I'm writing elsewhere but I care passionately about this topic.  Here is what I had to say this morning: https://liveonearth.dreamwidth.org/1413541.html

When they play to their bases, they miss me entirely.  I am tired of our people and our politicians talking past each other.  Politicians, it is on you to lead the way to civility, to honest negotiation and compromise.  I know Trump won't do it, but he is pushing you to do it.  Stop spouting talking points and get on with the hard work of figuring out how to best secure our borders.  It can be so much more than a wall.   

 Seems like neither side will take the other side's point.  Dems, it makes sense to discourage people from using their children as a way to get into the US.  Reps, it's not fair to treat every desperate person who illegally crosses the border as a vicious criminal.  Let's talk about this, and Dems stop harping on "inflicting harm on the children" (one of the oldest lines in the book of politicians), at least until you address the issue more deeply than that.  I'm tired of it too.  And I pretty much despise both parties and their talking points.  And our asinine prez.  Ugh.

I've been keeping my mouth mostly shut about out political situation because I find myself disagreeing with much of what is said on all sides.  Trump is clearly delusional, and generates his own "alternate reality" which is how he has managed to get this far.  Humans are susceptable to anyone who has certainty, and tend to adopt the views of a person who knows the truth.  This is the secret of gurus everywhere.  Be certain and people will believe.  It doesn't matter if the truth they know is not true.  All it really needs is truthiness and regular repetition to be adopted.

Only 26% of registered voters actually voted for Trump.  That 26% includes several people who are dear to me, whose thoughts and opinions I respect.  The most common reason cited for their vote is hating Hillary.  In most every election that I've voted in, I've voted more against someone than for.  Only when I vote for 3rd party candidates can I really say I'm voting FOR someone.  Both the Dems and the Reps are corrupt, and have been so for a long time.  Every candidate who gains their party's nomination does so by agreeing to tow the line, to serve the corporate donors and perpetuate the corruption that has our nation's nuts in a vise.  Ethical candidates will never get those nominations; they must compromise with greed.  The Republicans elect dummies, actors, class clowns and now a narcissist.  It's embarassing.  Obama was smart and thought he coud do some good but had to quash his own ethics to serve as a Dem.  He tried to do no harm and it cost him dearly.

I worry that Americans are so idiotic as to really believe Trump's denigration of the media.  Our media is not perfect.  They parrot each other, and stories become more simplistic and less nuanced with each repetition.  Few outlets do deep investigative reporting, but some do!  They will be hard at work in the years to come making sure that somebody actually understands what is going on.  If you are one of those who believes that all media is corrupt and Trump's twitter feed is the source of truth, your IQ must be <85.  A friend of mine recently reminded me that "half of everybody is below average", well that may be true but even the less bright can have bullshit detectors that work.  I hope everybody's BS detectors are getting tuned up on this nonsense.

I also disagree with the out-freaking I hear from the Democrats.  If our nation and institutions are so fragile that one demagogue can tear them completely apart, then it was never going to stand in the first place.  America is an experiment, not a guarantee.  Nations come and go.  Species come and go.  We may not be one of the longer-lived species.  We have no hope of competing with cockroaches or horsetail.  So lighten up already.  Laws are made and repealed.  Nations are created and fall.  The planet is already infested with us.  Ten out of ten people die.  This is the way of the world, and freaking out doesn't do anyone any good.  Be an activist in the resistance if it suits you, but don't have a stroke.  Let's all just take a deep breath, and then a few more.

The group that I do not hear speaking up today are the once-upon-a-time small government anti-corporate libertarians.  Where did you go?  Why aren't you speaking up?  Are you holding your nose in the back row of the Republican party?  Perhaps you are simply happy that so many regulations will fall, that every bureacracy under the executive branch will be decomissioned, and that government will indeed shrink.  Do you not care that the new form will be fascism?  Do you not care that your fishing streams and forests full of game will be poisoned by industrial gasses and runoff?  Subsistence survival gets a lot harder when the environment is destroyed.  We might need those rivers for something other than kayaking.

I keep reading in the media that the record Latino turnout at the polls is a new "firewall" or somesuch for Democrats.  Well that may apply in this election, but don't count on it in the future.  Latinos are independent and have been provoked to vote for their own interests.  Trump voters have provided a new impetus for the Republican party to stop shafting its lower income voters.  If the R party can respond in any effective way to this challenge it could result in a shift in the demographics of both parties.

