Kamala Versus The Lie Fly Guy

Basically there's three things about last night's vice-presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Mike Pence last night: first, men thought the debate was a forgettable, inconsequential tie, and women thought Harris won by an historic landslide

 

 

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More Americans said Sen. Kamala Harris did the best job in the vice presidential debate Wednesday night, according to a CNN Instant Poll of registered voters who watched. About 6 in 10 (59%) said Harris won, while 38% said Vice President Mike Pence had the better night. 

Those results roughly matched voters' expectations heading into the debate. In interviews conducted before the debate, 61% of those same voters said they expected Harris to win, 36% thought Pence would.

Read the full poll results here 

There was a stark gender gap in the results, with women saying Harris did the best job in the debate by a 69% to 30% margin. Men, meanwhile, split about evenly between Harris (48%) and Pence (46%). 

Harris did improve her favorability rating among those who watched, according to the poll, while for Pence, the debate was a wash. In pre-debate interviews, 56% said they had a positive view of Harris -- that rose to 63% after the debate. For Pence, his favorability stood at 41% in both pre- and post-debate interviews. 

Harris' numbers went up among men (from 49% favorable before to 56% afterward) and women (from 63% favorable before to 70% post-debate), and she even boosted her favorability rating among Trump supporters (from 4% favorable pre-debate to 12% after). Pence's numbers held steady among men and women (50% of men had a favorable view in both pre- and post-debate interviews, among women it was 33% pre-debate and 32% after). 

As after the first presidential debate, though, most voters who watched said Wednesday's event hasn't changed their minds about whom to support. Overall, 55% say it had no effect on how they are likely to vote, while those who did choose a side tilted narrowly toward Joe Biden. 

Both vice presidential candidates are broadly seen as qualified to be president: 65% said Pence is qualified to serve as commander in chief should that become necessary, 63% said the same of Harris. 

Most debate watchers said Harris did the better job defending her running mate (64% Harris to 34% Pence), that she seemed more focused on uniting the country (62% to 34%), was more in touch with the needs and problems of people like you (61% to 38%) and that she expressed her views more clearly (57% to 39%). Most said Pence spent more time attacking his opponent (56%) than thought the same of Harris (36%).

  

Second, Pence, like Trump before him last week, refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power, stating that he and Trump were "fighting every day" to stop Biden and Harris from a "massive opportunity for voter fraud".

At the tail end of Wednesday night’s vice-presidential debate—one that was noticeably less fiery and chaotic than last week’s presidential clash—Vice President Mike Pence completely avoided answering what he would do if President Donald Trump refuses to step down if he loses the election.

Late last month, the president explicitly refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. At last week’s debate, Trump again declined to commit to accepting the outcome of the election should he end up losing, instead undermining public trust in the voting process by declaring that because of mail-in balloting the 2020 election is “going to be a fraud like you’ve never seen.”

The veep first said that he thinks his ticket will win re-election before accusing Democrats of not accepting the outcome of the 2016 election, bringing up the Russia investigation and the impeachment of the president. After invoking former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s advice that Joe Biden shouldn’t concede on election night if the results are close, Pence reiterated his belief that Trump would be re-elected.

“President Trump and I are fighting every day to prevent Joe Biden and Kamala Harris from changing the rules and creating a massive opportunity for voter fraud,” he concluded. “If we have a free and fair election, we’ll have confidence in it.”

As with Trump, the heavy implication is that only a Trump win will be considered the results of "a free and fair election" and a Biden win will be challenged in every way possible. 

And third, there probably won't be another presidential debate, at least not next week.

President Donald Trump said Thursday that he will not participate in the second presidential debate with Joe Biden after the Commission on Presidential Debates said the event will be held virtually in the wake of the President's positive coronavirus diagnosis. 

"I am not going to do a virtual debate," Trump said on Fox Business. "I am not going to waste my time on a virtual debate." 

Biden's campaign on Thursday swiftly agreed to the virtual format. But Trump's comment throws the debate into question after the commission took the significant step to wholly remake the event. The move was seen as needed by members of the debate commission given the uncertainty around the President's health. 

Frank Fahrenkopf, head of the debate commission, told CNN that the commission spoke with both campaigns "just before" they announced that the second debate would be held virtually. 

"We did not consult with them," he said, adding that their decision is "supported by the Cleveland Clinic," the commission's health advisers. 

Bill Stepien, Trump's campaign manager, accused the commission on Thursday of "unilaterally canceling an in-person debate" to help Biden and said the President will be holding a rally instead of attending the debate. 

The commission said the debate moderator, Steve Scully, and the attendees who will ask Trump and Biden questions will appear from Miami, the original site of the debate.

 

Remember, the second debate was supposed to be a town hall format. A remote debate in the regular format was a real win for Trump avoiding questions from American voters, but Trump burned it down anyway. 

As I said last night, Biden may have a decisive lead, but all bets are off as to what happens next.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Apparently Senate Republicans have made it clear that Trump killing COVID-19 aid will cost the GOP the Senate and any cover to save Trump's ass, and that's enough to motivate him to come crawling back to the bargaining table with Nancy Pelosi.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday tried to salvage a few priority items lost in the rubble of COVID-19 relief talks that he blew up, pressing for $1,200 stimulus checks and new aid for airlines and other businesses hard hit by the pandemic.

In a series of tweets, Trump pressed for passage of these chunks of assistance, an about-face from his abrupt and puzzling move Tuesday afternoon to abandon talks with a longtime rival, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The California Democrat has rejected such piecemeal entreaties all along. But Pelosi did talk with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin Wednesday evening, her spokesman said, about stand-alone airline rescue legislation as the industry is shedding tens of thousands of jobs.

