Well, we have nine days to go and I have completely run out of deep, thoughtful, provocative things to say. I am reduced to binge watching godawful offerings on Peacock. I did find a little toy that might amuse you. 538.com has an app that allows you to pick a state, click on it to make it blue, and then watch as their computer recalculates the probability that Biden will win. You can find it here. Right now, they are giving Biden an 87% chance of winning the election, but if early in the evening North Carolina is put into Biden's column, then you go to the app, plug that in, and it tells you that now Biden has a 99% chance of winning with a likely electoral vote count of 377.
I realize this does not compare in interest with a lengthy essay on what Theodor Adorno can tell us about the current uprising in Nigeria, but it is the best I can do.
One thing I will comment on about Biden. I have been much cheered by his repeated celebration of labor unions and his emphasis on the importance of creating good union jobs. That is not something I heard from either of the Clintons or indeed from Obama or from Carter, so far as I can recall. Maybe electing a president who is two generations past his prime has something to be said for it.
31 comments:
Politicas and Poker (from “Fiorello!”)
Politics and Poker
Playing for a pot that’s mediocre
Politics and Poker
Running neck and neck
If politics seems more predictable
That’s because
Usually
You can stack the deck
Politics and Poker
Politics and Poker
Makes an average guy
A heavy smoker
Bless the nominee
And give him our regards
And watch while he leans that in
Poker and Politics
Brother you gotta have
That slippery
Haphazardous
Commodity
You gotta have the cards!
According to a report on this morning’s Meet The Press, if the election comes down to counting absentee ballots, Pennsylvania will be a key battleground, because large numbers of defective absentee ballots were sent to voters without the envelope required to have the ballot counted. The Republicans are already preparing lawsuits to be filed in Pennsylvania courts to preclude these ballots from being counted, assuming, apparently, that these ballots will be pro-Biden.
Non-Americans (at least this non-American) find it confusing that the leftish party has colour blue and the rightish one red, contrary to the international convention. I’d thought that it comes from a time when liberal Lincoln was a Republican and the southern states were lynching and Democrat, but I just Googled it and actually it’s very recent, only 50 years or so, and is transatlantic: in Britain, the left party is liberal (in the American sense = progressive) while in America the right party is liberal (in the old British sense = economically free market). Additionally, in Britain we have a Liberal party, which combines both meanings in one. Put it down to you say tomato.
MS's point is well taken. Yes, Biden, like Gore, Kerry, and Clinton before him will be the candidate who gets more votes, absent voter suppression.
Voter suppression needs to be addressed squarely and forcefully but the Dems aren't terribly interested in expanding their brown/black/progressive base (remember HRC's lawyers did not choose to get involved in the 2016 MI voter suppression lawsuit filed by the Green Party which was required given that the Green Party didn't have standing).
Bottom line: the "right" to vote is pure ideology. Sleepy Joe et al need to expand the court and establish federal stipulations as to what the states can and cannot do in terms of their Constitutional mandate of administering elections - at minimum.
My point is that all these models of probability do not factor in the most important variable. Everything they say ought to be qualified with an asterisk "absent voter suppression."
I don’t understand the apparent compulsion to make odds on an election. Perhaps it is because I have never had any interest in gambling. Once, to kill time while stuck Vegas, I played the slots limited to the $60 in my wallet. Once I bet on a horse race at the state fairgrounds in Northampton, MA, and won $7.
I decided this morning, to avoid looking at the latest polls and electoral vote projections, to Invest my energy in the quest to find the most fitting description of of Mike Pence. The results are as follows. He is a toady, no doubt. Toady is defined as a servile parasite, Etymology Online say it derives from “toad eater”. The charlatan’s assistant, a “fawning flatterer’, would eat a presumably poisonous toad to provide the pretext for his being cured by the patent medicine being offered for sale by the charlatan. Toad eater goes back as far as 1620 and was shortened to toady in 1826. Aside from toady, the words that come to mind are obsequious, sycophantic, brown-noser, and lickspittle (abject toady, one who will do any repulsive thing from 1741). Every toady has his charlatan, and Pence has Trump.
RPW> I have completely run out of deep, thoughtful, provocative things to say.
I've read and watched a lot of RPW's oeuvre... Thoughtful and entertaining? Yes. But deep and provocative?
Subjective, of course. Still, maybe local devotees could furnish a few examples of the deep and provocative in RPW's writing? With a few accompanying words as to why they think so?
