Actually, we do know what will happen tonight, and tomorrow, and the next day, and onward. Here is your road map:
1) If the Republicans win, high turnout and established procedures say that there is election integrity. If not, the fix was in.
2) If the Republicans win, there will be a need for Congressional investigations -- lots of 'em. If not, they are unnecessarily divisive and are used as personal vendettas against Donald Trump and his supporters.
3) If the Republicans win, it is proof that polls are a reliable, accurate barometer of the public will. If not, they are worthless, pointless exercises that try to create a desired outcome.
4) If the Republicans win, the right-wing media did us a valuable service in getting out the message that voters needed to hear. If not, the left-wing media are mind-controlling scum who are traitors to America.
And, above all,
5) If the Republicans win, we should accept the results, move forward in unison, and put hyperpartisan bickering and fighting aside in favor of the greater good. If not, it is time to march, take up weapons, and set things right.
What could go wrong when upward of half the country decides that no rules apply to them that they choose not to observe, and no result is acceptable unless it is what they seek? Good luck getting them out of office once they are in, and have the tools to solidify their presence for a long time to come. We have been warned. Tonight will give us a better idea of how many people actually are listening.
Cathy Young’s (edit) article on the bothsiderism of election denial is excellent. For one thing, she starts by acknowledging there has been a bit of election denialism by the Dems. There has been, full stop.
That said, the base and pundits are purposely refusing to acknowledge that whining is different than a well-thought out and gamed attempt to methodically switch all the levers of political power to change the outcome of an election.
I’m truly hoping the bad-faith equivalency arguments are just to provide a fig-leaf cover. Because if partisans (and even everyday voters) cannot understand the difference between Stacey Abrams’ unhappiness and Donald Trump’s evil, we’re in very deep s%^t.
Can't agree that "it's all about turnout." It used to be all about turnout, but those days are past. Today it's all about which votes we count and which votes we allow to be counted.
Tomorrow it will be about which votes we pretend to count. And after that it will be about whether even to pretend to have an election at all. It will be Vogon "elections"... "resistance is futile."
What I find most anxiety inducing is that if there is a red-wave, I expect relative calm. Democrats will accept the results and since (R)s won, they will claim it was a free and fair election. Overall, I don’t see us boiling over.
On the flip side and we get a blue wave (my hope), we’ll be able to hopefully steer away from the path of authoritarianism we’re being dragged down. But the shortish term pain will be rough. We’re going to have to deal with a boil over, and I hope that the public can withstand the onslaught of lies, vitriol, and aggression that will flow for years. At least until after the 2024 election.
I know we're all focused on the vote today, but I can't not respond to Mona's piece , which hits a very deep chord with me. I've seen the disparity between boys and girls and school in my own family. TBH I have a very low opinion of public school in the US. Little girls often are doing well enough - because they love pleasing the very nice, sweet, sticker-giving-out teachers. Little boys - not so much. My little son had a thriving mind from the start. Get him going on video games, bugs, spiders, frogs, cheetahs, etc and he was off. But got pretty much shut down at school - bored, lazy, just not into it, except for recess.
My third grade grand-girl ( who I homeschooled during Covid - huge shout out to Sal at Khan Academy for providing us with math curriculum that put her above grade level ),loved her very sweet, nice, cuddly lady second grade teacher. But her love for Ms Sweet Teacher and all the cute stickers handed out did not translate to enthusiastic, hard working learning. Now, in third grade, she has a male teacher. What a difference. I now see her putting her head down, with focused attention on what she's doing, learning how to learn, not just how to please the teacher. She recounts in great detail the plot and characters of the book Mr Teacher is reading aloud. He has activated her mind and her pride in learning.
It's my (very unpopular ) opinion that American public education needs a complete retooling. From the start of the day til the end. And please, yes, let's get more men teaching the early grades. Let's design curriculum that ignites little boys and little girls. Minds are terrible things to waste don't you know.
Feeling cynical today. I’m starting to identify with comments that we don’t have much of a democracy to lose. I’m thinking about all the things Americans agree on, but cannot have and will never have: stop the obscene money in politics; shorter campaign season, affordable quality healthcare; access to full reproductive care; affordable college education; etc. Nope. Not for the likes of us. And oddly, we still get hair-on-fire desperate for our team to win. It feels like a huge deception.