Trump’s tweets amounted to him demanding his way in negotiations that he himself had ended. Trump, who absorbed much political heat for abandoning the talks, is the steward of an economy whose continued recovery may hinge on significant new steps such as pandemic unemployment benefits. His tweets seemed to move the financial markets into positive territory, though it was far from certain whether they would impress voters demanding more relief.

He called on Congress to send him a “Stand Alone Bill for Stimulus Checks ($1,200)” — a reference to a preelection batch of direct payments to most Americans that had been a central piece of negotiations between Pelosi and the White House.

“I am ready to sign right now. Are you listening Nancy?” Trump said on Twitter on Tuesday evening. He also urged Congress to immediately approve $25 billion for airlines and $135 billion for the Paycheck Protection Program to help small businesses.

The stock market fell precipitously after Trump pulled the plug on the talks but was recovering Wednesday after he floated the idea of piecemeal aid.

Trump’s decision to scuttle talks between Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Pelosi came after the president was briefed on the landscape for the negotiations — and on the blowback that any Pelosi-Mnuchin deal probably would have received from his GOP allies in Congress.

“It became very obvious over the last couple of days that a comprehensive bill was just going to get to a point where it didn’t have really much Republican support at all,” White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said Wednesday on Fox News. “It was more of a Democrat-led bill, which would have been problematic, more so in the Senate than in the House.”

Pelosi told reporters that “all the president wants is his name on a check” for direct aid payments.

The unexpected turn could be a blow to Trump’s reelection prospects and comes as his administration and campaign are in turmoil. Trump is quarantining in the White House with a case of the coronavirus, and the latest batch of polls shows him significantly behind Democrat Joe Biden with the election four weeks away.

 

Trump's increasingly erratic and destructive behavior is one of those things where normally you'd say "If your opponent is busy destroying themselves, don't interrupt" but the problem of course is that he's taking tens of millions of Americans to hell with him.

We'll see wha happens here, but Trump's all over the place at this point with his own lunacy and the steroid cocktail he's on and the illness, so who knows at this point.

StupidiNews!

•  A top North Korean diplomat and his wife disappeared from Italy in 2018 but apparently both of them have turned up in South Korea as defectors.
• The number of people infected with COVID-19 at last month's White House "super spreader" event for Amy Coney Barrett has risen to 34, including Donald Trump and Melania Trump.
• Oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico are being evacuated ahead of Hurricane Delta approaching New Orleans, the storm is expected to reach Category 3 strength with 120 MPH winds this week.
• The Trump regime is appealing their decision to end Census counting before October 31 to the Supreme Court as a federal appeals court has ordered the Census Bureau to keep counting.
• After 16 months of investigations and hearings, a new House Judiciary report finds Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple all "wield monopoly power" and calls for corporate breakups.
  

Last Call For Lowering The Barr, Con't

Attorney General Bill Barr is now openly tipping his hand as to what is coming in the plan to steal the 2020 election for Trump by disenfranchising millions of voters.

The Department of Justice has weakened its long-standing prohibition against interfering in elections, according to two department officials.

Avoiding election interference is the overarching principle of DOJ policy on voting-related crimes. In place since at least 1980, the policy generally bars prosecutors not only from making any announcement about ongoing investigations close to an election but also from taking public steps — such as an arrest or a raid — before a vote is finalized because the publicity could tip the balance of a race.

But according to an email sent Friday by an official in the Public Integrity Section in Washington, now if a U.S. attorney’s office suspects election fraud that involves postal workers or military employees, federal investigators will be allowed to take public investigative steps before the polls close, even if those actions risk affecting the outcome of the election.

The email announced “an exception to the general non-interference with elections policy.” The new exemption, the email stated, applied to instances in which “the integrity of any component of the federal government is implicated by election offenses within the scope of the policy including but not limited to misconduct by federal officials or employees administering an aspect of the voting process through the United States Postal Service, the Department of Defense or any other federal department or agency.”

Specifically citing postal workers and military employees is noteworthy, former DOJ officials said. But the exception is written so broadly that it could cover other types of investigations as well, they said.

Both groups have been falsely singled out, in different ways, by President Donald Trump and his campaign for being involved in voter fraud. Trump has repeatedly attempted to delegitimize ballots sent through the postal service, just as the country experiences increased voting by mail spurred by the coronavirus pandemic. He has also raised the specter that the ballots of military members, among whom he enjoys broad support, might be suppressed.

The DOJ and the White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Experts who reviewed the revision said they were concerned it could be exploited to help the DOJ bolster Trump’s campaign.

“It’s unusual that they’re carving out this exception,” said Vanita Gupta, the former head of the DOJ Civil Rights Division under President Barack Obama. “It may be creating a predicate for the Justice Department to make inflated announcements about mail-in vote fraud and the like in the run-up to the election.”

I don't know what people were obviously expecting here other than Barr rescinding the non-interference policy just weeks before the election. Of course Barr will announce a "major probe into election mail fraud" that calls the results into question, and it will be in Trump states that Biden picks up from 2016. The probe will be as widespread as it needs to be in order from Trump to declare the election void and to simply assume power.

He's counting on it as an excuse to justify authoritarian violence. People still think Trump is going to simply give up and get indicted in January. As it becomes clear Trump is going to lose catastrophically, he'll become even more dangerous day after day.

The next three months and change are going to test America like it hasn't been tested in decades.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

The news last month that acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf (The Bad Wolf™) was sitting on a DHS report outlining just how much of a domestic terrorism threat white supremacists militia groups were in the US in the Trump era turned out to be completely true, not that any ZVTS readers doubted the whole white supremacist domestic terrorism militia thing, or the whole Trump regime being less than truthful about the existence of the report thing.

In response to criticism that Donald Trump was quite literally asking white supremacist terrorist groups like the Proud Boys to "stand by" at the first presidential debate last week to be ready to commit election-related violence in his name, the DHS has released their full yearly domestic terrorism threat assessment, and it's gruesome, chilling stuff.

