It's Time to Toss The Electoral College Voting System on the Scrap Heap of History

In November's national election, President Donald Trump received 74.2 million votes, which is 12 million more than he got four years ago. But President-Elect Joe Biden received an historic 81.2 million votes, which is 16 million more votes than Hillary Clinton got four years ago.

These are astonishing numbers. America showed up at the polls, despite relentless efforts by Trump and his fellow Republicans nationwide to suppress the vote.

Biden had 7 million more votes in this election than Trump. That is by any and all measures a landslide victory. But the truth is he needed virtually all of those votes to secure the win. Unbelievably, Trump would have won in November if only a few more states went his way - even with an enormous deficit in the popular vote.

Washington Post columnist Marc A. Thiessen recently noted that Trump had come very close to winning this election, despite getting trounced by voters. 

“A flip of just some 73,700 votes in those three states [Arizona, Pennsylvania and Georgia] and Trump would be making plans for a second term — and we would all be taking about a ‘red wave,’ ” he wrote.  

The simple moral to this story? The Electoral College needs to be abolished. It doesn't work. It needs to be thrown on the scrap heap along with such other tired American ideas as blue laws, Jim Crow, segregation, flagpole sitting, The Whig Party, Pet Rocks, trickle-down economics and Gangnam Style.

Despite what our well-meaning Founding Fathers said about the Electoral College, it no longer works for the United States of America. When it comes to national elections, the idea of one American/one vote is indisputable. There should be no other way. Every vote should carry the same weight.

The Electoral College is undemocratic. It permits the election of a candidate who does not win the most votes. That's the definition of counter-intuitive. And it's precisely what happened four years ago. 

Trump was elected in 2016 with almost 3 million fewer votes than Clinton. It was a travesty. His re-election in 2020 would have been a tragedy.

One voter-one vote has its own set of issues, especially in the smaller states that currently are given too much clout but would have far less say in an election whose winner is the one who simply got the most votes.

But there's no other way. For one night in November every four years, do not think about living in a state. Just think about living in America. Giving power to the loser is wrong no matter how you spin and slice it.

One person. One vote. In a national election, this should be the defining tenet. It isn't perfect, but it's a lot closer to perfect than the Electoral College, which has become a demonstrable disaster. 

Padres GM Pulls Off Holiday Miracle, Lands Two of the League's Top Starting Pitchers Without Selling the Farm

Blake Snell, new Padre

Me and my fellow San Diego Padres fans have at times been befuddled and bewildered over the years by the moves the Padres front office makes. But not this week. The events of the last 48 hours will go down in the history of the Padres ball club as a franchise game-changer.

In two brilliant and unlikely trades, soft-spoken wunderkind General Manager AJ Preller picked up two A-list starting pitchers - Blake Snell from the Tampa Bay Rays and Yu Darvish from the Chicago Cubs -- without selling the farm.

Snell, 28, a lefty who won the American League Cy Young award in 2018, dominated the Dodgers in the recent World Series but was then inexplicably pulled from the game. That boneheaded move is presumably part of the reason Snell is evidently eager to play baseball somewhere else next season.

Yu Darvish, new Padre

Darvish, 34, this past season's National League Cy Young runner-up, came of age in 2019, and in 2020 he was flat-out dominant, finishing second in the National League Cy Young Award voting to Trevor Bauer.

If all that weren't enough, the Padres also today signed Korean superstar slugger and shortstop Ha-Seong Kim, who will be a huge addition to the infield and at the plate. Or he could be traded for yet another A-list player.

Kim is obviously not going to beat out Fernando Tatis, arguably the best young player in baseball, at short. The Padres infield is already arguably the best in baseball with Manny Machado at third, Tatis at short, Rookie-Of-The-Year runner-up Jake Cronenworth at second, and Eric Hosmer at first.

This embarrassment of riches reminds me of 1998 when the already talented Padres brought in pitching ace Kevin Brown from the Marlins to help escort that team to the playoffs.

Brown was near-perfect in the '98 postseason and ultimately helped the squad make it to the World Series for the first time since 1984. But in the Fall Classic, the Padres ran into the unstoppable New York Yankees. Many believe the '98 Yanks were the best team in baseball history. No argument here.

With all respect to the '84 and '98 teams, this is now the most talented team in Padres history, with three legitimate aces on staff, and four if and when former Cleveland Indians ace Mike Clevinger returns in 2022 from Tommy John surgery.

And probably five when super-prospect MacKenzie Gore gets called up and gets some experience in the Bigs. The lefty, who is the team's #1 prospect, is expected to be a front-of-the-rotation star as soon as later this year.

Life is very good for Padres fans right now and will be for a long while. We already live in America's Finest City, and we are finally getting a baseball team that is as great as the city.

Will we be able to see the 2021 model in person? I still have my doubts. But watching this squad on TV is better than not having baseball at all. I'll take what they can give us.

