Heather Cox Richardson - Letters from an American

[Go Bama]

September 16, 2020 (Wednesday)


Last night, Trump joined an ABC News “town hall” hosted by George Stephanopoulos in the battleground state of Pennsylvania. He faced ordinary Americans, who asked basic questions about health care, mask wearing, and so on, and delivered his usual litany of self-aggrandizement and lies. But he seemed cornered and unable to control the narrative the way he did in 2016. The White House has been doing damage control from the event all day.

The president promised to protect the ability of people with pre-existing conditions to get healthcare coverage and accused Democrats of trying to kill that rule. Of course, the opposite is true: the Trump administration is trying to overturn the Affordable Care Act—Obamacare—that protects such people, while Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden promises to expand and strengthen the law.

When Stephanopoulos fact checked him, Trump insisted that he is going to protect people with pre-existing conditions through his own forthcoming new health care plan. Stephanopoulos pointed out that he has promised such a plan repeatedly since he took office, but none has ever appeared. Today White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said there was a plan in the works but told reporters that if they wanted to know what it was and who was working on it, they should come work at the White House.

Trump claimed there would be a coronavirus vaccine in three or four weeks, although scientists say the earliest possible date is early 2021. Today, Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), told Congress that a vaccine will not be available until next spring or summer. When asked why his prediction was so different than that of the CDC, Trump said that Redfield had “misunderstood” the question and “made a mistake.” “Under no circumstance will it be as late as the doctor said.”

Speaking in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden said, "I trust vaccines, I trust scientists, but I don’t trust Donald Trump.” When Trump contradicted Redfield, Biden tweeted the video clip and added, "this is what I meant."
This afternoon, a spokesperson for Redfield appeared to bring the doctor’s comments more in line with Trump’s statements, but then retracted the retraction.

Trump defended his own reluctance to wear a mask by saying that “a lot of people think that masks are not good,” and then, when asked which people think that way, he said “waiters.” He criticized Biden for not issuing a national mandate for wearing masks. Biden promptly tweeted a fundraising message: “Just to be clear: I am not currently president. But if you chip in now, we can change that in November.”

The president almost never leaves the bubble of friendly interviewers on the Fox News Channel, and it showed. He seemed confused, out of touch, unable to budge off his talking points, even when they have been thoroughly debunked. He insisted that, far from downplaying the dangers of coronavirus as he is on tape admitting, he had “up-played it,” and that his response had been so good there was nothing he would change about it. When Stephanopoulos reminded him that the U.S. has 4% of the world’s population and more than 20% of the Covid deaths, Trump nonsensically blamed the statistic on testing. Today, Trump praised his own response to the coronavirus by saying that “if you take the blue states out, we’re at a level I don’t think anybody in the world would be at.”

The town hall was bad enough that Fox News Channel personality Laura Ingraham tweeted it was an “ambush.”

Trump’s floundering seems to have hardened Attorney General William Barr’s determination to keep control of the government. Tonight, speaking at conservative Hillsdale College, Barr rejected criticism from career prosecutors in the Justice Department that he is skewing cases to benefit Trump. “What exactly am I interfering with?” he asked. “Under the law, all prosecutorial power is invested in the attorney general.” He compared prosecutors to preschoolers, and denied they should have freedom to handle their cases without his interference.

Barr railed against what he called the “criminalization of politics.” “Now you have to call your adversary a criminal, and instead of beating them politically, you try to put them in jail,” Barr said, and he claimed that the United States was starting to resemble an Eastern European country.
But it was Barr who last week told federal prosecutors to think about prosecuting violent protesters for sedition—that is, for rebellion against the government. The attorneys who leaked the story did so anonymously, because they are afraid of retribution. Barr also asked prosecutors in the Justice Department to look into bringing criminal charges against Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan for letting protesters set up a “protest zone” in the city. Durkan is a former U.S. Attorney.

And today we learned that before federal officials cleared Washington D.C.’s Lafayette Square of protesters last June at Barr’s order, they sought ammunition and a device that makes anyone within range feel like their skin is on fire. A whistleblower from the D.C. National Guard, Major Adam D. DeMarco, noted that this technology is considered too unpredictable to use in war zones and that the protesters were peaceful and likely unable to hear orders to disperse.

Today we also learned that the Justice Department’s investigation of whether former National Security Adviser John Bolton disclosed classified information in his book, which was highly critical of Trump and his administration, has reached a federal grand jury.

There is increasing pushback to the escalating partisanship of the Trump Republicans. After his own rant on Facebook accusing government scientists of sedition, Trump loyalist Michael Caputo is taking a two-month medical leave of absence from his position as the top spokesman for the CDC. So is his science adviser, Paul Alexander, who was trying to censor CDC reports. Caputo will be replaced by Ryan Murphy, who held the job before Caputo arrived on the scene.

Today, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Ohio, Maureen O’Connor, publicly condemned a statement yesterday by the Ohio Republican Party “in the strongest possible terms.” The statement accused a Democratic judge of colluding with Ohio Democrats to cheat in the upcoming election “to elect radical liberals to fulfill their agenda, including judge with unmistakable partisan interests.” O’Connor called the statement “disgraceful,” and “deceitful.” “The Republican Party’s statement should be seen for what it is: part of a continuing string of attacks against any [court] decision that doesn’t favor a political end, regardless of party, even if that decision may be legally correct and indeed legally required,” she said. The former Lieutenant Governor of Ohio, O’Connor is a Republican.

For the first time in its 175-year history, Scientific American has endorsed a presidential candidate. The editors wrote: “The evidence and the science show that Donald Trump has badly damaged the U.S. and its people—because he rejects evidence and science. The most devastating example is his dishonest and inept response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which cost more than 190,000 Americans their lives by the middle of September. He has also attacked environmental protections, medical care, and the researchers and public science agencies that help this country prepare for its greatest challenges. That is why we urge you to vote for Joe Biden, who is offering fact-based plans to protect our health, our economy and the environment. These and other proposals he has put forth can set the country back on course for a safer, more prosperous and more equitable future.”

It is an enviable endorsement, but for his part, Biden seems aware that Americans are just tired of the constant drama and chaos of the Trump presidency. Tonight he tweeted simply: “We’re going to get this virus under control and get your life back on track.”

 

[Go Bama]

·
September 17, 2020 (Thursday)


It feels like power is slipping away from Trump and his administration, and they are trying desperately to claw it back. Meanwhile, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his team are trying to criticize the president without getting sucked into his orbit, so they can focus on moving the country forward.

Today began with Trump’s former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats warning in a New York Times op-ed that the 2020 election will determine “whether the American democratic experiment, one of the boldest political innovations in human history, will survive.” Our enemies, both “foreign and domestic,” are trying to destroy our faith in the upcoming election.

Calling for a bipartisan and nonpartisan commission to oversee the election, Coats said, “We must firmly, unambiguously reassure all Americans that their vote will be counted, that it will matter, that the people’s will expressed through their votes will not be questioned and will be respected and accepted.” He warned that if instead we accept “Total destruction and sowing salt in the earth of American democracy,” the only winners would be Vladimir Putin, [Chinese leader] Xi Jinping and [Iranian leader] Ali Khamenei.”

Coats did not mention Trump by name, but it was clear the president and his supporters were uppermost in Coats’s mind. Trump has repeatedly insisted that the mail-in voting means the election will be tainted, and that the only acceptable outcome is his own reelection. Today he tweeted: “Because of the new and unprecedented massive amount of unsolicited ballots which will be sent to “voters”, or wherever, this year, the Nov 3rd Election result may NEVER BE ACCURATELY DETERMINED, which is what some want. Another election disaster yesterday. Stop Ballot Madness!” This is entirely inaccurate, and Twitter flagged it.

Trump followed this tweet with one urging people to vote in person and another claiming: "There is a group of people (largely Radical Left Democrats) that want ELECTION MAYHEM. States must end this CRAZY mass sending of Ballots. Also, a GIFT to foreign interference into our election!!! Stop it now, before it is too late.”

(Trump seems eager not just to stop mail-in voting but also to get people to vote in person, even urging North Carolinians to vote in person a second time after filling out a mail-in ballot. It’s happened enough that I’m curious about why he seems to want people to cast their ballots in person, especially since voting machines in North Carolina notoriously malfunctioned in 2016.)

Midday, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned the House Homeland Security Committee that “the intelligence community consensus is that Russia continues to try to influence our elections” by spreading disinformation through social media, online journals, and so on. Russians are “very active” in their attempts to undermine Biden’s campaign. They are trying to “sow divisiveness and discord” and “primarily to denigrate Vice President Biden and what the Russians see as kind of an anti-Russian establishment.” Russians are spreading the idea that mail-in ballots are insecure, and that Biden is slipping mentally—both stories Trump echoes.

Trump took to Twitter to argue with his FBI director. “But Chris, you don’t see any activity from China, even though it is a FAR greater threat than Russia, Russia, Russia. They will both, plus others, be able to interfere in our 2020 Election with our totally vulnerable Unsolicited (Counterfeit?) Ballot Scam. Check it out!”

The president’s attempt to deflect attention from Russia while putting it on China is more disinformation. Department of Homeland Security whistleblower Brian Murphy last week said that DHS acting Director Chad Wolf told him “to cease providing intelligence assessments on the threat of Russian interference in the United States, and instead start reporting on interference activities by China and Iran. Mr. Wolf stated that these instructions specifically originated from White House National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien.”

Today the administration lost two more employees to the Republican Political Alliance for Integrity and Reform (REPAIR), launched a week ago by former DHS officials Miles Taylor and Elizabeth Neumann. The group is made up of current and former Trump officials who oppose his reelection. Josh Venable, the former chief of staff to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and Olivia Troye, the former top homeland security aide to Vice President Mike Pence, who played a key role on his coronavirus task force, both joined REPAIR today. Troye says she supports Biden because she thinks the U.S. is in a constitutional crisis, and “at this point it’s country over party.” Troye recorded a scathing video about Trump for the coalition “Republican Voters Against Trump.”
Late this afternoon, a federal judge in Washington state temporarily blocked Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s changes in the United States Postal Service in response to complaints from 14 states. Judge Stanley Bastian agreed “The states have demonstrated that the defendants are involved in a politically motivated attack on the efficiency of the Postal Service. They have also demonstrated that this attack on the Postal Service is likely to irreparably harm the states’ ability to administer the 2020 general election.” It’s not clear what the injunction will do, though, since most of the changes have already been made.

To reassure his base, Trump today announced he will create a national commission to promote "pro-American curriculum that celebrates the truth about our nation's great history." He claims that U.S. schools are indoctrinating children with a left-wing agenda that teaches them to hate America. This announcement was solely an attempt to rally his base; the federal government has no authority over school curriculum.

Tonight Biden participated in a CNN town hall in Pennsylvania with host Anderson Cooper, where he tried both to critique Trump’s administration and to demonstrate why he would be a good replacement for the president. The first difference between the two candidates was apparent immediately: while Trump sat during his town hall, Biden stood for the full hour and fifteen minutes. He was extremely well prepared for the live, unscripted comments from voters. Like the questions for Trump two days ago, the questions Biden fielded were pretty obvious ones.
He both answered the questions in detail and used them to criticize Trump. He took the president to task for his “close to criminal,” “totally irresponsible” response to the coronavirus and said that, if elected, he would increase testing and promote wearing masks. In response to Attorney General William Barr’s statement this week that lockdowns to combat the virus were the “greatest intrusion on civil liberties” in U.S. History “other than slavery,” Biden said, "What takes away your freedom is not being able to see your kid; not being able to go to a football game or a baseball game; not being able to see your mom or dad, sick in the hospital.”

Biden pointed out that he and President Obama had never had to send troops into a city, and that crime had declined on their watch while it is ticking up under Trump. He criticized Trump’s attack on the peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C., for a photo op, (although he incorrectly said Trump held the Bible upside down). He called for more accountability within police departments while defending “the vast majority” of law enforcement officers as “decent, honorable people,” who were eager to get rid of the “bad cops” in their midst. As president, he would bring law enforcement officers, unions, and communities of color to "sit at the table and agree on the fundamental things that need to be done” to move the country past the crisis it is in.

