Art by Jon Sommariva
For a wonderful break from the political, just check out this Target commercial featuring a bunch of kid Avengers playing out their own spirited civil war…
I love everything about this commercial, but I really love the gender politics of it. This is how you do it.
You know how Hillary and her supporters keep talking about how she’s raising money for other Democrats to run? Like that $15 million she raised with George Clooney?
Well, about that.
First, watch this video from The Young Turks which gives a solid rundown on the huge money laundering scheme Clinton and the Democratic National Committee have been running for the entire campaign:
This involves using loopholes in the campaign finance system to funnel much larger donations to Hillary’s campaign than is allowed for by law. It’s also an enormously unethical breach in party ethics because the DNC is not supposed to play favorites during a primary (which was why Tulsi Gabbard resigned from her second-in-command DNC position to be able to campaign for Bernie Sanders, unlike Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who has carried water for Hillary Clinton every step of the way). And there may be actual violations of campaign finance law, as the Sanders campaign said yesterday.
Okay, so they have this YUGE scheme that funnels cash through the state parties and the DNC into Hillary’s Victory Fund. And Hillary’s Victory Fund is where all that money she’s supposedly raising for other Democrats is supposed to go. Well, about that.
According to the Washington Post:
“’It’s time to rebuild our party from the ground up,’ the former secretary of state pledged. ‘When our state parties are strong, we win.’
“The joint committee that was formed, called the Hillary Victory Fund, ended up raising nearly $27 million by the end of 2015, thanks to six-figure donations from longtime Clinton allies and a New York fundraiser headlined by the singer Sting.
“So far, the state parties have served only as a pass-through for their share of the funds. Campaign finance records show that nearly $2 million in donations to the fund initially routed last year to individual state party accounts was immediately transferred to the DNC, which is laboring to pay off millions of dollars in debt…
“’I’ve never seen anything like this,’ said Lawrence Noble, a former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) who is now with the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. ‘Joint victory funds are not intended to be separate operating committees that just support a single candidate. But they appear to be turning the traditional notion of a joint committee into a Hillary fundraising committee.’”
So out of $27 million, only two million was sent to the state parties for their candidates, and that money was then returned to the DNC to pay its bills. That was last year.
According to Politico, in the first quarter of this year, the Hillary Victory Fund raised $33 million:
“The idea is that the committee will help the state parties raise money for their general election efforts, an area where Clinton’s allies argue that her insurgent rival for the Democratic presidential nomination Bernie Sanders has done little…
“Yet, during the first three months of the year, the $2 million transferred by the Hillary Victory Fund to various state party committees paled in comparison to the $9.5 million it transferred to Clinton’s campaign committee or the $3.5 million it transferred to the DNC.
“And the Hillary Victory Fund also spent $6.7 million on online ads that mostly looked like Clinton campaign ads, as well as $5.5 million on direct marketing. Both expenses seem intended at least in part to help Clinton build a small donor base, an area in which Sanders has far outpaced her.”
So, in short, the Hillary Victory Fund raised $60 million. Of that, most of it went either directly to Hillary’s campaign or toward promoting her campaign. Only $4 million went to state parties, and at least half of that boomeranged back to the DNC to pay its bills.
All those Democrats lower on the ballot aren’t getting much help when you get right down to it. You know what would really help them? A YUGE excited voter turnout in November.
And if the Democrats want that, Hillary isn’t the candidate they should be supporting.
UPDATE: A recent piece in Politico reports that even less of the money is remaining with the state parties, only 1% of the $61 million raised to date.
After her latest humiliating defeat last night, CNN reported that Hillary Clinton has “lost patience” with Bernie Sanders and will be attacking him more savagely now in an attempt to “destroy him.” They said she has decided that “party unity can come later.”
First off, this should come as a big relief to multitudes of Bernie supporters who have been suffering through endless lectures about how they shouldn’t critique Clinton too harshly in case she wins the nomination and will need to be strong against the GOP candidate. Hillary herself just publicly embraced a scorched earth policy and actively wants to hurt Sanders as much as possible, his strength as a possible nominee be damned. So arguments that we should maintain a certain gentle respect for her in our criticisms are now completely invalid. Cry ‘Havoc!’, and let slip the blogs of war!
Second, Hillary’s usual disingenuousness and condescension just ooze from this decision. She’s “lost patience” with Bernie, and now he’s gonna get it. As if she’s been graciously tolerating him tagging along till now, but now he’s had the gall to keep beating her in contest after contest and she’s just going to have to put her foot down and tell him to cut it out! As if she hasn’t already been smearing him and playing dirty tricks for months, and gotten particularly ruthless and mean the past few weeks. As if she could have taken him down any time she wanted but was being nice.
How dare this other candidate campaign to win, when the whole game was elegantly rigged for her from the outset? Who does he think he is? She’s like a spoiled debutante who shows up at her coming out ball to discover she has to share the spotlight with someone else.
“But Daddy told me that I’m the Chosen One!” she says, stamping her foot. “Get out of my way!”
And Bernie just keeps on dancing…
Get your own Berdie Sanders, handcrafted with love by Nydia Macedo, Doc Wilde’s Portuguese translator! Go here for details.
In the very week that she complained about Bernie Sanders’s campaign’s “tone” and its attack ads against her (existence of which her campaign subsequently was unable to prove), Hillary Clinton has reached…well, not a new low, because she’s gone just as low before, but another despicable low. She is using a carefully chosen segment of video from Rachel Maddow’s interview with him this week to portray Bernie Sanders as dismissive of women’s issues.
At a campaign stop yesterday, she said:
“Last night, Sen. Sanders agreed Donald Trump’s comments were shameful, but then he said they were a distraction from the, and I quote, ‘serious discussion about serious issues facing America.’ To me, this is a serious issue, and it is a serious discussion. We need a president who is passionate about this, seeing it as a top priority because women’s health is under assault.”
Bullshit. Clinton is shamelessly smearing Bernie again, misrepresenting a man with perfect 100% lifetime scores with Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America regarding support for women’s issues, a man who has always voted the right way to help American women and who has himself championed legislation on these issues.
Not shown in the video they’re circulating was this exchange:
MADDOW: “After, uh, the word spread that Donald Trump had made those remarks today about abortion, that a woman needs to be punished, uh, if she seeks an abortion and abortion should be banned, you said today that was shameful. What is shameful about it?”
SANDERS: “Well, I think it is — shameful is probably understating that position. First of all, to me, and I think to most Americans, women have the right to control their own bodies and they have the right to make those personal decisions themselves. But to punish a woman for having an abortion is beyond comprehension. I — I just — you know, one would say what is in Donald Trump’s mind except we’re tired of saying that? I don’t know what world this person lives in. So obviously, from my perspective, and if elected president, I will do everybody that I can to allow women to make that choice and have access to clinics all over this country so that if they choose to have an abortion, they will be able to do so. The idea of punishing a woman, that is just, you know, beyond comprehension.”
Bernie said that in the very interview Hillary is trying to cite as evidence that he’s dismissive of the issue.
What Bernie was actually dismissive of was anything said by Donald Trump. He, correctly, pointed out that the media drools over every stupid thing Trump says and he said rather than spending so much time talking about whatever stupid things Trump said on any particular day, the media should consider covering issues that matter. All of which he said after first very clearly making the statements I quote above in unequivocal support of women’s abortion rights.
