So, here we are: Watergate Defcon Status 1: The Trumpocalypse in Full

I've been meaning to post something on recent events for a couple of weeks, now, but a few things have kept me busy and events quickly keep overtaking any coherent thoughts I try to put down in writing.

We are all now in the center of the Trumpocalypse.

The news cycle has spun out of control, with events piling upon events. To sum up for posterity, the White House tried to quash a whistleblower complaint that Trump was holding up military aid for Ukrainse to force them to manufacture political dirt for him to use on Joe Biden. To prove his innocence, a couple of weeks ago Trump had the White House release a transcript proving ... well, proving that he was holding up military aid for Ukrainse to force them to manufacture political dirt for him to use on Joe Biden.

Very shortly thereafter, the US House finally opened an official "impeachment inquiry."

I'm not even going to try to track down the higgledy piggledy that ensued, except to say that the muck gets deeper and deeper as Trump flails about and the GOP tries to duck and cover and avoid the truth.

The elected officials of the Republican Party have been supporting a deeply corrupt, lawless man as their President. Why? In exchange for tax cuts for their billionaire patrons and crazy-ass right wing judges to appease the Evangelical wing of the party. That's what they care about, and that's what they got.

As near as I can tell, elected Republican officials are all okay with that deal. In 2018 billionaires paid less in overall taxes as a percent of their income than all other income groups. Republican appointed judges are overturning decades and centuries of decided law to benefit their party's financial benefactors. And in the face of overwhelming evidence of corruption and abuse of power, the entire Republican controlled US Senate doesn't make a peep beyond Mitt Romney tweeting that the denials "strain credulity." Give Mitt another few months and he may express "concern" about it all.

In the midst of this chaos, I'll commit a bit of prognostication and punditry:

My best guess is still that Mitch McConnell eventually decides his best chance to keep control of the Senate is to give Trump the boot. If so, the final collapse of this rapidly deteriorating house of cards may be fast, in the form of a discussion with Pelosi and a deal to bring one clean, direct charge swiftly through the House and Senate to remove him, and to leave the rest of the disaster that is GOP control in Washington stand in place. They have an easy charge to prove with Ukraine, and the 20 or so GOP Senators that are up for re-election can go home and pontificate about how they hated to do it, but they believe deeply in the rule of law and Donald Trump had -- inadvertently, they're sure -- overstepped his bounds, and how President Pence is healing this glorious nation of ours, God Bless America.

Then they will try like hell to bury every other thing that happened during the Trump administration, while Fox News treats the name Donald Trump like, "New phone. Who 'dis?"

But what do I know? I never thought the Republican Party would ever nominate a sociopath like Trump. Go figure, electing one of the worst human being in America to the Presidency has turned out to be a horrible, corrupt disaster. Who could have possibly see that coming?

If nothing else, we owe Donald Trump thanks for proving that the rot in the Republican Party political structure runs all the way to the core. The GOP is irredeemable. If they were a corporation they would literally change their name and rebrand. Since they all live in the Fox News bubble, I can only assume they'll add another bald eagle to their iconography and ooze on.

At the outset my only hope for the Trump Administration was that we might somehow make it out of this disaster without a nuclear exchange in Korea or the Middle East and without a needless war that would lead to hundreds or thousands of deaths. Despite the deteriorating world condition I thought we might make it. But last night's White House statement that we're abandoning the Kurds has made me lose even that hope.

Not a very cheery blog post. But the world isn't in a very cheery state this morning.


P.S. And then, literally as I was writing it, this gem of a tweet came along from Trump. This is a deeply disturbed mind, cracking under pressure. Things are going to get worse before they get better.

From the Joy of #IndictmentDay to Dr. Hans Zarkov Shouting a Warning over the Rocket Engines

I know I promised pretty pictures before another Trump post, but it's been a busy month on other fronts and I do have a bit to say on This Week in Trump.

Here, have a pretty picture of a sunset and we'll move on to business:

Special Counsel Bob Mueller rolled out his first indictments on Monday. That was sooner than I expected to see anything. Most of the indictments involved Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and his associate Rick Gates.The charges were unsurprising for anybody who has followed along and included conspiracy to launder money, conspiracy against the United States, being an unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading Foreign Agent Registration Act statements.

