OOPS! The Summit Is On!

In today’s open thread I said that I hoped to catch up on comments before leaving for my volunteer day with prisoners.  I was not consider that I would be watching the health care summit on TV, which is exactly what I’m doing.  Worst case scenario is that I’ll be back up to date before the weekend is over.

On the summit, the most notable feature is that all the Republicans have an expression like they just ate a bad clam.  Obama has been quite congenial, but has called the Republicans on several of their lies.  The Republican response to that has been for the speaker to evade and for the next speaker to repeat the lie.  Obama has also demonstrated the ability to express knowledge in depth on the issues with no teleprompters in the room.  The Republicans have offered nothing new: start over, don’t use reconciliation, health savings accounts (not a bad idea for the rich), tort reform.

One area of substantive differences has been over exchanges –vs- voluntary associations and unregulated sales against state lines.  The Democratic position is that it’s up to the federal government to set minimum standards on what an insurance company must offer.  The Republican position is that what should be covered should be left up to insurance companies and business owners.

Which of you trust your employer and an insurance company to determine what coverage you should have with no input from you or your elected representatives?

What are your observations on the summit?

The Afghanistan Story

On November 5, I posted this article as part of Blog Blast for Peace.  I am reposting it today, because they are featuring this article as I learned in the following email:

I wish the world could recognize today the sound of all our voices - crying for peace.
I applaud your entry for BlogBlast For Peace on November 5, 2009. I learned and was reminded of a great deal in this post. I am just now getting around to all the entries....reading them carefully.
One thing is certain: Bloggers and journalists in 50 countries have spoken in record numbers and continue to speak.
When will they listen?
You are #1640 in the official peace globe gallery found here. http://blogblastforpeace.com/
It will post February 19, 2010 and will be linked back to this post.
Welcome to the peace globe movement. I am reminded to keep going and let the people speak.
You spoke eloquently.
I appreciate your time and effort, Tomcat.
Mimi Lenox

