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redneckgaijinYesterday evening I stopped by the Texas Democratic Party website to see if anyone had filed for office for my county or for districts including my county.
In-county- no. Apparently nobody filed for any county-level race- tax assessor/collector, constable, two commissioner's court slots (not including mine)- as a Democrat.
State representative- no. I'm now in District 19, which includes Polk, Hardin, Tyler, Jasper and Newton Counties, and no Democrat filed for that district (or for a hell of a lot of adjacent districts).
I gave some very serious thought to running myself. It would either cost me $750 or 500 ballot signatures to get onto the Demcratic primary ballot, and thanks to the most recent court ruling filing has been re-opened until 6 P. M. February 1st, with April 6 (IIRC) being Primary Day.
Here are the reasons why I won't.
(1) I've done it before, in 2006, and I hated it. I couldn't find any substantial donors until almost the very end, when one donor (a WLP fan) gave me enough money to run radio ads during early voting. Since I am absolutely no man's ideal candidate, and since I'd seen enough October surprises, I decided to run as an open and honest candidate, laying my skeletons out on the table in public- including the fact that I write porn. Despite this the questions I caught in candidate forums in October were, yep, about those very things, and down the final stretch I became paranoid that the Liberty County or Polk County DA would seek to help their Republican colleague and score cheap re-election points by busting me for obscenity. It would take a lot- a LOT- for me to go through that again.
(2) In 2006 I lost my home voting box 2-1. If a candidate can't even win his or her own voting box, that candidate has no business running for anything, is my attitude.
(3) In District 19 Democrats are basically another third-party. Late last night I went to the official vote return records and did some math, and here's the results for the five above mentioned counties combined:
2008 PRESIDENTIAL RACE - McCain 48,446; Obama 17,744
2010 GOVERNOR RACE - Rick Perry 29,787; Bill White 13,524
So McCain got 73% of the vote over Obama; and Rick Perry, in a race where he ran an average of five percentile points below all the other statewide Republican candidates, took 69% of the vote. As a Libertarian candidate in 2006 I earned 24% of the vote in a different, but demographically similar, district. No wonder no Democrat has filed; they'd be paying a large sum of money, losing a lot of their time, and subjecting themselves to massive personal scrutiny and the risk of retribution from local Republican officeholders... for the privilege of getting hammered in November.
So no, I'm not going through that again. Forget it.
At the moment, pending the outcome of the Supreme Court case, I'm in Congressional district #36. To give you an idea of the gerrymander involved (and the lower federal court map didn't change it much at all), district #36 includes all the counties I mentioned before plus Orange, Liberty and Chambers counties... plus downtown Baytown, all of LaPorte and points south to Clear Creek, the NASA area over to I-45 except for one neighborhood, the more rural parts of Pasadena, and the poor neighborhoods along SH 35 between I-610 and Pearland. The net result is to take a chunk of Harris County which might be competitive between the Rs and Ds and attach it to a large, LARGE area so overwhelmingly red that the GOP has a pretty safe seat, in theory.
But despite that someone has filed to run for it- a retired airline pilot named Max Martin, a resident of the Clear Lake area. I am less than impressed with the Twitter and Facebook links he provides (which imply he made a run in 2010 and aborted it for some reason), but otherwise he seems, on paper, to be the kind of candidate I can get behind. We'll have to see if I'm still in that district, or he is, after the Supreme Court gets done with things.
All of which is nice, but it's not why I'm posting.
You see, I also noticed three people had filed for President on the Democratic ticket- one, of course, being Barack Obama.
The second was Bob Ney, basically a blue-dog Democrat who thinks Obama hasn't tried hard enough to cut the deficit and entitlements. Enough said about him.
The third was Darcy Richardson.
I will say right up front: I don't believe Richardson has a hope in hell of ousting Obama for the nomination. Richardson's never held office. He's most famous for writing a memoir of the Eugene McCarthy campaign of 1968. He's run as a third-party candidate for various things in the past, with the usual results. Facing off agains the Obama juggernaut, I just don't see it being much different.
Except to me.
Because, y'see, I cannot vote for Obama. Not with his support for indefinite (infinite) detention without habeas corpus, his protection of torturers (and his continuance of torture at Bagram and in the case of Bradley Manning), his continually putting Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block in attempts to appease Republicans and show his "bipartisan" bona fides, and his constant surrender to Republicans of more than they themselves asked for for nothing of substance in return.
And I cannot vote for any Republican whatever, for anything. If I don't like half-a-Republican in the Oval Office (or elsewhere), why would I vote for a whole one?
