Hong Kong Crackdown, Con't

China's new national security law making Hong Kong and its citizens subject to Chinese Communist Party draconian diktats has captured its first major global player: Hong Kong pro-democracy media magnate Jimmy Lai and his family.

Police on Monday arrested the media tycoon and activist Jimmy Lai, his sons and several executives of his publishing group for allegedly colluding with foreign forces, a crime punishable by life imprisonment under a sweeping national security law that China recently imposed on Hong Kong.

Officers arrived at the home of Lai and his sons, Mark Simon, a close aide and senior executive at Lai’s media group Next Digital, said in a tweet. Police were executing search warrants, Simon added. He said the alleged crime was colluding with foreign powers. Next Digital is the parent company of Apple Daily, a pro-democracy news outlet critical of Beijing that Lai founded in 1995.

Shortly afterward, more than 200 police entered Next Digital’s offices, according to the company’s Facebook page and a live-stream of the raid, and searched the Apple Daily newsroom. They rifled through reporters’ desks and papers, told employees to show their identification cards, and warned journalists to stop filming and photographing the raid as it unfolded.

The dramatic events were the most drastic use of the security law since it took effect last month, and highlighted the growing threat to the safety of pro-democracy activists and journalists in Hong Kong, where press freedom is supposed to enjoy constitutional protection.

In a statement, the Hong Kong Police Force said it had arrested seven men between the ages of 39 and 72 on suspicion of breaching the security law, without naming the suspects. Police said the operation was continuing. 

The arrests come after the U.S. Treasury Department last week imposed sanctions on Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam and 10 other officials, including Beijing’s envoy in the city, the police commissioner and his predecessor, for eviscerating political freedoms in Hong Kong. The city’s government said it would support Chinese countermeasures, calling the sanctions “shameless and despicable.”

“I have expected this day would come, but I did not expect it to come at this moment, after the U.S. sanctions,” said a journalist at Apple Daily, speaking on the condition of anonymity over fears for their safety. “These arrests are about revenge. They are targeting us, a media outlet which is the most outspoken against the Hong Kong government and Beijing.”

A senior journalist at Apple Daily, also requesting anonymity to protect their safety, added that arresting Lai was “just the first step.”

“Shutting down Apple Daily and threatening other media organizations is the goal — so that no one dares to speak the truth at the end. It is not excessive to say this is the end of Hong Kong press freedom,” the person said.

As bad as things are in the US, they're much worse in China and Hong Kong. The Trump regime wouldn't hesitate to march Jeff Bezos off to federal prison and shut down the Washington Post given the opportunity to do so, and I'm surprised he hasn't done so already.

I fully expect another round of massive protests in Hong Kong to free Jimmy Lai. We'll see how the world responds to China over this. My guess is other than toothless US sanctions, we won't see much.

It would be good for Joe Biden to come out very forcefully this week against China here. Just saying.

Apple Daily is among Hong Kong’s most-read media outlets, and Next Digital employs thousands of staff in the city. Several Next Digital executives were among those arrested Monday, a person familiar with the situation said.

A Conspiracy Of Dunces, Con't

Georgia's runoff election for the GOP primary is Tuesday, and that means avowed racist and conspiracy nutjob Marjorie Taylor Greene will be on the ballot against against neurosurgeon and founder of Cortex Toys, Dr. John Cowan. Georgia's 14th is an R + 27 district on the Cook PVI, so there's little hope for Democratic candidate Kevin Van Ausdal, but the larger problem is since the GOP is a white supremacist racism-tolerant party, Marjorie Greene is favored to win and is receiving no pushback from the GOP leadership.

House GOP leaders raced to disavow a Republican congressional candidate who made racist Facebook videos and embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory. But less than two months later, the party has done little to block Marjorie Taylor Greene from winning a seat in the House. 

Now, Republicans could be days away from adding their most controversial member yet to the conference in a runoff election in Georgia on Tuesday — a scenario that some lawmakers say should have been entirely avoided. 

Of the top three GOP leaders in the House, only House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (La.) has helped Greene’s opponent, neurosurgeon John Cowan, raise money and contributed to his campaign. Outside groups have not made any significant investments in the primary runoff for the solidly red seat, despite pleas from rank-and-file Republicans. And there hasn’t been a tweet from President Donald Trump that could signal to his supporters that they should oppose her.

POLITICO reported in June that Greene had posted hours of Facebook videos where she made a trove of racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic comments — including an assertion that Black people “are held slaves to the Democratic Party,” and that George Soros, a Jewish Democratic megadonor, is a Nazi. 

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said in June — through his spokesman, Drew Florio — that he found those comments “appalling,” and he had “no tolerance for them.” But Florio said last week that the California Republican is remaining neutral and letting the primary process play out — a stance that likely does not signal urgency to donors or outside groups. 

“This is the kind of race and kind of situation where you need those groups,” said Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.), who is actively supporting Cowan. “So often, they only get involved when they have someone that they are trying to get in. But I think it’s just as important they get involved when there’s someone they’re trying to get out.” 

The lack of intervention from national Republicans — despite their public rebukes of Greene — has frustrated and baffled GOP lawmakers, strategists and donors, who worry Greene’s victory would be a black eye for the party at a time when they are still grappling with a national reckoning over racial inequality. 

The GOP needs the racists in order to win.  In an overwhelmingly Republican district, given a choice of a dozen candidates, they're going to end up with the screaming, black-hating anti-Semite because that who the GOP are.

They're okay with racists, and need them to win.

Dig?

StupidiNews!

