World: please celebrate for us! (But not Vlad.)

Many factors are at work in the drama that’s unfolding this week, and maybe the least important player is a whining toddler who will rant at at Joint Base Andrews, Wednesday morning, screaming for attention after running around the White House prying the letter “J” off keyboards and leaving doobies in the ventilation ducts. There will be worse.* And just-in-case, I’ve urged that Biden, Harris and Pelosi keep distant (social and precautionary) from each other, while offering us all words of hope that America is back, baby.

Three groups will matter a lot, now and for weeks to come: foreign friends, foreign and domestic enemies… and nerds. I’ll get to Vladimir Putin and his fear of renewed western skill, in a bit. but first, here’s a call for our friends around the world to celebrate for us.

== Dancing in the Streets ==

To our allies around the world and to all friends of freedom, enlightenment, science and progress -- please turn out, the Wednesday.  Our domestic, home-grown enemies of progress -- many of them dear neighbors lured into furious madness by Fox/Sinclair/Goebbels liars, far more than by that pathetic toddler -- have triggered immune response by our protective services, locking down the American Capital and other cities when Joe Biden takes the oath of office, even more than we're compelled by a Trump-amplified pandemic.  

As  a result, Americans won't be pouring into the streets to celebrate nearly as much as we want to. But YOU, our allies in wanting an enlightened, forward-looking, fact-seeing and decently-just world, YOU can celebrate for us!

We ask that you fill your most famous streets with flags and balloons and signs that congratulate not just Joe Biden but all of us, including you fellow members of the Great Enlightenment Experiment!  Oh, stay safely masked and distanced! But please, make a good show of welcoming America back.

Because we need encouragement, right now! It truly would help Joe & Kamala, a lot. And also because, well, a dynamic and forward-looking, scientific-creative and generous USA is still necessary, if we want a civilization worthy of the stars. 

Certainly our enemies think so, given how hard they have striven to bring us down. Which brings us to...

== I wouldn’t be in Vlad’s shoes ==

I hope I’m wrong. I pray that I am wrong. But given the nearly 100% perfect record of Trumpian Republicans betraying the West and giving the Kremlin everything is wants (offer me large wager stakes on that: I will own your house), tearing down our sciences and alliances, weakening US entrepreneurship, waging war against all fact-using professions and instigating civil war, I have to worry whether the quarter million men and women in our security and intel agencies are even ready to teach Vladimir Putin that it’s time to back off.

1. For four years the top political-appointee slots atop those agencies have been people of at-best questionable qualification or loyalty. I have no doubt that skilled professionals isolated/cauterized the worst of them. But it is quite possible that an evisceration or rot-from-above has plunged deep into the ranks of those whose skill and professionalism won the Cold War and the War on terror, while treasonous, Sinclair agitprop demoralized them with slanders like “deep state.”

2. Putin is desperately getting in final licks. Yesterday he pulled out of the Open Skies Treaty that Trump formally exited a couple of months ago.  I expected (and obviously so did Vlad) that Biden would rejoin almost instantly (along with the Paris Accords on climate) since the Open Skies Treaty VASTLY favored Europe and the West and Putin long chafed over allowing NATO planes to crisscross Russia. Giving Putin an excuse to quick-exit that treaty - and the Intermediate Forces Agreement and others - was among the countless favors performed for him by the Kremlin’s White House agent. 

ALAS, not a single news report (that I’ve seen) has looked at this matter of timing. But watch. Don’t be distracted by Trump’s sudden tsunami of pardons! Vlad will do as many last-minute sabotages as Trump, these last few days.

3. On the other hand, Vlad’s got to be nervous. Surely some corner of our ‘deep state’ has been un-suborned, preparing options to offer the new president. Ways to - in some measured degree - at least smack the relabeled (but almost identical in staff, goals and methods) Soviet KGB across the snoot and say “back off!”  Oh, how wonderful - for example - if the Russian people were suddenly to see how much of their nation is now owned by “ex” Soviet commissars, now relabeled as billionaire oligarch mafia dons.

Okay. Revenge doesn’t interest the mature… and we count on Joe to be mature and judicious. So I expect to be frustrated and angry at his levels of restraint! Because… well… I am not ‘mature.’

4. I’ve spoken relentlessly about what simply has to be the elephant in the room, in DC. What I expect will be revealed as a mountain of blackmail.  We all saw in the recent Borat movie how trivially easy it is to lure many males into kompromat traps, and Russian spy services are much more adept at it than Sacha Baron Cohen. They have been doing it since the 1800s.  Elsewhere I warn those newly arriving in DC to be wary! 

