Republics

 Another stupid thing that I keep hearing from Electoral College fans (which seem to all be Trump fans as well) is that we can't have direct, i.e. popular vote elections for President because "we're a Republic, not a Democracy". Both the terms refer to rule by the people. "Republic" comes to us from the Latin res publica, i.e. a matter of the people; "Democracy" comes from demokratia, Greek for "power by the people". "Republic" came to mean a government of elected representatives, as distinct from a monarchy. "Democracy" indicated a political system where 'the people' had a vote. Most early republics did not have universal suffrage, even the United States limited voting rights to white, male landowners at its founding. "Democracy" was often used to refer to direct democracy or mob rule, the tyranny of the majority. However, over time, Republics where the representatives weren't elected by the people became common; examples include Socialist Republics and Islamic Republics, where there were representatives that were elected, or more precisely selected by the ruling party or by religious elites. The term Democratic Republic came to be used for systems where the people elected their representatives, and often "Democracy" was used as a shorthand. Those who attempt to make a distinction between a Democracy and a Republic are defining "Democracy" as "Direct Democracy" when in fact most people are not using the term that way.

Even if the Trumpists were correct in their claim that we're not a Democracy, there is nothing about being a Republic that prima facie precludes it from directly electing a President. The people are still electing their representative, the President.

It's Exhausting Keeping Up With Fake News

It has been exhausting keeping up with all the lies, half-truths and distortions that emanate from Trump and his minions. What is truly frightening his his apparent reliance on fake news stories and his tendency to tweet ill-considered opinions about the last thing that he heard about.

The term fake news and fake news sites has gained prominence in this election, mainly due to how often people formed their opinions based on these sites. A current example is the gunman who fired his weapon in a pizza place in D.C. because he has read in a fake news site about a Clinton-run ring of pedophiles operating from there. Donald Trump has been complicit in the legitimizing of fake news; he made a distrust of the mainstream media a major point in his campaigns. He kept the press sequestered in "pens" during his campaign rallies and accused them of colluding with Clinton to rig the election in her favor.

The mainstream press is not always right. Sometimes they get a story wrong. Sometimes individual reporters make things up. Sometimes their implicit bias influences a story. Other times a lack of resources will determine what gets covered and what doesn't. But the press in general wants their stories to be accurate. They research, they interview, they fact-check. Sources are vetted. Impartiality is the goal. It not just, as Donald Trump speculated, some guy in his parents' basement. It's a business that has staked its reputation on accuracy.

Fake news is none of those things. Often it's just one or two people writing blogs. Or it's an organization with an axe to grind or a specific point of view. They traffic in wild, unsubstantiated conspiracy theories. Facts are unimportant if they get in the way of the narrative. Fake news is not a mainstream news outlet making a mistake, it's not a reporter embellishing his exploits, it's not even perceived bias; fake news is misinformation, it's propaganda, it's a point of view where facts are irrelevant. And now our President-Elect, in addition to relying on fake news to inform his policies, has been tarring real news sources as fake news when they disagree with him, or say negative things about him.

Early in the campaign I'd read a Trump tweet, or hear something he said, think it sounded off, and then do some research. More often than not I'd discover fairly quickly that he was wrong. Now I just assume that what he says and tweets is bullshit. The odds are in my favor that way.

Haha! Just Kidding!

Donald Trump's campaign was crammed full to overflowing with demagoguery. Some might say that this approach, filled with appeals to bigotry, unrealistic promises to bring back jobs that were never coming back, jingoistic calls to subdue our enemies and vague ideas about making America great again, was what won the election for him. Oddly, some of his backers justified their support by rationalizing that he wouldn't follow through with some (or all) of his crazier ideas. You know, the ideas that had huge crowds chanting "lock her up" and "build the wall"; the incitement to violence (including the reference to 'Second Amendment People' taking action against a Clinton presidency). But now we appear to be in the "just kidding" phase. On several occasions Trump has laughed off some of the things that he said during the campaign, in particular that talking about "locking up" Clinton "played well" during the campaign, but we didn't need it now; he joked about how he thought "drain the swamp" was a stupid slogan, but kept it up because it received a good response. You can see from his cabinet picks that he's putting the swamp under EPA protection and bringing in as many swamp creatures as will fit. In fact, for a self proclaimed political outsider, he's bringing in a lot of insiders. What will be the response of the people who voted for him? Will they turn on him like they turned on those who came in on the Tea Party wave? Or will they remain blind to his actions as long as he bellows what they want to hear?

Facts, Schmacts

During the campaign, my biggest problem with Donald Trump was that he just didn't know what he was talking about. This is not to dismiss the racism, misogyny, xenophobia and assorted bigotry; not to mention the incitements to violence and the continuous string of insults, but in addition to the deliberate lying, he just didn't seem to have any idea how things worked...at all. Granted, you can never know the enormity of the job until you're in it, but Trump betrayed an ignorance of basic facts, such as the need to restaff virtually the entire West Wing once he took office. Even his own business operations were shown to be a mystery to him when he claimed that his employees "were having a hard time with Obamacare" although most were insured by way of group insurance through the company. Time after time his statements revealed a woeful lack of understanding of economics, the Constitution, libel laws, and even basics facts about a variety of situations. Of course, a president doesn't have to know everything, he has a cabinet, advisors, assistants. He has to delegate. But when you have advisors, you should actually listen to them, when you have experts on your team who know more than you do, you should actually consult with them before shooting off your mouth. Trump has done neither.

For the next four years we will have a president who just doesn't know jack-shit.

Happy Holidays

Say Merry Christmas, say Happy Holidays, say whatever you want, but let it be because you are wishing someone a happy or a merry whatever, not because you are making some mind of point.

Last year I worked on a UPS truck, delivering packages throughout the month of December. As we got closer to December 25th, I started wishing customer with whom I came in contact a Merry Christmas - until I came across "that guy".

After wishing this customer a Merry Christmas, he stopped me and "thanked" me for not saying Happy Holidays and went off on a tirade about political correctness, and all "those" people who hate Christmas ad nauseum. I can't say it ruined my day, but it certainly left a sour taste in my mouth. I didn't respond, since I was wearing the UPS uniform and just didn't have the time.

A few years earlier, I answered the phone at the grocery store where I worked. The very polite man on the line, like the UPS customer, "thanked" me for our store putting "Merry Christmas" in our ads (in fact we were alternating "Merry Christmas" and "Happy Holidays") and launched into a tirade similar to that delivered by the UPS customer. On that occasion, I spoke up. I let him know that I appreciated his input, but that I was one of "those" people who didn't celebrate Christmas and I hoped that he would take into consideration during the holidays that not everyone believed the way he did. I believe his response was along the lines of "Well...okay then".

So this December, when giving your holiday greetings, no matter what greeting you use, don't be a dick.

