One of the most encouraging results of Tuesday’e elections have been the ballot measures in the various states that resulted in expanded access to abortion (even in deep-red Kentucky), voting, and legalized marijuana and increases in the minimum wage. Oregon also seems likely to pass measures to establish a right to health care and to require a permit to buy firearms and high-capacity magazines.
When it comes to elections for offices, in objective terms, the results of the mid-terms has been a draw. The results are so close that at this point, the final outcome of which party controls the House of Representative and the Senate is still up in the air though it seems likely that the Republicans will have a tiny majority in the former. Right now, there are four undecided senate races. Of those, the one in Alaska is guaranteed to return a Republican since the top two candidates Lisa Murkowski and Kelly Tshibaka are both from that party. It will take some time to get the results since Alaska has a system where the top four people in the open primary go on to the general election and the winner there is decided by ranked choice voting, which takes longer to tabulate.
That currently results in 48 Democratic senators and 49 Republican ones. That leaves the races in Arizona where incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly is leading, Nevada where Republican Adam Laxalt, Jr is leading over the Democratic incumbent Catherine Cortez Masto, and Georgia where there will be a runoff on December 6th between incumbent Raphael Warnock and the utterly incompetent liar and hypocrite Herschel Walker, since neither of them obtained the required 50% b=needed to avoid a cutoff.
Interestingly Georgia is one of just two states (the other being Louisiana) that require a runoff if no candidate gets 50%. Georgia introduced this requirement because they feared that in a contest with more than one white candidate, they might split the white vote, enabling a Black candidate to win by a plurality.
Georgia’s runoff system began in 1963 when state representative Denmark Groover—an avid segregationist—proposed adding a second round of voting to ensure that at least half of all constituents backed a candidate.
Groover’s proposal came a few years after he lost his previous election bid in 1958, which he blamed on “Negro bloc voting,” or that theoretically, if Black voters put up a united front and voted consistently, it would further their political interests. Groover thought that a runoff would decrease the likelihood of an African-American being elected because it would rally white voters around a white candidate.
Yes, racism is at the root of that feature, like so many aspects of life in the US.
But in the strange world of US, what seems to matter is less the result but how the result compares to expectations and, seen that way, the commentariat across the political spectrum seem to have come to the conclusion that that this was a big win for Democrats and a big defeat for Republicans. This is because the party that holds the presidency typically loses big in the mid-term elections. When this was combined with Joe Biden’s low approval. ratings, the high inflation rate, and the artificially ginned up fears about crime by conservative politicians and media, they were expecting a ‘red wave’ that would result in s a shellacking for the Democrats that would give Republicans easy wins and big majorities in both chambers. When that did not happen, this gave Joe Biden and the Democrats a spring in their step even though, as I said, they may still lose their majorities in both chambers. Meanwhile, there is no joy in Trumpville because the mighty narcissist seems to have struck out.
Overall, this appears to be one of the worst performances by an “out party” in a midterm for many years, more like a stalemate than like the famous Republican wins of 2010 and 1994, when they successfully pushed back against an unpopular Democratic president, or for that matter like the Democratic “blue wave” of 2018.
…Former Trump White House communications director Alyssa Farah Griffin urged the Republican Party to ditch the former president.
“If you want the Republican Party to thrive, we’ve got to just finally speak out and say, ‘This man is a loser,'” she told CNN.
…Leading TrumpWorld figures like Steve Bannon are “despondent” and “catatonic” over Tuesday’s failures, NBC News’ Ben Collins reported.
“They were looking at all these other places that did not really line up with all the polls that we’re seeing in the weeks beforehand. They sort of can’t believe it,” he said on MSNBC. “They really did not have a plan. They were making fun of the Democrats’ ability to get out the vote while they started to lose some of these races.”
…An anonymous Republican source told Fox News that “if it wasn’t clear before it should be now: we have a Trump problem.”
The Fox News website published a headline calling Trump the “biggest loser tonight.” The New York Post, which is also owned by Fox News chief Rupert Murdoch, touted DeSantis’ win on its front page Wednesday, labeling him “DeFUTURE.”
Pundits across cable news spent Tuesday night in awe of Trump’s weakness throughout the night.
