Can the Dems take back the Senate?

Assuming Hillary Clinton wins the Electoral College and becomes our next president (and yes, that's a really HUGE assumption with the polls this close just a few days before the election), what happens next is important. In regard to the Senate, there is a very real possibility that the Democrats may regain control, which under this assumption, would be a 50-50 split or better, since V.P. Tim Kaine would have the tie-breaking vote.

This is what all those national polls don't tell us. The state by state polls show a much better picture of the way the Senate may go. Races like Wisconsin, where Russ Feingold has a slim lead in the polls and may take back his seat. Or Pennsylvania, where Democrat Katie McGinty is ahead of incumbent Pat Toomey.

I think the difference maker in all this is how well each state party does in their "Get Out The Vote" efforts. Clinton has a substantially larger national GOTV infrastructure in place, and they will be firing on all cylinders on Tuesday. Trump's ground game is expected to be less than impressive. And this may lead to the under-ticket candidates getting swept into office by the coat-tail effect.

This is important, because Clinton's ability to lead will be largely shaped by Congress. If they obstruct any meaningful legislation like they did during most of Obama's reign, it will result in another four or eight years of nothing getting done. Having a Democratic-majority Senate will at least help prevent the most toxic Republican bills from reaching the president's desk, and will likely get us some actually helpful bills through Congress.

One thing is certain, if the House leadership immediately starts threatening to obstruct like they did with Obama, I think they'll be tossed out of office by a fed-up population in the 2018 mid-terms.

Then we'll get to see some REAL positive changes happening!

Four days to go election map

Nate Silver over at 538 Election Forecasts has the latest probabilities for the Presidential Race.

Basically, Donald Trump has a slightly better than one-in-three chance of becoming our next president.

Which means, I'm not going to get another decent nights sleep until Wednesday!

I think the early results from important states like Ohio and Pennsylvania are going to be an indication of what lies ahead on election night. The old saying, "As goes Ohio, goes the nation" has turned out to be right much more often than wrong.

Election Night is shaping up to be a long one. Most news sources won't release results from the east until after the west coast polls close, at 11PM Washington D.C. Time. We're planning on being near the White House, the Washington Post, and the W Hotel while the results are being reported. I'll have a cigar and probably a flask of some single malt with me to help ward off the evening chill as we move to the early hours of the morning. We're at an AirBnb about 10 minutes walk from the area, so we can even nip back in and watch some TV in the peace and quiet of an apartment.

Four days out, there's still time for a juicy bombshell to be lobbed by a rogue FBI director or a conservative news network. We'll see what happens during the next 80 or so hours until the polls open in the East!

Giant Meteor 2016

I've been around for long enough to know that this election is something big.

Hillary? Donald?

Nah. I'm hoping for a giant meteor.

This is the PERFECT solution to all our nation's problems!

On election night, CT Joyce and me are going to be at ground zero! We'll be hanging out around the White House as the returns come in, and probably ducking into some local watering holes for a refreshing beverage or two. Like Shelly's Backroom, where a politically-minded citizen can have a smokey single-malt scotch while puffing on a decently-rated Maduro cigar, only to head back onto the streets and witness history happening.

History, in this case, will hopefully be a history-ending giant meteor that managed to slip by NASA radar and impact somewhere in the vicinity of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

I'm not the only one who apparently likes this idea. Giant Meteor was polling quite well earlier this summer:

So yeah, one way or another, it's bound to be a memorable night!

I'll be live Tweeting from the scene, at least until the shock wave of the meteor impact obliterates all nearby cell towers.

Or until we have a new president declared.

Fuckface Von Clownstick

So, back in 2013, Donald Trump got into a little Twitter war with Jon Stewart.

Talk about going into battle severely ill-equipped! Trump thought he was being clever by exposing Stewart's jewyness to the world, as if he was guilty of hiding it.

Stewart showed remarkable patience with the man, but finally had to respond to the moronic man-child.

And Fuckface Von Clownstick was born!

I almost wish I didn't vote already, because I would have cherished the thought that I wrote in the name "Fuckface Von Clownstick" on my ballot, and it would have become an official part of our city's election records! How much fun would it be to look up the complete election results and see that silly little name?

Of course, I'm not advocating a mass Von Clownstick write-in campaign. In the event of a close race, there's always the chance that a court would rule that those are actual votes for Trump, and possibly give him the election and make him the first president in history to be elected ironically!

