Bluenami Tsunami, Con't

Last week I noted Cook Political Report now had Joe Biden breaking the 270 electoral vote threshold in their forecasts meaning a clear win a November (whether or not Republican states will try to manipulate the results of or even try to nullify a Biden win is anyone's guess right now, but 2016 GOP voter suppression tactics will certainly apply).

This week Sabato's Crystal Ball remains at 268-204 Biden, with 66 toss-ups, but given the consistency of Biden's 8-10 point lead, several Safe Republican states are moving to Likely and could be in play if Biden's lead holds up at the state level, which given the 5-6 point overestimation of Clinton's state level polling in 2016 remains a gargantuan-sized if.

Sabato's Kyle Kondik:

2020 is shaping up to be a bad year in American history, which Republican lobbyist Bruce Mehlman illustrates in his latest look at the political environment. It is not the kind of year when one wants to be an incumbent running for reelection, and a majority of the public appears to believe that this president is not meeting the moment.
A few weeks into the public health crisis, we explored the possibility of Trump being the second iteration of Jimmy Carter, whose reelection bid fell apart among myriad crises in 1980. Since then, the Trump-as-Carter scenario has grown even more plausible.

There is time for the situation to change — as we wrote a few weeks ago, we want to see where things stand after the conventions, around Labor Day. But Trump is extremely unlikely to win if the polls continue to look the way they do now. And if these numbers represent a new normal, we need to account for the possibility that this election won’t be particularly close, and that new states may come into play. In other words, if the national picture remains bleak for Trump, then the slippage he’s seen from earlier this year wouldn’t just be limited to a handful of swing states.

Over the past few weeks, there have been some interesting little nuggets here and there about the map expanding into red turf. The very well-sourced New York Times trio of Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Martin, and Alexander Burns recently reported that internal Republican data showed Trump with only a small lead in Montana and trailing in Kansas, two states that Trump carried by about 20 points apiece in 2016 (both have competitive Senate races, too).

Enterprising members of the #ElectionTwitter community spearheaded a fundraising campaign to poll under-polled states: Public Policy Polling, the Democratic pollster, stepped up and polled Alaska and Montana on their behalf, with the money raised going to charity. Trump was up 48%-45% in Alaska and 51%-42% in Montana. (The #ElectionTwitter polling project remains underway, and we have supported them and we encourage others to as well at their GoFundMe page.)

Democratic pollster Garin-Hart-Yang had Biden up two points in Missouri, a 19-point Trump state; an earlier poll for Missouri Scout conducted by Remington Research, a GOP firm, had Trump up eight. On Monday, polling from Saint Louis University/YouGov had Trump up by a similar 50%-43% margin.

A UtahPolicy.com/KUTV 2 News poll of Utah had Trump up just 44%-41% there in late May, although the pollster (Y2 Analytics) later re-weighted the poll by education, which suggested a lead for Trump more in the six-to-10-point range, depending on which weighting was used (the Y2 post includes a thoughtful discussion of education weighting, an important factor in polling and something that might have contributed to some Democratic bias in state polls in 2016).

One other caveat comes from friend of the Crystal Ball Dan Guild, who has noticed that in the last three elections, some summer polling has seriously overstated eventual November Democratic performance in red states. That may be a factor now.

But Trump’s position is weak enough in mid-July that we have to concede there are some signs of competitiveness in states that were not competitive in 2016. This sort of thing can happen when the overall election is tilted toward one side over the other, which is the state of play at the moment and the advantage Biden currently holds.

If Trump were up by 10 nationally, we might be moving Safe Democratic states that Hillary Clinton won in the low double-digits, like Delaware and Oregon, into more competitive categories.

More to the point, we continue to rate states like Colorado, New Mexico, and Virginia as Likely, not Safe, Democratic. That’s despite it being hard to imagine Trump carrying any of them, even if his position dramatically improves.

So we’re moving seven Safe Republican states to Likely Republican: Alaska, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, South Carolina, and Utah.

Do we think Biden will win these states? Not really. In all likelihood, these red states are going to vote for Trump, and not just by a few points.

But could one or more flip if Biden wins decisively in November? Possibly. Let’s remember: A “Likely” rating still means we see one side — in this case, the Republicans — clearly favored in a state. We just don’t feel 100% certain about these states in the event of a lopsided election.

It's not much of a shift as far as the electoral picture, in fact it's a not a shift up front at all.  But if states like Indiana, Kansas, and Montana are no longer 100% Trump locks, then the entire electoral map has shifted at the back end since Memorial Day weekend.

Still, the second the Biden people believe they are up by 8 rather than down by 8 is the seond they start ensuring a second Trump term.

Take nothing for granted and fight like you're dying.

Because we are.

The Race Against COVID-19, Con't

The death rate of Black America from COVID-19 is only getting worse as the virus spreads into the Deep South, where health risk outcomes of Black patients and systemic racism in the US healthcare system are already stacking the deck against survival.

If you’re Black in America, Covid-19 is more likely to kill you, and the disparity has only widened as cases have surged across the U.S.
In counties where the majority of residents are Black, the death rate has climbed to 3.5 times the national average, up from roughly three times as high in May, an ongoing analysis of Johns Hopkins University and Census Bureau data by Bloomberg News finds. In places where African Americans exceed 13.4% of the population, the proportion they make up of the U.S., the death rate is double the national average, also a slight uptick from two months ago.

Since as early as April, public health experts and lawmakers have pushed the federal government to release more data and work to reduce the disparities. Absent national figures, the picture of racial health outcomes in the U.S. is still incomplete. What statistics exist have continued to show Black Americans bear the brunt of the virus. But with imperfect information, officials can't properly deploy resources or develop plans to tackle the issue. Four months into the pandemic, the problem appears to be getting worse.

Study after study of available information points to the same grim reality. In places with more than 100 deaths, Black Americans have made up 23% of them, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost twice their share of the national population. Federal statistics on 1.5 million coronavirus patients obtained by the New York Times showed that Black and Latino people who contract the virus are twice as likely to die. Even these statistics have gaps, with demographic information missing from hundreds of thousands of people.

