Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features r&b singer Eddie Floyd. Enjoy!

"There is nothing done by the Trump administration that can be rationally characterized as a radical aberration, some dramatic break, from U.S. tradition. Quite the contrary: none of Trump’s actions and policies are in some new universe of savagery, lawlessness, or radicalism when compared to those who preceded him in power."

-- Glenn Greenwald

News and Opinion

Yanis Varoufakis as always worth a full read:

Hoping for a return to normal after Trump? That's the last thing we need

Normalcy and the restoration of a modicum of decorum to the White House: that is what many elite supporters of Joe Biden hope for now that he has won the election. But the rest of us are turned off by this meagre ambition. Voters who loathe Trump celebrate his loss, but the majority rue the return to what used to pass as normal or ethical. ...

Trump’s rudeness to his opponents, however disagreeable, might have even brought some relief to the forgotten Americans who associate Biden’s politeness with the gentle mercies that the former vice-president reserves for Wall Street and the super-rich who bankrolled his campaign. Not unreasonably, they see Biden as a polite emissary of the bankers who repossessed their homes and, at once, a member of an administration that bailed out – with public money – those same bankers. They hear Biden’s sleek, well-mannered speeches about unity, respect, tolerance and bringing citizens together and they think “no, thanks, I don’t want to be united with, or tolerant of, those who got rich by shoving me in a hole”. To them, Trump’s behaviour is an ugly but welcome manifestation of solidarity with ordinary folks who feel empowered by the combination of the president’s vulgarity and his evocations of America’s irrepressible greatness – even if, deep down, they never expected their prospects to improve significantly when America becomes “great again”.

The tragedy of progressives is that Trump’s supporters are not entirely wrong. The Democratic party has demonstrated time and again its determination to prevent any challenge to the powerful that are responsible for the pain, anger and humiliation that propelled Trump to the White House. Democrats can talk until the cows come home about racial justice, the need for more women in positions of power, the rights of the LGBT community etc. But, the moment politicians like Bernie Sanders threaten to challenge the power structures that keep black Americans, women, minorities and the poor in society’s margins, they go all out to stop them. Trump’s supporters are unlikely to articulate this in so many words. However, their contempt for the liberal establishment is rooted in the realisation that the rich Democrats behind the Biden-Harris ticket won’t ever truly change conditions for the poor. Any redistribution of wealth and power that threatens their kids’ trust fund, or soaring asset prices on Wall Street, are off-limits – and those voters know that.

Against this background, however hard Biden tries to speak the language of some Green New Deal, no one can imagine him uttering a phrase like Franklin Roosevelt’s, who referring to bankers once said: “They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred.” Without a readiness to confront the greatest concentration of corporate power in the history of the United States, even the most amiable of presidents will fail to deliver either social justice or serious climate change mitigation. At least Trump wasn’t hypocritical, his supporters might say.

Ro Khanna: Progressives Helped Biden Win. We Can't Stop Push for Green New Deal & Medicare for All

Its completely outrageous that those who spent the election saying we all had to vote for Biden even if we didn't agree with him are now pointing to his victory as evidence that the voters agree with him.

— Nathan J Robinson (@NathanJRobinson) November 7, 2020

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ends truce by warning ‘incompetent’ Democratic party

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has criticised the Democratic party for incompetence in a no-holds-barred, post-election interview with the New York Times, warning that if the Biden administration does not put progressives in top positions, the party would lose big in the 2022 midterm elections.

Signaling that the internal moratorium in place while the Democrats worked to defeat Donald Trump was over, the leftwing New York representative sharply rejected the notion advanced by some Democrats that progressive messaging around the Movement for Black Lives and the Green New Deal led to the party’s loss of congressional seats in last week’s election. The real problem, said Ocasio-Cortez, was that the party lacked “core competencies” to run campaigns.

“There’s a reason Barack Obama built an entire national campaign apparatus outside of the Democratic National Committee,” she told the Times’ Astead Herndon. “And there’s a reason that when he didn’t activate or continue that, we lost House majorities. Because the party – in and of itself – does not have the core competencies, and no amount of money is going to fix that.” ...

