if we're down to a vagina v viagra ticket, i guess the remaining question is which one ends up on top.

i'm sorry. i'll stop.

i still think that booker is going to severely damage harris' chances in the south, though  - if he makes it that far.

if i were to do a ranked choice ballot, what would it be?

keep in mind that i'm really bernie or bust, and that this could change in five minutes, otherwise. but, i really don't like warren's ideas about much of anything. and, i don't trust harris, but at least she lies about things i like better. but, i can't think of any reason why i'd support biden at all - and probably wouldn't, in the end.

1. sanders
2. harris
3. warren
4. biden

bernie shouldda run for the greens...

in the end, vagina/viagra would be a good ticket, though.

especially if you're into intersectionality.

fwiw, buttigieg seems to have a better chance at the vagina vote than the viagra vote.

but, it's hard to see where his path is, really. he's going to lose to everybody, head-to-head.

yeah.

she has no information about timelines.

so, we're going to court. let's hope i can get this typed before the morning.

i mean, i want to be clear: i want the court to pull this, eventually. i have precisely no faith at all in the review process. it's just a process of getting the right argument....

the court won't just pull it on a whim - they'll tell me to wait. and, so long as they have a good excuse, i'm stuck waiting. potentially forever...

at three months past the deadline, if they can't give me a due date, that's an unreasonable delay.

but, if they give me a date, i'll have to wait.

that's why i'm asking them, first. i'll call at 16:00, if i don't get a response over email.

so, what they're claiming is that there's a backlog of cases, which i'm quite skeptical of.

and, they're further claiming that the manager is reviewing the file, which is not how the process actually works - it's supposed to go to a panel for review.

but, there's not a whole lot i can actually do, so long as they keep bullshitting their way through it. i could ask the court to pull the file, but they'll probably just tell me to wait.

what i've done is ask for a time frame. if they send me much of anything at all, i'll have to wait; if they don't, i can claim an unreasonable delay and ask the court to pull the file for that reason.

...and this does seem to suggest that, at this stage at least, there are both "viagra vote" and "vagina vote" constituents at play, potentially because people don't really know what they're talking about, yet.

so, you've got warren v harris and biden v sanders.

but, i expect that to break up as people get to know the candidates better.

if it doesn't, we're going to end up with vagina v viagra, in the end. and, it's going to be very boring, if we do.

i made a gentle attempt at initial contact with the new person, and will start bombarding her with calls at 15:00. i need a straight answer by the end of the day.

you can try to explain this away however you want, but it's the fundamental point:

Sanders does better with those registered with no party (22%) than those registered as a Democrat (15%). (Biden shows a similar gap.) 

Warren, on the other hand, does better among Democrats (25%) than unaffiliated voters (12%).

This matches up with national polling that suggests Sanders voters are not anywhere near as pleased with the Democratic Party as Warren voters are. 

this was the same basic difference you saw in 2016, too: present warren supporters seem to be old clinton supporters rather than old sanders supporters, and that makes a lot of sense when you look at their actual policies. or you can be gender-reductionist. whatever.

i will continue to argue that sanders is in his own lane, the tricky part is trying to figure out what the other lanes are, even if they all merge in the end. i'm not sure we have enough of an understanding of things, yet.

for example, you could argue that harris is in competition with biden for the black vote and the big money donors. or, you could argue that biden is in competition with bootigieg for center-right voters, or that bootigieg is in competition with warren for the "progressive" vote. these things aren't clear yet, and i think it's partly why the numbers are all over the place - nobody's really sure how to model the data, yet. what that means is that these polls are essentially worthless.

but, if sanders thinks he's going to win this by swinging registered democrats, he's wrong. he's not being embraced by the party, and he's still going to have to overpower registered voters with independents and new voters.

he shouldn't be thinking he can pivot to front-runner; he needs to do exactly what he did last time, and he needs to do it better than he did it last time.

