Thanksgiving...

As we head into the Thanksgiving holiday, I want to encourage all of us to be thankful that we live in this great country.  In spite of the obvious difficulty of the times, it is still the best place to be in this dangerous world we live in.  As long as we hold tight to our American ideals and weather the remaining time with leadership that seems to be only concerned with the success of selfish transactions, we will emerge from this period intact.  Our rehabilitation will be a challenge: to persuade the rest of the world that we in fact are the model for human rights, truth, honesty and the rule of law.  But there are enough of us in the end who will show the world a better way to live.  Resistance Strong!

The blush of victory from the Midterm elections is fading, and the magnitude of the job ahead is now replacing the elation of November 9^th with the realization that much work needs to be done.  We have had a Congress that has done very little constructive during the past two years or longer actually.  And with the Republicans having all the power over the recent past, the Democrats have been stymied in any effort to effect change or provide oversight of the Executive branch.

With the arrival of so many highly motivated freshman with a mandate from the voters to really try to do something constructive for the average citizen, the energy is palpable.  This new energy comes from campaigning to actually do work for the constituency the candidates represent…what a concept!  The House will now have the power to move legislation—healthcare, taxes, infrastructure, budget, etc.

The House will also have the power to investigate and to provide a check on the President.  Let’s hope they do what needs to be done, not out of spite, but out of a sense of responsibility to the people.  Revenge is not productive for the nation, and that must be our first priority—to heal the nation and try to find common ground with those on the Republican side that want to make progress on issues.  There will be many Republicans who still want to investigate Hillary Clinton because they are crazed and unhinged.  We must ignore them and work hard to marginalize those whose motives are still bent on trying to ‘lock her up’.

There are two additional important arenas that I think the Democrats must focus on right away: voter suppression and getting some answers on the Russian interference with our elections.

It became clear that our country has suffered a true cancer on our democracy in the form of depriving people the right to vote.  There have been systematic and persistent efforts for a very long time to deny minorities and economically depressed Democratic voters this guarantee provided by the Constitution.  It is laughable that one of our two largest political parties has been doing all it can to deny people that it arbitrarily decides are bothersome the right to vote.  In this past election we have witnessed unabashedly naked efforts in North Dakota, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin to legislate voter suppression at the state and local level.  Local election boards create insurmountable obstacles for poor people, black people, native Americans, Latinos, and other minorities in the form of questionable rules and regulations for registration.  Polling places have been moved by these local bureaus to make it harder to vote; hours for registration and voting have been made shorter to prevent people who are working two and three jobs to make it to the polls or the registration office. 

In Georgia, the Secretary of State, who coincidentally was running for Governor had the power to invalidate registrations arbitrarily for ‘signature irregularities’, minor accidental changes in registration information like a missing middle initial or the address designation spelled out as Road not being acceptable because it needed to be Rd. instead.  Over the past 3 years he has invalidated over 600,000 voter registrations!  Insanity!

In North Dakota, the Republican State legislature purposely passed a law requiring citizens to have a street address, knowing full well that Native Americans on reservations don’t have street addresses. 

These kinds of actions have been in the Republican play-book for decades.  Along with Republican legislatures’ efforts to gerrymander districts to isolate minority populations and create districts that favor election of their party’s candidates, these kinds of restrictions have over time necessitated the opposition party winning a contest by an average of more than 9% more votes than the Republican candidate just to be even in the race.  That is not fair, and it is not what the definition of a democracy is.

The new House must take a leading role in creating legislation that abolishes those practices.  But more than that, local entities and citizen’s groups must take the lead in stopping this practice.  We have two years until the next national election and the chance to return sanity to our government, and we must try to fix this inequity now and continue to fight this threat to democracy relentlessly. 

The corollary to this pox on our election process is the inadequacy of our voting technology.  I am a citizen of Florida, and what happened in Florida in Broward, Dade and Palm Beach counties is a disgrace.  Florida is a battleground state, and in all the elections since 2000 we have suffered from hanging chads, badly designed ballots, and voting machines that are old and breaking down.  No excuse.  With all the money spent on ridiculousness, we must find the funds and stamina to change our technology to make it fit the 21^st Century.  You can be sure that the Republicans and Donald Trump in 2020 will be screaming ‘election fraud’ if the election is anywhere close.  We must foreclose that option for them over the next 2 years.  That means that we as citizens must push our state legislators to take action to upgrade voting machines and mechanisms, streamline registration and open our polls long enough to eliminate long lines and unnecessary hardship in getting to the polls.  Unless we can have free and fair elections and the opportunity for every citizen’s vote to be counted, we are fooling ourselves into believing we are living in a democracy.

The other area of great concern is our security with regard to our elections being threatened by outside/foreign entities.  The Russian hacking of our elections is intolerable.  We must first get to the bottom of what happened in 2016, which means continued investigation to confirm or refute the charge that Trump’s campaign colluded and conspired with the Russian government.  If Trump was behind it, he needs to be impeached as a traitor; and if he did not collude or conspire with the Russians then the matter needs to be closed.  The Mueller investigation must come to a conclusion, and for goodness sake, make it happen sooner rather than later!