The threat assessment highlighted white supremacists as the most deadly among domestic terrorists in recent years and Russia as the primary threat to spreading disinformation.

“I am particularly concerned about white supremacist violent extremists who have been exceptionally lethal in their abhorrent, targeted attacks in recent years,” Chad F. Wolf, the acting secretary of homeland security, wrote in the foreward to the assessment. The threat report also stated that “Russia is the likely primary covert influence actor and purveyor of disinformation and misinformation within the homeland.”

The agency also highlighted Iran and China’s cyberwarfare abilities and warned of a potential surge in migration to the southwest border.

The delayed release of the report has been a point of scrutiny for a department that has faced consistent accusations of morphing into a tool for Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign. After the department singled out domestic terrorists and specifically white supremacists in a terrorism framework in September 2019, the agency’s leadership committed to releasing a follow-up assessment to the threat as well as a blueprint to confront it within months. It took far longer.

Brian Murphy, who was demoted from his post as the Homeland Security Department’s intelligence chief in August, said last month in a whistle-blower complaint that Mr. Wolf and his deputy, Kenneth T. Cuccinelli, blocked the release of the assessment because of how it would “reflect upon President Trump.”

The Homeland Security blueprint did finally emerge, shortly after Mr. Murphy’s complaint. It included $10 million for nonprofits and other organizations to prevent extremist violence.

The administration’s treatment of white supremacy re-emerged as an issue last week, when Mr. Trump failed to condemn white racist violence during the presidential debate, even after Christopher A. Wray, the F.B.I. director, affirmed to Congress the lethal threat of the racist extremists.

Now, the Homeland Security Department has done so in the assessment.

“This threat assessment confirms two things: that white supremacist extremists are the top domestic threat to the homeland, and they are often inspired by President Trump’s rhetoric,” said Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.

But this is the Trump regime, and every aspect, every facet of American government exists in part to serve Dear Leader, and the DHS and this report are no different.

The threat assessment for the most part mirrored drafts that were leaked to the public, refuting concerns that the department would dilute any warnings. The department did add a section absent from previous versions of the report, titled “exploitation of lawful and protected speech and protests.”

The section echoed Mr. Trump’s description of city governments led by Democrats as fostering chaos.

“We have seen over 100 days of violence and destruction in our cities,” according to the report. “The co-opting of lawful protests led to destruction of government property and have turned deadly.” 

While a majority of the protests against police violence and racism this summer were peaceful, some did include individuals who committed violent acts, including in Portland, Ore., where the Homeland Security Department sent teams of tactical agents. The aggressive methods of those agents, including forcing demonstrators into unmarked cars and using tear gas, is under investigation by the inspectors general for the Homeland Security and Justice Departments.

In other words, VIOLENT DEADLY EXTREMISTS ON BOTH SIDES OF THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM or something and the Democrats are just as guilty of encouraging their people to be violent too in the name of political expediency.

Which is horseshit in the same way that civil rights leaders were "terrorists" sixty years ago during the Jim Crow era of literally constructing separate neighborhoods, restaurants, hotels, schools, and goddamn drinking fountains for Black America because government policies mandated our second-class citizenship.

Only that's a bigger threat than ever. In the last four years this regime has paved the way to overturn the entire voting rights, civil rights, women's rights, and LGBTQ+ rights era and take us back to Jim Crow. They remain one Supreme Court justice appointment away from enough votes to overturn as much of it as they want to as "unnecessary relics of an era that no longer needs legislation to protect".

Thomas Jefferson said all men are created equal, and the guy owned slaves the day he wrote those words, because slaves weren't people (and women and anyone who wasn't a land-owning white male didn't count either.)

I'm tired of this. In the space of five years we went from real hope in this country to fighting for basic rights in the middle of a pandemic that government is trying to pretend doesn't exist and a lifetime trying to fix everything that's been broken.

We have to win.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

An increasingly desperate, out-of-control Donald Trump is now declassifying Russian disinformation on the 2016 investigation into Trump's Russia ties and passing it off as "bombshell" accusations that Hillary Clinton "masterminded the plot" to spy on the Trump campaign. 

Even as he recovers from a coronavirus case that left him hospitalized for days, President Donald Trump has intensified a late-campaign effort to undermine widely accepted evidence about Russia’s election interference efforts in 2016.

Trump authorized the declassification and release of documents this week based on intelligence that even his own advisers warn could be Russian disinformation, in what his allies have signaled is aimed at sowing doubt about the intelligence community’s conclusion that the meddling in the 2016 campaign came at the Kremlin’s direction — and was intended to boost Trump’s candidacy.

As Trump was still recuperating in the presidential suite at Walter Reed on Monday, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows said the president had “already tasked me with getting some declassification rolling” on sensitive Russia probe documents.

Some of those documents were released on Tuesday afternoon, including heavily redacted notes from former CIA Director John Brennan after a briefing with then-President Barack Obama. The notes describe intelligence reports that were drawn from Russian operatives, summaries of which Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe declassified last week.

In the legible, unredacted portion of Brennan’s notes, first published by Fox News, he wrote: “We’re getting additional insight into Russian activities from [REDACTED].”

In another section, the notes describe an alleged plan “approved by Hillary Clinton a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by the Russian security service.”

A second, also heavily redacted document released on Tuesday, a summary of the intelligence the CIA prepared for the FBI, describes “an exchange” between unknown individuals regarding “Hillary Clinton’s approval of a plan concerning U.S. Presidential Candidate Donald Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the public from the use of her private email server.”

Some Trump allies have framed this latest declassification push not as an effort to question Russia's interference at all but simply to question the "Trump-Russia collusion" narrative that loomed over the White House for much of Trump's presidency. But Ratcliffe's release suggested that the Russian intelligence indicated that attributing 2016 interference to Russia was part of a Clinton plot to stir up a scandal against Trump. And many Trump allies have deployed the new evidence to broadly declare that the entire scandal was cooked up by Democrats.

