Post-Election Fears

Each time Barack Obama was elected president, gun and ammo sales went through the roof. Gun nuts were afraid that the government was going to come and get their guns. Obama never advocated taking guns away, he only proposed rigorous background checks and making it harder to obtain military grade weapons.

Of course, there were no confiscations. It was all a huge lie, baseless fears stoked by paranoid conspiracy theorists, who incidentally owned stock in weapons manufacturers, whose stock prices went up. But when Trump was elected gun stocks dropped:

While industries like construction, biotech and private prisons saw their stocks rise on Wednesday, companies like Smith & Wesson and Sturm Ruger & Co. fell sharply, dropping by 15% and 16%, respectively.

Trump's election has stoked different fears, causing people to rush out and buy a different product: long-term birth control. IUDs can prevent pregnancy for up to 12 years, while hormonal implants work for three to six years -- hopefully long enough to survive the Trump administration.

Unlike the irrational paranoid fear gun nuts felt, the fear these women feel is totally justified.

Whereas Obama never proposed gun confiscation, Trump has promised to eliminate the birth control mandate for insurance policies. He has promised to repeal Obamacare, which will eliminate health care for millions of Americans, including women of child-bearing age who can't afford to be pregnant without health care.

Trump has promised to eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood, which provides birth control, prenatal care, abortions and women's health care.

Trump has promised to appoint Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade and allow states to ban abortion. This allowed many Catholics and evangelicals held their noses and vote for the thrice-divorced pussy-grabber.

Trump has said that women should be punished for having an abortion. He unconvincingly walked that back after this aides told him he wasn't supposed to actually say out loud the truly disgusting things that conservatives believe.

Trump has promised to deny women access to birth control, health care, and abortion. So of course they fear that they will get pregnant during next two or four years that Republicans hold the presidency and Congress.

Does Trump's presidency mean it's open season on women?

But darker fears may also be at work. Trump's candidacy has exposed a lot of sexism and outright misogyny, which Trump voters tacitly or explicitly condoned. When Trump was caught bragging about sexually assaulting women, his supporters defended him. They said that Trump was just lying to impress Billy Bush, or they denied such assaults are criminal, or said they wanted to grab pussies themselves.

Are women afraid that a Trump presidency will start an all-out assault on women by dickheads who want to emulate the president-elect?

That's probably a paranoid and irrational fear. But unlike the unreasonable fear of government gun confiscation that never happened during the Obama administration, the fact is that thousands of women are sexually assaulted and raped every single year.

And there's a disturbing trend in the court system to let rich white rapists off with a slap on the wrist (here are more).

So, all you gun nuts out there: your confiscation fears were all paranoid fantasies. But women's fears of getting assaulted, raped and pregnant in a country run by a sexual predator are all too real and ever-present.

What Wave?

I've been reading a lot today about the Trump wave and Trump's America and how the disaffected white man came out to finally vote for the first time. What a bunch of nonsense.

A key thing to remember in all of this is that Hillary and the Democrats blew it...Donald Trump did not win it. With the popular vote still coming in, we have Hillary at 60.1 million and Trump at 59.8 million. John McCain got 59.9 million in 2008 when enthusiasm for Republicans was at an all time low. Romney got 60.1 at a time when Barack Obama's approval rating was below 50 percent.

My point is that Trump didn't awaken droves of voters that have been pissed off at the elites. Hillary FAILED to awaken those voters and bring them to her side. She needed the same levels that the president had (69.4 and 65.9, respectively). Trump's "enthusiastic" voters are still less than McCain's unenthusiastic voters. That says FAIL on the part of Democrats to put up a candidate to beat a shrinking party.

And that's what they should be focusing on for the next four years. Who is out there who is young and can speak to a broad coalition (heavy on the younger side) as Barack Obama did? I've Monday morning quarterbacked the idea that Bernie Sanders could have beat Trump as many of my liberal friends have told me. He probably would have won Michigan and Pennsylvania. But the south? Doubtful. People of color? Much less than Hillary.

What really should have happened is this....Barack Obama doesn't run in 2008 and Hillary wins easily at a time when the Dems had a lock on the race. She takes out bin Laden and likely does a better job than the president did with Congress. Maybe she wins a second term, maybe not. With no Obama, Trump never really comes on the scene so he's not a factor in 2016. In comes the skinny guy with the funny sounding name and we elect our first black president this year when people are even more hungry for change...

A Loss For The Ages

Last night's election stunned the nation. Many are finding themselves asking how it could happen. The answers are obvious.

Barack Obama got 69 million votes in 2008 and 67 million votes in 2012. Hillary Clinton got 59 million in 2016. That says it all right there. If you are a Democrat running for president, you need 65 million votes to win because the GOP will always get around 60 million (McCain got 59 million in 2008 and Romney got 62 million in 2012). As Nikto mentioned in the previous post, Trump lost the popular vote. He will get at most 310 electoral votes (Arizona, Michigan and New Hampshire aren't official yet). He won states like Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by very small margins.

What this all tells me that is that the Democrats completely failed to get out the vote. There as no invisible white vote. The Republicans turned out and voted. Period. People were not excited about Hillary Clinton like they were about Barack Obama. She just didn't excite that coalition that can get Democrats elected president. She was too much of an undesirable candidate. The Democrats also failed to read the electorate and realize that this really was a change election. Bernie Sanders might have done better. Even a younger and hipper progressive candidate would have seemed a better fit with taking the baton from Barack Obama.

I have to admit that I'm really at a loss for words. Abraham Lincoln...FDR...JFK...Ronald Reagan....and Donald Trump? Really??!!

If his past behavior is any indication, our country is going to be run like a banana republic with the world looking upon us in disdain and pity. All of the apocalypse dreamin' by the alt right is finally going to come true...except for real this time.

I hope we can all live with it.

Don't Pack Your Bags for Canada Just Yet

There are reports that the Canadian immigration website went down last night due to excessive volume. Maybe it was Americans looking to flee to Canada, or maybe it was Trump's Russian hacking team performing yet another DDoS attack.  In any case, it's much too early to start thinking of moving to Canada.

Remember, in 2004 George Bush won reelection and Republicans took the House and Senate. That only lasted two years: they lost the Senate in 2006 and the House in 2008 when Barack Obama was elected. The same thing happened again when Republicans took the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014.

Republicans will try to spin the 2016 presidential election as some kind of mandate for Trump and their party. This is far from the truth: Trump lost the popular vote by more than 200,000, receiving only nine more than the 270 electoral votes required. Republicans lost seats in Congress: Democrats gained one seat in the Senate and at least five in the House, though Republicans do still retain control.

Democrats made gains in the Congress despite highly gerrymandered congressional districts, fielding a highly unpopular presidential candidate, and a never-ending drum beat of voter suppression and intimidation.

Trump won by playing the race, fear, and man cards against Hillary's diversity, progress and woman cards. Groups that had come out strongly in support of Obama (younger and minority voters) stayed home this time around, either because Republican manipulations of the system stopped them, swallowed the groundless Benghazi, email and foundation nonsense, or they just weren't into Clinton. Some of them may have swallowed Trump's "What have you got to lose?" line.

If Trump actually carries out all the promises he's made, people will quickly find out what they've got to lose. He has threatened hundreds of millions of Americans:

• Blacks: stop and frisk street harassment by cops
• Latinos: deportation of millions of illegal immigrants, which will inevitably mean harassment of millions of legal residents
• The press: threatening to sue anyone who writes anything bad about him (his supporters also threatened to string them up)
• Women: making abortion even harder to get and punishing women who get one
• Gays: Trump didn't talk about it much, but Republicans have vowed to overturn the Supreme Court gay marriage decision, and with Trump appointing Scalia's replacement they will almost certainly try to relitigate gay marriage
• College students: Sanders' and Clinton's college tuition proposals will go nowhere in the Trump administration
• Anyone with a pre-existing medical condition: Trump's plan to repeal Obamacare will allow insurance companies to reject anyone for any reason, and charge those they do enroll obscenely high premiums. Plus there won't be any premium subsidies from the government, just tax deductions -- which only the rich can use.
• Single parent households: Trump's plan will increase their taxes.

If Trump doesn't carry out those threats, he will turn out to be just another lying politician who made a bunch of promises he never intended to carry through on. He would face a huge backlash from the noisy minority of anti-establishment people who elected him. They would likely stay home in 2018, just like the people who were disappointed by Obama stayed home in 2010 and 2014.

