I wrote yesterday about how the incumbent Republican for Maine’s 2nd district Bruce Poliquin sued to stop the second and third choice votes of the third and fourth place candidates from being counted and argued that he should be declared the winner based on his plurality of just the first choice votes, where he had a slim 2,000 vote lead over Democratic challenger Jared Golden. He clearly seemed to think that the 23,000 second and third choice votes would go against him.
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Mehdi Hasan shows how in this interview with Steve Rogers, a Trump advisor for his 2020 campaign.

Hey US media folks, here, I would argue immodestly, is how you interview a Trump supporter on Trump's lies:pic.twitter.com/D8qElaic7o

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) November 14, 2018

But alas, this will not catch on. Why won’t we see mainstream US journalists follow Hasan’s lead? Because they want the same old hacks to appear over and over again on their shows and if they are too hard on them, they won’t pay a return visit. That is the dirty little secret of the US politics-media axis. Each side knows what the other side expects in order to put on a show for the viewers. It’s show biz.

Tom MacArthur is a Republican congressman from New Jersey who tried the familiar two-step of pretending to be a moderate while being a Trumpista. I am very glad to report that it was announced today that he has lost his seat to Democratic challenger Andy Kim, leaving the New Jersey Republican congressional delegation, like the California one, in tatters with just one congressperson from the former five, with some of the lost seats having been held by Republicans for decades. The House is now 229-198 in favor of the Democrats, a swing of 34 seats so far, with eight seats still undecided.
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One of the many adversities that befall those who are poor is that they get tempted to take risks with their own lives and the lives of their families just in order to survive, such as selling their organs and committing crimes. I was shocked to read this report about Anucha Thasako, a 13-year old Thai boy, who died of a brain hemorrhage after a boxing bout. It was bad enough that children are boxing at all but it appears that it is a way for poor people to earn money. Thasako had fought in 170 bouts since the age of eight.
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In this Hanukkah election season for the Democrats, another day brought another gift in that Democrat Kyrsten Sinema was declared the winner for the Arizona senate seat vacated by retiring Republican Jeff Flake.

Meanwhile, the US senate race in Mississippi will be heading to a runoff vote on November 27 since no candidate won more than 50% of the vote. The Republican incumbent candidate Cindy Hyde-Smith has 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 Democrat Mike Espy is black and given the racist history of public hangings especially in the deep south, the comment was seen as reprehensible.
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I wrote earlier about the strange phenomenon of extreme right wing parties in Germany that have been associated with xenophobia and anti-Semitism actively wooing the Jewish community and having some success, to the consternation of the major Jewish organizations in that country, surprised by the willingness to support a party that is overtly against their own community.
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John Oliver reminds us that the cruel and inhumane policy of separating children from their parents is still very much with us as large numbers of children have not been reunited and, incredibly, some cannot even be found in the system.

A joke that is making the rounds is that for Democrats this has been more of a Hanukkah election than a Christmas one in that each new day seems to bring new gifts.

Maine had introduced ranked-choice voting, something that should be adopted everywhere. This is where people mark their ballots in order of preference for candidates. If no one wins 50% of the vote, then the second choices of the voters who voted for the last place finisher are taken into account, and if that does not produce a clear winner, then the third choices, and so on. There are various ways of doing this but all these methods enable people to vote for the people they like best and not fear that they are ‘wasting’ their vote by voting for someone who has little chance of winning and thus enabling the person they hate most to win.
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Although he lost his race against Ted Cruz for the senate seat in Texas, Beto O’Rourke ran a spirited campaign in this deep red state and came close, and by inspiring increased Democratic voter turnout, likely helped other Democrats in down ballot races defeat incumbent Republicans. One little noticed result is that 19 black women ran for judge positions in Harris County and all of them won. That was not all.

Democrats won all 59 judicial races in Harris county in Tuesday’s midterm elections. In one of the most eye-catching and significant results, the longtime incumbent Republican county judge, Ed Emmett – in effect, the county’s chief executive – lost to Lina Hidalgo, a 27-year-old first-time candidate who immigrated from Colombia as a teenager.

The morning after the election, Glenn Devlin, a juvenile court judge in Houston who is one of the defeated Republicans, reportedly released most of the defendants who appeared in front of him after asking them whether they planned to kill anyone.

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