Tweetin’ Donny has determined that 44 of the 50 states are “hiding something”.

So many people hiding so much!

Actually only Colorado, Missouri, and Tennessee are willing to go along with this silly, paranoid, time-and-money-wasting hoax, which is clearly designed to distract everyone from Trump’s incompetence and lack of interest in actually doing his job, diminish the whole notion of “investigations” by putting this on the same plane as the Russian interference investigation, and, of course, fire up Trump’s base of “real” Americans.

Just to digress for a second on the “real” Americans thing, I don’t know that anything has made me angrier lately than hearing Mike Huckabee saying, “The media hates Trump more than they love America”. Really? It has to be one or the other? If someone points out Trump’s limitations they don’t love America? How about, “The reason someone hates Trump is exactly because they love America”.

Anyway, Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams couldn’t be more enthusiastic about Trump’s “very distinguished panel” and the vital role they’re playing for all of us. “We are very glad they are asking for information before making decisions,” he said. “I wish more federal agencies would ask folks for their opinion and for information before they made decisions.”

So it’s about being asked your opinion? Before decisions are made? Hmm. Well, I guess it is nice to be asked rather than told, but it’s that opinion of yours we’re criticizing here. Compare it to the opinion of the Secretary of State in Louisiana, Tom Schedler, a Republican, who said, “The President’s Commission has quickly politicized its work by asking states for an incredible amount of voter data that I have, time and time again, refused to release. My response to the Commission is, you’re not going to play politics with Louisiana’s voter data, and if you are, then you can purchase the limited public information available by law, to any candidate running for office. That’s it.”

Or the response of Mississippi’s Secretary of State, Delbert Hosemann, also a Republican: “My reply would be: They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico, and Mississippi is a great state to launch from. Mississippi residents should celebrate Independence Day and our state’s right to protect the privacy of our citizens by conducting our own electoral processes.”

What is Mississippi hiding? How many hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants in Mississippi voted for Hillary Clinton?  It’s true Trump won the state with one of his biggest margins of victory, 58.3% of the votes to Clinton’s 39.7%.

But look at all the counties that went blue. There were 462,000 people in Mississippi that voted for Clinton. Illegals! Al Qaeda! Someone! There’s a crime being committed here, and we need to get to the bottom of it, where we are surely going to find Crooked Hillary. Lock her up!

So far, 44 states, the majority of which went to Trump in 2016, have refused to provide information requested by the Commission’s vice-chairman, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, many pointing out that the Commission seems to have a limited grasp of privacy laws.

Florida and Nebraska are still “reviewing” the request. Hawaii and New Jersey haven’t indicated what they will do.  Six states haven’t yet  responded to the request, but, of those, four have already said they won’t cooperate.

I wrote a blog post a few days after inauguration talking about Trump’s baseless assertions and the many legitimate studies that have been done in the past that have all come to the same conclusion: voter fraud is not an appreciable problem and there are practically no documented instances of it. The few documented instances from 2016 were cases where the perpetrator was a Trump supporter, perhaps trying to level the playing field against all those imaginary Clinton-voting illegals.

Here’s a WaPo piece describing nine real studies that have been done revealing that voter fraud is basically non-existent, including a five-year long study conducted by the Bush administration. I guess maybe the institutions and people that did this work (e.g. Dartmouth College, Loyala Law School, and the Iowa Secretary of State) weren’t as “distinguished” as Trump’s appointees. And here’s a nice summary from the Brennan Center for Justice at N.Y.U. debunking the whole myth of voter fraud.

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, said, “This entire commission is based on the specious and false notion that there was widespread voter fraud last November. At best this commission was set up as a pretext to validate Donald Trump’s alternative election facts, and at worst is a tool to commit large-scale voter suppression.”

Yeah, but he’s a Democrat.  He must be hiding something. And obviously he does not love America.

Tweetin’ Donny has a big investigation going to finally “prove” that he won the popular vote, which he lost by about 3 million. See, 3-5 million votes were cast by illegals, all for Hillary Clinton, and that’s a scandal.

We’ve got something called “The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity” looking into it. It’s headed by “a divisive conservative voting rights expert”, Hans von Spakovsky, who no one seems to know much about as no biographical information was included with his appointment announcement. We do know he’s a believer in Trump’s fantasies though. From the link:

For more than a decade, von Spakovsky has been a polarizing figure in voting rights circles, with conservatives championing his efforts to tighten regulations and shore up voter roll inconsistencies. His critics point to a career in which decisions have led to disenfranchisement among poor and minority groups.

