Meanwhile, back in Loserville –

At least five people within President Donald Trump’s orbit have tested positive for coronavirus, including his chief of staff and a top campaign aide, becoming the latest administration officials to be infected with the virus after a string of outbreaks in the West Wing.

White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, top campaign aide Nick Trainer, who has been crunching the numbers when it comes to election data, and at least three other people in the White House, including a deputy for Meadows, have tested positive, multiple sources told CNN.

And have they been wearing masks and distancing, or better yet staying home? Of course not.

Trump campaign staffers told CNN they are furious because the leadership in the campaign never sent out an email informing staff of the positive cases or cautioning them to stay home for the time being. Meadows was in the office multiple times this week without a mask.

Meadows, 61, told people after Tuesday’s election that he had contracted Covid, but it wasn’t clear when he first tested positive, according to sources. In the past, he has appeared skeptical of coronavirus mitigation measures and has not often been seen wearing a mask.

He traveled with Trump aboard Air Force One during his final campaign swing on Sunday and Monday, accompanied the President on a visit to his campaign headquarters on Tuesday and attended a White House election night party where he came into close contact with members of the President’s family. He was not seen wearing a mask during any of those engagements.

I do hope they all get it.

White House officials are now alarmed, given Meadows has been around other staffers while potentially contagious, one aide tells CNN.

One White House official who was around Meadows several times this week said they were not notified that he had tested positive, though staffers are being told that “contact tracing was done.”

Meadows has been a leading skeptic inside the White House about the mitigation measures recommended by the coronavirus task force, viewing the panel as largely sidelined.

“Skeptic” isn’t the right word. “Dumbass” is more accurate.

Heads of state are breathing a HUGE SIGH OF RELIEF.

Remember when Trump tried to yank Trudeau’s arm off at the front door of the White House? And failed because Trudeau was expecting it and stiff-armed him with the other hand?

Portugal.

Fiji. I read the other day that getting back into the Paris Agreement is at the top of the list.

Belgium.

Iceland.

And the nation of Cher.

Aw yeah.

(Now disperse quickly – lots of aerosols with all that screaming.)

Sidney Blumenthal says Trump’s struggles will be NO USE.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe sent a team to view the American election, a routine exercise they have performed nine previous times. But this time they were shocked by what they observed. “Nobody – no politician, no elected official, nobody – should limit the people’s right to vote,” said Michael Georg Link, a member of the German parliament who led the group. “Baseless allegations of systematic deficiencies, notably by the incumbent president, including on election night, harm public trust in democratic institutions.”

This was his last chance to shame us.

Apart from the next few weeks, which is another bad holdover from the 18th century, but he’s going to face a lot less compliance now that his underlings hope to save some shreds of a future in DC.

Trump’s actions to stop or suspend the counting of votes and to certify the results is precisely the classic transgression for which the US has rebuked tinpot dictators, including in the state department’s annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. Trump’s call specifically flies in the face of Article 23 (b) of the American Convention on Human Rights, of the Organization of American States, to which the US is a signatory, which guarantees the right “to vote and to be elected in genuine periodic elections, which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and by secret ballot that guarantees the free expression of the will of the voters”.

“…except in the case of Donald Trump.” That’s in there somewhere, isn’t it?

One after another, the states’ ballots will be counted. The results will be known. They will be certified. And Biden will be declared the winner. Trump’s attempt to crown himself king will be his last failed reality show. Instead, he will be the first president since Benjamin Harrison to have lost the popular vote for president twice, the first time paradoxically as the winner but the second as the natural loser. Trump will soon be, as the poet Wallace Stevens wrote, “the Emperor of Ice Cream”.

Hope so!

Tom Frank says yes hooray but let’s not forget that it’s the Democratic Party’s move away from the working class to centrist pro-biz policies that got us to Trump. Me, I doubt that it’s quite that simple or direct or cut and dried, but on the other hand the move is undeniable.

Biden’s instinct, naturally, will be to govern as he always legislated: as a man of the center who works with Republicans to craft small-bore, business-friendly measures. After all, Biden’s name is virtually synonymous with Washington consensus. His years in the US Senate overlap almost precisely with his party’s famous turn to the “third way” right, and Biden personally played a leading role in many of the signature initiatives of the era: Nafta-style trade agreements, lucrative favors for banks, tough-on-crime measures, proposed cuts to social security, even.

Of course the years of everyone in the Senate overlap in the same way, because we all inhabit the same block of time. Biden has been in the Senate longer than most, because he’s a geezer, but still he’s not unique in his dates.

What Biden must understand now, however, is that it was precisely this turn, this rightward shift in the 1980s and 90s, that set the stage for Trumpism.

Let us recall for a moment what that turn looked like. No longer were Democrats going to be the party of working people, they told us in those days. They were “new Democrats” now, preaching competence rather than ideology and reaching out to new constituencies: the enlightened suburbanites; the “wired workers”; the “learning class”; the winners in our new post-industrial society.

