Dispatches From Bevinstan

As I said last night, the KY Democrats are now gone, wiped out in the General Assembly.  There is nothing standing between Bevin and everything he wants, and with a Trump administration, well, it's going to get bad here starting fast.  And he wants everyone to know that he his enemies are the first to end up under the bus.

On the defeat of House Speaker Greg Stumbo:

"The best news that came out of any individual district, for sure ... 38 years I believe Greg has been here, a career politician. He hasn't given a rip about the people in his district for a long time. He hasn't even lived there for better than a decade ... I say, 'Good riddance.' I mean he will not be missed one bit. Kentucky will be better for his absence." (From WVHU Radio.)

On the Environmental Protection Agency:

"Donald Trump has voiced his support for the coal industry ... Nothing would make me happier than to see his administration say, 'You know what? We're going to gut the EPA.' The EPA is not needed at the federal level ... There's not one state in America that wants dirty water and dirty air for its people. Not one. We've got the ability to implement, we're already the ones that enforce all the action at the state level. Let us continue to do what we are doing and what we can do well without the interference, without the un-elected bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., passing down edicts ..." (From WVHU Radio.) 

On Obamacare:

"Obamacare is a disaster. It has been from the time it was rammed down our throats by Democrats –100 percent of the people supporting it were Democrats. Well, guess what? The American people sent a powerful message last night. We have the presidency. We have the U.S. Senate. We have the U.S. Congress. We have states like ours and governors like myself that are saying enough of this. We're rejecting it. We want it gone. It's going to be gone." (From WVLC Radio.)

On Kentucky's direction:

"We will start to go in a different direction where able-bodied working age men and women are going to be expected to go to work. They're not going to get things for nothing in the state of Kentucky. Where deadbeat dads are not going to be welcome in this state – they are going to be held to account to take care of their children. Where people are going to (have) incentive to be, you know, traditional families with a mother and a father raising their children. Where we're going to start to reward the types of things that we know the cornerstone of a good, civilized society and a successful society are based on. We're going to return to the true Judeo-Christian principles that this nation was founded on. We're not going to be apologetic for the values that made this state and this nation great." (From WVLC Radio.)

I now live in a Christian theocratic state, dedicated to getting rid of people like myself, in a Christian theocratic country, dedicated to getting rid of people like myself.

Gonna be good times.

Welcome to Bevinstan.

So What The Hell Happened?

Well, to keep it simple, a whole lot of Americans showed up at the polls yesterday and voted, and it was very much "Dewey Defeats Truman" as all the pollsters got 2016 as wrong as Kentucky pollsters got 2015's rise of Matt Bevin wrong.

All the dazzling technology, the big data and the sophisticated modeling that American newsrooms bring to the fundamentally human endeavor of presidential politics could not save American journalism from yet again being behind the story, behind the rest of the country.

The news media by and large missed what was happening all around it, and it was the story of a lifetime. The numbers weren’t just a poor guide for election night — they were an off-ramp away from what was actually happening.

No one predicted a night like this — that Donald J. Trump would pull off a stunning upset over Hillary Clinton and win the presidency.

The misfire on Tuesday night was about a lot more than a failure in polling. It was a failure to capture the boiling anger of a large portion of the American electorate that feels left behind by a selective recovery, betrayed by trade deals that they see as threats to their jobs and disrespected by establishment Washington, Wall Street and the mainstream media.

Journalists didn’t question the polling data when it confirmed their gut feeling that Mr. Trump could never in a million years pull it off. They portrayed Trump supporters who still believed he had a shot as being out of touch with reality. In the end, it was the other way around.

It was just a few months ago that so much of the European media failed to foresee the vote in Britain to leave the European Union. Election 2016, thy name is Brexit.

Election Day had been preceded by more than a month of declarations that the race was close but essentially over. And that assessment held even after the late-October news that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was reviewing a new batch of emails related to Mrs. Clinton’s private server.

Mrs. Clinton’s victory would be “substantial but not overwhelming,” The Huffington Post had reported, after assuring its readers that “she’s got this.” That more or less comported with The New York Times’s Upshot projection early Tuesday evening that Mrs. Clinton was an 84 percent favorite to win the presidency.

And they were wrong. The exit polls tell the tale.  Despite the percentage of white voters dropping to 70% of the electorate, below 2012's 72%, white voters pulled the lever for Trump by big margins.



