Last Call For The Dear Leader Show

The Republican National Convention is at this point one long propaganda festival so blatant in its misinformation, gaslighting, and Trump idol worshipping that Goebbels himself would applaud. We're passing 180,000 dead from COVID-19 and Trump is getting kudos for it.

The Republican National Convention put President Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic front and center on opening night, depicting him as a decisive leader who marshaled resources, forcefully responded to the deadly threat, and “moved mountains” to save American lives. 

What it didn’t say is that the United States, with more than 5 million cases and more than 175,000 dead, with schools and businesses still closed and millions unemployed, has had one of the worst records on the pandemic in the world. Or that Trump repeatedly downplayed the virus threat until it had already spread throughout the country unchecked, and that to this day he inexplicably asserts that it will one day magically disappear. 

The virus — alongside some false assertions claiming that Democratic candidate Joe Biden planned to ban private insurance and introduce socialized medicine — set the tone for the evening, with a rural nurse, a doctor who himself had Covid-19, and front line workers praising Trump’s action to tame the disease.

A video recapped the statements Trump has made repeatedly at his press briefings — blaming China, the World Health Organization, and mistakes by scientists early on, as they worked to quickly learn about a virus none had ever seen before. The video also depicted Democratic governors like Gavin Newsom of California and Andrew Cuomo of New York either bumbling their own response or praising Trump for his. 

“One leader took decisive action to save lives, President Donald Trump,” the narrator of the video said. “Banning travel from China and coronavirus epicenters, Biden charged xenophobia. But President Trump was right.” 

But numerous public health experts, including top scientists whom Trump has diminished or contradicted, have said that the president failed, tragically, to mount a coordinated national response using the basic building blocks of public health, including a widespread, efficient and accessible national testing program.
That wasn’t the image at the convention. 

One speaker, Amy Johnson Ford, a nurse from West Virginia, praised Trump for expanding telemedicine to rural areas like her own community. The Trump administration did use emergency powers so many more people could access telehealth, not only in rural areas. It’s one of the administration’s few pandemic policies that has received wide bipartisan approval.

“I can tell you without hesitation Donald Trump's quick action and leadership saved thousands of lives during Covid-19,” Ford said. 

G.E. Ghali, an oral surgeon and chancellor of the LSU Health Sciences Center in Shreveport, La., praised Trump's response — despite the fact that hospitals, doctors and other health providers were pleading at that time with Washington to use all of its powers to get personal protective equipment like masks and gowns to hospitals. Without adequate PPE, hundreds of health care providers have died. 

Ghali himself got the virus. He was able to get a rapid test, receiving the results in minutes and starting remdesivir treatment within hours, although the drug is in short supply. After that he got convalescent plasma — a treatment that is safe but not yet proven to be effective. Trump has championed it, and publicly pressured the FDA to grant an emergency use authorization for plasma, which it did on Sunday. 

Ghali praised Trump for speeding up testing and supplies — the very things that many public health experts have cited as the administration’s biggest shortcomings. Testing in particular has been a chronic problem, allowing the virus to spread. 

“As a physician, I've seen firsthand how these breakthroughs have saved countless lives. As a patient, I've benefited from the expedited therapies made possible by the swift action of this administration,” Ghali said. “President Trump truly moved mountains to save lives.”

There still remains no national strategy to fight COVID-19 other than "the states are dealing with it".

As I said earlier today, the strategy is to go after Suburban women with the fear card.  But Trump's cavernous ego must be fed by State TV all the same.

When representatives from all the major TV networks visited the White House's South Lawn on Monday, part of what's known as a "walkthrough" to prepare for President Trump's Thursday night speech there, there was a surprise: A mystery anchor platform. 

The platform hadn't been on any of the diagrams given to the networks for the prime time address Trump is slated to deliver at the end of the Republican National Convention. So calls were made. Emails were exchanged. And the network executives discovered that the platform was built for one of the president's biggest supporters: Sean Hannity. 

That means Hannity, who's sometimes talked about as a "shadow chief of staff" for Trump, is getting special treatment from the Trump re-election campaign, according to multiple sources involved in the planning. It's the latest in a long line of examples of Trump favoring the Fox News personalities who promote him the most. 

Hannity said on his Monday night program that he will be live from the White House Rose Garden on Tuesday ahead of First Lady Melania Trump's speech; live on Wednesday from Fort McHenry in Baltimore, where Vice President Mike Pence will be speaking; and live from the South Lawn on Thursday. 

No other TV network has an anchor position along the South Lawn. On Tuesday, however, complaints lodged by other networks did lead to some small improvements in White House access. 

The political conventions are high-stakes television shows where every production detail matters. 

Understandably, given the network's extraordinarily cozy relationship with Trump, the people planning the GOP's convention want Fox front and center. 

The conservative network scored the biggest TV audience during the 2016 Republican convention, and Monday's preliminary ratings confirmed that the same will almost certainly hold true this year.

It's all a pageant of cultism. Only Dear Leader can save you from the Horde. We need to elect Biden if only to get FOX News reigned in.

I'll pass.

The GOP Suburban Strategy

The first night of the Republican convention was predictably bonkers and a mess of lies and mistruths.

The Republican National Convention started off with a parade of dishonesty, in stark contrast with last week's Democratic convention. While CNN also watched and fact-checked the Democrats, those four nights combined didn't have the number of misleading and false claims made on the first night of the Republicans' convention.

That wasn't the point.  The point was the McCloskeys.

The couple that chased Black Lives Matter protestors away from their front lawn in St. Louis at gunpoint hit up the Republican National Convention on Monday night. And what they had to say was downright dark.

The McCloskeys, a pair of personal injury lawyers who famously pointed guns at demonstrators in front of their palatial residence this summer, instantly went down as one of the most unusual appearances in the history of presidential conventions. They’re a pair no other president would have invited — but Trump.

Mark and Patty McCloskey warned that in an America under a future President Joe Biden, other Americans would likewise be forced to defend themselves from protestors on their own front lawns.

“No matter where you live, your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats’ America,” said Patty McCloskey.

The couple beamed into the convention from their Renaissance palazzo-style mansion in St. Louis, seated on a couch in a room richly-paneled with dark wood, and spoke straight to the camera.

They warned other Americans that they, too, may soon have to wave their own weapons at unruly gangs of demonstrators if Donald Trump loses the 2020 election.

“What you saw happen to us could just as easily happen to any of you who are watching from quiet neighborhoods across this country,” Patty McCloskey said. “And that’s what we want to speak to you about tonight.”

The one thing that will nearly guarantee a Biden loss is if the college-educated White suburban women that voted for the Democrats in 2018 and supported Black Lives Matter over the last three months turn on him over Fear Of Those People In My Neighborhood™.

Patricia McCloskey: They’re not satisfied with spreading the chaos and violence into our communities. They want to abolish the suburbs altogether by ending single family home zoning. This forced re-zoning would bring crime, lawlessness and low quality apartments into now thriving suburban neighborhoods. President Trump smartly ended this government overreach, but Joe Biden wants to bring it back. These are the policies that are coming to a neighborhood near you. So make no mistake, no matter where you live, your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats America.

