Housing Bubble, credit bubble, public planning, land use, zoning and transportation in the exurban environment. Specific criticism of smart growth, neotradtional, forms based, new urbanism and other top down planner schemes to increase urban extent and density. Ventura County, California specific examples.
Tuesday, November 06, 2018
Floral Interlude
From the NYC Botanical Gardens
Later today, election predictions that look almost like Firemane's and the CoreLogic report Sept Housing.
A couple of places Indi and part of KY close at 6pm.
The first real clue as to how the night may go will be @ 7pm when VA and GA polls close, (VA 5, 7, and 10 are key signals of the potential "blue wave"). And the GA governor's race was a coin flip heading into the day. Most of FL closes at 7pm - but we know from past experience, you can't be certain of anything in FL until the official count is largely complete.
reporting 3+ hour waits at city hall in Austin. Early voting has already surpassed the total votes in the last midterm. Everyone in Texas is voting apparently.
But what I want to know is whether you managed to attend a portion of all 6 major sporting events last week when the Sporting Super Equinox occurred in LA? (Game 5 of the WS was the day).
I was there as the 2018 American League Champions Banner was being raised outside Fenway Park. Our friends coming back from Italy after spending a week with us on the Cape were there for the WS victory parade.
To tell the truth after a lifetime of defeat snatched from the jaws of victory these less dramatic wins are not as cathartic.
Vote totals are insane. I suspect parts of Chicago will have totals exceeding population.
Oh. News. You may have noticed Mr & Mrs Dawg have been "traveling." Taking advantage. Turns out the youngest progeny will be attending University of California Santa Barbara in the fall. That means the "not tuition" will be too expensive for us to keep traveling.
The sun is coming up and a new clown act to perform in the house! Americans lose as nothing will get done with grid lock. On a good note my Nebraska state senator won and the good old boy puppet lost.
Countrywide 49%. This is supposed to be good. At a time when everybody is supposed to be incensed over T or wanting to support him-- it's better but hardly the best we can do.
Looks like the pre-election polling was pretty darn accurate.
Most of the aggregators were pointing to the Dems winning 224-234 house seats, (current count is 223-197 with 15 TCTC). A 230-205 final is the most common projection at this point, though because of the West Coast mail voting, if there is a last second 'slosh', it is more likely to be a couple more blue seats.
Generic ballot was around Dems +8 points. Current total is around +7, but West coast still has a lot of mail-in ballots to count, so it is likely the final Democratic edge in total House voting will be around 8 points.
Pretty much everyone had concluded the Dems would lose a Senate seat or two. Though 3 races are still not official, it will almost certainly end up Republicans +3.
In other, completely unrelated news, I broke my toe on Tuesday.
Noisome won in California. A man whose most famous act as SF Mayor was snorting coke off of his married secretary's ass. I've been told he contracted affluenza in the uterus and have no reason to doubt it. WASS.
I didn't here any messages *from* ANY politician this cycle. All I heard was both sides explaining in great detail why the other side is in league with Satan.
The young lady is a intern doing her job. What I saw was him pushing her arm away and nothing more. Acosta was a jerk refusing to yield the mic when his time was over. I think he is a word bender and to pushy. Not the first time either and pulling his permit is OK with me.
Maybe what you watched was doctored. News today is crunched for ratings and political opinion. I am sure this is over played on both sides but this is not the first time for Acosta.
Australia had a terrorist attack this AM knives not guns and propane bottles that thankfully failed to explode.
Acting Gov. Gavin Newsom requested a Presidential Emergency Declaration to aid with multiple fires burning in California. That must have been an interesting phone call.
They are recounting Gillum and Nelson. Who are actually getting closer to the Repubs. Not that I think it will flip the seat. And that acting atty general is already being thrown under the bus, is close to a scam. And also should tada. Recuse himself. Sorry. Hahahaha. This is not good for my soul.
>Only in today's world can you believe your lying eyes. LOL!
I'm thinking the way they did that was by superimposing two people playing Acosta and the intern over the background of the other reporters. Notice that faces of Acosta and the intern aren't shown.
