The Electoral College will meet on Monday to declare Donald Trump the winner of the 2016 election. Sometimes, in order to get beyond an awful loss, you have to give up on the rationalizations by which you deny the extent of your defeat.

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George W Bush was one of our worst presidents, but he did one really good thing: in 2003, he established the “do-not-call-registry” to prevent telemarketers from besieging people like me who work at home with unwanted phone calls. Fine. And it worked and was a very popular program. But then telemarketers started to get around it – Brigid and her sisters of Hell from Cardholder Services began calling several times a day along with other deplorables offering to pay my credit card bills and increase my life span.

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I am not going to try to assess Fidel Castro’s historical significance. I’ll leave that to people who know the history of Latin America better than I do. But I want to make one historical and a personal comment.
The New York Times subheads its decent story about Castro, “The Man Who Brought the Cold War to the Western Hemisphere.” That’s entirely untrue. Well before Castro and Che Guevara stepped on the world stage, the U.S. was involved in overthrowing governments in Latin America on the grounds that they were too close to “communism.”

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I’m very leery of SLATE’s decision to publish projections beginning at 8 AM tomorrow of who is going to win the presidential election in so-called battleground states. They are teaming up with VoteCastr, one of these Silicon Valley startups, who claims to have devised extensive data networks to forecast results. Leave aside the question of whether the predictions by this latest band of hotshots will be accurate. Is SLATE setting a dangerous precedent by teaming up with them?

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It’s hard to look past the presidential election, or even the battle for the senate, but there are a few initiatives on the ballot that are significant. On election day, voters in Colorado will decide whether to create a single-payer health insurance system in their state that would replace both private insurance from employers and the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges. The vote will tell something about whether Americans in a relatively progressive state would now favor going beyond Obamacare to a system of “Medicare for all” like Bernie Sanders proposed in the primary. Based on what I’ve seen in Colorado, I’m not optimistic.

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In warning about voter fraud, Donald Trump is following in the footsteps of more respectable Republicans like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. For decades, Republicans have used charges of fraud to enact legislation that would make it more difficult for predictable Democratic constituencies (minorities, the young) to vote. A key battle this November will be the Secretary of State’s race in New Mexico. It’s a doozy, with a truly scary Republican candidate.

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Lenny Bruce was a “sick comic” from the 1950s and early 1960s who was arrested for drugs and obscenity and was appealing a four-month jail sentence when he died in 1965. He was a genius. One of his bits, about a comic who plays the London Palladium, perfectly sums up what has happened to Donald Trump in the fall election. (Click on the link to hear it.) It’s about Frank Dell, a third-rate comic who plays Las Vegas lounges, but who tells his agent he wants to play a “class room” like the London Palladium. The agent tries to discourage him, but Dell insists — “I’m going to murder these people” – and the agent gets him booked there.

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I am no good at deciding who won or lost debates. I react to them as a voter and not as a journalist. And I tend to fasten on things that don’t necessarily upset or thrill other voters. Here are two things that bothered me – not because they’ll determine the election, but because they could foreshadow trouble after the election.

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