We’ve only got a couple of days left before all Hell breaks loose… Although my hope is that it really doesn’t, we all know that this next week is going to be one for the record books. False claims will be made, fingers will be pointed, offenses taken, words taken out of context…

I’ve written about this before, but I thought it might help to offer it up again, as we count the hours until the polls close on Tuesday, particularly if you haven’t entirely made up your mind how you’re going to cast your vote. It’s kind of an exercise in evaluation, and it’s very individual.

Whenever I approach a candidate, I ask myself a simple question: What am I going to have to fight them over? In other words, where do they stand on issues most important to me?

Since we’ve allowed our Masters to dictate the choice of candidates, we will be obliged to vote for the candidate we find least objectionable instead of voting for someone we actually like, so I will put together a list of those issues and ideas each candidate has expressed, and figure out if – and how hard – I’m going to need to fight them on it, weighting each issue by its importance to me. And I do this for every race on my ballot. Then, the candidate with the least number of hot-button issues on the “Fight List” will likely get my vote. But not always…

That’s a little tougher to do this year since Harris has steadfastly avoided any policy questions that might enlighten us as to what direction she’s going to take on a multitude of issues. So, we only have her history to guide us, and it is not a pretty picture to someone like me, who is pretty much a Constitutional “originalist.”

Trump, on the other hand, has made his positions on most issues quite clear – if he’s not just saying what he thinks people want to hear –– and to me, that’s not a pretty picture, either.

A snapshot of a few examples…

Harris I’d have to fight on the 2nd Amendment – tooth and nail. FYI, “mandatory buyback” is just a pretty little euphemism for “confiscation.” Harris would ban all civilian firearm ownership if she could. Hell, she’d repeal the 2nd Amendment entirely, by executive order, if she thought she could get away with it. She’d whittle away at several other Amendments as well – the 1st wouldn’t look anything like how our framers wrote it if she had her way.

Of course, Trump’s views of the Constitution don’t seem to be all that friendly, either. The 2nd Amendment is safer with him than it is with Harris, but his record there isn’t exactly pristine, either. And his rhetoric about firing squads and being a “dictator on the first day” casts a chill up the spine – his revised 1st Amendment wouldn’t look like anything Madison or Jefferson wrote, either. At times he really does sound like a fascist as he plays to his base…

Harris seems to think corporations print money that can then be taxed. She ignores the fact that corporations are legal fictions that cannot create wealth, they can only funnel it through their hierarchy. Any money a corporation controls comes from sales, loans, and investments, which means it’s the customers supplying the money that pays the bills – including taxes. You can bet that any new taxes levied on a corporation will increase prices of their products, virtually dollar-for-dollar. For the most part, then, WE pay the taxes levied on corporations! But she ignores this to make it sound like she’s making them “pay their fair share.” She’s just taxing the same dollar – our income – twice, sometimes three times.

Trump, being in business, has a slightly better grip on the subject – but only slightly. Let’s not disregard the fact that he’s filed bankruptcy what, 8 times, and is apparently several billion dollars in debt at the moment, including having bills from his campaign 4 years ago that are still unpaid. Most of the “greatest people” he hired before are now on record opposing his candidacy. His proposed tariffs will increase consumer prices, too; tariffs are not always the “punishment” he makes them out to be; the Koreans or Chinese or whoever aren’t necessarily going to be particularly hurt by them, but the American consumer will be.

Climate… Yes, I understand and do not attempt to deny that our world’s climate is changing, warming, becoming less stable. We can debate the cause, but the cause no longer matters and the debate only distracts from the need to act – and that’s by design. What we should be doing is try to help Mom set things back on track, but we’re not. If she has to, Mom – Mother Nature – will swat us arrogant humans back to the stone age in order to restore the balance. A Trump White House will stymie the small efforts being made to help the natural process, but a Harris White House would be friendlier to those efforts – and throw a ton of taxpayer money at it because that’s what Big-Government Democrats do when faced with a problem, instead of actually working to resolve it…

And then we can talk about character…

I plan to expand on these issues, and others, in future posts. And feel free to disagree with my assessments; as I said at the top, this evaluation is very individual; there are no wrong answers as long as you’re being honest with yourself. But you should understand, now, why I’d much rather have had Gary Johnson on the ballot again. There was only one issue on his platform I had a problem with…