Last Call For Biden, His...Emails?

The disinformation machine is working overtime against Joe Biden with three weeks to go, and Team Trump think they've won with with the fishiest story this side of a Russian trawler.

A newly discovered laptop, the FBI, a trove of emails, October, a presidential election—it sounds familiar. Especially when you add in a Russian disinformation campaign. On Wednesday, the New York Post released what it hailed as a bombshell: an unidentified computer repair store owner in Delaware had come to possess a laptop that contained Hunter Biden emails (and purportedly a sex tape), the hard drive and computer was seized by the FBI, the store owner at some point passed a copy of the hard drive to Rudy Giuliani, and one of the emails suggested that Hunter, who served on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma, may have in 2015 introduced a Burisma official to his dad, Vice President Joe Biden. The story depicts this as a big scandal, and Guiliani tweeted, “Much more to come.”

But the key point of the article was predicated on false information that Giuliani has been spreading for a long time—and that appears to be linked to a Russian disinformation operation that the Post neglected to note in its article. That is, the Post piece, based on an unproven smear, is in sync with Moscow’s ongoing effort to influence the 2020 election to help President Donald Trump retain power. (The FBI and other parts of the US intelligence community have stated that Vladimir Putin is once again attacking the US political system to boost Trump.) And this story presents a challenge to the American media: how to report on an orchestrated campaign to affect the election that relies on disinformation, salacious and sensational material, and the revival of allegations that have already been debunked.

The bad faith animating the Post story is demonstrated by its open embrace—in the first sentence—of a demonstrably false narrative and by its failure to report Giuliani’s association with a Russian intelligence agent who the Department of Treasury has accused of interfering in the 2020 election.

The article begins: “Hunter Biden introduced his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, to a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company, according to emails obtained by The Post.” The claim that Biden forced the firing of a Ukrainian prosecutor to protect Burisma has been the centerpiece of Giuliani’s long-running, Fox-hyped effort (on behalf of his client Donald Trump) to dig up dirt on Biden in the former Soviet republic.

Biden in 2016 did push for the firing of this prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, but there is no indication this was done to assist Burisma. In fact, there is a boatload of evidence that Shokin was canned because of his own corruption. There was no active investigation of Burisma at the time of his dismissal. (The absence of such a probe was even cited at the time as one sign of Shokin’s malfeasance) And as has been widely documented, Biden’s demand that Shokin be dumped was part of an international effort to pressure Ukraine’s government to clean itself up in order to receive financial assistance. (Several Republican senators also called for Shokin’s removal.) Yet Trump and others have falsely claimed that Biden nefariously bounced Shokin to cover up supposed Burisma misdeeds.

The Post repeating this baseless accusation is an act of propaganda—and the foundation for the article. The email the tabloid touts as big news suggests that in 2015 Hunter introduced a Burisma board member to his dad. The newspaper implies that this was somehow connected to Biden urging Shokin’s dismissal the following year. If there was nothing untoward about Biden pressing the Ukrainian government to replace Shokin, there certainly isn’t anything necessarily scandalous about Biden having met with the board member. Moreover, the 2015 email to Hunter—which simply says, “thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father”—discloses nothing about any conversation the board member might have had with the vice president. It’s not even confirmed that this meeting occurred. (The Biden campaign issued a statement saying it had reviewed Joe Biden’s schedule and no such meeting “ever took place.”)

The Post provides no information connecting this email exchange and the Shokin case. But Rupert Murdoch’s paper is using this one email to revive the Ukrainian scandal that Giuliani has been trying to gin up for over a year. (This crusade included trying to raise $10 million to make a documentary that would be released before the election.) And don’t forget that it was Giuliani and Trump’s search for Ukrainian dirt that led to Trump’s impeachment.

 

In other words, the Burisma story is stupidly obvious in the disinformation department, and it has been for months. Both Twitter and Facebook are blocking the story as what it is: disinformation. Conservatives are howling and calling for the Trump regime to take immediate, permanent action against social media companies.

In other words, we're at the point where the media decides whether or not to run with the fake Biden story. They failed this test four years ago with Hillary Clinton.

Will they fail it again?

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

The Trump regime is now embracing a no-vaccine, "herd immunity" approach as the government's preferred solution to the COVID-19 pandemic, a solution that will almost certainly lead to hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of deaths, you know, a...final solution...if you will.

The White House has embraced a declaration by a group of scientists arguing that authorities should allow the coronavirus to spread among young healthy people while protecting the elderly and the vulnerable — an approach that would rely on arriving at “herd immunity” through infections rather than a vaccine.

Many experts say “herd immunity” — the point at which a disease stops spreading because nearly everyone in a population has contracted it — is still very far off. Leading experts have concluded, using different scientific methods, that about 85 to 90 percent of the American population is still susceptible to the coronavirus.

On a call convened Monday by the White House, two senior administration officials, both speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to give their names, cited an October 4 petition entitled The Great Barrington Declaration, which argues against lockdowns and calls for a reopening of businesses and schools.

“Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health,” the declaration states, adding, “The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.”

The declaration has more than 9,000 signatories from all over the world, its website says, though most of the names are not public. The document grew out of a meeting hosted by the American Institute for Economic Research, a libertarian-leaning research organization.

Its lead authors include Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an epidemiologist and infectious disease expert at Stanford University, academic home of Dr. Scott Atlas, President Trump’s science adviser. Dr. Atlas has also espoused herd immunity.

The declaration’s architects include Sunetra Gupta and Gabriela Gomes, two scientists who have proposed that societies may achieve herd immunity when 10 to 20 percent of their populations have been infected with the virus, a position most epidemiologists disagree with.

Last month, at the request of The New York Times, three epidemiological teams calculated the percentage of the country that is infected. What they found runs strongly counter to the theory being promoted in influential circles that the United States has either already achieved herd immunity or is close to doing so, and that the pandemic is all but over. That conclusion would imply that businesses, schools and restaurants could safely reopen, and that masks and other distancing measures could be abandoned.

“The idea that herd immunity will happen at 10 or 20 percent is just nonsense,” said Dr. Christopher J.L. Murray, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which produced the epidemic model frequently cited during White House news briefings as the epidemic hit hard in the spring.

 

The regime has finally found "scientific" justification for genocide, and I have to say I'm really surprised that it took so long to reach this conclusion. The larger problem of course is that the White House is simply going to do nothing, if not actively punish states that enter a second lockdown phase, and Trump will have at least the next three months in order to do it.

COVID-19 cases are on the rise and we're frankly looking at a catastrophe in the weeks ahead, and Trump will do everything to make sure a whole lot of people don't get the resources they need to survive it.

Trump will be in a position to take bloody vengeance against America for voting him out. Of course, he was going to kill a lot of us anyway, so.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

Bill Barr may be the most corrupt Attorney General in modern American history, but he's not omnipotent, and not everything always goes his way, even when trying to unload a reason to indict former Obama officials weeks before the election.

 

The federal prosecutor appointed by Attorney General William P. Barr to review whether Obama-era officials improperly requested the identities of individuals whose names were redacted in intelligence documents has completed his work without finding any substantive wrongdoing, according to people familiar with the matter.

The revelation that U.S. Attorney John Bash, who left the department last week, had concluded his review without criminal charges or any public report will rankle President Trump at a moment when he is particularly upset at the Justice Department. The department has so far declined to release the results of Bash’s work, though people familiar with his findings say they would likely disappoint conservatives who have tried to paint the “unmasking” of names — a common practice in government to help understand classified documents — as a political conspiracy.

The president in recent days has pressed federal law enforcement to move against his political adversaries and complained that a different prosecutor tapped by Barr to investigate the FBI’s 2016 investigation of his campaign will not be issuing any public findings before the election.