Republicans and Democrats had previously rejected this Russian chatter as likely disinformation intended to deflect from Moscow’s own hacking operation targeting the Democratic National Committee. And Clinton herself was publicly making the case at the time that Trump was inviting Russian interference. Nick Merrill, a spokesman for Clinton, said last week that the documents were “baseless bullshit.”

Four people familiar with the matter said the Russians’ assessment of Clinton was only one part of a larger intelligence report that was billed as an initial examination of Russian cyberattacks targeting the 2016 election, and was not the reason that it was referred to the bureau.

The people all described Ratcliffe as “cherry-picking” portions of the intelligence to try to tarnish Trump’s political enemies.

 

Ratliffe here is certainly doing what Trump ordered him to do, and Trump now knows he's losing badly. The next several weeks are going to be full of distractions and garbage like this heading into the election, and if Trump loses by the margin I believe he will, then he will spend his lame duck months in a scorched earth campaign to destroy the Democrats.

COVID-19 has knocked out all his campaign major players, save Mike Pence. Barr himself is in isolation for possible exposure, Kellyanne Conway, Stephen Miller, and Hope Hicks are all ill, and oh yeah, he's hopped up on drugs and is staring down COVID-19 himself.

It's going to be bad, folks.  I predict he will order Joe Biden's arrest before long.

StupidiNews!

• The White House says it has completed all contact tracing needed after Donald Trump and several WH staff contracted COVID-19; the Trump regime turned down CDC help with contact tracing.
• A GOP county chairman in Arkansas has died from COVID-19, Steven Farmer's Reagan Day event in Craighead County hosted several GOP members of Congress who did not wear masks last month.
• Joe Biden says that next week's scheduled Presidential debate in Miami should be postponed if Donald Trump still has COVID-19.
• Donald Trump is accusing the FDA of a "political hit job" with the agency's rules on approving any COVID-19 vaccine and is ordering a review of vaccine policy.
• The Nobel Prize in Physics has gone to three scientists, German Reinhard Genzel, Briton Roger Penrose, and America Andrea Ghez for their discovery of a "supermassive" black hole.
  

Last Call For Trump Literally Goes Viral, Con't

Donald Trump, facing a barrage of devastating polls with 4 weeks to go until the election, has now decided to burn it all down around him and take the GOP with him (and tens of millions of Americans as well) by completely changing his mind on COVID-19 relief legislation talks and now decreeing that nothing will happen on COVID-19 bills until after the election.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday called an abrupt end to negotiations with Democrats over additional COVID-19 relief, delaying action until after the election despite ominous warnings from his own Federal Reserve chairman about the deteriorating conditions in the economy.

Trump tweeted that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was “not negotiating in good faith” and said he’s asked Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to direct all his focus before the election into confirming his U.S. Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett.

“I have instructed my representatives to stop negotiating until after the election when, immediately after I win, we will pass a major Stimulus Bill that focuses on hardworking Americans and Small Business,” Trump tweeted.

The unexpected turn could be a blow to Trump’s reelection prospects and comes as his administration and campaign are in turmoil. Trump is quarantining in the White House with a case of COVID, and the latest batch of opinion polls shows him significantly behind former Vice President Joe Biden with the election four weeks away.

The collapse means that Trump and down-ballot Republicans will face reelection without delivering aid to voters — such as a pre-election batch of $1,200 direct payments, or “Trump checks,” to most individuals — even as the national jobless rate is about 8% with millions facing the threat of eviction. One endangered Republican, Maine Sen. Susan Collins, said “waiting until after the election to reach an agreement on the next Covid-19 relief package is a huge mistake.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden slammed Trump’s move.

“Make no mistake: if you are out of work, if your business is closed, if your child’s school is shut down, if you are seeing layoffs in your community, Donald Trump decided today that none of that — none of it — matters to him,” Biden said in a statement released by his campaign.

Trump’s move came immediately after he spoke with the top GOP leaders in Congress, who had been warily watching talks between Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Pelosi. Many Senate Republicans had signaled they would not be willing to go along with any stimulus legislation that topped $1 trillion, and GOP aides had been privately dismissive of the prospects for a deal.

Just on Saturday, tweeting from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Trump said, “OUR GREAT USA WANTS & NEEDS STIMULUS. WORK TOGETHER AND GET IT DONE.” But any Pelosi-sponsored agreement of close to $2 trillion raised the potential of a GOP revolt if it came to a vote.

Last week, the White House said it was backing a $400 per week pandemic jobless benefit and dangled the possibility of a COVID-19 relief bill of $1.6 trillion. But that offer was rejected by Pelosi, who continued to take a hard line in the talks, including insisting on repeal of a $254 billion GOP business tax break passed in the March package as a way to finance additional relief.

Pelosi had spoken with Mnuchin earlier Tuesday. After Trump’s tweets spiking the negotiations, Pelosi said Trump was “unwilling to crush the virus” and “refuses to give real help to poor children, the unemployed, and America’s hard working families.”

 

The threat from Trump could not be more clear: America surrenders and we re-elect Dear Leader or we suffer into 2021, and four months from now is going to be too late for millions of us.

It's possible that Trump gets talked out of this, but I doubt it. It seems to me that Senate Republicans came to Trump and said they needed this package to stay in power in the Senate and the White House, and Trump saw them as weak cowards who are trying to betray him.

So he just butchered them out of spite.

Again, if you think Trump's leaving without a literal fight, well, history says that the lame duck period is more than enough time to make sure he inflicts maximum damage before January 20, and really all he has to do is nothing for three months and he gets to hand Joe Biden a collapsed economy.

