Last Call For An Orange Man With Mail Pattern Badness, Con't

Looks like Westy was right about Postmaster General Louis DeJoy facing House Democrats next week.

West_of_the_Cascades • a day ago

I haven't looked into this, but since the Postal Service is a quasi-autonomous organization (DeJoy isn't directly appointed by the President), it ought to (in theory) be even more illegal for Trump to "block" their testimony - not saying he won't try, but saying that a friendly judge is more likely to rule on an emergency motion to enforce a subpoena if it comes to that, because there's no serious argument that he can't testify.

Looks like Dejoy's lawyer has advised him the same.  Hooray for enlightened self-interest!

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has agreed to House Democrats’ request for him to testify next week about his controversial Postal Service changes that have raised hackles around the nation, according to two people familiar with the matter.

On Sunday, Democrats moved up a request for DeJoy to testify to Monday, Aug. 24, calling it an “urgent” matter. The Oversight and Reform Committee hearing is likely to be tense, with Democrats loudly objecting to changes that have slowed mail delivery in numerous parts of the country amid President Donald Trump’s calls to restrict the use of mail-in ballots for the November election.

A number of Democrats have called on him to resign, and moderate House member Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), even said that he wanted DeJoy, a major Republican Party fundraiser, arrested by the House sergeant at arms if he didn’t agree to testify.

“Over the past several weeks, there have been startling new revelations about the scope and gravity of operational changes you are implementing at hundreds of postal facilities without consulting adequately with Congress, the Postal Regulatory Commission, or the Board of Governors,” House Oversight Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) wrote to DeJoy on Sunday, giving him a deadline of Monday to respond to the testimony invitation.

“Your testimony is particularly urgent given the troubling influx of reports of widespread delays at postal facilities across the country—as well as President Trump’s explicit admission last week that he has been blocking critical coronavirus funding for the Postal Service in order to impair mail-in voting efforts for the upcoming elections in November.”

Maloney also has requested the testimony of Mike Duncan, chairman of the Postal Service’s Board of Governors. Duncan also agreed to testify, according to a person familiar with the matter. Duncan is a former chairman of the Republican National Committee.

A spokesperson for the Postal Service didn’t immediately have a comment.

We'll see what happens on Monday.  It's possible that Trump will move to block the testimony still, but as Westy pointed out, Trump may not be able to. DeJoy's cooperation is probably a very good idea on his part, because the second Trump realizes wrecking the post office in public is hurting him, he'll throw DeJoy under the postal truck.

Should be fun next week.

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Stream Of Unconsciousness

In a post-COVID world, there's little place for movie theaters, and increasingly, for entire movie studios, as NYT columnist Ben Smith opines on the death of Warner Bros.

For decades, the best thing about being a Hollywood executive, really, was how you got fired. Studio executives would be gradually, gently, even lovingly, nudged aside, given months to shape their own narratives and find new work, or even promoted. When Amy Pascal was pushed out of Sony Pictures in 2015, she got an exit package and production deal worth a reported $40 million. 

That, of course, was before streaming services arrived, upending everything with a ruthless logic and coldhearted efficiency. 

That was never more clear than on Aug. 7, when WarnerMedia abruptly eliminated the jobs of hundreds of employees, emptying the executive suite at the once-great studio that built Hollywood, and is now the subsidiary of AT&T. In a series of brisk video calls, executives who imagined they were studio eminences were reminded that they work — or used to work — at the video division of a phone company. The chairman of WarnerMedia Entertainment, Bob Greenblatt, learned that he’d been fired the morning of the day the news broke, two people he spoke to told me. Jeffrey Schlesinger, a 37-year company veteran who ran the lucrative international licensing business, complained to friends that he had less than an hour’s notice, two other people told me. 

“We’re in the brutal final scenes of Hollywood as people here knew it, as streaming investment and infrastructure take precedence,” said Janice Min, the former Hollywood Reporter co-president who did a brief stretch as an executive at the streaming platform Quibi. “Politesse and production deal kiss-offs for those at the top, and, more importantly, the financial fire hose to float a bureaucracy, seem to be disappearing. It’s like a club, already shut down by the pandemic, running out of dues to feed all its members.” 

The drama at Warner marked a turning point, in part because of its huge size and the high profile of the iconic companies under its umbrella: Warner Brothers, HBO and CNN among them. And it comes as Hollywood power is conspicuously absent from the national conversation. Washington is consumed by TikTok, the Chinese-owned video-sharing app that’s the most successful new content platform in the world. TikTok has succeeded as Quibi — Hollywood’s premium alternative to user-generated content — struggles to find an audience. The California politician just nominated for the vice presidency comes from San Francisco, and doesn’t particularly advertise her Hollywood ties (though she was all over Hollywood insiders’ Instagram last week). 

The corporate shifts at WarnerMedia and NBCUniversal in recent days signal that the technological shift you’ve been reading about for years is finally taking concrete form, accelerated by the pandemic. The new leaders of the industry want to talk about digital products and subscription marketing. The most interesting profiles of entertainment executives are, literally, obituaries, notably the catalog of victories and vices that marked the career of Viacom’s founder, Sumner Redstone. 

