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Election Day Countdown: There’s Got to be An Afternoon After [UPDATE-1]

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The American left — or at least those comfortable voting for and identifying with members of the Democratic Party — is in the throes of their predictable mortification, self-flagellating atop their hair shirts.

Why wasn’t the massive turnout an obvious and immediate repudiation of the deeply racist and misogynist Trump? Why weren’t the numbers evidence of a blue tsunami in spite of the massive push for increased voter participation?

~eye roll~

We do this. It’s a standing joke. I don’t how many variations of this I’ve seen in Twitter today. Here’s a couple examples:

We need to snap the fuck out of it. We didn’t get our heads on straight going into the count last night, and we weren’t ready for Trump’s fascist bullshit lie claiming victory.

We are winning the White House. We are going to take back the entire executive branch, including new cabinet members who aren’t wholly corrupt motherfuckers (Jesus, Wilbur Ross is still serving on the board of a Chinese bank even though he’s been called out in the media about it).

We’re going to have a new attorney general and a civil rights division which will do more than sit on its thumbs and spin.

Investigations which have been corruptly shuttered or squelched before they could launch will begin.

We might stand a chance at making traction against climate change; we might even rejoin the Paris Agreement from which the U.S. formally withdrew yesterday.

We won’t immediately regain the trust of allies and trading partners, let alone the rest of the world, but a new competent and ethical secretary of state will make letters like this one sent out yesterday look less like a fucking joke.

We know we are about to win once the votes have been counted. We’re just waiting for the pretty red bow on top.

Act like it.

~ ~ ~

The Senate doesn’t look good. This I have to admit. It will make the next two years hell especially while trying to stem a pandemic.

But there are some very bright spots, achievements worth celebrating.

Justice Democrats kept all their incumbents including The Squad. They also picked up three more seats for their organization:

Raúl Grijalva AZ-03
Ro Khanna CA-17
Ayanna Pressley MA-07
Rashida Tlaib MI-13
Ilhan Omar MN-05
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez NY-14
Pramila Jayapal WA-07

Cori Bush MO-01 (replaces Democrat William Lacy Clay Jr.)
Jamaal Bowman NY-16 (replaces Democrat Elliot Engel)
Marie Newman IL-03 (replaces Democrat Dan Lipinski)

Bush is the first woman of color to serve in Congress from her state.

Except for Newman, these Justice Democrats are all persons of color from a broad range of ethnic backgrounds. This is the future of the Democratic Party.

They are literally the future as they phased out more traditional, centrist Democrats.

Celebrate the arrival of more fresh faces, more new blood to the House of Representatives, bringing a more progressive perspective.

Also worth celebrating:

— Six indigenous Americans are now representatives elect;

— New Mexico’s congressional caucus is entirely women of color;

— 115 women of color ran for Congress this election, 82 of which were Democrats;

— Four Indian Americans won seats in Congress.

Change is coming. It’s not as fast as we’d like but some of that’s on us.

We should still celebrate it loudly, joyously. We should make it clear the changes are exactly what our government of, by, and for the people needs — it should represent us, it should look like us.

~ ~ ~

Lastly, drugs. All the drugs. Drugs won big last night.

I’ll admit I’m a bit hesitant to embrace decriminalizing every drug, but I haven’t read Oregon’s ballot initiative which does so. I’m good with the rest; we need to end the carceral state which in a large part is built upon drug-related convictions. We need to end the War on Drugs which has cost us a fortune we could spend on other public services while it both creates conflict in other nations and bolsters militarization of law enforcement.

Once again, change is coming.

~ ~ ~

What other good news do you have? Feel free to share it in comments.

~ ~ ~

UPDATE-1 — 8:30 PM ET —

NBC and several other outlets called the Michigan Senate race for incumbent Democrat Gary Peters. The margin of votes flipped back and forth through the day and ended somewhere around 47,000 votes. In no small part was this a win for Black Michiganders who cast votes for Peters and then worked diligently to count the mail-in ballots yielding Peters’ win.

Change is coming.

Three Things: Oracle’s 299, Flashback, Longreads and 4/20

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Day Zero — the day after federal income tax filings were due — came and went, with zero Trump tax returns disclosed to the public. While Trump’s positions on many issues flip-flop and confuse the world, on transparency, ethics, and his tax returns he has been utterly consistent: opaque and unethical.

Fortunately today is 4/20. Do with that what you will. Do you smell brownies?

Speaking of 4/20, did you know that states where marijuana legalization appeared on the 2016 ballot, those initiatives outperformed one or more of the two main presidential candidates? What a candidate or political party might do with that knowledge…anyhow, on with three things.

Unprophetic Oracle
There’s still some fallout after The Shadow Brokers (TSB) release last week of NSA Tailored Access Operations’ (TAO) toolkit. Software vendor Oracle announced a patch for 299 vulnerabilities revealed by the TSB.

Wrap your head around that: 299 fixes.

Bigger than the whopping 276 fixes Oracle issued last summer in one fell swoop.

Now wrap your head around the fact this mega-patch covers a range of corporate enterprise software used for nearly every aspect of business operations, from human resource management to service or manufacturing resource planning.

If the NSA isn’t conducting economic espionage Oracle seems like an odd target to saturate so wide and deeply.

Still haven’t decided what to think of Oracle’s ability to push out this many patches inside a week. Were they tipped off, or were these vulnerabilities so obvious they should have been fixed ages ago? Or maybe this is what happens when a business like Oracle takes its eyes off the ball and focuses on the wrong things like a protracted lawsuit against Google?

Memories, jogged
When I saw this table fragment on Twitter, listing a few exploits revealed by TSB, I had a flashback to the Bush administration.

Gee, I wonder how much of the NSA TAO-Equation Group toolkit could explain the White House’s missing emails post-Plame outing?

Longreads: Economics, Liberalism, Google’s first moonshot
These are worth your time yet this week or weekend.

The Liberal Order Is Rigged by Jeff D. Colgan and Robert O. Keohane in Foreign Affairs (registration required) — An examination of liberalism’s failure and how the failure led to anti-democratic populism. In my opinion, this assessment is good but simplistic; the knee-jerk reaction many will have to the word ‘liberalism’ alone indicates there is far more at work than liberalism failing to deliver on its merits. It’s still worth a read; we must begin to pick out and save the liberal from neoliberal if we are to save democracy. Must say I’m surprised at Foreign Affairs’ steady shift away from rigid conservatism as well as neoliberalism.

The moral burden on economists — Darryl Hamilton’s 2017 presidential address to the National Economic Association warns against treating economics as a morally neutral ‘science’. How much of the failure of liberalism is really due to immoral/non-neutral application of economics?

Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria by James Somers for The Atlantic — This tagline is quite the hook: “Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them.” Heartbreaking to think there hasn’t been a middle ground to free these books to the public. In my opinion, Google is out the money on the scanning process. What would happen if they spun off this effort as a nonprofit digital Library of Alexandria? Could the funds from books approaching out-of-copyright date pay for the upkeep and digitization of new works?

Chaffetz out?
I don’t even know what to think of the rumors that Rep. Jason Chaffetz may leave Congress before his term ends December 2017. Some speculate his role in cutting funding directly related to security for diplomats plays a role; others speculate the decision is based on a more personal driver. I hope he can live with what he’s done and what he may yet choose to do. I’d hate to have to explain myself to my kids if I’d made some of his decisions to date.

There’s your three things and a lagniappe. À bientôt!