Trump Goes Viral, Con't

Trump's latest stunt ahead of his four-day infomercial from hell is announcing a NeW BrEAkThROuGh tREaTmeNT for the coronavirus, which apparently is news to both the entire medical science community and to the coronavirus.

The Food and Drug Administration issued an emergency authorization for blood plasma as a coronavirus treatment, the agency and President Donald Trump announced Sunday — one day Trump attacked the drug regulator for moving too slowly to back the treatment.

The agency held off on the decision last week over concerns from government scientists that evidence for the treatment's effectiveness is thin, prompting Trump to accuse the FDA of slow-walking the therapy to harm his reelection chances without offering any evidence to support his claim. It is not clear whether the FDA has received additional clinical trial data in the last week that would support the therapy's use.

An emergency authorization normally paves the way for expanded use of an experimental therapy. But FDA's decision for so-called convalescent plasma — which more than 70,000 Americans have already received — is limited because patients have largely received it outside of randomized, controlled clinical trials that could prove whether the approach is effective.

Trump in a brief Sunday evening news conference appeared to oversell the FDA's assessment, claiming the agency found plasma "safe and very effective." However, the agency said more rigorous study is needed to prove whether the treatment effective. Janet Woodcock, the head of FDA's drug division who is now working on Operation Warp Speed, an interagency effort to accelerate coronavirus treatments and vaccines, on Friday told POLITICO that plasma has not been "proven as an effective treatment."

And unlike Gilead's remdesivir, which received an emergency use authorization months ago and has shown to benefit hospitalized patients, convalescent plasma "does not yet represent a new standard of care based on the current available evidence," FDA said in a statement.

Trump announced the emergency authorization alongside his health secretary, Alex Azar, and FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn, in a press conference one day before the start of the Republican National Convention. While Trump called it a "historic announcement," experts have said the treatment is unlikely to be a game-changer in the fight against a pathogen that's killed more than 170,000 in the United States.

Hahn, who took over as FDA chief in December, said Trump "has asked FDA to cut back red tape and try to speed medical products into the hands of providers, patients and American consumers."

Outside experts and former officials have accused FDA of caving to White House pressure during the pandemic -- most notably in its decision to authorize emergency use of hydroxychloroquine for treating Covid-19 infection despite limited evidence. The agency later pulled the authorization after randomized clinical trials found it provided no benefit, but Trump as recently as this weekend complained about the agency's reversal.

Plasma therapy involves giving the sick antibody-rich plasma extracted from the blood of coronavirus survivors. In theory those antibodies should help recipients fight off the virus. But while plasma treatment has been used safely against diseases from diphtheria to Ebola over the past 130 years, its track record on effectiveness is mixed. And it has not yet been proven to work against the coronavirus.

Scott Gottlieb, Trump's first FDA commissioner, on Sunday said that plasma is "probably beneficial" for coronavirus patients, as he also acknowledged scientists' concerns about the lack of evidence for the treatment.

"I think some people wanted to see more rigorous data to ground that decision," Gottlieb said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

So this is now what, the third? Fourth? Fifth "treatment breakthrough" announced by the FDA, none of which actually have been confirmed by the FDA or backed up by doctors in other countries for that matter. None of them are actually treatment breakthroughs, and none of them are even remotely ready for widespread use yet (remember, if remdesivir from pharma giant Gilead was working as well as thought, why not make that available for widespread use?)

At least the American media isn't taking Trump seriously or giving him the benefit of the doubt when he's clearly forcing the FDA to move up the timetable for political reasons ahead of the Republican convention this week.

The sad part is 175,000 Americans have died to this virus, and Trump is the most upset about how it's hurting his poll numbers. He doesn't care if your loved ones die to the virus or not, he just cares if he wins.

But what Trump will almost certainly do is announce an October Surprise vaccine that doesn't have rigorous testing behind it, and that will be the nightmare scenario from a public health standpoint.

The Trump administration is considering whether to bypass normal U.S. regulatory standards to fast-track an experimental coronavirus vaccine from the U.K. for use in America ahead of the presidential election, the Financial Times reported, citing three unnamed people briefed on the plan.

One option is to issue an “emergency use authorization” in October to a vaccine being developed by AstraZeneca Plc and Oxford University, based on the results from a relatively small U.K. study if it is successful, the people told the British newspaper.

A spokesman for the U.S. Health and Human Services department, which oversees the Food and Drug Administration, told the Financial Times that any claim that an EUA would be issued before the election was “absolutely false.” The administration was hopeful that a vaccine would be developed by the first quarter of 2021, he said.

With Covid-19 infections still widespread in the U.S., President Donald Trump’s political future hinges on his response to the pandemic and his promise to bring forth a vaccine by Election Day on Nov. 3. On Saturday, he tweeted that employees at the FDA are attempting to sabotage his re-election by slowing down coronavirus research.

There’s no evidence that the scientists and staff of the FDA are delaying treatments or vaccines.

The FT article came shortly before Bloomberg reported that the president is set to announce that a new treatment involving blood plasma donated by people who’ve recovered from the disease has received an emergency use authorization from U.S. regulators.

Mark Meadows, White House chief of staff, and Steven Mnuchin, Treasury secretary, have told top Democrats that the administration was considering fast-tracking a vaccine, the Financial Times reported. A spokesperson for the Treasury secretary said in response that Mnuchin “did not make any comments regarding AstraZeneca” and believes any decision on vaccine candidates is up to the FDA.

A spokesperson for AstraZeneca told the Financial Times that it had “not discussed emergency use authorization with the U.S. government” and that it “would be premature to speculate on that possibility.” AstraZeneca’s trial of 10,000 participants may be too small to justify just an order, according to the newspaper.

Trump will have to have a "vaccine" before the election, or there is zero chance he wins. And how many of his cultists will line up to take it because Trump said so?

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Another brutal police shooting, this time in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The victim's name is Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man shot in the back seven times by a white officer, in front of Blake's three sons who were in an SUV that Blake was entering. Three officers on the scene to break up an argument, and the officer's response was to empty this clip into Blake's back.

A man identified as Jacob Blake was shot by police during a domestic call in Kenosha on Sunday, Aug. 23. A large crowd took to the streets afterward to protest.

Kenosha County declared a state of emergency curfew from 10:15 p.m. until 7 a.m. Monday.

The shooting happened near 28th Avenue and 40th Street around 5:11 p.m., after officers were called for a “domestic incident.”

Graphic video of the shooting circulated social media. It shows Blake walking away from police and getting into an SUV. One officer is seen holding Blake’s shirt, and then seven gunshots can be heard.

According to the Kenosha Police Department, officers provided immediate aid to the man after the shooting. He was transported via Flight for Life to Froedtert in Milwaukee in serious condition.