There was also a surprise baked in, the first guilty plea from a campaign adviser named George Papadopoulos, who pled guilty to lying to the FBI to cover up the Trump campaign's interactions with Russia during the campaign. It was a plea bargain in exchange for becoming a proactive cooperating witness in the investigation, which many legal experts have interpreted to mean that he's been wearing a wire since his arrest earlier this year.

Now we're getting somewhere.

The information in the indictments and the testimony of former Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page before the House Intelligence Committee makes it clear that among other things Attorney General Jeff Sessions perjured himself before Congress when he denied any knowledge of Russian connections to the Trump campaign. Also, Trump campaign co-chair and adviser withdrew his nomination to be the USDA's chief scientist after he was tied to the indictments. The indictments also refer to as-yet unindicted coconspirators.

There's more to come.

The general sense of things is that this was an opening salvo from Mueller, an invitation to cooperate and cop a plea (Papadopoulos) to a relatively light charge, or to continue to lie and face the hammer (Manafort and Gates.) In general, I suspect that's correct.

The response from the White House has been predictable: a storm of diversion and lies, headed by an endless barrage of tweets from Trump that was only slowed by the delightful eleven minutes during which his Twitter account was deactivated by a Twitter employee on his or her last day on the job. (Truly, that was the most joyous event for #Resistance Twitter since the Night of the Covfefe.) In the midst of this week's chaos the US House Republicans unveiled their tax plan, which can best be described as The No Billionaire Left Behind Act of 2017.

Things are accelerating. Things are falling apart.

I'd still rate us as Watergate Defcon Status Two, but I can see Status One from here. I'm not quite sure when we hit Status One. It might be when Mueller starts indicting Trump family members, as now seems inevitable. Or Mueller may even drop a bill of potential impeachment charges with the US House.

If I had to bet on the mechanics I'd bet that Sessions gets forced out for repeatedly perjuring himself. That gives Trump an opportunity to appoint a new Attorney General who doesn't have to recuse himself on the Russian issue. The job interview will consist of one question, "Will you fire Bob Mueller?" The first person willing to answer "Yes" to Trump in private and "No" to the Senate confirmation hearing will get the job and pull the trigger. By then the 2018 midterms will be looming and even the shameless Congressional GOP will have to convene impeachment hearings.

Or with Trump looking increasingly unhinged every day perhaps he does something truly loopy and Pence rounds up a batch of cabinet secretaries to invoke the 25th Amendment. I'd try to come up with scenarios in which Trump voluntarily resigns, but right now he's increasingly desperate to pressure the justice system to lay off, so I don't see him giving up any of the leverage he has as President.

However it happens, this ride is going to get crazier. For the most part I'm just hoping that Trump doesn't drag us into a war somewhere in an attempt to rally the base.

It's bad. It's going to get worse. We're not yet in the end-game. Things are moving quickly, so as Dr. Hans Zarkov put it in Flash Gordon, "FOR GOD'S SAKE! STRAP YOURSELVES DOWN!!!"

Official Republican Party Platform Regarding Russian Foreign Intervention, 1945-Now, a Postwar Timeline

May 8, 1945 - VE Day

May 9, 1945 - We must use every tool at our disposal to contain Soviet foreign aggression.

October 6, 1976 - Gerald Ford: "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe."

October 7, 1976 - Gerald Ford: "I misspoke during the debate. What I meant to say was, 'We must use every tool at our disposal to contain Soviet foreign aggression."

June 12, 1987 - Ronald Reagan: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"

November 9, 1989 - Berlin Wall torn down.

Nov. 10, 1989 through Nov. 8, 2016 - We must use every tool at our disposal to contain Russian foreign aggression.

Nov. 9, 2016 - Official start of the Trump Doctrine: "Kiss kiss, smooch smooch. Oh, Pooty-Poot, I get so tingly and giddy when you cybertouch my electoral process. Do it again!"

Bonus Clinton Campaign Post-Mortem: the Politico article and the lack of a ground game

There was a really interesting article in Politico today:

How Clinton lost Michigan — and blew the election: Across battlegrounds, Democrats blame HQ’s stubborn commitment to a one-size-fits-all strategy.

