#USElection2020 | Joe Biden Set to Become 46th U.S. President

Edward Munch's The Scream perfectly reflects the feelings of many on the 2020 U.S. election

Earlier today, Joe Biden flipped the critical Northern state of Wisconsin as several other key battlegrounds remained too close to call. Even before a winner was declared in Wisconsin, the Trump campaign said it would request a recount. Senator Susan Collins of Maine was re-elected, dimming Democratic hopes of winning control of the Senate.
Trump’s Path To Re-election Narrows With Key Victory in Wisconsin

Joe Biden | Donald Trump | College of Electors | Vote count effective 3:30pm, November 4 2020Update, as of 3:30pm. AP declares Michigan for Biden, who is 7 seats away from victory

The lingering uncertainty of the 2020 campaign is perhaps unsurprising in an election with record-breaking turnout where most ballots were cast before Election Day, but many could not be counted until afterward.
Mr. Trump’s chances of winning a second term depended on his ability to carry more of the undecided states, including several battleground Great Lakes states that he won in 2016 where Mr. Biden is now holding leads.

count-all-ballots.jpgDonna Akers, left, of Grand Prairie, Lucy Cantu of Grand Prairie, center, and her sister Guadalupe Neidigh of Georgetown, Texas, participate in protest organized by Dallas Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression outside Dallas City Hall. The results of the presidential election are not yet complete and they wanted to voice their concerns that every vote be counted. Photograph: Tom Fox/AP

With millions of votes yet to be counted across several key states — there is a reason that news organizations and other usually impatient actors were waiting to declare victors — Mr. Biden has held narrow leads in Arizona, Nevada and Michigan. If Mr. Biden can hold all those states, the former vice president could win the election even without Pennsylvania, which has long been viewed as a must-have battleground state.

“We feel good about where we are,” Mr. Biden told rattled supporters early Wednesday morning. “I’m here to tell you tonight we believe we’re on track to win this election. I’m optimistic about this outcome.”


As of 3pm, with the vote in the city of Detroit still to be counted, where the urban vote — and, most particularly, the black vote — of Michigan’s largest city is expected to be blue, before the end of the day, Michigan will be placed in Joe Biden’s column, moving him even closer to the 270 College of Electors vote count he’ll need to become the 46th U.S. President.
Update | 7:48pm | Biden Inching Ever Closer to Victory
Paths to victory remain in the U.S. presidential race for both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, but Biden has more ways to win and appears to be running stronger state to state, based on the places — cities, mainly — where large absentee votes have yet to be counted.

On Wednesday, November 4th, Joe Biden was named the winner in the state of Michigan

Biden leads the electoral college vote tally 264 - 214 after he was declared the winner in Michigan and Wisconsin midday Wednesday, and Trump gained one vote in Maine. Adding Alaska for Trump — which had not been called but where the result is not in doubt — gives the president 217.
From there, four states remained to be called as Wednesday evening approached in the U.S.: Nevada — where the final vote tally will be released on Thursday; North Carolina, Georgia — expected to complete a final vote count late on Wednesday night; and Pennsylvania, where the vote tally of mail-in ballots coming in from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh has Joe Biden inching ever closer to declaring victory in the state.
Update | 3:20pm | Biden Flips Michigan

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It’s official: the AP has declared Joe Biden to be the winner of Michigan and its 16 electoral votes, flipping another “blue wall” state away from Donald Trump. Biden remains achingly close to a win in Georgia, while Nevada remains up for grabs. Stay tuned for further updates.

Kamala Harris to become first woman vice-president in American history

Not only will Joe Biden be declared the 46th U.S. President this upcoming Friday — if not sooner — California senator Kamala Harris will become the first woman vice-president of the United States, an historic achievement for a nation riven with division, offering hope not just for Americans, but for all of us, and most particularly our daughters and granddaughters, who will know that the highest and hardest glass ceiling has finally been shattered.

Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden Jr. started election night with many paths to 270 electoral votes, but by Wednesday morning Mr. Trump had won Florida, Ohio and Texas and was within striking distance of winning North Carolina. While the number of winning scenarios for Biden diminished on Tuesday, it was the former vice president, and not the president, who was on offence early Wednesday in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the once-reliable “blue wall” states, thanks to his big pre-election effort to encourage mail-in balloting and early voting. At noon today, Mr. Biden won Wisconsin and was tied in Michigan, with the largely Democratic vote in Detroit yet to be counted, giving him the edge to achieve the 270 College of Electors votes he’ll need to become the 46th U.S. President.

The U.S. electoral map, as of 4:26pm Wednesday, November 4, 2020Update | 3:30pm | College of Electors map has changed: Biden = 264 votes, Trump = 214

What follows are the top scenarios remaining for Joe Biden to win the 2020 election. Political strategists predict that Biden will win Nevada, a blue state where he remains narrowly ahead. At this writing, the remaining mail-in ballot vote in Pennsylvania is trending heavily & overwhelmingly for Biden.

The post-election vote count in Georgia continues on through November 4th, 2020Georgia mail-in ballot count continues Wed., Nov. 4. Final results expected by midnight.

One path involves Mr. Biden winning both Arizona and Georgia, Sun Belt states where he appears competitive with tens of thousands of votes left to be counted. Mr. Biden has the edge in Arizona, and a win there would take some pressure off him to rely entirely on the blue-wall states. He can afford to lose Pennsylvania (unlikely) if he wins Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin — he’s already won the latter, and appears on track to win the two others. If Mr. Biden prevails in Georgia and Arizona, he can reach 270 electoral votes — while losing Pennsylvania and either Michigan or Wisconsin, where as we write above, he’s already won, or is guaranteed to emerge as victor.

“Joe Biden’s path is largely unchanged since he entered this race,” Guy Cecil, the chairman of Priorities USA, a leading Democratic super PAC, said ony Wednesday. “There are still at least five competitive states giving him multiple paths to 270. It may take a couple of days to count the votes, and we may need to fight the Trump campaign in court, but Joe Biden remains the favourite.”

Meanwhile, in battleground Georgia, 100,000 votes remain to be counted.

Tomorrow’s VanRamblings’ coverage of #USElection2020 will focus on the Senate, and what a probable Republican Mitch McConnell majority will mean for the incoming Democratic President and Vice-President.
For today, though, we’ll leave you with this bit of heartening news …

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and "the squad" were re-elected to Congress on November 3, 2020

The 2018 U.S. election marked the beginning of a progressive movement that has shaken up the U.S. Congress. The outcome resulted in more than 100 women serving in the House of Representatives, an historic number. Throughout this last congressional term, four of the newly-elected women have attracted a great deal of attention: known as The Squad, representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), and Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) became the nucleus of a burgeoning progressive electoral movement across the United States.
Readers will be heartened to know that all four progressive Congresswomen were handily re-elected to Congress, and have added to their numbers …

Cori Bush. Set to become the first Black woman to represent Missouri’s first district in Congress, Bush — a nurse and Black Lives Matter activist who organized protests after the killing of Mike Brown — disrupted a 50-year family hold on the seat this year after losing her bid for seat in the 2018 Democratic primary.

Marie Newman. In Illinois, the AP and The New York Times projected that Marie Newman will win the third district. Newman beat a conservative, anti-abortion Democrat in her primary earlier this year and defeated Republican Mike Fricilone in the general.

Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), a former Bronx middle school principal, defeated a 16-term incumbent to win the Democratic primary. The progressive Congressman had a lot of support from young people, with the youth-led Sunrise Movement making 65% of the 1.3 million calls made for Bowman’s campaign. Bowman’s primary victory in July set the stage for Tuesday, which saw the AP and The New York Times project he’d win his race.

Let us not forget, either, the adjunct members of the U.S. Congress: Deb Haaland (D-NM) became one of the first two Native American women to serve in Congress when she won in 2018; Representative Sharice Davids (D-KS) joined Haaland in becoming one of the first two Native American women elected to Congress. Davids, a member of the Wisconsin-based Ho-Chunk Nation, is also the first openly gay congressperson from her state.