Thank you, Mimi.  Contributing my small part was an honor.
Before I begin, I wish to give credit to a rather remarkable woman on Facebook named Mimi Lenox.   She started a Facebook “cause” which has become quite successful, Blog Blast for Peace.  It is an annual event every November 5, and this article is my contribution to that cause.
Before long, President Barack Obama will have to commit himself on a way to proceed in the Afghanistan War.  It struck me that most Americans know little or nothing about that nation, because that’s not how the MSM covers news.  Most major networks cover only the sensational.  The one that does try to do a small amount of education does so only because they are the propaganda arm of the Republican party.  Education based on lies is not helpful.  So to assist you, here’s my take on the subject.
Afghanistan occupies an area between the middle east and the Indian sub continent.  It is peopled by at least a dozen separate ethnic groups including Baluch, Chahar Aimak, Turkmen, Hazara, Pashtun, Tajik, Uzbek, Nuristani, Arab, Kirghiz, Pashai and Persian.  The Pashtun are the largest and represent about half the population.  The Tajik represent about one fourth of the population.  While there are small religious communities from other faiths, Islam is the country’s principle religion, brought there by Arabs in the eighth and ninth centuries.  Before that, Afghanistan was often occupied but seldom ruled by the Persians, Greeks, and Sassanians.  The Mongols ruled there from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries.  Next Afghanistan was caught between two warring empires, the Mughal of India and the Safavid of Iran.  Both concentrated on destroying the region’s population and resources to deny it to each other.
In 1747, Ahmad Shah, a Pashtun, unified and expanded the country well beyond it’s present borders.  After his death Afghanistan entered a period of civil war.  In the nineteenth century, Afghanistan became a bone of contention between the British Empire and Czarist Russia.  It became a British protectorate until 1919.  Following the Russian Revolution, Afghanistan revolted with Soviet help.  Britain agreed to Afghanistan's independence, but secretly organized a coup by King Zahir Shaw.  He ruled as a complete dictator until ke was overthrown in 1973 by family members who declared a Republic.  Dahoud became President, supported by the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan, a pro Moscow party.  The PDPA overthrew Dahoud in 1978.  Moscow, not pleased with the progress of “reforms”.  They invaded in 1979 and turned the government over to Karmal.
Following the Soviet invasion, the USA provided aid and weapons to the Mujahedeen.  The CIA, under Reagan and the GOP,  paid $30 million to Osama bin Laden to organize a network of terrorists and unleash them against the USSR.  In 1989 the Soviets withdrew.  The US had a perfect opportunity to help build the nation and use the goodwill we had developed.  But with the Soviets gone, GHW Bush and the GOP had no interest.  The country remained in a state of chaos until the ISI, Pakistani Intelligence, aided a new religious group, the Taliban, who stabilized the country over the next ten years.  In the meantime, Osama bin Laden had turned against the US, because he objected to US forces being stationed in his Saudi homeland during and after the First Gulf War.
To the north, a vast reserve of natural gas was discovered in Turkmenistan.  Allowed to develop without interference, it would become part of the Russian Gazprom network.  But Big Energy in the US had other ideas.  Unocal planned a pipeline between the Caspian Sea in Turkmenistan and Karachi in Pakistan on the Gulf of Oman, cutting Russia out of the loop.  The route ran across Afghanistan, right through the enclave being used by bin Laden for his training camps.  So Unocal, backed by the Carlisle Group, a hedge fund whose most active participants are the Saudi Royal family and the Bush family, for the Taliban to agree to an election, to give the Taliban an aura of legitimacy, and a deal to build the pipeline.  The Taliban would not agree to an election.  Women’s rights groups got wind of the negotiations and objected in support of Afghan women and Clinton refused to invade as Unocal requested, so Unocal backed off and began negotiations with the Northern Alliance.  In 2,000 the pipeline was back on the table, because a stolen election in the US put the GOP back in power under GW Bush.  He threatened the Taliban to either turn over bin Laden or face military consequences.  Bin Laden launched his own preemptive strike to hit the US before we could get him.  That strike was the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon on 9/11/2001.  The rest is history.  The US invaded Afghanistan and installed a Unocal employee, Hamid Karzai to head our puppet government there.
Had we started nation building at that time, we still had an opportunity to stabilize Afghanistan, but GW “Chicken Hawk” Bush, Dick “5 deferment” Cheney, and Donald “I got Saddam his first chemical weapons” Rumsfeld were focused on attacking Iraq, in a failed attempt to control their oil and establish permanent military bases there.
In the meantime, Afghanistan has divided into two camps: a small, thoroughly corrupt, urban elite that controls the large cities and a much more populous, decentralized rural majority that hates the elite minority and the foreign powers whose backing keeps that minority in power.
So this is the mess Obama inherited.  The Afghan people have good cause to distrust foreigners, developed over centuries, and thanks to GOP duplicity from three different administrations, they have ample cause to hate Americans.  As much as I would love to see Afghanistan brought into the 21st Century, and Afghan women given the human rights they deserve, our troops are the wrong nationality in the wrong place at the wrong time to accomplish that goal.
Unfortunately, we have commitments with several allies to be there, so we cannot arbitrarily withdraw and leave them holding the bag, but the time has come to negotiate a withdrawal with those allies and work with the UN to alter the mandate backing our presence there.  Our men and women in uniform are far too precious to spend their blood on a war that we will not win.

Editorial: What Happened and Now What?

Other than the Open Thread, already posted, this will be today’s only article here.  I’m sure you all know that the unthinkable has happened.  Scott Brown has defeated Martha Coakley for the Senate seat previously held by Teddy Kennedy and JFK before him.  The spread was five points, so it wasn’t even close.  I knew it was over when I heard the recriminations coming out of MA, even before the polls closed.

First, lets take a look at what happened.

The problem began during the primary, when the Massachusetts party and corporate Dems threw their weight behind Martha Coakley, when the more progressive Michael Capuano could have better represented the party’s progressive agenda.  Capuano had the support of Michael Dukakis and Nancy Pelosi.  As a candidate, Coakley was a disaster.  She actually went on vacation from 12/19 through 1/5.  That’s half the final month’s campaign time!  She displayed all the charisma of a wet dishrag.  Brown, like other accomplished con men, drips charisma.  She did not take take Brown seriously.  She allowed him to define himself and did not expose his record that proves that, when he says “the people’s seat”, the “people” are all rich, white, sexist, homophobic bigots.  She did not make herself available to voters and, when asked to define her views, she answered in political doublespeak.

