James Gillen

Mister Speaker,

it has come to the attention of some of us that our 45^th President, soon to be inaugurated the 47^th, Donald Trump, is not amused. He recently posted on social media, ““The Democrats are all ‘giddy’ about our magnificent American Flag potentially being at ‘half mast’ during my Inauguration”. How could this be? Because former president Jimmy Carter, having already lived to 100 years old, decided to die on the last day of 2024, prompting the current president Joe Biden to announce a thirty day period of mourning, which would end up including the re-inauguration of Donald Trump on January 20, almost as if Carter were intending to ruin the event.

But how could he? How could this fact dispel the happiness of this occasion, in which the divine order of things is restored and our sovereign returns to his rightful place of power? How could it be counted as an omen against the new president? Has he not proven himself invincible?

Donald Trump, whose wrath shakes the mountains and causes storm fronts to recede from his glare. Donald Trump, who single-handedly created the Grand Canyon – after vacationing in Arizona and misplacing his wallet. Donald Trump, whose member is of such length, mass and hardness that he may topple the Washington Monument with a single whack.

And yet, Our President, whose dread majesty has reduced every member of the Republican caucus to fearful obedience, has the sensitivity of a small child, such that the coincidence of another president’s mourning period triggers hysterical emotion. Truly, Our President is a colossus who contains multitudes. Verily, he is like Zeus, only without the modesty or chastity. But why should he NOT be offended? Is Donald Trump not a better president than Jimmy Carter? Has he not done what no man since Grover Cleveland did, winning a presidential election after losing one? A loss, I do not need to remind my Republican colleagues, that only occurred because the 2020 election was rigged and stolen from Our President, and yet he returned with an undeniable majority vote – of the people who bothered to show up – despite the fact that there were one million fewer Americans since 2020, thanks to a deadly virus that President Trump allowed to run rampant. Surely that victory speaks to his popularity and his political acumen?

Therefore Mister Speaker, in order to compensate our Dear Leader for the offense committed against him by the real world, I propose the following:

That on the day of Donald Trump’s own death, whatever date on the calendar that may be, Congress shall declare the anniversary of said death to be a federal holiday and a date of remembrance and celebration. It will be a day of feasting and merriment for the country at large and a day of rest for our federal employees and contractors.

In this way, We, the People, will be able to demonstrate to Donald Trump’s family and faithful how much more popular he is than Jimmy Carter, how much more loved he is than Jimmy Carter, and how much better a president he is than Jimmy Carter. I think Trump’s followers will be amazed at the passion of our nation’s response.

And finally Mister Speaker, so that this happy day will not be too long delayed, I hereby offer a solemn prayer to the LORD, that He may take his faithful servant, Donald Trump, home to live with him as soon as possible, so that Elon Musk can get back to running things without further interference.

I yield back the balance of my time.

I exploit you

Still you love me

I tell you one and one makes three

Oho, I’m the cult of personality

– Living Colour, Cult of Personality

Happy New Year!

Eh, not really. I am not at all expecting this to be a happy year. This week is more about celebrating the fact that 2024 is finally over.

In less than three weeks Trump is going to resume his throne in the country that was once a democratic republic. And if I have to keep talking about him for the next four years (at least) I have to decide how he is to be addressed.

I am now willing to call Trump ‘President-elect’ because clearly he did get elected with a slim majority and a large margin in the Electoral College, but I am not calling him ‘president’ because while he likewise got elected fair and square in 2016, he lost all right to that title with his actions in office.

Likewise I am willing to use the expression POTUS, (President Of The United States) except that we are clearly no longer a “united” states, thus Trump would simply be President Of States, or POS.

I had called Trump Viceroy of Russian North America, but that may no longer be the case. Because now that Vladimir Putin has been grinding his army to death in Ukraine for the better part of three years, and had to pull out of Syria because they needed all the troops they could get for Ukraine, Russia is clearly getting weak. And Trump is like a shark, for example in terms of morality and higher brain processes. But specifically in that if the shark smells blood in the water, it’s going to dive for it. And right now, Putin is literally bleeding. So is Ukraine, but based on the fact that Trump’s foreign policy team includes hawks like Marco Rubio and General Keith Kellogg, Trump may not be as supplicant to Putin as he has been. Probably his staff told him he can get a lot more money from having Ukraine in the Western fold than he can get from having America in the Russian fold.

Which gets to another thing with Trump. Even during his first term, it was often noted that Trump didn’t have a policy on anything, his actions were basically dictated by the last person who talked to him. Well, at this point, Trump is so old that he can’t find his own dick without a smartphone app. He was basically running for president just to feed his Id and stay out of jail, and thanks to his cult, he achieved that goal. So he doesn’t need them anymore. And he doesn’t really need to actually be president, he can just hang around in the White House and Mar-a-Lago and fly everywhere with the Secret Service and overcharge their accomodations on the taxpayer dime and have two scoops of ice cream at every dinner and not have to actually do anything for it as long as the people around him are doing what the Republican brain trust wants them to do.

Coming up to the election it was becoming obvious to a lot of us that the people behind Trump were using him as a celebrity figurehead to sell an autocracy to the masses, and once inaugurated they would be the ones in charge, but now that it’s done and no one can do anything about it, they’re just making it that much more obvious to everyone else.

Which is why I decided that Trump’s new title is:
Vice President Trump.

Because really, has anyone even seen JD Vance recently?

What made Trump’s real status clear even to the Trumpniks is the recent “civil war” over H1B visas. His tech bros, President-elect Elon Musk and councilor Vivek Ramaswamy are in favor of them, ostensibly because we don’t have enough qualified professionals in the States but really because we don’t have to pay immigrant professionals as much and the status of an H1B visa is conditional and can be revoked, giving employers leverage over these employees. Of course people like Elon Musk would never be so unethical as to exploit such undue advantage.

Whereas Laura Loomer and other MAGA nativists object to the H1B not because it allows exploitation but because we’re getting more people of Indian descent – like Ramaswamy – into the culture of this country. And they’ve been saying so. And not unclearly.

Which allows people like Ramaswamy and Musk to actually flip back and pose as defenders of classical liberal capitalism and equal opportunity after playing to the same nativists for all this time. And after the Trumpnik backlash to his policy, President-elect Musk first posted on X “FUCK YOURSELF in the face” and then “Please post a bit more positive, beautiful or informative content on this platform”. Twitter was never about positive, beautiful or informative content even before he took it over, and it is certainly not so now.

And of course Musk also de-monetized the accounts of people like Loomer, to prove his commitment to free speech.