Legal analysts feared Bash’s review was yet another attempt by Trump’s Justice Department to target political opponents of the president. Even if it ultimately produced no results of consequence, legal analysts said, it allowed Trump and other conservatives to say Obama-era officials were under scrutiny, as long as the case stayed active.

The department — both under Barr and Trump’s previous attorney general, Jeff Sessions — has repeatedly turned to U.S. Attorneys across the country to investigate matters of Republican concern, distressing current and former Justice Department officials, who fear department leaders are repeatedly caving to Trump’s pressure to benefit his allies and target those he perceives as political enemies.

Kerri Kupec, the Justice Department’s top spokeswoman, had first revealed Bash’s review in May, after Republican senators made public a declassified list of U.S. officials, including former vice president Joe Biden, who made requests that would ultimately reveal the name of Trump adviser Michael Flynn in intelligence documents in late 2016 and early 2017.

 

This was their big, well, Trump card: FORMER OBAMA INTELLIGENCE OFFICIALS INDICTED, BIDEN UNDER INVESTIGATION DAYS BEFORE ELECTION only that's not happening because John Bash didn't play ball and when he was told to, he left the Justice Department rather than see his work abused by Barr.

The fact that the Justice Department is still sitting on the report makes it very clear there's nothing there to use in the final days of the election campaign. Don't be fooled.

Last Call For Supreme Protection

As expected, the US Supreme Court has tossed the Democratic party's anti-corruption lawsuit against Donald Trump, proclaiming absolute executive immunity to the courts eliminates any standing that Democrats may have had, and that impeachment, removal under the 25th Amendment, or being voted out of office are the only options for a corrupt president like Trump.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday put an end to a lawsuit brought by congressional Democrats that accused President Donald Trump of violating anti-corruption provisions in the U.S. Constitution with his business dealings.

The justices refused to hear an appeal by 215 Senate and House of Representatives Democrats of a lower court ruling that found that the lawmakers lacked the necessary legal standing to bring the case that focused on the Republican president’s ownership of the Trump International Hotel in Washington.

The lawmakers accused Trump of violating the Constitution’s rarely tested “emoluments” clauses that bar presidents from taking gifts or payments from foreign and state governments without congressional approval. The lead plaintiff in the case is U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.

 

The appeals court said the country is bound by a SCOTUS precedent established in a 1997 ruling, Raines v. Byrd.

Facts of the case

Several individual members of the 104th Congress, who voted against the passage of the Line Item Veto Act (Act) giving the President authority to veto individual tax and spending measures after having signed them into law, sued to challenge the Act's constitutionality. After granting them standing, the District Court ruled in the congressmen's favor as it found the Act unconstitutional. Direct appeal was granted to the Supreme Court.

Question

Did the congressmen have Article III standing to challenge the Line Item Veto Act as a violation of the Presentment Clause in Article I?
 

Conclusion

No. In a 7-to-2 decision, which avoided the question of the Act's constitutionality, the Court held that the individual congressmen lacked proper Article III standing to maintain their suit. The Court explained that the congressmen failed to show how the allegedly unconstitutional Act resulted in their personal injury, since it applied to the entire institution of Congress. Moreover, the congressmen based their claim on a loss of political power rather than a demonstration of how the Act violated one of their particularized legally protected interests. The Court concluded that, having failed to meet both of these standing requirements, the congressmen did not present the Court with a case-or-controversy over which it had jurisdiction.

 

And SCOTUS refusing to hear the case means it's done, not that anyone really expected this to go anywhere.

But state cases remain...

Election Injection Correction Detection

Microsoft has taken down a major malware botnet that could have infected thousands of voting machines across the country with ransomware, and the company says it remains on watch for more attacks.

 

Microsoft has disrupted a massive hacking operation that it said could have indirectly affected election infrastructure if allowed to continue. 

The company said Monday it took down the servers behind Trickbot, an enormous malware network that criminals were using to launch other cyberattacks, including a strain of highly potent ransomware. 

Microsoft said it obtained a federal court order to disable the IP addresses associated with Trickbot's servers, and worked with telecom providers around the world to stamp out the network. The action coincides with an offensive by US Cyber Command to disrupt the cybercriminals, at least temporarily, according to The Washington Post. 

Microsoft (MSFT) acknowledged that the attackers are likely to adapt and seek to revive their operations eventually. But, Microsoft said, the company's efforts reflect a "new legal approach" that may help authorities fight the network going forward. 

Trickbot allowed hackers to sell what Microsoft said was a service to other hackers — offering them the capability to inject vulnerable computers, routers and other devices with other malware. 

That includes ransomware, which Microsoft and US officials have warned could pose a risk to websites that display election information or to third-party software vendors that provide services to election officials. 

"Adversaries can use ransomware to infect a computer system used to maintain voter rolls or report on election-night results, seizing those systems at a prescribed hour optimized to sow chaos and distrust," Microsoft VP of security Tom Burt wrote in a blog post. 

Ransomware seizes control of target computers and freezes them until victims pay up — though experts urge those affected by ransomware not to encourage hackers by complying with their demands. The Treasury Department has warned that paying ransoms could violate US sanctions policy. 

He added: "We have now cut off key infrastructure so those operating Trickbot will no longer be able to initiate new infections or activate ransomware already dropped into computer systems."

 

This is definitely a victory for the good guys, and keep in mind that Republicans have spent four years doing everything they can to cripple US Cyber Command and our election defenses and to block reporting on just how vulnerable we remain.

It's now up to corporate entities like Microsoft to do the job the US government should be doing...and Republicans are attacking them too.

Biden, His Time, Con't

I've been harping on fighting like we're ten points down all year because Trump did everything he needed to in order to win four years ago and turn a 70% chance at a Clinton win into a Trump victory, but with three weeks to go, Amy Walter at Cook Political Report reminds us that there are some fundamental differences between Hillary Clinton's 12-point lead in October 2016 and Joe Biden's 12-point lead in October 2020.

Long before COVID-19 or the economic collapse that followed in its wake, President Trump gambled his re-election prospects on the assumption that his base would be enough to ensure his re-election. Since the first days of his presidency, Trump rewarded those who already liked or voted for him and ignored — or just outright alienated — everyone else.

And this past week, with polls showing him trailing former Vice President Joe Biden by double-digits and with only three weeks left until Election Day, Trump is once again spending all of his time in his comfort zone; calling into friendly cable TV and talk radio hosts.

To be successful, this ‘thread the needle’ re-election strategy required four main elements:

1. A united, enthusiastic and engaged GOP base
2. A deeply flawed opponent
3. Decent support among independent voters (Even as Trump ran up the score among his base in 2016, he also carried independent voters by 2-points.)
4. Third-party candidates siphoning off enough votes to allow Trump to win key states with a plurality as he did in 2016

Oh, and of course, it would also help to have a good economy, and not have a majority of Americans think that you have mismanaged a major health crisis.

Right now, only #1 is there for him. Even that rock-solid support from his base is looking shaky in the wake of his disastrous debate performance and COVID diagnosis.

Here’s where he is on the other three key elements:

2) Joe Biden has never been popular, but he’s also never been as unpopular as Hillary Clinton.

For example, the early October NBC/Wall Street Journal poll finds Biden’s favorable ratings at 43 percent — not all that much better than Hillary Clinton’s 39 percent at this point in 2016. But, when you look at their unfavorable ratings, Biden’s are 10 points lower than Clinton’s (41 percent to 51 percent). As important, the intensity of dislike for Biden (28 percent strongly disapprove) is also, well, not as intense as it was for Clinton, who, at this point in 2016, was deeply unfavorable to 40 percent of voters.

3) Trump is trailing Biden among independents in the most recent national polling by Fox News, CNN and Pew by 14 to 18 points.