If I’m right, then no event would so dramatically reverse our current troubles than a tidal wave of light. Some of the most blatant examples, for whom there is no other conceivable explanation than blackmail - Graham, Cruz, Rubio, Collins and Anthony Kennedy - could at any moment turn their legacy from zero to hero, by helping turn the tables on their tormentors. But don’t expect that. At least not till Biden establishes a Truth & Reconciliation Commission.

5. Extending that more generally, Putin knows his edifice will collapse if the West gets good intel. It's hard to retaliate or deter the current wave of relentless Muscovite attacks when we are blind! Part of that blindness will be solved when our defenders are no longer hampered by the quislings who were appointed over them by a Putin-blackmailed shill. 

But that leaves out an even more significant factor. That HALF of our good intel during the Cold War came from defectors, who would regularly even the playing field by bringing over vast floods of information, counterbalancing excellent KGB spycraft and our disadvantages as an open society.

==The vital importance of the moral high ground ==

During the Cold War, defectors were attracted by three things. We offered:

1) Safety

2) Good prospects

3) The moral high ground.

I’ve tried to explain this - repeatedly - to large audiences at CIA, fer gosh sakes!** - how the patterns of FSB/Putin actions all fit an overall aim of demolishing western alliances (Trump accomplishment #1) plus systematically toppling all three pillars that brought us recurring waves of defectors from the USSR. 

To that end, 'botched' assassinations of Russian dissidents were actually perfectly executed, achieving terror in potential defectors. 

Above all, the Trumpian campaign to crush and despoil the US moral high ground has been Putin's greatest accomplishment….

…but that victory can be reversed if our friends around the world do that one thing - both for us and for themselves and the planet and their children and the future:

Celebrate for us! 

Show the world that you know Donald Trump was an aberration! That the confederate side of our recurring American fever is and always has been a minority of fervid lunacy and when the blue is back, we can resume being a scientific, progress-seeking, problem-solving, egalitarian beacon and partner in making a better world.

And the forces of evil, trying to re-impose 6000 years of wretched, failed rule-by-oligarchy will fade under waves of cleansing light.

——

*Rent the first episode of the Kiefer Sutherland TV series DESIGNATED SURVIVOR. 

** And yes I am regularly invited back.

At the heart of the matter... Ukraine, Rapture, and Walken's dazzling prophecy

And the drama continues. Let's set aside the news that Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz will be Trump's defenders, nailing the coffin of those asserting that the Clinton impeachment "Starr Chamber" was anything but utterly biased... the sole whine that Republicans now hurl at any investigation of them. No, let's dial even deeper.

 At the heart of the impeachment imbroglio seems to be...“Trump’s animosity toward Ukraine.” 

One theme that runs through almost all of the accounts from witnesses who testified before House lawmakers is President Trump’s unyielding loathing of the former Soviet republic, which dates to his earliest days in the White House. “He just hated Ukraine,” one former White House official said.  Why? You might ask.  Well, for starters, Trump campaign manager - and now imprisoned felon - Paul Manafort was a mafia fixer for Viktor Yanukovich, Putin’s puppet Ukraine president, who was ousted by a popular revolution that – yes – got some support from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and George Soros. 

To Vladimir Putin, this was a body blow, almost as bad as the fall of the USSR itself (which VP bemoans as the 'greatest tragedy of the 20th Century.') Don't take my word; actually read Putin's speeches on the matter. The 'stealing' of Ukraine from Russia's sphere of influence was an unforgivable act of war by the West, despite the Ukrainian people's will on the matter. It had to be avenged, first in the 2016 U.S. election, but then...

Of the countless services to his master that Trump pursued, one of the foremost was helping Vlad with this grudge.

== The Treason is Getting Utterly Explicit ==

“Russia has reinvented itself as a bastion of Christian values in a world beset by relativism and godlessness. As a result, conservative Christians gathering at the World Congress of Families are looking to Putin to protect Christianity from the West.”  

Yep. After 70 years spent futilely trying to suborn the U.S. left, which generally saw through all the faux-egalitarian Leninist crap, Putin and his fellow commissars and KGB agents just dropped all the hammer-sickle stuff and re-branded themselves as billionaire-Christian mafia-oligarchs. And that was all it took, in order to hypnotize the entire U.S. right. What a contrast.

