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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And there was great rejoicing across the land

Here is a mashup of the spontaneous demonstrations that broke out across the country at the news that Joe Biden had won and that Trump had to go.

I was encouraged to see that so many of the people celebrating were so young. I am waiting to see what the demographics of the vote are, especially when it comes to young people because that is what will determine the future direction of the country.

Saturday Night Live, while reporting on other celebrations across the country and the world, also got in some digs at Trump.

Trump’s campaign ends not with a bang, not with a whimper, but as comedy

There was a curious juxtapositioning of events yesterday morning.

When the Associated Press called Pennsylvania for Joe Biden at 11:25 am, Trump was on the golf course, no doubt cheating at the game as he is often accused of doing. He apparently was told the news while he was playing and he looked decidedly glum as his motorcade went back to the White House, accompanied by the jeers of people on the streets, extended middle fingers, and chants of “Lock him up!” He is playing playing golf again today, with protestors at the gates of the golf club. Maybe he will play every day until it is time for him to leave the White House. That would be a good thing because that means he won’t be doing any more damage.

Meanwhile in Philadelphia, things were even weirder. Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, accompanied by Trump’s second idiot son Eric and members of his legal team, were holding a press conference, for reasons that are not clear, in the back parking lot of a landscaping company, not the most impressive of backdrops.


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What this election revealed about America is not good

When Donald Trump ran and surprisingly won in 2016, one might have explained that result by saying that he was a novelty candidate and that people who were tired of the usual two-party fare presented to them found him refreshingly different and were willing to give him a chance in the hope that he would shake things up. Sure, he said racist and xenophobic things during the campaign, but people may have given him the benefit of the doubt, that he was just saying these things to get elected and that once he won, the dignity of the office would moderate his rhetoric and he would govern responsibly. The parade of women who came forward to accuse him of grotesque behavior was harder to explain away but clearly many were willing to indulge in a ‘boys will be boys’ tolerant attitude.
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Who will bell the cat?

Once AP made the call that Joe Biden had passed the 270 electoral vote threshold, other news outlets like CNN and the New York Times and even Fox News quickly followed suit. AP soon after that called Nevada for Biden, giving him 290 EVs. If he also wins Georgia, and assuming that Trump holds on to North Carolina and Alaska, the final margin will be 306-232, a fitting bookend to Trump’s miserable presidency, since that was the same margin by which he won in 2016, that he of course labeled as a landslide victory, lying that it was one of the biggest in US history.
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Joe Biden declared the president

The Associated Press has declared that Joe Biden has won Pennsylvania and the presidency.

Meanwhile, Trump is playing golf at his golf course in Virginia while his lawyers are holding a press conference at (wait for it) a landscaping company in Philadelphia.

We should not be too hard on the pollsters

As in 2016, the final results of the presidential election had Donald Trump massively over performing when compared to the expectations based on the results of almost all the major polling outfits. There will be a temptation to beat up on the pollsters who got it so wrong and we can expect Nate Silver and others to be relentless grilled as to why the polls were so off. The ire aimed at them may be less this time because the final outcome of a likely Biden win is looking like it will be correct, unlike in 2016 where the prediction was of a Clinton win. But there will, and should be, much soul-searching as to why the polls were so off again.
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Trump’s speech yesterday, for the record

I usually try to avoid listening to Trump’s speeches but there was so much consternation at the vast number of lies in a speech he gave at a press conference yesterday that I felt obliged to watch it in its entirety. He delivered the written remarks in that weirdly flat monotone he uses when he is reading a script. It was pretty bad. Daniel Dale, who has been assigned the thankless task of fact-checking Donald Trump for CNN, lists all the lies in that short speech, that he called the most dishonest speech of his presidency, which is clearing a very high bar. (One thing that struck me is that Trump referred to ‘Mr. Biden’ and ‘Joe’ and did not use the usual insulting ‘Sleepy Joe’. But that was the only positive thing I heard.)
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