Sick & Tired

Yes, I am sick & tired. Sick & tired of the amnesia already setting in about how Donald Trump played on fear, hatred, and bigotry to stir up people with legitimate reasons to feel disenfranchised. I am sick and tired of the pretense that Donald Trump didn't get a great deal of his support by consistently and brazenly lying, lying about what he could and would do, lying about his opponents, even lying about what he himself had said. I am sick and tired of Donald Trump's intermittent tone of reasonableness, as if a calm voice and a speech read off a teleprompter erases all the megalomaniacal  ranting that went on during the campaign, and actually still goes on, usually via Twitter. I am sick and tired of being accused by Trump supporters of being "butthurt" (I have always hated that expression), that "Hillary won - get over it" and that we're all liberal crybabies when there are legitimate reasons to be wary of Donald Trump and indeed be fearful of what the country may become under his Presidency. I am sick and tired of the press being maligned and their competence and integrity undermined to the point that people will believe some nut who thinks the Jews are out to rule the world by way of blacks and that Sharia law is coming and that Obama hates America because he was born in Kenya and reflexively disbelieve the New York Times. I am sick and tired of facts being optional.

Sick.

And.

Tired.

Already...so very tired.

More Electoral College

Yes, yes, yes, the "libs" don't like the Electoral College when their candidate loses the election while getting more votes, in this case 2.5 million more 48.1% to 46.4%; the President-Elect didn't like it when he thought Obama won while losing the popular vote, but he guesses it's okay now.

I've heard some, in my opinion, ridiculous statements by people who are presumably Trump supporters. A lot of Clinton supporters, as well as others who were against Trump, make a point that Clinton got more votes, many more votes, than Trump did. While that's interesting, and points to (1) the fact that we are a very divided nation and (2) despite the big Electoral College win, there is no mandate from "the people"; it's largely irrelevant to the question of "who is our next President?". Both Clinton and Trump knew the rules and both campaigned in order to win the most electoral votes, not the most popular votes.  Although it's fun to prod Trump with the knowledge that he garnered less votes than "Crooked Hillary". One of the most ridiculous comebacks that Trump supporters, and even Trump himself, have put forward, is that Clinton really didn't win the popular vote, or that 3 million illegal immigrants voted for her, resulting in Trump gaining more legal votes. Another one that I heard is that if you count up the counties that each candidate "won", Trump received a majority of votes in approximately 2600 counties to Clinton's 500, as if this is somehow a significant statistic. Counties aren't like congressional districts, which each have similar populations (not exactly the same, since a state can have no less than one district) but are artifacts from earlier times. In Nebraska we have counties with less than 500 people, as well as counties with several million people. There are congruent situations all over the nation, so why bring up that meaningless figure? Because, somehow, Trump supporters can then assert that their guy won more of the nation, in addition to the electoral votes. They then derisively characterize the Clinton vote as having "won a couple of big cities", as if the almost 65 million votes were all from Los Angeles and New York City. The follow up to this is that we, as Americans, wouldn't want people "who are not like us", i.e. the city dwellers, to decide who our President should be, as if city folks aren't real Americans.

That brings us back to the recurring argument for keeping the Electoral College as it is: that by relying on the popular vote, the President would be decided by a handful of big cities. Los Angeles is 3.8 million, Chicago 2.7 million, and New York 8.4 million. That's 14.9 million out of 134.8 million total votes cast, those 3 huge, generally Democratic voting, cities together account for 11.05% of the votes cast, the number would be somewhat smaller if we added up the voting population. The total US population is 318 million, and since it looks like only 42% of the total population voted, the voting population of those 3 cities can be calculated as only 4.7% of votes cast. Add to that the fact that surely some  of the residents of these 3 cities voted for Trump, or even usually vote for Republicans and the steamroller that some imagine fades away. Add as many cities as you'd like, DC is only 0.6 million, Philly is 1.5 million, Boston and Detroit are 0.7 million each, and San Francisco is 0.8 million. That's only another 4.3 million, which only edges the voting population up to 6%.

There are other arguments against the Electoral College, but the argument that the big cities will decide the president under a popular vote system is not based on fact, or math.

Electoral College Lite

One of the most frequent arguments that I have heard recently in favor of the electoral college is that 10-15 urban areas, or alternatively, New York City and Los Angeles, would decide the election. With respect to the NYC/LA argument, those two cities hold 6% of the total US population, which is pretty significant, but the states of New York and California already hold 21% of the electoral votes, so their influence is already outsize. What the supporters of this idea forget is that there are plenty of people in New York and California outside the major urban centers that are more rural, more conservative and tend to vote Republican. These votes would suddenly count, as they don't now, being drowned in the sea of Democratic votes, just as Democratic votes in primarily Republican states don't end up counting toward the total. Electoral College advocates believe that there will be no campaigning in the small states due to their small population, but isn't that what's happening now? Very seldom do you see much attention paid to small states, especially in those that are a lock for either party. An exception is in a close election (like this last one) where every electoral vote was thought to be significant - Trump worked hard to get that one electoral vote in Maine and Clinton campaigned to win that one electoral vote in Nebraska (and failed). If the big urban areas are viewed as a Democratic lock, would you see the Republicans campaigning in the smaller states in order to balance the urban areas? It's hard to say, but one thing is for sure, the rural votes in California, as well as urban votes in Texas would be in play as they would not be under the current system.

Election Recount

President-Elect Donald Trump has been blowing up Twitter these past 24 hours in response to Jill Stein's request for a recount in Wisconsin, and presumably Michigan and Pennsylvania. Ms. Stein, the Presidential candidate of the Green Party has been raising money in order to ask for a recount in Wisconsin. Some of her representatives have cited evidence of irregularities, although no hard evidence has been put forth. A representative of the Clinton campaign, announced that her campaign will be "participating" his quote: "but now that a recount has been initiated in Wisconsin, we intend to participate in order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides." It is not clear, at least to me, what participating entails. Donald Trump, in a flurry of seven (so far) tweets, expressed his outrage that this was happening. Included in this post are images of two of the tweets, the other five don't really add much to his "argument". 

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump?lang=en

I'm not sure what Stein is attempting to accomplish with these recounts. While it is true that a different winner in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania would result in a different overall electoral college winner, this would not benefit Stein and the Green party directly. And I don't see where it would benefit Clinton either. All this can do is reflect badly on the Democrats as a party, unless there is actual evidence of massive vote tampering, fraud or system hacking, which Clinton's spokesman say they have no indication that it exists. 

Throughout the campaign, and even during the primaries, Donald Trump loudly proclaimed that the system was rigged against him and insisted that the only way that he could lose would be if it were stolen from him. His insistence that the results would be rigged against him became more shrill and paranoid as Election Day grew closer and the majority of polls showed Clinton ahead. His campaign attempted to water down his message by claiming that by "rigged", he meant that the media and the pollsters were reporting in such a way to cause him to lose, despite the disdain he and his followers have for mainstream media and the polls. His refusal to say whether he would accept the results of the election struck many as a prelude to an insurrection as some of his supporters (voters, not those in his campaign) talked about arming themselves to resist a Clinton Presidency. And let's not forget Trump's implied encouragement for 'Second Amendment people' to tale action to prevent a President Hillary Clinton from appointing Supreme Court Justices. Trump's people compared his refusal to pledge to accept the election results as similar to Al Gore's challenges to the Florida vote in the 2000 election. 