Boris, Boris, you are so eager to carp that you have lost all ability to recognize a self-mocking post when it appears. Lighten up!
The Republicans broke the Democratic filibuster today to advance Judge Barrett’s confirmation vote, which is scheduled to take place Monday evening. Even Sen. Murkowski broke ranks with Sen. Collins to break the filibuster and has indicated she will vote to confirm.
As Judge Barrett has testified, she has adopted the textualist/originalist jurisprudential philosophy of her mentor, Justice Scalia. In a prior series of comments, I had an exchange with aaall about overhauling the Constitution. In one of my comments I referenced statutes 42 U.S.C. §§1981, 1982, 1983 and 1985. These are codifications of the Civil Rights laws which were passed after the Civil War pursuant to powers granted to Congress under the 13th and 14th Amendments. Prompted by this exchange with aaalll, I went back to review a series of Supreme Court decisions known as the Civil Rights Cases decided in 1883. The cases involved lawsuits brought by African-Americans in the South who had been denied services by private business owners, e.g., denial of the right to enter a theater, denial of the right to ride a train in a car reserved for Whites, denial the right to lodging in a Whites only hotel. They claimed that the denial of these services by private citizens, rather than by the government, violated the above statutes, enacted pursuant to the aforementioned amendments. The 13th Amendment (the passage of which was the subject of the movie “Lincoln”) outlawed involuntary servitude, “except as punishment for crime ... duly convicted.” The rather long 14th Amendment, states in part, “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of within its jurisdiction of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
You will note that neither Amendment says anything about action by private citizens, and the 14th Amendment refers only to actions by a State, requiring what in legal terms has come to be called “state action.” Returning the Supreme Court decisions to review the Court’s decisions, I had something of a surprise. The majority, by a vote of 8-1, held that to the extent that the statutes applied to private citizens rather than State government, they were unconstitutional, because the Amendments were confined to state action, and therefore did not reach private action. The one dissent was written by arguably the greatest Justice of the 18th century, after John Marshall, Justice John Marshall Harlan, referred to thereafter as “The Great Dissenter.” (In law school, he is referred to as the First Justice Harlan, because his grandson, John Marshall Harlan II, also served as an associate justice on the S. Ct., from 1955-1971.) The first Justice Harlan was from Kentucky and, despite being the offspring of a slave holding family, was ardently opposed to slavery, argued against Kentucky’s secession, and fought on the Union side during the war. Thereafter, he became an attorney, won election to Attorney General of Kentucky, joined the Republican Party and was appointed to the Supreme Court. What surprised me? His reasoning, which would later be reflected in S.Ct. decision during the years from the 1930’s to the 1970’s. He argued that each of the private businesses, in some respect, represented the State in which they existed, and therefore, in a limited sense, were arms of the State by virtue of their being licensed by, or regulated by, the State. He even went further, writing in his dissent in Rex v. Ivens, the following:
(Cintinued)
“The opinion in these cases proceeds, as it seems to me, upon grounds entirely too narrow and artificial. The substance and spirit of the recent amendments of the constitution have been sacrificed by a subtle and ingenious verbal criticism. ‘It is not the words of the law but the internal sense of it that makes the law. The letter of the law is the body; the sense and reason of the law is the soul.’ Constitutional provisions, adopted in the interest of liberty, and for the purpose of securing, through national legislation, if need b, rights inhering in a state of freedom, and belonging to American citizenship, have been so construed as to defeat the ends the people desired to accomplish, which they attempted to accomplish, and which they supposed they had accomplished by changes in their fundamental law. By this I do not mean tha the determination of thses cases should have been materially controlled by considerations of mere expediency or policy. I mean only, in this form, to express an earnest conviction that the court has departed from the familiar rule requiring, in the interpretation of constitutional provisions, that full effect be given to the intent with which they were adopted.”
This by a Republican Justice. Does it sound like the advocate of textualism or originalsism.? I wish one of the Democratic senators had read this statement to Judge Barrett and asked her to square her jurisprudential philosophy with that of the First Justice Harlan. Indeed, his statement that the intent of those who adopt constitutional amendments, and who enact legislation, should be taken into account, a statement which directly contradicts Judge Barrett’s bizarre assertion that legislative history is not to be taken into account when determining the objective of a statute. His dissent, rejecting textualism, would be the precursor of J. Douglas’ finding a right of privacy in the penumbra of the 4th Amendment; to be expanded by J. Blackmun to protect a woman’s right to choose under the 4th and 14th Amendments; and most recently extended to substantive due process under the 14th Amendment by J. Kennedy to protect the right of individuals of the same gender to marry.
