State of play:

Joe Biden appears to be on the cusp of the victory in the US presidential election, as the Democratic nominee grows his leads in Pennsylvania and Nevada.

“Grows his leads”? His leads grow, or increase, but he’s not “growing” them, like a tomato patch. Get a grip.

Here’s where the day stands so far:

Biden now leads Donald Trump by 13,220 votes in Pennsylvania, but the AP has not yet declared a winner in the state. Biden is clearly intending to declare victory, with plans to deliver a primetime address tonight.

Georgia will hold a recount to settle the virtual tie between Biden and Trump in the state. As of now, Biden leads Trump by just 1,558 votes in the state, where about 5 million ballots were cast in the presidential race.

Biden’s lead in Nevada grew to 20,137 votes, following an update from Clark county, where Las Vegas is located. But the AP has not yet called that state either, and a Clark county official said today that counting would continue through the weekend.

It’s been a long four days.

Trump has issued another official whine.

“We believe the American people deserve to have full transparency into all vote counting and election certification, and that this is no longer about any single election. This is about the integrity of our entire election process,” Trump said.

Hahaha that’s funny. No it’s not. Nothing Trump does is ever about anything other than Trump.

“From the beginning we have said that all legal ballots must be counted and all illegal ballots should not be counted, yet we have met resistance to this basic principle by Democrats at every turn. We will pursue this process through every aspect of the law to guarantee that the American people have confidence in our government. I will never give up fighting for you and our nation.”

No they haven’t. He’s just lying, as always.

The Guardian comments:

Okay, so there are a few fact-checks we need to make here. It is not true that Trump has consistently called for all legal ballots to be counted. He sent a tweet yesterday that said, “Stop the count!” The tweet made no distinction between legal and illegal ballots; it simply called on election officials to stop counting votes.

And every ballot that is being counted right now represents a valid vote. There has been absolutely no evidence election officials are trying to count invalid ballots. In the lawsuits it has filed in several battleground states, the Trump campaign has failed to produce any evidence that invalid ballots are being counted.

“Evidence”? What’s that?

Oh and there’s this.

Arizona. Barry Goldwater country.

The vermin exodus has begun.

Of course he is. What else would he do? It’s all about him, so what would be the point of conceding?

Trump “has no plans to concede.”

Naturally.

In conversations with allies in recent days, President Trump has said he has no intention to concede the election to Joe Biden, even if his path to a second term in office is effectively blocked by losses in places like Georgia and Pennsylvania. 

That’s Trump for you. Just Say No.

Aides, including his chief of staff Mark Meadows, have not attempted to bring Trump to terms [with] what’s happening and have instead fed his baseless claim that the election is being stolen from him.

Trump’s allies have grown concerned that someone is going to have to reckon with [telling] the President that his time in office is potentially coming to an end, though they have not decided who should be the one to do it. There has been talk of potentially Jared Kushner or Ivanka Trump doing so, sources said. 

Hahaha no, they’re just as crooked as he is, and even almost as stupid.

It seems that Biden is now far enough ahead in Pennsylvania that it’s game over.

Biden will almost certainly pull off a comfortable win in Pennsylvania with 40,000 to 100,000 votes depending on who’s back of the envelope math you want to believe. But, the state may not be called for a few hours yet.

Speaking at a press conference, Philadelphia mayor Jim Kenney was asked for his response to Trump’s baseless accusations of voter fraud in the city.

Kenney replied, “I think what the president needs to do is, frankly, put his big boy pants on. He needs to acknowledge the fact that he has lost, and he needs to congratulate the winner.”

No doubt Princess Ivanka will persuade him to do the reasonable adult big boy pants thing.

Oops. I guess not.

Maggie Haberman on that press conference full of lies:

President Trump broke a two-day silence with reporters to deliver a brief statement filled with egregious falsehoods and smears about the election process as workers in a handful of states continued to tabulate votes.

The president painted the election results so far as part of a broad conspiracy to deprive him of a second term by Democrats, election officials in various cities and the news media.

“If you count the legal votes, I easily win,” Mr. Trump began when he took the podium in the White House briefing room, a false statement that cast aspersion on the rest of the election. He offered no evidence; instead, he listed a series of conspiracy theories about why ballots arrived late in some places.

At the same time that he insisted that Democrats were figuring out how many mail-in ballots they needed to counteract his performance in various states, the president listed a series of successful Republican wins on Tuesday and appeared unaware of the cognitive dissonance in saying that other Republicans had won while he lost as he claimed a plot to harm him.

Well he’s a stupid guy as well as a lying treasonous piece of crap.

This is it.

Oh god, Trump is giving a speech, a coup-preparing lying violence-inciting nation-undermining speech.

Awkward.