• Some of the worst flooding in decades has China's Yangtze River Basin inundated, with hundreds of acres of crops destroyed and tens of thousands evacuated from low-lying villages and towns.
• Health officials fear the effectiveness of any COVID-19 vaccine in the US could be limited by the country's growing obesity epidemic, with one in three American adults now obese.
• Protests in Beirut continued for a third day as demonstrators filled the streets after last week's devastating port warehouse explosion that killed hundreds and injured thousands.
• Trump regime officials say that the White House will move to crack down on foreign election interference, but with few details on what the regime will actually do.
• Major security flaws in Qualcomm Snapdragon mobile device chips could put as many as one billion Android phones and tablets at risk of data theft exploits.

Last Call For Europe Sees Us Going Viral

Europeans are flabbergasted that we've allowed Trump to take us to five million COVID-19 cases and rising and want to know what we plan to do about him. Even the Italians think our government is broken.

With confirmed coronavirus cases in the U.S. hitting 5 million Sunday, by far the highest of any country, the failure of the most powerful nation in the world to contain the scourge has been met with astonishment and alarm in Europe.

Perhaps nowhere outside the U.S. is America’s bungled virus response viewed with more consternation than in Italy, which was ground zero of Europe’s epidemic. Italians were unprepared when the outbreak exploded in February, and the country still has one of the world’s highest official death tolls at 35,000.

But after a strict nationwide, 10-week lockdown, vigilant tracing of new clusters and general acceptance of mask mandates and social distancing, Italy has become a model of virus containment.

“Don’t they care about their health?” a mask-clad Patrizia Antonini asked about people in the United States as she walked with friends along the banks of Lake Bracciano, north of Rome. “They need to take our precautions. ... They need a real lockdown.”

Much of the incredulity in Europe stems from the fact that America had the benefit of time, European experience and medical know-how to treat the virus that the continent itself didn’t have when the first COVID-19 patients started filling intensive care units.

Yet, more than four months into a sustained outbreak, the U.S. reached the 5 million mark, according to the running count kept by Johns Hopkins University. Health officials believe the actual number is perhaps 10 times higher, or closer to 50 million, given testing limitations and the fact that as many as 40% of all those who are infected have no symptoms.

“We Italians always saw America as a model,” said Massimo Franco, a columnist with daily Corriere della Sera. “But with this virus we’ve discovered a country that is very fragile, with bad infrastructure and a public health system that is nonexistent.”

Italian Health Minister Roberto Speranza hasn’t shied away from criticizing the U.S., officially condemning as “wrong” Washington’s decision to withhold funding from the World Health Organization and expressing amazement at President Donald Trump’s virus response.

After Trump finally donned a mask last month, Speranza told La7 television: “I’m not surprised by Trump’s behavior now; I’m profoundly surprised by his behavior before.”

With America’s world’s-highest death toll of more than 160,000, its politicized resistance to masks and its rising caseload, European nations have barred American tourists and visitors from other countries with growing cases from freely traveling to the bloc.

France and Germany are now imposing tests on arrival for travelers from “at risk” countries, the U.S. included.

“I am very well aware that this impinges on individual freedoms, but I believe that this is a justifiable intervention,” German Health Minister Jens Spahn said last week.

Europe is now treating us like we should have been treated for decades now: as a broken, white-supremacist theocracy that is a threat to the globe. I can't imagine Americans actually being welcome in a foreign country for the rest of my lifetime at a minimum.

We shouldn't be.  The rest of the world has every right to laugh at us. Removing the Trump infection and regaining the trust of the world will take decades, and it's going to cost us dearly.

Folks, even Italy got their shit together enough to fix the COVID-19 problem.

Italy.

But some of us decided Trump would make a good president. And we'll all have to live with that forever.

Some of us won't live much longer though. 165,000 and counting.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

As Republicans in Congress have failed to pass a COVID-19 relief deal leaving tens of millions of Americans stranded as one in three renters are now expected to miss their August rent payments entirely, Donald Trump has decided that he can now do whatever he wants to through executive order and Congress and the Supreme Court be damned.

President Trump on Saturday attempted to bypass Congress and make dramatic changes to tax and spending policy, signing executive actions that challenge the boundaries of power that separate the White House and Capitol Hill.

At a news event in Bedminster, N.J., Trump said the actions would provide economic relief to millions of Americans by deferring taxes and, he said, providing temporary unemployment benefits. The measures would attempt to wrest away some of Congress’s most fundamental, constitutionally mandated powers — tax and spending policy. Trump acknowledged that some of the actions could be challenged in court but indicated he would persevere.
Trump bemoaned how Democrats had refused to accept his demands during the recent negotiations but attempted to brush it aside, saying four measures he signed Saturday “will take care of pretty much this entire situation.”

But there were instant questions about whether Trump’s actions were as ironclad as he made them out to be. A leading national expert on unemployment benefits said one of the actions would not increase federal unemployment benefits at all. Instead, the expert said it would instead create a new program that could take “months” to set up. And Trump’s directive to halt evictions primarily calls for federal agencies to “consider” if they should be stopped.

Trump also mischaracterized the legal stature of the measures, referring to them as “bills.” Congress writes and votes on bills, not the White House. The documents Trump signed on Saturday were a combination of memorandums and an executive order.

The White House and Democrats have clashed for weeks about what to do with the $600 enhanced weekly unemployment benefit that expired at the end of July.

One of the measures Trump signed on Saturday aims to provide $400 in weekly unemployment aid for millions of Americans. Trump said 25 percent of this money would be paid by states, many of which are already dealing with major budget shortfalls. The federal contribution would be redirected from disaster relief money at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Those funds are not likely to last more than two months, and Trump would not say when the benefits would kick in.