Representative Katie Porter (D-CA) may be best known for her viral exchanges during congressional hearings featuring her whiteboard. More than just shareable videos, her determination convinced the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in March to agree to pay for coronavirus testing. Porter dominated California’s “jungle primary” for her seat this year, and the AP and The New York Times projected that she’ll keep her seat; Veronica Escobar (D-TX) who, alongside Sylvia Garcia was one of the first Latinas to represent Texas in the House. She’ll be back in the next Congress, the AP projected Tuesday night, and The New York Times projected early Wednesday morning.
VanRamblings will continue to update today’s post thru midnight tonight.

#USElection2020 | Nov. 3rd, 2020 | It’s All Over But the Counting

2020 U.S. Election | It's All Over But the CountingVanRamblings will update the site tomorrow afternoon, with updated election results

10:30pm PST | U.S. Election Night Update

Electoral College Update, 10:30pm, Tuesday, November 3rd 2020The electoral and College of Electors map of the U.S. | 10:30pm | November 3rd, 2020

Joe Biden addresses the U.S. electorate from Delaware late on 2020 election night

With many of the battleground states undecided, the Presidential race appears to be headed into a prolonged count, where the outcomes in states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania won’t be known until Friday, as these states, and others, continue a count of the millions of mail-in ballots that flooded into each of these states over the course of the past month.
Still, turnout across the U.S. was robust, reflecting the sense of urgency attending a presidential election conducted under an extraordinary shadow — a deadly pandemic, economic collapse, and a debate over racial justice.
President Trump and challenger Joe Biden battled early into Wednesday morning with no clear winner, as major contests remained too close to call and prospects grew that a decision in the presidential race would await an ongoing count of votes cast before election day. Trump misspelled the word polls in a tweet in which he asserted, without evidence, that Democrats were trying to steal the election, tweeting, “We will never let them do it.”

trump-steal-election.jpg

Misrepresentation: “Votes cannot be cast after the Poles are closed!”
The race to 270 College of Electors votes remains a nailbiter, late in the early morning hours of Wednesday, November 4th.
While President Trump is projected to win Ohio and the big battleground state of Florida, his Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, insisted early Wednesday that “we believe we’re on track to win this election.” Biden cited Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, where many votes — including an unprecedented number of mail-in ballots — were still being tallied in the bitterly contested presidential election that may take days to resolve.
“It ain’t over till every vote is counted,” Biden said. Around the same time, Trump fumed that “we are up BIG, while baselessly accusing Democrats of “trying to STEAL the Election,” as per the since deleted tweet above.
VanRamblings will continue our coverage of #USElection2020 tomorrow afternoon, and through until the last ballot is counted across the U.S, — and perhaps beyond that date (likely, this Friday, November 5th), as President Trump disputes the vote count in Pennsylvania, and has served notice that he intends to take the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Nonetheless, VanRamblings remains confident that Democratic Presidential contender Joseph R. Biden will emerge victorious, at the end of the day, and go on to become the 46th President of the United States of America.
maga-trump.jpg
9pm PST | U.S. Election Night Update

Electoral College Update, 9pm, Tuesday, November 3rd 2020

As of 9pm, ABC News projects Republican wins in Florida (25 College of Electoral votes), Kentucky (6), North Carolina (9) and Ohio (12), with Democratic flips from 2016, wins in 2020, adding Arizona (9) & Kansas (3).
At 9pm, CNN calls California (55), Oregon (7) & Washington (12) for Biden.

tight-battleground-races.jpg

7:30pm PST | U.S. Election Night Update
As of 7:30pm PST, the crucial battleground states of North Carolina, Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Virginia are too close to call. Based on the reported votes as of this hour, if Trump takes Michigan tonight, he wins the election, and returns to the White House.

Electoral College Update, 7:30pm, Tuesday, November 3rd 2020

The American networks have projected that Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden will win easily in Colorado, as the state has turned bluer with each passing election cycle. Meanwhile, the six combined electoral votes at stake in both North and South Dakota will go for Trump. Meanwhile, in good news for the Democratic Party, voters under 30 years of age across the Midwest are swinging towards Joe Biden in big numbers. In Connecticut, with seven electoral votes at stake in, Joe Biden wins easily.
CNN calls Michigan — which went for Trump in 2016 — for Joe Biden. Biden will also take the four electoral votes in New Hampshirey. Arizona, North Carolina & Iowa are projected to turn blue. As of 7:50pm, Joe Biden is projected to pick up the 20 electoral votes in Illinois. VanRamblings will update the site at 9pm PST, when more outstanding votes are counted.