(Like much of his industry, Mr. Redstone, who died last week at age 97, held on far longer than anyone expected. Former Viacom employees recalled that it had been more than six years since, the then- chief executive, Philippe Dauman, asked his aides to draft a stirring eulogy for Mr. Redstone, who was 90 at the time, and to create a website in his memory. But Mr. Dauman was fired four years ago, there are no plans for him to deliver a eulogy and the website remains on some forgotten digital shelf.) 

Much of what’s happening now in Hollywood, too, has that feeling of a death so long anticipated that you half assumed you’d just missed the funeral. At WarnerMedia, the executives’ firings came after the company badly botched the introduction of a streaming service whose name — HBO Go, HBO Now, or HBO Max — nobody could figure out. The service has primarily distinguished itself so far by its energetic and unsuccessful attempts to spin about 4 million people who have actually used the service into a number north of 30 million.

Disney Plus is trying to sell the live action Mulan remake for $29, the price of an adult movie ticket and two kids tickets and no popcorn.

A year from now most movie theaters in the US will be out of business, but they were headed for the graveyard ever since 9/11 and the Aurora shooting made them soft targets in the back of everyone's minds. All COVID did was speed up the desiccation process.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

If the "suburban housewife" revolt against Trump has reached here, Northern Kentucky outside of Cincinnati, then Trump is going to get butchered.

If you search “suburban housewives” on Facebook—between the pages dedicated to gossiping about the Real Housewives reality shows and one called “A group where we pretend to be suburban PTA housewives”—you will now find at least eight groups dedicated to overthrowing Trump. The group descriptions and membership varies, but the message is the same: Trump cannot count on suburban women to pull him over the line this November.

“Donald Trump used sexist language to describe us as ‘suburban housewives,’” one group description reads. “He also said that we’d be voting for him. He’s wrong.”

“A group of ‘suburban housewives’ whose vote Trump does NOT have—despite what he seems to think,” reads another.

Loni Yeary Gentry, a stay-at-home mother of three from Florence, Kentucky, started the group “Suburban Housewives Against Trump” on Wednesday afternoon. The objective, she said, was to create a space for other Trump critics in her conservative community to speak freely. When she went to bed that night, the group had just over 100 members. When she woke the next day, it had more than 300. At the time of publication, it had 6,000.

To Yeary Gentry’s surprise, the group members included several mothers from her children's Catholic private school—women she had assumed were Trump supporters.
"I think people may make assumptions,” she said. “And I think that's something the president has done, unfortunately, is make assumptions that all white women are going to support him. And we're not."

I don't think people fully appreciate what it's like to have the suburban school soccer moms with kids in Covington Catholic (Remember Nick Sandmann?) and schools like it here around the NKY Cincy exurbs to be in an open Facebook group against Trump.  This is a part of the country where an Obama bumper sticker will get your tires slashed, your car keyed, or your vehicle blocked in by two big Dodge Ram 1500 coal rollers covered in MAGA propaganda and Confederate flags.

If the women here are going to vote for Biden, in Kentucky, a state where Trump should win by 25 points, he's in dire trouble elsewhere, in more diverse suburban precincts.

Indeed, a recent NPR/PBS poll found that 66 percent of suburban women said they disapproved of the job Trump is doing overall, and 58 percent said they "strongly" disapproved. According to The New York Times’ Nate Cohn, Trump trails Biden by 25 percentage points with female voters. And in the 2018 midterms, when a historic wave of Democratic women swept into office, 51 percent of married men voted Republican, while just 44 percent of their wives did the same.

Presidential candidates have long considered the suburbs, which now make up about half the electorate, key to winning their elections. Trump took the suburban vote by 5 percentage points in 2016, and voters there drove him over the finish line in battleground states like Michigan and Wisconsin. That’s likely why his campaign dispatched more than a dozen female surrogates to the suburbs starting last summer, and why he has been increasingly courting them with his “law and order “message.

But Mary Hayes, the founder of a Facebook group called “The Real Suburban Housewives for Biden/Harris,” pointed out a flaw in Trump’s logic: The suburbs are not dominated by the white women who so famously supported him in 2016. By trying to appeal to suburban housewives with racist comments, Hayes said, Trump is alienating a large part of the increasingly diverse group.

Trump even acknowledged the growing diversity of the suburbs in a recent press conference, noting that more than 30 percent of suburban residents are minorities. But he also doubled down on his tweet, claiming that allowing low-income housing in the suburbs would create “lots of problems” and would “destroy suburbia.” (The policy in question, the Obama-era Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, was created to prevent housing discrimination. Biden has pledged to reenact it, but said nothing about Booker being in charge.)

“He might as well have said, ‘The white housewife will be voting for me because I kept the low income [people], or the minorities, or however you want to say it, out of your neighborhoods,’” said Hayes, a Black woman and mother of three from Northern Virginia. “You cannot want to get the vote of somebody and discard certain people in that same community.”

If Trump's anti-coattails carry over to Senate races, it's 2008 all over again, only this time with a real mandate.

StupidiNews!

• Robert Trump, Donald Trump's younger brother, passed away Saturday night from an undisclosed months-long illness in a New York City hospital at age 71.
• As researchers continue to look for a vaccine against COVID-19, pharmaceutical companies are producing record numbers of flue season vaccine doses for use in the US this fall.
• Japan's economy shrank by more than 25% in the second quarter as the country's financial woes are expected to improve somewhat in the third quarter.
• Vladimir Putin is offering military support for Belarus's regime as protesters are filling the streets in Minsk and other cities to demand free and fair elections.
• Justice Department officials say terrorist group ISIS was running a scam website for COVID-19 masks and other medical personal protective equipment.