Trump may even face mutiny from within the Republican Party if he tries to exact revenge on all the Republicans who denounced him after his pussy-bragging went public.

What this all means is that Republican electoral gains in this election will probably be short-lived.

The real question is how much damage will Trump and the Republicans do to the country in the meanwhile. Will they pack the Supreme Court with political yes-men? Will they destroy the tax system, the education system, the environment, the economy, the balance of trade, and relations with our closest foreign allies? Will they disenfranchise even more voters with pernicious laws to suppress Democratic and minority voters as they desperately cling to dwindling numbers and fading power?

Will the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, militias and alt-right nutjobs that Trump dredged out of the shadows be emboldened and harass more Latinos, murder more Muslims, burn more black churches, occupy more government facilities, and blow up more federal buildings?

If you pack up and go to Canada, yes they will. If you stay here and fight -- and vote -- the people who elected Trump will be dying off in greater and greater numbers in the next four, eight, sixteen years. They realize this, which means they're only going to get more vicious and desperate.

Sadly, the next few years promise to be very ugly. But time is not on their side.

The 2016 Election Was Decided in 2010

Before the election Donald Trump was saying that the election was rigged. It was, but not the way he meant it.

It was rigged by Republican legislatures elected in the off-year elections of 2010 and 2014. In the 2010 election Republicans won control of many state legislatures, such as Wisconsin. First they gerrymandered legislative districts to ensure Republican congressional majorities. Then they began passing laws to suppress voter turnout by Democrats and minorities.

This was a project that had long been in the works. Recognizing demographic trends, Republicans started their voter suppression campaign during the Bush administration, when Alberto Gonzalez fired US attorneys who wouldn't play ball.

It wasn't enough to prevent Obama's re-election in 2012, but over the next four years, with the help of the Supreme Court's neutering of the Voting Rights Act, they got their voter suppression machine into high gear in time for the 2016 election. Trump won several states by the thinnest of margins, entirely due to changes in election laws enacted by Republicans to prevent their enemies (and that's how they think of Democrats and minorities) from voting.

I can't say that I predicted this election's outcome, but I have always disputed the nonsensical myth that Democrats can't lose a presidential election because of shifting demographics. "The numbers," we were told, make it impossible for a Republican to win the presidency.

The problem with this is two-fold: the first is Republican voter suppression of Democrats and minorities, and the second is that much of the Democratic voter base is less experienced, less committed and less reliable than the elderly white people who have for centuries gamed the system to get what they want. For example, as contradictory and crazy as it seems, it looks like about a third of Latinos voted for Trump.

I have also disputed the value of polls in predicting election outcomes in recent years. Once upon a time they might have worked, but they are worthless now. In this age of endless telephone scams, no one with a brain answers the phone without caller ID. And no one responds to a telephone poll unless they're hopelessly naive and altruistic, or they're trying to game it.

Poll respondents are self-selecting. Selfish and self-centered people won't bother to waste their time on a poll. That means Trump voters were not adequately represented in the final tallies, just as his campaign claimed.

Even though Trump won the electoral college, it appears that Clinton won the popular vote: 59,163,675 votes nationally, to Trump's 59,027,971 — a margin of 135,704.

Trump will be the second president in 16 years to be elected by a minority of the voters. This is possible because of the electoral college: small rural states, which are more Republican, get more electoral votes per capita than large urban states, which are more Democratic. Republicans now control the presidency, the Senate and the House with comfortable margins.

The last time we gave Republicans this much control we got the World Trade Center Attack, the Iraq War, tens of thousands of dead and wounded Americans, handouts to big Pharma, Hurricane Katrina, warrantless wiretapping, the Great Recession and the Wall Street Bailout. Plus an endless litany of scandal after scandal: Bush ignoring the intel on Al Qaeda, his lies on WMDs, Jack Abramoff, Hurricane Katrina, the creation of ISIS by Bush's blunders in Iraq, Alberto Gonzales' resignation when the voter suppression firings were uncovered, the missing emails from Karl Rove's secret account (odd how no Republican ever mentioned that during this entire election cycle). And on and on.

By contrast, the last time we gave Democrats this much control we got health care for everyone.

George Bush's daddy issues and his lack of attention to detail got us into endless war in the Middle East. But Donald Trump makes Bush look like Einstein: Trump knows nothing about foreign policy, military doctrine, law, governance, or the economy.

Trump has a huge rat's nest of financial conflicts of interest. Every move he makes will immediately bring into question whether it's for the good of the country, or to feather Donald Trump's gilded nest.

Worse, Trump has a whole host of psychological problems: racism, misogyny, narcissism, greed, an inability to concentrate for more than a few minutes, an endless thirst for vengeance, and a constant need for attention and showing off. And then there's his incipient Alzheimer's.

Given the horde of sycophants and lackeys Trump has surrounded himself with, his administration is shaping up to be the most incompetent and corrupt in living memory.

Final Election Map

After months of back and forth, we have finally arrived on the eve of the election. Here is my final map.

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

The early voting in North Carolina, Florida and Nevada (especially Hispanic voter turnout) will push Hillary over the top.

How to Shorten the Wait for Voting

There have been numerous stories in recent days about terribly long lines for early voting, like this one in LA County:

Thousands of Angelenos braved long lines and, in some cases, waited up to four hours to take advantage of early voting this weekend at half a dozen polling stations set up around Los Angeles County.

From West Covina to Culver City, voters woke up before sunrise for a chance to be the first in line to cast their ballots and beat the inevitable crowds ahead of Tuesday’s general election.

We've had the same thing in our suburban Minneapolis city: both Saturday and today the line was an hour and a half long at the polling place where my wife works as an election judge. On the the Monday before the election proper, city officials say that a third of registered voters have already cast their ballots.

People are saying things like, "I have never seen such long lines." This should not be a surprise: only a few polling places are open for early voting compared to election day.

In LA County it's six polling stations for an area with 10 million residents. In our city, there are 22 polling places on election day, but only one for early voting.

In these last several presidential elections there have been many complaints about long lines. In some locales that's because election officials underestimate turnout, or close polling stations or supply an insufficient number of ballots in minority areas to intentionally suppress the vote.

But that's not always the case: in areas like ours people show up at polling places an hour early, then complain about having to stand in line for hours as the huge crush of voters clears. Then, during the middle of the day, the polling places are empty.

One of the biggest problems people experience voting is that don't know where their polling place is: they try to vote at a location near their work, or the polling place they see just down the street from their house. Lots of people show up at a polling station only to find that they're in the wrong place. This wastes a lot of time.

Why are polling places so picky? Ballots are extremely specific: if you go to the wrong polling station, they won't have the ballot for your place of residence. Ballots contain races ranging from president of the United States, US senate, US House, governor, state senate, state house, county, metropolitan regional authorities than span multiple cities and counties, city council, court of appeals, district court, watershed district, park board, school board, county and municipal clerks and even dog catcher. All these different jurisdictions have different boundaries, which means the ballot for the house across the street from you may well have several different set of races on it.

So, how do you minimize the time it takes to vote?

In many locales you can vote absentee without any lines at all. Apply for an absentee ballot before the deadline, then mail it at least a week before election day. If you don't want to use the mail, in many locales you can fill out your absentee ballot and turn it in at an early voting polling station to be tallied immediately without having to wait in line.

In Oregon all voting is done by mail.

Voting by mail has its attractions, but it is vulnerable to fraud, both official and unofficial. Mail-in ballots can be intercepted by third parties, filled in by the wrong people, and altered by unscrupulous election judges who open them (which has happened this election cycle).

If you vote in person, the first and most important thing to do is go to the right polling place. Polling stations aren't permanent. They can change for all sorts of reasons: shifting demographics, security concerns about holding elections in schools, churches that host elections can close or have scheduling conflicts, etc.

Like any bar, restaurant, or movie theater, demand for voting varies during the day. The easiest way to minimize your wait is to vote on election day at your local polling place during an off time. Around here, early morning is always busiest because so many people vote before work. Lines are usually shortest in early afternoon here, but this may vary in areas with different demographics. Taking a late lunch with a stop to vote may be your best bet.

When you vote this year, ask the election judge what their deadest time of the day is, and come in at that time the next time you vote. 

In most places, voting after work is usually less of a wait because most polling stations are open till 8 PM and people get off work at all different times. They arrive at polling stations in a staggered fashion during late afternoon and early evening than in the morning, when everyone shows at once when the polls open.

