Wednesday, November 04, 2020

The Polls Were Off Again

Biden was supposed to have had a 10 point lead nationally. That was a recipe for a landslide. Instead, one day later, we are looking at a nailbiter. The polls were off again. Looks like they are not designed to reach the core of Trump voters. 

The bigger news, though, is that the country is as divided as ever, and the Covid catastrophe does not seem to have budged the country much. It is the same old, same old. America has the political equivalent of a lifestyle disease. 

Biden will squeak through, but there is no landslide. 



America Is Eerily Retracing Rome’s Steps to a Fall. Will It Turn Around Before It’s Too Late? Two thousand years ago, the famous Republic had a chance to reject a dangerous populist. It failed, and the rest is history.

Can Biden Still Win? Can Trump Still Win? Yes. Here Are the Remaining Paths. The president was able to close off several avenues to an early Biden win, but the former vice president still has a number of options.

What’s Left in the Seven States That Will Decide the Race Though they’re still too close to call, there are some indications of which way things might go...... If Mr. Biden did carry Georgia, along with the other states mentioned so far, he’d win more than 300 electoral votes. 

Democrats Battle for Senate Control as They Maintain Grip on House Majority The two parties grappled for advantage in the fight for the Senate majority as Democrats aimed to add to their majority in the House. ....... That left both sides closely watching Maine, North Carolina and Georgia, where partial returns showed exceedingly tight races between Republican incumbents and their Democratic challengers........... At least one Senate race taking place in Georgia, an unexpectedly competitive battleground this year, was headed for a winner-takes-all January runoff that could decide the balance of the Senate only weeks before Inauguration Day if Tuesday’s contests did not. The state’s other race could also end up in a runoff, but it was too early to be certain.......  while strategists in both parties had said a second blue wave could wash out 10 to 20 Republicans, by Wednesday morning, returns indicated that no such sweep had materialized ..... Worried about Mr. Trump’s chances, though, many Republicans closed their campaigns with warnings to voters of the risks posed by putting the White House and Congress under full Democratic control.........  If Democrats were able to grab control of the House, Senate and White House at once for the first time since 2010, they could abolish the legislative filibuster — the last major vestige of minority rights in the Senate — and push through an ambitious slate of bills on voting rights, gun safety, policing and prescription drug prices. They would most likely reserve much of their political capital for expanding the Affordable Care Act and raising taxes on the wealthy to offset that and other new programs.........  Facing a Senate led by Mr. McConnell, Mr. Biden could even have an uphill battle winning its approval to fill his cabinet, and he would certainly face opposition to liberal nominees to the federal courts. 

2020 Should Be the Last Time We Vote Like This Turnout was inspiring, but our voting system is badly flawed....... Set against so many less important transactions in American life — ordering a complicated coffee from a national chain, or finding the best sushi place in a town you’ve never visited before — the simple act of casting a ballot is laughably antiquated. ....... In many countries, elections are administered by nonpartisan agencies that set rules for the entire nation. In the United States, elections are often run by elected officials — Republican or Democratic secretaries of state, for instance — and rules about who gets to vote and how they do so differ from state to state.

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Tuesday, November 03, 2020

Coronavirus News (308)

LinkedIn Top Startups 2020: The 10 Indian companies on the rise

5 takeaways from Xi Jinping’s speech during 40th anniversary visit to Shenzhen Chinese president full of praise for people of southern tech hub on visit to mark 40th anniversary of it becoming China’s first special economic zone ‘This is a global development miracle that the Chinese people have created together,’ he says

President Xi calls on more young Hongkongers to work, study, live in mainland China in speech holding up Shenzhen as model city Xi gives Shenzhen a mission to revitalise ‘one country, two systems’ as he launches new era of integration for southern China President appeals to Hong Kong’s youth to experience life on the mainland to ‘bring their hearts closer to the motherland’

Progressives don’t love Joe Biden, but they’re learning to love his agenda “The most transformative presidents in our nation’s history — Lincoln, FDR, LBJ — were not ideologues.”

Barrett, Declining to Detail Legal Views, Says She Will Not Be ‘a Pawn’ of Trump President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee refused to weigh in on critical matters that could come before the court, including health care, abortion rights and a possible election dispute.

China Got Better. We Got Sicker. Thanks, Trump. With a different leader, the United States could have contained the coronavirus. ......... the out-of-control antics of an incoherent American president, a man clearly desperate to stay in office because losing could mean his prosecution, humiliation and liquidation all at the same time. ............. Alas, we aren’t who we think we are. Covid-19 was supposed to be China’s Chernobyl. It’s ended up looking more like the West’s Waterloo. .......... Some of China’s facial recognition technology is so good, you don’t even have to take off your face mask. Your eyes and upper nose will do. ............. we have a uniquely individualistic culture, a highly fragmented local-state-federal power-sharing system, a frail public health system, a divided body politic, a Republican Party whose business model has long been to cripple Washington, and so many people getting their news from social networks that amplify conspiracy theories and destroy truth and trust. ............. we now have a president whose political strategy for re-election is to divide us, to destroy trust — and to destroy truth — and to declare any news hostile to his goals as “fake.” And without truth and trust in a pandemic, you’re lost. .............  a strategy of “total harm minimization” that would have protected the elderly and most vulnerable, while gradually feeding back into the work force the young and healthy most likely to experience the coronavirus either asymptomatically or mildly — and let them keep the economy humming and build up some natural herd immunity as we awaited a vaccine. ............. what ails us today is something that cannot be cured by a Covid-19 vaccine. We have lost the trust in each other and in our institutions and a basic sense of what is true — all necessary to navigate a health crisis together. We had them in previous wars, but not today’s.  


Don't Ignore the Good News On Covid-19 From Asia There’s light at the end of the lockdown tunnel, provided the right lessons are learnt. ........... The U.S. looks to have given up on controlling the pandemic until a vaccine arrives. ........... The strategies pursued by South Korea, Vietnam, China and others do still seem to be paying off. While the total Covid-19 death toll is between 500-700 per million people in France, the U.K., Spain and the U.S., in China and South Korea it is below 10 per million. Cases are a less perfect measure, but there’s a similar observable gap. Wuhan, once the epicenter of Covid-19, is welcoming tourists again. .................   If the key to avoiding more lockdowns is finding a way to “live with the virus” — through widespread testing, tracing of contacts and isolating positive cases to slow transmission — Western countries have made structural, not cultural, errors. ..............  Even the famously organized Germans failed to halt the second wave. ...............  South Korea tested early, and often, using walk-in centers and drive-throughs. In Wuhan, the authorities tested 11 million people over 2 weeks. The share of tests coming back positive in South Korea and Vietnam is below 1%; in France and Spain it has risen to 10%.   



Jack Ma's Blunt Words Just Cost Him $35 Billion China just showed the billionaire who’s boss in derailing fintech giant Ant Group’s monster IPO. Regulators might do better to heed his words instead. ...........   In that speech, apart from labeling the global banking Basel Accords as an “old people’s club,” Ma said “systemic risk” is not the issue in China. Rather, China’s biggest risk is that it “lacks a financial ecosystem.” Chinese banks are like “pawn shops”, where collateral and guarantees are the hard currencies. As a result, some decided to go so big they are not allowed to fail. “As the Chinese like to say, if you borrow 100,000 yuan from the bank, you are a bit scared; if you borrow a million yuan, both you and the bank are a little nervous; but if you take a 1 billion yuan loan, you are not scared at all, the bank is,” Ma said.


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