“I think there are number of people who have been active in promoting false and exaggerated claims of voter fraud and using that as a pretext to argue for stricter voting and registration rules,” said Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California at Irvine. “And von Spakovsky’s at the top of the list.”

After von Spakovsky’s appointment was announced, Hasen wrote on his blog that it was “a big middle finger” from Trump to people “serious about fixing problems with our elections.”

This week, the commission kicked off its big show with a letter sent to the 50 Secretaries of State around the country asking for names, addresses, birth dates and party affiliations of registered voters in each state. It also sought felony convictions, military statuses, the last four digits of Social Security numbers and voting records dating back to 2006.

From this Politico piece,

Many states immediately raised concerns and voiced their opposition to providing the information. 

Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes (D) said that she does not intend to release the data. 

“The president created his election commission based on the false notion that ‘voter fraud’ is a widespread issue — it is not,” Lundergan Grimes said. “I do not intend to release Kentuckians’ sensitive personal data to the federal government.” 

Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, similarly said he won’t turn over any information to the panel, telling members of the voter fraud commission to, “go jump in the Gulf of Mexico.”

Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, took a similar line.

All three of these states went to Trump in the election, but, at least so far, their leadership recognizes a preposterous breach of ethics and precedent when they see one.

Nonetheless, the prognosticators here at GOML are now going on record as predicting that this investigation will absolutely yield “evidence” that will 100% vindicate Tweetin’ Donny, and that will make an important contribution to his project of totally devaluing facts and creating “truth” as needed.

And the long-term fallout of this effort will be more restrictive voting laws that favor one particular party and I think we all know which one.

Hillary Clinton has now re-emerged from her self-imposed exile, and is blaming everyone but herself for the disaster her incompetent candidacy has wrought. Don’t get me wrong – I’ve said many times she would have been a perfectly fine executive and I would have loved to have her lead us. But as a candidate, she just never got the knack.

She’s now blaming the FBI for its role in the bogus email flap, Putin, Wikileaks, FoxNews, misogynist bigots, etc. etc. And it’s all true. But it misses the point, which is that if she can’t rise above those things to defeat an insane, toxic, incompetent, lying, racist, sexist, xenophobic con-man and clown, there’s really no excuse but that she was a poor candidate.

She figured she could just coast in as Trump self-destructed, and that simply running as Obama 2.0 was a great platform. It should have been enough. The scandal-free and ethics-first eight years of Barack Obama gave us a miraculous economic recovery from the 2008 precipice we stood on (hard to even remember now, isn’t it?), and gradually disengaged us from stupid and unwinnable military adventures in various parts of the world, particularly the Middle East.

But it wasn’t enough. The voters wanted a transformational candidate with a new message – someone who could break the politics-as-usual gridlock in Washington, and Hillary wasn’t that person. Neither is Trump, of course, but the electorate was fooled into mistaking his bullying, demagoguery, and chaotic doublespeak for something positive. The final price we’ll all pay for this deception is yet to be determined.

Bill Maher says Hillary should go away now, and that her re-appearance verifies all the bad things people think about the Clintons, i.e. that it’s always all about them. He points out she had her chance and she blew it.

I agree. It’s time for the Clintons to get off the stage. All of them, including Chelsea. Let Elizabeth Warren be the first female president.

From this article in the Failing New York Times yesterday:

While conservatives often decry government spending in general, red states generally receive more in federal government benefits than blue states do — and thus are often at greater risk from someone like Trump

In the map below, the darker the shade of blue, the more dependent on government spending the state is:

The states that benefit the most from government spending are, in order of dependency, Kentucky, Mississippi, New Mexico, Alabama, West Virginia, South Carolina, Montana and Tennessee. With the exception of New Mexico, all of these states went for Trump.

The states with the lowest state and local tax burden are Alaska, Delaware, Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, Tennessee, and Idaho. All of these except Delaware went for Trump.

In other words, the people who complain the most about government spending are those that benefit from it the most and contribute to it the least. Go figure.

The NYT article cited a few people who have benefited greatly from government programs that Trump now wants to cut or delete funding for in his proposed budget.

One avid Trump supporter in Tulsa said that Tulsa Domestic Violence Intervention Services “saved my life, and my son’s”. Trump’s budget cuts their funding.  “My prayer is that Congress will step in” to protect domestic violence programs, she said.

Billy Hinkle, a Trump voter enrolled in a job-training program that Trump wants to eliminate asks, “Why is building a wall more important than educating people?”. Hmmm. Good question, Billy.