Should Donald Trump loses his bid to remain President, he faces the prospect of prison

A feeling of alarm and fear about the future of American democracy, from voters across the political spectrum, has voters in its hoary grip, more worried about the state of their country in 2020 than about themselves.
Early on, some thought the catastrophe of Trump’s 2016 election could be a catalyst for aesthetic glory. “In times of artistic alienation, distress is often repaid to us in the form of great work, much of it galvanizing or clarifying or (believe it or not) empowering,” wrote New York magazine’s Jerry Saltz.
Since assuming power on January 20th, 2017, as Thomas Friedman writes in the New York Times, Donald Trump has made the whole world darker …

“There is no escaping it: America is on the ballot (today) — the stability and quality of our American governing institutions, the country’s alliances, how Americans treat one another, and our government’s basic commitment to scientific principles and the minimum decency that we expect from our leaders.

Trump maga crowd

Four more years of a president without shame, backed by a party without spine, amplified by a TV network without integrity, and the cancer will be in the bones of every institution that has made America America.”

What has the Trump presidency taken from Americans?
Innocence? Optimism? Faith?
Trump snuffed out American confidence, flickering but real, that as a people Americans could go only so low, and forgive only so much.
With Donald Trump in power the past four years, Americans went lower — or at least a damningly large percentage of Americans did. Many Americans gave Trump a bye on his florid cruelty, overt racism, rampant corruption, exultant indecency, the coddling of murderous despots, the alienation of true friends, the alienation of truth itself, and the disparagement of invaluable institutions and degradation of essential democratic traditions.

American author, philosopher, neuroscientist, Sam Harris: ‘The Key to Trump’s Appeal’

Throughout the past months, polls from across America have consistently showed that about 44% of voters approved of Trump’s job performance — even after he’d concealed aspects of his coronavirus infection from the public, shrugged off the larger meaning of it, and established the White House as its own superspreader environment, and cavalierly marched on.
Forty-four percent of Americans support the worst President in American history, and will blithely cast a ballot for him today, if they haven’t already.
What in God’s name have so many of our American neighbours become?

2020 U.S. election night graphic

We’ll pretty much know the answer to that question by 7:30pm PST.
Of course, there’s a good chance we won’t know who won the presidential election by later on this evening, given that more Americans than at any time in their country’s history voted by mail this year, due to the pandemic — not unlike many British Columbians last month — and as mail-in ballots take longer to count than ballots cast at polling places, and because each state has its own rules for how votes are to be counted and reported, some states will report results sooner than others … and yada, yada, yada
In fact, key battleground states have been counting mail-in and advance voting ballots for weeks, and by 7:30pm west coast time, we oughta know close to the final voting count in those states, as MSNBC political analyst Steve Kornacki, and NBC’s Meet the Press host, Chuck Todd, suggest below.

MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki on What to Expect On Election Night As Polls Start To Close

Chuck Todd: “I’ll Be Watching Florida, Georgia & North Carolina tonight” …

Ninety-five per cent of the entire vote in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina will be counted by 7:30pm west coast time tonight.
Here’s the crew from Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com on when we can expect election result returns in every state in the union. And this …

If Biden wins any one of the battleground states above, he wins the election — and Trump is not only consigned to the dustbin of history, but is staring down the prospect of spending years in jail, given that he’ll no longer be able to use Justice Department staff as his personal lawyers.

Per journalists in the New York Times: “Seldom far from Mr. Trump’s thoughts, however, is the possibility of defeat — and the potential consequences of being ejected from the White House. In unguarded moments, Mr. Trump has for weeks told advisers that he expects to face intensifying scrutiny from prosecutors if he loses. He is concerned not only about existing investigations in New York, but the potential for new federal probes as well, according to people who have spoken with him.”

Should Democratic presidential contender Joseph R. Biden not secure an undisputed win tonight across Florida, North Carolina and Georgia, and leave us having to await the vote count in Pennsylvania later in the week, in tomorrow’s VanRamblings we’ll write a bit about the College of Electors, and how this is the final deciding body which chooses the next President.
Here’s hoping Biden sweeps the board tonight, to become #USPrez46.

