There has been much hand-wringing and rending of clothing over the outcome of the recent “election”.  How did this happen, people are asking.  How can we stop them?  There are a lot of possible answers as to how it happened – some of them even true!  How do we stop them?  We don’t.  We can’t.  I mean, I don’t mean to be a downer, here, but they own the government and they’re going to do what they’re going to do.  So I propose a two-step plan which is really quite simple.  One, make the Republicans own every vicious thing they do and, two, prepare for the mid-terms…

Conservatives are great at evading responsibility for their own actions.  They have had thirty years to perfect the deflection.  Anything good that happens in this country can easily be traced – in their minds – to the previous Conservative administration and anything bad that happens traces easily to the previous “libtard” administration.

43 crashed the economy?  Clinton’s fault.  Obama put the economy back on track and headed in the right direction?  43’s policies finally coming to fruition.  It’s always wrong, of course, but try convincing them of that…and good luck to you.

Trump keeps promising big ole’ tax cuts for corporations and other privileged elite.  This will mean another crashed economy and more brutal cuts in services for the needy.  Unless we’re prepared to use violence – I don’t recommend violence – it’s going to happen.  So what we can do is document, in real time, the actions of the Cons in Congress.

It is the Republicans who think ethics oversight is a waste of government resources.  It is the Republicans – alone – who are attacking the American people by eliminating what little access they had to health care.  It is the Republicans who intend to dismantle every aspect of the social safety net.  The result will be rampant poverty and increased crime, both property and violent.  It’s going to suck.

But how LONG it sucks may well be up to the majority.  We need to take back at least one chamber of Congress during the next mid-term “elections”.  Listen, I know that most of the damage will have been done by then but it’s our next – quite probably our only –  opportunity to stop them.  If we spend the next two years arguing over whether Putin forced Hillary to use a private email server, we won’t be ready.

It’s three seats in the Senate.  Three.  My recommendation would be for every thinking person to use paper ballots, if possible.  The machines make it FAR too easy to dial in and set whatever result the powers that be prefer.  Vote absentee.  You can still drop the ballot off at your polling place if the sticker is important to you.  There are rumors that absentee ballots don’t get counted.  They do.  Those are just rumors, likely intended to discourage the use of absentee ballots.

But the absentee ballots create a paper trail the machines don’t.  It’s pretty much the only thing that can help us overcome our pretend “elections” and start to have our voices heard again.  So let’s stop talking about the Electoral College and the Russians and start to spread the word – today – to vote on paper via absentee ballots.

Three seats in the Senate and the attack on the American people can be…contained.  Make sure Republicans own every piece of brutal legislation they push to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the masses.  Then, make sure every thinking person votes absentee – that is, on paper.

I’ll tell you this: if nothing else, having ballots that can be counted and verified would be the worst nightmare of our ruling class…