America’s friends sighed and exchanged glances as the election results came pouring, then trickling in. They waited for the United States to say something, but it didn’t. “So,” Canada said, then cleared its throat. “So, uh, after that last election, you were pretty —”

“Pretty adamant,” New Zealand said. “Pretty adamant that this whole electing Donald Trump thing was a random fluke, an aberration, and not who you were at all.”

It’s a good joke, and it stings. I have to say, though, that I haven’t been saying that, and I’m far from the only one. This clearly is who we are and that is sickening.

“But you certainly don’t vote for him by mistake a second time,” Canada said.

“He might not win!” the United States said, quickly, not looking up.

“See, this is what I’m talking about,” Britain said. “Sure, America, he might not win. Let’s even say he probably won’t! But it’s not what you would call a resounding defeat, right?”

“Certainly not a wholesale repudiation of his entire ideology and all that he stands for,” New Zealand said.

Well now let’s be fair here. He doesn’t have an ideology. He’s not clever enough or coherent enough for that. He has Fox News, and an infinite supply of hatred and contempt, and enraged hostility to people who disagree with him. That may look like ideology in a weak light, but if you sat him down and told him to expound the ideology to you, you know what would happen. It would just be a patchwork of blurts stitched together with accordion gestures. He doesn’t have an ideology, he has only his angry impulses.

“I don’t understand,” the United States said. “This is not who we are.”

They exchanged glances. “Isn’t it, though?” Canada said. “I mean, at a certain point, you have to look at yourself and say, ‘Is who I think I am aligned at all with what I am actually doing?’”

Well we are the country that overthrew the duly elected Mossadegh in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala, for a start. We backed Pinochet’s coup against Allende. There’s the little matter of Vietnam. There’s the fact that it took us until nineteen sixty fucking five to pass the Voting Rights Act…which the Supreme Court has now mostly repealed. So yeah, Canada’s not wrong – we’re more like Trump than we are like Obama.

Helen Dale points out an interesting fact:

It is reasonably obvious the People’s Republic of China is engaging in genocide—or something close to—of its Muslim Uyghur population. Everything from concentration camps to mass sterilisation to adverts for “beautiful” female slaves in Xinjiang papers has done the rounds. Sometimes the stories are doubted at first—being alert to WWI-style atrocity propaganda is always wise—but in each case, the rumour has been confirmed by reputable news outlets and national governments across the political spectrum and around the world.

It’s also reasonably obvious no Muslim-majority country anywhere has emitted a peep in protest, and that beyond perfunctory diplomatic representations, no Western government—with the partial and limited exception of Donald Trump popping off in his own inimitable way—has had much to say either.

Well you see the majority-Muslim countries are far too busy raging at Macron for saying France values freedom of thought and speech.

Hm. Is it possible that there’s a tiny difference of proportion there?

On the matter of Islamic quiescence in the face of Chinese butchery: only some of this is because the countries in question know their own human rights records are lamentable and to criticise China is to invite prying eyes closer to home. Likewise, only some of it is to do with being bought and paid for by China’s Belt and Road infrastructure and regional development programme.

Much of the supine response, I’m afraid, is because China could turn (and would, if pushed) the entire Islamic world into a grease spot without breaking [a] sweat, and with little in the way of resistance from a now energy-independent West. Even the strongest Muslim countries like Pakistan and Turkey know this. 

So in other words the tantrums over Charlie Hebdo are safe because France won’t turn them into a grease spot, while actual genocide and persecution of actual Muslims in actual China are oh look what a pretty swan.

This is one take, but it leaves a lot out.

In the expectations game, the Democratic Party whiffed and whiffed badly. The Biden campaign and its allies managed to drive up turnout — but so did Trump. Republicans put up a hell of a fight, and not just, or even mainly, in the battle for the White House. Democrats have almost certainly failed to win a Senate majority, and so far they have lost some ground in the House as well (while still on track to maintain control of the lower chamber of Congress).

This is one reason it’s so infuriating to me that we ended up with Biden. A less inspiring candidate it’s hard to imagine. The Democratic party is terrified of the left, while the Republican party passionately embraces the right. Why is that?

So much for the Democratic fantasy — the one that seemingly never dies — of unobstructed rule. Democrats didn’t just want to win and govern in the name of a deeply divided nation’s fractured sense of the common good. No, they wanted to lead a moral revolution, to transform the country — not only enacting a long list of new policies, but making a series of institutional changes that would entrench their power far into the future. Pack the Supreme Court. Add left-leaning states. Break up others to give the left huge margins in the Senate. Get rid of the Electoral College.

Hey. Wait just a damn minute. Getting rid of the Electoral College is not some wild lefty power trip – the Electoral College is a bad and undemocratic way to elect presidents. It also gives Republicans a massive advantage out of all proportion to their demography (hence the undemocratic part). There’s no reason for presidential elections to be state by state; the UK doesn’t count Somerset then Yorkshire then Norfolk, it counts the country as a whole.