*First use of new tag: hispanic.  This population now activated is likely to become a powerful force in US politics.  Too bad they're so Catholic.

Listening to the media reports about Trump and Clinton, I understand the frustration of the majority of voters.  Most of us know that the "establishment" politicians, like Clinton, are part and parcel with the corporatocracy that has made our two party system a joke.  The two parties are simply different faces of the same government which is beholden to big business and rich investors.  While the Democrats make more of an effort to care for the most impoverished, neither side is actually effective at reducing poverty.  The Republicans assert that the poor are not helped by a free ride, and this may be true.  It is true that during the Great Depression here in the US, people got healthier.

Trump, on the other hand, is not part of the "establishment" except in so far as he is rich, and he is stupid enough to become their tool, just as Shrub did.  His daily empty statements, like what I just heard that he "will win" 95% of the black American vote, are lunacy.  There is no way that he is getting 95% of any vote, except perhaps of those white male voters who are angry and desperate enough to commit suicide but would rather have someone else do it for them.  I understand the line of thought that says "crash this train", that is to say, destroying our corporatocracy is the first step toward building something new.  This is more the approach of libertarians who understand that big business will not be dethroned by small measures.  Electing Trump would be a drastic measure that could crash this train, except for the fact that the corporate Republican powers will feed his ego and narcissism and keep him busy and distracted by giving him televised glory while they run things.  In other words, it won't work.  Electing Trump will not derail the corporate train.

The Libertarian and Green candidates are relatively attractive in this election.  Unfortunately the Libertarians appear to be almost as "estalishment" as Clinton, see Gary Johnson's positions here.  Jill Stein of the Green party is a physician and one smart cookie, and she actually makes the most sense to me of any of the candidates.  She knows that our two-party system is broken, and she addresses that question and others with a raft of information instead of party lines or defund-it-all ideology.

I do not know what it would take to persuade a majority of voters to choose third-party candidates, but I pray that I live to see it.  At this moment it appears to me that Clinton will win because so many people are terrified of the specter of a Trump presidency.  His racism, bogus claims and impetuous thin-skinned personality are enough to disqualify him for all but the most blindered of voters.  It is true that if he were elected the Republican party would attempt to control him, but we all know that he would be more likely to push the nuclear button than any other president in living memory.  While it bears discussing why we refrain from using nukes, just as it bears discussing why we can't as a society afford freeloaders, we might want to discuss it very well before we hand any control to a tool such as Trump.

I am sure I've mentioned it before, but it is my belief that in order to build a majority that can beat both established parties, we need to build a bridge between the far right Libertarians and the far left Greens.  When this happens we might actually wrest our democracy back from its service to business.  It would be heralded as a great crisis, just like the Brexit vote, but don't believe everything you hear in the news.  A reduction in our GDP might be good for us.  More unemployment is not an entirely bad thing.  We Americans need to get back to the project of taking good care of ourselves and our dear ones, building community, and being real people face to face with other real people.  This wealthy life of internet and automobiles has created a Great Satan that is making us sad.

** first use of tag: green party

I think this may be part of the reason that so many people have defaulted to supporting tRump.  At a gut level he gets it, that somehow the religion of Islam is motivating some people to kill bunches of hedonistic rich oblivious Americans.  We are The Great Satan, after all.  Our women roam around half naked.  We drink alcohol and eat so much that we can't get out of our chairs.  The Muslims who hate us find plenty to hate.  And the teachings of the religion are harsh.  Unforgiving.  Granted, most religions have some myths and stories that motivate hateful actions.  Most religions have a few fundamentalists whose simplistic interpretations lead them to extreme beliefs and behaviors.  Islam has a lot of people like that.  I am certain that the followers of ISIL think that American Muslims who don't help their cause are apostates, no better than the rest of us.  So given that there are quite a few Muslims who think we all deserve to die, and several at least who've been successful at violently killing Americans, being afraid of Muslims sounds kind of reasonable.  If the Dems don't admit to this, and begin teaching Americans about how they've been attempting to quell the fears of peaceable Muslims in order to prevent religious based warfare, they are missing the boat.  Blaming the Pulse shooting solely on easy access to guns is missing the very important point that currently there are a lot of people with this religious background who are motivated to kill.  We need to study them, to understand them.  They are not necessarily insane, they simply live in a different reality dictated by a different culture.  There are also a lot of Americans who are not Muslim who share their distaste for gays, their disrespect for loose women, and their instinctive hatred of other races.  Maybe you should be afraid.