Tarzan Vince, another Trump supporter in the program, says  “If he’s preaching jobs, why take away jobs?”. We’ll get back to you on that one, Tarzan.

Navy vet Ezekial Moreno, a Trump voter was stocking groceries when he enrolled in the soon-to-be-eliminated WorkAdvance program, which enabled him to find employment in the Aerospace industry. As a result, he was able to move his family out of an apartment into a house, get one daughter violin lessons, and a math tutor for another daughter. “There’s a lot of wasteful spending, so cut other places,” Moreno said. Yes, Ezekial, you put your finger on the problem: it’s those other people that need to have their opportunities cut.

70 year-old Judy Banks voted for Trump to “get rid of illegals”, but now finds the Senior Community Service Employment Program, which pays senior citizens a minimum wage to hold public service jobs and which she depends on, will be cut. “If I lose this job,” she said, “I’ll sit home and die.”

But none of these people regretted their vote for Trump. All said they would vote for him again in 2020. The article says, “Some of the loyalty seemed to be grounded in resentment at Democrats for mocking Trump voters as dumb bigots, some from a belief that budgets are complicated, and some from a sense that it’s too early to abandon their man.”

This WaPo article talks about research they did showing that if Trump voters could do it all over again knowing what they know now, only 1% would vote for Hillary Clinton.

I get why people don’t like Hillary, I really do. And I proudly voted for Bernie in the Massachusetts primary. But when the alternative is a fraud and con-man who is manifestly unqualified for the job by experience and temperament and a million other measures? Come on.

Can it be that easy to get someone to vote against their own self-interest?

It seems like Hillary’s “basket of deplorables” remark bothered them more than anything, like the smartest girl in class was calling them stupid. I don’t know if anyone’s vote would have gone to Hillary if she hadn’t said that and some other things, but the response of many Trump voters like the ones in this NYT piece boils down to:

You think I’m stupid? You don’t know what stupid is! I’ll show you stupid – I’ll cut off my nose to spite my face! Now who’s stupid?!

 No regerts, baby. No regerts.

One of the biggest mistakes made by the Clinton campaign was assuming that Hillary would have the support of most women. This would be their first real chance at breaking the biggest “glass ceiling” of all, and their first real chance to end the “testosterone poisoning” that has fueled our domestic and foreign policy since the county’s founding. Best of all, she would provide a great model to show all young girls that they can do anything and achieve anything.

But it didn’t work out that way. It was women that gave Trump the election. White working class women. It turned out class was much more important than gender: white working class women voted 62% to 34% for Trump. If it had been 50-50, Clinton would have won the election.

Part of the explanation is that what “working class” actually signifies has changed. It once suggested productivity and sturdiness. Now it’s a euphemism for downwardly mobile and poor. This New Yorker piece notes,

“A significant part of the W.W.C. has succumbed to the ills that used to be associated with the black urban “underclass”: intergenerational poverty, welfare, debt, bankruptcy, out-of-wedlock births, trash entertainment, addiction, jail, social distrust, political cynicism, bad health, unhappiness, early death.”

Here in the People’s Republic of Cambridge, most of us are subject to the mis-perception that the “women’s vote” consists mainly of like minded sisters: progressive, educated feminists who mostly subscribe to similar views on issues. We think, in general, women will be pro-choice, favor stricter gun control, favor an Equal Rights Amendment, equal pay for equal work (perhaps even “comparable worth”), and so on. We naturally think that women would vote for a like-minded woman given the chance, and Hillary would be the perfect choice. So smart, so qualified, so committed to their causes.

In Cambridge, 650 women at the Harvard Business School united in their dislike of Trump and signed a letter denouncing their fellow HBS alumnus, Steve Bannon, who had been appointed Chief Strategist for Trump. It said,

We are female graduates and current students of Harvard Business School. We represent a wide range of religions, ethnicities and professions. We are daughters, sisters and mothers; native-born Americans and immigrants; Republicans and Democrats.

Mr. Bannon has been described as one of the chief architects of the alt-right movement, a movement that preaches white nationalism, racism, misogyny and hatred. He has repeatedly put forth hateful rhetoric against women, including a radio interview in which he referred to progressive, educated women as “a bunch of dykes.”

But the “wide range”of the women inside H.B.S. is not as wide as they think. Outside Cambridge, in the real world, things are very different. This excellent article, also from the Harvard Business Review explains a lot about Trump’s appeal, the “culture gap”, and why class is more important than gender.