Abolish the police. Rewrite the nation’s history, with white supremacy and racism placed “at the very center.” Ensure “equity” not just in opportunity but in outcomes. Hell, maybe they’d even establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to teach everyone who voted for or supported the 45th president just how evil they really are.

But is any of that part of Biden’s campaign?

No wonder so many Republicans turned out to vote. Democrats proved to be the most effective GOTV operation for the GOP imaginable.

Because of the imaginary Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

These were prominent Democrats — progressive politicians, activists, and scholars and prize-winning journalists at leading cultural institutions — talking this way. Joe Biden himself usually did the smart thing and tried to distance himself from the most radical proposals. But in the end it wasn’t enough to mollify fears of an ascendant left hell bent on entrenching itself in power and enacting institutional reforms that would enable it to lead a moral, political, and cultural revolution.

In other words there are people who are more lefty than Joe Biden is. Well no shit, but I don’t see why we should assume everyone thought they would be telling Biden what to do.

And therein lies a paradox that should be obvious but apparently isn’t: Democrats live in a country with a large, passionate opposition. Arrogant talk of demographic inevitabilities and transformative changes to lock Republicans out of power in the name of “democracy” has the effect of inspiring that opposition to unite against them, rendering political success less assured and more tenuous.

What talk? Where is this talk happening? I haven’t seen it. And to repeat: currently the Republicans lock the Democrats out of power, thanks to the Electoral College and gerrymandering and a whole lot of voter suppression, made possible by the Supreme Court’s ruling that gutted the Voting Rights Act. I think that has a hell of a lot more to do with Dem failures than the existence of people to the left of Biden.

So please, Democrats, look in the mirror and show a little humility. You’re not nearly as self-evidently wonderful or widely loved as you’d like to believe. You are not destined to prevail anywhere. You share a country with a large group of people who hate your guts, and who aren’t going to submit to your rule or go along with your giddy plans to remake the nation in your image. It’s time to start acting like you understand this implacable fact and all it implies about the limits of your power and the parameters of the possible.

He says, blithely ignoring the Shelby ruling and the weird shape of the Ohio district that sends Jim Jordan to Congress and a thousand other little details like that.

Whether Trump goes or not, Trumpism isn’t going anywhere.

Democrats had hoped that four years of turmoil, attacks on norms and institutions and mendacity – plus a pandemic that cost 230,000 lives – would result in a quick, clean and overwhelming repudiation of the 45th president.

…

But on another miserable night for pollsters, it did not turn out that way. Trump proved resilient and increased his vote in Florida, Texas and other states. He found even more white working-class voters than last time and chipped away at Democratic support among Latinos. His cult-of-personality campaign rallies were as enthusiastic and rambunctious as ever.

Weird, isn’t it? His cult of loud boring stupid self-obsessed “personality” remains popular. Why? What’s to like? I’ll never understand it. I don’t mean it’s not my taste but I can see why people like it, I mean I can’t for the life of me see what there is to like. It’s not as if he’s genuinely funny, or charismatic, or refreshing. He’s none of those things. Bugs Bunny is those things, but Trump is a noisier Elmer Fudd.

When some Americans protested “This is not who we are”, Trump voters replied: “This is exactly who we are – and we’re not going anywhere.”

“The so-called moral outrage around Trump’s presidency did not produce any substantive shift in his Republican support,” tweeted Eddie Glaude, a professor at Princeton University and author of Democracy in Black. “In fact, he expanded his base among white voters. Trump continues to flourish in the intersection of greed, selfishness and racism.”

And misogyny; never forget the misogyny.

No.

No, chum, that’s wrong. The concept of “blasphemy” is pretty much the reason we need the concept of freedom of expression and speech and thought.

“Blasphemy” is a stupid word, invented to defend stupid ideas about supernatural bullies who are vastly more powerful than we are yet still need us to defend them against rude remarks by non-believers. What sense does that make? Why can’t your god do its own defending or rebuking or punishing? Why does it need you stepping in? Why does it need you all stern and serious telling us what we can’t say?

Your god is a human invention. Humans invent gods, in large part as a way to bully other humans. Gods are just a story. If they’re real they can take care of themselves, and if they’re not it doesn’t matter what rude things we say about them.

Have a little self-respect. Have it for yourself and have it for other humans too. Let gods take care of their own concerns and let humans mock them if we feel like it. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Do something useful.

Still waiting.

Trump still bellowing nonsense.

Donald Trump is again tweeting in all caps, making false claims about the remaining ballots left to be counted.

“ANY VOTE THAT CAME IN AFTER ELECTION DAY WILL NOT BE COUNTED!” Trump said.

