Craziness. Nothing But Craziness

Did you know that just because someone makes an allegation of wrongdoing against someone a police investigation doesn't necessarily take place? If I call the local police department and tell them that you're operating an illicit drug manufacturing factory in your family room, absent any other information, they're probably not going to investigate. They're certainly not going to arrest you based on this allegation. But what if there was "suspicious" goings-on? What if I was at the pharmacy and saw you buy a box of Sudafed? If I noticed that you had a new car? If you looked around furtively as you took your trash out to the curb and objected when I insisted that I open up your trash bags to verify that nothing illegal was going on? Nope. Still no arrest. If for some reason the cops show up and you tell them, you got a huge bonus which enabled you to afford the car and that you had a cold last week, that will be the end of it. Nothing to see here.

This is figuratively what's going on with the accusations of election fraud. Virtually every instance of "suspicious" activity reports, when it isn't an out-and-out partisan attempt to undermine confidence in the electoral system, is the result of people seeing things that they don't understand and jumping to incorrect conclusions. Every single report of suspicious activity has been answered by the appropriate election official and without exception has been explained to be either a lack of understanding of the ballot counting process, an actual error that was caught and corrected already, or something that had nothing to do with the ballot counting or election system. Every single instance of discrepancies between votes cast and the number of registered voters, or any other numerical discrepancy, has turned out to be based on inaccurate information. One such error involved using the population of several Minnesota cities to point out supposed irregularities in Michigan cities. Another pointed to a difference in number of votes reported by the state and an unofficial database which all districts had not uploaded their information into, and where not required to. In areas where it was alleged that vote counting machine algorithms where changing vote totals to favor Biden, an audit and recount of paper ballots showed no such thing. 

Over and above the perceived irregularities, accusations of the creation of large numbers of ballots for Biden in six or seven different states, in hundreds of jurisdictions using dozens of voting methods, with officials overseeing the vote from both major parties, and judges, most of whom were appointed by Trump, adjudicating the lawsuits aimed at overturning the votes of millions of people, if true, would have required a conspiracy so vast that it boggles the mind. 

So vast that it couldn't possibly have held together. 

Despite the insanity required to believe that such a nefarious, yet impossible, scenario took place, Trump is still claiming that he won, and not just that he won, but that it was a landslide, and several supporters are actually planning to attempt to suppress enough electoral votes next week to give Trump a victory that he did not earn.

It's done. 

The votes are counted, the states have certified, the judges, including the Supreme Court, have ruled, the Electoral College has cast their votes (which in a normal year would be a formality). All that is left is one more formality, the opening of the envelopes containing the electoral vote totals by the Vice President, their tabulation and the formal declaration that Biden has been elected president. 

It's done. Shut up & go home.

Now What?

Three huge negotiations were happening simultaneously in Congress. One was what is referred to as the omnibus spending bill. Congress routinely bundles spending authorizations for the myriad government departments, as well as foreign aid and grants to various non governmental agencies into a handful of giant bills. One of these was the Defense Spending Authorization Bill which passed last week but was vetoed by Trump because it did not contain a repeal of "Section 230", which immunizes social media platforms against actions taken by users of their sites and because it did contain an authorization to rename military bases that are named for Confederate generals and politicians. It remains to be seen whether Congress, which passed the bill by enough votes to override a veto, will actually override. 

The second of these (the so-called omnibus bill) was passed just a few days ago. It included a vast laundry list of spending authorizations from the routine to what could be considered "pork" pushed by special interest lobbyists. Most of these items were included in the budget that Trump submitted to Congress, including foreign aid and support for the arts. 

The third set of negotiations was the Covid Relief Bill. Among other things, this bill included a $600 one-time payment to individuals.  There was widespread criticism of this amount as too small. Democrats had initially wanted a larger amount, some factions of the Republican Party wanted no individual payment. Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, Trumps liaison with Congressional leadership suggested a compromise amount of $600. The Covid Relief Bill had broad support, as did the omnibus, so they were combined into one bill and were passed with bipartisan support. Trump immediately criticised it. His criticism was that the individual payment should be $2000, not $600 and that the bill should not have included foreign aid or support for the arts, even though his budget called for those expenditures. 

Trump could have weighed in with the $2000 figure at any time during the negotiations, but chose to focus on overturning the election. He only spoke up after the negotiations were over and conflated the items in the omnibus with the relief bill to make it look like foreign governments were being prioritized over working Americans. The Democrats immediately moved to increase the individual payment to $2000, but were blocked by Republicans in the House of Representatives. At the writing of this blog post there is no word on what Trump will do: whether he will sign, veto, or ignore. Whether Congress will vote on the increase (the previous attempt was what was called Unanimous Consent, where a proposal is considered to have passed if no one objects - someone objected). A further complication is that some Republicans want to bundle the foreign aid and support for the arts that Trump attacked with the $2000 relief checks. 

Congress is always going to do things that some (or all) people don't like. Compromises that somehow displease everyone will happen. That's never going to change. What we're seeing now is just chaos for the sake of chaos. A president who is actively trying to overturn the results of an election has abdicated any responsibility for governing, yet manages to gum up the works without any real solution. His idea of negotiation continues to be the bully's way.

Election fraud?

Was there election fraud?

If by 'election fraud' you mean an organized effort to subvert the results of the election, then 'no'. 

The former head of the nation's cyber-security, Christopher Krebs says 'no'. 

Attorney General Bill Barr, who has never missed an opportunity to back up Trump, says 'no'. 

Every governor and every state election official says 'no'. 

Every local election official says 'no'. 

So why does Trump claim that the answer is "yes" and why do his supporters agree? The election fraud claims are a textbook example of circular reasoning. Trump makes an unsupported claim that there was fraud. His supporters, who believe everything he says, point to Trump's claims as evidence that there was fraud. Trump cites concerns by his supporters as evidence that there was fraud. And 'round and 'round it goes. 

The genesis of the belief that the election was stolen is Trump's fragile ego and his longstanding efforts to paint anything he does as an "historic" success. It's evident that while part of him thinks that he really is as great as he claims to be, another part of him works feverishly to undermine any hint that he isn't. It's not arguable that Trump enjoys a huge amount of support, even losing the election, he received the second greatest amount of votes ever, his rallies draw thousands of people, Republican voters uniformly reject primary candidates that he disapproves of. He has, in four short years, turned the Republican Party into the Donald Trump Party. It's easy to see how he could interpret this adulation and sycophancy as unassailable support making him a shoo-in for a second term. But there was part of him that knew he had to hedge his bets. Joe Biden was leading the pre-primary polls last year, and Trump correctly predicted that Biden would be his general election opponent. Trump attempted to hedge his bets by asking the president of Ukraine to open a corruption investigation into Biden and his son Hunter. In 2020 Trump resurrected his belief that the election infrastructure was rife with fraud. In 2016, when most predictions had him losing to Clinton, he made unsupported allegations that election fraud was why it looked like Clinton received 3 million more votes than he had. Leading up to the election he made repeated claims that the system was rigged against him. 

Fast forward to 2020.

Due to the pandemic, many states made it easier to vote early or by mail. Trump, suspecting that people who took the pandemic seriously would be more likely to want to avoid Election Day crowds and vote by mail, began to undermine confidence in voting-by-mail (except in states or districts that were safely Republican) by making wild claims of its unreliability. His supports among elected officials made attempts to make it more difficult to vote early or by mail by going to court to prevent loosened mail-in rules, by reducing the number of early voting locations and putting up roadblocks to usage of drop boxes. Much of this was standard operating procedure for voter suppression by Republicans, with the added element of Trump tweeting about potential voter fraud every damn day. Despite all of this obstruction, a record number of people voted early, including absentee. 