One little-known element of that gap is that the white working class (WWC) resents professionals but admires the rich. Class migrants (white-collar professionals born to blue-collar families) report that “professional people were generally suspect” and that managers are college kids “who don’t know shit about how to do anything but are full of ideas about how I have to do my job,” said Alfred Lubrano in Limbo. Barbara Ehrenreich recalled in 1990 that her blue-collar dad “could not say the word doctor without the virtual prefix quack. Lawyers were shysters…and professors were without exception phonies.” Annette Lareau found tremendous resentment against teachers, who were perceived as condescending and unhelpful.

Hillary Clinton epitomizes the dorky arrogance and smugness of the professional elite. The dorkiness: the pantsuits. The arrogance: the email server. The smugness: the basket of deplorables. Worse, her mere presence rubs it in that even women from her class can treat working-class men with disrespect. Look at how she condescends to Trump as unfit to hold the office of the presidency and dismisses his supporters as racist, sexist, homophobic, or xenophobic.

The lesson here may be that the interests of women and men are, in fact, not nearly as far apart as we thought. But the interests of the “elites” are completely different than the interests of the “working class”.

Check out this article from the New York Times just yesterday, explaining the rationale that various women had for preferring Trump. Prepare to be disheartened.

OK, I get it. I get why someone like Hillary is so unappealing to so many men and, yes, so many women. I really do. But it still must be asked, is there no better alternative than a dishonest, impulsive, narcissistic, belligerent con-artist?

If you’re wondering whether any of the 60 million people who voted for Trump are feeling any buyer’s remorse, well, forget it. They aren’t. Inauguration, or as we’ve come to regard it, Crossing The Rubicon, is still a few days off, but a clear picture of what we’ll be getting has already emerged.

There will be no tax returns or medical reports released. There will be no divesting of business interests. Mexico will not be paying for The Wall. We will not Lock Her Up. There will be only extremely rare “press conferences” where every question is treated as an accusation and disputed rather than answered. There will be a cabinet of billionaires who are installed despite clear conflicts of interest. There will be daily tweets disparaging any individual who dares criticize the man-baby, and the presidency itself will be thereby demeaned. Russia, historically an ideological enemy, will be our best ally and have more influence on policy than any other. Relatives will be installed in important positions despite anti-nepotism laws. Our president will be hated and ridiculed by virtually every other country on the planet. If a business owner or board-member supports Trump, the bully pulpit will be used to encourage us to patronize that business – clearly an unprecedented (unpresidented?) abuse of the power of the presidency. Any of the 25 million or so people that got health insurance for the first time during the Obama years will now be out of luck.

There’s lot’s more that can already go on this list, and lots more will surely be added down the road. But you get the point.

Despite all these things, however, Iowa voters are happy with their choice. Iowa gave Trump his largest margin of victory, 15%, of any battleground state and are happy with what they got. The New York Times went to Monticello, Iowa last week to talk to the sages at the Table of Knowledge week and reported what they heard there 

The Table of Knowledge

Here is a sampling from that piece of what they said.

They  marveled at how he had forced his fellow Republicans in the House to reverse themselves on gutting the Office of Congressional Ethics. “He’s getting responses; things are happening. He got Congress to turn themselves around with one tweet.”

“There’s no secret the press doesn’t like him, and neither does a lot of the leadership,” he added. “And that’s because he’s planning on making a lot of changes.”

About allegations that Russians have embarrassing sex-tapes they could use to blackmail Trump, one said,  “The way it is nowadays, unless I see positive proof, it’s all a lie,”  He added he was more concerned that government officials might have leaked the material to the news media. “I don’t know if it was classified, but if it was, whoever leaked it needs to go to jail,” he said. “We need law and order back in this country.”

Asked about government programs to aid the poor, one said, “I think they should be drug-testing if they’re on welfare”, and “The welfare system needs to be reorganized – ‘Chicago people’ were moving to Iowa to receive higher benefits and bringing crime.”

One said, “I’m ashamed to say we caucused for Obama” in 2008. My view is he purposely got into the presidency so he could ruin America.”

Another called the Affordable Care Act a form of socialism. He said he had no problem with a candidate who had run as the voice of the working people but was stocking his cabinet with the ultrawealthy. He said, “I know these guys are really rich,” he said. “They may have pulled off a few plays that weren’t exactly on the up-and-up, but they all had to be pretty smart to be billionaires. If they replace their own concerns with the concerns of the country, they can make things really move forward. That’s what I’m excited about.”

