I live just a few miles from the North and South Dakota borders. This situation makes me a bit uncomfortable, since if the entire country has been slack about dealing with the pandemic, the Dakotas have been the slackest.

The current rates of infection and deaths per capita in South Dakota and previously restriction-free North Dakota are what Dr. Ali Mokdad would expect to see in a war-torn nation — not here.

“How could we allow this in the United States to happen?” asked Mokdad, a professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle. “This is unacceptable by any standards.”

North Dakota’s COVID-19 death rates per capita in the past week are similar to the hardest hit countries in the world right now — Belgium, Czech Republic and Slovenia — according to Saturday New York Times data. That data also places South Dakota’s recent per capita deaths among the world’s highest rates.

And there’s currently nowhere in the U.S. where COVID-19 deaths are more common than in the Dakotas, according to data published by The COVID Tracking Project.

It’s a situation “as bad as it gets anywhere in the world,” Dr. William Haseltine told USA TODAY.

It’s taken getting death rates to the highest in the world for those states to even begin to implement basic procedures to limit the spread. Not to excuse Minnesota, we’ve just been dragging behind on good policy, but not quite as badly as either Dakota. It helps that we’ve got a Democratic governor, unlike Noem (fanatical mad woman) and Burgum (coward).

Haseltine, president of ACCESS Health International and author of My Lifelong Fight Against Disease, blamed politicians — especially South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem — for ignoring public health measures that have been successfully used to curb the spread of the virus elsewhere in the world.

Noem has cast doubt on whether wearing masks in public is effective, saying that she’ll leave it up to the people to decide. She has said the virus can’t be stopped.

Burgum, also a Republican, had pleaded with people to wear masks and praised local towns and cities that have mandated masks. He had avoided requiring masks and refused to enforce limits on social gatherings and business occupancies until late Friday.

The disgraceful thing is that this isn’t even a question of following the will of the electorate — a majority of citizens favor a stronger state response.

A survey in late September and early October by the state health department found that 55% of respondents supported a mask mandate and 68% said they wore masks. Surveys of mask usage show North Dakota lags behind most of the nation — but now has reached about 80%, according to Facebook surveys mapped by Carnegie Mellon University.

We’ve let a fanatical minority of incompetents take the wheel and drive the country into a ditch.

Could it be…is it possible that QAnon is imploding? Q went silent after the election (and his predictions failed), one of the top administrators at 8kun resigned, and the mob of True Believers is dismayed.

Trump’s loss plunged many Q believers into a crisis of faith. “It’s hard to keep the faith when your wife and daughters have left you and we didn’t get the decisive MOAB [mother of all bombs] win we deserved on election night!!” one representative post on a Q forum read.

Some posts, potentially from trolls, in Q’s home subforum on 8kun this week insisted that the poster had died by suicide.

Other movements on the scene suggested at least one high-profile Q influencer was priming to pull the plug on QAnon—and blame 8kun in the process. NeonRevolt, a pro-Q blogger and author of a book on the topic, shared a “blind item” days after the election, alleging that Q’s 8kun account might have been compromised.

Well, yes, it is difficult to maintain your enthusiasm when you’ve ripped your family apart and discover that all the prophecies of your cult flopped. Unfortunately, that just leaves the QAnon cultists desperate for a rationalization to validate their awful decisions, so that kind of catastrophe never ends the belief, it just squeezes it out into another, equally disastrous body of life-ruining fantasies, as we’ve seen in every doomsday cult that’s ever existed.

Just wait for the emergence of “R” (oh, wait, that cult already exists — S, then). Also expect schisms. It’s going to be fun, but not for the faithful.

Are you smarter than an Alabama football coach? Here’s one who just got elected to the senate. Let’s see if you can spot the errors here.

I wonder if my European readers will see what’s wrong with this story.

Senator Elect Tommy Tuberville from Alabama believes that WW2 was fought to free Europe from socialism. pic.twitter.com/pUaYhfXCxy

— Jason Stanley (@jasonintrator) November 13, 2020

Then he accidentally erased the Supreme Court and the entire judiciary, which may not be such a bad thing.

