Orange Meltdown, Con't

Trump's newest press flack is displaying exactly the level of competence we've come to expect in Trump hires. Only the best people, remember?

It’s a feel-good story that President Trump’s press secretaries have relished over the years: the quarterly announcement of which government agency Mr. Trump has selected to be the lucky recipient of his salary, an easy way to show the president sticking to his 2016 campaign pledge to forgo his $400,000 salary and donate it.

In the past, the $100,000 check from Mr. Trump has been made out to the Small Business Administration initiative to help veteran entrepreneurs, to the Office of the Surgeon General to fight the opioid epidemic, and to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, among other places.

But on Friday, Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, did not just reveal that the president was sending his salary to the Department of Health and Human Services to help “support the efforts being undertaken to confront, contain and combat the coronavirus.”

She also displayed the president’s private bank account and routing numbers.
The $100,000 check she held up like a prop appeared to be a real check from Capital One, complete with the relevant details. An administration official said mock checks were never used in the briefing.

A White House spokesman, Judd Deere, said in a statement, “Today his salary went to help advance new therapies to treat this virus, but leave it to the media to find a shameful reason not to simply report the facts, focusing instead on whether the check is real or not.”

For an average civilian, that information could be used to withdraw or deposit money, make online purchases or hack an account.

“It’s not a best practice to share that information publicly,” said Eva Velasquez, the president and chief executive of the Identity Theft Resource Center. “If you don’t have protections in place, there are sophisticated schemes and ways someone could access those funds knowing the account and routing number and the individual person it belongs to.”

These clowns can't even get a simple thing right like "Don't display a person's account and check routing numbers on national TV" right.  And we're supposed to believe they have a handle on classified intelligence?

Jesus, what morons these people be.

Reade, Between The Lines

Joe Biden sexual assault accuser Tara Reade just had what little remaining credibility she had destroyed this week, and it was made clear on Friday that Reade has been materially misrepresenting herself for an extraordinarily long time.

The lawyer for Tara Reade, the former Senate aide who has accused Joseph R. Biden Jr. of sexual assault, said Friday that he was no longer representing her, just two weeks after taking her on as a client.

The lawyer, Douglas H. Wigdor, has been a leading plaintiff’s attorney of the #MeToo era. His firm is best known for bringing discrimination cases against Fox News — and its former star host Bill O’Reilly — and Harvey Weinstein, and his presence at Ms. Reade’s side gave her claims added legal heft.

His announced departure came a day after defense lawyers in California said they were reviewing criminal cases in which Ms. Reade served as an expert witness on domestic violence, concerned that she had misrepresented her educational credentials in court.
While not providing a reason for leaving, Mr. Wigdor said his decision was “by no means a reflection on whether then-Senator Biden sexually assaulted Ms. Reade,” adding that he was among the 55 percent of Americans who believe her, according to a Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll.

Mr. Wigdor, a conservative Republican whose support for President Trump in 2016 did not preclude him from suing prominent Trump allies, had a parting shot for the news media, which he accused of applying a “double standard” to its coverage of accusations against the presumed Democratic nominee.

“Much of what has been written about Ms. Reade is not probative of whether then-Senator Biden sexually assaulted her, but rather is intended to victim-shame and attack her credibility on unrelated and irrelevant matters,” he said. “We have and will continue to represent survivors regardless of their alleged predator’s status or politics.”

Ms. Reade did not immediately respond to a request for comment about her lawyer’s departure.

He is leaving as her credibility is coming under harsh scrutiny. On Thursday in California, lawyers who had faced off against her in court began raising questions about the legitimacy of her testimony, and the verdicts that followed, after news reports that Antioch University had disputed her claim of receiving a bachelor’s degree from its Seattle campus.

Then known as Alexandra McCabe, Ms. Reade testified as a government witness in Monterey County courts for nearly a decade, describing herself as an expert in the dynamics of domestic violence who had counseled hundreds of victims.

The public defender’s office in Monterey County has begun scrutinizing cases involving Ms. Reade and compiling a list of clients who may have been affected by her testimony, according to Jeremy Dzubay, an assistant public defender in the office.

Roland Soltesz, a criminal defense lawyer, says he believes Ms. Reade’s testimony made a significant difference in the outcome of the 2018 trial of his client Victoria Ramirez. Both Ms. Ramirez and her co-defendant, Jennifer Vasquez, received life sentences for attempted murder, arson and armed robbery.

“People have been convicted based upon this, and that’s wrong,” said Mr. Soltesz, adding that he “could care less about the politics of this whole thing.”

Me Too and Believe Women doesn't mean "buy a con job from somebody who has made a career of being a con artist."  Reade is facing serious accusations of misrepresenting herself as professional expert witness with credentials of a degree that she apparently never had.

If your lawyer leaves you because they find your credibility lacking, then you have a problem.

The larger issue is "Did Joe Biden sexually assault Tara Reade?"

The people who know Biden and who vetted him say this never happened.  Biden said it never happened, and Biden freely says if you believe Reade, then you shouldn't vote for him. But as the above article mentions, a majority of Americans in at least one poll, some 55%, do believe Reade.

I believe Biden at this point.  It would mean that essentially every Democratic politician in the 21st century is lying to cover for him, and if that's the truth, then we really do deserve another four years of Trump.