Going forward, there are many things that should be done to make voting easier.

Employers are supposed to accommodate workers' right to vote, but it never seems to work out. Businesses should be required to allow workers to vote at whatever time works out best for the employee.

Making election day a national holiday would theoretically make things easier, but that seems unlikely. People would try to use the election holiday for some other purpose, like a four-day weekend. Or they'd use it as a day to get chores done, which would mean they'd all try to vote early in the morning to free up time for something else, replicating the problem we currently have.

There are things that we should not do as well. We should not vote on the Internet, or use computers to record votes. With all the computer hacking going on, it's clear that computers cannot be trusted.

If you use a computer to enter your vote, there is no guarantee that it will be counted properly: a paper "audit trail" is meaningless. People need to be able to look at a ballot and count the votes by hand to guarantee an accurate tally is produced.

Republican-controlled states like Wisconsin have placed restrictions on early voting in order to suppress minority and Democratic turnout. Courts have struck down many of these laws, but the patchwork of local differences means all Americans aren't being treated equally under the law.

National standards should be established for voting: minimum numbers should be set for opening hours, weekend hours, days of early voting, polling stations per capita, travel distance, etc. In this new voting rights act states should also be able to exceed these minimums if they wish to make it easier for their citizens to vote.

Historically, the elderly are the most reliable voters: they have a sense of duty and have little else to do with their time. It should be just as easy for voters of all ages and backgrounds to carry out this most basic duty of democracy.

Comey Clears Clinton. Again

As expected, the tempest that FBI Director James Comey created in the campaign teapot a week ago Friday turned out to be nothing:

“Based on our review, we have not changed our conclusion that we expressed in July with respect to Secretary Clinton,” Mr. Comey wrote in a letter to the leaders of several congressional committees. He said agents had reviewed all communications to and from Mrs. Clinton in the new trove when she was secretary of state.

Emails from Huma Abedin's account on the Clinton email server were found on Anthony Weiner's laptop a few weeks ago during an unrelated investigation of Weiner's sexting scandal. Individuals within the FBI started leaking the existence of these emails to people in the Trump campaign (Rudy Giuliani and Jim Kallstrom), prompting Comey to write a letter to Congress informing them of the their existence.

In July Comey announced that, while Clinton had violated State Department rules by having her own email server, she had broken no laws. He needlessly got himself into hot water by editorializing about the investigation, calling Clinton "extremely careless."

Then, nine days ago, Comey himself violated Justice Department rules by releasing information about an ongoing investigation during an election.

The problem is that voting is already under way. How many thousands of votes did Clinton lose when Comey lent a fleeting phony air of legitimacy to the Trump campaign's portrayal of this new email revelation as somehow disqualifying?

It has become clear that certain elements in the New York FBI office are conspiring with Rudy Giuliani and the Trump campaign. In particular, the agents investigating the Clinton Foundation are buddy-buddy with Jim Kallstrom and Rudy Giuliani. They have used FBI resources to wage a political war against the Clintons.

The agents involved appear to be the prime Trump demographic: conservative, old, divorced white men who dread the possibility of having a female boss.

The next announcement Comey needs to make is about an investigation of the political machinations in the New York office of the FBI. But that can wait until Wednesday, after the election.

Why isn't the FBI investigating a real crime: Melania Trump worked illegally in the United States as a model in 1996. She made about $20,000 before she obtained the proper papers.

Trump's entire campaign has been based on the idea that we have to kick out all the illegal immigrants who do the jobs Americans don't want to -- picking our tomatoes, cleaning our hotel rooms, mopping our floors, cooking our food, roofing our houses, and butchering our meat.

Yet Trump's own wife is guilty of violating these same immigration law, to do a job that is in no way necessary to the economy or the national good, stealing jobs from -- as Trump would say -- beautiful, beautiful American women.

Like, say, Karen MacDougal, the woman that the Wall Street Journal says was paid off by the National Enquirer to keep her affair with Trump quiet.

If Trump is elected, he will have to set an example: his first act upon assuming the presidency must be to deport Melania.

Trump will secretly be overjoyed: he needed an excuse to trade her in for a younger model anyway. Melania has gotta be hitting menopause any day now. Clearly not a 10 anymore.

Dear Americans

Second To Last Electoral Map

As of Saturday evening, this is where the electoral map is at if the election were held today.

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

It looks like Trump is going to win Iowa and Ohio but I think the Hilz will win North Carolina and Florida.

This is a lot closer than Dems would like at this point. Nate Silver has Hillary Clinton at a 2 in 3 chance to win with Trump at a 1 in 3. It's going to depend on turnout and early voting has shown that Clinton has the advantage here.

I'll put up my last map on Monday night.

If Congress was your co-worker....

Specifically, Republicans...

 

Did Trump Use Veteran's Donations to Pay for FBI Leaks on Clinton Emails?

Last week FBI director Comey announced that the FBI had found additional emails from Clinton's email server on Anthony Weiner's laptop. Comey thought he had to do this because of leaks about the FBI investigation.

It looks like Donald Trump gave millions of dollars to a former FBI agent who provided the Trump campaign with inside information from the FBI about the emails on Weiner's laptop.

From Politico:

[Jim Kallstrom, a] former top FBI official who has claimed insight into the bureau’s rank and file's outrage over the handling of an investigation into Hillary Clinton[,] confirmed Thursday that he has been in touch with active agents after denying it in an interview published earlier in the day.

Kallstrom, a Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, is the founder of the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation, which was the beneficiary of the fundraiser Trump held last January instead of attending a GOP primary debate in Iowa. According to the Daily Beast, Kallstrom’s foundation has received at least three major gifts from the Manhattan billionaire, two of which came during the campaign, totaling over $1.3 million.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who Kallstrom told the Daily Beast is "a very good friend" of his, has similarly claimed to have a pipeline of information coming from the FBI's rank and file, offering a similar assessment of its mood to the one Kallstrom has. A week ago, Giuliani teased "a couple of surprises" from the Trump campaign just days before Comey announced that the FBI is examining additional, potentially new evidence related to Clinton's email scandal. He declined to elaborate at the time what those surprises would be, but said they would be "enormously effective."

This brings up a serious question: did Trump pay off Kallstrom with money raised for veterans in exchange for Kallstrom to use his connections at the FBI to get dirt on Clinton?

Making America Great Again

'Vote Trump' painted on black church set ablaze in Mississippi

Nasty Bitches, Delicate Fawns: Sexism, Gay Men, Conservative Religions and Trump

For months the media have been wondering how anyone could possibly support such an unqualified and intemperate candidate as Donald Trump. Are his vocal supporters worried about the economy? (They are, but they're mostly not personally hurting). Are they being left behind by the federal government? (No, they typically receive massive government subsidies of one sort or another). Are they authoritarians? (Some are, but some are libertarians.) Are they racists? (Oh, yeah, a whole lot of them are -- but not all of them.)

In a recent interview Barack Obama touched upon what may the biggest reason: sexism. That's a kind of "Well, duh..." observation, given that Clinton is the first serious female presidential candidate. But it's more than that.

According to a recent study, Trump support is highly correlated with hostility towards women. It turns out there are two kinds of sexism: hostile sexism -- the outright hatred based on the idea that women are inferior, conniving and untrustworthy; and benevolent sexism -- the idea that women are weaker, though morally superior, to men, and must be cherished and protected.

Hostile sexism portrays women as nasty bitches, while benevolent sexism portrays women as delicate fawns. Neither type of sexism is good for women -- or men, no matter how well-intentioned the benevolent sexists might be.

If you look at Trump supporters through this lens, things start making a whole lot more sense. Trump has splintered the Republican Party largely along these lines. When you line them up, it's clear that the woman-haters and -abusers are all in the Trump camp: Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, Roger Ailes, Rush Limbaugh, and so on.

The Republicans who consider women to be fawns have disavowed Trump, or at least condemned his behavior while holding their nose as they vote for him. These include men like Mitt Romney, the Bush men, Norm Coleman, Vin Weber, Jon Huntsman, Ken Mehlman, Glenn Beck, Paul Ryan, etc.

It's most telling in the support Trump enjoys from men who you wouldn't normally consider Republican: Julian Assange of WikiLeaks (who has been accused of rape and is on an anti-woman tear), and Libertarian Peter Thiel (who believes that women should never have gotten the right to vote). 

