The Real News Network has the interview Nader on What To do Now.

No matter what you may think of Nader’s past actions, I think he raises some excellent points and ideas here.

Now is the time to think about how we turn our campaign enthusiasm into something more permanent.

The New York Times published the opinion piece The Oscar Wilde Strategy by Lee Siegel.

Someone once said that upon reaching 60, you have two thoughts. The first is, “This is going to work out.” The second is, “This is not going to work out.”

Many of those who voted, as I did, for Barack Obama must have experienced a similar simultaneous sense of relief and despair last night, as jubilation gave way to the grim realization that the political paralysis of the past four years will become, if anything, worse and more bitter.

It was startling to hear, on CNN, the assembled pundits almost unanimously agree that President Obama had to find the “middle ground,” move to “the center” and “build relationships” with Republicans. Where have they been for four years? Mr. Obama had been trying desperately to find the political center for his entire first term, only to be stymied by Republicans trying to recapture the White House by rejecting his every attempt at compromise and then blaming him for being unwilling to compromise.

What to do in such a situation, with the country split right down the middle, and a Republican opposition driven by a hardcore faction that believes the country has been stolen from them by treacherous and unpatriotic forces? There is only one thing to do: one half of the country must leave the other half behind.

You really need to read the rest of the piece by following the link above.

I thank JamesG for sending an email containing an extensive quote from the article.  I wish I could post the whole thing here, but what is appropriate for a personal email is too long to be published on this blog without written permission from the author.

I don’t know how the target audience reacts to these videos from Bravenew Films.

I don’t have trouble imagining my ethnic group being scapegoated like this, so perhaps that is why I empathize.

MoveOn.org is promoting this video.

On job creation I expected the part where Mitt Romney says that government does not create jobs.  Then I was expecting a comment how cutting defense spending will costs hundreds of thousands of jobs.  The one they used is almost as good.

It is one thing to be confused about who is lying and who is telling the truth when it is merely an argument about which set of statements are true.  However, when the words of the candidate himself are contradictory, then it is not hard at all to figure out what’s what.

Voting by electronic methods does not have to lead to the abuses that are going on right now.  I have a relatively simple idea for making electronic voting verifiable and more transparent than the traditional paper ballot or any other voting machine method.

In my proposal, every electronic voting machine will print a receipt for the voter to take home. The receipt will have a ballot number and the vote for that ballot. In the voting booth the voter can verify that the receipt matches how the voter intended to vote.

The results of all ballots will be put online in a way that matches the receipts. What is online is what will be counted. Each person with a receipt will be able to go online to verify that his or her ballot was recorded correctly.  There should be no way for anybody other than the receipt holder to know which ballot number corresponds to which voter.

That will prevent the machines from incorrectly recording what the voter intended.  It will also prevent the machine from dropping votes. It will also maintain the secrecy of the ballot.

We still need a mechanism for preventing the machines from inventing votes that were not there. The number of votes cast can be compared to the records of voter sign-in and sign-out counts.

What’s left are issues of challenged voters and mail-in votes.

However, at this point the electronic vote is already better than the pure paper ballot vote.

With the principles of quality control applied to the checking of votes, it is not necessary for all voters to check that their vote is properly recorded. If enough voters do check, and the failures are below the AQL (acceptable quality limits), then the vote can be considered “correct”. If the errors are above AQL, steps can be taken to remedy the “few” precincts where the error rate is above acceptable limits.

If making electronic voting this verifiable is not so difficult, then why are there voting machine companies out there making electronic voting machines that use secret software and that can be easily hacked?  Why are there election commissioners buying such machines? Instead election boards and commissioners should be specifying what kind of machine they want to buy in requests for proposals (RFP).  The usual way government purchasing is done is with an RFP with all the specifications of the product to be purchased and an open bidding process among suppliers to provide the requested product or service.

Certainly a retired software engineer such as me cannot be the only person who has figured this out.

June 8, 2016

See subsequent post Uncounted: The New Math of American Elections (Full Length). In the video, there is a demonstration of some electronic voting hardware that is exactly what is needed for my idea to be implemented.

November 27, 2020

See subsequent post How To Cheat On My Electronic Voting Proposal.

