One of the most encouraging signs on the social issues front is that while businesses are doing extremely well with Donald Trump and the Republicans sending all the tax cuts their way, they are not willing to sign on to the anti-LGBT war being waged by the administration, especially against the transgender community.
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I wrote earlier about the strange phenomenon of extreme right wing parties in Germany that have been associated with xenophobia and anti-Semitism actively wooing the Jewish community and having some success, to the consternation of the major Jewish organizations in that country, surprised by the willingness to support a party that is overtly against their own community.
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A joke that is making the rounds is that for Democrats this has been more of a Hanukkah election than a Christmas one in that each new day seems to bring new gifts.
Maine had introduced ranked-choice voting, something that should be adopted everywhere. This is where people mark their ballots in order of preference for candidates. If no one wins 50% of the vote, then the second choices of the voters who voted for the last place finisher are taken into account, and if that does not produce a clear winner, then the third choices, and so on. There are various ways of doing this but all these methods enable people to vote for the people they like best and not fear that they are ‘wasting’ their vote by voting for someone who has little chance of winning and thus enabling the person they hate most to win.
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Although he lost his race against Ted Cruz for the senate seat in Texas, Beto O’Rourke ran a spirited campaign in this deep red state and came close, and by inspiring increased Democratic voter turnout, likely helped other Democrats in down ballot races defeat incumbent Republicans. One little noticed result is that 19 black women ran for judge positions in Harris County and all of them won. That was not all.
Democrats won all 59 judicial races in Harris county in Tuesday’s midterm elections. In one of the most eye-catching and significant results, the longtime incumbent Republican county judge, Ed Emmett – in effect, the county’s chief executive – lost to Lina Hidalgo, a 27-year-old first-time candidate who immigrated from Colombia as a teenager.
The morning after the election, Glenn Devlin, a juvenile court judge in Houston who is one of the defeated Republicans, reportedly released most of the defendants who appeared in front of him after asking them whether they planned to kill anyone.
After listing the 15 reasons, he concludes:
That’s more than a dozen bits of truly bad news for Republican, and it’s only going to get worse as they stare down the long barrel toward 2020, where the Senate map is massively in favor of Democrats; the economy is likely to be on a downturn; and Donald Trump will probably have long-since worn out his welcome with his one-trick pony. In other words, they’re getting more and more desperate, knowing that a historic shellacking is probably headed their way in two years.
And this desperation is showing. Over the next two years Republicans can nominate some more conservative judges to the lower courts, but that’s about it. With Democrats controlling the House; the filibuster controlling the Senate; and a man-child controlling the White House, they’re in for a very rough two years.
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I wrote before how I stumbled across the strange story of Clarence King (1842-1901), the first director of the US Geological Survey who for the last 13 years of his life, led a secret double life as a black man in order to marry a former slave Ada Copeland (1860-1964). I have now been able to read this fuller treatment by Sandweiss who tries to reconstruct how and why this fair-skinned, blue-eyed man managed to successfully hide his double life from all his family, close friends, and colleagues and even his wife while having five children with her, revealing his secret to her only in a final letter written on his deathbed in Arizona.
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It looks like Netflix has decided to put the episodes of its new weekly show Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj free on YouTube, at least for some episodes, no doubt to build up an audience. The third show last Sunday dealt mostly with the abusive monopolistic corporate practices in the US and how it came to be that way, using Amazon as a prime example.
The show was not quite as funny as the first two but it contained a lot of information.
Another week, another gunman goes into a crowded venue and opens fire, this time killing 12 people, wounding 16 others, and then apparently killing himself. This time the event took place late on Wednesday night at 11:20 pm at a crowded country and western themed bar and grill frequented by college students at nearby Pepperdine University in an affluent area near Los Angeles.
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Now that I have had time to reflect on the election and shift my attention away from the high-profile elections, my early lukewarm feelings need to be revised. It looks like Tuesday turned out to be pretty good for Democrats and bad for Donald Trump. If you needed to see that Trump was not happy, one can read the transcript of the press conference that he held on Wednesday where he was even more peevish, mean, and spiteful than he usually is. He even name-checked several Republicans who he claimed lost their congressional races because they did not ’embrace’ him (that narcissism and desperate need to be loved surfacing again) while ignoring those who did embrace him but lost anyway.
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