Now President-Elect Trump, who implied throughout the campaign that he would not accept any result except a win for him, he's upset that one of his opponents, supported by another, are asking for recounts, which is their legal right to do. He has been quoting and misquoting Clinton and the Democrats. One of the things he's claiming is that the Democrats insisted that the election night tabulations be accepted. This is not true. They said all along that they (including Clinton) would "accept the election results" - these "results" include whatever a hypothetical recount would come up with. They did not say that once the counts were finalized that they would not accept them. This may seem like a fine distinction, but it's the difference between ensuring that vote tabulation is fair and accurate and staging a coup. Trump also pointed to Clinton's concession and her words about working with Trump and giving him the chance to lead as negating any option for legal action to question vote results. I was not aware that a concession held any legal authority. 

What is Trump afraid of? With all of his talk about election rigging and his predilection for projecting his own antics onto others, I have heard some speculation that it was Trump who was behind some actual rigging. Is he worried that some of his own tampering will come to light? If he is so confident that these recounts will not change anything, why is he so worked up about them? Why would he care that Jill Stein and Hillary Clinton are wasting time and money? He's accusing his opponents of hypocrisy, but I see a lot of hypocrisy on his part. 

Words Mean Things

"Ha ha! Just kidding!"

That seems to be the position of many Trump supporters, and even Trump himself, as we progress through this transitional period between the election and the inauguration - when rhetoric becomes reality.

It's not even a matter for debate that Trump stoked bigotry and provoked and condoned violence during his campaign. It's on the record that he promised, time and time again, to build a giant wall across the southern border that Mexico would pay for; that he wanted to loosen up the libel laws to stifle those who disagreed with him; that he wanted to overturn Roe vs. Wade; that he was against same-sex marriage; that he would repeal "Obamacare"; that he would "take the oil" in the Middle East; that more nations should have nuclear weapons; that he wants to bring back torture; on and on and on it goes.

Some Trump supporters are salivating like Pavlov's dogs waiting for all of this to take place, others however, take the position that it was just talk, and he really won't do any (or most) of those things. This, I guess, is supposed to make us feel better about Trump's election victory. Ha, that wacky Trump, you didn't really believe that he'd build a wall, ha ha, you don't really believe that he's a racist do you?  Oh, that was just talk.

Yeah, it was that "just talk" that got him elected. He received a majority of the electoral votes by appealing to bigotry, hate, fear and divisiveness. So, I'm supposed to be relieved that he didn't mean it? That he's not a hateful bigot but he found it necessary to play the part of one to get elected?

In the first days following Election Day, there seemed to be good reason to think it was all a great big scam - Trump sounded reasonable, he was respectful and gracious to Secretary Clinton, and solicitous of President Obama's advice. He spoke about unity. That didn't last too long, the Twitter Monster emerged from his cave, insulting his detractors and whining about slights.

People are worried, concerned, yes fearful of what is to come in a Trump presidency. Some play down this fear, but I contend that worry, concern, and fear are rational, reasonable responses to the great unknown that is a Trump presidency. Possibly Trump will implement none of the things that he campaigned on, none of the positions that actually got him elected, but I believe that it naive and foolish to proceed as if everything that he said in the last 18 months was just words. Yes, they were just words, but words mean things.

Retail Holiday Fun

Back when I worked in the retail grocery business (only a year ago, but it seems longer) this was one of the busiest weeks of the year. The action started on the weekend before Thanksgiving and the sales volume increased every day until the day before the holiday was one long exercise in shoveling water against the tide. There are many things that can turn an employee into a homicidal maniac during this time, so don't add to it - save a life, it may be your own.

Throughout the year labor expenses are a big focus by upper management. Tight scrutiny is given to the "labor percentage", the amount of money that you spend on payroll expressed as a percentage of total sales. Due to this pressure, managers only schedule the minimum number of employees possible. When the holidays roll around, the sales are significantly higher, and since the labor goals remain a fairly constant percentage, managers can spend more labor dollars and hence schedule more hours. The problem with that is that due to labor constraints throughout the rest of the year, every employee is already working, if not full-time hours, then the maximum amount of hours for which they are available (part-timers usually are part-timers due to school, or a second job). So the amount of work has increased, but the numbers of people doing it has not. The result is going to be several things that a customer isn't going to like, one is longer lines at the checkout because everyone is already there and there's no one else to call in. The company where I worked had a "solution" - cross train non-cashiers to work a checkstand when it got busy. This may work in the short-term - you get a couple of extra people cashiering during a rush, but during the holidays it's a rush all the time. While your dairy clerks, and produce managers and cart pushers are checking, who's filling the milk, stocking the sweet potatoes and bringing in all the carts from outside? This helps to cause the other problem: out of stock product.

Depending on the size of the store, product might be brought in every day, or 2-3 days per week. It is impossible to accurately forecast the sales of every single item 100% of the time. For most of my time in retail grocery I did sales forecasts for the store, I broke them down to the day of the week and to the department. I was extremely accurate - for the whole store - but I never even attempted to predict what the sales of every product in the store would be. Department managers often had to make a rough guess in order to have enough for an ad but even then the guess was either too high or too low. Someone not in the business might suggest that over-ordering would be the way to go, and we often did just that, estimating high so as not to run out, but with many items you had a narrow window in which to sell them, and once that window closed, you were stuck with them. This cost money, and if the store isn't turning a profit, then eventually it will close down. A bigger problem when it comes to out of stocks is product that is in the store, but not on the shelf. The average amount of units of any item that a shelf slot holds is twelve (one case), some faster selling products will have 2 or 4 cases on the shelf. But this is a very limited amount. A high volume store can go through 24 cans of sweet potatoes or cranberry sauce in less than an hour. Of course, for the high volume and ad items, there are displays, but many people walk right by big displays and are then confronted by an empty shelf. Sometimes even the displays sell down. So this is where the problem in the previous paragraph and this one come together. Even if there is plenty of everything "in the back", someone still has to get it out of "the back" and onto the shelf, and those someones are also checking, bagging groceries, shagging carts, cleaning bathrooms, helping customers find things, taking phone calls, putting in orders for the next day, and a hundred others things.

This is a high stress time for your typical grocery employee. The employees are working maximum hours and the salaried managers are working unpaid overtime. No matter how hard they try they can't keep up. Then you come in and complain that they're out of something, they go to the back room and find what you're looking for, but you're gone, off to harass someone else. As they're stocking the shelf with the item that you apparently no longer need, they are stopped by several dozen customers asking questions and a handful complaining that they are blocking the aisle and that they should stock when it's not busy. They make a list of all the things in the aisle that need restocking and head to the back to get what they need, but it takes 20 minutes to get back there, because you are still looking for that item you asked about a half hour ago that you didn't wait for and 10 other customers want to know where the stuffing mix is. The harried employee gets his cart loaded up, but gets called to a different aisle because the shelf is empty over there too, then he's called on to check, then he has to bring in carts, and finally after an hour or more he remembers that he was restocking aisle 10 and its starts all over again. Oh, and don't forget the abuse that you get if you say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas".