Last Call For Tales From The Trump Depression, Con't

The Trump cult will never accept a Joe Biden win, and when they say they will settle 2020 with the bullet box if the ballot box doesn't work, it's time to believe them, especially in states like Michigan that will decide the election. Politico's Tim Alberta caught up with the cultists yesterday as the Trump Show resumed at a Ford plant in Ypsilanti.

In conversation after conversation with voters here Thursday, Trump supporters repeatedly—and completely unsolicited—say Democrats are attempting to steal the election from the president. 

“I lived in Chicago for six years. We know how Mayor Daley stuffed the ballot box for JFK against Nixon.” says Keith Brudder, a 72-year-old landscape contractor from the nearby town of Willis. “That’s what the Democrats in charge here want to do, with this mail-in voting. There’s just no way to have accountability for those ballots like you do when people come to the voting booth.” 

“In Wayne County alone, more than a million people who weren’t registered to vote in 2018 got to vote anyway, and that’s how Whitmer and these Democrats got elected,” says Matthew Shepard, a retired career military man who drove his hulking, orange paramilitary-style truck 90 minutes south from Shiawassee County to cheer on the president. (He offered no documentation for those statistics.) “That’s the only way Trump loses this election—this mail voting scam.”
Deborah Fuqua-Frey, who sits on the board of the Washtenaw County GOP and helped organize the pro-Trump rally here, says the United Auto Workers union “controls the outcome of the 2020 election.” And that terrifies her. “Because nobody knows how to stuff the ballot box like the UAW,” she says. “Trust me, I was a third-generation UAW member, and I know they’re always looking for new ways to cheat. That’s what they’re going to do with the mail system.” 

According to Fuqua-Frey, this would represent a sinister final attempt to remove Trump from office, after the failure of the Mueller Report, the Ukraine-inspired impeachment process, and, most recently, the Covid-19 pandemic. 

“Isn’t it kind of convenient that as soon as impeachment failed, we’ve suddenly got this virus?” she asks, alternating between puffs on a Winston and her inhaler. “This was domestic political terrorism from the Democratic Party. They’ve got all these numbers inflated, especially the deaths. Nobody can explain why nobody’s dying from other causes anymore. Most of these people who are ‘dying from coronavirus’ aren’t actually dying from coronavirus. It’s domestic political terrorism. But Trump will be fine. His voters know better. We aren’t falling for it.”
And so it went Thursday in Ypsilanti. With the president paying special attention to Michigan at a time of unprecedented turmoil in the state, touring a region rich in symbolic value for his reelection campaign, nearly every conversation with his die-hard supporters detoured into the dark and conspiratorial. Sure, there was talk outside the Ford plant of jobs created and regulations slashed and veterans taken care of. But much of that talk was perfunctory, a sort of rhetorical appetizer before digging into the red-blood entrees the president has chosen to serve up for his base. 

Having obsessively covered the Republican Party from the ground-up over the past decade, from the twilight of George W. Bush through the first term of Donald Trump, I thought I’d seen it all, heard it all. But this was new. The warp speed at which alarms about voter fraud—and specifically, voting by mail—were synchronized from the president’s Twitter feed to the lips of his voters guarantees a volatile five months ahead, and a potentially volcanic period thereafter. 

“This was the most exciting day of my life. Okay, the second-most exciting day, after the birth of my grandkids,” says Paula Stone, an Ypsilanti resident, after the president’s motorcade passes. Tonight, Stone says, like every other night, she’ll watch Fox News and click around the internet and social media for information about the president. But she’s not particularly interested in the highlights of his speech inside the Ford plant. 

“I want to know more about this vote-by-mail fraud,” she says. “I’ve heard some shady shit is going down.”

There is no way these frothing lunatics will accept a Biden win or a Trump loss. These people are scared, angry, and facing an economic depression unlike anything before it, we all are.

But there's a very good chance that when these cultists realize their God-emperor is going to lose, they will lash out in unprecedented violence.  It's only going to take one spark, one wrong call by law enforcement or by a mob worked up to bloody rage and a lot of people will get hurt.

And like COVID-19, that bloodshed will spread like wildfire around the nation.

Trump will relish it, of course.

That's the real problem.

Alabama Goes Viral

Don't look now, but new COVID-19 cases in Montgomery, Alabama this month are starting to overwhelm available ICU beds.

Montgomery hospitals are starting to run low on intensive care beds, said Dr. David Thrasher, a critical care doctor at Montgomery Pulmonary Consultants. The four counties making up the Montgomery metro area have seen a combined 721 new confirmed coronavirus cases since May 4 – an increase of 110 percent.

Mayor Steven Reed said the virus is straining the city’s hospitals.

“I’m concerned about the current status of the COVID-19 pandemic,” Reed said. “We are seeing an increase in the number of people who test positive. Occupancy in our Intensive Care Units has reached a critical point and Montgomery hospital officials are now referring some cases to Birmingham.”

Beyond the numbers, Thrasher also has concerns about the faces he’s seeing. About 40 percent of his patients have been between the ages of 25 and 40. And although older people are more likely to die from the virus, he said he has treated many younger patients, including a couple hairstylists. Some of his younger patients haven’t survived.

