Things haven’t been that great the past couple of weeks.

Although the January 6 Committee has begun its public hearings, making it abundantly clear just how big a SORE LOSER the previous president was, there are still far too many people who believe the lies he’s spewing and see nothing wrong with the coup and insurrection. And even as more and more details come out, there’s still the dreadful possibility that not a single one of the plotters will ever face any punishment for it.

Then, the highest court in the land, the one that is supposed to be above partisanship and consider all of Law as its purview, revealed conclusively that it has been taken over by partisan hacks who decided – without any basis in law or sense or rationality – to simply ignore any laws that weren’t at least around one hundred and fifty years old. Evidently nothing of any real importance happened after 1860. To make it worse, the issues of vital national interest were tossed back to the individual states with a casual “You guys figure it out.”

Meanwhile, the majority of the news media seems to be doing its darndest to preserve some sort of “impartiality” and “fairness” throughout all this. Even though one of the largest news networks in the country is the de facto propaganda arm for one of the political parties. Look, when someone in the kitchen is putting garbage in the soup, you’re supposed to tell everyone DO NOT EAT THE SOUP. Just saying “I recommend the salad” isn’t good enough.

To top it all off, most people aren’t able (for whatever reason) to see past their next paycheck and realize what is happening – and going to happen – to their country. There are enough short-term crises happening at the individual scale, and they need a quick fix to those matters right now, and if President Biden can’t make it all nice within the next week, well…..

So that’s why I’m not really excited for Independence Day this year.

The January 6 Hearings are underway. Everyone is expecting some sort of “bombshell” to drop; something brand new that has never been revealed before.

As if it would matter.

If you’ve been paying attention – and cared – you’d know everything you need to know about what happened starting with the day Joe Biden was named the winner of the 2020 Election.

The General Public has pretty much already settled into two camps on the Insurrection; the hearings aren’t going to change anything noticeable there.

Where their effect really needs to be seen and felt is in the national news media. One political party has been taken over by a faction that condoned and allowed if not actively supported the Insurrection, and it is not violating any principle of “fairness” to point this out. Nor is it “biased” reporting to state that the faction is still present and active within the Party, and is working to turn the country into a theocratic, neofascist dictatorship.

Enough of the nonsense about “How inflation will hurt the Dems in the mid-terms”, and more of “How the Cult of Trump is destroying the United States”.

At the end of the Great War, the victorious allies wanted to really punish Germany for everything they had to endure in their victory. In addition to the loss of territory, the Treaty of Versailles contained a statement where Germany apologized and took all the blame for the war, and they were forced to pay some 132 billion gold marks (about $33 billion in 1919 dollars; over $500 billion today) in reparations. After a lot of refinancing (and another war sparked – in no small part – by the perceived humiliation of the reparations), the last payment was made in 2010.

In that next war, Finland wound up on the losing side due an alliance of convenience with Germany after Finland was invaded by the Soviet Union. Finland not only had to let the Soviets keep the territory they grabbed, but give them even more land and some serious cash payments. After the payments were made, a new bit of Finnish currency featured some nude figures (seen from the back) gazing at a sunset over an ocean. The joke was that it represented the Finns watching their last reparations payment going off to the Soviets.

Now there’s some serious talk – again – about reparations payments to African-Americans to atone in some fashion for slavery.

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I don’t know how you’d pronounce it – perhaps “Eye-OWE-kay-arr” – but it’s an acronym for “It’s OK, If You’re A Republican”, and it seems to be the guiding ethical principle for today’s GOP. Any perceived offense or violation of ethics by a Democrat calls for immediate condemnation – at a minimum. But a similar or even greater offense by a Republican is of no consequence as long as the alleged offender is in good standing with the party.

A Democrat is found to have made a tasteless joke years before he entered politics? Sorry; he’ll have to resign. A Republican has many credible accusations of sexual assault in his history? Nothing to see here; he won’t do it again. The Democrat president’s son has just released a book? Even though the publisher bought the manuscript before Dad became president, that’s still nepotism! We must investigate! The Republican president puts several family members in high level positions, bypassing normal background security checks, and his son publishes a book? Meh, no big deal.

The best instance of this hypocrisy can be seen by comparing the responses to a pair of deadly attacks on government facilities.

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Let’s face it; it’s going to take more than a basic impeachment hearing to properly clean up after the insurrection attempt earlier this month. Punishing El Presidente by permanently barring him from holding federal office ever again won’t be enough. We’re going to need hearings on a scale we’ve never seen before.

We need something like the 9/11 Commission to identify the security failures that let the mob get as far into the Capitol as they did – and propose valid fixes to those failures.

We’ll need something on the order of the Kefauver Crime Committee that will treat the Q-Anon people, “Proud Boys”, and other such groups as organized crime so we can find them and root them out. Political disagreements are fine – but not turning to violence to get your way.

And, given that there are still people in Congress who still refuse to acknowledge reality, and that there are reports that the mob had help on the inside, we need a version of the Watergate hearings to clear the rot out of the federal government. If members of Congress need to be censured or even expelled for their role in the insurrection, so be it. They broke their oath of office; they should suffer the consequences.

Pretty much every news website has one of those maps of the United States for the presidential election on their main page. You know, the ones that color a state red if they went for the Republican candidate, and blue if they went for the Democrat.

Those maps have so many problems. They don’t give you any idea of how many actual votes – electoral or popular – a state contributes to the total, or the margins of victory in each state. I get it; all the ‘good’ maps that show that extra information are clunky or require special explanations. The basic Red – Blue Map is understandable at a glance. Leave the fancy stuff for after the election is really over.

But in a protracted election like we have now, the maps have been really terrible.

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Here’s something that troubles and angers me.

Yes, we’re seeing record turnount this time around.

But there’s still several millions of voter registrations that do not correspond to a ballot being cast.

It is conceivable that more than a few of those belong to dead people that have yet to be removed from the rolls. Others can belong to people who have moved to another state and haven’t updated their registration (or are duplicates because an old, invalid registration hasn’t been removed). It is also within the realm of possibility that some belong to people who, do to illness or some other mitigating factor, are physically or mentally unable to vote. For example, I can see the many residents of senior centers, hospices, etc. being too mentally “out of it” to be even aware that there’s an election – but they are still registered to vote.

But there’s no way all those perfectly valid reasons can account for the millions upon millions of eligible voters that we are talking about.

So, to those who had the opportunity but just couldn’t be bothered:

WHAT
IS
WRONG
WITH
YOU
?

In a typical year, one could understand if it was too difficult for someone to get to their polling place. But this year was unbelievably exceptional. Communities had plenty of in-person early voting. Many states offered “No excuse needed” absentee ballots; some even sent ballots to every single registered voter. And you could mail them in or drop them off in person.

There’s no excuse this year for not voting when you had the opportunity.