After reading it I sent it along to a few friends who I thought would be interested. That email turned into a bit of a rant. Normally I wouldn't just post up an email rant here, but I thought it made a bit of a useful companion piece to my earlier Clinton campaign post-mortem. (Clinton 2016: A Fundamentally Flawed Campaign)

One thing is becoming clear as we enter the Trumpocalypse. I may need to change my online handle from the relaxed Patioboater to Ranty McRantface.

---------------------

Subject: Back to everybody's favorite topic: Clinton was a terrible campaigner....

Time: 11:24 am EST

Also on the bloviation front, there was a good article in Politico today on the Clinton campaign's much vaunted ground game, which turned out to be a lack of a genuine ground game, especially in Michigan:

Politico, Dec. 14, 2016, How Clinton lost Michigan — and blew the election: Across battlegrounds, Democrats blame HQ’s stubborn commitment to a one-size-fits-all strategy.

This article matches up well with a lot of little things that I saw during the campaign. I had my hands full being treasurer of a state rep campaign, so this is the first year I wasn't really all that involved in the canvassing side of things.

The Obama campaign in 2008 and 2012 had prominent campaign office locations in strip malls. Those offices were fully staffed, bustling with volunteers, and the place to go for lawn signs, campaign lit, etc. I am an elected official, a Democratic precinct delegate, was treasurer of a Democratic state rep campaign, and have often served as a board member of our local and county Democratic Party organizations. But I literally had to do ten minutes of research to find the nearby Clinton campaign office, which was unmarked and located in an office complex. 

After the "grab 'em" video emerged my wife and mother-in-law very much wanted to put out lawn signs to counter the ocean of Trump signs in our neighborhood. So I said sure, no problem. But when I stopped by the Clinton office to get a lawn sign they would only give me one, and said the signs were being reserved for Clinton campaign volunteers. I had to come back again on another day to get somebody else to hand over another one. Hell, I probably would've ponied up five bucks for a sign, but it was one-per-person, no exceptions.

In 2008 and 2012 the coordinated campaign worked through the Obama campaign pretty much all year. Most of the coordinated canvassing we did on the state rep campaign this year was coordinated with our Congressional candidate because there wasn't a visible, organized Clinton door-to-door effort. 

I had the sense that something was amiss as we went down the stretch, but I dismissed it quite a bit based on the fact that I wasn't on the doors this time around -- I was doing the treasurer gig -- and that our area is very much a sweet spot for Trump. But things were indeed amiss. I had assumed that my sense that I felt that I wasn't seeing the Clinton ground game in Michigan was because I wasn't involved in that part of the campaign. But ... turns out that I wasn't seeing it BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T PLAN TO HAVE A GROUND GAME IN MICHIGAN!

Hindsight is always 20-20, and losing campaigns have a hundred fingers to point. But not planning to engage in retail politics in the state that is literally at the core of your electoral college plan is simply dumb campaigning. Michigan was never further than two or three states away from the "tipping point" of the Electoral College in 538.com's analysis all year long. And they took it for granted.

They got their asses handed to them in Michigan in February by Bernie despite what their big data was telling them, then they turned around and relied on their big data over retail data for the big show in November. They literally weren't entering their door-to-door responses back into their campaign and canvassing database. It's unfathomably stupid. 

I love data-driven campaigning more than most. But the absolute best possible use of data is to put people on the doors that matter. Clinton got her ass handed to her by Obama in 2008 because she didn't understand that. She nearly lost the 2016 primary to an elderly socialist Jew from Vermont because she didn't understand that. And now she has plunged us into what are likely to be four extremely dark years in our history because she didn't understand that.

This isn't complicated stuff. This is basic campaigning. These are training wheel decisions. You win elections by showing up and asking people for their vote.

How do you lose to the worst candidate in United States history? By running one of the worst campaigns in United States history.

Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.

Ugh.

The Electors in the Electoral College Should Do Their Duty as Americans

If the Electoral College is going to subvert the choice of the majority of voters, its Electors might as well do their duty while they're at it. They probably won't do it, since Electors are generally chosen on the basis of proven party loyalty. But the members of the Electoral College should take a close look at what Donald Trump has done and said both prior to and following the election. And if they are not satisfied that he should be president, they should should their duty as Americans and not vote for him.