....because he's not a democrat, and democrats know it.

i sent an email to the contact person this morning and got something back claiming that the file has been moved to a different office.

i'm expecting them to claim they "lost" it.

that's fine, keep fucking around. there's no deadlines, here. the judge can sort through all the bullshit, in the end.

i'm still going to have to call her to get a contact number.

they've got these things all over detroit, and the homeless folks don't like them much; i've talked to a handful of them about it at the diner (it's the only thing open for them, too), and they've pointed out that (some) detroiters have a tendency of basically discarding them, bumping into them, running over their stuff, etc.

i'm a long-time bicyclist. i drive on the sidewalk all of the time and have for years, and i've never hit a pedestrian because i'm respectful enough to watch where i'm going and capable enough to manipulate the vehicle - and perhaps because i'm conscious of the reality that it is in fact a vehicle. but, at the same time, i get the impression that it's a lot easier to stop on a bicycle, and that if you do need to stop quickly then you're much more protected from falling off.

the issue is probably that these devices are going faster than they can truly be operated safely at, and the solution is likely to just slow them down quite a bit. i know. but, think about what you're doing for a moment and ask whether it's actually kind of retarded to do it or not.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/death-of-british-youtuber-raises-fears-over-e-scooter-safety-1.4508280

no, really.

i'm serving a cop. meaning, i'm going to have to track the fucker down.

ugh.

i've been complaining about the need to serve people in person being archaic. can't i just send them an email? i mean, c'mon.

but, to file a judicial review, i need to fill out the form, go to the court, get the papers sealed, then serve, and then file again - meaning i'd better be fucking sure they actually get the damned things.

can we modernize this procedure sometime soon?

let me call them, first, and see what they actually say. if i get a shitty response, i'll have to see if i can at least do step one in windsor or not.

i think it's good i didn't buy those tickets, yet.

the changes to the laws in quebec essentially add "displaying religious symbols" to the list of things that public sector workers can do in public, but not at work.

that's the right context.

and, i don't see why the court would be able to tell you that you can't talk about an election at work, but it's ok to push a cross into somebody's face. that would be completely inconsistent; it wouldn't make any sense.

http://psac-ncr.com/political-rights-public-service-workers

well, it's dialectical, anyways.

this maybe isn't the best idea, but it's the right way to be thinking about what to do, next.

https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/build-the-energy-wall

again....

in the united states, you have something called the hatch amendment act that bans political activity while employed in the public sector. we have something similar to this in canada, which allows for reasonable restrictions on free expression in order to ensure that public servants are actually acting in the public will, and are not being directed by outside institutions like political parties or, in this case, religious institutions.

i have a hard time distinguishing between a church and a political party, but that opens up another can of worms - i think churches should be treated as political entities under the law, and taxed as such, as well. removing the taxation exemption from religious institutions would be an excellent companion law, to really get the point across.

if you can't come to work without taking your scarf off, you're demonstrating a conflict of interest. and, the courts are actually pretty clear on the point - this is well within the confines of the law on both sides of the border, with little ambiguity around it.

this law would survive a charter challenge.

that said, i think the government made a big error in invoking s. 33 and it may lead to it's unraveling, in the end. there may be specific sections that are too broad, and in some ways it may not be broad enough. the court system should be brought in to help make the law better, not shunned as a threat to it's existence.

but, if you're in america, you want to think of it basically as a corollary of the hatch amendment act. that's how quebeckers are actually approaching it: they want a firewall between religion and government.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/07/quebec-bans-religious-symbols/593998/

so, what am i actually doing with this judicial review?

well, they're three months late on the review (the statutory rec is 4 weeks; it's been four months), and have made no attempt to contact me, leading me to conclude that they're just not doing it. so, the idea is that i put this in front of a judge, and the judge yells at them to get off their donut-eating, racist fat asses and do something productive for society, for once.

i should call them, first, though, to get some kind of actual response.

if they give me something like "it's in process", then that's not good enough. if they give me something more detailed, with a specific end date, or evidence of extensions, then i'll need to wait.

for the rest of the morning...well, why don't i eat, actually.

i mean, rotating a few conservatives out might sound like a great idea right now.

but, it won't seem like such a great idea when the next republican president uses the same tactic to convert it into an ecclesiastical court.

sanders is usually better at this; he's stretching because he's desperate not to lose the court, and i get it. but, it's really not a good idea...

i'm not going to address the predictably silly aspects of this article, at the national review. conservatives are very silly people.

but, it is not hard to predict what would happen should this take off - whenever a new president takes over, they'd rotate the judges in that they like, and rotate the judges out that they don't. so, what was intended to be a check on power would become a rubber stamp.

i understand that the american left is very apprehensive about the court skewing to the right, but it has to look at this in the longer arc of history and just fucking deal with it until it can regain control using more appropriate measures. i may support shrinking the size of the court somewhat, but my official position is actually to suck it up and wait it out.