Some customers try to play it smart and shop late in the evening. That works pretty well during the others times of the year, but by 11:00 pm the store is trashed and won't be looking decent again until the night crew gets everything filled up again. (Free advice, shop early morning when all the displays are still full and the employees haven't yet sunk into a disabling depression)

And don't ever, ever, ever express sympathy for someone who is working on Thanksgiving, or Christmas Eve (or in some businesses, like convenience store) if you are in their shopping; if you gave a shit, you wouldn't be in there.

Is the Electoral College "Fair"?

Is the Electoral College a fair way to decide who gets elected President of the United States? I guess it depends on what you mean by fair. First, a little history:

When the founders were putting together the Constitution, the framework for the governance of the United States, they did not really trust direct democracy. This distrust derived from several assumptions. James Madison warned about the rise of "factions"; he envisioned a single-issue faction growing to more than 50% and imposing its will on the rest (the tyranny of the majority). In general, the founders did not trust "the people" to always make the correct decisions and set up an additional layer in the Presidential election system “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.” according to Alexander Hamilton. You can see the distrust for the will of the people in the early practice of Senators being chosen, not by direct election, but by appointment of state legislatures and by the restriction of the franchise to white landowners. The other influence on the creation of the electoral college was the fact that most people in that time viewed themselves more as citizens of their state than as "Americans". The United States under the Articles of Confederation was just that - thirteen "states" (state being back then more commonly applied to a sovereign nation than a subdivision of a larger country) - bound together by mutual treaties to act in concert, more like the European Union than the United States of today. Due to that attitude, much attention was paid to the rights of states, rather than individuals. Much was made of the more populous Northern states dominating the less populous Southern states, which is how we ended up with a Senate, which gave equal representation to each state, while the House of Representatives was proportional by population. Even within the House of Representatives, even the most sparsely populated states receive at least one representative, and are not joined together in one Congressional district with another state. It's interesting that state legislatures used to operate this way, but the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional, that it violated the principle of one man, one vote. 

When it came to organizing the electoral college, the principle of recognizing the distinctness of each state still held. Each state was assigned a number electors equal to the number of Congressional Representatives and Senators. In practice, 48 states award all of their electoral votes to whoever receives the most votes within the state (not necessarily a majority). Even the two that don't, break it down by Congressional district and award two votes to the overall state winner. 

Since we have had two elections in recent memory where the winner of the popular vote was not the winner in the Electoral College, there has been renewed concern. Admittedly, it's usually supporters of the candidate who lost in the Electoral College that make the most fuss, but it's a legitimate concern. 

One of the arguments for keeping the Electoral College is that with direct election, highly populous regions or urban areas would hold an undue influence on the result, that by focusing on ten or twelve large metropolitan areas, candidates would ignore rural areas and smaller cities. But how is that different than what we have now? The large cities in California dominate over the small cities and rural areas and take all of the state's 55 electoral votes. New York City is  much more Liberal/Democratic than the rest of the state and their population negates the more Conservative/Republican votes in the rest of New York. Nebraska is all but ignored, with our five measly electoral votes, safely in the R column, not really worth the effort of campaigning here. (Although in a close election, campaigning for that one vote in District 2 happens on occasion). No matter what system that we use, states with higher populations (and hence populous urban areas within those populous states) will have more influence. However, in the current system, rural states receive proportionally more influence, since every state is guaranteed a minimum of three electoral votes. A state with three electoral votes has 0.56% of the electoral votes, while Wyoming, which has three electoral votes, has only 0.17% of the nation's population. 

The difference in a direct election system is that the votes in say, New York City, will not negate the votes in upstate New York. Every vote in the state will contribute toward the result. 

I believe part of the fondness in some quarters for the Electoral College, other than "my guy won", is an attachment for the concept that we're primarily citizens of different, unique states, not primarily Americans. 

No matter what system we use, some areas will have more influence than others, no matter what system we use, candidates will campaign in areas where the most votes are, the difference with a direct election system is that the votes of the Republican rural potato farmer in upstate New York will count exactly the same as the vote of the Democratic schoolteacher in New York City; the liberal college professor's vote in Lincoln Nebraska will count the same as the rancher in the Panhandle. The vote in near-the-Arctic Circle Alaska will have as much influence as a vote in Los Angeles. I saw a map this morning (pictured to the right)which purported

to show that half of the US population lived in the counties shaded in blue. This map was used as an argument that we should retain the Electoral College, since these small geographical areas had more influence than the rest of the vast stretches of the nation. To this I say "so what?" If there's more people in an area, that area should have more votes. England in the early 1800's had what was called "rotten boroughs", where parliamentary districts shrunk in population, but the law made no provision for changing election district boundaries as population changed. The Wikipedia page on rotten boroughs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotten_and_pocket_boroughs lists eight districts with less than 50 voters, two with only seven! The law was changed in 1832 to reflect population changes. Of course, this is not exactly the situation in the United States, but we do have a system where one person's vote counts for more than another's simply because of where that voter lives. 

The one objection that I have for scrapping the electoral college in favor of direct election is operational. Right now, most states' elections are not that close and recounts are rare. When the majority of states show a clear winner, it isn't even necessary to count all the votes. For instance, if Nebraska has counted 92% of the ballots, and Trump is ahead 70% - 30%, there just aren't enough votes in that 8% of uncounted ballots to make a difference. Currently, we count them all, but we concede that Trump has won that state long before all the votes are in. In a close race under direct election, what might trigger a recount? What would be recounted? I believe that five days after the election, we're still counting votes from Election Day. How long does it really take to count all the votes? Better election day security and modernization of balloting and counting, as well as better fail-safes and paper trails would be necessary before a direct election could take place.

One probable side effect of switching to direct election of the President might be the proliferation of third parties. One of the main impediments to a third party presidency is the electoral college. In very few instances has an independent candidate gotten any electoral votes. A third party contender, even while losing, might garner enough votes to be able to receive support for future runs. Right now, the prospect of zero electoral votes discourages serious candidates. Some would welcome competition to the two major parties, others point to the sometimes chaotic elections in European countries or in Israel, where there are a dozen parties, many of them single-issue, all competing for votes, where governments can only form when two or more parties form a coalition.

All in all, what is "fair" is for the person who receives a majority of votes cast should be elected as President (maybe a runoff? - but that's an argument for another day). I'm not suggesting that the results of this election be overturned, or that the electors not vote according to the will of the voters in their states - Trump won the election by the rules that were in place at the start of the election - but that we seriously consider changing the rules so that every vote counts, and counts equally. 

One Aging White Guy Living in the Midwest (or the Great Plains or Whatever)

Yeah, look at the picture: middle aged white guy with a baseball cap with a picture of a chili pepper on it, cut off t-shirt, tattoo, sunglasses, beer in hand...stereotypes surely must come to mind.

Let me tell you a story.