Given Trump's repeated defense of Russian government hacking on behalf of his campaign, the allegations that he owes tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to Russian oligarchs, and his oft-stated intentions to continue to remain in close control of his business interests while benefiting from his position as President, there are plenty of legal grounds for Electors to reject Trump as President under the Constitution's emoluments clause:

Article I, Section 9, Clause 8:

No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States: and no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.

The notion that the Electoral College should perform its actual constitutional function -- electing a person fit to be President of the United States -- is probably a shock to a lot of folks. But this is already getting serious consideration from some of the Electors themselves. One Republican Elector -- Christopher Suprun from Texas -- has already declared his intention to not vote for Trump: Why I Will Not Cast My Electoral Vote for Donald Trump. (New York Times, Dec. 5, 2016.)

A group of 10 Electors have called for an intelligence briefing of Electors on the topic of Trump's ties to Russia before the Electoral College convenes, so that they can better assess his fitness for office: Electors demand intelligence briefing before Electoral College vote. (Politico, Dec. 12, 2016.)

The Electoral College's constitutional duty is clear, as outlined by Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Paper No. 68 (Avalon Project, Yale University):


Nothing was more to be desired than that every practicable obstacle should be opposed to cabal, intrigue, and corruption. These most deadly adversaries of republican government might naturally have been expected to make their approaches from more than one querter, but chiefly from the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union? 

...

The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States.


To sum up, the Electoral College was designed specifically to prevent a corrupt demagogue beholden to a foreign power from becoming president. This is its exact purpose.

If the Electoral College fails to elect a president by a majority, the election gets thrown to the US House of Representatives. The likely outcome there would be to ultimately install Mike Pence as President. If that happens I will undoubtedly hate every policy choice Pence makes.

But at least he's not a corrupt Russian stooge.

I consider the Electoral College to be a generally bad idea that should be replaced by a direct vote of the people. But if it manages to prevent Donald Trump from becoming our president I'll have to take back every bad thing I've ever said about it.

As I said at the top, I doubt it'll happen because the partisan backlash for Electors who don't vote for Trump would be severe if they don't manage to prevent Trump's election. And for some of them there would be legal consequences for failing to vote for Trump, even if the Republican Party kept the White House. But the constitutional and legal grounds for refusing to vote Trump are also clearly present.

If Republican Electors value their patriotism before their party, they will demand that intelligence briefing. And then they will vote their conscience.

Premonitions

I'm not generally one for premonitions, but I had a terrible premonition as I was driving in to work today. It's time for the terrible San Francisco earthquake that I've feared ever since I first moved out there in the early 90s.

I'm sure that notion is just the cumulation of all that has been terrible in 2016. It's only natural to think, "Okay, now what's really the absolute worst possible thing that can happen next?" And I guess for me, that's it.

San Francisco's an odd place. At one level it's this beautiful tourist destination filled with all these wonderful, fascinating people and places. But when you live there, it's just home, filled with it's pluses and minuses, like any place you can live. San Francisco has much more in common with Detroit than it thinks it does or would ever admit. Having lived both places, I know. But the last couple of times I was out there I was struck by the sense that it's been living in a golden age lately, the sort of time when we'll look back and mourn all that was and has been lost. I felt that dark cloud on me this morning.

As I said above, the notion was probably just a reaction to all that has been terrible lately. Fortunately for my current state of mind it doesn't feel like a personal, nearby premonition of danger -- though too much of my life is tied into people in San Francisco for the notion of a major earthquake there to strike me as anything other than personally horrible. As we're reaching the end of 2016 I've been reduced to laying on our couch in the evenings, listening to Gregorian chants to sooth the soul. I'm usually pretty buoyant, but hours of Gregorian chant are not a sign of an optimistic brain.

Heck, maybe it's just this nasty cold I've been fighting off that last couple of days.

In general I think the premonitions are usually your subconscious telling you to pay attention to things that your conscious thinking patterns have tried to bury or deny. Well, there are lots of signs of bad things in the future out there right now for lots of people I love. Maybe my subconscious has decided to round up all the signs to give them a specific aspect.