Crucially, Biden addressed the vast income inequality in America, casting himself as a voice for ordinary Americans. He reached back to his own youth as the son of a salesman in Scranton, Pennsylvania to contrast himself with Trump, who was born into great wealth. “I view this campaign as a campaign between Scranton and Park Avenue,” Biden said. “All Trump can see from Park Avenue is Wall Street. All he thinks about is the stock market.” He called for a raise for health care workers to more than $15 an hour.

When asked how he would make sure that future elections are not marred by this year’s great fight over mail-in ballots, Biden told voters, “Firstly, I would not try to throw into question the legitimacy of the election.”

 

[Go Bama]

September 18, 2020 (Friday)


Tonight, flowers are strewn on the steps of the Supreme Court, where “Equal Justice Under Law” is carved in stone. More than a thousand people gathered there tonight to mourn the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died today from cancer at age 87.

Justice Ginsburg was born in Brooklyn, New York, on March 15, 1933, in an era when laws, as well as the customs they protected, treated women differently than men. Ginsburg would grow up to challenge the laws that barred women from jobs and denied them rights, eventually setting the country on a path to extend equal justice under law to women and LGBTQ Americans.

Joan Ruth Bader, who went by her middle name, was the second daughter in a middle-class family. She went to public schools, where she excelled, and won a full scholarship to Cornell. There, she met Martin Ginsburg, and they married after she graduated. "What made Marty so overwhelmingly attractive to me was that he cared that I had a brain," she later explained. Relocating to Ft. Sill, Oklahoma, for her husband’s army service, Ginsburg scored high on the civil service exam but could find work only as a typist. When she got pregnant with their daughter Jane, she lost her job.

Two years later, the couple moved back east where Marty had been admitted to Harvard Law School. Ginsburg was admitted the next year, one of 9 women in her class of more than 500 students; a dean asked her why she was “taking the place of a man.” She excelled, becoming the first woman on the prestigious Harvard Law Review. When her husband underwent surgery and radiation treatments for testicular cancer, she cared for him and their daughter, while managing her studies and helping Marty with his. She rarely slept.

After he graduated, Martin Ginsburg got a job in New York, and Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School, where she graduated at the top of her class. But in 1959, law firms weren’t hiring women, and judges didn’t want women—especially mothers, who might be distracted by their “familial obligations”--as clerks. Finally, her mentor, law professor Gerald Gunther, got her a clerkship by threatening Judge Edmund Palmieri that if he did not take her, Gunther would never send him a clerk again.
After her clerkship and two years in Sweden, where laws about gender equality were far more advanced than in America, Ginsburg became one of America’s first female law professors. She worked first at Rutgers University-- where she hid her pregnancy with her second child, James, until her contract was renewed—and then at Columbia Law School, where she was the first woman the school tenured.

At Rutgers, she began her bid to level the legal playing field between men and women, extending equal protection under the law to include gender. Knowing she had to appeal to male judges, she often picked male plaintiffs to establish the principle of gender equality. In 1971, she wrote the brief for Sally Reed in the case of Reed vs. Reed, when the Supreme Court decided that an Idaho law specifying that “males must be preferred to females” in appointing administrators of estates was unconstitutional. Chief Justice Warren Burger, who had been appointed by Richard Nixon, wrote: “To give a mandatory preference to members of either sex over members of the other… is to make the very kind of arbitrary legislative choice forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment” to the Constitution.

In 1972, Ginsburg won the case of Moritz v. Commissioner. She argued that a law preventing a bachelor, Charles Moritz, from claiming a tax deduction for the care of his aged mother because the deduction could be claimed only by women, or by widowed or divorced men, was discriminatory. The United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit agreed, citing Reed v. Reed when it decided that discrimination on the basis of sex violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

In that year, Ginsburg founded the Women’s Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Between 1973 and 1976, she argued six gender discrimination cases before the Supreme Court. She won five. The first time she appeared before the court, she quoted nineteenth-century abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sarah Grimke: “I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.”

Nominated to the bench by President Bill Clinton in 1993, she was confirmed by a vote of 96 to 3. Clinton called her “the Thurgood Marshall of gender-equality law.”

In her 27 years on the Supreme Court, Ginsburg championed equal rights both from the majority and in dissent (which she would mark by wearing a sequined collar), including her angry dissent in 2006 in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber when the plaintiff, Lilly Ledbetter, was denied decades of missing wages because the statute of limitations had already passed when she discovered she had been paid far less than the men with whom she worked. “The court does not comprehend or is indifferent to the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination,” Ginsburg wrote. Congress went on to change the law, and the first bill President Barack Obama signed was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

In 2013, Ginsburg famously dissented from the majority in Shelby County v. Holder, the case that gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The majority decided to remove the provision of the law that required states with histories of voter suppression to get federal approval before changing election laws, arguing that such preclearance was no longer necessary. Ginsburg wrote: “[t]hrowing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” As she predicted, after the decision, many states immediately began to restrict voting.

Her dissent made her a cultural icon. Admirers called her “The Notorious R.B.G.” after the rapper The Notorious B.I.G., wore clothing with her image on it, dressed as her for Halloween, and bought RBG dolls and coloring books. In 2018, the hit documentary "RBG" told the story of her life, and as she aged, she became a fitness influencer for her relentless strength-training regimen. She was also known for her plain speaking. When asked how many women on the Supreme Court would be enough, for example, she answered “nine.”

Ginsburg’s death has brought widespread mourning among those who saw her as a champion for equal rights for women, LGBTQ Americans, minorities, and those who believe the role of the government is to make sure that all Americans enjoy equal justice under law. Upon her passing, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tweeted: “Justice Ginsburg paved the way for so many women, including me. There will never be another like her. Thank you RBG.”

For many, she seemed to be the last defender of an equality they fear is slipping away. Robyn Walsh, a University of Miami religion professor, watched the outpouring of grief after Ginsburg’s death and wrote “It says a lot about us that the loss of one voice leaves women and their allies feeling so helpless. I am grateful for RBG, her advocacy, and her strength. I'm enraged that we find ourselves here.”

That rage, prompted by the prospect of a Trump appointee in Ginsburg’s seat, led donors to pour money into Democratic coffers tonight. Democratic donors gave more than $12.5 million in two hours to the ActBlue donation processing site, a rate of more than $100,000 a minute. The effect of the loss of her voice and vote on the court will become clear quickly. On November 10, just a week after the upcoming presidential election, the court is scheduled to hear a Republican challenge to the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. In 2012, the court upheld the law by a 5-4 vote.

Ginsburg often quoted Justice Louis Brandeis’s famous line: “The greatest menace to freedom is an inert people,” and she advised people “to fight for the things you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you.” Setting an example for how to advance the principle of equality, she told the directors of the documentary “RBG” that she wanted to be remembered “Just as someone who did whatever she could, with whatever limited talent she had, to move society along in the direction I would like it to be for my children and grandchildren.”
Upon hearing of Ginsburg's death, former U.S. Attorney and law professor Joyce Vance tweeted, “We should honor the life of RBG, American hero, by refusing to give in, refusing to back down, fighting for the civil rights of all people & demanding our leaders honor the rule of law. This is our fight now.”

Rest in power, Justice Ginsburg.

May her memory be a blessing.

 

[Go Bama]

September 20, 2020 (Sunday)


The big story today is big indeed: how and when the seat on the Supreme Court, now open because of the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday, will be filled. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) announced within an hour of the announcement of Ginsburg’s passing that he would move to replace her immediately. Trump says he will announce his pick for the seat as early as Tuesday.
Democrats are crying foul. Their immediate complaint is that after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death in February 2016, McConnell refused even to meet with President Barack Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, on the grounds that it was inappropriate to confirm a Supreme Court justice in an election year. He insisted voters should get to decide on who got to nominate the new justice. This “rule” was invented for the moment: in our history, at least 14 Supreme Court justices have been nominated and confirmed during an election year. (Three more were nominated in December, after an election.)

There is a longer history behind this fight that explains just why it is so heated… and what is at stake.

World War Two forced an American reckoning with our long history of racism and sexism. Americans of all racial and ethnic backgrounds, all gender identities, and all levels of wealth had helped to defeat fascism and save democracy, and they demanded a voice in the postwar government. Recognizing both the justice of such claims and the fact that communist leaders used America’s discriminatory laws to insist that democracy was a sham, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower set out to make equal justice under law a reality.

Over the course of his eight years in office, from 1953-1961, Eisenhower appointed five justices to the Supreme Court, beginning with Chief Justice Earl Warren, the former Republican Governor of California, in October 1953. In 1954, the Warren Court handed down the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision, requiring the desegregation of public schools. The decision was unanimous.

From then until Warren retired in 1969, the “Warren Court” worked to change the legal structures of the nation to promote equality. It required state voting districts to be roughly equal in population, so that, for example, Nevada could no longer have one district of 568 people and another of 127,000. It required law enforcement officers to read suspects their rights. It banned laws criminalizing interracial marriage. It ended laws against contraceptives.

Warren resigned during President Richard Nixon’s term, and Nixon chose Chief Justice Warren Burger to replace him. Burger was less interested than Warren in using the Supreme Court to redefine equal rights in the nation; nonetheless, he presided over the court when it handed down the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision striking down restrictive state abortion laws. The case was decided by a vote of 7-2, and the majority opinion was written by Justice Harry Blackmun, a Republican nominated, like Burger, by Richard Nixon. All the justices were men.

Americans opposed to the Supreme Court’s expansion of rights complained bitterly that the court was engaging in what came to be called “judicial activism,” changing the country by decree rather than letting voters decide how their communities would treat the people who lived in them. Rather than simply interpreting existing laws, they said, the Supreme Court was itself creating law.

When President Ronald Reagan took office, he attacked the idea of “activist judges” and promised to roll back the process of “legislating from the bench.” In his eight years, he packed the courts with judges who believed in “a strict interpretation of the Constitution” and “family values” and said they would not make law but simply follow it. Reagan appointed more judges than any other president in history: three Supreme Court associate justices and one chief justice, as well as 368 district and appeals court judges. Older members of the Justice Department who believed that the enforcement of the law should not be politicized were outraged when Reagan appointees at the Justice Department quizzed candidates for judgeships about their views on abortion and affirmative action. Reagan’s Attorney General Edwin Meese said that the idea was to “institutionalize the Reagan revolution so it can’t be set aside no matter what happens in future presidential elections.”

George H. W. Bush followed Reagan, and his first nominee for the Supreme Court, David Souter, was confirmed easily, by a vote of 90-9. But his next nominee, for the seat of the legendary Thurgood Marshall, was a harder sell.

Clarence Thomas fit the Republican bill by believing in a strict interpretation of the Constitution. But he was rated poorly by the American Bar Association and had criticized affirmative action, making people leery of his support for the civil rights legislation Marshall had championed. Most damaging, though, was that an FBI interview with Anita Hill, a lawyer whom Thomas had supervised at the Department of Education, leaked to the press. In the private interview, Hill said that Thomas had sexually harassed her. The Senate called her to testify (but did not call the other women who had similar stories). One of the first in-depth public discussions of sexual harassment, Hill’s calm testimony revealed what sexual advances, often accepted by men, looked like to professional women. For his part, Thomas called it “a circus… a national disgrace… a high-tech lynching.”

The Senate confirmed Thomas by a vote of 52 to 48 in October 1991.
In the context of national anger over the hearing and the outcome, then-Senator Joe Biden, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, on June 25, 1992, suggested that, if a Supreme Court vacancy were to occur, the Senate should wait until after the upcoming election to fill it.

“Politics has played far too large a role in the Reagan-Bush nominations to date,” he noted. "Should a justice resign this summer and the president move to name a successor, actions that will occur just days before the Democratic Presidential Convention and weeks before the Republican Convention meets, a process that is already in doubt in the minds of many will become distrusted by all. Senate consideration of a nominee under these circumstances is not fair to the president, to the nominee, or to the Senate itself.”

This is the “Biden Rule” that McConnell cited as the reason he would not hold hearings on Merrick Garland’s appointment. There was no vacancy, no nominee, and no vote on any rule, not least because Biden didn’t call for one. He wanted to protect the Supreme Court from being further politicized.

So what is really going on? Republicans recognize that their program is increasingly unpopular, and the only way they can protect it is by packing the courts. By holding the seat open in 2016, McConnell could motivate Republican voters to show up for Trump even if they weren’t thrilled with his candidacy.