Mark McCloskey: At this moment in history, if you stand up for yourself and for the values our country was founded on, the mob spurred on by their allies and the media will try to destroy you. You’ve seen us on your TV screens and Twitter feeds. You know that we’re not the kind of people who backed down. Thankfully, neither is Donald Trump. President Trump will defend the God given right of every American to protect their homes and their families. But more than that, Trump’s vision for America is a country where you have an opportunity to work hard and build the life you dream of with a job you love, with your children being educated in great schools in a community where your family can play in the backyard without fear, worship in a church without shame and express your beliefs without retribution. Trump brought us the greatest economy our country had ever seen. The Democrats have brought us nothing but destruction.

Patricia McCloskey: When we don’t have basic safety and security in our communities, we’ll never be free to build a brighter future for ourselves, for our children or for our country. That’s what’s at stake in this election and that’s why we must re-elect Donald Trump. God bless you. God bless the president and God bless the United States. 

This right here?  This is the real GOP Suburban Strategy.

The only question is how well it will work, and how many votes Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and down-ticket Democrats, are going to lose because of it. Look, I've told you before that the weakness in liberals is NIMBY stuff, and Republicans have always been able to prey on that weakness.  It's why Republicans have won the white vote since before I was born.

But how well will it work?  There's evidence that maybe, just maybe, it's not going to this time. Not even in the Charlotte suburbs like Cornelius, as Politico's Michael Kruse found out.

The suburbs, like this one, just up Interstate 77 from the official site of the start of this week’s Republican National Convention, make up the terrain on which the coming election almost certainly will be decided. The suburbs almost always are a political battlefield, or at least have been for the last generation or more. And if Trump can’t win or even loses a sufficient slice of his support in Cornelius, one of the whitest and most reliably Republican of the key suburbs in this critical swing state, he probably can’t win North Carolina, according to pollsters and strategists. And if he can’t win North Carolina, they say, he probably can’t win reelection. Hence the message he’s been delivering with increasing frequency and ferocity of late, appealing to the “Suburban Housewives of America,” charging that Joe Biden wants to “destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream,” and stressing that residents of American suburbia want “security” and not “low-income housing” forced “down their throats.”

“Why,” he asked in a tweet over the weekend, “would Suburban Women vote for Biden and the Democrats when Democrat run cities are now rampant with crime … which could easily spread to the suburbs?”

It was a prominent and recurring theme on the opening night of the mostly virtual RNC. “They want,” said Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple from St. Louis who pointed guns at Black Lives Matter protesters marching past their house earlier this summer, referring to Democrats and echoing language used repeatedly by Trump himself, “to abolish the suburbs.”

The response I got from actual suburban women here on Monday, though, was a mixture of eye-rolls, laughter and confusion. “It’s not something I’m afraid of,” said Connie Searle, 61, retired from a human resources job at a bank.

“I haven’t heard anyone voice concerns about being afraid that angry mobs are going to come out this way,” said Sue Rankin-White, 72, who worked for the Department of Education in Washington and lived in northern Virginia before moving here.

Afraid of the city? “I’m here because of its proximity to Charlotte,” said Camerin Allgood McKinnon, 36, a mother of two who teaches dance.

While Searle, Rankin-White and McKinnon are all Democrats, the prospect of lawlessness in the suburbs doesn’t appear to be a top-of-mind concern, either, for women who aren’t Democrats. On Monday evening, I knocked on the front door of Meredith Wolverton, because the school teacher had posted on the Nextdoor app a string of anti-mask comments and a read of her Twitter timeline confirmed her support for Trump, even though she’s registered as unaffiliated. Standing on her porch, though, when I asked if she was frightened by a possible “invasion” of crime coming up from Charlotte, she flatly said no.

“I’m not concerned about that,” she told me. And she also wasn’t afraid of the coronavirus pandemic. What she was afraid of, she suggested, was the Democrats’ overreaction to it. “I want to be able to go to church,” she said. “I want to be able to go to the gym. I want to be able to go do all these things and have my rights as an American citizen.”

Affixed to her house was an American flag. Ditto for the houses around her. Cornelius started more than a century ago as a mill town. Its growth along with the rest of the area in the last few decades has been dizzying—population less than 3,000 in 1990, still not quite 12,000 in 2000, almost 25,000 in 2010 and now more than 30,000 and still going, with people moving in from the Northeast, the Midwest and elsewhere. But it’s maintained a largely Republican character. The mayor is a Republican. All but one of the five-person town board are Republicans. Sen. Thom Tillis started his political career here as a member of that town board.

In 2008, in the four Cornelius precincts, John McCain beat Barack Obama by an aggregate 2,663 votes. In 2012, Mitt Romney beat Obama by 4,043 votes. And in 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 2,984 votes.

The last midterms, though, ushered in a hard-to-ignore change, a byproduct of court-ordered redrawing of districts but also the shifting demographics and political preferences of the many newcomers. Going into the 2018 election, people here were represented in the state house, the state senate and the county commission by three Republican men. After? Three Democratic women.

And this summer, in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by Minneapolis police, citizens have clamored to have removed a monument of a Confederate soldier in front of a church on one of the town’s main drags — and marched for racial justice in a peaceful protest organized by a trio of local high school students.

“That is something that would not have happened even five years ago, I don’t believe,” Pam Jones, a founder and leader of a group called Unity in Community, told me.

Being from this part of NC, the blood-red foothills of Catawba County, I can tell you the shift from working-class white Democrats to Trump Republicans began 40 years ago with Ronald Reagan and was cemented in 1997 when the GE transformer plant in Conover moved to Mexico under Bill Clinton's NAFTA.  The plant was demolished in 2016 but the damage was done.

And if people here are even considering Joe Biden?

Trump is screwed.

I would love to see some Democratic women in an ad about what Republicans have really done to school funding and failed infrastructure.  And you know who is doing just that?  Amy McGrath, here in Kentucky.



This is a good ad.  For all his "bring home the bacon" stuff, Mitch McConnell hasn't lifted a finger to fix the Brent Spence Bridge and Rand Paul wants to make it into a toll project.

We need more, much more of this to counter the Republican fear card. This is how you do it.

In A New York Minute, Con't

New York State Attorney General Letitia James is suing the Trump Organization over financial fraud, this time for misrepresenting assets to lenders.

The New York Attorney General is investigating President Trump’s private business for allegedly misleading lenders by inflating the value of its assets, the attorney general’s office said Monday in a legal filing.

In the filing, signed by a deputy to Attorney General Letitia James, the attorney general’s office said it is investigating Trump’s use of “Statements of Financial Condition” — documents Trump sent to lenders, summarizing his assets and debts.

The filing asks a New York state judge to compel the Trump Organization to provide information it has been withholding from investigators — including a subpoena seeking an interview with the president’s son Eric.

The attorney general’s office said it began investigating after Trump’s former lawyer and “fixer,” Michael Cohen, told Congress in February 2019 that Trump had used these statements to inflate his net worth to lenders.

The filing said that Eric Trump had been scheduled to be interviewed in the investigation in late July, but abruptly canceled that interview. The filing says that Eric Trump is now refusing to be interviewed, with Eric Trump’s lawyers saying “we cannot allow the requested interview to go forward … pursuant to those rights afforded to every individual under the Constitution.”