Last Call For Biden, His Time

The selection of Kamala Harris as Joe Biden's running mate has very quickly solidified the Democratic party base behind him heading into this week's Democratic National Convention.

Helped by a party that seems unified behind him, Joe Biden leads in our current estimate of the Electoral College — the only count that will matter — as his nominating convention begins. The CBS News Battleground Tracker model has Biden up in states worth 279 electoral votes, slightly more than the 270 needed to win in November. To be clear, that doesn't mean Biden will win. This is now.

The electoral map has expanded this summer. Multiple Southern states previously in the Republican column now look to be in play, like Arizona, Georgia, and even Texas. Biden currently leads in the three upper-Midwest states that President Trump narrowly flipped in 2016: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

All that opens up multiple paths for Biden to reach 270, as we have seen widespread movement toward him, rather than shifts in just a few states. We estimate that states worth 96 electoral votes are toss-ups, including others that Mr, Trump won, like Iowa and Ohio. However, states currently leaning toward Biden could go back to toss-up status or even lean Republican if the race changes down the road.

Biden is helped by strong commitment from key parts of the Democratic base, plus gains among groups such as women, especially White women with college degrees. Our statistical model takes into account voting preferences of all kinds of voters throughout each state and nationally, as well as how many of them there are in each state, and produces estimates for all 50 states.

Biden leads Mr. Trump by 10 points in the preference of likely voters nationwide, as he did in July. Here's a closer look at the landscape and key groups across the country.
Among women, voters under 30, and White voters with college degrees, Biden continues to hold a substantial lead. While Mr. Trump maintains a lead among White voters without college degrees, it's narrower than his margin among the group four years ago. On the other hand, White evangelicals continue to overwhelmingly support him.

Biden now leads Mr. Trump among Black voters 90% to 6%. This is higher than the 72% of Black voters who backed Hillary Clinton heading into her nominating convention in 2016.

Biden also holds a sizable lead among Hispanic voters today, helping keep states like Arizona and Texas competitive, and he's nearly doubled his lead among suburban voters since July — extending a seven-point lead to 13 points today.

The biggest news is that at least in the CBS polling, Biden has closed the enthusiasm gap.



Biden is in a very strong position with 80 days to go.  We'll see if he and Kamala can hold on to or God willing, increase this lead.

An Orange Man With Mail Pattern Badness, Con't

Realizing that House Democrats can't do anything about saving the US Postal Service from home (and also how hideously bad it looks for Dems to be complaining while taking an entire month off) Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer are considering bringing the House back to session early for hearings and oversight.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Democratic leaders are considering cutting short the August recess and bringing the chamber back into session to deal with the unfolding crisis at the U.S. Postal Service, according to Democratic sources.

The House could return to vote with the next two weeks, the Democratic sources suggested. The chamber is currently in recess, with no votes scheduled until the week of Sept. 14.

Pelosi and other top Democrats, including House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), discussed the possibility of returning early during an emergency leadership call Saturday afternoon.

Democrats are looking to address organizational issues at the Postal Service in the coming weeks, not to provide additional funding at this time, according to sources familiar with the discussion.

One option would be to vote on a modified version of a bill introduced by House Oversight Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) earlier this week that would prohibit USPS from implementing a planned organizational overhaul that critics maintain would handicap mail-in voting.
Other top Democrats also floated addressing other issues, including expired federal unemployment benefits and voting rights. But Democratic sources said the immediate focus — at least for now — is preserving the Postal Service ahead of the election.

On Friday, Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) issued a scathing statement accusing President Donald Trump and Republicans of waging an “all-out assault on the Postal Service and its role in ensuring the integrity of the 2020 election.” Their statement came after Trump said he opposes a federal infusion of funds to save the flailing postal service because he doesn’t support mail-in voting.

“The President made plain that he will manipulate the operations of the Post Office to deny eligible voters the ballot in pursuit of his own re-election,” Pelosi and Schumer said. “The President’s own words confirm: he needs to cheat to win.”

Legislation that would never be taken up by the Senate is one thing, but prime time hearings where Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has to defend wrecking the Postal Service live on TV while America watches is what has to happen. And it looks like the House is in fact swinging into action as early as next week.

The House Oversight Committee will hold an emergency hearing on mail delays and concerns about potential White House interference in the U.S. Postal Service, inviting Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and Postal Service board of governors Chairman Robert M. Duncan to testify Aug. 24, top Democrats announced on Sunday.

Democrats have alleged that DeJoy, a former Republican National Committee chairman, is taking steps that are causing dysfunction in the mail system and could wreak havoc in the presidential election. The House had earlier not planned a hearing until September.

“The postmaster general and top Postal Service leadership must answer to the Congress and the American people as to why they are pushing these dangerous new policies that threaten to silence the voices of millions, just months before the election,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), House Oversight Chair Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.), Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) said in a statement announcing the hearing.

I fully expect the White House to block DeJoy and Duncan from showing up, saying that neither can be made available for the duration of the "busy election season" and a subpoena will take years to process thanks to the Supreme Court, so that means Pelosi needs to be ready to compel testimony through inherent contempt if necessary.