The disproportionate toll persists even when accounting for age, pre-existing health conditions, geography, occupational exposure and housing conditions, Richard Reeves, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute has found. “These starkly different numbers for African Americans would withstand every empirical argument you can make. You cannot explain this away,” he said. “It’s acting as an expression of a whole set of cumulative disadvantages faced by Black Americans.”

The Bloomberg analysis of more than 3,100 U.S. counties can only infer the deadliness of the virus among Black Americans. In our data set, which covers all deaths from March 23 to July 10, the race of those dying is unknown. In many cases, race and other demographic information is not being collected or released.

Minority communities and cities with large Black populations, like New York City, New Orleans and Detroit were some of the earliest hotspots. But as the virus has spread elsewhere, the disparities remain. The CDC data published by the New York Times showed Black people dying at higher rates across state lines and in areas rural, urban and suburban.

And again, even when controlled for health risk factors like diabetes, hypertension and obesity, even when controlled for wealth and location, Black Americans face a higher death rate, more than twice the national average, and it's only getting more blatant.

COVID-19 kills because our healthcare system kills Black Americans at a higher rate.

Period.

Systemic racism kills.  I don't know how much more clear I can be about it.

StupidiNews!

• A new UC San Francisco medical study find one-third of adults 18-25 have a risk factor that makes them vulnerable to COVID-19, and for half of those, the risk is caused by smoking.
• House Democrats are petitioning the Supreme Court to review a subpoena of Donald Trump's tax returns in light of the court's ruling last week that laid out legal guidelines.
• California has shut down all indoor businesses and has rolled back public gatherings as COVID-19 cases continue to spike in Southern California.
• EU officials say they plan "coordinated" trade sanctions and economic action across multiple EU countries to support Hong Kong's continued autonomy from China.
• Climate researchers say that spreading crushed rocks on farm fields across the globe could capture up to 2 billion tons of CO2 yearly to reduce carbon emissions.

Last Call For Trump Gets Schooled

California calls the Trump regime's cards on cutting federal funding to schools that do not open classrooms for in-person teaching, as both Los Angeles and San Diego school districts say they will go to online only courses this fall.

California’s two largest public school districts said Monday that instruction will be remote-only in the fall, citing concerns that surging coronavirus infections in their areas pose too dire a risk for students and teachers.

The Los Angeles and San Diego unified school districts, which together enroll some 825,000 students, are the largest so far in the country to abandon plans for even a partial physical return to classrooms when they reopen in August.

More than a third of California’s coronavirus cases are in Los Angeles County, and San Diego County has had 18 community outbreaks over the past week, more than double the state’s acceptable threshold.

“There’s a public health imperative to keep schools from becoming a petri dish,” said Austin Beutner, the school superintendent in Los Angeles.

The joint announcement came as Education Secretary Betsy DeVos continued to press the Trump administration’s case to quickly reopen public schools, not only for students’ social and emotional development, but also to allow parents to return to work fully.

In television appearances over the weekend, she downplayed both the virus and the school reopening guidelines issued by the administration’s own public health officials. “I think the go-to needs to be kids in school, in person, in the classroom, because we know for most kids, that’s the best environment for them,” Ms. DeVos said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

She also reiterated the administration’s stance that guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention deeming in-person classes the “highest risk” option were not mandatory. President Trump threatened last week to cut off federal funding to schools that did not reopen their campuses.

The recommendations from the president and Ms. DeVos have been disputed by many public health officials and teachers. On Friday, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Federation of Teachers, the National Education Association and AASA, the School Superintendents Association issued a statement saying that reopening recommendations should be “based on evidence, not politics.”

The groups added that “we should leave it to health experts to tell us when the time is best to open up school buildings, and listen to educators and administrators to shape how we do it.”

In the Los Angeles and San Diego districts’ joint statement, they noted that research is incomplete and recommendations have been contradictory.

But “one fact is clear,” the statement said. “Those countries that have managed to safely reopen schools have done so with declining infection rates and on-demand testing available. California has neither. The skyrocketing infection rates of the past few weeks make it clear the pandemic is not under control.”

The bigger problem is that COVID-19 is spreading in 48 of 50 states right now, and New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts are all getting close to reversing that progress.  Only Maine and New Hampshire are seeing fewer cases right now.

We'll see if Trump and DeVos move to punish school districts, but I doubt they will, hell I doubt they even can, legally.

Stay tuned.

Biden, His Time Con't

CNN's Harry Enten has seen enough Texas polls to consider the Lone Star State in play for Joe Biden in 2020.

New CBS News/YouGov polls show President Donald Trump is in trouble in three states he won in 2016. He's tied with former Vice President Joe Biden in Arizona (46% to 46%), a state he won by four points in 2016. Trump's down 48% to 42% in Florida, a state he took by a point in 2016. 

But it's the third state, Texas, where the eye popping result comes from. It's Trump 46% to Biden's 45%, a result well within any margin of error.

It's pretty clear looking at the data that Texas is a swing state in the 2020 election. The 2020 campaign could be the first time Democrats captured the Lone Star State in a presidential election since 1976. 

The CBS News/YouGov poll is not an outlier over the last month. There have been eight polls released publicly since the beginning of June. The result is that Biden and Trump are basically tied, with Biden up by a mere 0.3 points in Texas. 

Importantly, and unlike in other states, the polls in Texas have not overestimated Democrats over the last few cycles. If anything Democrats actually slightly outperformed their final polls in the 2016 presidential race and 2018 Senate races.
Things may change the closer we get to the election, but Texas really is competitive at this point. 

Texas has gotten progressively more competitive during Trump's time as a candidate and officeholder. A big statewide victory has eluded Democrats, though many races have come within single digits for the first time in a generation. In fact, the state seemed, if anything, to move to the left in 2018, as Democrats were able to achieve wins in some key congressional races.

A Biden win would be a manifestation of that trend on the statewide level.
Four years ago, Hillary Clinton lost Texas by nine points. She was the first Democratic presidential candidate to lose the state by only single digits since the 1990s.