I will not be following election news tonight. There is no real point to it. Give me a call in a week or two when the count and lawsuits are done. Until then it is a lot of angst/hope/fear/anger about something that (after I voted) I have no control over.
As I said earlier--the ability to invest money (luckily or skillfully) is a non-indicator about the ability to actually RUN a company or manage people.
I know more than a little bit about managing people, having been an NCO in the US military and having held a variety of supervisory positions and having been a teacher for 26 years.
It takes skill and a lot of hard work... and an actual understanding of people.
At the bottom of it I really do not think that Elon actually understands people very well. He might have an understanding of technology and a potential vision. But he is entirely too Elon-focused to deal with other people other than from a position of power.
And lots of people have vision. It isn't actually rare... and it is often wrong or off... or mistimed. Star Trek "invented" the cell phone in the 60's and the iPad in the 80's... they even called it a PADD.
Read some decent science fiction and you will see what I am talking about (and by science fiction I do not mean Star Wars or pretty much any Marvel movie).
Bill Leuders quotes Joseph Farah making the stunningly bad-faith (and very common) argument that "the cause of J6" was "not enough police." Farah blithely skips over the question of why more police were needed that day -- besides being dishonest about who was at fault for insufficient forces.
His case boils down to: "Democrats are the real culprits because they didn't bring out a heavy force to beat back Republican rioters -- oh, and when the police did use force against a rioter getting too close to the legislators she was hunting down, that was very, very bad."
The absurdity of the argument suggests that he's not trying to explain anything -- only to deflect from the sins of his allies.
There's also the dishonesty beneath this: "There were not enough police. At some point they opened the doors." Well, Mr. Farah, what happened in the hours leading up to "some point" when "they" -- who, precisely? -- opened "the doors" -- which doors? All of them?
There is nothing intellectually or morally serious about the MAGA efforts to explain away what MAGA rioters did that day, and what Trump did to make it happen. It's all just spin to justify having gotten 100% behind a sociopath and being committed to the proposition that every criticism of him and his cult followers is an attack on America itself arising from a corrupt "deep state."
Joseph Farah boycotted his daughter's wedding because, after loyally serving Trump for some years, she finally decided that she could no longer defend someone who went to such lengths to stay in power unlawfully, having lost an election that his campaign's internal polling had shown him likely to lose and then lying relentlessly about it. Joseph Farah decided he could not tolerate a daughter who made that choice. He put the "honor" of Donald Trump ahead of his own family.
That's the kind of person who will defend Donald Trump to the last -- and patch together any fairy tale he can to cover up the streak of violence that Trump's brand of politics has encouraged.
Waukesha has become one of the absolute meanest places in America. All of your most frightening stereotypes a la Deliverance can't compare. You laugh, but remember the dictum that Some will rob you with a gun and some with a fountain pen. (Woody Guthrie, I believe).
Waukesha is nothing less than 100 years of phobia about Socialists and Blacks from "big city" Milwaukee, which in themselves extended paranoia and fear mongering about an invasion of the wrong people from Europe and from the deep south ( This last got revised in the 70s to Chicago).
One can not even keep track of the many and various organizations in Waukesha designed to cause trouble, but they can be subsumed under one initialism: WILL (Wisconsin Institute for Law and Legislation). Ill Will is more to the point. Well, Waukesha, don't forget that the one group gave you Golda Meir, and the other group gave you Oprah Winfrey, but I digress.
I would like to know, Where is the lawsuit charging that having a witness watch me vote is a violation of the secret ballot?
People don't like to talk about it, but with the number of challenges to mail in and early ballots, we really do need to determine an appropriate response to the possibility of election subversion.
The fact is, Republicans have thoroughly stacked the courts, and a Cannon-like ruling on elections isn't an impossibility any more. I'm not sure what the answer is, but if Republicans actually do change the outcome by throwing out legitimate ballots, are we really just supposed to accept that?
So we now have confirmation that Russia has been engaged, and will continue engaged, in doing everything they can do to screw with our elections. "Que surprise!"
I certainly take Prigozhin at his word but there's also the hint of a pathetic cry for relevance. Paul Gosar is nobody's asset. We're our own worst enemy now, thank you very much.