The truce is over. The failure of the party to operate an online strategy “in a real way that exhibits competence”, Ocasio-Cortez told the Times, made it hypocritical for the party to advance criticism of progressive messaging. “If I lost my election, and I went out and I said: ‘This is moderates’ fault. This is because you didn’t let us have a floor vote on Medicare for all.’ And they opened the hood on my campaign, and they found that I only spent $5,000 on TV ads the week before the election?” Ocasio-Cortez said. “They would laugh. And that’s what they look like right now trying to blame the Movement for Black Lives for their loss.”

Grassroots activism that produced large turnout in Detroit, Philadelphia and Georgia was crucial to Biden’s win, and if the Democratic party fails to recognise that and incorporate the grassroots, the party disintegrates at the ballot box, Ocasio-Cortez said. “It’s really hard for us to turn out nonvoters when they feel like nothing changes for them. When they feel like people don’t see them, or even acknowledge their turnout,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “If the party believes after 94% of Detroit went to Biden, after Black organisers just doubled and tripled turnout down in Georgia, after so many people organised Philadelphia, the signal from the Democratic party is the John Kasich won us this election? I mean, I can’t even describe how dangerous that is.”

CLUELESS Democrat Gives Advice After Losing House Seats!

As we saw in Democratic primary exit polls: People absolutely do not like their private health insurance, as corporate front groups and lazy pundits always say https://t.co/cSWoI2sKps

— Andrew Perez (@andrewperezdc) November 3, 2020

pic.twitter.com/oM53nHZDQk

— DSA (@DemSocialists) November 8, 2020

Why Democrats Are Losing Senate & House Seats!

An excellent piece by Sirota, worth a full read. Here are some excerpts.

Money Never Sleeps

Since the election was called for Joe Biden, there has been a multitiered effort to blame disappointing election results on progressives, even as exit polls and voting results show that progressive organizing rescued Democrats from the jaws of a presidential defeat. While the country was celebrating the defeat of Trump, here’s what the voices of Big Money have been doing since the election:

• Democratic leaders are insisting that the party must abandon modestly progressive health care positions in order to boost the party’s chances in Georgia, even though polling says exactly the opposite.

• Republican John Kasich — who was given a DNC speaking slot by Team Biden and who nonetheless failed to help Democrats win his home state of Ohio — went on CNN to bash progressives, insisting that Biden’s top priority should be appeasing Trump voters. 

• Ian Bremmer — a Morning Joe character who is a reliable barometer of elite thought — echoed Kasich, suggesting that the first thing Democrats should do is reach out and appease Trump supporters.

• Joe Scarborough himself asserted that the election proves Democrats must run away from the left, even though their entire strategy was running away from the left, and that strategy resulted in disappointing down-ballot losses. 

• Politico published a list of alleged frontrunners for Biden cabinet slots, filled mostly with corporate-friendly Democrats and Republicans.

• The American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are publicly offering to work with the Biden administration, pledging a desire to "support bipartisan policies” and "break through the gridlock."

• As GOP operatives at the Lincoln Project explore turning their operation into a media empire, they are turning their attacks on U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the party’s few stars with a large national following. 

• Democratic leaders and the House Blue Dog Caucus — the corporate wing of the party — have spent the week attacking progressives, blaming them for a handful of moderate freshman lawmakers’ losses -- even as data show that Democrats in swing districts lost vote share as they moved further and further to the right.

...

Just as Republicans always spin every economic policy as a reason to cut rich people’s taxes, corporate Democrats and their allies have a left-bashing propaganda machine powered by a finely tuned algorithm designed to silence progressive leaders — whether it’s AOC, Bernie Sanders or anyone else — and to turn every election result into a rationale to protect billionaires, corporate power and the status quo.

Bree Newsome & Prof. Eddie Glaude: The Black Lives Matter Movement Helped the Democrats Defeat Trump

James Clyburn beclowns himself. He can't tell the difference between a call for civic action (defund the police) and a call for militant action (burn baby burn).

James Clyburn: ‘defund the police’ slogan may have hurt Democrats at polls

James Clyburn, the House majority whip and Democratic “kingmaker” who played an outsized role in Joe Biden’s successful presidential run, has said the “sloganeering” of the Black Lives Matter protests and other social justice efforts this summer might have hampered them at the polls.

Clyburn, a Black South Carolina congressman and prominent figure in the civil rights movement, likened the “defund the police” mantra of certain activists to civil rights efforts in the 1960s, when some public support for the movement’s objectives was eroded by radical messaging. ...