If you look nationally, you see Biden is up about 10 points compared to Clinton's two point popular vote win. If you shift the Texas result by eight points, he should be down just a point to Trump. 

There are reasons to think that Biden could be doing even better than this eight point shift would imply. 

In 2018, Democrat Beto O'Rourke came within three points of knocking off Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. It was the best Democratic performance in a Texas Senate race since 1988. 

It wasn't just O'Rourke who came close. The Democratic candidates for attorney general and lieutenant governor finished within five points of their Republican opponents.
As I noted last year, the reason the Democrats are doing so well in Texas is a shift among college educated white voters. You see this best in the suburbs of Austin, Dallas and Houston, where O'Rourke did disproportionately better than the Democratic Senate did six years prior. 

Indeed, Texas' white voter population is very well educated. One calculation by the New York Times' Nate Cohn reveals that a little more than 42% of the 2020 likely white voters in Texas have a college degree. That's 13th highest in the nation and the most of any state Trump carried in 2016.

As the old adage goes, Texas isn't a red, blue, or purple state.  It's a non-voting state, with basically the lowest turnout of any of the ten most populous states at 51.1% in 2016. (interestingly enough, New York is almost just as bad but its larger urban percentage tilts it towards the Dems, although it does explain how Republicans keep ending up as governor.)

Basically if Texas's turnout was higher, it would be a blue state.

Having said that, while I appreciate Texas is in a unique position in 2020, overlooking Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin again will prove fatal to a Biden win, Texas or no. Yes, a Texas win will break Trump's back, but if it comes at the expense of those three states, Trump comes out ahead with 43 electoral votes compared to Texas's 38. Trump *would* have to capture either Nevada, Minnesota, or New Hampshire and run the table on all the other swing states, but it's not a guaranteed Biden win.

I appreciate that Texas is genuinely in play.

But Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan are where Biden and his team need to be concentrating on right now, and throughout the election.

Besides, the amount of voter suppression shenanigans in Texas will almost guarantee a Trump win there.  Better to carve a path through the Rust Belt, and then move to put Trump away for good.

Right now, Biden's lead in WI, MI, and PA aren't too much larger than Texas.

The Regime Goes Viral, Con't

With it becoming clear that COVID-19 management by the Trump regime has failed completely and that tens of thousands, and most likely hundreds of thousands more will die from the virus between now and Election Day, the regime in the last 48 hours has sharply shifted towards blaming Dr. Anthony Fauci and offering him up as a sacrificial scapegoat.

The White House is seeking to discredit Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, as President Donald Trump works to marginalize him and his dire warnings about the shortcomings in the U.S. coronavirus response.

In a remarkable broadside by the Trump administration against one of its own, a White House official told NBC News on Sunday that "several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr. Fauci has been wrong on things." To bolster the case, the official provided NBC News with a list of nearly a dozen past comments by Fauci earlier in the pandemic that the official said had ultimately proven erroneous.

Among them: Fauci's comments in January that coronavirus was "not a major threat" and "not driven by asymptomatic carriers" and Fauci’s comment in March that "people should not be walking around with masks."

It was a move more characteristic of a political campaign furtively disseminating "opposition research" about an opponent than of a White House struggling to contain a pandemic that has already killed more than 135,000 Americans, according to an NBC News tally.

As I've long predicted, Dr. Fauci has now become the opposition, the Enemy, and will now be treated as such. And the regime always needs new Enemies.

Fauci, who runs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, had been a leading member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force and a key communicator with the public about the virus until the president soured on Fauci's sober assessments of the situation, which have increasingly conflicted with the more sanguine picture of a virus in retreat that the president has sought to paint.

In recent days, Fauci has deviated from Trump by disputing that the U.S. is "doing great" and faulting the decision in some states to re-open too quickly and sidestep the task force's suggested criteria for when it's safe to loosen restrictions. In one particularly alarming prediction, Fauci said he would not be surprised if the U.S. was soon adding 100,000 new cases per day— a figure that would reflect an abject failure to slow the spread.
Fauci declined to comment on the White House's attacks.

The White House effort to cast doubt on Fauci's judgment comes as coronavirus surges nationwide, which Trump has repeatedly downplayed as a result of increased testing rather than increased infections. Florida on Sunday reported over 15,000 new cases, the most any state has reported in a single day since the pandemic began. The U.S. on Friday also surpassed 70,000 new coronavirus cases nationwide for the first time ever.

As physicians and scientists have learned more about the novel coronavirus, the medical consensus on how to treat the virus and limit its spread has evolved — and not just in the U.S. Many of Fauci's assertions called into question by the White House official were based on the best available data at the time and were widely echoed by Trump, other members of the task force and senior White House officials.

"When you learn more, you change those recommendations," Surgeon General Jerome Adams, another member of the task force, told CBS News on Sunday. "Our recommendations have changed.”

I expect Jerome Adams and Dr. Deborah Birx will become the new government faces leading the "new" response, while Fauci is reassigned or demoted, or is driven to resign. At this point he may even be fired outright.

We'll see how long Fauci lasts, but the White House is clearly trying to lay the groundwork for his imminent departure from the government.

Meanwhile, lockdowns are coming, and they need to come sooner rather than later.

Houston leaders are calling for another lockdown as the number of active cases of the coronavirus in the county increased to more than 27,600 on Sunday. Houston's Harris County — the most populous county in Texas — has been the hardest-hit in the Lone Star State.

"Not only do we need a stay home order now, but we need to stick with it this time until the hospitalization curve comes down, not just flattens," Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo tweeted Sunday. "Many communities that persevered in that way are reopening for the long haul. Let's learn from that & not make the same mistake twice."

Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who had previously resisted a mask order in the state, warned Friday that the state would need to lockdown further if the case numbers don't decrease.

Republicans and the ignorant, selfish public will resist and ignore these orders, I'm sure.

And they will die as a result.

Think about that.

StupidiNews!

Back to a normal schedule this week with your daily StupidiNews.