All bets are off now.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

The latest CNN/SSRS poll has Trump getting wiped out 57%-41%, down a whopping sixteen points to Joe Biden after last week's disastrous debate and COVID-19 cover-up.

 

 

Likely voters broadly prefer Biden over Trump on a number of issues that voters consider critically important in the race, including the coronavirus outbreak (59% prefer Biden, 38% Trump), health care (59% to 39%), racial inequality in America (62% to 36%), nominations to the Supreme Court (57% to 41%) and crime and safety (55% to 43%). The two are about even over who would better handle the economy (50% say Biden, 48% Trump), similar to where they have been among registered voters in recent polling.
Biden's favorability ratings have also improved, with 52% of Americans now saying they have a positive impression of the former vice president, compared with 39% who have a positive view of Trump. 

Likely voters are more apt to consider Biden the candidate who would unite the country (61% Biden to 33% Trump), who is honest and trustworthy (58% Biden to 33% Trump), who cares about people like you (58% Biden to 38% Trump), who has a clear plan to solve the nation's problems (55% to 39%) and who would keep Americans safe from harm (55% to 43%). 

Although this is the first national CNN survey to report results among likely voters, a comparison of results among registered voters now to those from a survey about a month ago reveals Biden has made substantial gains in support among several key voting blocs. 

Biden has expanded his edge over Trump among women, from 57% to 37% in September to 66% to 32% now. That shift includes substantial gains for Biden among white women with college degrees and women of color. Among people of color generally, Biden's advantage has increased from 59% to 31% in September to 69% to 27% now. The former vice president has also made gains among younger voters, moderates and independents over the last month. 

It is important to note that these increases in support for Biden have not come alongside substantial decreases in backing for Trump. The President's core supporters remain as supportive of him as they have been, if not more. Among white men without college degrees, for example, Trump's support has increased from 61% in September to 67% now. But Trump does not appear to have made any gains among the groups his campaign needs to attract in order to dent Biden's longstanding lead. 

Compared with the last national CNN poll, the partisan composition of this poll is only slightly more Democratic (33% of all adults say they are Democrats now, compared with 30% in early September) and no less Republican (28% GOP now vs. 27% in early September). Among registered voters in the poll, 35% consider themselves Democrats, 30% Republican, those figures were 33% and 30% respectively in the previous CNN poll. When independents who lean toward one party or the other are added in, the results also show little movement, 53% of registered voters now are Democrats or lean that way, 43% are Republicans or lean that way. In last month's poll, those figures were 52% Democratic to 42% Republican. 

The shifts in this poll are similar to those seen in an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Sunday, which was conducted after the presidential debate but before the President's diagnosis of coronavirus was revealed. 

 

The crosstabs are lethal for Trump.  It basically shows a huge shift towards Biden in two groups: Hispanic voters, and Seniors over 65. CNN doesn't break down their polls to show both Black and Hispanic voters generally, so it's an assumption, but for Biden to go from 59% of non-white voters to 69% in one poll means he picked up a *huge* swing in Hispanic (and Asian) voters. Clinton got 74% of non-white voters in 2016.

And Clinton still lost, because of Trump's sizeable lead among white voters. He does not have that big lead this time. Trump won 2016 on the strength of voters over 50, where he got 52% of the vote among 46% of total electorate, and white men, 62% of them, making up 34% of the electorate. Overall in 2016, Trump had a 20-point lead with white voters, 57%-37%.

 

This CNN poll has that lead now gone.  Voters over 50 now prefer Biden 55%-44%, and white voters side with Biden 51%-47%. In particular, Seniors have abandoned Trump. Seniors over 65voted for Trump 52-45% in 2016. In this poll Biden is winning Seniors by twenty-one points, 60-39%.

And the big one, Trump won men 52-41% in 2016, and Clinton won women 54-41%.

In this poll?

Trump's lead among men is 49-47% but Biden's lead among women is 66-32%.

.

If this is even close to being true, Trump is dust and memory.

I'll believe it when the votes are counted.

But dear God, he's collapsing.  Let's finish him off.

Vote.

A Supreme New Term

The first Monday in October means a new Supreme Court term, and this one started off with a doozy.

 

As battles rage over the independence of the judiciary and whether one political party has claimed partisan control of the third branch of government, the state of Delaware says it has a better idea.

For more than a century, the state has required its major courts be roughly balanced, so that no more than a bare majority of a court is made up of members of one political party. And then it required the minority be made up of the other political party.

The result, Stanford law professor Michael W. McConnell told the U.S. Supreme Court Monday, is that “Delaware’s courts are widely regarded as the least partisan and most professional in the nation.”

The problem, countered Wilmington, Del., lawyer David L. Finger, is that it is unconstitutional. The plan denies the chance for his client, lawyer James Adams, to serve on the courts because he is neither a Democrat nor Republican but a political independent, Finger said, and that violates his First Amendment rights of political association.

It seemed a fitting beginning for the Supreme Court’s new term, as the Senate is torn along partisan lines about whether to confirm just before the election President Trump’s nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died Sept. 18.

Ginsburg’s death left the court with five conservative justices, all named by Republican presidents, and three liberals named by Democrats. Barrett’s confirmation would install a 6-to-3 majority for conservatives.

That reality was unspoken, as the justices again gathered by teleconference to begin their traditional first-Monday-in-October arguments. As a concession to their scattered whereabouts, the marshal omitted the command in the familiar “oyez, oyez” cry that listeners should “draw near” to hear the business of the court.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. began the session by noting that the door and Ginsburg’s spot in the empty courtroom are hung with black crepe.

“Justice Ginsburg’s contributions, as advocate, jurist and citizen, are immeasurable,” Roberts said before the session began. “We at the court will remember her as a dear friend and treasured colleague.”