This is simply dirty politics at its worst, and Hillary Clinton should be ashamed of herself. This is as bad as the time in 2008 her campaign released an image of Barack Obama in traditional African wear including a turban (taken while he was visiting his father’s homeland in 2006, the clothes proffered to him as a gift) so that it would scare white voters into thinking Obama was a Muslim. That whole “Birther” thing, where stupid people think Obama’s a Muslim from Kenya? Clinton started that. The Republicans just took the ball and ran with it.
Beyond the objective facts of his previous record, the truth is that during this campaign Bernie has been even more supportive of abortion rights than Hillary. After several debates in which the issue was never raised, the candidates were finally asked about it by Bret Baier at the Fox News debate in March. As Mother Jones reported, “Bernie Sanders opposes all abortion restrictions. Hillary Clinton’s stance is murkier.”
BAIER: “Can you name a single circumstance at any point in a pregnancy in which you would be okay with abortion being illegal?”
SANDERS: “It’s not a question of me being okay. Let me be very clear about it. I know not everybody here will agree with me. I happen to believe that it is wrong for the government to be telling a woman what to do with her own body. I think, I believe, and I understand there are honest people. I mean, I have a lot of friends, some supporters, some disagree. They hold a different point of view, and I respect that. But that is my view.
“I’ll tell you something which I don’t like in this debate. There are a whole lot of people out there who tell me the government is terrible, government is awful, get government off our backs. My Republican friends want to cut Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, education. But somehow on this issue, they want to tell every woman in America what she should do with her body.”
BAIER: “I guess the genesis of the question is that there are some Democrats who say after five months, with the exception of the life of the mother or the health of the baby, that perhaps that’s something to look at. You’re saying no.”
SANDERS: “I am very strongly pro-choice. That is a decision to be made by the woman, her physician and her family. That’s my view.”
So, no ifs, ands, or buts. No equivocation. Bernie Sanders supports a woman’s right to choose absolutely.
How about Hillary Clinton?
BAIER: “Do you think a child should have any legal rights or protections before it’s born? Or do you think there should not be any restrictions on any abortions at any stage in a pregnancy?”
CLINTON: “…Under Roe v. Wade, which is rooted in the Constitution, women have this right to make this highly personal decision with their family in accordance with their faith, with their doctor. It’s not much of a right if it is totally limited and constrained. So I think we have to continue to stand up for a woman’s right to make these decisions…”
BAIER: “Just to be clear, there’s no — without any exceptions?”
CLINTON: “No. I have been on record in favor of a late pregnancy regulation that would have exceptions for the life and health of the mother. I object to the recent effort in Congress to pass a law saying after 20 weeks, you know, no such exceptions, because although these are rare, Bret, they sometimes arise in the most complex, difficult medical situation…And so I think it is — under Roe v. Wade, it is appropriate to say, in these circumstances [we can have exceptions], so long as there’s an exception for the life and health of the mother.”
So, while Bernie stands against any restrictions to a woman’s right to choose, Clinton is open to late-term restrictions as long as exceptions are allowed if the woman’s health or life are endangered. That’s consistent with the stance she stated last September on MSNBC:
“I am where I have been, which is that if there’s a way to structure some kind of constitutional restriction that takes into account the life of the mother and her health, then I’m open to that. But I have yet to see the Republicans willing to actually do that, and that would be an area, where if they included health, you could see constitutional action.”
Constitutional action. Constitutional restriction. So, basically, if the Republicans are willing to allow some abortions in cases where the mother is endangered, she is willing to restrict, at least somewhat, women’s right to choose. And whether you agree with her on that or not, she certainly is in no position to claim the high ground over Sanders on this issue, and she is simply lying to the American people when she disparages him in this way.
You know how much of a warrior for women’s rights Bernie Sanders is? You know how much a warrior for all of our peoples’ rights Bernie Sanders is? Read this account about how domestic violence issues and legal entanglements on Native American reservations inspired him to fight for legislation that would help these women:
“The Native struggle also owes its marginalization to the complexity of the laws that govern it. For example, the tangled web of tribal and federal law nominally gives tribes the right to govern themselves. However, until recently, tribes had no authority to prosecute violent crimes that happen within their reservation boundaries. For years, whites could commit violent crimes on reservations and remain untouchable to tribal police.
“This legal nightmare extended even over marriage. It prevented Diane Millich, an Ute woman living on a southern Colorado reservation, from seeking any protection against her white husband, who beat her regularly. The Southern Ute Tribal Police could not arrest him and, because the couple lived on the Ute reservation, the husband resided outside the jurisdiction of the La Plata County sheriff. Millich went to the federal authorities for help and received none. In fact, Millich’s domestic nightmare would likely have continued had her husband not shown up to her office one day and shot her co-worker.
“It is this absurd and dangerous state of affairs that led Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to co-sponsor the Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013, which expanded tribal governments’ jurisdiction over domestic violence crimes and provided funds for tribal criminal justice systems and victim services.
“It is Sen. Sanders’ recognition of the deplorable conditions on tribal reservations that has led him to become the first presidential candidate to actively involve Native Americans in his campaign. The most promising sign of that involvement arrived on February 22, when Sanders appointed Tara Houska, an attorney and member of Couchiching First Nation, as the Native American advisor to his campaign.”
Bernie Sanders with Native elders before his rally in Seattle
Bernie Sanders cares deeply for women. He cares deeply for children. He cares so deeply for all of us that he even reaches out to those who are traditionally mostly ignored by our government and our politicians on the campaign trail. Bernie’s the first candidate to EVER actively involve Native Americans and their issues in his campaign. In addition to appointing Tara Houska as his campaign’s Native American advisor, this was reported in February:
“[Sanders advisor] Nicole Willis announced that presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders was creating a policy advisory committee on Native American issues. She said the committee’s membership will be announced soon.
“She said Sanders has already announced that he will continue President Obama’s tribal nations conference, keep a senior Native American advisor on staff at the White House, and work to restore tribal jurisdiction to improve local decision-making. He also pledged to expand the Violence Against Women Act and find additional funding for the Generation Indigenous initiative.
“Willis said that Sen. Sanders pledged to have a climate change summit within the first 100 days of his administration and that tribes would be included as full participants…”
And if you need more evidence, watch this short video from when Bernie went to speak at evangelical Liberty University and was asked about abortion. He not only addresses the extremely conservative crowd with respect, he earns their respect in turn though they disagree, and even gets some cheers. And throughout, he stands firm in his dedication to the right to choose.
Don’t let Hillary Clinton lie to you: Bernie Sanders fights for women, and he always has.
Please share this post. Let’s keep the lies from taking root.
“Bernie and his supporters are sexists. They’re misogynists! Did you see the way he interrupted her that time she was interrupting him? Hateful! And he mostly gets white voters because he’s a racist, and that one time, when he wasn’t even there, apparently one of his followers shouted ‘English only!’ at a Hispanic icon and even though there was a video showing it didn’t really happen it totally did! So obviously he and his followers hate Latinos. And even though there’s all that documentary evidence and eyewitness accounts of Bernie’s personal civil rights activism, that don’t count because he’s clearly racist against black people, like that woman he was chained to when he was arrested fighting for her rights. And he supported the Minute Men vigilantes who hunt Mexicans along the border, because that totally makes sense! He’s an egotist and just running for his own aggrandizement and doesn’t give a damn about anybody but himself. And ALL his followers are just loutish twenty-year-old frat boy Bernie Bros and every single one of them is an abusive asshole online. Oh, okay, yeah, there are a few women, but they’re just in it for the boys, and they’re too naive to understand what they’re doing. He’s not even a Democrat and his supporters are traitors to the party. And he’s a communist! And he loves guns and is totally in the pocket of the NRA! And he doesn’t understand how government works and he’s never accomplished anything in all his years in public service! And the fact that he hasn’t had to evolve over the years from having stances that are despicable or did great damage to the country and the world doesn’t mean he’s almost always been on the right side because of his character, it means he’s inflexible and resistant to change! He’s an unrealistic idealogue and he’s as bad as Trump! And it’s just awful the way he and his supporters tear poor Hillary down, they shouldn’t be so negative! We need to think about November!”
