"The Needle and the Damage Done" is the article title of the year, describing the return of the New York Times's infamous election-predicting "needle" from 2016 and the damage this "predicting" generally does to our discourse. I'm old enough to remember when the Eastern media outlets called the 1980 Presidential election a few minutes after 8 pm on Election Night and demoralized Idaho Democrats enough (it was only 5 pm there, and they were just getting off work!) that Senator Frank Church lost re-election by a point. But it's so much more sophisticated now, and this year's punditoids took one 8 pm forecast from Five Thirty Eight (of course!) to declare NO BLUE WAVEZ!!!!! while polling places in more than half the country were still open. I'd prefer that our voters stop obsessing over whether it's "worth it" to vote if your "side" can't "win," but maybe our "liberal" media can do less prognosticating and more reporting? This insane zeal to be "first" with a story helps keep our society sick, immoral, and decadent.
Here's another good result from Election Day: Colorado voters outlaw slavery as a punishment for a crime in their state, meaning prison laborers can no longer labor for nothing. We can make a very simple law-and-order argument supporting the Colorado voters' will: once you get your sentence for a crime, you cannot have further punishments heaped upon you. We'd use the same argument to oppose taking away felons' voting rights after they're out of jail (and, really, while they're in jail, too). Of course, if "law and order" only means GET TEH BLACKZ!!!!! to you, you won't see the point. Or much of anything else, frankly.
And here's another good result from Election Day: Louisiana voters amend their state constitution so that all felony convictions will now require a unanimous verdict. Yes, until this week, the state has used the 10-of-12-jurors standard to fill their jails with black folks, which has helped contribute to Louisiana's long standing as (until recently) the state with the most prisoners in our Union, which sure ain't something to yell WE'RE NUMBER ONE!!!!! about. A big part of this victory: Louisiana felons getting back the right to vote after five years out of prison, though I'm certain they don't account for all of the measure's 64-36 margin.
And here's some bad news from Election Day: pro-renewable energy ballot initiatives failed in three states after big fossil fuel corporations dropped over $100 million fighting them. This should remind us who really benefits from the "climate change hoax": big corporations with this kind of money to burn on convincing people climate change isn't really happening, and not scientists reporting that climate change is, in fact, happening. Shame the FCC took away our net neutrality, too, because network neutrality is the greatest tool we've ever devised to cripple the power of campaign spending. I regret having not already figured out how to do that.
Finally, there's really very little to say about our President's insane press conference after the midterms. Except the usual: our President should be ashamed of himself for being a grown man acting like that in public. (And then his press secretary spread an obviously-altered video of a journalist's "outburst" that "caused" our President to revoke his press credentials, because when you can't win the argument on the merits, you lie. It's the only tool they've got left in their toolbox. Well, not the only one, I suppose -- would now be a good time for that terrorist attack?)
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