"To war, to War, Fredonia's going to war."

                                                     If only Groucho were president
                                                     

Trump has FINALLY surprised me, not with his assassination of Qasem Soleimani--I expected an atrocity like this sooner--but the fact that he offered Iran peace afterward. That's a new level of cluelessness for Trump. I believe Trump assassinated Soleimani because he still held a grudge for the 1979 hostage crisis. He tipped his hand in a Tweet-storm after the assassination:



Iran being thousands of years old, those sites would be world treasures. Why 52 sites? Because 40-years-ago Iran violated our embassy and took 52 hostages. The crisis dragged out 444 days and was a real humiliation for Carter, and likely led to Reagan winning the 1980 election.Why would Trump refer to an incident that took place so long ago that half of today's Iran and a third of the US weren't even born yet? Because of Trump's revenge creed, documented by David Cay Johnson, who covered Trump for the New York Times for decades:

“Sixteen pages of Think Big [Trump's 1989 book] are devoted to revenge. All of them run directly contrary to this basic biblical teaching. Trump leaves no room for doubt that revenge is a guiding principle of his life—“My motto is: Always get even.”
― David Cay Johnston, The Making of Donald Trump

Once revenge was just Trump's personal and business policy. Now, it's now part of our country's foreign policy. When I posted the theory on Twitter that Trump still had a vendetta from 1979, I was criticized by the Left. Some people believe Trump was apolitical then and he never cares about anybody but himself. To the contrary, he cares about the US the way he cares about a piece of his property. Proprietorship is his version of nationalism. As for him being apolitical, I remember the 1979 hostage crisis, and I'll swear that even the most apolitical people were enraged by it. Everybody was.

Trump has shown outrage on issues on social/political issues long before he ran for president. One example pertains to the Central Park 5 in 1989, in which a female investment banker, Trisha Meili, was assaulted while jogging Central Park. She was bludgeoned with a rock, beaten, raped, tied up, and left to die. She was found hours later and saved, but suffered severe brain damage. The brutality of the attack stunned the whole nation. She was in a coma for a week during which she was unidentified. She seemed to be a teenager, which garnered even more sorrow and sympathy. When she awoke she no memory of the attack.

The New York Police Department responded in an accustomed way: they arrested every minority male who happened to be in that area of Central Park at the time, some 30 of them. Without any witnesses, the police made a racial identification anyway. They forced confessions out of four unfortunate African-American and one Hispanic youth. The real culprit, a serial rapist with no connection to the youths, came forward and confessed to the crime in 2002.

It's impossible to tell why this crime enraged Trump enough to weigh in on the issue, tipping the scales at $85,000 to buy a full-page ad in the New York Post, entitled "Bring Back The Death Penalty, Bring Back Our Police." 

The headline is a Tweet. Already he knew how to mislead in a few words as possible

Note that 1989 was not an election year. So, Trump wasn't running for president. Election campaigns weren't four-years long yet. Did Trump buy the ad with his own money? He managed to go bankrupt six times, so he might have. He was attention-seeking, but he always was, so why do this particular thing for attention?

My theory? Trump's outrage here is serious. The black-males-on-white-woman crime triggered him like it would any racist. I have no guess as to what degree classism motivated Trump, the fact that the unfortunate woman was an investment banker, i.e. wealthy. It's also possible Trump was acquainted her, or at least knew people who knew her. 

Trump is without a doubt a narcissist, but attachments to people don't define that disorder, their relationships do. A narcissist is capable of caring for people, but they'll always assert their own interests and needs over their friends and family and are obsessed with loyalty, like Trump.

But I digressed. Right now, it's therefore possible that Trump still harbored resentment over the Iran Hostage Crisis. In all fairness, many conservatives who are less sworn to revenge than Trump feel the same way. This is why his hard line on Iran is one issue that got him elected. Therefore, when his advisers gave assassinating Soleimani as an option, his principle kicked in. I would've thought Trump's advisers would know him better by now that to have offered it. 

The one thing you want to avoid in any simmering conflict is a revenge cycle: i.e. when people get too enraged to desire peace, and where each tit for tat blow exchanged simply creates the desire for more revenge.

Trump got conciliatory the next day because, as far as he was concerned, he got even, and thinking only of his own POV, peace was possible. However, his revenge has always been aimed at people on a lower social rung, those couldn't return his vengeance. He's oblivious to how it feels to be on the receiving end of retribution. Not only that, it's too late for him to learn about it, and unfortunately, he's dragged all of us along for the lesson. He's the one least capable of learning a lesson from consequences.  

