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

November 3, 2020PoliticsRaymond Tomlin

VanRamblings will update the site tomorrow afternoon, with updated election results

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

The 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.”

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.

9pm PST | U.S. Election Night Update

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

November 2, 2020News, PoliticsRaymond Tomlin

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.

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 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

November 1, 2020Music, Pop Culture, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

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.

Stories of a Life | The Ties That Bind Daughters and Fathers

October 31, 2020fixin to die rag, Jude and Megan, Stories of a LifeRaymond Tomlin

When Megan Jessica Tomlin was born on a Saturday night, March 26th, 1977, at Burnaby General Hospital at 10:26pm, given that she was a breach birth, the hospital room was filled with a harried collection of nurses and doctors & an anesthesiologist who’d been called to assist with the birth.
As a medicated Cathy lay peaceful, laying stock still on her white-sheeted hospital bed — given that she was infused with anaesthetic drugs to aid in the birth, to keep her sedated for what turned out to be her second, very difficult birth — upon delivery, a nurse gathered my new daughter, Megan, and brought her over to me, as I stood to Cathy’s left, just behind where her head lay, and handed my hushed newborn daughter into my arms.
For the 10 minutes that followed, a seeming lifetime of remembrance and love, Megan her eyes all blue peered directly into my eyes and deep into my soul, and for those few brief moments I into hers, as my daughter imprinted on me as the father who would become in her early years, and in succeeding years through to her late teens, the single most transformative person in her life, a father she trusted & loved with all her generous heart.
In the weeks that followed Megan’s birth, the wheels began to fall of the bus that was my marriage to Cathy, as Cathy seemed to lose herself, quitting her job at the Ministry of Human Resources office, drinking, staying out all night long, and otherwise engaging in self-destructive behaviour.
Why?

Given my position as the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation Learning and Working Conditions Chair for the Interior, and my long years of work previous with the Federation, and the great relationship I’d developed with Linda Shuto — working with her to form the first Status of Women office within an NGO anywhere on the continent — as well as BCTF President Jim McFarlane and, more especially with BCTF VP Don Walmsley, as you might well expect from a Federation comprised of mainly older members, Executive plans were afoot for Federation generational leadership change — and I targeted as the person who would become a future BCTF President.
Don Walmsley visited Cathy and me multiple times throughout 1977, in our newly acquired Interior home, to advise the both of us that plans were in process to, at the spring BCTF AGM in 1978, run me as a second vice-president of the Federation, with an eye to soon becoming BCTF President.
Here’s how the Federation saw it, Don explaining to the both of us: my organizing bona fides in the Interior had gained provincial attention, Cathy and I were a young couple “from the Interior” (the left on the Federation liked the idea of running candidates from rural areas), Cathy was a professional, was sophisticated and presented well, we had two children — we were, as far as the Federation was concerned, “the perfect couple”.
Here’s what Don Walmsley told Cathy and I …

“Next year, Raymond, we’ll run you for 2nd VP. Cathy, you can run as a Board of Education COPE trustee candidate for Vancouver School Board. Raymond, we’ll find you a job in Vancouver, find you a house, and Cathy we’ll make sure you’re employed, as well, finding you a job in the city similar to what you’re doing up here. Next year (1978), once you’re on the Executive, Raymond, and have moved down to the city, you’ll be closer to the Federation offices. In 1979, we’ll run you for 1st VP, and depending on how the election goes for President of the Federation, if our candidate loses, we’ll run you for President in 1980. If our candidate wins, and serves a three year term, we’ll run you for President in 1983.”

Sounded good to me — and not so good to Cathy, as elucidated above.
Once Don had left our home, Cathy told me that she had no intention of having the next 20 years of her life being planned by the teachers’ federation, nor was she enamoured of the idea of living in my shadow.
Understandable.
You know how when you’re watching an awards show on TV, and the winner is (almost invariably) a man, the first person he thanks, whom he gushes over, is his wife, saying ardently, “I couldn’t have done it without her — she’s been my rock, and has stood by my side throughout the entire journey that has led to tonight. I will love you for always, my beloved.”
Believe me when I write: Cathy was having none of that arrant palaver.

Long story short, by early 1978, I had been awarded custody of both Jude and Megan, Cathy was off gallivanting around the globe with a drinking & carousing rock ‘n roll band — and I was left to raise two infant children.
From the outset, Megan was a bright and engaged child, far ahead of her milestone maturational markers — walking at 9 months, speaking at age 1, reading at 18 months — and by the time she was two years of age, as in control of her environment as any 11-year-old child of my acquaintance.
Where Jude — 21 months Megan’s senior — wanted to be out and about all the time, one of the friendliest, most gregarious and social children you’d ever want to meet, Megan was quiet, reserved, pensive and thoughtful, as big a “daddy’s girl” as could possibly be imagined, by my side throughout the day, and separated from me only when she was in daycare, or asleep.
As Cathy and I often remarked to one another as Megan was growing up, “Whose child is this, anyway? Megan certainly can’t be ours — she’s just so much brighter & more capable than either of us, or both of us combined.”
For me, there has never been anyone to whom I have been closer, who has understood me and “had my number”, with whom my relationship has proved more loving & honest than has long been the case with Megan & I.

We acknowledge — as if we have known each other across many lifetimes — that we have found one another on this Earth, in this lifetime, and as I josh Megan by referring to her as her very own diety, in this life the two of us take succour in the knowledge that we love one another, know one another, that as we live lives that are separate, Megan now married with children, and me in my west side home spending hours each day writing stories just like this, that as we run across one another from time to time, as we often do in my Kitsilano neighbourhood, that the first words each of us will utter will be, “I love you” — as we set about to continue our day.

</ br>The knowing glance tells you everything you need to know about fathers & daughters