I do not know who I despise more, Donald Trump or the smug Barbie and Ken dolls that are his daughter and son-in-law, all of whom represent in almost caricature form the utter cluelessness of privileged white people with inherited wealth and family connections who think that they got where they are because of their intelligence and hard work.
One big piece of news in this year’s election is the huge number of early voters. As the US Elections Project website reports, as of this morning, over 79 million have voted, already well exceeding the record total of 47 million that voted early in 2016. This number is 58% of the total votes cast in 2016. Analysts were earlier forecasting up to 80 million early votes by the time Monday comes around but it looks like that number will be easily exceeded, likely by later today. [UPDATE: Yep, the number has been exceeded.]
This website looks at early voting patterns since 1992.
As of yesterday, the weekly total of confirmed cases in the US has reached a new record of over 503,000, exceeding the second wave peak of 471,000 set back on July 22.
Rappers Ice Cube, Kanye West, and Fifty Cent have all expressed support recently for Donald Trump. Amber Ruffin has some thoughts on this development.
Have you ever asked a bank to forgive your loan because you couldn’t pay? The chances are that the thought never even crossed your mind because banks are known to be very hard-nosed and demand that you pay them back every penny you owe. That is because you are small fry and they will not even lend you any money unless you provide them with sufficient collateral that can cover the debt and that they can seize if you default.
A new report into Trump’s finances reveal that banks were willing to forgive $287 million in loans that Trump owed them.
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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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The only measure of the health of the country that Donald Trump cares about is the state of the stock market and he warned in the last debate that if Joe Biden wins, the market will crash. But the idea that investors just hang around until after the election results are released to make their decisions is absurd. They usually try to anticipate the future and take steps accordingly. Since Biden has been leading in the polls consistently for some time, if investors really feared a Biden win, the market would have already tanked.
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Donald Trump loves to boast about the immense powers at his disposal. As Andrew Cockburn writes in the November 2020 issue of Harper’s Magazine (subscription may be required):
“I have the right to do a lot of things that people don’t even know about,” he boasted in March, ominously echoing his interpretation of Article II of the Constitution, which, he has claimed, gives him “the right to do whatever I want as president.” He has also declared his “absolute right” to build a border wall, whatever Congress thinks, and even floated the possibility of delaying the election “until people can properly, securely, and safely vote.”
Texas has long been a strongly Republican state. Although every recent election has brought predictions that the changing demographics of the state will turn it Democratic, those tantalizing promises have invariably fallen short when it comes to actual elections. Part of the reason may be that the change in demographics is largely due to the increase in Hispanic voters and they are not as strongly Democratic as (say) African American voters. There are various explanations given for this, the main one being that the Hispanic community is socially quite conservative and Catholic, and Republican stances of opposition to abortion and LGBTQ rights may resonate more strongly with them, even to the extent to overcoming the racism that underlies many Republican policies and the explicit racism of Trump.
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