Time to Think

Life Goes On                                                                                                              #309 By Hank Silverberg  I am flabergasted. My first reaction to the election results came right from the lyrics of Paul McCartney  "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da  Life Goes on! Brah Lala how life goes on"  Anyone who has read this blog before knows I am not a fan of Donald J. Trump. But he won the election and unlike his followers when Biden won four years ago , I am willing to accept the results. So let's move on.  But I need to point out one thing that I find extremely frustrating about the vote.  They are still counting votes in some insolated districts as I write this which is not unsual, so no conspiracy theories please. But as of now in the 2024 election Trump received 74,696,257 votes compared to the 74,223,975 he received in his losing effort in 2020.    In 2024, Harris received 70,967,637 votes. That is much less than Joe Biden's 2020 total of 81.2

Tips For Watching Election Results !         #308 By Hank Silverberg Watching election results these days can be an up and down drama, distorted by political pundits, different counting rules in each state- and frankly--propaganda.  Many American's will skip the wall-to-wall play-by-play that starts an hour or two before the polls close and goes on ad-nauseum into the wee hours of Wednesday morning.  But the days of simply watching a movie all night and finding out the results on the 11 o'clock news just won't work anymore.  We will not know who the next president will be until at least Wednesday morning at the earliest, or maybe a few days or even weeks later.  Don't be confused by it all.   There are lots of votes to count. For example, more than 72 million people have already voted early, either in person, by mail or by absentee ballot.  In some states those votes have already been counted but won't be made public until the polls close in that state. Then all of

Terminology                                              #307        By Hank Silverberg Communist, Fascist, Socialist--you have heard those words bandied about in this election cycle much more often than in the past. But it's clear listening to the rhetoric and the public's reaction to it that most people really don't know much about those political ideologies of any of those labels. Anyone who has taken an introductory political science course understands the traditional political spectrum.  You can't be a Fascist and a Communist at the same time. Fascism is on the extereme right of the poltical spectrum. Communism is on the extreme left, and Socialism is just to the right of Communism.  Yes, you can have authoritarian leaders in all three of these systems, but the ideology is far from the same.  So let's take a close look at each one. Fascism was invented in 1921 by Bonito Mussolini. General Francisco Franco in Spain perfected Faschism--a strong-man type of gover

Scenarios                                                                                       #306 By Hank Silverberg The election is just a bit more than two weeks away. While much of the media has been focusing on the presidential race, it could be the race for Congress and the U.S. Senate that could set the real agenda for the next four years, and possibly beyond.  Here are some scenarios which make me focus on the House and Senate.  Scenario 1: Kamala Harris is elected President, but she enters office next year with a Republican-controlled House and Democrats in control of the Senate.  Her problems will be similar to those that have faced President Biden since 2020. Republicans have shown little interest in compromising on anything, and have basically held up most legislation in Congress. As of now, the 118th Congress has been the least effective Congress in history, placing just 78 public laws on the books, with the GOP leadership notably killing the only real chance for immigra