• The US Navy says 18 sailors and 4 civilians were injured in a fire aboard the USS Bonhomie Richard at the US Naval Base in San Diego, the ship was evacuated and the fire put out.
• Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani says that all of Donald Trump's IRS audit issues have been resolved, implying that the White House no longer has an excuse to refuse to release Trump's tax returns.
• A US appeals court has ruled that the nation's first federal death row execution in 17 years can proceed on Monday for Daniel Lewis Lee, convicted in 1996 of killing three.
• Senate Judiciary chair Lindsey Graham has invited Robert Muller to testify on the Russia investigation of the Trump regime, Republicans and Democrats alike have wanted his testimony.
• A new Italian medical study finds that after two months after being hospitalized for COVID-19, 87% of patients still had at least one symptom of the virus and more than half had three or more.

Last Call For Trump And The Q Balls

People who say Donald Trump doesn't do any work outside the golf course are wrong. It takes effort to be actively boosting not one, but two white supremacist domestic terrorist groups, one military in the "boogaloo"/second Civil War, the other political in this whole Q idiocy conspiracy nonsense.

On July Fourth, before President Donald Trump spoke to the nation from the White House lawn, he spoke indirectly to another community on Twitter: QAnon.

That afternoon, he retweeted 14 tweets from accounts supporting the QAnon conspiracy theory, a sprawling and ever-mutating belief that a mysterious government official who goes by “Q” is leaving online clues about a messianic Trump’s secret plan to dismantle a cadre of Washington elites engaged in everything from pedophilia to child sex trafficking.

It wasn’t the first time Trump has nodded — accidentally or not — to QAnon followers on Twitter. But Trump's QAnon-baiting has gone into overdrive in recent months. According to a Media Matters analysis, ever since the pandemic began, Trump has retweeted at least 90 posts from 49 pro-QAnon accounts, often multiple times in the same day.

Those around Trump have followed suit. Eric Trump, the president’s son, recently posted a giant “Q” on Instagram as well as the hashtag version of the community’s slogan: “Where we go one, we go all.” White House deputy communications director Dan Scavino sparked glee on Facebook when he posted a photo with Q symbology in it back in March. Over on Parler, the niche Twitter alternative and MAGA hub, Rep. Devin Nunes of California, one of Trump’s most strident congressional defenders, directed people to The Dirty Truth, a video producer who has promoted QAnon-related conspiracies in the past.

And over that July Fourth weekend, Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, recorded a video of himself taking the QAnon loyalty pledge, a slightly altered version of the U.S. oath of office.

All this has occurred with barely any pushback from Trump or Republican leaders — or even much acknowledgment that the phenomenon exists. And the engagement has continued even as the FBI has labeled the amorphous online community a potential source of domestic terrorism after several people radicalized by QAnon have been charged with crimes, ranging from attempted kidnapping to murder, inspired by the conspiracy theory.

To Trump’s critics, the reason is simple enough: QAnon followers are some of Trump’s biggest boosters. They show up at rallies. They promote the president’s narrative online, even coming up with their own conspiracy theories to protect him. And as the president struggles in the polls amid criticism over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and response to nationwide protests over police killings, there are political benefits to engaging Trump’s most fervent fan base.

“It's easy enough for them to say OK, well, because of that, we can accept this other crazy level of behavior because those people love the president,” said Rick Wilson, a former GOP strategist and co-founder of the Trump-critical Lincoln Project. “They unequivocally support Donald Trump.”

For the uninitiated, QAnon refers to a conspiracy theory centered on the existence of a shadowy government official known simply as “Q,” who communicates with his followers through various online channels, dropping cryptic, Nostradamus-esque notes hinting at the elite’s secret machinations. QAnon alleges that the global elite, all part of a pedophile sex trafficking ring in Washington, are responsible for an amalgamate of baseless conspiracies, ranging from the murder of a Democratic National Committee staffer to widespread satanic worship and deliberately spreading the novel coronavirus.

In the QAnon mythos, Q and Trump are working toward an event called “The Storm,” the day that he finally arrests thousands of these elites and ships them to Guantanamo Bay. Occasionally, QAnon followers see various setbacks as The Storm in action; others have attempted to explain the lack of mass indictments through science fiction.

“Supposedly, I'm already in Gitmo and my clone is speaking to you right now,” Wilson said.

QAnon followers are hungriest for signs that the Trump administration is watching them — an errant hand-wave, for instance, can result in hundreds of followers insisting that Trump had drawn a “Q” to acknowledge them. But rather than leave it in the realm of “Da Vinci Code”-esque symbology, Trump’s actions, as well as his repeated insistence that the “deep state” is conspiring against him, have given them even more reason to believe in him.

And to QAnon followers, Trump’s regular retweeting of their messages indicates that he or someone on his team is acknowledging their work.

Yeah, there's a lot of crossover between the Boogaloo Boys and the Q Balls.  But it's all straight up Cult of Dear Leader stuff, Facism 101, here. We've already seen both groups kill. They are straight-up terrorists.

And the closer we get to Election Day, the more likely it will be for Trump to call on them to unleash deadly violence all over the country in order to help him stay in power.

Don't laugh at these guys. We're in the growing stages of a populist uprising that could lead to a death toll on par with COVID-19.

Florida Goes Super-Viral

Florida is now heading directly for a NYC March/April scenario where tens of thousands of daily infections lead to thousands of deaths, and several other states will soon follow.

Florida on Sunday reported a record 15,300 new coronavirus cases, the most by any state in a single day since the pandemic reached the United States.

The staggering number was the result of both increased testing and widespread community transmission that has affected the state’s population centers as well as its rural areas. It shattered the previous highs of 11,694 reported by California last week and 11,571 reported by New York on April 15.

Florida is set to hold the Republican National Convention in Jacksonville next month and has ordered schools to reopen five days a week.

Here are some significant developments:

President Trump on Saturday wore a mask in public for the first time, while visiting wounded service members and health-care workers at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Trump has previously shown disdain toward face coverings amid the coronavirus pandemic and refused to wear them. 