Another document signed by Trump on Saturday attempts to defer payroll tax payments from September through December for people who earn less than $100,000. The impact of this measure could depend on whether companies decide to comply, as they could be responsible for withdrawing large amounts of money from their employees’ paychecks in a few months when the taxes are due.

The president said that if he wins reelection, he would seek to extend the deferral and somehow “terminate” the taxes that are owed. He also dared presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden to try to recoup those tax dollars if elected in November. The payroll tax funds Social Security and Medicare benefits, and it’s unclear where those programs will get funding if the taxes are deferred.

Trump is now fully behind doing whatever he wants to keep Trump in power. He promised he would simply eliminate the payroll tax completely, meaning there would be no tax revenue for Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid and he's now daring Joe Biden and the Democrats to do anything about it.

Even worse, he did all this as performative nonsense at his Bedminster resort in New Jersey on a Saturday.

It's ridiculous, and we have months of this ahead, and politically Trump can actually win here because he once again refuses to play by anyone's rules but his own. There's a 99.9% chance he gets away with this and eliminates Biden's lead. Your Trump friends on Facebook will gladly tell you in a couple of weeks how he "saved" us even though it's his fault we're in this mess.  He creates a disaster and then takes the credit for a minimal cleanup effort while Dems scream and point and by the time anyone pays attention, he's on to the next disaster.

The one issue here is that Trump has officially jettisoned any need for Mitch McConnell anymore. It's not Republicans running away from Trump, it's now Trump running away from McConnell. I predict this is going to blow up in his face very quickly, because if there's anything old white Republican senators will not stand for, it's being made irrelevant by the guy in the Oval Office.

Already Pelosi and Mnuchin want to restart talks. But nothing matters unless the Senate GOP plays ball.

We'll see how this goes.

Sunday Long Read: The Final Torch Job

In this week's Sunday Long Read, Dvora Meyers asks that if in the Age of COVID and Black Lives Matter, the Olympics can and should even bother to exist. There's a non-zero chance that we've already seen the final Summer and Winter Games of the modern Olympics era. 

A year ago, back when we were still allowed to gather in groups larger than a minyan, activists convened in Tokyo to talk about how they were going to end the biggest global gathering of them all — the Olympic Games.

The activists came from all over: past host cities like Rio, London, Nagano, and Pyeongchang; future host cities Paris and Los Angeles; cities that had managed to derail their bids, including Boston and Hamburg; and places like Jakarta, which is gearing up for a 2032 bid.

They were in Tokyo exactly a year out from the scheduled start of the 2020 Summer Olympic Games, attending the first-ever transnational anti-Olympic summit, which was organized by Hangorin no Kai, a group of unhoused and formerly unhoused people based in Tokyo. The activists, along with academics and members of the media, talked about common Games-related issues, like displacement and police militarization, and discussed strategies for resisting local political forces and the IOC to protect their communities. Elsewhere in Tokyo, Thomas Bach, President of the International Olympic Committee, and the rest of the IOC crew had arrived to mark the start of the 365-day countdown to the Opening Ceremonies.

Eight months after these two very different gatherings in Tokyo, the IOC announced that the 2020 Olympics were going to be postponed by a full year due to the COVID-19 global pandemic. By the time they made the announcement, most other major sports tournaments planned for the summer had been canceled or postponed and the athletes, many of whom were shut out of training facilities due to lockdowns, were calling on the IOC to act for over a week. Once the IOC made the inevitable official, the athletes were able to reset and refocus their training on July 2021.

That even a stripped-down version of the 2021 Games will happen is hardly a foregone conclusion. The pandemic may not be under control by then. Even if it is, and even if an effective vaccine against the coronavirus is developed in time, the Games still might not happen. The postponement is likely going to add billions to a budget that was already triple that of the original projection of the Tokyo bid that the IOC had accepted in 2013. Public opinion in Japan seems to be swinging against the Games, too. In a recent survey, 77 percent of respondents said that the Olympics could not be held next year. In another poll, a slim majority of Tokyo residents said the same thing.

The horrors of the pandemic are real and massive. Yet COVID-19 has offered an opportunity to derail the Games — one that didn’t exist just a few months ago and certainly hadn’t existed when the activists came to Tokyo last July. Dr. Satoko Itani, a professor of sport, gender, and sexuality studies at Kansai University, told me that the pandemic is a “powerful wake-up call to the people who otherwise wouldn’t have given a thought about the costs of the Olympics.”

“Now that a lot of people in Japan are counting and monitoring the government’s spending to fight the pandemic, it became ever more clear actually just how much taxpayers’ money we had allowed the TOCOG [Tokyo Organizing Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games] and the government to spend on the two-week-long sport spectacle while we don’t have enough money to equip ‘essential workers’ with the essential protective gear,” they wrote in an email.

The Games’ postponement is happening not just against the backdrop of a global pandemic, but also that of a global uprising against state-sanctioned murders of Black people by the police. The catalyst for this movement was the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis by Derek Chauvin, but the protests quickly spread beyond the Twin Cities to the rest of the U.S. and then around the world, including Japan.

The pandemic, police brutality, and the Olympics are not unconnected events. While COVID-19 might be a virus incapable of racial bias, the course it has taken through the population of the U.S., wending its way through Black, Latinx, and poor communities, was determined by decades of racist policy and discrimination. American police forces have killed Black people for decades with impunity as part of the same system that allowed more African Americans to die from COVID-19 than any other group. It’s also the system that has allowed the Olympic Games in the post-war period to reshape the cities that host the event, rarely for the benefit of all citizens. The Games have been a driving force behind displacement, police militarization, increased surveillance, and violence against the working class and poor people, especially Black and Brown, in the cities where they’ve touched down. The very same groups that the pandemic has disproportionately killed and that the police disproportionately target are those who become the victims, rather than the beneficiaries, of the Olympics.

