Structural Problem with American Governance

Reading Kathryn Schulz's New Yorker article "Food Fight" (10/1/18) alongside Jill Lepore's "These Truths," one striking thing is the truth in Faulkner's observation, "The past is not dead. It's not even past."

Fact is, we have never solved the vexing problems we started with on this continent; we simply agreed to  workable compromises to ignore them, or set them aside, like a marriage in which the partners agree to simply live in separate rooms, have dinner with the kids, but in many other ways, lead separate lives. 
We get together around the Thanksgiving table, have Christmas, go to family reunions, but as time goes on, we really can't stand each other.  
We agree to not fight in the presence of the children or in front of our parents and friends, but underneath, there is more driving us apart than holding us together.

What Lepore clarifies is how much slavery was part of decisions which were made at the inception, and how it nearly destroyed the whole idea of a marriage between North and South, but, fact is, enough Northerners owned slaves, Benjamin Franklin notably, they agreed to dodge the slavery bullet every time it came up, and simply to ignore that problem. 

But eventually, it came back to nearly destroy the nation. 
The racism which under-girded slavery, however, never disappeared, smoldering deep inside the vital organs of the country.

Then there was the rural/urban divide, which has caused as many, if not more, problems than slavery. The solution seemed benign enough--have a Senate to be sure each geographic part of the country got equal say in federal rules, even if vast stretches of that geography contained few, if any, people. The founders and their progeny decided a country was not only its people, but its land, its acreage, and the rights to that land and its use.

And that, too has come back to bite US. 

And then there was the contempt the founding and the ongoing ruling elite have for the unwashed masses, the common man.  That got us the electoral college. In recent times at least, that meant minority Presidents, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, were handed power, when the humble masses chose Al Gore and Hillary Clinton.

The men with money, position and power were safe and could manipulate and control the masses.

Most recently abortion has been the driving force which has corrupted and distorted power.  Throughout the Bible belt that has meant only one thing really matters: Evangelicals, fundamentalist Christians decided they would vote for Lucifer himself, if it meant abortion would be outlawed. They could take care of Lucifer later, but for now they needed him to stuff the Court with anti abortionists. Nothing else mattered.

Red is for empty; Blue has people

Democrats failed to see this, and thought because the majority of citizens favored permitting abortion, this was an issue which would not hurt them. What they forgot is where that majority lies: concentrated in cities and the cities have been deprived of their power. 

There are more people in Los Angeles who want abortion to be safe and legal than in both the Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana and Idaho, but LA gets only 2 Senators and those empty states get 8. And the Senators control the Court whenever the President is a Republican. 

Trump won Red; Clinton Blue

It's a game, and the Republicans have manipulated the game.
They manipulate lots of games, because that's how rich men stay in power--they play games unseen. They get control of things and twist them to their own benefit.

All the conspiracy theories about Jews controlling this or that, about liberals conspiring to control the world with Black helicopters are 99% wrong. 
What is true is that people in 400 families control this country. 

And nobody yet has figured out how to stop them. 

Kanvanaugh, SCOTUS: The Reality

Does anyone really think this Brett Kavanaugh kerfuffle is really about Brett Kavanaugh being a Bill Cosby esque sexual predator?

Here is what really happened:
Mitch McConnell broke the agreement about Supreme Court nominations when Obama tried to put Merrick Garland on the bench. Everyone had played by the rule that a President can appoint pretty much who he wants if a vacancy occurs during his term in office, within the realities of who is centrist enough to get past the Senate when it is ruled by the opposing party. But McConnell saw he had the power to break the rules and he did it.

Now the Democrats are playing the one card left to them: They try to assassinate the character of a really radical reactionary Trump has put forward. They cannot deny him the spot for the real reason: He is to the right of Genghis Kahn and he will reverse Roe v Wade and will lead the court beyond Roger B. Taney ville, likely reversing equal voting rights, and possibly finding slavery permissible when the slavers claim they need to have slaves as a matter of personal religious belief.

So, they try to get Kavanaugh by any means available.

Their case is pretty pathetic: as the women in my office have said--what teen age male is not a sexual predator? They are too stupid to know any better. It's just a matter of degree. If they rape somebody, they should go to jail, but otherwise, girls ought to think about walking around a party in a bathing suit when boys are drinking.

Kavanaugh will be confirmed.
The # Metoo movement will smart and seethe.
But the #Metoo movement deserves a punch in the nose--they tried to make accusation into a sacrament.