Protests were nearly immediate, hence the curfew last night. Adam Silverman at Balloon Juice has more:

I’ve watched the video several times. As I’ve noted here several times, I’m a criminologist by training, even if not by practice anymore. I’ve taught hundreds of law enforcement officers. I’ve even taught policing to them. I’ve consulted with law enforcement, I’ve trained law enforcement (Federal, state, and local) in continuing ed/inservices, as well as in my martial arts classes, and I’ve had tactical training from some law enforcement (my quarterly weapons training is supervised by a close friend who is a SWAT sniper). While we only have 20 seconds of video, so almost no context, there is nothing in that 20 seconds that should have resulted in shooting Mr. Blake, let alone shooting him seven times in the back. There are three officers. His back is to them, and at one point he is close to pressing himself against the driver’s side front door of his mini-van. At that point the officer that had a hold of his t-shirt should have stepped forward and pressed Mr. Blake into the van with the other two officers providing cover and support. With Mr. Blake immobilized against the van, he could have then been taken into custody if he was either A) the person responsible for the domestic disturbance that they’d been called to deal with or B) someone else at the seen who had somehow interfered with their responding to the domestic disturbance call. Even if Mr. Blake had ignored their instructions – “lawful orders” – that is not a justification for this type of law enforcement response. There is no crime on the books in the US that allows for summary execution without judgement. In those 20 seconds, Mr. Blake had taken no aggressive actions towards those officers. He appears to simply be trying to get away from them and into his van. He hadn’t swung at them, kicked at them, charged at them. He certainly didn’t try to run them over as he wasn’t in the van yet.

As we wait for more news about both Mr. Blake’s condition and the context around what actually happened yesterday in Kenosha, the US is now faced with another example of how African Americans’ contacts with law enforcement, as well as those of other people of color, all too often end violently with the violence directed at the African Americans or people of color. And we’re faced with this example, and the responses it will engender, as the Republican Party begins its nominating convention. A nominating convention that was already expected to focus on unwavering, unflagging, and unconditional support for law enforcement and harsh condemnation of any criticism of law enforcement and how they actual interact with African Americans and people of color.

What has become exceedingly clear is that no one should be policed the way African Americans and people of color are policed. And by policed I do not just mean how law enforcement interacts and deals with them, but how our entire criminal justice system from law enforcement to the courts to corrections is applied. We are in serious need of reform across recruitment, vetting, hiring, initial education, continuing education, policing unions, as well as what prosecutors and judges authorize, tolerate, and do. And we certainly need to rethink how law enforcement should respond, and who within law enforcement should do the responding, to domestic disturbance and welfare check calls.

The video, which I will not link here, is being recorded from a window across the street. It clearly shows the officer shooting Blake in the back as Blake is opening the driver's side door and entering the SUV to check on his three sons in the vehicle.

The first officer makes no effort to restrain Blake as Blake passes him to go around the front of the SUV to reach to the driver's side door, the second of the three officers is standing at the left rear door of the vehicle and the third officer is behind the second at the rear corner of the SUV. The second officer draws his pistol one-handed and empties the clip into Blake's back at a distance of maybe two feet as Blake leans into the vehicle with the kids screaming in the SUV as it happens.

It is a black man being sentenced to summary execution by a white cop, only Jacob Blake at least survives the initial shooting by a miracle. I sincerly hope he lives and sues Kenosha PD into oblivion.

I'm so tired of this.  I'm so tired of my life's sole meaning being reduced to "I draw breath only because haven't been murdered by a cop yet for being a perceived threat". I am so much more than that.

But I'm also not because at any time, a police officer can decide I am a dead slab of cold nigger meat.  But for the grace of police, go millions of us. Savage beasts, subject to extermination in the name of "law enforcement". We are in America, but we are not Americans and never have been. We are not human in the eyes of police. We are just suspects, threats, things denied dignity and agency. There is an entire political party dedicated to keeping us in this social, open-air prison, to keep us as a menagerie of beasts to hunt for fucking sport, video game targets that can be butchered and splayed out for a laugh at the local cop bar and it makes me livid. I want to punch and hit and tear and I want to smash and I want to make them truly afraid so they stop, but that's exactly what they want.

An excuse to execute.

I am tired, and angry, and tired of being angry. I am tired of writing this story every few months. I am weary to my soul of seeing the absolute disdain by tens of millions of Americans who just don't give a shit if Black people are butchered. We deserve it, we are told. We should stop being thugs. We should always obey officers of the law. We shouldn't make them shoot us.

So I say this to you this morning. For the love of God, help us.

Get your families and your friends and the people you love to register to vote and help us. Trump got 57% of the white vote in 2016. In that CBS poll I referenced from yesterday when Biden is winning overall 52%-42%, Trump is getting 52% of the white vote. If white voters make up 70-71% of the electorate as they did in 2016, that would be an 8-point overall swing toward Biden from where Clinton was in 2016 and he'd walk away with an easy win.

That's it. Five percent of white Trump voters have to vote for Biden instead and it's a landslide.

It's been four hundred fucking years of this. Of only surviving because "we're one of the good ones" right up until someone decides we're not.

See this for what it is and help us.

StupidiNews!

• White House adviser Kellyanne Conway and her husband George, a Lincoln Project staffer, are both stepping down to take care of their family heading into the heart of the 2020 campaign season.
• Peruvian officials say 13 people have died in a stampede at a massive party raided by police and health officials over COVID-19 concerns.
• Thousands are evacuating the Louisiana coast as Hurricanes Marco and Laura take aim at the Gulf Coast, expected to make a double landfall this week within days of each other.
• Joe Biden says he's not ruling out a second term despite questions about his age, or his earlier statements suggesting he would only run for a single term.
• July 2020 tied July 2019 as the second warmest month on record in the US, the Northeastern US alone set 11 monthly all-time temperature records including Baltimore, DC, and Philadelphia.

Last Call For The Call Of Trumpthulhu

Being a Trump voter is to be a part of a cult.

It was mostly Democrats who watched last week's convention, and they liked what they saw. Now, as the Republicans begin theirs, we find a Republican Party whose voters not only hold a different view of things in America than Democrats do — but also one very different from most voters overall. And therein may lie Republicans' own challenge.

Republicans see an America — to borrow Ronald Reagan's famous test — better off today than it was four years ago, mainly, they say, because of their confidence in President Trump.

For most Republicans, America is a nation where the economy is still fairly good, where the effort to handle the coronavirus is going at least somewhat well and the president is doing a very good job on it. For them, the virus elicits less concern in the first place. They believe the 170,000 fatalities is an overstated count and one which, for many, can so far be considered acceptable. And it is a nation where, for an overwhelming number of Republicans, there has been too much focus on racial discrimination of late.

And so as their convention begins, one test for the GOP appears whether they can persuade more Americans to join them in these assessments. 