But people are growing wise to what the Olympic Games are actually about. “It wasn’t 15, 20 years ago you could say, ‘We’re going to have a bid in our city,’ and stand behind the podium and jabber on about jobs and economic upticks floating everybody’s boat, and people just nodded along,” Jules Boykoff told me. (Boykoff is a professor at Pacific University and author of Power Games: A Political History of the Olympics and NOlympians: Inside the Fight Against Capitalist Mega-Sports in Los Angeles, Tokyo and Beyond.) “Today, no way. People aren’t nodding along like they once did.”

Over the last decade, residents of potential Olympic host cities have voted overwhelmingly to reject the Games. The IOC and local organizers have lost referenda in Hamburg, Calgary, Graubünden, Krakow, Munich, Sion, Vienna, and Innsbruck. Activists in other cities like Boston, Budapest, and Graz/Schladming managed to turn public opinion against the Games so decisively that the bids were pulled before the IOC and Olympic boosters could be embarrassed by yet another referendum loss. If the anti-Olympics activists have their way, soon no city will be a safe harbor for the Games.

The arguments after Beijing, London, and Rio especially were that the Olympics were a sign of governmental excess, that the billions each game cost should have been used on citizens, infrastructure and programs, not expensive stadiums and sports facilities.

The calculus on that just got a lot harder to use to justify holding the Games anymore.  I don't think we'll see much of them in the future.

Retribution Execution, Con't

At this point the Trump regime is no longer hiding behind pretense and is actively searching for legal justification to openly disenfranchise as many mail-in ballot voters in the country as it can.

Just because Trump’s claims of rampant mail-in voting fraud aren’t supported by evidence doesn’t mean election experts aren’t concerned about problems holding a presidential election during a pandemic. It’s unknown whether the United States Postal Service can handle a surge of mail-in ballots in a timely fashion, and other officials have cautioned about long lines and a shortage of workers at in-person polling stations, which have been limited during the coronavirus outbreak. 

Some have predicted the crush of remote voting could mean a final winner in the presidential race between Trump and Democrat Joe Biden won’t be known for days or even weeks. Democrats are pushing for $25 billion for USPS in the next coronavirus recovery bill to help address those concerns, but it remains a source of disagreement with Republicans. 

There have already been some some notable delays in down-ballot elections during the pandemic, including one New York race this summer. Six weeks after a Democratic primary for a U.S. House seat, all of the ballots have yet to be counted. 

“This is a rare case where the president is not overstating the case,” argued Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a conservative group that has sued in North Carolina and Pennsylvania over the accuracy of voting rolls. “Frankly he’s understating the problem that I think we are going to face on Election Day. The system is going to break.”
Trump and his team are trumpeting these fears. 

The Trump campaign is holding events touting its legal actions on voting rules. And privately, the White House is debating possible further action, according to two people familiar with the situation. The White House declined to comment on whether Trump would be signing an executive order on the issue. 

“All Americans deserve an election system that is secure and President Trump is highlighting that Democrats’ plan for universal mail-in voting would lead to fraud,” said White House spokeswoman Sarah Matthews. “While Democrats continue to call for a radical overhaul of our nation’s voting system, President Trump will continue to work to ensure the security and integrity of our elections.” 

Trump has spent months railing against mail-in voting as the pandemic raged and his poll numbers dropped nationally and in battleground states. Yet on Tuesday, Trump appeared to change his mind for one battleground state: Florida. He claimed that because the state’s two back-to-back Republican governors — Ron DeSantis and Rick Scott — had managed elections professionally. Sophia Lin Lakin, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Voting Rights Project, dubbed Trump’s action “hypocritical.”
Voting specialists also note that five states — Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington — already conduct elections entirely by mail with few problems. This fall, three additional states — California, Vermont and Nevada — plan to send ballots to registered voters because of the pandemic. 

Voters in most other states can request an absentee ballot by mail without providing a reason. And numerous states are still reviewing their voting policies as coronavirus infections continue to rise. 

Already, Democrats and left-leaning groups are pushing to make voting by mail easier and to educate voters about how to properly cast remote ballots. Republicans are fighting voting rule changes in 17 states, going to court 40 times, drawing on a recently doubled legal budget of $20 million. At the RNC and Trump campaign, 12 staff attorneys and several dozen more outside lawyers are working on the issue across the country, according to an RNC official. 

Republicans have intervened to do just that in numerous states. In Iowa, they sued to prevent third parties from filling out personal information on absentee ballot requests. In Minnesota, they tried to prevent ballots from being sent to inactive voters. And in Nevada, the Trump campaign on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against the state over a plan to send ballots to active registered voters this November. 

“This unconstitutional legislation implements the exact universal vote-by-mail system President Trump has been warning against for months,” said Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser for the Trump campaign. 

Republicans have already won some battles. A Democratic super-PAC and other left-leaning groups agreed to drop a lawsuit over voting rules in Florida after a judge refused to order changes immediately, including a request that the government cover postage costs for mail-in ballots. Another lawsuit seeking to extend the state’s absentee ballot deadline was dismissed in Pennsylvania. 

“All politicians are paranoid about potential fraud in their campaigns. And sometimes rightfully so,” said Pat McCrory, the former Republican governor of North Carolina, who blamed fraud when he lost his 2016 reelection bid by 10,000 votes out of more than 4.6 million ballots cast. “He knows states like Michigan and North Carolina — like last time — could be close.”