But, man, it's hard to shake the feeling that something else bad is coming down the pike. I hope I'm wrong.

Post-Election Post-Mortem: What I got wrong and what I got right

Well, here we are two days after the 2016 election and Donald J. Trump is going to be our next president and it turns out that I was wrong as wrong can be about a few things, so let's get them out of the way. And then maybe I can point to a couple of other items:

Let's look at a few things I said in Tuesday's post (Election Day: Paragraphs of angry vitriol deleted) to see where I got it wrong and then talk a bit about something that maybe I got right.

Self-flagellation department:

"Nominating Donald J. Trump for President of the United States is rock bottom."

I was wrong. Correction: Electing Donald J. Trump as President of the United States is rock bottom. I think we're in for a dark and grim four years. Or longer.

I hope I'm wrong about that, too.

I should say something else here. There's a lot to discuss about the role that race played in this election, but I don't think that most of the voters who voted for Trump did so because of the racist elements in his campaign. I truly believe that a lot of voters voted for Trump despite the racist elements in his campaign. I wish they had been more troubled by those elements.

Most of all, I believe a lot of people voted for Trump because they are mad at the system and wanted to tear it all down. And Donald J. Trump was the candidate likely to tear it all down.

I'm reminded strongly of the Detroit Lions and Matt Millen.

How did that turn out? For the non-football fans among you here's what happened.

After the Detroit Lions barely missed the playoffs with a 9-7 record in 2000, decades of frustration of their continued mediocrity led their owner and fans to think it was a good idea to hire former player and announcer Matt Millen to tear it all down and start again. So the Lions sacked the front office and coaching staff and gave Millen a five-year contract to be their new president and GM. Millen an unqualified choice who was charismatic and talked a good game. But he had no management experience, no front-office experience, and no idea how to actually do the things he said he would do.

Tearing it all down is seldom a good idea.

After Millen went 21-59 in his first five years -- the worst five-year stretch for a team in NFL history -- the Lions gave him another five-year contract. By the 2008 season the team had fallen so far that they finally had to fire Millen while they were on their way to becoming the first NFL team to ever go 0-16.

I kinda feel like we just elected Matt Millen as our new President.

But I will say this for Matt Millen. He did tear it all down.

"Right now the Republican Party is broken. Badly broken."

I was wrong. The GOP now controls the White House and both houses of Congress. After obstructing a Supreme Court nominee for a year they will now make an appointment that will probably give them control of the Supreme Court for the next decade or longer. The Republican Party is functioning as designed. Any apparent race baiting, sexism, jingoism, xenophobia, or anti-intellectualism is a feature, not a bug.

To the Republican Party: "You need to pull yourselves out of your fact-free media bubble and start dealing with the real world."

I was wrong. The fact-free media bubble is functioning as designed and I was the one who missed a few points about the real world.

The part where I was dead-on right:

"Let me take a moment here to add that my fellow Democrats also have some things to work on. ... A lot of people feel the Democratic Party has abandoned them. We need to listen."

... and we're going to get a couple of years to work on those things without the distraction of governing or wielding any appreciable power in Washington -- or Michigan, for that matter.

There's a lot to unpack in the quote above, and I'm not going to do it all in this post. But specifically, the Democratic Party of FDR was 100% on the side of the working class. That sense has been eroding for a long time, especially among rural Americans, religious Americans, and Americans who didn't go to college and get white-collar jobs. 

What's the phrase I'm looking for to describe those people? Oh, that's right: the working class.

So what went wrong? In part I think it's because people look at the Democratic Party leadership and see a bunch of politicians who are every bit as much in bed with Wall Street and corporate executives as the GOP. And in part, I see a party that requires complete linguistic purity in speaking about every iota of its hundreds of different constituencies, yet seems pretty damn happy to toss around words like "redneck" and "gun nut" in its messaging.

So, yeah. If you look around and you see:

1) The existing GOP leadership not helping you

2) The existing Democratic Party not helping you and placing you outside the party in its messaging

... then why not vote Trump in the primary, vote Trump in the general election, and burn it all to the ground?

Hillary Clinton never understood that as far as I can see. Bernie Sanders clearly understands that. I think Elizabeth Warren mostly understands that. I hope we find other Democratic leaders who understand that, and find them fast. 