Anyway, out of all this, there are two things that particularly strike me.

The first is the guy who said that for him, absent “positive proof”, it was all lies. By this he meant that only if FoxNews reported something would he believe it. The rest of the media was all lies. In other words, there is no “positive proof” that will ever change his mind.

The second is that we now have an answer to the question Trump asked everyone a year ago, “How stupid are the people of Iowa“.

One of the reasons we have this silly Electoral College thing is that the founders couldn’t settle on the right way to elect a president. Should he be appointed by the senate? Should state governors decide? A popular vote would be good but people might not get accurate information about candidates from outside their state. And for a candidate who had never run for office and therefore had no record to analyze, it would really be a problem

They had to figure a way to prevent a completely unqualified demagogue from fooling the people who had no idea what he was really like, so they invented the Electoral College.

There’s little doubt that today the Electoral College will vote Donald Trump in as president, but it’s a bit ironic when you think that the people who knew him best supported him least. This seems like exactly the thing the Electoral College was meant to take into consideration

New York state gave Hillary a true landslide victory: 59% to Trump’s 36.5%.

But in New York City, Trump’s home town, it was really something. It didn’t matter that he had no record whatsoever of public service – everyone knew him very well from his businesses, bankruptcies, frequent law suits, outrageous media appearances and “socializing”, bogus “university”, and many other unsavory activities.

In New York City, Trump took an unbelievable beating.

In Queens, where he grew up, Hillary Clinton got an amazing 75.1% of the votes. But in Manhattan, where Trump lives and operates, everyone really hates him. He got less than 10% of the votes cast! It’s unbelievable.

Here’s the full breakdown by neighborhood.

You can zoom in and click on individual wards in that map. The Upper West Side is really devastating for Trump. That’s his old pussy-grabbing territory. In his prime, his favorite haunt had been the China Club (how perfect is that?!) on 75th and Broadway. If you spend a little time with the map, you can find parts of the UWS where Trump got less than 5% of the vote!

Trump thinks he has a mandate, but not only did he get fewer votes than Hillary, he even got fewer votes than that “loser” Mitt Romney got in 2012! Some mandate.

He claims to have won the popular vote, which he lost by close to 3 million votes, because millions “voted illegally”. There is not a single bit of evidence to support this. In fact the opposite is true.

Trump falsely claims to have won an Electoral College landslide . In fact, the opposite is true.

 Come to think of it, that makes a great slogan for the Trump presidency: “The opposite is true.”  Let’s get some bumper stickers made up.

Anyway, enough of this whining.

The message for today is pretty simple: if the Electoral College can’t even do the very thing it was created for, let’s just get rid of the stupid thing once and for all.

Some things make so much sense when you read them that you just know they’re true. They can’t not be true.  Depending on your own view of the world, they may give you comfort or consternation. Either way, they’re so obviously true, you can just accept them and modify your behavior and thinking going forward based on what you’ve read.

Less than two months ago, a couple of weeks before the election, Paul Krugman wrote  that Donald Trump had only a 7% chance of being elected according to the Times Upshot model, whatever that is.

His theme in that piece was basically that any Republicans who had endorsed him or hadn’t backed away from him soon enough should be ashamed of themselves, and that anyone who voted for down-ballot candidates were voting for Trumpism.

It was obvious from the beginning that he was a “con artist” — so declared Marco Rubio, who has nonetheless endorsed his candidacy. His racism and sexism were apparent from the beginning of his campaign; his vindictiveness and lack of self-discipline were on full display in his tirades against Judge Gonzalo Curiel and Khizr Khan.

So any politicians who try after the election to distance themselves from the Trump phenomenon — or even unendorse in these remaining few days — have already failed the character test. They knew who he was all along, they knew that this was a man who should never, ever hold any kind of responsible position, let alone become president. Yet they refused to speak out against his candidacy as long as he had a chance of winning — that is, they supported him when it mattered, and only distanced themselves when it didn’t. That’s a huge moral failure, and deserves to be remembered as such.

Of course, we know why the great majority of Republican politicians supported Mr. Trump despite his evident awfulness: They feared retribution from the party’s base if they didn’t. But that’s not an excuse. On the contrary, it’s reason to trust these people even less. We already know that they lack any moral backbone, that they will do whatever it takes to guarantee their own political survival.

And what this means in practice is that they will remain Trumpists after the election, even if the Orange One himself vanishes from the scene.

What he wrote made all the sense in the world. It was all obviously true. Backing Trump was an indication of spinelessness and dishonesty. But it’s all yesterday’s wisdom

There are only two kinds of people in the world: the kind that thinks there are only two kinds of people in the world, and the other kind.

