WELCOME TO OLD MAN WINTER

MORE THAN A TRACE OF SNOW...

...ENOUGH TO ANNOUNCE THE ARRIVAL OF WINTER

Saturday, 9:00 AM.  26 degrees F at the ferry dock, 24 on the back porch.  Wind NW, moderate with strong gusts.  The sky is overcast, with the sun trying to shine through; the humidity  is 74% after an inch or more of icy snow fell last night, enough for the city plow crews to get some practice.  The barometer is still rising, now at 30.22".  The ten day forecast is for temperatures around freezing, with snow on Tuesday and Wednesday.  Welcome to Old Man Winter.

OFF THE CUFF
THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE

   In the days since the election there have been anguished protests from The Left concerning the unfairness of life. They narrowly won the popular vote yet lost the election, and protest as though the Electoral College vote was immaterial. Of course, the United States Constitution does not establish a pure democracy, but rather a federal democratic republic, which everyone besides The Left understands.  Those are the rules by which we play our game.
   If The Left were playing baseball and had lost, they would be protesting the three strikes and you are out rule; in other words, they wouldn't really be playing baseball at all, but an entirely different game that they had made up in order to win it.

   The Founding Fathers were educated in Greek and Roman history, and understood that pure democracy was a Greek invention, noble enough at the time, but its usefulness relegated to small and homogeneous groups; i.e.,  the Greek city states.  The Romans, who succeeded them, created an empire comprised of many diverse cities and provinces, held together by force and the rule of universal laws.
   Our Founding Fathers had the prescience to see that the fledgling United States would spread across the North American Continent, a virtual empire that would dwarf Rome in population and power.  They understood that if it was not to be hobbled by continual fratricide among its components it needed to be a republic, based on democracy, but modified to diminish the possibility of it being broken apart by continual rebellion.
   Electing the federal Executive power through  simultaneous winner-take-all state elections  was their solution.  The system has changed somewhat in practice over the centuries, but the Electoral College method is still valid, and absent a very difficult constitutional amendment process, or another violent civil war, will remain the rule of our game.

   The Founding Fathers  also witnessed contemporary events that cautioned against pure democracy. They watched in angst, and finally in horror, the progress of the French Revolution and the control of the nation of France by the Paris mobs, and the chaos and havoc, and finally the dictatorship it engendered; they also remembered Roman history, with the continual need to squelch rebellions in provinces that resented being ruled by a distant power that ignored their needs, and their own experience of rebelling at being ruled by an elite an ocean away.  

  The Trump Revolution, although peaceful and constitutional, was just that; a rebellion against the prospect of a diverse nation, comprised of fifty sovereign states, being ruled by uncaring coastal elites a thousand miles distant, or by  the violent mobs of a few huge cities equally distant and foreign to the millions living elsewhere on the continent.
   Today, we see the true face of Leftist Democracy in Cuba, Venezuela, and other nations  of or our own hemisphere, where  dictatorships have been instituted via a one-man, one-vote, one-time election.

   Does anyone really think that those easily disenfranchised millions residing in the hinterlands of North America  will ever give up the safety of the Electoral College, to take the chance of losing everything in the Leftist casino of pure democracy?
   Long live the constitution, and its Electoral College.