Louisiana’s Democratic governor announced a new requirement that most people wear a mask in public. The state’s Republican lawmakers have opposed coronavirus restrictions. 

Walt Disney World in Orlando reopened after having been shuttered for nearly four months, even as Florida continued to report record infections. Testing supplies in the state are running low, and some big labs are taking several days to return results, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said at a news conference. He partly attributed the backlog to testing many asymptomatic people.
Shortly before Florida announced the new cases, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos made the rounds on Sunday news talk shows, where she continued to press schools to reopen even as fresh evidence emerged that the United States was failing to control new waves of infection and death.

In an interview with CNN’s “State of the Union,” DeVos said she would like to see closed schools be the “exception” rather than the norm. “The goal needs to be that kids are learning, full-time, this fall,” she said. “Kids need to get back in the classroom.”

DeVos added on “Fox News Sunday” that the Trump administration was looking at “all the options” for pulling federal funding from schools that don’t open in the fall. “American investment in education is a promise to students and their families,” she said. “If schools aren’t going to reopen … they shouldn’t get the funds.”

So we're right back to where we were around Easter: not enough testing supplies, no political appetite for a lockdown until  it's too late, and a Trump regime actively encouraging more infections and deaths so that the economic numbers don't get worse heading into the election.

Nearly 140,000 Americans have already died from this pandemic, and we could easily see another 140,000 more before the end of the year, and most likely a lot more.

I expect the death toll in Florida will eclipse that of New York by December 31.

Oh, and Texas isn't far behind, either.

Sunday Long Read: Biden's Big Battle

Tim Alberta (again) finds yet another "Biden is doomed!" angle, but this time it's from more than an anecdotal source. Michigan Democratic Rep. Elissa Slotkin is warning that Joe Biden and the Democrats are heading for another 2016-style loss in the state.

An endangered incumbent, representing a purple district in the most competitive region of one of America’s premier swing states, Slotkin is not an accomplished political player. She is still raw, still at times wobbly on her feet, still learning the secrets of her new craft. What sets the congresswoman apart is a skill set few in her field have—a talent for investigating, researching, crunching data and challenging conclusions and adapting to findings. She is, in short, a shrewd observer of the carnage unfolding in her backyard, if not yet the most lethal combatant. This serves Slotkin well. Rather than rely on outside assessments, she bases every maneuver, every tactical decision, on what she’s seeing and hearing for herself. That means dismissing advice from the national party. That means distancing herself from nascent ideological demands on the left. That means, in the summer of 2020, with a torrent of polling fueling a narrative that Trump has fallen way behind in his campaign for a second term, warning Democrats not to trust what they’re being told.

“I don’t believe it,” Slotkin says matter of factly. “Listen, if anyone tells me they can accurately predict what major events are coming in the remainder of 2020, I’ll give them a thousand dollars. I mean, this has been the year of black swans. … I don’t for one minute think this [presidential] race is safe in anyone’s column. I’ve been literally begging people to ignore those polls. They are a snapshot in time. And if 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that we have no idea what’s coming next.”
I stop Slotkin there. Is her gripe that these snapshots—the polling, both public and private, that shows Republicans bleeding support across the board—are accurate in the present, yet subject to so much volatility in the future as to be worthless? Or does she believe the snapshots themselves are inaccurate here and now?

“I think they’re inaccurate,” she replies without hesitation. “Here’s the thing. When I started to run and I had to hire a pollster, I interviewed a bunch of different folks and I decided to do what we do sometimes at the Pentagon, which is to take a ‘bad cop’ approach to the interview. … It was five or six folks that I interviewed, and I said, ‘You got something wrong. You screwed up in 2016. What did you get wrong? And how are you going to fix it?”

Only one pollster, Slotkin says, admitted that he got it wrong. That was the person—Al Quinlan of GQR, a large Washington-based firm—she hired.

“He told me that they fundamentally undercounted the Trump vote; that the Trump voter is not a voter in every single election, that they come out for Trump, so they’re hard to count,” she explains. “On a survey, if someone says, ‘I’m not sure I’m going to vote,’ you don’t usually continue the conversation. And some of them didn’t have any desire to be on those poll calls; they didn’t have the 20 minutes to talk to somebody. They didn’t want to do it. And so, they were fundamentally undercounted.”

Slotkin, ever the intel analyst—identifying trends, compiling a report, presenting a conclusion—tells me, with a high degree of confidence, “I believe that same thing is happening right now.”

Normally I would categorize this in the same box as Tim Alberta's breathless piece last month on middle-class black voters in Detroit saying that they'll vote for Biden, but that they are considering not voting at all.  But Stefanik is a former CIA analyst running for re-election in arguably the toughest House battle in the country right now, and if she says her own internal polls are showing Trump is going to win the state despite everything, I'd pay attention.

So what does Biden need to do to win?

Run a campaign like Slotkin did in 2018.

Shaped like a mirror image of Oklahoma—panhandle to the right—the territory stretches roughly 100 miles. To the far west lies Lansing, the diverse and economically barren capital city, as well as East Lansing, home to the behemoth campus of Michigan State University and its tens of thousands of students. To the far east is a cluster of wealthy, majority white townships in Oakland County, the executive hub of suburban Detroit. And in the middle, a vast region that defies easy definition, affluent exurbs run up against forgotten farmlands, diverging areas that are bound by little except a shared consistency of culture: The areas are overwhelmingly white, deeply religious and reliably conservative.

What the district lacks in ethnic diversity—it is more than 80 percent white—it makes up for with a rare geographic mix. Slotkin, unlike most members of Congress, has constituents that are urban, suburban, exurban and rural.

“The district is unique because it’s really three districts—west, central and east,” says John Sellek, a local Republican consultant. “The west is Ingham County, a place that does not elect Republicans. Then, you’ve got Livingston as the anchor for Republicans in the center of the district, a conservative, high-turnout area. And then in the east, you’ve got the northern suburbs of Oakland County, which is still considered a Republican area, but without the hard-core conservative voters you find in Livingston.”
Sellek, who lives in Brighton, an idyllic, affluent bedroom community inside Livingston County, adds: “What scares Republicans is the change in Livingston. It’s a high-growth area, and that growth is coming from suburbanites who aren’t sure they identify as Republicans anymore.”