Many of the details of the investigation were redacted or left out of the filing. But it mentioned valuations of three Trump properties: a Los Angeles golf course, an office building at 40 Wall Street and a country estate called “Seven Springs” in Westchester County, N.Y.

Last year, The Washington Post reported that Trump had inflated the potential sale value of the Seven Springs property in a “Statement of Financial Condition” — a type of document he sent to potential lenders to demonstrate his wealth. 

In 2011, Trump’s statement claimed that the property had been “zoned for nine luxurious homes,” and that the value of those home lots raised the value of the overall property to $261 million — far more than the $20 million assessed by local authorities. Local officials said Trump had received preliminary conceptual approval for those homes, but never completed the process or obtained final zoning permission. The homes were never built.

The court filing also mentions a question about a loan on Trump’s Chicago hotel, which one of Trump’s lenders forgave in 2010. The filing does not say why that forgiven loan is of interest to investigators.

The Trump Organization did not respond to a request for comment on Monday morning. Trump still owns his businesses, though he says he has given day-to-day control over to his sons.

 
This is a very polite way of saying that Eric Trump should appear at the AG's office before he is dragged bodily out of the White House by NY State Troopers serving a bench warrant.

The larger question though remains: it's not "Will Trump actually leave power peacefully?" but "Why can't he do so?"

The answer is "Because he will be indicted on January 21, 2021 and will spend the rest of his life in a New York state prison when convicted of felony fraud."

I fully expect Trump to skip town in January and never return to the US, so that he operates out of his golf resorts in Dubai or his licensed properties in Manila, Istanbul, or Pune, India.

Or, you know, Moscow.

Trump I can see operating as "US leader in exile" in some dacha on the Caspian Sea or something, given plenty of broadcast studio gear to show up on Russia Today or Sputnik to rally a violent, white supremacist terrorist militia movement dedicated to lethal attacks against the Biden administration and those who voted for him. An indictment and conviction won't make the lunatic Trump diehards suddenly turn into normal Americans again.

Just a cheery thought.

StupidiNews!

• Hospital officials in Berlin are confirming that Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny was poisoned, Navalny, an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin, was flown to Germany for care.
• The CBO is warning that Donald Trump's plan to eliminate payroll taxes would render the Social Security trust fund completely broke by 2023, unable to pay any benefits.
• Wisconsin Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has activated the National Guard after a second night of protests over the Kenosha police shooting of unarmed Black man Jacob Blake.
• FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn is walking back White House claims from Sunday that antibody therapy is an effective treatment for COVID-19, saying the data is not clear on its effectiveness.
• Social media app TikTok is counter-suing the Trump regime, claiming Donald Trump is using the company's connections to China as a fear tool to stifle First Amendment protections of users.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

FOX Business host Lou Dobbs was the functional head of the entire Department of Homeland Security, and if that surprises you in any way, understand that this is how Trump operates and has operated for years: the most qualified experts are always the people on TV who say Trump is right.

President Donald Trump told officials from the Department of Homeland Security to get their marching orders by listening to Fox Business host Lou Dobbs “every night,” former DHS chief of staff Miles Taylor told Anderson Cooper on Friday.

Dobbs, an effusive supporter of Trump, was basically the “shadow chief of staff” for the department, Taylor said in the CNN interview.

“The president would call us and ... he would say, ‘Why the hell didn’t you watch Lou Dobbs last night? You need to listen to Lou. What Lou says is what I want to do,’” Taylor said.

“So if Lou Dobbs peddled a conspiracy theory on late-night television or made an erroneous claim about what should be done ... at the border ... the president wanted us to be tuning in every night,” he added.

Taylor said he didn’t have time to watch Dobbs while the 250,000-person DHS was “trying to guard against some of the most severe threats to this country.”

“We can’t be watching Lou Dobbs and taking our orders from him, but this happened on a regular basis,” Taylor said.

Taylor served in the Department of Homeland Security from 2017 to 2019, including as chief of staff to former Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. He has blasted the Trump administration and is endorsing Democrat Joe Biden for president. He accused Trump in a blistering Washington Post op-ed of sacrificing national security for his personal benefit.

Taylor said earlier this week that Trump once asked if America could swap Puerto Rico for Greenland and that he frequently made disparaging comments about the Puerto Rican people.

Lou Dobbs is running DHS, Tucker Carlson runs State, Jeanine Pirro runs the DOJ, and Stuart Varney runs Treasury. The reality TV star in the Oval Office has TV pundits running the country and has for years.

No wonder then that Republicans, led by former Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, are finally saying Trump needs to go.

More than two-dozen former Republican U.S. lawmakers, including former Senator Jeff Flake, endorsed Democrat Joe Biden for president on Monday, the first day of the Republican National Convention, in the latest rebuke of President Donald Trump by members of his own party.

The 27 former members of Congress joined a “Republicans for Biden” initiative organized by the Biden campaign to encourage Republican support for the Democrat, the Biden campaign said. They cited Trump’s “corruption, destruction of democracy, blatant disregard for moral decency, and urgent need to get the country back on course” as reasons for the move, according to a Biden campaign statement.

Flake, whose opposition to Trump led the Arizona Republican to retire from the Senate in 2018, was due to speak to reporters later on Monday about his decision to endorse Biden.

The former lawmakers represent only the latest Republican group to endorse Democratic presidential nominee and oppose Trump in the Nov. 3 election, illustrating how the Republican president has alienated members of his own party.

Last week, 73 former Republican national security officials, including former chiefs of the FBI and CIA, endorsed Biden while calling Trump corrupt and unfit to serve.

The opposition groups object to Trump’s alienation of U.S. allies abroad and his leadership at home, including his response to the coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 176,000 Americans, according to a Reuters tally, and triggered a severe economic downturn.

The Trump campaign has described the Republican groups campaigning for Biden, such as Republican Voters Against Trump and 43 Alumni for Biden - hundreds of officials who worked for George W. Bush - as “the swamp,” disaffected former officials “trying to take down the duly elected President of the United States.”

Everyone who opposes Dear Leader is a Deep State operative, you know, including all the voters I guess. We have to escape this madness or they're going to kill us all.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

Trump's latest stunt ahead of his four-day infomercial from hell is announcing a NeW BrEAkThROuGh tREaTmeNT for the coronavirus, which apparently is news to both the entire medical science community and to the coronavirus.

The Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency authorization for blood plasma as a coronavirus treatment, the agency and President Donald Trump announced Sunday — one day Trump attacked the drug regulator for moving too slowly to back the treatment.

The agency held off on the decision last week over concerns from government scientists that evidence for the treatment's effectiveness is thin, prompting Trump to accuse the FDA of slow-walking the therapy to harm his reelection chances without offering any evidence to support his claim. It is not clear whether the FDA has received additional clinical trial data in the last week that would support the therapy's use.

An emergency authorization normally paves the way for expanded use of an experimental therapy. But FDA's decision for so-called convalescent plasma — which more than 70,000 Americans have already received — is limited because patients have largely received it outside of randomized, controlled clinical trials that could prove whether the approach is effective.

