Cowboy Who?

Donald Trump’s lawyers have held a press conference outside the car park of a local landscaping business called ‘Four Seasons’. It raised questions as to whether the campaign had actually meant to book the Four Seasons hotel instead.

Fort Worth Community Arts Center has six current exhibitions closing this weekend. I visited the space last week and the images below show the variety of artists and media in the multi-gallery building that once housed the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Works currently on view are from artists Dameon Lester (through December 12); Amplified…Answering the Clarion Call, curated by Deborah Peoples (through November 7); Ron Crouch’s Then & Now (through November 7); Our Faces, Our Voices, a group show featuring Jeremy Biggers, Ari Brielle, Dr. Valerie Bennett Gillespie, Riley Holloway and others (through November 7); Raul Rene Gonzalez’s Doing Werk (through November 7); and Charles Gray’s Not For Sale, also through the weekend.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The post Catch These Fort Worth Community Art Center Shows Closing This Weekend appeared first on Glasstire.

SpaceX may soon start offering Starlink’s satellite internet service to Canadians. The country’s regulators — the Innovation, Science and Economic Development department, in particular — have granted the company’s request for regulatory approval, allowing it to offer beta access to the high-speed internet network provided by Starlink’s satellite constellation.

.@SpaceX is joining the effort to help get Canadians connected to high-speed Internet!

Regulatory approval for the @SpaceXStarlink low Earth orbit satellite constellation has been granted!

— ISED (@ISED_CA) November 6, 2020

The service’s beta trials only started a few days ago after SpaceX sent out emails to people who previously signed up to receive more information about it. In the US, the service costs users $99 per month, not including the $499 upfront cost for the hardware kit needed to access the network. SpaceX called the beta program “Better Than Nothing Beta” to lower people’s expectations. It explained in the email that the service will suffer from inconsistent performance and brief periods with no connectivity at first. Early testers have been sharing mostly positive results, though, with some reporting download speeds of over 100Mbps.

SpaceX always intended to include the more rural parts of Canada to the first list of locations where it plans to offer beta access. However, it could only reach a limited number of locations for now, because it still needs approval for its ground stations in the country. According to SpaceQ, that means the beta program will initially be available in areas also covered by US ground stations. Elon Musk told the publication that the company is working to make Starlink more widely available until it achieves full global coverage by the end of next year.

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Today James reviews Robocop. The movie takes place in a violent, near-apocalyptic Detroit. An evil corporation Omni Consumer Products wins a contract from the city government to privatize the police force. To test their crime-eradicating cyborgs, the company leads street cop Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) into an armed confrontation with crime lord Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith) so they can use his body to support their untested RoboCop prototype. But when RoboCop learns of the company's nefarious plans, he turns on his masters.

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Even if you knew in advance about the “blue shift” that would occur in states like Pennsylvania — and we did know in advance about it! — it’s been hard to make enough of a mental adjustment for it this week. Numbers flashing across a TV ticker have a certain magnetic power and certitude to them. It was easy to forget that Joe Biden would gain ground once mail votes were added to the tallies because such votes were overwhelmingly Democratic this year in Pennsylvania and most other states.

But just because of that blue shift — and the red shift that occurred in states where mail votes were counted first — that doesn’t mean the presidential race was all that close in the end. Joe Biden’s win was on the tighter side of the likely range of outcomes suggested by polls, but it was a thoroughly convincing one judged on its own merits.

So put aside your anxieties of the past few days and the premature media narratives that have been circulating since Tuesday night. Suppose, instead, that you’d been on one of those weekslong rafting trips in the Grand Canyon (sounds pleasant, doesn’t it?) and woke up to this map:

It’s not a landslide, by any means, but this is a map that almost any Democrat would have been thrilled about if you’d shown it to them a year ago. Biden looks to have reclaimed the three “blue wall” states — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin (ABC News has announced that Biden is the “apparent winner” in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin¹⁸) — that were central to Hillary Clinton’s loss. He may also win Arizona (he would become the first Democrat to do so since 1996) and, in the opposite corner of the country, Georgia (the first Democratic winner there since 1992). Additionally, Biden easily won Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, which could be a thorn in the side of Republicans going forward. He also ran far ahead of Clinton in rural northern states such as Maine, Minnesota and New Hampshire.

Extrapolating out from current vote totals, I project Biden winning the popular vote by 4.3 percentage points and getting 81.8 million votes to President Trump’s 74.9 million, with a turnout of around 160 million. This is significant because no candidate has ever received 70 million votes in an election — former President Barack Obama came the closest in 2008, with 69.5 million votes — let alone 80 million. That may also be a slightly conservative projection, given the blue shift we’ve seen so far and the fact that late-counted votes such as provisional ballots often lean Democratic. I’d probably bet on Biden’s popular vote margin winding up at closer to 5 points than to 4, and 6 points isn’t entirely out of the question either.

