Steve's Politics Blog

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.

I believe that using the electoral college to overturn an election result we don’t like is such a bad precedent that I have unsubscribed from MoveOn.org because they are pursuing this line of action. The recent pronouncement of the Obama administration about Russian hacking is so dangerous that I would prefer to see Donald Trump be sworn into office than have Clinton/Obama be put into office in his stead. The lies about Syria that they have been duping us with is another reason why I think any establishment politician from either party would make a dangerous President at this time. I know it is unlikely, but at this point Donald Trump may be our best hope for avoiding the next war. Whatever other damage he may do to the country may not be as bad as letting ourselves be goaded into a war.

We can recover from a depression or more income inequality, but a nuclear war with Russia may not be something we would ever recover from.

Newslogue has the article Aleppo: One More Way The U.S. Political Establishment Has Lost Control Of The Narrative by Caitlin Johnstone.

The Syrian people will soon be able to start telling their own story, and people telling their own stories never makes the U.S. political establishment look good.
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The U.S. establishment completely lost control of the narrative in 2016, which saw the first ever presidential election determined by the sudden democratization of information that widespread internet access gave the American people.
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What if tomorrow everyone gets together on the internet and says “You know? Money is a conceptual tool invented by humanity to help humanity, and the way it works right now isn’t serving us. Let’s all agree that money works in a completely different way from now on.” Well that would be great for us, but death for the plutocracy we all live under. The billionaires who control everything are only “billionaires” if we all agree that money works a certain way and means a certain thing.

Of course, this article’s take on Syria and Aleppo is one that I have come to realize is more real than what our media has tried to feed us. I have been posting alot about that issue recently.

The third paragraph in the above excerpt is what made me sure that I want to read more from Caitlin Johnstone. This is an idea that I have been preaching since nearly the beginning of this blog.

I found the article Bernie Sanders’ anti-political correctness rant proves the left is learning the wrong lessons from Trump.

Cosigning Trump’s attack on political correctness validates the bigotry of his campaign.

What this article really proves is that the authors of articles like this are the ones learning the wrong lessons. They focus on what drives them away from Trump and they misjudge what attracts many people to Trump.

My response to a post by a pseudo-leftie exemplifies what I mean. His post ponted to the New York Daily News article KING: There’s a huge education level drop-off with the Trump cabinet picks.

Donald Trump will be the first President of the United States in 25 years to not have a graduate degree of any kind.

My response to my pseudo-leftie friend was the following:

And what did we get from the educated people that Obama appointed? Or the ones Bill Clinton appointed? What about the Best and the Brightest that David Halberstam wrote about giving us the Viet Nam mess?

And you wonder why the “least educated” scoff at your claims to a ‘superior education”?

Will the Democratic Party ever be willing to look itself in the mirror? I have seen no evidence, and you are certainly giving a fine display of lack of evidence here.

Now you see why I do not win friends and I do not influence people. What gets into me sometimes?

Naked Capitalism has the article NBC’s Denver Affiliate 9News Apologies on Air to Naked Capitalism.

Thanks so much to the speedy action of the members of the commentariat yesterday. We got an apology from NBC 9 News in Denver for a skit they had put up meant to educate readers about the evils of “fake news”. However, they made Naked Capitalism into an object lesson:

You may have to go to Denver, but apparently you can find a modicum of journalistic integrity in some isolated spots in America.

YouTube has the video RT Accounts from Aleppo Residents.

The fake news reports from Aleppo have been stirring emotions at the latest UN Security Council meeting, with diplomats echoing various claims. RT’s correspondent Lizzie Phelan in Aleppo gauged reaction from locals to the claims of genocide and massacres taking place in the city.

I have also found the RT story As thousands flee E. Aleppo, RT hears stories of those trapped there for years (VIDEO).

Mohamad has come from western Aleppo to pick up Ibrahim, his brother, who was trapped in Sheikh Sa’eed district.

“Four years ago he couldn’t escape, but I did. He was stuck there and thank God we are reunited now,” he tells our crew, meeting for the first time his two youngest nephews who were born in eastern Aleppo.

Oddly, this video shows the same type of buses that are being filled with people who sought refuge whereas they are shown by our press as leaving a pickup site completely empty.

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Of course, these RT reports should be rejected out of hand because they are reported by a Russian news medium. We trust our news media to never lie to us. They and Colin Powell can’t help it that they believed the stories the government told them about the WMD in Iraq before they stampeded us into that war. Our media has at least learned from their mistakes, and is reporting all sides of the conflict in Syria including this one.

And we know that our media’s reports of the Russian hacking of our election is the God’s honest truth.
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Robert Reich has posted Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda on his Facebook page.