Or Skip the Amendment Process Altogether

I still haven't made up my mind as to the best course of action to protest the abortion of reason that took place on November 8, 2016. Sometimes I just want to vent my spleen in the most vulgar way possible, partly because I know there is no fixing this. The people who voted for Donald Trump are like repeat-offender child molesters: there is simply no way to correct what is wrong with these knuckle-draggers. Michael Shannon is absolutely right when he says, "[I]f you're voting for Trump, it's time for the urn."

Other times, I think it makes sense to be stoic and roll with the punches. After all, this country has survived cartoonish goofballs in a lot of big offices - Ah-nold (a sexual predator like Trump) did two terms as the governor of the most important state in the Union, and it survived; Ronald Reagan was a puppet who did more to drive the rich and poor apart than any other President in history, and yet the country abides; Jesse "The Body" Ventura served a term as governor of Minnesota, and yet that state still had the good sense to send Al Franken to the Senate; George W. Bush destroyed the Supreme Court by replacing Sandra Day O'Connor with Samuel Alito, and yet that very same court voted to uphold the Affordable Care Act.

Twice.

And, of course, don't forget the most cartoonish of them all, the Lipstick Pig herself, former governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, a talking bobblehead.

In a column for the New York Times, writer Roxane Gay, who is both brilliant and crass, and, therefore, beloved by me, put it very simply when she wrote, "The world will not end because of a Trump presidency."

I can't even sit back and hope that Donald Trump dies, because then Mike Pence would be President; and I'm not sure he would be any better than the Nazi dumpster fire. (Oops, there went my spleen for just a second.) He looks and sounds more reasonable than Donald Trump, but that's sort of like saying Ayman al-Zawahiri is less bad than Osama bin Laden by dint of the fact that he's a doctor. (Damnit. Spleen again.)

See where this is going? Remember how Dr. Jekyll couldn't stop turning into Mr. Hyde by the end of the story?

BUT WAIT A MINUTE! Stay with me. Stay with me.

Instead of petitioning your elected officials to support the Barbara Boxer bill to abolish the Electoral College, petition your local elected officials to pass a National Popular Vote bill that would bypass the sclerotic joke of an institution that Congress has become and guarantee that the winner of the popular vote would also win the Electoral College. The bill's website, linked above, has seen a huge surge in traffic and support since November 8th - and will only get more popular once the Nazi dumpster fire takes office and starts fucking the country in the ass. (Spleen. You can't stop it. You can only hope to contain it.)

And after all, it's only four years, right? The Retardlicans will get torched in the 2018 midterms, and there will be open speculation about running Mike Pence against the Drumpf in the primary. If the midterms go really well for the Democrats, you may even see the Warren/Booker ticket start to take shape a mere two years from now. And then in 2020, the Democrats win back nearly everything, including both houses of Congress. The icing on the cake, of course, will be the 2020 census, and the opportunity to re-draw the congressional districts. The Supreme Court obviously wasn't enough of a reason to get more Democrats to the polls this year. Hopefully they will do a better job of understanding the big picture issues four years from now.

In the meantime, this Dude abides; but I reserve the right to vent my spleen at the slightest provocation, or even for no good reason at all. (Also the right to move to Guatemala if things get really bad.)

Support a Bill to Abolish the Electoral College

There is no immediate remedy to the electoral miscarriage that occurred on Tuesday, November 8, 2016, a day that I suspect will live in infamy in the annals of the history of this (now much more rapidly) fading republic. For the second time in five elections, a Democrat won the popular vote and will be prevented from becoming President of the United States by the results in the Electoral College; and for the second time in four elections, the American people were tragically misled about the Democratic nominee—by the T. Boone Pickens-backed Vietnam-era Swift Boat lies about John Kerry in 2004, and by the gross distortions concerning Hillary Clinton’s private email server in 2016.

It is long past time to abolish the antiquated Electoral College and move to direct popular election of the President and Vice President. Senator Barbara Boxer of California has introduced a bill to do just that. There will be tremendous opposition to this bill, and it will almost certainly be voted down, if it even comes up for a vote. The full Senate, currently led by impotent jackass Mitch McConnell, is likely to do nothing more than glare in Boxer’s general direction while watching her bill wither on the vine. There would have to be an astonishing groundswell of popular support for the bill to even get a hearing in committee.