Anyway, here's Jon telling the story recently:

Counting votes in Connecticut

Here in Connecticut we have a really good election system. Sec. of State Denise Merrill has done a wonderful job in helping ensure our elections remain fair and honest.

What I think makes a huge difference here is that we have a system that can and is audited regularly. States that have fully electronic voting machines are at risk of having the results of any particular machine altered, often by simply plugging in a USB thumb drive and quickly loading a small, self-erasing program. Something that can eliminate or change every fourth or fifth vote and then conveniently delete itself the moment polls close.

In Connecticut, we vote on paper ballots. These ballots are your actual vote. After you fill in the little bubbles on the page, you walk over to the optical tabulator, which then reads and logs the vote. The ballots are stored until well after the election results are final. Former Sec. of State Susan Bysiewicz helped bring this new kind of voting to Connecticut, and retired all those old mechanical voting machines.

(I DO miss the satisfying "ka-CHUNK" noise the machine made when you move the big red lever back to record your vote and open the curtains!)

A video about the new machines I made back in 2006:



A minimum percentage of electronic tabulators are selected for a post-election audit. That means a non-partisan group of counters will manually tally the paper ballots and match those results with those of the machine. If there's any discrepancy, it may trigger a larger audit, and in theoretical cases, may cause the entire election to have a manual recount.

When people in states vote on an electronic voting machine, there's zero paper trail to see if their votes were accurately counted.

You can see how easy it would be to alter the results of a swing state if someone got inside those machines. Allegations of such things have been made since 2004, when Ohio inexplicably went to Bush instead of Kerry.

I'd like to see a push for having every state go back to paper ballots, with electronic counting and enforced audits. We owe it to ourselves to do so.

CT News Junkie has a current article about how Connecticut's elections are safeguarded against "rigging". See it HERE.

My favorite debate meme

Midway through the third Clinton-Trump debate, this photo appeared on my Twitter feed.

I dunno, but it makes it look like a much warmer, fuzzier debate than what I was hearing!

via Erin Gloria Ryan, @morninggloria on Twitter, Senior Editor @TheDailyBeast. Priors: @Vocativ @Jezebel & @Vh1. Heard on #RaceWars.

The Death Throes of the Trump Campaign

I'm sorry I haven't been posting much here lately. I've been much more vocal on Twitter and Facebook, but as we approach the Final Days of this horrible shitfest I'll try to be more present here.

It's just 11 days until the big election.

12 days from when the Alt Right starts jamming the internet with calls for Hillary's impeachment.

This has been the most exhausting and contentious election season that I can remember. Every single day there's a new controversy, a new crisis, a new sound bite that rattles the internet like a 6.0 earthquake.

Why is this election so much crazier than previous years?

Two reasons, I think.

One: the mainstream media has been working overtime to make a mountain out of EVERY SINGLE molehill this year.

Yes, bros talking about grabbing pussies without consent is always naughty and bad. Yes, the stuff in Hillary's hacked emails is embarrassing and somewhat damning.

But the MSM is trumpeting all this stuff because it's great for ratings, and therefore, great for profits. There has been precious little discussion about the actual issues that face us, because that's boring, and most people (us!) want to hear about alleged 4th degree sexual assaults rather than things that will make a huge impact in our lives.

We suck.

Two: Trump's raucous campaign has tapped into a large nerve of White America's latent racism. We, as a nation, aren't far enough removed from the 1950s era segregation and all that goes with it to ignore this fact. We've made TREMENDOUS strides in the last 60 years, but we're still basically a nation of people who dislike anyone that's different from us.

Donald Trump has given much of America permission to indulge in this ugliness, through his words and his incivility. Rudeness, discourtesy, bad manners, and boorishness are all hallmarks of Trump's speeches. And through the trickle-down effect, people are becoming more and more impolite.

The upshot of all this is that the Republicans have left the field of respectability and become a party of loud-mouthed assholes. Their embrace of Donald Trump, and all he stands for, have forever tarnished and eroded any moral high ground they believed they possessed. By nominating a vicious child with the emotional warmth of a stone baby, they've sealed their fate.

The GOP is thrashing mindlessly in its terminal agitation. The party is dying.

I can only hope that something more moderate takes its place. Jesus, I never thought I'd be longing for the casual horrendousness of the Reagan-era 1980s!

2006 flashback

During the memorable 2006 Connecticut race for US Senate, the world learned of the power of Youtube and citizen journalism. In late September I was interviewed via phone by "The Guardian", a major UK media outlet, as part of a story looking at Youtube's impact on culture and politics during the days before Google's purchase of the service.