Justice Harlan also dissented from Plessy v. Feguson (1896), the decision which gave the Court’s imprimatur to the doctrine of “separate but equal,” which took another 58 years to overturn in Brown v. Topeka Bd. of Ed. Justice Harlan wrote:
“But in the view of the constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. the humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved. ... Sixty millions of whites are in no danger from the presence of eight million of blacks. The destinies of the two races, in this country, are indissolubly linked together, and the interests of both require that the common government of all shall not permit the seeds of race hate to be planted under the sanction of law.” These magnificent words resound to the present day.
Another error by my recalcitrant keyboard: "greatest Justice of the 19th century."
Chris, Ph.d, as I've remarked before--- Pence looks like my lobotomized lesbian grand-mother (sounds like her too).
Talking about grandmothers, the incumbent Democratic senator in Michigan, Gary Peters, is being opposed by John James, an African-American graduate of West Point and successful entrepreneur. He comes across as a very likeable guy, and if he were running for a different office as a Democrat, I would be inclined to vote for him. He just received the endorsement of the Detroit News today. Reports are that the race is close. James is now running ads featuring his African-American grandmother, talking about how well-mannered her grandson is, and how he was raised to respect his elder, and that, contrary to Sen. Peters’ ads, he will protect senior citizens that same way he protects her. Who can argue with a loving grandma?
"Voter suppression needs to be addressed squarely and forcefully but the Dems aren't terribly interested..."
Except, Jerry, the House has already passed voting rights legislation so your beef is with the Republican Senate. We might also remember that:
1. There was a major financial crisis going on early in Obama's first term.*
2. The Obama Justice Dept. was engaged in pre-clearance.
3. The Shelby County decision was delivered in 2013. Repeat 2013.
4. The Republicans took the the House in 2010 (and were to take the Senate in 2014) and no Republican controlled veto point will pass a meaningful bill on protecting and expanding the vote.
Also, one isn't going to ramp up a serious election challenge overnight. Clinton ran a bad campaign that they expected to win. Expecting them to mount a serious challenge is a reach. And, of course, Jill Stein is, at best, a grifter.
* Of course it took Obama way to long and with way too much self-negotiation too figure out that the Republicans would never deal in good faith.
" Who can argue with a loving grandma?"
I guess that would depend on what committee assignments he wants. If he was running to protect his grandmother he'd be a Democrat. Realistically he might be able to get a golden ticket but that would only happen if his vote wasn't needed and someone else didn't have a better case for that ticket.
Now that I've discovered U.S. Elections Project I have a new way to waste countless hours obsessing on the election over the next nine days. The site contains a wealth of information on early voting and provides links to Secretary of State websites for all reporting stats.
As far as I'm concerned, the state with the most remarkable early vote turnout is Texas. Texans have already voted at 80.2% of their 2016 total. Texas hasn't had voter turnout of greater than 70% since 1992, but as this Texas Tribune article has plausibly suggested, as many as 12 million Texans may vote in this election. To put this in perspective, 8.4 million Texans voted in 2018 when Beto lost by a mere 2.5%. In 2016, just under 9 million Texas voted. There is real excitement around voting in Texas this time, and it could very well turn blue.
While the 538 polling average for Texas is about even, three of the last four quality polls have Biden slightly ahead, with the fourth projecting it as even. Of course, these polls may not even be close to reliable if they haven't built into their models a likely voter profile that matches the excitement among Democrats and independents voting Democratic. As one measure of that uncertainly, fully 39% of early voters in Texas have not voted in a primary and so their affiliation is unknown. Of course, a large turnout does not guarantee that Biden will win in Texas, but Biden cannot win in Texas unless there is a large turnout. Right now, we're seeing that large turnout.
Suppose that on election night Biden ekes out a victory in Texas. If Biden won all the Clinton states but lost Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida, he would still win the election if he took Texas. A loss in Texas would mean the end of Trump, and the party could start on the evening of November 3.