Pack the Court, soon as the Dems get the White House and the Senate. 
That's the only way to undo the prospect of 30 more years of despotic rule from the United States Supreme Court, that Court which is the ceaseless tide carrying the ship of state relentlessly into the past.
MAGA!

David Leonhardt Breaks Through: Finally Some Reality

Mad Dog is happy to report that his relentless hectoring of his Twitter targets, his letters to the editor of the Times etc, have finally got the attention of at least one "opinion leader" namely David Leonhardt of the NY Times, who writes that the United States Supreme Court is now so fatally afflicted with partisanship, term limits for the justices should be imposed.

Of course, he wusses out by going for the 18 year limit scheme, and this would require a Constitutional amendment and getting that through 34 state legislatures stands a snowball's chance, but at least he is a mainstream media type who finally acknowledges sinking Brett Kavanaugh is an exercise in mass delusion, the red herring let loose to distract attention, when the great white shark is silently gliding behind.


The problem with the Supreme Court is not Brett Kavanaugh, nor even Alito, Gorsuch, Thomas or Roberts. The problem is the custom of running the court with only nine justices, each of whom serve for life.

Other countries have 27 or even 100 supreme court justices and they work just fine.


The problem with our court is as the nation changes with respect to its ideas about segregated schools, abortion, campaign contributions, gun control, labor unions, the Court remains somewhere to the right of Roger B. Taney and Genghis Kahn.


The problem is change is fine as long as change can be undone, modified as experiments fail and new ideas emerge.

But at least we are beginning to hear people talk openly about actions which are the natural outcome of Mitch McConnell's breaking the rules, because he had the power to do it: It was Obama's turn and McConnell refused to let him have his turn. Well now: you broke it;  we'll fix it.

Joys of the Shire: Autumn in New Hampshire

Finally, a crisp fall day. 

In "Lord of the Rings" the Hobbits love their shire and never want to stray from it, but some are called to rescue the world, and they have to leave. 
There is a scene in "Band of Brothers" in which the men of Easy Company are riding in an open truck, just after the German Army has surrendered, and the Germans are marching north down the divider strip, as the Americans are riding past them on the road, headed south.

Richard Winters, Easy Company's commander remarks admiringly, "Look how they  march in step, defeated, but still disciplined."

But David Webster, a private, stands up and screams at the Germans, "You servile scum! What were you thinking? Dragging us away, thousands of miles from our homes, just to defeat you!"

He has seen the concentration camps, the monstrous evil the Germans, whether they knew about it or not, were fighting for.

Sometimes, happy as you may have been in your own world, the larger world demands your attention.

Mr. Trump and his hideous minions may yet call forth such an effort, but today, this Hobbit was happy to simply breathe in the clean New Hampshire air, to bicycle along the roads past the Hurd farm, with its pigs and goats and cows and llamas and past the several horse farms, and past the apple orchards, watching men in their plaid shirts and suspenders work on their cedar shingled siding, or on their roofs, past women joggers in their Lycra leggings and their ear phones, over the covered bridge and over the Taylor river as it flows to the sea. 

It was one of those day you just give thanks you live in New Hampshire and you leave the fighting to come to another day.

Fire in the Belly vs The New Hampshire House Cats

A 70 year old United States Senator from Hawaii is finally giving us what we need: Some in your face resistance to the GOP goon in chief and all his little acolyte goons.
Senator Hirono from Hawaii has been sticking it to the Republicans over their handling of Professor Ford's accusations about Judge Kavanaugh.

The problem for Mad Dog is, this Kavanaugh thing is a specious, trivial fight to pick. 

But the response, the upwelling of exaltation from many Democratic quarters should tell us something.

Finally, someone who fights.

As Lincoln was said to have remarked when people brought tales of General Grant's drunkenness to him, "Tell me what brand of whiskey he drinks. I'll send a bottle to all the rest of my generals."

Here in New Hampshire we just got finished nominating a very tame, inoffensive, careful man to run for the open United States House of Representatives seat in the New Hampshire First.  His name is Chris Pappas and he says he wants to reach across the aisle and work constructively with Republicans.

Good luck with that.

He says he is not going to Washington to start a food fight. 

Good luck finding a foot fight. He will be bringing a feather to a knife fight.