Polling done this week in key swing states by Siena/New York Times finds Trump trailing independent voters by 11 points in Pennsylvania and 25-points in Arizona. Even if you turn out your base at high levels, you can’t win an election if you lose independents by double digits.

4) At this point in the 2016 election, 14 percent of registered voters in a Pew poll said they planned to vote for a third-party candidate.

In the end, the non-Clinton/Trump vote was six percent. The most recent Pew poll (Sept. 30-Oct. 5) finds just five percent of voters choosing a third-party candidate. As such, we should expect that third-party candidates will comprise a much smaller percentage of the electorate this year — probably around 3 percent. The lower the third party vote, the harder it will be to carry a state with less than 50 percent. In 2016, Trump won Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Florida with less than 49 percent of the vote.

As important, however, is the fact that those 2016 third- party voters and voters who didn’t vote in 2016, lean heavily to Biden now. According to the most recent Pew survey, Biden leads among 2016 third party voters 49 percent to 26 percent (23 points). Biden leads among those who didn’t vote in 2016, 54 percent to 38 percent.

In other words, Trump has not converted many of those ‘up for grabs’ voters to his column. That means he is more dependent than ever on pumping up and turning out those who have always been with him. But, there’s no evidence that he has been able to drive up his margins among those who are his biggest supporters.

 

In other words, everything that needed Trump to go right in 2016 happened. In 2020, that's not the case.

 

At least, not yet.

Some Trump allies say their best bet is to hope that the results look close election night, before some of the mail-in ballots are counted, allowing Trump to declare victory and have the results thrown to the courts.

 

Three weeks is an eternity in a campaign.

 

The fight like your ten points down thing still stands. Get your ballot in this week, get your early voting done this week, because after that the odds of getting your vote counted drop like a rock.

Especially if you live in a Democratic stronghold in a red state.

StupidiNews!

• Johnson & Johnson says it is pausing its COVID-19 vaccine trials after an "unexplained illness" in one volunteer, the company says it will investigate to see if the vaccine was the cause or not.
• At least one person is dead among 441 cases of COVID-19 after a super spreader event at a meat packing plant in Utah, almost one-third of the plant's 1,500 employees have been sickened.
• California election officials are investigating the state GOP after unofficial ballot drop boxes were advertised by the party to collect mail-in ballots.
• As protests against the Belarusian government continue, state police say they will use lethal force if protesters do not disperse.
• Digital privacy experts say the X4 kids' smartwatch by Norwegian tech company Xplora contains Chinese software that could surreptitiously record video, audio and location.
  

Last Call For The Country Goes Viral, Con't

The immediate danger after the election is white supremacist violence, and Trump trying to nullify the election and take power, but it's also an issue of COVID-19 pandemic spread as we rapidly approach 8 million cases. Here in Kentucky we've now set three consecutive weekly new case records, even with Gov. Andy Beshear's mask mandate.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear on Sunday announced the state has once again surpassed its record for new COVID-19 cases reported over seven days.

The 852 new cases announced Sunday brought Kentucky's weekly total to 7,675 cases of the coronavirus, topping last week's record of 6,126. The record before that had been set the previous week with nearly 5,000 cases.

This week's total includes more than 2,000 backlogged cases from Fayette County reported Wednesday, according to a press release from the governor's office.

Kentucky has now seen 80,292 COVID-19 cases since the start of the pandemic.

Beshear also announced three more deaths linked to the pandemic, including a 33-year-old man from Jefferson County, a 60-year-old man from Hopkins County and a 70-year-old woman from Warren County.

“That’s three more families who are now grieving," Beshear said.

Beshear announced earlier Sunday he and his family were quarantining themselves after potentially being exposed to a person with COVID-19. They all tested negative, and Beshear said they will be tested regularly and remain in quarantine until cleared by the state health department.

“We want to make sure we’re setting the example, and we want to make sure we’re keeping other people around us safe,” Beshear said.

Dr. Steven Stack, Kentucky's public health commissioner, said social gatherings and settings where people are close together for extended periods of time continue contribute toward case clusters.

"With the disease so widespread in Kentucky now, the risk of all of us getting exposed is high if we don’t all do our part to socially distance, wear masks and practice good hand hygiene," Stack said in the release. 

 

But Americans are bored of masks and social distancing, because the leader of the country is bored with masks and social distancing even after contracting the disease, and he's making it the policy of the federal government that they no longer care either. 

 

Trump’s infection with COVID had presented an opportunity for him to personally change his behavior and, with it, encourage his followers to do the same. That he didn’t was viewed as the final nail in the coffin for attempts to convince skeptical Americans that masks were invaluable in stopping the deadly disease’s spread.

“That’s when I realized that the time to convince Americans to take all these health precautions seriously in order to prevent the spread was totally over,” said one senior health official who works with the White House’s coronavirus task force.

Since the early days of COVID, the Trump administration has not only resisted mask-wearing but actively portrayed it as a form of partisan virtue signaling. To keep your face uncovered, the thinking went, was to show support for the president, a value of personal liberty, and a defiance against public health professionals who publicly speak out against the president’s response to the virus.

The logic has alarmed scientists. Multiple officials working on the federal government’s coronavirus response said that at the start of the pandemic they pushed for the administration to embrace public health messaging that underscored the importance of wearing a mask, washing hands and maintaining social distancing. Task force officials appeared in public hearings telling lawmakers and the American people that embracing these measures would prevent community spread.

But the White House moved in another direction. It pressured its health agencies to switch its messaging to focus almost entirely on reopening the country no matter the cost, officials said. Two senior health officials told The Daily Beast that they were pressured to step back from reinforcing the effectiveness of masks and social distancing—guidelines that Trump and his confidants viewed as potential obstacles to states reopening schools, bars, and restaurants. And as The New York Times reported, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was stopped by the White House from mandating masks on public transportation.

The mask skepticism from the White House was so evident that officials inside the West Wing began to stop personally wearing masks for fear of retribution.

“If you stepped into a meeting with the president and you wore a mask when he and the rest of the room were not, you would very likely hear about it from the president himself,” said a Trump administration official who has been in the room in such cases. “It was well-known [in the building] that if you wanted to be taken seriously by the president, you should take his lead on the masks thing… and not be the guy wearing a mask in a gathering with him, as if to say you’re sticking it to [Trump].”

Now, officials say that months of the president mocking mask-wearers and refusing to wear a mask in public has not only instilled a false sense of security in some Americans but facilitated the spread of the virus. Officials say they’ve reached the point of no return—that the time for getting the message out that masks, in particular, are necessary—has passed. And that, they said, points to a dangerous new reality: that the virus could continue to spread throughout the country, killing more people, throughout the next year.

 

Even if Joe Biden wins the election and Trump gets what's coming to him, half the country will continue to refuse to wear masks or enforce mask mandates, and so the pandemic will spread to tens of millions in 2021.  Even if a Democratic Congress and Biden enact a federal mask mandate, there's every reason to believe the Supreme Court will strike it down, especially if Amy Coney Barrett becomes a Justice.

And even if a mask mandate does survive judicial scrutiny, people will still refuse to wear them, refuse to enforce the laws, and spread the disease.

As bad as 2020 is and has been, there's a lot of reasons to believe 2021 will be one of the most hideous years in American history.

 

And hundreds of thousands of Americans will die.

The Future Of Trumpism

Donald Trump is in serious political trouble. The white grievance movement he metastasized, however, is going to be with us for decades. If you want a glimpse into what's coming in a world where Trump is no longer in the Oval Office, take a look at tiny Montevallo, Alabama, where an August non-partisan election for mayor became an ugly race that saw white conservative Rusty Nix prevail over Joyce Jones, a Black woman in the era of "partisan everything".

Perhaps no one was more surprised to learn that Joyce Jones wanted to defund the police than Joyce Jones herself.

