We've, cough, cough, wheez, gasp, upgraded our voting machines. We used to have optical scanners so there was a paper trail. The new machines have no paper trail. Worse, the machines used to check you in weren't completely working. Having already had my vote not count in these parts once, I'm not confident it will count this go 'round. But, I did at least try to minimize (by one!) the damage my neighbors doubtless inflicted.

If I had any lingering questions about what it must have been like to be a conscientious German in 1933, they were answered last night. I can't keep up this charade of being shocked at things like Donnelly (by any objective measure a Republican in a Democrat's suit) actually losing to a Mike Braun (by any objective measure a Neo-Nazi in Republican attire) or Beto losing to Ted. These Indiana folk are exactly who they appear to be: xenophobic, uneducated, untraveled, racists. That holds for roughly seven out of ten of them - not coincidentally Indiana is 80% White.

They are who we think they are: at their core they are very bad people. Getting more of them to vote will only underscore that simple fact. If you finally accept that they are very bad people at their core then everything that's happened begins to make a lot of sense. If you resist accepting that, then you're left with trying to explain why our very own Nuremburg Rallies hosted by Trump (like the one Monday in Fort Wayne, IN) are still so popular, why we tolerate allowing poor Brown children to be ripped from their mothers and placed into cages and why Green card holders are not allowed back into the country when they travel abroad, and so many other unconscionable things. There is no explanation absent the now all-too-evident fact that at their core, these are very bad people.

The Union may have won the battles of the Civil War, but in the battle for hearts and minds, the Confederacy clearly won in the so-called Heartland of America.