Since May 1, 27 people have died of the virus across the Montgomery metro.

Last week, a couple pastors reached out to Thrasher for advice on whether to hold church services. He advised against it, since religious services have proved to be hot spots for coronavirus transmission. The ensuing exchange wound up on Facebook, where it has been shared many times.

“There is no way for me not to cry when I see and treat folks that I work with and are giving their all to help others,” Thrasher wrote. “Many are on vents. Just intubated a 26-year-old male who will probably die. It is hitting Blacks worse but nobody is safe. We have to have an economic engine, but we have to insist for people to use good sense.”
The economy must reopen, he said, but that doesn’t mean going all the way back to normal.

“I’m not for shutting down the city,” Thrasher told Al.com on Tuesday afternoon. “But I want people to be careful. Wear a mask in public. Wash your hands. Don’t go into groups unless you have to.”

Expect this to be replayed throughout hundreds of smaller US cities in the weeks ahead. Everyone who thought the pandemic was "over" is about to get a nasty dose of reality...and maybe a nasty dose of a potentially lethal virus.

US cases are rising still, and we're "reopening" the states anyway.

Dallas, Houston, Southeast Florida’s Gold Coast, the entire state of Alabama and several other places in the South that have been rapidly reopening their economies are in danger of a second wave of coronavirus infections over the next four weeks, according to a research team that uses cellphone data to track social mobility and forecast the trajectory of the pandemic.

The model, developed by ­PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and updated Wednesday with new data, suggests that most communities in the United States should be able to avoid a second spike in the near term if residents are careful to maintain social distancing even as businesses open up and restrictions are eased.

But the risk for resurgence is high in some parts of the country, especially in places where cases are already rising fast, including the counties of Crawford, Iowa; Colfax, Neb.; and Texas, Okla. and the city of Richmond. Since May 3, Crawford County’s caseload has risen by 750 percent, and Colfax County’s has increased 1,390 percent, according to state data compiled by The Washington Post.

This is an anxious moment for the nation as people emerge from shutdowns and communities try to reinvigorate economic activity. Scientists and public health experts are monitoring rates of infections and hospitalizations, but it is difficult to forecast during this transitional period because models struggle to capture how people actually behave, including adherence to social distancing and hand-washing practices.

There are preliminary signs, however, that hot spots — new clusters of coronavirus spread — could soon flare across parts of the South and Midwest.

“As communities reopen, we’re starting to detect evidence of resurgence in cases in places that have overreached a bit,” said David Rubin, director of PolicyLab.

It's going to be a disaster within weeks at this point, and given the number of states where lawsuits are being actively pursued to prevent shelter-at-home orders, the virus is going to be impossible to contain.

When governors try to roll back openings, it's going to be a nightmare.

There absolutely will be armed protests in some of those states, lawsuits in others, and the simple act of wearing a mask, which would have helped contain the virus months ago, is such a political act now that enough of the country will refuse to do it that it makes trying to contain it pointless.

We're getting close to a major breaking point in the next six weeks or so.  It's going to be worst-case scenario at this juncture.

Don't expect Trump to lift a finger when that happens, either.

Biden, His Time, Con't

CNN's Harry Enten reminds us that despite Biden's good polling in May, Donald Trump is still the incumbent, and leading in May is a big difference from winning in November, as 2016 stands out as the big flashing neon sign that Democrats always have to fight as if they are losing.

Former Vice President Joe Biden is ahead of President Donald Trump in the presidential race. He leads in the swing states and is up somewhere between 5 and 8 points nationally, depending on what methodology you use. 

Yet it's important to point out that even if the polls are an accurate representation of the current state of the race, presidential races can shift a lot during the final six months of the campaign. 

Biden may be favored, but this race is far from over.  

Take a look at every presidential election involving an incumbent since 1940. It's 13 races in total and gives us a good baseline from which to work. 

There's been a 11-point difference between an average of May polls and the result in the average election. That would be more than enough to change the course of the 2020 race, if the shift occurred in Trump's direction. 

Now some of these races (most notably 1964) had polling leaders with large margins that have never occurred in any modern presidential election and were bound to shrink during the course of the campaign. If we look at the only races where the polling leader had a 25-point advantage or less, the average difference between the polls at this point and the result has still been a fairly high 8 points. 

If the 2020 race moved 8 points in Trump's direction, he'd win. 

You could even concentrate on just the most recent incumbent elections of 2004 and 2012. Like 2020, opinions of the incumbents (George W. Bush in 2004 and Barack Obama in 2012) were hardened early. The final national results in those races differed from the May polls by 3 and 4 points. 

If the 2020 race moved 3 to 4 points in Trump's direction, he might not win the popular vote, but he would have a pretty good shot of winning the electoral college. 

Interestingly, there have been three presidents who have lost since 1940 (Gerald Ford in 1976, Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H.W. Bush in 1992). Two of them (Carter and Bush) were actually ahead in the polls at this point. Carter was up by 6 points and lost by 10 points nationally. Bush was up by 8 points over Bill Clinton and 6 points over Ross Perot, and Clinton would defeat Bush by 6 points and Perot by 24 points. Meanwhile, Harry Truman and George W. Bush were trailing by small margins in the May 1948 and 2004 polls respectively, and both would go on to win by small margins. 

