I can’t fucking believe how many stupid people there are.

I can’t fucking believe there are so many fucking MORONs in this country. Gullible idiots. Uneducated mouth breathers who have learned NOTHING from history. Never mind they couldn’t recognize Trump’s Nazi Germany Fascism and avoid repeating it. They couldn’t even learn from the U.K.’s Brexit fiasco.

Are so many so stupid as to think if they don’t like Trump’s AmeriKKKa after a few months they can just have a do over? Do they think this is some reality TV show where they can just vote him off the island?

This is real and there is no turning back. This cannot be undone.

The House is Republican. The Senate is Republican. That alone is going to put right wing fascist judges in every opening of the Supreme Court. Certainly Merrick Garland will never be confirmed. So up to four in the coming years. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is not going to live another four years. She had her chance to retire and let Obama replace her and she didn’t. Now, it’s too late. The Supreme Court will be right wing fascist for decades. It will be 5-4 until it’s 6-3 and then 7-2.

You can look to the end of Obamacare. Gone. Rowe v Wade. Gone. Protections of every kind gone. So we’ll have dirty air, toxic water, bad food. Our protected open space will no longer be protected. Our National Forests will be clear cut. We’ll have oil drilling in the Grand Canyon.

The rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer trying to make up for the tax shortfall from those tax breaks for the 1%ers. The only trickle down we’ll get is warm, smelly piss.

Trump plans on paying for infrastructure by privatizing it. So if you drive anywhere, you’ll pay for each stretch of road, each bridge, each tunnel. That means any goods that are shipped are going to go up in price. So higher costs for food and clothing.

Imagine this country with Donald Trump Jr. as Secretary of the Interior and Eric Trump heading the Bureau of Land Management. No limit on hunting 365 days a year. Bag as much as you like of anytihng that moves. Goodbye wolves, coyotes, bears, moose, deer, elk, Bighorn sheep. And so the ecology will be forever out of balance, impacting our food, water and air supply. Chris Christie will be on the Supreme Court or maybe Atty General. Trump will pardon him so he’ll never pay for his crimes. Newt Gingrich our Secretary of State. Rudy Giuliani head of the F.B.I. Maybe even fucking Sarah Palin Secretary of Energy.

It’s a nightmare!

How could so many people be so fucking gullible and stupid? Narrow minded. Short sighted. Self-centered. MISOGYNIST. Did they not think that the rest of us are going to have to suffer under Donald Drumpf too?

Just wait until he makes good on NONE of those vague promised sound bites. In four years, it will be too late for the Democrats to try to put back what has been undone or fix what has been irrepairably broken. It will be too late.

And I will by hoarse from four years of screaming TOLD YOU SO!

You can’t fix stupid.

You can’t bring back the Pika or replant those old growth forests. You can’t put the topsoil back or purify the aquifer.

I really love my house. I love my furniture, my dishes, my plants, my bears, my stuff. I love San Diego.

But I’m seriously considering selling everything for whatever I can get for it and becoming an Ex-Pat. At least then, when the bombs fall, I might be far enough away to avoid the fallout.

I can see me separating all of my worldly goods into replaceable and irreplaceable. Figuring out how much I can afford to put in a shipping container to bring with me to wherever I end up. I think I might be able to keep my sewing machines If I stay in the New World. I think Costa Rica has the same electricity but I’d just need to change the plugs. But if I go to Italy I can’t take the Bernina or Featherweight with me. That’s a vote for staying in North America. Also, I think it will be cheaper to ship it to Costa Rica than to Europe.

I might have to sell the Prius and buy a new one just so I have a reliable car for 4-8 years. The Prius is 8 years old and I’m not sure it will last another 4. There probably won’t be any place to do repairs or get parts in Costa Rica.

If I sold the house for full market (providing the housing market doesn’t tank like everything else) I can pay off the mortgage, home equity loan and credit cards plus have money left over. That would cover relocation. I’ll have about $5,500 a month from my pension. That won’t change. I could probably live pretty well in Costa Rica (or El Salvador or Guatemala or Belize) on $5,500 a month.

To those that voted against their own best interests and were too stupid to see through the Republican LIES, you deserve what you’re going to get. I wash my hands of you.