So what divides us the most consistently and predictably? And by “us” I mean all of humanity.  Is it my religion vs. your religion? My language vs. yours? Liberal vs conservative? Haves vs. have-nots?

I think the most universal source of differences among us has to be the urban/rural divide.

If you come from a remote, sparsely populated place where your nearest neighbor is a long way off and where self-sufficiency is vital, you probably have a really different outlook on life than the person who lives in a big city in close proximity to all kinds of other people and who is not required to grow his own food or build his own house.

If you look at the places around the world where religion and culture have merged, where local government is everything and federal government is nothing, where women are most thoroughly under the control of men, where factional warfare between families, tribes, villages, sects and so on is the most common and persistent, well, you’re looking at sparsely populated, remote regions. Think Afghanistan, Yemen, Rwanda.

Even in a world of universal connectivity and instantaneous, affordable global communication, if you live in a place where you come in personal contact mainly with the same people and their families every day for your whole life, you’re going to have a much different perspective than someone who lives in a bigger city, or who travels a lot and maybe has lived in a few different places in his life.

In this country, talking about the divide between red states and blue states misses the point completely. At the state level, there is really very little difference among us, which is why the “swing” states swing.

But if you look below the covers, even to the county level, a clearer picture emerges.

Better yet, think of it as regions of population sparsity/density and  the differences between Trump America and Clinton America are clear.

Trump America

Clinton America

Virtually every medium and large population center in the U.S. went “Blue”. We live in a highly developed, affluent country where everyone speaks the same language, spends the same currency, has access to the same TV shows, buys the same range of products from the same companies, and so on. But the urban/rural divide asserts itself nonetheless. It’s not so very different from living in Kandahar vs., say, Helmand province. Or Karachi vs. Waziristan.

I don’t know how our differences can be reconciled if the three branches of the federal government and the fourth estate, too, pander to and amplify those differences. And even if they don’t.

Paul Krugman wrote an excellent piece just before the election describing the ways the whole thing had been rigged against Hillary. Here’s a quick summary:

1. State governments did all they could to suppress minority voting
2. Russian intelligence hacked Dem emails then released through Wikileaks
3. Comey deliberately spread innuendo that hurt Hillary
4. Foxnews trumpeting falsehoods, retracted, if at all, after damage done
5. Mainstream media clearly favoring the lying candidate with no proposals
6. Absurd media obsession with Hillary’s emails

In the end, it was simply that the potential Trump voters were energized to show up and vote, and the expected Hillary base, i.e. the coalition of youth, minorities, blue collar workers, women, etc, were not.

This coalition was built by Obama, an inspirational and charismatic figure. Hillary is not an inspirational or charismatic figure. She is not a natural retail politician, does not like to press the flesh, and does not smile easily. When she does smile, it seems fake, and somehow this translates into “not trustworthy”.

Moreover, she had little in the way of a transformational message to offer. To be fair, just running on another four years of doing what we were doing over the last eight should have been enough, particularly when the opposition is a liar, a con man, and certainly the least qualified candidate ever to be nominated by a major party, both by temperament and experience.

It seems weird to say, but the inspirational and charismatic candidate was Trump. As many others have pointed out, the lightning he captured in a bottle was the profound exhaustion that everyone in “flyover country” feels about “political correctness”.

They are sick of being called racists, homophobes, Islamaphobes, and whatever else simply for being Republicans, or for not abandoning what they feel are common sense positions fast enough to suit the college professors and talking heads.

They feel that if aliens arrived on earth tomorrow, they would think maybe 30% of our population must be transgender based on the volume of discussion of transgender issues. They want to understand why we have to  spend so much time and energy discussing the “persecution” that less than 1% of the population suffers for not being welcomed into the bathroom of their choice.

They  resent being called insensitive if they haven’t kept abreast of the already long and growing lexicon of pronouns needed to attempt to keep every individual happy. And personal pronouns are just the beginning. Just google LGBT vocabulary to get an idea of what you don’t know, and prepare to be accused of something if you don’t learn it all and fast. They think it’s all too much to ask of a farmer or an out-of-work machinist, a taxpayer and a church-goer.

Even writing the above paragraphs, which do not represent my own feelings about these issues, but merely attempt to explain the feelings of others, puts me at risk. If I dare to try to explain or understand these things, then I must at some level agree with them, and therefore I must be “outed” and “shamed” by the Internet Justice League, which can mean swift and severe punishment.

