I know getting people to not use the term "lockdown" is probably futile at this point, but it is an inaccurate term because we don't lock people in their houses here. The term has a bad connotation and it is used by right-wingers as a pejorative.

Some better terms could be:

stay-at-home

shelter-in-place

quarantine

home isolation

extreme social distancing

Dr. Sanjay Gupta reporting to CNN this morning that Doctors Without Borders is now focusing their aid on the US, having decided that it’s the most looming humanitarian disaster in the world right now & we have a president who can’t think of anything but feeling sorry for himself.

https://twitter.com/lynnkthurston/status/1326862113550331904

https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/12/health/us-coronavirus-thursday/index.html

up to the midterms hamstringing Biden and blaming the poor economy and the massive govt debt on Biden.

I'm sure one reason Republicans in office aren't fighting harder for Trump right now is they think strategically, having Biden in there now to clean up the mess helps them. And they can organize against him for the next election.

These people are endlessly crooked and destructive and we have to organize even harder to make sure we win seats in 2022, not lose them. The map is very good in 2022 for Dems to pick up Senate seats and we have to do this to ever have a chance of big change. The GOP knows this and will use Biden as a foil to keep power.

Because they keep voting for Republicans.

Hard to argue with the logic in this piece:

White Americans can be relied on, in the majority, as a group, to “vote Republican.” I put it in quotes because it’s worth examining what that anodyne statement really means. Liberal, sane, thoughtful White Americans often overestimate how many of them there are, how widespread their cause is. The result is that when I say “Americans are…” meaning of course the majority, which is still white, I get a wave of protest. Americans aren’t dumb! Americans aren’t dumb! They’re not violent, stupid racists! They want to live in a modern society! Are they, do they — at least the white majority? Let’s take a brief and hard look at reality.

Here are some things white Americans have been for, as a group, in their majority. Segregation. Endless war. Inequality. Billionaires. Capital. Guns and religion as primary social values. That is what the voting pattern above means. Conversely, here are some thing white Americans have been against, as a group, in their majority. Desegregation. Civil rights. Womens’ rights. Their own healthcare, retirement, and childcare. Public goods of any kind whatsoever. That is what the “voting pattern” above means in the real world. Need I go on? America’s problem is that white Americans as a social group, its majority social group, want America to be a failed state. They don’t want to live in a modern, civilised democracy, and never have.

White America is America’s problem. A big, white, ignorant problem. The problem of the white American voter — that white Americans don’t want to admit — goes back more than half a century at this point. If the answer is “Make America Great Again!” then the question is: “well, who brought it this point of self-destruction?” and the answer is….white Americans. They’re the ones responsible for the self-destruction of the society they still rule as a massive majority. Nobody else is responsible for their poverty, despair, and humiliation but them. That is what the chart above makes crystal clear.

Who voted, over and over again, to have worse lives? No healthcare, retirement, affordable education, childcare — no public goods of any kind whatsoever? White Americans did. What the? The question baffles the world. Why would anyone choose a worse life? The answer is that white Americans would not accept a society of true equals. “I won’t pay for those dirty, filthy peoples’ educations, healthcare, retirements! Why, their grandparents were my grandpappy’s slaves!” White Americans chose to retain power, supremacy, superiority, even in a failing society. They chose staying on top of decline and ruin, rather than prospering as equals.

https://eand.co/americas-problem-is-that-white-people-want-it-to-be-a-failed-state-bac24202f32f

We saw a ton of long lines in early voting and a ton of mail in votes, and granted there were more polling places on election day... but we're supposed to believe that Trump supporters overcame ALL that early and mail-in vote on election day? Is there anything fishy here?

they are beyond being reasoned with, unable to listen to policy, they are brainwashed herd animals, I hate to say. All those fucking rural areas have been completely taken over by the right, I don't see anyway out. Maddening, frustrating, depressing as hell.

Sure, Repubs suppress the vote and rig the system, but THEY HAVE THEIR RURAL BASE that we cannot touch.

More than Russia, China, North Korea. We're "very deceptive". We're "sick".

Unreal.

https://twitter.com/liamstack/status/1323616922714464258

The rightwing Supreme Court cut off late absentee ballots from Wisconsin. What about the troops voting overseas???

This was a huge deal that Republicans used against us in 2000.

I guess we are so far beyond simple hypocrisy now? But still-- what about military voters?

really interesting piece with a cool graph

https://messagebox.substack.com/p/new-poll-what-voters-are-hearing

The poll which was conducted October 23-24 by surveying 1,125 likely voters nationwide, offers a fascinating window into which stories are breaking through to which voters and reveals some really disturbing insights into our broken information ecosystem.

We didn’t do this poll to see who was winning the race. We are living in a flood of polling data. Each new poll brings the possibility of doom or the slightly reassuring feeling that nothing has changed (as long as the polls aren’t wrong!). You need that rush, we need that rush — so, of course, we asked people who they were going to vote for.

No need for doom from this poll … at least. Our poll was roughly in line with the average of polls — Biden leads 51-43 with only 2 percent undecided. Fifty-seven percent say they’ve already voted and Biden leads among that group 62-34.

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/27/how-democrats-can-learn-hardball-from-the-republicans-of-1861-432698

Neat piece:

If you’re looking for a historical example of a revanchist political minority that kept its foot on the neck of a growing and restive majority, look no further than the defenders of slavery in antebellum America. In the interest of keeping Black people in a state of intergenerational servitude, pro-slavery politicians in the antebellum period trampled flagrantly and frequently on the civil liberties not only of Black Americans, but of white people who opposed slavery’s expansion. They shut down the right of abolitionists to use the U.S. Postal Service and the halls of Congress to proselytize against the Peculiar Institution. They deployed violence and voter fraud to rig elections. To maintain property in human beings, they perverted the institutions of American democracy.

It wasn’t until the Civil War, when many of those pro-slavery politicians rebelled to fight for the Confederacy, that the anti-slavery Republicans had their chance to reverse the damage. And they did it by playing hardball.

With Southern Democrats absent from Congress and their northern pro-slavery allies reduced to a shadow of their former power, anti-slavery Republicans pursued a bold, majoritarian agenda that remade the nation in the North’s free-labor image. After decades of violent obstruction from the slaveholding minority, they exhibited little concern for traditions and niceties. From changing the size of the Supreme Court and adding new states to the Union (partly to pad their majorities in Congress and the Electoral College), to their refusal to honor the credentials of Southern congressmen-elect who were chosen in sham midcycle elections in 1865, the Republican Party of the 1860s used hard-knuckle measures to enact a sweeping constitutional revolution that established the foundation for liberties that Americans of all races enjoy today.

These Republicans of the 1860s weren’t angels. Their motives were not uniformly pure. And they didn’t always agree with each other. But in response to decades of anti-democratic incitement by white politicians from slaveholding states, who represented roughly just 25 percent of the country’s population in 1860, Republicans in the age of Lincoln and Grant united to make the rules work for the majority, even when doing so required rewriting the rules wholesale.