Where it matters… fight in the trenches

Yes your actions matter, in the critical days ahead. The most useful things you can do before Election Day:

- Check on your own voter registration and those of your friends and neighbors, especially in swing districts where cheating and voter dumping are afoot. If you find any discrepancies, yell.

- State assembly races are the most important ones! If there’s a swing district near you, or you know someone living in one, that’s where you and she should donate time and money. The candidate will remember you!

- Fight in the trenches.

Yes, yes. I know your mad-confederate dad or uncle or brother is beyond hopeless, glued to the Fox-teat, desperately gulping, even mainlining Hannity nostrums of hate toward law professionals and the FBI, the intelligence community and the U.S. military officer corps — half a million smart, dedicated “deep-state” conspirators who are all committing the same “treason” at the same time. And hate toward scientists, doctors, teachers and every other fact-using profession. If you’ve dared him to name one exception to this anti-all-smart-people pogrom, and he won’t even try, then sure, probably nothing will sway him. And yet…

…his wife is listening, from the next room, and she can’t be bullied inside the polling booth. And just maybe - you can chip away at his confederate zealotry. Or else maybe… just maybe… I’ve seen some RASRs (Residually Adult-Sane Republicans) lift their ostrich heads out of the sand. I’ve been responsible for a few.

Which is why I push using wagers. Properly parsed, they can corner any confederate … and/or possibly get you a little cash. I’ve listed dozens of starkly-put bets, like going to a nearby beach together and personally measuring ocean acidification. But here’s a new one or two.

“What were the tangible outcomes of Donald Trump’s forays into diplomacy?”

- A president accused of collusion with despots fed more suspicion by meeting privately, without witnesses, with a murderous communist tyrant and gave that Korean communist leader everything he wanted, backstabbing our closest ally, in exchange for empty, vague promises. WAGER: you can’t name a single tangible outcome that benefited the U.S.

- A president accused of collusion with despots fed more suspicion by meeting privately, without witnesses, with a murderous Russian mafia tyrant and gave that (ex?)-commie Kremlin lord… what? We have no way of knowing, though Donald Trump tried hard to reduce sanctions on Russian oligarchs. WAGER: you can’t name a single tangible outcome that benefited the U.S.

(Oh, in case it needs to be spelled-out, it’s funny how the scenario, including secret-private meetings, was the same with a murderous commie tyrant as with a murderous EX-commie tyrant. What? Nothing going on here?)

• WAGER: name a single factor that won us the Cold War that’s not been dismantled by the Trump-Fox-GOP. Our mighty alliances like NATO? Our peerless and admired American science? Strong and confident intelligence agencies, or a public that’s united against Kremlin scheming, or IRS auditors tracking KGB cash flows? Protection of Russian defectors, or an American tradition of adult negotiation based on evidence. Oh and climate change has given Russia twelve new seaports along a valuable, ice-free Arctic they now control.

Oh, your mad uncle won’t take a bet. But use that fact! The macho may never recover.