It worked. McConnell had held not just the Supreme Court seat open but other appointments as well, meaning that Trump has nominated, and under McConnell the Senate has confirmed, a raft of new federal judges. “You know what Mitch’s biggest thing is in the whole world? His judges,” Trump told journalist Bob Woodward. Faced with a choice between getting 10 ambassadors or a single judge, “he will absolutely ask me, ‘Please, let’s get the judge approved instead of 10 ambassadors.’ ” Trump has already appointed two right-wing Supreme Court justices and now, apparently, plans to nominate a third.

The 2016 McConnell rule that the Senate should not confirm a Supreme Court justice in an election year should now stop the Senate from confirming a replacement for Justice Ginsburg, but McConnell now says his rule only holds when the Senate and the president are from different parties. All but two of the many Republicans senators who insisted in 2016 that the Senate absolutely should not confirm a nominee in an election year have suddenly changed their minds and say they will proceed with Trump’s nomination.

This abrupt about-face reveals a naked power grab to cement minority rule.

Both of the last two Republican presidents—Bush and Trump-- have lost the popular vote, and yet each nominated two Supreme Court justices, who have been confirmed by the votes of senators who represent a minority of the American people. The confirmation of a fifth justice in this way will create a solid majority on the court, which can then unwind the legal framework that a majority of Americans still supports.

It’s not just the issue of abortion, for all that that’s what gets most press.

On the agenda just a week after the election, for example, is the Affordable Care Act.

 

[Go Bama]

September 21, 2020 (Monday)


Today started off with Attorney General William Barr designating New York City, Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, as “Jurisdictions Permitting Violence and Destruction of Property.” His statement responded to Trump’s September 2 memorandum calling for a review of funding to “state and local governments that are permitting anarchy, violence, and destruction in American cities.”

The idea of defunding cities is vague and it is also odd, considering how many Americans actually live in cities. The U.S. Conference of Mayors wrote to Trump on September 7 to ask him to rescind his memorandum, noting that “attacks on America’s cities are attacks on America itself. America’s cities represent 86 percent of the Nation’s population and 91 percent of real gross domestic product (GDP)…. Cities are the Nation’s incubators of talent: people flock to cities to take advantage of their accessibility, diversity, inclusiveness, vibrancy, infrastructure and innovation,” they wrote. They warned that if he tried to enforce a restriction on funding, they would sue, and would almost certainly win. They reminded him: “This is a time our Nation needs unity, not division, among all levels of government.”

This new declaration is little more than a distraction, meant to try to resurrect the old “law and order” ploy and take our eyes off… what?
There are several things the administration would rather keep off the table.

The first, of course, is the coronavirus. More than 200,000 Americans have now died of Covid-19 and almost 7 million have been infected. A study conducted by Pennsylvania State associate sociology professor Ashton Verdery and other researchers concluded that every Covid-19 death leaves an average of nine survivors who have lost a grandparent, parent, sibling, spouse or child. That’s close to 2 million Americans in mourning for a close relative. And while early deaths from the pandemic centered in Democratic cities, the weight of the deaths has now shifted to red states, places where members of Trump’s base live.

The administration remains eager to cover up just how bad the pandemic is. At a rally tonight, Trump falsely claimed that coronavirus “affects virtually nobody” younger than 18 and that it is dangerous mainly to elderly people with heart disease and other medical issues—a statement that is both false and contradicted by his own statements to journalist Bob Woodward on tape on February 7.

Today, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) removed a statement it had posted Friday saying that Covid-19 spreads through “small particles, such as those in aerosols,” and that “there is growing evidence that droplets and airborne particles can remain suspended in the air and be breathed in by others, and travel distances beyond 6 feet (for example, during choir practice, in restaurants, or in fitness classes.) In general, indoor environments without good ventilation increase this risk.” Trump acknowledged this information in the February 7 call with Woodward, but it suggests reopening restaurants and other small spaces is dangerous and that schools must be upgraded for better ventilation before they will be safe. Today the CDC abruptly scrubbed its website, saying the information was “posted in error.”

On Saturday, Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex M. Azar II, grabbed control of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the 26 other agencies in the Department of Health and Human Services, claiming sole authority to sign any new any new rules about foods, medicines, medical devices… and vaccines. Azar’s chief of staff Brian Harrison said the new policy was simply “a housekeeping matter,” but it seems clear there is a fight in HHS over approval for the vaccine Trump insists—contrary to scientists-- will be ready in October.

Investigative journalist Katherine Eban of Vanity Fair set out to figure out how the United States, “with its advanced medical systems, unmatched epidemiological know-how, and vaunted regulatory and public health institutions, could have fumbled the crisis so disastrously.” Her answer in a piece published Thursday: Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who, along with his “shadow” coronavirus task force of young corporate officers, had a "quasi-messianic belief in the private sector's ability to respond effectively to the crisis and their contempt for government capabilities." “Free markets will solve this,” Kushner allegedly said. “That is not the role of government.”

Trump and his loyalists would also likely prefer people not to notice that his poll numbers continue to be bad. For him to convince people that a loss for him means the election has been stolen, he has to make people think he is running more strongly than he is. Trump carried white voters in Minnesota by 7 points in 2016; this year he is losing them by 2 points, according to a new CBS News/YouGov poll. In 2016, Trump carried non-college educated white women in Wisconsin by 16 points; now he is losing them by 9.

Trump’s concern over this slippage shows in his recent attempts to recover a white base, calling, for example, for “patriotic education” that replaces recent attempts to grapple with the legacy of slavery and his reassurance to a rally audience in Minnesota that they have “good genes.”

The Trump campaign, and the Republicans in general, are now facing a cash disadvantage in these last weeks before the election. In 2019 and the first half of 2020, the Trump campaign raised $1.1 billion, but by early this month, it had already spent more than $800 million. Close to $60 million has gone into legal bills, $350 million went to continued fundraising, more than $100 million went to television ads before the convention, $11 million went to two Super Bowl ads. The campaign also lavished money on consultants. In the spring, Trump had nearly $200 million more than Democratic nominee Joe Biden, but that advantage was gone even before last weekend, when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death prompted contributors to pour more than $160 million into Democratic causes.

Trump and Republican Senators would probably prefer that voters don’t look too closely at the upcoming fight over a new Supreme Court justice, either. For all that Trump and McConnell are pushing their nominee, and Senators are declaring they will vote for anyone Trump nominates, in fact it is not clear that forcing through a radical nominee will help the Republicans in the election. What is most clearly on the table right now is the Affordable Care Act—Obamacare—which the Supreme Court will take up exactly a week after the election. Obamacare prohibits discrimination against people with preexisting conditions. This policy has always been hugely popular, and is even more popular now, when coronavirus has added almost 7 million Americans who have been infected with coronavirus to those with what could easily be considered pre-existing conditions. Right now, in the middle of a pandemic attributed to the administration’s poor handling of the crisis, seems a poor time to strip Americans of their healthcare.

For all that these stories are important, my favorite candidate for the story we’re not supposed to notice is last night’s leak of suspicious activity reports (SARs) filed by banks with the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as FinCEN. This agency combats money laundering. The documents, leaked to BuzzFeed, which shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, found that banks flagged more than $2 trillion in potentially laundered money between 1999 and 2017. The leaked documents, which make up less than 0.02% of the more than 12 million SARs filed with FinCEN between 2011 and 2017, show a world awash in money from criminal activity. They paint a picture of a world of fabulously wealthy oligarchs and criminals, operating out of our sight.

There is nothing specifically about Trump or his company in the leaked documents, and being flagged in a SARs does not necessarily mean wrongdoing. But transactions involving $1.3 trillion at Deutsche Bank, Trump's bankers, made other bankers nervous enough to flag them. In one of the documents, Bank of America raises concerns about the amount of Russian money flowing into the U.S. in 2016 through Deutsche Bank.

Finally, there is one more thing we should be paying attention to, and this one falls under the category of “high time.” On Friday, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will become the first woman to lie in state in the U.S. Capitol.

 

[Go Bama]

September 22, 2020 (Tuesday)


“We assess that President Vladimir Putin and the senior most Russian officials are aware of and probably directing Russia’s influence operations aimed at denigrating the former U.S. Vice President, supporting the U.S. president and fueling public discord ahead of the U.S. election in November.”

Thus reads the first line of a top-secret CIA assessment, published on August 31 but reported today. The report details how Ukrainian lawmaker Andriy Derkach, who, according to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the U.S. Treasury Department is a Russian agent, is disseminating false stories about Democratic nominee Joe Biden through congressmembers, lobbyists, the media, and people close to the president. Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani has been openly working with Derkach for several months.

The news stories that Trump denigrates as “Russia, Russia, Russia,” have been dropping steadily of late.

In his new book, veteran journalist Bob Woodward revealed that Trump’s former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, who was the president’s top intelligence official from March 2017 to August 2019, could not overcome his “deep suspicions” that Putin “had something” on Trump. Coats could see “no other explanation” for the president’s behavior toward the Russian president, Woodward wrote.

Peter Strzok, who led the FBI’s Russia investigation, told journalist Natasha Bertrand at the beginning of September that it is crucial to examine Trump’s financial documents in order to see if he is compromised. Strzok wondered why Special Counsel Robert Mueller appeared not to look at them. “I personally don't see how they could have done [the counterintelligence investigation] because I don't know how you do that without getting tax records, financial records, and doing things that would become public,” Strzok said. “Had they done it, I would have expected to see litigation and screaming from Trump. And the absence of that makes me think it didn’t occur.”

It turned out Strzok was right. Reporter Michael Schmidt of the New York Times wrote in his own new book that former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein secretly limited what the FBI could look at when it was examining Trump's ties to Russia. Rosenstein limited Special Counsel Robert Mueller to a criminal investigation rather than allowing a counterintelligence operation, so the full scope of Trump’s personal and financial ties to Russia, developed over decades, has never been examined.

This limit was news to former acting FBI director McCabe who had been overseeing the case when Mueller took it over. "We opened this case in May 2017 because we had information that indicated a national security threat might exist, specifically a counterintelligence threat involving the president and Russia,” McCabe said. "I expected that issue and issues related to it would be fully examined by the special counsel team. If a decision was made not to investigate those issues, I am surprised and disappointed. I was not aware of that.”

In his own new book, Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen wrote that Trump believed Putin was investing in him. In 2008, a Russian oligarch bought Trump’s mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, for nearly twice what Trump paid for it. This let Trump pocket $50 million. According to Cohen, Trump believed Putin put up the money for the deal.

Prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, who worked on Mueller’s team, also has a book coming out. He details how the team shied away from rising Trump’s wrath out of fear he would shut the investigation down, making them avoid looking at his finances, although Weissmann did remind readers that the same account that Cohen used to pay off Stephanie Clifford (known as Stormy Daniels) also received $500,000 in payments from a company linked to a Russian oligarch.

Weissmann noted that Trump’s campaign chair Paul Manafort told investigators that his Ukrainian business partner, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, who has been identified by the Senate Intelligence Committee as a Russian operative, asked whether Trump would permit Russia to take over all of eastern Ukraine. But Manafort would say no more, leaving Weissmann wondering. “It would seem to require significant audacity — or else, leverage — for another nation to even put such a request before a presidential candidate,” Mr. Weissmann wrote. “This made what we didn’t know, and still don’t know to this day, monumentally disconcerting: Namely, why would Trump ever agree to this? Why would Trump ever agree to this Russian proposal if the candidate were not getting something from Russia in return?”

On September 14, The Atlantic published an interview with Alexander Vindman, who, in July 2019, was the National Security Council’s director for European affairs. A specialist in Russia and Ukraine, Vindman organized a call between Trump and newly elected Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, and then listened to the conversation. Trump demand for an investigation into the Bidens before he would release badly needed money to Ukraine to enable it to resist Russian incursions so shocked Vindman that he reported it to the chief NSC lawyer John Eisenberg.

Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg asked Vindman if he thought Trump was working for Russia. “President Trump should be considered to be a useful idiot and a fellow traveler, which makes him an unwitting agent of Putin," Vindman said. "They may or may not have dirt on him, but they don’t have to use it. They have more effective and less risky ways to employ him. He has aspirations to be the kind of leader that Putin is, and so he admires him. He likes authoritarian strongmen who act with impunity, without checks and balances. So he’ll try to please Putin.”
Vindman told Goldberg: “In the Army we call this ‘free chicken,’ something you don’t have to work for—it just comes to you. This is what the Russians have in Trump: free chicken.”

Meanwhile, lawyers representing the United States at Julian Assange’s trial for extradition to the United States for publishing secret documents on WikiLeaks accepted his lawyers’ claim that Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) offered Assange a presidential pardon if he would help cover up Russia’s role in hacking the Democratic National Committee’s emails in 2016. U.S. lawyers said: “The position of the government is we don't contest these things were said. We obviously do not accept the truth of what was said by others.”

Ron Johnson is promising to release his committee’s investigation of Hunter Biden and Burisma, the Ukrainian company on whose board he sat, in the next week or so. Derkach sent material to Johnson directly, as well as sending it through Giuliani. Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee wanted to see what was going into the report, but the State Department refused to let it see the more than 16,000 pages of documents it had sent to Johnson’s committee until Eliot Engle (D-NY) threatened a subpoena and started contempt proceedings against Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to see what got turned over.

Johnson has already announced his report will hurt Biden’s candidacy, and that assurance has even Republicans worried. Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) said, “It is not the legitimate role of government, for Congress or for taxpayer expense, to be used in an effort to damage political opponents.” Engel said, “This ‘investigation’ is obviously designed to boost the president’s campaign and tear down his opponent, while our own intelligence community warns it is likely to amplify Russian disinformation.” “We’re going to make sure the American people see the whole picture, not just cherrypicked information aimed at breathing new life into debunked conspiracy theories.”

Meanwhile, Russia is trolling us. Today it released a deepfake of Trump, superimposing his face on another body while he talked as a special guest anchor on the government-controlled RT network. Using Trump’s own words, they showed him cheering on Russia. It was designed to irritate Americans and to demonstrate that America no longer commands respect.

And yet still Trump refuses to criticize Putin. Asked today who he thought poisoned Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny, Trump replied: “Uhhhh ... we'll talk about that at another time.”

 

[Go Bama]

September 23, 2020 (Wednesday)


Today Americans were roiled by an article in The Atlantic, detailing the method by which the Trump campaign is planning to steal the 2020 election. The article was slated for The Atlantic’s November issue, but the editor decided to release it early because of its importance.

The article’s author, Barton Gellman, explains that Trump will not accept losing the 2020 election. If he cannot win it, he plans to steal it. We already know he is trying to suppress voting and his hand-picked Postmaster General is working to hinder the delivery of mail-in ballots. Now Trump’s teams are recruiting 50,000 volunteers in 15 states to challenge voters at polling places; this will, of course, intimidate Democrats and likely keep them from showing up.

But if those plans don’t manage to depress the Democratic vote enough to let him declare victory, he intends to insist on calling a winner in the election on November 3. His legal teams will challenge later mail-in ballots, which tend to swing Democratic, on the grounds that they are fraudulent, and they will try to silence local election officials by attacking them as agents of antifa or George Soros. The president and his team will continue to insist that the Democrats are refusing to honor the results of the election.

Gellman warns that the Trump team is already exploring a way to work around the vote counts in battleground states. Rather than appointing Democratic electors chosen by voters, a state legislature could conclude that the vote was tainted and appoint a Republican slate instead. A Trump legal advisor who spoke to Trump explained they would insist they were protecting the will of the people from those who were trying to rig an election. “The state legislatures will say, ‘All right, we’ve been given this constitutional power. We don’t think the results of our own state are accurate, so here’s our slate of electors that we think properly reflect the results of our state,’ ” the adviser explained. The election would then go to Congress, where there would be two sets of electoral votes to fight over… and things would devolve from there.

They would likely end up at the Supreme Court, to which Trump this morning said he was in a hurry to confirm a new justice so there would be a solid majority to rule in his favor on the election results. “I think this will end up in the Supreme Court and I think it’s very important that we have nine justices, and I think the system’s going to go very quickly,” he said. "Having a 4-4 situation is not a good situation."

Amidst the flurry of concern over The Atlantic piece, a reporter this afternoon asked Trump if he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses the election. "Well, we’re going to have to see what happens," Trump said. "You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster." He went on to say: "Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very — we’ll have a very peaceful — there won’t be a transfer frankly, there’ll be a continuation."
In response to this shocking rejection of the basic principles of our government, Adam Schiff (D-CA), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, tweeted, “This is how democracy dies.” He said: “This is a moment that I would say to any republican of good conscience working in the administration, it is time for you to resign.” But only one Republican, Mitt Romney (R-UT,) condemned Trump’s comments as “both unthinkable and unacceptable.”

On Facebook, veteran journalist Dan Rather wrote of living through the Depression, World War Two, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, Watergate, and 9-11, then said: “This is a moment of reckoning unlike any I have seen in my lifetime…. What Donald Trump said today are the words of a dictator. To telegraph that he would consider becoming the first president in American history not to accept the peaceful transfer of power is not a throw-away line. It's not a joke. He doesn't joke. And it is not prospective. The words are already seeding a threat of violence and illegitimacy into our electoral process.”

There is no doubt that Trump’s statement today was a watershed moment. Another watershed event is the fact that Republicans are not condemning it.

But there are two significant tells in Trump’s statement. First of all, his signature act is to grab headlines away from stories he does not want us to read. Two new polls today put Biden up by ten points nationally. Fifty-eight percent of Americans do not approve of the way Trump is doing his job. Only 38% approve of how he is handling the coronavirus. Voters see Biden as more honest, intelligent, caring, and level-headed than Trump. They think Biden is a better leader.

Trump’s headline grabs keep attention from Biden’s clear and detailed plans, first for combatting coronavirus and rebuilding the economy, and then for reordering the country. The Republicans didn’t bother to write a platform this year, simply saying they supported Trump, but Trump has not been able to articulate why he wants a second term.

In contrast, Biden took his cue from Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and has released detailed and clear plans for a Biden presidency. Focusing on four areas, Biden has called for returning critical supply chains to America and rebuilding union jobs in manufacturing and technology; investing in infrastructure and clean energy; and supporting the long-ignored caregiving sector of the economy by increasing training and pay for those workers who care for children, elderly Americans, and people with disabilities. He has a detailed plan for leveling the playing field between Black and Brown people and whites, beginning by focusing on economic opportunity, but also addressing society's systemic racial biases. Biden’s plans get little attention so long as the media is focused on Trump.

The president’s antics also overshadow the reality that many prominent Republicans are abandoning him. Yesterday, Arizona Senator John McCain’s widow Cindy endorsed Biden. “My husband John lived by a code: country first. We are Republicans, yes, but Americans foremost. There's only one candidate in this race who stands up for our values as a nation, and that is [Biden].” She added “Joe… is a good and honest man. He will lead us with dignity. He will be a commander in chief that the finest fighting force in the history of the world can depend on, because he knows what it is like to send a child off to fight."

McCain is only the latest of many prominent Republicans to endorse Biden, and her endorsement stings. She could help Biden in the crucial state of Arizona, especially with women. "I'm hoping that I can encourage suburban women to take another look, women that are particularly on the fence and are unhappy with what’s going on right now but also are not sure they want to cross the line and vote for Joe. I hope they’ll take a look at what I believe and will move forward and come with me and join team Biden," McCain said.

That McCain’s endorsement stung showed in Trump’s tweeted response: “I hardly know Cindy McCain other than having put her on a Committee at her husband’s request. Joe Biden was John McCain’s lapdog…. Never a fan of John. Cindy can have Sleepy Joe!”

And, of course, Trump’s declaration has taken the focus off the Republican senators’ abrupt about-face on confirming a Supreme Court justice in an election year. The ploy laid bare their determination to cement their power at all costs, and it is not popular. Sixty-two percent of Americans, including 50% of Republicans, think the next president should name Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s replacement.

The second tell in Trump’s statement is that Trump’s lawyers confirmed to Gellman that their strategy is to leverage their power in the system to steal the election. Surely, they would want to keep that plan quiet… unless they are hoping to convince voters that the game is so fully rigged there is no point in showing up to vote.

Trump’s statement is abhorrent, and we must certainly be prepared for chaos surrounding this election. But never forget that Trump’s campaign, which-- according to our intelligence agencies-- is being helped by Russian disinformation, is keen on convincing Americans that our system doesn’t work, our democracy is over, and there is no point in participating in it. If you believe them, their disinformation is a self-fulfilling prophecy, despite the fact that a strong majority of Americans prefers Biden to Trump.

Trump’s statement is abhorrent, indeed; but the future remains unwritten.

 

[Go Bama]

September 24, 2020 (Thursday)


Tonight, protesters in Louisville, Kentucky, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York City, Rochester, and other cities are calling for justice and reminding observers that Black Lives Matter after a grand jury on Wednesday declined to charge the three officers involved in Breonna Taylor’s murder. The grand jury did indict Brett Hankison, one of the officers involved, on charges of first-degree wanton endangerment for shooting into her apartment and that of her neighbors without a clear line of sight. His actions, according to the charge, exhibited “extreme indifference to the value of human life,” Hankison had to post a bond of $15,000.

On March 13, three plainclothes Louisville police officers broke down the door of Breonna Taylor’s apartment as part of an investigation of a man they believed was a drug dealer in a different part of the city. Taylor had once dated the man, and police say they believed he had used her apartment to receive packages. They broke in without announcing who they were, and when they came through the door, Taylor’s boyfriend, who had a license to carry a gun, thought they were criminals and shot one of them in the leg. The three officers fired off 32 shots, six of which hit Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician.

She died within minutes.

The officers found no drugs.

After Taylor’s death, the officers involved filled out an incident report that said they had not forced their way into the apartment—witnesses and crime scene photographs show they did—and listed Taylor’s injuries as “none.”

On September 15, Taylor’s family and the city of Louisville announced they had reached a record-breaking $12 million settlement in the shooting, Louisville’s largest ever for police actions and one of the largest in the nation for the shooting of a Black American by law enforcement officers. The settlement includes a wide range of police reforms.

But when announcing the criminal charges, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron explained that Hankison’s bullets had not hit Taylor, so he could not be charged in her death. And since her boyfriend had shot at them first, the officers who did kill Taylor were justified in their use of force. It is unlikely there will be other charges, he said. The lawyer for Taylor’s family has called the six-month investigation a cover-up, and has asked Cameron to release the transcripts of the grand jury proceedings.

Democratic Governor Andy Beshear agreed that "It's time to post all the information…. All the facts, all the interviews, all the evidence, all the ballistics, to truly let people look at the information…. One of the problems we've had over the last six months is a total lack of explanation and information," he added. "And the vacuum that's created there — our emotions, frustrations — can truly fill that. It's time for people ... to be able to come to their own conclusions about justice."
Cameron, a Republican, cited the pending trial and an FBI investigation as a reason to keep the evidence under wraps. “At this point, I don’t think it’s appropriate” to release more information, he said.

“I have to say, as an attorney, that the decision didn’t surprise me,” said Savala Trepczynski of the University of California Berkeley School of Law. “It’s very hard to hold the police accountable in a deep way... given the system that’s in place and how it tends to favor police at every turn. As a person, though, the (decision) is upsetting, disappointing, angering — all of those things. I felt grief, a familiar grief.”

The idea that our laws are written in such a way that they privilege white people and disadvantage people of color, especially Black Americans, is the principle at the heart of critical race theory. This is the theory that Trump has called “un-American propaganda,” and which he has ordered federal agencies to stop addressing.

Trump learned about critical race theory from Tucker Carlson’s show on the Fox News Channel, and that show, too, was in the news today. A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought against Carlson by Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who claims to have had an affair with Trump before he became president. In 2018, on his show, Carlson accused McDougal of extorting Trump. She sued him for defamation.

Lawyer Erin Murphy argued for FNC that Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil, a Trump appointee, should toss the lawsuit because Carlson’s show is not news. It is commentary, Murphy said, and so he has no obligation to tell the truth. Murphy said that a reasonable viewer should recognize that Carlson simply provides hypothetical statements to offer “provocative things that will help me think harder,” and his accusations against McDougal, couched as questions, were simply provocations. "What we’re talking about here, it’s not the front page of The New York Times," Murphy said. “It’s Tucker Carlson Tonight, which is a commentary show.”