He says he thinks his victory over more strident, more progressive Democrats is an endorsement of his rejection of simply being the loudest, the angriest man in the room.

The problem is, he hasn't won a real victory yet. He has to beat Eddie Edwards who is embracing Trump with both arms, a true believer in Trumpism.

Well, maybe New Hampshire is more polite and maybe New Hampshire voters are not angry but just looking for good government and clear minds.
We can always dream. 

The Incredible Shrinking Democrats: Trivialization of the Party

This morning, driving to work, 2 stories on NPR:
1/ North Korea has agreed to dismantle missile launching sites, nuclear facilities and move toward normalization of relations with South Korea, opening borders, co hosting Olympic games.


2/ Prolonged interview about the Roe killing Kavanaugh nomination, accusation of the man's drunken groping as a teenager.

Now, try to imagine which matters more to you, if you are John Q. Public.
How does this play?
Well, Trump & Company may be testosterone driven jerks, but he did manage to bully North Korea into cowering and behaving.  If you don't care that much about abortion availability, what matters more--whether a teenage girl has to go out of state for her abortion or whether your President can intimidate one of the three big Axis-of-Evil guys into submission?

Watching images of strongmen of past, Hitler smirking after his troops rolled across the border into Czechoslovakia unopposed, Mussolini strutting, chest out, around his balcony, and the frenzied reaction of women in particular in the crowds, I thought, Uh-oh, here we go again.


Mussolini in particular loved to tell tales of how he "took" various women under stairwells, in barns, wherever and, like Berlusconi, it seemed to enhance his appeal to his crowds.
Leaders with balls.

Democrats have clung to the wisps of feminine indignation about the nasty things a judge did when he was a randy, drunken youth, completely ignoring the actual significance of the naked power play executed by Mitch McConnell and his GOP co conspirators. 
This is what is going to happen. You heard it hear first.
Kavanaugh or someone equally reliably conservative will be confirmed. With Alito, Roberts, Thomas, Gorsuch + Trump's next "Justice" the 5 votes to reverse Roe v Wade will be in place and the federal guarantee of abortion will be rescinded and states will decide whether or not to allow abortions. Some will continue to allow it, but from Texas to Florida and up to the Dakotas, wide swaths of the country will be no abortion zones with all the consequence.

But that will be just the beginning. Conservative rulings will flow for 30 years, no matter what direction the country takes. Corporations will buy Congressional seats; Gerrymandering will guarantee minority rule across the nation, and not just in the South, but in Pennsylvania and the rust belt and maybe even New England.  Flag burning will be outlawed. Owners of private property like restaurants and bakeries will be allowed to refuse service to people who their religious beliefs tell them not to like--homosexuals, Blacks, immigrants. Public schools will become more and more segregated. Discrimination against various groups--Blacks, Jews, Hispanics--in gated communities, private clubs, schools, will be simply an expression of free speech and religious freedom.

In short, we will return to the America of 1950 and President Trump, having made good on his promise to Make America Great (i.e. 1950) Again, will be re elected, possibly more than once.


All this will happen as Chuck Schumer weeps, Adam Schiff quietly objects, Nancy Pelosi fumes, Steny Hoyer shrugs and the tired, pallid old guard which is the Democratic Party heads off to the assisted living communities they so richly deserve.


And the last not-so-best hope of this nation, the Democrats wilt under the glare of the strongman, these Dems fearful of offending, always seeking harmony and compromise will be shoved aside as Neville Chamberlain and history's victims and prey have been in the last century.


The past is coming back to get us, zombie like; it's a smoldering infection which just keeps recrudescing while the timid become the lunch of the bold.

What this State Needs is a Good Talk Show

Reading Mikhail Gorbachev's history and memoir, "On My Country and the World." (1998).

"The Untold History of the United States" mentions it and it is well worth a read.

What becomes immediately apparent is while we had a profoundly demented leader in Ronald Reagan, the Russians sent us a gift we refused. Had Obama been President when Gorbachev was changing his Russia, we would likely have few or no nuclear weapons, no more endless war and a better economy.

Oliver Stone, Mad Dog knows, is a writer of screed, a conspiracy aficionado, but, as the saying goes, just because you're paranoid doesn't meant there isn't someone out there who wants to kill you, and his "Untold History" is fascinating, troubling, motivating and wonderfully entertaining. It also points you toward a variety of revelatory sources, like "War is a Racket" by Smedley Butler. 

