Tuesday, May 10, 2016

A classic parody song (and animation)

The year is 1943 and Walt Disney released an American animation parodying Nazis and Hitler, as a propaganda piece, Der Fuehrer's Face. While the animation is fairly obscure, owing to its archive shortly after release in 1943, the parody song which was written by Oliver Wallace, is probably best remembered via the recording by Spike Jones and His City Slickers.

I happen to know this song by way of freshman year in college and my dorm neighbor who sang this song to me, and to do it justice you have to stick your tongue out when you make that pbht sound.



Now, I'm not one to just bring history to you. Nay, I also have a reason: Replace any reference to Fuehrer with Donald, as in Donald Drumpf, Herr Gobbell with Frau Palin, as in Sarah Palin, and Herr Goring with Herr Priebus, as in Reince Priebus. Suddenly, this reality we currently live in makes a lot of sense.

When der Donald says, "We ist der master race"
We HEIL! (phbt!) HEIL! (phbt!) Right in der Donald's face
Not to love Der Donald is a great disgrace so
We HEIL! (phbt!) HEIL! (phbt!) Right in der Donald's face
When Frau Palin says, "We own der world und space"
We HEIL! (phbt!) HEIL! (phbt!) Right in Frau Palin's face
When Herr Priebus says they'll never bomb this place
We HEIL! (phbt!) HEIL! (phbt!) Right in Herr Priebus's face !

Are we not the supermen
Aryan pure supermen
Ja we ist der supermen
Super-duper supermen!

Is this Nazi land so good?
Would you leave it if you could?
Ja this Nutzi land is good!
We would leave it if we could!

We bring the world new order
Heil Donald's world to order
Everyone of foreign race will love der Donald's face
When we bring to der world dis order!

When der Donald says, "We ist der master race"
We HEIL! (phbt!) HEIL! (phbt!) Right in der Donald's face
Not to love the Donald is a great disgrace so
We HEIL! (phbt!) HEIL! (phbt!) Right in der Donald's face!

When der Donald says, "We ist der master race"
We HEIL! (phbt!) HEIL! (phbt!) Right in der Donald's face
Not to love the Donald is a great disgrace so
We HEIL! (phbt!) HEIL! (phbt!) Right in der Donald's face!

Wednesday, May 4, 2016

Word of the Day: Schadenfreude

Schadenfreude: Feeling of enjoyment that comes from seeing or hearing about the troubles of other people. - Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Example: A day after the Indiana primaries, I was overcome with Schadenfreude when both John Kasich and Ted Cruz dropped out of the presidential nomination race, thus leaving Donald Drumpf as the presumptive nominee.

Monday, May 2, 2016

4 (Quick) Additional Thoughts on the Sanders Campaign

  1. Voter turnout: Everyone knows that when turnout is high, Sanders wins, right? Wrong. It's exactly the opposite. Of the 17 states Sanders has won, 12 of them have the lowest voter turnouts among the 40 states that have already voted. The mean and median turnout rates for states where he's won is lower than that of Clinton's.
  2. Closed / Open Contests: Everyone also knows that Sanders wins when the contest is open, right? Wrong. He's won 39% of open contests and 40% of closed ones.
  3. The Undemocratic Winner: There's nothing democratic about caucuses. They have the lowest turnouts during the primary season. In Minnesota, you don't even need to be registered to vote in order to participate in the Democratic Caucus and turnout is still low! In Wyoming, there are 41,314 registered Democrats, but only 280 votes cast in their caucuses, which is just a 0.68% participation rate. That's not something to be proud of. Sanders has won 11 out of 13 caucuses, making him the Undemocratic Winner of 2016. These state parties need to end the undemocratic caucus process.
  4. Bad Math Sanders: Another variation of the Sanders campaign rhetoric on super delegates, is that he should take all of the super delegates in states where he's won. Yet, he's primarily won in small states and when you tally up the numbers, he still loses! Apparently they've cut back so much staff, no one is vetting these arguments before they're made public. Every time he falls short of the margin he needs to win by, the margin of the remaining states increases, making his math even more ridiculous.