Today Vyskocil agreed with FNC’s lawyers. “The statements are rhetorical hyperbole and opinion commentary intended to frame a political debate, and, as such, are not actionable as defamation,” she wrote. Vyskocil agreed with FNC lawyers that the “general tenor” of Carlson’s program indicates to the audience that he is not explaining the news, but rather is “engaging in ‘exaggeration’ and ‘nonliteral commentary.’” She said: “Given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer ‘arrive with an appropriate amount of skepticism'" about anything Carlson says.

 

[Go Bama]

September 25, 2020 (Friday)


Trump’s refusal Wednesday to commit to accepting a loss in the November election with a peaceful transfer of power continues to make waves. Today the New York Times reported that military officers are worried that Trump will try to drag them into a contested election. But while people are rightly frightened about Trump’s increasing authoritarianism, it’s important to understand that he is deploying these particular threats about the election to create an impression that he has the option to control the outcome in November. He does not have that option.

Trump and his cronies are trying to create their own reality. They are trying to make people believe that the coronavirus is not real, that it has not killed more than 200,000 of our neighbors, that the economy is fine, that our cities are in flames, that Black Lives Matter protesters are anarchists, and that putting Democrats in office will usher in radical socialism. None of these things is true. Similarly, Trump is trying to convince people that he can deploy the power of the government to remain in power even if we want him to leave, creating uncertainly and fear. By talking about it, he is willing that situation into existence. It is a lie, and we do not have to accept it.

For his part, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden recognizes that Trump’s repeated threats not to leave office are both letting him convince us that leaving is his choice, rather than ours, and keeping the media focused on him when we should, in fact, be talking about real issues. Biden is refusing to give the idea oxygen, reminding reporters that it is a “typical Trump distraction.” “I just think the people in the country are going to be heard on November 3,” he told them. “Every vote in this country is going to be heard and they will not be stopped. I'm confident that all of the irresponsible, outrageous attacks on voting, we’ll have an election in this country as we always have had, and he'll leave.” He said: “I don’t think he’s going to get the FBI to follow him or get anybody else to enforce something that’s not real.”

While the Senate voted unanimously yesterday to commit to the peaceful transfer of power in January, it was actually Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, a Republican, who gave Trump’s refusal to commit to a peaceful transfer of power the dripping disdain it deserved. Speaking to reporters, Baker defended the mail-in ballots that Trump is saying will invalidate the election, and called Trump’s suggestion that he wouldn’t leave office peacefully “appalling and outrageous.” Baker said he would to do everything in his power to defend the results of the election.

“A huge part of this nation’s glory, to the extent it exists as a beacon to others, is the peaceful transfer of power based on the vote of the people of this country,” he said.

Trump responded with an insulting tweet, but one that suggested he was deliberately stoking the story to try to get free media coverage.
This makes sense, because there are signs that Trump and the Republicans have a real money problem. We know that the Trump campaign has run through close to a billion dollars, leaving him and other Republican candidates short of cash for the last weeks of the campaign. At the same time, Democratic fundraising in the wake of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death has been unprecedented. The squeeze showed clearly in three highly unusual appearances by Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on the Fox News Channel begging for donations.
Two new ploys to advance Trump’s reelection, one claiming to address healthcare concerns and one claiming to address coronavirus concerns, reveal both the campaign’s attempts to construct their own reality and to do it on someone else’s dime.

The president has repeatedly promised his own healthcare bill to replace the Affordable Care Act that his administration is currently trying to kill. Under criticism for trying to end the law that protects people with preexisting health conditions from discrimination in buying insurance—the ACA will come before the Supreme Court a week after the November 3 election-- Trump on Thursday abruptly signed an Executive Order affirming that “it is the official policy of the United States government to protect patients with preexisting conditions.” The Executive Order is toothless; if the Supreme Court overturns the ACA, the Executive Order will mean nothing.

But Trump also suggested that he might be willing simply to keep the law and call it his own. “Obamacare is no longer Obamacare, as we worked on it and managed it very well,” Trump said of the law that continues to provide coverage for more than 20 million Americans. “What we have now is a much better plan. It is no longer Obamacare because we got rid of the worse part of it — the individual mandate.” “We’ve really become the health-care party — the Republican Party,” he said.

Trump also announced he would give $200 toward the cost of their medicines to 33 million older Americans. That’s $6.6 billion dollars that he will be putting in the pockets of key voters just before the election. Apparently, his plan is to take money from Medicare under a rule that allows the Medicare to test out new programs. Authorization for such a shift in funding usually requires a lengthy approval process, and the new program needs to be cost neutral. Ameet Sarpatwari, assistant director of Harvard Medical School's Program on Regulation, Therapeutics and Law told NPR’s Sydney Lupkin: I think the administration is pushing the envelope in terms of classifying this as a demonstration."

The Trump campaign is also planning a taxpayer-funded advertising blitz, costing at least $300 million, to “defeat despair and inspire hope” about the coronavirus pandemic. According to Politico’s Dan Diamond, the ads will feature interviews between administration officials and celebrities. The ad campaign was conceived and begun by Michael Caputo, the top spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services before he stepped down last week for medical leave after an infamous Facebook rant.

Caputo claimed in his video that Trump has personally demanded the advertising campaign. "The Democrats — and, by the way, their conjugal media and the leftist scientists that are working for the government — are dead set against it," Caputo said. "They cannot afford for us to have any good news before November because they're already losing. … They're going to come after me because I'm going to be putting $250 million worth of ads on the air." The White House says it is not accurate that Trump “demanded” the campaign.

To pay for the ads, Caputo requisitioned $300 million from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and $15 million from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). But he sidelined the Ad Council, which is a nonprofit consortium of advertising companies that since World War Two has worked on a nonpartisan basis with the government on public health or social issue campaigns. Instead, Caputo hired his own business partner to make the videos.

Josh Peck, the former HHS official who oversaw the Obama administration’s advertising campaign for HealthCare.gov, told Diamond that officials in the Obama administration were never featured in videos, and that the Trump administrations Covid videos sound like they are about more than Americans’ health. He said: "CDC hasn’t yet done an awareness campaign about Covid guidelines — but they are going to pay for a campaign about how to get rid of our despair? Run by political appointees in the press shop? Right before an election? It’s like every red flag I could dream of.”

Trump’s challenge to the outcome of the election is a sign of his desperation, but it is no less dangerous for all that: as they say, a cornered rat will bite the cat. While Democrats and a remarkable number of Republicans are speaking out against Trump, and while teams of lawyers are fighting his lawyers in court, ordinary Americans also have a crucial role to play in this moment. It is up to us to reject Trump's fictions and reclaim the national conversation from the anger and hatred and fear Trump is stoking.

It is time to reassert our core American values so they dominate the public realm, demanding of our representatives a free and fair vote for everyone, a free and fair vote count, and a government of our own choosing.

 

[Go Bama]

September 26, 2020 (Saturday)


Today, Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to take Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's seat on the Supreme Court.

The rest of the news can wait.

Rest up, everyone. It's going to be rough ride for awhile.

 

[Go Bama]

September 27 (Sunday)


Late this afternoon, the New York Times published the story we have been waiting for since 2016: the story of Donald Trump’s taxes. There was never any doubt that whatever was in those taxes was bad or he never would have worked so hard to hide them. But the picture the New York Times story revealed was worse than expected.

The New York Times obtained more than two decades of Donald Trump’s tax information, including that of his companies, through his first two years in the White House. The picture they paint is of a man more than $300 million in debt; whose businesses are constantly losing money; who deducts personal expenses including houses, airplanes, and $70,000 in hairstyling; who is fighting with the IRS over the repayment of a $72.9 million tax refund which, if it has to be repaid, will run to $100 million; and who in his first year in office paid the most income tax he had paid in a decade: $750.

That’s not a typo.

In 11 of the 18 years the reporters examined, Trump paid no taxes at all. He has, however, paid taxes elsewhere. In 2017, Trump paid $750 to the U.S., but paid $15,598 in Panama, $145,400 in India, and $156,824 in the Philippines (rather undercutting the idea that American tax laws are too harsh on the very wealthy).

The information illuminates a number of the shadowy puzzles of the Trump presidency. It shows that he was deeply in debt in 2015, and was, as his former fixer Michael Cohen said, eager to rebuild his brand by running for the highest office in the land. He had a bad habit of running through cash and accumulating huge debt, a pattern that showed up first when he ran through the money his father gave him, and then when the brief popularity of The Apprentice put $427.4 million into his pocket. He threw the money from The Apprentice into failing golf courses.
The presidency has injected cash into Trump’s businesses, as lobbyists and foreign governments invest in them, but he is still losing money. The Times notes that “within the next four years, more than $300 million in loans—obligations for which he is personally responsible—will come due.”

This, of course, means that Trump is a huge national security risk. He owes money—to whom we don’t know—and he does not have it to pay his debts. It is no wonder that a bipartisan group of nearly 500 national security officials, past and present, last week endorsed Biden for president. According to Defense News, the list included “five former secretaries of the Navy, two former Army secretaries, four former Air Force secretaries, two retired governors, and 106 ambassadors.” Retired General Paul Selva, who served as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the first two and a half years of Trump’s term, signed the letter.
The tax returns also suggest that Trump’s desperation to stay in office is sparked by the 1973 Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel memo saying a sitting president cannot be indicted. Former inspector general of the Department of Justice Michael Bromwich tweeted “Trump knew something we didn't when he started balking at the peaceful transfer of power. If he loses the election, he faces federal and state prosecution for bank fraud, tax fraud, wire fraud, and mail fraud, as does his entire family. No OLC memo will spare him.”

Among other things, the information revealed that Trump wrote off about $26 million in “consulting fees” between 2010 and 2018. This reduced his taxable income, but it appears it might have simply been a way to give money to his children without paying taxes on it: his daughter Ivanka appears to have received $747,622 from the Trump Organization in consulting fees, despite being an employee there.
Remember, this is the information Trump chose to tell the IRS. It seems worth wondering what he did not tell them.

The Times says it will not release the actual documents in order to protect its source(s). It also says it will continue to drop more news from this trove over the coming weeks.

A piece from Michael Kranish at the Washington Post today reinforced the New York Times story. Apparently, when he was on the verge of personal bankruptcy in the 1990s, Trump tried to trick his 85-year-old father, who was sliding into dementia, into signing a codicil to his will that would cheat Trump’s siblings out of their inheritance and give Trump control of his father’s entire estate. Trump’s mother stopped her husband from signing it.

Trump had a press conference scheduled for shortly after the New York Times story broke. When asked about it, Trump claimed the story was “totally fake news,” although a lawyer for the Trump Organization could only try to refute the story with misleading information. After the conference, CNN’s Ana Cabrera pointed out that Trump could stop the New York Times story if it were wrong by “releasing his tax returns, by making them public.”

This evening, news broke that Trump’s former campaign manager, Brad Parscale, has been hospitalized after threatening suicide. While most commentators simply noted the story and warned against making this particular personal story political, Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said: "Brad Parscale is a member of our family and we all love him. We are ready to support him and his family in any way possible. The disgusting, personal attacks from Democrats and disgruntled RINOs have gone too far, and they should be ashamed of themselves for what they've done to this man and his family." There is no evidence linking Democrats or anyone else to this incident.

 

[Go Bama]

September 27 (continued from previous post)

The big New York Times story came on top of yesterday’s big story: Trump’s announcement that he has nominated Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court, to take the seat formerly held by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Barrett clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and like he was, she is an originalist. In a speech, she explained: “The constitution means what it meant to those who ratified it.” Scalia “interpreted that text as people would have understood that text at the time it was ratified…. if we change the law now to comport with our current understandings or what we want it to mean then it ceases to be the law that has democratic legitimacy.” Change must come from new laws and new constitutional amendments, not from the courts. Like Scalia, Barrett resists “the notion that the Supreme Court should be in the business of imposing its views of social mores on the American people.” This understanding does not bode well for the Affordable Care Act, which the court will begin to review on November 10, just a week after the election.

Trump elevated Barrett from her professorship at Notre Dame Law School to the U.S. court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on May 8, 2017, and the Senate confirmed her the following October 31. Now 48 years old, she is in line to join the Supreme Court.

