Broken Glass 💩 ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️ 💩 

It’s the Economy Stupid:   Everyone is pointing fingers, assigning blame:  it’s Biden’s fault, it’s Kamala’s fault, the campaign was too short, it wasn’t focused on the right things and so on.  All of those points have merit and will be debated and micro analyzed for weeks if not years to come, but it may be that what most impacted the outcome of the election were the COVID shutdowns and the inflation that followed because while so many of us were focused on fascism and the clown’s obvious flaws including his affinity for Nazism and his obvious racism and misogyny a lot of swing voters were focused on the more mundane, the size of their grocery bills.  Inflation is back down to normal levels and the US economy is the envy of the world, but the wage earners who suffered the most during the COVID shutdowns and then suffered even more when they went shopping for groceries and other essential items don’t get that success is slowing inflation, not returning prices to pre-pandemic levels.  Economics is complicated, for the most part not taught in school, and most people don’t read the Wall Street Journal or any business paper on a regular basis, but they do shop and pay bills.  It’s easy to say that all of Trump’s voters are fascists or racists because some of them are and some of them also hate the idea of a woman becoming president, but it’s not all of them.  Unfortunately, a lot of them either don’t think it matters if Trump is a horrible person because they don’t think his obvious flaws and dangerous policies will affect their lives as much as paying more for cereal and milk. That’s not to say that racism and misogyny and a host of other things didn’t play a role in the outcome of the election, but at the end of the day, it may have been mostly the shutdowns and inflation and no campaign strategy or Democratic candidate, man or woman, black or white, was going to be able to undo that.  So here we are, and it’s not going to be pretty.

The House and Senate: Yesterday there was some good news, Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin, Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin, and Nevada’s Jackie Rosen were all declared winners of their very hard-fought Senate races. Though we know the Senate will be controlled by Republicans we still don’t know the size of their majority.  Late yesterday, The AP called Republican Dave McCormick the winner of the Pennsylvania Senate race, but incumbent Democrat Bob Casey hasn’t conceded, he’s waiting for the remaining absentee ballots to be counted because there remains a very small chance that he could still eke out a win.  In Arizona, with 74% of the votes in, Democrat Ruben Gallego remains narrowly ahead of election denier Kari Lake but with 900,000 votes still to be counted, his lead has been shrinking so it’s too early to know how whether his lead will hold.  We also still don’t know who will be controlling the House because a number of races mostly in California won’t be called for a while.  According to The Hill, as of last night, 214 seats have been called for Republicans, 200 for Democrats.  Of the 21 remaining to be decided, Democrats lead in 13, Republicans in 8.  Do the math, it doesn’t look good for Democrats.

Abortion rights:  All but three of the proposed measures aimed at preserving or expanding abortion access passed on Tuesday.  The three failures were Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota.  In Florida 57.1% of voters voted for the abortion amendment but the hurdle for passage was 60% and Governor DeSantis had used all his powers and a few he probably didn’t have to campaign against the amendment’s passage and unfortunately for the women in his state, despite the popularity of the abortion rights amendment, his efforts paid off.  In Nebraska, 55% of voters voted to incorporate a 12 week ban into the state constitution and in South Dakota 58% opposed including a right to abortion into the state constitution, leaving SD’s near total abortion ban intact.  Even in the states that have expanded guaranteed abortion rights, the fight isn’t over because Republican held state legislatures and Governors are likely to throw impediments in the way of those services being provided because that’s what they do.  Moreover, despite the fact that more people than not want abortion rights, House and Senate Republicans are still talking about passing legislation to impose a nationwide ban and it’s highly likely that the fight to ban the abortion drug Mifepristone nationwide isn’t over.  I guess this is as good a place as any to mention that Trump is still saying that he’ll put RFK Jr in charge of health things and no, the nepo guy, isn’t changing his view on vaccines, he’s just trying to sound a wee bit more reasonable to make his appointment to something that might need Senate confirmation possible, there are after all a few real doctors in the Senate. For the record, RFK saying that he won’t act to ban vaccines, that he’ll just subject them to more scrutiny, is bull 💩 because those vaccines he’s talking about have already been heavily scrutinized by real medical professionals.     

Hate: On the night of November 9 in 1939, Nazi leaders unleashed a series of pogroms against the Jewish population of Germany, and we all know what happened next.  Last night while I was at a presentation commemorating what has become known as Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass,  hundreds of Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam to attend a Maccabi soccer (football) match were attacked in what Dutch, European leaders and even the NY Times referred to as an anti-Semitic attack. A significant number of Israelis have been injured, some have still not checked in with families or friends, and the Israeli government is sending planes to bring the Israelis affected by what Dutch authorities are now calling a pogrom home. History repeating itself in so many places sucks.

#BringThemAllHomeNow