If DeJoy doesn't show, I expect the Dems will gladly be willing to share the stories of folks not getting their prescriptions, checks, and supplies on national TV for several hours as counter-programming to the Republican convention.

It should make for sobering theater.

Sunday Long Read: Inside The Blast Zone

Our Sunday Long Read is a sobering reminder that given the state of the country right now and the man in the Oval Office, the FBI should be expecting another October Surprise like we had in 2018 when mail bombs showed up at the addresses of Trump critics. Wired Magazine's Garrett Graff takes us through the hunt for the MAGA Bomber in October 2018.

WEIRD THINGS HAPPEN in and around New York City nearly every day, so the appearance of a suspicious package at George Soros' residence in Westchester County didn't initially raise many eyebrows at the FBI's hulking New York field office.

Late on the evening of Monday, October 22, 2018, the office received an alert known as a “nine-liner”—a brief update on an unfolding situation that, in the classic muddle of government communications, is actually 11 lines long. As a routine precautionary response, a team of bomb techs headed to Katonah, New York, to examine the yellow padded envelope. Given the rarity of mail bombs—the US Postal Service encounters about 16 a year, amid plenty of hoaxes—the technicians had good reason to expect it was a false alarm.

But they quickly sent an update when they arrived on the scene: “Boss, we found some energetic material,” an agent on the ground reported by phone to William Sweeney, the FBI assistant director in charge of the New York office. “We have a viable device.”

Sweeney, a 20-year veteran of the bureau, had spent the bulk of his career in the tri-state area and now oversaw the agency's largest, most powerful, and most politically fraught office, comprising more than 2,000 agents, analysts, surveillance specialists, and other personnel, who handled everything from Italian mobsters to Russian spies at the UN. His friendly neighborhood-dad persona belied his role as one of the FBI's most important feudal lords, and he was no stranger to terrorism cases. A year earlier, when a would-be suicide bomber had targeted the Port Authority bus terminal in 2017, the suspect's body was still smoking from his incompletely detonated pipe bomb when Sweeney arrived on the scene. Now, Sweeney knew that the follow-up call from the agents in Katonah would change the night's rhythm dramatically. An actual working bomb? “That starts the machine,” Sweeney says.

Multiple FBI teams were dispatched, including the office's terrorism unit. One investigator's initial theory was that this was an inside job: The package had appeared in a mailbox at the Soros residence that was surveilled by a faulty security camera, which meant there was no record of how it got there. How would anyone but Soros' house staff know that the camera guarding the mailbox was inoperative?

But the next day, the Secret Service discovered a similar package at the nearby residence of Hillary Clinton, addressed to the 2016 presidential candidate. And with that, the “174 case,” FBI code for a bombing investigation, morphed into a “266 case”: an investigation into domestic terrorism.

By Wednesday at 8 am, news of the bomb at the Soros residence made the morning show at CNN; commentator John Avlon ran a segment about how Soros had long been a target of conservative and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Then, as CNN anchors Jim Sciutto and Poppy Harlow were anchoring their 9 am show, the alert came that a suspicious device had appeared in CNN's own mail room. (It was intended for former CIA director and TV commentator John Brennan, who was actually a regular fixture on CNN's competitor, MSNBC.)

As the NYPD-FBI bomb squad rushed to the scene, authorities decided to lock down much of Columbus Circle, evacuating the 55-floor Time Warner Center and closing a subway station. Tens of thousands of workers poured out of their offices and shops. Sciutto and Harlow evacuated their studio but continued to report on the unfolding situation from the street, via Skype and cell phones, along with their colleagues. Bomb technicians loaded the device into one of the NYPD's three “total containment vessels”—a specially configured truck with a round, reinforced storage unit able to absorb a bomb's blast—and a six-vehicle convoy of police and fire vehicles hustled the bomb to an NYPD firing range in the Bronx. From the scene, Sweeney called one of his deputies: “Set up the JOC.” It was time to open the crisis command center, the Joint Operations Center, in Chelsea. The country had a serial bomber on its hands.

The hours ahead would see a Herculean mobilization of federal resources and a nationwide manhunt, equaled in the past decade perhaps only by the search for the Boston Marathon bombing suspects. What none of the investigators knew, though, was how much the Hunted Man himself seemed to be enjoying the coverage. As CNN broadcast the breaking news about the unfolding terror campaign, he wandered into a tire store and smiled broadly as he watched the chaos unfold on TV.

The convicted MAGA bomber, Cesar Sayoc, was created by Donald Trump.  Who knows how many more are out there?

I fear we'll find out in the next few months.

Last Call For A Conspiracy Of Dunces, Con't

As Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman points out, we know exactly what the post-Trumpian GOP looks like. It's the party of dangerous cult conspiracy QAnon, a Christian white supremacist group that promotes lethal terrorist violence against a "global cabal" of Democrats, Hollywood actors, wealthy philanthropists, religious figures and tech business leaders as "pedophiles", who justify deadly attacks on people by saying they have to be put down by any means possible in order to "save children".