While many of the once-red districts that flipped in 2018 had witnessed considerable shifts in voting behaviors and were thus long overdue for a Democratic takeover, the 8th remains at its core a messy, self-contradicting political universe. Its red-to-blue conversion in 2018 was hardly a reflection of a lurch leftward; rather it was a unique repudiation of Trump and his new right, a verdict made possible by lopsided advantages in money, energy and, ultimately, turnout.

“This isn’t the story of a district that’s moving toward Democrats,” says Dave Wasserman, the ace congressional handicapper for the Cook Political Report. “It’s still a very polarized district between some of the true Detroit suburbs on one side, and a very liberal state capital and college campus on the other side, and a lot of deeply conservative areas in between.”

This polarization is embodied by Ingham and Livingston, adjacent counties, both of which are contained fully within the 8th District. Ingham County is 75 percent white, has a median household income of roughly $53,000 and a poverty rate of 21 percent; Livingston County is 97 percent white, has a median household income of more than $78,000 and a poverty rate of less than 6 percent. One county has virtually no recent history of electing Republicans; the other, virtually no recent history of electing Democrats. If these are the political extremes, the middle is represented by a narrow strip of Oakland County, the last piece of the district’s puzzle. It’s a competitive, if right-leaning, stretch of mostly affluent suburbs, meaning it’s all a matter of margins: Whereas a Republican blowout all but guarantees a Republican win in the district, a relatively close race there gives Democrats a chance. (Slotkin lost Oakland County by some 14,000 votes in 2018, which allowed her to win the district by 13,098 votes thanks to huge turnout in Ingham County; during the previous midterm, in 2014, Bishop carried Oakland County by some 32,000 votes and won the district by roughly 30,000 votes overall.)

Slotkin won because she was able to turn out the anti-Trump vote on the left and middle.  She freely admits she's in trouble in November for that reason, and that Biden will be too if he mistakes anti-Trump sentiment for pro-Democratic policies.

As overly pragmatic as I am, I tend to agree with her. I don't believe that Biden is headed for a loss. But I do believe that he could lose, and that he needs to assume that he may be behind.

Don't believe the polls.  Fight like you're down by 10 points every day.

Indepen-Dunce Week: Lowering The Barr

Oh, and while Roger Stone was being let off the hook, Attorney General Bill Barr has reassigned a third US Attorney looking into Trump's criminality.

Attorney General William Barr has pulled Richard Donoghue from his role as U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York to take on a new role at Main Justice. 

After rumors of a reshuffling last week, the Justice Department confirmed the news in a statement on Friday, announcing that Donoghue will be leaving his role to serve as Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General, or top deputy to Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen. 

Donoghue, seen as close to Barr, was tasked with supervising all DOJ investigations involving Ukraine in February. His office also played a major role in the federal investigation into President Trump’s inaugural committee, and oversaw cases against drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman and Chinese telecommunications company Huawei, among others. 

Seth D. DuCharme, the current principal associate deputy attorney general, will take over as acting U.S. attorney in Brooklyn.

So that's Jessie Liu out at DC, Geoffrey Berman out at Manhattan, and now Richard Donoghue out at Brooklyn. All were overseeing Trump cases.  All have been reassigned by Bill Barr while investigations of Trump were still ongoing.

There's still a tremendous amount of damage that Barr can do between now and January, but should he still be Attorney General next year as part of a second Trump term, all is lost.

Indepen-Dunce Week: The Country Goes Super-Viral

New COVID-19 cases in the US have tripled in the last month from 20,000 to 60,000 and rising as outbreaks in Florida, Arizona, Texas and South Carolina are raging uncontrolled. We're rapidly headed for the sort-case scenario, where illness becomes so widespread that the sheer number of casualties begins to affect the daily functioning of the country as a whole.

With rising Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations sending many states backward in their reopening plans, one health expert warns that if the US continues on its current path it will reach "one of the most unstable times in the history of our country." 

"We will have hospitals overwhelmed and not only in terms of ICU beds and hospitals -- and that's bad -- but exhausted hospital staff and hospital staff that's getting ill themselves," Dr. Peter Hotez, the dean of tropical medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, told CNN Friday night. "So, we won't have enough manpower, human power, to manage all of this." 

Only five states saw a decrease of at least 10% in average new daily cases over the past week. And the US set a record for the highest single day of new cases for the second time this week with 66,627 cases on Friday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

The problem remains Republicans.

The resurgence has many local leaders returning to actions taken in March and April to slow the spread of the virus. 

At least 26 states have paused or rolled back their plans to reopen. 

Atlanta's mayor and Georgia's governor are at odds over the mayor's order Friday to send her city back to Phase 1 of its reopening plan. Citing an "alarming" increase in cases, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said residents under this phase should leave the house only for essential trips, and restaurants and retailers must offer only to-go or curbside pickup service. 

Gov. Brian Kemp's office said the mayor's plan is not "legally enforceable" because Kemp signed an order prohibiting local action from being more prohibitive than the state's requirements. To free the capacity for more testing and hospital care in a surge, Kemp reactivated a makeshift hospital Friday at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta. 

In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott renewed a disaster declaration first issued March 13 to mitigate spread in his state, while Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer requested the extension of National Guard use through December for humanitarian missions such as running mobile screenings, distributing food and medical supplies and disinfecting public spaces. 

"All people who study these viruses think that the summer is the quiet time. Think about that. This is the quiet time for coronavirus," Dr. William Haseltine, a former professor at Harvard Medical School, told CNN on Friday. "If this is the quiet time, I hate to think what winter is going to be like this year."

Even here in Kentucky.

The top two leaders of Kentucky’s General Assembly and Attorney General Daniel Cameron are criticizing Gov. Andy Beshear for mandating the wearing of masks to curb COVID-19 without consulting them, and Cameron on Friday asked a state judge if the order is legally proper.

