President 2016 - Clinton, Stein and Me

So, VoteSmart has a really cool widget - VoteEasy - to help you decide which US 2016 Presidential Candidate most shares your values, and might best represent you in the White House for the next four years. (You can also use it for the Federal Congressional races, which is a cool bonus.)

This widget doesn't ask anything stupid like "which candidate do you like," or "what is your favorite color," or even "what is the airspeed of an unladen swallow," so it eliminates basic confirmation bias.  Instead, it asks "What is your stance on abortion, and how important is it to you?" 

They also give you information on how they got their results, so you can decide if you agree with them or not.  I expect a lot of angry people will tell them they're full of shit, and "they have the typical liberal/conservative/egghead/fuckwad bias."  Whatever; people are stupid.  It's one of those years where everyone says the other guy is full of shit, and stops listening. 

Here are my results:

Like has been said many times - by me and others - Stein and Clinton have very similar positions.  The difference is that Clinton has spent 20 years preparing to be able to hold the most powerful job in the world, and has her shit together, while Stein has been running a boutique political party that slightly more than no one had heard of before Bernie Sanders didn't get the DNC nomination (the reasons he didn't aren't part of this post, so try to focus).

Anyway, go check out the VoteEasy widget and decide who you really want to have as President, based on voting record and rhetoric, and anything else the VoteSmart people can find that demonstrates where the candidates really stand. They update their database regularly, so you can check back regularly to see if your candidate has flip-flopped this week, changing the results. (Or, Hell, maybe you flip-flop, because, you know - Obamacare.)

Especially tell your "conservative" friends to do this thing. I expect many of them will discover Johnson is less of an asshole than Trump, and that's a good thing.