Mystery at the bank, It is closing. A national bank and it hasn't been the same since the old guard retired. I guess this small town is to small for them to manage.
I bet a lot of stuff will not be covered by insurance, rich or poor. I wonder how bad the fire would be if clean the dead trees, scrub and bigger fire breaks would have affected the fire.
Yeah, but Rob at least would have done all those things. They showed a fallen ceramic tile. It hadn't helped preserve the roof. NASA does controlled burns. We are much wetter here. It sounds like the power company needs to do lots of maintenance. Also some areas are the responsibility of the Feds.
Arizona Senate just went Democrat - meaning the final tally will likely be 53-47, (a 2-seat pickup, just as most of the pregame polling suggested). While Florida is messy (what else is new?), a Democrat win for either Gov. or Senate at this point is an extreme long shot.
The House is more complex. Different news sources have different "calls". RCP has the current count @ 227-199 (9 TBD). That's +32 Democrats. 538 projects the final tally to be +38 (233-202). IIRC, that's exactly what my final projection was, but it waffled between 233 and 234 the last week, and I'm not 100% sure what my final was at this point.
In any case, once again, the pre-game polling was remarkably good (in the aggregate), and unlike 2016, the press wasn't nearly as stupid about guarantees - as almost all of the final stories I read included lots of discussion about "ranges" of possible results.
Logging of selected trees and fallen would help along with controlled burns but they banned that activity. Widening of fire breaks and adding more. Drought is not unnatural and leaving the fuel to dry more and intensify the rapid fire can be reduced. Allowing people to live in certain areas is a problem. PGE and can only play by the laws, so blaming them may not be all their fault. IMO.
How can you believe in a voting system executed so sloppy especially in a tight race.
How can you believe in Capitalism, when companies are run so sloppily and routinely fail due to horrid management, when there's tons of freely available information to prevent it?
That's meant (slightly) tongue in cheek, just to clarify.
If people are involved, you will ALWAYS have a wide variety of outcomes. My observations, based on time working for a government agency and time spent in the private sector convinced me that competence is a non-partisan trait. Idiots come in many flavors. And based on my observations, they are as common in the private sector as they are in government.
So, you're going to have "some" badly run operations - and some well run operations in government, just as in business. The reality is that very few races are actually close. And the very nature of our de-centralized voting apparatus makes it very difficult to alter results in a wide-ranging systemic way WITHOUT being detected.
Mind you, I have strong personal objections when candidates that are running are ALSO in charge of tabulating votes (GA this year), or when family members are in a position to appoint vote tabulators for a state (FL back in 2000). But, by and large, the system of checks and balances makes it difficult in the extreme to actually "rig" elections - unless the outcome is ALREADY a coin flip.
CR has the Goldman-Sachs take on "full employment". They're projecting 3% U3 by 2020. They also think by that time the "breakeven" payroll increase at that point will be 90,000 per month (less than half what it has been the past 8 years).
If you can't believe the company that sold $40 billion in MBS in 2007 AFTER shorting the housing market with their corporate holdings, who can you believe?
Rigging happens but it is very rare Gerrymandering is not at all rare, and can be very damaging. But the diversity of the area changes so you have to keep doing it.
How can you believe in a fair vote when it is run so sloppily? Some Corporations are poorly managed. Not all Most small start ups are lean and mean when they become bigger one can't micro manage and that's where most get sloppy. We are talking elections where most get it done well. You may be excepting of poorly managed when the majority gets it done in reasonable fashion year after year. Confidence in the system has again been violated in the same state and counties. Not my idea of exceptable.
I do believe that if you hold an office and run for another you resign when yo declare to run for another.
You kind of make my point regarding elections. The vast majority deliver election results without major issues and get no coverage.
But, *THE SAME PLACES* have problems year after year.
That is predictable, because if incompetent people set the system up, and everyone in the system (thousands of people), continue to get the same training, you have a self-perpetuating train wreck. What doesn't help is that the WINNER of the train-wreck elections has ZERO incentive to actually do the hard work of fixing things.