Clinton's purported lead among college-educated whites evaporated 45-49% in favor of Trump, and among white voters without a degree, Clinton was destroyed 28-67%.  She actually did have a slight lead among white women with degrees, 51-45%, but white men with degrees voted for Trump by a whopping 15 points, 39-54% in favor of The Donald.

But here's the other knife that Clinton didn't see coming:



Clinton *lost* white Millennials by five points, and Gen Xers by 18.  Overall, Clinton did win Millennials 55-37%, but in 2012, Obama won them 67-30%.

Here's the thing: Clinton will end up winning the popular vote by millions, Trump might not actually get even to McCain's 60 million.  But the electoral college means that Clinton ran up the score in states like California, Texas, Georgia and New York when she needed to run it up in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Florida.

Most of all where Dems got "Nadered" in Florida in 2000, the third party vote for Johnson and Stein in Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Michigan and Wisconsin was higher than Trump's margin of victory in any of those states.

That was the ball game.

Now comes the consequences.

StupidiNews!

• With a stunning victory and record turnout that shattered Clinton's Midwest "firewall" states, Donald J. Trump is now President-Elect of the United States of America.
• Republicans will also keep control of the US Senate as Democrats came up short but Illinois Democrat Tammy Duckworth did win her race unseating Republican Mark Kirk.
• California became the largest state to legalize recreational use of marijuana along with Massachusetts, at least one-fifth of Americans now live in states where pot is legal.
• Dow futures were down as much as 1000 points before reality set in early Wednesday as world markets were roiled by the Trump upset.
• President-elect Trump's victory leaves the state of US cybersecurity in doubt other than promising an immediate review of America's internet structure.

Election Day Open Thread

Polls close here in Kentucky starting at 6 PM and in the Central time zone half of the state at 7 PM, so we'll place all state calls here starting then.

I'll update as we go.

[9 PM update]  Florida is razor close, as is Ohio and NC.  Still no surprises.  In the Senate races, Tammy Duckworth wins in IL, but Evan F'ckin Bayh was smoked in Indiana.

Locally, Kentucky Democrats have been annihilated.  This state is now under one-party GOP rule until further notice. KY GOP needed to pick up 4 seats, they might end up with a dozen plus.  Matt Bevin will be able to pass anything he wants come 2017, and then this state will feel the pain.  Kansas budget plus an NC bathroom bill plus the closing of the state's last abortion provider?  A very real possibility.

[10 PM update] Ohio officially called for Trump, Virginia called for Clinton.  Iowa, Nevada, and Colorado too close to call.  Turnout massive but that's throwing off all the state call models.

[11 PM update] NC and Florida called for Trump.  CO called for Clinton. This is where things start getting dicey.  MI, WI, PA, NH, GA still too close to call.  Clinton needs MI, WI, NV and PA now.  Any one of those go to Trump, it's all but over.

[12 AM update] Georgia and Iowa go to Trump.  FOX News has called Wisconsin for Trump, but others have not. PA, NH, MI, AZ, NV still not called yet.  Without Wisconsin...I don't think she can win.

[1 AM update]  Wisconsin and Pennsylvania all but called for Trump the way NC and Florida were earlier tonight.   It's just about over barring some serious last-minute urban voting.

[1:45 final update] And AP calls PA for Trump. I was wrong like everyone.

It's over barring a miracle involving Clinton winning everything else.   Clinton will probably win the popular vote.

But here there be dragons.

Tomorrow, we fight them.

A Good Day For Nutjobs

No matter who wins, the mouth-breathing doomsday prepper crowd is getting ready for that American Armageddon starting tomorrow, and spending an awful lot of money on their paranoia to boot.  Hey, they're good for the economy, right?

As Lucas Cameron sees it, there’s no way this election can end well. “Trump will win the popular vote by a landslide, and then the Electoral College will give it to Clinton,” he told me as his wife, Nikki, drove us through the rolling mountains of northeast Tennessee. Their home-schooled 12-year-old son, Jonathon, sat in the back, sipping on a McDonald’s drink, placidly gazing out the window as his father laid out some fairly terrifying scenarios. “By spring, we’ll be in a proxy war with Russia and going at it hard with Iran,” Lucas said. Things don’t look much better if Trump, his preferred candidate, wins. “If Trump is elected, Black Lives Matters goes crazy,” he says. “And Obama won’t let him take office. He’ll declare martial law so he can stay another four years.” If he does, and Trump takes office, “a recession is guaranteed.” 

