DL Open Thread: Sunday, November 13, 2022

Terrible Night For Election Deniers.  Meaning, it was a good night for democracy:

Every election denier who sought to become the top election official in a critical battleground state lost at the polls this year, as voters roundly rejected extreme partisans who promised to restrict voting and overhaul the electoral process.

The national repudiation of this coalition reached its apex on Saturday, when Cisco Aguilar, the Democratic candidate for secretary of state in Nevada, defeated Jim Marchant, according to The Associated Press. Mr. Marchant, the Republican nominee, had helped organize a national right-wing slate of candidates under the name “America First.”

With Mr. Marchant’s loss to Mr. Aguilar, all but one of those “America First” candidates were defeated. Only Diego Morales, a Republican in deep-red Indiana, was successful, while candidates in Michigan, Arizona and New Mexico were defeated.

Here’s A D Victory The Rethugs Didn’t See Coming.  One of my faves of the cycle:

FiveThirtyEight’s final election forecast projected that Washington Republican congressional candidate Joe Kent would win by more than 12 points. Instead, in the biggest upset of the midterms, Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez has carried the Republican-leaning district in southwestern Washington.

Gluesenkamp Perez is the kind of relatable candidate Democrats have often struggled to nominate in recent years. At 34, she is more than two decades younger than the average House member. After Reed College, she started running a Portland, Oregon, auto shop along with her husband. They live across the state line in rural Skamania County, Washington, in a home they built themselves. She’d run for office once before in 2016. Gluesenkamp Perez lost that race for county commission, but managed to run ahead of Hillary Clinton by 6 points.

In her first debate with Kent, Gluesenkamp Perez introduced herself as a practical small business owner who was struggling with the costs of health care, child care, and government regulations. Her opponent, she argued, was an extreme figure who lived in a social-media-warped reality while she ran her auto shop.

BTW, for what it’s worth, MSNBC projects a 219-216 R edge in the House when all the votes are counted.  That should be more than interesting…

Does Grassley Remind You Of Anybody?  Been posting his exercise regimen since 2010.  You know, to show he ‘still has it’.

Wanna Keep Doubling Down On Crypto?  $1 billion goes missing just like that.  Or maybe it’s ‘only’ $370 mill.  Who knows? I mean, it’s not real money, is it?  You tell me.  I’m right here with this article:

But now, crypto feels less ready for the mainstream than it has in years. Even as crypto slunk into a bear market in recent months, there was still the dream of crypto as it was originally conceived in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis: Part of the blockchain’s raison d’être lay in cutting out greedy bankers and creating greater trust between transacting parties. Now, in 2022, the crypto markets are controlled by an industry that’s proved time and time again just how similar to the existing financial system it really is. Before this year’s crash, it felt like a decent portion of the public was starting to trust this industry. SBF’s antics have turned back the clock, and what looked like a winter is starting to feel more like an ice age.

But the problem is more fundamental than losing a bit of money. Crypto was built on the idea that you shouldn’t have to trust banks with your money, that people should be able to hold it themselves, hopefully somewhere a little more secure than a mattress. And though you can still technically do that, there’s no guarantee that the value of your tokens won’t someday plummet to zero, thanks to the actions of a few rogue billionaires with outsize effects on the market. This is, transparently, a terrible deal, and a seeming betrayal of that dream of crypto utopianism—the vision of a future without shady intermediaries.

I’ll be writing a think-piece about what happened in Dover yesterday soon–after I think about it some more, and touch base with a few people.  Suffice it to say that the fact that the caucus chose a speaker who actively campaigned against at least two of its members, and ran interference for a criminal, does not shower the caucus with glory.  To put it mildly.

What do you want to talk about?