The part that most people don't get is just how SMALL Federal power happens to be in regards to dictating to states. The CDC is in charge of gathering health data from the states - but has almost zero legal authority to mandate ANYTHING, (except in an actual health emergency). Any cooperation happens through voluntary assistance - plus the Feds actually offering "free of charge" help.
But, in the end, each State vital records office is run by the people in that office - some are great - and some are awful. Typically, the awful ones get that way due to political appointment of incompetent leadership from clueless politicians. If you have solid organizational knowledge, an entity can continue to run effectively on "auto-pilot" for awhile. But, if/when the organizational knowledge is lost due to long-term neglect, it becomes incredibly difficult to rebuild. This is multiplied in difficulty by the size of the state in question.
When a state as large and populace and diverse as Florida allows its election apparatus to decay, it takes MAJOR time and effort to rebuild. But, it comes down to cash and priorities. If your priority is to fix the broken stuff - then you replace your outdated tech, upgrade your training, etc. If you are focused on political advantage - then you sink your money into things like purging voter roles (which is perfectly fine *IF* your basic voting mechanism is already in good shape), or identifying potential voter fraud (that pretty much every study has shown to be rare in the extreme).
"Wobbly" is just fine, if yours is the party that is winning. But, it's a lot like the Y2K IT issues. The issue was known a long, long time before Y2K. But, most corporations made choices to not make it a priority until the last second - at which point, there's a mad scramble in the last moments - only paid heed to because the worst case scenarios were potentially company-ending.
The seemingly never-ending issues with Florida voting are solely the fault of the political people in power in Florida for the past 20 years that continue to allow the system to stay broken.
What Florida does effects national interest. I don't really care how they elect a local dog catcher but when it screws up on a close race effecting Presidential and Congressional seat it become a problem for all of us.
Corporations who bought into Y2K had no choice but to updated which was good for computer sales. When you rely on the experts who developed the systems you have to believe them or take your chances. Corporations pay a price for failure and are punished by the consumer, voting is to me totally different, scared if you will.
I've lived in Texas my whole life and my vote has never mattered in a National election. If you don't live in one of about 12 states, election fraud would not even be noticed. I think the electoral college is important and i think Trump getting elected is a feature, not a bug in the system, even if I don't like the man. IMO national elections should be administered by a national standard ballot. We should keep the electoral college, but decouple the district votes from the statewide votes so your vote counts in your district and your state. Texas for example would have 36 individual district votes and 2 state votes.
Largely agree with your take. But, it would actually take a Constitutional Amendment to allow the Feds to mandate election rules.
The "bug" is not the electoral college per se, but rather that since the Federal government lacks the authority to override state level problems and policies - the political parties have largely stepped in to write those rules.
One of the reasons the recent SCOTUS nullification of part of the Voting Rights Act was so big is because that legislation was just about the only Federal level control that existed. So, basically, the conservative court has allowed MORE leeway for state political machines to do whatever they please in regards to voting policy and process. This is also one of the reasons the number of suits attacking various state level voting laws has exploded. The voting rights act used to allow pre-emptive review - ("No, you can't do that."). Now, the individual party machines pass the rules that benefit them - and then the other side files lawsuits to try and retain some balance.
I guess a company here in Nebraska sent voting machines and personnel to help out in Florida. Must have some real junk down there but I guess they don't take voting seriously. :(
Seems one of the key recount machines that broke was bought immediately after the 2000 hanging chad fiasco. So, the machine is 18 years old. The company that made it has been out of business for 8 years. And, according to the article, the state HAD appropriated money for replacing the aging (unserviceable) equipment prior to these elections. But, they couldn't make up their minds about what to get, and so did nothing.
Liz, I have a friend who was burned out in Paradise. Lost everything except clothes they wore and the cats. His name is Kirt Switzer. He has a facebook page. He might be helped by offering your hurricane recovery story. He is younger than I but has health problems so can't be as active as Muddy Biker is in his rebuild in Santa Rosa. We got a bad dose of the smoke from Paradise yesterday. Rain is on the way but predicted to be light. We need an early snow!!!
