Unto Others

"When Hurricane Sandy happened in our sophomore year, did you ever think it would become your job?"

A friend asked me that when I started my latest job which is, as you may have guessed, tying up the loose ends of Hurricane Sandy recovery. I've now worked in two different jobs doing some aspect of storm recovery, and almost across the board, it's incredibly complicated. So with the recent flooding in Louisiana, I thought this would be a good time to talk about disaster recovery, and what happens when it becomes political.

When you talk about flooding and disasters, FEMA is the first thing that springs to mind, and with good reason. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is often the first on the ground when a disaster hits, and that disaster can be anything from a hurricane, to flooding, to tornado, to a terrorist attack, to an Ebola scare, all natural disasters FEMA has been involved in in the last fifteen years.

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Advice on Going Green

I'm not going to start this post with a list of reasons about why it's bad to vote for a third party candidate. We've all seen enough of those articles, and frankly, they don't seem to be persuading anyone, and it can feel condescending. People have valid and legitimate reasons to vote for third party candidates, and I have never been in the business of talking people out of voting. So if you want to vote third party, godspeed my little involved citizens. Live your truth.

But think twice before you vote for Jill Stein.

Not because she's in the Green Party, but because of who she is as a candidate. If Jill Stein were running in a Democratic primary, I would also advise you to vote against her, because she is in no way qualified to be the president.

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Real Talk about Gary Johnson

Before this election cycles goes any further, we need to talk about Gary Johnson. I'm seeing a lot of people on Facebook tout Johnson as a great candidate, capable leader, and a man would make a great president. Blog Readers, I didn't move out of New Mexico and struggle to make it in the big city to see this country governed by former governor Gary Johnson.

"But Gary Johnson seems so chill!" you say. "He wants to legalize marijuana, he's totally cool with gay people, and he's pro-choice! What more do you want, you crazy liberal?"

Ah my friends, we've come to one of my favorite discussions. Being pro-gay, and pro-choice, and pro-weed does not a liberal make. If you're really a progressive, you believe in utilizing the power and means of the government to help out those who need the most assistance in society. It's great to be pro-gay marriage, but if you're going to be against the government spending money of group homes and foster care and healthcare for low income people, you're not really pro-gay, because LGBT people are far more likely to be homeless, be refused healthcare, and need access to government services.

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We've Got Your Mail

Hillary Clinton should probably just start using carrier pigeons and burning the notes, with all the problems email has caused her. For those who were focusing on finishing the new season of Bojack Horseman (or like me, catching up on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend) and didn't see the news, the WikiLeaks recently posted 20,000 emails from top officials at the DNC. 

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Hard Pass

In the 2008 Superbowl, David Tyree caught a ball on his helmet, gaining 32 yards, and setting the Giants up for their game winning touchdown. It was the Hail Mary pass to end all Hail Mary passes, it was named the Play of the Decade, and it meant the Giants won the Superbowl over the Patriots.

This is all to say that sometimes, Hail Mary passes are very successful. That's why people keep throwing them. But for every Helmet Catch, there are dozens, nay, hundreds, of failed Hail Mary tosses. The Stop Trump movement within the Republican party, is one such failure.

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Just a Bill

This week, I could talk about how I was wrong when I tried to predict who Trump would pick for his Vice President, but believe me, the shame of my political prediction failures is enough. I could give you a summary of Governor Mike Pence, but just check out #PeriodsForPence and the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and you'll get the idea.

Instead, this week, I thought I would talk about something simpler. I'm in the process of switching jobs, and presenting at a conference this week, so this week is as good as any to talk about how a bill becomes a law!

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She Doesn't Have the Range

Short lived memes based on old comedy sketches is one of my favorite things about the endless void that is the internet, and "she doesn't have the range" is currently ticking off all those boxes. For the uninitiated, "she doesn't have the range" is a line from a British sketch comedy show, but it has reentered popular culture with a savvy Twitter user who applied it to current pop stars.

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Poll-er Opposites

We all knew this day would come. The day when I had to talk about polls. Believe me, I was dreading it as much as you were.

Before I go into everything that's wrong with election polling, and which polls you should and shouldn't trust, I'll say a few words about what's good about public opinion polls. In three recent major elections (2008, 2010 and 2012) the polls predicted election results fairly accurately. In this election season, public opinion polls were showing the rise of Trump before anyone in the mainstream thought of his candidacy as legitimate. The polls did something that even light of my life Nate Silver didn't do, and predicted that Donald Trump would win the Republican nomination.

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Good Trouble

Welcome one and all to the brand-new, official, real life website of West Wing, Best Wing! Like the Italian sculptors of yore, I have found myself a patron who gave me the funds necessary to make this blog official.

For my inaugural post, I was going to write about abortion. On Monday, the Supreme Court will be handing down a decision on Whole Women's Health v. Hellerstedt, and their decision on this could impact abortion laws across the country. But then I remembered that I've already written that postSeveral times. And I promise to write another one explaining the decision when it is released on Monday.

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Give Them Hope

First, on a serious note.  Early last Sunday morning, a gunman burst into a popular gay bar in Orlando and opened fire with an AR-15, killing 49 people and wounding 53 others before being killed by the police. This is the worst mass shooting in American history by a single gunman, and LGBTQ people, specifically LGBTQ people of color, were explicitly targeted. All people were struck by the scale of this tragedy, but personally, it has hit me hard. Mass shootings are always more terrifying when you can see yourself in the people who were killed.