The margin is also a bit more impressive in the context of our highly polarized political era, which has tended to produce close elections. If I’m right about the popular vote margin, Biden’s win would come via the second-largest popular vote margin since 2000, exceeding Obama’s 3.9-point margin against Mitt Romney in 2012 but lagging behind Obama’s 7.3-point win over John McCain in 2008.

Biden also defeated an elected incumbent, which is relatively rare. Since World War II, five elected incumbents who sought reelection have won it — Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Obama. Trump is now the third sitting president to lose his reelection bid in that time, along with Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush.

What about the polls? Didn’t they show a wider margin for Biden? Yes, they did — Biden led in the final national polls by around 8 points. So we’re probably going to wind up with a polling error of around 3 to 4 points, both nationally and at the state level. (Although that will reflect a combination of states like Georgia, where the polls were spot-on, and others like Wisconsin, where there were big misses.) This is, of course, a subject on which we’ll have more to say in the coming days. For now, it’s safe to say that pollsters will have some questions to answer, especially about how they missed in the same direction (underestimating Trump) in some of the same states two elections in a row.

At the same time, this election’s polling error may wind up being fairly normal by historical standards. Indeed, the final polls miss by around 3 points, on average, in presidential elections. The error this year may be somewhat wider than that, but we should wait for all the votes to be counted because margins may shift substantially in some states before results are certified.

In any case, Biden’s ability to survive a polling error of the size that sank Clinton was precisely the reason he was a fairly heavy favorite in our forecast. Biden won (or is likely to win) several states — Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona¹⁹ — by margins that will probably be between 0 and 2 percentage points, in contrast to Clinton, who lost Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida by margins of 1 percentage point or less. Biden’s 89 percent chance of winning the Electoral College included the possibility of nail-biter wins in critical states — although, again, it’s hard to know if this race would be regarded as that much of a nail-biter if not for the timing of ballot counting and the blue shift.

The bigger problems — both for Democrats and for the polls — were in races for Congress.

There weren’t necessarily any huge upsets in the Senate; it’s just that Democrats lost most of the toss-up races. Among races where winners have been projected so far, Democrat Sara Gideon is the only Senate candidate favored in our forecast to have lost, and she had only a 59 percent chance of beating Sen. Susan Collins, according to our final forecast. Gideon, however, is likely to eventually be joined by Cal Cunningham in North Carolina, who had a 68 percent chance, although the polling in that Senate race had tightened in the closing days of the campaign following a Cunningham sexting scandal. Republican Joni Ernst held off challenger Theresa Greenfield in Iowa, although Ernst was a narrow favorite in our forecast.

Democrats do retain a chance at a Senate majority, or more likely a 50-50 split in which Vice President-elect Kamala Harris would be the deciding vote. Democrats currently hold 48 seats,²⁰ but there are two runoffs in Georgia on Jan. 5 that are sure to attract hundreds of millions of dollars worth of advertising. I’m a little too exhausted to prognosticate about the Georgia runoffs all that much, but Democrats are at least mathematically alive here in a state that Biden appears likely to win. They also retain some outside chances at winning a Senate seat in Alaska, where mail votes have not yet been counted.

But Democrats underperformed in the U.S. House, where they’ve lost almost every toss-up race that has been projected so far and Republicans have made a net gain of five seats and counting. It also appears as though Democrats will underperform in the House popular vote relative to the presidential vote and the generic ballot, where Democrats led by about 7 percentage points. That looks like a significant polling miss (although the House popular vote can take a long time to finalize). In that sense, the election could be described as more of a repudiation of Trump specifically than of Republicans writ large.

Biden did have some shortcomings, however. One major one was his apparent underperformance among key groups of Hispanic voters, especially Cuban Americans in South Florida and Mexican Americans in South Texas. As you can see in this chart from The New York Times, there were huge shifts toward Trump in these areas:

Indeed, even with the addition of Georgia and Arizona in their column, Democrats’ Electoral College coalition is somewhat fragile if it doesn’t contain Florida or Texas. It’s not clear yet what the tipping-point state will be in this election — but mostly likely it will be Arizona or Wisconsin, where it appears as though Biden will win by around 1 percentage point. That could mean there’s around a 4-point gap between the roughly 5-point popular vote victory that we eventually expect from Biden and his margin in the tipping-point state, a bigger Electoral College disadvantage than Clinton had in 2016 (3 points).

Still, this brings up one last point: This is the seventh election out of the past eight in which Democrats have won the popular vote for president. If American elections were contested on the basis of the popular vote, this race could probably have been called fairly early on Tuesday night, and we could all have gotten a lot more sleep the past few days. But don’t let bleary eyes obscure Biden’s accomplishment.

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President Donald Trump still has a chance of amassing over 270 electoral college votes and earning a second term, but his campaign is pre-emptively launching bids to challenge state results. Here's an explainer on where those efforts stand.