A comment on leaving LA. Re: Flood Plane LA built a vast flood protection system that folks don't even know it is there. Another drawback of LA is it is laced with leaking oil pipelines and leaking gas wells. Or if you remember that leaking natural gas underground storage site. As added disadvantages: Earthquake faults and urban/wildland fire interface. Back in the day when the Sylmar quake happened it was followed by a big fire - another Malibu disaster. Shake and Bake as they say. STAY AWAY!!!!
83 comments:
A cactus in my front yard grows those green flowers
Any voting reports?
I voted. :)
A couple of places Indi and part of KY close at 6pm.
The first real clue as to how the night may go will be @ 7pm when VA and GA polls close, (VA 5, 7, and 10 are key signals of the potential "blue wave"). And the GA governor's race was a coin flip heading into the day. Most of FL closes at 7pm - but we know from past experience, you can't be certain of anything in FL until the official count is largely complete.
A late start and unexpected traffic caused me to vote fewer times than I had planned.
reporting 3+ hour waits at city hall in Austin. Early voting has already surpassed the total votes in the last midterm. Everyone in Texas is voting apparently.
But what I want to know is whether you managed to attend a portion of all 6 major sporting events last week when the Sporting Super Equinox occurred in LA? (Game 5 of the WS was the day).
I was there as the 2018 American League Champions Banner was being raised outside Fenway Park. Our friends coming back from Italy after spending a week with us on the Cape were there for the WS victory parade.
To tell the truth after a lifetime of defeat snatched from the jaws of victory these less dramatic wins are not as cathartic.
Vote totals are insane. I suspect parts of Chicago will have totals exceeding population.
Oh. News. You may have noticed Mr & Mrs Dawg have been "traveling." Taking advantage. Turns out the youngest progeny will be attending University of California Santa Barbara in the fall. That means the "not tuition" will be too expensive for us to keep traveling.
Florida woman frowns.
Hehehe.
Poor Dawg!
Good Evening!
Go while you can you worked hard for it!
Pretty flowers. Everything here is turning brown for the winter, fall is gone.
Plenty of pretty here: except the red tide. Horrible.
UCSB, eh? Rough, really rough!
Good Morning!
Skif of snow this AM more coming tomorrow.
The sun is coming up and a new clown act to perform in the house! Americans lose as nothing will get done with grid lock. On a good note my Nebraska state senator won and the good old boy puppet lost.
Cool. Maybe they'll do something, until they notice. And then they'll quit.
Good morning. I wonder what the percentage voting was.
Countrywide 49%. This is supposed to be good. At a time when everybody is supposed to be incensed over T or wanting to support him-- it's better but hardly the best we can do.
Looks like the pre-election polling was pretty darn accurate.
Most of the aggregators were pointing to the Dems winning 224-234 house seats, (current count is 223-197 with 15 TCTC). A 230-205 final is the most common projection at this point, though because of the West Coast mail voting, if there is a last second 'slosh', it is more likely to be a couple more blue seats.
Generic ballot was around Dems +8 points. Current total is around +7, but West coast still has a lot of mail-in ballots to count, so it is likely the final Democratic edge in total House voting will be around 8 points.
Pretty much everyone had concluded the Dems would lose a Senate seat or two. Though 3 races are still not official, it will almost certainly end up Republicans +3.
In other, completely unrelated news, I broke my toe on Tuesday.
Good Morning!
Wake to Kali nut with a gun last night. :(
The Blue Tsunami is turning out but to be a trickle. Seems the extremes messages didn't play well in most races. IMO.
Toe, ouch!
Toe,poor baby. Recount. Nelson.
Lovely day here.
The phone is hardly ringing.
Noisome won in California.
A man whose most famous act as SF Mayor was snorting coke off of his married secretary's ass.
I've been told he contracted affluenza in the uterus and have no reason to doubt it.
WASS.
Kali never disappoints us with their politicians.
What extreme messages?
I didn't here any messages *from* ANY politician this cycle. All I heard was both sides explaining in great detail why the other side is in league with Satan.
Regarding the latest mass shooting ...
