 pm
Heh. This is all what I meant by being spit roasted. Republicans, always looking for that last dime on the floor to shovel to the rich, are as much a friend of non-college ex-working class people as Dr. Mengele was a family doctor to Jews. Populism and nationalism are always the last refuges of conniving scoundrels.
Dems like Obama and Clinton went for the investor class and free trade, but have not figured out what to do with expendable part of the economy, i.e., Homo sapiens, and those working stiffs are indeed pissed off. Its not like I would have known a better path, but Edsall’s piece is chilling. We got through the Industrial Revolution. What brilliant minds will get us through the post-industrial revolution, or will we be taking shotguns to AI and each other like modern day Luddites?
I just finished a book by Jennifer Carlson, a sociologist at the U of Arizona. Jenn published her Ph.D. dissertation as “Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline”. If you can’t be a breadwinner, you can arm up and defend the home and family from….what? She just won a MacArthur award for her research in that field. Kinda goes to your comment (as well as Obama’s famous comment) about clutching Guns and Bibles when all else is lost.
I see that Ruy Teixeira went from the Center for American Progress to the American Enterprise Institute. One has to wonder if it is time to hijack that starship.