The window for the Padres to make a deep run in the playoffs and make it to the World Series for the first time since 1998 has officially opened wide for the next four or five years, at least.

Granted, the Padres gave up some good players in thkmese trades, including starting pitcher Zach Davies and several very good prospects. But incredibly, only one of the top five prospects -- Luis Patino, a right-handed pitcher -- was traded away.

Getting two A-list pitchers with the words "Cy Young" attached to their names in exchange for prospects? That is almost unheard of!

All praise to GM Preller, the cooly shrewd baseball savant who stocked the farm system and made almost all the right moves over the last few years. He had this vision all along.

For all the trade activity, the Padres' lineup from the exciting 2020 campaign is still mostly intact, including Padre superstars Machado and Tatis, as well as clubhouse leader Hosmer, Trent Grisham, young phenom Cronenworth, Tommy Pham and Wil Myers, who had a hugely successful rebound season.

Starting pitchers Danielson Lamet and Chris Paddack, too, will be back, but Paddack needs to bounce back from a tough year.

The 2020 Padres were the most fun team to watch in all of professional baseball, largely thanks to the pure, good-natured joy of Tatis, who set the tone for a really positive clubhouse.

He gets it. As the son of a longtime Major Leaguer, Tatis respects the game but understands that it is a game. If it isn't fun, why bother?

The 2021 Padres will be an even better show. The team now now has the talent, heart, management and ownership to compete with anyone in Major League Baseball. Yes, I mean anyone. I'm looking right at you Dodger Blue. 

Game Over! It's Time to Step Out of the Darkness and Into the Light

Game over. 

Despite all of Donald Trump's threats to expose rampant voter fraud, he has no evidence. With all respect to my friends who still defend this malignant man, you, and he, are clinging to a greased rope. It's time to come out of the darkness and into the light. 

Trump is defective. Zero character or empathy or compassion. He’s a raging narcissist and pathological liar who does not care about you. Let me say that again: He. Does. Not. Care. About. You. 

Never did. Never will.

Trump mocks you in private. He disses our troops and veterans. He's a failed businessman. He really only has one skill, and that is his ability to bullshit his way through life. He's an opportunist with no core values who worships thugs and losers. 

But his 15 minutes are up.

Trump's house-of-cards presidency was built on an ugly foundation. He was pretty good at tapping into the fears and prejudices of increasingly angry, older white Americans who fear they are losing control of this country and do not want to see America change. 

Trump is an empty suit who stands for nothing. He was a pro-choice moderate most of his adult life. Then he recognized that there was an audience of mostly white voters who would respond to him if he suddenly joined the GOP and became a right-wing culture warrior. 

He was Pat Buchanan meets reality TV star. A combination from hell for anyone with a brain or a conscience. 

To get what he wanted, Trump threw anyone in his White House circle, as well as those outside of it, under the bus. He's a slick Yankee canoodling with rustic confederates. It's been an odd, dysfunctional and despicable courtship from day one.

Trump claims to put America first. But he's outsourced virtually all manufacturing jobs at his various now-defunct companies to other nations because of the cheap labor. He's never given a damn about America's working men and women. He has in fact bankrupted multiple businesses and walked away unscathed while thousands lost their jobs.

While Trump has railed these last four years against illegal immigrants, most of whom are simply coming here for a better life for their families, he's always hired them in large numbers at his hotels and other properties. He made them work long, extra hours for criminally little pay, then fired them when it was revealed that they worked for him. 

Before the election last month, some of my friends who voted for Trump in 2016 said they could not vote for him again because of his lack of morals or decency or character. But some of those friends reneged. 

It’s tough to see a friend vociferously and inaccurately defend Trump and the crooks, goons, loons and buffoons who make up his inner circle, which is the most corrupt administration in modern American history. It just isn't cute or funny or entertaining any more. 

And Now It's Really Over 

Trump will go down in history as the closest thing to a fascist that America has produced. These past four years, Trump has brought out the worst in America and Americans. And as you read this, he is still trying to do something that is the most un-American thing any politician can do: cancel the votes of his fellow Americans. 

Trump has been exposed as a fraud. He is not a master deal-maker. Far from it. He's a grifter. He didn't even write "The Art of the Deal," his alleged book. Trump is a cowardly thug whose policies are hurting America even more than his cruelty, ignorance and Mussolini-like pomposity.  

I get the disruption. I understand the appeal and power of someone who is really outspoken and doesn't play by the typical political rules by which so many pols have played. But Trump's so-called "disruption" was a sham. A misnomer. 

It has never been about disruption, it is in fact about a dangerously destructive chaos theory built on his innate ability to bring our darkest demons to the surface. He's Nero, but with no musical abilities whatsoever.