He doesn’t get to make new law via a tweet. He doesn’t get to make new law at all; he’s not a legislator.

Also, this is the guy who deliberately sandbagged the postal service, by appointing a stooge who removed sorting machines and banned overtime, thus causing the mail to back up, thus causing votes to be held up. Now he wants to execute the second arm of this plot by shouting that postmarks don’t matter.

Why would we stop the count? Who is this maniac?

His lead in Georgia is shrinking.

After an update from the Democratic-leaning Fulton county, Trump’s lead over Joe Biden now stands at 14,857, or 0.3% of the total vote.

So STOPTHECOUNT.

National Geographic informs us of the discovery of a 9 thousand year old burial of a hunter of large game in the Andes who turned out to be a woman:

…the remains found alongside the toolkit were from a biological female. What’s more, this ancient female hunter was likely not an anomaly, according to a study published today in Science Advances. The Haas team’s find was followed by a review of previously studied burials of similar age throughout the Americas—and it revealed that between 30 and 50 percent of big game hunters could have been biologically female.

This new study is the latest twist in a decades-long debate about gender roles among early hunter-gather societies. The common assumption was that prehistoric men hunted while women gathered and reared their young. But for decades, some scholars have argued that these “traditional” roles—documented by anthropologists studying hunter-gatherer groups across the globe since the 19th century—don’t necessarily stretch into our deep past.

That seems surprising for at least two reasons: one, you’d think the male advantage in speed and strength would make a difference, and two, you’d think women’s childbearing ability would be too valuable to risk. It’s interesting.

In initial discussions about the toolkit, the researchers presumed the owner was male, perhaps a prominent figure of society, or even a chief of the group. “I’m as guilty as anyone,” says Haas, who has been working in the region since 2008. “I thought yeah, that makes sense with my understanding of the world.” Back in the lab, however, close inspection of the bones suggested the physiology of a biological woman. To confirm, they analyzed a protein that forms tooth enamel and is linked to sex.

So far so good, but then suddenly the wheels fall off.

Importantly, the team cannot know the individual’s gender identity, but rather only biological sex (which like gender doesn’t always exist on a binary). In other words, they can’t say whether the individual lived their life 9,000 years ago in a way that would identify them within their society as a woman.

Are they sure? Can’t they tell if she wore makeup? Played with dolls as a child? Kept losing her car keys?

The 2018 discovery does pose a challenge to gender binaries commonly assumed for our early ancestors: Men acted as hunters, women acted as gatherers. This assumption comes from studies of modern hunter-gatherers, where men more frequently are responsible for the hunt while women bear the most responsibility for caring for children, says Arizona State University’s Kim Hill, who specializes in human evolutionary anthropology and was not part of the study team. “You can’t just stop in the middle of stalking a deer in order to nurse a crying baby,” Hill says via email.

Plus children are a resource and you’d want to protect the resource from dangerous work like hunting.

It’s interesting, apart from the small eruption of New Gender Thought.

CBS is projecting Biden as the winner in Michigan.

Hahahahaha no Donnee that’s not how it works. You can “claim” it all you like but it doesn’t mean anything.

After the random number of …………….. he ranted about secretly dumped ballots. Twitter stamped “DO NOT BELIEVE THIS” all over both of them.

Look at this stupid nonsense. Why should they stop the count? Wtf? “Stop counting so that Trump can say he won!”? Uh, no, that’s not how this works.

Also – a bunch of people close together, shouting. Bad pandemic practice.

More attempted election theft, not from the Democrats, again.

When the Republicans stole the election that way in 2000 the Dems folded. They must not fold this time. (They shouldn’t have folded then either.)

Rudy Giuliani, former top NY prosecutor, is accusing The Wrong Party of stealing votes, on the basis of nothing whatever apart from the fact that he’s a piece of shit.

Quick fact-check on Giuliani’s tweet: there is no evidence of “massive cheating” in Pennsylvania or any other battleground state.

There is also no evidence that Pennsylvania Democratsare trying to “steal” the race. Election officials in the state continue to count valid ballots cast by election day.

This is America, where legal eagles tell lies about their rivals to help a hardened criminal steal a second term as president.

Biden’s won Wisconsin. We’re not dead yet.

The announcement from Wisconsin aligns with the Biden campaign’s statements that they are optimistic the race is moving in their direction. Biden’s electoral vote count is now up to 248, meaning he will win the election if he can maintain his leads in Nevada and Michigan.

Trump is demanding a recount but it’s unlikely to make a difference.

Nevada says it will update its count tomorrow. That’s fine, you guys take your time, we’re in no hurry.

These two were a pair in my feed. A dismal truth.

Trump is an actual literal criminal on a massive scale, but it doesn’t matter because he’s a racist and he empowers racists.

It’s shameful being an American at this point.