Trump and election deniers were the big losers

To no one’s surprise, Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy for 2024 in a rambling hour-long speech that the media cut away from because it was largely a warmed over version of what he says at rallies, except that it seemed even more incoherent. Even Fox News cut away, showing just how much his star has faded and Rupert Murdoch has reportedly told him that Fox News will not support his candidacy. That will not deter his MAGA cultists who will be delirious with joy at their Dear Leader riding to their rescue.

Trump is clearly announcing his run from a position of weakness because he had undoubtedly expected that he would be riding a wave of election successes by his acolytes in the various races. But they lost all over the place. Now his announcement is seen as a desperate attempt to stem the calls for him to stay out of the race and to stymie those who might think of challenging him. The Republican establishment is recoiling from the thought of him dragging them down again. With a normal person, pressure might work to get a failing candidate to withdraw and one can expect all manner of maneuvering behind the scenes to try and keep him out so that someone else can be the party nominee. But that may not work because Tump is not a normal person. He is a delusional narcissistic pathological liar who sees anyone who is not totally supportive of him as an enemy and he will lash out at them. Republicans have created a monster and it is now turning on them.
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The Twitter albatross around Elon Musk’s neck

Elon Musk is by no means stupid. No one who creates his own company and in the process becomes one of the world’s richest people can do so without having considerable acumen in some areas of life. But such people can be, and often are, jerks and narcissists who get carried away by their success in one area to think that they somehow have a general ability to succeed at whatever they do that they can apply anywhere. That is what seems to have happened with Musk. Musk was a highly successful user of the Twitter platform, having close to 100 million followers, and was able to use it to sway financial markets and bring attention to himself. This must have made it seem that he could easily run it even better and draw even more attention to himself and was why he rashly made an offer to pay $44 billion for it, a figure that analysts said was way too high. After he realized that, he tried to back out of the deal but was sued and had to go through with it. After being forced to buy Twitter, Musk said in a tweet that he did so not “to make more money. I did it to try to help humanity, whom I love”. And there was much laughter in the land.
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Funny comic strip

As we await the results of today’s election, here is one of the strips from Get Fuzzy, a daily comic strip by Darby Conley that has three main characters who live together in an apartment: a human Rob, a dog Satchel, and a cat Bucky. Rob is a nerdy single guy with apparently no social life who spends his spare time playing video games and is a fan of rugby. Satchel is naive, gullible, lovable but dim, while Bucky is devious, ignorant but thinks of himself as very smart, and is constantly scheming to find ways to make money and also torment Satchel.

I read the strip daily and decided to share this one to introduce it to people who might not have known about it. Sadly, Conley stopped producing new daily strips in 2013 and Sunday ones in 2019 but reruns appear every day and they have mostly a timeless quality and whatever current events that are alluded to that have become dated can be easily understood.

(Get Fuzzy)

I clearly pay too much attention to the crazies

Last Tuesday turned out to be the best mid-term elections for the party in power in 20 years, thwarting the so-called Red Wave. Republicans, Trumpists, and election deniers had been salivating over the prospect of getting massive wins in the Senate and House of Representatives and state offices and that simply did not happen.

Some of those down ballot races for state offices were very important. Take Nevada. Democrat Cisco Aguilar, who had never run for elected office before, defeated Trump-endorsed election denier Republican Jim Marchant for the position of secretary of state. This is important because the secretary of state oversees state elections and Marchant was the founder of an organization called America First Secretary of State Coalition that consists of seven election deniers running for similar positions in other states that sought to restrict access to the ballot as part of their effort to make sure that Republicans win.

Aguilar, an attorney and first-time candidate, cast himself as a bulwark against Marchant, who had intimated that he would try to make it easier for Trump to win his state in a comeback run for president.

“When my coalition of secretary of state candidates around the country get elected, we’re going to fix the whole country and President Trump is going to be president again in 2024,” Marchant said at a Trump-hosted rally in Nevada in early October.

“The secretary of state’s job is to protect democracy by keeping our elections fair and transparent,” Aguilar said in his most-played general election TV ad.

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Democrats take control of the Senate, reduce gap in the House

So much for the red wave. Democrats have already won 50 seats in the US Senate even before the Georgia runoff to be held on December 6th, meaning that they retain control.

Nevada announced the results of their election for US senate and incumbent Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto was declared the winner over Republican Adam Laxalt Jr by 48.8% to 48.1%. When this is coupled with yesterday’s result in Arizona where Democrat Mark Kelly retained his seat, defeating Blake Masters fairly easily by the margin of 52% to 46%, that gives Democrats 50 seats, the same number that they had before the elections, and thus will retain control of the senate.
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TV review: Inside Man (2022)

The four-part mini-series each lasting one hour debuted last week on Netflix. I watched it because the premise seemed interesting and it had good actors. It features Stanley Tucci as a criminologist who brutally murdered his wife and is now on death row in the US. But it turns out that he has powerful analytical skills and a superior knowledge of human psychology and this enables his to solve crimes even while in prison. The prison warden allows people to consult him on unsolved cases. A fellow death row inmate in the adjacent cell happens to have an almost perfect memory and accompanies him during these interviews to serve as a recorder. David Tennant is a vicar in the UK dealing with a troubled verger in his church. (A verger is someone who serves as a caretaker and attendant in the church, assisting the vicar in his duties.) Although the vicar and the convict never meet, their stories become intertwined because a British journalist visits Tucci to try and get him to solve the disappearance of someone the journalist knows who happens to be the mathematics tutor to Tennant’s son.
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In US elections, a draw can become a win

One of the most encouraging results of Tuesday’e elections have been the ballot measures in the various states that resulted in expanded access to abortion (even in deep-red Kentucky), voting, and legalized marijuana and increases in the minimum wage. Oregon also seems likely to pass measures to establish a right to health care and to require a permit to buy firearms and high-capacity magazines.

When it comes to elections for offices, in objective terms, the results of the mid-terms has been a draw. The results are so close that at this point, the final outcome of which party controls the House of Representative and the Senate is still up in the air though it seems likely that the Republicans will have a tiny majority in the former. Right now, there are four undecided senate races. Of those, the one in Alaska is guaranteed to return a Republican since the top two candidates Lisa Murkowski and Kelly Tshibaka are both from that party. It will take some time to get the results since Alaska has a system where the top four people in the open primary go on to the general election and the winner there is decided by ranked choice voting, which takes longer to tabulate.
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