After the release of the response to Republican Chairman’s Nunes memo I think that it is past time for the GOP to lose their majorities in the House and the Senate.

Set aside that they have added 1-2 trillion dollars to the Federal debt.

Set aside that they feel Wells Fargo has been punished too harshly for its financial crimes against its own customers.

Set aside that hey have stripped away healthcare for people and slashed funding for mental health as the nation endures a protracted crisis of mass murder.

Set aside the border walls, the protectionism, the abandoning of international commitments, the blatant nepotism and corruption.

Those are important issues and with some issues on which people can reasonable disagree.

However, it is clear that Russia, our geopolitical advisories, have penetrated our political processes, attempted to manipulated our voters, and influence the outcome of our elections. By our intelligence community this is an accepted fact and yet the GOP wants to do nothing about it.

Chairman Nunes’ memo did nothing to the illuminate the dangers we face but instead attempt to muddy the waters and throw suspicion not at our attackers, the Russians, but the party in opposition to his.

By wide margins the legislature has passed sanctions to be enforced against the Russia for their cyber warfare and espionage operations within the United States and the Executive had implemented none of them. Yes the GOP helped pass those sanctions but as the President ignores them they remains silent.

The Russian launched a sophisticated, expensive, and target attack on our self-governance. It is the opinion of our intelligence agencies that this did not stop with the 2016 presidential election but rather the Russian operation continues with the goal of influencing this year’s elections. We must assume that they will continue this aggressive assault on our most basic freedom.

What possible domestic policy is more valuable and more important than defending our nation from foreign attack?

It is tragic that the GOP lashed themselves the Trump ship. They had opportunities to sink that vessel but cowered before his supporters and now in bailing out his troubled administration they do the Russians a favor.

They must go.

That’s a provocative question and let me put out here at the start I think Trump is a terrible person and in the 12 months of his administration our worst President. Yes I know some of you disagree and that’s your opinion we’re not here to debate the merits of the Trump presidency.

Here is my thought: if Trump had lost would the serious threat to our democracy from Russian meddling have been so exposed?

It is a fact widely held within our intelligence community that Russia seriously meddled in out election process. The recent Mueller indictment, which is but a small piece of a much larger and on going investigation, clearly demonstrates that the Russians were engaged in a deep, sophisticated, and intricate operation within American borders to influence our elections. (Yes, I know that there are some who feel that the Russian never expected Trump to win and that the operation was to undercut the administration of Hillary Clinton. I see no evidence to support that interpretation.)

Had Clinton won the Electoral College there would ben investigations into this matter but hamstrung by a hostile congress, fights over other policies, a general sense that it was not worth the time because everyone knows Trump couldn’t have won, and without the independence of a dedicated special prosecutor. These factors, only available under Trump’s victory, have accelerated the investigation and public disclosure of the Russian Ops.

You might think of this as the Bailystock & Bloom outcome of the election. By producing a hit instead of a flop they exposed their criminality and so it would seem for the Russians.

Now, because we are aware of the dangers there is not only a serious investigation into who know what and who did what, but there are thoughtful conversation about our election processes.

I think one of the things we must do to combat this and a number of associated ills if move to a strong national identity system There are candidates proposing using variations on public key encryptions for an ID Card and this is a good place to start. It is a place we would be much further from without the disastrous Trump Presidency.

When I took chemistry, both in high school and in college, a common warning from the professors was to ‘watch your units.’ Make sure that you tracked if the equations were in milligrams or whatnot and not lose track of those units, because mixing up units produced wildly erroneous results.

This is good advice in general. Always make sure that you are measure by the same methods and units otherwise you can’t compare things. A good example is unemployment.

Do you know what I have not heard from conservative talking heads and friends throughout the year of 2017? Labor Force Participation.

During the final years of the Obama administration, as unemployment fell, it was a quite common rebuttal from advocates on the right that that the raw unemployment figures were not the ‘true’ story and that one had to look at the terrible labor force participation, the percentage of the adult population that took part in wage labor to see that the Obama policies were actual failures covered-up by the falling unemployment figure.

Over the last year the Labor Force Participation rate has remained basically at the same level as it was during the last year of Obama’s presidency. Since now those on the right want to crow about a good economy they have changed out measuring sticks, throwing aside their former ‘truths.’

By the way this is in no way a fault that lies purely on the right. During the tail of Bush II’s administration I heard quite about ‘underemployment’ as the ‘true’ measure of the economy, and argument that vanished with the election of a Democratic president.

What’s really sad is how often these partisans will honestly forget that they ever used a different measure. With a new situation they’ll abandon their old certain truths for new certain truth that support their current position. This human failing is one of the great weaknesses in democracy, people rarely operate by purely rational means and that puts us at the whim of emotion, tribalism, and popularity.