"In western Europe, many people believe that the West is collapsing and all civilisation is threatened by Islam, by demography, and by democracy…What they try to pretend is that there is only one country where Western civilisation is well and alive and thriving, and that's Russia." … Once dismissed as fringe extremists by the political elite, the WCF now counts friends amongst the leaders and politicians swept to power by the populist wave in Europe and the U.S.

“Vice President Mike Pence and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson were originally scheduled to address the conference, but their names were removed from a list of speakers without explanation.”… "Among the members of the WCF is the Family Research Council, an anti-LGBT group with longstanding ties to Pence. "It is a geopolitical and ideological battleground," said Kreko, and remarked that the event was a message from "pro-Russian forces in Moldova that the U.S. conservative right and Russia together can save the world from this plague of liberalism and tolerance." reports Newsweek. 

Then there's Mike Pompeo, openly saying that he's biding time till the Rapture, when 99% of Americans will be consigned to living torment, then eternal damnation, followed by a permanent end to all democracy, diversity, ambition, discovery, curiosity, freedom... an end to all new generations of children... and an end to the United States of America. And yes, although that's not a direct quote, it is exactly what he means.

== It's fragging obvious ==

I doubt any pundit anywhere will take this interpretation. But I believe one reason that Trump intends to pardon - and even promote - soldiers convicted in military courts of war crimes is to drive a wedge between the U.S. military officer corps (USMOC) and the non-commissioned ranks. Putin-Murdoch-etc. know that the USMOC is the 3rd best-educated clade in American life. Moreover, the officers — while conservative in demeanor and behavior — remain deeply committed to science, fact-using and the rule of law, all of which are being warred-upon by the New Oligarchy. 

(Retired officers provide the largest group of new Democratic candidates who have been taking territory in purple and red districts.)

Indeed, the thing I fear most about a second Trump term is that interference in the promotion process will start to have major effects, as these deeply non-political men and women - devoted to the Constitution - are chivvied and harried beyond forbearance. But the scariest angle is how they will also have to start watching their own backs, if Trumpism sinks talons deeply into the non-commissioned ranks.

Doubt this? I know officers who report that the TVs in the noncom ready rooms are always… always… tuned to Fox News. Ponder that.

== Is Civil War pending? ==

I cannot urge you too strongly to read the linked article from The Atlantic's special issue on "Civil War." Here's a blip from How America Ends, by Yoni Appelbaum, who shows why the right is so desperate to cheat and grip power, in the face of demographic collapse:

 “A conservatism defined by ideas can hold its own against progressivism, winning converts to its principles and evolving with each generation. A conservatism defined by identity reduces the complex calculus of politics to a simple arithmetic question—and at some point, the numbers no longer add up.”

And: “When a group that has traditionally exercised power comes to believe that its eclipse is inevitable, and that the destruction of all it holds dear will follow, it will fight to preserve what it has—whatever the cost.”

Before you gloat over the apparent intention of the Republican Party to self-destruct at a gibbet of fanaticism, consider a sobering historical correlation and danger sign. The Fox/Putin systematic destruction of moderate conservatism has implications, as Appelbaum points out:

“In his recent study of the emergence of democracy in Western Europe, the political scientist Daniel Ziblatt zeroes in on a decisive factor distinguishing the states that achieved democratic stability from those that fell prey to authoritarian impulses.

“The key variable was not the strength or character of the political left, or of the forces pushing for greater democratization, so much as the viability of the center-right. A strong center-right party could wall off more extreme right-wing movements, shutting out the radicals who attacked the political system itself….  

“If groups that traditionally have enjoyed privileged positions see a future for themselves in a more democratic society, Ziblatt finds, they will accede to it. But if “conservative forces believe that electoral politics will permanently exclude them from government, they are more likely to reject democracy outright.””

This is just another reason to be ready with an olive branch to offer any and all ‘RASRs’ who are willing to renounce their movement’s fealty to mafia-oligarchy, and who will help re-establish the primacy of facts and fact professions. 

(And I have mentioned especially Utah Republicans. They will never be liberal Democrats, so don't ask it. But like Sen. Mike Lee and others, they are realizing that the version of conservatism offered by Putin, Fox and the MAGA inciters is not compatible with theirs. Most Red States and GOP pols and pundits have terrible record score vastly worse than blue ones. Will Utahns form the nucleus of a clean, honest, and fact-friendly conservatism? One can dream.)

Facts matter. And the talons of foreign despots must be taken off our institutions. All else is negotiable! But without those two things, we are forced to accept a bitter truth. That sane conservatives have turned a blind eye to their duty, to country, civilization and even conservatism. At which point, we’ll just have to save all of those things, ourselves.