And when I read what Richardson has to say on his reasons for running, I can't stop my head nodding in agreement:
He's even more clear about it in this Wikinews interview:
So, there. I'm going to vote for Darcy Richardson for President in the Democratic primary come April (or whenever). And it would be nice if the rest of you did, too. No, he's not likely going to win the nomination... but if he even got so much as 10% of the primary vote, that would be a major slap in the face of an Obama administration more focused on protecting the wealthy than actually helping the poor and preserving vital American freedoms.
And besides, you do NOT get a prize for voting for the winner in an election. If your sole reason for voting for someone is, "Because I think he'll win," then you're worse than useless as a voter. The whole point of voting is to get someone who represents what you believe into office. If you're voting for someone who doesn't represent you, not only are you wasting your vote, but you're also pissing on the votes of others who are voting their beliefs rather than voting on a horse race.
Darcy Richardson for President.
It's nice to have someone I can wholeheartedly endorse for political office... for a change...
In-county- no. Apparently nobody filed for any county-level race- tax assessor/collector, constable, two commissioner's court slots (not including mine)- as a Democrat.
State representative- no. I'm now in District 19, which includes Polk, Hardin, Tyler, Jasper and Newton Counties, and no Democrat filed for that district (or for a hell of a lot of adjacent districts).
I gave some very serious thought to running myself. It would either cost me $750 or 500 ballot signatures to get onto the Demcratic primary ballot, and thanks to the most recent court ruling filing has been re-opened until 6 P. M. February 1st, with April 6 (IIRC) being Primary Day.
Here are the reasons why I won't.
(1) I've done it before, in 2006, and I hated it. I couldn't find any substantial donors until almost the very end, when one donor (a WLP fan) gave me enough money to run radio ads during early voting. Since I am absolutely no man's ideal candidate, and since I'd seen enough October surprises, I decided to run as an open and honest candidate, laying my skeletons out on the table in public- including the fact that I write porn. Despite this the questions I caught in candidate forums in October were, yep, about those very things, and down the final stretch I became paranoid that the Liberty County or Polk County DA would seek to help their Republican colleague and score cheap re-election points by busting me for obscenity. It would take a lot- a LOT- for me to go through that again.
(2) In 2006 I lost my home voting box 2-1. If a candidate can't even win his or her own voting box, that candidate has no business running for anything, is my attitude.
(3) In District 19 Democrats are basically another third-party. Late last night I went to the official vote return records and did some math, and here's the results for the five above mentioned counties combined:
2008 PRESIDENTIAL RACE - McCain 48,446; Obama 17,744
2010 GOVERNOR RACE - Rick Perry 29,787; Bill White 13,524
So McCain got 73% of the vote over Obama; and Rick Perry, in a race where he ran an average of five percentile points below all the other statewide Republican candidates, took 69% of the vote. As a Libertarian candidate in 2006 I earned 24% of the vote in a different, but demographically similar, district. No wonder no Democrat has filed; they'd be paying a large sum of money, losing a lot of their time, and subjecting themselves to massive personal scrutiny and the risk of retribution from local Republican officeholders... for the privilege of getting hammered in November.
So no, I'm not going through that again. Forget it.
At the moment, pending the outcome of the Supreme Court case, I'm in Congressional district #36. To give you an idea of the gerrymander involved (and the lower federal court map didn't change it much at all), district #36 includes all the counties I mentioned before plus Orange, Liberty and Chambers counties... plus downtown Baytown, all of LaPorte and points south to Clear Creek, the NASA area over to I-45 except for one neighborhood, the more rural parts of Pasadena, and the poor neighborhoods along SH 35 between I-610 and Pearland. The net result is to take a chunk of Harris County which might be competitive between the Rs and Ds and attach it to a large, LARGE area so overwhelmingly red that the GOP has a pretty safe seat, in theory.
But despite that someone has filed to run for it- a retired airline pilot named Max Martin, a resident of the Clear Lake area. I am less than impressed with the Twitter and Facebook links he provides (which imply he made a run in 2010 and aborted it for some reason), but otherwise he seems, on paper, to be the kind of candidate I can get behind. We'll have to see if I'm still in that district, or he is, after the Supreme Court gets done with things.
All of which is nice, but it's not why I'm posting.
You see, I also noticed three people had filed for President on the Democratic ticket- one, of course, being Barack Obama.
The second was Bob Ney, basically a blue-dog Democrat who thinks Obama hasn't tried hard enough to cut the deficit and entitlements. Enough said about him.
The third was Darcy Richardson.
I will say right up front: I don't believe Richardson has a hope in hell of ousting Obama for the nomination. Richardson's never held office. He's most famous for writing a memoir of the Eugene McCarthy campaign of 1968. He's run as a third-party candidate for various things in the past, with the usual results. Facing off agains the Obama juggernaut, I just don't see it being much different.
Except to me.