Should President Trump lose in November, the Joe Biden presidency will be the target of some kind of angry far-right movement consumed with conspiracy theories. We know this because it’s what always happens when a Democrat gets elected. But how widespread it becomes and how much it affects mainstream politics are uncertain; it could be as influential as the tea party during Barack Obama’s time in office, or as fringe as the militia movement was during Bill Clinton’s.

The leading contender is already taking shape and working its way into the GOP: the lunatic conspiracy theory known as QAnon. It already has its first soon-to-be member of Congress, along with a raft of candidates who have captured Republican nominations for a number of offices, including in the U.S. Senate. And it has establishment Republicans confused and uncertain, aghast at what it represents but too cowardly to purge it from their ranks.

In case you’re not familiar, QAnon began a few years ago with posts on 4chan claiming that an anonymous government insider (“Q") was revealing the hidden forces behind all current events. The theory posits that Trump is a messianic figure at war with an international cabal of satanic, cannabalistic pedophiles; at any moment, the president (who in some tellings was partnering in this effort with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III) will expose his enemies and cart them all off to Guantanamo Bay. The FBI believes QAnon poses a domestic terrorism threat.

At Trump rallies, you could see signs and T-shirts promoting QAnon, and the Trump campaign has courted the movement’s adherents. For a president who is, himself, both a consumer and an advocate of all manner of conspiracy theories, it was an easy fit.

To get some clues about what might happen after the election, we can look at the case of Marjorie Taylor Greene, who this week won a runoff in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, all but guaranteeing her a seat in Congress.

Greene has a lengthy history of not just promoting QAnon but of posting racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim videos online. When she won the runoff, Trump tweeted his congratulations, calling her a “future Republican Star” and “a real WINNER!” Sen. Kelly Loeffler and Rep. Douglas A. Collins, competing for a Senate seat in Georgia, both applauded Greene’s victory. “It’s clear that we need more outsiders with business sense in Washington,” said Loeffler.

If Greene were alone, it might not be so important. But QAnon followers have won Republican nominations for U.S. Senate in Oregon and for House seats in Arizona, California, Colorado, Illinois, Nevada, New Jersey, Ohio and Texas. Media Matters for America has identified 70 Republican congressional candidates who have promoted QAnon this year.

And how have Republicans in Congress reacted? Only one, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.), had the courage to say that there is “no place in Congress for these conspiracies.” In response, the Trump campaign attacked him. Politico reported that the House Freedom Caucus, the home of far-right congressional Republicans, is “actively supporting Greene and recruited her to run for the deep red seat instead of a more competitive one.” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) — who had criticized Greene’s views before — released a statement saying he looked forward to her winning in November.

There are some conservatives condemning Greene and what she represents. But that happened during the early days of the tea party, too.

Greene and the QAnon caucus coming in 2021 will be indicative of the kind of violent backlash Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be facing should they (hopefully!) win. Make no mistake though, the Biden presidency is most likely going to be marked by waves of deadly white supremacist terrorist violence from the right.

At the very least, it's going to be marked by these conspiracy nutjobs being all over our screens like the Tea Party was ten years ago.

An Orange Man With Mail Pattern Badness

Trump is literally destroying the capacity of the US Postal Service to do its Constitutionally-appointed job by cutting hours, cutting deliveries, and removing mail-sorting machines and destroying them, and the plan to do this has been in the works for months now.

The United States Postal Service proposed removing 20 percent of letter sorting machines it uses around the country before revising the plan weeks later to closer to 15 percent of all machines, meaning 502 will be taken out of service, according to documents obtained by Motherboard outlining the agency’s plans. USPS workers told Motherboard this will slow their ability to sort mail.

One of the documents also suggests these changes were in the works before Louis DeJoy, a top Trump donor and Republican fundraiser, became postmaster general, because it is dated May 15, a month before DeJoy assumed office and only nine days after the Board of Governors announced his selection.

The title of the presentation, as well as language used in the notice to union officials, undermines the Postal Service’s narrative that the organization is simply “mov[ing] equipment around its network” to optimize processing, as spokesperson Dave Partenheimer told Motherboard on Thursday. The May document clearly calls the initiative an “equipment reduction.” It makes no mention of the machines being moved to other facilities. And the notice to union officials repeatedly uses the same phrase. Multiple sources within the postal service told Motherboard they have personally witnessed the machines, which cost millions of dollars, being destroyed or thrown in the dumpster. USPS did not respond to a request for comment.

In May, the USPS planned to remove a total of 969 sorting machines out of the 4,926 it had in operation as of February for all types of letters and flat mail. The vast majority of them—746 out of 3,765 in use—were delivery bar code sorters (DBCS), the type that sort letters, postcards, ballots, marketing mail and other similarly sized pieces. But a subsequent document distributed to union officials in mid-June said 502 of those machines would be removed from facilities.

The May document, titled “Equipment Reduction,” breaks down the exact number of machines the USPS slated to remove by region and facility. Although the document uses terms like “proposed reduction” and “reduction plan” and does not reflect the USPS’s final plan, it provides a general picture of the sweeping changes previously reported by Motherboard about mail sorting machines being removed around the country. It also shows that USPS management is undertaking a broad reduction of the agency’s ability to sort and process all types of mail, except for packages which have been steadily increasing in recent years before booming during the pandemic.