At this point I fully expect Trump and the GOP to tie up every red state election result in so much red tape that the country is forced to go to House delegations, which favor Trump. He's going to steal an entire second term and the country will do nothing.

Actually I take that back. We'll try to resist and we'll be cut to pieces for our efforts by his fascist troops.

The Rocky Road To Republican Redemption

Hawaii Democrat (and former Republican) Beth Fukumoto explains her journey from the GOP to the Democratic Party, and unlike 99% of Never Trump Republicans, she actually is doing what it takes to earn a second chance.

I rehearsed the words over and over from the back of the black sedan, hired to take me from my red-eye flight to an event at the Republican National Committee headquarters: “We are committed to electing candidates who reflect the full diversity of our nation.”

It was June 2013. I had come from my home state to D.C., to do one job — announce a $6 million investment from the Republican Party to support candidates of color and women running at the state level.

This initiative was one of many meant to change the course of the GOP following its defeat in the 2012 presidential campaign and the subsequent release of its what-went-wrong report, known as the “Growth and Opportunity Project.”

Without a more inclusive message, better representation, less ideological rigidity, and compassionate immigration and economic policies, the report warned, Republicans would continue to lose national elections. It described a party I wanted to help build.

Over the next year, I recruited people to a party that promised diversity, dialogue and the chance to reimagine its foundation. I wanted a government that would be responsible with its power and judicious in its interventions, a leveler when our systems became unbalanced.

Instead, that party nominated a president who sends federal forces to tame American cities yet refuses to use the power of his office to coordinate an effective response to the novel coronavirus.

There are only so many ways to say, “I was wrong.” I’ve exhausted them all.

As the Republican leader in the Hawaii House, I made compromises that I regret. I spoke out when our presidential candidate said he might have supported Japanese American internment, but I couldn’t find the courage to question the implementation of voter identification laws that I should have understood weren’t designed to protect voters.

I made decisions out of political expediency, or hubris, or naivete. Republicans offered an inclusive vision of “Growth and Opportunity” for all; then we elected a man that didn’t even bother to fake it. I couldn’t make it right. I declined to endorse him and criticized his policies. Then, when he won, I continued to disagree with him in public, and my Republican colleagues said they would strip me of my leadership position unless I promised to stop speaking against him. So, I resigned from the party. A few months later, I joined the Democratic Party.

I drew my red line too late. I’ll answer for my choices publicly and privately for years to come. But admitting your mistakes is one of the best ways to keep from repeating them.

Fukumoto switched parties and was deservedly mauled in the primaries in 2018, coming in a distant 5th for the seat won by current HI-1 Democratic Rep Ed Case. She paid for her crimes with her career. She asked Hawaiian voters to give her a chance to redeem herself as a Democrat, and they told her to go straight to the nearest volcano and take a swan dive.

But at least Fukumoto, unlike 99.99% of Never Trump Republicans, isn't asking for absolution or even forgiveness. She deserves neither and has resigned herself correctly to the fact that she'll never receive either one.

Don't feel sorry for her, she's got a nice job at Harvard as a Kennedy School fellow. She's better off than the vast majority of Hawaii right now.  The point is, she correctly tried to earn a path to redemption, and was rightfully denied it.  She accepted it, and moved on, warning the remaining Republicans a similar fate awaits them this fall and in the years ahead.

I wish her well, actually.  But she can never be part of our political process like she was, and has lost the right to do so. She failed her constituents totally. She has to live with that, but so do her constituents. They are the ones we should reserve our empathy for. Not Beth Fukumoto.

We will not forgive. We will certainly not forget.

Stamp Of Disapproval

Democrats are taking aim at the Trump regime's new Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, a Trump donor and businessman who is doing everything in his power to sabotage the US Postal Service so Americans turn against it and it can be destroyed and privatized, not to mention that DeJoy is trying assure the disenfranchisement of possibly tens of millions of voters who will attempt cast their ballot by mail this year.

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy unveiled a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s mail service, displacing the two top executives overseeing day-to-day operations, according to a reorganization memo released Friday. The shake-up came as congressional Democrats called for an investigation of DeJoy and the cost-cutting measures that have slowed mail delivery and ensnared ballots in recent primary elections.

Twenty-three postal executives were reassigned or displaced, the new organizational chart shows. Analysts say the structure centralizes power around DeJoy, a former logistics executive and major ally of President Trump, and de-emphasizes decades of institutional postal knowledge. All told, 33 staffers included in the old postal hierarchy either kept their jobs or were reassigned in the restructuring, with five more staffers joining the leadership from other roles.

The reshuffling threatens to heighten tensions between postal officials and lawmakers, who are troubled by delivery delays — the Postal Service banned employees from working overtime and making extra trips to deliver mail — and wary of the Trump administration’s influence on the Postal Service as the coronavirus pandemic rages and November’s election draws near.

It also adds another layer to DeJoy’s disputes with Democratic leaders, who have pushed him to rescind the cost-cutting directives that have caused days-long backlogs and steady the Postal Service in the run-up to the election. DeJoy clashed with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), in a meeting on the issue earlier this week.

Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), chair of the House subcommittee responsible for postal oversight, called the reorganization “a deliberate sabotage” to the nation’s mail service and a “Trojan Horse.”

David E. Williams, formerly chief operating officer and executive vice president, will take the role of chief logistics and processing operations officer, a new position for a trusted adviser to former postmaster general Megan Brennan and members of the agency’s governing board. A new organizational chart also gives Williams the title “executive vice president,” though that role was not included in the internal restructuring announcement obtained by The Washington Post. The Postal Service’s Kevin L. McAdams, the vice president of delivery and retail operations and a 40-year USPS veteran, was not listed on the chart.