And after all this everyone in Trumpworld was waiting to see how the czar would react given his own criticisms of H1B, Trump told reporters this weekend that he’s “always liked” the visas. At his New Year’s party a reporter asked him what made him change his mind, and he said “I didn’t change my mind.”

Well, he IS senile.

December 27, Trump posted “Anyone – of any race, creed or nationality – who came to America and worked like hell to contribute to this country will forever have my respect. America is the land of freedom and opportunity. Fight with every fiber of your being to keep it that way!”

And one of his followers responded “Wtf is going on here? This is NOT what we voted for.”

You can’t show it any better than that.

I mean, certainly Trumpniks didn’t vote to keep America as a land of freedom and opportunity for anyone who is willing to work for it.

This is the problem with representative government generally and the American “democracy” in particular. Elected officials only answer to voters every two to six years, but they answer to their donors every single day. So who did you think Trump was going to side with?

Charlie Kirk recently said that we didn’t vote for an oligarch. This just a few weeks after Steve Bannon told the fan club that Trump should run for a third term and put political opponents like Rachel Maddow in prison. But you didn’t elect an oligarch.

Bullshit you did. You wanted a thin-skinned oligarch with delusions of competence, you just wanted it to be Trump. Because you’re a cult of personality and style matters more than substance.

So congratulations, your personality cult just elected a thin-skinned oligarch with delusions of competence, it’s just a different personality.

That’s what you wanted, Trumpniks. That’s what you’re going to get.

And there’s a word for people who conned themselves into getting something they thought they didn’t want.

The word is sucker.

So here’s your sign:

I expect you to be wearing this for me every damn day for the next four years, or however long it takes for people to start CAD-producing guillotines.

Well, I had thought I was done commenting on 2024, but on Sunday, former President Jimmy Carter died.

In some respect that is not really news. Carter had already lived to 100, making him the longest-surviving president ever. He had lived over a year in hospice care and had also survived his wife Roslynn for over a year. Whatever one thinks of death, they’re together now. So I see little cause to mourn. I also see little reason for praise.

When I was a kid, I read through the TIME-LIFE series of books on World War II, starting with its origins at the end of World War I. The peace talks for that war were supervised by the “Big Four” Allied Powers, but since Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando could not speak English while French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau could, the talks ended up being a Big Three where Clemenceau debated with British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and American President Woodrow Wilson. And at one point Clemenceau gave his assessment of Wilson: “I never met a man who talked more like Jesus Christ, or acted more like Lloyd George.”
That’s basically my assessment of Jimmy Carter.

Certainly Carter was a more sincere Christian than most Southern Baptist politicians since, but by the same token he was so self-righteous he didn’t see much reason to work out his differences with others. There was an excellent biographical article on Carter this Sunday where it was recalled that Hunter Thompson said Carter was “one of the three meanest men I’ve ever met”, with the other two being Muhammad Ali and Sonny Barger of the Hell’s Angels. “He’d cut both your legs off to carry a ward in the Bronx.” He made a lot of enemies he didn’t need to make, which contributed to a tough primary campaign against Ted Kennedy in 1980. His stubbornness made it possible for him to forge a peace deal between the bitter enemies Anwar Sadat in Egypt and Menachem Begin in Israel but it didn’t help him with Congress. He did a few things that we probably needed to do anyway, like restoring the Panama Canal to its home nation, but that was perceived as weakening American prestige, as opposed to the OPEC-led energy crisis and the Iranian hostage crisis, which did weaken American prestige.

In his Monday morning podcast, Keith Olbermann’s headline was “THE GREATEST PRESIDENT SINCE FDR IS DEAD”. I mean… really? Carter was better than Truman, who handled diplomacy during the Korean War and desegregated the military? Better than Eisenhower, who might have been the last Republican to believe in responsible government? Better than JFK? LBJ?

I can understand why Olbermann wouldn’t praise Ronald Reagan, Carter’s successor. In fact, this is his thesis from the transcript: “I will make my case, and more importantly, my case that the fact he WASN’T re-elected was the beginning of the end. The 1980 election was when I realized America wanted a spokesmodel, not a leader. A fake smile, not principles; often somebody dumber than they were. Even Clinton and Obama and their exceptional presidencies prevailed on charisma. That we turned away a complete human for a mentally diminished bad actor who wasn’t that sharp to begin with has set a pattern we may never break before the nation ends.”

Ha, ha, Keith. You’re half right. To be sure, Reagan set the model for a cheerleader president who got by on charisma and sold a bunch of promises that could not be reasonably delivered. But he was hardly a “mentally diminished bad actor who wasn’t that sharp to begin with”, at least not at first. I again invoke the 1980 primary debate between Reagan and then-rival George H.W. Bush on illegal immigration where both men addressed the issue with sensitivity and more articulately than most politicians in either party could do today.

You can criticize Reagan for a lot of things, including racism, but he was a cheerleader, not a prophet of hate. Racism was not the basis of the appeal. Reagan did not make his own immorality the basis of his appeal. Reagan and Reagan Republicans like John McCain did not make fun of disabled reporters or accuse female reporters who questioned them of being on the rag. That took a special kind of moral decay. That’s the second half of the problem with basing politics on charisma. If Carter set a standard of moral integrity, we had another leader who established that a president could break both laws and moral standards and get away with it. That wasn’t Trump. That was Bill Clinton. Because that was where we first had a womanizing pathological liar and real estate cheat commit perjury in a federal investigation and get impeached over it and walk away. Because his party told everybody the charges were “nothing”, that they were a “witch hunt”, that they “didn’t rise to the level of impeachment” – hey Democrats, stop me if this sounds like anything you’ve been hearing recently.

That required normalization by his party and a sympathetic media. Normalization by people like… Keith Olbermann.

See, this is why when Democrats opposed Trump by invoking “the rule of law”, that was in retrospect doomed from the start. Because Democrats don’t use laws. They have norms. And the difference is that a law is on the books whether everybody agrees with it or not. That’s why they’re laws. Norms are just the way we’ve decided to do things. It’s easier for the party in power to operate on norms than on laws that explicitly get in their way. Just call the Constitution a “living document” and ignore the parts you don’t like. The laws are enforced by law enforcement. Norms are only enforced by peer pressure. But when your norm ultimately becomes “we don’t enforce the laws”, well, guess what happens to the rule of law? And what happens to your rule of norms when the norms change on you? We had a whole system of laws, many of which were written after Watergate precisely to prevent a president from getting as bad as Nixon. But really, we quit having the rule of law when we changed the norm to “it doesn’t matter if a president commits perjury, it doesn’t even matter if he’s impeached, as long as he’s in our party and he gives us the Supreme Court justices we want.”

Jesus Christ, Keith, where do you think the Republicans learned that?