On Aug. 11, Ms. Jones was in the final stretch of her campaign for mayor of Montevallo, a town of 6,674 people in central Alabama, when she appeared in a candidate forum alongside her opponent, Rusty Nix. The moderator asked both candidates how they would work with the town’s police department. Ms. Jones said she was grateful for the work of Montevallo’s law enforcement, and that as mayor she would consider adding social programs to help the town not just respond to crime (of which there is little in Montevallo) but prevent it, too.

She awoke the next morning to find her phone clogged with social-media notifications. “‘Defund the police,’” she remembered. “It was like a wildfire.” Citizens on one of the local Facebook groups accused Ms. Jones, who was running to be the town’s first Black mayor, of using the “same language” in her answer as the Black Lives Matter movement, implying that she had a hidden agenda. “Very few people will actually say ‘Defund the police,’” one man warned.

Montevallo’s elections are nonpartisan, and there was a time when they felt that way. Candidates would run on proposals like updating the sewage systems, beautifying Main Street and starting a townwide recycling program.

But as Ms. Jones, a 44-year-old lifelong Montevalloan, was finding, not even her tiny town was immune from the divisions roiling the Trump era, the political tremors that once would have felt out of place in casual conversations at Lucky’s supermarket, not to mention local elections, but that now seemed to color everything.

Ms. Jones tried to quash the rumors. She posted on her campaign’s page about her daughter in the Alabama National Guard, her niece and nephews in law enforcement, how she did not believe in “de-funding the Montevallo PD.” But the falsehood continued to ricochet across social media. One man shared a photo of activists in Austin, Texas, holding a giant black-and-white “Defund the police” banner, captioning it, “Montevallo’s future if liberals keep getting elected.”

For Ms. Jones, it was but one partisan-inflected battle in a campaign season of many, an election that would go on to mirror national fights over poll watchers and targeting of Black voters; include sobbing staffers, charges of racism and warnings of Marxism; and culminate in an unsettling feeling among many that, by the time the final vote was counted on the evening of Aug. 25, something in the town had been lost.

“It has always been in my heart this center of civility,” said Montevallo’s outgoing mayor, Hollie Cost. “Before the age of Trump, before all” — she paused — “this, whatever this even is, we all got along. It just ripped us apart.”

 

And in rural Alabama, everything old is new again, including that oldest of foes, racism.

On the morning of Aug. 25, Ethel Blake, Ms. Jones’s mother, loaded her own 88-year-old mother, Sadie Burns, into the car. It was raining as Ms. Blake drove to the polling station and helped her mother stand in the long line. They were wearing their Joyce Jones T-shirts, which, as they’d checked on the Alabama secretary of state’s website, was legal to do when voting.

Each candidate has the opportunity to appoint a poll watcher inside the building. Like most candidates had done for years in Montevallo, Ms. Jones’s campaign did not appoint one. All four members of the Conservative Coalition, however, had watchers on duty.

Ms. Blake felt their eyes on her when she reached the front of the line. As she helped her mother obtain her ballot, she learned why. The poll watchers had flagged the two women for their T-shirts. They would have to go home and change.

Ms. Blake’s face burned — she knew she’d read the website right, but didn’t know how to respond — as she went to retrieve her mother, who became upset. “But I haven’t voted yet,” she kept repeating. Back home, Ms. Blake urged a plain blouse over her mother’s head. “Momma, I know, just please,” she said, fighting back tears as Ms. Burns said she didn’t want to change.

Ms. Blake prayed for God to cover her mouth as they returned to cast their ballots. She called Dr. Reece to tell him what happened. “Not as an adult have I sobbed that way,” Dr. Reece said.

They weren’t the only Black voters stopped for their T-shirts. Herman Lehman, the city clerk, said the poll watchers — none of whom agreed to be interviewed for this story — had been misinformed about the rule. But white voters who wore campaign gear said they had cast their ballot without issue. “It was really crazy, because it was after I had voted that we got the reports of people being turned away,” said Andrea Eckelman, who had worn her Jones T-shirt, button and mask to vote. “And the only people getting turned away that I heard of were people of color.”

Ms. Jones’s campaign spent the rest of the day trying to confirm that anyone who had been turned away for a T-shirt had ultimately returned to vote. Finally, from a tent outside the polling station, they listened to the results trickle in.

It had been a record turnout in Montevallo, a 60 percent increase from 2016 that included many first-time voters. Out of 1,307 votes cast, Mr. Nix won by 49.

Shortly after the results were announced, according to Ms. Jones and three others who witnessed it, a pickup truck filled with teenage boys sped by. “You suck,” they yelled, appending a racial epithet.

Ms. Jones reflected on that moment. “Listen, I’m not the angry Black woman. I’m not. Like, I fight really, really hard to not let that be my narrative,” she said. “But we, even I, walk around thinking that these things don’t happen — not here, not anymore.”

 

Win or lose, this is going to keep happening around the country for quite some time. The difference is how virulent -- and violent -- things are going to get if Trump wins as opposed to if Biden does. The rest of the GOP that went all on on white grievance politics will still be in office for the most part, and outside this cycle, especially in 2022 and 2024, I expect their numbers to grow.

 

And if you're wondering what the present of Trumpism is, it's the Traveling COVID-19 and Hatred Roadshow, all day, every day.

 

President Trump has asked his campaign to put him on the road every single day from now until Nov. 3.

Behind the scenes: His team is in the process of scheduling events to make that happen, two sources familiar with the discussions tell Axios. But not everyone thinks this is a good idea. One adviser said, “He’s going to kill himself.”

Why it matters: Look at the polls. Trump is in need of a rebound, and he's betting he's got a better chance on the move than sitting around the West Wing.

What we're hearing: The campaign is more worried than ever that seniors — a crucial voting bloc — are abandoning Trump over his handling of the pandemic. 

"He really f----d up with seniors when he said not to worry about the virus and not to let it control your life," one Trump adviser told Axios. "There are so many grandparents who’ve gone almost a year without being able to see grandchildren." 

 

We still have a lifetime of work to do.

A Supreme October Showdown

The Senate Judiciary hearings for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett begin on Monday, and while Lindsey Graham may be in charge of the proceedings, all eyes will be on Kamala Harris.

 

Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) went viral twice when she questioned Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh at his volatile confirmation hearing two years ago.

She scored a hit when she pressed the nominee on whether he knew of any laws that tell a man what to do with his body, as abortion laws do for women, flustering Kavanaugh and prompting him to say he did not.

But she also pushed him on whether he’d discussed the Mueller investigation with anyone at a law firm linked to President Trump — adding ominously, “Be sure about your answer, sir.” Kavanaugh appeared mystified and ultimately said no, leaving Republicans furious and Democrats unsure what Harris was getting at.

Those moments illustrate the power Harris’s prosecutorial skills have to energize Democrats and elevate her profile, but also the risk for controversy she faces in high-profile hearings like these.

Starting Monday, Harris will again be at the center of an explosive nomination battle — this time in an unprecedented role as a member of a presidential ticket participating in a divisive Supreme Court hearing just three weeks before Election Day.

As Joe Biden’s running mate, she faces an especially delicate task: appearing tough enough to satisfy liberals upset with Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination, but restrained enough to support Biden’s outreach to disillusioned Republicans.

At the same time, she is auditioning as a possible future president. “If I were Kamala Harris, I would try to [give] off the most presidential demeanor possible,” said Mike Davis, a Republican Judiciary Committee counsel during the Kavanaugh hearings. “Her job is to be presidential.”

Harris’s aides say she will leave the campaign trail this week to focus fully on the hearing. Despite her national profile, Harris will be among the Judiciary Committee’s most junior members at a potentially raucous proceeding where everyone will be masked, several senators facing reelection will need to score points, and two members may participate remotely due to coronavirus infections.