“As usual, you have put forth this order by edict rather than through collaboration,” said Senate President Robert Stivers, House Speaker David Osborne and Cameron —all Republicans — in a two-page letter sent to Beshear, a Democrat, Thursday night.

They noted in their letter to the governor that earlier Thursday a judge in Scott County “issued a statewide temporary restraining order against your executive orders and guidance.“

They were referring to an order by Scott Circuit Judge Brian Privett in response to a lawsuit filed by Agriculture Commissioner Ryan Quarles, a Republican, and Evans Orchard and Cider Mill in Georgetown, challenging Beshear’s restrictions on certain businesses. Cameron joined the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.

Besides issuing a restraining order on Beshear’s restrictions for 548 agritourism businesses registered with the state Department of Agriculture, the judge said before Beshear could issue or enforce any executive order related to the COVID-19 emergency that he declared March 6, “the governor or other person authorized by the governor shall specifically state the emergency that requires the order, the location of the emergency, and the name of the local emergency management agency that has determined that the emergency is beyond its capabilities.”

The mask effect that was supposed to go into effect Friday afternoon is now in legal limbo and could be for a long time.  Meanwhile, several county sheriffs say they will not enforce Beshear's mask ordnance anyway.

So the pandemic will continue, and people will continue to suffer life-long organ damage or die until enough people get the point and wear masks when they go outside.

 

 

Indepen-Dunce Week: Stone Cold Commutation

And as expected, we got the Friday Night News Dump for the ages last night as Donald Trump eliminated Roger Stone's prison sentence just hours after Stone publicly asked Trump to do so, with Stone saying he was writing a book "and the ending wasn't finished yet."

President Trump commuted the sentence of his longtime friend Roger J. Stone Jr. on seven felony crimes on Friday, using the power of his office to spare a former campaign adviser days before Mr. Stone was to report to a federal prison to serve a 40-month term.

In a lengthy written statement punctuated by the sort of inflammatory language and angry grievances characteristic of the president’s Twitter feed, the White House denounced the “overzealous prosecutors” who convicted Mr. Stone on “process-based charges” stemming from the “witch hunts” and “Russia hoax” investigation.

The statement did not assert that Mr. Stone was innocent of the false statements and obstruction counts, only that he should not have been pursued because prosecutors ultimately filed no charges of an underlying conspiracy between Mr. Trump’s campaign and Russia. “Roger Stone has already suffered greatly,” it said. “He was treated very unfairly, as were many others in this case. Roger Stone is now a free man!”

The commutation, announced late on a Friday when potentially damaging news is often released, was the latest action by the Trump administration upending the justice system to help the president’s convicted friends. The Justice Department moved in May to dismiss its own criminal case against Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, who had pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I. And last month, Mr. Trump fired Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States attorney whose office prosecuted Michael D. Cohen, the president’s former personal lawyer, and has been investigating Rudolph W. Giuliani, another of his lawyers.

Democrats quickly condemned the president’s decision, characterizing it as an abuse of the rule of law. “With this commutation, Trump makes clear that there are two systems of justice in America: one for his criminal friends, and one for everyone else,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and a leader of the drive to impeach Mr. Trump last year for pressuring Ukraine to incriminate his domestic rivals.

Two House committee chairmen quickly announced that they would investigate the circumstances of the commutation, suggesting that it was a reward for Mr. Stone’s silence protecting the president. “No other president has exercised the clemency power for such a patently personal and self-serving purpose,” said a statement issued by Representatives Jerrold Nadler and Carolyn B. Maloney, both New York Democrats.
Mr. Stone, 67, a longtime Republican operative, was convicted of obstructing a congressional investigation into Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign and possible ties to Russia. Prosecutors convinced jurors that he lied under oath, withheld a trove of documents and threatened an associate with harm if he cooperated with congressional investigators. Mr. Stone maintained his innocence and claimed prosecutors wanted him to offer information about Mr. Trump that he said did not exist.

As his time to report to prison neared, Mr. Stone openly lobbied for clemency, maintaining that he could die in prison and emphasizing that he had stayed loyal to the president rather than help investigators.

“He knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him,” Mr. Stone told the journalist Howard Fineman on Friday shortly before the announcement. “It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn’t.”

In an interview with Fox News this week, he characterized himself as collateral damage in the quest to target Mr. Trump. “The president, who I’ve known for 40 years, has an incredible sense of fairness,” Mr. Stone said. “He is aware that the people trying to destroy Michael Flynn, now trying to destroy me, are the people trying to destroy him.”

While it was not clear when the two last spoke before the decision, Mr. Trump called Mr. Stone on Friday to deliver the news of his clemency personally, according to an official briefed on the conversation.

The president has used his power to issue pardons or commutations to a variety of political allies, supporters or people with connections to his own circle, like the former New York police commissioner Bernard B. Kerik, the financier Michael R. Milken and former Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois.

But Mr. Stone is the first figure directly connected to the president’s campaign to benefit from his clemency power. While Mr. Trump has publicly dangled pardons for associates targeted by investigators, that was a line he had been wary of crossing until now amid warnings from advisers concerned about the possible political damage.

Barr is grouchy of course, and is threatening to resign for the 957th time, but nothing will happen because nothing ever does.  Barr has run roughshod this week over rule of law, with revelations that he bullied US attorney Geoffrey Berman out of his job because he was investigating Trump, revelations that came from Berman's own mouth as he testified under oath to Congress this week, but again, nothing ever happens.

So Stone is a free man as of this point, and Republicans in the Senate are already congratulating Dear Leader for his courage.

Barr should be impeached a dozen times over but of course, nobody's got time for that in the era of the Trump Depression and the COVID-19 pandemic.

So on we go with rule of law only applying to Trump's enemies.  Friends get off.

Indepen-Dunce Week: A Supreme Promise Kept

In the final and most shocking Supreme Court decision of the 2019-2020 term, Justice Gorsuch sided with the court's four liberals to affirm that a healthy chunk of east-central Oklahoma along with most of Tulsa is in fact the Creek Indian Nation because Congress never got around to officially dissolving that promise, and now as many as 1.8 million or so non-Native people are now squatting on various reservations.

