underpants
underpants's JournalThe Jets clinched their 30th losing season in 61 years
Outlasted by the New England Patriots in a surprisingly entertaining Monday night game, the Jets -- 30-27 losers at MetLife Stadium -- fell to 0-9 for the first time.
A franchise known for its losing moments -- the Butt Fumble, the Rich Kotite era, Dan Marino's Fake Spike, the "Heidi" Game, et al -- has added a new low to its inglorious past.
The Jets clinched their 30th losing season in 61 years, including a current streak of five in a row. There was only one other 0-8 start, in 1996, but they managed a win before finishing 1-15.
Eye-popping NextGen Stat: Flacco's 20-yard touchdown pass to Crowder had a completion probability of just 6.2% -- the most improbable completion of the season.
https://www.espn.com/blog/new-york/jets/post/_/id/84861/jets-find-a-new-way-to-lose-clinch-worst-start-in-franchise-history
😆 The lost years of Trump staffers 😁 job interviews
I see a gap in your employment history. Care to explain?
I was in prison.
Are you sure you weren’t working in the Trump administration?
Nope. Prison. Definitely prison.
McD's to test "McPlant" burger - not a P. L. T.
McDonald's to test McPlant, which includes a meat-free burger, next year; Beyond Meat shares fall
McDonald's will test a meat-free burger in several markets next year as it adds plant-based menu offerings, which it has coined "McPlant."
International President Ian Borden said that McPlant was created "by McDonald's and for McDonald's." Borden said that the McPlant line could also include chicken substitutes
McDonald's began testing a meatless burger, dubbed the P.L.T., in several dozen Ontario restaurants in September last year. By April, the chain had ended the pilot and has since said that it has no plans to bring back its P.L.T. burger at this time.
Rival Burger King, which is owned by Restaurant Brands International, released a plant-based Whopper in the U.S., with a patty made by privately held Impossible Foods last year.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/09/mcdonalds-to-test-mcplant-which-includes-its-own-meat-free-burger-next-year-beyond-meat-shares-fall.html
Trump did far worse in the election (incumbent) than we should have expected
By the standards of most other incumbents, his reelection campaign was a historic failure
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/11/09/trump-incumbency-advantage-defeat/
But the truth is that Trump did far worse in last week’s election than he should have, and that his reelection campaign was a historic failure. Incumbency is a far greater advantage, this year, than it has been made out to be. And during an ongoing crisis, American voters tend to choose the devil they know over the one they don’t. It’s really hard to overstate the incumbent advantage in U.S. politics. In most cases, incumbent presidents not only win reelection, but also substantially increase their popular-vote margin. Twenty-one American presidents have served a second term. Among these, only three were unable to grow their vote share significantly in their second election. Between their first and second elections, Thomas Jefferson, Ulysses S. Grant and Ronald Reagan doubled their popular-vote margins over their opponents. Franklin D. Roosevelt improved his by 80 percent, and Bill Clinton by 50 percent.
The presidential historian Allan Lichtman told NPR that this is because incumbents have “name recognition, national attention, fundraising and campaign bases, control over the instruments of government, successful campaign experience” and the benefit of voters’ “risk aversion.” This can manifest as an aversion to any new risk over substantial risks people are already experiencing. Incumbents can win in recessions. Incumbents can win when lots of Americans are dying. Incumbents win even during periods of exceptionally low American satisfaction with the state of the nation. Some incumbents win reelection handily during periods of national crisis or scandal — think George W. Bush in 2004 against the backdrop of the faltering Iraq War and his top weapons inspector’s admission that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction.
The basis of the conclusion that Trump did surprisingly well was, on the right, that Trump outperformed polls — which, obviously, are not working — and, on the left, that Trump is such an anomaly that anything banal or normal such as “incumbency advantage” ought not apply to him. But given Trump’s incumbency and the state of the economy in his first three years, his baseline should have been to win comfortably. If you forget the polls and the idea that anybody voting for Trump should feel demoralizing, his electoral performance was, simply, a sensational failure. It’s not to Democrats’ advantage to move the goal posts such that a potentially historic win by a challenger — Biden — comes to feel, emotionally, like a defeat. This is the kind of narrative for which Republicans argue — not just this year, but all the time. The conservative magazine American Greatness argued on Thursday that the election “resoundingly validates President Trump’s policies,” pointing to Trump’s “historic victory” with Florida Latinos. “That is the incontestable reality,” the editorial continued, “no matter the vote [count].”
The wording here is important. A Republican triumph is an emotional “reality” that cannot be contested no matter the real reality. Insofar as the goal of much of conservative politics these days is to ding Democrats’ pride, they make themselves out as tremendous underdogs in America, such that any votes they receive are a surprising triumph and a humiliation for Democrats, who always ought to do better. Thus, every swing state or nationwide election becomes a 16th seed facing a top dog. And even a narrow loss or draw — like, say, a popular-vote loss offset by an electoral college victory — is an awesome upset, a “win,” an owning-of-the-libs, proof of Democratic weakness. The rules always shift such that even a dismal result for them can be called in their favor. In 2016, to win meant winning the electoral college. In 2020, to win means winning more people, by a raw head count, than Trump won in 2016, or maybe just more Latinos. The conservative Free Beacon actually declared Thursday that Trump “won” because he “accomplished his goal of becoming the most famous person on Earth.”