Of course, just because something is possible doesn't mean it's likely. 

Even if we saw a swing in the 2020 race, there's no guarantee it would go in Trump's favor. In the 13 races since 1940, seven times the incumbent did better than he was polling now. The other six times, the challenger did better. Just based on that data alone, it's really no better than a 50/50 proposition that Trump will do better in the results than he is polling currently.

Trump needs a three point shift to win the electoral college.

That's all he needs.

He can do that through GOP voter suppression alone.

Don't ever let yourself think Biden is winning easily. Don't ever relax. Remember 2016.  Clinton lost that election in the last ten days of the campaign thanks to James Comey.

Don't let up. The second we do, we lose everything.

StupidiNews!

• A Long Island man was stabbed and killed by his son Thursday during a Zoom video chat meeting, several members of the chat called 9/11 and the son was arrested later Thursday afternoon.
• Senate Democrats are crafting a bill to guarantee unemployment insurance through the rest of 2020, Senate Republicans say they have no plans to allow the legislation to come up for a vote.
• Hong Kong activists are expected to return to the streets in Friday protest of China's newest proposal to crack down on the city's semi-autonomous status.
• Donald Trump says the CDC will "very soon" put out national COVID-19 social distancing guidelines for churches and other places of worship.
• A federal judge in Washington state has ruled that police need a warrant to search your smartphone and that includes needing a warrant for looking at the lock screen.

Last Call For Tales From The Trump Depression

Georgia governor Brian Kemp reopened the economy at the end of April, and the jobs and the good times are back in the Peach State, right?

Weekly applications for jobless benefits have remained so elevated that Georgia now leads the country in terms of the proportion of its workforce applying for unemployment assistance. A staggering 40.3 percent of the state's workers — two out of every five — has filed for unemployment insurance payments since the coronavirus pandemic led to widespread shutdowns in mid-March, a POLITICO review of Labor Department data shows.

Georgia's new jobless claims have been going up and down since the state reopened, rising to 243,000 two weeks ago before dipping to 177,000 last week. The state cited new layoffs in the retail, social assistance and health care industries for the continued high rate of jobless claims that have put it ahead of other states in the proportion of its workforce that has been sidelined.

Georgia, which began pushing to resume economic activity on April 24, presents an early reality check as the White House amps up pressure on governors to lift shutdown orders and President Donald Trump’s economic advisers predict jobless claims will nosedive after the reopening. The state’s persistent unemployment numbers suggest that government restrictions aren’t the only cause of skyrocketing layoffs and furloughs — and that the economy might not fully recover until consumers feel safe.

Oh.

There are many reasons Georgia’s jobless numbers are still going up, economists say, including that the state, like most of the country, is still whittling through a backlog of applications. State officials also say some laid-off workers are filing duplicate claims, which can artificially inflate the numbers. But the data still underscores how lifting stay-at-home restrictions alone will do little to bring jobs and spending back unless consumer confidence improves, bringing demand with it.

“Think of a restaurant: They’re not going to be able to bring back their entire staff because they’re just not going to have the clientele,” said Laura Wheeler, associate director of the Center for State and Local Finance at Georgia State University. “That’s going to hinder the return of the workforce, because while we’re going to open up, we’re not going to open up to the full capacity that we were at before.”

And in Georgia, public polling indicates that confidence has yet to return. Nearly two-thirds of Georgia residents in a recent Washington Post-Ipsos poll said they felt their state was lifting restrictions too quickly, and only 39 percent said they approved of Kemp’s handling of the outbreak.

“We’ve been chasing a bit of a false narrative that the economic hit is about the restrictions and not the disease itself,” said Julia Coronado, president and founder of Macropolicy Perspectives, an economic research consulting firm. “The economic story really isn’t about lockdowns, and we’re going to make mistakes by pursuing that narrative. It really is about the disease, and how fearful people are about getting sick, and how businesses are going to operate in a world where this virus is with us.”

At the same time, the Trump administration is pushing to get governors to reopen their doors in the hopes that doing so will help revive the U.S. economy.

So you mean as I said a month ago that people aren't going to go out to eat during a pandemic because of the pandemic?

But gosh, I thought the vast majority of Americans were actively against the tyrannical lockdowns and would flood back to restaurants and theaters because they didn't believe the virus was real.

The Trump Depression will continue until the pandemic is actually contained and all the "reopening" of the economy in the country won't fix that, so I guess the next step is to just lie about the dead people in hospital gurneys and makeshift morgue trucks as we approach 100,000 casualties.

Trump's reelection is doomed.

The economy has gone from President Donald Trump's greatest political asset to perhaps his biggest weakness. 

Unemployment is spiking at an unprecedented rate. Consumer spending is vanishing. And GDP is collapsing. History shows that dreadful economic trends like these spell doom for sitting presidents seeking reelection. 

The coronavirus recession will cause Trump to suffer a "historic defeat" in November, a national election model released Wednesday by Oxford Economics predicted. 

The model, which uses unemployment, disposable income and inflation to forecast election results, predicts that Trump will lose in a landslide, capturing just 35% of the popular vote. That's a sharp reversal from the model's pre-crisis prediction that Trump would win about 55% of the vote. And it would be the worst performance for an incumbent in a century. 