Trump has tried hard to systematically destroy our institutions and our culture. He sought anarchy. He begged his justice department to throw his political opponents in jail and urged Republicans to cancel millions of Americans' votes. 

In case you didn't pay attention to what Trump was doing when he wasn't Tweeting paranoid, grammatically challenged rants and absurdities at 4 a.m., he was strategically destroying our natural environment. He was the greatest enemy of the environment that has ever sat in the Oval Office. 

Under Trump, our air and water were sullied in the name of cutting regulations, most of which were reasonable safeguards against corporate pollution running rampant. He reversed Obama's efforts to preserve our oceans and lakes and rivers. He wanted to see new oil drilling off the California coastline, in the Gulf of Mexico, along the eastern seaboard and pretty much anywhere and everywhere. 

During his presidency, Trump spread hate and intolerance across this land like an evil Johnny Appleseed. He never attended church, and he has never read the Bible in his life. 

Race relations in this country are the worst they've been since the civil rights riots in the 1960s. Hate crimes based on race, religion and sexual orientation are at their highest level in modern American history. There are reportedly more insults, attacks and hate crimes against Muslims and Jews and gays than ever before.

Trump supporters, it's time you take some responsibility for the hate spread every day by your outgoing president, who constantly lied and relentlessly focused on people’s differences, prejudices and fears. 

He is not only the most divisive president in my lifetime, he's arguably the most divisive public figure in modern American history. He wanted to divide and conquer. It almost worked. 

The Trump Illusion

He isn't going away, for sure. But Trumpism will inevitably fail and fall. As my colleague and former Newsweek editor Jon Meacham writes in "The Soul of America: The Battle For Our Better Angels,"  this country has faced profoundly deep divisions before, and has gotten through each of them to come together. 

Meacham is an eternal optimist, but he's no Pollyanna. He's a historian who understands the pivotal moments of the United States. His optimism is informed by an understanding of the real stories behind the events that have shaped and defined this country. 

Meacham predicted that we would eventually tire of Trump's empty bravado because, in the long run, Americans have always embraced our better angels. 

Biden won this election in a landslide. He got 7 million more votes than Trump. And that is good news for this country and for the world. As Americans, we will again find common ground and eventually move beyond Trumpism. 

No political cycle lasts forever in this nation, good or bad. If we don't discard Trumpism, America the Grand Experiment will blow up in the lab.  

I love America and Americans. I have friends on all sides of the aisle and I have always been part liberal and part conservative. I am a capitalist who believes in competition and cares about the environment. You can be both. 

And I've spent the last 25 years proudly covering our military and our veterans. Trump, who lied about having bone spurs to get out of serving his country, never gave a damn about our warriors until he decided to run for president. He calls them names in private. 

The real last straw for me with Trump came while I was on assignment for Yahoo News  with my former Newsweek colleague Mike Isikoff just after the 2016 election. Sitting in a lounge area inside a federal court room in San Diego during the Trump University fraud trial, I heard, off the record, several stories of students who were ripped off by Trump. Many had lost their life savings. It was sickening.

Trump University was a bogus school. A scam. Trump took millions from these students without any cares or conscience. He said he would never settle that case, that he wanted to see justice served, but that was of course total bull. 

For $25 million, Trump walked away from this open-and-shut case of fraud on a massive scale. He should be behind bars for that alone.

I am mostly civil in my debates, but you can't fight fire with cloth. People who deny trump's abuse of power and incompetence these last four years and his almost daily dog whistles (and sometimes bullhorns) to the racists in his base are worthy of counter rage by any sane, decent, compassionate American. 

Trump is a deeply insecure and vicious man. He's incompetent and tells lies almost every time he opens his mouth or tweets.  I have close friends who support Trump. But debating them now is shooting fish in a barrel. 

Trump is a variety-pack of Shakespeareanesque villains -- from King Lear, who craved power and was wildly insecure and needed constant praise, to Falstaff, the fat, arrogant chicken-shit who spent all his time with sleazy third-rate criminals and constantly tried to sleep with married women.

Like so many Shakespearean bad guys, Trump is a mentally unstable would-be king who lied, cheated, manipulated and caused his own downfall. The one thing, though, that Trump lacks that most Shakespearean villains possess is intelligence. Trump is actually not interesting or complex or smart enough to rise to the Bard's level. 

I hope that my friends who still support Trump as he goes down in flames will eventually see who this guy really is and what he tried to do to this great country. It's time to step out of the darkness and into the light. Seek and find your better angels. 

Game Over.

EXCLUSIVE: Can Artiva Therapeutics' Natural Killer Cancer Therapy Help an Older Drug, Rituxan, Fight Blood Cancers?

I've been immersed this past week in “bio talk.” That’s the often downright Byzantine language spoken by scientists as they do their best to describe their technologies in terms we mere mortals can understand. But as funny as these scientists talk, I admire them. They spend insane amounts of time isolated in labs working to save lives.

