Last Call For Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Anti-Black racism literally begins from birth in America.

Black newborn babies in the United States are more likely to survive childbirth if they are cared for by Black doctors, but three times more likely to die when looked after by White doctors, a study has found. 

The mortality rate of Black newborns shrunk by between 39% and 58% when Black physicians took charge of the birth, according to the research, which laid bare how shocking racial disparities in human health can affect even the first hours of a person's life. 

By contrast, the mortality rate for White babies was largely unaffected by the doctor's race. 

The findings support previous research, which has shown that, while infant mortality rates have fallen in recent decades, Black children remain significantly more likely to die early than their White counterparts. 

Researchers from George Mason University analyzed data capturing 1.8 million hospital births in Florida between 1992 and 2015 for the new study, which was published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, also known as PNAS. 

When cared for by White physicians, Black newborns were about three times more likely to die in the hospital than White newborns, the researchers found. 

"Strikingly, these effects appear to manifest more strongly in more complicated cases, and when hospitals deliver more Black newborns," the authors wrote. "The findings suggest that Black physicians outperform their White colleagues when caring for Black newborns." 

The authors did not speculate about the reasons behind the trend, but wrote: "Taken with this work, it gives warrant for hospitals and other care organizations to invest in efforts to reduce such biases and explore their connection to institutional racism." 

"Reducing racial disparities in newborn mortality will also require raising awareness among physicians, nurses, and hospital administrators about the prevalence of racial and ethnic disparities," the researchers added. 

There's a minuscule chance that it's just the state of Florida that's this bad, but frankly I'd suspect that not only is Black prenatal and postnatal care this bad nationally, it's probably far worse than just "three times more likely to die" for Black babies in other states.  I'd imagine in Mississippi or Alabama, it's ten or twenty or more.

It's that third sentence that gets me though.

"By contrast, the mortality rate for White babies was largely unaffected by the doctor's race. "

White babies are fine.

Black babies die.

Black lives still matter.

Convention Connection, Day 2

The Democrats celebrated the past, the present, and the future in day 2 of their virtual convention, with some Never Trump Republican performative theater, but then again, conventions are about performative theater, and I certainly don't have to forgive a single Republican personally if they want to vote for Biden in November.

Oh, and Bill Clinton was there. Briefly. Still, the night was about Dr. Jill Biden.

Four years ago, Clinton mesmerized Democrats in Philadelphia with his defense of “the real” Hillary Clinton versus the Republican caricature of her.

Clinton’s speech on Tuesday served as a reminder of his ability to distill complicated subjects into something someone might want to listen to – in this case, devastating statistics related to the coronavirus.

But Jill Biden’s role this year is more important. Democrats are acutely aware that Biden remains only softly defined for large swaths of the electorate, and on Tuesday, Biden sought to personalize him.

Speaking from a school in Wilmington, Delaware, Jill Biden said she “fell in love with a man and two little boys standing in the wreckage of unthinkable loss, mourning a wife and mother, a daughter and sister” after the 1972 car crash that killed Biden’s wife and daughter.

“How do you make a broken family whole?” she said. “The same way you make a nation whole, with love and understanding and with small acts of kindness. With bravery, with unwavering faith. You show up for each other in big ways and small ones again and again.”

There are exceptions to the rule. Khizr Khan, the father of a Muslim American Army captain who died in Iraq, was effective from the podium in 2016. But most people who are not politicians or performers have difficulty holding a room.

It’s a problem that Democrats at least since the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004 have been trying to find an answer for. The coronavirus, it turned out, did the work for them.

At its darkest, the effectiveness of human testimony from afar was clear on Monday, with Kristin Urquiza’s story about her Trump-supporting father dying from the coronavirus – a “a healthy 65-year-old,” she said, whose “only preexisting condition was trusting Donald Trump.”

But on Tuesday, Democrats demonstrated that they could make more joyful vignettes work, as well – having Biden nominated by The New York Times security guard who told Biden “I love you” when the two met in an elevator last year. The exchange went viral, even as the newspaper did not endorse him, and Biden’s campaign delighted in the contrast between the security guard’s judgment and that of the newspaper.

