I knew you would be trouble but I didn’t anticipate how much or for how long. I didn’t anticipate how high-maintenance you would be, when you, with your big head, your big mouth, and your shocking ideas, eclipsed every other craven presidential wannabe in that first GOP cattle call back in 2015. Continue reading
“The Rising Waters” is even more salient now than when Carl Hassmann drew it in 1906. Then, as now, American society was in a desperate state, thanks to decades of the rich getting richer and leaving everyone else behind. The Gilded Age had created vast industrial wealth while consigning millions to exploitative working conditions and poverty. Landed security became more elusive as labor-saving machinery displaced rural folk and opportunities to homestead shrank with the “closing” of the American frontier. Cities became clogged with Americans seeking the respectability and comfort that came with new white-collar jobs. Continue reading
Over one weekend, some 15,000 people, mainly Haitians, suddenly appeared at the Mexican border of the US, wanting to come in. They fled Haiti because Haiti is broken down. Its resources are meager and mismanaged. Its political culture is corrupt; its government, dysfunctional. Its last democratically elected president, Jovenel Moïse, was mysteriously assassinated, possibly by a clique of private outside adventurers. He left Haitian government in a precarious position, for he had been hollowing out and disabling its already puny civic institutions. Haiti is a Somalia in the making, where utter lawlessness could follow a decline in stable control. Continue reading
Editor’s note: This previously unpublished post is seeing the light of day today, 3 Dec 2021, as the Omicron variant has begun to sicken Americans, sending the covid epidemic into a third distinct phase. The basic distinction made here, in the divergent risks the virus poses to the vaccinated and unvaccinated, remains as salient today as in September, when this piece was composed.
Instead of continuing to wane. the pestilence known as COVID is surging, and a nasty new phase of the pandemic lies ahead. Since the more contagious delta variant arrived from overseas, it has moved into areas previously left untouched. More Americans in out-of-the-way places are getting sick. Delta is spreading over the South and other “red” regions where a fatalistic or defiant attitude toward preventive measures reigns.
At the same time, delta confounds the simple narrative of “victory through vaccination” that federal officials and the scientific community have been telling. Two starkly different fates await the vaccinated and unvaccinated, but, unfortunately, even vaccinated people are still contracting and transmitting the disease. Continue reading
Where Trump beat Biden in 2020, his margin of victory was often wide. Listed below are the states where Trump prevailed, in order of his relative popularity. The results show where Democrats are least competitive, where Trump prevails because of an absence of viable competition.
After that is a second list, of the ten states most closely decided in 2020. In four states (Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania), Biden prevailed by a margin of less than one percent. Had these states gone the other way, Trump would still be president.
The political crisis of the United States will resolve when a rival party becomes ideologically competitive in the many states where Trump dominated comfortably last time around. Many of these states are small. How to woo votes away from Trump in these areas is an experiment worth embarking on prior to the election of 2024.
KEY: State (Electoral votes) NUMBER OF VOTES CAST FOR TRUMP / Margin of victory
*Votes garnered in Maine gave Trump 1 electoral vote out of a possible four.
SOURCES
Vote totals from https://www.archives.gov/electoral-college/2020
Margins from https://cookpolitical.com/2020-national-popular-vote-tracker
Downloadable blank outline map from JFK Library
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