Sunday, May 1, 2016

6 Thoughts on the Current State of the Sanders Campaign


  1. Popular Vote: The Sanders campaign has alternately suggested that the super delegates should support the popular vote or that in states where he's won he should be leading in super delegates. I mean to douse this flawed argument. As it stands right now, Hillary leads the popular vote by a margin of 3.18M -- yes, I'm actually tracking this with a spreadsheet -- and clearly more people want Hillary to be the Democratic nominee. The intention of voters can't get much clearer than that.
  2. Math w/o Super Delegates: The Sanders campaign has stated that Hillary can't earn the nomination with pledged delegates, and therefore the convention will be a contested one. Not true on four counts.
    1. If she wins with roughly 72% of the votes in the remaining contests, she could win the nomination on pledged delegates alone. His math is flawed but his logic is worse, as he faces an even higher hurdle than she does, having passed the point last week where he can no longer win the nomination on pledged delegates alone. The irony, you see, is that for Sanders to actually win the nomination, he would have to rely on the Establishment!
    2. The math in the primary process: A candidate must win 50% + 1 vote, of the delegates, in order to win the nomination. The only way Sanders' nomination pencils out, is if the super delegates go against the will of the people -- Clinton leads Sanders 57.5% - 42.5% -- see popular vote argument (1).
    3. Hypothetically if you eliminate super delegates from the nomination process and then apply the 50% + 1 vote rule, Clinton would need to win just 40% of the remaining votes in order to capture the needed delegates. This is critically important because the Sanders campaign is critical of the role of the super delegates, which is why they continually demand that the media ignore the super delegates in the nomination math.
    4. There is no contested convention, no matter how the Sanders' campaign wishes to portray it. On the first ballot Hillary wins, plain and simple. If she doesn't win on the first ballot, then it is a contested convention. Just because the Sanders campaign thinks his nomination is a viable outcome doesn't make the convention a contested one. But in case it isn't obvious to the Sanders campaign: If you go against the will of 57.5% of voters, there will be riots and you will be vilified in history books.
  3. A Con Man: A few journalists and psychologists consider Bernie Sanders a con man. What I can't figure out is whether he's conning others or himself. For instance, he insists that he can pass his policies, yet he also insisted that African-American reparations is politically impossible -- most people could easily discern that either both are possible or both are impossible, but unlikely contrary to each other. The same thing comes to the delegate math and his anti-South rhetoric. Is he conning himself into believing this fantasy, or is he trying to con voters? Perhaps a bit of both. Seeing as young people are the only ones gullible enough to buy into what he's selling, he's certainly conning less experienced Americans. But when he offers up hypocritical arguments on the viability of his ideas and his candidacy, he's surely conning himself.
  4. The White Male, and Youth Candidate: I've mentioned this before, but Sanders' viability rests solely on white males, and the youth vote. In every other demographic, he loses. He loses Asians, Blacks, Hispanics, Men of other races and Women of all races. The sole age group that he's completely captured is 18-24, by roughly a 75% - 25% margin. He holds a very marginal lead in the 25-29 group, but then loses all other age groups by wide margins. It's neither reflective of America nor of the Democratic Party. As I said last year, Bernie represents going back to old white men, and having gotten a taste of the alternative I think most Democrats would prefer to diversity rather than return to old white men. 
  5. The Better Candidate: The Sanders campaign likes to point to hypothetical general election polling to suggest that Sanders would perform better against any GOP candidate than Hillary. Yet in the nine Democratic exit polls where voters were asked who they thought would be better at beating Donald Drumpf, every nine of those polls said Clinton was stronger than Sanders, by an average margin of 67% - 30% (range = 58% - 73% for Hillary, 20% - 39% for Bernie). And it makes sense that people would vote for the candidate they thought would be the stronger candidate, right? When it comes to voting, people put their vote where their mouths are, as opposed to hypothetical general election polls, making Hillary the obviously better candidate.
  6. Hillary's Guilty of Something: If you read enough Bernie Bros, you come to realize that the Bernie Bros all think that Hillary is guilty of something. Or put it this way: WhitewaterVinceFosterTravelgateBlueDressMonicaLewisnkyEmailgateBenghaaaaaazi was one big conspiracy. When confronted on Hillary's emails, they rely strictly on innuendo of a worst-case scenario, not what the facts have so far revealed. So self-assured they are that the worst-case will come to pass, that they give Republican nutjobs a run for the money when it comes to accepting conspiracy theories. And they won't shut up about it. They're dangerous echo-chambers of the rightwing nutjob propaganda.