“I take powerful people up on my elevator all the time,” the woman said on Tuesday. “When they get off, they go to their important meetings. Me, I just head back to the lobby. But in the short time I spent with Joe Biden, I could tell he really saw me. That he actually cared.”

I've never questioned Biden's humanity and his empathy. He's really good at it, even more so I think than Barack Obama or even 90's Bill Clinton.  Obama is cool and funny but still nerdy as the professor you want to excel for, whereas Clinton overdoes it with the Slick Willie car salesman act at times, but Biden always came across as genuine to me, even if his policy decisions were awful.

Oh, and he's learned from his mistakes (some of them).

Dr. Jill Biden's story of her husband was phenomenal though, moving, funny, and real. She's going to go far as First Lady.

We'll see what day 3 brings.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

The Senate Intelligence Committee released their fifth and final counter-intelligence volume of their bipartisan report on Donald Trump's Russian collusion and finds that not only was the Mueller report right, but that it didn't go nearly far enough to describe the damning actions by Trump and his campaign.

A sprawling report released Tuesday by a Republican-controlled Senate panel that spent three years investigating Russia’s 2016 election interference laid out an extensive web of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and Russian government officials and other Russians, including some with ties to the country’s intelligence services.

The report by the Senate Intelligence Committee, totaling nearly 1,000 pages, provided a bipartisan Senate imprimatur for an extraordinary set of facts: The Russian government undertook an extensive campaign to try to sabotage the 2016 American election to help Mr. Trump become president, and some members of Mr. Trump’s circle of advisers were open to the help from an American adversary.
The report drew to a close one of the highest-profile congressional inquiries in recent memory, one that the president and his allies have long tried to discredit as part of a “witch hunt” designed to undermine the legitimacy of Mr. Trump’s stunning election nearly four years ago.

Like the investigation led by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, who released his findings in April 2019, the Senate report did not conclude that the Trump campaign engaged in a coordinated conspiracy with the Russian government — a fact that Republicans seized on to argue that there was “no collusion.”

But the report showed extensive evidence of contacts between Trump campaign advisers and people tied to the Kremlin — including a longstanding associate of the onetime Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Konstantin V. Kilimnik, whom the report identifies as a “Russian intelligence officer.”

The Senate report for the first time identified Mr. Kilimnik as an intelligence officer. Mr. Mueller’s report had labeled him as someone with ties to Russian intelligence.

Putin ordered the DNC hacking, and ordered an operation to help Donald Trump win. At the very least, Paul Manafort passed and received information from Russian intelligence, the report finds.

Democrats highlighted those ties in their own appendix to the report, noting that Mr. Manafort discussed campaign strategy and shared internal campaign polling data with Mr. Kilimnik, and later lied to federal investigators about his actions.

Democrats also laid out a potentially explosive detail: that investigators had uncovered information possibly tying Mr. Kilimnik to Russia’s major election interference operations conducted by the intelligence service known as the G.R.U.

“The committee obtained some information suggesting that the Russian intelligence officer, with whom Manafort had a longstanding relationship, may have been connected to the G.R.U.’s hack-and-leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election,” Democrats wrote. “This is what collusion looks like.”

The assertion was a sign that even though the investigation was carried out in bipartisan fashion, and Republican and Democratic senators reached broad agreement on its most significant conclusions, a partisan divide remained on some of the most politically sensitive issues.

The Senate report said that the unusual nature of the Trump campaign — staffed by Mr. Trump’s longtime associates, friends and other businessmen with no government experience — “presented attractive targets for foreign influence, creating notable counterintelligence vulnerabilities.”

And yes, that now infamous June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower between Trump's campaign and Russian nationals was every bit as shady as we suspected.

The Senate investigation found that two other people who met at Trump Tower in 2016 with senior members of the Trump campaign — including Mr. Manafort; Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law; and Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son — had “significant connections to Russian government, including the Russian intelligence services.”

