Another week, another gunman goes into a crowded venue and opens fire, this time killing 12 people, wounding 16 others, and then apparently killing himself. This time the event took place late on Wednesday night at 11:20 pm at a crowded country and western themed bar and grill frequented by college students at nearby Pepperdine University in an affluent area near Los Angeles.
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Now that I have had time to reflect on the election and shift my attention away from the high-profile elections, my early lukewarm feelings need to be revised. It looks like Tuesday turned out to be pretty good for Democrats and bad for Donald Trump. If you needed to see that Trump was not happy, one can read the transcript of the press conference that he held on Wednesday where he was even more peevish, mean, and spiteful than he usually is. He even name-checked several Republicans who he claimed lost their congressional races because they did not ’embrace’ him (that narcissism and desperate need to be loved surfacing again) while ignoring those who did embrace him but lost anyway.
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Surely, in a head-to-head contest, a cat should easily defeat a rat? But that is not what the video below shows. This is not natural.
There is a metaphor in there somewhere.
Glenn Greenwald and Victor Pougy compare yesterday’s election in the US with last month’s election in Brazil to show how awful it is here.
That a country poorer than the U.S., with a much shorter history of democracy, can hold such seamless, fair, participatory, and efficient elections proves that the opposite outcome in the U.S. — massive voter disenfranchisement, multi-hour voting lines, pervasive machine malfunctions, and elections that are not decided until weeks after the fact — are very easily avoided and thus likely intentional.
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Rachel M. Cohen provides a run down of some of the ballot initiatives that passed yesterday, including one important one in Michigan that reader Mark Dowd has pointed to.
FROM STATE LEGISLATIVE races to the House of Representatives, progressive candidates made a dent in the 2018 election season, and will be relatively well-represented in federal and state-level governments next year. But it’s not just elected office: Left-wing activists also made their voices heard through ballot initiatives across the country. On Tuesday night, progressives walked away with some wins and some losses on that front.
They made gains for Medicaid expansion, public education, and voting rights. But they lost other battles, like on criminal justice reform, nurse-to-patient ratios, and universal home care.
Cohen’s article is worth reading.
As I feared, the Trump cult remains strong in the US, strong enough to increase its majority in the US Senate, even as it lost control of the House of Representatives. In Ohio, Republicans won all the statewide elected offices except for incumbent Democratic senator Sherrod Brown who won quite easily. No congressional seats switched parties either, so the status quo in Ohio was retained.
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Kim Davis is the rancid homophobic clerk of a county in Kentucky who shot to fame because of her refusal to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, even after the US Supreme Court ruled that all bans on such marriages were unconstitutional. She has been defeated in her effort to retain the office that she seems to regard as a family sinecure, having taken it over from her mother who hired her to work in the office. She has lost to a Democrat. Her replacement is by no means a great friend of the LGBT community but he has promised to enforce the law equally.
This is not a major election, just a small one in a backwater. But the defeat of the awful Davis pleases me a great deal.
While there he talks to Beto O’Rourke and Ted Cruz and their respective supporters. O’Rourke had the good sense to play it straight but Cruz does not seem to realize that when you try to trade sharp barbs with a comedian, you will always lose because comedians deal with hecklers all the time. This is especially the case when your interviewer has the name ‘Insult’ but Cruz tries anyway and gets drubbed. That happens at the 9:00 mark.
I voted at about 10:00am today. While there were no lines, the polling place was busy and most of the booths were occupied. I met a friend there as she was leaving and she said that there was a line when she arrived. We both felt that the turnout was high for an off-presidential year election but what the means is anybody’s guess, though since where we live is a pretty progressive area, a high turnout should be good for statewide offices and issues.