These are cultists in a death cult. Majorities of Republicans think that America is better off now, with a raging pandemic killing tens of thousands verging on hundreds of thousands (and they refuse to believe that is even happening) with a cratering economy where unemployment is in double digits, where America is a laughingstock and Americans are banned from traveling to most countries, where the most common reason as to why things are better than 2016 is because of Donald Trump.

And the reason they believe things are better now is because Obama isn't in charge.  They even believe their finances are better now than in 2016.

Your Republican neighbors are cultists.  There's no hope for them until they are deprogrammed and that will take years, if ever. We'll have to move forward through them, not with them.

Biden, His Time, Con't

Checking in with CNN's election guru Harry Enten, we see the age-old battle once again: younger voters vastly prefer the Democratic candidate, but don't give enough of a damn to vote.

There is good news for former Vice President Joe Biden when it comes to younger voters. He's no longer underperforming where Hillary Clinton ended up in the final 2016 polls. 

The big question coming out of the Democratic National Convention is whether they'll actually start to like him. Going in, young voters still didn't like Biden, which leaves him susceptible to some of these voters potentially not turning out to vote in the fall. 

Biden, at this point, holds a more than 20-point lead with young voters in live interview polls taken in August. Biden's up by 25 points among 18-29 year-old voters in an average of the most recent CNN/SSRS, Fox News and NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College polls. It's a 24-point lead if we look at 18-34 year-olds in the CNN/SSRS, Monmouth University and NBC News/Wall Street Journal polls.

Young Millennials and the oldest of Gen Z now able to vote for the first time in a presidential contest clearly prefer Biden. They just dislike him. So will they actually vote?

The answer, historically, is no.

Biden's net favorability (favorable - unfavorable) rating averages out to be -4 percentage points among the 18-29 year-old subset. That's actually about 5 points worse than his net favorability with all registered voters in those polls. If we expand out to 18-34 year-olds looking at data from CNN, Gallup and Monmouth, Biden's net favorability remains negative. 

Indeed, the difference between vote choice and net favorability among young voters is striking. Biden's running about 30 points better against Trump in the horserace than his net favorability alone would suggest. Again, if we add more data from July, the point stands. 

Compare what's going on with young voters to 65 years old and older. They give Biden a net favorability rating of +10 points in an average of ABC News/Washington Post, CNN, Fox News and Monmouth polls. The same polls have Biden ahead of Trump by 9 points with this group. That is, there's no statistical difference. 

Senior citizens like Biden, and they're voting for him. 

What's going on with younger voters is pretty simple: They're voting for Biden because they really don't like Trump. His net favorability with those under the age of 30 averaged -40 points in these same polls, or about 35 points worse than Biden's net favorability rating. 

It's difficult to imagine Trump gaining too much among younger voters going forward. They know who he is after about 3.5 years of his presidency. 

The potential pitfall for Biden is that voters who like neither candidate are much less likely to be enthusiastic about voting. In CNN's last poll, only about 10% of those who did not have a favorable opinion of either candidate said they were enthusiastic about casting a ballot in the fall elections. Among those who had a favorable view of at least one of the candidates, about 60% were enthusiastic about voting in the fall. 

Of course, enthusiasm about voting is not the same as actually voting. You can vote without being enthusiastic about the idea, though the two are linked. 

An ABC News/Washington Post poll from late May (the latest I could attain the raw data file for) drives home the point. Voters who had a favorable view of either of the candidates were 20 points more likely to say they were certain to vote than those who liked neither. 

Not surprisingly, younger voters are also less enthusiastic to vote and say they are less certain to vote than older voters in November, which follows historical precedent. The question is whether they'll make up a smaller percentage of the electorate than they usually do given they don't really like either candidate on the ballot. 

We just don't know. Still, this data does show the potential problem of Biden relying on young voters disliking Trump as the mechanism for getting them to vote for Biden in November.

Younger voters hate Trump, but they don't give a damn about voting for Biden (or anyone), either.  And cajoling them doesn't work.  Obama got through to them in record numbers, but he's the exception that proves the rule.

Enten also adds that Black voters remain key to Democrats' chances of winning this fall, a "of course" moment but one that continually needs spelling out for some.

Biden will take any help he can get with Black voters. 

So far this month, there have been five live interview polls for which I could attain a Black voter crosstab: ABC News/Washington Post, CNN/SSRS, Fox News, Marist College/NPR/PBS NewsHour and NBC News/Wall Street Journal. While none of the polls individually have a sample size to be too reliable, aggregated together they tell a pretty clear story. 

Biden is ahead among Black registered voters by 67 points on average and 71 points in the median of these polls. That's a sizable advantage. 

It's actually slightly less though than the 75-point lead he had with Black registered voters when I looked at the average of polls taken in late May through mid-July. While we can't be sure that Biden's actually doing worse with Black voters than he had previously, given sample size restrictions, it's quite clear he isn't doing better than he was earlier in the summer. As far as I can tell, Biden's lead with Black voters is currently at one of its lowest levels of the 2020 campaign. 

More interestingly, his support among Black voters is quite clearly smaller than Clinton's 79-point margin in the final registered voter polls of 2016. 

An 8-point shift among Black voters (i.e. moving from a 79-point win for the Democrats to a 71-point win) could be a huge deal if applied to the swing states. It could shift the overall margin in a number of states (like Michigan and Florida) by a point. Remember Clinton only lost Florida by a little more than a point and Michigan by just 0.2 points.

The proliferation of by-mail voting may help with both Black voters and young voters, and that's why Trump wants to get rid of it.

Still, there are just too many factors going into November to be confident about that 9-point Biden lead though.  We'll see. The Trump Regime is already trying to create a "miracle cure" for COVID-19 and there's still 10 weeks to go...

My advice as always: get your ballot requested and in as soon as you can. Kentucky's online voting ballot request portal went live this weekend.

Vote like your country depends on it, because it does.

Sunday Long Read: The Correct Kind Of Hero

The New York Times unceremoniously jettisoned its copy editor desk three years ago, and of course in the era of niche social media doing what has to be done, a Twitter account took over the duties and did a good enough job that even the Times has taken notice, doing his work from the shadows, as The Ringer's Ben Lindbergh reports for our Sunday Long Read.

On October 18, 2019, a New York Times standards editor emailed seven other Times editors to alert them to the existence of a new Twitter account that they would soon grow to respect—and, at times, resent. According to the characterization of one of the editors on the email, the message advised its recipients “that there was a lawyer on Twitter aggressively pointing out typos, and that we should consider following him.” A little more than a month after the Twitter account’s creation on September 16, The New York Times had taken note of @nyttypos, or Typos of the New York Times.