Lindsey Graham (R-SC), chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has laid out a lightning fast schedule for Barrett’s expected confirmation. Today he told the Fox News Channel that his committee will approve her by October 22, so she will be on track for a full Senate vote before the end of October. It will be one of the fastest confirmations for a Supreme Court justice in history.

This is a huge scandal. In March 2016, when President Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court after the death of Antonin Scalia the previous month, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) insisted that it was inappropriate to confirm a justice so close to an election. That was ridiculous, of course, in our history 14 justices have been confirmed in an election year before the election (three more have been confirmed after it). But no Supreme Court justice has ever been confirmed later than July before an election. Now the Republicans are fast-tracking a nominee while people are literally already voting. And the president has said he wants Barrett confirmed because he expects the election results will be thrown into the Supreme Court where, presumably, she will vote in his favor.

Barrett is a devout Catholic who is a member of the charismatic Christian People of Praise community. Concern about the gender roles enforced in that patriarchal community have prompted her supporters to claim that her opponents are anti-Catholic. This claim is odd when both the Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, and the Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, are themselves devout Catholics who have endured Republican attacks on their faith, including Trump’s declaration that, if elected, Biden would "hurt the Bible, hurt God…. He’s against God.”

Rather than being prompted by concern for religious freedom, Republicans insisting that Democrats are anti-Catholic falls in line with a pattern identified by Brian Fallon, former director of public affairs for the Department of Justice and now the executive director of Demand Justice, which has tried to stop Trump’s packing of the federal judiciary. “It is a long running tactic of Senate GOP that, when they are about to do something unpopular, they invent some grievance to ‘psych’ themselves up and act like Dems forced their hand. This is why they are desperate to act like attacks on Catholicism are lurking out there.”

Today, Biden urged senators, many of whom he knows personally from his decades in the Senate, to de-escalate their stance on Barrett and to “do the right thing.” He warned that voters “are not going to stand for this abuse of power.” “This is where the power of the nation resides — in the people, in the rule of law, in precedents we abide by. To subvert both openly and needlessly, even as Americans cast their vote would be an irreversible step toward the brink and a betrayal of a single quality that America has born and built on — the people decide.”

“I urge every senator to take a step back from the brink,” he said. “Take off the blinders of politics for just one critical moment and stand up for the Constitution you swore to uphold.”

 

[92tide]

September 27 (continued from previous post)

Rather than being prompted by concern for religious freedom, Republicans insisting that Democrats are anti-Catholic falls in line with a pattern identified by Brian Fallon, former director of public affairs for the Department of Justice and now the executive director of Demand Justice, which has tried to stop Trump’s packing of the federal judiciary. “It is a long running tactic of Senate GOP that, when they are about to do something unpopular, they invent some grievance to ‘psych’ themselves up and act like Dems forced their hand. This is why they are desperate to act like attacks on Catholicism are lurking out there.”

the gop has been playing (watb) victim since the early 90's. it's one of their main schticks

 

[Go Bama]

September 28, 2020 (Monday)


After last night’s news dump, today was mostly follow up while everyone takes a deep breath before tomorrow’s presidential debates. Since last night was a late one and the morning early, I’m going to take advantage of the lack of big news to rest up for tomorrow.

First, though, a rundown of the little that hit the radar screen:
Wildfire risk in the West continues high, with more than 3.7 million acres burned in California alone and 26 dead there.

The Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield, was overheard talking on a plane about Trump’s new medical advisor for the coronavirus task force, Scott Atlas, a radiologist and talking head on the Fox News Channel.

“Everything he says is false,” Redfield said. Atlas’s advocacy of exposing children to the coronavirus to achieve herd immunity has made public health experts blanch. “Many of his opinions and statements run counter to established science, and, by doing so, undermine public-health authorities and the credible science that guides effective public health policy,” 78 of his former colleagues wrote in an open letter.
More than 200,000 Americans have died from Covid-19 and cases are currently rising in 21 states. Vice-President Mike Pence, who heads the White House coronavirus task force, says cases are going to continue to rise.

Meanwhile, the New York Times revealed today that, this summer, White House officials pressured the CDC to downplay the dangers of coronavirus to youngsters as the administration pushed the idea of reopening schools. White House officials actively sought to present the idea that the disease was less dangerous to children, and that the psychological damage of staying out of school would be more harmful to them than the coronavirus. While the CDC was trying to make the pros and cons of reopening schools clear, Trump said in early July that children handled the virus well, and “we want to get our schools open. We want to get them open quickly, beautifully, in the fall.”

Last night’s tax story earned Trump’s predictable angry tweets. But there was a thundering silence from Republicans about the tax story, while Democrats expressed alarm at the dangers of a president exposed to more than $300 million in debt. For ordinary Americans, even small debt can prevent obtaining a security clearance because it makes a person vulnerable to blackmail or other pressure.

After the Republican campaign’s initial reaction was to blame Democrats and “RINOs” for Brad Parscale’s suicide scare and hospitalization yesterday, it turned out today that the issue was domestic violence. A police report showed that Parscale’s wife called police when he loaded a gun. Arriving at the scene, police saw she was was badly bruised and scratched, and she “stated Brad Parscale hits her.”

The New York Times tonight issued part 2 of the story of Trump’s taxes, this time a deep dive into how The Apprentice rehabilitated Trump’s image as a wealthy businessman.

Finally, the day’s biggest news story dropped tonight, when a member of the grand jury that oversaw the Breonna Taylor case filed a motion asking the judge to release the grand jury proceedings. The motion suggests that the public statements of Kentucky Attorney General David Cameron contradict the evidence the grand jury saw. That grand jury was in charge of considering charges against the three law enforcement officers who executed a no-knock warrant on Taylor’s apartment and ended up murdering the 26-year-old emergency room technician after her boyfriend shot at the men he thought were intruders.

That’s it for me tonight, folks. I'm thinking tomorrow's going to be newsworthy.

 

[Go Bama]

September 29, 2020 (Tuesday)


My house is blissfully quiet, but my ears are still ringing.

The first presidential debate of 2020 was unlike anything we have seen before. CNN’s Jake Tapper said: "That was a hot mess, inside a dumpster fire, inside a train wreck." "He was his own tweets come to life." “We’ll talk about who won the debate, who lost the debate ... One thing for sure, the American people lost.” Conservative pundit William Kristol called it “a spectacle… an embarrassment… a disgrace… because of the behavior of one man, Donald Trump. The interrupting and the bullying, the absence of both decency and dignity—those were Donald Trump’s distinctive contributions to the evening, and they gave the affair the rare and sickening character of a national humiliation.”
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

In a normal presidential debate, both candidates try to explain their policy proposals, jab at their opponent, and convince undecided voters to move in their direction. If this had been a normal presidential debate, its weight would have fallen on Trump, who is significantly behind Biden, to win voters. Biden’s goal would simply have been not to lose anyone.
If we were calling this like a normal presidential debate, Trump lost. He did not move the needle in his direction. Biden won; he did not lose anyone.

But this was not a normal presidential debate.

Trump long ago gave up the pretense that he wanted to win a majority of voters. For months now, he has made no effort to reach outside of his base. Instead he has focused on solidifying and radicalizing it. As his trade war with China and the coronavirus has weakened his support, he has given massive grants to farmers, promised checks to 33 million elderly to help pay for prescriptions, splashed transportation grants around, and recently even offered grants to lobstermen who have lost business because of the trade war.

Trump set out tonight not to convince undecided voters to support him, but rather to harden his supporters and encourage them to disrupt the election so he can contest the results until the solution goes to the Supreme Court where he hopes a majority will rule in his favor. He laid it all out tonight.

His performance was no accident. He came out determined to dominate the debate in much the same way as Fox News Channel personalities or talk radio hosts dominate their shows. He interrupted, argued, lied, and generally sucked the oxygen out of the room. He cheated, refusing to follow the rules that he had agreed to, thus demonstrating that he would not be bound by the rules everyone else had to live by. He bullied moderator Chris Wallace of the Fox News Channel into repeatedly appeasing him by saying, for example, “Mr. President you’re going to be very happy, because we’re going to talk about law and order,” and “Let me ask — sir, you’ll be happy, I’m about to pick up on one of your points to ask the vice president.” Trump was attempting to demonstrate his dominance.

He went on to echo the grievances and lies that his supporters have come to believe. Ignoring the more than 200,000 Americans dead of Covid-19, he insisted he was the victim of Democrats' lies about the disease. When Wallace tried to rein him in, he attacked him for being unfair, although Wallace never once fact-checked Trump’s lies.

If Trump had a strategy at all that involved voters, it was to try to keep them from backing Biden. Trump kept yelling at him about “Law & Order,” as he likes to tweet, and kept trying to drive a wedge between Biden and the more progressive wing of the Democratic Party, finally saying to him: “You just lost the left.”

Trump tipped his hand, though, when Wallace asked: "Are you willing, tonight, to condemn white supremacists and militia groups and to say that they need to stand down?” Trump demanded names of such groups, and Wallace named, among others, the Proud Boys, the hate group that helped to organize the riot in Charlottesville, Virginia. After hedging, Trump finally answered: "Proud Boys, stand back and stand by! But I'll tell you what, somebody's got to do something about antifa and the left." "That's my president," the head of the Proud Boys posted on the social media chair that will still host them. Within an hour the group had new shoulder patches designed with the words “Stand Back and Stand By.”

Trump called for his supporters to act as poll watchers to prevent a fraudulent vote. He is losing badly in Pennsylvania, a state he needs, and tonight he lied that Philadelphia election officials refused to permit his poll watchers to observe voting. “Bad things happen in Philadelphia,” he said, “bad things.” The truth is that seven satellite offices where voters can register and apply to vote, complete, and drop off mail in ballots opened in Philadelphia. Poll watchers are not allowed because there is no polling taking place. Trump’s calls for poll watchers are pretty clearly calls for voter intimidation.

Tonight, again, Trump refused to commit to accepting a Biden victory, saying that he could not agree to fraudulent results. He suggested the election could take months to solve, and that he “definitely” wants the Supreme Court, including his new nominee Amy Coney Barrett, to “look at the ballots.” (Democrats have said Barrett should recuse herself from any election-related cases; Republicans say that is “absurd.”)
It was a performance designed to show a strong man who is calling out his armed supporters to enable him to seize an election he cannot win freely.

But Trump performed as he did because it’s all he’s got. He has no policies, no platform, no plans that he can sell to the American people, and no attention span either to govern or to explain how he wants to govern. So his only option is to dominate. Even he knows that ploy is a desperate one. Tonight’s tell was actually in his dominance play itself: overt bullying like he displayed tonight is actually a sign of weakness and abuse, not of true power.

The bar for Biden going into this debate was low: since he is so far ahead, he simply needed not to lose votes. But he did well. First of all, he managed to retain his train of thought, which was no easy thing with Trump interrupting and lying and yelling, clearly trying to derail him and, at the very least, bring out his stutter. He put to rest Trump’s insistence that he is failing mentally.

Despite Trump, Biden also managed to explain some of his policies, too, as well as pointing out that more than 200,000 Americans have died on Trump’s watch, and that he has done the economy no favors. Under Trump, he said, America has become “weaker, sicker, poorer, more divided and more violent.”

But Biden’s strongest moments were ones Trump teed up. When Biden defended our troops from Trump’s “losers” and “suckers” comments, citing his son, Beau, who died of cancer after his service in Iraq, Trump missed the opportunity to acknowledge Biden’s loss, and instead repeatedly attacked Biden’s son Hunter, who struggled with substance abuse. Trump insisted—incorrectly—that Hunter was dishonorably discharged from the Navy (in fact, he was administratively discharged), and tried to smear him. Biden looked directly at Trump to say that Hunter had a drug addiction he is managing, and Biden is proud of him. While Biden spoke as a father defending his son, his message will resonate with the 20 million Americans who are battling addiction.

Most important, though, Biden made the debate about the country and the American people, not about Trump. While Trump listed his own grievances, Biden spoke to the camera, asking Americans what they needed, what they think. He promised that we can accomplish anything if only we work together. He urged people to ignore the chaos and vote. “Vote whatever way is the best way for you,” he said. “Because he will not be able to stop you from determining the outcome of this election.”