And yes, Appelbaum covers a few of the points I make in POLEMICAL JUDO. How nice to be a wee bit less lonely.

== Looking back ==

Of all Christopher Walken schticks, it wasn't the infamous SNL "Cow Bells" scene that most rang true. It was playing the fervently anti-communist dad in Blast from the Past who, emerging from 30 years in a bomb shelter, asks his son (Brendan Fraser): "So we're supposed to believe that one day the Moscow Politburo guys just threw up their hands and said 'We surrender'?"

"That's about it, Dad."

Walken shakes his head and sighs: "You've got to hand it to them."

At the time, I (like everyone) thought this a cute little joke on dad's paranoia. Who knew it would turn out to be a terrifying prophecy! That many of the same conspiratorial commissars who schemed against us during the cold war would smoothly convert themselves (with help from Bushes) into billionaire "oligarchs" still using a virtually unchanged KGB, still seeking to destroy the West.

All of the Russoligarchs who Fox/Murdoch/Kochs now adore grew up reciting Leninist slogans and their leader called the fall of the USSR "history's greatest tragedy," yet we're to believe they all became freedom-lovers? Yes the leopard changed its spots, but its claws? Before, it was a criminal gang under a guise of elevating workers. Now, it's a gang - largely the same gang - openly bragging mafia-aristocratic rule. Big diff?

It is! Reiterating the point until some of you start spreading it: for seventy years, they tried using Marxist incantations to suborn the American Left, and almost entirely failed. But as soon as they dropped the hammer and sickle symbols and egalitarian slogans in favor of billionaire-mafia stuff, the U.S. Right falls all over itself, throwing themselves on their knees to betray America and cater to every Putin whim.

Shatter our alliances and sciences? Sure! Attack all the intel, FBI and military officers who fought the Cold War, dissing 500,000 of our finest as "deep state"? Whatever you say boss! Wreck any sense of fact or accountability and devastate our rule of law while making a mockery of U.S. justice by appointing pre-blackmailed shills as judges? Sure, anything the politburo commissars... I mean Godfather Putin... says.

Reminder. Watch this scene again, as Putin greets his co-owner of Fox News, MBS. And notice the puppet entering the room in the background. Then watch the grin as he greets his master, while other western leaders know what they are looking at. The winner of the new cold war, destroyer of NATO and puppetmaster for the American fall.

Oh, Christopher Walken had it right.

You've got to hand it to them.

== A roundup of worthwhile articles. ==

 1) How Ukraine has benefited from the recent attention and is shaping up not to fail, despite Putin's machinations. 

2) How Barr & Perry and so many other members of this cabal openly call Trump the anointed of God and are jabbering Book of Revelation stuff more openly than ever.

3) Russians have been quietly seeding political scandals in the West for decades. But their methods started working much better when they dropped the marxist surfaces and found different western allies. Read about how simple the method is, from Slate.

4) Professional trolls understand how to harness our biases (and hashtags) for their own purposes and how best to drive us to distrust our neighbors. This article shows how they often start by building rust with 'adorable' viral postings that have nothing to do with politics, from Rolling Stone.

What an era. "End of history" my shiny metal....

The failing political strategies

The New York Times offers a detailed update of the Russian Election Interference Thing. And yes, our "deep state" public servants who won us the Cold War are trying to stymie many of the very same Kremlin masterminds from flipping their defeat back into victory over the West. 

Step one, getting the American right to dismiss our defenders as a "deep state." Study, learn. Be angry that our enemies have taken Washington, which no other hostile power ever accomplished before.

== Staring at a tree -- ignoring a burning forest ==

Alert to you economics/trade nerds!  One of my RASR (Residually Adult-Sane Republican) friends – investment guru John Mauldin – recently cited this short explanation of the Trade War threat by currency expert Taggart Murphy:

“‘Trump is doing everything he can to bring on the end of the days when the US can borrow whatever it wants in whatever amounts it wants. To be sure, there is no recipe book. The dollar is now so entrenched as the world’s money that if your assignment were to bring the curtain down on that—and thus the ability of the US to borrow whatever it wants whenever it wants—it’s not at all clear what you would do.

“‘But you’d start by doing everything that Trump is doing—pick fights with all your allies, blow the government deficit wide open at the peak of an economic recovery, abandon any notion of fiscal responsibility, threaten sanctions on anyone and everyone who seeks to honor the deal Obama struck with Iran (thereby almost begging everyone to figure out some way to bypass the US banking system in order to do business), [Which they are openly doing, comments JFM] throw spanners into the works of global trade without any clear indication of what it is precisely you want for a country that structurally consumes more than it produces and thus by the laws of accounting MUST run trade and current account deficits.”

