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I'm still struggling to come to terms with what the heck happened last week. The cute moniker "Red Ripple" gained popularity, but it's ending up like the "Red Repose." Reuters News has a live feed with maps (rollover for details) and stats of the election: https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-EL ... vkdgzdqpm/. Staggering that in 2022 we need something like that because a whole lot of states simply can't manage to efficiently and accurately count votes.

So far, the dims gained one seat in the Senate, and the Republicans lost one; the outstanding races, like Georgia, are still important, but with Kamala still there doing whatever it is that she does, the Senate remains in the dims' control (please, SCOTUS, nobody die or retire). The dims gained one state governor; the Republicans lost one. The House is at 204 dims, 211 Republicans. The Republicans flipped 16 seats so far, but the dims flipped 5. Mathematically, even the House isn't a done deal yet.

If the dims somehow get 14 more House seats, I'll have to go back and re-read Revelation because I'm certain that would be one of the signs of the Apocalypse that I've forgotten. The Four Horsemen--Biden, Harris, Schumer, and Pelosi--would stay right where they are for another two years, and all we need to do to pretend we can tell the future is to take the damage the Biden administration has done to the country in the first half of his term and multiply it by two. If we don't take the House to be able to apply some measure of check-and-balance, it's going to be apocryphal...and then even if 2024 is successful the road back to prosperity and sanity will be a long one.

BTW, after literally and blatantly buying the youth vote with the unconstitutional student loan bailout, any bets that they don't fight the recent court decisions all that hard? They can do some shadow boxing, say they tried, and let it go away and not pile-on that huge amount onto an already huge deficit.

I know my grandfather wouldn't recognize what's happened to the relationship of geography and votes with the massive urbanization of the country. In 1950, 64% of the population--and the votes--lived in the concentrated urban population centers. Today, that number is 83%...and is expected to increase close to 90% by 2050. I found this data informatics map on Twitter that gives a good visual of where the votes come from:

Didn't want to start a new topic, and didn't see any better existing topic than this one. So...

Ran across this website, sort of by accident: https://www.usdebtclock.org/. May be old news to everyone but, wow, does it pack in a lot of dynamically updated information. And I mean, a lot.

I'm not very bright--just ask any of my democrat-voting friends--but this web feed should be mentioned by every Republican running for office. In all of those numbers, a starkly dangerous picture is painted.

For example, the current U.S. federal debt-to-GDP ratio is 125.9%. If you throw in state/local spending as well, the total debt-to-GDP ratio is 140.09%.

Now, I was never a presidential advisor in economics, but it doesn't take a genius to figure out that if, on an annual basis, your debt is 140% of your revenue...well, you're in very big trouble.

The federal debt-to-GDP ratio is shown historically for three years for comparison:

• 1960: 52.3%
• 1980: 34.68%
• 2000: 55.9%

The U.S. has a total employed workforce smaller now than it did in 2000...even though the population now (not including the millions of undocumented aliens who have crossed our border under Biden) is 333.3 million and in 2000 it was 282.2. So the actual workforce since 2000 has decreased 0.5% while the population has increased by 18.1%.

The official unemployed number is 5.72 million; the actual unemployed number is 10.45 million. There are 34.65% more people receiving Medicaid than are receiving Medicare. Of our population of 333.3 million, an estimated 40.82 million are living at the federal poverty level, 12.2%. Statistically, 1 in every 9 people you see is at the federal poverty level, and many living on the government dole. There are over 38.5 million food stamp recipients, 11.5% of the total population.

The U.S. has over $7.48 trillion in debt held by foreign countries. The U.S. trade deficit with China alone is over $416 billion. The federal government has over $172.153 trillion in unfunded liabilities.

All of this while Biden tells us that the economy is strong and that inflation is just in our imaginations.

Only 16 days until election day! Urge everybody you can to cast their ballots. And let us pray that millions of dead dimocrats don't cast theirs...