CunningAllusionment

He is so unambiguously unwavering in his total rejection of the notion of running for office, that I have no doubt that he never, ever will.

The only way Stewart/Colbert win an election is because masses if people wrote them in whether they (S/C) wanted it or not.

Fuck that. I suppose you'd rather Captain Kirk said "to go boldly"? When correct grammar lacks drama, well then damn grammar I say! Damn it to hell!

I have some friends who requested from craigslist pictures of guy's faces and cocks. They got tons of responses. They made a memory board game out of it called "craigslist casual encounters". It's hilarious.

My wife and I are having a home birth in April. How long was your wife's labor that the midwife didn't get there in time? By "delivered" do you just mean that you caught her, or did you also help with rotating her as she came out?

Agreed.

One of the main problems with the American political system, on the left especially is that we're fixated on specific battles. It doesn't really matter of Dr. LeGrow doesn't win this election. What matters is if LeGrow uses this election to build a movement of which he is only a part.

This is why the huge groundswell that swept Obama and the Democrats to victory in '08 failed to produce the promised change. Change doesn't come from the halls of power. The activism that got Obama elected wasn't a movement, it was a campaign, and unlike movements, campaigns end. For contrast consider that the civil rights movement isn't over, many of the campaigns that defined it in the beginning are over, but the movement has continued to run new campaigns, some of which they lose, but that doesn't stop the movement.

What made Milk effective was that he understood that it wasn't about specific elections as much as it was about building a movement that grew and learned from victories and defeats.

The problem for the Democratic party is that movements require a vision, and the Democrats are so resolutely centrist, they don't have a compelling vision to build a movement around. The lesson the Democratic party will take from their impending defeat is exactly wrong. They will conclude, like always, that they were too far to the left, when the fact was that they didn't go far enough. In 2008, people were ready to see heads roll on Wall Street, in 2009 there was broad support for single payer, and almost everyone wanted to get the fuck out of the Middle East. Instead of being decisive leaders, the Democratic party insisted on pursuing an agenda of bipartisanship. But the Republican party wasn't and isn't interested in negotiation. They want to crush the Democratic party. You can't negotiate with someone who wants to crush you. So when the Republicans threatened to filibuster, the Democrats didn't even make them do it. They buckled preemptively and sold out their own agenda to win the bipartisan support they could've known they'd never get, especially since, by denying it, the Republicans made the Democrats look like the incompetent fools they were.

So now we're going to elect people with the same policies and ideologies as the people who got us into this mess, but now we're worse off than we were before.