"It would take nothing short of an economic miracle for pocketbooks to favor Trump," Oxford Economics wrote in the report, adding that the economy will be a "nearly insurmountable obstacle for Trump come November."

A miracle isn't coming.

Now, divine intervention from the other side, well. That part worries me greatly. As I've said before, the more obvious Trump's coming defeat becomes, the more likely he will do something precipitous. If he loses, he is going to prison for the rest of his life and he knows it. Pence can't pardon him for state crimes.

But there's a lot Trump can do on the way out.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Donald Trump continues to isolate America from allies and to withdraw from treaties as the nation's transition to autocratic rogue nuclear failed state status continues largely unabated.

President Trump has decided to withdraw from another major arms control accord, according to senior administration officials, and will inform Russia on Friday that the United States is pulling out of the Open Skies Treaty, negotiated three decades ago to allow nations to fly over each other’s territory with elaborate sensor equipment to assure they are not preparing for military action.
Mr. Trump’s decision will be viewed as more evidence that he also may be poised to exit the one major arms treaty remaining with Russia: New START, which limits the United States and Russia to 1,550 deployed nuclear missiles each. It expires weeks after the next presidential inauguration.

American officials have long complained that Moscow was violating the Open Skies accord by not permitting flights over a city where it was believed Russia was deploying nuclear weapons that could reach Europe, as well as forbidding flights over major Russian military exercises.+

And, in classified reports, the Pentagon and American intelligence agencies have contended the Russians are also using flights over the United States to map out critical American infrastructure that could be hit by cyberattacks.

American officials also note that Mr. Trump was angered by a Russian flight directly over his Bedminster, N.J., golf estate, in 2017.

But Mr. Trump’s decision, rumored for some time, is bound to further aggravate European allies, including those in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, who are also signatories to the treaty.

They will remain in the accord, but have warned that, with Washington’s exit, Russia will almost certainly respond by cutting off their flights, too, which the allies use to monitor troop movements on their borders — especially important to the Baltic nations.

For Mr. Trump, the decision marks the third time he has renounced a major arms control treaty.

Two years ago, he abandoned the Iran nuclear accord, negotiated by President Barack Obama. Last year he left the Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty, again saying that he would not participate in a treaty that he said Russia was violating. The Open Skies Treaty was negotiated by President George H.W. Bush and his Secretary of State, James Baker, in 1992, after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But the idea was first presented by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in the summer of 1955, and was rejected by the Soviets as an elaborate plan to spy on a weaker foe.

For more than a year, Mr. Trump has said he would not renew it unless China also joined. Beijing, which has a nuclear arsenal one-fifth the size of Washington’s and Moscow’s, has rejected the idea.

It is unclear whether Mr. Trump will try for a brief extension of the treaty of several months — the current wording allows only for a single, 5-year extension — or abandon it altogether if China refuses to join.

So Trump is blaming Russia and China and withdrawing anyway, which is exactly what both Russia and China want.

Putin maneuvering Trump into throwing away another decades-old treaty that leaves NATO more vulnerable is going to be just one example of the damage Trump's regime will cause that will take the rest of my lifetime to fix, if not longer.

It's About Supression, Con't

Donald Trump is now openly threatening states that are trying to expand vote-by-mail, all but ordering his regime to find a way to cut states off from federal money unless they obey Dear Leader's tweets.

During the impeachment of President Trump, an expert witness called by Democrats floated a theoretical scenario involving the president threatening a state hammered by a natural disaster, to illustrate the corruption of Trump’s shakedown of Ukraine.

What would we think if Trump dangled federal disaster aid as leverage to force a governor to do his political bidding, asked Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan, adding: “Wouldn’t you know in your gut that the president had abused his office? That he betrayed the national interest?”

Trump has now done something very close to this. And the answer to Karlan’s question is: Yes, Trump is abusing his office and betraying the national interest:




Trump is referring to the Michigan secretary of state’s announcement that applications for absentee ballots will be mailed to 7.7 million residents. That’s to ensure that Michiganders can vote safely amid a pandemic that has brought more than 50,000 cases of coronavirus to the state and killed more than 5,000 people.

Trump’s new threat is not a precise parallel to Karlan’s scenario. But Trump is threatening to somehow withdraw federal aid unless Michigan drops vote-by-mail, a naked effort to extort Michigan into doing something that could help him politically. (Trump rage-tweeted a similar threat at Nevada.)

That last point is crucial. It has been widely reported that Trump’s advisers fear he’s losing Michigan, which he probably needs again, especially with Arizona at risk.

We also know Trump fears vote-by-mail can hurt his chances. Trump explicitly admitted that with such Democratic voting rights measures, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

And so, in lodging this threat, Trump is saying the corrupt part out loud — with a bullhorn.

Steve M. tells us what happens next.

It won't be just Trump contesting the election results between November and January -- it'll be his entire support network, starting with Fox News. Fox didn't seriously argue for the overturning of election results in 2008 and 2012, but this time will probably be different. The right regards vote-by-mail -- at least in contested states won by Democrats -- as voter fraud by definition. A Democratic win in any vote-by-mail swing state will automatically be declared fraudulent.