The report said that the connections between the Russian government and one of the individuals, Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, “were far more extensive and concerning than what had been publicly known.”

Since the release of Mr. Mueller’s report, Attorney General William P. Barr and numerous Republican senators have tried to discredit the special counsel’s work — dismissing the investigation into the 2016 election as “Russiagate.”

Releasing the report less than 100 days before Election Day, lawmakers hope it will refocus attention on the interference by Russia and other hostile foreign powers in the American political process, which has continued unabated.

The report is the product of one of the few congressional investigations in recent memory that retained bipartisan support throughout. Lawmakers and committee aides interviewed more than 200 witnesses and reviewed hundreds of thousands of documents, including intelligence reports, internal F.B.I. notes and correspondence among members of the Trump campaign. The committee convened blockbuster hearings in 2017 and 2018, but much of its work took place in a secure office suite out of public view.

The Senate Intel report concludes that the Russians were behind the DNC email theft, that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks were given that information, and that Roger Stone told WikiLeaks to release the DNC information to blow the Access Hollywood tapes out of the news cycle, which it did in the space of hours.

Oh, but it gets worse once we get to the appendices of the document. Specifically, Appendix A notes that were a number of criminal referrals made to the Justice Department of Trump campaign officials that were of course ignored by Jeff Sessions and later Bill Barr.  We now know who these referrals indicate.

The Republican and Democratic leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee made criminal referrals of Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, Erik Prince and Sam Clovis to federal prosecutors in 2019, passing along their suspicions that the men may have misled the committee during their testimony, an official familiar with the matter told NBC News.

The official confirmed reports in the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, which reported on the matter last week. A criminal referral to the Justice Department means Congress believes a matter warrants investigation for potential violation of the law.

The committee detailed its concerns in a letter to the U.S. attorney's office in Washington, D.C., in June 2019, the official said.

The Post reported that the letter was divided into two sections. One named those suspected of making false statements, The Post said: Bannon; Clovis, a co-chair of the Trump campaign in 2016; and Prince, a private security contractor.

A second section raised concerns about the testimony of other witnesses, including Trump Jr. and Kushner, whose statements were contradicted by Trump campaign aide Richard Gates, although it did not pointedly make a false-statements allegation, The Post reported.

The Los Angeles Times reported that the committee questioned whether Bannon lied about his interactions and conversations with Prince about a meeting in the Seychelles between Prince and a top Russian official. Prince told special counsel Robert Mueller's prosecutors that he briefed Bannon on the January 2017 meeting, but Bannon said the conversation never happened. 

The Senate Intelligence Committee made criminal referrals of Donald Trump's son and son-in-law, a former Trump adviser, and a former Trump campaign co-chair, and the brother of the Education Secretary. They were not prosecuted by the Justice Department, nor were they even investigated as a result.

It's obstruction of justice, all the way down.

The nearly 1000-page report confirms what I've been saying for years:

Trump took Russian help to win in 2016 and then lied about it at every opportunity to the American people.

Ahem.

This is the report that Robert Mueller should have released last year. This is the report that should have gotten Trump impeached. Several people in the campaign should be in prison, including Trump's own son and son-in-law.

And this is the report that should cost the GOP everything in 2020 at the polls.

StuipidiNews!

• Utah GOP Sen. Mitt Romney says that he see "no evidence" that mail-in voting in November's election would somehow increase voter fraud.
• The Biden-Harris campaign is reportedly creating "layers and layers of contingency plans" to deal with a number of election fraud disaster scenarios by the Trump regime.
• California power utility PG&E warns rolling blackouts in the state will be imminent unless consumers and businesses cut power consumption during a record heat wave this week.
• The State Department is urging US colleges to divest from Chinese stocks and land due to delisting risk and possible increased sanctions against Beijing as Hong Kong's crackdown continues.
• Two Utah mink farms say COVID-19 is killing their animals, transmission from animal to human of the disease is not confirmed at this point.

