My thoughts on the school bathroom issue… it shouldn’t be an issue. Kids know which bathroom they need to use, particularly at a high school age. When we take time to understand one another, there’s no need for a law, one way or another. But if we’re going to have a law – and I speak directly to the conservatives here – one that respects property rights and individual freedoms is the law to support. We must support nondiscrimination in housing, employment, and access to government-owned facilities.

As for restaurants, bars, gas stations, and other small venues, most of those are one person per bathroom affairs, regardless of gender. They are essentially private, so it makes as no difference who goes into which one, unless there’s a line.

A few years ago, this wasn’t a federal, state, or local decision. It was a personal decision. It should remain that way and the law should protect that personal decision.

On the one hand, I don’t want to see Trump become president. On the other hand, I have a stronger desire to not see his supporters erupt in an armed putsch if he doesn’t get nominated due to GOP insider machinations. Even less would I want to see a candidate harness the seething rage that would result from an assassination of Trump.

There’s what I want and what I got right now. And what’s going on now is very gritty. There’s quite a lot of rage in Middle America, and whenever in history the middle class is frustrated in its upward progress, it will turn to politics to create the necessary upheaval to change the situation. When politics fails, the middle class resorts to violence. The USA dodged a huge bullet with the election of FDR in 1932. If both Trump and Sanders get short-shrifted by their respective parties, we’ll have some very dark days ahead of us.

If a person espouses hateful views and is consistently dismissive of and brutally rude to people without power… if that same person is hostile towards people who try to keep him honest and resorts to personal attacks to divert attention from his faults, that person should not only be shunned by decent Americans, but the press should also unmask and reveal the fraud. Shame on the American press for treating Donald Trump as a ratings event and not holding his misogynistic, bigoted, brutish, heartless, opportunistic, sociopathic, and very unpresidential feet to the fire.

The answer is simple: It depends, particularly on whether or not there’s a mass baptism of the football team. And if they’re first cousins. Check the Constitution and your local state laws for guidance in these matters! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsidBpKINEM

In this video, I begin a series on the causes and background to The American Civil War. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1giXyZdXKO8

Looking at internal migration patterns in the USA, California begins to loom as a state facing its worst drought in recorded history. People are leaving that state, and the numbers are going to increase as time goes on and the drought worsens there. Where are they going to go?

Texas looks good to them. Cheaper houses, warm climate, not too many earthquakes… seems like the place to be. Austin’s gotten crowded, but there’s still stuff to do in Dallas and Houston and San Antonio, right? And what happens to Texas politics if there’s an influx of a bunch of them there libberul Californy-ans?

Texas turns blue, that’s what. As in, votes in Democrats to the the state and federal house and senate, puts a Democrat into the governor’s chair, and puts Texas’ 38 electoral votes into the Democratic camp. Republicans have a hard enough time winning presidential elections – they couldn’t possibly do it without Texas.

Ironically, it’s those Texas Republicans, with massive backing from the oil industry, that have been some of the most vociferous critics of the need to take action to alleviate the problems of global climate change. Now, while it looks like California’s drought woes are based upon an pre-existing cyclical pattern, it does seem like a kind of poetic justice that there’s a shot of a climate change leading to the toppling of those people that pooh-poohed the idea that the environment was something to worry about.

Because it sure is something to worry about when it changes your safe seat into a toss-up or a win for the other party.

I, for one, plan to hide and watch. This looks like it’ll be an interesting story to follow, given the upcoming election. Because the Republican’s haven’t had a convincing win since 1988. Bush II’s wins in 2000 and 2004 were near-run things. Moving Texas to the blue column would have produced Democrat victories.

Now, while I view the main political parties as basically different branches of a political elite that remains largely captured by special interests like AARP, AIPAC, defense lobbyists, and the federal employee unions, I still find the outcome of political contests to be as entertaining as a Super Bowl featuring two teams I don’t have an emotional attachment to. Win or lose, I can still enjoy to watch how the game is played.

And it looks like the GOP will have some heavy lifting to do, all thanks to Mother Nature.

The short answer is, yes, in that it will be Harry Reid blocking everything with a filibuster instead of Mitch McConnell. So what if the GOP gets a majority of anything less than 60 of 100 senators? Short of that number, the opposition can block everything, which is exactly what they did while in the minority.

I’d expect that if the GOP wins in the Senate, we’d see the celebrations cut short by the rift within the Republican party between the old hands and the young bucks of the Tea Party faction. We may yet see the Democrats yield the floor to filibustering Republicans shooting down their own party’s agenda.

Sure, the President can veto bills that cross his desk – it takes just one guy to block a law – but those laws don’t even get to his desk if at least 41 guys in the Senate decide to block a law. The Democrats could barely trickle out legislation with a majority of 55 in the Senate. The GOP will be hard pressed to do better with a majority of 51.

And as for the nearly $4 billion spent on the elections this year… it’s just more evidence that the people that do get into government are strongly beholden to certain interests, at the very least. Quite a few are bought outright. This is why the richest Americans get Quantitative Easing bank account boosts and the poorest get a no-fly zone and assaulted journalists when they have unaddressed needs. We’ve got Soviet-style apparatchniks engaging in a kleptocratic, autocratic looting of the nation. This has been going on for some time. It’s just more apparent with each passing election and mania/crash economic cycle.

The Tea Party is engaging in the politics of division, not compromise. They refuse to let others have anything they want if they are not able to have their way without compromise. The last time the USA had a round of that sort of thing on a national level, it was the pro-slavery faction that dragged the nation into civil war.

When our leadership is so full of pride and self-importance that it cannot think of statesmanship and focuses solely on selfish ends such as party fundraising and re-election for re-election’s sake, we have a situation that, in history, produced one of four outcomes. I’ve described these before, but the concept bears repetition. The outcomes from this current immobilizing rift will be either constitutional convention, civil war, national dissolution, or authoritarian regime.

A constitutional convention requires a desire to work things through: I don’t see that here. Election politics involve dividing people. American politicians are in a permanent re-election mode, so they are constantly dividing, not reaching out. No constitutional convention, or if we have one, it will fail with the same gridlock that we see now in Congress.

Civil war involves regional splits. We don’t have that here. National dissolution? In a looser federation of states, perhaps, but there is still enough will at the center to assert itself on any would-be breakaway state or region. That will at the center points the way to authoritarian regime.

It need not be an ideological authoritarianism: it could, in fact, arise out of a state of emergency declared in the face of a massive government and economic crisis. With the budget going nowhere and the debt ceiling about to be reached without extension, we are well on our way to that big crisis. But it need not be this time: the Congress may yet blink in the face of that showdown and one side or another budge to the demands of the other.

But the situation continues. If not now, then some point in the future will produce the situation in which, finally, neither side compromises and the crisis occurs. We will then see, piece by piece, authoritarianism solidify and dominate the nation.

The worst thing from the Tea Party is that they accuse Obama of being a tyrant. In their idiotic refusal to cooperate with him, they may very well have sealed their own fate and that of the nation in causing a tyrant to emerge as a consequence of their uncompromising tantrums.