To the extent that this piece is even about Jimmy Carter, certainly Carter was a better man than most of the presidents I’ve mentioned, but objectively, he wasn’t even as good a president as Joe Biden. And we can see from that example that winning an election and being a good administrator does not necessarily mean you have the skills to win the public for a second term. And unlike Biden, I wouldn’t even give Carter credit for being a good administrator. The best thing he did domestically was hiring Paul Volcker to handle inflation, and that had effects that were deeply unpopular at the time and through the next few years after Reagan kept him.

If at this time, we’re expected to rank Carter in terms of historical presidents, the obvious comparison is with Herbert Hoover, someone who was regarded as a great humanitarian both before and after leaving the Oval Office, but who as president was so inept at handling crisis that his successor from the other party ended up resetting the whole paradigm of American politics from then on.

One might think given the level of loss that Biden-Harris suffered in 2024 that Trump might be in a similar position to reset American politics, but given what a bag of cats his party has turned into even before his second inauguration, that seems unlikely.

But we’re also expected to give tribute to the dead, and I can at least say this much: When I was coming of age, I thought Jimmy Carter was the worst president ever, certainly the worst in my lifetime. But thanks to Bush Junior and Trump, that is clearly not the case.

So rest easy, Jimmy. You’ve earned it.

In the news vacuum between Christmas and New Year’s, I’ve been seeing a few things on YouTube where leftists engage in Schadenfreude at an apparent civil war on the Right concerning the outright racists like Laura Loomer who want to bar all immigration to this country and President-elect Elon Musk who wants to keep most of the rules as they are so he can get more “qualified professionals” from places like India (who coincidentally would not command the same wages as American professionals).

And that is good in that conflict between the MAGAts makes it less likely that they will be able to pass laws against the rest of us who just want to live our lives in peace. But ultimately they’re still in charge. Because if you’re not voting for the Democrat, you’re effectively voting for the Republican. The reason The Election happened the way it did is that Trump only got 3 million votes over his 2020 total while Kamala Harris had over 6 million votes less compared to Biden.

And that’s if you voted Green, voted Libertarian or voted for Democrats down ballot and left the presidential choice blank. Or just stayed home. When you don’t vote, you vote. Because you know that the Republicans are motivated to get out and vote, and if you don’t vote, you’re effectively voting for all those people to let their choices win out over yours.

But politically what that means is that if Democrats don’t give people something to vote for, Republicans are going to keep winning by default. So that means the Democratic Party needs to ask itself what it needs to do to win elections again.

First off, like James Carville says, they need to recognize that the purpose of a political party is to win elections, without which none of their ideals can be realized. If your goal is to debate some hypothetical perfect government amongst yourselves when you can’t even agree with each other, much less convert the population at large, welcome to the Libertarian Party.

A good rule of thumb is to adopt the Constanza Maneuver. What is that, you ask? Well, if you don’t know, you are probably not real old and uncool like I am. But there was this one episode of Seinfeld where Jerry was talking with his schmuck friend George Constanza and George was going over his bad luck and bad decisions and realizing that everything he did got the opposite result of what he wanted. So Jerry tells him, “if what you do always gets the opposite of what you want, why don’t you do the opposite of what you want, and get that?” So George tries it. He sees a girl at the deli and rather than try to pick her up with some bullshit story about how he is cooler than he actually is, he just walks up to her and says “My name is George. I have no job, and I live with my parents.” And it works. Obviously it doesn’t work for long, but this is how he ended up getting a job with the New York Yankees, and that lasted for several years.

If you’re old enough to remember that episode, you know what I’m talking about. And unfortunately that means your first application of the Constanza Maneuver is to go against the Democratic Party’s innate tendency to prioritize its seniors over the younger people who actually know how to communicate.

Because in addition to many, many previous examples, such as the continuing presence of Dianne Feinstein in the Senate right up to her death of old age, we recently had an expose’ in the Wall Street Journal about Joe Biden’s general lack of acuity in the White House leading to (among other things) lack of communication within government in regard to our Afghanistan withdrawal, and keeping him on a tight schedule with limited access to others “to limit potential missteps”. And then on the Republican side, in addition to the general ill health of Mitch McConnell who is stepping down as Senate Leader after this term but continuing to be Senator from Kentucky, you had a Texas Congresswoman, Kay Granger, having been missing in action for the last six months, being found in a memory care facility where she was admitted “after being found wandering through her neighborhood while seemingly lost and confused.”

But more relevant for the Democratic Party right now, Nancy Pelosi of California, who is 3 years older than Joe Biden herself, who is no longer Democratic House Leader but has been running a lot of things behind the scenes (including the pressure campaign to end Joe Biden’s run for president) was apparently the big factor in pushing aside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-New York) for the leading Democratic seat in the House Oversight Committee, in favor of Gerry Connolly (D.-Virginia), who is not only elderly but suffering from esophageal cancer.

Again, this is hardly a problem unique to Democrats, but we already know that Republicans don’t particularly care about getting new voices or listening to different viewpoints, because they have a base that doesn’t care about that either. But in the long run that’s going to be a problem for them too. Because to go back, we already know from the 2020 elections that the potential Democratic/non-Trumpnik vote is a lot bigger than the total that actually showed up this year. And whoever can appeal to the people that didn’t show up could win the next election.

And as I had said just after the Brian Thompson shooting, if it seems like it’s odd that the youth of today – along with a lot of other people – are willing to support the murder of an executive but are not willing to support the one party that might have stopped Musk’s current tech oligarchy, the common factor is that people don’t think that that one party really cares about them. The Democrats don’t really care about ending oligarchy when they effectively practice it themselves. And I can see that a lot of the party bigwigs didn’t want a rabble-rouser like AOC in a position of authority on a major committee, but part of the Constanza Maneuver is not giving a damn what the safe position is. Because that’s all the Democrats have been doing since Obama ended his second term, and even during his Administration. Playing it safe. They played it safe picking Hillary over Biden cause it was “her turn”, they then picked Biden over a whole host of younger people cause it was “his turn”, he picked Kamala Harris as his running mate cause she ran all the demographic boxes, then refused to hand over the 2024 campaign to her after the midterms because he thought he would be a safer candidate, then when he had no choice he and the other Democrats transitioned to Harris – who is only 60 – because that was safer than an open convention. The Democrats have been playing it safe while Republicans continue to put all their chips on the riskiest bet imaginable. And where are they now?

This is completely independent of whether the Democrats should be all in on socialists like AOC or doing more to appeal to the center, or even if they know how to appeal to anybody. But that’s a broader issue I intend to discuss in the next few weeks.