I just returned from visiting Nydia, my amazing inamorata, in Brazil for a couple of months where, among other more psychologically healthy activities, we spent a great deal of time tracking the American election. Last week, as we sat eating airport food, drearily counting the minutes before I had to depart, I noticed the latest of many Captain America t-shirts I’d seen worn by Brazilians during the visit.
I told Nyd I was heartened to see the shirts, and the popularity of the character, who I see as a true symbol of the American ideal, not the jingoistic symbol of American imperialism seen by some. And I credited that popularity to the Marvel films, and Chris Evans’s very human, very decent, very noble portrayal of Steve Rogers. Captain America isn’t propagandistic, he’s aspirational.
“Captain America is Bernie Sanders,” I told her. “They’re both old guys from Brooklyn with superhuman stamina, dedicated to New Deal policies, still fighting to protect the weak from the powerful, unflinching in their belief in the American dream.”
Later, back home in the states, I saw author Catherynne Valente tweet, “Clinton is Black Widow (troubled past, does the right thing eventually) Sanders is Hulk, always angry, no one is Cap.” I have a lot of respect for Ms. Valente, but I disagree.
First off, Clinton ain’t much like the Black Widow. She lacks the Widow’s metaphorical agility as a campaigner, and when she takes aim at her opponent, her shots almost always miss or ricochet back and hit her. I’ll grant she has a “troubled past,” if you really want to undersell the problems with Clinton’s record, but that very record shows she actually doesn’t really do the right thing eventually unless it’s politically expedient or she has to because she’s forced to “walk back” a stance or action because of political damage. She does have a great deal of “red in her ledger,” blood on her hands, in places like Haiti and Iraq and Libya and Honduras, places that have suffered terribly because of Hillary (and Bill) Clinton’s ruthless political calculus. But the Widow owns up to her acts, and, in The Winter Soldier, even released the transcripts records to the internet, taking full responsibility for her misdeeds and working to redeem herself for them.
Hillary won’t even share the content of a few speeches she made to Wall Street, much less acknowledge the terrible human impact of her decisions over the years.
And Bernie as the Hulk? No. The Hulk’s anger is unreasoning, destructive rage. Bernie is angry, yes, as he should be, but he is not destructive. He is protective, nurturing, and constructive. And he is anything but unreasoning; just watch the video of him speaking to the students at evangelical Liberty University, where he engages them with respect and gets respect in return though their philosophies are radically opposed.
I’d say Donald Trump is the Hulk, but he lacks the Hulk’s dignity and compassion. Hell, he lacks the Hulk’s intellect.
But no, Bernie is definitely Captain America.
One of the best pieces I’ve ever read on Captain America is by Steven Attewell, and in it he addresses Steve Rogers’s political identity:
“Steve Rogers isn’t a jingoistic conservative asshole…Unlike many other patriotic characters who derive their virtues from the American heartlands, Steve Rogers grew up in the cosmopolitan multi-cultural world of New York City. He came of age in New York City at a time when the New Deal was in full swing, Fiorello LaGuardia was mayor, the American Labor Party was a major force in city politics, labor unions were on the move, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade was organizing to fight fascism in Spain in the name of the Popular Front, and a militant anti-racist movement was growing that equated segregation at home with Nazism abroad that will eventually feed into the ‘Double V’ campaign.
“Then he became a fine arts student. To be an artist in New York City in the 1930s was to be surrounded by the ‘Cultural Front.’ We’re talking the WPA Arts and Theater Projects, Diego Rivera painting socialist murals in Rockefeller Center, Orson Welles turning Julius Caesar into an anti-fascist play and running an all-black Macbeth and ‘The Cradle Will Rock,’ Paul Robeson was a major star, and so on. You couldn’t really be an artist and have escaped left-wing politics. And if a poor kid like Steve Rogers was going to college as a fine arts student, odds are very good that he was going to the City College of New York at a time when an 80% Jewish student body is organizing student trade unions, anti-fascist rallies, and the ‘New York Intellectuals’ were busily debating Trotskyism vs. Stalinism vs. Norman Thomas Socialism vs. the New Deal in the dining halls and study carrels.
“And this Steve Rogers, who’s been exposed to all of what New York City has to offer, becomes an explicit anti-fascist. In the fall of 1940, over a year before Pearl Harbor, he first volunteers to join the army to fight the Nazis specifically. This isn’t an apolitical patriotism forged out of a sense that the U.S has been attacked; rather, Steve Rogers had come to believe that Nazism posed an existential threat to the America he believed in. New Deal America.
“Captain America didn’t ‘share 40’s values’ – a reductive label assuming that everyone alive in 1940 was either a racial bigot, a misogynist, a homophobe, and an unthinking militarist, and handily ignores the people of color, women, gays, and left-wing activists who were hard at work to change American society for the better – he exemplified from the beginning the ideal that America could be. Thus Steve Rogers led the Invaders (a multispecies and multinational Allied superhero force) into Europe to fight fascism, he fought with Nick Fury’s Howling Commandos, a racially integrated fighting force from the beginning, and fought with the French Resistance rather than snidely repeating anachronistic cheese-eating surrender monkey jokes.
“Thus when Captain America is unfrozen in the 1960s, he’s not freaked out by the changes in racial progress – instead, he forms an instant partnership with one of the first black superheroes, the Falcon, who movie audiences just met for the first time, and the two of them go toe to toe against an insane imposter Captain America who’s obsessed about communists under the bed. The analogy cannot be more pointed: the real Captain America stands for racial equality and civil liberties, the Captain America who believes that the government needs to ‘smash’ reds by any means necessary is a fraud. In the 1980s, Steve Rogers runs into a childhood friend, Arnold Roth, who happens to be gay – and Steve Rogers defends his friend from bigoted violence, because Steve Rogers is a good man.
“In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, when Steve Rogers is unfrozen in the ice in 2011, he’s not here to be startled by our progressive values. He’s here to judge us for falling short of his – and that’s the entire crux of the plot of Winter Soldier. When Steve Rogers wakes up in post ‘New York’ America and sees SHIELD preparing a giant fleet of sniper drones that’s going to be used to cull the human race based on meta-data that supposedly predicts the bad things people might do in the future, he immediately calls this out as inherently incompatible with the Constitution and the ideals that Steve Rogers fought and essentially died for. He puts his faith on ordinary soldiers and rank-and-file officers to do what’s right, not the corrupt or blinded authorities personified respectively by Robert Redford and Samuel L. Jackson. And his solution to SHIELD/HYDRA’s plan for world domination through mass murder is not only to sacrifice himself to save the world (again), but also to release all of SHIELD’s secrets to the world.”
Did I say that Bernie Sanders is Captain America? Bernie Sanders is Captain America.
