Monday, September 16, 2024

In my previous post, I sketched out my objections to retail medical care as epitomized by HMOs.
I know first-hand how one’s life is put at risk when one is forced to endure the deliberate delays imposed on a person by the process of “pre-authorization.” The HMO hope is that delaying treatment will cause you to die before they need to expend any serious money to provide for your care. Such was certainly my case in the summer and fall of 2010, when my heart was obviously inn distress. There was no excuse for a HMO denying me an adequate test for three months. The situation was not helped, of course, by the fact that the HMO doctor I was assigned to was not capable of diagnosing the condition of my heart. Mediocrity, Inc.

As I approached the age when I could free myself from the bondage of HMO strictures, I asked myself why I should risk being assigned to someone I don’t trust just because a HMO is too cheap to provide expedient care by a competent specialist. Yes, HMO “advantage” plans appear to be cheaper, but that’s part of how they recruit “investors” (aka “patients”) to be part of their Ponzi scheme.

Instead, why not sign up for Traditional Medicare with a Medigap policy? Indeed, that is what my spouse and I decided to do. Unfortunately, my spouse was denied a Medicare card! We applied on August 3rd, and on August 14th, she was told “No. You don’t deserve a card.” There was no explanation for the denial. I am 76; she is 71. We both have worked decades during which we were subject to the Medicare tax. We both will lose our group health medical coverage plan on September 30th. We were both told by a Social Security worker at a Social Security office in Garden Grove, California that all the forms we turned in on August 3rd were in proper order, and that we should soon expect our cards.

And then the door gets slammed in our face.

A month has gone by and we have done everything possible to get an explanation, and no one will help us except in the most superficial, perfunctory way. We have spent dozens of hours making phone calls and writing letters and waiting in line. One worker at a Social Security office recently appeared to sit at her computer terminal and type a few sentences into my wife’s file. “My supervisor will probably get to this in about two weeks,” she said. “Next, please.”

That’s it. Social Security won’t do anything more than that. Our group insurance plan expires at the end of the month, and my spouse will have no health insurance to provide for basic care on October 1st. I have worked and been subject to the Medicare tax for over a half-century, and this is how my spouse and I get treated. She, too, worked for many years and paid this tax. It’s an outrage that amounts to a criminal offense on the part of the government.

This outcome is almost more than I can bear. It’s one thing to be young and to be treated badly. It’s quite another to be 76 years old and have to endure the sting of being told, “What a sucker you are! You thought we actually cared about you? Your job is to pay your taxes and shut up. If you end up owing hundreds of thousands of dollars because you didn’t have the Medicare coverage you worked your whole life to attain, then that’s your tough luck for being a gullible citizen.”

The irony, of course, is that it’s not as if my hope for my spouse and I to both have Medicare effective on October 1st was because we were getting something for free. Paying a Medicare tax is jut the first installment of this health insurance deal. As everyone should know, Medicare is not free. My spouse and I will pay close to a thousand dollars a month in order to have access to a choice of competent doctors. A thousand dollars a month. This is hardly a cheap health insurance policy.

Vice-President Kamala Harris says that her policy choices are different from Trump’s because she cares about “you.” Here, my dear readers, is an example of how “you” is treated by the U.S. government.

The other election choice, of course, is even worse, since Mr. Turnip has only managed to come up with “a concept of a plan” for health care reform after over nine years of thinking about it. Other than the complete replacement of the Affordable Care Act by a set of insurance companies with no guardrails on their policies whatsoever, I cannot imagine what he has in mind.

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Post-script:
Of course, health care is almost completely a matter of luck. I have had too many doctors either physically abuse me or lie to me — yes, deliberately lie to me — or simply not take seriously my symptoms, to believe that the medical system regards me as I am anything other than a piece of meat to be processed for profit.

As I have approached the age of retirement from full-time work as a professor, my spouse and I have received in the mail a steady stream of adventisements for health care plans with the name of a HMO (Health Maintenance Organization) attached to the term “Advantage”: Kaiser Advantage; Blue Shield Advantage. Ah! I ask myself: but to whose advantage? The allure of details in these advertisements would suggest that it is to your advantage (convenience, low cost, etc.), but this is merely a come-on to disguise one of the more long-running bait-and-switch operations legally at work in the U.S.

