Kevin Drum gives 15 reasons why Democrats crushed Republicans this week

After listing the 15 reasons, he concludes:

That’s more than a dozen bits of truly bad news for Republican, and it’s only going to get worse as they stare down the long barrel toward 2020, where the Senate map is massively in favor of Democrats; the economy is likely to be on a downturn; and Donald Trump will probably have long-since worn out his welcome with his one-trick pony. In other words, they’re getting more and more desperate, knowing that a historic shellacking is probably headed their way in two years.

And this desperation is showing. Over the next two years Republicans can nominate some more conservative judges to the lower courts, but that’s about it. With Democrats controlling the House; the filibuster controlling the Senate; and a man-child controlling the White House, they’re in for a very rough two years.
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Book review: Passing Strange by Martha A. Sandweiss

I wrote before how I stumbled across the strange story of Clarence King (1842-1901), the first director of the US Geological Survey who for the last 13 years of his life, led a secret double life as a black man in order to marry a former slave Ada Copeland (1860-1964). I have now been able to read this fuller treatment by Sandweiss who tries to reconstruct how and why this fair-skinned, blue-eyed man managed to successfully hide his double life from all his family, close friends, and colleagues and even his wife while having five children with her, revealing his secret to her only in a final letter written on his deathbed in Arizona.
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Hasan Minhaj’s show took on monopolies and Amazon

It looks like Netflix has decided to put the episodes of its new weekly show Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj free on YouTube, at least for some episodes, no doubt to build up an audience. The third show last Sunday dealt mostly with the abusive monopolistic corporate practices in the US and how it came to be that way, using Amazon as a prime example.

The show was not quite as funny as the first two but it contained a lot of information.

What will it take to end this madness?

Another week, another gunman goes into a crowded venue and opens fire, this time killing 12 people, wounding 16 others, and then apparently killing himself. This time the event took place late on Wednesday night at 11:20 pm at a crowded country and western themed bar and grill frequented by college students at nearby Pepperdine University in an affluent area near Los Angeles.
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Second thoughts on the election – Trump had a bad day, Democrats had a good day

Now that I have had time to reflect on the election and shift my attention away from the high-profile elections, my early lukewarm feelings need to be revised. It looks like Tuesday turned out to be pretty good for Democrats and bad for Donald Trump. If you needed to see that Trump was not happy, one can read the transcript of the press conference that he held on Wednesday where he was even more peevish, mean, and spiteful than he usually is. He even name-checked several Republicans who he claimed lost their congressional races because they did not ’embrace’ him (that narcissism and desperate need to be loved surfacing again) while ignoring those who did embrace him but lost anyway.
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US elections compare poorly with Brazil’s

Glenn Greenwald and Victor Pougy compare yesterday’s election in the US with last month’s election in Brazil to show how awful it is here.

That a country poorer than the U.S., with a much shorter history of democracy, can hold such seamless, fair, participatory, and efficient elections proves that the opposite outcome in the U.S. — massive voter disenfranchisement, multi-hour voting lines, pervasive machine malfunctions, and elections that are not decided until weeks after the fact — are very easily avoided and thus likely intentional.
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Results of ballot initiatives

Rachel M. Cohen provides a run down of some of the ballot initiatives that passed yesterday, including one important one in Michigan that reader Mark Dowd has pointed to.

FROM STATE LEGISLATIVE races to the House of Representatives, progressive candidates made a dent in the 2018 election season, and will be relatively well-represented in federal and state-level governments next year. But it’s not just elected office: Left-wing activists also made their voices heard through ballot initiatives across the country. On Tuesday night, progressives walked away with some wins and some losses on that front.

They made gains for Medicaid expansion, public education, and voting rights. But they lost other battles, like on criminal justice reform, nurse-to-patient ratios, and universal home care.

Cohen’s article is worth reading.

Election results review

As I feared, the Trump cult remains strong in the US, strong enough to increase its majority in the US Senate, even as it lost control of the House of Representatives. In Ohio, Republicans won all the statewide elected offices except for incumbent Democratic senator Sherrod Brown who won quite easily. No congressional seats switched parties either, so the status quo in Ohio was retained.
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Homophobe Kim Davis loses her re-election bid

Kim Davis is the rancid homophobic clerk of a county in Kentucky who shot to fame because of her refusal to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, even after the US Supreme Court ruled that all bans on such marriages were unconstitutional. She has been defeated in her effort to retain the office that she seems to regard as a family sinecure, having taken it over from her mother who hired her to work in the office. She has lost to a Democrat. Her replacement is by no means a great friend of the LGBT community but he has promised to enforce the law equally.

This is not a major election, just a small one in a backwater. But the defeat of the awful Davis pleases me a great deal.