You did good, Senator John McCain, thank you. Rest in Peace

US Navy Library of Congress

At John McCain's funeral service the tributes were moving and inspiring and as truthful and unpretentious as the man who was shot down, badly injured and captured by North Vietnamese, and was a prisoner of war for 5 years, enduring torture and refusing early release out of solidarity with fellow prisoners. Who, on his return, entered politics and served as a Representative and then Senator for 36 years.

But the most moving of all was Meghan McCain's eulogy to her father who she loved so deeply. She didn't hold her tears back but spoke fiercely and passionately and with the most wonderful articulacy. She unequivocally rebuked and condemned the current president and his behavior without naming him.

Everybody who spoke did that today, including 95 year old Henry Kissinger. As John McCain undoubtedly knew they would.

Barack Obama and George Bush spoke their truths about their personal and political relationships with him. They used the platform to promote unity and the ideals McCain believed in that they share. There was plenty of wry humor, but they both always brought it back to the most important thing about McCain - that he believed in equality and never treated a person differently on account of their religion, race or gender. That he spoke his truth to authority without fear.

The entire ceremony was transfixing. The tremendous respect was foremost and the grief was palpable. Rest in Peace Senator McCain. You did good, choreographing this service the way you did. Bringing people together. This was a sobering and wonderful moment in American history.

#HistoryMade? Will Electoral College Electors Tell Trump "You're Fired"?

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“Everyone during the election perceived accurately—that in fact what the Russian hack had done was create more problems for the Clinton campaign than it had for the Trump campaign. There’s no doubt that it contributed to an atmosphere in which the only focus for weeks at a time, months at a time were Hillary's emails, the Clinton Foundation, political gossip surrounding the DNC...  

I think there is no doubt that when any foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our elections … we need to take action, and we will—at a time and place of our own choosing. Some of it may be explicit and publicized; some of it may not be.” - President Barack Obama

The Electoral College votes on America's next president on Monday. Anti-Trump voters have been at work since Hillary Clinton won the popular vote but lost the election in circumstances that are highly suspect. Apart from the country-wide protests, a petition was started by Daniel Brezenoff, asking the electors to elect Hillary Clinton. It now has close to 5 million signatures. People in every state have signed it.

There has also been a storm of protest from President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and other Democrat and Republican senators and representatives, and some electors, triggered by 17 intelligence agencies unanimously reporting that Russians intervened in the election through hacking and that “only Russia’s senior-most officials could have authorized these activities”  

Vladimir Putin, of course, laughed the Intelligence report off. But he did that when the scandal first broke of Russian State sponsored Olympic doping. And now it's undeniable fact. Trump also laughed it off, as did his vacuous mouthpiece Rep Chris Collins. Speaking to CNN's Wolf Blitzer he said it was time to "put this nonsense aside." Blitzer shot him down, as he did when Collins said that President Obama had never acknowledged Trump's win.

A bipartisan group of electors, calling themselves the Hamilton Electors, published an open letter to the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, requesting that he release all the facts on Russian interference before they vote.

“...We intend to discharge our duties as Electors by ensuring that we select a candidate for president who, as our Founding Fathers envisioned, would be “endowed with the requisite qualifications.” As Electors, we also believe that deliberation is at the heart of democracy itself, not an empty or formalistic task…

The Constitution envisions the Electoral College as a deliberative body that plays a critical role in our system of government — ensuring that the American people elect a president who is constitutionally qualified and fit to serve. Accordingly, to fulfill our role as Electors, we seek an informed and unrestrained opportunity to fulfill our constitutional role leading up to December 19th — that is, the ability to investigate, discuss, and deliberate with our colleagues about whom to vote for in the Electoral College.

We further emphasize Alexander Hamilton’s assertion in Federalist Paper #68 that a core purpose of the Electoral College was to prevent a “desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.”

