Well stated. Growing up in poverty in this country, whether you’re in an urban or a rural area, is a great recipe for acquiring PTSD. So is being a woman, or (perceived to be) LGBT, or…

That your personal vision of utopia was not immediately achieved is not the same thing as “both sides are equally bad,” nor is it an excuse for you to sit on your lazy ass and whine about how everything’s all terrible and we should all just kill ourselves rather than working for real change with people not every jot and tittle of whose current views we agree with.

What you’re counseling here is despair, and it’s not only counter-factual, but dumb.

With utmost respect, as an Oakland resident, I’d rather see that money wasted on the arena, and I do mean wasted, than spent to further the aims of the West Oakland Riders and their ilk. At least blowing it on football won’t get young black and brown men extra-judicially executed.

Did neither of bother to read the National Popular Vote site? It’s not a Constitutional change. It’s just an inter-state compact, and a good number of states are a part of it.

I know it’s tempting to be lazy and call every positive change hopeless, but in the end, it’s just not as much fun as going out there and making good things happen.

Let’s fund really crazy teabaggers in the primary! It worked brilliantly for Claire McCaskill in Missouri.

That was indeed the enabling (and as we can see, persistent) lie. A law capping (or deferring) real estate taxes on owner-occupied residential property would have been ample for that purpose, but that was never really the purpose.

If the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers’ Association has given a flying fuck about the impoverished elderly since 1978, they have hidden it well.

It wasn’t Obama who refused. It was Ben Nelson and his ilk. Please not to assume that Democrats nation-wide are in lock-step, as Republicans are forced to be.

With all due respect, politics is exactly how we can prevent “planetary extinction,” as you term it.

To be more realistic, what we’re threatening with our mucking around isn’t planetary extinction, but the drastic reduction in our population. This has happened before.

Despair? Speak for yourself. We need to beat the Republicans like a big bass drum, and then, and only then, we can put pressure on Democrats, who have shown that they will at least sometimes listen. The Republicans never have, and never will.

With all due respect, if you imagine that logic or reason or science will persuade these people, you are delusional.

They and their kind pay attention to just one thing when they’re challenged on a deeply held belief: overwhelming force. Sometimes that force comes from judicial rulings, as I hope it will in this case. The other kind is less pleasant to apply, but sometimes necessary, e.g. Union bayonets in 1865, which is what it took to deal with their forbears.

You are delusional if you’re parroting Nader’s 2000 talking point about how both sides are equivalent. There is a great deal Obama’s done and failed to do that disappoints me, but I am under no delusions about what would have happened with Geezer and Dingbat, that being the only other choice. You seem to have forgotten what the other choice actually is.

For those of us who work for a living, or hope to, the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that between a poke in the eye and a knife in the liver. I know which one of those I can live with. Do you?

He would indeed, and he’d be perfectly comfortable with having any entity bigger and stronger than you, except the federal government, make capricious and arbitrary rules you’d be “free” to ignore by moving (job, home, etc.), which of course everyone has plenty of money to do.

With all due respect, have you actually read An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations? Contrary to the right-wing crew, it’s not a paean to unrestricted free markets, even slightly, and the “invisible hand” phrase is neither important nor, when mentioned, laudatory.

Please let’s get off Adam Smith’s back. He was very enlightened for his time, certainly more than any Republican.

With utmost respect, Mr. Baker, the Walton heirs are not “creative,” except in the sense that they hire people to come up with phrases like “death tax” and other such tripe. Sam Walton was a felon who should have died penniless, and his heirs have done nothing with their unearned wealth.

What kind of stupid horseshit is this? There would be plenty of military applications for all this stuff, and believe me, it would be so deployed…that is to say if it existed at all.

Recto-cranial insertion is a terrible problem, and you need to fix yours.

The way to get alternate systems is to build it up from smaller pieces. For example, San Francisco and Oakland, California both have ranked choice voting. People just love it, contrary to the “oh, those poor little voters will hate the confusion” story the opponents told. Once we’re into the details of which preference voting system is best, we’re a long, long way in the right direction.

Whining about how we have to have it nationally doesn’t advance this idea one whit. In fact, it serves the cause of those who don’t want it because it has you sitting on your hands rather than getting out there and doing something constructive.