The commentariat, even among Republicans and their media supporters, have decided that Trump was the biggest loser in this election. Trump was expected to announce on the 15th that he was going to run again but these results may have given him, or at least his advisors, pause. But Trump being Trump who sees any retreat as a weakness, is likely to go ahead and announce anyway.
Politics in the US is weird that way, similar to the way that the stock market seems to respond to whether actual data (such as a company’s sales figures and profits) beat expectations rather than what they actually are. Yesterday, for instance, the stock market soared higher by almost 4%. Why? Because ‘the market’ reportedly anticipates that since the release of inflation rates showed a drop from previous months, the Federal Reserve is going to slow down the rise in interest rate hikes. The fact that assigning a collective motive to the actions of a vast number of individual actors always involves considerable guesswork does not seem rational to me. But what do I know, since I do not ‘play the market’ and thus have little understanding of the mindset of those who do?
However, the election did have objectively encouraging signs for progressives when one looked beyond the top line races for Congress.
For one thing, some of the more extreme and high profile supporters of Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election being stolen lost their races. I was critical of the strategy of some Democrats to promote the more extreme candidates in the Republican primaries on the assumption that they would be easier to beat. That seems to have paid off in the results since many, though by no means all, lost their races , though I still dislike that strategy.
They were candidates who publicly supported Donald Trump’s false claims that he had won the 2020 presidential election. And their denial of Joe Biden’s victory may have contributed to their own defeat.
…Their losses in some cases validated a decision by Democratic-aligned groups to spend millions to help them win their GOP primaries, figuring that their far-right status would make them easier to defeat in the general election. Some gubernatorial candidates in this category included Dan Cox in Maryland, Darren Bailey in Illinois and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania.
Two of the races in Arizona – Kari Lake for governor and Mark Finchem for secretary of state – still remain undecided.
Lake has said she wouldn’t have certified the 2020 election results and has called for her opponent, Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, to go to jail for doing so. Finchem wants to give his state’s Republican-led Legislature the authority to reject election results. Also still up for grabs is Nevada’s closely watched secretary of state race, where Republican Jim Marchant has promised to decertify the 2020 result there.
This article looks at other races where Trump’s people lost.
In New Hampshire, a state with a popular Republican governor, and where Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan won by the narrowest of margins in 2016, Trump’s political instincts cost Republicans a shot at another pickup opportunity. He backed Don Bolduc—a retired Army general who claimed that schools were leaving out litter boxes for kids who identified as animals, said that the above-mentioned popular Republican governor was a “communist Chinese sympathizer,” and insisted that the 2020 election was stolen (until immediately after the primary, when he announced that he’d changed his mind). Bolduc, unsurprisingly, lost, even as Gov. Chris Sununu easily won another term.
In Michigan—another state where Trump’s lies about the 2020 election gripped the party—another conservative TV personality Trump backed in a primary, Tudor Dixon, lost handily to incumbent Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
While some of the people whom Trump promoted did win, they were hoping for a lot more and that simply did not happen.
Weird approach. If the big “win” results in them losing power and hence the ability to affect positive change / stymie the awfulness of Republicans, then it seems a loss to me. The fact that the small loss was expected to be a rout does not in my view make it a win.
@Holms,
What people are not saying is that a small majority in either the house or senate means that there are likely some congress-critters in each chamber who the democrats can work with. Not all republicans in congress are Trumpian’s. For example, if Lisa Murkowski holds on to her seat in Alaska she will be willing to consider policy proposals from the democrats, and also likely to oppose impeachment proceedings against Biden. While I disagree with Murkowski on a lot of issues, I recognize that she feels an obligation to her constituents, including those who didn’t vote for her. I can respect that. I do not respect any politician who punishes constituents who didn’t vote for them. There are some in each party, but at the present time the republicans have far more people who see their office as an expression of personal power rather than as a position to help others; they want to be rulers rather than public servants.
If there had really been a red-wave the non-Trumpian republicans would be unwilling to work with the democrats for fear of being punished by their own party. That is far less likely to happen now. The non-Trumpian republicans will have more room to make up their own minds. So even if the democrats lose the house and senate, as a realistic progressive democrat the results of this election are about as good as I could have hoped for. Would I call it a “Win”? No. But in some contests you have to play for a draw.
It is a win because the people soundly rejected the attempt by the GOP to use abortion as a wedge issue.
Even those who voted for a GOP candidate absolutely do not support their attempt to ban abortion. You can’t ban it.