In 1980 I was part of a religious group called The Way International. It was a Christian group that was far enough outside the mainstream that it often got labelled as a cult. The Way has a program called Word Over the World Ambassadors, kind of a missionary program, where volunteers were assigned to a year of proselytizing, usually in an area far from home. I signed up for this program and in August of 1980 left my home in Queens, NY to attend a week-long gathering of Way folks in New Knoxville Ohio, Way headquarters. There I received my assignment to serve as a Word Over the World (WOW) Ambassador in Sidney Nebraska, population 5000.

It was in Sidney where I experienced bigotry first hand.

Not that I had never seen bigotry practiced by, and inflicted on, others. When I was in my teens, homeowners in my Queens neighborhood of Rosedale organized to keep blacks from buying homes in the neighborhood. At the time, Rosedale was almost 100% white, predominantly Irish, Italian and Jewish. The homeowners formed an organization called R.O.A.R. - which either stood for Rights Of All Rosedale or Restore Our American Rights (I think it changed from one to another).  http://billmoyers.com/content/rosedale-way/ - it was never proved if R.O.A.R.  members did it, but homes of black residents of Rosedale were firebombed and vandalized. Watch the linked video. It was pretty disgusting. I was appalled at the hatred, but honestly, and to my shame, I didn't speak up or otherwise do anything about it.

But back to 1980. When I arrived in Sidney, along with three other people around the same age (I was 22 at the time) I was a little culture shocked. After all, I had come from one of the largest cities in the country and here I was in an insular rural community. But otherwise it seemed like a decent enough place. Little did I know that the community was fortified against us. Steve, the appointed leader of our group, had made a scouting trip to Sidney a month or so earlier. He secured a job for himself and looked into housing options, so the people of Sidney were well aware that a "cult" would be in their town.

It didn't take long for the people of Sidney to begin to express their displeasure at "the other" in the their midst.

I was fired from my job as an apprentice glass cutter because my employer's church objected to him hiring a "cult member". We were evicted from our duplex on New Year's Eve for the same reason and had difficulty finding another place to live due to discrimination by landlords. We were verbally assaulted in the streets and in stores, people attempted to run us down with their cars and staged a protest outside our house. We were refused service in several local restaurants; local churches organized meetings to protest our presence; a weekly radio program by a Sidney minister regularly railed against us. I was physically assaulted in a men's room at a bar one night. All because of our religious beliefs.

Before the thought "Oh that's nothing" forms in the minds of those who have experienced much worse, I thought the same thing myself. None of us were killed, our house wasn't burned down, the police weren't pulling me over and shooting us while our hands were up. And most importantly, I could have walked away from The Way and been accepted by those yahoos as soon as I joined an "acceptable" church. When I moved to another town I passed as just another white mainstream Christian and the discrimination just magically melted away. The color of my skin, my facial features or my accent didn't continue to identify  me as "other". My whiteness enabled me to walk away from the bigotry of the ignorant, a privilege that many others do not have.

So yeah, I benefit from what some call white privilege, and I haven't experienced the systemic racism, bigotry and discrimination that so many others do every day, but in part due to my limited experience with bigotry, discrimination in any form disgusts me, and I have no patience with it.

Including at the highest levels.

Clinton vs. Trump

As the ugliest and muddiest of presidential election campaigns draws to a close, a few more thoughts.

First of all, no matter who wins, I doubt that most of us will see much change in our day-to-day lives. And no matter who wins, there's a Congress who will probably not cooperate with either candidate overly much and there's another election in four years. Despite the gloom and doom, the Democrats survived eight years of George W. Bush and the Republicans survived eight years of Barack Obama. I've heard from people on both sides who are convinced that the Republic will be destroyed if the opposing candidate is elected. This doesn't mean that I think that the election doesn't matter, I think it does. If you're a conservative, you undoubtedly believe that Hillary Clinton's policies are not good for the country, or that you do not want to see liberal justices added to the Supreme Court. If you're liberal you see Donald Trump to be a dangerous loose cannon.

As most of my friends know, I support Hillary Clinton. Yes, I am aware of the accusations about The Clinton Foundation, Benghazi and the emails. From what I have read and the conclusions that I have drawn from the available information, my opinion is that while it looks bad on the surface, there is a lot of smoke and no fire. I realize that reasonable people may disagree. It is my opinion that if there were no private email server, no Benghazi deaths, no Clinton Foundation, the Republicans would create something to hold hearings about, like the never-ending Benghazi hearings that failed to conclude any wrongdoing despite a stated goal of bringing Clinton down . The Republicans have made it their mission to obstruct and character assassinate at every turn. The Obama administration has been hobbled at every turn by Republicans, whose main goal was to make Obama a one term president, and when that failed, to stop him from accomplishing anything. Their refusal to even hold hearings on a Supreme Court nominee is a case in point, with their suggestions that they may do the same if Clinton is elected further evidence of their lack of integrity. Some are even discussing impeachment before she is even elected. It is the Republican obstructionism which caused me to decide that, for the foreseeable future I would not vote for another Republican, even locally.

Donald Trump also provides plenty of reasons not to vote for him. He is a divisive figure, crude and insulting to be sure. He spews hate at every turn. But the main reason that I could not vote for him, other than my vow not to vote for Republicans any time soon, is simply that he does not know what he is talking about, does not know what he is doing, and sees no problem with shouting out "facts" and figures that have no basis in reality. He says that he will do things that are either unfeasible, not affordable or illegal. He shouts out things that people want to hear and has no idea how things work, not just politically, but economically. He has no idea how complex things are. He is in way over his head. Think he's going to bring back manufacturing jobs? He has no idea how, but he'll certainly have someone to blame when it doesn't happen. The same with all of his other ephemeral "policies".

Some people think that once Trump is in office, he'll settle down, bring in "the best people" and act presidential. As Terry Pratchett wrote, 'a leopard won't change his shorts' - Trump had the opportunity to bring in "the best people", but listens only to himself, why would anyone think that once he is the occupant of the Oval Office he'll suddenly get all meek and humble?

I do predict, that with the current political climate, whoever is elected will be a one-term president.

Media Coverage of the Election and the Ignorant Electorate

It's a vicious cycle. The majority of the electorate is ignorant and likes it that way, and the mainstream media, including talk radio by the way, are for-profit enterprises that give people what they want to hear - what will sell more newspapers, garner more advertising, create more buzz. While some individual reporters, editors and media executives might have an altruistic, "serve the public" view of their role, the bottom line is profit. The symbiotic relationship between the stupid segment of the public and the profit seeking, competitive media results in, for the most part, dumbed-down coverage. While it is true that there have been articles dissecting the candidates' plans (or lack of the same), including the feasibility of same, as well as economic impact, not to mention their legality, these types of stories generally get ignored. Yet the more spectacular coverage does get more traction and gets results. For example, the recordings of Trump talking about sexual assault got days and days of coverage, and seemed to have an effect on the polls - yet, was anyone really surprised that Trump would say anything like that? It was 100% consistent with his previous statements and his many years in the public eye. And the announcement by the FBI, 10 days before the election, that there were Clinton related emails on Anthony Weiner's laptop that they were checking out. We already know that Clinton had a problem with emails and was investigated, was it really a story that there were emails on a laptop that her top aide used? Yet, this news seemed to move the polls as well. Why? Because this kind of news is profitable for the media outlets - why is it profitable? Because the ignorant electorate likes the good vs. evil narrative, they like things simple, and they like to hear things that corroborate what they already believe.