To date eighty Presidential electors have signed the letter. Those wishing to add their names can contact ElectoralCollege16@gmail.com

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid told Buzzfeed News that he supports that call for an Intelligence briefing on the Russian interference before they vote. Reid said he believed this was as "big a deal as Watergate, as 9/11 and he believes, along with US Senators Dianne Feinstein and Ben Cardin, that a 9/11 type commission should be set up to investigate.

Reid also blamed FBI Director James Comey for his role in Hillary Clinton's surprise loss. A view shared by many, including Hillary Clinton and her supporters. The FBI agents received Weiner's computer from the NYPD and held onto it for two weeks before sending it up the chain of command to Comey. Their later excuse was that they needed time to better assess the emails. But they were prohibited by law from reading any of them without a warrant, for which they needed Comey's OK. 

If they had sent it immediately, Comey's 2nd letter acknowledging that there was nothing to investigate, would have been released before early voting began, instead of 48 hours before the election, and probably wouldn't have changed the outcome of the election.

On Thursday, Hillary Clinton spoke to donors about how Comey's letter to Congress swung the election in Trump's favor, and added that Putin had a longstanding grudge against her for her 2011 accusation that Russian parliamentary elections had been rigged.

But, she said, “Make no mistake as the press is finally catching up to the facts, which we desperately tried to present to them during the last months of the campaign. This is not just an attack on me and my campaign, although that may have added fuel to it. This is an attack against our country. We are well beyond normal political concerns here. This is about the integrity of our democracy and the security of our nation.”

California attorney Michael Hawley said to The Hollywood Reporter that electors have received thousands of emails, and some have received death threats. Hawley, Mark Lemley and Larry Lessig co-founded the Electors Trust, an organization that provides free and confidential legal counsel and defence to electors who "wish to vote their conscience." 

An Elector, speaking to Salon on condition of anonymity, said “We have gotten reports from multiple people that the Donald Trump campaign is putting [career] pressure on Republican electors to vote for him based on…future political outcomes based on whether they vote for Donald Trump or not.”

Legally and constitutionally Trump isn't president yet. The number of electors who have voted their conscience is rare throughout American history, but as everybody has been pointing out for a year, this is no ordinary American election. Never has there been a candidate who has:

And that's the short list.

This degree of protest from electors, politicians and the general public is unprecedented, and the highest number of electors to ever break from a presidential candidate was in 1808, when six Democratic-Republican electors voted against James Madison. But, as everybody keeps reiterating, it's been an unusual American presidential election, so one final unusual event will fit right in.

History has already been made, for better or for worse. Why not go for broke and eliminate the worse? All it needs is for 37 electors to vote their conscience and Donald Trump is history. I'm going to let myself hope for two more days that Hillary Clinton can still be America's next president.

She won the popular vote by 2.8 million, which means a clear majority of Americans want her. The world wants her. #ImStillWithHer.

Trump Train Mows Down American Democracy

Aaaaand, America's Next President… is the one who lost the popular vote by close to 3 million in an election that Russia and fake news directed. A man whose highly inflatable ego inflates his wealth but not, of course, his debt, which he said during the primaries was now non-existent but which motherjones.comhas revealed to be $1.3 billion.

It's the guy who's under investigation for ties with Russia, who has chosen an oil mogul for Secretary of State with enormous economic interests in Russia and who's a friend of Putin's. The man who's chosen a cabinet of far-right, anti-everything-progressives some of whom have zero experience. Who paid $25 million to settle a lawsuit for his fraudulent university, who can’t finish a sentence articulately, and who trashed Hillary Clinton throughout the campaign, whipping up rage in his fans, threatening/promising to jail her when he won, then said the Clintons were good people once he had. 

The guy who lies and cheats and steals and sniffs and whines. The sociopath who exploits fear and ignorance, hates Muslims, Latinos and African Americans, despises the poor, abuses women, stiffs his workers — Ahhh! Enough of the words. Pictures do a better job.

Yip. Classy, huh. That’s the next American president. Unless one of the investigations unearths something criminal, or the petition to the Electoral College electors (which has over 4.8 million signatures and counting) begging them to save America has some effect, or they decide off their own bat that they liked that hashtag #HistoryMade.