Last week, I attended the American Society of Hematology (ASH) conference, where the latest clinical trial results are announced for blood cancers and other blood diseases. I cover the conference every year.

The ASH meeting is a place where bio talk, or geek speak, is everywhere. But the conversations, if you listen closely, are about new treatments that are changing cancer treatment as we know it.

The conference this year was of course held online, but it was still an impressive showcase of some of the world’s most advanced and promising cancer research. These men and women in their white lab attire are methodically turning cancer from a deadly disease into one that in many cases can be treated like any chronic condition. We're not there yet, but we're on that path.

And nowhere is this more evident than in blood cancers, which in many cases are the most malleable cancers for research and often respond best to treatment.

As I wrote in Healthline on Saturday, there were countless new treatment modalities and trials for lymphoma, leukemia and other blood cancers and diseases introduced and updated at ASH. But some of the most intriguing cancer-fighting technologies generating buzz in the biotech world weren't even ready to be presented at the conference.

AB-101, for example, an off-the-shelf NK (natural killer) cell therapy from Artiva Biotherapeutics, is one of those. Artiva did not have any AB-101 data to show at this year's conference. But there's growing interest in the San Diego-based company among those who follow the NK cell landscape. And soon cancer patients will likely want to make themselves aware of this technology, too.

NK cell therapy’s potentially profound ability to fight cancer is becoming better understood, as I first reported for Healthline two and 1/2 years ago. While the body's natural killer cells sound like the perfect cancer warriors, it has taken a long time to unravel the mysteries of how these cells work in the body, and how scientists can use them as a viable therapy.

“What we are seeing at ASH is that NK cells are becoming increasingly validated as a therapeutic modality, and several presentations are providing proof of concept,” Tom Farrell, CEO of Artiva, told me last week.

AB-101 is heading into a Phase 1/2 trial at up to 20 U.S. cancer centers in 2021. “It will be tested both alone and in combination with rituximab in patients with r/r NHL who've progressed twice or more,” Farrell explained.

And it appears that this technology does not present nearly the same safety risks associated with approved autologous T cell therapy (CAR-T).

Rituxan, as many of you know, is one of the best-known and most-used lymphoma treatments in the world. It's been around now for a quarter century. But in the last few years, several next-generation lymphoma treatment modalities such as bispecific monoclonal antibodies and other cell and gene therapies have emerged to challenge the status quo.

Each of these next-generation technologies is a potential threat to existing treatments. And it looked for a brief while as if Rituxan might slowly fade from view.

But Rituxan, one of the first approved monoclonal antibody drugs, isn’t going anywhere. It is still the standard bearer in the lymphoma space. The main reason for that is that it works, for many lymphoma patients. And it is now being studied in combination with a variety of other treatments that enhance its effectiveness.

Virtually everyone in the oncology world agrees that combination treatments are a big part of the future of cancer therapy. To effectively kill cancer and find a cure, experts say, it’s often going to take more than one mechanism. There is no one magic bullet that kills all cancer.

AB-101 is built to enhance the anti-cancer activity of a monoclonal antibody. This is a hot idea at the moment, as is natural killer cell therapy. And AB-101 fortifies Rituxan, and for some lymphoma patients the combination could indeed be a replacement for another relatively new treatment, CAR-T.

Rituxan, and its biosimilars, work by binding to a target on the cancer cell, then recruiting NK cells which kill the cancer cell. AB-101 provides an off-the-shelf source of NK cells for cancer patients who may need them.

“NK cells are basically the business end of several FDA-approved antibodies for the treatment of cancer,” said Jason Litten, MD, chief medical officer at Artiva.

Ferrell noted that while antibodies are mainstays of cancer therapy, many patients have sub-optimal responses, and those who progress have limited options.

With AB-101, Farrell said his company intends to leverage its proprietary off-the-shelf NK cell platform to "enhance and extend the clinical application of monoclonal antibodies and other cancer targeted therapies that rely on NK cells to mediate their anti-cancer activity.”

AB-101 is a so-called a "cryopreserved" NK cell product candidate with high and consistent expression of tumor-engaging receptors including the high-affinity variant of CD16. 

These NK cell attributes have demonstrated improved outcomes for cancer patients in both the transplant and therapeutic monoclonal antibody settings, Farrell explained. 

And in preclinical models, AB-101 demonstrates enhanced antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity with a variety of therapeutic antibodies.

“Allogeneic NK cells have been tested in clinical trials for more than a decade. Based on this experience, we expect that AB-101 will be well tolerated," Litten said.

"This contrasts with T-cell therapies that are associated with life-threatening cytokine release syndrome, neurotoxicity, and graft-versus-host-disease."

Farrell and Litten expect the initial clinical trial data from the upcoming trials will be submitted to next year’s ASH. I look forward to checking on their progress.