… In the place of the Democratic party’s old household god – the “middle class” – these new liberals enshrined the meritocracy, meaning not only the brilliant economists who designed their policies, but also the financiers and technologists that the new liberalism tried to serve, together with the highly educated professionals who were now its most prized constituents…

However, there are consequences when the left party in a two-party system chooses to understand itself in this way. As we have learned from the Democrats’ experiment, such a party will show little understanding for the grievances of blue-collar workers, people who – by definition – have not climbed the ladder of meritocracy. And just think of all the shocking data that has flickered across our attention-screens in the last dozen years – how our economy’s winnings are hogged by the 1%; how ordinary people can no longer afford new cars; how young people are taking on huge debt burdens right out of college; and a thousand other points of awful. All of these have been direct or indirect products of the political experiment I am describing.

In short, it’s been a period of sharply rising inequality, and that’s not something to celebrate.

The fun part –

Trump LOST. He LOST. He’s a LOSER. He LOST.

He’s fired. We fired him. You’re FIRED, Dumb Donny. Get out. Leave the silver where it is. We’ll be checking your luggage.

Gonna lose all your “friends” Donny. They never did like you, they just wanted the crumbs from your table. Your crumbs have no more value because you LOST.

Losing loser is refusing to leave. Security will have to remove him.

Another detail of Bannon’s beheading fantasy:

Speaking on his podcast, the War Room, which was distributed in video form on a number of social media outlets, the far-right provocateur appeared to endorse violence against Wray and the US’s most senior infectious diseases expert.

“Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci … no I actually want to go a step farther but the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man,” Bannon said.

Ahhhhhhhh no. No he’s not. That’s the very thing he isn’t. It’s the very worst thing about him – the all too obvious fact that there isn’t the tiniest trace of ordinary normal human sympathy and kindness in him. He could see a frightened lonely puppy crying and he would kick it out of his way. He could see a little girl wailing in anguish as she’s rescued from a man who abducted her on the street, and he would wish he could molest her himself. He is not kind-hearted, to anyone, ever. He’s both callous and cruel, and he’s utterly selfish. Kind-hearted is the thing he most is not.

That’s important. It matters.

Also: Newt Gingrich.

The increasingly heated language around the election has also included interventions from more mainstream figures, including the former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich, who appeared to call for election workers in Pennsylvania to be arrested.

Speaking to Sean Hannity on Fox News, Gingrich amplified Trump’s false complaints of election rigging and mused about what he believed was the solution.

“My hope is that President Trump will lead the millions of Americans who understand exactly what’s going on,” Gingrich said. “The Philadelphia machine is corrupt. The Atlanta machine is corrupt. The machine in Detroit is corrupt. And they are trying to steal the presidency. And we should not allow them to do that.”

“First of all, under federal law, we should lock up the people who are breaking the law,” he continued. “You stop somebody from being an observer, you just broke federal law. Do you hide and put up papers so nobody can see what you’re doing? You just broke federal law. You bring in ballots that aren’t real? You just broke federal law.”

Except that he doesn’t know that anyone is doing that.

This brave new world…

Twitter permanently suspended an account associated with former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon after he suggested in a video posted online Thursday that Dr. Anthony Fauci and FBI Director Christopher Wray should be beheaded.

Bannon made the comments calling for medieval violence during a livestream of his talk show and podcast, War Room: Pandemic.

“I’d put the heads on pikes. Right. I’d put them at the two corners of the White House. As a warning to federal bureaucrats: Either get with the program or you’re gone,” he said in the now-deleted video previously posted on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. However, it has been recirculated through other accounts.

Totally normal, right? We know Fauci already has to have full-time security because of Trump’s bullying and lying.

CNN reported the video was viewed at least 200,000 times on Facebook before it was deleted.

Just great. Will Fauci now have to live in a safe house?

Bannon’s message comes as some members ofPresident Trump’s inner circle have amped up inflammatoryrhetoric while the election results remain unresolved. Donald Trump Jr. said this week the president should “go to total war” over the election.

Meaning Trump should stage a fascist coup and become an outright dictator.

Bannon’s lawyer has quit.

On Friday, a prominent lawyer who was defending Mr. Bannon against fraud charges in federal court in Manhattan abruptly moved to drop him as a client, one person familiar with the matter said.

“Mr. Bannon is in the process of retaining new counsel,” the lawyer, William A. Burck, said in a brief letter to the court, giving no explanation.

No explanation required.

Since August, Mr. Bannon has been fighting the criminal charges lodged against him by federal prosecutors in Manhattan, the case in which Mr. Burck has been his lawyer.

Mr. Bannon was arrested on charges of defrauding donors to a campaign to privately fund a wall on the United States’ border with Mexico, one of Mr. Trump’s signature political promises.

The prosecutors have charged that Mr. Bannon and three co-defendants, while pledging publicly not to take any of the money raised for themselves, siphoned off hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for travel, hotels, personal credit card debt and other expenses.

What a mensch, huh?

Stephen Gillers, a legal ethics expert at New York University School of Law, said speaking generally, “Lawyers will withdraw when a client’s behavior sabotages the lawyer’s work on the client’s behalf.”

Mr. Gillers said he did not know why Mr. Burck was seeking to withdraw from Mr. Bannon’s case, but he added: “Bannon’s public comments made Burck’s job more difficult. Burck was hired to fight the prosecutors and should not also have to do battle with his own client.”

Smart guy, Bannon.

H/t iknklast

Updating to add, because it’s scathing and apt and true:

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.