They asked me about how we in Connecticut used video on Youtube to report and influence the election.

From The Guardian:

In the meantime, one corner of the US was caught up in the first YouTube campaign. In Connecticut, Senator Joe Lieberman - Al Gore's running mate in 2000, and the kind of Democrat who sits so close to the Republicans as to make no difference - was engaged in a bitter fight, built along the faultline of his support for the Iraq war, to regain his party's nomination against Ned Lamont, a more liberally inclined Connecticut businessman who makes his money from cable TV. For Lieberman's tech-minded opponents, YouTube was a gift: they simply poured anti-Lieberman and pro-Lamont footage on to the site, linked the footage to other blogs and websites, and then watched its aftershocks ripple out into the wider world.

Among the most celebrated examples were film of George Bush greeting the senator with what appeared to be a kiss, and TV clips of a long line of conservatives, from Vice-President Dick Cheney to the notorious TV evangelist Pat Robertson, offering Lieberman their support. In addition, there was a steady trickle of clips in which pro-Lamont activists pointed cameras at Lieberman and his aides and asked them testing questions. They played their part in a shock result: Lieberman lost out to his challenger, and is now defending his seat as an independent.

Bob Adams, 47, works as an IT specialist in the Connecticut town of Milford. Over the summer, he devoted a great deal of his spare time to anti-Lieberman film-making, managing to confront the senator (his best shot came with a testy encounter about donations from Wal-Mart), and posting about 50 clips to YouTube. "This is another option for people who want to see what's really going on," he says. "And it's a very democratic thing: anyone with a video camera and a computer can get the same shots CNN can get. If you want people to hear your voice, you put up a video, and you're out there. Political reporters have all that 'You're off the bus' stuff to worry about; if they're denied access by the parties, they're going to starve. With someone like me, I don't have that much to lose. If I had to stop doing this tomorrow, it wouldn't make much difference to my life, except I'd have a lot more time to spend with my wife. So they don't have that power over me."

Ah, memories. Ten years later, the power of online video has become even stronger, while the advent of social media has nearly eliminated the need for blogs. Much more of our attention is being captured by Twitter and Facebook than by individual blogs.

Which I think ultimately is a good thing, because it gives pretty much everyone a voice, not just those who are technically savvy enough to host a blog.

The downside, of course, is that the immediacy and size limitations remove a lot of the detail and careful editing that you saw in blogs. (Other blogs, not my own...careful editing was often sacrificed on my blog!)

"You grab her by the ... wherever!"

I can't believe the word "pussy" has become a topic of discussion across the nation!

Every time I think I have an understanding of Donald Trump, something else he's done obliterates it and I have to start all over.

This time, at least it's kind of funny. In a tragic, end-of-the-world kinda way should he win. But he won't win. Not now. Not ever.

He'll be lucky to stay out of jail after this is all over. The Trump name, which used to be synonymous with luxury, is forever tarnished and will live on as a running gag on late night TV for years to come.

In case you've been in a coma, here's the video and comments by "The Young Turks".

9/11 Anniversary

The Quinnipiac Bridge was illuminated beautifully for the weekend of the 15th anniversary of September 11th, 2001.

I doubt there's anyone under the age of 25 who doesn't remember exactly where they were when they heard the news of the attack. The television images were riveting as well as horrifying. These were civilians, not soldiers, who were dying as we watched.

There have been many TV documentaries and films about the terrible events of that day. But the one that really chills me to the bone, because it happens in real time, is the documentary "9/11" by the Naudet brothers.

It was on Youtube for a while before getting pulled down, but I'm sure it's available somewhere online. Not on Amazon Prime, I'm sad to say, as I've recently subscribed to this service and find it amazing! However, the film was broadcast on network television within months of the attack, and it might be out there somewhere for viewing.

I'm very glad that a new building has finally been completed in the vacant area of New York skyline that had previously been occupied by the twin towers. I tend to agree with Donald Trump, who immediately after the attack suggested that we rebuild both towers "just one floor higher" in the exact location of the two destroyed towers.

But I think we did very nicely with the new "Freedom Tower" (or "World Trade Center" tower, as it's referred to by pretty much everyone) and by creating a memorial park with two water pools that occupy the former footprint of both towers as a place of remembrance.

Joyce and I visited there back in December. It felt like a very sacred place. Most people, even tourists, kept their voices low and respectful. It seemed like a good gesture to the thousands who lost their lives that fateful day.