You own this. You cannot blame the Democrats for the final destruction of the United States of America that our forefathers envisioned for us. You own Trump and the Republicans that will have turned this country into a fascist state. Don’t know what a fascist state is? Well, fucking LOOK IT UP. It’s basically what Ann Coulter was spewing this week. Only the elite have democracy. Everyone else lives under a totalitarin dictatorship. That’s what you just voted for when you elected Trump and gave him a Republican Senate.

This may be the last presidential election you ever vote in. If there are any more, they will simply be formalities. You know. Like those elections in Africa. Robert Mugabe has nothing on Donald Trump.

What does it say?

What does it say about a government when we must rely on a group like Anonymous to protect our elections from being stolen by Karl Rove’s Project Orca or finally do something about the Westboro (tax shelter loonie bin) “Church”?

 

 

Let’s give Anonymous all the help we can.

My predictions for the electoral college

Obama – 281 electoral college votes.

Rmoney – 257 electoral college votes.

Obama will take Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin and New Hampshire.

Rmoney will take Florida, Virginia and Colorado.

Only possible upsets? Colorado goes to Obama and New Hampshire goes to Rmoney. In which case its:

Obama – 286

Rmoney – 252

However it goes Obama needs to win in landslides of over 10% in any state with electronic voting machines. Because the Republican owned and controlled voting machines seem to have a little glitch that transfers democratic votes to republicans up to 10%. So a democrat has to have over a 10% lead in order to simply squeak by.

Even if Obama loses Wisconsin and Iowa, he still wins with 270.

If you’d like to play your own electoral college prediction game you can over at fivethirtyeight. If you

If you want to see some unbiased polling, try real clear politics. They combine and smooth the numbers to take out outliers and bias and their polls tend to be the most accurate.

Obama sells us out again.

He could have shown some courage and leadership and make Elizabeth Warren a recess appointment.

Instead he stabs her in the back and nominates Richard Cordray, an underling.

The Republicans won’t approve of him either so what was gained?

Now all I’m waiting for is for him to sell us out on the debt ceiling.

Then I’ll be registering GREEN PARTY.

Quotes and comments

Gore Vidal: “Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half.”

Nope. That voting half is obviously brainwashed by the propaganda of Fox News.

Charles Bukowski: “The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don’t have to waste your time voting.”

Don’t worry. Pretty soon Corporatism will take care of that. They’ll run everything. No dictator necessary.

Theodore Roosevelt: “A vote is like a rifle: its usefulness depends upon the character of the user.”

Considering the character of some of the voters, I’d say their I.Q. is equivalent to the caliber of the guns they’re stocking up. They’re pretty useless.

Emma Goldman: “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”

You said it Emma. Just wait for the Corporatists to take over. Did I mention that a Republican in the California Legislature tried to make it illegal for any teacher to vote on any measure that had anything to do with education because they would be biased? Yep, wanted to take away teachers’ rights to vote. It could happen to you. But first they’ll take away your right to unionize.

Louis-Ferdinand Celine: “I have never voted in my life…I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it’s certain they will win.”

Piss on you Louis. It’s lazy bastards like you that allow the idiots to keep putting the corrupt bastards back in power.

Joseph Stalin: “Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.”

Anyone remember Diebold? That’s how we got George W. Bush. Twice. That and the media. As for vote counting, it’s now vote buying via Citizens United. Another legacy of George W. Bush, activist judge Roberts and the Fascist Five.

George Jean Nathan: “Bad officials are elected by good citizens who do not vote.”

You said it. Or….there’s no point in replacing a Corrupt Bastard if you’re replacing them with an even MORE Corrupt Bastard.

John Quincy Adams: “Always vote for principle, though you may vote alone, and you may cherish the sweetest reflection that your vote is never lost.”

Also known as the TOLD YOU SO vote. Didn’t vote for Bush. Twice. Didn’t vote for Arnold. Twice. Didn’t vote for Reagan. Ever. Why? BECAUSE I’M NOT STUPID.

Hunter S. Thompson: “All we have to do is get out and vote, while it’s still legal, and we will wash those crooked warmongers out of the White House.”

Unless you’re replacing crooked warmongers with even MORE crooked warmongers.

William Inge: “It is useless for sheep to pass a resolution in favor of vegetarianism while wolves remain of a different opinion.”

So what are you saying William? Give up? Don’t bother to vote? Or perhaps the sheep should hire them some dogs to enforce the vegetarianism law on the wolves. (Yes, there is vegetarian dog food. And dogs are loyal.)