Assange has been working with Russian hackers to sabotage Clinton's campaign. Russian President Vladimir Putin is another Trump supporter, whose government constantly attacks and undermines women in Russian society. Putin notably threw the women of Pussy Riot in jail for two years for singing a song critical of him in a church.

Thiel is known for cofounding PayPal and his Libertarian fantasy to create island countries (seasteads) in the Pacific Ocean. His other claim to fame was his crusade to destroy Gawker: Thiel secretly financed Hulk Hogan's invasion of privacy lawsuit against the gossip website. Why? Because Gawker outed Thiel as gay. But Thiel's misogyny and homosexuality may be intimately intertwined.

Just as there are two kinds of sexism, there are two ways to be gay: some gay men just happen to like men, while some gay men simply hate women. Milo Yiannopoulos, who has written for the alt-right website Breitbart.com (whose editor is running Trump's campaign), is a notorious misogynist. His hatred of women is, according to the man himself, why he is gay: "I mean, look, I don’t mean to be rude, but most of the reason I went gay is so I didn’t have to deal with nutty broads." (Is it any surprise that only nutty broads would go out with Yiannopoulos?)

Clearly Donald Trump and most of his lackeys like having sex with women. The question is, why do they hate women so much? Maybe it's these men's own weaknesses.

As Trump himself has stated, when he sees a beautiful woman, he can't control himself. That gives women a great deal of power over him. Trump resents that power, so he tries to put them down and minimize their power by bullying, insulting, threatening and assaulting them.

The identical dynamic is at work in the Taliban and Wahhabi Saudi Arabia: they cover women's bodies and keep them locked away because these men simply cannot control their own lusts. Some forms of Christianity and Judaism have the same mindset: women are temptresses so they must be covered and locked up and controlled to prevent them from tempting men.

The obsession with sex is obvious in the most conservative religions, Wahabbi Islam and old Mormonism: they allow men to take multiple wives. As with Donald Trump, it's all about pussy.

Clearly, the problem isn't women: a man like Trump is so weak and morally corrupt that he can't control himself. Instead he blames women for his own weakness.

It's like an alcoholic blaming a liquor store for his drunkenness, or a fat man blaming a restaurant for his weight problem.

Yeah, some women are nasty bitches. Some are delicate fawns. But most are just normal people, who have the same rights and responsibilities as everyone else.

Salman Calls For Focus

GMO Crops Only Increase Corporate Profits

An analysis by the New York Times has found that the GMO (genetically modified organisms) crops have none of the benefits they're supposed to have:

The promise of genetic modification was twofold: By making crops immune to the effects of weedkillers and inherently resistant to many pests, they would grow so robustly that they would become indispensable to feeding the world’s growing population, while also requiring fewer applications of sprayed pesticides.

Twenty years ago, Europe largely rejected genetic modification at the same time the United States and Canada were embracing it. Comparing results on the two continents, using independent data as well as academic and industry research, shows how the technology has fallen short of the promise.

An analysis by The Times using United Nations data showed that the United States and Canada have gained no discernible advantage in yields — food per acre — when measured against Western Europe, a region with comparably modernized agricultural producers like France and Germany. Also, a recent National Academy of Sciences report found that “there was little evidence” that the introduction of genetically modified crops in the United States had led to yield gains beyond those seen in conventional crops. 

Over the last 20 years pesticide use in the United States has fallen by a third, but herbicide spraying has increased by 21% — and herbicides are used in much higher volumes, so we're talking a hell of a lot of Roundup.

By contrast, in France, use of insecticides and fungicides has fallen by a far greater percentage — 65 percent — and herbicide use has decreased as well, by 36 percent.

As the article notes, herbicides and pesticides are toxic by design. Many of them are based on neurotoxins like sarin, a nerve gas developed by the Nazis. These chemicals cause measurable IQ drops in children and have a major role in the catastrophic decline of pollinating insects like honeybees.

Biotech seeds cost North American farmers almost double what normal seeds cost. Farmers also have the added expense of huge quantities of weed killer that's keyed to herbicide-resistant crops. Finally, farmers cannot use seeds from GMO crops in the next year's planting: corporate giants like Monsanto have taken farmers to the Supreme Court to stop them from using a practice from the dawn of agriculture.

In the end, GMOs have not increased North American crop yields above Old Europe's. The only thing that has increased is corporate profits.

The Hypocrisy of Our "Justice" System

After literally years of scandal mongering and a dozen investigations into Benghazi and Hillary Clinton's private email server, Congress and the FBI had to finally give up.

This summer the final Republican investigation found Clinton had done nothing wrong with regard to Benghazi. And FBI director James Comey pronounced the email investigation closed and that no crimes had been committed. But Comey couldn't just leave it there: he insisted on offering his personal opinion that Clinton was careless with her handling of email. 

It was highly questionable for the FBI director to make such a politically loaded statement in the first place, let alone in the middle of an election.

But last Friday Comey dropped a nuclear bomb on the campaign when he announced that emails from Clinton's server appeared on Anthony Weiner's laptop, which the FBI was looking at with regard to allegations that Weiner was sexting an underage girl. He offered no details; was Comey being coy, or was he intentionally muddying the waters as much as possible?

Compare this to the treatment Donald Trump received in the Trump University fraud case. In May Judge Gonzalo Curiel delayed the start of the trial until Nov. 28, weeks after the election, even though the plaintiffs had expected a July date. This saved Trump the monumental embarrassment of having to testify in a fraud trial during the Republican National Convention.

For Curiel's kindness, Trump blasted the judge a month later:

In an interview, Mr. Trump said U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel had “an absolute conflict” in presiding over the litigation given that he was “of Mexican heritage” and a member of a Latino lawyers’ association. Mr. Trump said the background of the judge, who was born in Indiana to Mexican immigrants, was relevant because of his campaign stance against illegal immigration and his pledge to seal the southern U.S. border. “I’m building a wall. It’s an inherent conflict of interest,” Mr. Trump said. 

As for the emails: there are Huma Abedin's emails, not Hillary Clinton's. Abedin used the laptop to connect to the server, so some of Abedin's emails were left on it. Nothing has been said about the content of those emails, or how many were sent by Clinton.

Now it turns out that Comey knew about these emails several weeks ago, but waited until 11 days before the election before telling Congress. Clearly this wasn't that urgent: he waited two or three weeks to tell Congress. He waited exactly long enough to do maximum damage to Clinton's campaign. By the time we find out that there's still nothing to this phony email scandal, it may be after the election.

Comey has been blasted by Democrats and Republicans alike. Among his critics are the chief White House ethics lawyer of the Bush administration from 2005 to 2007, Richard Painter. Painter has filed a complaint against the FBI with the Office of Special Counsel, accusing Comey of violating the Hatch Act.

Painter describes a different email scenario that Comey isn't talking about:

THE F.B.I. is currently investigating the hacking of Americans’ computers by foreign governments. Russia is a prime suspect.

Imagine a possible connection between a candidate for president in the United States and the Russian computer hacking. Imagine the candidate has business dealings in Russia, and has publicly encouraged the Russians to hack the email of his opponent. It would not be surprising for the F.B.I. to include this candidate and his campaign staff in its confidential investigation of Russian computer hacking.

But it would be highly improper, and an abuse of power, for the F.B.I. to conduct such an investigation in the public eye, particularly on the eve of the election. It would be an abuse of power for the director of the F.B.I., absent compelling circumstances, to notify members of Congress that the candidate was under investigation. It would be an abuse of power if F.B.I. agents went so far as to obtain a search warrant and raid the candidate’s office tower, hauling out boxes of documents and computers in front of television cameras.

The F.B.I.’s job is to investigate, not to influence the outcome of an election.

This isn't some fantastical story, it's an exact description of what Donald Trump has done. What Painter doesn't mention is that several of Trump's advisors have close ties to Russian oligarchs, getting paid by Trump and the oligarchs at the same time.

And about the same time the Abedin emails were found on the Weiner laptop, it was learned that one of Trump's advisers has held secret meetings with Kremlin officials.

Yet Comey has not publicly humiliated Trump by commenting on these investigations, or investigations into allegations that Paul Manafort and other Trump cronies are unregistered foreign agents for Ukrainian and Russian politicians trying to manipulate U.S. elections.

Comey is either grossly incompetent or intentionally interfering with the election. Or is he just pissed off that his boss, Loretta Lynch -- who told him not open his big fat mouth, is a woman?

What this incident clearly shows is that Trump's charges of the "system" being rigged against him are completely false. The legal system has come down on Trump's side every single time during this election cycle, while individuals like Comey have abused and misused the system's rules to hurt Clinton again and again.