A few years ago, writer J. Michael Straczynski put these words in Steve Rogers’s dialogue balloon:
“Doesn’t matter what the press says. Doesn’t matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn’t matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. This nation was founded on one principle above all else: the requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world: No, YOU move.”
That is exactly what Bernie Sanders is doing. He’s telling the Democratic establishment and the GOP and the media and the big money special interests, No, YOU move.
And the people of America are hearing him. And they’re starting to plant their feet as well.
(NOTE: A while back, I had a really interesting discussion about Captain America and his place in America’s political psyche. I posted it here.)
Art by Danny Kelly
I’m still seeing many people clinging to the argument that a lot of the stuff we see online that is critical of Hillary Clinton is either from sinister right-wing operatives or from gullible left-wingers who have been tricked by those operatives into not supporting the party-ordained candidate. Someone just posted a mini-rant (inspired by a New York Times piece) about Republicans posting anti-Hillary tweets so that liberals will repost them and be turned against Hillary…
Wait, what?
If the liberals are reposting these insidious tweets, they’re doing so because they agree with them already. They’re not being hypnotized by the totemic power of 140 well-chosen characters to achieve a sudden right-wing epiphany that Clinton doesn’t represent their views. If a GOP agent provocateur tweets “I love chocolate,” even if he doesn’t, it wouldn’t be at all surprising if some chocolate-loving Democrats agreed and retweeted.
Are there right-wing operatives out there in social media trying to manipulate voters? Of course. There are also confirmed accounts of the Clinton campaign using Karl Rovian tactics like push polls to try to dishonestly manipulate Democratic voters into believing false things about Bernie Sanders and his policies. That was the same tactic Rove used for Bush in South Carolina when the pollsters were telling racist voters John McCain had a little black baby. The Clinton camp and its surrogates have also, for months, tried tactics varying from implying that Bernie Sanders is just like Hugo Chavez, the ex- strongman dictator of Venezuela, to having the candidate herself lie straight in voters’ faces over and over again that Sanders plans to completely abolish Obamacare and then start all over on the healthcare issue. That simple lie — used constantly, the classic political “Big Lie” — has gone mostly unchallenged by the media and has misled many voters into thinking that their coverage is in danger if they vote for the guy who is actually trying to get them better, more affordable coverage.
This is, of course, the same Hillary whose campaign in 2008 released a picture of Barack Obama wearing traditional Kenyan garments, including a turban, in order to frighten voters into thinking he was a muslim, as well as resorting to other underhanded tactics designed to capitalize on white people’s base ignorance and xenophobia about foreigners and black people in general.
Which is worse? Republicans dishonestly trying to manipulate Democrats, or Democratic politicians cynically lying to manipulate their own voters?
How about when you see a liberal friend criticizing Hillary, or supporting Bernie, just give them the benefit of a doubt. Maybe, like you, they’ve come to their decision on their own terms, according to their own experience and values, and they have reached different conclusions than you have. Respect them, and engage them, and change their minds by reasonable sharing of information and ideas if you can. But stop projecting all this nonsense that if people disagree with you, it’s the Republicans’ fault.
Mostly, it’s Hillary Clinton’s fault.
Beautiful.
This is why I support Bernie Sanders. He’s a Hail Mary pass against all the entropy and corruption and business-as-usual. His roots are in New Deal America, and his roots are strong. He is running because he wants better for us, for ALL of us, and for our children, and he is willing, has always been willing, to fight like hell to get it for us. He represents a nearly impossibly rare opportunity to do great things, to reach for goals that elevate us as a people, to work for an America that truly belongs to us all.
A vote for Bernie is a vote for our people, our land, our country.
Please vote.
In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.Thomas Jefferson
Dear progressives,
Time to put your money where your mouth is. Bernie can’t rely on Wall Street and Walmart; he needs us.
When he entered the race, only political junkies knew who he was. Even in the fall, nearly half of Democrats polled didn’t really know who he was. Now he’s tied one primary so tightly you’d need a quantum microscope to see the actual result, lost one by a handful of points, and won one by the largest numbers in history, all against a candidate who started the race as one of the most recognized politicians on the planet, a candidate with the full force of not only her own family’s political machine behind her but the Democratic establishment as well.
Nevada was a speedbump. The actual delegate numbers are what counts, and in that the race continues to be a dead heat with Clinton only a single delegate ahead. Nationally, Bernie polls either within single percentage points of her or (in the latest national polls) actually ahead of her by as much as 6% (a milestone he reached earlier than Obama did).
While the media and the establishment tell you that Bernie Sanders is “slipping” in the delegate race (as the NYT put it a few days ago) and his campaign is floundering, this is the actual situation.
They will show you delegate totals which put Hillary Clinton hundreds of delegates ahead of Sanders, and which don’t even give you the actual numbers for the pledged delegates gained through each primary in which they are almost tied with 52 and 51 respectively. Those extra delegates are superdelegates who have said that they will vote a certain way, but who will not vote until the end of July and can change their minds at any time. Those votes DO NOT COUNT until they are cast, and by that time they will amount to a very small segment of the total. Unless the race is still a tight one at that time, their impact won’t even matter.
Also, again: they can change their minds, and that is what usually happens as the race shifts. Most superdelegates will honor the popular vote out of some sense of decorum and honor and utter democracy. So if Bernie Sanders manages to outpace Hillary Clinton in the long fight — which he stands a very good chance of doing, if the voters don’t allow themselves to be disheartened and disillusioned by a media that is actively providing them inaccurate information on behalf of the establishment candidate — many of those superdelegates will actually vote for him.
At this point in 2008, Hillary Clinton also allegedly had more superdelegate votes than Barack Obama. How’d that work out for her?
As people learn more about Bernie Sanders, they start to support him. His likeability and trustworthiness scores in the polls are in the 80-90% range, while Hillary Clinton’s hover down around 10%.
Ten. Percent.
People don’t trust her, even many people who are voting for her because “I love Bernie, but she has a better chance of winning.” And do you really think a candidate who 90% of the population doesn’t think they can trust is going to do well in the general? The polls indicate no: according to the latest polls, Bernie Sanders beats all possible GOP opponents by a much safer margin than Hillary Clinton does, and she actually loses to some of them.
And you know what? Clinton won Iowa and Nevada in a couple of disastrously sloppy caucuses, and the caucus system provided her her narrow victories. But the actual popular vote in all three states so far, the actual number of voters voting one way or the other, broke 55% for Bernie to 45% for Hillary. The caucus system, anti-democratic by nature, hides the fact that more people actually voted for Sanders so far in this race.
Simply put, Bernie is our best chance to win in November by every current objective metric. Our best chance against the theocracy and rampant greed and fascism offered up by the entire Republican party.
So stay in the fight. Spread the word. Feel the freakin’ Bern. VOTE, for fuck’s sake. And contribute. I just donated again, for the fifth time.
David is facing the Wall Street Goliath, and stones for his sling are damned expensive.
Not seeing much about this, so in case you didn’t know, it’s TONIGHT (2/23/16).
It will be moderated by Chris Cuomo, who lives in Clinton’s toy chest and comes scurrying out if she throws him snacks. He will act like she’s the Beatles and he’s a teenybopper in 1964. He will also very aggressively grill Bernie on how sinisterly socialist he is and ask why Bernie has the gall to think he should continue his campaign even though Hillary has such a huge lead in the delegate race (she has 51 delegates, Bernie only has 51 as well).
Bernie will go first, allowing Hillary the last word and strategic advantage of being able to tailor her answers to address things he says, because that’s the tradition in these things now. Establishments gonna establishment.
