Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/11/30/school-time-rock-electoral-c.html
Tom the Dancing Bug, IN WHICH “School Time Rock” explains the Electoral College system… and just might save our country!
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Sorry guys but unless the FBI (lol!) uncovers that the Ruskies really did hack the e voting machine totals in WI, MI and PA, a ‘faithless elector’ win for Clinton would start the crazies actually shooting up the joint for Rage Mango (as my kids call him). I dread the next four years… at least I can flee to Canada!
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Approvingly quoting Alexander Hamilton, the guy who wanted America to be ruled by a dictator-for-life, seems a bridge too far.
Once again, let’s learn the lesson here: Trump is the pumpkin medal we’ve earned for having a dysfunctional political system that failed to respond to a crumbling America. Instead of melting down, blaming the Russians, and hoping for the dead shadow of Clinton to come save us, let’s move the fuck on.
The only possible way of stopping Trump from destroying this country utterly is building a viable, honest, democratic political party. That means repudiating Clinton, neoliberalism, and the horrific, self-serving party apparatus that has turned elections into an empty game. It means repudiating the system of lobbying and backdoor deal-making that has thoroughly rotted Washington.
This means that instead of pining for a repudiation of the result of the election by unaccountable authority, we need to be fighting Howard Dean and his ilk, who will otherwise be happy to blindly pursue their own power at our expense.
Or we can cry in our soup for the next two years, mutter about what should have been, and watch as the country slides into a hole.
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Sure, we’re all nurturing this hope that the Electoral College could save us, but the reality is it’s a bunch of Trump patsies and it has been this way for a long time. Let’s stop pretending this is a real option. No one wishes more than me that we could prevent him from coming into office, but I think the Electoral College putting in Clinton is a pipe dream.
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Bolling’s a genius.
Can anymutant fit the lyrics in that strip to a melody? Feels like it might have been intended for “Modern Major General”, but I can’t quite get them to mesh… maybe it’s something else?
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In other words, we are royally fucked.
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[quote=“astazangasta, post:3, topic:90339”]
Approvingly quoting Alexander Hamilton, the guy who wanted America to be ruled by a dictator-for-life, seems a bridge too far.[/quote]
I think you might want to do a bit more research into both Hamilton and the significance of the Federalist Papers which the quote came from. You’re saying Hamilton, George Washington’s right hand man, Founding Father, one of the most prominent promoters of the Constitution and its ratification, and co-author of the Federalist Papers, the most definitive document for interpreting the Constitution, shouldn’t be quoted on Constitutional matters.
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I think that very few people are actually hoping that the result of recounts is a President Clinton at this point. Even her supporters largely feel that overturning the projected electoral count right now would be utter chaos and result in a discredited Democratic President and possible actual guns-a-blazin’ fights. To my mind, the goal is to discredit Trump himself even further. To show how few people actually support him, to take away any thought of a “mandate”, and to cause him to lose as much face and power as possible.
He’s claimed repeatedly that he only lost the popular vote due to massive widespread voter fraud. I support the idea of proving him wrong as definitively as possible.
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My guess would be an existing Schoolhouse Rock song, but the obvious ones I’ve looked at (“Preamble,” “Send Your Vote to College,” “I’m Just a Bill”) don’t seem to fit.
ETA: I don’t think it actually fits a song, just based on the meter. I’ve counted the syllables per line, and get (paired by rhyme):
22
23
20
34
31
21
The first pair I can see, but having one line have half again as many syllables as the line it rhymes with? That’s a lot of extra syllables to cram in. And the next pair again, but reversing the which line has more syllables?
I don’t think this was meant to match up to a song at all.
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This was done as an addition of the re-release of the Schoolhouse Rock videos to DVD:
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Easily said, not so much done.
Which, should it happen, will come too late to save anything. Even if they instantly got their shit together, they wouldn’t be in a position to impact anything until after Cheeto Mussolini and the Republican congress have destroyed the social safety net, put one or more reactionaries into the Supreme Court, destroyed the US’s international relations, installed a kleptocracy and destroyed voting rights which would prevent the newly reformed Democrats from coming back into power. The recount fantasy exists (mostly as acknowledged fantasy) precisely because of how completely and permanently fucked we’ll be if tRump takes office.
Plus, the myth of voter fraud has been used to disenfranchise voters - imagine what a lie this big, if left unchallenged, would be used to do in that regard. I mean, I think they’ll still at least try to disenfranchise Democratic voters to stay in power, but if we acknowledge the lie, they’ll have a harder time doing it.
It is. We’ve already seen one member who said he could not, in conscience, vote for tRump resign his position instead.
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Constructionalist interpretation of the Constitution is the legal equivalent of the Society for Creative Anachronism. Grab your quill pen and tricorn hat and pretend you understand Ben Franklin’s world and what he intended.
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I’m not sure how you intend to do that. Your mountains of definitive evidence vetted by qualified experts are meaningless against a tweet from a conspiracy theorist.
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Double kudos for legit inclusion of “Ben Franklin” and “SCA” into the same post!
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I hate to be a spammer here, and it’s not my intent…as I already posted this same thing in another Boing Boing article. But here goes.
There is a movement I only discovered 2 days after the election: The National Popular Vote. 11 states have already enacted it. In essence, it says that instead of handing all of a state’s electoral votes to that state’s popular vote winner, the votes go the NATIONAL popular vote winner instead. Once the equivalent of 270 electoral votes agree to this plan, NPV becomes law in those states.
Look folks…there is NOTHING in the Constitution that says all of a state’s Electoral vote must go the state’s popular vote winner. Nothing. A state may dispense its Electoral votes as it pleases. Sooo…why not give those votes to the national vote winner?
Give it a look: http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/
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Excellent work, and I’m sure you’re right. Thanks for trying!
Ever listen to mid-period Elvis Costello? 
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The more rational arguments you make for why this should happen, the more distress you are storing up for when it 100% inevitably doesn’t.
It’s like those sovereign citizens who go on about how congress made some procedural mistake in 1822 that means income tax was never legal, which is of course very interesting, but do you have any other interests to occupy you for 15-20 years?
Yes, and then he went on to explain how that was because Turmp isn’t bible enough, which gives a clue as to the kind of person Republicans have been putting in these purely symbolic chairs. If it were physically possible, I’d worry about them electing someone worse than Turmp.
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“…right person for the job”?
What country was this cartoon intended for?
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Except that the SCA doesn’t have significant support in legal circles, unlike originalism, as personified on the US supreme court by Thomas, and lately, Scalia. It is faintly ridiculous, but scoff at it at your peril.
No, I’m sorry, you are not. You are republicanly fucked. You fought a war over it, remember.
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