This is why I don’t allow Google to index this blog. This is what leads to self-censorship and, ultimately, backlash. This is what leads to Trump.

This is what the people in Iowa, or as we eastern elite liberals prefer to pronounce it, Ohio, have to tell us.

When, oh when, can we do away with the Electoral College? As with Bush/Gore, the person with the most votes loses.

Clinton won the popular vote.

Prominent historian Simon Schama described a Trump victory and Republican control of both the Senate and U.S. House of Representatives as a “genuinely frightening prospect”.

“NATO will be under pressure to disintegrate, the Russians will make trouble, 20 million people will lose their health insurance, climate change (policies) will be reversed, bank regulation will be liquidated. Do you want me to go on?,” Schama told the BBC.

“Of course it’s not Hitler. There are many varieties of fascism. I didn’t say he was a Nazi although neo-Nazis are celebrating.”

He forgot to mention that The National Enquirer is now the Newspaper of Record

Pay no attention to the man behind he curtain.

On Tuesday either Trump or Clinton will be elected. But I don’t think that will be the end of it. The same forces that make governing impossible now (at least for a Democrat) will redouble their efforts.

The House Republicans, dominated by their obstructionist wing, are committed to the filibuster as the standard tool for opposing legislation, effectively changing the way we make law. They have successfully prevented a sitting president from even starting the process of filling a vacant Supreme Court seat, as was his right. They gutted the Affordable Care Act and then spent huge amounts of the taxpayers money repeatedly suing to remove the hollow shell that remained.

If Clinton is elected, impeachment proceedings will certainly begin immediately. Hillary Clinton used the wrong email server and that’s that. If that’s not good enough, she also “lied” when she uttered the word “video” while consoling families of the four individuals killed in Benghazi in 2012, or at least that’s what someone alleged. Nuff sed.

But what if Trump gets elected? Hang on just one second – I need to step outside a sec before I go on –

Whew. OK. I feel a little better now.

So a President Trump would be allowed to govern, right? Not so fast. There is so much “Trump is a clown unfit for office” sentiment out there, and not just among Democrats, that an “Impeach Trump” movement might have something for everyone. It wouldn’t be hard to find a valid reason to impeach. I’m guessing they could start with improper business dealings with Russia, but it could be any of a hundred things.

If successful, they’d get the rock-ribbed, anti-abortion, midwestern, conservative, establishment Republican they’ve wanted from day one in Pence. He’d have none of the stink of the primaries on him and would restore some sense of decorum to the office. FoxNews would love it, too. They’d go back to persecuting Clinton or whoever they thought might challenge in 2020.

So who’ll be president in 2018? My magic 8-ball says all signs point to Tim Kaine.

Remember how easy it used to be to screw up your chance to be president (or even vice president)? Those were the good old days. Here’s a little visual quiz. See if you can remember what’s going on in each of these pictures. I’ll give you a slam dunk for the first one. Meet you below the pics.

Gary Hart resigned his senate seat in 1988 to run for president. He was the front-runner in the primary when allegations of womanizing forced him to drop out. That’s right, allegations.

Ed Muskie shed a tear during a NH speech. See ya.

Gore sighed at some stupid thing Bush said in a debate. Elitist!

GHWB looked at his watch during a debate. Outrage!

Thomas Eagleton saw a therapist once for depression. Lunatic!

Biden defends himself against plagiarism charges. OK, you got me there.

When Trump entered the race last year, a lot of people were saying it’s just a publicity stunt like everything else he does. He’s so obviously unqualified, even he knows this can’t go anywhere. As time went on, his scattershot nonsense somehow resonated with Republican primary voters (surprise, surprise), but even as he gained momentum, the guys who thought they were actually running things did not take him seriously.

They said, “When the field slims down and people can unite behind an establishment candidate, this will change”. Then it was the “Anyone But Trump” movement, the brokered convention hope, and a few other fleeting intermediate manifestations of denial. Finally it was, “Now that he’s the nominee, he’ll pivot and show that he is actually ‘presidential'”.

Throughout it all, many people still held to the belief that even Trump knows he can’t do the job and, let’s face it, wouldn’t want to.  He will find a face-saving way to bow out before it’s too late. As the mountain of bullshit coming from the Trump campaign grew, the thought was that sooner or later he’ll say something so over-the-top that even FoxNews will turn on him and he’ll have to quit.