As the election got closer, realizing that the early voters were likely to overwhelmingly be Biden voters, and that mail-in votes in most states would be counted last, Trump began claiming that the results should be final on Election Night, despite the near-certainty that there would still be millions of votes to be counted days, or even weeks after Election Day. Even though, due to there being enough uncounted votes to make the final result impossible to call, Trump declared victory and demanding that the states stop counting votes. Entirely predictably, as the mail-in votes were counted, Biden pulled ahead in Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia and retained that lead as the final votes were tabulated.. The other "swing" state, North Carolina, was won by Trump. Some states were closer than others, but Biden's lead was wide enough in all of them that a count was unlikely to change the results. Trump or his surrogates filed suits to stop counting in several of these states and in Pennsylvania to throw out virtually all mail-in votes. 

I hate to use the phrase "let that sink in", but let that sink in - without any evidence that there was a problem with the election system, Trump was attempting to prevent election officials from counting votes. He and his supporters started using the phrase "count all legal votes" without a shred of evidence that any votes were illegal. Reporting the mail-in votes was described as "massive dumps of votes" when it was nothing more nefarious than reporting mail-in vote totals. Due to Republicans in many states preventing election officials from beginning to count mail-in ballots before election day, this was 100% expected. There was nothing suspicious about this. 

A tactic that was in process even on Election Day itself was Republican observers agressivly challenging, in some jurisdictions, every ballot. It's true that Republicans went to court, claiming that their observers were not allowed to observe, or that they were being turned away or thrown out. In Philadelphia they were being kept 10 feet away (as were Democratic observers), Philadelphia election officials subsequently allowed them within 6 feet, which is what local statues called for. The allegation that Republican observers were not allowed to observe was not true anywhere, the few observers who were thrown out were thrown out for being disruptive and ones who were turned away either had no legal right to be there, or allowing them to enter would have exceeded the allowable number of observers. Nothing to see here.

Antrim County Michigan is one of the biggest cogs in the conspiracy theory machine. Early reporting in that reliably Republican county showed a landslide victory by Joe Biden; this got the attention of election officials who discovered, not a ballot tabulation issue by the vote counting machines, but a human error, reporting issue that was quickly corrected. A so-called forensic report by a partisan "expert" made multiple claims of problems with the Dominion voting machines. A hand-count audit verified the correctness of the machine count. Nothing to see here. 

Every other claim: dead people voting, vote totals changed, mail-in votes sent in after the deadline, has been, if not debunked, has been presented without a shred of evidence. Even Trump's lawyers have said, in open court, that their lawsuits are not claiming election fraud. Judge after judge has rejected Trump's claims. Even the Supreme Court, with three of his own appointees, whom he thought would hand him the election. 

In summary, there is no election fraud of any note. Trump has attempted to undermine confidence in the election, he has called for ballot counting to stop while he was ahead and to continue while he was behind, he has made farcical and ridiculous claims without any supporting evidence.

There is no election fraud.

Trump lost.

 

Political Arguments

There are many issues in politics and culture on which reasonable people can disagree. Do we send troops to country "A"? What should the requirements for immigration be? How strenuous should we make environmental regulations? A good discussion or argument with an intelligent person is something I find invigorating. Changing my position is something that I'm open to, and is something I've done many times. The phrase "nothing you can say will change my mind" usually indicates an aversion to facts and an adherence to dogma of one kind or another, and represents a closed mind. I just find that sad. 

I'm not at all shy about wading in on people's social media posts and expressing my disagreement. I make a few exceptions: family members of my parents' generation and an subset of my friends' list (who shall remain unnamed) who I have learned from experience take offense very easily yet whom I wish to maintain cordial relations with. Most of the people with whom I interact on a regular basis have similar political and culture views to mine, and if there any who don't, they choose not to express those views on social media. 

Even when it comes to Donald Trump, a president whom I find corrupt and incompetent, there are areas of disagreement where I will entertain an opposing view. For example, even though he clearly doesn't understand economics, in particular tariffs, his "get tough on China" stance is reasonable. Trump has managed to avoid getting us into any new wars, and even though he hasn't done it yet, he talks about withdrawing our troops from Afghanistan, a position that most Americans agree with. 

But what I have seen over the last few years, and in particular since the presidential election, is a complete willingness to believe anything that Trump says, despite evidence to the contrary. The claims of massive and widespread election fraud, not only isn't "a matter of opinion", but have been debunked repeatedly by election officials in every state, some of whom are Republicans, and rejected in courtroom after courtroom. Trump lawyers themselves have, when questioned in court, denied that their lawsuits are allegations of fraud, but are seeking to disallow votes on technical grounds, such as improper absentee ballot rules and the existence of drop boxes. 

Hard core Trump supporters believe, based on Trump's word, that Republicans who decline to break the law and invalidate thousands of votes, are somehow not really Republicans but RINOs - Republicans In Name Only, as if the test of a true Republican is unwavering loyalty to Trump. 

They really believe that, not only did Trump win the election, but that he won "by a landslide", by "a lot", and "easily". 

They have convinced themselves that ballots cast in the name of dead people or otherwise conjured from the ether, tipped the balance to Joe Biden, even when Republican House members and Senators in those same states and on the same ballots were elected. 

They imagine that poll workers threw ballots marked for Trump in the trash and scanned Biden ballots multiple times. 

They are certain that a far-reaching conspiracy involving the DNC, the Biden campaign, poll workers and election commissioners throughout the country, judges in (so far) close to 40 jurisdictions, Republican governors and Secretaries of State, and the Supreme Court, has subverted the will of the people to attempt to oust Trump from office. 

They ignore the fact that Trump's Election Integrity Commission was disbanded within a year after finding no organized election fraud. 

They ignore the ongoing efforts of state Republican governors and legislatures to make it more difficult to vote, targeting with almost surgical precision, demographics that tend to vote for Democrats. This includes reducing polling places and indiscriminate purging of voter rolls. 

They point to the many affidavits by Trump supporters and the Trump campaign alleging fraudulent activity and ignore the explanations from local election officials that these allegation, virtually without exception, either result from a lack of understanding of ordinary procedure or reading into innocent circumstances nefarious intent (such as the poll worker who thought it suspicious that food for only about a third of poll workers arrived at lunchtime while a white van was parked outside)

Now we have the spectacle of the State of Texas suing to invalidate all the electoral votes in four states that went for Biden. Not for fraud, mind you, but for technicalities and disagreement over procedures. 

But despite all of the evidence that there wasn't fraud on any detectable scale, despite Trump's own attorneys saying that they aren't alleging fraud, and 40 judges saying that no evidence of fraud has been presented, and even this move by Texas, because Trump, on Twitter, says that he won in a landslide, easily, by a lot and that there was fraud and an attempt to steal the election...that's what people believe.

We have a lot of idiots in this country. 

Do Record High Stock Averages = A Healthy Economy?

Is a "record" stock market a sign of a healthy economy? Maybe. Maybe not. First, let me direct you to some pervious blogs about the stock market:

https://tjpolitics.blogspot.com/search?q=stock+market

"The economy" is not just one thing, but a number of interconnected things, some of which effect our daily lives and some which have more long-term implications. We're not going to look at every aspect of the economy, but we're going to zero in on what the stock market tells us about the overall stability of the overall economy and what it doesn't. 

The first thing that it's important to know is that there is no "Stock Market", as in a unitary entity that we can point to and say "that's the stock market". There are several organizations in the United States which exist to facilitate the trading of stocks, The New York Stock Exchange is the most well known, as is the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ), there are also exchanges in other US cities, as well as in other countries. Think of these exchanges as marketplaces where stock can be bought and sold. 

The second important fact to know is that when a politician or economist refers to "the stock market", they are not referring to the totality of traded stocks, but to a narrow slice called the Dow Industrial Average. The Dow Industrial average is a weighted average on 30 stocks. Yes, just 30. And weighted by what? Price. Stocks that are higher priced are weighted more heavily than lower priced stocks, which skews the average. (See further explanation in the link above)

The third important thing to realize is the increased stock valuation of the Dow, or even of just individual stocks, is just paper profits. If you hold a stock certificate you don't actually have any money in the bank. You may have 100 shares of stock worth $1000 each, but all that means is that if someone buys that stock from you for $100,000, you have $100,000, until you sell that stock you merely have the potential for $100,000. It is entirely possible that some event will cause the stock valuation to plummet and your stock will be worth nothing. Even assuming that the value goes up, you're just moving money around. You're often not even contributing operating capital to the underlying company unless it's an initial public offering. Wealth isn't really being created, it's just being moved around. 

