Thoughts on the US 2024 election

I am feeling somewhat better now. Last week, I was suffering from “election depression. On the night of the election, we turned the TV off at 10pm. In the morning, neither my wife nor I wanted to turn the TV on, but we did, and the first words we see are “TRUMP WINS”. Ugh. As I thought about the the past four years, and why did the election end up with a Trump win, the phrase “necessary but not sufficient” came to mind. It was necessary to update the Electoral Count Act, and it was necessary to take actions to have hundreds of lawyers ready to fight frivolous election fraud claims, and it was necessary to build up the elections offices across the US to ensure a free and fair election. But, those things, in and of themselves, were not sufficient to guarantee victory for Kamala Harris. Another phrase that comes to mind is “preparing to fight the last war“. Again, preparations were made to avoid another violent takeover like January 6th, but preparations were not made (or actions taken) to help ensure that Donald Trump would lose the election (fair and square). I am not the person to say what should have been done, or how the Democratic Party should have approached the 2024 election, but the fact that Trump won the popular vote and the Electoral College vote shows that (1) more people wanted Trump than Harris, and (2) all of the weird things that Trump did, all the things he did, the civil and criminal cases against him, did not sway his supporters to vote for Harris.

Nine days after the election, Trump has picked up the rest of the swing states, and Republicans will be in control of the House and Senate – the trifecta. Trump’s cabinet picks so far look like a “clown car from the circus”. His strategy – selecting people who will be totally loyal to him.

For myself, I need a little rest from the election. My wife and I have cut way back on our news consumption. I think our short term plan will be “watch and listen” or “wait and see”.

Completion of the Kamala Campaign Timeline project

With Election Day in the US come and gone, I have completed updates to the Kamala Campaign Timeline website. This site covered the day-by day events of the Harris-Walz campaign from Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the race through Election Day. Each daily entry contains a link to the CNN daily blog for that day, links to other press coverage of the campaign, and links to videos of campaign events.

Having covered topical events before (see my Portland Protest News site), I was familiar with tracking down stories and links. The CNN daily blog was very helpful as a starting point for finding other coverage. During the development of the site, CNN began to restrict the number of page views to their site, and to reserve content for subscribers. Whenever this happened, I looked for other coverage.

As with the Portland Protest News site, I found it difficult to make time everyday for site updates. Since I was using a static site generator, I was able to catch up and still keep the consecutive date timeline. I have seen some recent comments about creating news streams. I have created a few streams myself, but aggregating feeds still depends on someone creating those feeds. Kamala Campaign Timeline was such a site (although the template did not support generation of a RSS feed – darn!). To me, the best site of this kind is Political Wire. However, it takes time to sift through the news, pick out the stories of note, and post cogent summaries/quotes, and to do it day in and day out. The DailyKos site is probably the best known Democratic/Progressive news site, and they have a staff supporting their efforts. Similarly, keeping the @kamalahq Threads account going took some effort, and someone, somewhere was paying for that. So, my opinion is that it is a tough job for a single person to carry that kind of load, but maybe there is someone out there who can handle it, or organize it (like Election Law Blog has a set of guest editors).

Anyway, I enjoyed having another shot at creating a daily news site, and hope that this serves as a historical record of a unique campaign. I’m just sorry that Harris and Walz didn’t win.

The circle of life – squirrel edition

This morning, I was walking my dog, and as we arrived home, I saw a baby squirrel in the grass in front of our home. He was not moving, so after I got my dog inside, I went and checked on the baby. Its head was moving and its eyes were open, but the baby was staying still in the grass. I assumed it had fallen from the trees in the front yard.

My wife and I checked on some animal rescue groups, and found one that was open (on Labor Day!). I called, and they said they would take the squirrel. The volunteer also gave me a summary of general things to do, and that the best solution was if the baby’s parents would come to take care of the squirrel. I checked on the baby, it had moved further into the grass, and was making little squeaks. I went inside and got a box ready, then went outside to get the baby, but it was no longer visible. I paused and listened to see if I could hear any squeaks. What I heard was the chattering of an adult squirrel, and I wondered if another squirrel had come to take care of the baby. The adult squirrel then ran to a bush underneath the tree, and I then heard some little squeaks. The baby squirrel was near the base of the bush – to me, the adult squirrel must have picked it up and put it there, and was watching from the tree when I came out again to look for the baby.

After a few seconds, the adult squirrel picked up the baby by the scruff of its neck, and ran off, running up another tree, then jumping on our courtyard wall, then going into the courtyard. I went inside to tell my wife, and we put off our visit to the rescue center. We will keep an eye on the courtyard to see if anything else develops, but I feel that the squirrels are taking care of their own, and that is a good feeling.

Irritating inconsistencies in Chai framework versions

This week, I spent some time working to understand how to use the Mocha testing tool and the Chai assertion tool in developing apps using Node.js. I found two articles that I was going to use to get started, and I decided to set up my package.json file to use the latest version of the tools. What I found was that I could not use the example code in the two articles, and kept getting error messages that I could not find answers for, except that several people recommended using an older version of the Chai assertion tool. I took a look at the Chai website releases page, and found that in version 5, only ECMAScript Modules were supported. Previously, ECMAScript Modules and CommonJS Modules were allowed. However, this change meant that I would have to change the example code I was using to run the latest version of Chai. I tried numerous combinations of changes, but none were totally successful. After an hour of trial and error, I decided to reinstall version 4.3.7 of Chai in my test project, and everything now worked as I expected. UGH! Onward!

Oliver Willis, in a recent Substack post, goes into further details on Sources Go Direct, and how the Harris campaign is doing this (via Dave Winer). The last paragraph is the best:

Frankly, the relationship between Trump and the press, which follows in the footsteps of the relationship George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had with many of the same outlets, shows that you can just wait them out. Like a toddler who has a tantrum, let them complain and bellow and fume, and then they will lose interest. They are attracted to shiny, loud objects, not substance, and by generating her own heat, Harris can do what’s best for the people, not the elites who ultimately do not care about our well-being at all.

Doug Muder of The Weekly Sift makes excellent points about how the mainstream media wants access to Harris so they can tear her down. It makes total sense that she is “going direct” with her message. Trump gets a pass with the mainstream media for having two incoherent “media availability” sessions – why bother with the press?