Further, the timeline of the May document did not come to pass. It proposed a plan resulting in the machines being removed by the end of July, but that didn’t happen. Interviews with six postal workers and union officials around the country, who spoke to Motherboard on condition of anonymity because they’re not authorized to speak to the media, revealed these machine removals are still occurring in Michigan, West Virginia, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Texas.

More machine removals are planned in the months ahead. The document sent to union officials in June shows an updated plan to extend the machine removal timeline through the first quarter of 2021.

The Postal Service now says thanks to Trump shooting them in the head on Fifth Avenue, that it can no longer guarantee mail-in ballots can be delivered on time to state voting officials in November.

Anticipating an avalanche of absentee ballots, the U.S. Postal Service recently sent detailed letters to 46 states and D.C. warning that it cannot guarantee all ballots cast by mail for the November election will arrive in time to be counted — adding another layer of uncertainty ahead of the high-stakes presidential contest.

The letters sketch a grim possibility for the tens of millions of Americans eligible for a mail-in ballot this fall: Even if people follow all of their state’s election rules, the pace of Postal Service delivery may disqualify their votes.
The Postal Service’s warnings of potential disenfranchisement came as the agency undergoes a sweeping organizational and policy overhaul amid dire financial conditions. Cost-cutting moves have already delayed mail delivery by as much as a week in some places, and a new decision to decommission 10 percent of the Postal Service’s sorting machines sparked widespread concern the slowdowns will only worsen. Rank-and-file postal workers say the move is ill-timed and could sharply diminish the speedy processing of flat mail, including letters and ballots.

The ballot warnings, issued at the end of July from Thomas J. Marshall, general counsel and executive vice president of the Postal Service, and obtained through a records request by The Washington Post, were planned before the appointment of Louis DeJoy, a former logistics executive and ally of President Trump, as postmaster general in early summer. They go beyond the traditional coordination between the Postal Service and election officials, drafted as fears surrounding the coronavirus pandemic triggered an unprecedented and sudden shift to mail-in voting.

Some states anticipate 10 times the normal volume of election mail. Six states and D.C. received warnings that ballots could be delayed for a narrow set of voters. But the Postal Service gave 40 others — including the key battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida — more-serious warnings that their long-standing deadlines for requesting, returning or counting ballots were “incongruous” with mail service and that voters who send ballots in close to those deadlines may become disenfranchised.

“The Postal Service is asking election officials and voters to realistically consider how the mail works,” Martha Johnson, a spokeswoman for the USPS, said in a statement.

In response to the Postal Service’s warnings, a few states have quickly moved deadlines — forcing voters to request or cast ballots earlier, or deciding to delay tabulating results while waiting for more ballots to arrive.

Pennsylvania election officials cited its letter late Thursday in asking the state’s Supreme Court for permission to count ballots delivered three days after Election Day. But deadlines in many other states have not been or cannot be adjusted with just weeks remaining before the first absentee ballots hit the mail stream. More than 60 lawsuits in at least two dozen states over the mechanics of mail-in voting are wending their way through the courts.

Because the Trump regime is deliberately destroying the US Postal Service, the next several months will now be one huge chaotic binge of voting lawsuits that critically breaks our capacity to hold free and fair elections, with Donald Trump anticipating that he'll be able to steal the election regardless of the outcome with the help of enough GOP state legislatures, Republican US House delegations, and the US Supreme Court.

The Republican party would rather destroy American democracy than allow half the country to vote during a pandemic.

If we do not fight this now, they will destroy it.

Your members of Congress are home for the rest of the month.  It's time to give your Representatives and Senators a call at their home offices and make it clear this isn't going to be allowed to happen without a fight.


 

Time To Vote In Kentucky

In a major win for democracy and voting rights here in Kentucky, Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear and GOP Secretary of State Michael Adams announced at a joint press conference a deal to allow all Kentuckians concerned about COVID-19 to request ballots to vote by mail as soon at the end of next week.

Kentucky will not be using no-excuse absentee voting by mail for the upcoming Nov. 3 elections, Gov. Andy Beshear and Secretary of State Michael Adams announced Friday.

Unlike with the June 23 primaries, Kentucky's registered voters will have to provide a reason for why they need to vote by absentee ballot in November. Anyone concerned about their own health or compromising another persons' health can request an absentee ballot.

All ballots have to be postmarked by Nov. 3 and received by county clerks by Nov. 6. County clerks will have drop-off boxes for anyone concerned about sending in their ballots by mail.

No-excuse early voting, which was permitted for the first time in June for two weeks leading up to Election Day for the June primaries, is included in Beshear's and Adams' plan for November.

Starting on Oct. 13, registered voters will have the option to cast their ballot early in-person for three weeks heading into Nov. 3. And while polls were open for early in-person voting Monday through Friday in June, this time around, they will also be open on Saturday.

Beshear, a Democrat, praised Adams, a Republican, for "putting ideology on the shelf."

"I don't really think that this was too much of a negotiation going back and forth (on Adams' plan)," Beshear said Friday. "I think we both wanted a successful election where we could protect people's health, and we believe will be one of the larger turnouts we've seen because of there are so many options to vote."

The online portal for requesting ballots should be up by August 21, Beshear said.  And three weeks of early voting, including Saturdays? That's just as amazing.