If Trump wins Michigan or Nevada, there'll be relentless calls on Fox to challenge the Democratic electors' right to vote in the Electoral College, and those challenges will be taken seriously by Republicans at the state level. In previous years, Republicans in Washington have treated such calls as boob-bait, useful for the building of party unity against the Democrats, but not for much more. This time, I think Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, and others might insist that voter fraud allegations need to be taken very, very seriously. They'll also undoubtedly look for reasons to question Senate pickups by the Democrats.

I don't know if they can persuade much of America that the election was fraudulent. But at the very least, they can reframe the narrative so that the media begins describing Joe Biden's ascension to the presidency as accompanied by a "legitimacy crisis" -- even if, unlike Trump in 2016 and George W. Bush in 2000, Biden has won a clear victory in both the Electoral College and the popular vote.

Joe Biden might even get sworn in.

And the moment he does, he's going to be told by Our Pundit Betters™ that he needs to pardon Trump or face civil unrest that will kill thousands, if we're not already up to our necks in civil unrest from the Trump Depression and COVID-19.

StupidiNews!

• Thousands have been evacuated from Midland, Michigan as record flooding breached two dams Tuesday along the Tittabawassee River.
• The US has hit a major "baby bust" with the lowest birthrates in the country since 1985, particularly among white Americans.
• The US Supreme Court has blocked the release of Mueller investigation grand jury testimony, granting the Trump regime a reprieve from a House Democratic subpoena until after the election.
• Senate Republicans have passed a bill to delist Chinese companies from US stock exchanges, the bill is not expected to pass the House.
• Justice League director Zack Snyder will re-shoot the movie for HBO Max next year, the film may be "episodic" in nature and Snyder is reportedly getting $20 million for the project.

Last Call For Retribution Execution, Con't

As I said back in 2016 when it came to Turkey, if you want to stage a coup, you need five things:

• Armed forces
• Airwaves
• Airports
• Allies
• and the Asshole in charge you're trying to overthrow.

If you think about what Trump's doing in the US right now, it's trying to get a hold of these five things, where the "asshole" is Joe Biden.  Allies he's had from the beginning: the GOP will let Trump do whatever he wants.  Airports, Trump has control of those too if needed.  Airwaves, he has not one but two state TV networks in FOX and OANN, and he's currently going after Biden with Barr and "Obamagate".

That leaves the Armed Forces, the really dangerous one.

I don't have good news in that regard.

President Donald Trump has always prized loyalty in his subordinates, but news about pending personnel moves at the Pentagon could indicate the president is determined to root out perceived enemies within the Defense Department.

Jonathan Swan of Axios first reported in February that the White House had compiled a list of civil servants across the government who should be dismissed because they allegedly had not been loyal enough to the president. The ousted government officials will reportedly be replaced by people who are more ardently pro-Trump.

Since then, it has emerged that Trump intends to nominate retired Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Tata, a Fox News contributor, to fill the No. 3 leadership position in the Pentagon. Tata left the Army after an investigation found he had affairs with at least two women while serving in uniform, the Raleigh News & Observer reported. More recently, Tata has lauded Trump for his support of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher.
Tata is already serving as a senior advisor to Defense Secretary Mark Esper, a defense official confirmed following a May 15 news story by Foreign Policy’s Jack Detsch and Robbie Gramer.

The two Foreign Policy reporters also first revealed that Michael Cutrone will move from Vice President Mike Pence’s office to the Pentagon, raising concern from some administration officials that Cutrone will undermine Esper by vetting political appointees to the Defense Department based on how loyal they are to Trump.

Considering what's most likely coming as the Trump Depression and COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage, looking a few miles downstream is warranted at this point.

While the recent personnel moves may signal a more aggressive push by the president to exert direct control over the Pentagon, the White House has been deeply involved in selecting officials for defense jobs since the beginning of the Trump administration.

Under then-Defense Secretary James Mattis, several defense officials faced a protracted vetting process because the White House felt that their social media posts were not sufficiently loyal to Trump, a former Defense Department official told Task & Purpose.

But since the Senate acquitted Trump in February of allegedly withholding $250 million of military aid to Ukraine in an attempt to get that country's government to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, the president has been particularly vindictive against defense officials over any sign of disloyalty — real or perceived.

If confirmed by the Senate, Tata would replace John Rood, who was fired in February. Rood had certified in May 2019 that Ukraine had made enough progress fighting corruption to allow for the military assistance package to go through, thus undermining Trump's arguments about why he withheld the aid.

Trump has also withdrawn Elaine McCusker’s nomination to be the Pentagon’s comptroller. McCusker had reportedly raised concerns with the Office of Management and Budget about whether the president’s freeze of military aid to Ukraine was legal.

Likewise, The White House removed Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman from the National Security Council in February. During the president’s impeachment inquiry in November, Vindman told lawmakers there was “no ambiguity” that Trump had asked Ukraine’s president to investigate former Biden during the July 25 phone call between the two leaders.

The president is retaliating against defense officials who argued in favor of providing the military aid Ukraine and anyone who stood up to Trump himself, said Evelyn Farkas, a former Defense Department official in the Obama administration whose purview included Russian and Ukraine.