The irony here is that the first time a woman has a serious shot at winning the presidency, the election is dominated by men's inability to control their lust: from Trump's bragging about pussy-grabbing, to accusations from more than a dozen women that Trump sexually assaulted them, to Trump dredging up decades-old accusations of rape against Bill Clinton, and finally now to Anthony Weiner's obsession with sexting.

Usually the charge against women being president is that they can't control their emotions. But this election makes a far stronger case that men are incapable of controlling their dicks.

The Biggest Villain of the 2016 Election: Laziness

Trump Voter Commits Election Fraud

For years Republicans have been claiming that the country is rife with election fraud as an excuse to place more restrictions on minorities and Democrats to suppress their votes. Now there's a bona fide instance of fraudulent voting. By a Trump supporter.

A woman in Iowa was arrested this week on suspicion of voting twice in the general election, court and police records show.

Terri Lynn Rote, a 55-year-old Des Moines resident, was booked Thursday on a first-degree charge of election misconduct, according to Polk County Jail records. The charge is considered a Class D felony under Iowa state law.

Rote was released Friday after posting $5,000 bond. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for Nov. 7.

The Des Moines Register reported that Rote is a registered Republican who cast two ballots in the general election: an early-voting ballot at the Polk County Election Office and another at a county satellite voting location, according to police records.

Rote hadn’t planned on voting twice but said it was “a spur-of-the-moment thing” when she walked by the satellite voting location, she told The Washington Post in a phone interview Saturday.

“I don’t know what came over me,” Rote said.

She added she has been a supporter of Donald Trump since early in his campaign, after Republican candidate Mike Huckabee dropped out of the primary race.

Rote told Iowa Public Radio that she cast her first ballot for Trump but feared it would be changed to a vote for Hillary Clinton.

“The polls are rigged,” Rote told the radio station.

Leigh Munsil, an editor for the Blaze, noted on Twitter that Rote was the same woman who had caucused for Trump earlier this year.

This kind of fraud is exactly that Trump is implicitly telling his voters to commit. When he says the polls are rigged, he's actually telling his voters to rig the polls. Since Hillary is cheating, the logic goes, Trump supporters have to cheat too. And so they are.

Trump has also told his supporters to "monitor" the polls. This is nothing but a blatant attempt to harass and intimidate minority voters. Trump is asking his supporters to threaten minorities with violence if they show up to exercise their constitutional rights.

The Republican Party of New Mexico is even harassing their own voters, threatening to expose them if they vote for Democrats. The Republicans sent out a mailer that stated, "When the Democrats win the election and you didn't do your part to stop it... Your neighbors will know." Now, how could they know? It's supposed to be a secret ballot. How can the Republican Party know how you voted, unless they commit a crime to find out?

The fact is, over the last four presidential elections there has been a significant amount of manipulation of elections by Republican officials: in 2000 in Jeb Bush's Florida Republican operatives threw a hundred thousand voters off the rolls in coordination with George Bush's Texas. In 2004 Ohio closed polling stations in minority areas, creating huge delays that prevented thousands of people from voting. Bush won those states by the tiniest of margins; there's no question that manipulations by Republican officials threw both those elections to Bush.

The Bush administration fired US attorneys who wouldn't play the voter suppression game at the behest of Karl Rove, who was forced to resign when the scandal was revealed. Voter ID laws were passed explicitly to prevent minorities and Democrats from voting in Texas and Pennsylvania (Republicans in both states acknowledged this publicly). In states like Ohio Republicans gerrymandered Democrats into a few crazy-shaped districts to pack them with 90% Democrats, while creating a large number of districts with only 55-60% Republicans to allow them to win more House seats, even though there are more Democrats in the state.

In the 2012 election Democratic House candidates nationwide got a million more votes than Republicans, but because of gerrymandering Republicans won a substantial majority of House seats. In 2008, before the gerrymandering, Democrats won the majority.

The fact is, in-person voter fraud is vanishingly rare. The vast majority of fraud by voters is committed with absentee ballots. The most common fraud is children or nursing home staff filling out absentee ballots for senile elderly, or parents filling out absentee ballots for children who are away at college. This kind of fraud is favored by rich white people, and voter ID laws do absolutely nothing to prevent it.

The wealthy can commit fraud by voting in multiple jurisdictions: rich New Yorkers like Donald Trump will vote absentee in New York and in person in Florida. Anne Coulter got in hot water a few years back for lying on voter registration forms. Typically, they claim residency in one state to get special tax treatment on their homes (homesteading), but then vote in another jurisdiction. A national voter registration database would fix this (and also the problem with people remaining on voter rolls for years after they move to another state), but for some strange reason Republicans resist this.

So when Trump says that the election is rigged, in one way it's true: Republicans officials have been rigging elections for at least the last 20 years. Since Trump has pissed off so many in the Republican establishment, he's afraid they'll use their clout to make him lose.

Chill Out, Dudes

As the political world whips itself into a tizzy about the letter that James Comey sent to Congress yesterday, I find myself very unmoved by all of this. I can see why Democrats are pissed off but what else was Comey supposed to do? Sit on it until after the election? As I have said all along, James Comey is straight shooter. Republicans are pretty hilarious, though. Now, I guess, Comey is great. Poopy head before, but now awesome!!

Here are the facts based on the letter and what we know as of today. The emails did not come from the Clinton server. They were on a laptop owned by Huma Abedin and used by Anthony Weiner for his weener related activities. The emails did not come from Hillary Clinton. They are related to the still closed investigation. There are only three emails being checked as having classified information. And, most important, the Clinton campaign is already calling for transparency.

We won't get it, of course, because the investigation is ongoing. Many in the political world are saying this will make the race close and it certainly might. I'm going to hold out until next Friday before making any judgments in terms of the polls. Let's remember that a significant number of people in swing states have already voted and Hillary has the favor in this department. I also think that we may have yet another Trump bombshell before election day, whether by his own doing or externally.

Ultimately, though, I don't think it will matter in terms of the election. There are very few undecideds out there. Voters know these candidates and this latest information isn't going to change anyone's mind. Democrats need to chill the fuck out and get the vote out rather than bitch about James Comey. I also don't think it will matter in terms of Hillary Clinton's ability to govern save some earth shattering information in the three emails (which I highly doubt). The first woman being elected president as well as all of the challenges she faces will overshadow the continuing email nonsense.

Could Trump blow it in Texas?

Maybe. I'm inclined to say no but the polls are pretty close.

The Trump Effect

Sadly, I've encountered far too much of this in the past year and a half. Thanks, conservatives, for bringing your bile and mouth foaming out from a blog comments section into the schools that you say are already broken. What a bunch of fucking assholes.

Mea Culpa, Right Wingers?

A Lesson in Linguistics from the Little League Candidate

Much of what Donald Trump says is incoherent and simplistic -- his sentences run on and on, he uses fifth-grade vocabulary, he repeats and contradicts himself endlessly. But the one thing that really made him an object of derision was his use of the word "bigly."

It turns out that Trump isn't saying "bigly." He's trying to say "big league." The problem is that he's pronouncing "big league" incorrectly, which makes people hear it as a different word.

Standard American English has a rule for pronouncing vowels when they appear before a voiced consonant at the end of a word. A voiced consonant is spoken with vibrating vocal cords; an unvoiced consonant is not. These generally come in pairs: for example, "d" is voiced and "t" is its unvoiced partner. Other voiced/unvoiced pairs are b and p, g and k, v and f, z and s, the "th" in "that" and the "th" in "thin," the "ch" in "church" and the "j" in "jerk," the "sh" in "shut" and the "s" in "measure."

Now for that rule: when a root word ends in a voiced consonant the vowel preceding it is doubled in length. This is not at all obvious, even though we speak English all the time. I didn't realize this myself until I studied Japanese, which uses double-length vowels in any position in a word, treating single- and double-length vowels as completely different sounds.

You can hear the difference by comparing English words that differ only in the voicing of the final consonant. For example, bed and bet, ride and write, rod and rot, fad and fat, bid and bit, and league and leak. If you pronounce "bed" with a single-length "e", it's harder to distinguish from "bet."

When Trump says "big league" he usually does so very quickly, with two shorter vowels, instead of two longer vowels. Americans are used to hearing those long vowels before voiced consonants at the ends of words. When Trump incorrectly uses shorter vowels our brains try to interpret the sounds using the standard pronunciation rule, and we come up with "bigly."