Two men armed with loaded handguns were arrested Thursday near the Pennsylvania Convention Center in Philadelphia where an ongoing vote count could decide the presidential election, police said Friday.

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What would a national popular vote mean? Instead of watching days of livestreams of swing state poll workers, the result would have been settled on Tuesday night.

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There’s no doubt that this election’s close nature has left many of us disillusioned and deeply disappointed in America. And like many of us, I, too, expected that better angels of our nature would prevail. That we would come to our senses as a nation and roundly rebuke what’s happened these last four years. That the true character of our great nation would finally make itself known. I mean, this is the country that put a man on the moon, but, more than that, put Alex Jones on YouTube. And yet, still we must swallow the bitter pill that America may be ignorant, shallow, and irrational to its core.

I used to call myself an American with pride. Being part of a country that gave the world such lasting cultural touchstones as Jerry Springer baiting people into fistfights on live TV was a special feeling. But despite our proud heritage, this election reveals just how short we’ve fallen of living up to our vision of ourselves. And now we must all come to grips that our nation — the nation that gave us more than 100 episodes of Joe Rogan watching people eat goat testicles, that gave us not one, but TWO Paul brothers, is not what we thought it was.

It’s difficult to even begin making sense of it. For a nation like ours to show up and vote for a man like Donald Trump in record numbers defies every notion of what I thought this country was all about. But alas, there’s no doubt a shadow has been cast today over the once noble republic that birthed “Cash Me Outside” girl. And all of us who thought we could expect a little more from our country, a country where Tucker Carlson has the most-watched news program on cable TV, are left with questions that may never have good answers.

How can a nation capable of turning the simple act of revealing the gender of your child into a wildfire that burns down an entire state be so insistent on screwing things up? How could a country, one that birthed the timeless love story of 30 brown-haired white guys named Chad competing in an elimination contest for the chance to marry a woman, lack the emotional depth required to make the right decision for the future of all of us? How could a people that had to be explicitly told not to eat Tide Pods be so short-sighted? Or are some things simply beyond explanation?

Are we really that far from understanding each other? Is our great land, with a long-running reality show that recently featured a white contestant evicting three Black contestants, really so blind to its own inequality? How could the country who built a television franchise around following police as they arrest Black and brown people put their support behind a racist demagogue who broadly characterizes Black and brown people as criminals?

Does anyone know? Does anyone have the answer to how a nation whose most popular sport involves watching men give each other brain damage can so reject intellect? How a republic that gave birth to the planet’s biggest multi-level-marketing companies fails to see when they’re being conned? How a populace in which 34 percent of adults don’t believe in evolution supports a candidate who so consistently denigrates science? Or how could a country where OJ Simpson has 925,000 Twitter followers so egregiously fail to be a good judge of character? Or how our great, shining city on a hill that made a man world-famous for being an asshole to his employees on television fails to show even the most basic compassion and empathy?

How was this election so close?

I’ll never understand it.

The arc of the moral universe is long. And winding. Sometimes it zigzags. Sometimes it goes in a circle. Sometimes it misses its exit and has to make a U-turn. Sometimes it gets confused listening to Google Maps and ends up driving the wrong way down a one-way street. But it usually figures out where it’s going. Eventually.

The arc of the moral universe is crooked and irregular. Mostly because of gerrymandering. In fact, it kind of looks like earmuffs if you turn it on its side. Sometimes the arc gets the popular vote right but still messes up the electoral college. Sometimes it all hinges on a county in Arizona, and you just have to wait — hoping the arc can get its shit figured out soon.

The arc of the moral universe is actually pretty lopsided. It often bends toward justice for some people but not others. And even when everybody posts black squares, it doesn’t magically straighten out the arc. Because a month later, they’re asking why racism isn’t solved yet. And you have to remind them that fixing systemic injustice means making systemic changes. The arc can’t travel fast enough to fix 400 years of oppression overnight.

The arc of the moral universe takes a nosedive every time that one guy you went to high school with decides he’s qualified to interpret COVID mortality rates and posts his findings on Facebook. In fact, the arc of the moral universe takes a nosedive every time anyone logs onto Facebook. It’s nosediving right now.

The arc of the moral universe is following a pretty weird trajectory these days. Honestly, based on the way it’s weaving between lanes, it probably wouldn’t pass a sobriety test. But sometimes, it still manages to elect the better candidate. And even though he’s not everything you hoped for, he’s a lot better than the other guy. So you breathe a little sigh of relief.

The arc of the moral universe is really less of an arc and more of a big squiggly line. With lots of loop-de-loops and weird angles. It looks like it was drawn by a three-year-old hopped up on four glasses of Hi-C.

And the thing about the arc is that you can’t ever really see the whole thing at once. You can look back to see where it’s been. But from where you’re standing, you can’t look ahead to see what’s coming next.

But sometimes, it really does bend toward justice.

