kanesrealm

I urge you to go to nationalpopularvote.com and explore how the individual States of our nation can and are taking action to make the popular vote in our Presidential elections actually matter and it doesn't require a Constitutional Amendment. Senator Barbara Boxer of California introduced a bill in the Senate yesterday calling for the start of a Constitutional Amendment process to eliminate the Electoral College. This is not going to go anywhere. The original reasons for the Electoral College no longer has the same merit because of the size of our country and the dispersal of our population. As I write this Hillary Clinton now leads in the popular vote by 1,150,000 and growing. Every elected official in our country is elected by getting the most votes. It's time to change the system. The Electoral College has for most of our history corresponded to the popular vote and so has been continued to be accepted. Twice in sixteen years it has failed to match. In a country that c...

In politics it's standard operating procedure to attack the media, if your back is to the wall just change the topic to the media is bad and dishonest. A free press is necessary for the survival of democracy but now more than ever people are turning from traditional news sources to websites that traffic in fantasy and conspiracy theories or radio personalities that simply echo what their audience wants to hear. Many are accepting these false stories as fact and not bothering to take the few minutes necessary to discover the truth. Case in point are the reports that a lot of Americans are getting their information from Facebook. In their news feed they read a truckload of fake stories and take it as fact. Your news feed on Facebook is not the news, it's what your "friends" are posting and sharing intermixed with advertising and fake news sites deliberately spreading misinformation. The founder of Facebook dismisses this by saying we're not a news site, which is a ...

How ya feelin' champ? A little better? Just take a spoonful of Pepto and a sedative at bedtime, you'll be fine, mostly. Let's start with a deep breath, now on to some useless analysis. We'll begin with draining the swamp. That phrase actually means nothing. Swamps encompass an entire ecosystem and the creatures living there are amazingly adaptable, so it is in politics. Most of the names being floated for the new Trump Administration are old well known names and insiders. Rience Priebus has been appointed Chief of Staff, there is no greater insider in Republican politics than it's current Party Chairman and it is a direct olive branch to the Republican leadership in Congress. Steve Bannon of Breitbart News and a former senior executive of Goldman Sachs has been named Chief Strategist, which simply means advisor, although President-elect Trump says he will be equal to Priebus which is, strange. All Presidents have paid advisors. It seems the long reach of Goldman S...

That's the percentage of eligible American voters that didn't. This bizarre phenomenon is unique to the United States. In most other countries of the world where citizens have the right to vote they show up in immense numbers. Still other countries are dictatorships and their citizens long to be free and want to vote. But here in the United States nearly half the voting population stays home and that is not a recent development, it has been the same for many decades. The most common reason someone gives for not voting is that their vote doesn't count. A reason that is easily proved wrong when you focus on that number, 46%. If all of those voters showed up on election day they could quite literally chart the course of the nation. I believe the real reason they stay home is because they think the United States will always be a free nation with a McDonald's and a Walgreen's on every corner. That there will never be armed troops patrolling the streets. That there wil...

Well, how you doing today. Feeling nauseous? Feeling giddy with joy? Feeling like the Republic is now under the control of a Sith Lord? Feeling like the saviour of the nation has arrived? I guess it all depends on where you stand. I said in this little forum from the very beginning that Donald Trump could get the Republican nomination and go on to win the Presidency. I was hopeful that he wouldn't but never delusional that he couldn't. Forget about the polls which got it wrong and forget about the professional pundits who got it wrong and are still getting it wrong in their analysis. Trump won in the Electoral College because of rural America turning out in large numbers. As I write this Hillary Clinton still has over 200,000 more votes than Donald Trump and that number will likely grow by the time the count is complete. The irony is that the same people who voted for Donald Trump are the ones who rail against the Electoral College. Let me repeat again that millions of Amer...

As always when addressing the healthcare topic I begin with reminding readers there is no such thing as Obamacare. Republicans, most notably Mitt Romney in his 2012 Presidential Campaign dubbed the Affordable Care Act "Obamacare" in an effort to demonize it and turn it into a negative. Obama in a very clever political maneuver embraced it and turned it into a positive. Just a week out from the general election, the news is jam packed with all the headlines that insurance premiums are going up in the A.C.A. insurance exchanges from 22% to 25% or as much as 40% depending on whose figures you use, big discrepancy between 22 and 40, don't you think? Here are some basic facts about the increases, less than one percent of those using the exchanges will face an increase directly from their pocket. For the rest, because they can't afford it, the federal subsidies will pick up that increase. Does that mean the impact on that one percent doesn't matter? Absolutely not. It ...