Anyone who followed @nyttypos that day soon got a feel for the flavor of its tweets. On October 19, @nyttypos spotted a “happened” instead of a “happen” in a story about Brexit; a missing space and a picture of three people captioned with five names in a story about TikTok clubs; a missing comma and a “statue” in place of a “statute” in a story about President Donald Trump’s attempt to host the G7 Summit at his own Doral resort; a subject-verb agreement error in a story about Venezuela’s water quality; a misplaced comma in a story about Bernie Sanders accepting an endorsement from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; and a missing space between quotation marks and a quote in a story about Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Although the account linked to a “nice, probably typo-free story” in the love section, it also found time to editorialize about the supposedly sorry state of the Times. “It’s kind of a shame that virtually each and every piece of content the Times produces, even the pretty great ones like this, has a typo in it,” @nyttypos tweeted about an opinion piece that contained a wayward word. On the same day, a story about a German YouTuber that contained a duplicated phrase prompted the observation “At times I really have a hard time believing that this paper is edited at all.” Between typos, @nyttypos engaged in a debate about the proper way to form plurals—“M.V.P.s” or “M.V.P.’s”—in support of the position that “Apostrophes don’t pluralize!”

It wasn’t the account’s most productive typo-finding day. But it was a weekend, and its owner did have other work. “I took ten minutes out of my fun Saturday afternoon reading D.C. Circuit opinions about jurisdiction to review FERC orders to read this article and find the typos,” @nyttypos tweeted about the TikTok story.

The proud pedant behind @nyttypos is, as his Twitter bio proclaims, an “appellate lawyer and persnickety dude.” While working for a government office on appeals for the federal courts of appeals and the Supreme Court, he has diligently, competently, and caustically grammar-policed the paper of record in his spare time, producing more than 20,000 tweets over the past 11 months. His account is a cross between an ego trip, a crusade, and a compulsion. His quixotic quest to flag the words that weren’t fit to print has attracted roughly 8,000 followers, yielded countless corrections, and made its anonymous owner the object of some fascination within the walls and Slack chats of the Times, while exposing the trade-offs in copy quality that competitive publishing in the age of algorithms demands.

“He’s obviously a smart, well-read, knowledgeable person,” says Jason Bailey, an editor on the national desk at the Times (and a former colleague of mine when he was a copy editor at Grantland). “And he’s almost always right.” Bailey, who frequently fields tweets from @nyttypos, says the tipster sometimes reports perceived typos that aren’t incorrect according to the most recent version of the Times style guide, which is more up to date than the 2015 PDF @nyttypos possesses. “But for the most part, if it comes to grammar, he’s correct. And to be honest, I’ve learned some things from him, because I’m not an English major or a grammarian in a traditional sense. I kind of edit by ear a little bit. So some of those more technical details, he’s been helpful with.”

Despite his proficiency and apparent command of syntactic arcana, @nyttypos is self-taught too. Studying Latin in high school helped him learn the parts of speech, but he majored in philosophy, and his experience in journalism is limited to a short-lived column in his college paper. “I don’t think that I have a terribly great grasp on grammar, to be honest with you,” he says on the phone. “I think I intuit some things.” Sometimes he researches rules before tweeting, lest the master of spotting mistakes commit a mistake of his own. “I don’t like to be wrong about things,” he says, unsurprisingly.

The prolific account is an outlet for a lifelong impulse of its ornery operator, who hates GIFs and emoji almost as much as misspellings. He remembers first being bothered by bad copy as a 5-year-old typo prodigy who noted mistakes on menus at a local restaurant. Teachers have told him that he read the Times to classmates in kindergarten, and he confesses to fashioning his writing after The New York Times Book Review when he was a preteen. While he expresses some fondness for The New York Times Magazine, he says he’s never been a devoted Times reader and doesn’t harbor any sentimental attachment to the paper; he read it because it’s what was available in the “middlebrow suburban home” where he grew up in Philadelphia in the 1990s.

Now in his early 30s, @nyttypos still indulges his deep-seated antipathy toward typos in his professional and personal lives. In his own legal writing, which he describes as “fairly fussy,” he strives for immaculate copy not only because of his habitual aversion to errors, but also because some judges look down on typo-prone lawyers, and because misquotes or mistakes in citation may confuse readers or undercut his credibility (a concern for the Times, too). “If you’re trying to get a case into the Supreme Court, which I do on occasion, and you’re trying to stand out from a crowd of thousands of submissions, you want to signal in all sorts of ways that you’re terribly competent, and one way of doing that is not typing typos,” he says.

Judges make grammatical mistakes too—some, he observes, display a regrettable tendency to swap “tenet” and “tenant”—but he keeps those typos to himself unless he has a personal connection to the judge or can notify a designated clerk who handles corrections. However, he does deploy his talents in other offline company, with some social consequences. By general request, he proofreads the legal briefs that his colleagues compose. But he took things too far when he sent unsolicited feedback to his office’s press secretary. “I was sending her corrections to all of her press releases every day, and I think I was asked to stop fixing them,” he says. “So now the corrections are filtered through somebody else if they’re really bad.” When he encounters typos in the wild, he sometimes tries to “helpfully” point out mistakes, but he picks his spots, holding his tongue if he has reason to anticipate an awkward interaction. Thus far, he hasn’t objected to the handmade sign at the corner shop near his home that says “can sale closed containers” and “no sales on Sunday’s” because he fears offending the proprietor. He knows not to [sic] where he eats.

Although @nyttypos revealed his identity to me—a scoop some New York Times newshounds would be happy to have—he asked not to be named. His status as a mystery man enhances his mystique. “Some of the editors that I’m closer to, we definitely discuss him,” Bailey says. “And he’s kind of this curious figure because he spends a lot of time doing this … and it is fascinating to think about why someone would do that. There are times where he’s tweeting me all weekend.” Bailey and other editors have made a game of trying to guess who he is, but @nyttypos withholds just enough details that they haven’t cracked the case. Although he says his current boss is politically conservative and “might think it’s so wonderful to see me criticizing the Times,” he may want to work for a law firm in the future, and he doesn’t know whether his hobby would go over well: “You wouldn’t want the entire hiring committee thinking about it, that some weird, typo-correcting Twitter personality is applying to work there.”

Not the superhero we deserve, but maybe the one we need, as they say.

He's smart enough not to want to actually work for the Times though. Maybe that's for the best.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

According to The Guardian's account of CNN media critic Brian Stetler's book on the Trump Regime and its incestuous relationship with FOX News, "Hoax", Trump ordered Attorney General Bill Barr to have a few words with FOX News owner Rupert Murdoch about legal analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano after Napolitano criticized Trump in October over his Ukraine quid pro quo deal, leading to Trump's eventual impeachment by the House.

The attorney general, William Barr, told Rupert Murdoch to “muzzle” Andrew Napolitano, a prominent Fox News personality who became a critic of Donald Trump, according to a new book about the rightwing TV network. 