Health care in the United States, in fact, is in the hands of insurance companies and pharmaceutical industry to a degree that can only be called a Ponzi scheme. An HMO is not a “health maintenance” organization. It is a PROFIT-MAINTENANCE organization. Dozens of people working for Kaiser earn more than a million dollars a year. The CEO of Kaiser makes 20 million a year. In such a profit-generating system, The primary goal of any organization in which a large number of individuals are that well remunerated ccan only be a matter of methods that result in a massive surplus of funds. An individual’s well-being is merely a secondary side-effect that is more a matter of chance than of calculated cathexis meant to alleviate the suffering and distress of a patient. One is, unfortunately, assigned a doctor or physician assistant in a manner that resembles the red-lining that afflicted housing distribution in urban areas such as Los Angeles.

HMO Health Care is a Ponzi scheme in which the maximum amount of money is collected from the maximum number of people possible, while of course only rendering the amount of service needed to keep the scheme intact. The operational culture of “pre-authorization” is the primary means by which this gap allows those who run the scheme to be very well rewarded financially. The success of this particular Ponzi scheme is that the siphoned wealth of hundreds of thousands is distributed in a manner that avoids any appearance of outright fraud. Unlike the classic Ponzi scheme, such as the one Bernie Madoff is famous for, in which an extremely limited number of people avail themselves of a mind-boggling reservoir of money, HMO schemes know that the secret to perpetuating themselves requires the caution of restraint. No one individual should be disproportionately accruing exorbitant wealth. Rather, the guardrail on greed is that “there’s plenty to go around, so let’s not get ostentatiously avaricious.”

.

The election of the next president of the United States will pivot on a total of less than a thousand votes cast in two states: North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Here are two potential Electoral College maps with the outcome of the election.

Assuming that Harris wins Wisconsin and Michigan, she can lose North Carolina and Georgia and still win the election with 270 Electoral College votes.

Or, on the other hand, she can win Wisconsin, Michigan, and North Carolina, but if she loses Pennsylvania, Trump will regain the White House with 271 Electoral College votes.

Pennsylvania is to the 2024 election what Florida was to the election of 2000, in which Bush edged Gore by a handful of disputed votes, underscored by a politically motivated disenfranchisement campaign.

**********

Even if Harris were to win both North Carolina and Pennsylvania, Trump will challenge the outcome in a number of ways, and I have ideas for two political cartoons.

Cartoon Number One:

Image:
Trump is standing at the counter of a ramshackle bait and tackle retail store, his face scrunched with smirking impatience. A sign on the wall behind the balding man at the cash register reads:
Burner Phones — 10 percent off

Trump says: “Since when do you do background checks for burner phones?”

(Alternate line: “Just put it on my tab.”)

Follow-up Second Cartoon:

Trump is at Mar-a-Lago, siting at his desk. Phone in hand. SCOTUS Chief Justice Roberts is at his desk at the Supreme Court. Roberts is holding a newspaper, dated November 10, 2024
Newspaper headline “Harris Wins White House”

Trump’s Caption: “I just need you to find me four more votes.”

As such, given this likely scenario, what Harris and her campaign must begin doing right now is filming — and buying time for — a two week advertising campaign that will culminate on the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving Day. Every airport television at the bars where people are sipping their drinks and waiting for their flights should be filled with brief snippets of factual statements that remind people of the legitimacy of the vote. . What is needed is that on Thanksgiving Day, November 28, Americans have accepted Harris’s victory in the election, even if it is by the thinnest of margins. Advertising based on facts is the only guardrail that will preserve democracy.

It wouldn’t hurt, of course, to remind people of one thing I am certain of: Trump will lose the popular vote for the third election in a row. “Three time loser! Three time loser!” That should be the mantra of November 15th, 2024.

*************

The problem with Kristoff’s column is that it’s not the supporters of Trump as a candidate for president that I wish to demean. Rather, it is their unwillingness to accept the results of a free and fair election. They were fine with the election of 2016. Why? Because they won. However, when their candidate loses, suddenly it becomes a case of the other side having “stolen” the election and then exploding in fory and trashing the Capitol building to vent about their disappointment.

Trump is going to lose the popular vote for the third time in a row.

Can his supporters say that out loud and admit that this is a true statement?

If they can’t, then it is not being some kind of supercilious, smug member of a cadres of “elites” to say that we as a nation have a real problem.

If Trump loses to Harris, the one factor he should first consider is how his willingness to play to his base on the issue of health care during his term of office affected the 2024 election. After all, abortion is fundamentally a health care issue. Therefore, instead of Trump demeaning VP Harris and Ms. Clinton with a comment about blowjobs. an accurate pairing in a social media post of “odd coincidences” by Trump would be the juxtaposition of Hillary Clinton and himself with a caption, “Isn’t it funny how heelth care impacted both of our careers in different ways?”