Eugenics: the pseudoscience behind racism and genocide

Eugenics:

noun (used with a singular verb)

1. the study of or belief in the possibility of improving the qualities of the human species or a human population, especially by such means as discouraging reproduction by persons having genetic defects or presumed to have inheritable undesirable traits (negative eugenics) or encouraging reproduction by persons presumed to have inheritable desirable traits (positive eugenics).

 

Evidence

I bring up eugenics because President Donald Trump is a eugenicist. He's never come out and said that, but he has declared he had "good genes," in several pre-presidential interviews.

The better evidence is from who Trump the Younger lets into his inner circle, such as Steve Bannon. Bannon's eugenic and racist credentials are impeccable. Trump has praised neo-Nazis as "good people." He's come out in favor of racist Confederate statuary. Then you look at the rest of the people who he appoints: white as cotton. Also, consider the difference in the way he treated Texas and Puerto Rico after they were struck by hurricanes. Puerto Rico is still struggling.

Of course, there's also the elephant in the room, Trump's morally reprobate and impractical immigration policies. (Can you tell I don't like Trump?) Even if Trump doesn't say the word eugenics, and probably doesn't know a word that big, neo-nazis and white supremacists definitely hear the message. He encourages their belief.

An argument against Trump has to attack eugenics. Not only is it immoral, but it's also fatally flawed.

A Short History of Eugenics

At one time almost every educated white person in North America or Europe was a eugenicist. There've been vague forms of eugenics throughout history. However, modern style was an unfortunate interpretation of Charles Darwin's evolutionary theory. This was posited by Darwin's half-cousin, Francis Galton. Darwin disagreed with his half-cousin's interpretation. Unfazed, Galton coined a new word: "eugenics" and gave birth to a movement.

From there the idea spread like a meme through other Western countries, having harmful effects wherever it caught hold. Galton's gift provided scientific legitimacy to colonialization that Western Europeans needed to continue their ventures. In the US, states passed sterilization laws aimed at "inferior" people. Of course, it also reinforced the crudest racism, letting New Englanders agree that the Jim Crow might be useful after all. Racism had always been a potent force in US politics, now it was scientifically sound.

One effect that we're struggling with as I write is immigration policy. The first federal immigration law, The Page Act, was passed in 1875 before; eight years before Galton's initiatives. It was targeted only at Chinese. While that might be a counter-example, it also means our country didn't limit immigration for the first 86 years. Not just that: the Constitution doesn't mention immigration. That's what priority the issue had. The document does allow Congress to set rules for granting citizenship. Without anything in the founding documents, the ninth and tenth amendments would seem to suggest it's up to the states to regulate it. The states, however, wanted more population wanted more population in the early days. As far as know, the Constitutionality of immigration laws has never been tested in court.

Emergency Quota Act of 1921 the Immigration Act of 1924 were both passed, and both were very eugenic. For the first time, immigration was constrained by quotas. People from Northern Europe had much higher quotas than people of Southern or Eastern Europe (or from anywhere else). They also singled out Jews, Italians, and Slavs as especially unfavorable. The 1924 Act bolstered the prohibitions on Asian migration. The effects of eugenics were evident in these laws. We were trying to invent the superior race. Sterilization was done in every state of the union. Across Europe was mostly the same.

Until the cataclysm of the Second World War when the Concentration and Death Camps were liberated. The Nazis pushed eugenics to an extreme and chose the Jews as the most inferior race. The sight of dead bodies carpeting the ground to the horizon gave people a glance at the evil they were practicing to lesser extremes. Eugenics fell from favor.

But it was never scientifically refuted. That was a colossal oversight. That should have been the Epilogue of the Nuremberg Trials. The fact that eugenics was never formally disproved is coming back on us now, in the form of neo-nazis who think their racism has a basis in science but a conspiracy has suppressed it. But most importantly in Donald Trump who thinks he's keeping America safe for white people.

Refutation

First, I'm not a scientist. I've done a lot of scientific reading, but mainly I'm just a guy doing his best.

Some have pointed out that the superior people inevitably happen to coincide with the group that's in power at the time. That makes a short point for me: decisions about who's superior must be made politically, not by objective scientific standards.