“I don’t think the president minds that we know this,” said, Farkas, who is running for Congress in New York as a Democrat. “I think that he’s trying to send a signal internally and externally: don’t cross him.”

Getting rid of anyone in the Pentagon who played a role in his impeachment is one thing, but I think Trump's playing a longer game, perhaps much longer.

It's definitely a far more dangerous one, as Jon Chait reminds us.

The most dangerous elements of Trump’s anti-democratic agenda are as-yet-unexploded ordnance, which may over time prove either terrifying or meaningless. His regular incitements to violence, goading his “tough” supporters in the military, police, and biker gangs to finally take off the gloves, have not yet produced a republic-shaking tragedy. And his embrace of Republican vote-suppression logic — he is now threatening to withhold funds from states that allow absentee voting — may, or may not, prevent a free and fair election. These actions are democratic tail risks. Like abolishing the pandemic response team, they’re quickly denounced and quickly forgotten, because they probably won’t matter in the end — unless they do matter, in which case their effect will be catastrophic.

Maybe Trump doesn't have the balls to arrest Joe Biden.  But he'll do everything up to that point, and if civil unrest happens, then all bets are off.

The Return Of Austerity Hysteria

Republicans continue to say there's no reason to do anything even though 30 million Americans have lost their jobs and 90,000 have died needlessly to COVID-19.

Top Republicans on Capitol Hill are pumping the brakes on new coronavirus stimulus spending days after House Democrats pushed forward with a sweeping relief package, underscoring a deep partisan divide as the nation grapples with the pandemic. 

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, said Tuesday that he does not currently see a need for another relief package, telling CNN there's been no change in his posture despite meeting earlier in the day with Vice President Mike Pence and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin about the economy. 

"I don't see the need right now," he said of another package. McCarthy said they talked about the economy, the number of states opening back up and progress in testing.
Asked if there's been a change in his posture against moving now on another relief package, he replied, "No." 

Pence planned to discuss "economic impacts of the coronavirus" during his meeting with Mnuchin, McCarthy and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell earlier Tuesday morning, according to a source familiar with the Vice President's meeting on Capitol Hill. 

Leaving the Senate floor and after meeting with Pence on Tuesday, McConnell wouldn't respond to questions about whether there's any desire for another rescue package. 

Asked by CNN last week about the possibility of moving ahead on a phase four recovery package, McConnell said, "I don't think we have yet felt the urgency of acting immediately. That time could (come), but I don't think it has yet." 

As Mnuchin left McConnell's office, he said they got a "good update" that was "very helpful" and that he was off to testify before the Senate Banking Committee. 

He declined to respond to a question about whether he thought more Covid-19 aid was needed now.

McCarthy's opinions are meaningless, he's literally the least powerful person in Washington DC right now.  But McConnell continuing to refuse to even offer a package at this point underscores what I've been saying all long: there will be no "phase 4" bill, and you're 100% on your own.

As far as the GOP is concerned, the pandemic is over, you should go back to work, back out to eat, back out to the movies, the gym, the salon, the malls, and spend spend spend. It's your fault the economy is bad.

Meanwhile, Georgia and now Florida have been caught red-handed manipulating COVID-19 data to make sure tourists flock in and hit the beaches.

Late last Friday, the architect and manager of Florida's COVID-19 dashboard — praised by White House officials for its accessibility — announced that she had been removed from her post, causing outcry from independent researchers now worried about government censorship.
The dashboard has been a one-stop shop for researchers, the media and the public to access and download tables of COVID-19 cases, testing and death data to analyze freely. It had been widely hailed as a shining example of transparency and accessibility.

But over the last few weeks it had "crashed" and gone offline; data has gone missing without explanation and access to the underlying data sheets has become increasingly difficult.

The site was created by a team of Florida Department of Health data scientists and public health officers headed by Rebekah Jones. She announced last week her removal as of May 5 in a heartfelt farewell note emailed to researchers and other members of the public who had signed up to receive updates on the data portal.

Citing "reasons beyond my division’s control," Jones said her office is no longer managing the dashboard, is no longer involved in publication, fixing errors or answering questions "in any shape or form."

She warned that she does not know what the new team's intentions are for data access, including "what data they are now restricting."

"I understand, appreciate, and even share your concern about all the dramatic changes that have occurred and those that are yet to come," she wrote.

"As a word of caution, I would not expect the new team to continue the same level of accessibility and transparency that I made central to the process during the first two months. After all, my commitment to both is largely (arguably entirely) the reason I am no longer managing it."

And yes, Jones was told to delete all COVID-19 data so it could later be replaced with better, happier data.  Republican states are actively rewriting away the dead to save themselves in November.

One day before a top Florida Department of Health data manager was taken off her role maintaining the state’s COVID-19 dashboard, officials had directed her to remove data from public view that showed Floridians reported symptoms of the disease before cases were officially announced, according to internal emails obtained by the Tampa Bay Times. She has since been asked to resign, she said Tuesday.

According to the emails, department staff gave the order shortly after reporters requested the same data from the agency on May 5. The data manager, Rebekah Jones, complied with the order, but not before she told her supervisors it was the “wrong call.”

