Briefly

Health Care
Tr*mp says, "I have to tell you, it's an unbelievably complex subject.  Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated."  Nobody?  Well, duh!

Voter Suppression
Our President had to stock his Cabinet with plutocrats, presumably because he just couldn't find enough wingnut ideologues — but he does have unreconstructed Confederate warrior Jeff Sessions, who has dropped the government's argument that the Texas voter ID law was designed to suppress minority voting.  Can the other plaintiffs win without the backing of the Justice Department?  We'll see.

Federal Budget
Congress never pays much attention to presidential budget proposals, so we can ignore Tr*mp's speech and just wait for Paul Ryan.  We are most likely to see yet another attempt at implementing supply-side economics, and need only look to Kansas to see how well that works.

Military Spending
It is obvious to the simple-minded that more military spending will "make America stronger" — except that it won't.  Fortunately, this particularly dumb idea would have to be funded with cuts to enough programs popular in the various states to ensure it won't happen.

Antisemitism
The cemetery vandalism will turn out to be the work of drunken young men, possibly wearing red caps; and the bomb threats not part of any organized plot, but individual acts inspired on 4chan or by the Daily Stormer.  This doesn't make the problem any less serious: antisemitism is an inevitable accompaniment to any kind of xenophobia, and enough empty threats might inspire some demented individual to attempt a real bombing.

* * *

Update (11PM): Well, he gave the campaign speech again.

The Supremes

When you stop to think about it, John Roberts was right, in a way.  Times have changed.  Back in the 1960s, southerners wanted to keep blacks from voting because they were black.  Now, they want to keep blacks (and Latinos) from voting because they vote for Democrats.

Given the dismal state of Congress, the chance of it "fixing" Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act anytime soon is very unlikely.  Personally, I think Section 5 should apply to all states and counties, because you don't have to be a racist to take an interest in voter suppression.  Also, considering how clever our programmers are, wouldn't it be possible to develop computer algorithms to create rational (rather than politicized) voting districts in every state?  (Perhaps the criteria could be crowd-sourced.)

As for the Defense of Marriage Act, I was hoping for something better than the usual five-four split, but you take what you can get.  The California marriage case, which turned on the litigant's standing to sue, was more a matter of ducking the issue than a statement about marital rights.  I wonder if the nine of them got together and negotiated which of them would vote on one side or the other?

Voter Fraud

Well it appears that there well may be some voter fraud going on out there, despite the protestations of Democrats.  The problem for voter fraud blowhards on Fox, though, is that the fraudsters are not Democrats.

On the heels of voter suppression claims, which are getting varied responses in various states, this does not look especially good for the GOP.  On the other hand, most people haven't heard about it.  Few are paying attention.

The most significant problem with our voting systems, in my opinion, is that they are left to the states.  I've met quite a few of my State Senators and Assemblymen, and quite a few of them are either self-aggrandizing assholes or just pure, out-and-out, morons.  Honestly, I don't think a majority are corrupt.  Most of them are just too stupid to get away with corruption for more than a week or two — but they still feel obliged to take orders from those few who actually are smart enough to be corrupt.

It follows that a particular state's voting laws will favor the inclinations of the power brokers in that particular state, no matter what the state's political leanings.  There are a few extra restrictions on states (and/or counties) with histories of particularly blatant racism but, generally speaking, the power brokers have their way.

Every couple of years, we hear about a tossup — elections that must wait for the absentee ballots to be counted before a winner is decided.  It happened in my Congressional District in 2010.

Now, when you stop to think about it, it's a hell of a lot easier to perpetrate voter fraud by absentee ballot than by showing up in person and risking years in federal prison.  What are the Republican — or, for that matter, the Democrats — doing about that?

My mother died in 2005.  My guess is that she's still on the voter rolls, because expunging dead people from the rolls costs the state money — and states don't have a lot of money, and state politicians rather would spend it on winning the votes of living voters instead of my deceased mother.

I will not cast my deceased mother's vote, even though I know how she would have wanted to vote before she developed dementia and died — and even though her vote might help fight off an especially repulsive onslaught on my Congressman by Karl Rove and the billionaires of Crossroads GPS.

Why should I?  One way or the other, it's pretty much all in the bag.