"Granting that there are limitations on the positive impact that Obama will have in American society"

Who is talking about "limitations on the positive impact Obama will have"? Hultner listed four specific "impacts" of Obama's government which have been unrelentingly negative, not a "limited positive impact" but actually actively making things worse — and (1) his repeated bailouts of failed financial corporations and the incestuous relationship between his cabinet and major Wall Street firms; (2) Obama's constant lethal "impacts" on several different Muslim countries with drone missile strikes; (3) his ongoing imprisonment and torture of a whistleblower (who happens to be gay) for exposing the full extent of (1); (4) his deportation of over 1,000,000 undocumented immigrants during his first term, making him numerically the single most destructive President in American history for undocumented families. If this is not an example of people's rights being well and completely trampled, I don't know what in the world would be. By any standard of justice, compassion or simple decency his record has been appalling.
My recent post Election Results

"YOUR ability to create change is completely meaningless beside the actual changed caused by this election …."

The recent vote resulted in the re-election of the incumbent President of the United States. Now maybe you think narrowly maintaining the same status-quo composition of the governing party in Washington is a good thing. Maybe the alternative would have been far worse. But for better or for worse, very narrowly managing to keep the same people in power for the next 4 years who have been in power for the last 4 years is hardly an example of making social "change," unless the word "change" has simlpy been revised to mean "Whatever outcome seems most preferable to voting Progressives," whether this actually involves moving one way, or moving another, or staying in exactly the same place as you've been for the last 4 years.

My recent post Election Results

Here you go, I wrote a song for you. All together now.

o/~ o/~ o/~

Oh I cheered when Obama was chosen,

My faith in the system restored!

But then I wept when obstructionists made him

Deport millions, make kill lists and fight wars

And well I know these years haven't been perfect

But just think what he can do with four more!

Oh

Love me, love me, love me

I'm a liberal.

o/~ o/~ o/~

#WithApologiesToPhilOchs

My recent post Election Results

Polls have closed in a historic election in this secessionist republic of one. This year there was only one candidate for Head of State, Charles W. Johnson, but remarkably, as a result of a protest boycott campaign against the one-party state, Johnson has refused to vote for Charles W. Johnson, leaving the popular vote at 0-0. Given the lack of any voter turnout, there have been widespread fears of legal disputes or civic unrest, turning Charles W. Johnson against Charles W. Johnson, but tonight the state media agency has announced that the SRO will be issuing a press release later tonight declaring that Charles W. Johnson will peaceably step down as Head of State, the Republic will provisionally operate as a free spokescouncil, and all political decisions will henceforward be made by an endless consensus process meeting which will continue until the next election cycle, or until someone needs to leave to go to the bathroom or get some sleep.

So Walking Dead has more or less announced that it is definitely headed from the land of General Horror and Misery into the territory of Completely Gratuitous Gore & Misery Porn. With the latter calculated to punish the characters who are the most conventional horror-film targets. Given the settings they decided to bring over from the comics for this season I cannot say that I am surprised. (Roughly the same thing happened at the same time in the comics, although in a different way.) But I also can’t say I’m especially pleased to watch it happen.

I would like it if people telling me to vote for their favorite candidate would decide whether they think voting is for hard-nosed, reality-based pragmatism, or pie-in-the-sky idealistic expressions of your convictions. If you’re trying to get me to vote for your favorite candidate out of hard-nosed pragmatism, you need to keep in mind that I live in Alabama, a state where somewhere around 60% of the vote will more or less certainly go to the Republican candidate no matter what I do. I could not possibly take away a single electoral vote from your least favorite candidate, or give a single electoral vote to your favorite candidate, no matter what I did at the polling place. There is no realistic case whatever for the claim that it matters whether I vote for your favorite candidate, or vote for someone else, or vote for no-one at all. If I snuck into the polling place 20 times and filed fraudulent votes, all of them for your least favorite candidate, I still could not possibly be helping your least favorite candidate get elected, because the number of electoral votes the winning candidate gets doesn’t diminish with the margin of victory.

Now when I point this out people will say that maybe I ought to vote for their favorite candidate anyway because at least that way I’ll be registering my opposition or my protest to all the awful things their least favorite candidate(s) have done or are going to do or seem likely to do. It won’t have any practical effect, but at least I am putting it out there. But then if the point of voting is supposed to be to express my deep political convictions, without any reference to the practical effects I can get out of it, why in the world would I vote for any candidate for office at all? I am an anarchist and my political convictions cannot possibly be expressed by attaching myself to a candidate for government office. If I’m going to express a political conviction, without concern for results, then I figure I may as well actually express the political convictions I believe in, not the incredibly vague and approximate cluster of convictions that might be loosely associated with the least-shitty candidate on the ballot. And the best way to do express those convictions — the ones I actually do believe in — is by refusing to participate in this ridiculous and corrupt struggle for political power.