Barr’s meeting with Murdoch, at the media mogul’s New York home in October 2019, was widely reported at the time, with speculation surrounding its subject. According to Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth, by CNN media reporter Brian Stelter, subjects covered included media consolidation and criminal justice reform. 

“But it was also about Judge Andrew Napolitano.” 

Stelter’s in-depth look at Fox News, its fortunes under Trump and its links to his White House will be published on Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy. 

In early 2019 it was reported that Napolitano, a New Jersey superior court judge who joined Fox News in 1998, told friends he had been on Trump’s shortlist for the supreme court. But he broke ranks later in the year, labeling Trump’s approaches to Ukraine, seeking political dirt on rivals, “both criminal and impeachable behavior”. 

“The criminal behavior to which Trump has admitted,” Napolitano wrote, in a column dated 3 October, “is much more grave than anything alleged or unearthed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and much of what Mueller revealed was impeachable.”
Citing an unnamed source, Stelter writes that Trump “was so incensed by the judge’s TV broadcasts that he had implored Barr to send Rupert a message in person … about ‘muzzling the judge’. [Trump] wanted the nation’s top law enforcement official to convey just how atrocious Napolitano’s legal analysis had been.” 

Barr has been widely accused of riding roughshod over the rule of law, in service of Trump and his own authoritarian view of the presidency. 

Though Barr’s words to Murdoch “carried a lot of weight”, Stelter writes, “no one was explicitly told to take Napolitano off the air”. Instead, Stelter reports, Napolitano found digital resources allocated elsewhere, saw a slot on a daytime show disappear, and was not included in coverage of the impeachment process. 

In Stelter’s telling, Napolitano thought he was being kept off air by “25-year-old producers” who didn’t think viewers could handle his analysis. Stelter, however, says an unnamed “twentysomething staffer” confirmed that one host, Maria Bartiromo, would only book Napolitano to discuss non-Trump topics, because he would upset Bartiromo too much if he criticised the president. 

Fox News’ audience, of course, remains loyal to Trump as his campaign for re-election continues. Some Fox employees, Stelter writes, “justified the benching of the judge by claiming that viewers hated him: ‘Why are we going to book someone who kills our ratings?’”

Judge Nap got back in Trump's good graces of course by backing Barr dropping charges against Michael Flynn and commuting Roger Stone's prison time, but having Barr lean on Murdoch should be enough for not just Barr to be removed from office, but Trump as well.

Luckily, we can do that in the next few months.

Last Call For Worst-Case Scenarios, Con't

Rob Shapiro at Washington Monthly games out an interesting, if not oddly specific scenario for November: Biden wins, and Trump agrees to go quietly only under a full pardon, or he'll tell his followers to start up that Second Civil War.

Let’s start with what we know about the president’s core message. We know that his website offers no new proposals for his second term on taxes, healthcare, energy, agriculture, education, or even on how to beat the pandemic. When the pandemic, and his mismanagement of it, drove down jobs and growth, his message has shifted to the claims that widespread mail-in voting is part of a rigged election, and the only way he can lose is through mail-in ballot fraud. This new message has become as central to his 2020 campaign as anti-immigration was in 2016.

Trump’s attacks on the electoral process this year started with the suggestion that the election should be delayed, because widespread mail-in balloting based on the pandemic, as he put it, would be a “catastrophic disaster” leading to fraudulent results. Perhaps he thought he could delay the election until a time when he could point to the pandemic receding. Alas for that plan, Republican leaders from Mitch McConnell down rejected the trial balloon out-of-hand. Even so, the controversy generated wide publicity for his claim that a fair election would be impossible with largescale mail-in voting.

To be clear, that claim has no basis in fact. As the Brennan Center for Justice reported recently, extensive research shows that mail-in ballot fraud is very rare; and a National Academy of Sciences study found that universal mail-in voting has no discernible effect on each party’s share of the turnout or the election’s results. But for Trump’s strategy, the salient fact is that Democrats are much more likely than Republicans to vote by mail, by a margin of 72 percent to 22 percent, according to a recent Monmouth University survey.

The current centerpiece of Trump’s attacks on mail-in voting is his public push to block funding for the U.S. Postal Service and enact new policies that will delay deliveries of mail-in ballots to state election officials.

By normal political standards, this war on mail delivery is remarkable on several counts. First, 91 percent of Americans view the USPS favorably for its prompt reliable delivery of their mail. Second, his high-profile attacks have given Democrats a strong incentive to organize their voters to request and mail-in their ballots early. Finally, instead of declaring war, his newly installed postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, could have found discrete and hard-to-trace ways to weaken the USPS’s capacity to deliver tens of millions of mail-in ballots on time.

DeJoy may be taking such steps anyway. He announced this week that he would suspend the policy changes until after the election. Whether he really is or not, the headline-grabbing dispute has further publicized and reinforced the president’s core message that any election with high levels of mail-in balloting is rigged.

The third piece of this messaging addresses what Trump may do about a rigged election.: By his own statements, Trump may not accept the election result if he loses—and implicitly, neither should his supporters. He made the same threat in 2016, near the close of his third debate with Hillary Clinton. But if Trump had lost in 2016, whatever he said about it would have had little if any consequences. The threat has different implications this time, because now he is the president.

For example, if loses narrowly, he could direct his attorney general to sue to overturn the results in a few states, based on the Justice Department’s findings of mail-in ballot fraud. We do not know what would happen next. Americans typically see a narrow loss as a loss, however, and while Trump’s messaging has prepared his more fervent supporters to protest such an outcome, that type of public pressure usually does not affect judges.

We also cannot know what Trump will do if he loses badly. Based on game theory, he does have one course left that might take the sting out of his defeat: After spending months preparing his supporters for the prospect that Democrats will steal the presidency, Trump’s representatives could tell Biden’s camp that unless the president-elect agrees to some concessions, the sitting president will publicly reject the results as a fraud and call on his followers to take mass action in the streets.

In Trump’s view, this could be his ultimate deal. He agrees to accept the election results and retire peacefully, but only if Biden and Democratic congressional leaders agree to shelve future investigations and forgo federal prosecutions of him and his family and associates—and call on state prosecutors and attorneys general to do the same.

It's plausible, the problem with this is Biden already pledged not to pardon Trump back in May.The second problem is Trump will do this anyway if he loses. Remember, it's not if Trump will spend the rest of his life in a New York penitentiary, it's when his sentencing starts after his convictions on tax fraud and racketeering.

Trump will do absolutely anything to avoid prison. He knows he will die there. Keep that in mind as you go forward in 2020.

Householder Of Cards, Con't

As Ohio Republicans are reeling from the indictment of now former State House Speaker Larry Householder on bribery and fraud charges related to taking millions from an energy company in order to pass legislation worth billions to the energy industry in the state, with former GOP Gov. John Kasich openly endorsing Joe Biden at the DNC, and the state's job market now locked in double digit unemployment, the state party is desperately trying to stay afloat and keep their total control of the levers of power, something that is no longer assured in November.

