The wrecking of asylum protections

Seeking asylum in another country is the last refuge of desperate people. Leaving one’s home and fleeing with just the possessions one can carry, often with children in tow and traveling through dangerous territory where criminals can take advantage of your desperation, is not a decision that people make lightly. Hence the right to seek asylum is one that should be protected for the sake of simple humanity. But decency and humanity are not words that racist Trump and his racist cohorts understand and so it should not be surprising that they have almost completely destroyed even the limited protections in the US that were in place to protect the right to asylum
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Early voting patterns

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.
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Trump tone it down? That’s wishful thinking

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.

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Sadly, this satirical prediction made may well come true

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of people voting using mail-in ballots instead of in person on election day, previous methods of projecting results are no longer valid and should not be used even if that means the results will not be known until days later instead of on election night.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.
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