As long as there are pregnancies, there will be a need for safe abortions. Sometimes things go wrong, and abortion is the only option to save the pregnant person. Even deeply religious pro- life people understand that saving the mother is far more important than worrying about the doomed or dead fetus.
Maybe a win, maybe a stay of execution. While Trumpism lost, authoritarianism didn’t. Trump-the-loser just means they need to rally around someone else; and DeSantis has already started his campaign. So far, the authoritarians seem more interested in owning the libs and energizing their base than in attracting the middle, but there is no guarantee that they will all be that short-sighted.
“artificially ginned up fears about crime by conservative politicians and media”
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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/15/opinion/nyc-black-victims-crime.html
You know txpiper, if you have a point to make you should probably try to make it.
Linking to a 9-month-old opinion piece behind a paywall is just further evidence that you are an idiot.
I had a quick look, flex.
Basically, txpiper is intimating that in NY the scare is not a scare, that Blacks aren’t being incarcerated sufficiently, and that it’s Blacks who suffer from this unless they’re dealt with much (MUCH!) strictly. For their own good.
(I know, I know… it doesn’t even make internal sense)
Yeah. I did not expect txpiper to even attempt to dispute my adumbration.
Yeah, I expect that txpiper is too busy scouring the babble in a desperate attempt to find another pathetic excuse for the failure of their prophesy (a sweeping in of a divinely mandated christo-fascist government as a precursor to the second cumming -- you know, when jesus fucks us non-believers in all our orifices). The devil himself is less evil than these fuckers.
Those goat herders gotta find a goat to scape.
Dun bin too danged soft on them blacks and god don’t like it.
Abortion rights are not universal human rights and thus said supposed rights should be addressed at the State level and not at the Federal level. Recently the people of California voted to have abortion rights embedded in the California State Constitution. And so be it.
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Is the embracing of abortion healthy for society? Answer: No. But then people have often voted for policies which are detrimental to their welfare. H.L. Menken: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
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Despite laws, murders occur, rapes occur, abortions occur. Should murder be legitimized? Should rape be legitimized? Should abortion be legitimized?
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The culture of abortion is a death culture.
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In Ancient Greece, abortion was used to enforce a zero population growth policy. An abortion culture brings about a degradation of family culture and population decline, The Roman conquest of Ancient Greece was much easier than Roman generals expected. The historical account by Polybius described numerous Greek villages as being half empty. There were no previous epidemics to explain the depopulation of greek villages. Polybius explained that abortion encouraged various hedonistic drives with men becoming disinterested in building families.
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Abortion and (illegal) immigration. Illegal is a keyword because the Left wants to deny/degrade sovereignty of any nation. In the USA, 1 Million abortions are performed per year. Until 2021, when 2 million illegals crossed the Southern border, the annual immigration rate into the USA was 1 Million. The American Left and Big Business say immigration is needed for there is a labor shortage (forget about the unemployment problem of US citizens). Well, is that not the same reasoning of the Democrat Party and Slave Owners who said since the 1700’s: Import the Africans! We need the labor!!!
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So import foreigners to replace the aborted future US citizens.
I guess fried fish subscribes to the white supremacist idea of the great replacement. Never mind the bit where they themselves are of foreign origin. (Just a wild guess that they aren’t Indian, First Nation, or Mexican.)
Troll did not get the memo issued by the people of California, Kentucky, Vermont, Michigan or very red Montana. The people have said very clearly the The state shall not infringe on a citizens right to bodily autonomy, healthcare, family planning, privacy, or abortion. Zippeth ze lip and crawl under your rock.
friedfishe, as always out-of-topic:
I confess I can’t definitively decide whether your idiotic ramblings are a product of your feeble thinking ability and lack of knowledge, or merely hateful spoutings.
Probably a combination of both.
Murder, rape, abortion: one of those is not like the others.
(Hint: Do you imagine there are rape clinics where people pay to get raped or murder clinics where people pay to get murdered? Do you see people protesting on the street for the right to be raped or murdered?)
I also note that we do not have any shortage of people. We have a bit of an overpopulation of humans which might kill the whole planet, but humans are not an endangered species.