I could write some stuff about the current state of the presidential race, and I no doubt will soon. But for now, I just want to show a couple of new ads from the two Democratic candidates. They should both like that since they, naturally, want as many people to see them as possible.
We’ll start with Hillary’s:
Well, all right then. Going negative, misrepresenting the scope of your opponent’s views and goals, and…attacking him for his impassioned attacks on Wall Street? That’s a good tack to take in post-Bush, post-economic-crash America.
Here’s Bernie’s:
Now this ad is really about Bernie’s single issue: us.
This is what the two campaigns want from us. Hillary wants us to not like Bernie, to avoid thinking we need to do all that much about Wall Street, and, well, to stop liking Bernie, pleeeease…
Bernie wants us to come together as a family, to look out for each other, and to together make this country what it’s supposed to be.
Right here we see the “pragmatic” approach of doing anything necessary (including trashing your opponent) to advance your personal career goals versus the “idealistic” approach of appealing to people’s better angels to bring us together to do the work to make an actual difference in the world.
I know which side I’m on.
Gloria Steinem looking for boys, 1996
“There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.”
Thus spake Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State to Bill Clinton, with Hillary Clinton laughing gleefully by her side. The “women who don’t help each other” she was talking about were the very, very many women supporting Senator Bernie Sanders for the presidency instead of Mrs. Clinton. Essentially, Albright’s (and presumably Hillary’s) message was that if a woman dares to not vote for Clinton, she can go to hell.
Meanwhile, Gloria Steinem made comments on behalf of Clinton in which she said that the main reason young women are supporting Bernie Sanders is to meet boys. How disappointing it is to hear that sort of condescending bullshit from one of the guiding lights of feminism. In a single breath, she denies the political agency of millions of women to make their own informed decisions, and infantilizes them as acting emotionally rather than rationally simply because they aren’t falling in line and showing the proper obeisance to her candidate.
After an online shitstorm of outrage over her comments, Steinem is backpedaling in a clumsy bit of damage control and trying to play it off as a joke. But this isn’t the first time she’s made such condescending (matronizing?) comments about women who don’t support Hillary. A while back, she implied that women weren’t supporting Clinton because when they looked at the Clintons, it subconsciously reminded them of issues they had in their own marriages and that made them uncomfortable.
So, to Gloria Steinem, if you’re a woman and you don’t support her friend Hillary, it absolutely must be because you’re either immature and horny (if you’re one of the women under 45 who support Bernie Sanders 2:1) or driven to neurotic distraction by your marital difficulties (presumably if you’re a woman old enough to be assumed immune to your glandular drives). It can’t possibly be because you’re intelligent and have looked at the candidates, their policies, and their comportment as leaders and come to your own rational conclusions.
It’s an odd form of empowerment that demands obeisance and subservience.
Mother Jones recently ran an article titled “That Time Bernie Sanders Said He Was a Bigger Feminist Than His Female Opponent,” referring to the 1986 gubernatorial election in which Sanders was running against the incumbent, Madeleine Kunin. The writer plays on the reflexive outrage of such male presumption, and Sanders lost that race, but ironically ten years later in a congressional race against another female candidate:
“…feminist writer Gloria Steinem traveled to Vermont to endorse Sanders, joking that she’d come to make the congressman ‘an honorary woman.’ Another speaker, a female state senator, emphasized Sanders’ feminist credentials. ‘As we know, to be a feminist a person does not have to be a woman,’ she said. ‘A feminist is a person who challenges the power structure of this country…Bernie Sanders is that kind of feminist.'”
That senator, her decisions no doubt driven by neurosis or puberty, is surely going to hell.
Recently, I saw a woman post this in a discussion on Facebook:
“Don’t let anybody – ANYBODY – tell you not to vote based on gender. We’ve elected presidents of this country for 250 years based on gender. The white men (and women with Stockholm Syndrome) telling you otherwise, are guilty of supporting yet another white man because, whether they are conscious of their internalized biases or not, they aren’t truly ready for a women in charge. It is clear as day that Hillary is vastly more qualified for the job. Period. Truth be told: there will never be the ‘right’ women for these people.”
Now, first thing, I’m not going to tell you not to vote based on gender, or whatever other criteria you choose. That’s your right, and frankly, all things being equal, I’d vote for the female candidate in a heartbeat because I do, genuinely, think having a woman president is a damned important milestone we need to hit, and soon. If I thought, based on their records and policy and what I’ve been able to gauge of their character, that Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton were roughly equivalent, the gender factor would probably be the factor that swung me to vote for Hillary. But I don’t see them as equal at all, so I can’t commit to her just because she’s sort of okay in the usual corporate Democrat way, and also a woman.
And that’s me. You may be different, that’s fine, that’s the very nature of our sort-of-in-a-way democratic system. You decide based on what you want to decide on, I’ll do likewise, and we’ll argue about it and then settle it at the polls.
But read that quote up there again. This is, actually, from a professional writer,* a very smart woman, but a woman so blinded by her own viewpoint that she’s not even capable of granting respect to other women who decide to support the opposing candidate based on whatever criteria they decide. If you don’t support Hillary as a male voter, plainly that’s just sexism, of course, but if you’re a woman and don’t support her, it’s because you’re a victim of Stockholm Syndrome and “internalized biases” you’re not conscious of. If you aren’t willing to support the woman candidate JUST BECAUSE, then she is willing to deny you the very agency of your own thoughts and observations and decisions.
I find that fairly despicable.
Vote how you want. If gender is the only thing that matters to you, knock yourself out. But really, do you have to be such an asshole about it?
*( WHOOPS: I was wrong, she’s not a writer. She’s — get this — an actual Wall Street executive who used to be with Morgan Stanley. Consider the source…?)
“[Hillary’s]…been tepid in her support of abortion rights; she has cozied up to Wall Street and big banks, drawing huge speaking fees and donations from the financial institutions that the next president should aggressively regulate. In the Senate, she deployed dismaying rhetoric against immigration rights, once describing herself as ‘adamantly against illegal immigrants,’ and it took her…way too long to support gay marriage.”
I’m sympathetic. I look forward to seeing the first female POTUS, too, and as a white guy I’m forced to admit that such a milestone is by definition much more important to many women than it is to me. That doesn’t mean, however, that it is not important to me, nor that I am a misogynist for not supporting Clinton (an accusation I’ve suffered through already from devout Clinton supporters). What it means is that I’m aware of the big flaws in Clinton that the writer herself acknowledges, as well as others, and I’m able to rationally compare what she has to offer to what Bernie Sanders has to offer.
Again, if I were doing a “Plus-side/Minus-side” chart of the two candidates, I’d put “Is a woman” on the plus side for Hillary, and “Is a white guy” on the minus side for Bernie just because I do want our culture to hit that milestone. Unfortunately for Hillary, my chart wouldn’t stop there, though it seems to for many of her supporters.
“There will be sexism, veiled and direct, from the right and the left,” Traister writes. “Democratic women will feel screwed by their friends all over again, as I did in August when I saw a poll showing Clinton ahead of her Democratic challenger Bernie Sanders by a mere 6 points with the party’s men and 44 points with its women: a 38-percentage-point gender gap that seemed to speak volumes about how much men on the left care about women’s leadership…”
I’d say that it speaks more to the fact of how much some women on the left care more about having a woman in office than they do about actual policy. Yet even with women, Clinton isn’t an overwhelming choice: her support among Democratic women, which was nearly universal when she started this campaign, has plummeted to ridiculous levels; twice as many women under 45 support Bernie Sanders as support her, and even a third of women her own age support him. So the strong majority of Democratic women clearly aren’t ignoring matters of candidate history and policy in the name of gender, and it’s a lot harder to accuse them of veiled misogyny. (Which is why they’re resorting to accusations of neurosis and immaturity.)