But for this essay, I think one way to start general reform is by addressing the gerontocracy in politics, which might be a non-partisan issue but is that much less likely to be addressed by the Trump Party than the Democrats, given that their Dear Leader makes Joe Biden look like Bill Nye the Science Guy. Strictly as a hypothetical, among the many, many changes I would make to the American government – such as, changing the official language to Swedish – I would recommend putting a maximum age limit of 75 on any federal office. After all, if the Founders saw the wisdom of putting a minimum age limit on presidents, it’s just as wise to state maybe someone older than 75 would be too old for office, especially since most people in the 1700s didn’t even live to 75. You wouldn’t be ineligible to run any time before that, but if the end of your term takes you past the age of 75, you can’t run again. The specific exception being Supreme Court justices and lower court judges, who would have to retire at 75, in addition to having term limits. Because as a lot of liberals pointed out, it was Ruth Bader Ginsburg staying on the Court in hopes of outlasting a Republican President that helped bring things to this point. And that decision, along with much of Joe Biden’s presidency, only points up an issue with people in power: the longer they stay in power, the more likely they are to make very unwise decisions, such as, staying in power in the first place.

And if there is anything that I have learned in my lifetime it is this: Human beings are like milk cartons. They should come with a sell-by date.

Elton John has gone on a media tour, and in recalling his past drug use, he has said that it was a bad idea for countries to decriminalize marijuana. Now from a libertarian or even harm reduction standpoint, I’m inclined to disagree. But we’ve been getting a lot of evidence of how dangerous it is for important people to make important decisions while chronically altered.

At 5:58 pm December 20, the Republican House of Representatives managed to pass a two-thirds vote to continue funding the government, which heads to the Democratic Senate. An agreement that had previously been made between the parties got torched by President-inept Donald Trump, or more accurately, by his main advisor, Elon Musk.

Side note: an old friend, Jason Tondro, the same Jason Tondro who had worked for Paizo and is currently working for Wizards of the Coast/Dungeons & Dragons and recently attracted controversy by saying he doesn’t care what old gamers think about the ‘woke’ direction of his company, posted recently on Facebook that he came up with a new word, ‘Xit’ to describe what used to be a ‘tweet’ before Musk changed Twitter into X. ‘Xit’ is meant to be pronounced ‘shit’.

Anyway, this week Musk Xitted that the government should not only throw out the spending bill, but not pass any spending until Trump’s coronation on January 20^th. In other words, a whole month, during which government workers would have no salary through Christmas and the civilians who depend on them would have few if any services. The fact that Musk got House Speaker Moscow Mike Johnson (BR.-Louisiana) to go along with this has caused a large number of people to refer to Musk – perhaps jokingly – as the president-elect.

This is not a new observation. Ever since The Election, Lawrence O’Donnell, one of the remaining reasons to watch MSDNC, has pointed out that Musk’s influence on our President-inept makes him the acting President for the new government with Trump as Vice President at best, especially since JD Vance is that much less in the spotlight now than he was as a Senator. Recently O’Donnell pointed out that Musk openly uses drugs and has violated the federal security rules regarding federal contractors, which applied to Musk because of Space X’s work for the government.

But then, the lesson of the first Trump term was that all the laws and all the safeguards our government has to protect against corruption are meaningless if they’re not going to be enforced. And the lesson of this election is that nobody wants to enforce them.

Because America wanted celebrities. They wanted reality TV. They wanted the government to be run like a business. Well, now we once again have a celebrity coming to the White House who got his reputation from playing a billionaire on TV, while his eminence grise is an actual billionaire who’s going to run this country just like he runs Twitter. Into the ground.

Specifically by expecting all the staff to work harder with fewer resources and personnel, and calling the result “efficiency”, and by giving a platform to crank theorists, neo-Nazis and Putin sympathizers, to the extent that they are not all the same group.

Why? Because everybody in the Trump Party, possibly including Trump, knows that Trump is a pudding brain who at this point in his life is just a greasy, unnatural, artificially colored amalgamation of pork. Like the McRib. Except we don’t have to listen to the McRib ramble for 2 hours about how everything it doesn’t like is socialist. So you have Elon Musk, who certainly has more direction than Trump himself even if he might actually be more addled by chemicals. So we have what are ostensibly Trump ideas like “DOGE” (Department of Government Efficiency) to be co-headed by Musk and fellow suckup Vivek Ramaswamy. Because nothing says efficiency like creating a whole new bureaucratic office and then appointing two men to run it.

And all of that is because Musk knows his target better than all the other suckups and having more money and influence than the others is in best position to appeal to him. Also this week, Musk apparently crashed a dinner at Mar-a-Lago where Trump was hosting suckup-in-training Jeff “Democracy Dies In Darkness, And I Should Know” Bezos. Journalist Seth Abramson reacted: “What it also confirms is that Musk not only has no boundaries and believes himself Trump’s superior but has no intention of permitting any other plutocrat to squeeze more juice out of Trump than him. Showing up at that dinner uninvited is a power play intended to cow both other oligarchs and Trump.” This from an article that concluded: “One person was happy with the night, and in the end it’s likely the only one Musk cared about. Trump woke up the morning after the crashed dinner and took to his Truth Social account exclaiming: “EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!”

Because Trump really is a little kid who still needs to be reassured that he is the most important person in the world, even after the public has twice confirmed that he is. And heaven forbid anything should threaten that self perception. This month Trump successfully bullied ABC News into bribing him with a $15 million contribution to his presidential library (I had no idea HUSTLER had so many back issues) because anchor George Stephanopoulos said he was guilty of rape in the E. Jean Carroll civil case (a legal technicality more than a slander) and not only that, he wants to sue pollster Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register for a pre-election poll that showed Harris leading slightly in Iowa where Trump ultimately won by a safe margin.

I have never seen a more sore winner in my life.

Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, Trump. Can you just let reality WIN, for once? Can you not pitch a fit because you can’t make the sun rise in the west? Can you not sue the H.L. Mencken estate for him predicting that one day America would elect a downright moron? You’re gonna be president again. Despite all the “experts” telling America why that would be a horrible idea. You defied all the odds.

You got everything you wanted. No one can touch you.

You’re Superman now.

So go and jump out of a window, Donnie.

Everyone wants to see you fly.

No way to delay the trouble comin’ every day.