This past primary season is still washing over Mad Dog's canine brain, but one thing which is abundantly clear is very few people were actually listening, and of those who did, most remained silent, simply listening and not responding to candidates, not challenging their ideas and forcing them to rethink their positions, at least on the Democratic side.

This is, in fact, one thing the other side does exceedingly well, with Rush Limbaugh, Lou Dobbs and all those other airwave pontificators. They also invest in The Federalist Society and all sort of avowedly right wing think tanks, which the left does not. The left is always trying to be open minded and even handed, i.e., academic, thoughtful and respectful.

Mad Dog thinks what this country needs is not a good 5 cent cigar, but a good left wing radio show, e.g. "Radio Free New Hampshire."

He is well aware Al Franken tried this and it went down in flames. But, truth be told, fine as Franken was, in many ways, he was too often unfunny.

This show needs to be entertaining, with musical interludes, seductive, alluring, attractive in ways liberals neglect.

And Mad Dog would like to point out, liberal neglect is a major failing. Much as he loved Obama, who was by far the best President to hold office during Mad Dog's long and doggy life, Mr. Obama had some failings:
1/ He failed to extract us from Afghanistan. He should have emphatically stated this war had a purpose: to get Osama Bin Laden, but the idea of rooting out or denying "sanctuaries" for terrorists was always absurd--the 9/11 terrorists trained in Florida and Berlin. The day after Bin Laden's body was dumped into the sea, every last American man and woman should have been on an airplane home from Afghanistan.
And he should have closed Gitmo and called into his office every Democrat who opposed it and raked him over the coals until they agreed to do it.
2/ He did not pursue criminal charges against anyone involved in the financial meltdown of 2008-2009. The country needed some revenge. Anger required it. Obama neglected it. Millions lost homes, life savings and Obama was like, "Oh, never mind."
3/ He did not get out often enough to rally the troops, or if he did, he allowed the press to ignore him.
4/ He was, in general, too afraid of appearing to be an angry Black man, for fear of frightening those white suburban ladies in Peoria, when, in fact, there was anger building in the country and he thought the soothing word and turning the other cheek was a proper response.

And what can you say about the Trumpling?
1/ Well, you have to admit, whereas Obama docilely handed over his cell phone, his computer because he was told to do this, Trump said, "Screw you," and took to cyberspace and his daily tweets, as inane and somethings frankly insane as they are, they are the 21st century version of the fireside chat. He is saying to the American voting public, I am engaged with you. I am talking to you.
2/ His Presidency is one long campaign rally: He spends incalculable energy on stoking up the troops, and he is devoted to marketing above governing. Like Hitler, he knows the value of bread and circus, the good show. Hitler designed the Nazi flag himself, after many tries. 

He personally designed his huge rallies. When he wasn't poring over maps for the next country to invade, he was designing parades, night rallies, pageants and Olympic shows. (And never forget, the modern Olympic movement was his creation.)

3/ Hitler was a Keynesian economist: Mad Dog doesn't know where he got the money, but he poured tons of it into building the first major highway system, building the VW beetle, the "People's Car" literally--Volkswagen. And he poured money into the armaments industry, all of which meant jobs from infrastructure. He also helped the farmers.  So whether or not people thought much about the Jews, whether they hated Jews before Hitler or simply never thought much about them, they shrugged off whatever hate swirled about them as long as they had bread, jobs and really fun rallies. Trump understands all this.

4/ Trump also gets Hitler's formula: Keep it really simple and keep repeating it. It doesn't matter if a wall is an idiotic idea. It's a good symbol and you can pour money down a mine shaft and create jobs for those who will dig for it.  Immigrants crossing the Southern border are not the problem, in reality, of course. Most illegal immigrants arrive by airplane and overstay their visas. Most legal immigrants are well educated Asian--now those guys will take somebody's jobs--but you can vilify the brown skinned, tattooed rapist MS-13 and protect everyone from a trivial boogeyman and you'll have them screaming at your rallies.

All this and more could be discussed on Radio Free New Hampshire.
You could have thoughtful liberals like Terence O'Rourke expounding on why packing the Supreme Court would be a good idea to wrest the nation from the "rule of the dead."  You could examine the Trump base. You could dissect out the reasons underlying his appeal. You could evaluate the great white knights the Democrats may or may not have.
And you can explore ideas like, "I'm not looking for a knight; I'm looking for a sword."