So, what determines the value of a given stock? A combination of a company's profitability, supply and demand, and most importantly, perception. A company's stability and profitability will be a factor if an investor is looking to make long-term investments. Supply and demand come into it, since, like anything else, if a certain stock has a lot of people clamoring to but it, then the sellers will be able to increase the price. The biggest contributor to a stock's value, however, is perception. If a company is perceived to be on the road to greater profitability, then more people will be interested in buying its stock and the laws of supply and demand will drive the price up. 

What influences an investor's perception? A technological breakthrough, a new product, or a change in leadership might lead an investor to conclude that profits will rise, as will a government administration that tends toward fewer regulations. The upward trend in stock prices during the Trump presidency was fueled in part by his antipathy toward regulations, as well as by the 2017 corporate tax decrease. But the bottom line in investment decisions is that it's all a gamble. Investors are gambling that the price they paid for stocks will continue to increase. 

So, back to our original question: Is a "record" stock market a sign of a healthy economy? In the first paragraph I tentatively answered "Maybe or maybe not". There are aspects of the economy which are reflected in the stock market. Rising stock price averages generally reflect confidence, but confidence in what? Confidence that a given company will continue to be profitable, inspiring more people to want to buy its stock, therefore causing the stock price to rise. The assumption then, is that the confidence will be rewarded and that the companies that represent the stock market will be profitable. The further assumption is that a profitable company will increase investment and employment, spreading the wealth around so to speak. But is that the correct assumption to make? 

Not necessarily.

The goal of anyone running a large company isn't to create jobs, although that may be a side effect. Any company that can increase profits without increasing, or even maintaining, employment levels will do so. Anyone who has been involved in planning at any level in a capitalistic endeavor knows that the first area that is cut if profits are threatened is labor. And it doesn't take a threat to the profit margins for jobs to be eliminated, even a desire to maximize the amount of profit can result in a reduction in the workforce if other methods don't easily present themselves. Of course, in some industries, expansion will require additional workers. If you're going to open another factory, you'll need additional factory workers, but if you're just going to increase output, it might be done just by increasing productivity - pushing people harder or by automation. 

Theoretical considerations aside, what does the stock market's (i.e. the Dow Jones Industrial Average) record high valuation tell us about the economy in general? Very little. The official unemployment rate is still close to 7%, around twice the level it was at the beginning of the pandemic (although around half its nadir of 15% a few months ago); we are still looking at a huge net loss in jobs compared to the first of the year; many small businesses have closed and whole segments of the entertainment and service industries have shut down; evictions are at an all-time high. 

It's obvious that these stratospheric stock prices are not translating into better conditions for people who aren't in the top 1% of the country. They're not even necessarily translating into increased profits for the companies issuing the stock. What they represent is a gamble, not on the prospects of these companies increasing employment and investment, benefitting broadly, or even their long-term profitability, but that stock prices will increase enough to guarantee a profit to the gambler when the stocks are sold. 

"The Stock Market" is an illusion of economic health, not the reality.

Holding On No Matter What

After the 2016 presidential election it became apparent that Russian Intelligence had attempted (and probably succeeded) in influencing our election. There was no serious suggestions that the Russians had changed any votes or suborned any election workers or officials, but that the influence took the form of disinformation, "fake news" (in its original meaning, not the "news that I don't like" meaning that Trump gave it) that served to sway people's opinions. The long running investigation into Russian interference did not uncover any evidence that Trump had not been legally elected, but that he enthusiastically accepted the Russian aid and actively sought to obstruct the subsequent investigation. 

The cries of "not my president" in some instances reflected a belief that the lection had been stolen, especially since Clinton received over 3 million more votes than did Trump. In most cases "not my president" indicated the understanding that Trump did not see himself as the president of all the people. Starting with his hate-filled campaign, with a brief pause for about 20 minutes the day after the lection, and continuing throughout 4 years of rage tweeting and irrational invective, Trump made it clear that he represented only those who gave him unwavering loyalty and adulation. 

Now, after four years of unrelenting hammering away at any trust in anything or anyone other than Trump, after furious undermining of all of our institutions with a cult-like following that made up close to half of the electorate, is it at all surprising that Trump turned his attention on the whole election system? We are now at the point, even though it looks like we will finally be able to have a transition to the new presidency, where a significant percentage of Americans believe that Trump "rightfully" won the election, that it was "rigged" against him, by an amazingly efficient cabal of Democrats. 

One of the most insidious acts of undermining trust has been Trump's attacks on the media, which he continuously characterized as fake news and regularly tarred as the enemy of the people. Why was this action so destabilizing? Because in a democracy a free press is a necessary information counterbalance to the government. How many examples are there about the government hiding or lying about actions that make them look bad? No one, no party, is immune to prevarication. So how do we hold the government accountable, hold their feet to the fire? By the existence of an independent set of entities who have the resources to root out the truth. How do we guarantee that any media outlet is presenting us with the truth? We don't. But the fact that there is still competition among major media outlets, and that their continued existence and solvency is based on their reputation for accuracy, helps to keep their reporting accurate. What most people have a hard time understanding though, is the difference between news and commentary. 

You would be hard pressed to find many inaccuracies in any of the mainstream media's reporting. Many people would disagree with this, mostly people who don't like what is being reported. Take the New York Times series on Trump's finances. Trump has said it's "fake news", and his supporters follow suit, but there's one simple, easy way to debunk the Times' reporting on Trump's taxes, and that's for Trump to authorize the release of his tax returns. So much of the accusations of "fake news" and media bias rests on someone saying "nuh-unh" without providing any countering facts. A grey area is the use of anonymous sources. Like it or not, some credible sources of information may not want to make their identities known, for various reasons. And an anonymous source generally isn't anonymous to the reporter who is receiving the information. A news story isn't published based on a call from a public pay phone or a burner cell phone without knowing where the information is coming from. A lot of discussion at a media outlet precedes using anonymously provided information, and the newspaper or television network has determined that the source is credible and trustworthy and is staking their reputation on the reputation of their source for veracity. 

Commentary, opinion, punditry...none of that is news, it's what a person or an organization thinks about the news. If the president sends troops into yet another country, that's news. If a talking head holds forth on why it's a good thing or a bad thing, or even speculates on the possible consequences, that's opinion. If a newspaper publishes an analysis of why people support a particular candidate, that's opinion.  A large amount of what people point to when they talk about "the news", or "the media" is the opinion side. The dry facts are too boring for most people, so they gravitate to the color commentators on their favorite platform and deride the prognosticators that they disagree with. 

So now we have arrived at a place where the way elections have been decided throughout modern times, i.e. by counting the votes and everyone agreeing that the candidate with the most votes in each state received that state's electoral votes (partial exception in Nebraska and Maine) and the candidate with the most electoral votes became president, has been upended. Administrative steps like canvassing boards and state certification of results and even the actual casting of votes by the electors has long been considered a mere formality. States reported their vote totals and most of the time each state showed enough of a margin for one candidate or another that the media felt confident in reporting who won. This year, due to the large number of mailed-in ballots, some states were still counting for a few days after Election Day. But once the counting was complete, or at least until one candidate was mathematically assured of victory, everyone just accepted the result. Even the election in 2000, with it's recount in Florida, only happened because Bush's lead was less than 2000 votes and a recount narrowed that to around 500 votes. The other 49 states plus the District of Columbia saw no such upheaval. 2020 is completely different.

In 2017, President Trump, stung by receiving three million fewer votes than Secretary Clinton, despite winning in the Electoral College, cast about for ways to make his victory "legitimate". He baselessly claimed that millions of undocumented immigrants had cast votes. He created a commission to investigate election fraud. The commission folded within a year without finding any systemic election fraud. Even as the pandemic caused many states to look for ways to make absentee, mail-in or early voting easier, and Republicans looked for ways to stymie those efforts, no actual open doors for fraud were identified. Sure, Trump and his enablers repeatedly claimed that mail-in voting would be more fraud-prone that in-person, Election Day voting, but no evidence to support this was every presented. Republicans took every opportunity to make casting, collecting and counting mail-in ballots more difficult, realizing that it was Democratic voters who were taking precautions against Covid infection more seriously and therefore more likely to vote by mail. 