Robert Frost: “Thinking is not to agree or disagree. That’s voting.”

Ah, Robert. Jon Stewart would love to have you on his show if you were still alive. You’d be the Daily Show poet laureate. And you would have been a hit at the Rally to restore sanity.

Winston Churchill: “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

If they’re a Republican, 90 seconds will do.

Isaac Asimov: “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”

Voting takes hard work, research and responsibility. Unfortunately, like pregnancy, any idiot is allowed to participate.

David Sedaris: On Undecided Voters: “To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes​ down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. ‘Can I interest you in the chicken?​’ she asks. ‘Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?’ To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.”

And then choose the shit. The undecideds are clueless, lazy, stupid or variations of all three. If you’re too lazy to do your work, too clueless to understand the issues or too stupid to use critical thinking skills to make a decision than by all means….stay home. Don’t allow Fox News to do your thinking for you.

Wendell Berry: “Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.”

Which is why the earth will not be destroyed by climate change. The earth will continue. Humans on the other hand are doomed (as are many plants, birds, animals, fish, reptiles, etc. But not all. They’ll survive. We won’t.)

Plato: “In politics we presume that everyone who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state. When we are ill…we do not ask for the handsomest physician, or the most eloquent one.”

How do you think Reagan or Schwarzenegger got elected? Only now it’s not who’s handsome or eloquent. Now it’s who has the biggest bank account. Because if you’ve made lots of money, you must know how to run the government. Right? A CEO is just like a Governor only for less pay? ROFLOLPIP.

David Foster Wallace: “In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.”

Yep. A non-voter doubles the stupid vote. That’s why there are more registered Democrats, but the Republicans keep winning.

I think voting should be like a subscription service. If you don’t use it for a few years, your registration is dropped and you have to register all over again. That should be annoying enough to either keep someone out permanently or motivate them to vote often enough so their registration doesn’t get dropped.

All that said, there needs to be some major election reforms regarding standardization across the states. How write-ins are conducted, etc. should be the same in all states. If they can demand it of education, they can certainly do it for elections.

Who knew?

My two current most favorite politicians are Senator Al Franken of Minnesota (the state that keeps on giving us Michelle Bachman) and Congressman Alan Grayson of Florida (the state that gave us George Bush and wants to give us Jeb Bush).

Who knew?

Sad day for education

Texas Board of Education adopts textbooks that support a conservative Christian agenda.

1. The Board removed Thomas Jefferson from the Texas curriculum’s world history standards on Enlightenment thinking, “replacing him with religious right icon John Calvin.”

2. “Teachers in Texas will be required to cover the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation’s Founding Fathers, but not highlight the philosophical rationale for the separation of church and state.”

3. Curriculum standards also will describe the U.S. government as a “constitutional republic,” rather than “democratic,” and students will be required to study the decline in value of the U.S. dollar, including the abandonment of the gold standard.

4. Conservatives beat back multiple attempts to include hip-hop as an example of a significant cultural movement.

5. The Board refused to require that “students learn that the Constitution prevents the U.S. government from promoting one religion over all others.”

6. “Other changes seem aimed at tamping down criticism of the right. Conservatives passed one amendment, for instance, requiring that the history of McCarthyism include ‘how the later release of the Venona papers confirmed suspicions of communist infiltration in U.S. government.’ The Venona papers were transcripts of some 3,000 communications between the Soviet Union and its agents in the United States.”

7. “They also included a plank to ensure that students learn about ‘the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.'” The Dallas Morning News noted that “high school students will learn about leading conservative groups from the 1980s and 1990s – but not about liberal or minority rights groups.”

8. “Board member Barbara Cargill, R-The Woodlands, objected to a standard for a high school sociology course that addressed the difference between sex and gender. It was eliminated in a 9-to-6 vote. She worried that a discussion of that issue would lead students into the world of ‘transvestites, transsexuals and who knows what else.'”

9. “Members voted to polish up references to the American ‘free enterprise’ economic system and removed most mentions of ‘capitalism,’ a word that board member Ken Mercer, R-San Antonio, said has a negative connotation.”

10.”Board members also rejected requiring history teachers and textbooks to provide coverage on the late U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy and new Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, while the late President Ronald Reagan was elevated to more prominent coverage.”