Elton John's "Ticking" might as well be the official theme song for the 21st century.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Usb1222A8iY
Ugh.😫😱😰😳😩👹👿💀💩
It is alleged the video showing Acosta pushing the young lady minion to keep the Mike was doctored up to look worse.
The young lady is a intern doing her job. What I saw was him pushing her arm away and nothing more. Acosta was a jerk refusing to yield the mic when his time was over. I think he is a word bender and to pushy. Not the first time either and pulling his permit is OK with me.
What you saw was doctored. Supposedly.
Good Morning!
Maybe what you watched was doctored. News today is crunched for ratings and political opinion. I am sure this is over played on both sides but this is not the first time for Acosta.
Australia had a terrorist attack this AM knives not guns and propane bottles that thankfully failed to explode.
Acting Gov. Gavin Newsom requested a Presidential Emergency Declaration to aid with multiple fires burning in California.
That must have been an interesting phone call.
You are burning again? Soon there won't be much of Kali left. An earthquake for a piece de re'stistance? Or more mud and volcanic explosion.
... cats and dogs sleeping together.
You know, real biblical stuff.
They are recounting Gillum and Nelson. Who are actually getting closer to the Repubs. Not that I think it will flip the seat.
And that acting atty general is already being thrown under the bus, is close to a scam. And also should tada. Recuse himself. Sorry. Hahahaha. This is not good for my soul.
>What you saw was doctored. Supposedly.
You mean like this. LOL.
https://i.imgur.com/XTnzprz.gifv
EJ,
Only in today's world can you believe your lying eyes. LOL!
>Only in today's world can you believe your lying eyes. LOL!
I'm thinking the way they did that was by superimposing two people playing Acosta and the intern over the background of the other reporters.
Notice that faces of Acosta and the intern aren't shown.
Lot of fire! Hows the Dawg house? Hope they are safe. :0
The fires are near daawg?
Yes, the fires are very near the Dawg's house. Hope all is well.
Oh dear.
We are doing our small part in renovation.
Good Morning!
Dawgs silence is not good. Hopefully they just got evacuated and the house is fine. Crossed fingers.
Hope Dawg is fine.
But. Oh that brand new kitchen.
Maher joked about needing A bodyguard. It's not that funny.
Looks like a lot of people should consider a bodyguard. Loonies are growing. :(
I'm guessing that things are OK at Dawg's place. Not so much a bit East of there.
I wish he'd check in.
Not yet.
Good Morning!
Salute to the Veterans past and present.
No Dawg?
Mystery at the bank, It is closing. A national bank and it hasn't been the same since the old guard retired. I guess this small town is to small for them to manage.
The bank I used for years in Hialeah changed hands a couple of times and now I get a notice the branch is closing
I am getting worried about dawg.
The hub is worried too.
Good Morning!
Cold 31F and windy today. 60F Thursday BBQ day.
Fire still ripping. :(
At least the Malibu people have resources.
Good Morning!
I bet a lot of stuff will not be covered by insurance, rich or poor. I wonder how bad the fire would be if clean the dead trees, scrub and bigger fire breaks would have affected the fire.
Yeah, but Rob at least would have done all those things. They showed a fallen ceramic tile. It hadn't helped preserve the roof. NASA does controlled burns. We are much wetter here. It sounds like the power company needs to do lots of maintenance. Also some areas are the responsibility of the Feds.
Still a lot of uncalled races.
Arizona Senate just went Democrat - meaning the final tally will likely be 53-47, (a 2-seat pickup, just as most of the pregame polling suggested). While Florida is messy (what else is new?), a Democrat win for either Gov. or Senate at this point is an extreme long shot.
The House is more complex. Different news sources have different "calls". RCP has the current count @ 227-199 (9 TBD). That's +32 Democrats. 538 projects the final tally to be +38 (233-202). IIRC, that's exactly what my final projection was, but it waffled between 233 and 234 the last week, and I'm not 100% sure what my final was at this point.
In any case, once again, the pre-game polling was remarkably good (in the aggregate), and unlike 2016, the press wasn't nearly as stupid about guarantees - as almost all of the final stories I read included lots of discussion about "ranges" of possible results.