Last Call For Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

As Virginia Democrats are on the verge of passing new state legislation in a special session to reform police departments across the commonwealth, the state Senate's most powerful Black Democrat is suddenly facing felony charges for her role in allegedly damaging a Confederate statue during a June protest.

A Virginia state senator has been charged with damaging a Confederate monument in Portsmouth during protests that also led to a demonstrator being critically injured when a statue was torn down, authorities said Monday. 

Sen. Louise Lucas faces charges of conspiracy to commit a felony and injury to a monument in excess of $1,000, Portsmouth Police Chief Angela Greene said during a news conference. The protest occurred in June. 

Lucas is a longtime Democratic legislator and a key power broker in the state Senate, joining the chamber in 1992. The charges were filed the same week Virginia lawmakers are taking up dozens of criminal justice reforms during a special legislative session.
The reaction from some of her fellow Democrats was swift. 

“It’s deeply troubling that on the verge of Virginia passing long-overdue police reform, the first Black woman to serve as our Senate Pro Tempore is suddenly facing highly unusual charges,” Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, tweeted on Monday evening. 

The American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia called for the charges against Lucas and several others to be dropped. The ACLU said the charges constitute a stark overreach by police because they were not approved by the local prosecutor's office. 

Lucas did not respond to an email and phone call seeking comment. Her attorney, Don Scott, told WAVY-TV that Lucas will “vigorously” fight the case and be vindicated. 

Lucas is being charged at a time when many memorials to the Confederacy are being taken down, whether by demonstrators opposed to racial injustice or by authorities seeking to dismantle them through official channels. The monuments have long been viewed by many as symbols of white supremacy. But they've drawn increasing attention following the death of George Floyd, a Black man who died in Minneapolis police custody. 

The monument in Portsmouth consists of a large obelisk and statues of four Confederate military personnel. During protests that drew hundreds of people in June, heads were ripped off some of the statues while one was pulled down, critically injuring a demonstrator.

Greene, the Portsmouth police chief, said that “several individuals conspired and organized to destroy the monument as well as summon hundreds of people to join in felonious acts.” 

Greene said those acts “not only resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage to the monument, but also permanent injury to an individual.” 

Greene did not detail exactly what Lucas or several other people are accused of doing did to merit the charges that have been filed against them. 

Other people facing charges include members of the local NAACP chapter, a local school board member and members of the public defenders office, the police chief said.

This is straight up retaliation, like something out of a Klan Jim Crow playbook. Then again, Jim Crow never really ended in America, did it? It certainly didn't end in Virginia.

And of course, state Senate Republicans are calling for Lucas to turn herself in and face charges, and to suspend the special session.

Black Lives Still Matter.

Convention Connection, Day 1

Michelle Obama's keynote speech last night at the Democratic National Convention was impressive, and sorely reminds of of what we missed about her and her husband, in a night of great speeches making the case as to why Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the way forward.

But the best part of the speech was the end.

Joe Biden wants all of our kids to go to a good school, see a doctor when they’re sick, live on a healthy planet. And he’s got plans to make all of that happen. Joe Biden wants all of our kids, no matter what they look like, to be able to walk out the door without worrying about being harassed or arrested or killed. He wants all of our kids to be able to go to a movie or a math class without being afraid of getting shot. He wants all our kids to grow up with leaders who won’t just serve themselves and their wealthy peers but will provide a safety net for people facing hard times.

And if we want a chance to pursue any of these goals, any of these most basic requirements for a functioning society, we have to vote for Joe Biden in numbers that cannot be ignored. Because right now, folks who know they cannot win fair and square at the ballot box are doing everything they can to stop us from voting. They’re closing down polling places in minority neighborhoods. They’re purging voter rolls. They’re sending people out to intimidate voters, and they’re lying about the security of our ballots. These tactics are not new.

But this is not the time to withhold our votes in protest or play games with candidates who have no chance of winning. We have got to vote like we did in 2008 and 2012. We’ve got to show up with the same level of passion and hope for Joe Biden. We’ve got to vote early, in person if we can. We’ve got to request our mail-in ballots right now, tonight, and send them back immediately and follow-up to make sure they’re received. And then, make sure our friends and families do the same.