Additionally, Trump constantly uses "big league" as an adverb (modifying a verb), and since most adverbs end in -ly, the usage doubly reinforces the "bigly" interpretation of the sounds.

Why does this pronunciation rule exist? Doubling the length of the vowel disambiguates the final consonant, providing more time to hear that it is voiced. Not all dialects of English use this rule: in several UK and Irish dialects vowels aren't doubled before final voiced consonants.

Russian and German, on the other hand, always devoice final consonants. In many German cognate words the change is reflected in the spelling. Bed is "Bett," God is "Gott," bread is "Brot." I'm guessing that the American doubling of vowel length before final voiced consonants is partially a result of hypercorrection from German and Slavic immigrants to emphasize the voiced consonant. It's "bed" not "bet," you lousy kraut!

Why does Trump use "big league" as an adverb so much? Is it a real estate thing? A New York thing? A rich guy thing? "Big league" is usually used as a noun, such as "Playing in the big leagues." Most people going for a sports-related adjective would use "major league," such as "major-league yabbos" (from a scene in Animal House).

But then Trump is little-league presidential candidate, isn't he?

Son of Skewed Polls

As yet another severe case of cognitive dissonance descends upon conservatives across our nation, so does the growing cries of skewed polls. Remember how well that worked out in 2012? The polls were accurate in predicting the election.

Nate Silver put up a piece a few weeks ago that should have put all of this to rest. But it didn't. Take a look at this nonsense. Aside from the fact the Silver (and the reality of 2012 outcome) have already pwned this shit, Durden misses a very key point. Polls showing a big lead for Democrats can actually be detrimental to voter turnout. People will see how high up she is and maybe just stay home if their XBox or latest binged watched show seems more alluring.

Perhaps the skewed polls mouth foamers should spend more energy on nominating a conservative candidate who is more appealing to voters. It can't possibly be that voters don't like what we are selling. Or that it doesn't function in reality!!

Sex and the Presidency

There's a bit in Woody Allen's Annie Hall where Allen and co-star Diane Keaton are talking to their therapists on split screen.



The dialog goes like this:

Allen's Therapist: How often do you sleep together?
Keaton's Therapist: Do you have sex often?
Allen: Hardly ever. Maybe three times a week.
Keaton: Constantly. I'd say three times a week.

This is funny because it's so true: most men think about sex all the time, while most women don't. Estimates vary, but some studies indicate that men think about sex 34 times a day.

If men could have sex all the time, they would. And all that sex has consequences. It either requires birth control, or it results in pregnancy. And if those pregnancies are undesired, it can result in abortion.

The American right wing always frames abortion issue as a moral failing of women. But all of those women are pregnant because men had sex with them. That's why women are more hesitant about having sex: they can get pregnant. Men initiate sex far more frequently than women and they often use coercion -- physical or emotional -- to get sex when women really don't want it. For this reason, you can blame most abortions on men.

A lot of evangelicals support Trump, even knowing his history of greed, immorality, divorce, adultery and assaulting women. Evangelicals famously used to say that "character matters," that immoral private behavior disqualified a person from higher office. Well, they don't say that anymore: Trump has endorsements from numerous prominent evangelicals, including Jerry Falwell Jr.

In just five short years evangelicals have completely flipped on this issue: 30% used to say that "an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life." Now 72% say that. The reason? Donald Trump.

Why have evangelicals abandoned their moral high ground and talked themselves into this flip-flop? Because they think Trump will nominate Supreme Court justices who will overturn Roe v. Wade.

I don't know why they think he'll keep this particular promise. He denies things he's said on video. He's declared bankruptcy multiple times while enriching himself at the expense of investors. He's cheated on his wives, failed to pay people who did work for him, failed to release his tax returns, and screwed Trump University students out of millions of dollars for phony "courses."

Electing Trump will normalize sexual assault

But the worst thing about Trump is that electing him will normalize sexual assault. When his private banter became very public, his supporters passed off his bragging about molesting women as locker room talk. This gives men license to think that this kind of criminal behavior is normal. People at Trump rallies brag about how his pussy-grabbing makes him a real man.

The corrosive influence of Trump's sleaze is already affecting how people think: it has already convinced 42% of evangelicals that immoral and illegal behavior is okay.

In evangelical parlance, electing Trump would embolden sexual predators like him. A Trump presidency would encourage more licentious and aggressive masculine behavior. It would result in more unwanted pregnancies and more abortions -- whether abortion is legal or not. There will always be abortion because the bastards who get women pregnant always bail on them.

So, let's look at the moral implications of this election, as if evangelicals still practiced what they preached:

With Donald Trump as president men will think they can do whatever they want to women, then brag about it, and then lie about it. They will cheat on their wives, their business associates and their taxes. They will get their mistresses pregnant and force them into back-alley abortions.

With Hillary Clinton as president people will think they can delete old emails and make lame excuses about it. They will forgive their spouses, work to cure malaria around the world and pay their taxes. They will practice consensual, protected sex to avoid unwanted pregnancy and reduce the number of abortions.

It seems like a pretty simple choice, based on the morality.

What 130 of the Worst Shootings Say About Guns in America

Great article. Check it out!

The Rigging Process

How Everybody Can Win

Mark criticized Trump's debate claim that the United States isn't  making things anymore as false. However, not everything Trump says is an outright lie: sometimes there's a glimmer of truth to it.

Mark's observation that manufacturing in the US has doubled since 1979 may be true, but it ignores important facts. Pretty much all consumer products -- cell phones, clothing, shoes, TVs, computers -- are no longer made in the United States.

We were #1 in manufacturing until as recently as 2002. But by 2012 China had overtaken the United States, producing 22% of the world's manufacturing output, with the United States coming in second with 17%.

Clearly the United States still does a lot of manufacturing and export, but a lot of what we're manufacturing is high tech tools and machinery that are sent to foreign countries that are then used to manufacture consumer products that are then imported into the United States. We also build expensive things like airplanes and gigantic earth movers: things that cost a lot but employ a small number of Americans.

We're mostly out of mass-market consumer goods business -- that's why Trump's "Make America Great Again" hats and plastic Fourth of July American flags are made in China.

But developing countries like China and India are finally developing a middle class and the consumer market has grown drastically. That means manufacturing worldwide is way up, but the US share of worldwide manufacturing has declined markedly; more to the point, the number of people employed in manufacturing in the US is way down.

This is why Trump's claims on US manufacturing are false. To do make the US the largest manufacturer of consumer goods again we'd either have to pay Americans the same slave wages that Chinese factory workers are paid, or our factories would be totally automated.

In 1960 manufacturing had a 25% share of employment in the United States. In 2011 it was about 9%. Manufacturing as percentage of GDP has remained stable at about 12% the whole time.

This is the "gotcha" that Trump isn't mentioning. If we bring manufacturing back to the US according to Trump's plan, it'll mean a huge cut in pay for American workers, or it will mean more automation and fewer workers in manufacturing. We can't create more well-paying manufacturing jobs unless other conditions change.

We do lead the world in some export categories, notably agriculture and aircraft. If Trump starts a stupid trade war with the rest of the world by slapping tariffs on imports, we will lose all our export markets.

This is the key: in order for the people in developing economies to be able to afford to buy American goods, they need jobs that pay enough to afford to buy our stuff.

The current problem is that large parts of the world pay their workers a lot less than the American or European middle class wage: their labor markets are cheaper than ours. Those people want to make as much as Americans, and it's in America's best interests for people in those countries to make more: their countries will lose the advantage of lower labor costs.

It might seem contradictory, but for Americans to prosper, the rest of the world needs to prosper -- so they can afford to buy our stuff.

That should inform how we write the trade agreements. We shouldn't be shutting out products made in foreign countries with Trump's prohibitive tariffs, we should be making sure that companies in other countries pay their workers salaries commensurate with Americans. One way is to require that all trade agreements with the US have anti-corruption clauses and strong protections for trade unions -- something we should have in all states of the Union. The agreements should also eliminate tax havens, like Ireland.

This would have another benefit: if people in Mexico and China are paid salaries that approach American levels, they'll have no incentive to leave their countries and come to the United States.

History shows this to be true: in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Europeans flooded into the US by the millions. But after Europe stopped being a war-torn hellhole, they stopped emigrating here in huge numbers.

If we use trade as tool to improve the lot of people of in other countries, they will want to stay home and they'll be able to buy American stuff.