It can be hard and scary to be visible. A lot of queer people spend much of their adolescence, and sometimes much of their lives, hiding a big part of their identity. For me, even now that I'm fully and totally out, I'm faced with a lot of daily situations in which I have to make a choice between hiding a part of myself and coming out to a person I don't know very well. Sometimes I don't have the energy, sometimes I genuinely feel it's none of their business, and sometimes I feel I have reason to fear for my safety.

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Thanks, Federalism

My friend Jason recently messaged me requesting a post on electors, the people who make up the electoral college. My first response was "silly Jason, the electoral college isn't actually made up of people who vote for a nominee. That would be insane, and could possibly lead to the electoral college voting for someone who did not win the popular vote. Our country would never let that happen."

Wow, was I wrong. It only took a couple of Google searches for me to go from "the electoral college is just a way of easily showing who won the election" to "THERE ARE NO LAWS GOVERNING ELECTORS WHY ARE WE NOT RIOTING IN THE STREETS?!" So let's follow that trajectory, shall we?

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Looking Into the Future

If you know me even a little, you know that I hold the website 538 in the absolute highest regard. Maybe it's because I've never been good at math so I'm easily convinced by statistics and models that I don't fully understand, maybe it's because the site predicts elections correctly the vast majority of the time, or maybe it's because I'm widely known as the Nate Silver of Oscar Predictions, so I feel a certain kinship.*

So when a journalist from 538 tweeted that Clinton would probably secure the nomination before the polls even closed in California, I had a vision of the future where people were complaining that she "stole the election" because they called if for her before the people of California even decided. This blog post is here to explain why that's not the case.

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Stop Worrying About the Zika Virus

Or: Answering Your Zika Questions in Five Parts, with help from my Good Buddies at the CDC

1. "I think I got the Zika virus!"

You probably don't have Zika. Even if you get 150 mosquito bites a week, you probably don't have Zika. Even if you've seen Zika on the news a lot lately. Even if all your friends are tell you that you have Zika. Even if you read the tea leaves and they spelled out Z I K A.

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In Their Defense

Remember when this blog was just about complicated Congressional bills instead of my opinions about the election and sexism? After trying (and mostly failing) to write about polls and why they're flawed, I decided to tackle a far easier subject and discuss the most recent defense bill that just passed the House, but will probably be vetoed.

The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017 allocates money to the Department of Defense, which in turn, funds the military. I'll spare you an exhaustive account of everything that's in the bill, because the bill is hundreds of pages long, and I don't have time to read it all. The bill appropriates 23 billion dollars in funding, to allow current military campaigns to continue through April of 2017, at which point, the new president will have to request supplemental funding.

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Still Relevant After All These Years

If you had told me that the 1994 Crime Bill was going to play a huge role in the 2016 election, I would have been a little surprised. And yet here we are, with a lot of accusations being tossed around about the crime bill, and me not knowing much about it, beyond what's been thrown around by my Facebook friends.

So here you go, a primer on the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. To paraphrase John Mulaney, I know it's kind of stupid to write a blog post about a bill that was passed 22 years ago, but I wasn't a political blogger back then.

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Swear to God

For the most part, when a politician takes their oath of office, they raise their right hand, place their left hand on the holy book of their choice, and swear to uphold the Constitution of the United States. Curiously, there's no constitutional requirement that an elected official take their oath of office on a holy book. In fact, John Quincy Adams allegedly took his oath of office on a book of laws, and Representative Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) the only member of Congress who lists her religion as "unaffiliated" took her oath on the Constitution.

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Sexism in Politics

"Medicare-for-all will never happen if we continue to elect corporate Democratic whores who are beholden to big pharma and the private insurance industry instead of us."

I understand what Paul Song was trying to say here, that money in politics prevents politicians from passing progressive policies. I see what he means so clearly, that I was almost ready to write off his use of a word that his almost exclusively directed at women, and used to demean women. At a rally for Bernie Sanders, Paul Song casually and tangentially called Hillary Clinton a whore, and to be very honest, it didn't really shock me all that much.

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North Carolina Hate Bill #2

North Carolina recently signed a bill into law that prevents cities from passing LGBT non-discrimination ordinances. That's a problem because North Carolina doesn't have any specific statewide protections in place to prevent discrimination towards gay and transgender people. Seeing a gap in protection, the city of Charlotte passed a bill outlawing discrimination towards gay and transgender people.

Not willing to let city laws be out of step with the state, the North Carolina state government passed a bill that overturned the Charlotte non-discrimination law. The bill also mandated that students use bathrooms that correspond to the gender on their birth certificate, and prevented cities from raising their minimum wage, which had nothing to do with anything except that the state house does not appreciate when localities try to enact progressive provisions that are counter to state law.

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Contested Contest

No one, not even me, thought Trump would last this long. I was sure that he would have dropped out of the race by now due to boredom, or lost a fair amount of states. But that has yet to happen, and I, like most of the country, am freaking out about the possibility of Trump actually winning the Republican nomination, which is why I, along with the rest of America, am hoping and praying for a contested convention.

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AP Wizardry

Back in February, I settled in to watch the New Hampshire primary, thinking it would be a long evening of political pundit cross talk while I waited for the results to come in. Imagine my surprise when, at 8:01, every news station called the race. I know we are living in a technological golden age, where all the information we could ever want is at our fingertips, but it was shocking to me that with 3% of precincts reporting, the news could declare who won a race.

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