We must also significantly increase or financing of efforts to counter the kind of Russian interference we experienced in the lead-up to the 2016 election, and create and deploy effective counter measures and punishment if they continue to try to influence our electoral process.

These will not be an easy two years.  You can expect the Republicans to oppose any threat to their agenda with responses that are in line with the negativity and abandonment of humanity we have witnessed since Trump was elected.  They will continue to defend the indefensible, and we must simply be steadfast in our effort to reconstruct a civil society based on integrity and the rule of law.

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Majority Rules!

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We have spent the last two years enduring all manner of insult to our democratic society.  With the election of Donald Trump, an era of autocracy in the United States began.  The hints of its arrival have been foreshadowed for the past twenty years by movements like the Tea Party, the Alt Right and now the Freedom Caucus.  But then on January 20, 2017 the full measure of this new modality of our government actually began.

As Americans, we have been raised on the notion that whatever the result of an election, we must abide by the concept that the electorate has spoken and is entitled to have its way by virtue of a voter mandate.  And so with the arrival of the Trump Administration we were told that the era of “American Carnage” was finally over.  What we didn’t realize is that the era of “American Carnage” was just beginning.

Starting on that dark January day we watched as our new Chief Executive set about methodically dismantling the levers of government that over the past 240 years had delivered a society that certainly has plenty of flaws, but has given all of us a standard of living that is the envy of the entire world.

Those first actions were a harbinger of the chaos that would soon envelop us: the Muslim ban, the escalating prejudice against minorities, the effort to instill fear in our populace concerning the ‘other’, the constant lying, the appointment of corrupt executives to the President’s cabinet, etc.

So, here we are two years after that with a government that is purposefully understaffed in almost every realm; a sinister strategy to undermine our law enforcement structure and corrupt the rule of law; the unbridled effort to undermine the Mueller investigation,; the abdication of Constitutional oversight responsibility by the Congress; the reversal of practically every regulation promulgated over the past 50 years to clean up our environment; the ominous rise of ‘nationalism’ and hate related crimes; the rise of pernicious racism; the campaign to paint the press as the ‘enemy of the people’; the creation of new tax cuts that do nothing for the average citizen except add over a trillion dollars to the national debt; the poisonous destruction of the fabric of who we are as a country.

The results of the midterm elections have shined a light on what has evolved, and have made a start at revealing all the bad things that have resulted from this new Trumpian era.  But that does not mean we are out of the woods….just look at what has happened in the few short days since the election:  Trump continues to threaten a warlike stance against the new Democratic majority in Congress.  (He is threatening to go to war with his own government!)  His methodology of distracting and creating unnecessary crises continues with the ‘threat of the caravan’ from Mexico.(Have you heard anything about this "threat" since the election?)  His policy of voter suppression is expressed in his and his sycophant's statements and actions about the elections in Arizona, Georgia and Florida.  He is purposefully sowing the seeds of doubt in voter's trust of the integrity of the election process.  You can be sure that he will double down on that effort in advance of his attempt at re-election in two years. And most recently, his appointment of Matthew Whitaker as acting Attorney General is wrong and perhaps unconstitutional.

Considering all of the above, the question arises: Why is it so difficult to reign in Trump and his black-hearted legions?  One would think that the majority of Americans would have more power in containing this malignancy.  It is a constant struggle to oppose his endless effort to fulfill some sort of personal mission he has to make this country his empire, with himself as king, and poison our relationships with all our allies in the world.

Faster action is stubbornly opposed by forces that do not relate to an understanding of society as the majority of us know it.  The minority is still ruling the country!  And that is the fallacy in our democracy.  It is true that the rights of the minority should be protected in our country, but that doesn't mean that the minority should rule when they have not actually obtained a voter mandate.
A democracy is supposed to be guided by the majority.  But over the past 30 years there has been an effort by the Republicans to undermine that basic concept.  From voter suppression to gerrymandering to corrupt special interest money financing politics, the will of the majority has been consistently thwarted.  The Republicans claim majority, but the reality of their actual majority is a lie.

So, to right the ship, we must turn the boat, however it is the proverbial battleship that cannot turn on a dime.  It IS turning back in the right direction, but we can hardly see the change.  We have to be committed to hold the wheel firmly in the right direction.  Our vigilance will, over time, return us to a more humane and less chaotic society.

It is a painfully slow process to fix this mess, and we will still suffer mightily during the next two years, as we fight this sickness infecting our country.  I hope we all learned a lesson about vigilance and the preciousness of our democracy.  One election does not a victory make, but at least we are starting our own rehabilitation.

What can each of us do to persevere in the face of the difficult two remaining years of Trump’s presidency?  We can try to hold back our passion and rage at each indignity Trump hurls at anything having to do with truth.  We must simply understand that he is who he is, and will be that way until the bitter end.  We must focus on the future and what we will need to do to fix the damage after he is gone.  That’s why the recent opposition campaign focused on health care and infrastructure was more successful than Trump’s focus on fear and dangerous immigrants. I think our citizenry implicitly understands this.