“We have a bit of an overpopulation of humans which might kill the whole planet…”
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Over 1.4 billion in each of Africa, China and India. I’m confident that there are, or will be, people who will recognize that, energy sources aside, too many carbon-generating humans is the problem. Perhaps they can utilize the hostility towards hydrocarbons and chemical fertilizers in population reduction efforts.
Africa is a continent, and I’m wholly unsurprised that txpiper is a white supremacist in addition to being a fake Christian.
Of course it’s the non-white countries which are the overpopulated places in his tiny stunted mind, not those greedy wasteful white suburbanites with enormous carbon footprints.
“an overpopulation of humans”
Texas seems to have a huge overpopulation problem and emits far more greenhouse gases than entire countries in Africa. West Texas is going to be completely uninhabitable desert within a few decades, when it’s not on fire. Water is life, you can’t drink fossil fuels.
Only a KKK class bigot imagines that the entire continent of Africa, India, and China are the overpopulated regions.
“West Texas is going to be completely uninhabitable desert within a few decades, when it’s not on fire.”
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My goodness. That sounds awful. The hill country is too arid for my tastes, much less that.
But you shouldn’t be wasting your life getting all spooled up about things you cannot personally fix or change. You need to relax and get reacquainted with your own creed and evolutionary perspective. Isn’t natural selection supposed to weed out the inferior so that the winners in the mutations lottery can prevail?
Wow, two off-topic incoherent attention-grabbing trolls in one thread. Mano’s getting popular!
^
Eeew! There is a strong stink of ignorant racist shit around here.
It appears to itself to be nothing but a shiny bag of righteous xian goodness, but the more that flimsy bag of lies is stepped on the more the yuck oozes out.
I am about to vomit!
Sorry RB your last comment wasn’t there as I wrote mine but was when I posted. Obs I mean the one immediately above you!
It’s ok, they are just hill folk Texans who apparently don’t need water and are entirely separate from Dallas or Houston. Hardly count as actual humans.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4Nbd8ydmLqI
Ignorance on proud display:
No.
I particularly like the unironic use of “weed out”, of “inferior”, and of “winners”.
I do get it.
When one’s entire belief system relies on wilfully ignoring science, ignore it one will. And then make up some caricature based on that ignorance, and sneer at it.
Concept at hand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitness_landscape
And yet you yourself routinely rail at science, O hypocrite, at every perceived opportunity. Almost as if you were “all spooled up” about it.
It’s fucking obvious how you keep shoehorning that prejudice into any and all comment threads, regardless of its relevance to whatever the topic at hand is… such as in this instance. As obvious as your evident ignorance about science.
(To be fair, maybe not to you)
“I particularly like the unironic use of “weed out”, of “inferior”, and of “winners”.”
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You can say “removed”, “less-well-adapted” and “more fit”. It doesn’t change a thing.
Like the NYT piece I linked to above, it’s just the cog-diss that happens when liberal worlds collide. You don’t know which bullet point you’re supposed to refer to.
I could, but not being an ignoramus I don’t, since I actually understand the relevant concepts and nomenclature.
<snicker>
(“cog-diss” — you’re wallowing in it!)
Do tell. Which bullet point am I supposed to refer to?
#10 fishe
Body autonomy is the universal right, abortion is one application of this concept. Denying access to abortion means denying body autonomy.
In order: No, as murder breaches the body autonomy of another person. No, as rape breaches the body autonomy of another person. Yes, as abortion is an application of the concept of body autonomy: the right to decide if others have access to your own body.
Sources needed for everything in this paragraph.
And then a steaming dollop of replacement theory. I think you’d get along with txpiper.
Oh and then your partner in grime came out to play!
#25 tx
Trust a racist to interpret evolutionary fitness as superiority/inferiority.
Well, fiddlesticks! If I’d known I was a racist, I’d have married a white girl.
HAH! He thinks he can’t be racist if he married a different skin colour.
Yeah, that makes him as totally non-racist as Strom Thurmond!
Trust a racist to interpret evolutionary fitness as superiority/inferiority.
And then pretend evolution causes racism. Or liberal evolutionists are “the real racists.” Or something…
It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that txpiper is not racist — obviously lives in a fantasy world (YEC) and partakes of Evangelical/Republican ideology to boot — but only comes across as such.
I mean, given that mental image of the world and sources of information, it’s somewhat possible txpiper truly buys into the scaremongering and the party line.