The Supreme Court said Thursday that a large swath of eastern Oklahoma remains an American Indian reservation, a decision with potential implications for nearly 2 million residents and one of the most significant victories for tribal rights in years.

The land at issue contains much of Tulsa, the state’s second-largest city. The question for the court was whether Congress officially eliminated the Muscogee (Creek) Nation reservation when Oklahoma became a state in 1907.

In a 5-to-4 decision invoking the country’s long history of mistreating Native Americans, the court said “we hold the government to its word” and the land Congress promised to the Creek Nation is still Indian land.

“If Congress wishes to withdraw its promises, it must say so. Unlawful acts, performed long enough and with sufficient vigor, are never enough to amend the law,” wrote Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who was joined by the court’s liberal justices.

“To hold otherwise would be to elevate the most brazen and longstanding injustices over the law,” Gorsuch said, “both rewarding wrong and failing those in the right.”

The dissent, led by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., warned of significant upheaval in the criminal justice system, and in other areas of government such as taxing and zoning. But state and tribal leaders downplayed those concerns and said they are negotiating an agreement to address jurisdictional issues.

Most directly, the ruling means that federal officers, not state authorities, have the power to prosecute tribal members for major crimes committed in the defined area. Less certain is how the decision affects the authority of state and city leaders when it comes to imposing taxes, zoning laws and other regulations.

Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter and leaders of five tribal groups issued a joint statement after the ruling indicating they have made “substantial progress toward an agreement” to submit to Congress and the Justice Department that would put in place a “framework of shared jurisdiction.” 

“We have a shared commitment to maintaining public safety and long-term economic prosperity for the Nations and Oklahoma,” according to the statement from Hunter and the Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw and Seminole nations.

Lawmakers in Washington would have to pass legislation, for instance, for state officials to continue prosecuting crimes involving tribal members in the area affected by the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Somehow I don't see Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats going out of their way to dissolve these five nations anytime soon, which means Oklahoma and Washington DC are going to have to work out an agreement and stick to it.

But this is a huge tribal victory, one that almost certainly means that all of Eastern Oklahoma is Indian Country, along with the existing Osage Reservation northwest of Tulsa.

We'll see what can be worked out.

Thanks, Neil!

Indepen-Dunce Week: Stone Cold Negative

Bill Barr may have dropped the charges against Michael Flynn (who is now completely down the "deep state" conspiracy theory black hole) in order to save Donald Trump, but Barr apparently isn't going to extend convicted dirty tricks artist Roger Stone the same courtesy. If Trump wants to save Stone from reporting to a Georgia prison on Tuesday, he's going to have to order the pardon himself.

The Justice Department supports longtime Trump friend Roger Stone going to prison on Tuesday, according to a new court filing. 

Stone has asked a federal appeals court for emergency help to delay his prison term until September, citing coronavirus. 

But the Justice Department, which has been criticized for going easy on Stone, said the report date of July 14 that was set by his trial judge is "a reasonable exercise of that court's discretion based on the totality of the factual and legal circumstances." 

The Justice Department argument on Thursday sets up how Stone may need to turn to President Donald Trump as his last hope to avoid prison. 

The department told the DC Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday that Stone, 67, hasn't given any legal reasons why he should be treated differently from other convicted felons or kept out of prison at this time. Stone had claimed he had an exceptional situation because his age put him at risk of death from coronavirus in prison. 

Stone has all but conceded he's unlikely to get another reprieve from a court before July 14, when he's set to turn himself in to a federal prison camp in Georgia. In recent weeks, he blanketed online forums with pleas for a presidential pardon. 

Despite Attorney General William Barr calling Stone's case a "righteous" prosecution, Trump has repeatedly said Stone is a victim of the Mueller investigation, which the President, without basis, has called corrupt and illegal. "He can sleep well at night!" Trump wrote on Twitter on June 4 after a Stone supporter tweeted about a pardon. 

Stone's prison term has already been delayed before. 

A federal judge delayed Stone's June 30 prison report date by two weeks, ordering him to spend that time at home essentially in quarantine. The prison in Jesup, Georgia, has reported 10 inmates and three staff testing positive with coronavirus as of Thursday afternoon, with one staff member recovered. It's unclear how many of those cases are in the medium-security prison versus the camp where Stone is to report. 

Stone was indicted in January 2019 on charges including attempting to cover up his efforts to reach WikiLeaks in 2016 to help the Trump campaign access documents stolen by the Russians. Prosecutors argued at the trial that Stone had lied to Congress in 2017 to protect the President. 

A jury found him guilty last November, and Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced him to more than three years in prison in February.

So, absent a presidential commutation or full pardon, Roger's going to prison on Tuesday.  And if that happens, I bet he'll be willing to make a deal to rat out Trump to save himself.

Clock's ticking, Donald. You've talked a good game, but are you willing to risk Barr's wrath?

President Donald Trump implied in a pair of interviews Thursday that he was ready to grant clemency to Roger Stone, his friend and ally who was convicted of, among other things, lying to Congress and is set to go to prison this month.  

Trump is widely expected to pardon or commute Stone's sentence, according to at least half a dozen sources close to the President. 

Asked by Fox News host Sean Hannity whether he's considered a pardon or commutation for Stone, Trump said during a phone interview, "I am always thinking." 

"You'll be watching like everyone else in this case," he said. 

In another interview, with radio host Howie Carr, Trump decried Stone's treatment at the hands of law enforcement and said he may grant his clemency plea. 

"He was framed. He was treated horrible. He was treated so badly," Trump said. 

Told Stone was "praying" for a pardon ahead of the day he is due to report to prison on July 14, Trump said Thursday, those prayers may be worthwhile. 

"If you say he's praying, his prayer may be answered," Trump said. "Let's see what happens." 

Stay tuned.  That pardon could come as soon as tonight.

What will Barr do in response?  Most likely nothing and he'll go around cleaning up the crap all over the floor like he always does, but wouldn't this be funny if it was the last straw?

We'll see.  Should be an interesting weekend to say the least.

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