Tommy Tuberville, who is about the be sworn in as a U.S. Senator, thinks the three branches of government are “the House, the Senate and executive.” https://t.co/021Fo4R9GO pic.twitter.com/pT2cpbTTXd

— Ian Sams (@IanSams) November 13, 2020

Maybe we need some kind of qualifying exam before you can run for office.

Our local blue dog Democrat, Collin Peterson, lost to yet another incompetent, unqualified Republican. It granted another seat to the Republican party in congress, which sounds like a bad thing…except that it should also help unify the Democrats, disposing of a discordant regressive voice from their ranks. Here’s an interesting analysis.

The Journal editors assert that these losses– including other reactionary Blue Dogs and New Dems from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party “will reduce Mrs. Pelosi’s legislative running room and perhaps test her party control. Her strategy of refusing to compromise on a Covid-19 relief bill may have cost seats, and now she’ll have a harder time getting a blue-state and union bailout through the Senate. If Mr. Biden wins, the GOP will be better poised to retake the House in 2022.” Or maybe the exact opposite. Losses of fake Democratic careerists like Brindisi, Kendra Horn (OK), Xochitl Torres Small (NM), Max Rose (NY), Joe Cunningham (SC), Abby Finkenauer (IA), Collin Peterson (MN)– as well as for virtually all the Blue Dog and New Dem candidates the DCCC and House Majority PAC wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on– will allow the Democrats to better define themselves, if they choose to, as a vehicle for the legitimate interests of working families, rather than as the other party of corporate whores.

The losses allow the Democrats to better define themselves, if the leadership chooses to. Somehow, I don’t see Pelosi/Schumer taking any steps in the right direction. They won’t see that conservative Democratic candidates are losers.

Another thing the more conservative leadership would like to do is pretend the Green New Deal and other progressive social policies were a recipe for disaster. They weren’t. They’re our path to victory.

The fight over the role of progressives in sinking (or not) Democrats’ chance at a robust unified government began late last week in a call leaked to Politico. On that call, Rep. Abigail Spanberger claimed she almost lost her race in Virginia because she was accused of wanting to defund the police (she does not). House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn reportedly said, “we are going to run on Medicare for All, defund the police, socialized medicine, we’re not going to win.” That’s led some progressives to push back; notably, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who pointed out every co-sponsor of Medicare for All won reelection and that Democrats are still running like its 2000 instead of 2020.

Earther looked at the Green New Deal, another bête noire of conservatives and Fox News, to see if it sank Democrats chances. The bill has 101 co-sponsors in the House and 14 co-sponsors in the Senate. Of the 93 House co-sponsors who ran for a seat in Congress’s lower chamber in 2020, only one lost reelection.

Using Cook Political Report’s Partisan Voting Index, Earther found four House co-sponsors who are in districts that range from very slightly Democratic to moderately Republican. Of those four, three decisively won their reelection bids, including Reps. Mike Levin, Jahana Hayes, and Peter DeFazio. The fourth, Rep. Tom Suozzi, is currently behind in his race in New York by about 4,000 votes, but is projected to “easily win” once all mail-in ballots are counted, according to Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman. [As of this date, that election has not been called, but he seems to be behind, so maybe not]

Outside of Suozzi, the only Green New Deal co-sponsor to lose is Florida Rep. Debbie Murcasell-Powell. She lost what was a moderately Democratic-leaning seat, though it was previously represented by Rep. Carlos Curbelo, arguably the most outspoken Republican on climate change prior to losing the seat in 2018 to Murcasell-Powell.

This is quick-and-dirty analysis aligns with other data showing that representatives who have sponsored and voted for progressive policies were not punished by voters. An analysis commissioned by the Sunrise Movement and Justice Democrats and shared with Intercept Washington, DC, bureau chief Ryan Grim shows that Democratic House candidates in more liberal swing districts won by greater margins than more conservative ones.