Let us reoollect something that Hillary and Bill Clinton would like all voters to forget, but which Trump voters haven’t forgotten. Hillary and Bill betrayed working people in the 1992 election. What part of “job training” don’t you you two dumb asses named Clinton understand? Instead of focusing immediately on the need to become training the work force to pivot with the oncoming post-manufacturing economy, Hillary Clinton (in particular)_ took the lead in trying to reform health care. Uh, excuse me, Hillary. You didn’t campaign on that. I, for one, did not vote for that. I voted for you because I heard your husband promise “uob training” at a rally I attended in 1992. And I worked phone banks for the CWA so that my first wife could get job training as she entered her early 40s.And you betrayed us, and instead failed even to change the health care system. What a belly flop!

So, health care was a big mistake as the thing to focus on in 1992.

In a similar manner, Trump and the GOP’s desire to seize the moment and go for the Supreme Court in his first term was ultimately a decision to focus on health care rather than the economy. Trump couldn’t resist a chance to play to his base, so he went for it, instead of waiting for it to happen in a second term. Subsequent to his first term — but couse directly related to his decisions in hi first term, Roe versus Wade was reversed, and now instead of economic issues being the front-runner in the 2024 election, it’s a health-care issue that has shot to the top for many women voters. Yes, grocery bills are higher, but they would be even higher if one had even another mouth to feed. Family size is a personal choice, not a state-sanctioned infringement on one’s reproductive rights.

Sunday, September 8, 2024

Early this morning, I drove to the store to get some groceries to tide us over the next couple days. At 10 a.m., driving home, the car’s temperature gauge read 85 degrees. Durin the time I had been in the store, the morning had gotten warmer, but it wasn’t viciously hot. Four hours later, the heat had intensified to an exponential degree. It was like an interest payment on a debut that was being compounded by the minute.

This afternoon, the thermometer on the small side porch of the house we rent read 106 degrees. A half-hour later, near 1 p.m., it read 110. By 2:30 p.m., it registered 116 degrees. We live about a half-mile from the shoreline, and I have to assume that the heat was close to 120 degrees just a few miles inland.

Is it possible that the thermometer outside our house was faulty? I suppose so, but when I conduct a compare and contrast recollection of this morning’s walk from the store to my parked car, and what the direct burnt of the heat felt like as I stepped outside at 2 p.m., the gap between the two instances is more than 15 degrees. The official media report the high in Long Beach today as being 104 degrees. Well, who am I supposed to believe? The media or my lying skin?.

In any case, we can only afford an airconditioning apparatus that cools down one room. the rest of the house is soaking up all the excess heat that was absorbed by the ground during the day.

This heat has arrived like a balloon payment of.a hidden tax for August having been one of the mildest summer months I can ever remember in Los Angeles. “Pay back time,” summer says.

Despite the heat, I got some work done on an article on Allen Ginsberg’s posthumous collection, “Death & Fame.” I had not read the book until I received a request to contribute to a book on Ginsberg to the published by Cambridge University Press. The book turns out to be much more interesting and vital than I expected.

The oppressive heat forced me to miss a reading set up by Lynn McGee and her cohort of friends at the “W-E Bicoastal Poets Series. When the weather cools and the video is posted, I look forward to seeing the entire program. In the meantime, I want to call your attention to Joseph Zaccardi’s poetry. Like Ginsberg, Zaccardi was born in Newark, New Jersey. His most recent book is”Songbirds of the Nine Rivers” (Sixteen Rivers Press 2023).

Los Angeles Harbor Arts
401 S. Mesa Street
San Pedro, CA
PUT TO SEE: 18 artists on exhibit
Reception: 2 to 5 p.m.
Saturday, September 7, 2024

Two visitors to LAHA, on Thursday, September 5, 2024, in front of a painting by Linda Fry

The Padres baseball cap is the one my father wore when my mother and he attended the only game that the Padres won in the 1984 World Series.
NOTE: WordPress insists on changing “MONEYBALL” to “Moneybag.” Autocorrect is such a drag.