But anything is possible. Donald Trump is a Nazi, and his election is a repudiation of every single value to which the idea of the United States of America has ever aspired. Write to your elected officials and urge them to support this important bill. Nothing can be done to prevent an unfit psychopath from becoming the leader of the free world on January 20, 2017; but by passing this bill and amending the United States Constitution, we can almost certainly ensure that it will never happen again.

The Wisdom of the Trumpskyite #1

The guv’ment cain’t take mah guns away, and they cain’t make me get no health care, but they gotta get me a job. I deserve it as a Amer’can!

Deep Thoughts #137

When you register as Republican now, do you get a fitted sheet and hood, or is it one-size-fits-all, like your plastic mesh John Deere caps?

Deep Thoughts #136

The Drumpf will get about 70 million votes. If we offer those fuckers the Gulf States, could they please move down there and fucking secede?

Deep Thoughts #135

If you “think” either Benghazi or emails are relevant, you are not only immune to facts and reason, you’re also a sexist fucking misogynist.

Deep Thoughts #134

If you asked me whether Americans were more ignorant about Hillary Clinton or the Affordable Care Act, I’m not sure what my answer would be.

Deep Thoughts #133

Remember debtors’ prison? We should have an intellectual version in Siberia, and ship the sexist anti-Hillary Clinton dullards there to die.

Deep Thoughts #132

People as mentally deficient as the mort at 0:54 in this video should not be allowed to vote. He also needs lessons on how not to be sexist.

Deep Thoughts #131

You have been misinformed about Hillary Clinton, but you have time for some remedial learning before the election. Read this, or don’t vote.

Deep Thoughts #130

To the people who call Hillary Clinton a liar but then turn around and support Donald Trump: How do you fucking retards not shit yourselves?

Deep Thoughts #129

Hillary Clinton is one of the most qualified Presidential candidates ever. If you don’t recognize this, you are ignorant; please don’t vote.

Fourth Grade

And so hot on the heels of the timely birthday sequence, here is the equally timely first-day-of-school sequence.

2012 - Kindergarten

2013 - First Grade

2014 - Second Grade

2015 - Third Grade

2016 - Fourth Grade

The Back Nine of Little and Cute

We went to Cedar Point and Cuyahoga Valley National Park last month, and on the travel day between the national park and the amusement park, we wound up watching the 1998 version of The Parent Trap in our hotel room. When Meredith (Elaine Hendrix), the gold-digging wife-to-be of Nick (Dennis Quaid) first appeared on-screen, Jackson sort of perked up and said, "She is h-o-t!" Which, of course, is when you know it's over. He has also recently starting talking about posting Minecraft tutorials on the internet. He actually used the word "tutorials." I may have been in college the first time I heard that word.

So anyway, this is way late, but here's the birthday picture rundown for 2016. Jackson is nine years old, and he just started fourth grade.

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

Deep Thoughts #128

The Senate can’t even confirm a Librarian of Congress in a timely fashion? Mitch McConnell has to be the most useless person alive on earth.

Another National Park

Before this year, I had been to three national parks in my life: Grand Canyon (twice), Mammoth Cave (twice), and Mount Rainier. (Those are the ones that I can recall having been to, anyway. It's possible that we got one or two more during family vacations when I was a kid.) So far this year, we have been to five national parks, increasing my total by 167%. We hit Yosemite, Sequoia, Kings Canyon, and Joshua Tree on our pilgrimage to see a moose back in March. Today, we got back from a trip that was originally just supposed to be an outing to Cedar Point, but which happily turned into a mini-vacation that netted us another national park, due to my misinterpreting when Amy would want to leave for Cedar Point. That misinterpretation meant that I had to ask for an extra vacation day from the old juke joint - and the extra day meant that we got the chance to spend most of this past Thursday wandering around Cuyahoga Valley National Park, which is in northeast Ohio, between Cleveland and Akron.