And on a final note, I Googled when did Donald Trump… And got this.

Millions of wishful thinkers perhaps? Millions of Trump voters experiencing #TrumpRegret, buyer’s remorse a la Brexiteers? Nothing quite so inspiring. It was one of those fake news sites, which posted that Trump had died, as per the quote below. (I’m not linking to it here in case it carries a virus.)

Donald Trump was pronounced dead today at 11am following what some are describing as a violent heart attack.

The world famous businessman and TV personality was previously treated for minor cardio vascular issues that followed a mild course of antibiotics.

Fans have already taken to social media to express their emotions with hash tags #RIPTRUMP #TRUMPRIP #TRUMP4EVER.

Donald’s family and friends have asked to be left alone by all press and media at this present time.

PLEASE SHARE THIS ARTICLE TO INFORM EVERYONE OF THE SAD LOSS OF DONALD TRUMP.

Snopes’ rather dry comment on it was:

“We’d rather not bother giving such cruel and callous clickbaiters additional publicity (so we’re not linking to anything here), but enough confused readers have asked us about this fake report that we unfortunately need to debunk it here.

Donald Trump is not dead.”

Sigh. No, he’s not. But American Democracy is in danger of its life. Everything that’s good about America is in danger of becoming something of the past.

A Warning From Time Magazine 2016 Person of the Year

Scrolling through Hillary Clinton's Twitter feed, looking for respite from the relentlessly depressing news, I found the above.

Pretty appropriate, given Trump's latest ranting and raving about China. I don't know what's more irritating; the stupidity of the man or how many people endlessly debate what he's done or said as if he were a sentient being when in fact most of the time there's nobody home. Evidenced by his tweet that he won by a landslide because the elections were rigged and millions voted illegally but he tried to stop the recount instigated by Jill Stein.

Time Magazine named him 2016 Person of the Year, opting for a portrait of Trump in a remarkably similar pose to that of Hitler when he won the dubious honor. The magazine had this to say about their choice: 

"It’s hard to measure the scale of his disruption. This real estate baron and casino owner turned reality-TV star and provocateur—never a day spent in public office, never a debt owed to any interest besides his own—now surveys the smoking ruin of a vast political edifice that once housed parties, pundits, donors, pollsters, all those who did not see him coming or take him seriously. Out of this reckoning, Trump is poised to preside, for better or worse."

William Saletan, writing for Slate, said of Donald Trump that he's "virtually lobotomized".

I agree. I believe that Trump is literally too stupid to understand what an average toddler can. It could explain his avoidance of intelligence briefings.

Trump ran his campaign on emotive issues which needed the intelligence of a pea-brain to see through. He's massively entitled, has a kind of lizard-brain ability to con people, and doesn't care about consequences because he's always been able to slither away from them himself and make other people pay.

Astonishingly, TV anchors, panels, some journalists, are still talking about him as if he's a normal human being, 'giving him a chance'.

You give peace a chance. You don't give a serial predator one. And it's dangerous to interpret Trump's stupidity as meaning he's ultimately harmless. He's not. His need for wealth, power and attention is the craving of an addict. He'll sacrifice the country and feed his supporters what they want to hear so they take the poison he's feeding them. He and his lovely family of mindless, soul-less daddy-clones will make a killing and when the economy tanks and the middle class disappears they'll blame Obama or Hillary Clinton.

Trump won't care. He has already broken all his campaign promises and his fans don't seem to realize it, perhaps because the reporting of it comes from the snobby elitist liberal media.

For the next four years Trump will play Republican politicians off against each other, and capitalize on their desire to have positions of power. He's already doing that. Look how he yanked Mitt Romney's chain, meeting him for dinner and getting together for talks then adding to his list of potentials for the position. As if he understood the first thing about what's needed in a Secretary of State.

Or how to govern, come to think of it. Or how to finish a sentence articulately. How to start it. How to hold a decent conversation. Or how to run a business without breaking laws, screwing decent people's lives up and going spectacularly bankrupt, there's that.