There’s a woman in my Facebook feed who I don’t know personally but whose work as a writer I have great respect for, and I see her post often about how great Hillary is, about how progressive she is, about how naive it is to think that Bernie (or anybody) can stand up to the wonderful Hillary Clinton. But, for me, everything she posts is tainted by the first comment on the matter I saw her post in which she showed anger at Sanders supporters and said something to the effect of “If these assholes keep us from getting a woman president and we just get another fucking white guy, I’m going to kick some asses.”
I support Bernie Sanders not just because he has been an unmatched progressive warrior for decades, not just because he is a man of unflinching integrity, not just because he stands solidly against the corrupt power of huge corporations and Wall Street rather than coddling them and taking their money, not just because he doesn’t coldly calculate every stance he takes based on polling and focus groups, not just because he’s not the safe choice of entrenched party power, and most definitely not at all because he’s a man. I support Bernie Sanders because I see in him an opportunity all-too-rare to actually make a huge difference in our government and our country. An opportunity for positive change on a New Deal scale.
Fortunately, more and more of my fellow voters, men and women, are seeing that in him too. Some may proclaim they’ll see us in hell…I see it more as we’re trying to get to America.
An excellent piece, whichever side you’re on…
BY KELLY WILZ
Fair warning: This blog is not going to be angry. It will not be written in all caps. There will be no vulgarity. And it probably won’t go viral. I don’t care.
What I do care about is the fact I’ve read over 70+ articles in the past two weeks alone discussing the 2016 election and what I see is a total lack of nuance and a lot of critiques that overgeneralize or underplay the very real role gender plays when people talk about Clinton and/or any other women who dare to step into positions that for so long have only been held by men.
What I do care about is how on my Facebook feed and elsewhere, I see well meaning folks called out as sexist jerks for simply offering legitimate critiques of Clinton and what a Clinton presidency might look like.
I like nuance. I…
View original post 2,613 more words
Well, the big name writer who loves Hillary Clinton and preaches a lot about how those on the left need not to “trash” each other’s candidates (and will stomp you if you criticize Hillary in his threads, though somehow her supporters who say nasty things about Bernie don’t seem to get stomped) has unfriended me on Facebook. Again. This is, I think, the fourth time he’s booted me in the past six months, and because I actually really like and respect him (feelings clearly not reciprocated), previously I’ve just sent him a fresh friends request each time, which he’s then ultimately accepted. Not going to bother this time; maybe I’m learning to take a hint.
Why did he boot me? Was it because of the article I posted citing the actual history of Hillary and Bill Clinton’s relationship with the Children’s Defense Fund and the Clintons’ horrible record in the war on poverty? Was it the essay by black writer/preacher/civil rights activist Shaun King defending Bernie Sanders’s exceptional record on black issues and civil rights? Was it because I posted a funny meme that satirized the two candidates’ position on the issue of “Jazz?”
I dunno.
I don’t think he’d tell people not to criticize (as opposed to insult) his candidate, because his self image is plainly that he is fair and open to dialogue. I also don’t think he’d say people shouldn’t joke around and satirize her, because his self image is that he is a defender of free expression who has a great sense of humor. But I think he’s hypervigilant and overly sensitive to things that he doesn’t want others seeing (particularly solid, critical facts about his candidate that may “trash” her shiny veneer even more than nasty insults about her), and he’s like a twitchy young gunslinger who’s too fast on the draw at any perceived slight.
I may wind up following him again, because I often enjoy his posts (when they’re not just screed after screed telling people not only how to behave on his wall but on theirs). And I’ll miss our virtual friendship because I do think highly of him and I’ve enjoyed our interactions. But I’m never going to censor my own damn speech just for his sake, and if he’s such a delicate hothouse flower that he can’t countenance our political disagreements, that’s too fucking bad.
I posted the above on Facebook, and naturally people started asking who I was talking about. I said I wasn’t going to name him because I wasn’t calling him out, I was just citing his behavior to make a point. But I did say folks could message me privately and guess, and I’d let them know if they got it right. I had a feeling that his imperious behavior would be immediately recognizable to anyone who regularly sees his posts.
Twelve people guessed. Eleven got it right.
One of the eleven shared with me a thread on his wall in which a woman calmly and politely critiques Hillary Clinton on policy and the writer snidely asks her if she’s a Republican shill or being paid by the GOP. So much for the elevated dialogue he’s allegedly promoting.
I’m still not looking to call him out or start a feud or anything, and he may have booted me for a different reason. And he has a right to control his friends list any way he likes. So if you mention him directly or badmouth him in a comment, I won’t let the comment post. None of this piddly stuff really matters, when you get down to it, and I just wish we could all treat each other at least a little bit better.
Oh, and SANDERS 2016!!!
UPDATE: I’ve been hearing from more Sanders supporters who claim they were booted from the writer’s friends list because they either defended Sanders on his wall or posted political stuff he disagreed with on their own. At the same time, he posts rants about how some people are obnoxiously complaining that he shouldn’t post whatever he wants to. So be careful what you say on this guy’s wall, or even your own, lest he transport the whole kit n kaboodle of you to their engine room. Er, I mean off his friends list.
We hear a lot of nonsense spin about not voting for Bernie Sanders because he’s “not electable.”
When you point out that in pretty much all the polls, for months, Sanders has outperformed Clinton (often by a large margin) when matched up against any specific GOP candidate, the data is handwavingly dismissed because “Hillary has low numbers because she’s been under attack for decades, but Sanders is untested.”
Other than the fact that the entire corporate power structure of the Democratic party is trying to squash him, of course.
And never mind the fact that in the past year, as both candidates have shown the people who they are and what they stand for, Sanders’s favorability numbers have soared from the low 30s to nearly 90% while Clinton’s have plummeted from the mid-70s to 39%. It can literally be said that most voters, whether they support him or not, genuinely like Bernie Sanders. The same is not true of Hillary Clinton.
All the same, while the polls consistently show Sanders beating GOP candidates by a larger margin than her, they do (usually) also show Clinton beating them. So if things continue along this track, it appears that either of them is actually electable, though Bernie would be the more certain bet.
Part of Bernie’s strength is that he has enormous blocs of voters who are incredibly passionate about his candidacy. Within the Democratic party, he has a two-to-one edge over Hillary among all voters under 45. Let me say that again: ALL DEMOCRATS UNDER 45 prefer Bernie by a two-to-one margin. And anyone who tells you that young people won’t turn out to vote hasn’t been paying attention to the tens of thousands of people who show up to see Bernie speak, or who spontaneously marched in support of him in cities coast to coast recently. The young people will be there for Bernie. He doesn’t do as well among older, longtime Democrats, though he still has a lot of support; even a third of Baby Boomer women, Hillary’s core demographic, support Bernie.
And many polls don’t even count independent voters, most of whom support Bernie, or the surprising number of crossover Republican voters who can’t stand their own candidates but see in Bernie a man of integrity they can get behind.
So much for the “electability” nonsense.
