By Steve Rhodes

Culled from a variety of sources.
* Donald Trump won 43% of the vote in Illinois. About 2.3 million people. They knew exactly what they were doing. Grapple with it.
Assignment Desk: Interview all 2.3 million!
* Biden won Illinois with 55% of the vote – about 2.95 million people.
* Others:
Jo Jorgenson, Libertarian Party: 1.1%, 58,000.
Howie Hawkins, Green Party: .5%, 26,000.
Brian Carroll, American Solidarity Party: .2%, 8.000.
Gloria La Riva, Party for Socialism and Liberation: .1%, 6,900.
Kanye West was not on the ballot – though write-in candidates got 5,269 votes (.1%).
To repeat: 43% of Illinois voters chose Trump.

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Posted on November 6, 2020

By The Beachwood Bookmaking Bureau

For entertainment purposes only. And office pools. Updated as events warrant.

The chance that . . .

Trump wins popular vote: 1%. And that’s even if Putin holds back the river wards until he learns how many votes he needs. 11/4 UPDATE: Still true.

Trump wins Electoral College: 48%. Draws another inside straight in the swing states but loses by margin of dead voters who attended his rallies and got COVID. 11/4 UPDATE: Still true.

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Posted on November 3, 2020

By Nick Shreders

I’m not one bit worried.
I’m Dr. Nick and I’ll be your election week Valium.
I’ve spent countless hours looking at all of the psephologists and heavily invested in the prediction markets and they tell me better than a flawed Des Moines Register poll and a big (stranded) crowd in Butler, Pennsylvania this weekend that those fervently desiring to turn Trump out shouldn’t be spooked that we’re about to see 2016 all over again.
Here’s why.

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Posted on November 2, 2020

By Allan Sloan/ProPublica

The Federal Reserve, which these days seems to be the only major part of the federal government capable of operating drama-free, has done a lot to help keep our economy afloat. It has cut interest rates to unprecedented low levels, bought billions of dollars of corporate IOUs, helped stabilize the debt markets and helped rescue a stock market that had begun falling sharply in mid-February when the COVID-19 recession started and that seemed headed for a crash.
In the process, the Fed has indirectly provided support to house prices and to the vital home construction business by forcing down mortgage interest rates to all-time lows of about 3%. Given that home equity is a major asset for many middle-class Americans, supporting home prices is especially important. As is supporting the home construction industry, which is a major source of blue-collar jobs.
But if you dig deeper, you’ll see that the Fed is unintentionally worsening economic inequality by providing the most help to Americans who are least in need of it. And it’s also putting stress on the middle class’ most important asset: retirement benefits.

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Posted on October 30, 2020

By Cindy Cohn and Sophia Cope/Electronic Frontier Foundation

For years the EFF has been calling for U.S. companies that act as “repression’s little helpers” to be held accountable, and now we’re telling the U.S. Supreme Court.
Despite all the ways that technology has been used as a force for good – connecting people around the world, giving voice to the less powerful, and facilitating knowledge sharing – technology has also been used as a force multiplier for repression and human rights violations, a dark side that cannot be denied.
Last week, the EFF filed a brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to preserve one of the few tools of legal accountability that exist for companies that intentionally aid and abet foreign repression, the Alien Tort Statute (ATS).
We told the court about what we and others have been seeing over the past decade or so: surveillance, communications, and database systems, just to name a few, have been used by foreign governments – with the full knowledge of and assistance by the U.S. companies selling those technologies – to spy on and track down activists, journalists, and religious minorities who have been imprisoned, tortured, and even killed.

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Posted on October 29, 2020

By Michelle Andrews/Kaiser Health News

When COVID-19 began making headlines in March, Charles Collins pulled out a protective face mask from the supply at the manufacturing company in Rockaway, New Jersey, where he was the shop foreman and put it on. The dozen or so other workers at the facility followed suit. There was no way to maintain a safe distance from one another on the shop floor, where they made safety mats for machines, and a few of the men had been out sick with flu-like symptoms. Better safe than sorry.
Management was not pleased.

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Posted on October 25, 2020

By The U.S. Department of Justice

Links added by The Beachwood Value Added Affairs Desk.
The Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (Goldman Sachs or the Company), a global financial institution headquartered in New York, New York, and Goldman Sachs (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd. (GS Malaysia), its Malaysian subsidiary, have admitted to conspiring to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) in connection with a scheme to pay over $1 billion in bribes to Malaysian and Abu Dhabi officials to obtain lucrative business for Goldman Sachs, including its role in underwriting approximately $6.5 billion in three bond deals for 1Malaysia Development Bhd. (1MDB), for which the bank earned hundreds of millions in fees.
Goldman Sachs will pay more than $2.9 billion as part of a coordinated resolution with criminal and civil authorities in the United States, the United Kingdom, Singapore, and elsewhere.

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Posted on October 22, 2020

By Human Rights Watch

Social media platforms are taking down online content they consider terrorist, violently extremist, or hateful in a way that prevents its potential use to investigate serious crimes, including war crimes, Human Rights Watch has found. While it is understandable that these platforms remove content that incites or promotes violence, they should ensure that this material is archived so it can possibly be used to hold those responsible to account.

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Posted on October 12, 2020

By Phyllis Bennis/OtherWords

As the pandemic continues to claim lives across the country, new information keeps coming out about how the Trump administration has made it harder for Americans to protect themselves.
We now know, for example, that early in the pandemic the U.S. Postal Service had planned to deliver five face masks to every U.S. household. It could have made mask-wearing a lot more common a lot earlier – and saved a lot of lives. But the White House scrapped the idea.
Now we also know that the Trump administration took $1 billion in stimulus funds that were supposed to go towards making masks and other protective equipment for the pandemic and gave most of it to weapons manufacturers.

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Posted on October 7, 2020

By Steve Eckardt

Transcript of this morning’s statement by the President of the United States.
Hello, this is President Donald Trump reaching out to America to say I’m feeling fine. And to say, “Thank you, thank you” to all the people that’ve stood beside me during this minor incident.
It’s like I’ve said: I am stronger than the Chinese virus and so are the American People!
I’ve had a worse time with Athlete’s Foot than with this supposed killer.

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Posted on October 6, 2020