We could not have put up a worse candidate, and the national party took the seat for granted as she did.  However, this election goes way beyond Coakley.  She was running against Scott Brown, for goodness sake!  If the Democrats put up a mentally retarded, flatulent chimpanzee, with halitosis and BO, who masturbates in public and throws feces at the crowd, any fool in their right mind would vote for that monkey over Scott Brown!  Why didn’t they?

The demographics of the election were clear.  There was a strong voter turnout among Democrats, Republicans and Independents.  The Democrats were heavily in favor of Coakley, and the Republicans goose-stepped behind Brown.  There’s nothing unexpected there.  With three times as many Democrats as Republicans, that was good for Coakley.  But the race turned on the independents, who comprise 51% of the electorate.  They voted heavily for Brown.  Why would they do that when these same people delivered Obama a huge spread just over a year ago?  They are angry, and that anger goes beyond the inept Martha Coakley.

When Barack Obama campaigned for President, he promised “bipartisanship” and “change we can believe in”.  Readers of the previous incarnation of this blog will remember that I repeatedly said that the two are mutually exclusive.  One cannot effect change while attempting bipartisanship with an entity that refuses to compromise on anything.  Obama had a choice.  He could choose bipartisanship or change, but he tried to have both.  The result was “business as usual”, not “change we can believe in”.  Now I’m not saying that Obama accomplished nothing.  He accomplished quite a lot.  But his attempts at bipartisanship foiled the major items on his agenda.

On health care, Obama promised a national plan that covered everyone and provided the choice of a public option, paid for by raising the income taxes on people making over $250,000 per year.  Instead of designing what he wanted and pushing it through Congress, he left it to Congress to craft, eventually turning it over first to Max Baucus.  Instead of Obama’s plan, Baucus delivered BARF (Baucus Against a Real Fix), which is now the basis of the Senate Bill.  From there the Nevada Leg Hound, Harry Reid, humped every GOP and DINO leg in the Senate, weakening the bill even further and loading it with special deals to buy votes.  The resulting bill is a monstrosity that voters cannot understand.  Therefore they were easily confused by the lies from big health care and the GOP, and over 50% now oppose it in its present form.  In Massachusetts, this was exacerbated by voter fear that they would have to pay more for others’ health care when they already have their own universal plan.

On the economy, Obama promised to side with Main Street against Wall Street.  Instead he associated himself with Tim Geithner, Larry Summers and Ben Bernanke, the same corporatist conservatives who enabled the Wall Street banksters’ greed that caused this financial crisis.  He allowed Republicans and DINOs to reduce the amount of and water down the stimulus package.  He did these things in the spirit of bipartisanship, and bipartisanship defeated change.  Now the banksters are reaping huge bonuses from profits earned speculating with our money while refusing to lend that money to Main Street.  When voters see this, they feel justifiably angry that this is not the change they voted for in 2008.  It’s the business as usual they rejected.  In Massachusetts, the economy was the key issue.  Brown presented himself as the “change” candidate.  The voters, desperate for change and seeing business as usual, fell for the lie.

On foreign policy, Obama did promise to expand the war in Afghanistan, and at the time, the majority of Americans supported it.  In the spirit of bipartisanship, Obama has kept Gates at Defense and left the Bush/GOP ideologue generals, Petraeus and McChrystal in charge.  Since then, the corruption of the Bush/GOP puppet, Karzai has made that expansion untenable, and the majority of Americans have turned against the war.

On transparency, Obama promised it, but he has shielded the Bush administration from investigation and prosecution by continuing to cover-up their crimes in the spirit of bipartisanship.

Progressives, feeling abandoned, were not energized to work to convince Independents to vote for Coakley.  This may have been the principal difference in the race.

Now it may appear that I am blaming Coakley’s defeat on Obama.  I am not.  In my opinion, Obama has depended too heavily on the wrong advisors.  They have led him astray.  Obama needs to become the strong leader he promised to be.

Second, let’s look at where we go from here.

First, we need to start to enforce party unity.  We no longer need traitor Joe Lieberman to be the 60th vote.  Since he is the principal reason the health care bill became such a mess, the time to strip him of his Homeland Security Chair is now.  In addition, Senate Democrats need to be informed that siding with Republicans against Obama’s key priorities will cause them to be stripped of their leadership roles and cut off from party funding when they face reelection.

