Trumped Up It's going to be a long four years, but I don't think it'll be eight. The danger in 2020 is Pence, a man who believes you can "pray away the gay" and has nothing but contempt for women and minorities. Unlike his boss, Pence can give the appearance of being reasonable, and a lot of people will fall for it. We'll face that hurdle when it comes, however, and I hope we'll have a better candidate then. Meanwhile, farewell Obamacare, it was nice for millions while it lasted, but now you're uninsured again. Time to buy stock in health insurance companies, as their revenues will skyrocket on the increased premiums they'll charge. Farewell any chance of a left-leaning Supreme Court. There's one vacancy already, and Kennedy, Bader Ginsburg, and Breyer are over 80 or getting there. That's going to be a problem for equal rights, voting rights, and campaign funding reform. The House and Senate have, effectively, a rubber stamp in the White House, so we can expect them to try on many bad plans, including tax cuts to increase income and wealth disparity, defunding Planned Parenthood, cutting welfare, gutting Social Security and Medicare, and generally driving the economy into the ground. Would we have done better with Sanders? I doubt it. We might have done better at getting out the vote if the Democrats had put up someone other than Clinton, but her candidacy was pretty much inevitable after 2008. Any who stayed home or went third party because Clinton beat Sanders were foolish, and while you can say that Johnson took votes from Trump, that ignores a lot of one of the things wrong with many liberal voters: they think "libertarian" candidates are more liberal than they actually are. Look at the support Rand Paul gets. A competitive third party wouldn't be a bad thing, but they aren't. They siphon votes and voters we need. I won't be putting my American passport into the post to the State Department. I sure as hell will be supporting the Democrats still in Congress and in the mid-terms in 2018. This fight's just getting started.

You May See the Doctor Now And it's totally worth it. Doctor Strange is easily in the top tier of Marvel movies: funny, when it needs to be, with especially fun special effects, and a stellar cast, all performing comic book material with fun and brio. I especially like how it treats magic as the manipulation of physical laws as they exist in one dimension in another. It's the String Theory of magic. But anything with Benedict Cumberbatch was going to be good, wasn't it?

President Ryan I think I know why Paul Ryan won't say Trump's name, even though he'll confirm he will vote for him: He's hoping it goes to a tie, and he gets to be President by default. Say it goes 269-269 Clinton-Trump. Say then it goes to the House for a vote on the candidates. Given that the Republicans control the House, but most of them don't actually want Trump in the White House, regardless of their actual behavior at the polls, which is driven solely by party loyalty), and given that the Freedom Caucus madmen want to control the House agenda regardless of the leadership and in opposition to anything resembling reasonable, it's possible for there to be no decision. Assume Pence is Vice President-elect, by virtue of the Senate being in Republican control and having that decision, instead of sticking with the Oompa-Loompa, he goes for Ryan. Or, if the Senate can't work it out, given the original tie starting point, Ryan just gets the job. Yea! In your face, Mitt Romney!