It's becoming increasingly clear to Americans that the Republican Party only stands for one thing: the privilege and power of wealthy white men.

Over the last 40 years they have devised increasingly byzantine rules to prevent low income whites and people of color from voting and are now trying to outright throw out ballots in Detroit, Philadelphia and Atlanta.

America is confronting a crisis like we haven't seen since 1930, and, just as happened during the Republican Great Depression (yes, that's what they called it in the 1930s), the GOP is committed to making it worse.

The Republican Party's latest 2020 scam gives Trump a tiny chance of hanging onto the White House while doing massive, permanent damage to American democracy and, as if they consider it a bonus, kneecapping and, in some cases, killing working class and poor Americans.

America's rightwing billionaires comfortably hang out on their massive estates, giving instant Covid tests to their live-in servants, while using the word "freedom" to describe their lifestyle in the rightwing media they own or support.

All across America today, millions of people are terrified. And it's not just fear of getting a deadly COVID illness that often leads to strokes, dementia, long-term heart disease, and kidney failure.

Over 30 million Americans are unemployed, and because of repeated Republican cuts, the unemployment benefits for many run out at the end of the year. Since early summer, we've been adding another 700,000 or so people to those rolls every month.

It turns out that Donald Trump was right: the election was rigged. He would know, of course, because he and Lewis DeJoy were the ones who rigged it.

The Founders' greatest fear, when it came to the president, was that a man would be installed in the office who was in debt to, or loyal to a foreign government. It's why they put the Foreign Emoluments ban in the Constitution.

Jared Kushner visited with the Saudi's and the UAE just before they blockaded Qatar; within a few months an investment fund heavily financed by Qatar gave Kushner the billion dollars he desperately needed to save his failing real estate empire, and the blockade ended.

Republican threats to have individual states choose electors for Donald Trump even though their citizens voted for Joe Biden are not about this election; they're about putting a fascist in the White House in 2024.

And the reason Republican elected officials across the country are letting this drag out, even though they know Trump has no chance because Biden's margin of victory is so large, is to see how far they can push this in anticipation of 2024. This is a test.

Either he's dragging this out so he can raise money to line his own pockets, or he's coordinating with the billionaire donors who largely own a number of Republican state legislatures to steal the election. Or both.

The Constitution says that individual states' legislators can award their electoral votes to whomever they choose; it just takes an act of the state's legislature, in most states signed by the governor. It's never happened, but it is constitutional.

Meanwhile, election law and practical reality say that Trump can only continue to raise money from his donors if the election is still "live": so long as he doesn't concede.

We're coming out of one of the darkest times in American history, certainly the darkest time in the memory of most living Americans.

Fear and hate have been the dominant national emotions during the last two Republican presidencies. They were used to lie us into a war in Iraq, and to tear us apart from each other for the last four years.

Joe Biden becoming president means that we can focus on making life better for American citizens, rather than trying to demonize each other.

When Donald Trump first decided to run for president, he confided to friends that his real goal was to get publicity for his brand and squeeze a larger payment out of NBC for his TV show. He even bragged that he'd be the first person to make money running for the White House.

Once he unexpectedly won, he turned that into a business opportunity, redirecting over $100 million of government money into his own properties and businesses.

Now, with the possibility of losing the presidency, he's setting up his Plan B, his next business opportunity.

There's a reason this election is this close. The old saying is, "Own the media, own the country," and this election proves it true.

Democrats have been totally stupid when it comes to the information wars. While Republicans built an enormous national "talk to people all day, every day, all year" media infrastructure, Democrats only pour money into advertising once every four years.

America needs an absolute right to vote, like most other major democracies.

One legacy of slavery is that our Constitution does not contain an absolute right to vote for all citizens who have achieved the age of majority.

Fascists build walls, like they did around East Germany. Donald Trump is building a new, unscalable wall around the White House today, and the Republican party has spent the past four years celebrating a wall on our southern border.

Fascists divide and imprison people based on ideology and race. Trump and the Republicans have put children in cages after tearing them away from their mothers, and built out a private for-profit prison system to hold refugees of color.

On April 18, Bob Woodward recorded Jared Kushner saying that Trump had taken control away from the doctors and was going to open the country back up. But why then? What was happening right around that time?

Trump's official national emergency declaration came on March 13, and most of the country shut down or at least went partway toward that outcome. The economy crashed and millions of Americans were laid off, but saving lives was, after all, the number one consideration.

Trump doesn't care how many people in Omaha were stranded for hours in the freezing cold, over 3 miles from the nearest road or parking lot, after he's left his rally, putting some in the hospital. And he clearly doesn't care how many people die of Covid.

One of the defining characteristics of a sociopath is that they view themselves as the only "real" humans on the planet, and everybody else is basically a prop in the amazing story of their lives.