Second, we need to pass health care reform.  There are a couple ways we can go.  One is to pass BARF as is in the House, coupled with a deal to fix it using the Reconciliation process, including the addition of a strong public option.  The alternative is to start over using Reconciliation.  That has the disadvantage that certain reform elements, such as the ban on denial of coverage for preexisting coverage and rescission for illness, cannot be included.  They would have to be proposed separately, subject to GOP filibuster.

Third, we need to fire the corporatists in Treasury, regulate Wall Street seriously, impose a steep windfall profits tax on banksters, and increase the income tax on the very rich.  We can use the money to reduce the deficit and fund jobs programs.

Fourth, we need to start withdrawing our military from Afghanistan.

Fifth, we need to deliver on the transparency Obama promised.

Sixth, and perhaps most important of all, we need to abandon bipartisanship completely.

I’m sure there is much more that I have not covered, but to summarize briefly, unless the Democrats actually become the party of change promised in 2008, we will face severe losses in 2010, and in 2012 we will return to No Millionaire Left Behind, with a generous dose of Theocracy, as we goose step into the future at gunpoint.

Editorial: Was Read’s Gaffe Racist?

I trust that you all know by now what I think about the Nevada Leg Hound, Harry Reid.  I’d like him to dildo his own nether regions with a saguaro cactus, native to his state.  Why?  There is not a GOP or DINO leg in the Senate that Harry hasn’t humped in the process of caving-in to our detriment.

The media and the blogosphere are awash with accusations and claims that Reid should step down, and the Republicans are comparing Reid to Lott.  I suppose it’s time for me to weigh in on this.

I’d like to establish my own creds on racism, as a point of reference.  My father was an equal-opportunity bigot.  He hated all minorities, but especially blacks.  By the time I was nine or ten years old, I knew that black people were shiftless, unsanitary, lazy, and untrustworthy.  Back then, I was diving for mussels in the bay, came up under a boat, hit my head and knocked myself out cold.  A young black boy (meaning about my age) saved my life.  After talking with him for awhile, he did not seem at all like my father’s description.  I wanted to be his friend, so I took him home to meet my family.  We walked into the living room, and I blurted out what he had done.  My father got red in the face and screamed, “Get that little nigger out of my home!”  I was so ashamed that, in my heart, I became an activist that very day.  By the time I was 18, I had made three trips to the south during vacations to protest for civil rights.  I faced down police dogs and fire hoses.  I escaped serious injury, only because black people there protected me.  When Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “I have a dream!”, I was there.  I dropped out of college after two terms to become a full time activist against the war in Vietnam and for Civil Rights.  I worked primarily through SDS, before the weather faction took over.  I liaised with other groups to coordinate our efforts, so I was well acquainted with such luminaries as Roy Innis of CORE and Stokely Carmichael of SNCC.  As a member of the national steering committee for MLK’s Vietnam Summer, I attended several meetings with Dr. King.

Keeping this in mind, on the previous incarnation of this blog, I wrote that I was hesitant to support Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination for president, because I doubted that a black man could be elected in this nation.  That was not a racist remark on my part.  My creds prove that.  It was an honest expression of concern about the level of racism that remains in our nation.  I voted for Obama in the Primary and in the General, and am pleased to admit that I was wrong.

Harry Reid’s ‘light skinned’ and ‘negro dialect’ statement was surely ill conceived, but just like me, Reid has the creds to prove that he is no racist.  Comparing him to Lott is absurd.  Lott said he wished Strom Thurmond had been elected President.  Thurmond ran as a Dixiecrat (1948) and an Independent (1960) on a platform of segregation.  An avowed racist, Thurmond switched to the GOP and led the GOP filibuster against the Voting Rights Act.  Reid, on the other hand has been a strong supporter of every piece of civil rights legislation during his career.  When Reid made this statement, he was probably thinking out loud.  Hw was considering factors he thought would make Obama less vulnerable to our nation’s remaining racism.

There is evidence to support his concern.  According to a National Academy of Sciences study:

…People tend to view members of their own political group more positively than members of a competing political group. In this article, we demonstrate that political partisanship influences people's visual representations of a biracial political candidate's skin tone. In three studies, participants rated the representativeness of photographs of a hypothetical (Study 1) or real (Barack Obama; Studies 2 and 3) biracial political candidate. Unbeknownst to participants, some of the photographs had been altered to make the candidate's skin tone either lighter or darker than it was in the original photograph. Participants whose partisanship matched that of the candidate they were evaluating consistently rated the lightened photographs as more representative of the candidate than the darkened photographs, whereas participants whose partisanship did not match that of the candidate showed the opposite pattern. For evaluations of Barack Obama, the extent to which people rated lightened photographs as representative of him was positively correlated with their stated voting intentions and reported voting behavior in the 2008 Presidential election...