So what happens? The candidates go along with it. The candidate who spends a lot of time laying out detailed economic plans is ignored, while a candidate who shouts out a simple slogan gets support. Hillary Clinton started out as the nerd candidate. Go back and listen to some of her back and forth with Bernie sanders during the primaries. Not particularly exciting. Lots of policy, lots of plans, lots of economics. When the conventions were over and she had to go head-to-head with Trump she thought she could do the same, but quickly turned to one liners and slogans and yes, name-calling, to battle Trump.

This will continue for as long as the voters refuse to demand substance from the candidates and stop rewarding the media for vacuous reporting. When the majority of voters stop being ignorant. 

Election Day is Almost Here

This election has been, by far, the ugliest, mud-slingingest Presidential election that I can recall in modern times (since I've been voting!) I'm not suggesting that politicians haven't disliked, or even despised, each other in past elections, but the level at which it has become personal, and the degree to which the candidates, rather than their surrogates, have participated in the vitriol is surely a new thing.

Politics has always been an us-vs.-them game, with occasional brief flashes of cooperation or bipartisanship. But I believe that the current nastiness can be traced back to the mid-nineties and Newt Gingrich. Gingrich was on a mission to unseat the Democrats as the majority party in both houses of Congress and to render President Bill Clinton ineffective. Newt's strategy was to, not only pursue the usual within-the-system tactics, but to use the power of television, then in the form of CSPAN. He made his attacks personal. Coupled with the rise of conservative talk radio, politics became trench warfare. And Democrats didn't forget, George W. Bush was vilified in just as vicious a fashion as Clinton was; if it wasn't for the unifying effect of the 9-11 attacks, I suspect that it would have been worse. Under Barack Obama it got even worse. Republicans made it their reason for existence to block everything that he attempted to accomplish.

But this contest has exceeded all previous measures of incivility. One candidate, Donald Trump, started his primary campaign with hate and insults. Substituting demeaning nicknames for his opponents in lieu of presenting a rational case for why he was the better candidate. He continued into the general election, insulting not only Hillary Clinton, but multiple segments of the population. Hillary Clinton, who likes to repeat Michelle Obama's call to "when they go low, we go high", nevertheless got down in the mud with Trump, even calling many of his supporters deplorable.

But what's depressing is that most of the electorate is ignorant, and makes their decisions based, not on any objective facts, but on sound bites, slogans, Facebook memes, and what their friends say. The insult-driven campaign works because most people won't go any deeper. Once they hear something that they want to hear, they need to hear no more, they need to research no further, they need not question their position.

Rigging

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

popularized by Carl Sagan 

This quote is usually used to debunk supernatural events, but I believe that it applies equally to conspiracy theories. Oftentimes what we call conspiracy theories speculate from ambiguous evidence and draw conclusions about what might be turning them into, in their view, what is?

One of the latest conspiracy theories is that the Clintons and their media allies are colluding to "rig" the results of the presidential election. As with most conspiracy theories, it is based on scant evidence, and what supposed evidence there is, is extremely ambiguous.

The vague allegations that the election would be rigged came first; some time ago Trump suggested that the only way that he could lose would be if the election were stolen from him via "massive fraud". Later the (mainstream) media were added to the mix, Trump alleging that the media was an arm of the Clinton campaign, that they were biased against him, and that they were poisoning people's minds against him. Finally, he combined the two allegations into one, that it was media collusion and voter fraud that would cost him the election. Of course he praised the media when a story was run that supported his narrative or criticized Hillary Clinton.

I'm not surprised that Trump thinks this - he's a nut. He's a self-absorbed, narcissist who's overly impressed with his own resume, and who has demonstrated a predilection for conspiracy theories. What I find disturbing is the number of seemingly intelligent people who believe it as well. Despite the fact that every allegation against Clinton, not only in this campaign, but for decades has enjoyed media coverage, Trumpists still believe that the Clintons have the mainstream media in their pocket. This is not to say that there's no bias, or that different news organizations haven't supported Clinton, but look at the New York Times, supposedly the media stooge of the Clintons, and their very much complete coverage of every Clinton pseudo-scandal. When I've pointed this out on occasion, the goalposts move and the standard then becomes that the media isn't criticizing Clinton. Trump, who had received free and scrutiny-free coverage from the mainstream media for most of the primaries, when he finally starts to see some actual coverage of his positions and questioning of his blatantly false statements, he and his followers think that everyone is against him. Most of the coverage is actually just reporting of Trump's own words.

Then there's the supposed rigging of the election. Despite there being no evidence of any voter fraud, let alone massive voter fraud, Trump has his people believing that huge amounts of people will be voting in the name of dead people, and that despite Republicans being in charge in most of the swing states, that institutional election fraud will be perpetrated.

Like most of Trump's fantasy allegations he has people believing that if it could be true, then it must be true.

To refer back to Sagan's putative quotation, this is quite the extraordinary claim, therefore it requires extraordinary proof, or at least some proof.

Managers Part IX - What Does a Manager Do?

So what does a manager do? To most people, a manager is just a higher-paid, busier version of the people he or she manages, who also bosses people around. What just what is a manager supposed to manage? According to Bill Oncken Jr., whose book Managing Management Time is one of the most detailed, practical management guide that I have ever seen, a manager is someone who, in contrast to someone who does things, a manager is someone gets things done.  How does a manager get things done? Allowing for the fact that some people with the title "manager" don't supervise anyone, but oversee processes, managers get things done by way of other people. How the professional manager utilizes others to get things done consists largely in how his or her time is spent.

There are broadly three categories of time: boss-imposed, system-imposed, and self-imposed. As we progress, you'll see that time can also be divided in other ways, some that overlap with the three categories listed here. Boss-imposed time is pretty easy to explain - it's the time you spend doing things that your immediate supervisor tells you to do. System-imposed time is time that you spend dealing with the administrative tasks - paperwork, tracking, answering emails. The amount of system-imposed time varies from industry to industry and flourishes when there active factions within a company all vying for control and influence. Self-imposed time is a little harder to pin down. It's not playing hooky from work and going fishing or playing golf, it's not deciding to spend your work day with your feet up on the desk. What it is, is time that you spend conducting your business as you see fit, free from the constraints of the system or the orders of your boss. It's the time you spend planning, the time you spend coaching your subordinates and anticipating and solving problems that haven't occurred yet. In a perfect world, your boss- and system-imposed time will be minimized and your self-imposed time will be maximized. But how do you do that? We'll look at the boss and the system in a later post, but first let's look at a group of people who aren't really part of the three categories of time: subordinates.