To download a PDF of this entire list, click here.

Early in President Trump’s term, McSweeney’s editors began to catalog the head-spinning number of misdeeds coming from his administration. We called this list a collection of Trump’s cruelties, collusions, and crimes, and it felt urgent then to track them, to ensure these horrors — happening almost daily — would not be forgotten. This election year, amid a harrowing global health, civil rights, humanitarian, and economic crisis, we know it’s never been more critical to note these horrors, to remember them, and to do all in our power to reverse them.

Various writers have compiled this list during the course of the Trump administration. Their work has been guided by invaluable journalistic resources, including WTFJHT, NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other sources, to whom we are grateful.

ATROCITY KEY

– Sexual Misconduct, Harassment, & Bullying
– White Supremacy, Racism, Homophobia, Transphobia, & Xenophobia
– Public Statements / Tweets
– Collusion with Russia & Obstruction of Justice
– Trump Staff & Administration
– Trump Family Business Dealings
– Policy
– Environment

Jump to November 2020

Jump to 2020

Jump to 2019

Jump to 2018

Jump to 2017

BEFORE JANUARY 2017

1. – February 10, 2011 – In 2011, Donald Trump stoked false claims that Barack Obama had lied about his education. During a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump said, “Our current president came out of nowhere. Came out of nowhere. In fact, I’ll go a step further: The people that went to school with him, they never saw him, they don’t know who he is. It’s crazy.” This is false. Numerous accounts from Obama’s college classmates refute Trump’s claim, including Obama’s Columbia roommate, Phil Doerner.
   
   
2. – March 30, 2011 – Donald Trump was a vocal proponent of the “birther” myth, claiming Barack Obama was not born in the United States. In 2011, Trump told Bill O’Reilly, “If you are going to be president of the United States you have to be born in this country. And there is a doubt as to whether or not he was… He doesn’t have a birth certificate. He may have one, but there’s something on that, maybe religion, maybe it says he is a Muslim. I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t want that. Or he may not have one. But I will tell you this. If he wasn’t born in this country, it’s one of the great scams of all time.” In response to the “birther” conspiracy theory, the State of Hawaii released Barack Obama’s short- and long-form birth certificate.
   
   
3. – August 6, 2012 – Over a year after the White House released Obama’s long-form birth certificate, Donald Trump again promoted the “birther” myth, tweeting, “An ‘extremely credible source’ has called my office and told me that @BarackObama’s birth certificate is a fraud.” President Trump has publicly attacked media outlets for citing anonymous sources, but has himself cited anonymous sources numerous times to support the claim that Barack Obama lied about his biography.
   
   
4. – December 12, 2013 – Years after first stirring controversy about Barack Obama’s birthplace, Donald Trump implied a conspiracy surrounding the death of the Hawaiian State Official who had released Obama’s long-form birth certificate in 2011. Trump tweeted, “How amazing, the State Health Director who verified copies of Obama’s “birth certificate” died in plane crash today. All others lived.”
   
   
5. – May 27, 2015 – Continuing to build on the debunked “birther” conspiracy, Donald Trump said Barack Obama could have claimed Kenya as his birthplace for special treatment from colleges. Trump said, “There are three things that could happen. And one of them did happen. He was perhaps born in Kenya. Very simple, OK? He was perhaps born in this country. But said he was born in Kenya because if you say you were born in Kenya, you got aid and you got into colleges. People were doing that. So perhaps he was born in this country, and that has a very big chance. Or, you know, who knows?"
   
   
6. – June 16, 2015 – In his speech announcing his candidacy for President of the United States, Donald Trump said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
   
   
7. – June 16, 2015 – In the same speech announcing his candidacy, Donald Trump said, “I will build a great wall—and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me—and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.” Trump’s belief that Mexico should finance construction for the wall led Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto to cancel a meeting with Trump in June 2017, and again in February 2018. Peña Nieto has repeatedly said that Mexico will not fund the border wall.
   
   
8. – July 18, 2015 – Donald Trump insulted the military service of Senator John McCain, a decorated Vietnam War veteran who endured torture and solitary confinement as a POW in Hanoi. Trump said in a speech at the Family Leadership Summit in Iowa, "He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” Trump’s comments drew boos from his audience in Iowa, as well as widespread condemnation from Republicans and Democrats alike. Donald Trump himself was exempted from military service after receiving four student deferments between 1964 and 1968, and a medical deferment for a “bone spur in his foot” after graduating from college.
   
