I can’t wait for November 7th to arrive

Election day in the US is Tuesday, November 6th and I for one cannot wait for it to arrive. Elections drag on for so long here that the period before the voting is really tiresome for many reasons. One is that news coverage of every major event starts by briefly discussing the actual event before pivoting quickly to what the event might mean for the elections. Will it help the Democrats? Republicans? Trump? All this is of course pure speculation. Poll numbers will often be thrown in to support this or that view but drawing a line from events to poll numbers is highly iffy.
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Good news and bad news from overseas

The good news is that Ireland has voted to remove the crime of blasphemy from its constitution, with young people leading the way.

Until recently, Ireland was deeply conservative, dominated by the Catholic church, but the country has legalised gay marriage and abortion in popular votes, and is now led by an openly gay taoiseach.

Reflecting the speed of changes in Ireland, the strongest support for ending the ban came from younger voters, exit polls suggested. Four in five voters under 35 backed the change, according to the Irish Times, while over-65s only approved it by a narrow margin, with 52% in favour and 48% against.

The government had already laid out legislation to remove the offence of blasphemy from the constitution and all relevant laws, should the referendum be passed.

It has been over 150 years since anyone was prosecuted for blasphemy in Ireland, but the country had passed a blasphemy law in 2009.

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ZOG, the MAGAbomber, and the Fox network

As Josh Marshall points out, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter Robert Bowers explicitly attacked the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) that helps refuges with resettlement in the US, saying on the white nationalist social media site Gab just before the slaughter, “HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in.”
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A well-deserved slap in the face for Trump

After ramping up hateful rhetoric against any and all perceived opponents, and coddling and downplaying the words and actions of white supremacists and neo-Nazis, Donald Trump and the Republicans will now try to distance themselves from the climate of anger and violence they have spawned, the most recent manifestation of it being the vicious murder of 11 people and the injuring of six others at a Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh by a neo-Nazi who, during the rampage, was saying pretty much the same words as the neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville.
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Elite racism can be just as sincere as common racism

Amanda Marcotte has an interesting piece where she says that the recent Megyn Kelly episode explodes the common myth that exists among the intelligentsia that the elites are too sophisticated to really buy into racist ideologies and that when they do indulge in race-baiting, it is part of a cynical but conscious political strategy that does not reflect their real views. Such people can often point to ‘friends’ to dispute the characterization. It is this kind of thinking that may have prompted NBC to hire Kelly despite her past history of race-baiting at Fox News where the willingness and ability to do so is practically a job requirement. But even though she was no longer working at Fox, she still went there.
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Rapidly escalating political violence

This has been a hell of a week for politically motivated violence in the US. The mail bombs sent to prominent people perceived as opponents of Donald Trump by a fanatical Trump supporter are just one indicator of how toxic the political climate has become. Today we have the horrendous killings at a synagogue in Pittsburgh where reports say that eleven people have died and six others wounded. That synagogue is in a neighborhood that is very familiar to me from my days as a graduate student in that city, because it is adjacent to where both the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University are and many students and professors (including my thesis advisor) live there.
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If you thought Australian politics was a web of intrigue and backstabbing, check out what is happening in Sri Lanka

Late in the evening on Friday, October 26, the Sri Lankan president Maithripala Sirisena (MS) swore in Mahinda Rajapaksa (MR) as prime minister and declared that he had removed the existing prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe (RW) from office, immediately triggering a constitutional crisis and upheaval, resulting in the president suspending parliament until November 16. As it stands, Sri Lanka currently has two people claiming to be prime minister.

To fully understand how bizarre and Byzantine Sri Lankan politics is, I need to fill in a little background. After the 1977 elections, the Sri Lankan constitution was changed and the country went from the British style parliamentary system with a strong executive prime minister to one modeled more closely on the French system, with a strong executive president independently elected of the parliament who then picks the prime minister who is usually the leader of the largest party in parliament or the one who can command a majority.
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Seth Meyers on Republicans lies about health care

Donald Trump is a president who clearly hates the work that goes into the job. The mid-term elections coming up November 6th has enabled him to stop doing any work at all and spend all his time doing what he enjoys most, holding rallies in front of his adoring fans and doing what has become effectively stand-up comedy routines, that require him to lie through his teeth about anything that comes into his head and whipping up racism and hate and anger. He is holding an average of two rallies a day all over the country in support of endangered Republican candidates.

Seth Meyers provides a good run-down of what is happening.