Complications pummeled Ohio Republicans this week as they sought to put up a united front headed into the GOP’s national convention.

One of their best-known politicians threw his support behind Democrat Joe Biden, their Republican state attorney general challenged the Trump administration, and President Donald Trump himself took on an iconic Ohio company in an area of the state where loyalties to job security ran higher than loyalties to party four years ago.

With early voting set to begin in less than seven weeks, Democrats are enthused about their possibilities in a state crucial to Trump, one he carried by 8 points over Hillary Clinton in 2016. It’s a striking turnaround for a party that just last year was wondering if the one-time swing state — with 18 electoral votes — had moved out of its reach.
Since Trump faced Clinton, Democrats have seen progress in the 2018 midterm and 2019 local elections, including in key suburban areas. Trump’s call Wednesday to boycott the Akron-based Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company, while inaccurately claiming the company had announced a ban of Make America Great Again hats, gives the party new material as it tries to return struggling blue-collar workers to the fold.

Jane Timkin, the Republican Party chair who ousted an ally of former Gov. John Kasich from that job, was dismissive of Kasich’s speech endorsing Biden at the Democratic National Convention and expects Trump’s momentum to build.

“I feel pretty good,” she told The Associated Press. “The president has a 95% approval rating among Republicans and, aside from folks like John Kasich, who was a never-Trumper, I think the rest of the party is very united and excited about re-electing President Trump.”

A June 28 Quinnipiac University poll placed the figure at 92% among Ohio registered voters, with 93% of Democrats favoring Biden and independents divided 44% for Trump and 40% for Biden.

Kyle Kondik — an analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics who wrote “The Bellwether,” a 2016 book about Ohio presidential politics — said it remains to be seen whether Kasich will sway fellow Republicans. Kasich carried Ohio over Trump in 2016′s Republican presidential primary, but his campaign soon ran out of steam.

“I think Kasich represents a lot of his friends and neighbors (in suburban Columbus) who probably feel the same way he does,” Kondik said. “They’ve just seen enough.”

Kondik also said it’s too soon to predict whether Trump’s Wednesday assault on Goodyear, an integral part of Akron’s “Rubber Capital” history, will cost him among the northeast Ohio auto industry voters who backed him in 2016. Four years ago, a single remark by Clinton — that the transition to clean energy meant “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business” — damaged her performance in eastern Ohio’s coal country, where she had been running well.

Even Akron’s most famous native, LeBron James, jumped on Trump’s Goodyear comments: “Unbelievable brand and unbelievable history,” he said at the NBA’s pandemic home in Lake Buena Vista, Florida.

U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, a Democrat from Youngstown, helped lead a rally in Akron the next day, joined by local and union officials and a crowd of workers holding up such signs as “It will be a Goodyear without Trump.” With working families struggling during the coronavirus pandemic-pounded economy, Ryan said: “We have enough challenges.”

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Bill Conner, a United Steelworkers union local official in Akron, saying Trump’s boycott call could hurt “an American company, American workers.”

We'll see if it makes a difference.  Ohio is definitely a Midwestern state with more in common with Indiana and Kentucky than Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin.  It's a red state and that probably won't change in November.

But it might.

Some Trumps Just Want To Watch The Blue States Burn

According to the chief of staff of former Homeland Security head Kirstjen Nielsen, Donald Trump indeed wanted FEMA to cut off all emergency funding for California wildfires because the state didn't vote for him in 2016, and when Nielsen refused, she was forced to resign.

President Donald Trump wanted to shut off emergency relief for California amid devastating wildfires because it was a blue state, and he tried to deliberately separate families to deter immigration, according to a scathing account given by a former administration official on Monday.

In a new ad by the group Republican Voters Against Trump, Miles Taylor, former chief of staff to former Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, said Trump was “actively doing damage to our security,” recounting a number of episodes that he said revealed Trump’s inability to lead. Taylor said Trump wanted to expand family separation at the border, withhold emergency funding because of partisan grudges and neglect pressing national security issues for the sake of his political objectives.

Taylor endorsed Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, in the ad, saying he felt that the former vice president would protect the country despite their partisan differences. He also wrote in an op-ed in The Washington Post that Trump tried to use the Department of Homeland Security to fulfill a political agenda, including shutting down the California-Mexico border. Taylor is among the most senior former members of the Trump administration to back Biden.

The White House denounced Taylor’s remarks, pointing out that during his tenure in the administration, from 2017 to 2019, he never publicly voiced concerns.

“This individual is another creature of the D.C. Swamp who never understood the importance of the President’s agenda or why the American people elected him and clearly just wants to cash-in,” White House spokesperson Judd Deere said in a statement to POLITICO. “President Trump has an unprecedented number of accomplishments in spite of government bureaucrats who are only out for themselves, not the forgotten men and women of this country.”

In the ad, Taylor alleges that Trump asked for funding to be pulled from the Federal Emergency Management Agency during catastrophic wildfires that caused millions of dollars in damage in California, because the state was not part of his political base.

“He told us to stop giving money to people whose houses had burned down because he was so rageful that people in the state of California didn’t support him,” Taylor said.

Trump tweeted in January 2019 that California should stop receiving FEMA money until “they get their act together” on proper forest management. He also blasted the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, in November and threatened to cut off future funding unless the state adopted measures to curb forest fires.

Taylor also alleged that Trump tried to separate families of immigrants in order to deter them from illegally entering the country. Under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy, hundreds of families were separated when parents were held in detention for illegally crossing the border. The administration officially reversed course on separating children from their parents after a fierce outcry, but Taylor alleges that Trump tried to reinstitute the practice in order to scare immigrants.

Taylor said in his op-ed that Trump became “visibly furious” when Nielsen refused. Nielsen left her post in April of last year.

So yes, everything I suspected that happened with FEMA and California during the early Trump years was correct.  Donald Trump ordered his cabinet to hurt Clinton states like California because not enough of the 40 million Americans who lived there were loyal enough to him.

So they deserved to suffer and die. He doesn't want to punish the Obama coalition of voters.

He wants to kill us.

This is still the case today.

Trump is a monster.

It's About Suppression, Con't

Donald Trump couldn't have been happier in 2016 when his Russian friends and GOP allies were able to suppress the black vote that carried Barack Obama to victory in 2008 and 2012, and Trump thought it meant it was a sign that Black voters secretly liked him but were too afraid to say it, because Trump is a monster, a moron, and a clinical narcissist.

In a private meeting inside Trump Tower days before his inauguration, Donald Trump told a group of civil rights leaders something most Republicans wouldn’t dare publicly acknowledge: lower turnout among Black voters did, in fact, benefit him in the 2016 presidential election.

"Many Blacks didn’t go out to vote for Hillary ‘cause they liked me. That was almost as good as getting the vote, you know, and it was great,” the president-elect said, according to an audio recording of the meeting shared with POLITICO.