“I came out very publicly and very forcibly against sloganeering,” Clyburn said Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union. “John Lewis and I were founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. John and I sat on the House floor and talked about that defund the police slogan, and both of us concluded that it had the possibilities of doing to the Black Lives Matter movement and current movements across the country what Burn, Baby, Burn did to us back in the 1960s,” Clyburn said.

Burn, Baby, Burn became a street slogan during the Watts civil unrest of 1965 in Los Angeles, at the time the largest and costliest uprising of the civil rights era. ...

As an example, Clyburn cited the defeat of South Carolina US Senate hopeful Jaime Harrison, who ended up beaten comprehensively by the incumbent Republican Lindsey Graham in a race many had hoped he would win after he turned a longshot campaign into a real contest. “Jaime Harrison started to plateau when ‘defund the police’ showed up with a caption on TV, ran across his head,” Clyburn said in a separate Sunday appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press. “That stuff hurt Jaime. And that’s why I spoke out against it a long time ago. I’ve always said that these headlines can kill a political effort.”

Bernie Sanders: "We need a federal minimum wage of at least $15/hr."

Joe Biden: "I beat the Socialist!"

Florida: *Votes for $15 statewide minimum wage, and *not* Joe Biden*

— Now Accepting All Who Want Change (@TravisMenard00) November 6, 2020

Democrats Reflect On 2020 Presidential Election

SIROTA: Well, there's two things, there's, one, the focus on trying to moderate a message in order to attract so-called Biden Republicans. That was a failure. The data shows that the better strategy is to try to pull out your own voters and voters who haven't been voting. And I do think the Democrats did a decent job of that. But the amount of money - and we're talking about tens of millions of dollars - that went into focusing on trying to appeal to a mythical Republican swing voter - the data shows that that was not a good strategy.

And I would argue is - why the election was as close as it was. I think an inanimate object should have been able to win a landslide against Donald Trump in the middle of a pandemic and economic crisis. And I think the other thing that comes out in the polling data is that the Democrats paid a price for not having a very strong economic message. I mean, I do think the Biden campaign was shrewd in some of what it did, focusing on the pandemic and the like. But without having a strong economic message repeated over and over and over again, you saw an exit poll that showed Donald Trump won 82% of voters who said that the economy was their top issue.

That is a huge problem. It was a huge problem in the election. I'm certainly glad that Joe Biden won. But moving forward, if the Democrats do not have a strong populist, progressive economic message heading into 2022 and 2024, we could get something worse than Donald Trump.

Biden's First Executive Orders Revealed

Biden faces rocky transition as work of undoing Trump's damage begins

In his first address to the nation, the president-elect said he would unveil a group of scientists and experts on Monday to help him craft a plan to tackle the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout. ... Biden’s presidential transition team has already spent months planning for his first term, and accelerated their activities in the hours prior to his win becoming official. The team launched its presidential transition website a day before the election was officially called for Biden.

Now, Biden and the transition team have to build a government largely remotely, during the pandemic, and while contending with a Senate that could stay in Republican hands, a House sure to feature fewer Democratic allies than it did previously, and a public that includes more than 70 million people who voted for Donald Trump over Biden.

Biden is already said to be planning to sign a series of executive orders soon after being sworn into office on 20 January that would reverse the work of the Trump administration, including rejoining the Paris climate accords, and reversing Trump’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization (WHO). ...

Last week some of Biden’s more technocratic plans for his administration came into public view. He’s expected to bring in Gary Gensler, the former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission regulatory organization, to advise on regulating Wall Street, according to the Wall Street Journal. Bringing in Gensler suggests that Biden plans to satiate calls from some liberal organizations to include regulators with high regard in liberal circles like Gensler.

Analysis: how will Trump spend his last months in office?

Russia and China silence speaks volumes as leaders congratulate Biden

Most world leaders rushed to congratulate Joe Biden on his election, but Russia and China, two likely losers from the defeat of Donald Trump, remained silent, perhaps waiting for the outgoing president to concede defeat. ...

Iran, suffering from Trump-inspired sanctions and now recording nearly 500 Covid-related deaths daily, celebrated Trump’s demise and said the US should now compensate Iran for its mistakes. Iran’s president, Hassan Rouhani, due to leave office next summer, said he will wait to see what Biden does before deciding if there is any difference between Trump and his successor. ...

Tensions also spilled out from Turkey, with figures close to Recep Tayyip Erdogan warning Biden not to support Syrian Kurds or challenge Turkey’s wider ambitions in the Middle East. ...