In many ways, the stakes are higher this time. Barrett’s confirmation would create a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, an outcome Democrats warn would threaten abortion rights, the Affordable Care Act, LGBTQ protections and more.

 

Democrats should expect to see the confident Harris we saw in last week's Vice-Presidential debate, especially when she gets interrupted (I promise you she will be) by Lindsey Graham. What Democrats shouldn't expect is Harris somehow stopping this nomination herself. Graham will have this nomination through the committee by the end of the week, and the real battle will be next week when the full Senate returns to business and holds a floor vote on a Supreme Court nomination just days before the election.

I don't expect that battle will go well for Democrats.

Senators have been preparing for the possibility of a vacancy for months. Senate Republicans vowed in May that they’d fill an opening this year, shortly after Ginsburg was hospitalized. That same month, Senate Democratic leadership and Judiciary Committee aides began to plan for a possible vacancy, according to a Democratic leadership aide. In these discussions, Democrats strategized on their messaging, including maintaining a focus on health care.

With no procedural tools to stop Barrett from getting confirmed to the Supreme Court, the only weapon Democrats have is messaging. But Brian Fallon, executive director of the liberal Demand Justice group, says that Democrats on the Judiciary Committee have been “sleepwalking” so far.

“Dianne Feinstein, Chris Coons, Dick Durbin have been going around sulking about how the Republicans have the votes. And they ought to be convincing the country about what a partisan power grab this is,” said Fallon, whose group is spending millions against Barrett’s nomination. “Get passionate.”

Coons responded that he will be as “passionate and forceful” as he can be.

“There are some folks who are literally never happy no matter what we do,” he said.

Democrats will scrutinize Barrett’s previous writings on Obamacare, including her criticism of Chief Justice John Roberts for ruling to uphold the law. Her views on abortion will also come up. She has described abortion as “always immoral,” but she’s also suggested that Roe v. Wade will endure in some form.

“This nominee poses a clear and present danger to everybody’s health care, that should be uppermost in everyone’s minds, but that’s only the start,” said Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii.), who also sits on the Judiciary Committee. “She has a position on abortion.”

Democrats hope their questions create tension between the committee’s conservatives who want the ACA repealed and Roe struck down and those up for reelection who are staying away from such suggestions.

Schumer refused to directly comment on how Senate Republicans’ confirmation of Barrett might affect key Senate races. Ever the optimist, he said that this is a fight like the one to save Obamacare, when Schumer helped convince former Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to tank his party’s repeal effort.

“This is our job to push this as hard we can, knowing it’s not an easy fight, knowing that Trump is a vindictive guy and anyone who goes against him has suffered,” Schumer said of Senate Republicans who tangle with the president.

Yet there were always enough senators complaining about Obamacare repeal to conceivably tank the bill. When it comes to Barrett, only two of 53 GOP senators oppose her confirmation before the election. Getting two more looks borderline impossible.

Still, Harris should be able to provide more than a few memorable moments. And let's not forget that Susan Collins and Graham himself are both locked in the toughest Senate races of their respective careers right now against Democratic challengers that have both handily outraised them. Jamie Harrison especially has dominated Lindsey Graham's fundraising totals, including a record $57 million third quarter haul to besiege Graham in the final days.

It should be a solid fight.

StupidiNews!

• Officials in Thailand say 20 people have been killed when a train collided with a bus east of Bangkok, 30 more passengers were injured as the bus tried to beat the train to the crossing.
• One of the men charged last week in an alleged plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer had been previously pardoned on weapons and armed robbery charges in Delaware.
• Donald Trump once again says he wants a COVID-19 stimulus deal ahead of the election, but Senate Republicans say they don't expect a deal or a vote this year.
• Israel says it vehemently opposes the purchase of US F-35 fighter jets by Qatar, going so far as to say that recent diplomatic normalization talks with Doha could be rescinded.
• AT&T plans major layoffs at its HBO and Warner Media divisions as COVID-19 and closed theaters wreck profits, the company plans to cut costs by as much as 20%.
  

Last Call For The Most Taxing Of Explanations, Con't

The New York Times continues its investigative reporting series into Donald Trump's taxes, and there is substantial evidence that he committed campaign fraud in 2016 to the tune of tens of millions of dollars by using Las Vegas real estate as his campaign slush fund.

Donald J. Trump needed money.

His “self-funded” presidential campaign was short on funds, and he was struggling to win over leery Republican donors. His golf courses and the hotel he would soon open in the Old Post Office in Washington were eating away at what cash he had left on hand, his tax records show.

And in early 2016, Deutsche Bank, the last big lender still doing business with him, unexpectedly turned down his request for a loan. The funds, Mr. Trump had told his bankers, would help shore up his Turnberry golf resort in Scotland. Some bankers feared the money would instead be diverted to his campaign.

That January, Mr. Trump sold a lot of stock — $11.1 million worth. He sold another $11.8 million worth in February, and $7.5 million in March. In April, he sold $8.1 million more.

And the president’s long-hidden tax records, obtained by The New York Times, also reveal this: how he engineered a sudden financial windfall — more than $21 million in what experts describe as highly unusual one-off payments from the Las Vegas hotel he owns with his friend the casino mogul Phil Ruffin.

In previous articles on the tax records, The Times has reported that, in all but a few years since 2000, chronic business losses and aggressive accounting strategies have allowed Mr. Trump to largely avoid paying federal income taxes. And while the hundreds of millions of dollars earned from “The Apprentice” and his attendant celebrity rescued his business career, those riches, together with the marketing power of the Trump brand, were ebbing when he announced his 2016 presidential run.

The new findings, part of The Times’s continuing investigation, cast light on Mr. Trump’s financial maneuverings in that time of fiscal turmoil and unlikely political victory. Indeed, they may offer a hint to one of the enduring mysteries of his campaign: In its waning days, as his own giving had slowed to a trickle, Mr. Trump contributed $10 million, leaving many people wondering where the burst of cash had come from.

The tax records, by their nature, do not specify whether the more than $21 million in payments from the Trump-Ruffin hotel helped prop up Mr. Trump’s campaign, his businesses or both. But they do show how the cash flowed, in a chain of transactions, to several Trump-controlled companies and then directly to Mr. Trump himself.

The bulk of the money went through a company called Trump Las Vegas Sales and Marketing that had little previous income, no clear business purpose and no employees. The Trump-Ruffin joint venture wrote it all off as a business expense.

Experts in tax and campaign-finance law consulted by The Times said that while more information was needed to assess the legitimacy of the payments, they could be legally problematic.

“Why all of a sudden does this company have more than $20 million in fees that haven’t been there before?” said Daniel Shaviro, a professor of taxation at the New York University School of Law. “And all of this money is going to a man who just happens to be running for president and might not have a lot of cash on hand?”

Unless the payments were for actual business expenses, he said, claiming a tax deduction for them would be illegal. If they were not legitimate and were also used to fund Mr. Trump’s presidential run, they could be considered illegal campaign contributions.

 

And this is why Donald Trump has been hiding his taxes for years.

This is why Tisha James is waiting for him in New York.

This is why he's been in a state of panic at losing the election.

Because the second he leaves the White House, he gets indicted on a massive pile of tax evasion, fraud, racketeering, and campaign finance charges, and perp walked on national TV.

Because he knows he's going to spend the rest of his life in a box, a joke, a national punchline, one of history's greatest losers.

And I can't wait.

The Country Goes Viral, Con't

The next wave of COVID-19 infections is underway in the US, and most likely it will be the worst so far.

The daily rise in coronavirus cases set new records in six U.S. states and worldwide.

Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma and West Virginia all had record single-day increases in cases on Friday, according to NBC News' tally.

The World Health Organization meanwhile announced that 350,766 new infections were reported Friday, surpassing by nearly 12,000 a record set earlier in the week. The new cases include more than 109,000 from Europe alone.