We have got to grab our comfortable shoes, put on our masks, pack a brown bag dinner and maybe breakfast too, because we’ve got to be willing to stand in line all night if we have to.

Look, we have already sacrificed so much this year. So many of you are already going that extra mile. Even when you’re exhausted, you’re mustering up unimaginable courage to put on those scrubs and give our loved ones a fighting chance. Even when you’re anxious, you’re delivering those packages, stocking those shelves, and doing all that essential work so that all of us can keep moving forward.

Even when it all feels so overwhelming, working parents are somehow piecing it all together without child care. Teachers are getting creative so that our kids can still learn and grow. Our young people are desperately fighting to pursue their dreams.

And when the horrors of systemic racism shook our country and our consciences, millions of Americans of every age, every background rose up to march for each other, crying out for justice and progress.

This is who we still are: compassionate, resilient, decent people whose fortunes are bound up with one another. And it is well past time for our leaders to once again reflect our truth.

So, it is up to us to add our voices and our votes to the course of history, echoing heroes like John Lewis who said, “When you see something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something.” That is the truest form of empathy: not just feeling, but doing; not just for ourselves or our kids, but for everyone, for all our kids.

And if we want to keep the possibility of progress alive in our time, if we want to be able to look our children in the eye after this election, we have got to reassert our place in American history. And we have got to do everything we can to elect my friend, Joe Biden, as the next president of the United States.
Thank you all. God bless.

This was good stuff, folks.  I'm glad to see it.

Graham Cracked-up

Over at Cook Political Report, Jessica Taylor moves Sen. Lindsey Graham's race from Likely Republican to Lean Republican as Democratic challenger and former state party chair Jamie Harrison is closing the gap in South Carolina.

Ever since he launched his underdog bid against veteran GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, former South Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Jaime Harrison has needed a lot of things to go right to be genuinely competitive in a place as heavily Republican as the Palmetto State.

One of those was proving he could match the three-term incumbent from a fundraising standpoint. Harrison has now outraised Graham for two consecutive quarters. He has pulled nearly even with Graham for amount raised throughout the cycle, with $30.9 million brought in by Graham and $29 million total raised by Harrison through the end of June.

The second was a more favorable electoral climate that could help the Democratic challenger boost African-American turnout and woo white, college educated suburban voters to his side; now, the uncertainty and anger amidst the COVID pandemic — including a surge last month in South Carolina — has done just that. Racial injustice protests that swept the nation in early June also give Harrison, who is Black, further motivation for turning out African-American voters in the state. Were Harrison to upset Graham, South Carolina — the first state to secede from the Union in 1860 — would become the first state in history to have two Black senators serving at the same time, joining Republican Sen. Tim Scott.

Polling shows that possibility is no longer a long-shot, though the race fundamentals still give Graham an advantage. A Quinnipiac University poll conducted from July 30-August 3 showed the race tied at 44 percent a piece. Graham’s job approval was also narrowly underwater (47 percent disapproving and 43 percent approving), and he was losing independents by 10 points to Harrison. The Democratic nominee is also winning women by 5 points, but that slim advantage seems to be driven by Black women, since Graham is still winning white women by 26 points. Republicans also argue that the poll undersampled GOP voters and said their own polling shows a more sizable lead for Graham.

Two Democratic surveys last month also suggested the race was tightening, and private Democratic pollings shows the same thing. An internal survey from Cornell Belcher at brilliant corners Research & Strategies (conducted July 13-19) for Harrison’s campaign showed Graham with a 43 to 41 percent lead in a four-way race (including a Libertarian and a Constitution Party candidate), and also noted that Harrison was leading by 19 points among college-educated women and 7 points among suburban voters. An Anzalone Liszt Grove survey (conducted July 5-20) for the Lindsey Must Go super PAC showed Graham with a 49%-45% edge, underscoring still why it is much easier for a Republican than a Democrat to come close to 50% in the state. However, Democrats hope that with third-party choices on the ballot, that threshold will drop, but Republicans say they aren’t worried about such a scenario.