No immediate statement came from the Saudi royal court, which is heavily dependent on US defence hardware to protect itself. The left in the Democratic party wants “an end to forever wars”, especially a withdrawal of US support for the Saudi war in Yemen. The Saudis also want to end the disastrous intervention so long as it does not leave Yemen under complete control of Houthi rebels.

Israel’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, a close ally of Trump, sent Biden formal congratulations without naming him president-elect, but Israel will want reassurances about the US maintaining pressure on Iran and its continued support for the normalisation of relations between Israel and Arab states.

Bolivia's new president was sworn in Sunday.

Bolivia's new leftwing president: 'We have reclaimed democracy'

Bolivia’s new president, Luis Arce, has vowed to rebuild his country’s battered economy, revive ties with leftwing neighbours and serve one term only, as he prepared to take office after October’s landslide election.

Speaking to the Guardian before his inauguration on Sunday, the UK-educated economist was cautious about characterising his victory as proof that Latin America’s leftwing “pink tide” of the early 2000s was bouncing back after a period of rightwing dominance. Since 2018 the left has returned to power in Mexico and Argentina, while a leftwing economist is well placed to win Ecuador’s presidential election in February.

But Arce’s win did represent a sensational domestic resurrection for the Movement for Socialism (Mas) party, which some observers thought was doomed after its figurehead, Evo Morales, was driven abroad last year after a failed election, social unrest and what supporters call a US-backed coup. “The left is not defeated in Bolivia – on the contrary, we have a new opportunity now to work for the Bolivian people,” the incoming president said.

Arce, 57, said his emphatic first-round win showed Latin Americans would no longer accept anti-democratic, rightwing regimes, such as the interim government that took power after Morales abandoned Bolivia in November 2019. “We have reclaimed democracy for Bolivia, and our message is that we will not tolerate any kind of de facto dictatorial regime or coup in Latin America,” he said, promising to seek justice for the victims of a shooting of unarmed civilians at the height of last year’s unrest.

He promised to repair ties with Argentina’s Peronist leaders and restore relations with the leftwing governments of Cuba and Venezuela, which Bolivia’s conservative interim president, Jeanine Áñez, severed, despite lacking a democratic mandate. ... But Arce also signalled he would be pragmatic, “leaving matters of ideology and politics to one side” when dealing with leaders of different stripes, such as Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro. “We want to do good business with our neighbours,” he said.

US posts fourth consecutive daily Covid record as Joe Biden prepares taskforce

As President-elect Joe Biden announced that he would name his own coronavirus taskforce on Monday, the US recorded its fourth consecutive record daily total of new Covid cases, close to 130,000. “That plan will be built on a bedrock of science,” Biden said, promising to “spare no effort – or commitment – to turn this pandemic around.”

On Sunday, Biden’s campaign revealed that former US surgeon general Dr Vivek Murthy and former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Dr David Kessler would be co-chairs of the working group.

According to Johns Hopkins University, 127,399 cases were recorded across the US on Saturday, bringing the total recorded to nearly 9.9m. More than 1,000 deaths were recorded, bring the national toll close to 237,000.

Bearing out Dr Anthony Fauci’s recent warning of cases rising and staying above 100,000 a day, the seven-day average for cases was 103,973. Hospitalisations were also rising, at around 56,000.

Hospitalization crisis across the US in face of a massive surge of coronavirus infections

Using 10 modeling groups’ data, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated its four-week hospitalization forecast for Nov. 30. They estimated that there would be 2,600 to 13,000 new COVID-19 hospitalizations per day by the end of this month. Over the last seven days, the national rate of admissions to hospitals has been just over 1,200 per day. In other words, the CDC is expecting the rate to climb two to 10 times in the next three to four weeks.

This is an astounding rate that should force local and state governments to pause and give immediate considerations to their response to the pandemic. This is no longer a speculative matter. The need for greater mitigation efforts is becoming necessary to stem the tide of infections to provide relief to health care systems.

Even the mainstream news and local media outlets have been raising repeated concerns over the alarming rates of hospitalizations from COVID-19 infections that are bringing health systems to the brink. Unlike testing and case numbers, which can be quite variable, hospitalization numbers are a reliable metric for the state of the community transmission as it represents people sick enough to seek care. ...