It’s not clear what the impact of all the changes will be. DeJoy wrote in an internal memo to employees obtained by The Post that the new structure would create “clear lines of authority and accountability,” but others are more skeptical. The USPS publicly released a shorter description of the changes that did not include DeJoy’s remarks to postal workers. The agency declined to comment further on the staffing changes.

“One of the things that’s led to a lot of head scratching is how some of these folks have been reassigned. We’re not sure he put the right players in the right spots, but maybe he sees something we don’t,” said one person with deep knowledge of the leadership team, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to give a candid assessment. “We’re all going to wait and see and hope he’s done the right things, but who knows? It looks as if most of the people we’ve all worked with for years and years are still there, just moved around.”

The Postal Service will implement a hiring freeze, according to the reorganization announcement, and will ask for voluntary early retirements. It also will realign into three “operating units” — retail and delivery, logistics and processing, and commerce and business solutions — and scale down from seven regions to four.

DeJoy is destroying the Postal Service so it can be replaced, and that Americans are forced to pay two to three times more for postage.  Why does Trump hate the Postal Service so much? Like most Republican politicians, Trump can't stand the idea of government that actually works.

For years, the USPS has been the most popular government agency in the United States. According to a Pew Research Center study released in April, 91 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of the Postal Service, and roughly the same percentage of Americans want to bail out the agency. Similarly, countless companies that do business with the Postal Service are fans. Online retailers, including Amazon, even spent millions of dollars on an ad campaign begging lawmakers to save the Postal Service.

These facts leave us with a very curious situation. The Postal Service is seriously struggling, but it’s never been more important. It’s critical to get prescriptions to the homes of people during a pandemic and to deliver ballots to state election boards. It’s even prized by huge corporations like Amazon, who could easily give their money to a competing private company but would rather work with Postal Service. At the same time, President Trump seems to disdain the agency, and the new postmaster general seems to be doing more harm than good.

The upshot of it all is that the USPS has survived difficult moments in the past. The agency can trace its roots back to the days of the American Revolution. Two and a half centuries later, mail service has never been more essential. If anything, a crisis like this could serve to remind the country how much it needs the Postal Service, despite what a handful of powerful people might believe.

Trump is taking advantage of the chaos of 2020 to wreck the Postal Service, a long-term goal of the GOP.  He wants to punish states that conduct safe and effective voting-by-mail with a postal system that's too broken to do the job correctly, and force states to end the practice for all but rich Republicans.

Turning voting-by-mail into a postal poll tax was always the plan.  Ending vote-by-mail for 99% of America is the goal.

The Country Goes Viral, Con't

As the US surpasses 160,000 COVID-19 deaths, a new study from the Institutes for Health Metrics and Evaluation, operated by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, finds that the US could reach 300,000 dead by December 1.

Researchers behind an influential model are projecting that the US death toll from coronavirus could reach nearly 300,000 by December 1 -- but that can be changed if Americans consistently wear masks. 

According to Johns Hopkins University, 159,990 people have died in the United States since the pandemic began. 

"The US forecast totals 295,011 deaths by December," the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation statement says. 

The model doesn't have to come true, said IHME Director Dr. Christopher Murray: "The public's behavior had a direct correlation to the transmission of the virus and, in turn, the numbers of deaths. 

The statement said that if 95% of the people in the US wear face coverings, the number would decrease to 228,271 deaths, and more than 66,000 lives could be saved.
Murray told CNN his group looks at studies on the effects of mask use and the best estimate is they can cut spread by 40%. 

"You get this really huge effect that accumulates over time," he told Anderson Cooper, "because every individual that is wearing the mask is putting the brakes on transmission by 40%. That starts to add up." 

The model comes the same day the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released an ensemble forecast that projects 181,031 deaths by August 29. 

"State-level ensemble forecasts predict that the number of reported new deaths per week may increase over the next four weeks in Hawaii and Puerto Rico and may decrease in Florida, Mississippi, New Mexico, the Northern Mariana Islands, Ohio, Texas, Vermont and the Virgin Islands." the CDC says on its forecasting website. 

The forecast relies on 24 individual forecasts from outside institutions and researchers.

Again, the biggest single factor in preventing deaths would be a national mask mandate, and that will never happen as long as Republicans are in charge.  We're looking at a third of a million deaths by the end of 2020, meaning COVID-19 would be the third leading cause of death in the US this year, behind only heart disease and cancer.

But we'd have to start now, and Donald Trump will simply never allow that to happen, so tens of thousands of Americans will die as the flu season ramps us this fall and COVID becomes even more rampant, overwhelming hospitals and clinics and people die from secondary knock-on effects.

As many people are going to die as Trump allows.

 

Last Call For Legally Bland

The good news is that House Democrats can enforce subpoenas against former Trump White House officials like former WH Legal Counsel Don McGahn.  The bad news, McGahn also gets to challenge that subpoena in court, and is doing so.

House Democrats can sue to force President Trump’s former White House counsel Donald McGahn to comply with a congressional subpoena, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

In a 7-2 decision, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed Congress’s oversight powers and said the House has a long-standing right to force government officials to testify and produce documents. The ruling came in one of a set of historic clashes between the White House and Democratic lawmakers.
The “effective functioning of the Legislative Branch critically depends on the legislative prerogative to obtain information, and constitutional structure and historical practice support judicial enforcement of congressional subpoenas when necessary,” Judge Judith W. Rogers wrote for the majority.