I will add that I've never seen such excitement about voting in my home state of Washington. Biden will obviously win Washington, but a high voter turnout is important for down-ballot races. The King County Director of Elections, Julie Wise, is projecting a 90% voter turnout in King County, which represents 1/3 of the electorate in Washington state. As of today, 41.7% of Washingtonians have voted. In 2016, it wasn't until three days before the election that Washington reached that number. So even in a state where Republicans aren't competitive in most statewide races there is the makings of a massive turnout.
As reported in The Guardian, voter turnout could reach, according to Michael McDonald, who administers the US Elections Project, 150 million voters or (sadly) 65% of eligible voters, the highest turnout since 1908.
jeffrey g lessen
I’ve always thought Pence’s lobotomy was performed by ‘mother.’
Jerry,
I think you might be misreading the current political situation re: voter suppression. Black voters, I think, will insist that a new voting rights act be passed, and they are a constituency that can not be ignored at a time when racial justice is one of the most prominent issues. Also, Biden’s recent speeches place great emphasis on racial justice. Having said it, the pressure will be on to do it. To be sure, I agree with your general characterization of the Dems, and I may be overly optimistic.
I, too, am heartened by Biden's mentioning of labor unions. But I seem to recall that Obama appeared alongside some striking workers in Chicago when he was running in 2008 never to be seen alongside such people and causes once he was elected. (Please correct me if I'm wrong on this.) Optimism tempered by pessimism this time around. Same goes for foreign policy should Biden win.
I watched the 60 Minute interviews of Il Duce/Pence and Biden/Harris. It was very amusing to see Il Duce walk off the set in a tantrum when the questioning got too tough, leaving Leslie Stahl looking on in stupefaction, to be followed by Pence to do damage control. I will say Pence has a remarkable ability to avoid answering questions at the same time he praises his overlord. I thought Biden and Harris were excellent, giving straight answers to Norah O’Donnell’s questions, and contrary to Il Duce’s claim of favoritism, she pressed both Biden and Harris as hard as Stahl had pressed Il Duce.
I sympathize with Ecrasez's comments regarding the so-called color designations of the two dominant political parties in the US. It was not that long ago when we did not have blue, red, or purple states. I believe it to be a media designation beginning in the early 90s that took hold and has now stuck.
-- Jim
RMcD,,
Obama had a mixed report card regarding his efforts on behalf of workers generally, and labor unions in particular. He passed the Ledbetter Equal Pay Act to guarantee equal pay for female workers. He saved the auto industry by supporting a two-tier payment scale for auto workers. His administration also appointed commissioners to the NLRB that were more favorable to unions than the NLRB was under Bush. It must be remembered. moreover, that during his second term he was opposed by a hostile Republican Congress that would not compromise with him.
See generally https://www.workforce.com/news/workplace-legacy-barack-obama.
Biden, I believe, can be expected to live up to his promises to labor unions. He comes from a blue collar working class background, unlike Obama. And if the Democrats succeed in flipping the Senate, he will have the support he needs to pass progressive labor reform.
Chris, I beg to differ.
That an examination of the breadth and depth of voter suppression and the impact of same since 2000 has not and is not a central explanatory issue in the rise of far right power in the US (in media focus or in the focus of policy making) to me at any rate, reveals the degree political influencers prefer "the blue pill" to "the red pill."
The one American journalist (who has been filtered out of American media but who is a welcomed voice in British media) is Greg Palast. Go here for an interview with him if you wish to hear his explication of voter suppression in this voting cycle:
https://bit.ly/2FZPec5
Pennsylvania lost 50% of its manufacturing jobs to NAFTA and China, courtesy of Biden and other globalists- and you have the unmitigated gall to tout him as pro-union. Similar numbers across the Rustbelt, including my hometown of Redford, MI. (I actually know actual workers, you elitist POS.) What a benighted, wicked man you are.
RFGA,
Since you have not identified the object of your wrath, I will assume your comment is directed at me. You are certainly entitled to your opinion regarding the effect that NAFTA had on manufacturing jobs in the U.S., but there is no consensus by economists that you are correct. For example, in “NAFTA’s Impact opn the U.S. Economy: What Are the Facts?”, https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/naftas-impact-u-s-economy-facts/. the authors state: Twenty-years later, scholars and policy makers often disagree about the impact that NAFTA has had on economic growth and job generation in the U.S. That impact, they say, is not always easy to disentangle from other economic, social and political factors that have influenced U.S. growth.” Given these differences of opinion, it surely is an unjustified exaggeration to call someone “benighted” who believes the overall effect of NAFTA for the U.S. economy was favorable.