In theory, there is no such thing as subordinate-imposed time. In any organizational chart that you're likely to see the big boss is on top, medium and little bosses are under him, front line supervisors are father down and the workers are on the bottom. There is no organizational chart in the world where the subordinates, again, in theory, can tell the boss what to do, or make demands on his time. The fertilizer flows downhill! So, if you are allowing your subordinates to determine how your time is to be spent, then you are exercising some self-imposed time by willingly upending that org chart. (This is not to say that lower-level managers and workers are without worth - later on we'll talk about how to manage your manager). You are letting yourself be managed, reversing the roles and eating up your self-imposed time.

More detail on this in a later article, but the key to eliminating subordinate-imposed time is to delegate. Let me point out that delegating and assigning are two different things. Assigning is when I give you a task, perhaps even tell you how and when to do it. Delegating is when I give you responsibility and authority for a certain aspect of your job and hold you accountable for getting it done. Certainly training and coaching is involved, but someone to whom responsibility is delegated does not wait to be told what to do, or how or when to do it. Someone who has tasks assigned, goes from one duty to the next, and is at a loss when the list of jobs runs out. Time for a break! (or to go ask the boss what to do).

At one time in my life I managed a retail store. When I left for the day, I entrusted the operation of the store to an "evening supervisor". Once I had fully trained this person and clearly communicated my expectations, I allowed him to manage his time as he saw fit, as long as the standards that I had set had been met. My immediate supervisor however, insisted that I provide my evening supervisor with a list of things to do every night. Not only that, but I had to let him inspect this list at any time to prove that I had created it, complete with check-marks indicating that my supervisor had completed the list. And I couldn't just hand out a generic list every night - no - it had to be a brand-new, fresh list every night. My boss-imposed time increased and forced me to burden my subordinate with some boss-imposed time as well. Nobody won.

But there is a way to minimize, or even eliminate, subordinate-imposed time...stay tuned.

Moving the Goal Posts

Moving the goal posts is a logical fallacy wherein one side "changes the rules" mid-discussion. This can take the form of one side demanding higher and higher standards of proof, or of changing definitions as their positions are debunked. An example of this involves two roommates, Cain & Abel. Cain maintains that he does more of the household tasks than Abel does, and that Abel should do more. Abel disagrees and requests that Cain put together a spreadsheet showing all the household chores, who does them and how much time it takes; if the spreadsheet shows that Cain spends more time doing household duties than Abel, then Abel will adjust. Two days later, Cain presents his spreadsheet to Abel. It clearly shows that Cain does 62% of all the housework. Abel points out that he works longer hours than Cain, 50 hours/week to Cain's 35, and that mowing the lawn is a more physically demanding task than washing the dishes, and cites this as a reason not to adjust. Abel has moved the goalposts, i.e. he has changed what they were measuring after they had agreed what would be measured. Another example is personal - I was participating in a forum of ex-members of a religious group. I was taking the position in a discussion that Christianity could not be demonstrated to be more "true" than any other religion. One of my fellow posters suggested that Christianity had stood the test of time - over 2000 years and counting - and that's what showed that God was behind it. I pointed out that Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism had all predated Christianity, and if we were going to use longevity as proof of truth, then Hinduism would be the winner. My fellow poster quickly dropped the longevity argument. She had changed the standard mid-discussion. I have run into this pretty regularly in my political discussions this election cycle.

I've encountered goal post moving fairly regularly during the election season. I've probably even done it a time or two myself! You might be in the middle of talking about Trump's immigration policies and point out that we actually do need to get better control over our borders, and that Trump is correct that as a sovereign nation we should not allow illegal immigration. The goalpost is: the premise that the United States need to control its borders. Any arguments should be restricted to whether that premise is correct or not. Someone else responds with "Yeah, but Trump's a bigot and he only wants to do this because he hates Mexicans, remember, he called them rapists. Do you see where the goal posts just moved? The argument isn't now about whether controlling the border is a good thing or a bad thing, it just became about whether Trump's policy is bad because he's a bigot. Okay, it's arguable whether Trump's a bigot, and that might be a legitimate point if we were talking about his fitness to lead, but we're not, we're talking about a specific policy. The goal post move now changed the standard for evaluating Trump's plan from "Is border control a good thing" to "Is border control advocated by a bigot a good thing".

A goal post move that pre-dated the election was the so-called "birther movement". Donald Trump and others speculated that Barack Obama might not have been born in the United States. The goal post was seeing a birth certificate proving that he was. When the birth certificate was produced, the goal post was moved to "we need to see he long form birth certificate". When that was produced many still didn't believe that it was genuine; those goal posts are turbocharged.

"Moving the Goal Posts" is just one logical fallacy that politicians and those who support them use in rationalizing their own positions.

Demonizing the Opposition

Rather than have an actual, substantive discussion about the relative qualifications of different governing philosophies, most people find it easier to characterize the "other side" as in some way evil. Sometimes they even use the actual word "evil", but more often than not some euphemism is applied. The other guys "hate America", or are racists, or are crooks. Name-calling is so much easier than taking the time and energy to understand the other side's position, to understand why they believe the way that they do, and to understand why they don't agree with you. Why do people seem to at times vote against what you think are there best interests? Why do people tolerate in their own preferred candidate things that they abhor in the other candidate? There's no easy answer to this; it takes work, it takes thinking, dare I say that it takes empathy to put yourself in another's shoes, in that person's head. 

And I'm not just talking about person-to-person attacks, when you characterize a politician as, for example, a hater-of-America, you are by extension painting anyone who agrees with or supports that politician with the same brush. Statements like that just kill civil discussion right off the bat. There are people that I get along with fairly well, who can't talk about "liberals" without unmistakable disgust and accusations that we are destroying America.

The current Presidential election has just made things worse. Previous modern elections have involved serious and fundamental differences in vision for the future of the country, and there has been no shortage of ad hominem attacks, but the salvos fired by the campaigns of the major party candidates resemble the comments on Facebook, and they are often literally just that, considering the Twitter war that one of the candidates continually wages.

The root of some of this incivility can be traced partially to the rise of certain political talk radio personalities in the nineties, for example, Rush Limbaugh. The constant drumbeat of attacks against Bill Clinton gave conservatives some source material for their anger and challenged liberals to come up with counterattacks. The rise of and widespread use of social media allowed everyone to be able to publicly voice an opinion and we saw "sources" multiply like mushrooms on a rainy day. Facilitating political discussion while at the same time separating real face-to-face discussion made it very easy for people to always be in "insult mode".

I doubt that we'll see civility reign any time soon. I almost typed in "a return to civility", but I'm not sure whether I am allowing false nostalgia to color my perceptions. Just remember, when you're discussing political positions, you're talking about real people, not cartoon demons.

It's Not Paranoia If...Okay, Yes It Is

In a discussion on Facebook this morning about Candidate Trump, an acquaintance suggested that Trump was better than Clinton, and disputing my assertion that Trump doesn't know what he was talking about, opined that Trump would "get up to speed pretty quickly".

No, Trump would not get up to speed at all, let alone pretty quickly, because he believes that he already knows all that he needs to know. He doesn't listen to his advisors now, why would he listen to anyone if he were elected? I imagine a "decider" on steroids. That's not a compliment.