All this and more, if only some money man of a liberal persuasion would sponsor it.

Dream on, Mad Dog.

Anti Trumps: Get a Grip

How many people did Hurricane Maria kill in Puerto Rico?
President Trump whines he's been saddled with 2985 deaths which weren't on him--those people died later and were not killed by the hurricane.
Reporters from CNN, MS NBC, NPR have assailed him for showing indifference to the facts and making up his own reality.


But what is a fact?


And how much more about that number of 3,000 deaths do the reporters know than the President?

I had wondered about this because I have filled out death certificates and if ever there was a "garbage in/garbage out" phenomenon, death certificates have got to be it. You can trust the fact the person named is dead, and maybe even have some idea of the time of death, better for the date of death, but cause of death? Forget it.


American medicine stopped doing routine autopsies decades ago--and if you want to know what really killed somebody, that is the way. The only people who get autopsies now are "medical examiner's cases"--dead people who died unexpectedly or under suspicious circumstances. Autopsies are for determining if there was foul play.

We need that balloon in Hampton

So when you have 3,000 deaths, how do you know what those people died from?


The News Hour had an illuminating segment about how the George Washington University School of Public Health did their study which provided that number of 3,000 deaths from Hurricane Maria. Turns out, what they do is they look at the number of deaths in the months of August, September and if there are typically 5,000 deaths in August but in the month of Maria there were 8,000 deaths, then they attribute those extra deaths to the hurricane.

The base

Individuals are not counted. No death certificates are examines. Causes of death are not assessed.

So maybe Trump has a point.
And how do you assess cause and responsibility?  If a man who has bad coronary artery disease dies walking up stairs instead of being about to take an elevator because the hurricane knocked out power, is that a hurricane death?


If a woman falls down the stairs in a dark stairwell because the power is out, is that a hurricane death?

Not a good messanger

So what Trump is really complaining about is the accounting system. Personally, I have never accepted the idea that if a pitcher is yanked from a game with two runners on the bases and the relief pitcher gives up a home run, the two base runners who scored are counted against the original pitcher, not against his relief. It's sort of like that with Trump and Puerto Rico--he did not make the mess. He did not cause the hurricane damage. He did fail to help avoid subsequent suffering, and it is notable, the white people in Texas who were also hit by the hurricane got way better treatment from the United States government. But then again, those Spanish speaking, brown skinned Puerto Ricans are not Trump voters.

What strikes me is not so much the peevish Trump, but the self righteousness of the reporters and pundits, who are all in high dudgeon because they KNOW the TRUTH and Trump is denying something they are sure of, which, in fact, is not a certainty.


If we are ever going to beat Trump, it can't be with stupidity.
We have to focus on what is really wrong with him. Don't even bother to comment on really stupid tweets, or if you do, make sure everyone is laughing.

Immigration: Ha! Ha! The Joke's on You, Build the Wall Freaks

So it turns out the threat is not coming from a flood of Mexican rapists massing on the Southern border hoping to defile White American womanhood, but it's the Yellow Peril!

The Census Bureau’s figures for 2017 confirm a major shift in who is coming to the United States. For years newcomers tended to be from Latin America, but a Brookings Institution analysis of that data shows that 41 percent of the people who said they arrived since 2010 came from Asia. Just 39 percent were from Latin America. About 45 percent were college educated, the analysis found, compared with about 30 percent of those who came between 2000 and 2009.

“This is quite different from what we had thought,” said William H. Frey, the senior demographer at the Brookings Institution who conducted the analysis. “We think of immigrants as being low-skilled workers from Latin America, but for recent arrivals that’s much less the case. People from Asia have overtaken people from Latin America.”

--New York Times 9/13/18


Now the Asians coming in have college degrees and it's just possible, in point of fact, they may be a threat to the indigenous white factory worker in Wilkes Barre or the coal miner in West Virginia, because these new folks are actually educated and can pay more for that house and will gentrify your neighborhood and move you out and you'll be living in a trailer with your mother and your girl friend and her three kids.

Building the wall won't help you now.