that said, there are ways to lure a judge off the bench. maybe one of the conservative judges might like a nice, cushy job as an ambassador to the virgin islands, for example.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/how-bernie-sanders-would-destroy-supreme-court-%E2%80%98rotating%E2%80%99-justices-67082

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2019/04/25/analysis/canada-pace-meet-paris-climate-target-two-centuries-late

why are historical liberal voters - not hardcore dippers, but card-carrying liberals - so frustrated with trudeau right now?

well, i'll never join a party. i'm an anarchist. and, i can only speak for myself, although i've pointed out a number of concerns, concerns that the party seems to largely want to address by arguing that they're changing direction. when you go to the party and say "you're doing this wrong", and the party says "actually, that's just the way we do it now.", then they shouldn't be surprised when people get up and walk out. i can point to miscalculations and bad logic all day, but at the end of the process you have to look at the execution and make your choices. if they want to do things wrong, you can't stop them.

trudeau seems to personally have a fondness for ronald reagan; i don't, i think he was a monster. but, it was reagan that uttered the lines - i didn't leave the democratic party, the democratic party left me. and, so i say goodbye to the liberal party, if it insists on burying itself into oblivion.

but, why is it losing so much support to the greens, specifically?

again, i can only speak for myself, here, but it's less a question of the propaganda and more a question of the actual policy. if you flip through these pages, you'll see that i had no delusions about the liberals shutting down pipelines, even if actually buying one is a little over the top. i stated over and over again that the whole point of their argumentative thrust was to act as a pr wing of the oil industry, and that the end point was more pipelines, not less of them - and that because the ndp have essentially the same position, the only way to shut down the pipelines is to stop them in court. so, i took the issue out of the political arena and into the judicial arena, which i would argue is where it actually belongs. in a liberal capitalist society, the legal question around building pipelines largely reduces to one of property rights, which is for the courts to decide, and not for the legislature to use a tyranny of the majority to bully through. the idea of this being in the "public interest" is fundamentally wrong, in a society based around the concept of property.

so, i can only speak for myself, but it's not the pro-pipeline thing that's pissing me off. i fully expected that.

but, it was the other side of the apparent contradiction that i was hoping would be better developed, because i realized that, from the perspective of a bourgeois capitalist party, there really doesn't have to be a contradiction. see, the liberals are all about money; it's the party of bay street. they're supporting the pipelines because all they care about is the money, then they pay lip service to environmental concerns in a ploy to maximize profit - i am not confused about any of this. but, you can make a lot of money by selling environmentally friendly approaches, too, like big infrastructure projects. if this is the bankers' party, and all they care about is the money, and they're broadcasting that they want to invest in clean technology because all they care about is the money, then you're left with a clear lesser evil choice over these western yahoos that would declare independence tomorrow if they could get away with it.

so, i didn't expect the liberals to not support pipelines, but they were broadcasting that they would also support transition because it was profitable, and that's not a contradiction from their bourgeois perspective, even if it seems to be one from any other perspective.

it was the best (realistic) choice on the table.

four years later, they've carried through with their pro-pipeline position as was expected, but they've done nothing substantive on transitioning the economy, at all. rather, they've introduced a (poorly designed) redistributive tax that will have no meaningful effect on emissions, and done a lot of pointless photo shoots. the infrastructure bank that was supposed to fund large scale projects as a subsidiary of the bank of canada using public money has instead been converted into a neo-liberal conglomerate to push "public-private partnerships" for corporate gain, and has essentially nothing to show for itself.

so, if they had spent quickly and lavishly on transition, i would have less reason to be angry about the pro-pipeline position. but, as they've done nothing substantive to actually transition, all we're left with is the expansion of the petro-state. i can't continue to support that.

and, why can't they announce these public works projects? why can't they announce a manhatten project for the climate, switch things into high gear and get 'er done? because they're hamstrung by the ideology of neo-liberalism, by market discipline, by an insistence that government not interfere in the private sector, and by a series of international agreements that make action of this sort potentially expensive. but, this is new to the party - they weren't like that under chretien, and certainly weren't like that under the elder trudeau. really, they were at a crossroads: would they accept these international agreements that were (mostly) signed by the conservatives, or would they tear them up like they used to say they would? and, they've become conservative-lite in every possible way, by upholding the international system, even as it's falling apart in front of them.

if tackling climate change means tearing up nafta and pulling out of the wto, then you tear up nafta and pull out of the wto. but, they didn't - they just let the targets slip by.

and, we're going to have to let them slip by, in turn.