One thing that distinguishes Trumpite election denialism from earlier versions is that it starts with Trump's narcissistic pathology and turns it into a political doctrine immune to evidence. Trump said beforehand that if he lost, it was necessarily fraudulent. His cult followers took the same position: that Trump couldn't conceivably lose a fair election, because they revered him and couldn't believe that so many people detested him.
It's a religious faith, which evidence cannot break through. Some, when questioned, have actually said that nothing would persuade them that the election wasn't stolen -- just as some said that nothing Trump did could ever make them stop supporting him.
On top of that is the sweeping distrust of American institutions that runs through the MAGA right wing, which has been intensified by Trump's disdain for institutional norms and laws. When institutions have attempted to hold him to the rule of law, Trumpites accuse them of perfidiously hamstringing or attacking the Duly Elected President who represented the Will of the American People.
When longstanding institutions, including a fair number of Republican officials, attested that the election was not stolen, Trumpites had their rejoinder teed up: It was all the Deep State waging an unholy war on Trump, and those GOP officials were backstabbers. So MAGA world - in the name of "draining the swamp" - is aiming to seed the institutions with MAGA loyalists who would not commit the sin of putting institutional integrity or rule of law above the wishes of Donald Trump or any of his acolytes.
Great article by Cathy Young on election deniers, as usual. An excellent takedown of GOP bothsidesism on the subject.
In brief, Democrats have had some election complainers, mostly low-level, none of whom ever tried to overturn a legal election, while Republicans, led by a President and a group of senators and representatives, actively worked to falsify electoral votes, violently attacked the Capitol to overturn the results, and tonight are running more than a few candidates who say that those actions were right, that they'd do it all again, and if they're not elected tonight, they'll give it all a try at their level. As Cathy Young aptly put it, this "is not just comparing apples and oranges, it’s more like comparing a tricycle to an 18-wheeler.
Actually, we do know what will happen tonight, and tomorrow, and the next day, and onward. Here is your road map:
1) If the Republicans win, high turnout and established procedures say that there is election integrity. If not, the fix was in.
2) If the Republicans win, there will be a need for Congressional investigations -- lots of 'em. If not, they are unnecessarily divisive and are used as personal vendettas against Donald Trump and his supporters.
3) If the Republicans win, it is proof that polls are a reliable, accurate barometer of the public will. If not, they are worthless, pointless exercises that try to create a desired outcome.
4) If the Republicans win, the right-wing media did us a valuable service in getting out the message that voters needed to hear. If not, the left-wing media are mind-controlling scum who are traitors to America.
And, above all,
5) If the Republicans win, we should accept the results, move forward in unison, and put hyperpartisan bickering and fighting aside in favor of the greater good. If not, it is time to march, take up weapons, and set things right.
What could go wrong when upward of half the country decides that no rules apply to them that they choose not to observe, and no result is acceptable unless it is what they seek? Good luck getting them out of office once they are in, and have the tools to solidify their presence for a long time to come. We have been warned. Tonight will give us a better idea of how many people actually are listening.
Cathy Young’s (edit) article on the bothsiderism of election denial is excellent. For one thing, she starts by acknowledging there has been a bit of election denialism by the Dems. There has been, full stop.
That said, the base and pundits are purposely refusing to acknowledge that whining is different than a well-thought out and gamed attempt to methodically switch all the levers of political power to change the outcome of an election.
I’m truly hoping the bad-faith equivalency arguments are just to provide a fig-leaf cover. Because if partisans (and even everyday voters) cannot understand the difference between Stacey Abrams’ unhappiness and Donald Trump’s evil, we’re in very deep s%^t.
Can't agree that "it's all about turnout." It used to be all about turnout, but those days are past. Today it's all about which votes we count and which votes we allow to be counted.
Tomorrow it will be about which votes we pretend to count. And after that it will be about whether even to pretend to have an election at all. It will be Vogon "elections"... "resistance is futile."
What I find most anxiety inducing is that if there is a red-wave, I expect relative calm. Democrats will accept the results and since (R)s won, they will claim it was a free and fair election. Overall, I don’t see us boiling over.