But luckily, Lucas and Nikki have been preparing for years—for nuclear war, for social unrest, for economic meltdown, and all kind of biblically prophesied turmoil. A completely insane election is just one more possibility for how it all ends, and people like them—so-called preppers, who were once known as survivalists—are ready. The Camerons have bought a plot of a land in a remote stretch of Tennessee, which I wasn’t allowed to see for fear of compromising the secrecy of its location. They are almost done building a tiny house—144 square feet, to be exact—which they’ll put on the property and plant creeping vines and tall bushes to hide it from prying (government) eyes. It’ll have solar panels on its roof and there will be wind turbines on the property, which means they won’t need to rely on the electric grid. And, of course, they’ve stocked up on weapons and ammunition.

He and Nikki run a business, Off Grid Contracting, to help others prepare for any modernity-ending eventuality, and what they’ve found is that the 2016 election has been a massive boost. “I’ve just never seen as many people prepping as there are now,” Lucas said. His friend Kevin O’Brien, a local realtor who specializes in helping people find plots of land to go off-grid, says, “My phone has been ringing off the hook.” I asked them to show me, using their forearms to mimic the slope of a graph, how demand has changed. Instead, both men imitated a rocket ship taking off. 

“People are getting ready,” Kevin said. “The can has been kicked down the road so many times. It’s a mathematical probability that the dollar will collapse.” 

While the rest of the country expects—or at least hopes—the election will put a merciful end to the chaos of campaign season, the Camerons are among the many Americans who think it will only get worse. The end of the campaign, many in this community believe, is only the beginning: The really bad stuff will begin the day after the election. “I’ll be honest with ya, I think some things are going to go down,” Lucas told me. 

“Nobody takes Obama seriously,” he said, “but the two people who are running for office—a lot of people are scared that he’ll hit the nuclear button without even taking a breath, and that she’s so wicked that I won’t be surprised if she opens the floodgates of ISIS to come in and kill all Americans.” Though most of his clients, like him, support Trump, he says, “Most all of them expect there will be riots in either case.”

In a way these clowns are proof of the oldest of adages about fools, money and parting.  On the other hand, how much paranoia and fear have these folks been fed to make them this way, and to rope their families, businesses and entire lives into this movement?

On the gripping hand, these guys are mostly Trump supporting "sovereign citizen" Bundy Ranch militia-types anyway, so if anything I'd be keeping a careful law enforcement eye on them.  They fit the profile, as the saying goes.

StupidiNews, Election Day Edition!

• It's Election Day.  Go vote.

Last Call For The Last Map

Here's my final map prediction for tomorrow:

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

323-215 to Secretary Clinton, Trump takes Iowa and Ohio, but loses all the other swing states: FL, OH, NC, PA, VA, CO, NH and NV.

326-212 if you switch Ohio and NC.  I would be pleasantly surprised if the Buckeye State didn't disappoint me.  It's possible Florida could go either way too but I have to hang my hat on something, and that's going to be the huge Latino early voter turnout in FL and NV.

Trump has no viable path to 270 if he loses both, he'd have to run the table on all the other swing states I named except for New Hampshire, and he's just not going to break the Virgnia/Colorado/Pennsylvania Clinton firewall and still lose Florida.  If he does, he wins outright and will win. Bigly, even.

Still, sticking with the above map, which is Obama 2012 minus OH and IA, but plus NC.

What about the Senate?

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

I think Dems are going to get pickups in PA, WI, and IL for sure and defend Harry Reid's seat in NV, meaning they have to get at least one win in Missouri, Indiana, NC or NH. I think they'll get all but NH in this scenario, so 52-48 Dems.

Please vote tomorrow if you have not voted already.

The Big Winner Tomorrow Is...

...Angry Racist White Guys, according to the NY Times.  Gosh, when has America somehow not belonged to Angry Racist White Guys?

“I never thought I’d see the day where illegal immigration was included in a presidential candidate’s top three issues,” Mr. Gilchrist, a supporter of Donald J. Trump, said. “For me personally, my mission has been accomplished.” 