Trump in a brief Sunday evening news conference appeared to oversell the FDA's assessment, claiming the agency found plasma "safe and very effective." However, the agency said more rigorous study is needed to prove whether the treatment effective. Janet Woodcock, the head of FDA's drug division who is now working on Operation Warp Speed, an interagency effort to accelerate coronavirus treatments and vaccines, on Friday told POLITICO that plasma has not been "proven as an effective treatment."

And unlike Gilead's remdesivir, which received an emergency use authorization months ago and has shown to benefit hospitalized patients, convalescent plasma "does not yet represent a new standard of care based on the current available evidence," FDA said in a statement.

Trump announced the emergency authorization alongside his health secretary, Alex Azar, and FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, in a press conference one day before the start of the Republican National Convention. While Trump called it a "historic announcement," experts have said the treatment is unlikely to be a game-changer in the fight against a pathogen that's killed more than 170,000 in the United States.

Hahn, who took over as FDA chief in December, said Trump "has asked FDA to cut back red tape and try to speed medical products into the hands of providers, patients and American consumers."

Outside experts and former officials have accused FDA of caving to White House pressure during the pandemic -- most notably in its decision to authorize emergency use of hydroxychloroquine for treating Covid-19 infection despite limited evidence. The agency later pulled the authorization after randomized clinical trials found it provided no benefit, but Trump as recently as this weekend complained about the agency's reversal.

Plasma therapy involves giving the sick antibody-rich plasma extracted from the blood of coronavirus survivors. In theory those antibodies should help recipients fight off the virus. But while plasma treatment has been used safely against diseases from diphtheria to Ebola over the past 130 years, its track record on effectiveness is mixed. And it has not yet been proven to work against the coronavirus.

Scott Gottlieb, Trump's first FDA commissioner, on Sunday said that plasma is "probably beneficial" for coronavirus patients, as he also acknowledged scientists' concerns about the lack of evidence for the treatment.

"I think some people wanted to see more rigorous data to ground that decision," Gottlieb said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

So this is now what, the third? Fourth? Fifth "treatment breakthrough" announced by the FDA, none of which actually have been confirmed by the FDA or backed up by doctors in other countries for that matter. None of them are actually treatment breakthroughs, and none of them are even remotely ready for widespread use yet (remember, if remdesivir from pharma giant Gilead was working as well as thought, why not make that available for widespread use?)

At least the American media isn't taking Trump seriously or giving him the benefit of the doubt when he's clearly forcing the FDA to move up the timetable for political reasons ahead of the Republican convention this week.

The sad part is 175,000 Americans have died to this virus, and Trump is the most upset about how it's hurting his poll numbers. He doesn't care if your loved ones die to the virus or not, he just cares if he wins.

But what Trump will almost certainly do is announce an October Surprise vaccine that doesn't have rigorous testing behind it, and that will be the nightmare scenario from a public health standpoint.

The Trump administration is considering whether to bypass normal U.S. regulatory standards to fast-track an experimental coronavirus vaccine from the U.K. for use in America ahead of the presidential election, the Financial Times reported, citing three unnamed people briefed on the plan.

One option is to issue an “emergency use authorization” in October to a vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca Plc and Oxford University, based on the results from a relatively small U.K. study if it is successful, the people told the British newspaper.

A spokesman for the U.S. Health and Human Services department, which oversees the Food and Drug Administration, told the Financial Times that any claim that an EUA would be issued before the election was “absolutely false.” The administration was hopeful that a vaccine would be developed by the first quarter of 2021, he said.

With Covid-19 infections still widespread in the U.S., President Donald Trump’s political future hinges on his response to the pandemic and his promise to bring forth a vaccine by Election Day on Nov. 3. On Saturday, he tweeted that employees at the FDA are attempting to sabotage his re-election by slowing down coronavirus research.

There’s no evidence that the scientists and staff of the FDA are delaying treatments or vaccines.

The FT article came shortly before Bloomberg reported that the president is set to announce that a new treatment involving blood plasma donated by people who’ve recovered from the disease has received an emergency use authorization from U.S. regulators.

Mark Meadows, White House chief of staff, and Steven Mnuchin, Treasury secretary, have told top Democrats that the administration was considering fast-tracking a vaccine, the Financial Times reported. A spokesperson for the Treasury secretary said in response that Mnuchin “did not make any comments regarding AstraZeneca” and believes any decision on vaccine candidates is up to the FDA.

A spokesperson for AstraZeneca told the Financial Times that it had “not discussed emergency use authorization with the U.S. government” and that it “would be premature to speculate on that possibility.” AstraZeneca’s trial of 10,000 participants may be too small to justify just an order, according to the newspaper.

Trump will have to have a "vaccine" before the election, or there is zero chance he wins. And how many of his cultists will line up to take it because Trump said so?

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Another brutal police shooting, this time in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The victim's name is Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man shot in the back seven times by a white officer, in front of Blake's three sons who were in an SUV that Blake was entering. Three officers on the scene to break up an argument, and the officer's response was to empty this clip into Blake's back.

A man identified as Jacob Blake was shot by police during a domestic call in Kenosha on Sunday, Aug. 23. A large crowd took to the streets afterward to protest.

Kenosha County declared a state of emergency curfew from 10:15 p.m. until 7 a.m. Monday.

The shooting happened near 28th Avenue and 40th Street around 5:11 p.m., after officers were called for a “domestic incident.”

Graphic video of the shooting circulated social media. It shows Blake walking away from police and getting into an SUV. One officer is seen holding Blake’s shirt, and then seven gunshots can be heard.

According to the Kenosha Police Department, officers provided immediate aid to the man after the shooting. He was transported via Flight for Life to Froedtert in Milwaukee in serious condition.

Protests were nearly immediate, hence the curfew last night. Adam Silverman at Balloon Juice has more:

I’ve watched the video several times. As I’ve noted here several times, I’m a criminologist by training, even if not by practice anymore. I’ve taught hundreds of law enforcement officers. I’ve even taught policing to them. I’ve consulted with law enforcement, I’ve trained law enforcement (Federal, state, and local) in continuing ed/inservices, as well as in my martial arts classes, and I’ve had tactical training from some law enforcement (my quarterly weapons training is supervised by a close friend who is a SWAT sniper). While we only have 20 seconds of video, so almost no context, there is nothing in that 20 seconds that should have resulted in shooting Mr. Blake, let alone shooting him seven times in the back. There are three officers. His back is to them, and at one point he is close to pressing himself against the driver’s side front door of his mini-van. At that point the officer that had a hold of his t-shirt should have stepped forward and pressed Mr. Blake into the van with the other two officers providing cover and support. With Mr. Blake immobilized against the van, he could have then been taken into custody if he was either A) the person responsible for the domestic disturbance that they’d been called to deal with or B) someone else at the seen who had somehow interfered with their responding to the domestic disturbance call. Even if Mr. Blake had ignored their instructions – “lawful orders” – that is not a justification for this type of law enforcement response. There is no crime on the books in the US that allows for summary execution without judgement. In those 20 seconds, Mr. Blake had taken no aggressive actions towards those officers. He appears to simply be trying to get away from them and into his van. He hadn’t swung at them, kicked at them, charged at them. He certainly didn’t try to run them over as he wasn’t in the van yet.