Furthermore, if this were not a concern, why did a staffer in the Clinton camp edit debate video used in a Clinton campaign ad to make Obama appear darker than he is, if not to play on American racism?  Reid was doing nothing more than analyzing the nation’s political climate.

So, should Reid step down?  No!  The only reason the GOP is after him over this is to derail health care legislation.  After all, isn’t this GOP sanctimony over the sensitivities of African Americans the moral equivalent of hypothetical protestations from Israel that someone is mistreating Palestinians?

Would Jesus Oppose Capitalism?

Here’s an interesting notion:

Would Jesus Christ - the founder of the largest religion in the world, unequivocally recognized as a messenger of peace and love - support capitalism?

It's one of the questions filmmaker Michael Moore, the well-known creator of documentaries such as Bowling for Columbine and Sicko, asks in his latest film, Capitalism: A Love Story.

In Capitalism, the filmmaker wonders whether Christ would support a system that, as the filmmaker stated, "has allowed the richest one per cent to have more financial wealth than the 95 per cent under them combined."

Moore, a Roman Catholic, argues that Jesus' commandments to care for others and feed the poor and hungry go against the love of money and greed that make up capitalism. He argues that one cannot be a religious Christian and a capitalist.

Clement Mehlman, a Lutheran chaplain at Dalhousie University, agrees.

"Jesus was a Jewish peasant, coming from an underprivileged tradition Himself, so He would have been what we would call a communist or a socialist," he says. "And there are elements of communism in descriptions of early Christian communities. They pooled their resources. There was not independent wealth, there was communal wealth."

The idea that Christ preached a socialist message would probably scare some conservative believers, but Mehlman has no problem with that.

"Jesus says to follow Him, you have to give everything you own to the poor," he says with a wry smile. "How many Christians do you see doing that? It's a text that should be thrown at the wealthy fat cats."… [emphasis added]

Inserted from <Common Dreams>

It rarely happens, but in this case I completely disagree with Michael Moore.  I think Jesus would have no problem whatsoever with capitalism.   But there is a catch.  Capitalism is an economic system in which a free market sets the price of goods and services between an unlimited number of suppliers, with no barriers to entry, and an unlimited number consumers, based on the law of supply and demand.  In Adam Smith’s view, monopolies and oligopolies were the ultimate evil.  True capitalism has no place for corporations, because they concentrate suppliers, create barriers to entry, and form both monopolies and oligopolies, which collude to function as monopolies.  In fairness to Moore, he was referring to our current economic system, but that system is NOT capitalism.  Jesus never raised an objection to the common free market trade of goods and services between individuals, which is capitalism.

Mehlman’s argument that to follow Jesus we have to give all we have to the poor has a problem.  It takes Jesus’ statement out of context.  The person to whom Jesus was speaking was one of the elite theocrats, who was rich from the temple monopoly.  Jesus required this of him only because the man’s life was centered around his greed.  Jesus often dined in the homes of believers who had not divested themselves of all their possessions.  One cannot care for the poor and feed the hungry without the means to do so.

The system we have in the US today is hard to label, but I’ll try to give it two labels.  One is crony corporatism.  We have rule by corporations through the empowerment of corporate cronies.  The other is plutocratic fascism.  I don’t mean Nazism here.  Fascism is a system where access to power is available only through elite status or membership in a group.  Thus, plutocratic fascism is government of, by and for the rich, and the rest of us have to band together into groups to be heard at all.  Economic exploitation by the elite is the norm.  Would Jesus oppose this?  I say yes, and I’m sure Moore would agree, because this is what I think he meant.

The closest thing Jesus encountered to our system was the monopoly on mandated temple sacrifice held by the religious right of his day.  There was no other source of supply for sacrificial animals and the unique currency required to buy them.  These theocrats manipulated the system to fleece the common people.   Sound familiar?  Jesus’ response was to drive them out of the temple.  Unlike the religious right, Jesus would certainly oppose our economic system.