• Frank Zappa & The Mothers (of Invention) “Trouble Every Day”

I’m reading last year’s papers

Although I don’t know why

Assassins, cons and rapers

Might as well die

– Steely Dan, “King Of The World”

While the Cabinet nominations of President-inept Donald Trump continue to draw flak, it might actually be more newsworthy what the Trump team’s default “Plan B” is. Specifically, Trump’s most offensive pick, former Congressman Matt “Morrissey Called, He Wants His Hairstyle Back” Gaetz, withdrew from consideration when he failed to sway Republican Senators who had voted twice to acquit Trump during impeachment. But after that, Trump announced his backup choice, Pam Bondi, the former state Attorney General in Florida. Among other things, she had received a donation from Trump in 2013 and subsequently decided not to have Florida join a joint lawsuit against Trump University. But that level of corruption is par for the course these days. Otherwise Bondi is perfectly qualified for the job as well as totally loyal to the new order, and not so provocative that she draws the wrong kind of attention.

Now it seems like another Trumpnik, Fox News employee Pete Hegseth, may lose his appointment to Secretary of Defense after he turned out to be a full-time alcoholic with a television anchor hobby. According to several sources including Politico, Trump has several choices waiting in the likely eventuality that Hegseth also hits a wall in confirmation. The leading choice is Ron DeSantis, the Florida Governor himself. Given that he’s term-limited he has reason to seek higher ground. He also has real military and legal qualifications, having been a Navy officer and serving with JAG. And he’s also the guy who set the standard for making his home state an unassailable stronghold for Republican dominance.

I have not actually read Machiavelli’s The Prince, but there is an often-quoted section of it where the author says a prince may often improve his reputation by first appointing a ruthless official who accomplishes goals expediently but alienates the population, and when this happens, he simply gets rid of said official and appoints someone else without an obnoxious reputation who will be in his own way ruthless but more subtle. In this way the prince creates relief among his subjects. (The historical example in the text is Cesare Borgia.)

I’m pretty sure Trump has never read Machiavelli – I doubt he can spell Machiavelli – but I’m sure that supporters like Steven Bannon have, and they would be in position to advise Trump. But that raises the question of whether he would take the advice. Or why he would foist appointees who are obnoxiously bad even by Republican standards. It could just be that Trump is exactly what he appears to be, a pudding brain with less maturity or self-control than a five-year old.

This leads to another point. I am normally loathe to make direct comparisons between Trump and Hitler, mainly because they always make Hitler look better. But there is at least one obvious parallel. In Weimar Germany, after World War I, the political establishment was composed of bourgeois conservative parties and the Social Democrat left, which was being pressured by even more left-wing parties. And then you had the reactionaries (namely the military and industrialists) who were running things under the German Empire and who blamed the Left for losing the war even though they weren’t in charge of the government at the time. These groups saw Adolf Hitler as a lowlife rabble-rouser, but they could see his popularity and saw him as a vehicle to maximize their ends while minimizing Hitler’s. Specifically they sought evil and reactionary but feasible goals like suppressing dissent and re-militarizing the country, as opposed to Hitler’s crackpot goals, like, starting a war with everybody at once.

Well, in this country you have an unpopular bourgeois Left Democratic Party that is being pressured by even less popular “progressives” and directly opposed by a reactionary, Christianist Right that is even less popular than them. (For example, Mike Pence and JD Vance.) Donald Trump, an angry, popular demagogue, just happened to side with them and their party, and made his popularity synonymous with their success. And everyone in the used-to-be republican Party goes along with him because they see Trump as a vehicle for their evil, reactionary but feasible agenda (namely turning America into a Hungarian-style one-party regime) and not so much for Trump’s crackpot ideas (like invading Mexico or assimilating Canada).

The German reactionaries failed to control Hitler because his cult of personality was far too large and they needed him a lot more than he needed them. And that’s pretty much why no one in the Republican Party speaks out against the cult that it has become. But the difference may be that people are able to recognize how decayed Trump has become over nine years. Come to think of it, the German generals were starting to realize by 1943 how physically and mentally ill Hitler was.

Where was I? Oh yeah, it looks like the Senate isn’t waiting for Trump to start a war with every other power on the globe before they push back, because it’s increasingly likely he won’t be able to throw out the election system and declare himself President for Life before he dies of natural causes. Which at the rate he eats may be January. More likely the second “Administration” will wait about two years to suddenly declare that Trump is mentally unfit under the 25^th Amendment so that JD Vance can take over. Why two years? Because according to the 22^nd Amendment, a person can serve as president for a theoretical maximum of ten years, two four-year terms and up to two years after succeeding a president: “no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.” The question then is whether that cult is going to go along with it. If the gambit works I’m not sure it would be better or worse than Trump surviving. If the stringpullers depose their figurehead they would have a more stable regime, but that would also make it harder to overthrow. If Trump continues to rule as a demented king, he might destroy the whole basis of his party’s support, but that would require him to do truly horrendous levels of damage to the country. As in, more than he already has.

And lest it seem that the Trump Party has a real mandate for any of this, let me again point out that Trump didn’t increase his vote totals much, if any, from 2020. He got a majority popular vote and swept the swing states because at least ten million people who voted for Biden and Democrats in 2020 stayed home this year. This election was at least as much a vote of no-confidence in the establishment as it was an assertion of MAGA theology. Which leads to a much more ominous event.

On December 4, 6:45 am in New York, United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was on a street in New York on his way to an 8 am UHC investors meeting when he was shot and killed. The 8 am meeting went on as scheduled.

And from what I see of the social media reactions, no one is shedding a tear.

There are now several camera shots of the suspect which are being circulated and they all show a tall white guy wearing a hooded jacket and backpack, except that some pictures show the backpack with dark straps and others show it with light straps. So the suspect is a tall, thin, white guy with angular features, in a hooded jacket and wearing a backpack whose description varies according to the camera shot, and which he is no longer wearing.

I’m pretty sure whoever did it got this idea from that Timothee Chalamet lookalike contest they held in New York City recently. Hell, the assassin might be one of the guys from that contest. Hell, he might BE Timothee Chalamet.

Nobody wants to help catch this guy. And if they DID, all he has to do is wait four years and run for President.

Seriously, unlike most people I am NOT saying this assassination is a good thing. Protesting our extortionist healthcare system by shooting one of its executives would be like a 19^th Century person killing a plantation owner and thinking that got rid of slavery. That took Constitutional amendments. And of course a Civil War to force the issue on the people who wanted slavery in the first place.

The overwhelming Schadenfreude at the billionaire’s death, and the very fact that it happened, just indicates how many people in America have given up thinking that this system is going to protect the innocent. It doesn’t even protect its own. After all, this country had a chance to vote for a government that could have made things more progressive and equitable, and instead people chose, if only by inaction, to make the system exponentially worse.

Because they think, for good reason, that the “progressive” party doesn’t care about them, so they don’t care about it. And as I just said, when the law doesn’t apply to the powerful, it doesn’t apply to anybody, and the only way you can have justice is to get it yourself.