His whole life this nasty piece of work has abused people and manipulated their greed. He's also created chaos around himself so nobody gets power over him. He mindlessly hurls accusations at whomever he feels like whenever he feels like it. He'll try to do the latter with foreign leaders, as he has with China, his latest stunt, of which there are so many it's hard to keep up. He'll destroy international trade agreements that benefit everybody, put his weight behind leaders guilty of horrendous crimes against humanity, incentivize and legitimize white supremacy, sexism, inequality, injustice, bigotry and lies.

America's governing business will be conducted by denizens of the swamp. 2017 will march in a new pre-Civil Rights era. The Administration and the way that the president operates will promote stupidity as an admirable trait and fake news as a mainstream source of information. Progress on climate change will be incinerated. Scorched earth policy will come to have new meaning. 

And truth? The real meaning of it and its importance to how we live our lives is already so frayed at the edges that it wouldn't be a surprise to find in four years time that it's a forgotten concept. In conclusion to their piece about the 2016 person of the year choice, Time had this to say:

"For reminding America that demagoguery feeds on despair and that truth is only as powerful as the trust in those who speak it, for empowering a hidden electorate by mainstreaming its furies and live-streaming its fears, and for framing tomorrow’s political culture by demolishing yesterday’s, Donald Trump is TIME’s 2016 Person of the Year."  

Hardly an accolade. A warning, more like. But we're not so good, as a race, at heeding warnings are we?

I’ve marched, protested, been beaten and arrested--all for the right to vote. Friends of mine gave their lives. Honor their sacrifice. Vote. pic.twitter.com/1lYp99RaOe

— John Lewis (@repjohnlewis) November 3, 2016

Is Bernie Sanders Attracting Racists? Is Hillary Clinton Evil?

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The primaries have been a steep learning curve, especially around expectations. It's common news that Trump and his supporters thrive off racism, which is loathsome and worrying, but predictable. What hasn't been predictable is the way Bernie Sanders' campaign has developed.

From early interactions between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, it doesn't appear as if he believes she is evil. It looks as if he likes her. And yet his campaign is painting a very black picture of her these days. That was unexpected, but then I once didn't expect Bernie's supporters to engage in hate and vitriol and climb on the back of the years-long GOP attacks on Hillary that weren't fact-based. Then when they did I was sure it wasn't behavior that Bernie would endorse.

Mind you, who ever expected him to attack the Democratic Party? Or to be disingenuous in saying that he and his campaign have nothing to do with Hillary's increasing unpopularity.

It brings to mind a SkyNews anchor drily commenting on how, when the Panama Papers scandal broke, public opinion about whether David Cameron was corrupt or not swung heavily into "Yes he is!" after a week of screaming tabloid headlines promoting the idea.

Hillary Clinton isn't evil, and for all the accusations, there's never been a shred of evidence to prove that she is. Talking about dates, people, events, those pesky, inconvenient details without which a crime can't be solved and a person can't legitimately be pronounced guilty. Ironically, I kind of expected to learn that I was wrong about her. It hasn't happened. 

We've probably all had to constantly adjust expectations. Hillary Clinton supporters didn't expect to be called Clintonistas, or attacked and abused online for supporting a woman who they truly believe is the better candidate and who I certainly don't believe has been bought by anybody. They didn't expect for her to be compared to Hitler and for all the suffering and lives lost at his hands to be used in a cheap joke to promote an untruth and elevate Bernie Sanders by comparison. 

They couldn't predict that the "Corrupt Hillary" campaign would morph into "Corrupt Democratic Party", or that so many conspiracy theories and unsubstantiated accusations would flood the internet.

But, speaking for myself, no matter how frustrating the misinformation about Hillary has been, I've never for a minute entertained the idea that Bernie would attract racists. Never! Today a comment on NYMag was shocking and troubling. Somebody calling themselves weekhauken360 said this:

"Bernie plus Trump is a super super majority of the white eligible voters in the USA which represents 77% of the electoral college. The largest turnout of white voters in USA history is in motion. Read it and weep! Hillary represents the majority of the black and brown vote - her core - that's it - no more no less."