As we wait for more news about both Mr. Blake’s condition and the context around what actually happened yesterday in Kenosha, the US is now faced with another example of how African Americans’ contacts with law enforcement, as well as those of other people of color, all too often end violently with the violence directed at the African Americans or people of color. And we’re faced with this example, and the responses it will engender, as the Republican Party begins its nominating convention. A nominating convention that was already expected to focus on unwavering, unflagging, and unconditional support for law enforcement and harsh condemnation of any criticism of law enforcement and how they actual interact with African Americans and people of color.

What has become exceedingly clear is that no one should be policed the way African Americans and people of color are policed. And by policed I do not just mean how law enforcement interacts and deals with them, but how our entire criminal justice system from law enforcement to the courts to corrections is applied. We are in serious need of reform across recruitment, vetting, hiring, initial education, continuing education, policing unions, as well as what prosecutors and judges authorize, tolerate, and do. And we certainly need to rethink how law enforcement should respond, and who within law enforcement should do the responding, to domestic disturbance and welfare check calls.

The video, which I will not link here, is being recorded from a window across the street. It clearly shows the officer shooting Blake in the back as Blake is opening the driver's side door and entering the SUV to check on his three sons in the vehicle.

The first officer makes no effort to restrain Blake as Blake passes him to go around the front of the SUV to reach to the driver's side door, the second of the three officers is standing at the left rear door of the vehicle and the third officer is behind the second at the rear corner of the SUV. The second officer draws his pistol one-handed and empties the clip into Blake's back at a distance of maybe two feet as Blake leans into the vehicle with the kids screaming in the SUV as it happens.

It is a black man being sentenced to summary execution by a white cop, only Jacob Blake at least survives the initial shooting by a miracle. I sincerly hope he lives and sues Kenosha PD into oblivion.

I'm so tired of this.  I'm so tired of my life's sole meaning being reduced to "I draw breath only because haven't been murdered by a cop yet for being a perceived threat". I am so much more than that.

But I'm also not because at any time, a police officer can decide I am a dead slab of cold nigger meat.  But for the grace of police, go millions of us. Savage beasts, subject to extermination in the name of "law enforcement". We are in America, but we are not Americans and never have been. We are not human in the eyes of police. We are just suspects, threats, things denied dignity and agency. There is an entire political party dedicated to keeping us in this social, open-air prison, to keep us as a menagerie of beasts to hunt for fucking sport, video game targets that can be butchered and splayed out for a laugh at the local cop bar and it makes me livid. I want to punch and hit and tear and I want to smash and I want to make them truly afraid so they stop, but that's exactly what they want.

An excuse to execute.

I am tired, and angry, and tired of being angry. I am tired of writing this story every few months. I am weary to my soul of seeing the absolute disdain by tens of millions of Americans who just don't give a shit if Black people are butchered. We deserve it, we are told. We should stop being thugs. We should always obey officers of the law. We shouldn't make them shoot us.

So I say this to you this morning. For the love of God, help us.

Get your families and your friends and the people you love to register to vote and help us. Trump got 57% of the white vote in 2016. In that CBS poll I referenced from yesterday when Biden is winning overall 52%-42%, Trump is getting 52% of the white vote. If white voters make up 70-71% of the electorate as they did in 2016, that would be an 8-point overall swing toward Biden from where Clinton was in 2016 and he'd walk away with an easy win.

That's it. Five percent of white Trump voters have to vote for Biden instead and it's a landslide.

It's been four hundred fucking years of this. Of only surviving because "we're one of the good ones" right up until someone decides we're not.

See this for what it is and help us.

StupidiNews!

• White House adviser Kellyanne Conway and her husband George, a Lincoln Project staffer, are both stepping down to take care of their family heading into the heart of the 2020 campaign season.
• Peruvian officials say 13 people have died in a stampede at a massive party raided by police and health officials over COVID-19 concerns.
• Thousands are evacuating the Louisiana coast as Hurricanes Marco and Laura take aim at the Gulf Coast, expected to make a double landfall this week within days of each other.
• Joe Biden says he's not ruling out a second term despite questions about his age, or his earlier statements suggesting he would only run for a single term.
• July 2020 tied July 2019 as the second warmest month on record in the US, the Northeastern US alone set 11 monthly all-time temperature records including Baltimore, DC, and Philadelphia.

Last Call For The Call Of Trumpthulhu

Being a Trump voter is to be a part of a cult.

It was mostly Democrats who watched last week's convention, and they liked what they saw. Now, as the Republicans begin theirs, we find a Republican Party whose voters not only hold a different view of things in America than Democrats do — but also one very different from most voters overall. And therein may lie Republicans' own challenge.

Republicans see an America — to borrow Ronald Reagan's famous test — better off today than it was four years ago, mainly, they say, because of their confidence in President Trump.

For most Republicans, America is a nation where the economy is still fairly good, where the effort to handle the coronavirus is going at least somewhat well and the president is doing a very good job on it. For them, the virus elicits less concern in the first place. They believe the 170,000 fatalities is an overstated count and one which, for many, can so far be considered acceptable. And it is a nation where, for an overwhelming number of Republicans, there has been too much focus on racial discrimination of late.

And so as their convention begins, one test for the GOP appears whether they can persuade more Americans to join them in these assessments. 

These are cultists in a death cult. Majorities of Republicans think that America is better off now, with a raging pandemic killing tens of thousands verging on hundreds of thousands (and they refuse to believe that is even happening) with a cratering economy where unemployment is in double digits, where America is a laughingstock and Americans are banned from traveling to most countries, where the most common reason as to why things are better than 2016 is because of Donald Trump.

And the reason they believe things are better now is because Obama isn't in charge.  They even believe their finances are better now than in 2016.

Your Republican neighbors are cultists.  There's no hope for them until they are deprogrammed and that will take years, if ever. We'll have to move forward through them, not with them.

Biden, His Time, Con't

Checking in with CNN's election guru Harry Enten, we see the age-old battle once again: younger voters vastly prefer the Democratic candidate, but don't give enough of a damn to vote.

There is good news for former Vice President Joe Biden when it comes to younger voters. He's no longer underperforming where Hillary Clinton ended up in the final 2016 polls. 

The big question coming out of the Democratic National Convention is whether they'll actually start to like him. Going in, young voters still didn't like Biden, which leaves him susceptible to some of these voters potentially not turning out to vote in the fall. 

Biden, at this point, holds a more than 20-point lead with young voters in live interview polls taken in August. Biden's up by 25 points among 18-29 year-old voters in an average of the most recent CNN/SSRS, Fox News and NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College polls. It's a 24-point lead if we look at 18-34 year-olds in the CNN/SSRS, Monmouth University and NBC News/Wall Street Journal polls.

Young Millennials and the oldest of Gen Z now able to vote for the first time in a presidential contest clearly prefer Biden. They just dislike him. So will they actually vote?

The answer, historically, is no.

Biden's net favorability (favorable - unfavorable) rating averages out to be -4 percentage points among the 18-29 year-old subset. That's actually about 5 points worse than his net favorability with all registered voters in those polls. If we expand out to 18-34 year-olds looking at data from CNN, Gallup and Monmouth, Biden's net favorability remains negative. 