Three-and-a-half years later, those comments take on new weight, as Democrats and Republicans battle over restrictions on voting amid an historic pandemic.

Trump has repeatedly alleged, without evidence, that expanding mail-in voting will lead to massive fraud, and Republicans have filed lawsuits against a number of states attempting to do so. Higher voter turnout tends to benefit Democrats — low turnout among Black voters in key states is one of the reasons Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in 2016. And voting rights activists have warned that GOP efforts to limit access to absentee ballots could keep many from voting this fall, particularly Black people, seniors and others at high risk from Covid-19.

The coronavirus pandemic was not on anyone’s radar on Jan. 16, 2017, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, when Trump hosted the meeting with leaders from the Drum Major Institute, a voting rights group founded by King and fellow civil rights leader Harry Wachtel. But voting access was. The meeting was requested to lobby Trump on a proposal to put photo identification on Social Security cards to combat voter ID laws.

Attendees included Martin Luther King III, William Wachtel, James Forbes, Johnny Mack and Scott Rechler. Former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young briefly spoke to Trump by phone during the meeting.

Wachtel’s then-chief of staff Tootsie Warhol provided the audio to POLITICO this week. The lawyer-turned-activist attended the sit-down and surreptitiously recorded it from his iPhone. Born Teddy Mukamal, he said his motivation for sharing the recording now is that he is in the process of reinventing himself as Warhol, an artist and activist, since leaving his law firm in November.

Warhol has filed with the Federal Election Commission to run for president in 2020, though he described his independent campaign as a new way to engage voters and said he hopes former Vice President Joe Biden wins the November election.

He told POLITICO, “The first thing that I can never forget was how when you walked in, (Trump) name-drops all these Black celebrities and tries to give the illusion that they’re his friends.”

Inside Trump Tower, Trump told the group that he had “so many” Black friends who “are so incredible, and everyone knows that.” At the top of the meeting, he showed off NBA Hall of Famer Shaquille O’Neal’s sneaker, world heavyweight champion Mike Tyson’s belt and Sugar Ray Leonard’s boxing glove. (He also flaunted Tom Brady’s Super Bowl helmet and his own chair from “The Apprentice.”)

And during the 45-minute meeting, Trump asked the attendees if they were “surprised that Hillary lost so badly” and boasted that he won 11 percent of the Black vote in 2016. Trump lost the national popular vote by nearly 3 million and only won 8 percent of Black voters, according to exit polls, 81 percentage points behind Clinton. Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, and John McCain, the 2008 GOP standard-bearer, won 6 percent and 4 percent of Black voters, respectively.

Note that the meeting to help increase the voting base through a national voter ID program through Social Security never went anywhere, because the point of Voter IDs isn't to protect the integrity of voting, it's to stop poor people, college students, and the elderly from voting at all, and it disproportionately affects Black people.

A national voter ID program, you see, would solve the problem that voter ID laws create artificially.

And we can't have that.

Trump of course was too stupid to know, or too egotistical to care.

Still is today.

Last Call For A Taxing Situation, Con't

Trump just lost his post-SCOTUS legal challenge to keep his taxes out of the hands of New York County DA Cyrus Vance's office, and the clock is now ticking on the secret Trump has been hiding for five years.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero threw out President Donald Trump’s challenge to a subpoena seeking his tax returns, a decision that all but guarantees a New York grand jury access to these documents in the near future. Trump will fight Thursday’s order, but he has run out of options: The Supreme Court already rejected his sweeping claims on immunity, then gave Marrero a road map that led ineluctably to a decision against the president. And soon, at long last, New York prosecutors will obtain the tax returns that he has fought so long to conceal.

New York County District Attorney Cy Vance reportedly began investigating Trump in 2018 for the illegal hush money payments that Michael Cohen made on his behalf. Since then, prosecutors have indicated that they are also looking into bank and insurance fraud by Trump and his companies. In 2019, a New York grand jury subpoenaed Mazars, Trump’s shadowy accounting firm, for eight years of financial records from both Trump and his businesses, including tax returns. The president, aided by the Department of Justice, intervened to quash the subpoena. Trump’s lawyers argued that sitting presidents are absolutely immune from state criminal subpoenas. Alternatively, they insisted that prosecutors should have to show a “heightened need” when subpoenaing the president, demonstrating that their action is a “last resort” to obtain information “not available from any other source.”

Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion for SCOTUS, issued in July, rejected both these arguments. Roberts explained that nothing in the Constitution compels state prosecutors to show a “heightened need” for a subpoena of the president. Nor do the president’s constitutional powers shield him from a subpoena while in office. To the contrary, historical practice confirms that “the public has a right to every man’s evidence.” However, Roberts noted, a president may challenge a subpoena that is issued in bad faith if he can show it was designed to harass him. He can also defeat a subpoena by showing that it will impede his constitutional duties. The chief justice then sent the case back down to the lower courts, giving Trump an opportunity to raise these final objections.

Roberts’ decision was diplomatic: It confirmed that no one is above the law without immediately forcing Trump to comply with the law. But it was also a time bomb, because the chief justice surely knew that none of those objections had any merit in this case. The bomb went off on Thursday. Trump’s lawyers argued that Vance was engaged in a yearslong campaign of harassment against the president, a “fishing expedition” with illicit partisan motives. But they provided no credible evidence to back up their claims. As Marrero wrote:

This Court cannot mechanically credit allegations that a particular application of judicial process to the President is necessarily unduly burdensome and motivated by bad faith if, upon thorough and independent review, it fairly and compellingly appears that the claimed imposition on the President lacks plausible basis. … Given force, the relief the President seeks … would essentially extend the application of presidential immunity simply by virtue of a mere invocation that it is, after all, the President whose petition to be shielded from judicial process the Court is evaluating.

But the Supreme Court declined to extend such immunity to the president in Trump v. Vance. And Trump cannot get around that decision by lobbing vague and unsubstantiated accusations at prosecutors. That tactic might succeed on Twitter, but it does not fly in a court of law. Marrero explained:

The President’s response embodies a novel application of presidential immunity to protect the executive branch from judicial process. At its core, it amounts to absolute immunity through a back door, an entry point through which not only a President but also potentially other persons and entities, public and private, could effectively gain cover from judicial process.

Finally, Marrero noted, Trump failed “to raise claims based on identifiable executive policies or specific Article II duties” that might be hampered by complying with the subpoena. The president did not establish that turning over his tax returns would prevent him exercising his executive powers. He barely even tried—perhaps because a president who spends so many days tweeting his grievances cannot plausibly insist that an otherwise valid subpoena would somehow hinder his ability to lead the nation.