Logging of selected trees and fallen would help along with controlled burns but they banned that activity. Widening of fire breaks and adding more. Drought is not unnatural and leaving the fuel to dry more and intensify the rapid fire can be reduced. Allowing people to live in certain areas is a problem. PGE and can only play by the laws, so blaming them may not be all their fault. IMO.
How can you believe in a voting system executed so sloppy especially in a tight race.
You gonna keep the rich and celebs out of Malibu? And the poor out of Paradise.
LBD,
How can you believe in Capitalism, when companies are run so sloppily and routinely fail due to horrid management, when there's tons of freely available information to prevent it?
That's meant (slightly) tongue in cheek, just to clarify.
If people are involved, you will ALWAYS have a wide variety of outcomes. My observations, based on time working for a government agency and time spent in the private sector convinced me that competence is a non-partisan trait. Idiots come in many flavors. And based on my observations, they are as common in the private sector as they are in government.
So, you're going to have "some" badly run operations - and some well run operations in government, just as in business. The reality is that very few races are actually close. And the very nature of our de-centralized voting apparatus makes it very difficult to alter results in a wide-ranging systemic way WITHOUT being detected.
Mind you, I have strong personal objections when candidates that are running are ALSO in charge of tabulating votes (GA this year), or when family members are in a position to appoint vote tabulators for a state (FL back in 2000). But, by and large, the system of checks and balances makes it difficult in the extreme to actually "rig" elections - unless the outcome is ALREADY a coin flip.
https://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2018/11/goldman-unemployment-rate-down-to-3-in.html
CR has the Goldman-Sachs take on "full employment". They're projecting 3% U3 by 2020. They also think by that time the "breakeven" payroll increase at that point will be 90,000 per month (less than half what it has been the past 8 years).
If you can't believe the company that sold $40 billion in MBS in 2007 AFTER shorting the housing market with their corporate holdings, who can you believe?
Trump is getting even scarier
Yep. Hehehe. Never the less, it would be nice if it went to 3% by 2020. May be black unemployment would mlm go down 2ce as much.
Rigging happens but it is very rare
Gerrymandering is not at all rare, and can be very damaging. But the diversity of the area changes so you have to keep doing it.
Fires still burning?
Good Morning!
Good Morning!
Fires still going.:(
How can you believe in a fair vote when it is run so sloppily? Some Corporations are poorly managed. Not all Most small start ups are lean and mean when they become bigger one can't micro manage and that's where most get sloppy. We are talking elections where most get it done well. You may be excepting of poorly managed when the majority gets it done in reasonable fashion year after year. Confidence in the system has again been violated in the same state and counties. Not my idea of exceptable.
I do believe that if you hold an office and run for another you resign when yo declare to run for another.
You kind of make my point regarding elections. The vast majority deliver election results without major issues and get no coverage.
But, *THE SAME PLACES* have problems year after year.
That is predictable, because if incompetent people set the system up, and everyone in the system (thousands of people), continue to get the same training, you have a self-perpetuating train wreck. What doesn't help is that the WINNER of the train-wreck elections has ZERO incentive to actually do the hard work of fixing things.
The part that most people don't get is just how SMALL Federal power happens to be in regards to dictating to states. The CDC is in charge of gathering health data from the states - but has almost zero legal authority to mandate ANYTHING, (except in an actual health emergency). Any cooperation happens through voluntary assistance - plus the Feds actually offering "free of charge" help.
But, in the end, each State vital records office is run by the people in that office - some are great - and some are awful. Typically, the awful ones get that way due to political appointment of incompetent leadership from clueless politicians. If you have solid organizational knowledge, an entity can continue to run effectively on "auto-pilot" for awhile. But, if/when the organizational knowledge is lost due to long-term neglect, it becomes incredibly difficult to rebuild. This is multiplied in difficulty by the size of the state in question.