Basically, the people who actually back progressive policies came through the election largely unscathed and, in many cases, fared better than their more conservative Democratic counterparts in swing districts. And lest we forget, Kamala Harris, one of the Senate co-sponsors of the Green New Deal, is now vice president-elect. To be fair, there were also high-profile examples of progressive Democrats running on a Green New Deal failing to pry swing-ish districts out of Republican hands, notably the Texas race between organizer Mike Siegel and Rep. Mike McCaul, and a post-mortem on that race is certainly something to watch out for.

Here’s the deal: progressive Democratic policies are winners. Voters prefer them when they are not labeled as Democratic policies, because what the voters really dislike (reinforced by conservative media) is the Democratic Party. Maybe if the party actually embraced what they ought to be, a green/labor party, rather than working so hard at being a centrist/corporate party, they’d have more authenticity and earn more trust.

Trump hasn’t conceded yet. That’s not supposed to happen. We should be getting worried, because it’s not just one delusional madman in power, we’ve also got the Senate Majority Leader saying there’s no reason for alarm over his intransigence, and when Moscow Mitch declares that there’s nothing to be worried about, it’s time to panic. We’ve got senators like Roy Blunt saying that Trump may not have been defeated at all. The Secretary of State has announced there will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration.

Meanwhile, hordes of fanatics are building a defiant mob on social media. Trump is all about sucking up to his “fans”, so he’s going to continue to shy away from that graceful admission of defeat, if a narcissist like him were even capable of such a thing.

There’s also this:

Pentagon finally confirms near total decapitation of civilian leadership in the last 24 hours. Secretary of Defense Esper fired Monday, the top Pentagon Policy official, top Defense Department intelligence official, and chief of staff to the Defense Secretary all out today

— Ryan Browne (@rabrowne75) November 10, 2020

It’s a purge to pave the way to seizing military control.

You’d think the election is now over, with some continuing ballot counting in a few states that won’t be enough to overturn anything. The Republicans do have a trick up their sleeve, though — abusing our archaic electoral college to override the popular vote. Apparently, there is a convenient loophole in which a state legislature could override the appointment of electors to stack the deck, and Pennsylvania, as one example, is a state where the Republicans control both houses.

At Trump’s urging, the state’s legislature — where Republicans have majorities in both houses — purports to exercise its authority under Article II of the Constitution to appoint the state’s presidential electors directly. Taking their cue from Trump, both legislative chambers claim that the certified popular vote cannot be trusted because of the blue shift that occurred in overtime. Therefore, the two chambers claim to have the constitutional right to supersede the popular vote and assert direct authority to appoint the state’s presidential electors, so that this appointment is in line with the popular vote tally as it existed on Election Night, which Trump continues to claim is the “true” outcome.

The state’s Democratic governor refuses to assent to this assertion of authority by the state’s legislature, but the legislature’s two chambers proclaim that the governor’s assent is unnecessary. They cite early historical practices in which state legislatures appointed presidential electors without any involvement of the state’s governor. They argue that like constitutional amendments, and unlike ordinary legislation, the appointment of presidential electors when undertaken directly by a state legislature is not subject to a gubernatorial veto.

They’ve also got the Supreme Court in their back pocket.

While we were dreading the possibility of an October surprise, and marveling that their efforts were so pathetic, maybe we should be more concerned about a January surprise. There is precedent.

Indeed, refusing to wage a much more organized, public campaign to challenge Trump’s coup attempt is exactly the kind of strategy Democrats went with 20 years ago in Florida during the Brooks Brothers riot — and look how that turned out. We got an illegitimate Bush presidency that gave us the Iraq War and a financial crisis that ended or ruined millions of lives.

This time around it could be even worse — the end of whatever’s still left of American democracy.

Remember that empty, exhausted, defeated feeling we had as the lawyers took over Florida and nitpicked their way to effectively shutting down ballot counting, and the Supreme Court declared Bush the president? And then most of us resigned ourselves to accept it, saying that Bush couldn’t be so bad that it warranted our side disrupting democratic institutions in the way the Republicans were doing? Are you ready to feel that way again?

Let’s wrap up this whole past week with a summary of the election news.

Now let’s forget it all. Forget Trump (well, except for the lawyers, who have a big job ahead.)