Trump appealed today to the 2nd Circuit to tie up Marrero's order but the Supreme Court just made it clear six weeks ago that Trump has no real legal basis to stop Vance's office from getting his tax returns. The order doesn't go into effect until the 28th, so we'll see what transpires.

If the order is stayed, it will not be stayed for long.

And then it's over for Trump and he knows it.

Convention Connection, Day 4

There were several great moments on the final day of the DNC last night, 13-year-old Brayden Harrington giving a speech about how Joe Biden gave him to courage to work on his stutter like Biden himself overcame, Julia Louis-Dreyfus getting in some brutal digs at the Tangerine Tyrant, but Joe Biden's acceptance speech may be the best speech I've ever seen the man give, and it could not have happened at a more crucial time in the tapestry of American history.

Just a week ago yesterday was the third anniversary of the events in Charlottesville. 

Remember seeing those neo-Nazis and Klansmen and white supremacists coming out of the fields with lighted torches? Veins bulging? Spewing the same anti-Semitic bile heard across Europe in the '30s? Remember the violent clash that ensued between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it? 

Remember what the president said?  There were quote, "very fine people on both sides." It was a wake-up call for us as a country. And for me, a call to action. At that moment, I knew I'd have to run. My father taught us that silence was complicity. And I could not remain silent or complicit. At the time, I said we were in a battle for the soul of this nation. And we are.

One of the most important conversations I've had this entire campaign is with someone who is too young to vote. I met with six-year old Gianna Floyd, a day before her Daddy George Floyd was laid to rest. She is incredibly brave. I'll never forget. When I leaned down to speak with her, she looked into my eyes and said "Daddy, changed the world." Her words burrowed deep into my heart. Maybe George Floyd's murder was the breaking point. 

Maybe John Lewis' passing the inspiration. However it has come to be, America is ready to in John's words, to lay down "the heavy burdens of hate at last" and to do the hard work of rooting out our systemic racism. America's history tells us that it has been in our darkest moments that we've made our greatest progress. That we've found the light. And in this dark moment, I believe we are poised to make great progress again. That we can find the light once more. 

I have always believed you can define America in one word: Possibilities. That in America, everyone, and I mean everyone, should be given the opportunity to go as far as their dreams and God-given ability will take them. 

We can never lose that. In times as challenging as these, I believe there is only one way forward. As a united America. United in our pursuit of a more perfect Union. United in our dreams of a better future for us and for our children. United in our determination to make the coming years bright. 

Are we ready?  I believe we are. This is a great nation. And we are a good and decent people. This is the United States of America. And there has never been anything we've been unable to accomplish when we've done it together. 

The Irish poet Seamus Heaney once wrote:
"History says,
Don't hope on this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme" 

This is our moment to make hope and history rhyme.

Joe Biden gets it.  It was a beautiful speech. He understands America is its people, and the choices our leaders make in the name of those people. And right now, the guy in the Oval Office?

He only cares about himself.  Period. That's it.

Biden's not perfect by any stretch. He still has a lot to answer for regarding his political decisions over the years, and how they hurt people. Guy wasn't even in my top five in 2019.  But if I had seen this Joe Biden years ago, I would have held him in higher regard. This is the Joe that Barack Obama saw in 2008.

We need to make sure he wins.

Bannon: Busted, Broken, And Bagged

After everything shifty and grifty former Trump chief strategist, Breitbart editor, and human pile of rumpled failure Steve Bannon was involved with at the Trump regime, the guy finally gets collared for good ol' mail fraud in the end.

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon was arrested Thursday after being charged with defrauding hundreds of thousands of donors through his “We Build the Wall” fundraising campaign.

Bannon and three associates were indicted in a federal investigation in the Southern District of New York. Prosecutors allege the four defrauded donors by raising “more than $25 million to build a wall along the southern border of the United States,” but some of that money was used for personal gain.
The United States Postal Inspection Service assisted in the investigation.

Others in the indictment are Timothy Shea, a 49-year-old from Colorado accused of owning a shell company, Brian Kolfage, a disabled Iraq war veteran, and Andrew Badolato, who according to his own website was a contributor to Breitbart News, the conservative publication Bannon used to run.

The campaign was intended to raise money to help President Donald Trump fulfill a campaign promise to build a border wall. Instead, prosecutors allege that Bannon and his team profited off the arrangement.

The indictment said the defendants “collectively received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donor funds from ‘We Build the Wall,’ which they each used in a manner inconsistent with the organization’s public representations.”

“The defendants defrauded hundreds of thousands of donors, capitalizing on their interest in funding a border wall to raise millions of dollars, under the false pretense that all of that money would be spent on construction,” Acting U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss said in a statement. “While repeatedly assuring donors that Brian Kolfage, the founder and public face of We Build the Wall, would not be paid a cent, the defendants secretly schemed to pass hundreds of thousands of dollars to Kolfage, which he used to fund his lavish lifestyle. We thank the USPIS for their partnership in investigating this case, and we remain dedicated to rooting out and prosecuting fraud wherever we find it.”

The White House declined to comment. A spokeswoman for Bannon did not return a request for comment.

Trump of course said he knows nothing about this at all, despite the fact that Bannon and his brick heads constantly said they were raising money for Trump's wall and used that point to specifically raise money, multiple times.

When asked about the pattern of lawlessness in his administration, Trump said that Obama did it too, except the number of former Obama White House officials indicted for crimes is, you know, zero.

PS: Large Adult Son was more than happy to back this.

Donald Trump Jr. praised We Build The Wall and Brian Kolfage at a 2018 event: "This is private enterprise at its finest. Doing it better, faster, cheaper than anything else. What you guys are doing is amazing.” pic.twitter.com/hOL25JoZPI

— andrew kaczynski🤔 (@KFILE) August 20, 2020

And of course he knew everyone involved.

This was the White House statement. Besides Don Jr. participation in an event, he does know people involved in the project like Kobach, Bannon, Erick Prince and David Clarke. https://t.co/vl3NJSNQcn

— andrew kaczynski🤔 (@KFILE) August 20, 2020

Don is lying again because that's what grifters do with effectively unlimited power. They lie and con people out of money daily. They are bad at it, but use Trump's influence and power to get away with it.

Only, they're no longer getting away with it.

StupidiNews!

• The White House is formally classifying teachers as "essential workers", meaning that they can be required to continue to work even if they have tested positive for COVID-19.
• More than 70 former Republican federal law enforcement, national security, and intelligence officials have signed on to a letter endorsing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in 2020. 
• The FDA's top vaccine research head is confirming reports that he will resign if the Trump regime green-lights an unproven vaccine for COVID-19.
• Mexico's political world was rocked this week by the naming of three former presidents and a dozen ministers in a massive bribery scandal involving state oil giant Petroleos Mexicanos.
• Ride-share giants Uber and Lyft will be able to continue operations in California after a judge granted the companies relief while litigation over the state's law classifying drivers as employees continues.