“The game takes no prisoners,” Andrew McCutchen said. “It doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn’t matter where you’re from or what you did to get you there. You’ve got to show up the next day and be ready to win. Can’t feel bad for yourself. Game doesn’t feel bad for anybody. Game doesn’t care who you are. Game doesn’t care what you did last year. Game doesn’t care if you were an MVP or an All-Star. You’ve got to be ready to go the next day. That’s what I’ve learned. I don’t care that I hit two homers today. I’ll be ready to go tomorrow, trying to win the ballgame. That’s what we have to do. Gotta put our big boy pants on and go…. We don’t feel bad for each other in here. We’re just going to shake it off and get ready to go the next day.”
— Andrew McCutchen, Sunday, August 11, 2024

Professional athletes are not known for being LBGTQ advocates. If anything, the homosocial legacy of professional sports competition has directly served to reinforce the normatively of heterosexual role-playing. The death of Billy Bean, a journeyman baseball player who come out of the closet after his playing days were over, this past summer was the occasion for a lengthier obituary than his performance on the baseball diamond might usually have generated, in large part because of his courage to publicly acknowledge being gay. Billy Bean’s name, however, was close enough to a more famous name associated with baseball, Billy Beane, that some obituaries conflated their careers. Beane (with an “e” at the end) with the protagonist and main proponent of “Moneyball,” the idea that careful evaluation of a player’s true worth on the field might enable a small-market team on a tight budget to have a competitive roster. It’s not unusual in professional baseball, for instance, for a large-market team (the Yankees; the Dodgers; the Red Sox, etc.) to have a payroll two or three times larger than a small-market team (the Pittsburgh Pirates).

The problem with the “Moneybag” approach is that it requires a genius — and a fair amount of luck — to pull it off. One can’t be merely a competent general manager and be successful with tis approach. A case in point this year is (once again) the Pittsburgh Pirates, who two-thirds of the way through the 2024 season were actually two games above .500 (56-54). Then the bottom, as it has frequently done over the past thirty years, fell out once again. In early August, the Pirates lost 10 games in a row; and there went the season. By the start of the final weekend in August, the Pirates had a record of 7 wings and 18 losses. It’s possible that they will win both of the remaining games of this month’s schedule, but I don’t know many people who are betting on the Pirates finishing 9-18 for the month of August.

So why have the Pirates floundered so badly this year? Andrew McCutchen’s observations at the start of today’s post pretty well sum it up: it’s a game in which what you did last year is irrelevant. David Bender was an all-start reliever two years in a row, and now his ERA is above 6.00 and he is directly responsible for the Pirates losing seven games in the ninth inning this season. However, is he alone in Major League Baseball in letting down his teammates? Not at all. Camilo Doval, a reliever on the San Francisco Giants, was an all-star game player last year. This year, his ERA shot up to 6.43 and he was sent down to the minor leagues.

Bednar’s performance in August has been far worse than Duval’s: How much worse? Bednar has a 10.97 ERA (13er/10.2ip) in August and has blown three save chances. Even so, one can’t place yet another disappointing season entirely on Bednar’s shoulders. All-star third baseman Hayes has had a subpar year at te plate, and the outfield defense ranks last in the MLB. The Pirates’ shortstop leads the MLB in errors at that position. Well, what can one expect from a team with the second lowest payroll in MLB? “MONEYBALL,” as I said, requires a genius. It didn’t take a genius to choose Paul Skenes as the team’s first round draft pick last year. Apparently, though, it takes a genius to realize the Mr. Cruz, at the very outset of his career, was far better suited to center field than shortstop.

The Pirates have a stunning stadium to play their games in. It’s a shame their fans don’t have players to watch to match that stadium’s quality. The San Diego Padres, on the other hand, can come very close to having an attractive stadium in an urban setting. While Padre fans have been waiting a long time for a World Series championship, and the odds don’t favor them this year, at least team management is fielding a competitive ensemble. As “Iron Mike Marshall once said, “Victory is the quality of competition” and at least the Padres will make the playoffs for the third time in the past five years. I wish that team much luck! “Ninety percent of the game is half-mental,” said Yogi Berra, and that applies to management, too.

Sunday, August 17, 2024

The Glass Ceiling of a Hundred Million Votes for Harris

The results of the most recent national poll will undoubtedly bolster the outlook of those attending the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week. I don’t want to be too much of a “downer” at the party, but I am old enough to remember how Michael Dukakis was leading in the polls after the Democratic convention in 1988, and that didn’t turn out too well, did it? The campaigns by Harris and Trump to become the next president will reach hurricane force in the next nine weeks, and it is impossible to predict the outcome of this “perfect storm” of mediated technology and kitchen table conversations. How many eligible voters will register for the first time, and how many will exercise their franchise? The answers to those questions sketch the trajectory of this nation’s fate.