It saddens me immeasurably that the most vocal groups, who identify themselves as Christians, have sided with the plutocrats and corporatists against the poor, contrary to Jesus’ teaching.  This is the opposite of authentic Christianity!

Editorials on the GOP from Charles Blow and Me

Amid all the wailing and gnashing of teeth coursing through the media and the blogosphere forecasting the imminent demise of the Democratic party, we need to recognize that the other side is worse off than we are.

The first editorial is from Charles Blow:

The attack on the Republican establishment by the tea party folks grabs the gaze like a really bad horror flick — some version of “Hee Haw” meets “28 Days Later.” It’s fascinating. But it also raises a serious question: Are these the desperate thrashings of a dying movement or the labor pains of a new one?

My money is on the former. Anyone who says that this is the dawn of a new age of conservatism is engaging in wishful thinking on a delusional scale.

There is no doubt that the number of people who say that they are conservative has inched up. According to a report from Gallup on Thursday, conservatives finished 2009 as the No. 1 ideological group. But ideological identification is no predictor of electoral outcomes. According to polls by The New York Times, conservative identification was slightly higher on the verge of Bill Clinton’s first-term election and Barack Obama’s election than it was on the verge of George W. Bush’s first-term election.

It is likely that Republicans will pick up Congressional seats in November partly because of the enthusiasm of this conservative fringe, democratic apathy and historical trends. But make no mistake: This is not 1994.

This is a limited, emotional reaction. It’s a response to the trauma that is the Great Recession, the uncertainty and creeping suspicion about the risks being taken in Washington, a visceral reaction to Obama and an overwhelming sense of powerlessness and loss.

Simply put, it’s about fear-fueled anger. But anger is not an idea. It’s not a plan. And it’s not a vision for the future. It is, however, the second stage of grief, right after denial and before bargaining.

The right is on the wrong side of history. The demographics of the country are rapidly changing, young people are becoming increasingly liberal on social issues, and rigid, dogmatic religious stricture is loosening its grip on the throat of our culture.

The right has seen the enemy, and he is the future.

According to a Gallup report issued this week, Republicans were more than twice as likely as Democrats and a third more likely as independents to have a pessimistic outlook for the country over the next 20 years. That might be the fourth stage of grief: depression.

So what’s their battle plan to fight back from the precipice of irrelevance? Moderation? A stab at modernity? A slate of innovative ideas? No, their plan is to purge the party’s moderates and march farther down the road to oblivion... [emphasis added]

Inserted from <NY Times>

The second editorial is from me:

I consider the retaking of America a two step process.  First get rid of the alligators.  Then drain the swamp.

Get rid of the alligators.  The alligators are the GOP.  They are divided into four segments:

Neocons: They believe that the US should rule the world by force.  They brought us wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  They also planned to conquer Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Iran, but could not proceed because the GOP botched the first two.  They also believe in ruling our nation by fear, and if that does not work, by force.  In the event of a civil disturbance in which US troops refused to fire on our citizens, Bush and the GOP had Blackwater storm troopers poised to cut us down.  The US public is tired of war.  The GOP has played the fear card so many times that only the most delusional Faux Noise sheeple believe it.  And we are reasonably safe from the threat of force from our government, as long as the GOP is never allowed back in power.  They cannot win over the public, unless a major terrorist attack, on the scale of 9/11, succeeds.

Theocons:  They believe in establishing a theocracy through which they can mandate observance of their piety codes on those who do not share their beliefs.  They would overturn a woman’s right to control her own body, muzzle science, criminalize the LGBT community, enforce abstinence only education, and require the teaching of the Genesis creation account in schools.  They cannot win over the public, because the majority opposes their repressive policies, and because the numerous scandals from Pastor Ted to John Ensign exposes them as the hypocrites they are.

Corporocons: They believe in No Millionaire Left Behind, the only successful Bush/GOP policy.  Because of them, the bottom 40% of Americans own only 0.2% of the wealth.  The banksters are a subset of the corporocons.  They cannot win over the public by themselves, although they have worked in close concert with the GOP, they are equally happy to buy Democrats.  They have been successful enough in that endeavor that eliminating them will have to wait until the second step of the process.

Insanocons:  This is the teabagger set.  They believe only what they see on Faux Noise.  Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, and Michelle Malkin are their demigods.  The think what they’re told, say what they’re told, go where they’re told and do what they’re told, happy to goose-step into insignificance.  They are dangerous because of their passion, but there are few enough in numbers, and so far off the deep end, that they cannot win over the public.

