Et tu, Fox News?

Trump and his supporters continue to be in denial that he has lost the election and claim that the election was stolen from him, despite the almost complete absence of evidence. As is usually the case, the losing side is looking around for the villains who contributed to this situation and they have taken aim at Fox News, despite the fact that the network has long been been a faithful mouthpiece for Trump, with their talk shows giving him complete freedom to utter nonsense and amplifying his efforts to spread hate and division. Fox viewers were the largest part of Trump’s support, dwarfing in numbers other Trump-supporting outlets like One America News Network, Newsmax, and Breitbart.

What has specifically earned their recent ire is that Fox News, along with the AP, were the first to call Arizona for Joe Biden, doing so late on Tuesday night itself. That call, though it did not put Biden over the top of 270 electoral votes, still brought him to 264, close enough that it was all over bar the shouting, since it was expected that Nevada with its six EVs would go for Biden too. That would make all the other as yet uncalled races in Pennsylvania and Georgia moot.
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Michele Bachmann urges her god to use his iron rod

One of my favorite wackos, former Minnesota congresswoman and seeker of the Republican nomination for president in 2012 Michele Bachmann, has tweeted out a video of her praying, urging her god to bring out his iron rod and smite the delusions of the forces of evil arrayed against Trump who are trying to defeat him. It is likely that she does not have a dirty mind like mine and is thus oblivious to the double entendre.

Comparing US elections with India’s

People in the US, especially its political ruling class, constantly boast that the nation is the world’s greatest democracy. But of all the major democracies, it is the one that makes voting hardest, making a mockery of the claim. There are all manner of obstacles placed in the path of registering voters and voting itself, such as requiring onerous documentation from voters, inadequate numbers of polling sites, requiring people to sometimes travel huge distances to vote, poorly trained poll workers, malfunctioning machines, holding it on a working day instead of a weekend, and so on. The number of failings is truly mind-boggling.

Compare this with Indian elections. Like the US, India has a federal structure. It has an 800 million voting age population, far greater than the 250 million or so in the US. But, and this is important, by law each voter should not have to travel for more that 2 km (about 1.25 miles) to their polling place. As a result, the election system is designed to take voting machines to the remotest part of the country, sometimes into deep jungles, using elephants and forging rivers, if there is even a single voter living there. And yet, they manage to have elections that are reputedly fair and efficient. I discussed this in some detail in a post last year.

The difference only makes sense if you realize that India seeks to maximize the number of people voting while in the US, the goal is to actually reduce the number, especially of marginalized groups.

The new political parlor game: Asking WWTD?

Now that the presidential election is over and Joe Biden has won, a new cottage industry has sprung up that consists of speculating on the answers to the question: What Will Trump Do? I think that even he has to realize that there is no way that he will retain the office of the presidency. He has made a practice of thinking that he can bend reality to his will by denying it but first the pandemic proved him wrong and now the election has also done so. So what will he do now?

It is hard to predict because he has no identifiable political ideology or moral or ethical or philosophical or ideological core. Over his lifetime, he has been all over the map when it comes to issues. So trying to treat him as if he is a rational person acting on some set of principles is useless. What is necessary is to identify those things that he cares about and it is clear that what he only cares about is himself, and that is the most appropriate basis for speculation.
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John Oliver looks back on a tumultuous week

He reviews the events of the past week. He ends by saying that whatever disappointments people may have about the loss of seats in the House of Representatives and the failure to win a majority in the Senate, we should savor the many, many good things that happened.