Our challenge is to relax about the fact that he is unchangeable.  We must continue to counter each abuse he hurls with a ‘wall’ of truth and integrity.  We can only oppose each outrage with steadfast belief, and the action available to each of us to support the rule of law and speak out for what we know is right and true.

We have what it takes to win the long game.  We must all keep the faith.  In the end, majority rules.

                                                                   Majority Rules!

Joy and/or Relief

Well, I guess we are all breathing a bit easier this morning after the Democrat’s capture of the House of Representatives.  We finally have some leverage to try to re-balance our governmental machine.  We can now re-establish our Constitutional controls over the abuse of power by the Executive branch. 

But this change is only the beginning of this marathon. It is certainly a major victory to have overcome the 9% popular vote edge created by Republican gerrymandering.  The result: the arrival on the scene of over 100 women and younger representatives.  There was also the turnover of at least 7 governorships to Democrats.  There is now a more balanced division of Statehouses between Democrats and Republicans.  This is important because in 2020 there will be a new census and revision of gerrymandered district boundaries for voting.  And with new Democratic strength, the effort to change the gerrymandering will show positive results.  Hopefully we will see the retreat of crazy district borders that favor Republican victory when even the popular vote is in the Democrat’s favor.  In fact there were ballot initiatives passed in Michigan, Colorado, Utah, Missouri approving redistricting controlled by the citizens and not the statehouses.

The Democratic majority in the House will now be able to propose legislation to try to move initiatives forward that will benefit the average working middle class family, including a restructuring of Obamacare to insure protection for people with pre-existing medical conditions; infrastructure initiatives; even a workable immigration policy.  None of these issues were approached positively over the past two years.  And if they are met with obstructionism by Republicans, then those actions will be evidence supporting renewed voter approval for additional Democratic victories in 2020.

Additionally, the House will now exercise its subpoena power to investigate corruption, specifically from Cabinet appointments that abused their power and position in so many egregious ways for the past two years.  And most importantly, they will now be able to provide oversight and investigation into the actions of Donald Trump.  Perhaps we will now be able to discover who has financed him all these years, as his tax returns become the target of investigative subpoenas.  Also, it is now unlikely that the Mueller investigation will be aborted by an uncontrolled Executive branch.  Re-establishment of checks and balances will hopefully diminish the abuse of power with regard to Trump attempting to discredit the Justice Department and the instruments of national security, the FBI and the CIA.

Also, the Senate elections in 2020 will be much more favorable for Democratic seat pickups than were possible in 2018.  In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the worst Republican senators decide to retire before that election to avoid them having to serve in a minority position after 2020—think Mitch McConnell, who certainly wouldn’t relish being a minority leader after the being the majority leader for the last 8 years.  He would probably rather leave than suffer the indignity of having his arbitrary actions during his tenure be wholly reversed.  Maybe we will get lucky and people like Chuck Grassley and Orin Hatch will also pass into history.

I would like to congratulate the voting electorate in California District #50 and New York District #27 for showing how ignorant and stupid they are in re-electing two men who have been indicted for crimes, Duncan Hunter and Chris Collins!  Those voters deserve the representation they will be getting—perhaps from their chosen representatives while incarcerated.    Imagine parents trying to explain to their children why they voted for people who were indicted for criminal behavior.  God bless family values!  Perhaps those parents will say, "Yeah kids, don’t do any research on the candidates; just vote for people because they are pretty and say they are innocent."  

Let’s not forget the House’s greatest Republican white supremacist disgrace—Steve King—re-elected in spite of his anti-semitic and anti-immigrant rants.  Good going you voters in Iowa’s district #4!  As my mother would say, “He’s not from the ‘finest!’”  What do you think King meant by suggesting that two female Supreme Court justices should disappear and ‘elope’ to Cuba?

There were disappointments, to be sure, especially in Florida, Georgia and Texas.  But those races invigorated a somnolent voter base and introduced some new energetic personalities to the Democratic scene.  It also exposed the naked voter suppression being foisted upon the citizens by the Republican candidates.  

There were also some really positive moves against some negative people.  Scott Walker was defeated in Wisconsin.  Walker was anti-union and anti-healthcare initiatives.  He lied to his constituents that he favored protecting people with pre-existing medical conditions while he signed a lawsuit trying to do away with that protection.  Hypocrisy is sometimes so unabashed!  A bad governor was rejected in his re-election campaign in Maine in favor of a Democratic woman.  Darryl Issa is gone, and so is Paul Ryan.  No loss there for sure.

So, on balance, there is much to be thankful for in the results of this midterm election.  The slide toward autocracy has been blunted.  There is now a true opposition party in the mix.  Our two years of hog-tied impotence are finally over.

Let’s hope that the Democrats are judicious in their pursuit of justice and successful in bringing smart legislation to bear.  There is much work to be done, but now, at last, there is a repository of positive energy and action that we hope will re-invigorate our American ideals and spur progress on a whole host of issues too long ignored by the current administration and Congress.