For politics, words like "superior, perfect and truth" only have a meaning in specific, limited contexts. Such as we say, "Mike Trout is a superior baseball player." Or, "Sandy Koufax pitched a perfect game," or "The truth is, he pitched a perfect game." Those qualities can only be determined in a narrow context, such as within the rules and events of a baseball game. The statistics and videos are there to doublecheck the factuality of the claim.

Outside narrow contexts those words are seductive. They can trick a person into believing they can be boundless, even eternal, qualities.

Keeping that in mind, let's talk about a superior race. It is a myth that evolution makes species superior when the environment is harsh. Remember that evolution doesn't go one way. In nature, we were never evolving into a "superior" species. Also, evolution isn't stopped because life is so easy. No, you can't stop evolution any more than you can stop gravity. If we harshen up our environment, what might happen is that human brains shrink, because our brains require a lot of resources expending 20 percent of our energy intake. No other animal comes close. If the harsh environment were short of food, our extra intelligence could be the first thing overboard.

Evolution over generations makes a species more successful in its environment, this success us measured by how many of an organism's genes are later found within the species. This is why our superior minds can't get rid of cockroaches, mosquitos, and rats. Those animals aren't superior, they're entrenched in their niches. If the environment changes radically, all can go extinct.

Outside the narrow scope I described, "superiority" is an entirely human judgment wholly disconnected from environmental favor.  While not necessarily arbitrary, the traits human beings regard as superior might be far from what evolution will award. I don't think we can be successful at eugenics, but if we are, there's a good chance we'll kick ourselves into extinction.

To change the direction of evolution toward what we think is superior, humans would have to completely control the environment; breed the people with favorable traits, and eliminate the people with inferior attributes. That requires a lot of brutality and attrition. I don't Hitler think would have gotten very far with this, but it wouldn't have been implemented. Practically speaking, he couldn't have. I'm not sure he would've recoiled from those imposing these requirements on Germans, but he might have.

We've been creating dog breeds since Darwin. We haven't, however, created a "superior dog," that is one that beats us in chess while reciting Cervantes. Instead, by controlling their environment and interbreeding them, people have created a lot of specialized breeds.

My last point is evolution is a slow process working by the geological clock. The nation-states that are around now will all be gone by the time any effect whatsoever is apparent. How are we supposed to set up a regime that stands and continues to implement eugenics after all else we create fails?

 Right now  

The way Trump is treating immigrants shocks us. Be ready for when his grade of brutality grows. I expect this after he meets with Putin and gets advice. Trump had rather imprison ten thousand innocent Hispanics than arrest the only the thirty criminals among them. For deterrence, he'd separate children from their families. This has required more facilities. For somebody purported to be fiscally responsible, he's ticking up a lot of needless costs. That's nothing compared to the atrocity he's committing. He could build his wall on the funds he saves from arresting the guilty and letting the innocent in and allowing them to keep their children. But that's beside the point: doing unrealistic things to hurt people is called evil.

Forty-five percent of people think he's doing a good job. He has to appeal to that deplorable class, so be prepared to see worse.

The nature of power

As humans, we are mysteries to ourselves. Every day we handle money. Do we ever stop to wonder what it is and why we're so compelled to use it? A piece of green paper with George Washington's portrait and "1's" at the corners is just what I described. Same with a green piece of paper with Ben Franklin's portrait and fifties at the corner. When we believe it's money, we treat it differently. We count it carefully, safeguard it, save or spend. We don't just possess the money, we're able to command it: buy something on a credit or debit card. Then you never handle the dollars you're exchanging. The money "emblem" doesn't even need the bills, it doesn't need to be visible. A few million electrons, too small for the eye to see are sufficient. Money is the difference between life and death, wealth and destitution. The amount we have divides us into classes. 

That's some powerful magic because when you get right down to it, money exists only in the human mind. Some people are disturbed by its etherealness and insist we must use gold. It doesn't matter really what we use to physically represent money, it's whether we regard it as money. Gold is impractical for our economy, there's not enough of it, it's heavy and cumbersome to transfer. During the 1870s-1933, in the planting seasons, farmers would take out loans for seed. The banks would run out. They had to send to Britain for more. The trip from Britain took two weeks, and by that time, banks would fail by the dozens.

My point being: money is imagined. We do a lot of things to keep up the illusion. Our social understanding that sees it creates it and respects it. Other things that have enormous influence over us exist only in our minds. Borders. Nation-states, private property. Why do we all go along with it? Because some people might not have an objection, and there's a cost to rejecting them, just like there's a penalty for ignoring any of the cornerstone social imaginations in our lives.

