Mississippi is going to have a run-off election on November 27 to decide its senate seat. This should have been an easy win for the incumbent Republican senator Cindy Hyde-Smith against her Democratic opponent Mike Espy. But Hyde-Smith, who was appointed to the seat to replace Thad Cochran who had to retire due to ill health, had managed to make the race more competitive by various bone-headed moves such as wearing a confederate cap and praising a secessionist general from the civil war, suggesting that suppressing the votes of liberals would be a good idea, and worst of all, saying that she would gladly be in the front row for a lynching. The last was particularly egregious given that state’s history of public lynchings and the fact that her opponent is black.
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The investigative public television series Frontline has partnered with the investigative journalists at ProPublica on a series that they have called Documenting Hate where they chart the recent actions of neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups. Their first episode Documenting Hate: Charlottesville premiered in August and I reviewed it here. Yesterday they showed the second episode Documenting Hate: New American Nazis and you can see the full episode online here.
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It is now two weeks since election day and four Congressional seats are still undecided as votes are still being counted. Perhaps the most turbulent one is in Utah where Republican incumbent Mia Love is locked in a tight race with Democrat Ben McAdams. The lead kept switching as votes came in from various districts and the latest reversal has McAdams up by just 739 votes out of nearly 270,000 cast. He seems to feel confident enough that this lead will hold up to declare victory when the final votes are certified later today.
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Authoritarian governments are bad enough but it is disturbing when we have ‘backsliding democracies’ where countries actually choose authoritarian leaders in elections, as John Oliver points out in a survey of the current trend around the globe. He looks at the characteristics of authoritarian societies before getting to the issue of whether the US is one or heading towards becoming one.

Can anyone trust anything that the Saudi Arabian government says about the death of Jamal Khashoggi? Their lies have been so shameless that it is no wonder Donald Trump and Mohammed bin Salman are so close because they are both cut from the same cloth, using one lie to cover up earlier lies and never bothering to explain why they uttered the earlier lies. Take the latest concessions by the Saudi government.
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Life is such a precious gift that unless one is a sociopath, killing someone is such a horrific thing that one shies away from it. It takes extraordinary circumstances for someone to lose control of themselves sufficiently to kill another human being. So governments have elaborate methods by which they encourage ordinary people to join their military and then turn them into killers. These involve training them to unquestioningly follow orders and to dehumanize those perceive as the enemy, by portraying them as less than human or so outlandishly evil that they deserve to die, and to shower the killers with medals and honors upon their return in order to make them feel like heroes.
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In Mississippi, a run-off election is scheduled for November 27 since no candidate obtained the required 50% of the vote. The contest will be between incumbent Republican senator Cindy Hyde-Smith and Democrat Mike Espy. I wrote before about how Hyde-Smith had already got herself into trouble by saying that “”If [Tupelo cattle rancher, Colin Hutchinson] invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.” Her opponent Espy is black and given the racist history of public hangings of black people, especially in the deep south, the comment was seen as reprehensible. She dismissed criticisms by saying it was a joke.
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As yet another sign of the blue wave, it looks likely that Orange County in California, long a stronghold of the Republican party, will not be left with even a single Republican congressperson. The latest result called has Democrat Katie Walters Porter defeating Republican incumbent Mimi Walters by running on an unabashedly progressive platform. In the last remaining uncalled Orange County race in the 39th District, Democrat Gil Cisneros has taken the lead over Republican Young Kim and seems likely to eventually win.
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Ohio is becoming notorious not just for producing horrific murder cases, it also leads the way in how gerrymandering produces results that do not come close to reflecting the voting preferences of its citizens and last week’s election results demonstrated this very clearly. Republican officials have abused their power to draw districts such that all the Democratic-leaning voters were crammed into as few seats as possible, leaving few left over in the other areas. The results are stark, with Republicans winning a huge majority in the state houses while actually trailing in the popular vote.

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I have written before about the Byzantine political intrigues in Sri Lanka that has led to political turmoil. A measure of how things have deteriorated can be seen by a fight that broke out in the Sri Lankan parliament when some members rushed at the Speaker.

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