#USElection2020 | U.S. Long National Nightmare Will Soon Be Over

trump-cries.gif

The old tricks aren’t working. The October Surprise surprised no one. Junior says nobody’s dying. And the low whine of panic emanating from Trump, and his terrible children — Don Jr. mansplaining the pandemic, while Ivanka’s campaign “tea parties” try to convince suburban women that daddy doesn’t want you to die, just everyone else — well, it’s all coming to an end, perhaps as early as 7:30pm Pacific time Tuesday night, when all the Florida votes — including mail-in ballots — will have been counted.

Voting by young people aged 18 - 29 in the 2020 U.S. election will be exponentially greater than in 2016

The graphic above was published by MSNBC two weeks ago. For the past two plus years, American activist Emma González — the high school senior who survived the horrific February 2018 Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida — and her fellow Parkland student, David Hogg, have joined with tens of thousands of other youth across the U.S. to change gun laws, and work to vote Trump and the Republicans out of office.

In 2015, young voters by the millions across Canada cast a ballot for Justin Trudeau, in numbers previously unimagined, driving overall voter turnout across Canada from 60% in 2011 to 70% in October 2015. In the process, the overwhelming youth vote turnout gave Trudeau a majority government.
As pollsters tend to under count young voters — because, as can be seen in the 2016 MSNBC figures in the graphic above, more often than not those 18 – 29 years of age don’t get out to vote — given that in 2016 Donald Trump won the Electoral College (but not the popular vote) by the mere combined vote of 107,000 American votes in just three states: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — out of a total combined U.S. Presidential vote of 128,838,342, with 65,853,514 votes cast for Hillary Clinton, and 62,984,828 for Donald Trump — and given the unprecedented strength of the 2020 student Get Out the Vote campaign, dedicated to mobilizing the largest early vote and the largest overall student and young persons vote in American history, and given their success to date in driving the vote of young people across the U.S., in every state, by anywhere from ten to fifty times their number in 2016, and given that pollsters haven’t properly accounted for the young vote — young people are notoriously difficult to reach by pollsters — the youth voter turnout in the 2020 election will prove the difference maker, and come the late evening of Tuesday, November 3rd, it’s gonna be a rout, and not just a nailbiter, for Democrat Joe Biden.

Don’t take VanRamblings word alone, though — listen to what seasoned political operatives, strategists and journalists in Canada, and across the U.S., have to say about Tuesday’s consequential Presidential election.

Slate's Poltical Gabfest panel, David Plotz, Emily Bazelon and John Dickerson

Slate’s Political Gabfest is my favourite American political podcast — every Thursday is a joy, when the podcast is published late in the afternoon.
The podcast is hosted by the cantankerous and recently divorced American journalist, David Plotz — the former CEO of Atlas Obscura, past editor-in-chief of Slate, longtime co-host of the Slate Political Gabfest and founder of City Cast, who lives with his three children in Washington, D.C. —&#32and Gabfest co-hosts, Yale University professor and legal scholar, and writer with New York Times Magazine, Emily Bazelon, and correspondent with CBS’ 60 Minutes, the humble, good-natured, engaging and oh-so-erudite John Dickerson — who in the embedded podcast below of their latest Political Gabfest episode weigh in on the U.S. election, in an informed, easy-to-listen-to and accessible manner that will give you a greater insight into what is likely to occur tomorrow night than you’ll hear anywhere else.

The members of The Herle Burly podcast — left-of-centre federal and provincial Liberal Party strategists, David Herle and Scott Reid, and former four-time Stephen Harper Conservative party campaign manager and right-of-centre political strategist (a supporter and advisor to U.S. President, Donald Trump) — also weigh in on the November 3rd, 2020 U.S. election.

The PBS Newshour’s regular Friday political panel, moderated by Newshour anchor Judy Woodruff, the panelists, moderate Republican, sober New York Times columnist and acknowledged Trump-disparager, David Brooks, and 83-year-old, left-of-centre American political columnist and commentator, Mark Shields, together discuss tomorrow’s inductive 2020 U.S. election.

