National Stew

  Do we wait for perfect people? There are not now, nor have there ever been, perfect people, except one, and if you believe that story, we crucified him! Is perfection attainable? Human history and daily practice say no. Should we let that stand in the way of progress?  A historian I trust said that one of our founders was a horrible man. I have no argument against that theory. The question then: “Is the product of his intellect invalid?" If the product of the minds of our founders is deemed incorrect and inoperable because they were severely flawed men, we also have no right to take on the trials of our own day! We are as flawed as they, in ways we can not yet grasp! Do we wait for perfect documents? Our founders were flawed, as we have noted. We live and work in a system they created. Is that system inherently wrong as a result? Shall we wait for perfect people to produce perfect governing documents? If so, we would not to this day have attended the greatest evil of their t...

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Ending TPP  Ending JCPOA Ending NAFTA  Ending Affiliation with WTO    TPP  The Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Trump obviously did not understand was the biggest boon to China in this century! Under the agreement, we would have an economic and democracy-boosting agreement with the Pacific Rim nations that would have rivaled China and provided security and economic and military leverage against them!  JCPOA  The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was intended to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons and improve regional and global security. Iran accepted restrictions on its nuclear program and underwent regular inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Our removal from the program resulted in our blindness to the Iranian nuclear progress, which is now just short of weapons production!  NAFTA  The North American Free Trade Agreement was ended by the Trump administration and the new agreement brokered by them led to higher U...

That is the headline I expect to see post-election  It's too early to see the full effect of the debate, but the most morose of the Commentary I have seen came from Democrats early after the event. It was that on which the pundit class based its commentary!  It seems the only way media on either side of politics comments is Democratic self-loathing! The first ten things I read from the right this morning were the whimpering comments from the left about how they lost and needed to change course! Their self-deprecating made it as bad as they perceived!  Tragically the debate was bad but not as bad as the dems made it out to be. It was one tiny data point in the face of a megalomaniacal cartoon-style villain, a felon with 34 felonies and multiple remaining felony indictments who incited an election overthrow to dispossess the votes of 81 million voters!

If the court rules that individual states can not determine eligibility the door would be open to all third parties for ballot access challenges. The court would have to set up or help to establish federal rules to determine eligibility requirements or face a flood of challenges for all 50 states. That seems to be a nail in the coffin of Federalism. A Trump victory in SCOTUS would set up a 50 state rush of indie candidates who would take eligibility questions to the high court. To avoid that they would have to legislate from the bench or convince Congress to legislate an end to Federalism!

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  After reading the report: 1. Did not exonerate Trump. 1. Did not exonerate Trump. 2. Made no suggestion for criminal charges beyond the ones made in an earlier iteration and noted below. 3. Durham found no reason for opening a full investigation into Trump/Russian collaboration at that time. 4. Suggested that the FBI should have opened a preliminary investigation. The implication being that a preliminary investigation would have led to a full investigation. 5. Durham said that it was possible that the FBI needed to put some reforms in place. In addition, the investigation as a whole did see an earlier iteration that made 3 criminal charges: One plead guilty, the 2 others were tried and acquitted. I am awaiting the Durham appearance before congress to do a full report. I have an inescapable sense that there is something else going on here. Similarities between this report and the Müller report like something is being left out of the story by both. Somewhere in my reading, I ran ac...