Indeed, the difference between vote choice and net favorability among young voters is striking. Biden's running about 30 points better against Trump in the horserace than his net favorability alone would suggest. Again, if we add more data from July, the point stands. 

Compare what's going on with young voters to 65 years old and older. They give Biden a net favorability rating of +10 points in an average of ABC News/Washington Post, CNN, Fox News and Monmouth polls. The same polls have Biden ahead of Trump by 9 points with this group. That is, there's no statistical difference. 

Senior citizens like Biden, and they're voting for him. 

What's going on with younger voters is pretty simple: They're voting for Biden because they really don't like Trump. His net favorability with those under the age of 30 averaged -40 points in these same polls, or about 35 points worse than Biden's net favorability rating. 

It's difficult to imagine Trump gaining too much among younger voters going forward. They know who he is after about 3.5 years of his presidency. 

The potential pitfall for Biden is that voters who like neither candidate are much less likely to be enthusiastic about voting. In CNN's last poll, only about 10% of those who did not have a favorable opinion of either candidate said they were enthusiastic about casting a ballot in the fall elections. Among those who had a favorable view of at least one of the candidates, about 60% were enthusiastic about voting in the fall. 

Of course, enthusiasm about voting is not the same as actually voting. You can vote without being enthusiastic about the idea, though the two are linked. 

An ABC News/Washington Post poll from late May (the latest I could attain the raw data file for) drives home the point. Voters who had a favorable view of either of the candidates were 20 points more likely to say they were certain to vote than those who liked neither. 

Not surprisingly, younger voters are also less enthusiastic to vote and say they are less certain to vote than older voters in November, which follows historical precedent. The question is whether they'll make up a smaller percentage of the electorate than they usually do given they don't really like either candidate on the ballot. 

We just don't know. Still, this data does show the potential problem of Biden relying on young voters disliking Trump as the mechanism for getting them to vote for Biden in November.

Younger voters hate Trump, but they don't give a damn about voting for Biden (or anyone), either.  And cajoling them doesn't work.  Obama got through to them in record numbers, but he's the exception that proves the rule.

Enten also adds that Black voters remain key to Democrats' chances of winning this fall, a "of course" moment but one that continually needs spelling out for some.

Biden will take any help he can get with Black voters. 

So far this month, there have been five live interview polls for which I could attain a Black voter crosstab: ABC News/Washington Post, CNN/SSRS, Fox News, Marist College/NPR/PBS NewsHour and NBC News/Wall Street Journal. While none of the polls individually have a sample size to be too reliable, aggregated together they tell a pretty clear story. 

Biden is ahead among Black registered voters by 67 points on average and 71 points in the median of these polls. That's a sizable advantage. 

It's actually slightly less though than the 75-point lead he had with Black registered voters when I looked at the average of polls taken in late May through mid-July. While we can't be sure that Biden's actually doing worse with Black voters than he had previously, given sample size restrictions, it's quite clear he isn't doing better than he was earlier in the summer. As far as I can tell, Biden's lead with Black voters is currently at one of its lowest levels of the 2020 campaign. 

More interestingly, his support among Black voters is quite clearly smaller than Clinton's 79-point margin in the final registered voter polls of 2016. 

An 8-point shift among Black voters (i.e. moving from a 79-point win for the Democrats to a 71-point win) could be a huge deal if applied to the swing states. It could shift the overall margin in a number of states (like Michigan and Florida) by a point. Remember Clinton only lost Florida by a little more than a point and Michigan by just 0.2 points.

The proliferation of by-mail voting may help with both Black voters and young voters, and that's why Trump wants to get rid of it.

Still, there are just too many factors going into November to be confident about that 9-point Biden lead though.  We'll see. The Trump Regime is already trying to create a "miracle cure" for COVID-19 and there's still 10 weeks to go...

My advice as always: get your ballot requested and in as soon as you can. Kentucky's online voting ballot request portal went live this weekend.

Vote like your country depends on it, because it does.

Sunday Long Read: The Correct Kind Of Hero

The New York Times unceremoniously jettisoned its copy editor desk three years ago, and of course in the era of niche social media doing what has to be done, a Twitter account took over the duties and did a good enough job that even the Times has taken notice, doing his work from the shadows, as The Ringer's Ben Lindbergh reports for our Sunday Long Read.

On October 18, 2019, a New York Times standards editor emailed seven other Times editors to alert them to the existence of a new Twitter account that they would soon grow to respect—and, at times, resent. According to the characterization of one of the editors on the email, the message advised its recipients “that there was a lawyer on Twitter aggressively pointing out typos, and that we should consider following him.” A little more than a month after the Twitter account’s creation on September 16, The New York Times had taken note of @nyttypos, or Typos of the New York Times.

Anyone who followed @nyttypos that day soon got a feel for the flavor of its tweets. On October 19, @nyttypos spotted a “happened” instead of a “happen” in a story about Brexit; a missing space and a picture of three people captioned with five names in a story about TikTok clubs; a missing comma and a “statue” in place of a “statute” in a story about President Donald Trump’s attempt to host the G7 Summit at his own Doral resort; a subject-verb agreement error in a story about Venezuela’s water quality; a misplaced comma in a story about Bernie Sanders accepting an endorsement from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; and a missing space between quotation marks and a quote in a story about Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Although the account linked to a “nice, probably typo-free story” in the love section, it also found time to editorialize about the supposedly sorry state of the Times. “It’s kind of a shame that virtually each and every piece of content the Times produces, even the pretty great ones like this, has a typo in it,” @nyttypos tweeted about an opinion piece that contained a wayward word. On the same day, a story about a German YouTuber that contained a duplicated phrase prompted the observation “At times I really have a hard time believing that this paper is edited at all.” Between typos, @nyttypos engaged in a debate about the proper way to form plurals—“M.V.P.s” or “M.V.P.’s”—in support of the position that “Apostrophes don’t pluralize!”

It wasn’t the account’s most productive typo-finding day. But it was a weekend, and its owner did have other work. “I took ten minutes out of my fun Saturday afternoon reading D.C. Circuit opinions about jurisdiction to review FERC orders to read this article and find the typos,” @nyttypos tweeted about the TikTok story.

The proud pedant behind @nyttypos is, as his Twitter bio proclaims, an “appellate lawyer and persnickety dude.” While working for a government office on appeals for the federal courts of appeals and the Supreme Court, he has diligently, competently, and caustically grammar-policed the paper of record in his spare time, producing more than 20,000 tweets over the past 11 months. His account is a cross between an ego trip, a crusade, and a compulsion. His quixotic quest to flag the words that weren’t fit to print has attracted roughly 8,000 followers, yielded countless corrections, and made its anonymous owner the object of some fascination within the walls and Slack chats of the Times, while exposing the trade-offs in copy quality that competitive publishing in the age of algorithms demands.

“He’s obviously a smart, well-read, knowledgeable person,” says Jason Bailey, an editor on the national desk at the Times (and a former colleague of mine when he was a copy editor at Grantland). “And he’s almost always right.” Bailey, who frequently fields tweets from @nyttypos, says the tipster sometimes reports perceived typos that aren’t incorrect according to the most recent version of the Times style guide, which is more up to date than the 2015 PDF @nyttypos possesses. “But for the most part, if it comes to grammar, he’s correct. And to be honest, I’ve learned some things from him, because I’m not an English major or a grammarian in a traditional sense. I kind of edit by ear a little bit. So some of those more technical details, he’s been helpful with.”