While Mr. Trump seems likely to lose the election, many of his most extreme supporters say they believe that they have already won. Whether the subject is immigration, military intervention, the news media or federal government corruption — and even the entire democratic process — their views, long thought to be well outside the political mainstream, have been given a voice inside it. And that voice belongs to the presidential nominee of a major political party. 

Of course, Mr. Trump’s populist candidacy has energized ordinary Americans across the country who previously felt alienated from the political system, but it has also emboldened extremist groups that say he has validated their agendas. 

It is unclear how much legitimacy these organizations can realistically expect to gain, given the extreme nature of their views to most Americans. But if they are able to maintain even a measure of influence on the right after the election, this could be Mr. Trump’s most enduring legacy. 

“Trump has shown that our message is healthy, normal and organic — and millions of Americans agree with us,” said Matthew M. Heimbach, a co-founder of the Traditionalist Youth Network, a white nationalist group that claims to support the interests of working-class whites. It also advocates the separation of the races. 

Whatever happens on Nov. 8, Mr. Trump’s candidacy has brought groups like Mr. Heimbach’s out of the shadows, and they say they have no intention of returning. 

“For racists in this country, this campaign has been a complete affirmation of their fears, worries, dreams and hopes,” said Ryan Lenz, the editor of the Hatewatch blog at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks such groups from its headquarters in Montgomery, Ala. “Most things they believe have been legitimized, or have been given the stamp of approval, by mainstream American politics to the point now where it’s no longer shameful to be a racist.”

And that ladies and gentlemen, is the true legacy of Trump and the GOP in 2016: Making Racism Acceptable Again.  Acceptable enough that 60 million people are going to vote for the guy tomorrow, minimum.

Not that it ever wasn't acceptable, mind you.  But Obama winning made them tired of covering for it, and that's why Trump won the primaries.

Pretty awesome, huh.

Mad Don: The Road Warrior

Remember the joke that anti-government Libertarians sure love to use public highways to drive to those rallies?  And you know, it gets even funnier because Libertarians have zero sense of humor and always respond with "Well, maybe if we had more toll roads and bridges, at least they would be paid for." Sure, that would essentially be a massive, regressive tax on the poorest Americans especially in places without public transportation, but it's not like anyone's actually going to do that to the federal highway system, right?

So do we want to take a guess at what Donald Trump's big infrastructure plan is?

Trump, as you might have noticed during this long, emotionally torturous campaign, likes to wax poetic about America's collapsing bridges and “third-world” airports, and he has vowed to fix up the country by doubling Hillary Clinton's proposed spending on infrastructure. At the same time, he’s also promised to pass gargantuan tax cuts while limiting the budget deficit.

This has all raised an obvious question: How, exactly, does America’s angriest clementine plan to pay for all of this building? I mean, Mexico isn't going to cover the wall and repairs to I-95, is it?

Thankfully, we now have an answer from two of Trump's chief economic advisers. In a report from Oct. 27, University of California–Irvine professor Peter Navarro and private equity honcho Wilbur Ross outlined how the candidate would transform about $167 billion of federal tax credits into $1 trillion of infrastructure spending. Factor in the effects of economic growth, they argued, and the cost to taxpayers would amount to zero, zilch, nada. Or, as they put it, the whole thing would be “budget neutral.”

Of course, it‘s not really free. Americans would just end up paying for the construction a bit later on.

Under Trump's plan—at least as it's written (more on that in a minute)—the federal government would offer tax credits to private investors interested in funding large infrastructure projects, who would put down some of their own money up front, then borrow the rest on the private bond markets. They would eventually earn their profits on the back end from usage fees, such as highway and bridge tolls (if they built a highway or bridge) or higher water rates (if they fixed up some water mains). So instead of paying for their new roads at tax time, Americans would pay for them during their daily commute. And of course, all these private developers would earn a nice return at the end of the day.

One of the big fights here in Cincinnati is over the Brent Spence bridge, which carries I-71/75 traffic across the Ohio River and is one of the busiest trucking bridges in the country.  Republicans really, really want to turn it into a private toll bridge because it would be a massive profit generator for whoever got the bid. Voters really, really want to throw out whoever votes for such a plan in either northern Kentucky or southwest Ohio.

