I have just thought of a practical issue that people might want to think about when they call for abolishing the idea of an electoral college. This really only applies to the fact that the vote in each state determines how many electoral college votes a candidate gets.

Imagine if all that matters for choosing the President is the totals in the nationwide vote. If the vote is very close, does that mean we need a nation-wide recount of all the votes? As it is now, we are more likely to only need recounts in a small number of states where the vote is close.

If people get their further wish for hand counted ballots, then that’s a lot of ballots to recount. Of course, I believe that electronic ballots can be counted more honestly, let alone just as honestly, as hand counted ballots if the system were designed from the start to promote honest elections. Such a system bears little resemblance to the electronic voting that we have today. See my previous post Making Electronic Voting Transparent for a description of such an honest electronic system.

Alternet has the interesting article If Obama Had Prosecuted Goldman Sachs’ Brain Trust, We Wouldn’t Be Plagued by Them Again in Trump’s Cabinet.

I’ll rearrange an excerpt from the article to put the emphasis where I think it belongs.

United States history features notable crackdowns after vast financial scandals. After the crash of 1929, the head of the New York Stock Exchange went to jail and the savings-and-loan scandals of the 1980s produced over 1,000 prosecutions.

[but despite this history] many chalk up President Obama’s lack of action to business-as-usual in Washington.

Well, this article is one more indication that Obama himself has brought on this disaster for us. Are we supposed to thank him, and cheer for him on his way out of office?

Occupy Democrats has a silly article, Trump Told China to “Keep The Drone.” China’s Response Is Chilling. This article is typical of Occupy Democrats these days.

What might the “lessons” China seeks to teach Trump be? Economic retaliation? A provocative military posture?

Maybe China will stop selling their goods to us and stop stealing our jobs? Perhaps China will try to have a massive sale of its $300 billion in US bonds so that they drive down their value and become worthless to the Chinese.

Maybe we should continue our current foreign policy of refusing to cooperate with Russia in our common interests, and cow-towing to the Chinese to forsake our friends in Taiwan.

Or maybe, just maybe, Donald Trump actually knows how to fix both situations. We have become so fixated on judging Donald Trump as being incompetent we have lost our ability to recognize when he might have a good idea or two. Maybe two is all the good ideas he has, but let’s not paint ourselves into the corner of having to oppose everything he proposes. That would be like the Republican reaction to Obama.