In the months leading up to the 2020 election Trump worked overtime to undermine confidence in the system. He often said that the only way that he could lose was if the election was rigged against him. He asserted that vote counting should stop on Election Night and a winner declared, knowing full well that in some states the mail-in ballots would be counted after the day-of ballots, meaning that an Election Night lead for him in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin or Georgia could very likely melt away as mail-in votes came in. This is exactly what happened. He was ahead in all of those states on Election Night, but fell behind in all of them as all of the votes came in. He prematurely claimed victory on Election Night. He called for voting to stop in the states where he was ahead but losing ground. He called for voting to continue in states where he was behind but had a chance of winning. Three weeks later he hasn't conceded, although he has allowed the transition to begin.

Around three dozen lawsuits have been filed by the Trump campaign in various jurisdictions (but always in areas or states that he lost). Except one, which was allowed to proceed on procedural grounds, all of them have been dismissed for lack of evidence. In some suits, a relative handful of ballots are being challenged, in some, like in Pennsylvania, they are attempting to have all seven million mail-in ballots thrown out because they claim the Pennsylvania mail-in system is unconstitutional! Interestingly, while Trump screams FRAUD, and that there is an organized cabal perpetrating a theft of a whole election, the lawsuits are not suggesting fraud, but mostly technical issues and supposed irregularities. But his supporters believe the tweets and are convinced that Trump won (sometimes they say "in a landslide") and that Biden stole the election. They believe that "the media" has declared Biden the winner in an election that has yet to be decided. 

Trump enablers among Republicans elected officials are acting like this refusal to accept the results of an election is normal, that fighting tooth and nail to invalidate as many votes as it takes to reverse the results is normal, that expecting an election to be decided in the courts is normal, that state officials who are for all intents and purposes rubber stamps are now acting as if they have investigatory authority. None of this is normal. None of this is acceptable. One of the hallmarks of our system of government has been a peaceful transfer of power from one administration to another, even when the outgoing and incoming where bitterly opposed. There is little chance if any that Trump will barricade himself in the White House and refuse to leave in January, but he has done lasting damage to the institution of the presidency by his actions. Millions of people will never believe that President Biden was legitimately elected. That does not bode well for the future. 

Sore Loser

With few exceptions the results of our presidential elections have been pretty straightforward in modern times. Around 40 states lean so far one way or the other that it usually isn't necessary to wait until all the votes are counted to see who the winner is. Even in the so-called swing states, it generally doesn't require that every single vote be counted before we know who the winner is. If candidate "A" is 20,000 votes ahead and there are 10,000 votes left to count, then mathematically there is no way candidate "B" can win. Media outlets receive voting information from the states and report this information. Most of them will "call" an election based on their analysis of the numbers. They don't always agree, but the "calls" by the media are not official and no one thinks that they are. The media is reporting information that they have received from official sources. In most cases, especially this year. In addition to reporting the apparent winner, they report how many votes were cast for each candidate any how many ballots (if any) are left to tabulate. No one is making anything up. "The media" isn't deciding who the winner is. They are reporting who the winner is. This year is no different in that respect than any other election. 

Sometimes a state's votes are very close. Not only do we have to wait for all ballots to be counted, but in some cases there will be a recount to verify the count. This is not unusual. It happens sometimes. Very seldom does a recount change the winner, and the swing is hardly ever more than a few hundred votes. This year is no different in that respect than any other election. 

There are often isolated problems. Voting machine software crashes, ballots get lost, people try to vote more than once, ballots are misprinted, registered voters are purged from voter lists. It's not a huge system, it's a huge collection of systems. Not only does every state have its own election laws, but often individual counties and municipalities have their own systems. There's going to be problems. This year is no different in that respect than any other election. 

What's different this year is that we are in the midst of a pandemic where many people felt uncomfortable about voting in person, so existing mail-in and absentee voting overwhelmed the systems in many areas. The party in power worked overtime to prevent localities from making it easier to vote remotely, including slowing down the mail and blocking local changes to when mail-in ballots could be counted. Voting in person was frustrated in many jurisdictions as polling places were eliminated and additional hoops to jump through were instituted. 

What's different this year is that the President of the United States has been spending months convincing his supporters without evidence that the system was unreliable, that it was rigged against him and that any result that differed from him winning in a landslide was illegitimate. 

No surprise that once enough votes were counted to make it indisputable that the president did not win re-election, it was disputed. 

It was widely predicted that in some states the day-of votes would trend toward Trump, since his supporters were more likely to vote in person and that the mail-in ballots would trend toward Biden, since Democrats were more likely to be concerned about distancing on Election Day and therefore would vote early or by mail in greater numbers. And since in most cases early votes and mail-in ballots would not be counted until after the day-of votes were tabulated, that is exactly what happened. States that had Trump slightly ahead on Election Day evening, like Pennsylvania, little by little gave way to a Biden lead as all the votes were counted. One of Trump's propaganda points was that we should know the winner on the evening of Election Day, and of course since he knew how things would go in the swing states, attempted to get voting stopped in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin where he was initially ahead. In the states where he was slightly behind, like Arizona and Nevada, he pushed for all the ballots to be counted. 

Once Biden drew ahead in these key states, his legal team went to work filing lawsuits to get wide swaths of votes invalidated while taking to Twitter to make unsubstantiated claims (i.e. lies) about alleged election irregularities. In most cases what he was telling his supporters on Twitter was different than what his lawyers were claiming in court. Virtually every case was thrown out of court. The few cases that weren't dismissed involve vanishingly small numbers of ballots that will not change the result. 

Republicans in general are parroting Trump's line, claiming to only be concerned about election integrity, even though they were never concerned about it before and there is no evidence of a coordinated, or even significant effort to rig the election. What Trump and the Republicans are doing is an attempt, not to protect the integrity of the election, but to overturn it.   
 

Election Fraud

No one is surprised. Trump was asked several times in 2016 whether he would accept the results of the election. His answers included "We'll see" and "If I win". In 2016 it was a moot point because he did win. Russian interference did not extend to actually changing any votes, just spreading disinformation to our easily fooled electorate. The popular vote in our system of selecting a president is irrelevant, as much as we wish it wasn't. He could complain all he wanted about the imaginary 3 million undocumented immigrants whom he said voted for Clinton - it didn't matter.

In 2020 it matters.

Trump has been asked repeatedly if he would respect the results of the election, if there would be an orderly transition if he lost, and he repeatedly declined to unequivocally answer, proclaiming that he would win, or that he would only accept a legitimate result and suggesting that the only legitimate result was a win for him. 

For once, he told the truth. 

For months Trump has been working steadily to undermine faith in our electoral system. He has, without a scintilla of proof, alleged that the voting system was rigged, that it was rife with fraud, and invented all manner of bizarre scenarios. He and his Republican enablers, meanwhile, have been working overtime to make it harder for people to vote. Republicans in Florida effectively nullified a vote by the majority of Floridians to give felons who had served their sentences the right to vote. Republicans in Texas limited ballot drop boxes to one per county, even in counties with millions of voters, Republicans in Georgia closed many polling places. Republicans throughout the country refused to expand voting by mail for people concerned about voting in person during a pandemic and when the rules were loosened, went to court to prevent it. Republicans attempted to invalidate votes postmarked by election day but received afterward. I'm sure that I'm overlooking some of these moves. 

Despite all of these roadblocks, people found ways to cast their vote. People took advantage of early voting options, waiting in line for hours in order to exercise the franchise. Due to the likelihood that early voting would be done predominantly by people concerned about Covid-19, it was predicted that mail ballot and early ballots would lean Democratic. In many states, including several of the swing states, state law required that day-of ballot be counted first. The entirely predictable (and predicted) result was that several states would show Trump leads until the mail-in and early ballots were counted. This is what happened. Trump and the Republicans tried to get counting stopped while he was still ahead. 