The decision is a legal victory for House Democrats, but the ruling does not mean that McGahn will immediately appear on Capitol Hill. The court sent the case back to the initial three-judge panel, which had ruled against the House, to consider McGahn’s other challenges to the subpoena. The timeline makes it unlikely that the case will be resolved before Congress adjourns in January and the subpoena expires.

The opinion also cleared the way for a second House lawsuit, finding that lawmakers are not barred from going to court to challenge the Trump administration to block the diversion of billions of dollars to build the president’s signature southern border wall. 

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), whose panel issued the subpoena, said the decision in the McGahn case “strikes a blow against the wall of impunity that President Trump has tried to build for himself.”

He pointed to a pair of Supreme Court decisions in July rejecting the president’s claims of sweeping immunity from investigations by a state prosecutor and Congress.

“No one—not even the President—is above the law,” Nadler said in a statement.

In response to the rulings, Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said, “While we strongly disagree with the standing ruling in McGahn, the en banc court properly recognized that we have additional threshold grounds for dismissal of both cases, and we intend to vigorously press those arguments before the panels hearing those cases.”

In other words, the clock will run out before this even gets to the Supreme Court, and I suspect in any future deliberations where the House or Senate of the opposite party of the White House issues subpoenas, they can be run out within the two years of any Congress with this process.

Should Trump win in November, or if Biden wins and the GOP still controls the Senate (both I figure are about 25% chances), we will see this fight play out again in 2021 and 2022.

Householder Of Cards, Con't

The massive bribery scandal in Ohio against former State House Speaker Larry Householder has crossed state lines into Kentucky, as Republican attorney Eric Lycan is being named as the money man behind the multi-billion dollar racket.

An attorney who has served as general counsel for Republican committees and candidates in Kentucky is mentioned in a massive political bribery case in Ohio.

Eric Lycan is affiliated with a political dark money group that is accused by federal prosecutors of serving as a corporate slush fund for indicted former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder.

Lycan incorporated Generation Now as a political 501(c)(4) group in 2017 and serves as its treasurer. It is accused by the FBI of illegally funneling $60 million from FirstEnergy Corp. affiliates to assist the campaigns of political allies of Householder, so that he could pass a $1 billion bailout of two aging Ohio nuclear plants and block an anti-bailout voter referendum.

An FBI affidavit detailing the scheme referred to Lycan as "the attorney" and describes two other unnamed political committees funneling money to campaigns that were incorporated by Lycan: The Growth & Opportunity PAC and the Coalition for Growth & Opportunity. He served as treasurer for both groups.

Lycan served as the general counsel of the Republican Party of Kentucky from 2016 until April 2019 and has served for almost three years as the general counsel of the Republican majority leadership of Kentucky’s House of Representatives.

He also previously served as counsel for the 2014 campaign of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, chairing its Lawyers for Team Mitch group for attorneys supporting his reelection.
Lycan has also served as treasurer of or incorporated several political committees and groups in Kentucky such as Kentucky Rise PAC, a federal super PAC that in 2014 contributed more than $35,000 to a slew of Republican state House candidates and the House Republican Caucus Campaign Committee in the party's attempt to win back the majority in that chamber.

Lycan did not return an email seeking comment on the indictment and Generation Now.

And this all connects back to Mitch McConnell, who has been the country's biggest advocate for exactly the type of dark money groups that fueled the Householder scandal.

This one's got legs, folks.  A lot of people are going down, and not all of them are in Ohio.

Tales Of The Trump Depression, Con't

A par of researchers took a granular look at unemployment by Census tract and found that millions of Americans -- nearly all of them Black and Latino -- live in neighborhoods where unemployment in the Trump Depression is above 30%.

The economic damage from the coronavirus is most visible in areas like Midtown Manhattan, where lunch spots have closed, businesses have gone dark and once-crowded sidewalks have emptied.

But some of the worst economic pain lies in other neighborhoods, in the places where workers who’ve endured the broadest job losses live. In corners of the Bronx, South Los Angeles or the South Side of Chicago, unemployment is concentrated to a breathtaking degree. And that means that other problems still to come — a wave of evictions, deepening poverty, more childhood hunger — will be geographically concentrated, too.
Data estimating neighborhood-level unemployment rates suggests that as many as one in three workers in these areas are jobless, deeply widening economic disparities within cities.

In New York City, it’s as if parts of the Bronx were experiencing the Great Depression while the Upper East Side faced only modest drops in employment, according to Yair Ghitza and Mark Steitz, analysts who have estimated unemployment at the census tract level based on national economic statistics over the last six months.

The federal government doesn’t report unemployment data down to the neighborhood level, so the two researchers modeled these fine-grained statistics in a way that makes them consistent with state and national surveys. Through June, they found most neighborhoods in the Bronx had unemployment rates in excess of 20 percent, while most neighborhoods south of 95th Street in Manhattan had rates less than half that.

“What’s salient and visible right now is the businesses that are shuttered, and the office buildings that are empty,” said Ingrid Gould Ellen, a professor of urban policy and planning at N.Y.U. “What we’re not quite seeing at least the physical manifestations of yet is the really just stark decline in incomes in so many neighborhoods around the city, and in a lot of working-class neighborhoods.”

“We will see them,” she predicted, warning that concentrated distress in these neighborhoods could also have long-term consequences for the children growing up there.

Mr. Ghitza, the chief scientist at Catalist, a Democratic data firm, and Mr. Steitz, a principal at TSD Communications, have tried to solve a large multiplication problem in modeling neighborhood-level unemployment. Official government statistics estimate, for example, the share of residents in a given census tract who are women, the share who are African-American, and the share who work in food service. Using such data, Mr. Ghitza and Mr. Steitz created an educated guess of the number of Black female food-service workers in each tract, then matched those demographics to national monthly unemployment statistics on the occupations and demographic groups most severely affected in this downturn.