When a state as large and populace and diverse as Florida allows its election apparatus to decay, it takes MAJOR time and effort to rebuild. But, it comes down to cash and priorities. If your priority is to fix the broken stuff - then you replace your outdated tech, upgrade your training, etc. If you are focused on political advantage - then you sink your money into things like purging voter roles (which is perfectly fine *IF* your basic voting mechanism is already in good shape), or identifying potential voter fraud (that pretty much every study has shown to be rare in the extreme).
"Wobbly" is just fine, if yours is the party that is winning. But, it's a lot like the Y2K IT issues. The issue was known a long, long time before Y2K. But, most corporations made choices to not make it a priority until the last second - at which point, there's a mad scramble in the last moments - only paid heed to because the worst case scenarios were potentially company-ending.
The seemingly never-ending issues with Florida voting are solely the fault of the political people in power in Florida for the past 20 years that continue to allow the system to stay broken.
What Florida does effects national interest. I don't really care how they elect a local dog catcher but when it screws up on a close race effecting Presidential and Congressional seat it become a problem for all of us.
Corporations who bought into Y2K had no choice but to updated which was good for computer sales. When you rely on the experts who developed the systems you have to believe them or take your chances. Corporations pay a price for failure and are punished by the consumer, voting is to me totally different, scared if you will.
Agreed.
Living in Florida is embarassing.
Elephants are evolving shorter trunks toevade ivory poachers.
Tusks
I've lived in Texas my whole life and my vote has never mattered in a National election. If you don't live in one of about 12 states, election fraud would not even be noticed. I think the electoral college is important and i think Trump getting elected is a feature, not a bug in the system, even if I don't like the man. IMO national elections should be administered by a national standard ballot. We should keep the electoral college, but decouple the district votes from the statewide votes so your vote counts in your district and your state. Texas for example would have 36 individual district votes and 2 state votes.
Ruby,
Largely agree with your take. But, it would actually take a Constitutional Amendment to allow the Feds to mandate election rules.
The "bug" is not the electoral college per se, but rather that since the Federal government lacks the authority to override state level problems and policies - the political parties have largely stepped in to write those rules.
One of the reasons the recent SCOTUS nullification of part of the Voting Rights Act was so big is because that legislation was just about the only Federal level control that existed. So, basically, the conservative court has allowed MORE leeway for state political machines to do whatever they please in regards to voting policy and process. This is also one of the reasons the number of suits attacking various state level voting laws has exploded. The voting rights act used to allow pre-emptive review - ("No, you can't do that."). Now, the individual party machines pass the rules that benefit them - and then the other side files lawsuits to try and retain some balance.
Is it supposed to be over today? I bet it won't be.
Florida Woman
Good Morning!
I guess a company here in Nebraska sent voting machines and personnel to help out in Florida. Must have some real junk down there but I guess they don't take voting seriously. :(
Just read an article about Florida.
Seems one of the key recount machines that broke was bought immediately after the 2000 hanging chad fiasco. So, the machine is 18 years old. The company that made it has been out of business for 8 years. And, according to the article, the state HAD appropriated money for replacing the aging (unserviceable) equipment prior to these elections. But, they couldn't make up their minds about what to get, and so did nothing.
My point exactly.
Liz, I have a friend who was burned out in Paradise. Lost everything except clothes they wore and the cats. His name is Kirt Switzer. He has a facebook page. He might be helped by offering your hurricane recovery story. He is younger than I but has health problems so can't be as active as Muddy Biker is in his rebuild in Santa Rosa. We got a bad dose of the smoke from Paradise yesterday. Rain is on the way but predicted to be light. We need an early snow!!!
A comment on leaving LA.
Re: Flood Plane LA built a vast flood protection system that folks don't even know it is there.
Another drawback of LA is it is laced with leaking oil pipelines and leaking gas wells. Or if you remember that leaking natural gas underground storage site. As added disadvantages: Earthquake faults and urban/wildland fire interface. Back in the day when the Sylmar quake happened it was followed by a big fire - another Malibu disaster. Shake and Bake as they say. STAY AWAY!!!!
New post. Oh, and a new fire. This one much closer.
Cool! Glad you are OK at least for now. :)
Thanks for sharing a really very nice article i like your blog too much
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