There are currently 55,817 hospitalized patients in the United States, up from a low of 28,608 on Sept. 20. Of these, 11,078 are in the ICUs and 2,943 are on ventilators. The previous peaks in hospitalization in April and July reached close to 60,000. The breakdown by age group (which has remained consistent throughout the pandemic) reveals that 75 percent are over age 50, with the majority in this group being over 65. Those between 18 and 49 account for 24 percent of hospitalizations.

Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus taskforce coordinator, sent an election-eve memo to President Trump warning that “we are entering the most concerning and most deadly phase of this pandemic … leading to increased mortality.” Dr. Anthony Fauci, blatantly opposing Trump, told the Washington Post, “We’re in a world of hurt.” These assessments are quickly being realized.

Panel: Floated Biden Cabinet Like West Wing Episode From Hell

Caitlin Johnstone:

Biden Will Have The Most Diverse, Intersectional Cabinet Of Mass Murderers Ever Assembled

Well you’ll be happy to know that the next US president and his crack team of ventriloquists are assembling a cabinet of mass murderers that’s as diverse, inclusive and intersectional as America herself.

It’s been obvious for a long time that Joe Biden’s cabinet would be packed with Obama holdovers, war pigs and whatever primary opponents he owes favors to, but now that he is the media-anointed winner of the presidential election we’re getting a bit more confirmation on who they’re expected to be.

A new Politico report informs us that the heavy favorite to lead the US war machine into further imperial conquest as Secretary of “Defense” is a butcher of the fairer sex named Michele Flournoy, who was Obama’s Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from 2009 to 2012.

In an article titled “Biden: A War Cabinet?“, Antiwar‘s Mariamne Everett writes the following:

Flournoy, in writing the Quadrennial Defense Review during her time as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy under President Clinton, has paved the way for the U.S.’s endless and costly wars which prevent us from investing in life saving and necessary programs like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. It has effectively granted the US permission to no longer be bound by the UN Charter’s prohibition against the threat or use of military force. It declared that, “when the interests at stake are vital, …we should do whatever it takes to defend them, including, when necessary, the unilateral use of military power.”

While working at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a “Top Defense and National Security Think Tank” based in Washington D.C., in June 2002, as the Bush administration was threatening aggression towards Iraq, she declared, that the United States would “need to strike preemptively before a crisis erupts to destroy an adversary’s weapons stockpile” before it “could erect defenses to protect those weapons, or simply disperse them.”

“In 2009, she joined the Obama administration as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, where she helped engineer political and humanitarian disasters in Libya and Syria and a new escalation of the endless war in Afghanistan before resigning in 2012,” report Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J S Davies in another Antiwar piece on Flournoy. “From 2013-2016, she joined Boston Consulting, trading on her Pentagon connections to boost the firm’s military contracts from $1.6 million in 2013 to $32 million in 2016. By 2017, Flournoy herself was raking in $452,000 a year.”

Flournoy would be the very first female head of the US war department, and if that doesn’t make you want to listen to P!nk and kiss your Hillary Clinton pendant I don’t know what will.

A favorite to lead America’s other war department, also known as the State Department, is former National Security Advisor and Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice. Rice is an ideal choice for a leading role in the Biden administration because she holds the valuable trifecta of being (A) female, (B) Black and (C) an enthusiastic promoter of the Iraq invasion which murdered a million human beings.

Some quotes from Rice, courtesy of Everett:

“I think he [then Secretary of State Colin Powell] has proved that Iraq has these weapons and is hiding them, and I don’t think many informed people doubted that.” (NPR, Feb. 6, 2003)

“It’s clear that Iraq poses a major threat. It’s clear that its weapons of mass destruction need to be dealt with forcefully, and that’s the path we’re on. I think the question becomes whether we can keep the diplomatic balls in the air and not drop any, even as we move forward, as we must, on the military side.” (NPR, Dec. 20, 2002)

“I think the United States government has been clear since the first Bush administration about the threat that Iraq and Saddam Hussein poses. The United States policy has been regime change for many, many years, going well back into the Clinton administration. So it’s a question of timing and tactics. … We do not necessarily need a further Council resolution before we can enforce this and previous resolutions.” (NPR, Nov. 11, 2002; requests for audio of Rice’s statements on NPR were declined by the publicly funded network.)

Rice, who is also notorious for helping to deceive the world into the destruction of Libya, may have difficulty getting confirmed for Secretary of State in a Republican-held Senate. But one way or another she’s guaranteed to be playing some role in the Biden administration.