 

The reality is that Justice Ginsburg is gone, and she will be replaced by Amy Coney Barrett, and the ripple effects of that will resonate for decades. The first case heard could decide whether or not judges can even be partisan candidates, or if they must be appointed by state legislatures, allowing gerrymandered Republican strongholds like Ohio, Florida, NC and Michigan to simply remake the courts, and on voting issues, state courts would rule.

For everything else voting-wise, Republicans have a plan for that too. Cases from Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Wisconsin are already expected to get hearings from SCOTUS in a matter of weeks, and they could decide both states.

The Purcell principle, named for a dispute over an Arizona voter identification law taken to the court on an emergency basis in 2006, dictates that federal judges should generally refrain from causing confusion by changing voting rules in the lead-up to an election.

While the notion sounds simple enough, its application in practice can often be baffling. And just how to apply the idea of keeping election procedures stable in the midst of an extraordinary national health emergency like the coronavirus pandemic is far from clear.

“It’s being brought up in just about every case right now as we are getting closer to the election,” said University of California at Irvine law professor Rick Hasen, who coined the term “Purcell principle” in a 2016 law review article. “But it’s not a hard-and-fast-rule, and it’s not well developed.”

The jockeying over the principle is evident in the fight the justices are wrestling with right now — a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling last month that made some changes to the state’s usual voting procedures, including allowing absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day or lacking a postmark to be counted even if they don’t arrive until three days later.

Republicans have fought the changes by arguing that the state court usurped a role that the U.S. Constitution says can be played only by the state Legislature and that the Constitution also forbids allowing the receipt of ballots after Election Day. But GOP leaders of the Pennsylvania Senate have also cited the Purcell principle as a reason to reject the changes the state’s highest court ordered last month.

“Changing the rules in the middle of the game by informing voters that they now have until November 6 for their ballot to be received risks confusion and the potential for fraud,” Republican election lawyer Jason Torchinsky wrote in a brief filed last week for the state lawmakers.

Lawyers for Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, a Democrat, seem to embrace the Purcell principle even more aggressively. In a brief filed Monday afternoon, they devoted four pages to arguing that the notion is as much about federalism as it is about timing. The idea behind the concept, they say, is fundamentally that federal courts shouldn’t be monkeying at the last minute with state-run elections, not that states lack the power to manage that process.

“Applicants’ request for this court’s intervention now is precisely the eleventh-hour federal meddling that the Purcell principle counsels against,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro wrote. “The senators appear to argue that this court should issue an order preventing those state courts from addressing Covid-19 related emergencies in their respective states. This is directly contrary to the Purcell principle.”

Legal experts say the Supreme Court could broaden the Purcell idea to cover last-minute state court orders, but it’s still unclear whether it would apply to changes sought or agreed to by the election authorities themselves. Also uncertain is whether a state court ruling issued six weeks before Election Day qualifies as the kind of disruptive, late-breaking order the judges in the Purcell case worried about.

“What is the cutoff time? How flexible is it? I think we don’t know what,” Hasen said.

 

The answer will be whatever SCOTUS and Justice Barrett decide. 

Oh, but it gets worse.

Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, lashed out on Monday at the religious liberty implications of the Supreme Court's 2015 decision that cleared the way for same-sex marriage nationwide. 

Thomas wrote that the decision, Obergefell v. Hodges, "enables courts and governments to brand religious adherents who believe that marriage is between one man and one woman as bigots, making their religious liberty concerns that much easier to dismiss." 

Thomas' strong opinion came down on the first day of the court's new term, and reflects the fact that critics of the landmark opinion from five years ago that was penned by now retired Justice Anthony Kennedy, are still infuriated by its reasoning. They believe the court should have left the decision to the political arena and have long said that it will infringe upon the rights of those who have religious objections to same-sex marriage. 

Supporters of LGBTQ rights are fearful that the court is poised to continue a trend from last term, ruling in favor of religious conservatives in key cases. 

The case that prompted Thomas' statement concerned Kim Davis, a former county clerk in Kentucky who gained national attention in 2015 and was jailed after declining to issue marriage licenses out of an objection to same sex marriages. The high court on Monday declined to hear an appeal in her case. 

Thomas called Davis "one of the first victims" of the court's "cavalier treatment of religion" in the Obergefell v. Hodges decision but warned "she will not be the last." He said that her case was not properly presented before the court, but he urged his colleagues to revisit the religious liberty implications of the landmark opinion down the road.

 

Thomas and Alito are begging for a case to overturn Obergefell and eliminate same-sex marriage, almost as eagerly as they are awaiting a chance to overturn Roe, and a host of other decisions could be history in the next several years.

You should be scared. If we don't win here, win now, and win overwhelmingly with a mandate to expand the court to eleven justices, we go back to 1950.

And a lot of us won't survive the trip.

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StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump's doctors say he's "not out of the woods yet" but he did return to the White House after spending three days at Walter Reed Medical Center for COVID-19.
• A team of three US and British scientists have won this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine for work on the Hepatitis C virus, allowing much more accurate testing and reduction in the disease.
• In an unsigned ruling the US Supreme Court sided with South Carolina Republicans in reinstating a witness signature requirement for all mail-in ballots for the November election.
• Eric Trump testified under oath in a deposition before a New York court in the state's probe of the Trump Organization's finances, Trump tried to delay the deposition until after the election.
• British archaeologists have confirmed the burial site of a 6th-century Anglo-Saxon warrior's grave near Berkshire, buried with bronze bowls, weapons, and metal fittings.
  

Last Call For It Just Took A Couple Decades Is All

Quite a bit of garbage has been heaped upon John Judis and Ruy Teixeira's The Emerging Democratic Majority over the years, the 2002 book that predicted "demography as destiny" in Sun Belt states becoming purple, if not outright blue, as they gained more Black and Hispanic voters. What the book failed to predict is that Rust Belt states would become redder at the same time for the opposite reason: more white voters.