Trump vowed to fix the bridge with this plan on Friday at his rally in Ohio.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump rallied in Clinton County Friday, announcing he'd replace the Brent Spence Bridge if he is elected.

Trump spoke at 4:30 p.m. Friday at Airborne Airpark, vowing to bring jobs back to America, rebuild inner cities and to keep the country safe from terrorism.

“We’re going to fix and invest in our inner cities, we’re going to bring jobs back to the inner cities,” Trump said.

Trump did not announce how he planned to replace the Brent Spence or what he would do to cover those costs.

Of course not.  Those plans come later, after you've already fallen for the scam.

StupidiNews!

• Former US Attorney General Janet Reno has died at the age of 78, she was the nation's first female top cop, serving 8 years under Bill Clinton.
• FBI Director James Comey says emails discovered on former Congressman Anthony Weiner's laptop do not contain new information and that the FBI is still not recommending prosecution.
• UK PM Theresa May says that in light of last week's British High Court ruling requiring Parliament to approve leaving the EU, legislation is now being drafted to do just that.
• China has officially announced a new Finance Minister, barred two Hong Kong activists from seeking office, and a new "Great Firewall of China" cybersecurity law all in one day.
• Environmental officials are gathering in Marrakesh as a follow-up to last year's UN Paris climate accords, but a new UN report finds the world is essentially out of time to start action.

Last Call For Echoes Of A Dark Past

Trump's "closing argument" ad out today is awful, and as Josh Marshall notes, it's a direct appeal to America's anti-Semites to vote for Trump.

From a technical and thematic perspective it's a well made ad. It's also packed with anti-Semitic dog whistles, anti-Semitic tropes and anti-Semitic vocabulary. I'm not even sure whether it makes sense to call them dog whistles. The four readily identifiable American bad guys in the ad are Hillary Clinton, George Soros (Jewish financier), Janet Yellen (Jewish Fed Chair) and Lloyd Blankfein (Jewish Goldman Sachs CEO).

The Trump narration immediately preceding Soros and Yellin proceeds as follows: "The establishment has trillions of dollars at stake in this election. For those who control the levers of power in Washington [start Soros] and for the global [start Yellen] special interests [stop Yellen]. They partner with these people [start Clinton] who don't have your good in mind."

For Blankfein: "It's a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the [start Blankein] pockets of a handful of large corporations [stop Blankfein] and political entities."

These are standard anti-Semitic themes and storylines, using established anti-Semitic vocabulary lined up with high profile Jews as the only Americans other than Clinton who are apparently relevant to the story. As you can see by my transcription, the Jews come up to punctuate specific key phrases. Soros: "those who control the levers of power in Washington"; Yellen "global special interests"; Blankfein "put money into the pockets of handful of large corporations."

This is an anti-Semitic ad every bit as much as the infamous Jesse Helms 'white hands' ad or the Willie Horton ad were anti-African-American racist ads. Which is to say, really anti-Semitic. You could even argue that it's more so, given certain linguistic similarities with anti-Semitic propaganda from the 1930s. But it's not a contest. This is an ad intended to appeal to anti-Semites and spread anti-Semitic ideas. That's the only standard that really matters.

Nobody, I repeat, nobody should be at all surprised by this.  This is who Trump is, this is who his supporters are, and always have been.

This is intentional and by design. It is no accident.

Trump has electrified anti-Semites and racist groups across the country. His own campaign has repeatedly found itself speaking to anti-Semites, tweeting their anti-Semitic memes, retweeting anti-Semites. His campaign manager, Steven Bannon, is an anti-Semite. The Breitbart News site he ran and will continue running after the campaign has become increasingly open in the last year with anti-Semitic attacks and politics.

Beyond that, this shouldn't surprise us for a broader reason. Authoritarian, xenophobic political movements, which the Trump campaign unquestionably is, are driven by tribalism and 'us vs them' exclusion of outsiders. This may begin with other groups - Mexican immigrants, African-Americans, Muslims. It almost always comes around to Jews.

You can add women and LGBTQ Americans to that list too.  We have a white nationalist running for president, and he's going to get 40% of the vote minimum.

Just another reminder that Wednesday morning these assholes are still going to be here.

The Late, Great, Early Voting Movement

In states that are controlled by Republicans in 2017, I fully expect to see efforts to completely end early voting altogether, and Nevada is going to be the reason why.