This describes a system to defraud my idea, but mentions that experts looking at the open source for the electronic voting system could be looking for such schemes in the software. If there are any fraudulent schemes in the software, they would be detected and the software would be banned from use in government elections.

William Black has written the article The Great Betrayal – and the Cynicism of Calling it a Grand Bargain .

Kuttner wrote to warn that Obama intends to seek a “grand bargain” causing the U.S. to adopt the type of austerity program that threw the Eurozone back into a gratuitous recession.

Worse, Obama intends to begin to unravel the safety net (Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid) to convince the Republicans to enter into this Faustian bargain.  Just as only a conservative Republican could visit “Red” China, only a Democrat can begin the destruction of the safety net.  The difference, of course, is that normalizing relations with China was a good thing while unraveling the safety net is a terrible thing.

I had been hoping to keep this controversy among Progressives under wraps until after the election, but I can see that it is difficult to keep this hidden.

Electing Mitt Romney is not the solution to preventing the Great Plague (aka Grand Bargain). What is the solution is for the Progressive Community to be able to turn on the proverbial dime after the election. As soon as we know that Obama has been re-elected and that the Democrats are in firm control of Congress, we must start applying immediate pressure to prevent the Great Plague from coming to fruition.

November 7 cannot be the time to take it easy and think our problems have been solved.

Another gem posted on The Real News Network.

It is so sad when the Republicans want to focus on spending cuts now and the Democrats concentrate on spending cuts later, but none of the mainstream politicians are focusing on what to do now.

When are we going to, as a nation, focus on the trillions of dollars of infrastructure work that we know must be done in the next decade? Do we do it now when there are lots of people unemployed, resources going unused, and interest rates at historic lows? Or do we do it later if and when we get full employment, the economy is running at full capacity, the interest rates are high, and any extra government spending will only fuel inflation?

Where is the sanity in refusing to do now what is the most appropriate thing to do now, and formulating a policy where we will do necessary work at exactly the wrong time in the economic cycle?

Many of the posts on this blog are inspired by what I read and and see on The Real News Network.  Because this source is so important, I am posting this explanation of what The Real News Network is, what it can become, and the support that it needs.

“The Promise” represents The Real News Network as we hope it will be when fully funded. What you have been seeing so far on our web site is just a taste of what’s to come.  We need your support to make this vision a reality.

The following video was re-emphasized in today’s email from The Real News Network, but it was originally posted in 2009.

The Huffington Post has the article Mitt Romney Massachusetts Budget Targeted Programs For Poor, Disabled . I don’t usually post items from this source, but JackH suggested it.  The information in the article is important to understand.

A detailed Huffington Post review of Romney’s budget proposals from his first year in office, however, reveals that he advocated deep cuts to programs serving the state’s most vulnerable — even when those cuts had little effect on the state’s fiscal position. Romney’s aggressive reductions to social programs did not earn support across the aisle. The state legislature ended up overriding more than 115 Romney vetoes in his first year as governor.

“There was no magic in the Romney approach,” recalled former Democratic state Rep. Dan Bosley. It was “cut as many social programs as you can.” Bosley added: “If we didn’t override every one of his vetoes, we overrode most of his vetoes. … There wasn’t a bipartisan effort to run government.”

Romney targeted many programs that had been historically supported by both parties. He pushed to eliminate or gut more than 20 state programs serving veterans, disadvantaged children, and adults with severe physical disabilities. He also sought to cut money for breast cancer screenings, suicide prevention and programs that assisted the blind and the deaf.

These cuts would have totaled $26.8 million — 2.2 percent of the $1.2 billion state budget deficit that Romney inherited upon taking office. None of these cuts were necessary for balancing the state’s budget. All were overridden by the Democratic state legislature, and the state still closed its budget gap with room to spare.

One point you can take away from this is that the nation might survive a Romney administration if the Congress had 85% Democrats to override Romney.  Unfortunately, there is unlikely to be such a lopsided number in Congress.  If there were such a lopsided majority in Congress, President Obama could get the country moving again without the interference of Romney.

RichardH has suggested that I need to provide these important tips from Mitt Romney on how to survive the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.