Despite his proficiency and apparent command of syntactic arcana, @nyttypos is self-taught too. Studying Latin in high school helped him learn the parts of speech, but he majored in philosophy, and his experience in journalism is limited to a short-lived column in his college paper. “I don’t think that I have a terribly great grasp on grammar, to be honest with you,” he says on the phone. “I think I intuit some things.” Sometimes he researches rules before tweeting, lest the master of spotting mistakes commit a mistake of his own. “I don’t like to be wrong about things,” he says, unsurprisingly.

The prolific account is an outlet for a lifelong impulse of its ornery operator, who hates GIFs and emoji almost as much as misspellings. He remembers first being bothered by bad copy as a 5-year-old typo prodigy who noted mistakes on menus at a local restaurant. Teachers have told him that he read the Times to classmates in kindergarten, and he confesses to fashioning his writing after The New York Times Book Review when he was a preteen. While he expresses some fondness for The New York Times Magazine, he says he’s never been a devoted Times reader and doesn’t harbor any sentimental attachment to the paper; he read it because it’s what was available in the “middlebrow suburban home” where he grew up in Philadelphia in the 1990s.

Now in his early 30s, @nyttypos still indulges his deep-seated antipathy toward typos in his professional and personal lives. In his own legal writing, which he describes as “fairly fussy,” he strives for immaculate copy not only because of his habitual aversion to errors, but also because some judges look down on typo-prone lawyers, and because misquotes or mistakes in citation may confuse readers or undercut his credibility (a concern for the Times, too). “If you’re trying to get a case into the Supreme Court, which I do on occasion, and you’re trying to stand out from a crowd of thousands of submissions, you want to signal in all sorts of ways that you’re terribly competent, and one way of doing that is not typing typos,” he says.

Judges make grammatical mistakes too—some, he observes, display a regrettable tendency to swap “tenet” and “tenant”—but he keeps those typos to himself unless he has a personal connection to the judge or can notify a designated clerk who handles corrections. However, he does deploy his talents in other offline company, with some social consequences. By general request, he proofreads the legal briefs that his colleagues compose. But he took things too far when he sent unsolicited feedback to his office’s press secretary. “I was sending her corrections to all of her press releases every day, and I think I was asked to stop fixing them,” he says. “So now the corrections are filtered through somebody else if they’re really bad.” When he encounters typos in the wild, he sometimes tries to “helpfully” point out mistakes, but he picks his spots, holding his tongue if he has reason to anticipate an awkward interaction. Thus far, he hasn’t objected to the handmade sign at the corner shop near his home that says “can sale closed containers” and “no sales on Sunday’s” because he fears offending the proprietor. He knows not to [sic] where he eats.

Although @nyttypos revealed his identity to me—a scoop some New York Times newshounds would be happy to have—he asked not to be named. His status as a mystery man enhances his mystique. “Some of the editors that I’m closer to, we definitely discuss him,” Bailey says. “And he’s kind of this curious figure because he spends a lot of time doing this … and it is fascinating to think about why someone would do that. There are times where he’s tweeting me all weekend.” Bailey and other editors have made a game of trying to guess who he is, but @nyttypos withholds just enough details that they haven’t cracked the case. Although he says his current boss is politically conservative and “might think it’s so wonderful to see me criticizing the Times,” he may want to work for a law firm in the future, and he doesn’t know whether his hobby would go over well: “You wouldn’t want the entire hiring committee thinking about it, that some weird, typo-correcting Twitter personality is applying to work there.”

Not the superhero we deserve, but maybe the one we need, as they say.

He's smart enough not to want to actually work for the Times though. Maybe that's for the best.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

According to The Guardian's account of CNN media critic Brian Stetler's book on the Trump Regime and its incestuous relationship with FOX News, "Hoax", Trump ordered Attorney General Bill Barr to have a few words with FOX News owner Rupert Murdoch about legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano after Napolitano criticized Trump in October over his Ukraine quid pro quo deal, leading to Trump's eventual impeachment by the House.

The attorney general, William Barr, told Rupert Murdoch to “muzzle” Andrew Napolitano, a prominent Fox News personality who became a critic of Donald Trump, according to a new book about the rightwing TV network. 

Barr’s meeting with Murdoch, at the media mogul’s New York home in October 2019, was widely reported at the time, with speculation surrounding its subject. According to Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth, by CNN media reporter Brian Stelter, subjects covered included media consolidation and criminal justice reform. 

“But it was also about Judge Andrew Napolitano.” 

Stelter’s in-depth look at Fox News, its fortunes under Trump and its links to his White House will be published on Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy. 

In early 2019 it was reported that Napolitano, a New Jersey superior court judge who joined Fox News in 1998, told friends he had been on Trump’s shortlist for the supreme court. But he broke ranks later in the year, labeling Trump’s approaches to Ukraine, seeking political dirt on rivals, “both criminal and impeachable behavior”. 

“The criminal behavior to which Trump has admitted,” Napolitano wrote, in a column dated 3 October, “is much more grave than anything alleged or unearthed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and much of what Mueller revealed was impeachable.”
Citing an unnamed source, Stelter writes that Trump “was so incensed by the judge’s TV broadcasts that he had implored Barr to send Rupert a message in person … about ‘muzzling the judge’. [Trump] wanted the nation’s top law enforcement official to convey just how atrocious Napolitano’s legal analysis had been.” 

Barr has been widely accused of riding roughshod over the rule of law, in service of Trump and his own authoritarian view of the presidency. 

Though Barr’s words to Murdoch “carried a lot of weight”, Stelter writes, “no one was explicitly told to take Napolitano off the air”. Instead, Stelter reports, Napolitano found digital resources allocated elsewhere, saw a slot on a daytime show disappear, and was not included in coverage of the impeachment process. 

In Stelter’s telling, Napolitano thought he was being kept off air by “25-year-old producers” who didn’t think viewers could handle his analysis. Stelter, however, says an unnamed “twentysomething staffer” confirmed that one host, Maria Bartiromo, would only book Napolitano to discuss non-Trump topics, because he would upset Bartiromo too much if he criticised the president. 

Fox News’ audience, of course, remains loyal to Trump as his campaign for re-election continues. Some Fox employees, Stelter writes, “justified the benching of the judge by claiming that viewers hated him: ‘Why are we going to book someone who kills our ratings?’”

Judge Nap got back in Trump's good graces of course by backing Barr dropping charges against Michael Flynn and commuting Roger Stone's prison time, but having Barr lean on Murdoch should be enough for not just Barr to be removed from office, but Trump as well.

Luckily, we can do that in the next few months.

Last Call For Worst-Case Scenarios, Con't

Rob Shapiro at Washington Monthly games out an interesting, if not oddly specific scenario for November: Biden wins, and Trump agrees to go quietly only under a full pardon, or he'll tell his followers to start up that Second Civil War.