Also under discussion for a role in leading the US threshing monster is Senator Tammy Duckworth, who has for months been aggressively attacking the Trump administration for not confronting Russia over the completely discredited claim that Moscow had paid Taliban-linked fighters to kill occupying coalition forces in Afghanistan.

You might think that someone who promotes cold war escalations on a daily basis which have no relationship to facts or reality might make Duckworth an unsuitable candidate for military leadership, but what you are apparently too bigoted and Russian to realize is that the Senator from Illinois is both a woman of color and handicapped. I bet you feel silly now.

Up for consideration as leader of America’s most sociopathic government agency is Obama’s former CIA Deputy Director Avril Haines, who protected all perpetrators implicated in a Senate report on CIA torture from suffering any consequences for their unspeakable brutality, and helped redact that same report. If selected Biden would become just the second president with the highly progressive distinction of selecting a female CIA Director, the first being Donald Trump when he appointed Torturer-in-Chief “Bloody” Gina Haspel (whose appointment Haines supported).

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to see how else the Decency President plans to uplift us with girl power and diversity of ethnicity and sexual orientation in the most powerful force of human slaughter in the history of civilization. 2021, here we come!

Neocons IMMEDIATELY Try To Retake The Republican Party

Glenn Greenwald is totally worth a full read:

No Matter the Liberal Metric Chosen, the Bush/Cheney Administration Was Far Worse Than Trump.

That the liberal belief in and fear of a Trump-led fascist dictatorship and violent coup is actually a fantasy — a longing, a desire, a craving — has long been obvious.

The Democrats’ own actions proved that they never believed their own melodramatic and self-glorifying rhetoric about Trump as The New Hitler — from their leaders joining with the GOP to increase The Fascist Dictator’s domestic spying powers and military spending to their (correct) belief that the way to oust The Neo-Nazi Tyrant was through a peaceful and lawfully conducted democratic election in which vote totals and, if necessary, duly constituted courts would determine the next president.

The motives for concocting this Wagnerian fantasy about coups, dictatorship, concentration camps and civil war are numerous. Politics is boring, and your life unspectacular, if it’s dedicated to a goal as banal and uninspiring as empowering a septuagenarian career-politician — the centrist-authoritarian author of the 1994 Crime Bill, the credit card industry’s most loyal servant, and key Iraq War advocate — along with his tough-on-crime prosecutor-running-mate who always seems as if she just left a meeting of the Aetna Board of Directors where massive hikes in deductibles were approved. ...

Posturing as a courageous soldier in an existential battle for freedom, democracy and the survival of the marginalized against Nazi despotism is far more exciting and psychologically satisfying (and financially profitable) than being an obedient liberal drone marching in perfect tune to the dreary, McKinsey-scripted musical theater produced by Tom Perez and the DNC. That is therefore the delusional storyline adopted by many. ...

But this entire narrative is complete and utter bullshit: blatantly so. There is nothing done by the Trump administration that can be rationally characterized as a radical aberration, some dramatic break, from U.S. tradition. Quite the contrary: none of Trump’s actions and policies are in some new universe of savagery, lawlessness, or radicalism when compared to those who preceded him in power. ... That Trump ushered in an unprecedented climate of lawlessness and authoritarianism is perhaps the most stunning of the assertions, particularly when delivered by the Bush/Obama Warriors on Terror who succeeded in imposing a model of the American Presidency that resided above not only morality but law.

To clarify, President Trump’s press conference will NOT be held at Four Seasons Hotel Philadelphia.
It will be held at Four Seasons Total Landscaping— no relation with the hotel.

— Four Seasons Hotel Philadelphia at Comcast Center (@FSPhiladelphia) November 7, 2020

Keep on digging: Trump team holds press conference at suburban garden centre

Donald Trump’s increasingly desperate bid to hang on to the White House crossed into abject farce on Saturday, after his campaign staged a purportedly major press conference at a Philadelphia landscaping business situated between a crematorium and sex shop. On Saturday morning, as Trump played golf and continued to baselessly accuse the Democrats of stealing the election for Joe Biden, the president announced, in a tweet that was subsequently deleted, a “big press conference” at the Four Seasons in Philadelphia.

