Rahul Dave

# It's time for citizens to really unite My brain dump the morning after a big election in the US. The mid-term election was a blowout for Democrats. I am so happy today to be able to write those words. So many things to say, first a few notes. * Citizens United was the real loser in this election. And the missing ethics rules that allow members of the government to legally do insider trading, which they actually do, a lot of. A political job in Washington is worth real money, legally. * The TV here in the NYC area included local races in the Hudson Valley (where I live) and New Jersey, and they were vicious and on all the time. NYC itself not so much. * Often all the commercials in a single break were political. Some of them were so lame and sarcastic I thought they were actually ads for the competitor they were trying to get us to hate. * If money could have bought this election, it would have been a landslide for the Republicans. The ad in the Ohio governors election was over the top, a blame the victim campaign, so cynical, they openly dared the voters to be as depraved as they were. I hope that woke a lot of voters up. * We are not powerless, we actually are some of the most powerful people in the world. We the People are a co-equal branch of government along with the courts and executive. We should vote with the same sobriety as we expect our reps to vote. * When we think our elections are mere entertainment, we surrender that power to who had the best schtick or most entertaining ads. We act like the robots the elites depend on us to be. Our vote isn't a message, it's an act of government. * Already hearing pundits say basically "yeah we know Congress can't do anything" because for two years we had a Congress that wouldn't do anything. Now we have one that move and cancel the Iran War, for example, with a single vote to withdraw authorization (which was never given). * If only political pundits could handle little intricacies like sports pundits can. * I heard a podcast interview with Jamie Raskin by an editor at the New Yorker. It was disgusting. The reporter mostly he wanted him to say he would consider impeaching Trump, and of course that was the title of the story. If only he had been willing to let Raskin explain how different things are now, they have just elected a Congress that is ready to shake things up, and impeaching Trump might not be the fastest way to start putting things right, to building an America that has new better guardrails to prevent us from going around in circles. Why couldn't the New Yorker, of all pubs, leave space for him to explain, but nope, they want their freaking headline, and still very much need to be routed around. Raskin has to go direct more. We have a lot of work to do and that work will be done by the people, by us. This is the big gestalt the elites in the US haven't caught on to. The new tech lets people contribute to our country on an everyday basis, not just when the parties need money to run ads that we're now totally on to. I know I am an elite, but I also know people in high positions in the progressive world who could help by getting behind the open technology not owned by Musk or Zuck or Jeff or whoever, that will allow us to effectively organize. Now is the moment to do this, to make sure this victory doesn't slip away into the comatose blur that the MSM works so hard to keep us in.