Once again, I'm going to lead with just one photo of Jackson, and hope that this inspires me to write some more about this park, and to post more pictures of our little boy while he can still be considered a "little boy." I don't know what constitutes an official "growth spurt," but he's in the throes of something that's going to have him on the threshold of adolescence before long. He's really into Minecraft these days, and he spends more time than I would like for him to spend watching Minecraft videos on the magic internets. Tonight, he showed me something he was building in the game, and he said that it was for his Minecraft "tutorials." Not so long ago, this was a little person who was incapable of speech and who could not feed himself. Now he's developing tutorials for Minecraft - with plans to post them on the internet, of course. Darwin help me. This picture is of Jackson contemplating Brandywine Falls, at Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

Why are we here?
Because we're here.
Roll the bones.

A Pilgrimage to See A Moose

When I was 9, we took a three-week family vacation by car - and when I say "by car," what I really mean is in a mid-1970s Buick LeSabre - to California, mostly to visit my uncle in San Francisco, but also so my parents could take me and my brother to Disneyland. They're not big Disney people, and we were never the kind of family who went out and did things only because other families were doing those same things and we wanted to fit in; but there was some kind of bugaboo buried somewhere in their collective psyche that told them they should probably take us to one of the Disney parks at least once while we were kids, just to have done it, so we would know what it was like, how much less satisfying it is than roughly any other amusement park anywhere on (Spaceship, natch) Earth. (Okay, I threw that last part in. They felt like it was something they should do as parents. I thought it was unsatisfying, at least in terms of the rides.)

And yes, we drove. Not because getting there is half the fun, as Clark W. Griswold would have said, but probably because it would have been much more expensive to fly. We camped overnight, in a Coleman pop-up camper, in places like Gothenburg, Nebraska; somewhere in Wyoming; and Winnemucca, Nevada, before arriving in San Francisco and staying with my uncle, who would have been 30 or 31 at the time. Being a tech person, he had a number of fancy gadgets in his apartment, and one of them was a laserdisc player. Remember laserdiscs? Same technology as a CD, but the size of a vinyl record album, and they played movies. So what did my MIT-educated uncle elect to play on laserdisc for his impressionable 7- and 9-year-old nephews?

National Lampoon's Vacation.

And we, much to my mother's chagrin, devoured it. We watched it over and over again, and we aped the lines; and for whatever reason, the pimp-daddy's reply to Clark's request for help getting back on the interstate, "Hey, fuck yo mama!", was the one we latched onto and aped the most. I have since maintained a deep and abiding love for that film, and the whole point of this digression is that, because of all of the fond memories I have wrapped up in the concept of National Lampoon's Vacation, I have come to think of any trip to California, from some place far enough afield as the Griswolds would have traveled in the film (Chicago, in point of fact - which is close enough to Indianapolis for government work), as a trip to Walley World.

We have recently returned from just such a trip.

We did not go to Disneyland. Amy took Jackson to Florida to visit her grandfather last year during spring break, and while they were there, they went to Disney World. That might just get me off the hook for Disney parks. Our trip this year was for the purpose of seeing friends and family, and visiting national parks. We started in Sacramento, ended in San Bernardino, visited five relatives and one of Amy's friends from college, and made it to four national parks - Yosemite, Sequoia, Kings Canyon, and Joshua Tree (and collected what I am roughly estimating as around a gajillion dead bugs on the front end of the car I rented when we landed in Sacramento).

I wanted to include more than one picture in this post, but - surprise! - it took me way longer to write the post than I had imagined it would. So for now there is only one picture. However, we have about a thousand pictures to go through, and I have a lot more to ramble on about, so there will be more posts about the trip. And more pictures. (No, really. There will be. Pictures of Jackson, too.)

So for starters, here's a picture that contains Jackson way down in front in the foreground, and Half Dome, one of the impressive granite landmarks at Yosemite National Park, way up at the top in the background.

Deep Thoughts #127

So let’s see…some lying monkeys make fake entrapment videos, mouth-breathing Retardlicans fall for it (again!), monkeys get indicted. Weird.

The Peddies vs. The Facebooks

So my brother, bless his heart, refuses to engage with Facebook, which is where my wife would have attempted to post the video shown below - attempted, because the original was close to 1GB. (I don't know if that would have worked or not, because - wait for it - I refuse to engage with Facebook!) The Blogger website just laughed at me when I tried to post it. I had to crop it quite a bit to get it under the 100MB Blogger limit - so Jess, if this is simply unwatchable, let me know, and I'll put the original on a flash drive and bring it with me on the Walley World trip.