I am seriously starting to think that the only way to fix things, or even try, is to flush it all out and start from scratch. Let’s call it the US Constitution 2.0. Because you can’t expect Republicans to fix this system when it’s exactly what they want and you can’t expect Democrats to fix it when they did so much to get things to this point.

“The Force can have a strong influence on the weak-minded.”

– Obi-Wan Kenobi, Star Wars

Apparently on Sunday when President Biden pardoned his ne’er-do-well son Hunter it was such shattering news that they put it in the middle of football coverage. My question is: Why?

Because this is in contrast to a President-inept Donald Trump whose current pick for Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, has been revealed according to his history as president of Concerned Veterans for America as having been “repeatedly intoxicated while acting in his official capacity—to the point of needing to be carried out of the organization’s events.” Another potential appointee, Charles Kushner, is picked by Trump to be Ambassador to France. Kushner, the father of Jared Kushner, was convicted of filing false tax returns and retaliating against a cooperating witness. Trump pardoned him before leaving office in 2021. What is the point of being mad about a Democrat’s use of the pardon power when Trump’s whole approach to staffing his administration is to hire guys who NEED pardons?

Whether anyone acknowledges this or not, half the point of this election was that people didn’t want their favorite reality TV game show host to go to prison. If that’s not a pardon, I don’t know what is.

But there are still Good Christians ™ on the Right and pearl-clutching Democrats who act like Hunter Biden’s pardon actually matters. To those people, let me put this as diplomatically as I can…

Fuck you. Fuck your Mom. And fuck you while you’re having your eyelids pulled up to watch your Mom getting fucked.

What it is is that you do not acknowledge that standards are a thing, and we have them for a reason. You do not acknowledge this because Donald Trump is apparently the only person in the world who could take a jet to Great Britain, barge into Queen Elizabeth’s estate, have her corpse exhumed and fuck it live in front of TV cameras, and have his opinion polls go UP. HE can do that. YOU can’t.

Hell, the reason he had to pardon Roger Stone and Paul Manafort and the other crooks is because they don’t have a magic mind control shield that tells everybody “You Can’t Punish Me, I’m a TV Star!!”

The fact that you can acknowledge there’s something wrong with Biden pardoning his own son means that you still theoretically think that standards apply to SOME people but not to your perfect little boy. At least Joe Biden didn’t hire Hunter for anything. Does anyone know what Jared Kushner’s job at the White House even WAS?

Did you think Trump was the only one who got to break the law and get away with it? That he was the only one who could shield his kids? That he was the only one who could give jobs to his friends and his cronies and the people who bribe him? No? Then why are you upset?

When people like me say, or used to say, that we have a rule of law, this is what we meant. Because laws are supposed to apply to everybody. If they do not, there ARE NO LAWS. When your perfect little boy can commit crimes and do as he pleases while the rest of us are supposed to obey the laws, on what standard do you justify that other than “he’s Donald Trump”? The answer is, there IS no standard, and therefore if the laws don’t apply to him, they don’t apply to US either.

Did you think Trump is immortal? That the gods sent him down from Heaven to establish righteousness among the nations and he will reign over us forever? That therefore the laws of man don’t apply to him? No. He is a mortal who has to live in the same reality of science and causality as the rest of us peasants. That’s why he almost died from coronavirus. Because while a virus may be mindless, it’s not so stupid to believe Donald Trump when he says it doesn’t exist.

When this talking shit stain is finally wiped off the shoe of the Earth, you will find that you’ve traded away reason and ethics and laws for a temporary idol and you will have nothing to protect you when someone even worse comes along. I should know, because I made that same point to Democrats during Monicagate, and they didn’t listen to me any more than you do.

Your standard is fraud. Your standard is grift. Your standard is crime. Your standard is Trump. And Joe Biden, recognizing the will of the people, has finally acknowledged this.

So any of you Fox News macho men, if you still want to get your panties in a bunch because Biden is finally acting on the standard that you rewarded, just consider: This is what you wanted. This is what you wanted the world to be like. Sit down, shut up, smile and be happy.

You got what you wanted. I hope you enjoy it just as much as I do.

As we continue to ruminate over how and why this country sodomized itself with a jackhammer this last election, I think it all comes down to an old saying: “Everything happens for a reason. And sometimes, the reason is that you’re stupid and make bad decisions.”

When I say here, ‘stupid’ I define stupidity versus intelligence and I define intelligence as being able to gather data, acknowledge it and act on it, including changing one’s actions if that is warranted by new information. Stupidity therefore is refusing to do what the facts are telling you is right. I don’t necessarily mean voters are stupid in that they’re uneducated. There are a lot of educated Trump voters. And I don’t mean you’re stupid just because you disagree with me. Look: It doesn’t matter what you think, it doesn’t matter what I think about abortion, or Ukraine or some other hot political issue, you have a right to your opinion, you have a right to your vote, and if you elect a guy that I think is reprehensible, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.

Except:

When Trump sent a mob to the Capitol to “fight like hell”, stop the Electoral College certification and kill his own Vice President and Republican congressmen with a hanging scaffold that just happened to be there at a “peaceful protest”, that should have automatically disqualified him from any federal office. It did not because you wanted him there, and because the writers of the Constitution did not specify “No person shall be eligible for the office of President if he is both a raging hammerhead and an overgrown child with an emotional age somewhere between a sugared-up toddler and a 12-year old girl on her first period” because they thought it went without saying.

And then you said that the Biden-Harris economy sucks, and the Trump economy was so much better, so you voted for Trump despite everyone and his Mom – including conservative economists – repeatedly telling you that Trump has gone whole hog on broad-based tariffs, which major retailers have predicted will require them to raise prices.

That is not just disagreeable, that is playing Russian roulette with a machinegun.

One example of where I speak: New York Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to her credit, had a video conference event where talked to her own voters and supporters after the election to ask what happened and why. And at one point she asked, how many of the people who voted for her also voted for Trump, and why. And one of the responses she got was to the effect of “I think that both of you are outsiders compared to the rest of DC, and less ‘establishment’.”

So you’re saying that ‘establishment’ is necessarily bad and ‘outsider’ is necessarily good? Because that’s what you’re telling me when you vote for both Ocasio-Cortez and Trump, two people who are certainly outsiders to their respective party establishments but who come from radically different perspectives and have nothing else in common. How would you expect two such people in the same government to negotiate and which would you want to prevail? Those are questions you need to answer instead of choosing labels over policies.