Trump is paranoid, hyper-sensitive to slights and extremely defensive. When he is attacked he unleashes a flurry of tweets, few of them especially coherent, defending himself and attacking his attacker. He creates "facts" out of thin air to buttress his position and consistently accuses others of what he is on record of being guilty of.

His paranoia regarding his shrinking poll numbers shows just how far off the cracker his cheese his cheese has slipped. For months he reveled in all the free air time he received, playing the media for suckers as he called ego-stroking news conferences, he cited his good standing in the polls as if popularity somehow equaled competence.  Until his poll numbers started slipping and the media began calling him on his bullshit. Of course, if he was now behind, the polls must be rigged, the election itself would be rigged and the media is colluding with Clinton. How many remember that when it looked like the Republican leadership and Ted Cruz might have an outside chance of denying him the nomination he speculated that the Republican nominating process was rigged against him?

This man is unstable.

Lying Liars Who Lie

I really try to understand the attraction of Donald Trump, I really do, but sometimes I just have to scratch my head...or smash it against a wall, when contemplating why people say that they're voting for Trump. I understand why some people don't like Hillary Clinton. For some it's philosophical, they're conservative in their political viewpoint and don't want to see a perceived liberal in the White House, a President who would appoint "liberal judges". These people sincerely believe that liberals are destroying America and see Hillary Clinton as exemplifying the liberal politician. If that's as far as they went, and claimed that Trump was bad, but at least he's nominally a Republican, so they're going to vote anti-liberal I'd get it. But then they try to justify, to further rationalize their preference for Trump by pointing out that "Hillary lies", "Hillary is deceitful", "Hillary is corrupt" as if Trump somehow is not.

I'm not going to spend the time in this particular post fact-checking all the accusations against Hillary Clinton, or voicing my opinion on their significance, but, even stipulating that the basic accusations are true and that Hillary Clinton is a basically dishonest, dissembling, deceitful human being, why, oh why does anyone think that Donald J. Trump isn't?

Donald Trump lies so often that it is often difficult to keep up. His speeches are full of made-up "facts". He lies about things that can be easily checked, he lies about things that he is on record as saying, he lies when he says that he didn't tweet something that he tweeted just days before, he lies about why he doesn't release his tax returns, he lies about his net worth, he admits lying during business deals, he lies about his opponents and their families, and on and on it goes. And then, he accuses others of lying, while he lies about them.

You want to make a political case for Trump, go ahead, there are legitimate, if shaky, points to be made, but to claim the moral high ground versus Hillary Clinton? Don't make me laugh.

Words Mean Things

Political contests have always been as much about style as about substance. There's a small percentage who geek out over policy positions, but the majority make their decisions based on feelings, impressions and sound bites. The majority isn't influenced by facts, and like religious devotees, will not change their minds no matter what evidence is presented to them. This is something to be sad about, but it isn't likely to change any time soon.

Another thing that will likely not change in the near future, and is likewise a sad thing, is politicians telling us what we want to hear, shading the truth and outright lying. Politicians generally will not lead, that is, will not stake out a position that they hold dearly and idealistically, the consequences be damned. People like that sometimes run for office, but seldom get elected, and if elected seldom get re-elected. Rather, our politicians attempt to determine what position will garner the greatest number of votes and financial support (not necessarily in that order) and stake out that position. It's not unusual for politicians to tailor their speeches and policies depending on who they are talking to.

This is why I am not upset or at all surprised that Clinton has said things to Wall Street executives (or is alleged to have said) that differs from what she says on the campaign trail, or that her position on the TPP has changed. I'm not worked up that Trump's position on immigration has somewhat changed over the course of the election season, or his "plan" to defeat ISIS has bounced around. This is normal, run-of-the-mill stuff. The same with a candidate doing whatever it takes to win an election. Clinton called in a lot of chips, Trump used his own chips, neither one pulled any punches. I'm okay with that.

As a Clinton supporter, I'm not irked about Trump bringing up Clinton's deleted emails, or the appearance of impropriety with The Clinton Foundation, or his spin on her record as Secretary of State, including Benghazi. It's all fair game, these are weaknesses that Clinton has and he's right to try and bring attention to them. Honestly (or, as Trump would say "believe me") I'm of the opinion that much of the mud thrown at Clinton is fabricated, blown out of proportion, or assigned meaning and significance that it does not really have.

What I have a real problem with is that we have, running for President, the most unprepared person who has run for the office in my memory, and probably in my parents' memory as well. Some will, and do, argue that what we need in Washington is an outsider, someone not tainted by politics as usual. I'm not going to debate that point, but being an elected official is a job like anything else, and there has to be some minimal level of qualification for the position.

Of all of our Presidents, most had some level of government or military experience. Herbert Hoover was Secretary of Commerce, Chester Arthur and George HW Bush held appointive office below cabinet level; all other Presidents had experience either in Congress or as a governor, or were elected immediately after military service, like Eisenhower. Even among the military men, other than Ike, only Zachary Taylor had no political experience.

While Donald Trump's abrasive and demagogic style annoys me, it is his utter lack of understanding of how government works, including what a President actually does that bothers me. He shows no knowledge or even curiosity about international affairs, economics or even about the way people in this country live. Unlike the usual politician, who "clarifies" a position when it causes consternation among the electorate, or apologizes and moves on, at least acknowledging a realization that the wrong thing was said, Trump often denies that he said something that he is on the record as saying. He makes baseless accusations without even a shred of evidence (remember Ted Cruz's father being accused of colluding with Lee Harvey Oswald?), and when it is pointed out that there is no evidence, or his allegation has been debunked, he just repeats it louder and more often. It's not that I disagree with him, it's just that he makes no sense. 

His attacks and insults on multiple segments of our society, his vicious attacks on his kinda, sorta allies in his own party, the gratuitous insults to anyone who disagrees with or opposes him, should worry all of us. And then there's his promise, if elected, to instruct the Attorney General to "look into [Clinton's] situation"; bellowing that she should be in jail. He is dangerous in his ignorance.

Trump appeals to much that is deplorable in our country. He has whipped up paranoia among a segment of our people with his cries to jail his opponent, to ban immigrants based on religion, and his allegations that the system is rigged and that the media is in Clinton's pocket. A crowd cheered at a woman's suggestion at a Mike Pence appearance that if Clinton is elected, we stage a "revolution" to prevent her taking office. The bigots and the ignorant among us have been given a safe place to express their bigotry. I'm not saying, like Clinton did, that half his supporters are a "basket of deplorables", in fact, the Trump supporters that I know, friends and family are pretty upstanding, good and decent people. But when I see video of Trump rallies where people are  shouting out racial slurs, screaming to lynch the opposition, including the opposing candidate, using violence against protesters; when white nationalist and racist groups support him, I can't argue that he is appealing to that which is deplorable and shameful in this nation.

Fortunately, it looks less and less likely that Trump will win this election in four weeks. It might be easy to shrug it off and, if a Republican, look to 2020, but the genie is out of the bottle.