   
9. – August 7, 2015 – During the first Republican primary debate in 2015, Donald Trump clashed with moderator Megyn Kelly regarding his many controversial statements against women. In one exchange, Trump claimed his disparaging remarks about women were limited to comments about Rosie O’Donnell, to which Kelly responded, “Your Twitter account has several disparaging comments about women’s looks. You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president?” The next day, Trump told a CNN interviewer that Kelly had been “off-base” in the way she treated him. “She gets out and she starts asking me all sorts of ridiculous questions,” Trump said. “You know, you could see there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”
   
   
10. – August 19, 2015 – In August of 2015, just three months after Trump announced his candidacy for president, two of his supporters in Boston beat a homeless Latino man with a metal pipe, and then urinated on him. Asked by the arresting officer why they had done it, one of the attackers said, “Trump was right—all these illegals need to be deported.” During a press conference shortly thereafter, Trump said he hadn’t heard about the assault. “It would be a shame,” he told the crowd of reporters, before continuing, “I will say, the people that are following me are very passionate. They love this country and they want this country to be great again. They are passionate.”
    
    
11. – November 25, 2015 – At a campaign rally in South Carolina, Trump mocked New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, who has arthrogryposis, a congenital joint condition. “Now, the poor guy, you ought to see this guy,” Trump said, imitating Kovaleski by flailing his arms about. Trump’s ridicule of Kovaleski came after the journalist disputed Trump’s claim that he had seen thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center — a claim that has been discredited by officials.
    
    
12. – April, 2016 – Jill Harth accused Donald Trump of sexual assault. In a 1997 lawsuit, Harth stated in court documents that Trump harassed and groped her in 1993. She later dropped the suit but stood by her story.
    
    
13. – May 5, 2016 – For the Mexican holiday of Cinco de Mayo, Donald Trump posted a photo of himself eating a taco bowl to Facebook and Twitter, captioned, “Happy #CincoDeMayo! The best taco bowls are made in Trump Tower Grill. I love Hispanics!”
    
    
14. – May 31, 2016 – Donald Trump attacked Gonzalo Curiel, the federal judge who presided over the Trump University fraud case, saying that Curiel’s assignment to the case represented "an absolute conflict because the judge was “of Mexican heritage.” “I’m building a wall,” said Trump, “It’s an inherent conflict of interest.”
    
    
15. – May 2016 – Temple Taggart, former Miss Utah in the 1997 Miss USA pageant, claimed Donald Trump sexually harassed her. Taggart said that Trump, on multiple occasions, had kissed her on the lips without her consent.
    
    
16. – June, 2016 – Cassandra Searles, Miss Washington 2013, accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct at the Miss USA pageant. Searles posted a photo of contestants with Trump on Facebook, saying, “One guy treated us like cattle,” and “proceeded to have us lined up so he could get a closer look at his property.”
    
    
17. – July 30, 2016 – Donald Trump belittled Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the parents of a Muslim American soldier who had been killed while serving in the Army, for their speech at the Democratic National Convention. In his speech at the DNC, Khizr Khan had addressed Trump’s stringent anti-Muslim immigration policies, saying, “Have you even read the United States Constitution? I will gladly lend you my copy. In this document, look for the words liberty and equal protection of law.” In response to the speech, Trump suggested that Khan had “no right” to criticize him.
    
    
18. – October 7, 2016 – In the 2005 Access Hollywood tape, Donald Trump bragged to Billy Bush about grabbing women by their genitals without consent. In the video published by the Washington Post, Trump said, “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it, you can do anything… grab them by the pussy.” Trump said his statements were “locker room banter” and apologized “if anyone was offended.” He later issued a further response to the tape’s release, saying, “I’ve never said I’m a perfect person.”
    
    
19. – October 7, 2016 – Donald Trump reiterated his false claim that the young men known as the “Central Park Five” were guilty of sexually assaulting a jogger in 1989, despite DNA evidence that exonerated them.
    
    
20. – October 11, 2016 – Tasha Dixon, a former Miss Universe contestant, accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct. Dixon asserted that Trump walked into their changing room in 2001 while contestants were changing. On the Howard Stern Show in 2005, Trump said about the pageant, “I’ll go backstage before a show and everyone’s getting dressed and ready and everything else. And you know, no men are anywhere. And I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant. And therefore, I’m inspecting it. You know they’re standing there with no clothes. And you see these incredible looking women. And so I sort of get away with things like that.”
    
    
21. – October 12, 2016 – Mariah Billado, a former Miss Teen USA contestant, claimed that Donald Trump behaved inappropriately during the pageant. Billado said that in 1997 Trump walked into the changing room when contestants were not fully clothed. She is one of four former Miss Teen U.S.A. contestants to tell the same story of Trump’s sexual misconduct.
    
    
22. – October 12, 2016 – Rachel Crooks claimed Donald Trump sexually harassed her. Crooks said that when she met Trump for the first time in 2005 while working as a receptionist for a company in Trump Tower, Trump would not let go of her hand and inappropriately kissed her.
    
    
23. – October 12, 2016 – Jessica Leeds alleged Donald Trump made inappropriate sexual advances towards her. Over 30 years ago Leeds sat next to Trump on a plane, where he lifted the armrest, grabbed her breasts, and put his hand up her skirt. She described him as an “octopus,” saying, “his hands were everywhere.”
    