In the United States, the governor of Ohio told reporters Friday that he believes there is no single reason why cases are rising, but he believes people aren't taking enough precautions against infection.

"We're sick of wearing masks, we're sick of all of this, and I get it, but we've got to hang in there for our kids. We've got to hang in there for ourselves," Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, said.

"The best way to summarize it, I think, is that people are simply not being cautious," the governor said. "They're going about their family life and meeting with people."

Ohio set a single-day record of 1,840 new cases, and Oklahoma of 1,524.

Missouri recorded just under 3,000 new cases, according to NBC News' tally. The state also set a new single-day record for deaths at 129.

Cases have also risen in West Virginia with 382 new cases Friday; Montana with 722; and North Dakota with 656, according to the tally.

In Montana, cases have more than doubled in the last two weeks, compared to the two weeks before. There has also been a staggering 230 percent jump in Covid-19 related deaths in just over two months, according to Gov. Steve Bullock.

"Disregarding expert advice from state and health officials, as well as the pleas of our frontline health workers and neighbors, is leading us down this concerning path," he said in a series of tweets Friday.

"We need to listen to our health care workers. The path forward is simple if only Montanans follow the guidelines and restrictions we have in place. This is the pathm that will save lives, and it will keep our schools, our main street businesses, and our communities open and safe."

 

We have an executive branch that refuses to take safety precautions, refuses to enforce them, and refuses to do anything to help states. The official position of the American government is your decision to protect yourself and others from COVID-19 is entirely optional. More than 210,000 Americans are dead, and still after eight months half the country refuses to believe that the pandemic even exists.

Even if Joe Biden was president tomorrow and had the CDC issue mask directives, tens of millions of Americans would simply ignore them.

Hundreds of thousands of people are going to die as a direct result.

I honestly don't know what to say other than protect yourself.

Sunday Long Read: You'd Better Ask Somebody

Our Sunday Long Read this week comes from Tove Danovich at The Ringer: in an era where we crowdsource everything through the internet, why not philosophy and social acceptability with the burning, eternal question of "Am I the asshole?"

This is how it starts. You’re on Reddit late at night when you see an interesting post. It went up only four hours ago, but it already has almost 5,000 upvotes. Apparently a couple wants to name their daughter after the Star Wars character Captain Phasma, and they decided to ask the world whether it was OK. The internet seems to think that it isn’t, but you have a different read. Then there’s this kid with a stuffed tiger named Tig who asked his dad to suggest the tiger’s last name. “I couldn’t help myself and just instantly replied ‘Bitties,’” the dad wrote. Now the tiger is named Tig Bitties and the poster’s wife is mad at him. Should he have held his tongue?

At first, commenting on these posts feels like watching Keeping Up With the Kardashians, only if it were broadcast live and you could anonymously text any of the characters when you thought they were right or had done something appalling. It’s dramatic. It’s addictive. Soon, it’s like you’ve become fluent in a foreign language, abbreviating “Am I the Asshole” to AITA and wondering WIBTA (“Would I Be the Asshole”) if you told a friend that you hated his girlfriend or asked your roommate’s boyfriend to start paying rent because he’s been over so much lately. You start reading AITA posts before bed instead of doomscrolling the news because here, at least, it feels like your opinion matters.

With everything else going on in the world (please see: a pandemic, massive unemployment, the upcoming U.S. election, Karens, police brutality, protests, riots, climate change, and balancing working from home with sending your kids to school), the Reddit forum known as Am I the Asshole? has started to feel like a safe space. It’s a place where accountability actually exists, even if only in the form of branding someone right or wrong in one absurd situation. It’s also a place for growth: Sometimes posters return to talk about how their lives changed—almost always for the better—because of the advice they got from thousands of anonymous strangers.

Eventually you stop reading just for the drama, and instead comment because you honestly want to help. You feel like, if not a good person, then at least a better one for it. And maybe you are.

“The ability to define what is wrong and ‘what people are doing that should change’ should be number two on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs,” says Marc Beaulac, founder of Am I the Asshole? (henceforth referred to as AITA). Beaulac, a photographer and dog rescuer in his early 40s, began AITA in 2013 as a way to figure out whether he was wrong in a debate with female coworkers about the temperature in their office. “This was before people used the term ‘mansplaining,’ but I was essentially asking the question, ‘Am I mansplaining?’” Beaulac says. (This, too, seems like it could be a very popular subreddit.) He knew how he felt about the issue, but acknowledged that he didn’t know anything about what it felt like to be a woman in an office in the United States. Even in 2013, before people threw around terms like “cancel culture,” he worried about backlash to having the wrong opinion. But, Beaulac says, “that’s one thing that’s great about the anonymous crowd.” On AITA, the worst repercussions for bad behavior are people in the comments telling you you’re wrong and branding “Asshole” at the top of your post.

But that all came later. In 2013, Beaulac says the only response he got to his question was, “You’re kinda right, I guess.” Afterward, Beaulac debated whether or not to keep the subreddit alive, whether other people might have questions like his own. “When I decided not to delete it after getting my own answer, I felt like I was doing a public service of some kind,” he says. He thought it might be fun to pick through interpersonal conflicts with “a couple thousand people who liked chatting about moral philosophy without having a degree in it.”

For the first four years of its existence, AITA was a relatively small community in the tens of thousands. But around Thanksgiving of 2018—for reasons unknown to Beaulac—it took off. Beaulac soon added 10 moderators to his team, all volunteers who said they wanted to add something to the forum, and by July 2019, the subreddit had 1 million subscribers. It took less than a year to get to 2 million. Posts regularly get picked up on other parts of Reddit, various online publications report on the ones that go viral, and a popular Twitter account (which has 420,000 followers and counting) reposts a curated selection of them. But AITA isn’t just a forum of absurd humans with absurd conundrums. Today, AITA might be the largest public forum for conflict resolution on the planet.

The format of the posts has largely remained the same since the beginning. Someone asks a question about an interpersonal conflict, and readers weigh in about whether the poster was in the right or in the wrong and why. But the moderation team has come up with ways to make the subreddit better (or sometimes just more fun).

One of those ways is by adding rules. A subreddit is allowed to have up to 15 rules; since the team added a “No COVID posts” edict earlier this year, AITA now has 14. The most important of those rules is “Be Civil”—without it, AITA might feel like the rest of the internet instead of being a respite from it. The moderators explain that being civil means to “attack ideas, not people” and to “treat others with respect while helping them grow through outside perspectives.” It’s not often that social media and personal growth go together in the same sentence.

Then, a year ago, the AITA team created a bot that would calculate a consensus 24 hours after posting and label the post in one of four ways: You’re the Asshole, Not the Asshole, Everyone Sucks Here, or No Assholes Here. Users in the mood for judging others can read posts only by people deemed “asshole”; those who want something nicer can read only “not the asshole” posts. It’s a nod to the fact that while thousands of people do come to the subreddit to weigh in and help, voyeurism is the appeal for many others.

We often think of the kinds of dilemmas on AITA as something for an advice columnist or therapist to weigh in on, but the question of who is right and who is wrong—even when it comes to something like “AITA for switching to regular milk to prove my lactose intolerant roommate keeps stealing from me?”—is something moral philosophers, religions, and individuals have been trying to answer since the beginning of human society.

 

Plato, Socrates, Aristotle and the rest may have had various things to say about the public forum like this, but then again, they never had to deal with internet trolls.

Having said that, maybe there's something to a place where, you know, you can discuss things online with a bunch of people from around the world, right?

 

Last Call For Biden, His Time

If Joe Biden is winning over retirees in Florida's largest senior community, The Villages, then Donald Trump is going to lose Florida and the election.