What else?

There's a lot more to noodle on from Tuesday. More people voted for Clinton than for Trump, despite her general terribleness as a campaigner. I feel good about that, though it doesn't really matter in the big picture. And I could write blog post after blog post about Hillary Clinton's terribleness as a campaigner. Losing to a candidate as truly awful as Donald Trump makes her the Matt Millen of Presidential candidates. 

I could write about racism in this campaign and what I fear is coming for America. I'm deeply troubled and truly appalled.

I could complain about the media coverage -- oh, boy, could I complain about the media coverage! -- but that's like complaining about getting bad calls from a referee. The media and what passes for journalism in 2016 is what it is. Its only loyalty, its only duty, is to ratings points and Internet clicks. Expecting better is a fool's errand.

The ground genuinely shifted on Tuesday. I don't know where it will end up. I wish I did. 

But for now, R.I.P. the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan (1980-2016). We officially have the Republican Party of Donald Trump (2016-).

And maybe R.I.P. the Democratic Party of FDR (1932-2016). Or perhaps we should make that R.I.P. the Democratic Party of FDR (1932-1992) and R.I.P. the Democratic Party of Bill Clinton (1992-2016). I'm going to do a bit more mulling before I weigh in on what I think should be next for the Dems. But things need to change. Even if Hillary had won on Tuesday, that would be every bit as true.

Election Day: Paragraphs of angry vitriol deleted

Well, here we are. Election Day.

It kinda feels as if every possible take on this election has already been generated by the roomful of monkeys that is the Internet. But a couple folks wondered what I thought about it all, so here goes. I doubt anybody's going to like what I have to say:

[Paragraphs of subsequent anger deleted.]

You see? It's like that. I am angry. Very angry at what has been done to this country that I love. And there's more than enough anger out there today. Nobody needs me adding to it.

[More paragraphs of angry vitriol deleted.]

Sigh. Let's try again.

So here's the thing. I am a Democrat for a lot of reasons. But I also believe that to make this country and this system work we need to have a functioning two-party system led by people of good will who have different perspectives, who grapple with the facts, and who negotiate to find reasonable solutions to our problems. And through that process we generally do as much good for as many people as is reasonably possible.

Right now the Republican Party is broken. Badly broken. And I'm mad at the people who broke it.

Yes, I know that some of you would disagree with that point. Let me remind you that you made Donald Trump your nominee for President of the United States. And Donald Trump isn't the aberration. Donald Trump is what the Republican Party has become. It's popular to say that recovery starts when you acknowledge that you've hit rock bottom. Nominating Donald J. Trump for President of the United States is rock bottom.

Politics isn't perfect. Politicians aren't perfect. (Lord knows politicians aren't perfect!) Heck, the preamble to the US Constitution doesn't promise to form a perfect union, just "to form a more perfect union." And the founding fathers were starting with the mess of the Articles of Confederation, so more perfect in that context was really just aiming at marginally functional.

Over the past couple of decades we as a nation have been working towards a less perfect union. It makes me angry.

I would start listing all the ways in which I think the GOP has run off the rails. But that would only lead to me typing "[more paragraphs of anger deleted]" again. So I'll settle for pointing out that when George Orwell wrote "Ignorance is strength," it was a warning, not a recommendation. You need to pull yourselves out of your fact-free media bubble and start dealing with the real world. I genuinely wish you luck in trying to build a functional, rational party out of what you have created. Really, I do. We need you. You want to capture my attention? Show me that -- for example -- you can acknowledge the simple fact that global warming is real, man-made, and a long-term threat to the well being of the United States. Then propose some conservative solutions.

That is what a functioning two-party system looks like. And this country badly needs one again.

Let me take a moment here to add that my fellow Democrats also have some things to work on. I very much hope and expect that Hillary Clinton will win the election today. And when she says she wants to be a President for all the people, I hope she means it. We shall see. A lot of people feel the Democratic Party has abandoned them. We need to listen.

And that's it. I could go on to type and delete more paragraphs of anger, but why? There's a whole Internet full of it today.

More than anything else, I'm hoping for a massive electoral rejection of Trumpism and all that it entails today. And I hope that this election marks a low point in our political history. We shall see.