Now Trump and his cultish enablers are claiming that the results are tainted. They are throwing around accusations and allegations that are based on nothing more substantial than a belief that Trump couldn't have lost, so any numbers showing that he lost must be rigged. 

The fact that Biden conducted no massive rallies and very few small ones is not proof that the numbers are wrong

Disbelief that Biden could have received more votes than Obama did in 2008 or 2012 is not proof of fraud

The fact that Trump rallies attract huge crowds does not translate into invalid polling results for Biden

Mainstream media outlets "calling" the election just means that they think the numbers warrant it; it is not proof that the media is manipulating the numbers. 

There is no real evidence other than "there must be fraud" scenarios that Trumpists are looking for any scrap of "proof" for.

The Republican post election talking points try to make it look like questioning every opposition vote and letting the courts decide is normal. It's not. It's a desperation move by a desperate man and his desperate enablers. 
 

The Electoral College Must Die

As I write this I have no idea who will win the presidential election or which party will control the Senate. I don't know which candidate will end up with more actual votes (no one "wins" the popular vote because it's not a contest) but however it turns out, the Electoral College is a bad idea. 

"But the genius of the founders!"

Please.

The Electoral College was compromise piled on top of compromise. 

Keep in mind that the founders were not supporters of democracy. They did not believe that "the people" were capable of making decisions. They did want national policy to be determined by those who were already in power, and this decision-making included who would be the president. The participants at the Constitutional convention debated several different scenarios for selecting a president. One solution was to have the legislature choose the president, this, as well as a suggestion for direct election, was rejected. The former due to separation of powers considerations and the latter because they simply didn't trust "the people". Keep in mind that each state set its own standards for who would be able to vote, and that in general the franchise was limited to white male landowners. The legislatures of each state, often a self-selected collection of oligarchs that were representatives in name only, determined who the electors would be and who they would vote for. 

So the one compromise was to set up a system where the will of the voters, even though they were a small percentage of the actual people, could be circumvented if those people made the "wrong choice".

The second compromise relates to how the legislature was set up. At the time of the writing of the Constitution the ruling class of each of the states viewed each state as a sovereign nation (what "state" used to mean) and were keen to maintain their own power and influence. The governments of the states with smaller populations did not want a legislature with membership based on population, since that would put them at a disadvantage. The leaders of the larger states did not want to give up the advantage that greater population gave them. The compromise was a two-chamber legislature, with one chamber's members elected according to population and the other, the Senate, with two senators from each state. Initially the senators were selected by each state's legislature, not elected. 

This compromise made sense when each state viewed themselves as separate and unique, and only associated with the others in a glorified alliance, and not subdivisions of a federal nation. This is hardly the case anymore. 

A compromise within a compromise was made in order to entice the slave states to enter the union. A huge percentage of the people in the salve states were enslaved people. The Southerners wanted to count them in the census, as this would give them more influence in Congress, the Northerners did not want to count enslaved people at all, since they could not vote. What we ended up with was the infamous 3/5 Compromise, whereby enslaved people, for the purposes of representation in Congress, were counted as 0.6 of a person.

The total number of members of Congress from each state would equal the number of electoral votes they would have. 

How did we get to the point where we have had several recent elections where the candidate who won, received fewer votes? 

The main reason is that early in hour history it became the norm for states to award all of their electoral votes to the candidate who received the most votes. If there were more than two candidates, this could mean that the winning candidate received less than 50%. A losing candidate with 49.9% would receive no electoral votes from that state. Another reason is that many states have become predominantly either rural or urban, and the two major parties appeal predominantly to one or the other. The predominantly rural states tend to be lower in population. Since every state most receive a minimum of 3 electoral votes, the smaller states have proportionally more influence than the larger, more urban states. 

Advocates of the Electoral College will claim that this is exactly what the founders planned for, except that they didn't. For many years the size of the House of Representatives, and hence the Electoral College, increased as states were added and population grew. In 1929 the Permanent Apportionment Act was passed, limiting the size of the House of Representatives to 435. The US population increased from 123 million in 1930 to 309 million as of the 2020 census. Two states were added. The result was that not only were the number of people represented by each Congressman steadily increasing, but the relative clout of the smaller states was increasing as well. 

Due to the above, we have a situation where, in any state where one party is dominant, those who vote for the minority party are effectively disenfranchised. 

Supporters of continuing the Electoral College claim that if we switched to a popular vote system, California and New York (or sometimes a collection of big cities) would call all the shots and that the voters in the small states would be ignored. This is wrong for several reasons, and why I often say that if you're for the Electoral College, you're just bad at math. California and New York, combined, have around 18.9% of the US population as of the last census. That sounds like a lot and it is, but it's not so scary as it seems. In the Electoral College, the two states combined control 15.5% of the total. So there would be an increase, but they are already throwing their weight around, not too mention that the counterweight is Texas and Florida with a combined 12.4% of the Electoral votes (16.5% of the total population). EC cheerleading usually doesn't take into account that not everybody in California and New York votes for Democrats. There are substantial minorities of Republicans in both states (as there are Democrats in Texas and Florida) whose votes would count in a popular vote setup. The thinking that small states would lose their influence assumes that they have any influence now. How often do campaigns visit Vermont, or Wyoming or Alaska? Hardly ever, because they are each safely in the orbit of one political party. The states that get the most attention have two qualities: (1) They are medium-to-large and or (2) They are "swing" states, whose voters are close to equally divided between the two major parties or (3) Both. 

The problem with discussing eliminating the Electoral College is that it is enshrined in the Constitution and it is difficult to change it, especially when one party owes much of their power to it. 

So, how can we address the worst problems of the Electoral College while still keeping its shell?

1. Repeal the Permanent Apportionment Act and increase the size of the House of Representatives. Designate the population of the smallest state (currently Wyoming at around 500,000) as the size of a Congressional district. I recently calculated that this would increase the size of the House from 435 to 565. Smaller to medium states' delegations would remain the same while the larger ones would increase. This would make the House of Representatives more proportional to population and by extension, the Electoral College.

2. Require that electoral votes be awarded by each state proportionally. This would differ slightly from the system that Nebraska and Maine use (they award 2 electoral votes to the statewide winner and 1 vote each to the Congressional district winner). This system would require states that are now swing states, to award the relevant percentages to the second place candidate. For example in Wisconsin, with 10 electoral votes, saw Trump and Biden almost equally divided. They would split the electoral votes 5-5 (or 6-4 if you wanted to give the winner an advantage). Nationwide the electoral votes would closely match the popular vote.

This system would eliminate the disproportionate influence of small, rural states, and enfranchise minority party voters in the "safe" states. Large population centers would probably have as much influence as they do now, but would be balanced by the rural populations in the smaller states. Urban areas in otherwise rural states would also be heard for the first time.

The Electoral College was not engraved in stone and handed down from on high. It was born of a series of compromises by people who didn't trust "the people" and disliked giving them any power. We have changed over the decades to a country that values our leaders being chosen by "the people"...at least that's what we say. 

(Ranked choice voting deserves its own article...coming soon)

Donald J. Trump is a Serial Liar

Some people feel that they are making an informed choice to support Donald Trump. I regularly engage with people on social media regarding politics. While there are definitely the name-callers and the conspiracy followers, there is also a large number of people who adopt a rational tone and present information in a calm reasonable manner.

The problem is that the information that they are presenting ultimately comes from what Donald Trump is telling them. 

And Donald Trump is a serial liar.