Sara Branscome’s golf cart whizzed down the smooth asphalt path that winds through The Villages, the nation’s largest retirement community, an expanse of beautiful homes, shops and entertainment venues that bills itself as “Florida’s Friendliest Hometown.”

Branscome’s cart was festooned with two American flags that flapped in the warm afternoon breeze. A line of oncoming carts bedecked with balloons and patriotic streamers chugged past while honking. Branscome jabbed her left foot on the horn pedal, then gave a thumbs-up.

“This gets you rejuvenated and ready for the next month or so, so we can do this and win. It gives you hope,” the 60-year-old retiree said.

Then she let out a whoop and two surprising words: “Go Biden!”

It’s not a cry that might be expected to resound in The Villages, and it’s certainly not one that is encouraging to President Donald Trump. Older voters helped propel him to the White House — the Pew Research Center estimates Trump led among voters 65 and older by 9 percentage points in 2016 — and his campaign hoped they would be a bulwark to cement a second term.

They remain a huge chunk of the electorate. Pew estimates that nationwide, nearly 1 in 4 eligible voters will be 65 and older. It’s the highest level on record, going back to 1970.

But there have been warnings that older voters are in play. To be sure, Trump has solid support among older adults, but his campaign has seen a drop-off in its internal research, according to campaign aides, and some public polls suggest Democrat Joe Biden is running ahead or just even with Trump.

Multiple polls shoe Biden is running ahead of where Clinton was with multiple groups: with seniors, with women, with men, with Latinx voters, with independents, and especially with white college-educated women and suburban voters.  

The big difference around this time is that there's not any major third-party threat siphoning off the anti-Trump vote.  Trump's still going to get 46% of the vote just like he did in 2016. But Biden will be at 52% rather than 48% like Clinton was, and with maybe 2% voting third-party/other rather than close to 7% as in 2016.

That's why Clinton lost, especially in the last two weeks of the election. Comey's "but her emails!" convinced millions to buy into the "both sides are just as corrupt" fallacy and it gave us Trump. That's not happening so far.

And I'm making another assumption that Trump will get to 46%. The rate things are going, he may not even hit that mark. It's entirely possible that Biden's double-digit lead holds and he ends up winning something like 54-44%. Right now, the polls are in this territory and have been since Trump's debate meltdown and COVID infection.

Still plenty of time for Trump to gain ground. Clinton was up by double-digits with two weeks to go as well. But for the first time, I'm ready to entertain the thought that Biden will win, and that we're going to really pull this off.

But the caveat remains and it's a pretty huge one as Harry Enten reminds us.

Even if you were to construct a 95% confidence interval for how the polls at this point have differed from the result, it's about +/- 12 points. Biden's advantage is just inside of that. It suggests there is only a roughly 1-in-20 chance that Trump wins the popular vote. In other words, it's something that could occur, though is improbable. 

Instead, Trump still has a decent chance because of the possibility of a popular vote/Electoral College split. We don't know the true extent to which Trump has a better shot in the Electoral College than he does in the popular vote, but we know it exists. 

One baseline is assuming Trump does about three points better in the state that determines the Electoral College winner than he does in the popular vote. That's what occurred in 2016. This means in reality that Trump needs things to shift seven points in his direction nationally to win the Electoral College given he's down 10 points nationally right now. 

(A look at the state level polling generally confirms this rough estimate.) 

It's far from impossible that Trump closes the margin with Biden by seven points. It's an event that occurs about 1-in-7 times, if historical trends hold. 

Indeed, you can see that the chance Trump wins is more than negligible in statistical models such as those created by Jack Kersting, FiveThirtyEight and the Economist. They all point in a similar direction. 

Trump has roughly a 1-in-7 to 1-in-11 chance of pulling off the victory in November, according to all these different models. 

This may not seem like a lot, but it's not nothing. 

Pick up a simple six sided die that you probably have somewhere around your house. Trump's chance of winning is nearly as good as you throwing the die and hitting a six on your first roll of the die. 

To use an example closer to my heart, the Buffalo Bills had about a 1-in-6 chance of making the playoffs heading into the final weekend of the 2017 NFL season. By winning against Miami and Baltimore losing to Cincinnati, the Bills ended up in the playoffs for the first start since 1999. 

In fact, we've already seen a 1-in-6 possibility become reality this presidential election season. Back in the primaries, Biden seemed like he was done for after losing the first three contests. He had about a 1-in-6 shot of winning the plurality of delegates. 

Of course, we all know what happened after that. Biden won the South Carolina primary convincingly and was off and running to the nomination. 

In the real world, the seemingly unlikely things happen all of the time.

If your state has early voting next week, get to it.

Trump still wins 10-15% of the time. I'd much rather be Biden's camp right now but we cannot, cannot, cannot afford to relax.

And besides, Biden winning is just step one in years of work ahead.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

The plan to October Surprise the Trump regime to a win with "new bombshell revelations!!11!" about Hillary Clinton and the 2016 FBI investigation into the Trump campaign has failed miserably thanks to Trump's COVID collapse, and we're getting into a dangerous point now in American history.

 

With coronavirus running through his body in competition with a heavy steroidal dose, President Trump is frustrated that a country where over 210,000 people have died from the virus seems disinterested in the “hoax” of Russiagate.

Trump spent part of his week demanding the latest version of his Russia counter-narrative—that the intelligence officials teamed up with Democrats to invent Russian collusion in 2016—be used to prosecute his political enemies. “I say, ‘Bill [Barr], we have plenty [of evidence], we don’t need any more,” Trump told Maria Bartiromo on Thursday. On Friday, he fumed to Rush Limbaugh that Republicans are “afraid they’re going to influence the election… they don’t play the tough game.”

Providing that “evidence” to Attorney General William Barr’s special prosecutor is loyalist Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe. Intelligence veterans are seething as Ratcliffe helps Trump concoct a narrative to aid him in an election. “Everyone knows the deal here,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA officer. “They know Ratcliffe is irresponsible. It’s just everything goes.”

Yet Trump and his aides, in recent weeks, have recognized that the public isn’t captivated by the Breitbart-friendly accounts of uncovered notes from former CIA officials four years ago, according to two sources familiar with the private complaints.

“Mainstream media isn’t covering it. So most voters aren’t aware of the facts,” John McLaughlin, a top Trump pollster, told The Daily Beast. “You’re [the] first reporter who’s ever asked me and it has yet to be a question in the debates.”

Other political advisers don’t even think it’s worth the bother at this point. Some senior Trump aides have privately insisted that amplifying the inquiry from special prosecutor John Durham is a waste of time, at least electorally. “It is not going to move any votes that aren’t already in our column,” one said. 

 

And this all goes back to Trump's toxic narcissism. He sees the Russia investigation as a personal attack against him, and he's utterly baffled as to why the country that obviously loves him as its new messiah doesn't rise up in armed rage to throw down the Democrats. Trump, constantly surrounded by enablers and sycophants, believes the entire country is like his White House full of yes men and toadies.

 

“The media has worked hard to keep voters in the dark about Joe Biden colluding with Hillary Clinton to spread the Russia collusion hoax and undermining the peaceful transition of power in 2017,” Matt Wolking, the Trump campaign’s deputy communications director, said in response to a request for comment Friday.

One person who has repeatedly talked to Trump about Durham’s probe and the president’s desire to imprison many of his political enemies recounted how Trump has lamented how more people aren’t defecting from the Democratic Party for what is supposedly the “biggest scandal” in recent U.S. political history. The president also blames media outlets—including Fox—for not covering Durham-related developments as aggressively as he’d like. They’re “cover[ing] it up” for the voters and American public, Trump has said.

Another source with knowledge of the president’s griping on the matter said that there was at least one instance in the past two months when President Trump had flipped through cable-news channels looking for coverage of the probe one day, only to voice his irritation when he couldn’t find any. 