This kid would never have hurt you

Real World Democracy in New Hampshire

After 6 months of campaigning, the primary election results for the Democratic nomination to face the Republican Trump fan for the open seat in the New Hampshire First for the United States House of Representatives are in:

Candidate			Party	Votes	Percentage
	★	Chris Pappas i	D	26,875 votes	42% votes
	★	Maura Sullivan i	D	19,313 votes	30% votes
	★	Mindi Messmer i	D	6,142 votes	10% votes
	★	Naomi Andrews i	D	4,508 votes	7% votes
	★	Lincoln Soldati i	D	1,982 votes	3% votes
	★	Deaglan McEachern i	D	1,709 votes	3% votes
	★	Levi Sanders i	D	1,141 votes	2% votes
	★	Mark Mackenzie i	D	746 votes	1% votes
	★	Terence O'Rourke i	D	656 votes	1% votes
	★	Paul Cardinal i	D	317 votes	0% votes
	★	William Martin i	D	230 votes	0% votes
Total				63,619

What is remarkable is that nearly 64,000 citizens out of a population of 1,300,000 took the time to vote.

What is disturbing is that 70,000 is a pretty small number and those who did vote chose the "safe" candidate, a man who has worked in state government for years, made lots of friends, avoids conflict and prides himself on "reaching across the aisle."

His argument was that he has won in Republican districts and the New Hampshire first is deeply purple, having gone back and forth between Dems and GOP almost every cycle.

On my street, there are 11 families. Only two of these households bothered to walk down the street to vote. Most of my neighbor were blissfully unaware there even was an election and only one household had folks who could name a single one of the 11 candidates for the open seat.  Only two ever went to a "forum" which was the way the Democratic party presented its candidates.

The head of the Democrats refused to allow a real "debate" where candidates could exchange freely, saying with so many on the stage that would be too unwieldy.

The good news is the Stepford wife candidate, the pretty blonde Marine Corps vet who dark money had imported to run for the seat lost. You could not turn on the TV without seeing her for 2 weeks prior to the election. One would have thought she was the only one running, but she lost to a guy with deep roots and a long history in New Hampshire.

Particularly interesting was the showing of Naomi Andrews, who entered the race late, who sounded as if she was running for student government president, but who had worked for the former Congresswoman and presumably was known and liked by some regular party employees.  Somehow, she pulled in 10 times the vote of the really substantive, grown up candidates; she out polled a man who took fire in Iraq and won a bronze star. So much for "Thank you for your service."

Really, the rest of the news is pretty discouraging. It is discouraging because citizens did not care enough, even in New Hampshire, which is a state which claims it deserves to hold the first Presidential primary in the nation because its citizens are so engaged, so politically aware, so involved.
Bull.
The same citizens who go to the ball game and blubber about the national anthem, who rail against football players for "disrespecting the flag" by taking a knee, can't be bothered to go to a forum and listen to candidates for their national government. These same super patriot citizens who have American flag decals all over their cars and flags outside their houses cannot name even 3 real issues or where any of the candidates stand on them.
They could not be bothered to walk next door when a candidate came to their neighbor's house to discuss the issues.
For these patriots, making any effort at all, even mental effort, taking even three hours to think about political and social issues was too much to ask.
As if real patriotism requires no effort at all.

One of my neighbors who did go to multiple meetings to hear the candidates repeatedly came to a different conclusion about who to vote for: She voted for a woman because she thinks Congress needs more women and she liked Mindi Messmer's drive to protect the environment. I cannot fault her for that. This neighbor  is a patriot in the real sense of the word--she took the time to think to discuss to agonize over her choices.

For my money, there was nobody even close to Terence O'Rourke, whose intellect, whose grasp of the issues, whose boldness with respect to solutions--he would fix the rule from the dead in our Supreme Court by packing it--made him the obvious standout choice.

But he was spitting into the wind. He got all of 657 votes. That's the number of thinking citizens out of 1.3 million souls living in this state.
Since almost the beginning of our Republic, party machines have been able to turn out voters to vote for the candidates of their choice, and Terence O'Rourke was clearly not that; he was a challenge to entrenched party pols.

During the 1930's the world chose between fascism and democracy and large parts of it chose fascism. Democracy was too indecisive, too weak for many countries. Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, all chose fascism. Mussolini made the trains run on time and Hitler put people to work building the autobahn to connect up the nation with roads.

The strongman has his appeal.
Democracy, as we can see by the results this past Tuesday, remains dysfunctional 90% of the time and is lucky to be still alive.



PS: For all the talk about the Blue Wave coming in November, it's interesting to note that 21,000 Republicans got out to vote for their Trump booster, Eddie Edwards on 9/11/18, virtually the same number as Democrats who voted for Pappas.