Your Odds

So, you do the Alabama odds:

1.  You have better odds of having an accident where you hit some Chinese-tourist at 3 AM in Dothan.

2.  You have better odds of getting attacked by a bear.

3.  You have better odds of getting struck by lightning while painting your barn roof.

4.  You have better odds of Auburn betting Alabama by a score of 70 to 7.

5.  You have better odds of finding a single PhD-educated Republican single gal (age 40) who drinks beer from the bottle, smokes unfiltered cigarettes, and does her own brake-jobs.

The Super-Secret Trump Destruction Plan For Mail

I'm going to present the super-secret plan in full detail:

1.  All postal boxes will be removed completely.  Then all sorting machines will be disconnected.

2.  Mail will be dumped into canvas bags and delivered to a Utah warehouse, where it'll be bulk-loaded onto cargo planes, to be flown into China.

3.  Once in China, 66k US-hired Chinese will sort the mail manually.  With a 9-week delay built into the system, your ballot will be still in China in February of 2021. 

4.  This is all hush-hush, and only known by President Trump, the Postmaster General, and Trump's barber.

(fake news)

Democratic Convention: Night 2

Basically, with the clips added up....I watched a total of about 60 minutes.

Four observations:

1.  There's a real problem in generating hype and enthusiasm compared to a normal convention.  As they emerge out of this week, I seriously doubt that they get more than 2 or 3 points of a gain, and within a week....that's gone. 

I blame the digital way this was handled.....you just can't generate hype.

2.  Bill Clinton speaks?  Well....in a minor and short way.  They should have given him twice the talking time.

3.  Jill Biden's speech?  I give it three stars. 

4.  After everything wrapped up.....they came back around to viewers for night #1....where it lost a quarter of the audience from 2016. 

They need some magic to really pull up the numbers at this point.

Next Week Will Be Interesting

The Postmaster General agreed to meet next week...at the House Oversight and Reform Committee meeting.  What'll happen?  My expectations:

1.  He's going to guarantee them that he CAN'T guarantee anything unless it all moved by registered mail....meaning you get a note to go and pick up your note at the post office, you can track the letter each step of the way, and you go back there to mail the ballot....sending it either registered. 

2.  He's going to tell them a particular dead-line date that the ballot has to be mailed by (likely being around the 10th week of October).  If it's not in the system by that point, the expectations of coming back by the 3rd of November drastically decreases.

3.  The arguments by the Democratic members of this committee will reach a level, where trust in the post office to handle this....is zero.  Instead of giving people trust....they will in some way....make this a miserable expectation.

4.  He's going to tell the committee that fake ballots will probably occur, and he can't prevent that....nor can the committee do anything to prevent fake ballots.

5.  He's going to suggest that safety and security of post office operations are in jeopardy because of Antifa.  Then he'll suggest hiring over 50k private security folks for this period.....with Congress paying for four weeks of extra security. 

Forty Minutes of DNC Convention 'Frolics'

If you add up the video clips I watched of the opening night of the DNC Convention....it's about 35 to 40 minutes.

The general feeling?  It's like one of those Jerry Lewis telethons.....about 16 hours into the 'show'.

There is no drama.  There is no crowd.  Mostly just a collection of speeches.....mostly downsizing Trump....not pumping up Joe Biden.  Maybe those came later, but it just left a sour taste in my mouth.

If I had this live on TV?  Yeah....I'd probably be slipping over to the History Channel.

If it doesn't improve on the second night?  I'd just go and cancel out the 3rd and 4th night.  Whoever dreamed this up as a strategy.....screwed-up.

The Reality of Mail-In-Voting

Basically, you'd need to have all the ballots printed and ready to mail out by the later part of September.  That means handing the job over to the approval group of each state by 1 September and finalize the 'job' required.

1 September?  Well....that's roughly two weeks away.

No screw-ups in the process?  That's why I state the obvious....this needs to wrapped up at the printing plants by the 4th week of September, and handed to the postal system sometime in the week of the 15th of October.

The three debates?  Well, this comes into the game as well.  The first debate doesn't occur until 29 September.  The second would be 15 October.  The last would be 22 October.

Looking at the mailing business....you might as well cancel the 22 October debate because a high number of people would have mailed their ballot back by this point.

What if you wait until the 23rd of October to make this decision and mail the ballot?  The post office won't open until the 26th (Monday).  Could the postal system handle 70-odd million envelopes going out on the 26th and getting to the right address by 3rd of November?  I kinda doubt it.

The idea of Joe Biden having health issues, and Harris moving up, with a new VP?  State by state, this would need to be corrected on the ballots, before the massive printing or mail-out. 

Why Is the Postal System So F**ked?

Over the last month, with all the hype going on by the political folks....you are left with two impressions:

1.  The postal system is so capable....that you'd trust it with your voting apparatus.

2.  The postal system is so f**ked-up, that it'd ruin the 2020 election entirely.

So I'll offer these seven observations:

1.  You could mail a hundred breakable items from various points in the US....to one single address, and 99 of them would arrive in one piece.  You could bundle up a hundred ballots, and find that fifty of them reach the right people, and fifty disappear.  No rhyme....no reason....no statistical data, just plain luck.

2.  Lets be honest and admit that probably seventy-percent of the personnel for the postal system....are kind, professional and capable people.  The other thirty-percent probably ought to be 'clerking' at some gas station or serving coffee at the Waffle-Hut.

3.  Fedex and UPS wouldn't exist, if the postal system wasn't so screwed-up.

4.  Probably ten-percent of the population will tell you that they haven't been in a post office in five years.

5. Once you have an utter failure in the works (the day after the election)....how will people react to the post office system? You could have well over 50-million Americans all frustrated and angry.  People thinking that they can survive this?  They'd probably would be 'cancelled-out'.

6.  BLM and Antifa frustrated enough over the postal failure that they'd burn down a hundred post office buildings?  Carriers packing pistols?

7.  Postal vehicles hijacked in the days prior to the election....stealing hundreds of thousands of votes?

There's some serious events coming out of this whole chaos.