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On the roster: How to drop out when nobody knows you’re running - I’ll Tell You What: Book club! - Appeals court sides with faithless elector - Trump focused on flipping Minnesota - Just a little off the top



HOW TO DROP OUT WHEN NOBODY KNOWS YOU’RE RUNNING



TO: Steve Bullock, Bill de Blasio, John Delaney, Tulsi Gabbard, Kirsten Gillibrand, Wayne Messam, Seth Moulton, Tim Ryan, Joe Sestak, Marianne Williamson and (eventually) Beto O’Rourke



RE: Next steps



You could listen to the naysayers in the media elite who call you “bottom-tier” or snidely refer to you as the “1 percenters.”



First of all, media FAIL! Many of you are not even registering in polls, so 1 percent isn’t even accurate. But you can bet that those liars in the mainstream press won’t be issuing any corrections. (Note to any reporters or producers who see this: All of the candidates listed above remain available for interviews, corndog eating contests or, potentially, some sort of trial-by-combat arrangement with each other.)



But the biggest mistake is saying you are at the bottom. Wrong again, media morons! (So sorry about all the media bashing. No timeslot too early or too late, no interview topic too demeaning!)



There have so far been 276 men and women who have filed their paperwork to run for president, starting with Willie Felix Carter, a former TV repairman from Los Angeles who first filed in 1986, re-upping quadrennially, to Mosemarie Dora Boyd, a personal injury attorney from Ft. Smith, Ark., who filed on Tuesday.



Most of you are not lawyers and certainly none of you could fix a television and yet here you are outperforming a guy who’s been running for president longer than Joe Biden and a woman who will come to your home anywhere in the Arkansas River Valley to discuss your case with no money up front.



And don’t get us started on Grapelton Monroe Feret of Philadelphia. His campaign committee name is simply listed as “DEEZ NUTZ.” You are all winners in our book if you are outperforming a candidate who is tapping into the power of the deez nuts movement but stepping it up to ALL CAPS.



But even as those media jackals (again, sorry) don’t credit you for powering past juggernauts like those three, you’re still caught in the expectations game simply because you’re, say, the mayor of America’s largest city, the governor of a state bigger than the United Kingdom or a longtime U.S. senator.



In the latest act of the corporate media’s rigged system (don’t hate the player, hate the game, y’all) all of you other than the former congressman from Texas are not likely to be included in next month’s presidential debate. While he will have the chance to bring his brooding intensity – and presumably some explicit and somewhat disturbing graphic novellas he’s been working on in his notebook – to a nationwide audience, the rest of you won’t.

So what will you do?



We see Sen. Gillibrand is currently dumping the remainder of her campaign coffers into early state TV ads like elephant-ear batter down a storm sewer at the end of the county fair in a bid to score a late polling rally. Cool, cool.



But at least she’s doing something! What are you going to do, sit at home drinking boxed chardonnay and eating Baked Lays while you stare holes in Julián Castro and Amy Klobuchar?



Don’t be the person sitting on their couch endlessly writing, deleting and re-writing congratulatory tweets for Andrew Yang. Be proactive and don’t let the lamestream media (ugh. Politics is the worst, right?!? Don’t be a stranger!) control your fate.



Sure, you could do the noble thing like Jay Inslee and just drop out with a note of thanks to your supporter(s) and a promise to work hard for the eventual nominee and then return to your otherwise normal and fulfilling life. But this is politics in 2019, and who’s got time for noble, normal and fulfilling?



The big idea is to just pretend you were never running in the first place.



Stick with us on this one for a second here. You delete your website, update your social media bios, cancel your upcoming interviews and just pretend like it never happened.



And when someone confronts you when you’re walking through the halls of Congress or maybe cashing in your change jar at the grocery store you just give them a super weird look and say “Um… no. What are you even talking about, weirdo?” Then just go into the Senate dining room or go buy some more boxed chardonnay like it never even happened.



Gaslighting those terrible reporters is exactly what they deserve (seriously, drinks soon!).



THE RULEBOOK: KEEP IT IN CHECK

“A man must be far gone in Utopian speculations who can seriously doubt that, if these States should either be wholly disunited, or only united in partial confederacies, the subdivisions into which they might be thrown would have frequent and violent contests with each other.” – Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 6



TIME OUT: BIRD SONGS

NYT: “[As Sesame Street] marks its 50th anniversary — after 4,526 episodes, not to mention specials, movies, albums and more — the legacy of ‘Sesame’ is clear: It impacted the music world as much as it shaped TV history, inspiring countless fans and generations of artists... In his first appearance, in 1973, Johnny Cash brought his young son to the taping — and in the ‘90s returned with his granddaughter and daughter Rosanne Cash. Throughout the late ‘70s and ‘80s, the artists that graced the Sesame stoop were a crossover with the Billboard charts: Carly Simon, Linda Ronstadt (doing a mariachi number!), Diana Ross, Paul Simon (upstaged by a little girl), Billy Joel. In the ‘90s and 2000s, there was Celine Dion, the Dixie Chicks and Destiny’s Child. For generations of children watching at home or at school, the message was that even world-famous stars could be accessible.”



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