This state is so delightfully progressive it curls my toes. Much as I liked Kitzhaber, I think I am going to like our new governor Kate Brown more! She was sworn in yesterday. On Monday this week (when she was still Secretary of State) she made the announcement that the Independent Party of Oregon qualifies to be a MAJOR PARTY claiming as members more than 5% of registered voters as of the 2014 gubernatorial election. The total membership of the Independent Party as of 2/2/15 was 108,742, which is three voters over the minimum to become a major party. I suspect that with the publicity incurred by this landmark change, more people will change their voter registration from Dem or Rep to INDY.

SOURCES
http://www.indparty.com/node/25
http://time.com/3709837/oregon-kate-brown-governor/

I sample propaganda from all sides of the US political spectrum. Today I got an email from Dick Cheney. I will have to check with my republican friends to find out if they actually think highly of Dick, because as far as I can tell he is evil incarnate. Anyway, Dick sent me a link and asked me to give money to the National Republican Congressional Committee. The headline on the donation page is "Stop Democrats from controlling all of Washington" and the image is one of Obama, Hillary and Biden walking toward the camera, smiling. Here: https://www.nrcc.org/defeat-liberal-democrats/. I showed it to my coworkers today and they could not figure out how that image supports the republican desire to oust the Dems, aside from who was in it. I did notice that Obama's hands are in his pockets (hidden hands = deceitful), and that all three are laughing as if about an inside joke. Also Biden has his arm around Hillary in comfortable buddy gesture. The last thing to notice about the image is that it is shot from above, looking down on Obama's head as he looks down to walk. I am told that this angle makes a person seem less powerful. I would have thought, though, that they'd go for something that made him look more evil, but I guess that having an inside joke with hands in pockets is bad enough. Dick didn't get any of my money, though.

I'm reading an article in New York magazine (April 7-20, 2014) about the color of Obama's presidency, and the first thing mentioned is the Bill Maher show in which Bill Kristol was frankly upset at him for saying that the rise of the Tea Party was due to racism. My liberal friends here in Oregon, and the ones that live in the Rockies and the South for the most part agree with this assessment. They are certain that's the reason that some who call themselves Tea Party are in stark opposition to every single thing that Obama says or does, apparently without consideration of the details. It is reasonable to assume that this oppositional defiance is based in that base instinct that Obama is brown and different and must be wrong and evil. But this assumption is simpleminded too; there is more to the Tea Party than simple racism.

Those who hate Obama for his skin are not political creatures. They do vote, and host radio shows, but in they do not make sense or generate policy. All they do is upset everybody, stop policy and new ideas from being developed. We need to shut them up by ignoring them, instead of trying to beat them in rational argument. There is no point arguing with racism or insanity.

There are Tea Party libertarians who are political, intelligent and curious, and interested in shades of meaning without regard for shades of skin tone. These are the Tea Party core that most liberals haven't met, and won't meet, because their experience has been so bad trying to negotiate with the angry racists. There is a rational case for small government, for making the government operate according to the constitution, for the separation of church and state and for making corporations behave like responsible businesses instead of being "persons" with rights but no responsibilities under the law. These concerns need to be discussed and rationally balanced with our desire to take care of the less fortunate among us, instead of dismissed as rantings.

So I beg of you, Americans, to do your best to listen to and respect the other side, whoever they are. I beg liberals to consider that there might be real concerns about the longterm viability of large government. And I beg Tea Party conservatives to offer reasons, to be specific and soften your words when you despise something that Obama has done. It is my conviction that Obama is sympathetic to the libertarian position, but because he is a politician and elected as a Democrat, he must play the game within the parameters of his position or be removed. It has cost him dearly. It will be interesting to see what our first brown-skinned president does after his 2nd term ends and he is free to act on his real inclinations.