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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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.
Election day today will be a good, though not perfect, test of the size of the Trump cult. Since Trump is not on the ballot, it will not be a direct test but since the Republican party has almost unanimously capitulated to him and even shown a pretty disgusting level of obsequiousness towards him (Ted Cruz being the perfect example), any Republican candidate for any office is seen as a surrogate for Trump. The old adage that all politics is local does not apply in this election.
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The laws in Pakistan against blasphemy are an absolute disgrace. They are so expansive and ambiguous that people can use them against their enemies by alleging blasphemy and making their lives intolerable. It seems like charges can be brought easily and religious mobs easily incited who then in turn intimidate authorities into take action against the accused. Hence the decision last week by the Pakistani Supreme Court to overturn the blasphemy conviction of the woman known as Asia Bibi is a welcome development.
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Since the shooter who caused the deaths of two people at a yoga studio killed himself, it is going to be a while before his motives can be gleaned from other sources. But initial signs point to this possibly being another rampage by a racist far-right misogynist, someone who shared the ‘incel’ (involuntarily celibate) mindset of rage against women because they will not have sex with them.
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While racist and xenophobic appeals in US elections are nothing new, this year it has been raised to a level of brazenness that I have never seen before. There is no question that if there ever was an election for progressives to ignore all the subtleties and vote along strict Democratic party lines, it is Tuesday’s elections. This is not because the Democrats are particularly wonderful, because the faults of that party hardly need to be repeated here. But Donald Trump has made this election all about him and any victory anywhere will be hailed by him as an endorsement of the toxic views expressed by him, the Republican party, and Fox News. Unless a down ballot election features a manifestly awful Democratic candidate and an exceptionally decent Republican who has loudly and unequivocally condemned Trump, it too has to be seen as a referendum on Trump.
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Fox News has long since abandoned any pretense to being a news organization. It is now an unapologetic propaganda arm of the racist, white nationalist, neo-Nazi, Republican movement in America that has reached its apotheosis in Donald Trump. Long gone are the dog whistle codes to provide a face-saving façade. As Jon Schwarz points out, Fox News has done more to incite domestic political violence than Trump, and he discusses the history of how the network was designed to serve this purpose.
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I just watched the first two episodes of Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj on Netflix and was blown away by them. Each show focuses largely on one issue, somewhat like John Oliver does, but whereas Oliver mixes hard news and analysis in the form of a news show with him as the anchor seated behind a desk, Minhaj uses a high-energy stand-up comedy format to mix hard news with analysis, with him moving around on a stage with large screens behind and below him and talking in a fast pace. He, like Oliver, provides lots of facts and background information that one does not often hear even on news shows but interspersed with plenty of comedic analyses. It really kept me glued to the show. The fact that I agreed with everything he said on both shows may had aided my enjoyment.
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