Because, y'see, I cannot vote for Obama. Not with his support for indefinite (infinite) detention without habeas corpus, his protection of torturers (and his continuance of torture at Bagram and in the case of Bradley Manning), his continually putting Social Security and Medicare on the chopping block in attempts to appease Republicans and show his "bipartisan" bona fides, and his constant surrender to Republicans of more than they themselves asked for for nothing of substance in return.
And I cannot vote for any Republican whatever, for anything. If I don't like half-a-Republican in the Oval Office (or elsewhere), why would I vote for a whole one?
And when I read what Richardson has to say on his reasons for running, I can't stop my head nodding in agreement:
I simply didn’t anticipate the kind of paralysis that seems to have immobilized the party’s progressives when it comes to challenging a sitting President of their own party.
. . .
Yet we need, perhaps now more than ever, someone with the courage to stand up and fight for the progressive values and causes that President Obama paid so much lip service to in 2008.
. . .
I think it’s fair to say, and should be said, that President Obama needlessly squandered his first two years in office, saddling the nation with health care legislation that nobody really wanted instead of fighting for a single-payer Medicare-for-All program that would insure the basic health needs of every American.
While pushing for legislation seen by many on the Left as a boon to the private insurance industry, the President virtually ignored the country’s mounting jobs crisis — until he started running for re-election, that is.
Extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy added insult to injury and, in no small measure, helped to give rise to the Occupy Wall Street movement. Unlike the last Democratic administration, the gap between rich and poor has widened substantially during Obama’s presidency.
. . .
As should be clear to everybody, the President is now in full campaign mode. Progressives shouldn’t be fooled again.
He's even more clear about it in this Wikinews interview:
The fact that President Obama initially appointed Larry Summers as chairman of his White House Economic Council shortly after taking office, should have given everybody pause. Summers is probably more responsible for the country’s current economic mess than any other individual.
As President Clinton's Secretary of the Treasury from 1999 to January 2001, Summers shaped and pushed the financial deregulation that unleashed the near-collapse of Wall Street in the autumn of 2008, particularly when he pushed through the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 during the final years of the Clinton Administration — legislation, as you know, that had prohibited banks from doing both commercial and investment banking.
An architect-turned-enabler of this never-ending economic crisis, Summers later supported the Commodity Futures Modernization Act that, unbelievably as it might seem, mandated that financial derivatives — including the reckless credit default swaps at the heart of the financial crisis — could be traded between financial institutions without any government oversight whatsoever.
It’s little wonder that Rolling Stone writer William Greider, in a marvelously detailed article in late 2008, pointed out that Obama’s choice of Summers and other key economic advisers, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, seemed designed to sustain the failed economic policies of the Bush presidency — an administration that never saw the financial crisis coming in the first place.
The Summers appointment told me that the President had no earthly clue how this devastating financial crisis happened or how to reverse it.
Things only got worse after that. President Obama failed to resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. He failed to include a public option in health care. He failed to assert his constitutional responsibility during the recent debt limit crisis. Unbelievably, he's failed to protect Social Security and Medicare. He extended the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. He failed to push for cap-and-trade. And he failed to close Gitmo. I could go on, but I think you get the point. If anybody deserves a serious intraparty challenge, it's the current occupant of the White House.
In retrospect, it's really incredible that a Democrat of national stature and credibility hasn't entered this race — at least as of now.
So, there. I'm going to vote for Darcy Richardson for President in the Democratic primary come April (or whenever). And it would be nice if the rest of you did, too. No, he's not likely going to win the nomination... but if he even got so much as 10% of the primary vote, that would be a major slap in the face of an Obama administration more focused on protecting the wealthy than actually helping the poor and preserving vital American freedoms.
And besides, you do NOT get a prize for voting for the winner in an election. If your sole reason for voting for someone is, "Because I think he'll win," then you're worse than useless as a voter. The whole point of voting is to get someone who represents what you believe into office. If you're voting for someone who doesn't represent you, not only are you wasting your vote, but you're also pissing on the votes of others who are voting their beliefs rather than voting on a horse race.
Darcy Richardson for President.
It's nice to have someone I can wholeheartedly endorse for political office... for a change...
no subject
Date: 2011-12-18 06:07 pm (UTC)I've read a bit into Naomi Wolf's book "Give Me Liberty" about the modern-day American experience of attempting to exercise rights our Founding Fathers had in mind. The bit about how running for office goes was very disenchanting and disorienting!
I need to finish the book....but I need to get up the nerve to not get more depressed doing it!
no subject
Date: 2011-12-18 10:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-18 11:09 pm (UTC)Oh, and <A HREF="http://www.wlpsound.com/podcast/">I fool around with silly music too.</a>