Michael McDonald, the chair of the Nevada Republican Party, complained at a rally on Saturday that “certain people” had the opportunity to vote. According to CNN, McDonald “was referring to a polling location in Clark County, which is 30% Hispanic and the county in which Las Vegas is located.”

Video of McDonald’s remarks were captured by Correct the Record, a group which supports Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy.

In the video, McDonald complains that “in Clark County, they kept a poll open ’til 10 o’clock at night so a certain group could vote,” even though “the polls are supposed to close at 7.” It is, indeed, true that polling places were kept open past the stated 7pm closing time, but not for the nefarious reason that McDonald suggests.

It is a standard practice during elections to allow anyone who was in line prior to closing time to cast a ballot, so that no one is disenfranchised because they failed to anticipate their neighbors’ interest in the election. In Nevada, Latino turnout is unusually high — an ominous sign for Republican candidate Donald Trump, who has campaigned on his overt racism towards people of Mexican descent. This has led to long lines at some polling places with large numbers of Latino voters.

On Friday night, for example, hundreds of voters were still in line at 9pm at a Mexican grocery store which served as a polling place in Las Vegas. So long as these voters took their spot in line before 7pm, however, they were allowed to vote.

Mr. Trump, for his part, attributed the later closing times to some kind of conspiracy during a rally in Reno. “It’s being reported that certain key Democratic polling locations in Clark County,” the Republican candidate claimed, “were kept for hours and hour beyond closing time to bus and bring and [SIC] Democratic voters in.”

Whether Clinton wins Nevada on Tuesday (and I think she'll win handily) expect Republicans to stop with the subtle dog whistles and get out the Trump bullhorns starting Wednesday to equate early voting with voting fraud.  Hell, don't be surprised by a push for federal legislation to set "common sense national voting standards" either.  National voter ID/end early voting laws will be the new rallying point in 2018 midterms.

Watch. When it becomes clear that Republicans were done in for the third presidential election in a row by early voting, they will seek to eliminate it completely as "saving an undue burden on taxpayers", especially when it becomes clear that the Latino voters the GOP were courting have utterly turned against them.

It will be time to punish Clinton supporters, just as the last eight years have been a concerted GOP effort to punish Obama supporters.

Spooked A Man In Reno Just To See Him Flee

Things got ugly at a Trump rally last night in Nevada as somebody yelled "He's got a gun" in the crowd, a fist fight broke out, and Donald Trump was rushed off stage all over a man with a "Republicans against Trump" sign.

During Trump's speech, scenes of chaos broke out near the front of the stage after a scuffle involving a protester, when an unidentified individual yelled "gun," the Secret Service said in a statement.

A man was escorted out of the crowd by agents, but, "upon a thorough search of the subject and the surrounding area, no weapon was found," the Secret Service said. "A thorough investigation is ongoing at this time by the U.S. Secret Service and the Reno Police Department."

Two Nevada Republican sources who spoke with multiple attendees who witnessed the incident at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center said a scuffle broke out when a man appeared to raise a sign in protest of Trump.

Moments before, the Republican presidential nominee had predicted he would have “tremendous” support from Hispanic voters on Election Day when he spotted the protester.

“We have one of those guys from the Hillary Clinton campaign,” Trump said. “How much are you being paid? $1500? Out. Take him out,” Trump continued, as the crowed roared.

Less than 30 seconds later, Trump was stopped mid-sentence when two Secret Service agents rushed him off stage to safety behind a curtain. An announcer alerted the crowd that Trump would return soon.

The Republican nominee appeared unharmed back on stage several minutes later, finishing his speech.

"Nobody said it was going to be easy for us, but we will never be stopped. I wanna thank the Secret Service. They don't get enough credit. They're amazing. So let's get back," Trump said on his return to the stage.

More than anyone I respect the US Secret Service for keeping President Obama safe for these last eight years, a Herculean task.  Yes, they've had problems but they've done the job.  Having said that, the Donald Trump fear and paranoia playbook has real consequences, and we saw that last night.

We have to vote on Tuesday.  We have to stop this madness, and then continue to fight against it starting Wednesday morning.