*****

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/08/18/harris-trump-post-abc-ipsos-poll/?utm_source=alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=wp_news_alert_revere&location=alert

“As Democrats gather this weekend in Chicago for their upcoming national convention, Harris stands at 49 percent to Trump’s 45 percent among registered voters in a head-to-head matchup. When third-party candidates are included in the survey, Harris is at 47 percent and Trump at 44 percent, with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at 5 percent. In early July, Trump stood at 43 percent, Biden at 42 percent and Kennedy at 9 percent.”

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The problem with this kind of poll is that it doesn’t account for the “stealth” third party candidate who has twice in the past quarter-century changed the course of American politics: the presidential nominee of the Green Party. In both 2000 and 2016, Ralph Nader and Jill Stein siphoned off enough votes in “battleground” states of the Electroral College to allow George W. Bush and Donald Trump to be inauguaated. Do the consequances of these elections weigh heavily on te conscience of Jill Stein, as she prepares to mount yet another campaign that might forestall the election of the first woman (as well as the first womn of color) to the presidency? Not at all. If Jill Stein can attract just enough voters to give Donald Trump an electoral college victory, she will pour herself a glass of champagne and congratulate herself on a job well done.

Given the impact of the Green Party on the Electoral College, it’s still very featsible that Trump will emerge once again triumphant. Peraps, though, the buzzer-beater election I predict will conclude with an upset win by Kamala Harris. The election of 2024 is the culminating confrontation between the ghost of Roy Cohn and the neo-liberal faction of American capitalism. If Trump loses, consider the consequences. He is already scheduled to go on trial for election interference in the 2000 election. At age 78, what does he have to lose from leading an all-out assault on the electoral process? I predict that he will double down, though that may prove to be the “Captain Queeg” moment I predicted many years ago in this blog.

I repeat: what would Trump have to lose, if he opts for an even more extreme reaction to losing the popular vote three elections in a row? It is not too early, therefore, for those in charge of civil order in major American cities to begin to plan for Trump’s attempts to hold rallies on his behalf in the ten weeks following Election Day. People have the right to assemble and protest, and this right must not be abridged. If 80,000,000 people vote for Trump, they have a right to vent their disappointment that 88,000,000 of their fellow citizens voted for a woman of color. I am quite certain that they will feel that those who will vote for Trump in November will believe that the election was once again “stolen.” Can anything convince them otherwise? Very unlikely. Trump will claim that A.I was put to use to manipulate the vote, and what evidence would convince his supporters otherwise.

In the period in which Kamala Harris is madame president elect, Trump’s desperation will no doubt be the subject of scathing quips by such commentators as Stephen Colbert. Unfortunately, Project 2025 is not a joke, though the recent cartoon of Trump as “Hannibal Lecter 2024: accompanied by DJT’s comment that “I never should have published the menu” was very funny. The economic and social despotism that Project 2025 has in mind goes far beyond anything ever imagined by Barry Goldwater. The blueprint of the Foaming at the Mouth Radical Right is clearly articulated in Project 2025 and it should be taken at face value.

All of us, therefore, who believe that we are stakeholders in a system of checks and balances must urge as many people to vote as possible for Kamala Harris. The glass ceiling she confronts can only be shattered convincingly if, in fact, 100,000,000 people were to vote for her. There are more than enough eligible voters to have that happen. As improbable as such a turnout might seem, it may be the only way for this country to avoid another civil war. A definitive turnout that is beyond any conspiratorial reproach is imperative. Let those who support the Constitution of the United States of America and the flag for which it stands commit themselves to this unprecedented effort.

Sunday, August 11, 2024

Lately I’ve been thinking of how much the process of becoming a poet involves a close rereading of poets you believe you’re familiar with, and the extent to which that close reading is inspired by other poets’ knowledge of poems that deserve more of your attention. When I think of the late Neeli Cherkovski, for instance, I recollect a conversation we had about Bukowski’s poetry in the early 1970s, and in particular, the poems by Bukowski that appeared in early issues of INVISIBLE CITY, the magazine co-founded and co-edited by Paul Vangelisti. While both Neeli and I agreed that those poems were among Bukowski’s best in that period, what surprised me was Neeli’s admiration for the title poems of Bukowski’s second book from Loujon Press, “Crucifix in a Deathhand.” One might think it is one of Bukowski’s best-known poems, especially since it is as much focused on Los Angeles itself as an urban cyclorama as Blake’s “London” is on that environs. I remember digging up Bukowski’s poem after that conversation and wondering why Laurence Goldstein had not included it in his survey of Los Angeles-themed poems, “POETRY LOS ANGELES.”