Because of it’s buying power, Texas dominates textbooks. So if a state cannot afford or does not ask for a specific edition, like California and Florida do, they will end up getting the Texas edition of a textbook.

Because educational publishing is a for profit private business. Much like testing.

Texas has overlooked one radical group.

School librarians.

The Texas board of ed does NOT control collection development in school libraries. And librarians can be a pretty radical bunch, being against censorship and all. You better believe the librarians are on this, updating their purchase lists and making sure what the textbooks attempt to suppress is widely available and advertised in the classrooms. They’ll also collaborate with teachers to make sure education is….fair and balanced.

48 of 50 states adopt national education standards. Texas and Alaska so far refuse. (Big surprise.)

Now I’ve looked at the national standards and I’m not impressed. California has had state standards for years. I’m familiar with the state standards. They’re rigorous. So are the national standards but not in a good way. Why? Because they reflect the weaknesses of No Child Left Behind. English Language Learners and Special Education students are still being held to the same standards as other students. No amount of “extra help” is going to help ELL students stay at grade level. Especially if they not only don’t speak English but perhaps their participation in school is the first experience they have had attending any sort of school. I’m not kidding. I’ve seen the influx of all sorts of immigrants over my 30 years of teaching. I’ve seen children from Viet Nam who didn’t know what a toilet was or how to use it. Yes, literally. Teachers had to go into the bathroom and show them how to use a toilet. I have no idea what is going on with the Somali children, but I know for some of them this is their first experience in school. So what do you do with a third grader who doesn’t speak English and has never attended school. Exactly how much extra instruction in either English or Somali will it take for that child to test at the third grade level by April? Special Ed? Well, they’re designated Special Ed for a reason. They have learning disabilities. If they were at grade level THEY WOULDN’T BE IN SPECIAL ED! Duh.

Once more politicians are making decisions that are better left to teachers. Because what do we know? I only have a masters in education, a masters in library and information science, 30 years of experience and am National Board Certified.

Do I think there should be national standards? Yes.
Do I think it should be these national standards? No.

Now why are standardized national core standards so important? If you don’t control the standards, you can’t control the textbooks. Because adopted textbooks have to meet the standards.

This recent textbook adoption standard taken by Texas does NOT meet the national core standards.

Good luck with that Texas. How long will Pluto still be a planet in your state?

What’s so bad about polling?

I think polling influences elections.

If polls come out a few days before a race predicting a winner, even if it’s unlikely, that person gets votes. Voters will vote for the “winner” if they think that person has “already won”.

It’s like when Fox News called the election for Bush.

We’ll see if I’m right. But read more about it at five thirty-eight.

Not many people are going to read through the math and crunch the numbers like this guy. They’ll just believe the latest poll the news reports, whether it’s biased or bogus.

Personally, I’m really pissed. I’m pissed that once again voters are being stupid. Corporations (mostly health) who want to see the health bill defeated are throwing money behind Scott Brown, either directly to his campaign or funding other organizations. Goebbels said it best; tell a lie often enough and people will start to believe it. That’s the essence of Scott Brown’s campaign.

Martha Coakley is a lousy campaigner. She doesn’t like getting up in front of people and bragging about herself or attacking her opponent. But she stands behind the same programs Teddy Kennedy did. She gets it. She is the candidate that will be looking out for the best interests of the public, not the best profits for corporate America.

This seat is the 60th vote. Massachusetts isn’t just voting to represent themselves. They have the future of the entire country in their hands. And they are about to screw us all.

I don’t know what Massachusetts makes but whatever it is, I’m willing to do without. I’ve avoided patronizing any goods or businesses that have anything to do with Utah or the Mormon church because they screwed Californians over Prop 8. (And I am totally behind revoking tax exempt status for all organized religion. That will solve our budget crisis in one fell swoop right there.) I’m willing to shun all things Massachusetts if they screw us over.

Democracy is the worst form of government….except for everything else.

Churchill also said “The best argument against democracy is a 5 minute conversation with the average voter”.

En masse we are reduced to the lowest common I.Q. I.E .those that believe the lies bought by corporations spewed by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Sarah Palin, Pat Robertson……and Scott Brown.

How can any person with an I.Q. higher than their belt size want to voluntarily associate with these mouth breathing pond scum?

Pleae, God. Let Scott Brown stick his foot in it big time. Maybe Sarah Palin can go to Massachusetts and campaign for him?