We also often see folks saying “whoever you support in the primaries, just be sure to support the winner in the general election.” And that’s a reasonable and rational request. There’s not a man or woman who has stood on a Republican debate stage who is qualified for the presidency, and some of them (the frontrunners, naturally) are simply monstrous and would be total disasters for our country and the world. Most sapient people would prefer either Clinton or Sanders to any of the snarling buffoons of the GOP, so the principle of supporting whoever ultimately winds up opposing them is obvious. And most people will do exactly that.
Except…
Except, young voters are pretty notorious for their lack of participation, and while many of those now fired up about Bernie Sanders will remain engaged even if he loses the nomination, the unfortunate likelihood is that many of them won’t. There will be anger, yes, but I don’t think that’s what will lead them to stay away on election day. I think it will be the nihilistic feeling that their vote doesn’t count after all. Bernie will have given them hope that an establishment they see as hidebound and corrupt could be successfully challenged and changed, and that hope will have been crushed. To a demographic that is already tragically, even stupidly, disengaged, that loss of hope will prove enough to keep many from bothering to cast a vote for anybody.
I’m not supporting that attitude even a little bit. But I do recognize it as a political reality. Many more people will turn out to vote if Bernie Sanders is the nominee, and they will support the Democratic candidates in other races when they do. If Hillary Clinton is the nominee, she, and all the other Dems on the ballots, will lose those disillusioned young voters.
That, in itself, may not be enough to tilt the election to Trump or whichever other malignant pustule the Republicans nominate. Hopefully not. But let me tell you what almost certainly will:
If Bernie Sanders wins the nomination by popular vote but Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment steal it from him, and buck the will of the majority of voters, through process maneuvers.
As someone commented today on Facebook, “If there’s a cabal of Democratic Party insiders who will choose the candidate no matter who the Democratic voters want, then I am not a Democrat. If the majority of voters go with Clinton, then I’ll vote Clinton. If more of them want Sanders and the party chooses Clinton anyway then I will do everything I can to turn the Democratic Party into an irrelevant third party.”
Today’s the day of the Iowa caucus, and it’s being reported that the Clinton camp has been training their supporters to game the caucus results wherever possible to keep Martin O’Malley’s delegates from going to Bernie Sanders. The fact that this is possible is one of many terrible things about the caucusing system (and the primary system in general, and our electoral system at large), and the fact that Clinton is falling back on it shows just how desperate, and ruthless, she is. Though she can game the caucuses, the fact that she will is troubling, especially after months of obvious unethical favoritism shown her by the Democratic National Committee and its unfortunate head, Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
At the same time, while Bernie endures an avalanche of attacks from the establishment media and pundits and Democratic party insiders, much of it disingenuous and a lot of it verging on character assassination (compare Chris Cuomo’s loaded questions to Sanders to the fanboy bootlicking he gave Clinton) Nancy Pelosi herself is making a point of saying that many of the great things Bernie Sanders wants to do for the American people will not happen, not because of Republican intransigence but because her Democrats won’t work with him to make needed change. That’s right: Nancy Fucking Pelosi, the absolute mascot of the Democratic corporate establishment, basically just threatened to stamp her feet and pull a Mitch McConnell if Democratic voters don’t choose the candidate that she wants them to.
How dare the voters think they have the right to decide who wins an election?
And then, ahead, we have the existential threat to democracy that is the superdelegates. Another of the bugs in our electoral system, the superdelegates are the very essence of the establishment looking out for the establishment:
A “superdelegate” or an “unpledged delegate” is a delegate to the Democratic National Convention or Republican National Convention that is seated automatically, based on their status as current (Republican and Democratic) or former (Democratic only) party leader or elected official. (From Wikipedia)
Superdelegates are unelected, they have significant power (especially in a close election like this one), and they are the political party’s way of saying “No, no, never mind, we’ve got this” to the voters.
For months, hundreds of superdelegates have been already pledged to vote for Hillary Clinton. Why wait to see what the people want? The establishment has chosen, after all.
So, what happens if Bernie Sanders wins the primaries according to the will of the Democratic voters, but then the party sics the superdelegates on him and manages to give the nomination to Hillary Clinton? I’ll tell you:
All those Bernie Sanders voters get really, really fucking pissed.
Then, you know, voters are human, and voters are emotional, and voters don’t always do the “reasonable” thing. I think, combined with the lower turnout among younger voters, the backlash among angry voters who actually won the vote for the nomination only to have it stolen from them could well sink what is otherwise a very good chance for the next president to be a Democrat.
Bernie’s supporters will almost all vote for Hillary if she wins the nomination fair and square. But if she, and her longtime cronies and pals, insist on stealing it?
Get ready for President The Donald, or something just as bad.
Today, I get to share some huge news with you about the future of Doc Wilde.
As you may know, the first book in the series, Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom, was published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 2009. It was very well reviewed and sold well enough that Putnam contracted me for two more books toward building a regular series. The safe (and possibly sane) course of action would have been to stick with Putnam and all the benefits of publishing with a big house. My experience with Putnam was largely positive, and I’d beaten the odds by landing with them in the first place. But…
But I wasn’t satisfied with the book Putnam put out or their support of it. There were some editorial dictates I allowed myself to be persuaded to follow that I felt weakened the story, the book was pigeonholed by the publisher as a middle-grade work rather than a tale for all ages as I intended, and the publisher put very little effort or money into promotion (this is, alas, mostly par for the course these days).
Additionally, I was simply more ambitious about the Wildes than Putnam was, and had wanted the books to be fully illustrated. With this in mind, before I’d even finished writing the book I’d sought and found the perfect artist for it, a hellaciously talented Aussie named Gary Chaloner. Gary read what I’d written to that point and fell in love with the characters and agreed to join the Wilde team. While I finished the book, he put a lot of time and work into getting the characters just right, and I loved his take on my heros. A fellow pulp-fan, Gary understood the Wildes in his bones, and his images were dynamic and clever and made my story look good. The picture atop this post is one of his.
When they bought Frogs of Doom, Putnam disregarded all the work Gary had already done and my aspiration for nicely illustrated volumes. The book they put out replaced illustrations with goofy typographical effects in the text which made it look expressly aimed only at younger readers, and while the painted cover was nice, it did not capture my characters as I saw them and I never got so much as an email consultation with the artist.
Now, that’s not unusual, not many authors actually have much say in the covers that get stuck on their books. But since I’d been through months of collaborative effort with my artist of choice, who had labored meticulously to honor my vision, I was naturally even more dissatisfied by the outcome.
So, inspired by the independent publishing revolution, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I managed to work some loophole sorcery and not only wriggled out of the contract for the next two books but regained full rights to Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom. I brought Gary back on board and we set out to create the books I’d wanted all along. After lots of work and some delays, in 2013 we rereleased the first book in a gorgeous new edition that was not only packed with great Chaloner artwork but also featured my preferred, extended “Author’s Cut” of the story.
Working with Gary on this book was the most enjoyable creative collaboration I’ve ever had, and the resulting volume is a thing of beauty. Unfortunately, just after its publication, Gary was forced to resign from the series due to scheduling concerns. This was a crushing blow, but I rallied and hired a new artist, Tess Fowler, which was a terrible mistake. She took my money and dragged ass for months without producing anything but a few rough sketches then, as we approached the originally agreed upon release window, threw a neurotic fit and ceased all communications. She kept the cash. I later found out that I’m not the only victim of this sort of behavior on her part.