There is also a fifth segment of the GOP:  the authentic intellectual conservative.  I did not include them, because the other four segments have turned on them, marginalized them, and driven them out of the party to such an extent that they are virtually extinct.  That is a sad thing, because without them, the GOP has no redeeming value.

So this is what we’re up against.  The only way we can fail is to form a circular firing squad.  Though the Democrats are far from perfect, supporting them is a necessary step toward reclaiming our nation, and we need to be just as passionate in that support as the insanocans are in theirs.

Then drain the swamp.  The swamp is the Democratic Party.  But that’s another editorial.

Editorial: Resolving The Electoral College Dilemma

With Congress in recess, Obama on vacation, and the Crotch Bomber still dominating the news cycle, I think this is a good to post a major article.  I’ve been planning an editorial on the Electoral College for some time now and, since Lisa G. brought it up in a comment a couple days ago, I decided to do it now.  In the earliest days of our country, Presidents and Vice Presidents were elected by state legislatures, not by voters.  Because of the great distances that had to be traversed on horseback and the time it took to do so, the founding fathers provided for the electoral college, a meeting of representatives from each state convened for the sole purpose of choosing the President and Vice president of the United States in Article V of the US Constitution.  As time passed, voting for Presidents and Vice Presidents replaced choice by state legislatures, and travel time is no longer an issue, but the electoral college remains.
Here is the 2008 electoral college map:

And here’s how electors are apportioned among the states.

…The Constitution gives each state a number of electors equal to the combined total of its Senate membership (two for each state) and House of Representatives delegation (currently ranging from one to 52, depending on population). The 23rd Amendment provides an additional three electors to the District of Columbia. The number of electoral votes per state thus currently ranges from three (for seven states and D.C.) to 54 for California, the most populous state.
The total number of electors each state gets are adjusted following each decennial census in a process called reapportionment, which reallocates the number of Members of the House of Representatives to reflect changing rates of population growth (or decline) among the states. Thus, a state may gain or lose electors following reapportionment, but it always retains its two "senatorial" electors, and at least one more reflecting its House delegation…

Inserted from <history.com>
Here is a table with the same data in textual form:

Jurisdiction	Rep	Sen	Total
Alabama	7	2	9
Alaska	1	2	3
Arizona	8	2	10
Arkansas	4	2	6
California	53	2	55
Colorado	7	2	9
Connecticut	5	2	7
Delaware	1	2	3
DC	0	0	3
Florida	25	2	27
Georgia	13	2	15
Hawaii	2	2	4
Idaho	2	2	4
Illinois	19	2	21
Indiana	9	2	11
Iowa	5	2	7
Kansas	4	2	6
Kentucky	6	2	8
Louisiana	7	2	9
Maine	2	2	4
Maryland	8	2	10
Massachusetts	10	2	12
Michigan	15	2	17
Minnesota	8	2	10
Mississippi	4	2	6
Missouri	9	2	11
Montana	1	2	3
Nebraska	3	2	5
Nevada	3	2	5
New Hampshire	2	2	4
New Jersey	13	2	15
New Mexico	3	2	5
New York	29	2	31
North Carolina	13	2	15
North Dakota	1	2	3
Ohio	18	2	20
Oklahoma	5	2	7
Oregon	5	2	7
Pennsylvania	19	2	21
Rhode Island	2	2	4
South Carolina	6	2	8
South Dakota	1	2	3
Tennessee	9	2	11
Texas	32	2	34
Utah	3	2	5
Vermont	1	2	3
Virginia	11	2	13
Washington	9	2	11
West Virginia	3	2	5
Wisconsin	8	2	10
Wyoming	1	2	3
Total	435	100	538