Money is power, and power is imaginary, too.

Money's not the only form of power. What is power then? The measure of a person's power is in how many people they can get to cooperate with them, over what duration, and to what extremes. I'm sure if the observations could ever be done, it can be described as people x duration x extremes.

And in judging power, it doesn't matter what the method is, whether he does it by his charm, her money, his ruthlessness. Adolph Hitler, Josef Stalin, Saddam Hussein, did it by being charming at first and then making the charmed people do brutal things, while the dictator did more charming. Once the dictator has surrounded himself by ruthless, but charmed people, and they have power networks of their own, he's set for life.

Money is power, and if people were aware of that, they wouldn't let anybody get too wealthy. The Koch Brothers have $40 billion dollars. How many assassins can that buy? How many mercenaries How many politicians? Even if one might turn the billionaire down, there's always another one to buy. Remember, it's the number of people cooperating, directly or indirectly, that makes somebody powerful. 

Is there any practical use for my observation? Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and all major and minor dictators through history were only men that people started to obey. Just remember we don't have to follow the dictator. It's the people in his network who can stop obeying him, and negate their obedience and the reason for it. I don't suggest they take that lightly because as I said, there are penalties.

I consider this to be very pertinent for today when we're facing a president who's an authoritarian.

TMI! TMI!

This entry still needs some work, but I'm putting it up like this because I'm out of time. This was a comment I was going to put up on FB, but I decided it belonged here. I'll continue to do edits on it until it's not so Facebooky.


People are terrible with processing and communicating information. Evolution didn't mold our minds to be truthful. To varying, but to always significant degrees, we all make mistakes, we all lie, and we deceive ourselves. That includes every religion, every faction, every family, every nation, every group humans can form. I won't go into why this is, only to say it's inherent to our evolution and to the way our minds operate.

These aren't so significant in a tribal society. But imagine information roiling through millions of people, all of it filtered and altered, and you should see that there's a problem. There's no way the information stays accurate. Even solid evidence is subject to distorted and false interpretations, added to other false information to create or support a narrative. And since people lie, and in building cohesion of a group, they're subject to lying or distorting information that would compel others to join their faction. That's not even opposed or mischievous people who manufacture evidence.

Without taking these into account, people overestimate their ability to get accurate information and draw conclusions. Once they have solid opinions, there's confirmation bias. Discovering something that supports your opinion feels good. Reconsidering and retracting is painful, an instinctive shame because if you were in a tribe, you just lost status.

Don't think you or anybody you trust isn't subject to any of this. If you evolved as a human, you are. Whenever I see or hear any news, I always ask is it mistaken? Is distorted by self-deception? Is it a lie? Or is it two or three of the above. More than likely the answer to one of those questions is: unknown. 

Why you probably shouldn't laugh at Anthony Weiner yet.

It seems Anthony Weiner has ruined his life because he can't stop sexting. He even sexted with his young son in the room. The story is so bizarre. The really odd thing is, he didn't have any behavior like this in his history before 2011. I realize that Sexting was something new, but it isn't just sexting. Somebody this obsessed with sex would have been doing other things to get his rocks off, like joining Adult Friend Finder. 

It sounds to me like Antony Weiner might have a physical brain disorder. A malignant tumor would be doubtful because it would have killed him by now. Maybe a benign tumor. It could also be a rare side-effect of some medication. He was a workaholic and might have worked through a headache which was actually a stroke, that then went undetected. He definitely hasn't been like this his entire adult life, or there would have been a lot more stories about him that came out about him after the first sexting scandal.

No, he changed suddenly, so much so that people who knew him (like Jon Stewart) thought at first the original sexting scandal to be a hoax. It seemed to me that everyone was taken aback by his behavior. Also, he can't alter it, and it's becoming worse, despite his own expectations. Not even when his young child comes into the room does Weiner stop himself from sexting. The results were very disturbing. Not child porn, but close enough to make you fight down lunch.

NY Post: Just be happy you don't see a face

Brain cancer and brain trauma have been known to cause behavior changes like this. And even when a brain pathology makes a person do something, the person will still rationalize it as there choice and make arguments about it.