    
24. – October 12, 2016 – Mindy McGillivray accused Donald Trump of groping her. McGillivray alleged that Trump touched her without her consent while she was attending a concert at Mar-a-Lago in 2003.
    
    
25. – October 12, 2016 – Jennifer Murphy, a former contestant on the television show “The Apprentice,” said that Donald Trump kissed her without her consent after a job interview in 2005. She claimed that he had made multiple inappropriate comments to her while she was on the show and when she met with him later about job opportunities.
    
    
26. – October 12, 2016 – Natasha Stoynoff, a journalist, accused Donald Trump of sexual harassment. Stoynoff said that Trump insisted on giving her a tour of his Palm Beach estate while she was interviewing him and his wife, Melania. Trump pinned her to a wall and kissed her. Trump called her a “liar” and responded to Stoynoff’s story, saying, “Look at her… I don’t think so.”
    
    
27. – October 13, 2016 – Lisa Boyne accused Donald Trump of sexual misbehavior. Boyne asserted that at a dinner in 1996, Trump and modeling agent John Casablancas paraded women in front of their table, looking under their skirts to determine whether each woman was wearing underwear.
    
    
28. – October 14, 2016 – Kristin Anderson claimed Donald Trump groped her in the early 1990s. Anderson was at a club in Manhattan with friends when, she asserted, Trump reached into her skirt and touched her without consent, leaving her and her friends “very grossed out.”
    
    
29. – October 14, 2016 – Samantha Holvey described Donald Trump’s sexual misconduct at the 2006 Miss USA pageant. While participating in the competition, Holvey noted that Trump inspected each contestant before the event. She noted, “He would step in front of each girl and look you over from head to toe like we were just meat, we were just sexual objects, that we were not people.”
    
    
30. – October 14, 2016 – Summer Zervos, a former contestant on The Apprentice, accused Donald Trump of sexual assault. Zervos claimed that Trump assaulted her on several occasions, kissing and grabbing her, and during one business meeting, “began thrusting his genitals.”
    
    
31. – October 15, 2016 – Cathy Heller accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct. Heller said she was having Mother’s Day brunch in 1997 at Mar-a-Lago when Trump grabbed her, tried kissing her, and became angry when she twisted away.
    
    
32. – October 21, 2016 – Karen Virginia accused Donald Trump of groping her. Virginia described how she’d seen Trump with a group of men at the U.S. Open in 1998, and overheard him say about her “Hey look at this one!” and “Look at those legs.” After his comments, Trump approached Virginia, grabbed her by the right arm, and touched her breast. The incident lingered with Virginia for years, and she came forward with her story alongside Gloria Allred: “I now understand that I was not to blame. Mr. Trump, perhaps you do not remember me or what you did to me so many years ago, but I can assure you that I remember you and what you did to me as though it was yesterday," she said. "Your random moment of sexual pleasure came at my expense and affected me greatly.”
    
    
33. – October 22, 2016 – Jessica Drake, an adult film actor and director, accused Donald Trump of inappropriate sexual contact. Drake said that Trump grabbed and kissed her without her consent at a charity golf tournament in 2006, then made further unwanted advances by inviting her to his suite. After Drake repeatedly declined his invitations, Trump asked her, “What do you want? How much?”
    
    
34. – October 27, 2016 – Ninni Laaksonen, a former Miss Finland, alleged that Donald Trump had sexually harassed her. Laaksonen described an incident in which Trump groped her from behind in 2006.
    
    
35. – November 13, 2016 – Ivanka Trump accompanied her father on his presidential interview with 60 Minutes. Ivanka’s upscale jewelry brand used her father’s political appearance to promote a $10,800 bracelet she had worn during the broadcast.
    
    
36. – November 18, 2016 – One week after Trump’s election, 100 foreign diplomats gathered at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C. to drink champagne and tour the building. One diplomat told the Washington Post, “Why wouldn’t I stay at his hotel blocks from the White House, so I can tell the new president, ‘I love your new hotel!’ Isn’t it rude to come to his city and say, ‘I am staying at your competitor?’” This indicated a conflict of interest that could have violated the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which forbids government officials from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
    
    
37. – November 18, 2016 – Even though he said he would not settle the case, Donald Trump agreed to pay $25 million to settle his Trump University fraud lawsuits. The real estate seminar program was not an accredited university and used misleading marketing tactics to recruit students.
    
    
38. – November 27, 2016 – Without citing evidence to support his claim, Donald Trump tweeted, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally”. This claim has been repeatedly debunked.
    
    
39. – End of December 2016 – In December of 2016, Donald Trump’s senior adviser Jared Kushner, incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn, and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak met at Trump Tower to establish a “line of connection.” The meeting occurred around the time that the Obama administration was placing sanctions on the Russian government for interfering in the 2016 election.
    
