Gopal Balakrishnan:
On numerous occasions since the 90s the left has rallied to a center-right candidate to ward off the far-right and the results have been disastrous. Not only is the far right strengthened by bolstering its credentials as the only real opposition force to the establishment, the left is drastically weakened at the expense of the center-right.
It’s nice to see many people are giving the Democratic establishment the middle finger by declaring that they won't vote for Hillary in November if she gets the nomination. However, it's almost May, and six months is a long time from now. Will the Bernie or Bust movement be able to hold strong until then? If Hillary gets the nomination, it’ll be the beginning of the long walk.
The other day I introduced myself. Someone read what I said, and indicated that they thought I might have come here to convince you all to vote for Hillary Clinton. That isn't the case, actually I came here because there's nobody to talk to in the real world around me, and I wanted to speak to progressives like myself.
However, I thought I would explain what I do think.
When I was 8 years old, the girl next door owned a pink 3-speed Schwinn bicycle. Since my family was poor and I had no bicycle at all, I fell in love. We would pedal around the neighborhood with her perched on the handlebars and me joyfully switching gears while making race car motor sounds. It was heaven.
This is a bit of a sequel to my first essay. I'm just trying to probe the overall mood around here, whilst still trying to get into my stride. This was a bit of a pain in the ass to write since I couldn't seem to get it quite right.
One of the main tenets … of the I Ching is that one does not fight evil, one makes energetic progress in good, to paraphrase the Ching. By fighting evil, a person is actually sending energy to the evil by concentrating on it. It seems to be better (from my limited perspective) to use my energy to foster good, and to starve the evil in the process ~ crystaljim
sites, one topic that is rarely discussed is hispanic and young white voter suppression, particularly outside the South. In two recent cases one can see how both IL and CA have suppressed both. In IL the Clinton surrogate state election official ensured that university towns did not receive enough ballots, disenfranchising tens of thousands of actual liberal voters.
My partner and I took turns poll watching today. It was interesting, but got more and more depressing as the day went on. First, a little Arizona history.
This is my first post here; I brought this up in a couple of comments on DKos, but so far has been blown off.
According to the early poll workers, turn out has been brisk. Of the 20 or so people there, I'd say 3/5s were voting GOP, but this is the reddest part of Cook County (SW suburb). During the times that I was an election judge here, Shrub won by a huge margin, and Obama was only a couple of hundred short in 2008. (That was a moral victory, given the number of churches within one mile (12) vs. the number of bars (2). I did not realize that when I moved here.)