But even RealClearPolitics columnist Bill Scher sees the writing on the wall here. Judis and Teixeira were right, just the timeframe was 15-20 years off the mark.

 

Biden is running a campaign based on de-polarization, treading very lightly on divisive cultural issues and eagerly welcoming support from Republicans tired of Trump. However, Biden’s shift from the last two Democratic campaigns is in tone, not substance. He hasn’t diluted the party’s position on abortion; he just talks about it infrequently. He’s subtly inviting pro-life voters who have soured on Trump to feel more comfortable crossing party lines.

Recently the New York Times interviewed just such a Republican voter. “You’d think I’d be glad to hear that [Trump] nominated a judge who is pro-life,” this voter said. “But I think what we need more than anything else is someone who is broadly pro-life, not just worried about the unborn, but about the living.”

Politico talked to two women at an event for a Michigan Democratic congresswoman who described themselves as longtime Republicans primarily because of their abortion views, but have since rethought their party affiliation. “I’ve had it with this idea that you’re only pro-life if you fight against abortion,” said one. “I can’t be that single-issue Republican anymore.” With Biden turning down the temperature on abortion, even in the face of a hotly contested Supreme Court nomination, some pro-life voters are finding it easier to voice nuanced views and shed any sense of obligation to choose a political team based on one’s abortion position.

Biden can be quite blunt when talking about race, even calling Trump a “racist” to his face in last week’s debate. But he consistently balances his rhetoric on racism with reminders of his own white working-class roots. During a CNN town hall in Pennsylvania last month, Biden was asked if he benefited from “white privilege.” Biden responded without hesitation, “Sure, I've benefited just because I don't have to go through what my black brothers and sisters have had to go through.” But recognizing that many in the white working class bristle at the notion that they are privileged, Biden quickly added, “Grow up here in Scranton, we're used to guys who look down their nose at us. … We are as good as anybody else. And guys like Trump, who inherited everything and squandered what they inherited, are the people that I've always had a problem with.” Without crudely equating the black and white working-class experiences, Biden is attempting to display understanding of both and close the racial divide.

If Biden’s de-polarization strategy works as intended, and polls show it is, he will win with a geographically broad coalition. In fact, if Biden wins everywhere he is leading in the RealClearPolitics averages as of Saturday, he will win 375 Electoral College votes, 10 more than Obama did in his historic 2008 victory.

A President Biden would certainly have challenges in maintaining a big tent party while being pressed by his left flank to move, and speak, aggressively on a slew of fronts. But if successful, the Republican Electoral College advantage would be no more.

The Republican skew manifested first in 2000, as Al Gore’s environmental and gun control record -- and Bill Clinton’s personal behavior -- eroded gains Clinton had made in the Sunbelt and the Midwest. Even though Gore won the popular vote, with the help of the Supreme Court he lost Florida and the Electoral College.

But Democrats are not without their own Electoral College advantages. In 2004, if 60,000 Ohioans who voted for George W. Bush had voted instead for John Kerry – out of 5.6 million votes cast – Kerry would have become president without a popular vote majority. Democrats have won 20 states, and Washington, D.C., three times in row, totaling 232 electoral votes. Democrats may have “wasted votes” in densely populated states like California, New York and Illinois, but that also gives Democrats a big head start in any election year.

Republicans have won 22 states three times in row, but only get 179 electoral votes out of them. And some of those Republican states — Arizona, Georgia, Texas and South Carolina — have shown signs of shift, with Democratic House or Senate gains in 2018 and surprisingly close margins in presidential or Senate trial heat polling. If one or more of these states turns firmly blue, while no currently blue states becomes less so, the Republican Party will be at a massive disadvantage, irrespective of the small shift in electoral votes that will come after the 2020 census.

Perhaps American democracy would be better off without the Electoral College, but that day is highly unlikely to ever come, as both parties would have to see the wisdom in abolishment at the same time to enact the necessary constitutional amendment, or adopt any sort of workaround on a state-by-state basis. Fortunately for Democrats, they are perfectly capable of winning the Electoral College this year. And after 2020, if Democrats can continue to avoid the pitfalls of polarization, winning may become even easier.

 

Right now the most obvious candidate is a Blue Arizona. If Mark Kelly wins and Biden takes the state, the GOP is in real trouble in the future if Democrats can hold the Upper Midwest. 

How big of an "if", well, we'll see.

Actual Pro-Life Catholicism

Pope Francis has officially committed the Catholic Church to ending the death penalty with a new papal encyclical on Sunday.

Pope Francis’ new encyclical, “Fratelli Tutti,” does something that some Catholics believed could not be done: It ratifies a change in church teaching. In this case, on the death penalty.

In 2018, Pope Francis ordered a change in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the official compendium of church teaching, when he termed the death penalty “inadmissible.” Today the pope placed the full weight of his teaching authority behind this statement: The death penalty is inadmissible, and Catholics should work for its abolition. A papal encyclical is one of the highest of all documents in terms of its authority, removing any lingering doubt about the church’s belief.

“There can be no stepping back from this position,” says Francis, referring to the opposition to capital punishment expressed by St. John Paul II. “Today we state clearly that ‘the death penalty is inadmissible’ and the Church is firmly committed to calling for its abolition worldwide.”

Helen Prejean, C.S.J., author of Dead Man Walking and a long-time opponent of capital punishment, whose work helped to alter the catechism, praised today’s news.

I rejoice in Pope Francis’s ringing proclamation of the inviolable dignity of all human life, even the life of murderers, and I am heartened by the church’s unequivocal opposition to governments’ use of the death penalty in all instances. In killing chambers, I’ve seen close-up the torture and suffering of human beings, rendered defenseless and killed by the state, their lives stripped of all dignity. I rejoice that now this clarity of church teaching will help end this unspeakable suffering and spark the Gospel of Jesus to be lived in its fullness: restoration of human life, not humiliation, torture and execution.