On the flip side and we get a blue wave (my hope), we’ll be able to hopefully steer away from the path of authoritarianism we’re being dragged down. But the shortish term pain will be rough. We’re going to have to deal with a boil over, and I hope that the public can withstand the onslaught of lies, vitriol, and aggression that will flow for years. At least until after the 2024 election.
I know we're all focused on the vote today, but I can't not respond to Mona's piece , which hits a very deep chord with me. I've seen the disparity between boys and girls and school in my own family. TBH I have a very low opinion of public school in the US. Little girls often are doing well enough - because they love pleasing the very nice, sweet, sticker-giving-out teachers. Little boys - not so much. My little son had a thriving mind from the start. Get him going on video games, bugs, spiders, frogs, cheetahs, etc and he was off. But got pretty much shut down at school - bored, lazy, just not into it, except for recess.
My third grade grand-girl ( who I homeschooled during Covid - huge shout out to Sal at Khan Academy for providing us with math curriculum that put her above grade level ),loved her very sweet, nice, cuddly lady second grade teacher. But her love for Ms Sweet Teacher and all the cute stickers handed out did not translate to enthusiastic, hard working learning. Now, in third grade, she has a male teacher. What a difference. I now see her putting her head down, with focused attention on what she's doing, learning how to learn, not just how to please the teacher. She recounts in great detail the plot and characters of the book Mr Teacher is reading aloud. He has activated her mind and her pride in learning.
It's my (very unpopular ) opinion that American public education needs a complete retooling. From the start of the day til the end. And please, yes, let's get more men teaching the early grades. Let's design curriculum that ignites little boys and little girls. Minds are terrible things to waste don't you know.
Feeling cynical today. I’m starting to identify with comments that we don’t have much of a democracy to lose. I’m thinking about all the things Americans agree on, but cannot have and will never have: stop the obscene money in politics; shorter campaign season, affordable quality healthcare; access to full reproductive care; affordable college education; etc. Nope. Not for the likes of us. And oddly, we still get hair-on-fire desperate for our team to win. It feels like a huge deception.
I will not be following election news tonight. There is no real point to it. Give me a call in a week or two when the count and lawsuits are done. Until then it is a lot of angst/hope/fear/anger about something that (after I voted) I have no control over.
As I said earlier--the ability to invest money (luckily or skillfully) is a non-indicator about the ability to actually RUN a company or manage people.
I know more than a little bit about managing people, having been an NCO in the US military and having held a variety of supervisory positions and having been a teacher for 26 years.
It takes skill and a lot of hard work... and an actual understanding of people.
At the bottom of it I really do not think that Elon actually understands people very well. He might have an understanding of technology and a potential vision. But he is entirely too Elon-focused to deal with other people other than from a position of power.
And lots of people have vision. It isn't actually rare... and it is often wrong or off... or mistimed. Star Trek "invented" the cell phone in the 60's and the iPad in the 80's... they even called it a PADD.
Read some decent science fiction and you will see what I am talking about (and by science fiction I do not mean Star Wars or pretty much any Marvel movie).
Bill Leuders quotes Joseph Farah making the stunningly bad-faith (and very common) argument that "the cause of J6" was "not enough police." Farah blithely skips over the question of why more police were needed that day -- besides being dishonest about who was at fault for insufficient forces.
His case boils down to: "Democrats are the real culprits because they didn't bring out a heavy force to beat back Republican rioters -- oh, and when the police did use force against a rioter getting too close to the legislators she was hunting down, that was very, very bad."
The absurdity of the argument suggests that he's not trying to explain anything -- only to deflect from the sins of his allies.
There's also the dishonesty beneath this: "There were not enough police. At some point they opened the doors." Well, Mr. Farah, what happened in the hours leading up to "some point" when "they" -- who, precisely? -- opened "the doors" -- which doors? All of them?
There is nothing intellectually or morally serious about the MAGA efforts to explain away what MAGA rioters did that day, and what Trump did to make it happen. It's all just spin to justify having gotten 100% behind a sociopath and being committed to the proposition that every criticism of him and his cult followers is an attack on America itself arising from a corrupt "deep state."