My own view is that Democrats likely over-performed in 2018 because Trump was not on the ballot that year and so the loss of some Democratic house seats this year, while regrettable, may just be a sign that polls did not take into account the Trump black swan effect and thus had inflated and unrealistic expectations. This is supported by the fact that the Democrats who lost tended to be in Republican-leaning states like Florida, Oklahoma, and South Carolina where the Trump coattail effect was likely to be greater. They did lose a seat in New Mexico that Biden won but gained a seat in Georgia that has long been Republican.
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The Supreme Court hears arguments on the future of Obamacare

Trump has waged war against the decade-old Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare. Part of it is because he wants to overturn every aspect of Obama’s legacy. But another is that Republicans have long fought bitterly against the law because it helps poor people and is thus, by definition, ‘socialism’. Trump promised to overturn the law but failed repeatedly so naturally, since he can never see himself as a loser, he claimed that he actually won because he got rid of that part of the law known as the individual mandate.

Insurance works by spreading the risks and the larger the pool of insured people, the better the system works. The mandate was the fine that was imposed on people who did not sign up for insurance. Trump did not actually get rid of the individual mandate. What happened was that an earlier Supreme Court decision said that while such a mandate exceeded congress’s power and was unconstitutional, in a narrow 5-4 ruling by chief justice John Roberts, they also said that it could be considered a tax and thus was within congressional taxing powers.
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Analysis of Latinx, Asian American, and African American voting

There has been some mixed reporting about how the Hispanic (or Latinx) vote went. Of course, one thing to bear in mind is that this community is highly diverse and does not vote monolithically. Their roots lie in many different countries that have very varied histories and hence their life experiences also vary accordingly. Those of Cuban and Venezuelan origin tend to be right wing and vote Republican more than other groups. Catholicism, particularly opposition to abortion, also plays a major role for those who are older and particularly religious. And of course, there are also major generational splits with younger people across the board tending more towards Democrats.

In an election of many firsts, it appears that surging youth turnout in a number of key states may have helped propel Joe Biden to victory.

Analysis suggests an increase of as much as 10% in youth voter turnout – with particularly high engagement in 11 key battleground states. That may have been game-changing for Joe Biden, who had the support of 61% of people aged 18-29.
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Now, young people have had their say. Projections suggest young people made up 17% of the vote share this time around, with young people also having the potential to make a decisive difference in key Senate races in states such as Georgia, Arizona and North Carolina.

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The parodies mocking Trump begin in earnest

It has been a while since I posted any of the Downfall Hitler parody memes but you knew that the parallels between Trump hunkered down in the White House wondering what the hell he can do and Hitler in his bunker during his last days offered too many ripe opportunities to resist. This is one that really captures what I think is likely going through his mind.

Trump is still in denial and tweeting away that he has still won and that all will be revealed soon.

Meanwhile the landscaping company whose back lot was used for Giuliani’s hilarious press conference is now hawking merchandize making fun of the whole thing.

Four Seasons Total Landscaping – a Philadelphia groundskeeping company situated between a crematorium and a sex shop where on Saturday Rudy Giuliani somehow held a press conference about baseless claims of voter fraud – has swiftly sought to cash in on its newfound fame, selling merchandise emblazoned with Trump-inspired puns.

“MAKE AMERICA RAKE AGAIN”, read one sticker on sale on the company website on Monday. It also featured the phrase “LAWN AND ORDER!” The stickers were selling for $5 each.

Progressive Democratic candidates did pretty well on Tuesday

Now that Joe Biden has won the presidency, all the right-wingers, neoconservatives, and Republicans who created the fertile soil for a low-life like Trump to become their party’s standard bearer but later abandoned him to advance their own agendas, are now trying to put the brakes on any progressive measures that Biden might take by bad-mouthing progressives. Republican John Kasich, who ran for the Republican nomination is 2016, is one of the first out of the gate, baselessly claiming that the far-left almost cost Biden the election when they actually helped him win in Arizona and almost in Georgia.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was having none of this rubbish and immediately shot back.

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More bad news on the pandemic front

The US had its fourth consecutive day of record covid-19 positive tests at 128,396, a death toll that stood at 1,097, and a steadily increasing seven-day average of deaths at 924 and hospitalizations at 51,763. The total number of confirmed cases also passed the grim milestone of 10 million.


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