Sunday Long Read: Coming (Back) To America

New York Times Magazine writer Jim Yardley has spent more than a dozen years as a foreign correspondent and editor, living in and covering Beijing, New Delhi, and Rome.  This summer he came back to the United States to cover the 2016 election as one of America's wayward sons, a man who decidedly no longer recognized the country or the people he left more than a decade ago.

I had forgotten how big the people are, how big the cars are, how much fried food can be stacked onto a single plate. Everything seemed larger than I remembered, even the night sky. Driving along the 610 Loop in Houston, I saw a cigar shop named SERIOUS CIGARS that was easily triple the size of my grocery in Rome.

“This country is huge,” Tomás said one day. “It is like 50 countries all together.”

Tomás, a Chilean, has traveled the world, but this was his first long tour across the United States. On seeing one rural road sign, he asked what it meant to “adopt a highway.” Another day, another road sign: “Hitchhikers May Be Escaping Inmates.” Tomás was startled by how thoroughly so many American cities emptied out at night. In Colorado Springs, we attended a rodeo where the announcer made a long soliloquy praising our military for defending our freedom at home. Tomás had embedded many times with American forces in Afghanistan. He liked the soldiers, but he didn’t understand how sending troops to other countries, particularly Iraq, kept Americans free at home.

Before the rodeo, I met two ranchers, Rob Alexander and Bill Craig. The air smelled faintly of horse manure as we sat on a plastic cooler drinking Coors. Alexander, 53, explained that the rodeo was a fund-raiser for ranch hands, who often lacked health insurance or a safety net to help out in emergencies. Ranching families had taken a hit in the past two decades, in part because trade agreements led to the consolidation of many cattle operations and an increase in imported beef from South America. Craig, 35, is a fourth-generation rancher, but he said land is now so expensive and profit so meager that he could never afford to start a ranch from scratch today. They talked like men whose lifestyles and values were endangered.

“Something is wrong,” Craig said. “Watch the TV. The moral compass is so far out of whack in our country right now.”

At the University of Texas at Austin, I met Lisa Moore, a professor of English and women’s studies who is one of three plaintiffs suing to overturn a new state law allowing students to carry concealed handguns on campus. Born in Canada but a resident of Texas for 27 years, Moore is a naturalized American citizen who is still a bit baffled by her new country. “That is the weirdness of the United States to me: Everybody is always talking about their rights,” she said, while identity in Canada derives from the idea of the social compact.

Moore is a gay, married mother of two children who teaches courses on L.G.B.T. literature. “Campus carry” infringes on free speech, she argues, by inhibiting her ability to provide a safe learning environment. What if a student becomes enraged by the subject matter and pulls out a Glock?

American gun manufacturers produced 3.3 million guns the year I left for China, according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. By 2014, the number was nine million (supplemented by 3.6 million guns imported into the country). According to some recent estimates, there are now roughly as many guns as people in the United States, maybe even more. To many foreigners, the American infatuation with guns is an inexplicable, if defining, national trait. On a taxi ride in Beijing once, the driver, upon discovering I was American, shaped his hand like a pistol and began shooting imaginary bullets.

At a firing range outside Austin, I met six guys shooting semiautomatic rifles. Several of them worked for Defense Distributed, the open-source organization in Austin that came up with a plastic handgun whose design can be downloaded from the web and produced with a 3-D printer. The State Department ordered the company to remove the design code, but the company is challenging that order in court. For Benjamin Denio, at the time a 36-year-old who worked in desktop support and did product testing at Defense Distributed, being able to produce your own plastic gun is a safeguard against the tyranny of the state. “The term I would use to describe the level of vitriol in the country,” Denio said, “is that it is the ‘cold civil war.’ ”

A "cold civil war" seems about right.  America is broken, having been largely rendered ungovernable and unmanageable by political forces on the right that decided an America they could no longer fully control was going to slowly burn to the ground instead.  History says we've gotten repeatedly lucky to avoid the fascist moment, although even a cursory glance at our history shows many such moments and systems that took decades and centuries to be dismantled, and some that very much remain.

We're at one of those nexus points now, where we choose whether or not we're going to continue down the road of this country's decidedly darker and awful days, or the brighter ones where we work to correct our many mistakes.

Only 150 years ago these states were disunited.  We're closer to that moment again now than we've been in some time. Maybe we just need a little perspective from somebody who has been away for a while.