Evil libruls! Communist Democrats! Satanic panic!!!
Milo Yanniyippiwhateverhisnamewas also claimed he wasn’t racist, because he preferred black men as sexual partners.
Overpopulation and human driven climate change obviously is a global problem that is not caused by China, India, or the entire continent of Africa.
Referring to a continent as shorthand for black is hella racist, as was the claim that it’s those non-white people who are overpopulating the planet.
Thanks John Morales. Agreed.
I would be inclined however to state it that perhaps txpiper believes that they are not racist (it is easy to not see the inherent racism in one’s world view when one is deeply submerged in a society awash with systemic racism and bigotries of other colours -xianity being one of those bigotries).
So, my apologies to txpiper here. I was a bit harsh.
But….
…..what you wrote at #14 and #18 was inherently racist even if you don’t see it being so, txpiper.
“Overpopulation and human driven climate change obviously is a global problem that is not caused by China, India, or the entire continent of Africa.”
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You’ve mentioned overpopulation twice as being problematic. If that is correct, then how are China, India and African countries, which total up to well over half of the world population, not part of the problem?
=
“Referring to a continent as shorthand for black is hella racist..”
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And, of course, it is no such thing. Racist, fascist and science are just words you like to use that you have no respect for. You don’t even have a working definition for racist.
I gotta admit that the vanishingly small (think ε) possibility given the comments at hand that txpiper is no racist remains the same, after reading that.
(Still infinitesimal, of course — as small as can be)
Working definition? If you say racist things, and then claim that weren’t racist because your spouse isn’t white, you are racist. Not a racist, just the noun is sufficient. Bad Xtian!
that = they
Autogenerated text, bah and humbug!
Africa. 3.7% of global CO2 emissions. Population 1.4 billion.
USA 15% of global CO2 emissions, 4 times that of Africa. Population? 330 million. 1/4 the population of Africa.
China 27% of global CO2 emissions. Population 1.4 billion. So what’s is that? 4 times the population of the USA with CO2 emissions not quite double the USA.
India. 6.8% of global emissions again with 4 times the population of the USA which is responsible for 15% CO2 emissions.
So yes, while we have a population problem in terms of land and resource availability, as soon as you start talking about carbon emissions the USA is the outlier here.
Australia is not innocent either. 1.1% global emissions with a population of 30 million out of 8 billion.
Pointing at China India, and Africa as having an equal share of responsibility is dishonest in the least.
https://ourworldindata.org/annual-co2-emissions
Texas produces a huge amount of the carbon footprint of the US. According to recent reporting:
https://www.chooseenergy.com/data-center/carbon-dioxide-by-state/
I was gonna mention that, but in terms of overall resources, not just CO2.
Looks even worse, then.
FWIW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions#/media/File:20211026_Cumulative_carbon_dioxide_CO2_emissions_by_country_-_bar_chart.svg
And txpiper once again demostrates his ludicrously stupid misunderstanding of evolutionary biology, which he thinks is a “creed”, like his own vile version of Christianity, involving the worship of natural selection. Natural selection is an undirected, purposeless process that happens whether anyone believes in it or not, does not work toward any goal, and is not “supposed” to do anything. In many cases, it produces results that are extremely unpleasant from a human point of view -- such as the evolution of viruses that are more effective at infecting people.
As for relationships between population, greenhouse gas emissions, and other environmental issues, attention tends to be directed toward the first in order to displace blame for the others away from rich, largely but by no means uniformly white people, onto poor, largely but by no means uniformly black and brown ones. The figures for emissions cited and linked to here probably underestimate the extent to which rich countries bear responsibility, because they are generally based on where greenhouse gases are emitted, rather than where the products of the processes concerned are consumed -- as is well known, much industrial production has been “outsourced” from Europe, North America and other rich countries to places where labour costs are lower and environmental controls less stringent. Most population growth is now occurring among populations with low per capita emissions (and other burdens on the environmental), and moreover that growth has been slowing in proportional terms for half a century; even the absolute annual growth of world population (population at the end of a year minus that at its start) was highest around 1990. There are good environmental and health reasons to keep it going down (and the most effective way of doing so is to improve the education, status and opportunities of women and girls, including their access to contraception and abortion), but this will do very little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on the timescale (the next 30 years or so) that this needs to be done if we are to avoid catastrophic climate disruption.