Joseph Farah boycotted his daughter's wedding because, after loyally serving Trump for some years, she finally decided that she could no longer defend someone who went to such lengths to stay in power unlawfully, having lost an election that his campaign's internal polling had shown him likely to lose and then lying relentlessly about it. Joseph Farah decided he could not tolerate a daughter who made that choice. He put the "honor" of Donald Trump ahead of his own family.
That's the kind of person who will defend Donald Trump to the last -- and patch together any fairy tale he can to cover up the streak of violence that Trump's brand of politics has encouraged.
Waukesha has become one of the absolute meanest places in America. All of your most frightening stereotypes a la Deliverance can't compare. You laugh, but remember the dictum that Some will rob you with a gun and some with a fountain pen. (Woody Guthrie, I believe).
Waukesha is nothing less than 100 years of phobia about Socialists and Blacks from "big city" Milwaukee, which in themselves extended paranoia and fear mongering about an invasion of the wrong people from Europe and from the deep south ( This last got revised in the 70s to Chicago).
One can not even keep track of the many and various organizations in Waukesha designed to cause trouble, but they can be subsumed under one initialism: WILL (Wisconsin Institute for Law and Legislation). Ill Will is more to the point. Well, Waukesha, don't forget that the one group gave you Golda Meir, and the other group gave you Oprah Winfrey, but I digress.
I would like to know, Where is the lawsuit charging that having a witness watch me vote is a violation of the secret ballot?
People don't like to talk about it, but with the number of challenges to mail in and early ballots, we really do need to determine an appropriate response to the possibility of election subversion.
The fact is, Republicans have thoroughly stacked the courts, and a Cannon-like ruling on elections isn't an impossibility any more. I'm not sure what the answer is, but if Republicans actually do change the outcome by throwing out legitimate ballots, are we really just supposed to accept that?
So we now have confirmation that Russia has been engaged, and will continue engaged, in doing everything they can do to screw with our elections. "Que surprise!"
My plan for the day: After work go for a 30 mile bike ride on the W&OD.
Then dinner.
Then a walk, while listening to Marketplace on WAMU.
Then drive to Kensington for my usual Tuesday AA meeting.
Home and to bed. I’ll catch up on the election news in my hometown newspaper, the Washington Post.
I certainly take Prigozhin at his word but there's also the hint of a pathetic cry for relevance. Paul Gosar is nobody's asset. We're our own worst enemy now, thank you very much.
Of course there was a Russia hoax. Trump is absolutely right. The hoax is that there was a hoax.
This is the very rabbit hole of insanity.
One thing that distinguishes Trumpite election denialism from earlier versions is that it starts with Trump's narcissistic pathology and turns it into a political doctrine immune to evidence. Trump said beforehand that if he lost, it was necessarily fraudulent. His cult followers took the same position: that Trump couldn't conceivably lose a fair election, because they revered him and couldn't believe that so many people detested him.
It's a religious faith, which evidence cannot break through. Some, when questioned, have actually said that nothing would persuade them that the election wasn't stolen -- just as some said that nothing Trump did could ever make them stop supporting him.
On top of that is the sweeping distrust of American institutions that runs through the MAGA right wing, which has been intensified by Trump's disdain for institutional norms and laws. When institutions have attempted to hold him to the rule of law, Trumpites accuse them of perfidiously hamstringing or attacking the Duly Elected President who represented the Will of the American People.
When longstanding institutions, including a fair number of Republican officials, attested that the election was not stolen, Trumpites had their rejoinder teed up: It was all the Deep State waging an unholy war on Trump, and those GOP officials were backstabbers. So MAGA world - in the name of "draining the swamp" - is aiming to seed the institutions with MAGA loyalists who would not commit the sin of putting institutional integrity or rule of law above the wishes of Donald Trump or any of his acolytes.
Great article by Cathy Young on election deniers, as usual. An excellent takedown of GOP bothsidesism on the subject.
In brief, Democrats have had some election complainers, mostly low-level, none of whom ever tried to overturn a legal election, while Republicans, led by a President and a group of senators and representatives, actively worked to falsify electoral votes, violently attacked the Capitol to overturn the results, and tonight are running more than a few candidates who say that those actions were right, that they'd do it all again, and if they're not elected tonight, they'll give it all a try at their level. As Cathy Young aptly put it, this "is not just comparing apples and oranges, it’s more like comparing a tricycle to an 18-wheeler.