But it never happened. In fact there was so much jaw-dropping blather to refute, fact-check, and just marvel at, you didn’t have time to re-act to a particular thing before there were two more outrages to process. Re-tweeting shit from white supremacists? Mocking people with disabilities? Trump University? Buffett doesn’t pay taxes? Obama founded ISIS, not figuratively but literally? Ted Cruz’ father conspired to kill Kennedy?  Even starting a small list diminishes the importance of  the dozens of other “should disqualify” things you forgot about.

No one ever held him accountable for any of it. And if someone did try to call him on something, he never took a step back from it, other than the occasional “He was just kidding, and, anyway, why aren’t we talking about Clinton’s emails” from Kellyanne Conway.

It was always double down. And then ramp it up.

Finally Trump’s exit strategy reveals itself. The way out is clear. Go down swinging as hard as you can and take your 50 million “followers” with you to the next level.  We can look forward to Trump monopolizing what passes for political discourse in this country for the next four years, and making a ton of money in the process.  No one can take their eyeballs off the spectacle, and eyeballs are money, as our finest “journalists” readily admit. You might as well call the coming media empire the DHC Network – Delegitimize Hillary Clinton. “Lock Her Up” was just a taste of what’s to come.

Can’t “Make America Great Again”? No worries, it was actually “Ruin America for Personal Gain” all along.

I don’t hear from my Australian friends too often – generally an email at Christmas with family news, or maybe when something big happens in the world of sports. This election season is different, though, and I’ve received a couple of distraught  messages like this one from a friend in Melbourne after the first debate (I’m  “Mad Dog”, his view of my approach to downhill skiing ):

Mad Dog

I turned on the last 20 minutes of the debate today. I cant believe what is happening over there. I wonder if Americans understand how this is being perceived in other countries? It is regular front page news here and the general tone is one of incredulity. How could America have finished up with this masquerading as a political system? Could anyone possibly vote for Donald Trump? Really? Has he any possibility of winning? The election, along with the gun debate and police shootings of black youth have really made America the laughing stock of the world, with the general view that this is a once great empire in serious decline.

I think it is really sad as I have great respect for America and the friends I have there. I also think there may be a silver lining at the end of this. Surely Trump is going to get smashed, drag the senate down with him and possibly the house. That way making the passage of sensible legislation that much easier and at the same time forcing the Republican party to ask themselves serious questions and stop this sort of thing ever happening again.

I did see Alec Baldwin on Saturday night live and enjoyed it! Also Robert DiNiro.

I told him I blamed the media for giving Trump a platform over the years, and the decline of what passes for journalism. I said, for me, the silver lining was actually the loss of “empire”, that I was sick of the toxic strain of worldwide liberalism that blames the U.S. (and Israel) every time a light bulb burns out somewhere in the world. Let some European country (or Australia!) step up and be the world’s policeman and scapegoat.

The real problems will begin after November 8th. Trump isn’t going away. Win or lose, fifty million people will have voted for him, and the opportunity to monetize that (and, of course, the diseased hypertrophic ego) will not be denied.  One way or another his media presence will expand and the excesses will increase.

I was watching one of those focus group things after the third Clinton-Trump debate. They had a bunch of “undecided” voters in a room, and were asking them whether anything they heard would cause them to commit to vote for one of the candidates.

It’s been said before, but, really, who the hell could possibly be undecided at this point? You already know you’re dealing with people who don’t have it quite together. So, of course most people said, no, nothing had changed for them. And one guy said yeah, he was now voting for Hillary, and a woman said now she was voting for Trump. Everything is designed to be “fair”,  meaning the ridiculous false equivalency that we’ve been served up here must be maintained, or else, God forbid, someone will say the coverage is biased.

Anyway, her “reasoning” was along the lines of “they’ve had eight years, blah blah nothing changed something something America etc etc.”  I wasn’t really listening. Put it this way – I’m not undecided and this moron wasn’t gonna change that.

But I totally get the impulse to throw the bums out. Doesn’t matter if unemployment is down, the stock market is up, Guantanamo is moribund, we’ve got the only kind of peace we’re ever going to have in our lifetime, and so on. Give someone else a chance. Change is good. Let’s shake it up a little.

Except this time is different. The one guy is so obviously, manifestly, thoroughly unfit for the job, we just can’t let it happen. This time, we have to keep the bums in.

In this country, everyone is entitled to be as stupid as they like. It’s in the Constitution. I almost wrote “that’s what makes our country great” there. Problem is, the die is cast. It’s too late now. The worst just might happen. There’s nothing left to do about it. It could be President Trump.  If only the election WERE rigged!