Biden also refused to be scared off by Trump’s threats not to honor the election results. He brushed them off, saying “I will accept it, and he will, too. You know why? Because once the winner is declared once all the ballots are counted, that’ll be the end of it.”

 

[Go Bama]

September 30, 2020 (Wednesday)


So what was happening while we were distracted by Trump’s debate performance?

First of all, his tax returns, publicized by the New York Times since Sunday, have taken a back seat to his support for the white supremacist gang the Proud Boys and his attacks on a peaceful election.

Second, coronavirus news is not getting the airtime it should. More than a million people around the world have died of Covid-19, including more than 205,000 Americans. Florida is seeing a surge in new cases since Governor Ron DeSantis signed an executive order allowing restaurants and bars to reopen. The Midwest is also in a surge, with record numbers of new cases in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Kansas. Wisconsin hospitals are nearing capacity and South Dakota has the highest rate of spread in the country. Experts worry about a dramatic rise in cases as cold weather settles in.

Third, Brad Parscale, Trump’s former campaign manager, left the Trump campaign today after his involuntary hospitalization for psychiatric evaluation over the weekend after threats to self-harm. He cited his need “to focus on my family and get help dealing with the overwhelming stress.” Parscale knows the secrets of the Trump campaign since the heady days of 2016, and the family is reportedly worried he will begin to cooperate with law enforcement about possible campaign finance violations. Campaign staff is scrubbing his presence from the campaign's website.

These three big stories are on the back burner because last night Trump told white supremacist thugs to “Stand Back and Stand By” before saying that “somebody's got to do something about antifa and the left," a statement observers note sounds much like a precursor to calling them to action against those he perceives to be enemies.

He also called for “poll watchers” to prevent fraudulent ballots and warned that Democrats are going to steal the election from him. He said he expects the election results will take “months” as the campaign challenges mail-in ballots, and that he hopes the case will end up in the Supreme Court.

Today, it feels like Trump’s embrace of white supremacist gangs and his open declaration that he is planning an assault on our democratic process was a turning point for the campaign, and for the nation.
The president reportedly is happy with the way the evening went, believing his supporters love to see him go on the attack. Today he has complained that he “was debating two people last night,” but that he had won and it was “fun.”

Trump’s team is dutifully echoing his talking points. Campaign spokeswoman Thea McDonald told the Washington Post that “Poll watchers are critical to ensuring the fairness of any election, and President Trump’s volunteer poll watchers will be trained to ensure all rules are applied equally, all valid ballots are counted, and all Democrat rule breaking is called out…. And if fouls are called, the Trump campaign will go to court to enforce the laws, as rightfully written by state legislatures, to protect every voter’s right to vote. President Trump and his team will be ready to make sure polls are run correctly, securely, and transparently as we work to deliver the free and fair election Americans deserve.”

This high-minded language is a weird echo of the language white supremacists used in the American South after the Civil War, as they drove Black voters and white Republicans from the polls and turned the region into a one-party state for generations.

Neo-Nazis and right-wing thugs are thrilled they have a fellow traveler in the White House. “I got shivers,” Andrew Anglin, the founder of the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer, wrote Wednesday. “I still have shivers. He is telling the people to stand by. As in: Get ready for war.”

But not everyone was thrilled with Trump’s performance. Focus groups of women were turned off by his bullying, and his male supporters thought he interrupted too much. An adviser called it “a disaster.” Politico’s chief political correspondent Tim Alberta thought Trump looked exhausted and “behaved like cornered prey.” The Commission on Presidential Debates is reworking its rules to try to prevent another spectacle like last night. Foreign observers were “aghast,” according to an AP report; Kenyan commentator Patrick Gathara wrote: “This debate would be sheer comedy if it wasn’t such a pitiful and tragic advertisement for U.S. dysfunction.”

Even within the White House people were dismayed. “It’s nuts…” “total lunacy,” an official and a staffer told Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman. A prominent Republican added: “Trump didn’t win over any voters, and he ****ed off a lot of people.”

Trump’s people are trying to walk back Trump’s support for the Proud Boys. They are also trying to convince him to temper his future performances. Dana Bash from CNN reported today that “A source familiar with the president’s debate prep tells CNN that they wanted him to be aggressive, but not act like Jason from Friday the 13th.” Republican lawmakers were largely silent today about Trump’s performance, although Susan Collins (R-ME) agreed that Trump should have condemned white supremacist gangs after she first tried to blame both sides for the debacle.

At his rally tonight in Minnesota, Trump said Biden is cancelling the next two debates, although Biden has said he’ll be there. Trump is also talking about getting rid of a term limit on the presidency and serving another 8, 12, or 16 years.

Americans who care about our electoral process are now trying to prepare for crisis at the polls. “This is a blatant attempt at voter intimidation,” said Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, a Democrat. “It’s very important to be clear about that. It’s illegal. It is a crime to engage in voter intimidation or election interference.” Several state attorneys general say they will arrest anyone who tries to intimidate voters.

Perhaps most important today was the news that the FBI’s Dallas Field Office yesterday released an intelligence report warning that a “violent extremist threat” is imminent, and that the period between now and the inauguration next January is a “potential flashpoint.” That threat comes not from the “left,” as Trump charges, but from the right-wing gangs that Trump is encouraging, including the Boogaloos, a staunchly anti-government group that is working to bring about a race war to speed up the collapse of the government. The report, which was obtained exclusively by The Nation, is titled “Boogaloo Adherents Likely Increasing Anti-Government Violent Rhetoric and Activities, Increasing Domestic Violent Extremist Threat in the FBI Dallas Area of Responsibility.” The report warns that there is “increased ‘patrolling’ or attendance at events” that serve the Boogaloo’s cause, including “otherwise peaceful and lawful protests.”

Today a federal judge in Montana rejected the attempts of the Trump campaign to stop the state from expanding mail-in voting. He permitted the new system to go into place, and called the idea of widespread voter fraud “fiction.”

 

[Go Bama]

October 1, 2020 (Thursday)


This evening, I talked to a woman who said she cannot read the news any more. It’s all just too much. If you feel this way, please understand that it is fine to look away when you need to. We are already exhausted, and we are entering a period that is going to be chaotic. Even a normal campaign year is crazy, but this year, the extraordinary chaos feeds the needs of this president to destabilize the country and emerge as a savior. The current chaos is designed to make you hopeless about creating change so that you give up. To combat that, look away and recharge your batteries. Focus on the things that ground you: family, friends, pets, gardening, movies, books, biking, church… whatever works. Just come back when you can… and remember to vote.
It’s going to be nuts from here on out.

In the first draft of this October 1 letter, I wrote that presidential adviser Hope Hicks has tested positive for coronavirus. Trump tweeted that he and the First Lady “will begin our quarantine process!” CNN’s White House correspondent John Harwood noted at 11:30 pm: “curious that neither Trump nor WH have disclosed any test results for him more than 3 hours after news broke that Hope Hicks tested positive. Trump’s typical approach is boasting that he doesn’t worry because he gets tested so much. He told Hannity he doesn’t know if he has it.” MSNBC justice and security analyst Matthew Miller tweeted “Thank god the White House has a history of being completely honest about the president’s health. It would be awful if we couldn’t trust them right now.”

At about 1:30 am on October 2, the White House announced that Trump and First Lady Melania Trump have tested positive for coronavirus. This will be the first time I break my midnight rule—in the past, I have always cut the news off at midnight, no matter what happens at 12:01—but this has such huge implications for national security, the economy, and, of course, the election that it has pushed everything else off the media radar screen and I cannot justify leaving it for a day.

Stock futures plunged more than 400 points immediately after the news broke, but right now that’s the only result of this news that we can measure.

The story has been coming clearer in the last three hours since the story broke. Apparently, Hicks tested negative on Wednesday before she boarded Air Force 1 with the president and most of his closest advisers, but developed symptoms during the day. A second test on Thursday morning was positive. Nonetheless, the president and his aides and advisers flew to New Jersey on Thursday, where he attended a fundraiser, gave a speech, and attended a roundtable with supporters, all without a mask. It was only the leaking of the Hicks story that shook loose the information that the Trumps are infected.

According to CNBC, those on Air Force 1 on Wednesday were White House chief of staff Mark Meadows; national security advisor Robert O’Brien; Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani; White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany; Ivanka; Jared Kushner; Donald Jr.; Eric; Donald Jr’s girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle; Eric’s wife Lara; Tiffany; campaign manager Bill Stepien; campaign official Jason Miller; White House social media director Dan Scavino; White House counselor Derek Lyons; political advisor Stephen Miller; Representative Jim Jordan, (R-Ohio), [and] Alice Marie Johnson, the criminal justice reform advocate Trump pardoned.

Trump also stood inside near Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden for an hour and a half on Tuesday, yelling and spitting—the very conditions that are most likely to spread the disease. At the debate, his entourage, which included Hicks, Jordan, and the four older Trump children, refused to wear masks despite the mandate that they do so.
This story proves how crucial it is to have a White House we trust.

Immediately, Twitter users noted that someone had suggested this very scenario back in September as a way for Trump to steal headlines away from Biden, emerge victorious over the virus, and claim credit for a new treatment that had cured him. Elections almost always feature an “October Surprise” to move voters in the last few weeks of the election when it is too late for the other side to challenge that surprise move. And while this news certainly looks genuine—the White House doctor issued a statement after Trump announced the test results—there is plenty that the Trump campaign would like to distract us from.

On October 1, alone, we learned that a study of more than 38 million articles about the coronavirus pandemic between January 1 and May 26 published in English shows that Trump was “likely the largest driver of… Covid-19 misinformation.” The Cornell University study found that 37.9% of misinformation mentioned Trump.

Trump’s former national security adviser, retired Lt. General H.R. McMaster, told MSNBC that Trump is “aiding and abetting Putin’s efforts” to disrupt the November election. Trump’s refusal to acknowledge that Putin is engaged in a “sustained campaign of disruption, disinformation and denial” helps the Russian leader.

It turns out that Trump’s pick for the Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett, in 2006 signed an anti-abortion “right to life ad” near another ad from the same organization that called for putting “an end to the barbaric legacy of Roe v. Wade and restor[ing] laws that protect the lives of unborn children.” While such a stance will thrill anti-abortion voters, in fact a majority of Americans do not support ending Roe v. Wade, and senators up for reelection have been saying that Barrett would not interfere with the law.

A former senior adviser to Melania Trump today released tapes of the First Lady complaining both about being criticized for her lack of involvement with the children held at the border and for having to decorate the White House for Christmas. “I'm working ... my a** off on the Christmas stuff, that you know, who gives a f*** about the Christmas stuff and decorations? But I need to do it, right?... OK, and then I do it and I say that I'm working on Christmas and planning for the Christmas and they said, 'Oh, what about the children that they were separated?' Give me a f****** break. Where they were saying anything when Obama did that? I cannot go, I was trying get the kid reunited with the mom. I didn't have a chance -- needs to go through the process and through the law.” (Under President Barack Obama, children were separated from their parents or someone who presented as a guardian only when officials were concerned for their safety. Under Trump, such separations were routine until a judge stopped the practice.)

Don Jr.’s girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle, who was a co-host of a Fox News Channel show, was also in the news today. It turns out that she left FNC abruptly after an employee complained of sexual harassment.

According to a story by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker, Guilfoyle required her former assistant to work at her apartment, where Guilfoyle would sometimes be naked, and would share with the assistant inappropriate pictures of men, discussing her sexual activities with some of them. Guilfoyle denies any workplace misconduct, but the story grabbed headlines. FNC settled the case against her for $4 million.

Tonight the House of Representatives, controlled by Democrats, passed a $2.2 trillion coronavirus relief measure. No Republicans voted for it.
Right-wing conspiracy theorists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman have been charged with four felonies in Michigan for intimidating voters, conspiring to violate election laws, and using a computer to commit a crime. The two allegedly sent robocalls to voters in five states to discourage mail-in voting. The calls falsely said that personal information of those people who vote by mail would be shared with police, credit card companies, and the CDC, which would then require vaccinations.