Trump quickly altered his statement, revealing that the press conference venue was not a Four Seasons hotel, but Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a suburban business between a crematorium and an adult book store on the outer edges of the city. “Big press conference today in Philadelphia at Four Seasons Total Landscaping – 11.30am!” the president tweeted at 9.45am. ...

The Trump campaign has not publicly said whether this was, as it would appear, a case of mistaken identity. ...

I could write jokes for 800 years and I'd never think of something funnier than Trump booking the Four Seasons for his big presser, and it turning out to be the Four Seasons Total Landscaping parking lot between a dildo store and a crematorium. pic.twitter.com/P45HV1daD9

— Zack Bornstein (@ZackBornstein) November 8, 2020

The real hero today is whoever answered the phone at Four Seasons Landscaping and offered no clarification whatsoever until it was too late, I salute you, my fellow patriot.

— Geraldine (@everywhereist) November 8, 2020

Krystal Ball's Dem Autopsy: How Corporatists, Impeachment, And Wokeness Nearly Blew The Election

Exit Lines: Campaign Analysts Miss the Signal in the Noise

A lot of men were biting dogs in pre- and post-election analysis. “Trump Is Losing Ground With White Voters but Gaining Among Black and Hispanic Americans,” 538 (10/19/20) reported. “The Trump Vote Is Rising Among Blacks and Hispanics, Despite the Conventional Wisdom,” declared an NBC article (11/2/20). “Many Latino Men Are Supporting President Trump This Election,” said NPR (10/28/20), while a CNN headline (11/4/20) said, “More Latino Voters Support Trump in 2020 Than 2016.”

Is that really what the exit polls showed, though? The polls conducted for leading media by Edison Research said in 2016 that Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump among Latino voters by 36 points (65% vs. 29%), whereas in 2020, the exit polls said that Biden won those voters by a 34-point margin (66% to 32%). That’s a less-than-seismic shift to revolve a trend piece around.

The Black vote had slightly more movement, from an 80-point margin for the Democrat in 2016 to a 75-point lead in 2020, but neither dismal showing was anything for Trump to boast about. The bottom line, obscured by these demographic gee-whiz stories, is that Trump had a 15-point advantage among whites and a 46-point deficit with people of color.

Another theme of campaign analysis was Trump’s supposedly fading appeal among seniors: CNN (10/6/20) wrote about “How Trump’s Losing Among Seniors at a Historic Rate.” “Trump Is Losing Seniors. Here’s Why,” Politico (10/15/20) offered. “Trump Trails Among Seniors, Key Group in Many Battleground States,” the Wall Street Journal (10/18/20) reported.

Again, that’s not quite what the exit polls showed. Voters over 65 are still Trump’s best age cohort, giving him 51% of their vote, just 2 percentage points less than he won in 2016. Biden did a little better among seniors than Hillary Clinton did, so Trump’s margin shrank from 8 points to 3 points. But the more dramatic change was among voters under 30, who gave Clinton an 18-point lead and Biden a 27-point one—a surge in youth support that went largely unremarked by media (FAIR.org, 11/3/20).

Exit polls also complicated a favorite trope of campaign coverage: Trump’s “white working-class base.” It’s true that Trump does 15 percentage points better among white voters without college degrees than with them—but what if class involves not just education, but money? Among the almost three-fourths of voters whose households make less than $100,000 a year, Trump trails badly: Biden showed a 15-point lead (57%/42%) among those who make less than $50,000, and was 13 points ahead (56%/43%) with the $50,0oo–$99,999 bracket. Only among the wealthiest quarter did Trump have a lead, winning $100,000+ households 54% to 43%.

Voters with more money tend to vote Republican: There’s a dog-bites-man story that you don’t hear a lot about.

Trump is a loser!

Here's the intro to an interview worth a read:

U.S. Military Responsible for Widespread PFAS Pollution in Japan

While communities across the U.S. have been struggling with massive pollution from the military’s use of firefighting foam that contains PFAS, Japan has awoken to its own environmental crisis from the industrial chemicals in the foam. The growing awareness of the issue in Japan is largely due to one reporter: Jon Mitchell, a British investigative journalist based in Tokyo, who has spent years chronicling environmental contamination in the Asia-Pacific region.

His most recent book, “Poisoning the Pacific: The U.S. Military’s Dumping of Plutonium, Chemical Weapons, and Agent Orange,” is based on thousands of pages of documents he obtained from the U.S. military through the Freedom of Information Act; they detail the widespread contamination of bases and the areas surrounding them with PFAS and other hazardous substances, including chemical weapons, Agent Orange, jet fuel, and PCBs.

