Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
For those political junkies who love data, this website maintains updated totals of early voting state by state, along with weekly analyses of the trends. As of today, over 35 million people have voted early. (I dropped mine in the ballot box in my local city hall yesterday.) To get a sense of scale, this is about 25% of the total number of votes cast in the 2016 election, which was about 138,800,000.
[Read more…]
The debate organizers have made a rule change for the second debate on Thursday between Joe Biden and Donald Trump that includes mute buttons.
When Trump and Biden face off on Thursday for a final televised debate, each candidate will have their microphones cut off while the other is delivering responses to questions.
During the 90-min debate, each candidate will have two minutes of uninterrupted time to respond to questions before they move on to open debate. The rule change from the non-partisan Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) comes after a chaotic first debate during which the presidential conductors spoke over each other, and Trump, especially, interrupted his opponent.
Observers have been warning that given the unprecedented nature of this year’s election with the large numbers of people voting using mail-in ballots instead of in person on election day, previous methods of projecting results are no longer valid and should not be used even if that means the results will not be known until days later instead of on election night.
The media are on course aware of this problem but as this piece from The Onion suggests, they may not be able to withstand the pressure to call the result if they think that another network might be on the verge of doing so. In the media business where ratings is everything, the desire to be first can, sadly, overpower the desire to be right.
[Read more…]
Every year, some outfit ranks the popularity of the names given to newborns. It will be interesting to see if the rank of Karen takes a hit now that it has become a negative meme.
He puts his life on the line among the massless maskless hordes attending a recent Trump rally in Pennsylvania to bring us a flavor of the nuttiness he encounters.
It is disturbing that neither Trump nor his doctors nor White House spokespersons are saying when he last tested negative for the coronavirus, even as he insists that he plans to hold rallies and demands that the next debate on October 15 be held in person instead of virtually as the debate commission has decided. The fact that Trump seems to have later decided against traveling this weekend after saying that he would suggests that maybe, just maybe, wiser counsels have prevailed on him to not be so utterly reckless.