    
    - – -

    JANUARY 2017

40. January 10, 2017 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Donald Trump approached him about leading an investigation into “Vaccine Safety.” The prospect that vaccination can lead to autism has been repeatedly debunked by long-running, peer-reviewed studies. Trump had supported the anti-vaccination theory on stage at the 2015 presidential debates. In September 2015 he publicly stated, “We had so many instances, people that work for me, just the other day, two years old, a beautiful child, went to have the vaccine and came back and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic.”
    
    
41. – January 11, 2017 – Donald Trump’s lawyer Sheri Dillon stated that Trump would “voluntarily donate all profits from foreign government payments made to his hotel to the United States Treasury.” Two months into his presidency, no evidence existed that Trump had followed through with this promise. If Trump did accept payments from foreign states through his businesses, as his lawyer claimed, he may have been in violation of the Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution. This clause forbids government officials from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
    
    
42. – January 11, 2017 – Donald Trump refused to divest from his real estate companies or place his assets in a blind trust, as encouraged by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. The United States Government designates a “Qualified Blind Trust:” for executive branch employees as one where the trustee has no relation whatsoever to the government official. Contrary to this, President Trump opted to entrust business...

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As you may have heard, there’s some big news in DC. That’s right: the baby panda turned 11 weeks old. But in light of the other major news happening right now, we’ve got some panda content to lighten the mood. Here’s what the cub has been up to this past week. Celebrating Halloween  While human cubs were […]

I feel like I aged a year this week.

In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew shares an update on where votes are still coming in and what to make of the overall results at this point.

Masked Sarcasm



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What is the Electoral College?
The “Electoral College System,” is the abstruse election method Americans use to indirectly select the President of the United States, arguably the most powerful person in the world.

Wait. Did you say indirectly?
That’s right! When we think about Democracy, we usually imagine electing the candidate who receives the most votes, but this isn’t done in the United States. In fact, Donald Trump lost the popular vote twice, yet he still got elected in 2016 and could still squeak out a “victory” in 2020, thanks to the Electoral College and a few hand-picked handmaid Supreme Court Justices.

Why is this happening?
In 1787, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention set out to decide how to elect the American President. Pennsylvanian James Wilson proposed that the popular vote winner should become president, but James Madison rejected this idea and said the quiet part out loud. “There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.”

What does that even mean?
That’s a long and fancy way of saying that since slaves couldn’t vote, the North would wield more political power as they had a larger population of free men in a direct election system. In order to appease the southern slave-holders, the Electoral College was born.

I still have no idea what the Electoral College is.
It’s a mystery wrapped in a riddle wrapped in a nation founded by slaveholders.

Now I have a headache.
That’s just going to get incrementally worse as this explanation goes on. After rejecting Wilson’s proposal, the founders designed a system as complicated as the installation manual for your Bluetooth Wi-Fi home-linked garage door opener, only much, much more racist. Instead of people directly electing the president, it was decided that electoral intermediaries would be appointed by each state to cast their ballots for president.

That doesn’t make sense.
Don’t worry — it gets worse! To further accommodate slave owners, the founders allowed for slaves to be valued at 60 percent of a free person’s value, an idea enshrined into our still venerated Constitution as the three-fifths clause. If you can get your head around the idea that slaves were valued for the sole purpose of giving their white slaveowners more political power, congratulations! You probably also understand how apartheid worked.

This is more convoluted than the plot of Mulholland Drive.
If you’re not sufficiently addled by these 18th-century mental gymnastics, consider this: The three-fifths clause also laid the groundwork for how congressional seats would be allocated, immediately swelling the power of southern states in the legislature as well.

So neither the President nor the Congress is truly representational. What about the Senate?
Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaghghrghxghrkhkkk. Sorry. I choked, threw up a little, and then swallowed.

I think that’s how a lot of people are feeling about this country.
Yes.

This sounds a lot like minority rule.
Your words — not mine. But also, yes.

OK, but slavery ended. Why are we still using the electoral college today?

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Christina Animashaun/Vox

Congress hasn’t taken steps to admit Puerto Rico as the 51st state.

Puerto Ricans have again voted in favor of making their island home a US state and they’re hoping that, this time around, their decision will carry actual weight.

Puerto Rico, which has been a US territory for 122 years and is the world’s oldest colony, has held five previous non-binding referendums on the issue. In 2012 and 2017, the island’s 3 million citizens overwhelmingly backed statehood, but Congress never took further action to admit Puerto Rico into the union.

This year, they were asked: “Should Puerto Rico be immediately admitted into the Union as a state?” A majority of voters answered “yes,” according to the AP, New York Times, and the island election commission, as of Wednesday afternoon. With 95 percent of precincts reporting, the margin stood at 52 percent for, and 48 percent against.