😁 From The Daily Mail (right-leaning UK paper) no less 😆
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8927011/Donald-Trump-doubles-refusing-concede-did-media-decide-president-is.htmlAFTER THE ELECTION: THE DATES YOU NEED TO KNOW
NOVEMBER 23: All swing states election results are certified by this date
DECEMBER 8: 'Safe harbor' deadline which means the statutory deadline for resolving disputed results. If the states have followed correct procedures, whatever the result is on Dec. 8 stands, even if one side still disputes it
DECEMBER 14: Electoral college electors are chosen and sworn in
JANUARY 5: Georgia run-off elections for two Senate seats, determining who controls the Senate
JANUARY 6: Congress certifies the Electoral College votes
JANUARY 20: At midday the new president is sworn in and assumes all of the powers of commander-in-chief - including the ability to direct the Secret Service and U.S. Marshals to remove unwanted White House guests
Sticky notes, "a nonzero number of people", and Jill Stokke - Trump's legal claims details
Here are the GOP and Trump campaign’s allegations of election irregularities. So far, none has been proved.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-election-irregularities-claims/2020/11/08/8f704e6c-2141-11eb-ba21-f2f001f0554b_story.html
Pennsylvania
Republican observers were there, after all. Trump had “a nonzero number of people in the room,” one of his attorneys conceded in federal court Thursday evening.
Michigan
In that case, a Republican election observer said she’d been given a sticky note by an unnamed poll worker, alleging that late-arriving ballots were being counted improperly. But she couldn’t provide the poll worker’s name or any other proof.
Nevada
By then, the allegation had been whittled down drastically. Instead of 10,000 cases, Trump’s allies presented one: a woman named Jill Stokke, who said she was denied the right to vote in person because her mail ballot had been stolen and filled out by someone else.
But, in fact, Stokke’s story was more complicated.
Goodbye, Kayleigh McEnany (and Sarah Sanders and Sean Spicer)
Goodbye, referring to German death camps as “Holocaust centers” for some reason!
And goodbye, lying about whether separating children from their parents was the intent of your border policy (it was).
Goodbye, claiming indignantly that the president wasn’t doing some terrible thing only for him to brag explicitly about doing it like 10 minutes later (I don’t have a specific example for this one because it happened about a thousand times!).
We’d say we wish you success in your future endeavors, but that would be lying. And nobody likes a liar!
Bye!
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/11/goodbye-trump-white-house-press-office.html
Goodbye, Betsy DeVos
So long, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos! It wasn’t just that you were unqualified to lead America’s educational system, as someone who never worked at a public school, attended a public school, or took out a school loan. It was that you were the opposite of qualified, an early example of the Trump administration’s elitist disregard for the very role of government agencies themselves. You sailed into the Department of Education as if sailing into port on one of your yachts, buoyed by your belief that public schools are a “dead end,” your declaration that government “sucks,” and your family’s hundreds of millions of dollars donated to Republican causes.
But it was in 2020, as American schools faced arguably their biggest crisis since the civil rights era, that you really made your contempt for teachers and children plain. As schools across the country sought aid and advice to reopen safely in the fall, you holed up in your Michigan compound, protected by around-the-clock U.S. Marshals that have cost taxpayers as much as $25 million over four years. (You’re the first Cabinet secretary ever to insist on such protection.) From your mansion, you joined Donald Trump’s demands that schools reopen NOW—but offered no support or assistance. The end result: politicizing school reopening as an issue, making it more difficult for schools to open safely. You’ve overseen a slow-motion education disaster that will have lasting effects on an entire generation of children.
And you’ve done it all with a haughty, better-than-this attitude that makes clear just how little of a shit you give. You didn’t give a shit during your confirmation hearings, when you plagiarized your Senate questionnaire and didn’t bother to learn anything about the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act.* You didn’t give a shit this summer, when you sniffed, “The secretary of education isn’t the nation’s superintendent.” Well, soon you won’t be the nation’s anything. I can’t wait to never think about you again. You’re expelled.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/11/goodbye-secretary-of-education-betsy-devos.html
Goodbye, Ben Carson
The whole Goodbye series on Slate today is outstanding.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/11/goodbye-ben-carson.html
It seemed odd that you, an allegedly devout Seventh-day Adventist, would willingly tie your credibility and reputation to a hedonist like Trump. It seemed wrong that you, a believer, would shrug off the many credible allegations of sexual assault against Trump. When asked in October 2016 if you thought the women were lying, you said, “It doesn’t matter if they’re lying or not. What matters is that the train is going off the cliff. We’re taking our eye off of that and we’re getting involved in other issues that can be taken care of later.”
You weren’t just incompetent. You were malignant. You tried to eliminate a number of HUD programs meant to help poor Americans, or veterans, or Native Americans afford housing, and tried to get rid of fair housing regulations meant to fight discrimination. What you couldn’t eliminate, you attempted to cut to the bone. Trump—whose first mention in the New York Times was in a 1973 story about the Department of Justice suing him for discriminating against Black tenants—surely appreciated having you, the only Black member of his Cabinet, around to cut housing benefits to low-income people of color. And you never gave up in your quest to slash protections. In June, in one of your final acts, your department proposed a rule to scrap the Obama administration’s 2016 guidance requiring single-sex homeless shelters to accept transgender people.
In a country where few Black men are widely exalted, you improbably scaled that pedestal. You probably thought you’d remain there forever. But wondering what happened to you doesn’t mean I thought you were on the right path to begin with. You often railed against athletes and celebrities, and once told an audience that you discovered during your 25th high school reunion that the “really cool” people from those years were now dead. Two years before you announced your candidacy, you let your bigotry slip into public when you compared same-sex marriage to pedophilia and bestiality. You were no hero of mine. But jumping on the Trump train was something I didn’t expect.
More than five years ago, I wrote about your quixotic quest to enter politics, wondering if it would destroy your legacy. I wasn’t so sure then. But today, the answer is clear. You should hope that you’re forgotten.
Common decency
Stated another way here
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1016276249
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