Greenville       Georgia is now a 45-45 tie between Trump and Biden.  Democrats are worried that students stuck at home won’t vote, the way they would in college.  My bet on that is that students stuck at home will use any excuse, including voting, to get out of the house.  Trump is screaming that the Attorney General needs to investigate Biden before the election, and Senator McConnell is passing notes to the White House saying don’t send me any stimulus bill before the election.  The last of Trump’s captive drug companies has pushed back its vaccine timeline, and the numbers are now saying it’s down to only 55% who are willing to take it now that it’s become a speedup.  Just another day in America!

Meanwhile, hoping for accountability some fine day in the future, maybe next year or sometime after that, two former legal eagles from different parties who served under Bush and Obama, are floating their own sort of post-Watergate reforms if sunshine breaks through the clouds.  Supposedly these guys have fifty different proposals but here’s some:

Among their ideas:

• Provide more authority and protection for future special counsels investigating presidents or other high-level officials and have them report their findings to Congress and the public rather than to the Justice Department.
• Prohibit presidents from pardoning themselves and amend the bribery statute to make it illegal to use the pardon power to bribe witnesses or obstruct justice.
• Bar presidents from managing or supervising private businesses or establishing blind trusts for their financial assets and require any business in which they have an interest to file public reports.
• Authorize inspectors general to investigate and report on reprisals or intimidation of journalists.
• Revise the authorization of force passed after Sept. 11, 2001, to prohibit humanitarian military intervention without additional votes by Congress and limit the use of nuclear weapons to self-defense in extreme circumstances.
• Ensure that the attorney general makes decisions on prosecutions involving the president or presidential campaigns, not the F.B.I. director, as happened during the Hillary Clinton email case.

A lot of that is inside-baseball and not everyone’s cup of tea, but my idea is simple as an antidote for pandemic-induced, economic and overall depression.  Win, lose, or draw, maybe it’s worth just thinking about the fact that “another world is possible” and making your own list of what needs to be done to lock the doors tightly against the horror we have been facing, so we don’t have to endure this nightmare again.

Hope is not a plan, but it’s something to hang on to now, so we can imagine a better future.