In past centuries, the church was generally accepting of the death penalty. Both St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas declared it licit not only for the sake of punishment, but also as a way for the state to protect itself, ideas that took hold in the church and influenced civil society. In the Roman Catechism, written after the Council of Trent in the 16th century, the church supported the death penalty for those two reasons: “Another kind of lawful slaying belongs to the civil authorities, to whom is entrusted power of life and death, by the legal and judicious exercise of which they punish the guilty and protect the innocent.”

As recently as the 1990s, the Catechism of the Catholic Church said that the state could still use capital punishment to protect people from violent criminals: “The traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude, presupposing full ascertainment of the identity and responsibility of the offender, recourse to the death penalty, when this is the only practicable way to defend the lives of human beings effectively against the aggressor.”

In 1995, however, in his encyclical "Evangelium Vitae," St. John Paul II tightened the restrictions, saying that the times that the state needed to use capital punishment to protect other citizens were “very rare, if not practically non-existent.” Four years later, he called for its abolition. So did Pope Benedict XVI, in 2011. The door to the death penalty was gradually closing. Today it was shut. It is a clear example of the development of doctrine over the centuries.

In his new encyclical, Francis also traces a lesser known counternarrative, showing a theological thread that has always been against the death penalty: “From the earliest centuries of the Church, some were clearly opposed to capital punishment,” he writes and includes commentary from St. Augustine, who argued for mercy in the case of two assassins.

In “Fratelli Tutti,” the pope grounds his opposition to capital punishment not only in mercy, perhaps his most characteristic spiritual theme, but also in opposition to revenge. “Fear and resentment can easily lead to viewing punishment in a vindictive and even cruel way, rather than as part of a process of healing and reintegration into society,” he writes.

 

This is, as both Zandardad and Joe Biden would put it, a Big Effing Deal.

 

Zandardad introduced me to the works of Sister Helen Prejean long ago, and it's how he got involved with the Southern Poverty Law Center. I know the Catholic Church has been in real trouble over the last couple of decades (centuries?) but there are still good liberal, actual, merciful, "teachings of Jesus" Catholics out there and my parents (and Joe Biden) are some of them, and to see that Pope Francis is doing the right thing here reminds me that just for a millisecond, not all Church officials are bad all the time.

 

Some still have faith in a better world, driven by people making a difference, one life at a time, even if I'm not really one of them. 

Maybe that's okay.

 

The Blue Tsunami's Future

Even should the Democrats perform beyond my wildest dreams in the Senate this year, and they run the table on all the GOP seats in play (NC, SC, IA, MT, ME, AZ, CO and both GA seats) and Doug Jones keeps his seat in Alabama? The Dems would be up 56-44 in the Senate, still a long way from a 60-seat majority in 2008, and probably less so as we'd have quite a few folks lining up to be mavericks like Kyrsten Sinema, America's favorite Democratic Senator who sided with Trump more often than not in her first four years in office.

Having said that, 2022 does present another map where Republicans are on the defensive in the Senate, and one of the big fights will be for Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey's seat, because Toomey apparently won't be there to defend it.

Sen. Pat Toomey has decided not to run for reelection or for governor of Pennsylvania in 2022, according to two people familiar with his plans, a surprise decision by the Republican with significant implications for the state’s next elections.

He will serve out his current Senate term but won’t run for either of those offices, seemingly ending his career in elected office, at least for now. A formal announcement is expected Monday.

Toomey’s office on Sunday neither confirmed nor denied the senator’s plans. The people familiar with his plans spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

As the only Republican now holding statewide office other than judges, Toomey was widely seen as the likely Republican favorite for governor in 2022. His decision not to run for that office or for Senate could create two wide open contests on the Republican side, while depriving the party of running its most established current political figure in Pennsylvania.

It will also open a prime Senate target for national Democrats, regardless of who controls the chamber after this year’s election.

Most political insiders had expected that Toomey, 58, would wait until after the 2020 election to decide his political future. It was not immediately clear why he had decided to make an announcement now, weeks before the Nov. 3 presidential election.

Toomey’s surprise decision comes at an already tumultuous and perilous time for Republicans in Washington. President Donald Trump is hospitalized with the coronavirus. Three GOP senators have also contracted the virus, which could hamper the party’s push to install Judge Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court. And Trump and fellow Republicans face increasingly dire poll numbers, threatening their holds on both the White House and Senate.

“It’s incredibly surprising,” said Charlie Gerow, a Republican consultant in Harrisburg. “It throws dozens of wild cards into the mix.”

 

As I said,  Republicans will have at least 20 out of 34 seats to defend, including Lisa Murkowski, Rob Portman, Richard Burr, Roy Blunt, Todd Young, and Toomey, all winnable seats. Dems on the other hand will have to defend tough races in Nevada (Catherine Cortez Masto), New Hampshire (Maggie Hassan), and Colorado (Michael Bennet).

Toomey's impending retirement could be very important two years from now.

We'll see.

 

StupidiNews!

• Only Texas, Missouri, and South Carolina reported a decrease in new weekly COVID-19 cases from last week, nationally the country has topped 54,000 daily cases for the first time since August.
• The Biden campaign reports both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris continue to test negative after Biden's exposure to COVID-19 with Donald Trump's illness at the debate last week. 
• British authorities are planning a possible three-stage lockdown if the country cannot get COVID-19 cases under control, PM Boris Johnson denies any suggestion that current measures aren't working.
• Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer says that it's not safe to hold Senate proceedings with three GOP senators reporting COVID-19, Republicans say the Senate will reconvene on Oct. 19.
• A group of hackers that stole data from an "unidentified federal agency" in May appear to be Russia's GRU-sponsored Fancy Bear team, behind much of the 2016 election and DNC hacking.