This is a flamingo at the San Diego Zoo. They are wonderful creatures to photograph if you get in close. Every contortion of their bodies, every difference in coloration, and every change in angle and lighting produces a new image. You could take pictures all day long and get hundreds of completely different looks.
Kevin Drum
The weekend brought us yet another New York Times story about Trump voters in the heartland. Here’s the nut of it:
The president’s supporters in places like rural Nebraska say they feel remembered. To them, these four years have brought a sense of belonging in a country led by someone who sticks up for, and understands, their most cherished beliefs.
This really is the key to things. After all, the Times story is centered on Henderson, Nebraska, which is not one of those rural places that’s fallen behind the rest of the country and is only barely surviving:
So what accounts for this sense of abandonment by Democrats? Partly it’s simple policy differences on things like guns, abortion, the death penalty, and so forth: the usual rural-urban divide. But it goes well beyond that. We’ve all read dozens of pieces like this one over the past few months, and the residents often express abject fear of what might happen if Joe Biden wins the presidency. This puzzles most of us. Afraid of Bernie Sanders? Sure, maybe. But afraid of Joe Biden? Mr. Mainstream? That’s crazy.
But if you watch Fox News or listen to conservative talk radio, you’d be scared too. Think about what they’re told every single day:
I could go on like this for dozens more bullets. If you watch Fox News or listen to talk radio, you can add dozens more yourself. And when you do, doesn’t it become obvious why people like this adore Trump? As far as they can tell, he’s their only bulwark against a Hollywood-academia-politically-correct-liberal tsunami that’s focused on crushing them and everything they believe in. We may joke about it, but to many of these folks a Democratic victory really does look a lot like the apocalypse.
When Trump is defeated, I suspect the Republican Party leadership will essentially disown him. They’re already pretty tired of him, and he really is too crude for their tastes anyway. By this time next year you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone who will admit to ever supporting him.
But Trumpism—or, more accurately, Murdochism—will live on. Its goal is to seed chaos and fear, and it will continue until something finally crushes it. But what?
Adam Schultz/Biden for President/ZUMA
Joe Biden is ahead in the national polls by about ten points or so. But we’re sophisticated people around here and we know that doesn’t matter. Only the Electoral College matters. And because we’re really sophisticated political consumers, we also know that the Electoral College all boils down to Pennsylvania. As the Keystone State goes, so goes the nation. So how are things going there? Here are the final poll averages before Election Day:
This is what the Washington Post calls a “slight” lead, but only because they don’t really understand how margin of error works. For the rest of us, this is a pretty substantial lead indeed. It’s not literally impossible for the Pennsylvania polls to be off by five or six points, but it’s pretty damn unlikely considering the amount of effort that’s gone into correcting some of the shortcomings of the 2016 polling.
Of course, all of this depends on Democrats getting out and voting. And I think they will. If they haven’t been motivated by the past four years, I can only assume they’re all in comas.
You are probably itching to know what I think about the election, aren’t you? Fine. Here are my predictions:
Basically, I think Trump will be crushed like a bug and will be forced to shuffle off to Mar-a-Lago to rant and rave from the sidelines for the rest of his life. I’m looking forward to that.
As for Trumpism in general, I think it would be better to call it Foxism. I don’t think it will go away in the Republican Party until something happens to Fox and the rest of the conservative talk-entertainment empire. Defeating that will be considerably harder than defeating Trump himself.
Here’s the coronavirus death toll through November 1. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.
I want to show you Tom Toles’ final cartoon for the Washington Post. Take a look at the middle row. That’s impressive as hell. In a few square inches he summarized precisely the biggest issues facing us between now and a few decades from now. Those three squares should be framed and mounted in every kitchen in America.
Here’s the coronavirus death toll through October 31. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.
Consolidated News Photos/CNP via ZUMA
Why has the mainstream media mostly ignored the Hunter Biden story? According to Trump supporters, it’s evidence of a silent conspiracy not to publish anything in the closing weeks of the presidential campaign that might hurt Joe Biden.
This assumes, of course, that the mainstream media has ignored the Hunter Biden story. But have they? The Trumpies take the view that allegations of any kind, no matter how dubious, should be aired uncritically. Most news outlets, however, take the traditional view that allegations should be confirmed before they’re splashed on the front page. Today, Ken Dilanian and Tom Winter of NBC News explain that they’ve spent the past two weeks trying to report out the story and have been unable to:
The lack of major new revelations is perhaps the biggest reason the story has not gotten traction, but not the only one. Among others: Most mainstream news organizations, including NBC News, have not been granted access to the documents. NBC News asked by email, text, phone call and certified mail, and was ultimately denied.
After examining text messages provided by Bobulinski, the [Wall Street Journal] reported that “the venture — set up in 2017 after Mr. Biden left the vice presidency and before his presidential campaign — never received proposed funds from the Chinese company or completed any deals, according to people familiar with the matter. Corporate records…show no role for Joe Biden.”…An NBC News correspondent asked Bobulinski for an interview and for copies of documents in his possession, but he declined.
….An NBC News correspondent sent a letter two weeks ago to Giuliani, seeking copies of the materials. His lawyer, Robert Costello, granted the correspondent the opportunity to review some Hunter Biden emails and other materials in person. The materials included copies of Hunter Biden identification documents that appeared to be genuine. But without taking possession of the copies, it was not possible to conduct the sort of forensic analysis that might help authenticate the emails and documents.
It was Giuliani who ultimately told NBC News he would not be providing a copy of the hard drive. NBC News responded by asking if, instead of a full copy of the hard drive, he could just provide copies of the full set of emails. Giuliani did not agree to that proposal. NBC News then declined an offer of copies of a small group of emails.
….James Rosen, a reporter for the conservative-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group, the nation’s largest operator of local television stations, reported this week that a Justice Department official told him the FBI had opened a criminal investigation into Hunter Biden and his associates last year focused on allegations of money-laundering — and that the probe remains active….NBC News has not confirmed any such investigation.
There is every reason imaginable to be suspicious of the Hunter Biden story. Rudy Giuliani is, to put it mildy, an unreliable source. The story about Hunter’s laptop being left in a repair shop is so fishy it stinks. The unwillingness to provide a full set of documents to reporters is an obvious tell that something is amiss. And even if it turns out that all the emails and other documents are legitimate, they still don’t implicate Joe Biden. They merely show what we already knew: that Hunter Biden would occasionally trade on his name in his business dealings.
Four years ago, the press went wild with the news that a cache of emails from Hillary Clinton had been located. That’s it. They had no idea whether the emails were new (they weren’t) or whether they contained anything interesting (they didn’t). There wasn’t even an allegation involved in this story, merely the existence of something that everyone already knew existed (emails between Clinton and Huma Abedin).
Having been suckered by conservatives over the email story in 2016, is it any wonder that reporters wanted at least a little bit of confirmation before splashing yet another conservative smear campaign on their front pages? And that they became justifiably dubious about the whole thing when Rudy Giuliani resolutely refused to let anyone see the entire document cache?
Of course not. The mainstream media did try to report the Hunter Biden story, but they ran into blockade after blockade. In the end, there was nothing there.
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Here’s the coronavirus death toll through October 30. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.
A reader suggested standardizing the country populations that I use to calculate deaths per million. That sounded reasonable, so I’m now using the UN estimates for July 2019 across the board. This had only a minor effect, but it’s the reason, for example, that the UK’s death rate declined today.
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