Being ripped off by Tess Fowler didn’t just cost me money, it cost me all the months she was allegedly working on the next book. And it triggered my depression, which I’ve battled for years, making further progress impossible for many months more. All the creative and logistical issues of creating these books were further exacerbated by the anxiety of my trust betrayed and depression’s leaden shroud. I entered a period of convalescence, realizing I needed to get a handle on my daily life again before I could even begin to think about getting back to work on the Wilde books.
Well, the time has come to get back on that buckin’ bronco. The Doc Wilde series is finally continuing. And the really big news is: Gary Chaloner is back as the official Wilde artist!
Gary is still very busy, so we’re taking it at a slower pace than originally intended, but it’s worth it to do these books right. The new release schedule will be a new Doc Wilde book every year. This will allow him to fit Wilde work into his schedule without overwhelming him, and it will allow me to alternate Doc Wilde books with other writing projects.
We plan to release the second book, Doc Wilde and The Mad Skull, by Christmas 2016, with a yearly release around the same time each year thereafter. And we hope you’ll join us on all our adventures for years to come…
As we creep toward Halloween, get in the mood by visiting with the very first cinematic Frankenstein’s monster.
This short film from Edison Studios was made in 1910 by writer/director J. Searle Dawley. It stars Augustus Phillips as Dr. Victor Frankenstein, Charles Ogle as the Monster, and Mary Fuller as the doctor’s fiancée.
It ain’t Karloff, but it’s a fascinating piece of film history. There’s some creative use of a mirror, both in the mise-en-scène and in the storytelling, and the sequence depicting the birth of the monster is primitive but amazingly creepy.
“[At university, Sanders] joined socialist organizations and dabbled in far-left communist politics, gaining national notoriety by petitioning the school to let students have sex in the dormitories. This was before birth control and abortion were legal, when there were still very serious repercussions for women if the condom broke, but that didn’t stop him from crusading against those silly rules that were an obstacle to his own satisfaction.”
So here we have a liberal harshly criticizing Bernie Sanders for fighting for people’s sexual freedom. Does the writer really think that legal adults at the time should have had their sexual activities interdicted by university administrators because condoms might break? Or is authoritarianism fine and dandy when it’s being fought against by the candidate you don’t like?
I’m sure there are Sanders supporters out there who are just as bad as these people. My point isn’t that Clinton supporters are abusive assholes, it’s that none of us should be. Not only does it lead to bad blood between individuals, I’m sure it turns at least some possible voters against your candidate enough that they won’t vote for that candidate no matter what happens.
Talk to me with respect and I’ll do the same to you.
(Of course, comport yourself like a bunch of racist, sexist, theocratic, clown car fascists and all bets are off. Just sayin’.)
Where have I been?
How am I doing?
What’s happening with the Doc Wilde books? Or any other writing I might be doing?
It’s time for a general update, and probably past time for a Doc Wilde update since Kickstarter supporters and other fans are patiently waiting for me to get the next book out.
First, if you would, read my post from back in February, “I’m Back. Ish.” It covers some important ground and remains pertinent, especially regarding the state of Doc Wilde, and whether the coming books will be illustrated or not. (And there will be coming books, it’s just going to take a bit longer.)
Now, since that post, which itself was part of an effort to drag myself back into the world and into health and productivity, things have improved somewhat, but I’ve also had a realization: I’m in convalescence. I’m making progress, but I’m doing so far more gradually than I’d like, and far more gradually than I tend to allow for. I’m fighting a depression monster that has had me pinned beneath its claws for many years, a monster which has beaten me and ruined my plans over and over and over again, a monster that has laughed at everything the psychiatric community has thrown at it from therapy to all sorts of drugs to electroshock therapy.
I have had to accept something about myself that batters what pride I still have: I have a disability. I look in the mirror and I don’t see someone who’s disabled, but I look at my life and I certainly do. And I fucking hate it, and I hate that I have to struggle, and I hate that it’s so goddamned hard, and I hate knowing how much I could accomplish if it weren’t a factor, but none of that actually makes any difference because it it what it is and I have to deal with it.
If I don’t, it will kill me. Continue reading
My Pebble is dying.
As it dies, after less than three years of extremely limited use, I keep getting emails from Pebble excitedly offering me the chance to buy the new Pebble Time, their latest chronographic wonder.
Uh, no.
Back in early 2012, I was happy to support Pebble on Kickstarter. They seemed like cool folks with a cool product, and I got caught up in the excitement of their historically successful fundraising endeavor. It’s been years since I actually wore a watch, but thought that maybe the functionality of having a watch that smoothly interacts with the phone in my pocket would make doing so worthwhile. And I felt good supporting some dashing entrepreneurs trying to do something great.
It took nearly a year before the watch arrived, but that was fine. Delays happen, plans go awry. But finally it arrived, and it was pretty shiny in its package…
…but I was hit immediately with buyer’s remorse. It seemed like a decent enough device, if a bit 8-bit in its aesthetic, but I realized that I simply had little use for it. So I tried a few times to sell it to my friends on Facebook, without luck.
I resigned myself to having unwisely purchased the thing and being out the $115 it cost (Kickstarter price; the retail price on this blighted thing is $150), and hoped to find uses for it as time passed. Eventually I started wearing it to the pool so I’d know when it was time to get my pale-skinned self back into the shadows before broiling began. This was all I was doing with this watch, swimming with it in my apartment pool three or four times a week for twenty-to-thirty minutes each time. As the watch is allegedly waterproof down to 50 meters, this should have been fine.
But, very quickly, it started malfunctioning. Since I was in the water when I noticed this, I assumed it was because of the water. I emailed their support:
Hi,
I was one of your Kickstarter supporters and my watch is starting to act up. I very rarely wear it, but one of the times I do wear it is when I’m in the pool, to keep track of my time in the sun (I’m cursed with very fair skin). I’ve used it this way maybe fifteen times since I got it.
Today in the pool, I glanced at the screen and saw that it was going haywire. The screen would white out, and it would draw random lines and patchily return to its display. It’s still doing so, though I suspect as it dries out the problem will go away…but if the waterproofing has slipped I’m stuck with a watch that has lost core functionality.
Can you help?
Thank you,
Pebble never replied.
This year, with the watch well out of warranty, I’ve tried to continue using it at the pool and the problems have become nearly constant. Some days, it works the whole swim, but more often it works intermittently, and more and more it simply goes blank and works not at all. I’d say it actually works properly about a tenth of the time, based not just on my pool experiences but on observation throughout the day.
As I said, I’d assumed initially that the issue was water-based, but further testing shows it’s not. The Pebble malfunctions just as often when it’s completely dry. It malfunctions if I wear it for a short walk to get the mail. It malfunctions sitting on my desk, charging. Malfunctioning is apparently its favoritest thing.
I’ve looked up their troubleshooting suggestions and done them all, including a complete factory reset, and the problem persists. Now, even when it’s working (which never lasts more than a few minutes), the image is corrupted and missing pixels.
And searching online, I found quite a few others with similar issues. Just read the 1 and 2 star reviews on Amazon.
Additionally, when the Pebble was offered on Kickstarter, the manufacturers bragged that it would have a great e-paper screen, using the technology seen on Amazon’s Kindle and other e-readers. When it actually arrived, that great e-paper screen was nowhere to be seen; the malfunctioning, low-quality display is actually a very primitive-looking LCD screen.
So, no, I don’t think I’ll be buying that new Pebble watch, thank you. I’d be better off with a sundial.
Under An Outlaw Moon 