Among Neeli’s prose projects, his WHITMAN’S WILD CHILDREN: Portraits of 12 Poets stands out as the best possible context for reading what turned out to be a posthumous collection of poems, which has just been reviewed by Paul Vangelisti in the Los Angeles Review of Books. It’s a shame that Neeli wasn’t able to go on a reading tour to promote this volume. I can only hope that individual readers let his visions come into focus as they read his poems for the mind’s ear. “I want to be a dead poet,” is a line Paul quotes at the end of his review. As readers find Cherkovski’s SELECTED POEMS, he will indeed become not only the dead poet of his aspirations, but also an old dead poet, the exalted fulfillment of his lifelong quest.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/alive-beyond-life/

Alive Beyond Life
Paul Vangelisti reviews Neeli Cherkovski’s “Selected Poems: 1959–2022.”

August 9, 2026

I lived in Ocean Park, California for 20 years and was a member of the Church in Ocean Park during much of that time.In the mid-1980s, two murals were painted on the sidewalls of the embankments supporting the Fourth Street overpass at Ocean Park Boulevard. About four blocks of Ocean Park Boulevard had traffic detoured to side streets when the murals were finished so that all of us living in Ocean Park could celebrate their completion and what they stood for.

I remember talking with Jim Conn, the minister of the Church in Ocean Park, at the formal celebration about the mural’s symbolism. At one point in our conversation, he said that this mural would be immediately understood in the Philippines, where political turmoil led to a people’s revolution powerful enough to drive the corrupt Marcos family out of power and into exile.

I drove by my old neighborhood the other day and noticed that the murals are still up and emanating their message of revolt against the panopticon.

Wednesday, July 31, 2024

Even though Donald Trump will lose the popular vote for the third consecutive national election for president, Kamala Harris will most likely lose the Electoral College vote. I am hardly the first one to make this prediction, but I would like to frame it with a comparison to the finish of a tight scoring basketball game, in which a player shoots the ball toward the basket a fraction of a second before the game clock sounds off. If the score is close enough for that final shot to make a difference in who wins, it’s called a “buzzer beater.” Trump will triumph, but will do so primarily because of another iteration of a “buzzer beater” election, in which he manages to have the referee of the game (aka the Supreme Court) intervene on his behalf in the same way that George W. Bush had its assistance in the election of 2000.

The racist, patriarchal tilt of the playing field should remind us that the lines in Langston Hughes’s poem, “Montage of a Dream Deferred” are still as prescient as they were seventy-five years ago: In a section of “Montage” entitled “Children’s Rhymes.” Hughes has the skip-ropers chanting:

“By what sends
the white kids
I ain’t sent.
I know I can’t
be President.”

I’m afraid that Kamala Harris is going to be the second instance of voters in the United States rejecting the chance to appoint a woman to be the President. If a white woman was not acceptable, what are the odds on a women of color being elected? As dismaying as the answer to that question is, Harris nevertheless still has a better chance of winning than Biden did. At the very least, she will bolster a few congressional races. And who knows? Perhaps she’ll pull off one of the great upsets os 21st century American politics and force Trump to face another jury in a court of law, although this time it won’t be to face charges of financial chicanery, but to defend his attempt to overthrow the results of the 2020 election.

As to how a guilty verdict in Trump’s election interference case might play out, if Harris were to be elected President, I call attention to a very important article regarding presidential pardoning power.

The President’s Conditional Pardon Power

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As a footnote to the above comment about Vice-President Harris being “a woman of color,” it should be emphasized that Trump as reverted to form and can’t resist the impulse to throw “red meat” to his MAGA base. This time, instead of doubting President Obama’s birth certificate, Trump is questioning whether Harris identifies as African-American.

Trump should have a voice-activated AI-driven computer attached to his ankle in the same way that people under house arrest have a monitor that tracks their whereabouts. Everytime that Trump relies on imagined misinformation, the computer should seeak up in a voice loud enough to drawn out his and correct the record. In attending Howard College, Harris could be said to have announced to the world that she identifies herself with the African-American community.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55690001