The electoral college system causes several problems.
The first, and most obvious, is that twice the electoral college has elected a President who lost the popular vote, and the last time, it saddled the nation with the worst President in US history.  Imagine where we might be had Gore been awarded the Presidency he won by popular vote in 2000.  Hopefully he would have been conscientious enough to heed the warnings Bush ignored and 9/11, the war in Iraq, torture, etc., could have been avoided.
The second is that all states except two (Maine and Nebraska) apportion their electors on a winner take all basis.  This effectively disenfranchises every voter who does not vote for the winner of that state.  Candidates would receive 15 electoral votes for winning Georgia by one vote and 15 electoral votes for winning New Jersey by 500,000 votes.  This also inclines candidates to ignore states that are solidly for or against them and concentrate their efforts in closely contested ‘swing’ states.  This deprives the voters in non-swing states of exposure to the candidates and businesses in those states the economic boon that campaign visits bring.
The third is completely anti-democratic.  The electoral college skews power to smaller states.  Our Declaration of Independence declares all created equal, but under the electoral college, some voters are clearly more equal than others, because in addition to an elector for each Representative in the House, which is based on population, states also get an extra two electors for their Senators, regardless of population.  On the surface, that appears minimal, but consider these two examples.

• Wyoming has 3 electors for their population of 532,668.  That’s one elector for every 177,556 people.
• California has 55 electors for their population of 34,756,666.  That’s one elector for every 631,939 people.

That gives a Wyoming voter 3.6 times the electoral power of a California voter.  While this is the most extreme comparison, the fact remains that the less populous a state is, the more electoral clout each voter has.  In my opinion, that is an injustice.
So I hope we can agree that the system needs to be changed.  The obvious way is to eliminate the electoral college.  That requires a Constitutional Amendment, and the procedures for doing so are as follows:

…There are essentially two ways spelled out in the Constitution for how to propose an amendment. One has never been used.

The first method is for a bill to pass both houses of the legislature, by a two-thirds majority in each. Once the bill has passed both houses, it goes on to the states. This is the route taken by all current amendments. Because of some long outstanding amendments, such as the 27th, Congress will normally put a time limit (typically seven years) for the bill to be approved as an amendment (for example, see the 21st and 22nd).

The second method prescribed is for a Constitutional Convention to be called by two-thirds of the legislatures of the States, and for that Convention to propose one or more amendments. These amendments are then sent to the states to be approved by three-fourths of the legislatures or conventions. This route has never been taken, and there is discussion in political science circles about just how such a convention would be convened, and what kind of changes it would bring about.

Regardless of which of the two proposal routes is taken, the amendment must be ratified, or approved, by three-fourths of states. There are two ways to do this, too. The text of the amendment may specify whether the bill must be passed by the state legislatures or by a state convention. See the Ratification Convention Page for a discussion of the make up of a convention. Amendments are sent to the legislatures of the states by default. Only one amendment, the 21st, specified a convention. In any case, passage by the legislature or convention is by simple majority.

The Constitution, then, spells out four paths for an amendment:

• Proposal by convention of states, ratification by state conventions (never used)
• Proposal by convention of states, ratification by state legislatures (never used)
• Proposal by Congress, ratification by state conventions (used once)
• Proposal by Congress, ratification by state legislatures (used all other times)

It is interesting to note that at no point does the President have a role in the formal amendment process (though he would be free to make his opinion known). He cannot veto an amendment proposal, nor a ratification…

Inserted from <usconstitution.net>
Regardless of which method is used, the Amendment could not take effect unless three fourths of the states ratify it.  Since more than half the states have an electoral advantage under the present system, we may rest assured that the Amendment could never get enough states on board to be ratified.
However, all is not lost.  There is a way to leave the electoral college in place and still ensure that the winners of the national popular vote will be elected President and Vice President.  How states apportion their electors is up to the individual states.  It requires 270 electoral votes to elect.  If a group of states with combined electoral votes totaling 270 or more were to pass identical state laws requiring that they award all their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, regardless of how their own state votes, it would guarantee the election of the national popular vote winners.  This could be done with as few as eleven states.   California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, New Jersey, Georgia and North Carolina combined have 271 electoral votes, but any combination with that total could make it happen.
There is already an organization working to implement this plan, The National Popular Vote Bill.  Here is their short description of their bill.

Under the U.S. Constitution, the states have exclusive and plenary (complete) power to allocate their electoral votes, and may change their state laws concerning the awarding of their electoral votes at any time. Under the National Popular Vote bill, all of the state's electoral votes would be awarded to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The bill would take effect only when enacted, in identical form, by states possessing a majority of the electoral votes—that is, enough electoral votes to elect a President (270 of 538).

It can work, but if we wait until election time to publicize it and lobby our state legislators, it will be too late.  The electoral college is an injustice we can fix now, if we’re willing to make the effort.  I encourage you to link this, forward this, and otherwise pass this on.