Maybe instead of laughing at Weiner and shaking our heads, we should urge him to get to neurologist. He might be seriously ill. If it is a physical pathology, he really can't help his behavior, but he might get it cured and be able to reclaim his life.

That would certainly be a story.

Trump is an Il Duce-bag

   Only three weeks have passed from the day Republicans chose Donald Trump as their nominee. Like a suicidal man who repudiates his choice one second before hitting the pavement, Repubs have been regretting nominating Trump ever since. Unfortunately, they can't pick up their brains from the sidewalk and put them back in. They will even more ashamed on November 8th, and long afterward.

    Trump is a fascist. The real McCoy, not some Godwin analogy in an argument over Final Fantasy. If you don't believe me, see his policy papers. Unlike Benito Mussolini, who had fascism defined and mapped out, Trump didn't become fascist by thought or design. (In Il Duce Mussolini's era, Fascism was cutting-edge evil.) No, Trump arrived at fascism due to beliefs his father passed on to him, beliefs that Trump has always been too narcissistic and stupid to re-examine. Those quaint World War II totalitarianisms (fascism, Nazism and Bolshevism) are especially attractive to sociopaths, including narcissist sociopaths like Trump.  

     So far, besides selling himself as a Messiah come to save our country from doom, Trump has made vindictiveness the theme of his campaign. He couldn't let it go with Khizr and Ghazala Khan, insulting them and the memory of their son. He had to sink himself and his party further and further with it. I can't wait to see how this guy will use nuclear weapons. No, actually, I can wait forever. And he has to tell Hilary Clinton that he'll get revenge if he loses. His followers might go 2A on her ass.

    Then there was the baby. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEeY8ENxPDwIf you watch the video, Trump's tone when he said “get that baby outta here” was practically a snarl, and he makes fun of the woman for believing him momentarily.

   Aren't politicians supposed to kiss babies? A cliche I know. Not that Trump could have done it (I mean even infants have their standards and would recoil from Trump's orange sleaze.) Yet, he should have, at least, taken his cues from that very old politicians trope: you don't have to kiss your supporters' babies, but dote over them. Make your constituents admire your forbearance toward their kids. (What? You think they'd believe you'd like a crying baby? No, they just want to know the candidate is willing suffer with them. It's a bonding experience.)

    The GOP leaders didn't have much of a choice accepting Trump after their base fell in love with him. Still, it's impossible to feel sorry for the leadership. They did it to themselves from years of propaganda, much of it from Roger Ailes at Fox News, who fortunately has now been dismissed. They scared their base for years over terrorism, Islam, race, immigration, the Clintons, Obama, our foreign policy, our economy, our debt, taxes, and our military, and so on. How could they be so thunderstruck when their voters acted like scared rats and forced the nomination of Trump?

    Frightened people want a want protection, a “strong” leader. A muscle-head. A bully, but on their side. We have a word for this: a strongman. A guy who makes grandiose plans to displace whole human populations never realizing nor caring about the suffering that would entail. A leader who can't be bothered with pesky details like how many people his deportation plan might kill. An iron-fisted blockhead who will build a wall, and by God, force Mexico to pay through warfare, dirty tricks . . . or nukes. A man who revels in the use of force: the more extreme the better.  That's Trump: a man who asks about nuking countries three times in a one hour national security briefing, like nukes are his new toy, and he can't wait to try it out.

  
  (Of course, Trump denies this now, because “deny and lie” is his “shock and awe.” Politifact gives him a truth rating of about 15%. Fifteen percent of what he claims is true, or mostly true.)
  
    People who are voting for Trump should just ask themselves how they would like working for Trump. How would they like working for a boss who only tells the truth less than fifteen percent of the time?

    Ailes and the rest of the GOP lie machine were so good at scaring people, the GOP base is acting like scared Germans in the 1920s-30s. Germany's situation was far more dire than anything we're going through, and the threats it was facing were far worse than immigration and terrorism. Devastated by war, isolated by the world, having faced starvation and economic chaos three times. The Germans had good reason to be terrified that the Soviet Union was about to roll in from the East. Stalinist operatives, not liberals or progressives, were within their country wouldn't let the German people forget the threat.

    What do we have stacked up against us? At least Islamic terrorists have no armies of real consequence, and couldn't move them here even if they had them. To the other side of their country, the Germans had the intransigent French, Belgians, and the worldwide British Empire. Post-war, the French (with Belgium) invaded Germany in 1923, creating the German hyperinflation that wrecked the economy and starved the people over two years. This is only a few after the starvation caused by the allied blockade. To sum up, their everyday situation was more dire than ours.

    Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones and company have made the US people feel as desperate as the post-WWI Germans, an astounding accomplishment. They way they've lost control of that frightened, angry base might be an object lesson to why propaganda is no substitute for news. This election has to represent the biggest long-term political-strategy failure in US history. It's enough to make Patrick Buchanan pull out his pubic hair, or Rush Limbaugh swallow one his cigars.
   
    A week ago came a rumor that Trump might drop out. That would be the best outcome for everyone involved. I'm certain he must have talked about it. He has a terribly thin skin. However, the story disappeared and has the hallmarks of being just a rumor. If so, it's hard to see how the GOP will ever recover from Trump. Whether they do or not, already the Republicans can write off the 2016 election. Anybody else they put up against Clinton now is bound to lose by twenty points. They can't get on the ballot this late in most states. I'm expecting most of the Trump supporters to stay home if their strongman quits. 

    By running for the presidency (which we're led to believe is an entry level position) Trump is taking a tremendous risk. He's not going to deal with a loss well. Moreover, Trump University looks like it ruin him financially, and even put him in prison. That's why he's using goon threats and saying if he loses the election must be rigged.


 
For as long as I've been alive, people have been hoping for third party. At the rate things are going, the GOP is going to be the third party in 2020. If not the fourth. And Trump will have his Trump Party then. If he's out on parole.

    Last Note: As I was writing this blog, I saw that Wikileaks has released 23,000 more of Clinton's Secretary of State emails. They're marked with a “C” for classified. There's some dispute about whether she knew it meant classified. When I was in the military, we stamped things “Classified,” no acronyms or abbreviations about it. I know I would have seen the letter and presumed it probably meant “copyright.” I know if it were drawn to my attention, a few seconds of thought would  have told me it didn't mean copyright, but the point is, I wouldn't have assumed it meant classified. Because it seems stupid to me that anything like that should be marked with single letter.

   Today it came out that Judicial Watch, a conservative operation, found indications of Clinton cronyism in an email just released. But Clinton didn't send the email, and what's described there is someone seeking a job and being recommended by a few people at the Clinton Foundation. Somehow, this didn't compete well with Trumps threatening innuendos to Clinton.  

    About Wikileaks: does Julian Assange want Trump to win? I realize he has every reason to despise Hilary Clinton, (and probably more than I know about) but surely he wouldn't endanger the world by putting Trump in office, . My question is why isn't Wikileaks or Anonymous getting dirt on Trump? It would be damaging to Wikileaks integrity if it's now being used as Assange's instrument of revenge.

    And we should also ask: has Trump made a deal with Assange? He certainly seems to have an understanding with Putin.

Fingers crossed.

The weather here in St. Louis is cold and rainy. Just miserable. It's just the sort of weather that will swing a midterm election to the Republicans. I went to vote this morning. I aggravated my ankle again over the weekend while gargoyle watching (see my personal blog Life After Shocks). So, I had to walk eight blocks to get to the poling station, a community center. Fortunately, I got to do a little shopping for necessities while I was there.

My state, Missouri, will have very limited impact on the nationwide results. We have neither the governor nor a senator in a race. For most other states, however, if there is one midterm election Democrats need to vote in, it's this one. If the senate turns Republican, as the odds are saying it will, we might anticipate a crisis. Also, if they capture the senate after what they've done, and haven't done, since 2012, truly the connections among the voting booth, morality and justice have been cut.

The Republicans now can't win the popular vote, and their strategy for holding on to power is to selectively suppress the vote and gerrymander. The conservative majority on the SCOTUS has given its approval to both. Apparently, SCOTUS conservatives think of the Gilded Age and Jim Crow not only as the good ol' days, but as exactly what the Founders had in mind. As a result, perhaps seven million people have been disenfranchised this election. If that doesn't make Democratic voters angry enough to show up at the polls, then the Democrats are truly a party of losers. Fact is, reversing all the damage will only get harder in subsequent elections.

At least this morning I saw some sign that voters are taking this election seriously. The turnout looked quite good despite the rain. There was actually a line. The number of votes tallied in the paper machine read 82, and there's was probably an equal amount of electronic votes.

So, I'm cautiously optimistic that the Democrats might retain the senate, and get the majority of governors. I'll see after my writers' meeting tonight.