The approach makes it possible to gauge employment differences at a finer level of geography than what the government reports. But these estimates also come with much wider room for error than official statistics, and the researchers warn that the results should be viewed alongside other data as policymakers try to understand an economy in free fall.

The resulting maps capture the flip side of recent analyses of private-sector data showing where restaurants have cut hours or where stores have closed their doors. Those business closings have been clustered, too, often in downtown districts where office workers no longer come in, or in wealthy neighborhoods where residents have sharply reduced their spending (or where they have left town altogether).

These maps reflect, instead, where the workers who once staffed those restaurants, bars, hotels and offices commuted home at night.

The maps also highlight how the distinct nature of the coronavirus economic shock has divided cities into neighborhoods where most people can work from home and neighborhoods where most can’t. And because the latter group is disproportionately made up of Black and Hispanic workers, those lines also largely follow patterns of racial segregation, as in Chicago.

It's very possible that these numbers get worse now that unemployment aid has lapsed thanks to the GOP. We're still very much a consumer economy, and if businesses aren't getting any business because people don't have money to spend, they go under and take jobs with them.

It's bad, absolutely bad now.  It's going to be catastrophic in a few months unless we fundamentally change the way aid works in this country.  We could lose a third of small businesses, lose 20% of existing jobs permanently.  We could see average unemployment hit 20% or more and it's awful enough at 14% now.

Another 1.2 million Americans filed for unemployment last week. More than 50 million unemployment claims have been filed in the last four months.

We'll see what Mitch McConnell and the GOP surrenders on this week, but if there's no bill and the Senate goes on vacation until after Labor Day, our economic situation may crumble.

Last Call For Going In Guns Blazing

New York State Attorney General Letitia James is suing the NRA out of existence, and it couldn't be happening to a more deserving criminal enterprise.

The Attorney General of New York took action today to dissolve the National Rifle Association, following an 18-month investigation that found evidence the powerful gun rights group is "fraught with fraud and abuse."

Attorney General Letitia James claims in a lawsuit filed Thursday that she found financial misconduct in the millions of dollars, and that it contributed to a loss of more than $64 million over a three year period.
The suit alleges that top NRA executives misused charitable funds for personal gain, awarded contracts to friends and family members, and provided contracts to former employees to ensure loyalty.

Seeking to dissolve the NRA is the most aggressive sanction James could have sought against the not-for-profit organization, which James has jurisdiction over because it is registered in New York. James has a wide range of authorities relating to nonprofits in the state, including the authority to force organizations to cease operations or dissolve. The NRA is all but certain to contest it.

NPR has reached out to the NRA for comment, but has not received a response.

"The NRA's influence has been so powerful that the organization went unchecked for decades while top executives funneled millions into their own pockets," James said in a statement. "The NRA is fraught with fraud and abuse, which is why, today, we seek to dissolve the NRA, because no organization is above the law."

James' complaint names the National Rifle Association as a whole, but also names four current and former NRA executives: Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre, general counsel John Frazer, former CFO Woody Phillips, and former chief of staff Joshua Powell.

It lists dozens of examples of alleged financial malfeasance, including the use of NRA funds for vacations, private jets, and expensive meals. In a statement, her office said that the charitable organization's executives "instituted a culture of self-dealing, mismanagement and negligent oversight" that contributed to "the waste and loss of millions in assets."

The lawsuit seeks to dissolve the NRA in its entirety and asks the court to order LaPierre and other current and former executives to pay back unlawful profits. It also seeks to remove LaPierre and Frazer from the organization's leadership and prevent the four named individuals from ever serving again on the board of a charity in New York.

My question though is "What's stopping the NRA from setting up shop in Texas or North Dakota?"

We'll find out.

Retribution Execution, Con't

The comically blatant corruption at the Trump regime continues as the "new" Inspector General brought in to bury the previous IG's investigation into Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's criminality is now resigning after just three months.

After less than three months on the job, the internal watchdog of the State Department has resigned, U.S. officials said, marking another significant shake-up for an office sworn to investigate malfeasance and wrongdoing.

Stephen Akard’s departure was announced to staff by his deputy, Diana R. Shaw, who told colleagues that she will become the temporary acting inspector general effective on Friday.

Akard became inspector general after President Trump abruptly fired Steve Linick in May at the recommendation of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. That decision immediately prompted criticism from lawmakers because Linick had been investigating allegations that Pompeo and his wife, Susan, had improperly used State Department resources. Linick was also examining several other issues, including Pompeo’s decision to expedite arms sales to Saudi Arabia over the objections of Congress.
Trump and his administration have come under increasing criticism for trying to evade oversight because the president has fired five officials in recent months who lead inspector general offices across the federal government.

In a note to her inspector general’s office colleagues that was obtained by The Washington Post, Shaw said Akard was taking a position with a law firm in Indiana, his home state. It’s unclear whether there were other factors in his decision.

Pompeo dismissed a question about Akard’s departure during a news conference on Wednesday. “He left to go back home,” Pompeo said. “This happens. I don’t have anything more to add to that.”

Akard’s resignation again throws into turmoil an office responsible for ongoing investigations into wrongdoing at the department, including those started by Linick. Shaw told colleagues: “I will do my best not to let this latest change negatively affect our operations.”

So who knows.  We'll be on the State Department's third IG in three months, and Pompeo will continue to flout federal law while he should be in prison along with Trump and most of the rest of his Cabinet of Corruption.

Just another day in the broken executive branch.