Implicitly, Murphy and John admit the contrast – that Bill Clinton and California’s Jerry Brown and most democratic governors have done the right thing, using good times to pay down debt. And Barack Obama, even inheriting the Second Depression, decelerated the rate of change of deficits, applying brakes to the 2nd derivative of debt. Our alliances and sciences and almost every other health metric did better across the span of DP administrations. In contrast, every single strength the made the late 20th century prosperous and mighty and that won the Cold War is being systematically dismantled.

Alas, neither John nor any other RASR seems ever to draw the blatantly obvious conclusion, that either:

(1) the entire leadership clade of the GOP consists of hypocritical morons who should not be trusted with a burnt match, or worse, or else

(2) that the bottomless list of outrageous harms to the U.S. can only be deliberate.

Look at Vladimir Putin’s grin, and tell me that you understand the meaning of the term “Occam’s Razor.”

== The one tree ==

My RASRs, in their frantic state of denial, choose to desperately cling to one tree in the forest. In John's case it is debt. And yes, it is dangerous how we are plunging toward a debt cliff. Note that, as usual, the second derivative of deficit spending  -- the rate of rate of change -- has veered from negative to positive under a Republican administration, as is absolutely uniformly and perfectly-always true. Always. And those "conservatives" who ignore this brutally consistent fact are no conservatives, but something else.

Alas, John chooses to blame our debt splurge on the Federal Reserve, for maintaining low interest rates, which is like blaming a liquor store owner's low prices for drunk driving deaths. Sure, it's peripherally pertinent, but not the real cause. (Meanwhile Trump howls at the Fed for raising rates; go figure?)

Look around to where governments are operating in the black, in blue states like Jerry Brown's California, where the nation's only fiscally-prudent politicians have been paying down debt during good times, as both Adam Smith and J.M. Keynes recommended. Or Bill Clinton's 1990's surpluses. But it goes farther. In 1993, President Clinton created the Bipartisan Commission on Entitlement and Tax Reform as part of the administration's effort to promote economic growth and control the budget deficit. The purpose of the commission, chaired by Senator J. Robert Kerrey (D-NE) and Senator John C. Danforth (R-MO), was to seek agreement across parties on long-term entitlement reform and structural changes to the tax system.

The resulting bill almost passed. It would have gradually raised retirement age and saved trillions, in exchange for cranking up Medicare for children and the poor and meaningful contributions by the rich. But the opportunity was trashed by Newt Gingrich and then by Dennis "friend-to-boys" Hastert, who worked with Fox to end all traces of adulthood in the GOP. (Oh, look up Dennis Hastert and be proud.)

Danforth-style Republicans are now entirely extinct. And the latest "supply side" tax cut again - as always - widened wealth disparities without stimulating R&D or "supply"... only asset bubbles.

== Trump's failing negotiating style ==

I've posted on Medium an expanded version of my look at the negotiation strategy always used by Donald Trump, that worked in the dark-coercive world of real estate, but that has never worked and cannot work in the worlds of diplomacy, politics and adult interaction. Except that the method has worked a couple of times... against him. The "deal-master" is clueless, disarmed and appears to be terrified.

Summarizing: what’s fundamental to this calamitous presidency is not the vulgarity or toddler tantrums or hatred of all fact-professions. It is his inability to grasp that "negotiation" is different at the adult or legislative or international levels. Those are three different things. But none of them work like real estate speculation or a TV reality show. Time and again, DT shows the same, predictable pattern: 

Break something the other side cares about. Threaten them with pain, then let them fall all over themselves to shift 90% toward what you want. It worked for Trump against Merv Griffin and dozens of development 'partners' and shivved contractors, and when he got his (very clever!) 1980s tax deals with New York City. It worked on The Apprentice.

And it hasn't worked even one time since he entered the White House. Not once. Sabotaging DACA and 2 million innocent young Americans didn't get him his wall. Trying to sabotage the ACA (Obamacare) only made people realize they like it. So far, his tariff war has accomplished zilch. Every month he takes something away from the Palestinians, never realizing that harming poor people strengthens, not weakens, Hamas. The list goes on, revealing a stunningly un-sapient inability to learn. 