Finally, a story from Texas shows just how concerned the Trump campaign is about the upcoming election. Today Texas Governor Greg Abbott limited the number of locations for dropping off mail in ballots to one site per county. This hits Democratic Harris County the hardest. It is huge, and has the state’s largest population count. Currently, it has 12 drop off locations. Democratic Travis County, which includes Austin, currently has four. Other large counties, more reliably Republican, only had one. Abbott argued that this measure would prevent voter fraud, but Democrats pointed out this is a “blatant voter suppression tactic.” It should indeed reduce Democratic ballots in the state… and, mind you, this is Texas! That the Republican governor feels the need to suppress Democratic votes in Texas shows just which way the wind is blowing.

As I say, the next few weeks are going to be wild. But don’t let it knock you off course.

 

[Go Bama]

October 2, 2020 (Friday)


Today’s media was consumed with news of the spread of coronavirus to the president and First Lady, as well as concern over the degree to which it has spread to other people associated with the White House. A number of those who attended the Rose Garden announcement of Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court have tested positive. That number includes the Trumps, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC), Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), and Fr. John Jenkins, president of Notre Dame. Also infected are Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee, and at least three journalists who have attended White House events in the past week.

And tonight, presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway reported that she, too, has tested positive.

As I write this, just before midnight, Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien has just announced he, too, has tested positive for the coronavirus.

Five minutes after midnight (sorry for breaking the midnight rule again), we learned that 11 staffers from the Cleveland debate also tested positive.

We will not learn of infections among the Secret Service.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has tested negative, as have Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his wife, Dr. Jill Biden.

This evening, medical professionals transferred the president to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center “out of an abundance of caution.” He walked from the helicopter under his own power, and posted a short video to his Twitter account assuring viewers that he is doing “very well.” He remains in charge; power has not transferred to Vice President Mike Pence.

Aside from the personal implications of the spread of this illness—and let’s remember that there are 46,459 other Americans who have contracted the coronavirus in the last day-- this major news story has huge implications for the upcoming election. It also illustrates how the administration’s secrecy and lies take away our ability to make informed decisions about our own lives, as well as about the nation.

The Trump entourage has refused to wear masks, social distance, or follow the advice of public health experts for reducing the spread of the virus. Now it appears that White House officials deliberately withheld information about their condition, directly endangering other people who acted on the presumption that the Trump people weren’t infected. The Washington Post reported that Secret Service agents, who risk their lives to protect the president, are angry and frustrated: “He’s never cared about us.” The 30-50 Republican donors who met with Trump Thursday night at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, are “freaking out,” one report noted. Tickets had cost up to $250,000, and Trump met privately with about 19 people for 45 minutes. Trump knew his adviser Hope Hicks had tested positive when he left for the club, but he went anyway. He did not wear a mask.

Reporter Chris Wallace of the Fox News Channel, who moderated Tuesday’s debate and so was one of those the Trumps' entourage endangered, revealed today that Trump arrived too late on Tuesday for a COVID-19 test, as the venue required. Instead, there was an “honor system.” Organizers assumed the people associated with the campaigns would not come unless they had tested negative. Trump’s people arrived wearing masks, which they had to have to enter the auditorium, but then removed them shortly after sitting down, and refused to put them back on. During the debate, Trump mocked Biden for his habit of wearing a mask.

The campaign did not tell the Biden camp that Hicks, who attended the debate, had tested positive for coronavirus the day after the event. The Biden organization learned it from the newspapers. The White House did not even tell former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who spent four days in close quarters with Hicks and Trump, helping the president prepare for the debate. He, too, learned the news from the media.

This crisis shows how the administration’s refusal to share information and its insistence on its own version of reality creates confusion that leaves Americans vulnerable and anxious. Its history of secrecy and lies means that few people actually trust anything its spokespeople say. It was striking how many people did not believe the Trumps were actually sick when the news broke; we are so accustomed to Trump’s lies that many people thought he was simply looking for a way out of future debates.

The constant lies—about coronavirus and virtually everything else—destabilize the nation because we cannot know what the truth really is. And if we don’t know what is actually happening, we cannot make good decisions. Today the editorial board of the Washington Post warned that the White House simply must let us know the truth about the president’s health so that we know who is actually running national security, the economy, and the election on our behalf.

That plea did not appear to make much of an impression on the White House: it did not bother to tell Pelosi, who is third in line for the presidency, that Trump was being helicoptered to Walter Reed Hospital.
And so we are facing a pandemic spreading through the upper ranks of the government just before an election with little faith that we will learn the truth about what is happening. That, just as much as the infections in the administration, is a crisis.

To its credit, the Biden campaign has identified this crisis and is doing its best to restore our sense of a shared reality, based in our history and our better principles. Rather than expressing outrage that the Trump camp exposed him and his wife and guests to coronavirus, Biden offered his best wishes for Trump and the First Lady, as did his running mate Kamala Harris. Biden’s campaign pulled all its negative ads out of respect for the president’s illness (the Trump campaign refused to follow suit).

Biden spoke in Michigan today, assuring the audience that “We can get this pandemic under control so we can get our economy working again for everyone.” But, he emphasized, “this cannot be a partisan moment. It must be an American moment. We have to come together as a nation.” He promised to get rid of the toxic partisanship that is keeping us all off balance. “I’m running as a Democrat,” he said, “but I will… govern as an American president. Whether you voted for me or against me, I will represent you... and those who see each other as fellow Americans who just don’t live in red states or blue states but who live in and love the United States of America. That’s who we are.”

To an increasingly weary country, he offered hope that we really can heal the nation’s ills. “There’s never been a single solitary thing America’s been unable to do. Think of this. Not once. Not a single thing we’ve not been able to overcome when we’ve done it together. So let’s get the heck up. Remember who in God’s name we are. This is the United States of America,” he said. “There’s nothing beyond our capacity.”

 

[Go Bama]

October 3, 2020 (Saturday)


I try to give us all a break on the weekend, but today seems like a day for which we need a record.

The president remains at Walter Reed Hospital. His condition is unclear. His doctors gave a cheery if vague picture of his health this morning, but minutes later, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows gave an off-the-record report to the press pool that told a different story. “The president’s vitals over the last 24 hours were very concerning, and the next 48 hours will be critical in terms of his care,” Meadows said. “We’re still not on a clear path to a full recovery.” Meadows had been caught on tape asking to go off the record, so his identity was revealed.

Furious, Trump went to Twitter to say he was “feeling well!” In the evening, he released a four-minute video showing him sitting up at a conference table, saying in a rambling monologue that he would be back to campaigning soon. The video had been edited.

In his briefing to reporters, Dr. Sean Conley dated Trump’s diagnosis to Wednesday, a day earlier than Trump had admitted publicly. That new information meant that Trump was contagious at Tuesday’s debate, and that he knew he was contagious when he attended a fundraiser at his Bedminster golf club on Thursday, maskless. It would also mean that Trump knew he was sick before his adviser Hope Hicks’s diagnosis. After the press conference, the White House released a document saying that Conley had misspoken.

Over the course of the day, more members of Trump’s inner circle announced they have tested positive for coronavirus: former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), and Nick Luna, Trump’s personal assistant, are all infected; Christie is in the hospital. It also became clear that the White House had made little or no effort to trace who had contact with the infected officials.

Meanwhile, White House sources told reporters that Trump had fought against going to Walter Reed Hospital so close to the election, fearing he would look weak. His doctors gave him no choice. He finally gave in, but waited until after the stock market closed on Friday to make the trip. He is not being treated with hydroxychloroquine, which he repeatedly touted as an effective cure for Covid-19, but rather with the anti-viral drug remdesivir.

Trump has built his case for reelection on the idea that the coronavirus either is not that serious or has run its course. He has ridiculed the idea of wearing masks, and refused to follow the safety protocols health experts recommended. Now he and his wife are sick, and coronavirus is spreading through his inner circle, apparently through a super spreader event last weekend at the White House, when Trump announced he was nominating Amy Coney Barrett to take the Supreme Court seat of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Trump’s strategy of downplaying the virus to convince Americans it was over has backfired spectacularly, with the nation watching aghast as the disease spreads through the White House and officials there seem unable to come up with a straight story about what’s happening. Interviewed by Isaac Chotiner for the New Yorker, Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, who has long-time sources in the White House, said that people there are “incredibly anxious…. For their own safety. For the safety of the country. I think they are scared for the president…. And I think they are just shell-shocked.”

According to Haberman, Trump “is very, very reluctant to have information about his health out there…. Any perception of weakness for him is some kind of psychic wound.” She explained how the upcoming election makes this sentiment particularly powerful right now. “This is his worst nightmare. Not just getting sick with this, but any scenario where he is out of sight and being tended to and Joe Biden is out campaigning.”

Indeed, Biden has taken to the campaign trail. With just a month left before the election, he is on the road while Trump’s campaign is paralyzed. Biden adviser Anita Dunn explained to Politico that he is practicing what he has been preaching. “There is no reason not to show the country that, yes, you can go about your business—if you do it safely, if you wear masks, if you socially distance…. The vice president has talked about this since March.”

The timing of the Trumps’ illness coincided with the final push from the Biden campaign. It has pulled its negative ads out of respect for the Trumps, it says, but had likely planned to anyway in order to focus on an uplifting message of change in the last month of the campaign. In any case, at this point the Biden campaign hardly has to draw attention to how poorly the administration had handled the coronavirus pandemic. With Trump in the hospital with Covid-19, it’s pretty obvious.

“They all know it’s over,” a Republican close to the Trump campaign told Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman. Another said, “This is spiraling out of control.”

It was a bad week politically for the president anyway. It was only a week ago—on Sunday—that the New York Times released information about his taxes, revealing that he is hundreds of millions of dollars in debt and has avoided almost all U.S. taxes for years. Just two days later—Tuesday—the first presidential debate saw Trump blustering and bullying in what he thought was a demonstration that his supporters would love. Maybe members of his base did, but a New York Times/Siena College poll released today indicates that most voters were repelled by Trump’s behavior. Biden is up seven points among likely voters in Pennsylvania, and five points in Florida. By Thursday, we knew that Hope Hicks had tested positive for coronavirus, and shortly after midnight, in the early hours of Friday, we knew that the president and the First Lady had also tested positive.

If there was any good news in all this for the Trump campaign, it was that the tape released Thursday of the First Lady saying “who gives a f*** about the Christmas stuff and decorations?” and “Give me a f****** break” about children separated from their parents has largely been forgotten. So has the statement of former national security adviser H.R. McMaster that the president is “aiding and abetting” Putin because he refuses to acknowledge that Russians are attacking the 2020 election.

Despite the growing crisis in the administration, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is still trying to get Barrett confirmed before the election, even if nothing else gets done. He has announced the Senate will not conduct business again until October 19, meaning it cannot take up the coronavirus bill the House just passed. Nonetheless, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has announced that the Senate Judiciary Committee will meet to consider Barrett’s nomination, despite the fact that two members of the committee are infected with coronavirus. Those two say they will quarantine for just ten days so they can emerge in time for Barrett’s confirmation hearings beginning on October 12.

And while we are watching coronavirus infect the president and those around him, it also continues to spread around the rest of the country. The United States as a whole on Friday saw the highest count of new cases since August: 54,411. Deaths are down, but still 906 Americans died on Friday from Covid-19.

 

[Go Bama]

October 4, 2020 (Sunday)


It has been an insane week. It was only last Sunday-- seven days ago-- that the New York Times released information about Trump's taxes. Since then, we've lived through Tuesday's debate and the wildfire spread of coronavirus through the inner circle of the White House, along with other stories that would have crippled any other administration but that now pass by with hardly a ripple.

Weirdly, for me, personally, it has been a really cool week. After eight months utterly isolated here with Buddy and my daughter, I have ventured out just a tiny bit and have met new, wonderful people, in quite unexpected ways. And my long-missing boys, kept away from caution over coronavirus, have stopped by for socially-distanced chats, or have, after negative Covid tests, moved home.

On the way from Los Angeles, one of them stopped by my office to pick up some stuff I needed and brought it to me, along with eight months of mail from work, full of simply lovely packages and letters from many of you. I will be responding in person to each of you, but since some of you have gone months and months with no acknowledgement of your gifts, I wanted to let you know they have, at long last, arrived. And the timing was perfect: they brightened up the weekend of a Very Tired Writer.
So here's to family and friends-- old and new-- and to helping each other make it through these very trying days.

Going to bed early tonight. I'll see you tomorrow.