As the Times noted, the turnout figures are complicated. But Puerto Ricans are hoping that sends a clear message to Congress regarding their desire to attain the rights and privileges associated with statehood. Though Puerto Ricans are American citizens and pay into federal programs like Social Security and Medicare, they do not hold seats in Congress and cannot cast votes for president. They do vote for a resident commissioner who can introduce legislation and vote on committees in the House of Representatives, but that’s a far cry from full voting privileges.

Congress isn’t under legal obligation to abide by the outcome of the referendum — congressional lawmakers could have passed legislation that would have conferred the island with statehood depending on the outcome of the referendum, but they didn’t.

Statehood proponents hoped for higher turnout than in past referendums, feeling that would make it difficult for US lawmakers to ignore the issue after years of claiming that Puerto Ricans should decide their own fate. Less than a quarter of eligible voters cast ballots in the 2017 referendum, which was boycotted by opposition parties that support either maintaining the status quo or independence. That raised questions about the legitimacy of the vote and allowed US lawmakers to punt the issue.

Puerto Rico has a lot to gain from becoming a state. In addition to having a say in presidential elections, the new state would have two seats in the Senate and five representatives in the House. It would also likely gain federal funding; it would be a lot harder for the federal government to withhold aid, as President Donald Trump, who previously mulled selling the island, did after Hurricane Maria.

But critics have warned that it would also increase federal taxes. (Puerto Ricans and corporations headquartered on the island currently only pay federal taxes in limited circumstances.)

If Puerto Rico becomes a state, it could shake up the political dynamics in Congress. Most Puerto Ricans who have moved to the US mainland have historically backed Democrats. But it’s not clear that the island would be reliably blue. Experts say it’s more likely that it would be a swing state.

President Donald Trump at the White House on November 4. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The president only wants to count the votes that will help him. It doesn’t work like that.

President Donald Trump began his Thursday by demanding that states stop tallying votes.

“STOP THE COUNT!” Trump tweeted at 9:12 am ET, after spending much of Wednesday posting a flood of misinformation on Twitter meant to make it seem as though Democrats are stealing the 2020 election from him.

There’s one big problem, though — if vote tallying were immediately stopped in all the states, former Vice President Joe Biden would prevail in Arizona and Nevada, giving him 270 electoral votes and making him the presumptive president-elect.

Not only is Trump’s talking point self-defeating, but it’s completely inconsistent with what his advisers were saying on Wednesday and Thursday.

About an hour before Trump posted his tweet, for instance, Trump’s former campaign adviser Kellyanne Conway was on Fox & Friends preaching the virtue of patience, saying, “We can’t wait three hours, three days, three weeks, to get a result? ... What is the rush?”

And on Wednesday evening, Trump campaign senior legal adviser Jenna Ellis appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show and blasted the media for “reporting inaccurately and falsely that the Trump campaign is wanting the ballot counting to be stopped.”

Ellis’s comments, in turn, contradicted what Trump said during his bizarre early Wednesday morning press event/campaign rally at the White House, during which he described the election as a “major fraud on our nation” and said “we’ll going to the US Supreme Court. We want all voting [i.e., vote counting] to stop.”

Trump’s real position, of course, is that only votes cast for him should be counted. His followers are on the same page, and that’s why groups of them chanted “Stop the vote!” outside government buildings in Michigan — a state where Trump led during the early part of the count on Tuesday evening, only to be surpassed by Biden as more ballots were tallied on Wednesday — while others chanted “Count the vote!” in Arizona, where Trump is trailing.

That incoherency is captured in this video mash-up:

Trump campaign officials like Ellis and Pam Bondi have tried to thread the needle by arguing that Trump wants all the legitimate ballots to be counted, but not ones that were cast fraudulently. But when Bondi was pressed to provide evidence of fraud during a Wednesday morning appearance on Fox & Friends, she couldn’t.

Trump’s Thursday morning tweet was likely meant to allude to Pennsylvania, where his narrow lead over Biden is in jeopardy as more votes are counted from the Democratic-leaning Philadelphia region. But what Trump doesn’t seem to understand is that Biden doesn’t need Pennsylvania to get to 270 electoral votes.

More broadly, Trump’s strategy, to the extent there is one, appears to be to try to create the perception that he was cheated by tossing out accusations of fraud. The problem for him is that there’s no evidence to back up his claims.

Later Thursday morning, Trump posted another tweet proclaiming that “ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!”

But that tweet contradicts state law in places like Pennsylvania and North Carolina that allow mail ballots to be tallied after Election Day so long as they’re postmarked before November 3. As I’ve explained previously, Trump’s position that mail ballots are vulnerable to fraud isn’t supported by evidence, but it may give the Supreme Court a pretext to get involved in an election he now appears very likely to have lost.

We should have seen this coming...

Darwin resident Asma Mukhi's husband headed to India earlier this year for what was supposed to be a brief family visit. But coronavirus travel restrictions for non-citizens have left him stuck overseas.