Everybody wins.

Trump does not think this way. For him, and an awful lot of Republicans, life is a zero-sum game and there can only be one winner.

This, in a nutshell, is why someone like Hillary Clinton will make a far better president than an egotistical narcissist like Donald Trump.

Third Debate Post Mortem

While the rest of the media falls into yet another Trump Trap (OMG!! He's not going to accept the results of the election), I'd like to focus on a few other items from last night.

Donald Trump said "We're not making things anymore, relatively speaking." Well, the relativity dial must be broken because US factory production has more than doubled since 1979. The problem is that computerization has taken the place of the human worker. That's simply the free market doing its thing and if you are one of these workers, time to get a college degree or be retrained in another line of work.

Hillary Clinton would add more than a penny to the national debt...about $200 billion dollars over 10 years. That's what independent analysts have said of her economic plan. Donald Trump's plan would about $5.3 trillion dollars to the debt with all of his tax cuts.

I could give two shits that Hillary Clinton wants an open, global market, for energy or any other economic sector. Free trade prevents wars. Period. If we go back to protectionism or mercantilism, we raise the risk of blood conflicts again as we saw in World War I and World War II.

The Latest 2016 Election Map

Here's my latest 2016 Election Map.

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

As we can all see, Hillary Clinton is poised for a landslide. Most of the major polling outfits and predictors are seeing a flip to a Democratically controlled Senate. And now it looks like House is in play with Republicans scrambling to retain their majority.

One thing to note about this map is the grey shade of Utah. I don't Hillary will win Utah but I do think that the presence of popular son, Evan McMullin, on the ballot will take away votes for Trump. They could end up tied or McMullin could just win it.

Donald Trump has been in a tailspin since the first debate. He's made it much worse with this complete and utter lovemaking to right wing bloggers in the last week. Arizona, Alaska, Georgia and Missouri are now in play. I actually think that Arizona will go for Hillary. The rest, we'll see with some more polls. Even Texas is getting tight now.

As I have said many times, she needs a landslide in order to govern effectively. On the day of the last debate, it appears that she has one in the making.

Crocodile Tears

Boy oh boy, have we heard a lot of mouth foaming and "See? I told you sos" from Republicans these days regarding the Affordable Care Act. They've even pointed to Mark Dayton's recent comments about rising insurance rates as evidence that Obamacare has failed and stuff.

Today, my esteemed governor has penned an op-ed which offers a more insightful analysis.

As disturbing as the falsehoods is the hypocrisy of some Republican politicians, who are crying crocodile tears over problems with the Affordable Care Act, which they have prevented solving. Time after time, Republicans in Congress blocked changes to the ACA because they want to destroy the law, not improve it — and because they believe that the worse the ACA’s current problems, the better their chances of re-election.

Indeed.

The real challenge with the ACA is that we need more young people to get insurance. They'd rather take the hit on taxes than pay a premium every month. Better marketing, more incentives and perhaps stricter punishment for being uninsured should all be pursued. The rate increases were going to happen anyway and likely be worse without the ACA.

And in that world millions would have been uninsured and thousands would probably be dead. I think I'll take the whining...:)

America Is Already Great

Here's why...

I'm Just Askin'...

The day after three Kansas militiamen were arrested for plotting to blow up a mosque and an apartment building where hundreds of Somali immigrants live, someone threw a firebomb into a Trump campaign office in North Carolina.

Trump blames "the animals representing the Clinton campaign" for the firebombing, even though no one knows who is behind it.

At least one of the militiamen is a confirmed Trump supporter. By Trump's own logic, if we can blame Clinton for the firebombing, can't we blame Trump for the plot to kill Somalis in Kansas? The assault was planned for the day after the November election: clearly they anticipated Trump will lose, and wanted to exact revenge for a humiliating loss.

Trump has adopted the style and rhetoric of right-wing neo-Nazi hate groups and conspiracy theorists, normalizing racism and misogyny and bringing it to the forefront of a presidential campaign. Trump has advocated violence repeatedly: he's told his supporters to assault protesters at his rallies. Trump has said that if Clinton wins she should be dealt with by "Second Amendment people." Trump has advocated torture and murdering the wives and children of terrorist suspects.

One of Trump's more vocal supporters is Alex Jones, of InfoWars infamy. Jones is an alt-right conspiracy theorist, who has put forth various conspiracy theories, including several about 9/11, that the Sandy Hook shooting was faked, and that the Orlando shooting was a "false flag operation."

Lately Jones has been pushing the conspiracy theory that Clinton will somehow steal the election. Jones was apparently prodded to do this by Trump campaign operative Roger Stone, a dirty trickster who has worked for Republicans since the days of Dick Nixon (he even has a tattoo of Nixon on his back).

I myself don't go for conspiracy theories. But since Trump and his supporters are so enamored of them, here's one: what if the firebombing of the Trump campaign office was a false-flag operation ordered by Roger Stone to distract attention from the arrest of Trump supporters who were plotting to murder hundreds of Muslim immigrants?

Put on your tin foil hat for a moment: if "truly evil" people were behind the firebombing, why would they do it when the office was empty? Why was no one hurt?

Doesn't that seem more like a Roger Stone dirty trick? Or at least a shady landlord trying to collect on an insurance policy, taking a page from Donald Trump's playbook?

There's no possible benefit for Clinton's campaign in the North Carolina arson. Isn't it more likely the Trump campaign itself staged the fire to elicit more outrage from his supporters?

I'm just askin'...

Dedicated To Right Wing Bloggers and Commenters Everywhere

The Undecided Voter

What would it take for Trump to lose your vote?

At this point, it's safe to say these are same sorts of people that drove Germany to where it was in the 1930s...

Quoran Quickie

It's weird how things can go viral on Quora. My answers that I think will generate many views and upvotes invariably don't. The ones I think are just throwaways, like this one, get thousands of views and upvotes.

I guess now that extends to comments. A recent answer on who won the first presidential debate led me to this comment on it.

My hope is that Trump loses by a large margin and the GOP returns to the party of Reagan and Bush 1. Even though I am a Democrat, I want an opposition party that can keep the left in check on some of the more outlandish ideas (all corporations are evil, globalization is always evil etc). They have to get rid of all that anger, hate and fear, though, and I’m not sure how that happens.

As of this morning, it has 129 upvotes, the most I have ever had for a comment and the most I've seen on Quora in a while. It took me less than a minute to write but I guess it had an impact.

Other Men Have Said Worse

Lock Him Up!

When I was in fifth grade, I took up the trumpet. Kids in band had to stay after school for practice. On the way home a gang of bullies from the parochial school would ambush me. To avoid them, I gave up the trumpet so I didn't have to walk home late.

In sixth grade I was a police boy, what they call a crossing guard nowadays. In the 1960s the older kids were given bright orange crossing flags and were responsible for making sure the younger kids crossed busy streets safely. (They don't seem to let kids do this anymore -- adults are crossing guards, in the few locales where they let kids walk to school.)

These duties made me late again and the same bullies went after me. Instead of ratting on them, I quit being a police boy to avoid them.

The next year I went to junior high at a public school, while the bullies went to a parochial school two miles in the other direction. The bullying ended, partly because our paths rarely crossed, but partly because I had grown to almost six feet tall.

I relate these incidents to establish that I know a bully when I see one. Donald Trump is a bully. His every word and action for the last 40 years has established this without question. No one, not even his supporters, tries to deny this: they glory in it.

Now Donald Trump stands accused of sexual assault. At its core, sexual assault is essentially a more aggressive and perverted form of bullying. I've never been molested personally, but I've seen it happen.

One day in eighth grade I was walking home. Across the street a gang of bullies was attacking a girl from my class. Lori was a thin, shy, quiet girl. She was nice. They were grabbing her breasts. She was crying and afraid. I didn't intervene, I just ran home. As far as I know Lori never reported the crime, and neither did I, I'm ashamed to admit. I suppose I didn't want to get in trouble with bullies again.

So Lori suffered in silence, like the vast majority of women and girls who are sexually assaulted.

Why did they go after Lori? She wasn't the prettiest or most curvaceous girl in class. She was very quiet and never bothered anyone.

The bullies chose her because she was available, vulnerable, and powerless against them. If she told on them they would deny it, and no one would believe her. Later, they would go after her and do something even worse...

Today Donald Trump says he wouldn't have sexually assaulted the women who are now accusing him of because they aren't attractive enough. Because I know bullies, I know Trump is lying.

