The news of this week, campaign-wise, has been the minor uprising at the Nevada Democratic party convention. The reason for this, I’m sure, is that this is the story the Clinton campaign and its supporters wanted us to be talking about. For months they have been trying to frame Bernie Sanders and his supporters as aggressive, undisciplined, even violent political loose cannons. The protest in Nevada, as it was covered on television, appeared to conform to that narrative, helped along by the strategic release of some crank calls that came in to the voicemail of a party official. So, on a week when Sanders virtually tied Clinton in Kentucky and beat her by ten points in Oregon, the take-away will be that he can’t and won’t control his people.
This smells a lot like rat-fucking to me. The Clinton operation is pretty good at it, especially when they have the DNC and the entire party establishment in their corner. Then there’s the David Brock effort, using tactics that he once focused on the Clintons themselves. But beyond the specifics of this campaign, what we’re seeing is kind of a Democratic party tradition: piss on the activist left, even when it’s likely to cost you the election. When have they ever not done this? From the marginalization of black southern voices in 1964, to shutting out antiwar voices in 1968, to undermining the McGovern campaign in 1972, the Dems always find a way to keep the lid on the progressive box.
That is, until now. It’s one thing to shut Jesse Jackson out in 1988 when he had won 11 contests (including 7 primaries) and almost 7 million votes. But the Sanders phenomenon is even more imposing, and not really centered around a candidate so much as a set of policies and ideas. It is in many ways a generational uprising, like Occupy Wall Street 2.0, emerging from the landscape unexpectedly. It is the center of energy on the Democratic side, and as far as I can see, the Clinton campaign – which is winning – is making no effort to engage this movement in any meaningful way. The fact is, they are treating the Bernie folks with the kind of contempt the Democratic establishment has traditionally reserved for the party’s left flank. That won’t wash this time.
The Clintons may really blow this election. If they don’t start making an effort to establish a productive, cooperative relationship with Sanders supporters … to meet them a bit more than halfway … they are not only going to lose, but they will also squander the future of their own party. That’s the choice. We can’t afford to pick the wrong path, people. Too much at stake.
luv u,
jp
Trouble is, we spend so much time on 
What I have to say about the “Bernie or bust” tendency, however, differs from what a lot of people on the hard left are saying these days. Working to defeat Trump by, among other things, supporting Clinton if she’s nominated is simply not that hard a pill to swallow for me – a person for whom a vote for Bernie was a kind of compromise. I want to take a moment to look at some of the main contentions I have heard from Bernie or Busters, none of which (spoiler alert!) I feel has any real merit.
As I mentioned in previous posts, we’re finishing eight songs for the next episode of Ned Trek, our Star Trek parody that’s the baloney in the cheap-ass sandwich known as the 
Kidding aside, we have a major problem – namely that one of the two people that can possibly become president of the United States is now Donald Trump. With regard to governing policy, foreign or domestic, this man is a monumental ignoramus and a congenital liar. Worse, he engages in these incendiary rants that stoke the flames of hatred and bigotry, recalling a violent past that he often invokes when urging his flock towards toughness. Perhaps most infuriating is the story about General Pershing and the execution bullets dipped in pig’s blood. Trump’s recounting goes something like this: We need to be tough, like in the good old days. Pershing was tough – he both desecrated and executed captured Muslims during the conflict in the Philippines at the turn of the last century. Ergo, we must follow the same standard as Pershing and abandon our squeamish “political correctness”.
Okay, I digress. Here’s the thing. Our first album had a holiday (i.e. Christmas) theme. The second was more of a straight rock record. The third was a mock country album. And yet, when you look us up in any of the music services, we tend to get chucked into “Holiday” or “Seasonal” categories, no matter what genre we assign to the album when we post it. The collection we’re working on rolls all over the stylistic map, starting in Alaska and ending up in Madagascar. Some pretty crazy shit, man. Look for it under “Holiday”.
The most disconcerting part of this likely scenario is the prospect of living through one, maybe two terms of rule by either an egotistical man-child-billionaire or a corporatist Democrat. Of course, I far prefer the latter, mostly because there is some opportunity to push Clinton from the left, but either way we are likely to see a more bellicose stance towards issues of war and peace. Either way we will be moving to the right of Obama along certain political vectors. And Obama is not even a standard progressive; he is a centrist, and very cautious at that.
Speaking of the Carpenters, Matt and I have been tracking some backing vocals for the next crop of songs – about eight of them, to appear in the next installment of 
What is kind of discouraging, however, is the mess that New York State elections often turn out to be. We actually have fairly restrictive voter laws. No early voting, no same day registration, excuse-only absentee balloting, and a lot of weird business, like all of those voters shut out in Brooklyn this time around. I’m not claiming any conspiracy. It’s just a kind of studied incompetence that I see in my own district. (For instance, my first presidential election as a voter was 1980 – I was away from home, at SUNY New Paltz, had applied for an absentee ballot, and they sent it to my parents’ house up in the Utica area. Stuff like that.)