I'm not going to wear down my typing fingers (especially since there only two fingers that I use to type) listing all the lies Donald Trump has told over the last four years. There's plenty of sources enumerating them. Now Trumpists and Trump himself will point the finger at "Fake News" and claim that the reporting on the lies are themselves lies. But you don't have to depend on traditional mainstream media for your facts. Virtually all of Trump's lies can be checked against publically available websites, including U.S. government websites. An early lie that Trump told was that his Electoral College win was historic, or unprecedented, except that a Google search of Electoral College results of  every presidential election shows that his winning margin was more like the 45^th best. Trump's claims about the economy are also based on lies. He claims that our economy, including job creation, the stock market and unemployment numbers are "the best ever", when even a cursory look at economic trends indicate that all the positive numbers are simply a continuation of the trends that started during the previous administration. It goes on and on. The information is out there and easily accessed. 

Donald Trump likes to claim that he has gotten more done "in 47 months than Joe Biden got done in 47 years" and that Biden is "all talk and no action". Biden's legislative accomplishments easily discovered, and he was by all accounts an active Vice President and a trusted advisor to President Obama. Trump, for all his bragging and boasting, has had only one significant legislative achievement, the tax change that was a giveaway to corporations and the rich; his numerous executive orders are empty barrels. 

So take a look, Trumpists, at the facts. Facts, not Trumpian assertions. Because if you're basing your support of Trump on what Trump says he has accomplished, then in all likelihood, you're basing your support on a lie. 

Russia, Russia, Russia (and a l'il bit o' Ukraine)

This is a reminder.

This is a reminder that if you aspire to express an opinion of the Mueller Report, or the alleged collusion of the 2016 Trump campaign with Russian Intelligence, or the Justice Department's Inspector General's Report, you should have already actually read the Mueller Report and the Inspector General's Report. 

I read them both. 

The whole damn thing. 

And the other whole damn thing. 

It took about a week to get through each of them. 

What The Mueller Report didn't do was determine that there was (or wasn't) collusion. Not because there wasn't any, but because that's not what they were looking for. They were looking for actions that fit the legal definition of conspiracy. That's a pretty high bar. It's pretty hard to prove. The report, however, was very clear that Russian Intelligence was undertaking a program intended to influence the election in favor of Trump, that Trump and his campaign staff knew about it, that they didn't report that Russians approached campaign staff with offers of cooperation, and that the campaign was perfectly cool with accepting this assistance. The only thing that got them off the hook for conspiracy charges was that they were too lazy to do any actual coordination with the Russians. 

The second part of The Mueller Report addressed obstruction of justice. The report was quite clear that there was obstruction of the investigation by the president himself. Mueller made no recommendation regarding charges due to Justice Department policy stating that a sitting president cannot be indicted short of impeachment. 

No sooner had the report been issued and a follow up testimony to Congress by Mueller when Trump actively solicited another foreign government to interfere in our election by asking the president of Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Biden and his son. The only reason that Trump is still the president is that a Republican majority Senate, pathetically tied to Trump's rise or fall, voted to not remove him from office after he was impeached.  

He was not exonerated. 

But our serial liar president tells his followers that it was a hoax and that in effect none of what clearly happened, happened. 

In addition, he and his followers are attempting to smear Vice President Biden and his family with charges of corruption that have been looked into and debunked. 

Trump is corrupt. 

Originalism

With a battle, or at least a battle of words, going on in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing room about Judge Amy Coney Barrett, I thought I'd look at the concept of originalism as it pertains to the interpretation of the Constitution. Originalists, sometimes called textualists, rely solely, or at least primarily, on the actual words in the Constitution. This sounds like it's common sense. Of course you'd rely on the words of the Constitution to determine what the Constitution says. But even a cursory examination of the words of the Constitution reveals that the words are often fuzzy. For example, what does "cruel and unusual" mean? We can, as originalists do when the words themselves are unclear, look to the milieu in which they were written to determine context. When the Constitution and it's first ten amendments were penned, punishments included whipping, branding, being confined in stocks, cutting off ears, and of course public hanging. These punishments could be inflicted for crimes ranging from petty theft or even giving birth out-of-wedlock. These were all perfectly normal in Colonial times, but our mores have changed drastically since then. Courts have progressively moved the bar regarding what "cruel and unusual" consisted of. It is unreasonable to expect that the founders would have anticipated all circumstances to which the Constitution would be applied. 

Another example is the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision, in which it was ruled that the separate but (theoretically) equal standard that was set forth in the 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson did not in fact satisfy the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Not only do attitudes changes, but the facts upon which cases are based change as well. The legality upon which the "separate" part of "separate but equal" was based derived from the prevailing view that Black people were not only inferior to white people, but that it was natural that they be kept separate. 

I don't support "legislating from the bench", where judges make the law. But courts must not only rule on guilt and innocence but must adjudicate between different interpretation of the laws as written and take into account evolving attitudes, culture and circumstances. Times change, as so does the lens through which we view the Constitution. 

Electoral College, What's It Good For? (Absolutely Nothin'?)

The election is around 3 weeks away, which means it's time to talk about the Electoral College again. I wanted to post this before the election, because I want to make it clear that my opinion about the Electoral College (EC) isn't based on who wins on Election day. 

The EC came about die to several compromises during the Constitutional Convention. The first thing to understand is how the people of the individual states viewed the concept of a "state" in those days. After over 200 years we tend to automatically think of a state as a subdivision of a country, and that's what it has come to mean, however a secondary definition of "state" is: "a nation or territory considered as an organized political community under one government, e.g. Germany, Italy and other European states". The second definition was the prevailing one in 1787 - the thirteen states viewed themselves as functionally independent nations held together in a confederation or alliance. This view didn't really go away until well after the Civil War. So, during the Constitutional Convention, rather than thinking of themselves as "Americans", they held themselves as "Virginians", "New Yorkers" or "Marylanders" and were very jealous of their rights as individual states in relation to other states. The states with lower populations were concerned that they would be consistently outvoted by the more populous states in the Congress, so the compromise that gave us a population-based House of Representatives and an equal representation Senate was arrived at. In addition, the notorious "three-fifths" compromise allowed enslaved people to be counted as three-fifths of a person for census purposes. The Southern slave states had actually wanted to fully count the enslaved people to increase their voting power while the non-slave states did not want to count them at all. When it came time to decide how the president would be elected, the system was based partially on this legislative compromise. 

The writers of the Constitution did not trust "the people". In fact, "the people" in general couldn't vote - only white, male, landowners could. But even within that group, the founders wanted a fail-safe against voters who might make the 'wrong' choices. The "people" wouldn't really be the ones who would vote for president, but a group of electors who would theoretically cast their votes for whoever received the most votes within their states, but in practical terms, could vote for whoever they wanted to. The number of electors from each state was based upon the total of members of Congress, including the two senators, so the proportion of electors would tilt somewhat toward the smaller states. 

A provision not found in the Constitution, but nevertheless followed in every state except Maine and Nebraska, is to award all of a state's electoral votes to the winner of the most votes in that state, effectively disenfranchising voters for the minority party candidate in states where the voters overwhelmingly support one party. 

One of the things that EC proponents bring up is that without it, the voters in the smaller states would have no voice and that elections would be decided either by New York and California or by a dozen or so big cities. This is not a strong argument: 

* The states no longer view themselves as sovereign nations with unique rights that need to be protected. While there are regional differences, most issues that come before a president are common issues to all Americans. 

* With the current system small states already are ignored in an election campaign. Also ignored  are voters in "safe" states like California and New York, which vote reliably Democratic and most of the states of the Deep South which vote reliably Republican. The states that get attention are the so-called wing states, states that are so evenly split between Republican and Democratic that they could go either way in an election. 

* The above argument ignores the fact that the more populous states do not vote as a block, and neither do the big cities. Arguing that California and New York would decide elections assumes that everyone in those states would vote the same way when in reality there are many conservative Republicans in upstate New York and northern California, just as there are liberal Democrats in Lincoln and Omaha Nebraska and in Atlanta Georgia, even though those states usually vote for and award all their electoral votes to Republicans. 

A weird non sequitur-ish argument is "We're a Republic". This is a variation on the recurring right-wing insistence that we're not a Democracy, conflating direct democracy (i.e. "mob rule") with what our government is: a Democratic Republic, or a Republican Democracy. Democracy is perfectly accurate as a shorthand description. The "We're a Republic" crowd has gotten it into their heads that a necessary feature of a republican form of government (which boils down to "not a monarchy") is something like an electoral college and equal representation to political subdivisions. The writers of the Constitution decided it would be a feature of our government, but there's plenty of republics that don't use any such system. 