Sexual assault is bullying: it's about establishing dominance, not sexual pleasure. Many of the women Trump attacked had come to him for help. Like any street bully, Trump assaulted them because he wanted to show he had the power. He could count on their silence because he could destroy their lives through crushing lawsuits and social ruination: if they ratted him out he would drag them through the mud, making their husbands and boyfriends think they had somehow invited the attack.

That woman on the airplane that Trump felt up? Today Trump scoffs at the idea that he would do such a thing. But just like the eighth-grade bullies in the street, Trump attacked that woman because she was available, vulnerable and powerless against him (who'd believe a billionaire would do such a thing?). Last Friday we heard Trump admitting that he just can't control himself around women, assaulting random women on planes is completely consistent with that.

And just like the eighth-grade bullies in the street, Trump's gang of thugs rallied and cheered him on. Listen to the comments of Trump's supporters when interviewed by the Daily Show's Jordan Klepper. One said, "You know what? So what if he wants to grab pussy. I wanna grab pussy."

Hey, Republicans: your voters are wanna-be sex offenders!

I am completely baffled by this clown. How is grabbing a woman like that in any way pleasurable for either party? What kind of demented, sick people are these guys? Trump supporters -- even the female ones, incredibly -- think that rich, smelly (Tic Tacs), fat, old, bald men are entitled to molest women and girls. For them sexual assault is completely normal and to be expected, and women must submit without complaint.

The fact is, these are sex crimes.

After the news of Trump bragging about molesting women broke, writer Kelly Oxford shared her story of being sexually assaulted. When she was 12 an old man on a city bus grabbed her pussy and smiled at her. By Saturday evening a million women had responded with stories of their own. The behavior Trump brags about is appallingly common in this country. But that doesn't excuse it: it's a sex crime.

A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for a bully, a vote for a sex offender. Supporting Trump is condoning the violation of women. Trump's election would mean the normalization of molestation and invite a wave of sexual assaults against millions of American girls and women.

America needs to stand up to bullies, molesters and sex criminals like Donald Trump. Trump may not have any regrets, but I do: I regret that the thirteen-year-old me didn't stand up to the bullies who molested Lori.

Donald Trump is a bully and a criminal sex offender. This time around I'm not going to stay quiet and let a molester get away with assaulting women. Donald Trump's repeated molestations of women are sex crimes, plain and simple. The man should go to jail.

Let's get a chant going: Lock him up! Lock him up!

State Department Bans Superman Disguise

WASHINGTON — To prevent terrorists from using Superman's foolproof disguise, the State Department is banning applicants from wearing eyeglasses in photos taken for passports.

In a notice published Friday, the department says that effective Nov. 1, applicants must remove glasses for passport and visa photographs. It says the step is being taken to "ensure aliens from extinct planets that used to orbit red suns" do not pose as American citizens. Only in rare circumstances, such as when the applicant's eyes "emit powerful energy blasts that can rupture steel plate and pulverize rock," will glasses be allowed.

The department says it expects to process a record number of passports — more than 20 million — in the current budget year that ends next October.

Minneapolis StarTribune

Cease The Lying

The facts on the Affordable Care Act as of October 13, 2016. 

Now stop lying about it because you had some kind of an issue with authority in your adolescence and get catty every time the federal government does something in the best interest of this country and succeeds at it.

Unrealistic Corporate Growth Expectations Caused Wells Fargo Debacle

Wells Fargo's CEO was just forced out after testifying before Congress about the scandal at the bank. The company created a quota system for employees to sign up existing customers for additional accounts. These quotas were so unreasonable that thousands of employees created accounts for customers they never asked for and never knew they had.

Honest employees who refused to cheat their customers to meet the unreasonable quotas were fired (and have since filed a $2.6 billion lawsuit for unlawful termination).

The problems at Wells Fargo are not unique. Wall Street has totally unreasonable expectations for revenue growth: companies that don't meet "analyst expectations" are hammered in the stock market. CEOs are given bonuses when their stock price increases, and are fired (albeit with a golden parachute) when they don't meet those unreasonable expectations.

There are only a few ways that revenue can be increased: 1) sell more products, 2) reduce costs, 3) increase prices, 4) create more customers, 5) create new products, 6) create new markets.

Wells Fargo tried to do #1: sell more products to their existing customer base. The problem was these people didn't want these products, but since Wells Fargo had all their financial information it was trivial to rip them off.

This fails when customers already have all the product they want, or can't afford to buy more products. Since salaries have been pretty much stagnant since George W. Bush was in office, there is little hope for growth here.

Most companies try to do #2: reduce costs. This typically involves reducing the cost of production (like Apple switching touch screen suppliers, or cutting employee salaries, or moving production to Asia), or improving productivity (firing employees and making the survivors pick up the slack, reducing the number of employees by replacing them with machines, or using technology to improve the productivity of existing employees).

Problem is, cost reduction often reduces the quality of the product or service. It's also hard for employees whose salaries have been cut (or never rise) to afford to buy the products and services that companies need to sell to increase their revenues.

However, there is a huge potential for cost savings that remains untapped in the vast majority of corporations: executive compensation. CEOs and their executives can pull down billions of dollars in compensation: in 2014 the average Fortune 500 exec made $16 million in salary -- 300 times the average employee, and oodles more in retirement and stock grant benefits. In 1965 the average exec made only 20 times as much as an average employee.

Since execs are just management overhead, the quality of products and services will be almost completely unaffected.

Wells Fargo will save tens of millions of dollars by firing John Stumpf. Not as much as the $185 million in fines they'll have to pay for bilking their customers, unfortunately.

Method #3 -- increasing prices -- is a problem for most companies for the same reason as #1: customers don't have the money. But certain companies can get away with it: in particular, drug companies who have a monopoly on life-saving treatments. Like, for example, Martin Shkreli increasing the price of Daraprim fifty-fold,  Mylan jacking up the price of the EpiPen several hundred percent, or the tripling of the cost of insulin for diabetic patients.

Drug companies can get away with this extortion because people will sicken or die without this medicine: they are holding a gun to their customers' heads and saying, "Your money or your life."

Number 4 -- creating more customers -- used to happen automatically: for centuries population increased geometrically. But population growth has stopped in most developed economies. The United States' population is still increasing but only due to -- you guessed it -- immigration.

Many young people today don't have very good jobs and don't anticipate that they'll be making enough money to afford a home and a family. So we won't be procreating our way out of this problem. Conservatives, afraid of losing their tenuous grasp on political power, are also afraid of immigration, so there's very little hope on that front.

In any case, population growth is not a solution: at 7 billion people, the world has already exceeded its carrying capacity. As the effects of climate change really start to hit hard and natural resources decline, the number of people the earth can support will decrease.

Item #5 -- create new products -- is the favorite of entrepreneurs. The problem is, again, that customers don't have the money to buy new doodads. And truly new products are extremely rare: the personal computer, the cell phone, the Internet were revolutionary.

But every time you come up with a new "killer app" it kills off some older product or service. The personal computer killed off the typewriter and jobs like secretary, file clerk, etc. The cell phone and the tablet are killing off the personal computer. The Internet is killing off newspapers and television networks.

And a lot of "new products" are just recycled garbage. The Great Recession was due to financial institutions selling failing mortgages by repackaging them in more and more obscure bundles to hide just how toxic they were.

Creating new markets -- #6 -- sounds great, but the only place to create new markets is to move into new countries. That means international trade. This is a hot topic in this election as Donald Trump touts gigantic tariffs on foreign countries' products to "punish" them for unfair trade practices. If we do that, they'll do the same to us, making it impossible to create new markets.

Also, in order for these new markets to buy our stuff, their citizens need the money to pay for it. The only new markets left are places like India, Indonesia, and Africa, where average incomes are generally very low. The only way for them earn the money to buy our products is if they have well-paying jobs. And the only way they can do that is if they're selling products and services to people who can afford to pay for them, and that means selling into western economies -- like ours.

(Creating new markets by going into outer space is intriguing, but impossible until we develop compact nuclear fusion generators -- something that doesn't look any closer than it was 50 years ago.)

All of these factors produce one inescapable conclusion: we are entering a steady-state economy and only a few small new companies can experience 10 to 15% revenue growth.

What this really boils down to is: what is the purpose of corporations? To make a small number of people filthy rich? Or to provide products and services to the people of the United States while giving a living wage to the people who actually do all the work?

The outcome of this election may very well answer this question, and determine the fate of the planet.