You cannot have it both ways, any more than you can vote for Trump on one hand and then vote for state initatives protecting abortion rights on the other. Because I think we all know in his artery-clogged heart that Trump really doesn’t care one way or another about stopping abortion, but if there is anyone he is still beholden to (outside of Russia) it’s the Evangelical community that now treats him like God on Earth. After all, with all the setbacks he’s had, he still won. (Thanks to you voters.) The Evangelicals are now just as drunk with power as Trump is, and they’re going to expect him to enact that national abortion ban. You could have stopped that. But no, you thought you could keep watching The Trump Show while still keeping abortion rights in your state, never mind all the red states you damned to Hell cause people voted in Trump the last time.

Here’s your sign.

Then here’s another example I’ve previously referred to, Bill Barr. Bill Barr actually has a brain. And earlier this year he was doing the tour of TV shows and interviews to hawk his new memoir, and he went into extensive detail about how as Trump’s Attorney General he saw how unqualified and erratic he is. And reporters would always ask Barr, who are you voting for? And he would always confirm that he was voting Republican, even if the nominee was Trump. Why? Because Biden would be worse.

Again: That is not morality. That is not even ideology. That is programming. That’s “I cannot vote for any non-Republican, no matter how much my intellect tells me that the current Republican candidate is wrong.”

Apparently to some people the prospect of another Biden term or a Harris presidency is so horrible that it’s worth having Dr. Oz running our health services. At this rate why not hire Dr. Phil as Surgeon General? His first name is “Dr.”!

People in this country don’t think, they react. They react to labels. They react to their programming.

They don’t actually go over the reasons why they believe what they believe, they just let other people define their terms for them, and then they act on those other people’s definitions.

Meanwhile, how is the “left” (which the woke Right describes as ‘anybody who disagrees with me and my Lord and Savior Trump’) going to respond to this? If you’re a Democratic Party official or member of the mainstream media (same thing), you probably have no idea. So I’ve seen a lot of people giving their hot takes as to how this happened and interviewing various people after the fact to find out why they voted the way they did, and what their motivations are. I say to those liberals:

No. Stop. Stop that.

You’re Trump whispering again.

Remember the last time this happened, you kept getting reporters to come out to Trump-voting neighborhoods and ask why they voted the way they did? Remember you did all those studies and articles, thinking, oh, if we only could get insight into the minds of Trump voters then we could appeal to them and correct course? No. Not happening. Joe Biden was the most pro-organized labor president we’ve had in decades, and organized labor pissed in his face.

What it is is that you good little liberals assume that because you have reasons for doing what you do, however flawed they may be, that you assume that other people are acting on reasons for what they do, which seem valid to them even if you disagree with them. No. The problem is that THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT ACTING ON REASONS. They are operating on feelings. Or what Stephen Colbert in his previous career presciently called truthiness – that is, believing in a thing not because it is actually true, but because it feels true – which is to say, I believe it because I want it to be true. Which feels better to me than fishing through the minutiae of context and facts.

Or as John Fugelsang put it recently, “the media doesn’t get that Donald Trump is the closest some red states will ever get to being able to vote for Boss Hogg.”

You cannot reason with such people any more than you can reason with the Joker. Some men just want to watch the world burn.

If you want to do some real soul searching and re-assessment, liberals, consider again that Trump did not actually increase his vote count from 2020, Kamala Harris only lost because she got at least 11 million votes less than Joe Biden did. Don’t try to Trump whisper the people who were never going to vote for you anyway. Consider why so many people who could have voted for you didn’t.

That is important insofar as you actually plan to be running things once you get elected, whereas Republicans are really good at selling themselves to get elected but always fall down on the ‘running things’ part.

But at the same time, while you actually want to have substantial policies if you win office, you need to sell yourselves to win, and you should admit by now that you can’t sell yourselves with substantial policies. Why? Because again: Americans, as a collective, are stupid.

The good news, sorta, is that Americans’ critical superficiality can work in your favor, and in fact has. Remember when Bill Clinton played sax on the Arsenio Hall show? Remember when Barack Obama won two terms? Nobody cared that the purchasing power of American workers was declining under Democrats, just as voters didn’t care that we’ve had a better post-COVID recovery than any other Western nation. Voters just care what looks good and feels good to them. And it’s pretty clear, again given the anemic vote for Trump and the fact that he won because Democratic voting was even more anemic, that Republicans are just running on the basis of a celebrity figurehead to get their way back in power, because no one cares about their substantial policies any more than people care about those of the Democrats. Which is why Republicans don’t have them.

All you need is another striking figure whom everybody loves and who is capable of competing with Trump on that celebrity level.

Taylor Swift IS 35 now, isn’t she?

It was surprising and sometimes consternating to find that notwithstanding the opportunities I had to learn the facts and despite one’s inherent distrust of what one learned from Nazi sources, a steady diet over the years of falsifications and distortions made a certain impression on one’s mind and often misled it. No one who has not lived for years in a totalitarian land can possibly conceive how difficult it is to escape the dread consequences of a regime’s calculated and incessant propaganda. Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, a beer hall, a café, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realized how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts of life had become what Hitler and Goebbels, with their cynical disregard for truth, said they were.

William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

Well.

As I keep saying: God is real and he hates us all.

Either that or as I also said last time, either somebody ginned the election returns like Maduro did in Venezuela or the average American voter is too stupid to find their face in a mirror.

Judging from the US Senate results, I’d say the latter.

And I could say that a country that was too sexist to elect Hillary Clinton is too sexist and racist to elect a woman “of color”, but then why did so many women and Hispanics vote Trump? Even AFTER the Puerto Rico shit? You can bitch all you want about the Electoral College, but again, Republicans won the Senate, fairly clearly. The Electoral College has nothing to do with that. Hell, at the end of all this Trump might have the popular vote.

I think what it comes down to is, once again, the media making this a horse race between an entertainer and a bureaucrat, where the entertainer has a natural advantage. Not only that, the impression was given that the Democrats had a get-out-the-vote operation and the Republicans didn’t.

It’s one thing for Trump to win, since everybody was saying this was a coin flip, but in the next few months before the Ministry of Truth is established, we need to analyze exactly how he won THIS big.

I saw a Vlad Vexler commentary on YouTube in the aftermath of this election, and he was pondering what exactly we need to consider as to how we (the center-liberal people) could have let things come to this. And my response was, what is there to understand? After all we have learned about Trump, after we have seen him visibly deteriorate, after we have seen what is waiting in the wings if he dies in office, we (well, not me) elected him again? Why?? Was it all just “Fuck the Democrats”? I mean, I can kind of understand that. But it’s not enough. Just as the evil and incompetence of the Republicans is independent of the fact that Democrats are inadequate even by leftist standards, the fact that Democrats are inadequate is independent of the fact that Republicans are not only evil but objectively unfit to govern, because as in socialist countries, the evil of their ideology is going to dictate policy that is totally in conflict with reality. And whatever my misgivings with the Democrats, that was the reason I voted for them.