Now, it would hardly be fair if VanRamblings didn’t allow you to hear from FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, the most trusted aggregate pollster in the United States. Up until 2008, Silver was a statistical sports analyst, whose track record predicting team and tournament wins garnered him an almost startling following among bookies, bettors, and those in the sports field.
As a lark, in 2008 Nate Silver decided to apply his statistical methodology to the U.S. election, both the Presidential and the congressional elections. Long story short, come election night, Tuesday, November 4th, Nate Silver’s prediction that Barack Obama would become the next president — having broken down the predicted vote in every county, in ever state across the U.S., and predicting with 100% accuracy, transformed Silver from a full-time sports analyst (an activity in which he and his colleagues on fivethirtyeight are still engaged) — and transformed him into the most trusted pollster in the United States. Here’s a bit of Silver on the election.


Nate Silver's aggregate polling website fivethirtyeight predicts an 89% chance Biden wins the U.S. Presidential election

Just click on the graphic above to be taken to fivethirtyeight’s 2020 election forecast


Today, we’ll leave you with this Joe Biden campaign ad, on decency

Music Sundays | Sorrowfulness | Burt Bacharach & Elvis Costello

Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharch's heartbreaking 1998 collaboration, Painted From Memory.jpg

The perfectly matched, heartbreaking, heavenly collaboration between Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach, Painted from Memory, the pop-music masterpiece, was released on the 29th of September 1998 — slightly old-fashioned, yet insistently clear and capable of flooding the heart with all the awful beauty of love’s highs and lows … mostly lows … “In the darkest place,” it all begins, “I know that is where you’ll find me” — remains to this day one of my favourite albums ever, one I go back to again and again.

The people we meet on the album who move through these 12 perfect pop songs aren’t teenagers tasting first-love tears.
They’re grownups who know what they’ve done to themselves, their hearts broken, who are now enveloped in a realm we’ve all visited from time to time, a dimension where time ticks away just a bit more slowly and the world passes by at a remove. They are displaced and disconnected, seen only in fine silver frames, distant cities or watching from afar. They live in empty houses, waiting for sleep to come to take them somewhere else, and all this they do to music meticulously crafted by two experts of the form.

Neither producer Burt Bacharach nor composer Elvis Costello is a stranger to collaboration, but together they are a singular pairing, as Costello brings discipline and edge to Bacharach’s lush melodic outpourings, while Bacharach returns the favour by setting Costello’s exacting progressions and taut wordplay in soundscapes that are both intricate and silky smooth.
Take, as a spectacular example, the gorgeous ballad What’s Her Name Today?, a Costellian pondering on the ruin brought about by those in pain that’s not so much backed by Bacharach’s purposeful grand piano as admonished — you’re a fool it declares, before sweeping up the whole affair into a whirlwind of strings and human wreckage.

Other times, they’re more sympathetic, deploying Bacharach’s famous mellow trumpet to harmonize with the vocals on the tricky tale of infidelity Toledo, or winking at the conceit of The Sweetest Punch by threading the tune with chimes, a lovely instrument you have to hit, with mallets.

In the song above, the horns say a little prayer, below … the bells chime.

The sum of this artistic one + one is more than strictly musical. By coming together when they did, each man underwent a kind of recalibration whereby the sheen of kitsch acquired by Bacharach’s body of work since his ’60s heyday was stripped away, and Costello, then in his mid-40s, shed the last lingering remnants of his image as an angry young man.
In turn, Painted from Memory itself became a bridge, connecting classic works of love and loss — think Frank Sinatra’s ninth studio release, 1955’s concept album, In the Wee Small Hours — to the wave of pop-jazz new schoolers (Norah Jones, Michael Bublé) that followed closely in its wake.

Costello and Bacharach know that opening yourself up to the sentimental side of life exposes you to its cruelties as well; it takes courage, so Painted from Memory concludes with a plea for fortitude and grace.
God Give Me Strength — which they wrote over the phone lines — is the first of the pair’s dual efforts and it remains one of the best, an achingly gorgeous last-stand waltz through the end stages of grief. “That song is sung out,” it concedes, “this bell is rung out.” Except that it isn’t, because there’s something in all of us, the part Painted from Memory renders so well, that will always wait for the bell to ring. That damned, beautiful bell.