In the U.S., the fight over PFAS contamination from military installations, which The Intercept was first to report in 2015, now usually centers on the degree to which the Department of Defense is obligated to clean it up. But in Japan, which is home to 78 U.S. military facilities, bilateral agreements release the U.S. government from any obligation to test for contamination caused by its operations or remove it if it’s detected.

Feh. Overly optimistic. A bipartisan climate policy is most likely to be a corporate friendly, habitat-hostile policy.

A Bipartisan Climate Policy? It Could Happen Under a Biden Administration, Washington Veterans Say

Many environmentalists hoped that Joe Biden would become the FDR of climate change.

But if, as seems likely, Biden emerges as the winner of a deeply divisive presidential election, in which the Republican Party retains control of the Senate, it is more likely he will need the skills of an LBJ. And climate policy, in a Biden era, could end up looking more like President Lyndon Baines Johnson's hard-fought civil rights legislation than President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's sweeping New Deal, say veterans of Washington's energy policy battles.

When Biden campaigned on a $2 trillion climate plan, the most ambitious ever proposed by a major party candidate, the Democrats were aiming to pick up the three Senate seats they needed for a majority that would support Biden's plan. And although that is still a distant possibility, the results from Tuesday's election so far show Republicans have held onto contested seats in Maine, Montana, Iowa and South Carolina, and remain ahead in Alaska and North Carolina. ... If Republicans maintain Senate control, any Biden climate legislation would have to get past Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a skilled legislative blockader and a longtime Kentucky ally of the coal industry.

But industry and environmental advocates alike say that Biden, who spent more than 40 years in the Senate, is uniquely suited to the challenge of dealing with McConnell—and with former colleagues of both parties. They are anticipating that Biden will be able to do more in the face of a hostile Congress than did President Barack Obama, who relied on a series of executive actions on climate that President Donald Trump has spent the past four years overturning.

Climate policy watchers expect Biden to engage Capitol Hill on green stimulus and Covid relief, including measures that already enjoy bipartisan support like infrastructure, farm aid and support for renewable energy and carbon capture and storage. And perhaps, packaged with the right incentives, that might even include economy-wide legislation that puts a price on carbon. At least one Capitol Hill veteran argues that partisan disadvantage may be an advantage in the long run, for the stability of climate policy.

Tropical Storm Eta lands in Florida after ravaging Central America

Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

‘Sleepy Joe’s’ Task Is to Put Liberal America Back to Sleep

During the Trump Era, Everyone and Everything in America Failed

Thomas Frank: Ding-dong, the jerk is gone. But read this before you sing the Hallelujah Chorus

Ocasio-Cortez Dismisses Centrist Attempts to Blame Left for Dem Losses, Calling on Party to Listen to Progressive Demands

As Centrist House Democrats Attack Medicare for All, Fox News Poll Shows 72% of Voters Want 'Government-Run Healthcare Plan'

Texas Democrats Thought 2020 Would Be a Banner Year. Instead, It Was a Catastrophe.

Caitlin Johnstone: Real Journalists Would Grill Biden On Yemen At Every Opportunity

Israel to Discuss Long-Term Military Aid With Biden

Israeli settler attacks wreck Palestinian olive harvest

San Diego’s spying streetlights stuck switched “on,” despite directive

Engels comes of age: the socialist who wanted a joyous life for everyone

Democracy Now: The End of Trump? Biden & Harris Claim Victory in Historic Election, Vowing to Heal Divided Nation

Jimmy Dore: INSANE Propaganda Babbling from Mainstream Media!

Krystal and Saagar: How 2020 Results DESTROYED Every Mainstream Narrative About Voters

Rising: Perennial LOSER John Kasich Trashes Progressives In Advice For Dems

Zaid Jilani: How Wokeness Distorted The Polls

A Little Night Music

Eddie Floyd - Big Bird

Eddie Floyd - 634-5789

Eddie Floyd - Slip Away

Eddie Floyd - Raise Your Hand

Eddie Floyd - On A Saturday Night

Eddie Floyd - I'm Just The Kind Of Fool

Eddie Floyd - A Deed To Your Heart

Eddie Floyd - Hey Now

Eddie Floyd Performs - Knock On Wood