Let’s start with what we know about the president’s core message. We know that his website offers no new proposals for his second term on taxes, healthcare, energy, agriculture, education, or even on how to beat the pandemic. When the pandemic, and his mismanagement of it, drove down jobs and growth, his message has shifted to the claims that widespread mail-in voting is part of a rigged election, and the only way he can lose is through mail-in ballot fraud. This new message has become as central to his 2020 campaign as anti-immigration was in 2016.

Trump’s attacks on the electoral process this year started with the suggestion that the election should be delayed, because widespread mail-in balloting based on the pandemic, as he put it, would be a “catastrophic disaster” leading to fraudulent results. Perhaps he thought he could delay the election until a time when he could point to the pandemic receding. Alas for that plan, Republican leaders from Mitch McConnell down rejected the trial balloon out-of-hand. Even so, the controversy generated wide publicity for his claim that a fair election would be impossible with largescale mail-in voting.

To be clear, that claim has no basis in fact. As the Brennan Center for Justice reported recently, extensive research shows that mail-in ballot fraud is very rare; and a National Academy of Sciences study found that universal mail-in voting has no discernible effect on each party’s share of the turnout or the election’s results. But for Trump’s strategy, the salient fact is that Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to vote by mail, by a margin of 72 percent to 22 percent, according to a recent Monmouth University survey.

The current centerpiece of Trump’s attacks on mail-in voting is his public push to block funding for the U.S. Postal Service and enact new policies that will delay deliveries of mail-in ballots to state election officials.

By normal political standards, this war on mail delivery is remarkable on several counts. First, 91 percent of Americans view the USPS favorably for its prompt reliable delivery of their mail. Second, his high-profile attacks have given Democrats a strong incentive to organize their voters to request and mail-in their ballots early. Finally, instead of declaring war, his newly installed postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, could have found discrete and hard-to-trace ways to weaken the USPS’s capacity to deliver tens of millions of mail-in ballots on time.

DeJoy may be taking such steps anyway. He announced this week that he would suspend the policy changes until after the election. Whether he really is or not, the headline-grabbing dispute has further publicized and reinforced the president’s core message that any election with high levels of mail-in balloting is rigged.

The third piece of this messaging addresses what Trump may do about a rigged election.: By his own statements, Trump may not accept the election result if he loses—and implicitly, neither should his supporters. He made the same threat in 2016, near the close of his third debate with Hillary Clinton. But if Trump had lost in 2016, whatever he said about it would have had little if any consequences. The threat has different implications this time, because now he is the president.

For example, if loses narrowly, he could direct his attorney general to sue to overturn the results in a few states, based on the Justice Department’s findings of mail-in ballot fraud. We do not know what would happen next. Americans typically see a narrow loss as a loss, however, and while Trump’s messaging has prepared his more fervent supporters to protest such an outcome, that type of public pressure usually does not affect judges.

We also cannot know what Trump will do if he loses badly. Based on game theory, he does have one course left that might take the sting out of his defeat: After spending months preparing his supporters for the prospect that Democrats will steal the presidency, Trump’s representatives could tell Biden’s camp that unless the president-elect agrees to some concessions, the sitting president will publicly reject the results as a fraud and call on his followers to take mass action in the streets.

In Trump’s view, this could be his ultimate deal. He agrees to accept the election results and retire peacefully, but only if Biden and Democratic congressional leaders agree to shelve future investigations and forgo federal prosecutions of him and his family and associates—and call on state prosecutors and attorneys general to do the same.

It's plausible, the problem with this is Biden already pledged not to pardon Trump back in May.The second problem is Trump will do this anyway if he loses. Remember, it's not if Trump will spend the rest of his life in a New York penitentiary, it's when his sentencing starts after his convictions on tax fraud and racketeering.

Trump will do absolutely anything to avoid prison. He knows he will die there. Keep that in mind as you go forward in 2020.

Householder Of Cards, Con't

As Ohio Republicans are reeling from the indictment of now former State House Speaker Larry Householder on bribery and fraud charges related to taking millions from an energy company in order to pass legislation worth billions to the energy industry in the state, with former GOP Gov. John Kasich openly endorsing Joe Biden at the DNC, and the state's job market now locked in double digit unemployment, the state party is desperately trying to stay afloat and keep their total control of the levers of power, something that is no longer assured in November.

Complications pummeled Ohio Republicans this week as they sought to put up a united front headed into the GOP’s national convention.

One of their best-known politicians threw his support behind Democrat Joe Biden, their Republican state attorney general challenged the Trump administration, and President Donald Trump himself took on an iconic Ohio company in an area of the state where loyalties to job security ran higher than loyalties to party four years ago.

With early voting set to begin in less than seven weeks, Democrats are enthused about their possibilities in a state crucial to Trump, one he carried by 8 points over Hillary Clinton in 2016. It’s a striking turnaround for a party that just last year was wondering if the one-time swing state — with 18 electoral votes — had moved out of its reach.
Since Trump faced Clinton, Democrats have seen progress in the 2018 midterm and 2019 local elections, including in key suburban areas. Trump’s call Wednesday to boycott the Akron-based Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, while inaccurately claiming the company had announced a ban of Make America Great Again hats, gives the party new material as it tries to return struggling blue-collar workers to the fold.

Jane Timkin, the Republican Party chair who ousted an ally of former Gov. John Kasich from that job, was dismissive of Kasich’s speech endorsing Biden at the Democratic National Convention and expects Trump’s momentum to build.

“I feel pretty good,” she told The Associated Press. “The president has a 95% approval rating among Republicans and, aside from folks like John Kasich, who was a never-Trumper, I think the rest of the party is very united and excited about re-electing President Trump.”

A June 28 Quinnipiac University poll placed the figure at 92% among Ohio registered voters, with 93% of Democrats favoring Biden and independents divided 44% for Trump and 40% for Biden.

Kyle Kondik — an analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics who wrote “The Bellwether,” a 2016 book about Ohio presidential politics — said it remains to be seen whether Kasich will sway fellow Republicans. Kasich carried Ohio over Trump in 2016′s Republican presidential primary, but his campaign soon ran out of steam.

“I think Kasich represents a lot of his friends and neighbors (in suburban Columbus) who probably feel the same way he does,” Kondik said. “They’ve just seen enough.”

Kondik also said it’s too soon to predict whether Trump’s Wednesday assault on Goodyear, an integral part of Akron’s “Rubber Capital” history, will cost him among the northeast Ohio auto industry voters who backed him in 2016. Four years ago, a single remark by Clinton — that the transition to clean energy meant “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business” — damaged her performance in eastern Ohio’s coal country, where she had been running well.

Even Akron’s most famous native, LeBron James, jumped on Trump’s Goodyear comments: “Unbelievable brand and unbelievable history,” he said at the NBA’s pandemic home in Lake Buena Vista, Florida.

U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, a Democrat from Youngstown, helped lead a rally in Akron the next day, joined by local and union officials and a crowd of workers holding up such signs as “It will be a Goodyear without Trump.” With working families struggling during the coronavirus pandemic-pounded economy, Ryan said: “We have enough challenges.”

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Bill Conner, a United Steelworkers union local official in Akron, saying Trump’s boycott call could hurt “an American company, American workers.”

We'll see if it makes a difference.  Ohio is definitely a Midwestern state with more in common with Indiana and Kentucky than Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin.  It's a red state and that probably won't change in November.

But it might.