I cannot even say that I am sorry. What is there to be sorry for? I did what I could.

I am mad. Because anybody who claims to care about the world we’re in and voted for the Trump Party anyway made the world worse. We let the Middle East down. We let Ukraine down. We let Taiwan down.

This is a world of consequences. You cannot, say, tell everybody that abortion rights matter, and vote for abortion rights initiatives and then elect a government that is going to make the Dobbs decision nationwide. Contrary to what Trumpniks believe, reality exists and causality exists. And the reality and consequences of their actions WILL come back on them just as they did in 2020. The problem is they will also come back on the rest of us. It will mean that more people, in this country and throughout the world, will die who didn’t have to die. We know those are the stakes because that is what happened.

Seriously, fuck this place. The Republican Party quit being a republican party. The Libertarian Party quit being a libertarian party. And America just quit being America.

The only thing I can say as encouragement for the next four years – or however long this lasts – is that America is, or is supposed to be, a country of individuals. It doesn’t matter if the collective has decided to be stupid and illogical. If you are still an individual – if YOU are still America – then America still exists.

Up til this weekend, every election poll has had the race still tied between Vice President Kamala Harris and once-and-future Viceroy for Russian North America Donald Trump. But apparently because Trump has so much built in support, from his Party, the “liberal” media and his cult of apes in pants, he figured he could afford a few unforced errors.
Like, when he went back to New York, a state he will never win, and held a Sunday rally in Madison Square Garden in New York City, for some reason, and the first speaker was a “famous” podcast comedian that I’ve never heard of until now telling jokes about the fecundity of Puerto Ricans and saying their homeland was a floating island of garbage. And at least he could make the excuse that he was using roast humor. The other guest speakers, who used various slurs for Harris and called her campaign staff “pimp handlers” weren’t even as funny. But apparently it’s the garbage comment that everybody fixated on. So in his when-you’re-in-a-hole-dig-to-China way, Trump decided to embrace the image by wearing a garbageman’s orange reflective vest to a campaign event. Cause apparently he didn’t look orange enough. You know he’s a professional garbageman cause he still had his tie on. He also decided to make the metaphor even more perfect by bringing out a white garbage truck with the Trump/Vance logo on it. And then he flubbed it by trying and failing to get in the cabin, displaying further evidence of his deteriorating motor skills.

And in this one speech Friday in Arizona, he got so frustrated at a bad microphone that he started doing the hawk-tuah like he was simulating oral sex on it. So Trump must think he’s going to win. He’s already rehearsing for his next meeting with Putin.

But otherwise, with everything we now know at this point, if Trump wins it is either because they ginned the results the way Maduro ginned the results in Venezuela, or because the American public as a whole is too damn stupid to find their faces in a mirror.

There’s a reason that the media is only focusing on a few swing states: Cause all but seven states are pretty much spoken for. If you look at, say, 270towin.com, it’s got Harris listed at 226 electoral votes cause those are the states that are pretty much sure to vote Democratic. Like, you know most of the Northeast and the West Coast are going to go blue. Trump is listed at having 219 votes. Because Alaska and most of “flyover country” are guaranteed to go Trump. Democratic Senate candidates in Texas and Florida are making a serious challenge, but ultimately, both states are going to go Trump. After all, if one of them did go Democratic, that would be the end of the election. If both went Democratic, that would be the end of the Republican Party.

Allan Lichtman’s final analysis for the Electoral College map shows Harris winning with the following spread on the remaining swing states: Trump gets Arizona and Nevada. That’s 17 Electors. Pennsylvania is still up in the air, which it probably would be given the amount of time it takes to get the votes. But Harris gets Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina and Georgia. Now, if Harris got Wisconsin and Michigan that’s 25 Electors. If she got Pennsylvania that’s 19 more and that would be 270 by itself. Of course that still won’t be enough because the Trumpniks will try to contest the results everywhere and if she has only that many, flipping one state would be enough to deny the election. Which is why North Carolina and Georgia going blue is important. I personally think Pennsylvania is more likely to go Democrat than North Carolina, but North Carolina is almost even money at this point. Georgia is always the wild card. It’s been red for some time and has a Republican government that has done a lot to restrict voting, even if it isn’t quite as Trumpnik as the governments in other red states. Yet voter turnout (and the repellent nature of local Senate candidates) has caused federal elections in Georgia to go to the Democrat the last few times.

And speaking as a Nevada native, frankly if I were a Harris campaign staffer looking at the Electoral College map, I’d say North Carolina for Nevada is a great trade.

And then there was the news that everyone on the Internet was going on about, where a major poll Saturday by Anne Selzer showed Harris leading by 3 in conservative Iowa. At the same time, more sober prognosticators don’t think Harris is actually going to win Iowa, but the telling thing is that a reputable pollster is showing her gaining and potentially winning a state Republicans can usually take for granted.

Maybe, contrary to what the media is telling us, Americans don’t want a country where Elon Musk is running economic policy, Robert Kennedy Jr. is running the health system and a rapist is deciding whether we have a national abortion ban.

My bet would be similar but not quite the same as Lichtman’s: Arizona and Nevada go Trump, although there’s a possibility that the popularity of the Democratic Senate choices in those states might carry Harris. Pennsylvania goes Harris, though that may take days to determine after Tuesday. North Carolina goes Trump, though that may take days. Georgia goes Harris. Again, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania would be just enough for Harris to clinch and if she gets either NC or GA, that would cement the victory, and if she gets both, or gets one of those plus either or both of AZ or NV, that would really cinch it. Remember, we all knew in 2020 that Trump wasn’t going to admit if he lost, and Biden won mainly because he won enough states by wide enough margins that Trump couldn’t steal anything by recount or state government interference, and as it turned out, none of the states he contested after Election Day went back to his column. That looks like what we’re going to see here.

All that being the case, I’m more interested in seeing how everything plays out, how quickly it plays out, and, just as important in the long term, who wins the Senate. Part of the reason I’m more optimistic about Harris is that Democrats in Senate races – especially Colin Allred in Texas – are polling a lot better in their races than Harris polls against Trump. And while there is always cross-voting it’s a little hard to believe that people who are voting for Democrats in downballot races are that disinclined to vote for Harris. (Just as, Democratic optimists not withstanding, it’s a bit hard to believe that all those rural Republicans in Nevada are flooding the early voting lists so that they can vote in Harris.) I’m also interested in seeing how the state election Questions, especially Nevada Question 3, turn out.

But still, we can never assume that Trump is done for or that he’s not going to win this election. Always remember: God is real, and he hates us all.