It's not true that Hillary only has the "black and brown vote" but the first two sentences really hit home. I thought weekhausen360 meant weep for the tragedy of it. But then I read an earlier comment and realized that he/she said it in triumph.

Shock and disgust, fear and trembling. However, one swallow doesn't make a flock or something. I went to Google and found a Daily Kos article stating that Bernie Sanders attracts racist voters, and quoting Patrick J. Egan, an Assistant Professor of Politics and Public Policy at NYU, as tweeting the following graph:

But then I saw that at the top of the page was a notice from the Daily Kos referring to the writer of the article:

Kudos to the Daily Kos team. That was enough evidence for me. I don't need or want to amass "evidence" against Bernie Sanders or do to him what people are doing to Hillary Clinton. It's ugly and promotes the worst part of life, where there's no love, no light, no truth, no joy. No peace. No real social progress.

I prefer Hillary in most ways and I feel safer around a person who doesn't portray themselves as a saint. I respected her but didn't much like her before, but I do now and my respect has grown. 

On the other hand, I don't much like the person Bernie seems to have become. But no matter how much I've had to adjust my expectations around him and his campaign, I don't believe I'll ever have to adjust this one: that he would be absolutely distraught at the idea that racists are celebrating white supremacy and supporting him because they believe he is the ticket to the realization of that terrible ideal. 

Bernie Sanders is not that man. And he never will be.  

Breaking News! Donald Trump Withdraws From the Presidential Race

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This morning at 08:00 EST Donald Trump’s campaign issued this announcement:

Donald Trump has withdrawn his candidacy and will no longer be running for President of the United States.

After months of research his campaign manager has revealed that plots to assassinate Mr. Trump have been developed by The Secret Service, Vladimir Putin, Megyn Kelly, Rosie O’Donnell, Women in general, the Pope, Fox News, the Liberal Media, Planned Parenthood, Egyptians, The Republican Establishment, Ted Cruz, John Kasich, Minorities, Mexicans, Muslims, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, David Cameron, Robert Mugabe, his own research department (Hollywood and TV) and, most amazingly surprisingly, Israel, some countries in the Middle East like Africa, and of course China.

While Mr. Trump understands that people who wanna take you down are just jealous he feels that all these groups are getting too much attention from the media and taking the spotlight away from him which isn’t fair.

And, you know, well, China is just. Amazing.

Mr. Trump is a very brave man, a very, very truth man, a very, very, very intelligent man, and a very, very, very, very rich man. An amazingly rich and intelligent man. He wants to assure his loyal supporters that he still cares about them and women you know should be punished if they have an abortion. And that they can find him through his new offices where he has been invited to Make the KKK Great Again. He invites them all to follow him. As for China.

Mr. Trump is very hurt because he is a very, very, very, very, very, amazingly sensitive man. He loves women and well, you know, China. He is currently being fitted for his new robes.  

Rumors that Mr. Trump is withdrawing from the race because he is scared he'll be beaten are all a lie generated by the KGB which Mr. Trump has discovered is in league with Planned Parenthood and the American Society for Issuing False Birth Certificates. 

Mr. Trump has learned also about amazingly secret campaigns to stop him as a candidate. Mr. Trump cannot say any more about that for now because they're amazing and secret and he doesn't want the media to get hold of them because that would take the spotlight away from him which isn't fair. It's amazing how unfair it is.

Mr. Trump denies accusations of sulking and dying his hair and his face orange. "My hands are not small," he said.

Other rumors about his impending bankruptcy and investigation by the CIA, the FBI and those tax people, are bullshit says Mr. Trump. So that can't be the reason why he has chosen to withdraw from the campaign can it? "I'm not a liar," he shouted, waving a steak around. "I tell it like it is." And the Getty Images photograph of him comparing the size of his dick to his thumb - “Well,” he said, “in that department I can assure you."