This is a good deal and I'm shocked by how good it is.
Hey, I fear COVID-19, I have several comorbidity issues, I'm requesting my ballot ASAP and voting and turning it in.

If you can do the same in your state, do it. Get that ballot, mail it in well before November 4th.

The Country Goes Viral, Con't

The real death toll from COVID-19 in the United States is over 200,000 and growing, because states and counties don't have the resources to properly test and autopsy every death anymore thanks to Trump. The number of additional deaths in the US are at least that high above CDC statistics.

Across the United States, at least 200,000 more people have died than usual since March, according to a New York Times analysis of estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This is about 60,000 higher than the number of deaths that have been directly linked to the coronavirus.

As the pandemic has moved south and west from its epicenter in New York City, so have the unusual patterns in deaths from all causes. That suggests that the official death counts may be substantially underestimating the overall effects of the virus, as people die from the virus as well as by other causes linked to the pandemic.

When the coronavirus first took hold in the United States in March, the bulk of deaths above normal levels, or “excess deaths,” were in the Northeast, as New York and New Jersey saw huge surges.

The Northeast still makes up nearly half of all excess deaths in the country, though numbers in the region have drastically declined since the peak in April.

But as the number of hot spots expanded, so has the number of excess deaths across other parts of the country. Many of the recent coronavirus cases and deaths in the South and the West may have been driven largely by reopenings and relaxed social distancing restrictions.

Counting deaths takes time and many states are weeks or months behind in reporting. The estimates from the C.D.C. are adjusted based on how mortality data has lagged in previous years. Even with this adjustment, it’s possible there could be an underestimate of the complete death toll if increased mortality is causing states to lag more than they have in the past or if states have changed their reporting systems.

But comparing recent totals of deaths from all causes can provide a more complete picture of the pandemic’s impact than tracking only deaths of people with confirmed diagnoses.

The numbers are staggering.

When the history of 2020 is written, it will be America's lasting shame for generations.

Well, that is if Biden and Harris win.  If they don't, Trump will write that history.

Last Call For Mitch Quits On A Deal

The Senate has adjourned for August recess with no deal.

The Senate left Washington, D.C., on Thursday until September — the latest sign that a deal on a fifth coronavirus relief package is, at least, weeks away.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had kept the chamber in session this week, which was technically the first in its August recess, as a last-ditch attempt to create space for the administration and congressional Democrats to get an agreement.

But with talks stalemated, senators argue there is little reason for them to keep holding daily, roughly 1 1/2-hour sessions. The House already left town and isn't expected to return until Sept. 14.

“We will have our regular pro forma meetings through the end of the state work period. If the Speaker of the House and the minority leader of the Senate decide to finally let another package move forward … it would take bipartisan consent to meet for legislative business sooner than scheduled,” McConnell said as he wrapped up the Senate until next month.

McConnell added that he hoped the Senate would be able to “act sometime soon.”

Senators will get at least 24 hours notice to return if congressional Democrats, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows are able to break the impasse and votes are scheduled. Otherwise, the Senate will formally reconvene on Sept. 8.

The House passed the HEROES Act three months ago.  The Senate GOP has blocked everything since then. This is one hundred percent the GOP's fault. They can't even pass a bill with their own majority caucus.  Nancy Pelosi is running the show and Senate Republicans, facing angry voters, will crack.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday that the high-stakes talks between the White House and Democrats on coronavirus relief will resume only when Republicans come to the table with at least $2 trillion.
"When they're ready to do that, we'll sit down," Pelosi told reporters in the Capitol.

The comments foreshadow a rocky road ahead as the parties haggle over a fifth round of emergency relief designed to address the health needs and economic devastation caused by the pandemic, which has hit the United States harder than any other country.

Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) had huddled with the White House negotiators — Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and chief of staff Mark Meadows — for a full two weeks when the talks broke down last Friday.

Quite aside from specific policy prescriptions, the sides have not yet agreed to the overall size of the next aid package.

Pelosi and House Democrats had passed a $3.4 trillion relief bill in May, while Senate Republicans responded late last month with a $1.1 trillion counterproposal.

The Democrats last week had offered to meet in the middle — somewhere in the $2 trillion range — but the Republicans refused the offer, ending the talks indefinitely.

Things are going to change rapidly for the GOP when the polls start showing them losing by double digits, would be my guess. 

Lowering The Barr, Con't

Attorney General Bill Barr is making it very clear that results of the show trial investigations into the Obama administration and the Biden campaign will absolutely be released during the election to help Donald Trump, coming as Trump's direct orders.

Attorney General Bill Barr said he could reveal at least some findings of a federal prosecutor’s examination of the origins of the Russia investigation before the November general election.

Speaking at a roundtable in Cheyenne, Wyo., on Thursday, Barr said that U.S. Attorney John Durham, who Barr appointed to review the origins of the Russia probe, “is moving along purposefully, and we certainly are aware of the calendar,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

“We’ll develop this case to the extent we can before the election, and we’ll use our prudent judgment to decide what’s appropriate before the election and what should wait until after the election,” Barr said.

Thursday evening Barr said on Fox News that there will be "a development" in the investigation on Friday. 

Durham’s investigation follows Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report that found “significant inaccuracies and omissions” in the FBI’s application to a court to obtain permission to monitor Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

But the report also determined the FBI’s decision to investigate the campaign was not motivated by political bias, as President Trump has suggested. The president voiced his impatience with the speed of the investigation on Thursday.