Presidential polling shows a much closer race than President Trump’s 14 point win over Hillary Clinton four years ago. Those same Senate surveys show Trump’s lead is now between just 5 and 7 points, but if the presidential race nationally tightens that margin could widen for Trump, making things more difficult for Harrison. Still, it was South Carolina that gave Joe Biden a decisive primary victory back in February that put him on a glide path to the nomination, and Biden does well with Black voters and is a plausible alternative for moderates as well. Plus, Democrats hope that Biden’s selection of California Sen. Kamala Harris, the first Black woman ever on a presidential ticket, as his running mate will further excite the African-American base, especially Black women that Harrison very much needs to turn out.

Several sources in the state point to one crucial decision by the Harrison campaign that has made him more competitive than Democrats in South Carolina usually are — going up early on TV with positive, biographical ads that were left unanswered by Graham for almost two months, with Harrison beginning ads in early April while Graham went on air in late May. Now, Graham’s latest TV ads tie Harrison to national Democrat and highlight praise he’s had for Hillary Clinton and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Harrison’s latest ad contrasts Graham’s travel expenses with the senator saying he would reauthorize COVID unemployment benefits “over our dead bodies,” a remark Democrats highlight as particularly tone-deaf as coronavirus deaths near 170,000 nationwide, including 2,260 in South Carolina as of Sunday.

And even some Republicans in the state are somewhat skeptical that Graham’s efforts to cast Harrison as a far-left candidate will work. One admitted that Harrison is running “a centrist Democratic campaign focused on dinner table issues that has captured a lot of disaffected moderates” and working to capitalize on demographic realignments in the state.

The unsaid difference is that Harrison rising to the station of state party head means he knows how to politic in the Palmetto State. He has run a disciplined, smart campaign, from opening with his biographical ads in the spring to going after Lindsey Graham with his greatest weakness, Previous Footage Of Lindsey Graham Saying The Exact Opposite Of His Current Position.

Compare that to Amy McGrath, who just has the opposite footage of herself problem and has already taken a new campaign manager as of this week.

Amy McGrath, the Democrat challenging Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in Kentucky, is replacing her campaign manager with a little more than 80 days before Election Day.

In a statement, McGrath’s campaign announced that Dan Kanninen will take over for Mark Nickolas as campaign manager. Kanninen, who recently joined the campaign, served as states director on former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s presidential campaign.

Kanninen ran the North Carolina operation for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016, and also oversaw some state operations during former President Barack Obama’s White House runs in 2008 and 2012, according to his bio. Kanninen is currently CEO of his own consulting firm.


“There is no more destructive force in Washington than Mitch McConnell—he is the architect of the dysfunction that is hurting Kentuckians,” Kanninen said in a statement. “Amy has served her country for more than 20 years, and she will continue to fight for Kentucky as senator. I’m honored to be a part of that fight.”

Nickolas will stay on with the campaign as a senior adviser overseeing paid media.

At least McGrath realized what she's doing is not working. Harrison on the other hand has a plan and is executing it.

If only the two were switched and Harrison was running here...

I'll take Lindsey getting the L though.

StupidiNews!

• UNC-Chapel Hill is halting all in-person undergraduate classes and moving to distance learning after 130 students have tested positive for COVID-19.
• Donald Trump says he will pardon someone "very, very important" this week as Democrats and critics continue to attack his political use of pardon power.
• Canadian Finance Minister Bill Morneu has resigned after conflict of interest ties for his charity work with a student grant program caused issues with the Trudeau government.
• Michelle Obama and Bernie Sanders opened the 2020 Democratic National Convention with speeches in praise of Joe Biden and running mate Kamala Harris.
• Four indiana cities are suing streaming giants Netflix, Hulu, Disney, and others over what they claim should be years of cable franchising fees owed to local governments.

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.

.

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.