And as one who has been criticized for engaging in ad hominem attacks (an characterization which I have rejected because the fallacy refers to using name calling without being conjoined with any rational argument, something I do not do) perhaps I am not in a position to take you to task for equating being “benighted” with being “wicked,” but surely there is no moral dimension to simply disagreeing on the facts. I can accept being called stupid, but stupid and wicked, that goes too far.
RPW> Boris, Boris, you are so eager to carp that you have lost all ability to recognize a self-mocking post when it appears. Lighten up!
Ah, the ad hominem strikes again. Popular shtick here, I see. The tree is worthy of its apples.
Your intention and self-categorization as well as you philosophically brilliant attempts to read my brain are irrelevant. Yes, my question was prompted by your post, but I'd been thinking about it for a while since you started obsessing about Trump catastrophically...
It bugs me to no end that your thoughts on Freud are illuminating and your remembrances of your younger self entertaining, but your thoughts on modern politics are dull, dull, dull, and your political recipes are pipe dreams... Here is one:
"What really needs to be done? I think the answer is pretty simple. The problem is that I can't do it, and neither can you. What we need is someone capable of raising large amounts of money [fifty, sixty, a hundred million], using it to pay full-time staff, crafting a fifty state, 435 Congressional District, state rep and state senator plan, recruiting good progressive candidates at every level, and then running this whole operation for years on end."
Year after year in this vein... How is it that you are not tired of the exhausting futility of your thought?
Nothing needs to be done, of course... Except for me being more circumspect from now on - skipping your silly politicking, gobbling stories of your intellectually glorious past...
Jerry,
I have had absolutely no respect for the Democratic Party organization since my experience working for the McGovern campaign. When I worked campaigns in Vermont, my initial opinion was confirmed in spades. I also have no argument with the impact of voter suppression on maintenance of the far right’s hold on power. But the far right’s rise to power began in 1990’s, and the modern version of voter suppression took off after the 2013 ruling Shelby County v Holder. It has helped keep the far-right remain in power in red states and the Democratic Party hasn’t done anything about it. From what I see in the polling data thus far in Georgia, one of the hardest hit states re: voter suppression is this: Romney won GA +7.8, Trump won +5.1, and Real Clear Politics has it tied today. Kemp won because of voter suppression, no doubt, but he and his idiot successor in the Sec. of State’s office have not suppressed enough votes to prevent an 8 point shift to the left in the pool of likely voters.
My only point in the previous post was to say that the democrats will have to bring a new voting rights act before congress, one that will end voter suppression as we know it. I think there is little doubt that it will happen.
MS, Comrade Wolff was actually the one who praised AH Biden's for being pro-union, in his above post, 9 Days. There is simply no disputing the obvious observational evidence supporting the widely held notion that NAFTA and the B-O pro-China trade policy were an unmitigated disaster for American workers. Where did Rustbelt manufacturing jobs go? The goods once produced therein are now produced overseas. End of story.
Globalization lifted hundreds of million of people out of poverty worldwide. The problem is that economists and politicians ignored the right side of the graph and only considered total utility. Had the neo-liberal consensus been in force after WW II Europe would never have recovered. The assumption that markets would solve all problems conveniently allowed the top .1 % to hoover up most of the benefits while ignoring the costs to the bottom 50%.
No, globalization virtually wiped out the American middle class- I saw it in Michigan and Ohio with my own 2 eyes. Each country's leaders are obligated to govern so as to facilitate the material well-being of its citizens. They are under no obligation to do the same for the citizens of other countries: any more than I should neglect my own children to provide for my neighbor's offspring. It's called natural law. As for the rich, the same thing can be said of them that Christ declared of the poor: we will always have them with us. Again Mother Nature rears her pretty head: some men are just better than others at increasing capital. Nozick had it right. As long as the Law is not violated in the acquisition or transfer thereof, its owner is entitled thereto. The Biden's gains are ill-gotten; Donald Trump's are not. Liberty- it's a beautiful thing:
'Ooh, freedom/Ooh, liberty/Oh, leave me alone/To find my own way home/To find my own way home.' Hunter-Garcia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k9mT6g-99E
BTW, the Marshall Plan, one could argue, did not violate the above governing principle, since the restoration of European markets was probably in America's economic self-interest. What would definitely violate it would be the Obama administration's treasonous American-Sino trade agreements, against which President Trump is constantly inveighing.
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