 

So this is where the danger comes in, as I've warned. When it finally penetrates Trump's shell that he's really in danger of losing this election, he's going to panic, and panicky, scared people with power do stupid, stupid things. I don't honestly know how far Trump will go, but given his documented, decades-long history of looting the place and leaving his enablers holding the bag, and his documented, decades-long history of petty retribution against everyone in a position of strength against him, the potential for a catastrophic miscalculation on Trump's part is very high.

What happens if Trump orders Barr to arrest Clinton, Biden, and Obama?

We could find out really soon.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

At this point the Trump regime has to be considered an active proponent of infecting as many Americans as possible with COVID-19, because it has ignored the recommendations of medical scientists, doctors, and public health experts at the CDC for close to seven months now. The CDC made it clear that a mask mandate was required on all US public transportation as we head into the flu season, and the White House wouldn't even consider it.

 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention drafted a sweeping order last month requiring all passengers and employees to wear masks on all forms of public and commercial transportation in the United States, but it was blocked by the White House, according to two federal health officials.

The order would have been the toughest federal mandate to date aimed at curbing the spread of the coronavirus, which continues to infect more than 40,000 Americans a day. The officials said that it was drafted under the agency’s “quarantine powers” and that it had the support of the secretary of health and human services, Alex M. Azar II, but the White House Coronavirus Task Force, led by Vice President Mike Pence, declined to even discuss it.

The two officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment, said the order would have required face coverings on airplanes, trains, buses and subways, and in transit hubs such as airports, train stations and bus depots.

A task force official said the decision to require masks should be left up to states and localities. The administration requires the task force to sign off on coronavirus-related policies.

“The approach the task force has taken with any mask mandate is, the response in New York City is different than Montana, or Tuscaloosa, Alabama,” said the official who asked not to be identified because he did not have permission to discuss the matter. “Local and state authorities need to determine the best approach for their responsive effort depending on how the coronavirus is impacting their area.”

Most public health officials believe that wearing masks is one of the most effective ways to protect against the spread of the virus, particularly in crowded, poorly ventilated public places that attract people from all over, like transportation venues. Many feel that the Trump administration has turned the wearing — or not wearing — of masks into a political expression, as seen most dramatically on Monday evening when President Trump whipped off his surgical mask at the White House door after returning from the hospital where he was treated for Covid-19.

“I think masks are the most powerful weapon we have to confront Covid and we all need to embrace masks and set the example for each other,” Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the C.D.C. director, who oversaw the drafting of the order, said in a recent interview.

Dr. Redfield has been publicly at odds with President Trump for promoting mask wearing along with social distancing, and for warning that a vaccine for the virus won’t be widely available until next year.

The thwarting of the mask rule is the latest in a number of C.D.C. actions stalled or changed by the White House. Late last month, the coronavirus task force overruled the C.D.C. director’s order to keep cruise ships docked until mid-February. That plan was opposed by the tourism industry in Florida, an important swing state in the presidential election. Political appointees at the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services have also been involved in rewriting the agency’s guidelines on reopening schools and testing for the virus, bypassing the agency’s scientists.

Some other members of the White House Task Force support a mask mandate. But others do not, among them Dr. Scott W. Atlas, a radiologist who has become Mr. Trump’s closest adviser on the coronavirus, and Mr. Pence, who runs the panel and sets the agenda.

 

Under this logic, there's no reason to even have a United States of America, because New York is not Montana, so national laws cannot be applied to any damn thing.

 

Except that public transportation is interstate travel. 

We could have stopped the spread of this stupid pandemic months ago, but we refuse because of politics and racism. Rural white folk are still hoping the pandemic will kill as many of those urban people as possible so they get more political power, I guess.

At this point, I actively consider every Trump voter to be okay with racism and okay with mass carnage of non-Trump voters because they're a dangerous death cult. Trump himself is a walking public health hazard who should be in quarantine.

They're trying to kill everyone. If they can't do it with a pandemic, they'll do it with violence.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

 The Republican rats are headed for the lifeboats off the sinking USS Trumptanic.

For Republicans, fearful of a possible electoral disaster just weeks away, it has become safe at last to diss Donald Trump — or at least to distance themselves from him in unmistakably purposeful ways.

A barrage of barbed comments in recent days shows how markedly the calculus of fear has shifted in the GOP. For much of the past four years, Republican politicians were scared above all about incurring the wrath of the president and his supporters with any stray gesture or remark that he might regard as not sufficiently deferential. Now, several of them are evidently more scared of not being viewed by voters as sufficiently independent.

This is far from an insurrection. Republicans in the main aren’t outright repudiating Trump. But they are effectively rolling their eyes in exasperation with him, and especially his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Among the most vivid recent examples:

* Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas acknowledging in a Friday interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that he’s “worried” about the election, which he warned could be a “bloodbath of Watergate proportions” for his party, depending on how voters view the pandemic and economy on Election Day.

* Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell telling reporters Thursday he has not been to the White House in more than two months, since Aug. 6, because he doesn’t have confidence that Trump and his team are practicing good coronavirus hygiene. McConnell said, “my impression was their approach to how to handle this was different than mine and what I insisted that we do in the Senate, which is to wear a mask and practice social distancing.”

* Sen. Thom Tillis, in a perilous fight for reelection in North Carolina, telling POLITICO in an interview that one reason to vote for him is to help Republicans keep their Senate majority as “the best check on a Biden presidency.”

* Sen. Martha McSally, running behind in her bid to keep her Arizona seat, refusing to say at a debate with challenger Mark Kelly — despite being pressed repeatedly by the moderator — whether she is proud of being a backer of Trump. “Well, I’m proud that I’m fighting for Arizonans on things like cutting your taxes … ” she filibustered.

* Sen. John Cornyn, still ahead in polls but facing a tougher-than-usual race in Texas, told the Houston Chronicle that Trump did not practice “self-discipline” in combating the coronavirus, and that his efforts to signal prematurely that the pandemic is receding are creating “confusion” with the public. Trump got “out over his skis,” Cornyn said.

* Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican in a historically Democratic-leaning state, said this week that Trump has been “incredibly irresponsible” through words and actions “to ignore the advice of so many of the folks in the public health, epidemiol infectious disease community.”

* After Trump abruptly called off talks on a new economic recovery plan this week, a number of Republicans publicly broke with Trump’s strategy. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, one of the most vulnerable Republicans up for reelection, went so far as to call Trump’s move a “huge mistake.” Rep. John Katko of New York, who represents a district Hillary Clinton carried, made clear he “disagrees” with the president. And Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a top Trump ally who is locked in the toughest race of his political career, urged Trump to come back to the negotiating table. In the face of the uproar, Trump did reverse course, though a deal remains highly uncertain.

What’s going on with all this GOP static? In the past, Trump has been able to effectively end the careers of people who drew his ire. Former South Carolina Rep. Mark Sanford, an occasional Trump critic, was in a tough primary challenge in 2018 when Trump weighed in decisively against him in the closing hours. The New York Times said Sanford’s loss proved that, “having a conservative voting record is less important than demonstrating total loyalty to Mr. Trump.” Later, Jeff Sessions, trying to return to the Senate from Alabama after losing Trump’s confidence as attorney general, learned the same lesson.

One thing that’s changed, operatives in both parties say, is that there is now strength in numbers. A growing roster of Republicans are stepping sideways or ducking from the camera to make sure they are not captured in the same frame as Trump. In addition, Trump is simply too consumed by the resident chaos all around his West Wing in the closing weeks of his own reelection campaign to carry out punitive measures against GOP disloyalists.

 

It's all starting to come apart for the regime. Once you show weakness like this, things only get worse for strongmen and authoritarians like Trump. Trump's either going to need to crack down on his party, or it's game over for him. Without the support of his enablers in Congress, he's as good as toast.