There's no rhetoric here from Barr about the Justice Department's long-standing guidelines to not interfere with an election cycle, only about how much of the interference will be happening before and after November. Barr is not only making it clear that an obviously political snow job is coming, but that a selected group of the Justice Department will be in place to openly attack Biden, Harris, and the Democrats through the transition period after the election.

In other words, it's Barr actually executing what Trump accused the Obama administration of doing four years ago. And should Trump win, the investigations will almost certainly become indictments. If you thought Trump and Barr were unfettered now, wait until they've stolen the election and are locking up dissidents in a second term.

And a third.

And a fourth.

Again, the only way to stop them is to drown them in Democratic (and democratic!) votes, in margins too big to manipulate, in every state.

The Bluenami Tsunami Meets The Blue Shift

As I said yesterday, we're likely in for ore of Election Month than we are Election Day in November. It may take weks to count all the mail ballots, and the big Democratic voter shift to voting by mail is going to be the future of elections in the 21st century as The Atlantic's David Graham explains.

As polling places closed on November 6, 2018, the expected “blue wave” looked more like a ripple. Not only had some of the highest-profile Democratic candidates lost, but the party’s gains in the House and the Senate looked smaller than anticipated.

The wave, it turned out, simply hadn’t crested yet. Over the ensuing weeks, as more ballots were counted, Democrats kept winning races—eventually netting 41 House seats. In Arizona, the Republican Martha McSally conceded the Senate race to the Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, who picked up more than 70,000 votes in post–Election Day counting. Democrats narrowed deficits in races in Florida and Georgia too. Republicans were stunned.

“California just defies logic to me,” then-Speaker Paul Ryan said in late November. “We were only down 26 seats the night of the election and three weeks later, we lost basically every contested California race.”

This sort of late-breaking Democratic vote is the new, though still underappreciated, normal in national elections. Americans have become accustomed to knowing who won our elections promptly, but there are many legitimate votes that are not counted immediately every election year. For reasons that are not totally understood by election observers, these votes tend to be heavily Democratic, leading results to tilt toward Democrats as more of them are counted, in what has become known as the “blue shift.” In most cases, the blue shift is relatively inconsequential, changing final vote counts but not results. But in others, as in 2018, it can materially change the outcome.

Although it is slowly dawning on the press and the electorate that Election Day will be more like Election Week or Election Month this year, thanks to coronavirus-related complications, the blue shift remains obscure. But the effect could be much larger and far more consequential in 2020, as Democrats embrace voting by mail more enthusiastically than Republicans. If the public isn’t prepared to wait patiently for the final results, and if politicians cynically exploit the shifting tallies to cast doubt on the integrity of the vote, the results could be catastrophic.

Imagine that as November 3, 2020, ticks away, President Donald Trump holds a small lead in one or more key states such as Pennsylvania—perhaps 10,000 or 20,000 votes—and seems to have enough states in his column to eke out an Electoral College win. Trump declares victory, taunts Joe Biden, and prepares for a second term. But the reported results on Election Night omit tens of thousands of votes, including provisional ballots and uncounted mail-in votes. Over the coming days, as those votes are counted, Trump’s lead dwindles and eventually disappears. By the end of the week or early the next, Biden emerges as the clear victor in Pennsylvania—and with that win, captures the race for the presidency.

If that’s how things unfold, Trump is unlikely to take defeat snatched from the jaws of victory graciously. He has already spent months attempting to delegitimize the election system. So imagine that he instead cries fraud and insists he’s the target of a criminal Democratic coup. What if he encourages his supporters to take to the streets, where there are violent clashes between partisans? He might even urge the Republican-led Pennsylvania General Assembly to submit a slate of Trump-backing electors, citing the Election Day returns, even if the full tally clearly shows Keystone State voters chose Biden.

The hypothetical of a blue shift reversing the early projected winner is the “nightmare scenario,” according to the election-law expert Rick Hasen. Either Trump or Biden could win by a sufficient margin to make the result clear on Election Night; it’s also possible that multiple states might see a decisive post–November 3 blue shift, creating even more chaos.

“You don’t need to worry about Russia,” Edward Foley, a law professor at Ohio State, told me. “Simply anxiety over a blue shift and willingness to litigate about it and fight about it could cause a raging contestation over a presidential election.”

In other words, November 2020 could make November 2000 look like a walk in the park, and there's no reason for me to believe the outcome if the voting goes to the Supreme Court that it would be any different than 2000.

We have to win in numbers too big to ignore.

StupidiNews!

• Russia is offering to share its "Coronavirus vaccine" with the United States, but US health officials are openly skeptical and warn that the vaccine falls far short of US standards.
• Convicted former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen's new book promises evidence of Russian collusion and Las Vegas sex parties, among other things.
• Israel and the UAE have reached a new deal on recognition of the Jewish state and normalization of diplomatic relations with US assistance as all three leaders face protests at home.
• The White House is now saying there are no plans to end the payroll tax permanently, despite Donald Trump making exactly that campaign promise earlier this week as a White House press conference.
• After attempts to skirt platform microtransaction rules, Epic Games is suing Apple for pulling popular game Fortnite from the App Store as Google plans a similar removal of the game.