Another non-argument rests on the belief that the founders were infallibly wise in the way they set up the framework of our government and that we shouldn't question it. This ignores history. Originally senators were chosen, not by a vote of the people, but by state governments. This was changed. Originally the president and vice-president were not tied together as "running mates". The person with the second-most electoral votes became the Vice President. This was changed after several deadlocked elections ended up being decided by the House of Representatives. The "wisdom" of the founders was subject to change when it didn't work out as envisioned. 

In the real world there's no way that the EC will be done away with. It would take a Constitutional amendment, and a party whose candidate won would have no motivation to support such a change. What can change is how electors are allocated. Nebraska and Maine both award two electoral votes to the statewide winner and one vote each to the winners within a Congressional district. There's no reason that this couldn't work nationwide. States could also apportion their electoral votes on a percentage basis, although I don't know of there's any provision for fractional votes. Several states are even now part of a "popular vote compact" where they agree to award all of their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote once the electoral votes of the compact states reach a certain threshold (270 electoral votes). 

Changing the way electoral votes are awarded within the states would still address the concern that small states not be overwhelmed by the more populous states, but would eliminate (or at least minimize) the possibility that the runner-up be declared the winner in a presidential election. 

Businessmen in Politics

There's multiple fallacies in comparing what a businessman has "accomplished" vs. what a politician has done in office, completely aside from the question of whether a politician is corruptly influenced.

Business and government are two different worlds. The aim of a business is to make money for the owner(s) of the business. That's it. A business owner may CHOOSE to be socially conscious, pay her employees more than the law or the market require, give to charitable organizations, CARE about the employees, but none of that is possible without turning a profit. The role of government is to provide services, or to provide security, not to be profitable. A business owner may discontinue a product or a division that is unprofitable, but you don't close down a government department because it's not bringing in enough cash. Even the most successful CEO necessarily has different goals than a government official. You can't criticize a legislator because he didn't "create jobs" and a business owner won't make a good Senator because he did.

Then there's the issue of accountability. CEOs of large companies are virtual dictators in their own companies. Of course in publicly held businesses there is a board of directors that theoretically has authority over the CEO and other management. In practice, however, as long as the CEO is presiding over increasing profits and there are no embarrassing public ethical lapses that they think may affect profits, the CEO has free reign. In private, or in family companies, the CEO is even more unaccountable.

Once a CEO becomes an elected official they are often in for a rude awakening. If she becomes a Senator or Representative, there is the shock of not being the ultimate authority and being part of a collegial body that only has authority as a body. If in an executive position, e.g. a state governor or the U.S. President, then they're in the unfamiliar position of having to work with a legislature to get anything done, and if the majority in the legislature is from the other party, then the job is that much harder. Both our governor, Pete Ricketts, and the President came to office thinking that they could just rule by fiat. Ricketts not as much as Trump, although Ricketts was shocked that some registered Republicans in the Unicameral did not automatically support his ideas. Trump seemed completely ignorant that Congress actually writes the laws and he cannot just do whatever he wants.

Finally, we now have the spectacle of someone who got into the White House by playing a successful businessman on television! Some of us have known all along, but the latest revelations about Trump's tax returns show that Trump was a horrible businessman. He consistently bankrupted his holdings, spent lavishly on investments that showed little potential for recouping that investment. He was only successful at convincing people that he was successful. And he took this ineptitude into the highest office in the land.

First Debate

I seriously doubt that anyone changed their mind based on this debate. After all, there were no shockers. Both candidates said the things that they have been saying all along. Trump interrupted, was rude and insulting and Biden initially tried to treat this as a normal debate...which it wasn't. So, what can we conclude from this?

Let's start with what we saw of Biden. 

Biden supporters (including me) were hoping that the former Vice President would avoid what are popularly called "gaffes" - what some of us just call "fuck-ups". The other issue was the concern that Biden would come across as confused or lost. Neither of these things happened. There were really only two moments when Biden lost control. One was his attempt to paint Trump as disrespectful to military men and women, bringing up his late son Beau, who served honorably in Iraq. He seemed completely flustered when Trump interrupted and turned it into an attack on Hunter Biden, reduced to repeating that what Trump was saying was untrue. He did rally, asserting that it wasn't about his family or Trump's family, but our families. The other moment was during a "Law & Order" discussion when Biden suggested that he had some support from law enforcement. Trump pounced, asking for Biden to name one law enforcement group that endorsed him. He was stumped and moved on. 

What did Biden do right? He was articulate and confident. There was no hint of mental decline or lack of acuity. He clearly laid out his priorities. For the most part he did not allow Trump to rattle him or shut him up when Trump interrupted him. He was not shy about labeling Trump a liar, repeatedly making the point that Trump couldn't be trusted. If this was any other president, it might be argued that Biden was out of line calling Trump a clown and a con and telling him to "shut up, man", but  conventional responses aren't appropriate against an unconventional opponent. 

How about Trump?

Nothing new from Debacle Donnie. He spewed his usual bullshit conspiracy theories, he repeatedly interrupted both Biden and the moderator. He dodged questions. Same old same old. When challenged on the shortcomings of his own record, his responses were variations on "You would have done much worse". He's still trying to run as an outsider, even though (obviously) he's running the government! When confronted with facts such as job creation being higher during Obama's last three years than Trump's first three, before the Covid-19 health crisis, he acted as if he hadn't heard the questions and simply repeated his talking point that he presided over the greatest economy and job creation the country had ever seen. 

Some big revelations that weren't really revelations: Trump, when given the opportunity, refused to speak against right-wing violence; he claimed that he paid "millions" in taxes in 2016 and 2017; and once again undermined the integrity of the upcoming election and all but came out and said he would only accept election results if he won. His rationale included not only unfounded allegations of election fraud, but the ridiculous claim that the Democrats didn't accept the results of the 2016 election

I can't really say that Biden "won" the debate in that he was unable to shut Trump up, but he was definitely the sane alternative.

Trump's Taxes

About 25 years ago I was heading to Indiana with two others for a class that we were taking. One of the individuals was self-employed. He sold some kind of cancer insurance as running an operation that looked a lot like a pyramid scheme. On our way home we stopped for dinner at a pizza restaurant - after we paid for our food, he asked for our receipts. When I asked why, he replied that he was going to "write them off" as a business expense. This was not legal.

There are two ways that expenses can be claimed in order to reduce your taxable income. One way is to itemize your expenses on your personal income tax return. Since the standard deduction increased to $24,800 for married couples filing jointly a household would have to have more than $24,800 in deductions in order to itemize. There are only certain expenses which can be deducted: 

* Medical & dental

* State & Local taxes

* Mortgage interest

* Charitable giving

*Casualty & theft

You can't deduct for things like haircuts or car repair, for example. The other way expenses can be deducted from your taxable income is if you own a business and those deductions are legitimate business expenses. For instance, if you buy a color printer - it's not a deductible expense if you use it for personal use, but if you buy it for your business, you can claim it as a legitimate business expense. Here's where dishonest people can commit fraud. My traveling companion from years ago was using not only his own non-work-related meals as a business expense, but expenses of other people. Federal tax returns do not require you to itemize your business expenses. You lump them together according to category: meals, supplies, car expenses, advertising, etc. Unless you're audited, no one knows that you've deducted things that were for purely personal use as business expenses. This appears to be what Trump did. Repeatedly.