By the next morning, control over the data was given to other employees, according to an email Jones posted Friday on a public listserv. Jones, the department’s Geographic Information Systems manager, wrote that she was no longer the point person for questions about the department’s “Florida’s COVID-19 Data and Surveillance Dashboard.” She implied her removal was an act of retribution.

Jones confirmed Tuesday that she was offered a settlement and the option to resign in lieu of being fired, effective May 26.

To recap, Republicans in Congress are pointing to COVID-19 cases and deaths "dropping dramatically" in red states proof that blue states are failing, and shouldn't be bailed out.  Those who don't play ball are fired.

There's your "conspiracy theory" only we know it's happening in real time.

We'll never know how many people this virus ends up killing, because it will be hidden in dozens of states and by the White House while the economic cost rises like a tsunami.

Now go to Applebee's, citizen. You have a duty to your country and your leader to make him look good.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

GOP Sen. Martha McSally is going down in flames in Arizona, and Democrat Mark Kelly, a former astronaut and husband to former Democratic Rep. Gabby Giffords, now has a double-digit lead. Arizona Republic columnist Laurie Roberts:

From the Republican uh-oh department: Arizona Sen. Martha McSally is sliding in the polls, dropping four percentage points in a month.

McSally now trails Democrat Mark Kelly by 13 points, according to the latest tracking poll by OH Predictive Insights.

While the April poll of 600 likely voters favored Kelly 51% to McSally’s 42%, in May it’s now 51%-38%.

The poll shows independents breaking more than 2-1 for Kelly.

“McSally is doing terribly,” pollster Mike Noble told me on Monday. “There’s no way to find a bright spot on that one.”

And that’s not even the bad news for McSally.

The bad news comes from Maricopa County, where Republicans rule.

At least, they did rule, until Democrat Kyrsten Sinema defeated McSally there in 2018 -- stealing 88 mostly-suburban precincts that normally would go to the Republican nominee.

McSally's declining support lies within the 4 percent margin of error in the May tracking poll, a blend of live and automated calls made between May 9 to May 11. But her Maricopa County numbers are a disaster.

In May 2019, this same tracking poll showed Kelly up over McSally, 46%-41%, among likely voters in Maricopa County.

In May 2020, Kelly has climbed to 54% in Maricopa County while McSally has dropped to 36%.

Just think about that for a moment. Kelly has gone from a five-point advantage in Maricopa County to an 18-point cruise.

McSally is losing Maricopa County, by far the largest GOP stronghold in the state, by 18 points. It shows that Trump's collapse among senior voters in Arizona as a result of demanding they be fed to the COVID-19 monster and oh yeah, openly planning to cut Socials Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, is not going to spare McSally in any way.

McSally has firmly gotten behind Trump on both sacrificing grandma to the virus and cutting social programs.

This is her position. In Arizona.

Democrats are looking better and better in the Senate almost daily.

StupidiNews!

• A federal judge has ruled that a fraud lawsuit against the Trump Organization may proceed, the suit names Donald Trump and his three eldest children as defendants.
• Norma McCorvey, better known as Jane Roe in the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade lawsuit, has reportedly confessed that she was paid by anti-choice activists to turn against abortion rights.
• Johnson & Johnson says it will no longer sell talc-based baby powder in the US and Canada as the company is "reassessing" its product portfolio in the wake of COVID-19.
• South Korean students are heading back to school in June as the virus is largely contained in the country through rigorous testing, mask usage, and contact tracing.
• The nearly 150 million Americans whose credit histories were exposed by credit bureau Equifax won't be getting anything from the company's landmark $575 million settlement after all.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

President Petty McVengeance hates Actual President Barack Obama so much that he now refuses to display or even unveil Obama's official portrait in the White House.

It's been a White House tradition for decades: A first-term president hosts a ceremony in the East Room for the unveiling of the official portrait of his immediate predecessor that will hang in the halls of the White House for posterity. 

Republican presidents have done it for Democratic presidents, and vice versa — even when one of them ascended to the White House by defeating or sharply criticizing the other.

"We may have our differences politically," President Barack Obama said when he hosted former President George W. Bush for his portrait unveiling in 2012, "but the presidency transcends those differences." 

Yet this modern ritual won't be taking place between Obama and President Donald Trump, according to people familiar with the matter. And if Trump wins a second term in November, it could be 2025 before Obama returns to the White House to see his portrait displayed among every U.S. president from George Washington to Bush. 

Trump is unconcerned about shunning yet another presidential custom, and he has attacked Obama to an extent no other president has done to a predecessor. Most recently he's made unfounded accusations that Obama committed an unspecified crime. 

Obama, for his part, has no interest in participating in the post-presidency rite of passage so long as Trump is in office, the people familiar with the matter said.

Can you blame Obama here?  Nobody was more instrumental to spreading and validating the Obama Kenya birther nonsense than Donald Trump as a way to attack the nation's first black President.  Obama in the White House drove Trump to fury, and being the birther candidate meant white voters rewarded him with the White House five years later, pure and simple.

So yeah, you won't see that portrait in the White House anytime while Trump is in office. Trump is an outright racist, and Obama sure as hell shouldn't have to come hat in hand to massa's White House.

I hope Biden puts it up on his first day.