(Ironically, the method DID work once, when Kim Jong Un used it on Donald Trump. And DT's unsecure cell phone (remember outrage over Hillary's email server?) allows perfect oppo profiling of this president.)

Yes, there's an alternative explanation for these actions. Or two. (1) deliberately weakening us at behest of Kremlin masters, and (2) pure evil. Sure, both of those are in play. But I believe a major factor is his inability to distinguish between obstinately repetitive, feral cunning on the one hand, and adaptably pragmatic intelligence.

The former worked well for him in the world of real estate deals, mafia coercion, falsehood-supported debt, bullying and money laundering. The latter is what you need when negotiating under the public glare, where a politician seen buckling to Trumpian pressure tactics will be finished, or where breaking something or hurting innocents doesn't shift the bargaining table.

Trump's opponents need to parse the feral-cunning from the drooling stupidity. We see the former at his Fox/KGB-supported nuremberg rallies. And his enemies under-rate this cunning at their peril. 

In turn, they display a stupidity of their own -- inability to grasp the power of polemic, ceding that territory to the Putin/Murdoch/Trumpian/fundie cabal, never realizing that these tricks can be answered... the way FDR and Churchill finally rose up and used the power of words to save civilization.

== Mueller and more ==

The day after Paul Manafort's conviction, Trump pointed to the mistrial on some counts as evidence that he was being improperly targeted by Mueller. “A large number of counts, ten, could not even be decided in the Paul Manafort case. Witch Hunt!” he tweeted.  But let’s count more truly. Across the 18 counts, there were 206 jury votes of guilty and ten jury votes to acquit. Read the article how a juror who professes to be a strong Trump supporter voted guilty 18 times.

A taste of the cyber-weapons that may be hurled against the U.S., if and when the Kremlin deems the time is right.

== Fresh Ideas ==

Folks have been thinking about how to reform various aspects of the archaic U.S. electoral process. Some notions are blatantly obvious and will happen the instant Democrats control Congress (only to be vetoed, alas.) Like ending gerrymandering, or requiring that all states use secure, easily audited voting apparatus with paper ballots or receipts, and that voter ID requirements be accompanied by generous compliance assistance, like automatic registration.  Some concepts – like those of Lawrence Lessig and his associate – would pry Big Money out of politics. (GOP Congress members spend far more time “fundraising” than on the floor or in committee, openly declaring that money buys access.)

Naturally, preferential-style elections make vastly more sense than the stupid plurality-wins system in most U.S. constituencies.

Some concepts are radical and would require a Constitutional Convention (e.g. we actually need TWO Dakotas?). Some are dumb notions that will never pass (e.g. all states agree to allocate their electors to the winner of the national popular vote - the “compact.” Yeah, that’ll happen.)

Given that even a massive Blue Wave will see its reforms blocked by Executive branch loons, Two Scoops followed by the vastly more dangerous Mike Pence, we need to look at things that are simple and might happen organically and almost instantly. Measures that small groups and individuals might take, that act with judo-like twist, that cannot easily be blocked by the forces of darkness.

Here’s one: In late November 2016 I wrote to some rich dudes suggesting they rent a luxury resort hotel somewhere and donate it for a unique and fascinating purpose — a weeklong actual, physical meeting of the newly-chosen Electoral College! 

Consider: there’s no rule that the Electors have to stay thousands of miles apart. Absolutely nothing prevents them from gathering and talking – like a “college” -- before submitting their votes to each state legislature. They could simply show up, privately (maybe with some Secret Service protection), at some secured resort.

No one else but cooks n’ such in attendance. Maybe even no phones. Should the press watch for white smoke pouring from a chimney?

Sure, the political parties may feel alarmed at the prospect. They’ll pressure their electors not to attend. Some states already have laws threatening punishment if an elector changes his/her vote from the pre-election commitment. But I’ll bet few chosen electors would stay away from their one chance in life to schmooze and, briefly, be among the most-important humans on the planet.

Officially at least. Because in fact, though members of the College might yell at each other and seek to persuade, there’s little chance anyone will reverse their partisan commitment, in any result-changing way. The one main effect would be that the elector-candidates nominated by each party, in each state, will be more closely vetted in advance, than before.

Still, what’s to complain about, if the EC decides to act like a “college”? 

No pressure or partisan posturing. Just a place for all the new electors to meet and talk.  Nine times out of ten, nothing would change; the electors would just hew to their pre-election commitments.

But on that tenth occasion, there’d be a final chance to fix something awful. I have never seen the idea anywhere else. And note, it can be done for a few million by a single donor.