Trump's business isn't just one company, it's at least 500 limited liability companies (LLCs). An LLC shields the owner or owners from personal liability if the company is sued and all profit "flows through" to the owners and is taxed on their personal income tax return. One example is certain tax credit programs which award credits based on expenditures on something that the government wants to encourage. If the tax incentive program awards a tax credit of 10% of expenditures, it is usually only looking at one LLC out of potentially dozens (or in Trump's case, hundreds) and ignoring all other LLCs owned by the same person. The main LLC can then pad their expenditures with payments to other LLCs owned by the same person. LLC-1 can pay LLC-2 a "consulting fee" of 20% of total expenditures - the IRS will treat LLC-1 and LLC-2 as separate entities even though they share ownership and the income from both flow through to the owner. So if the total expenditures are $1,000,000, including a $200,000 consulting fee to LLC-2, in this scenario where a 10% credit is awarded, LLC-1 receives $100,000 in tax credits which includes $20,000 for doing nothing but transferring money from one pocket to the other. This is also something that Trump appeared to do. Repeatedly. 

One thing that isn't a problem with Trump's taxes is depreciation. Depreciation is one of the most misunderstood parts of accounting. There's a movie that I've seen a few times (I forget the name) where a farmer is regaling his daughter and her friend about the wonders of depreciation. He explains that each year he deducts a percentage of what he paid for a piece of equipment and after a certain number of years, he has recouped the entire cost of the equipment. This is not how depreciation works! You do not receive, over a number of years, what you paid for a piece of equipment. Depreciation is the method by which you spread out the cost of an asset over several years (it varies depending on the type of asset) instead of claiming the expense at the time you purchased it. For example, if you bought a computer for your home business and paid $500 for it. If you "expensed" it, you would deduct $500 from your year's revenue as a business expense. However, by depreciating it, you would claim a depreciation expense of $100 in each of 5 years. (That's for 'straight-line' depreciation, there are other methods, and there are different timelines for different classes of assets). It's not a magic method of getting your money back, it's merely spreading out over time the tax deduction for the expense. 

Another thing that often gets misunderstood is the tax strategy of losing money to avoid paying taxes, or incurring expenses just to get the tax deduction. A frequent delusion is that a "write-off" means that something is free. Let's say your effective tax rate is 15%. You buy a piece of equipment for $1000, planning to use it for your business and deduct the expense. You don't get $1000 back! You get to reduce the amount of income that will be taxed by $1000. What you have saved is the tax, which in this case is $150. If you have made this purchase in order to save money on taxes, you actually have $850 less. 

Not every dollar of a loss for tax purposes means that money is actually lost. Some of that loss is on paper. A depreciation expense for a building that was purchased years ago and is increasing in value and can be sold for more than the purchase price and tax credits of various kinds. But it appears that many of Trump's properties are losing real money, shoveling out more in cash every year than they take in. So, what is Trump living on? The New York Times article pointed out an extremely large amount of debt. A mortgage taken out on Trump Tower and various other loans totaling over $400 million. That's what he's living on. Compare his situation to a person who is getting by by running up credit card debt, but has no real plan to pay it down. 

Trump apologists like to bring up how he donates his $400,00/year salary, but seldom acknowledge how his businesses have benefited from his visits as president. A president is certainly entitled to personal travel or vacation time, but for this president, the cost of housing Secret Service agents, renting golf carts and all of the myriad security arrangements go back into Trump's pocket. Something not touched upon was how much the Trump for President campaign pays for what will likely turn out to be personal expenses. 

Trump was elected partly by portraying himself as a successful businessman, while, as it turns out, he is an especially inept, businessman. Not only that, he has kept his house of cards standing by tax fraud. 

Anyone who has watched Trump over the decades is not surprised. Now we have the evidence. 

What Would YOU Do?

What would YOU do if someone was pounding on your door after midnight? I don't know what I would do, but I know what Kenneth Walker did. He grabbed his gun and headed for the front door just as the people who were pounding on the door burst through it by tearing the door off its hinges with a battering ram. In that dark room he saw two people with weapons drawn, so he fired his gun, hitting one of them. The two intruders began firing their guns, hitting, not Walker, but his unarmed girlfriend Breonna Taylor, as they retreated. Ms. Taylor soon died from her injuries. From where I'm sitting, Walker's actions were completely understandable. 

The actions of the two cops, once they broke into the apartment were also understandable. With a warrant that empowered them to break into the apartment without the permission of Ms. Taylor, they expected to find one unarmed woman. This is what their surveillance led them to believe. As they breached the door they were met with gunfire. I don't know if one shot qualifies as "gunfire", but there is no disagreement about who shot first - it was Walker. I suppose it must be police training to fire blindly when fired upon, because they managed to not hit Walker, but did hit Taylor 5 times. 

I say that once they broke into the apartment the cops' actions were understandable, but that doesn't mean that I think that their actions leading up to the break-in were understandable or right. I understand that they panicked when confronted with an armed man - but I believe that the situation should never have happened. 

There are differing accounts regarding whether the police announced themselves before breaking down the door. The police claim that they identified themselves, Walker says that they did not. Of 12 witnesses, only one claims that he heard the police yell "police", and that was after he had twice said that they had not. Eleven other witnesses said that they did not hear the police identify themselves. Walker goes so far as to say that he shouted out several times asking who was at the door and received no answer. 

Put yourself in the position of Walker and Taylor. Breonna Taylor was under suspicion by the police due to a previous relationship with a drug dealer, her former boyfriend. Walker knew about this ex-boyfriend and reported that he thought perhaps it was the ex-boyfriend pounding on the door. Imagine. You're sound asleep. It's after midnight. There's a pounding on the door. Maybe the person on the other side is hollering "police", maybe not. (It's been established that even with "knock first" warrants, the identification as police generally comes as the door is being battered open) Your girlfriend used to be involved with some shady characters. You have no idea who is trying to break down the door in the middle of the night. 

Several items give weight to Walker's version of events. He was licensed to carry a firearm. He had no criminal record, or for that matter, any negative contact with the police. After he fired one shot, and the two cops fled the apartment, he called 911. He told the operator that someone had broken in and shot his girlfriend. That doesn't sound like someone who purposely tried to kill a police officer. And the charge of attempted murder of va police officer was dropped. 

But let's go beyond the panicked reaction of Walker being confronted by two armed men breaking in and the cops' panicked reaction to someone who shot at them. Why was there a no-knock warrant issued and why did it have to be executed after midnight? The local prosecutor suspected that Breonna was still involved with her former boyfriend and was storing drugs and cash at her apartment. Instead of questioning her they decided that they would scare the shit out of her in the middle of the night (the police did not realize that she wasn't alone). They were parked outside her home for hours that night. Why not intercept her before she went inside and open the door with a key? The way that this happened was a recipe for disaster. And once the shootout concluded they made no effort to determine whether anyone had been shot inside and in fact did not send in paramedics for Breonna until 20 minutes after she was shot and only because Kenneth had called 911. 

According to law as currently written, no one is responsible for Breonna Taylor's death. Granted, this death was accidental. No one went into that apartment looking to kill anyone, but the way it was carried out provoked a citizen to defend himself and his girlfriend, which in turn caused the police to return fire. How many of us would get fired from our jobs for "accidental" incidents that fell well short of someone dying?  This isn't an isolated case. 

Right wing police apologists are attempting to paint Taylor and Walker as the bad guys. Walker having shot first is being put forth as the reason Breonna is now dead, he has been called the reason she is dead. Breonna's past is being trotted out as an excuse for police action. But it's the broader circumstances that have to be looked at and questioned. Breonna Taylor, even though there was circumstantial indications that she may have still been involved with her ex-boyfriend's drug dealing, she had not been convicted of anything before the police had been given permission to break down her door. They didn't even have a shred of hard evidence that she had committed a crime - the warrant, which gave the police permission to break down the door of a citizen who had not been convicted of a crime, to look for evidence, which, as I have already stated, they didn't have, and as it turned out, didn't find in the apartment. What if Walker wasn't there? What was the plan, that is, what was the plan after destroying the door? Would Breonna have been thrown to the floor with her hands zip-tied behind her back while the police ransacked her apartment? The Fourth Amendment doesn't appear to be all that important. Once they found no evidence, who was going to repair the door? But they didn't have to worry about those little details, because, instead of a woman all alone in her apartment, they encountered a man exercising his First Amendment rights. 

Before you unthinkingly defend the police and demonize the citizen, think about what you would do in this situation.