If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed. -- Benjamin Franklin
But it doesn't take much for Biden to lose if everything else remains the same from 2016.
For example, if all that changes from 2016 is white non-college voter turnout goes from 55% to 60%, Biden wins the popular vote by more than 3 million, but loses in a 306-232 electoral college rout that mirrors the 2016 map. Trump would win PA, MI, WI, and FL all by less than 1% again.
Even worse would be just a 4-point shift in the Black vote, with Trump going from 8% to 12%. Biden would win the popular vote by more than four million, but lose 276-262 as Biden would only pick up PA and WI, but Trump would keep FL, MI, and AZ. The same thing happens if Biden still gets 92% of the Black vote, but Black turnout is suppressed from 57% to 52%. A combination of a 10% Trump Black vote and a 2% drop in Black turnout also leads to electoral loss for Biden. It doesn't take much for Trump to win, folks.
Having said all that however, if Biden's share of white college voters goes up just three points from 54% in 2016 to 57%, he wins Georgia, NC, and Florida and he rolls Trump 350-188. Same happens if he does 3 points better with non-college white voters, going to 34% from 31%. If he does both, same electoral margin, but he wins the popular vote by almost 12 million. If Biden does five points better with white voters, he takes Texas and Ohio too.
The polls though have Biden regularly doing much better with white voters overall. This bodes really, really well for the blowout scenarios where Biden gets 350 or more electoral votes, where Trump simply can't dispute the loss anymore. Biden is doing much better than Clinton did in 2016, full stop.
And if Trump is doing well enough to tie overall with white voters?
From the beginning, John H. Durham’s inquiry into the Russia investigation has been politically charged. President Trump promoted it as certain to uncover a “deep state” plot against him, Attorney General William P. Barr rebuked the investigators under scrutiny, and he and Mr. Durham publicly second-guessed an independent inspector general and traveled the globe to chase down conspiracy theories.
It turns out that Mr. Durham also focused attention on certain political enemies of Mr. Trump: the Clintons.
Mr. Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut assigned by Mr. Barr to review the Russia inquiry, has sought documents and interviews about how federal law enforcement officials handled an investigation around the same time into allegations of political corruption at the Clinton Foundation, according to people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Durham’s team members have suggested to others that they are comparing the two investigations as well as examining whether investigators in the Russia inquiry flouted laws or policies. It was not clear whether Mr. Durham’s investigators were similarly looking for violations in the Clinton Foundation investigation, nor whether the comparison would be included or play a major role in the outcome of Mr. Durham’s inquiry.
The approach is highly unusual, according to people briefed on the investigation. Though the suspected crimes themselves are not comparable — one involves a possible conspiracy between a presidential campaign and a foreign adversary to interfere in an election, and the other involves potential bribery and corruption — and largely included different teams of investigators and prosecutors, Mr. Durham’s efforts suggest the scope of his review is broader than previously known.
Mr. Durham’s focus on the Clinton Foundation inquiry comes as concerns deepen among Democrats and some former Justice Department officials that his investigation is being weaponized politically to help Mr. Trump. Congressional Democrats last week called on the department’s inspector general to investigate whether Mr. Durham’s review was free from political influence after his top aide abruptly resigned, reportedly over concerns that the team’s findings would be prematurely released before the election in November.
The Clinton Foundation investigation began about five years ago, under the Obama administration, and stalled in part because some former career law enforcement officials viewed the case as too weak to issue subpoenas. Ultimately, prosecutors in Arkansas secured a subpoena for the charity in early 2018. To date, the case has not resulted in criminal charges.
Some former law enforcement officials declined to talk to Mr. Durham’s team about the foundation investigation because they felt the nature of his inquiry was highly unusual, according to people familiar with the investigation. Mr. Durham’s staff members sought information about the debate over the subpoenas that the F.B.I. tried to obtain in 2016 and have also approached current agents about the matter, but it is not clear what they told investigators.
A spokesman for Mr. Durham declined to comment.
“The Clinton Foundation has regularly been subjected to baseless, politically motivated allegations, and time after time these allegations have been proven false,” the foundation said in a statement.
If you want to know why we're learning about this now, it's because yesterday a New York judge told Eric Trump that he has to comply with a subpoena in the NY state case against the Trump Organization by October 7. Eric Trump had arrogantly said he wouldn't comply until after the election.
The Clinton Foundation inquiry story coming this close to the subpoena ruling is definitely a warning shot, fired by a regime that believes they can get New York to drop the case if the Clintons tell state AG Tisha James to do so, because that's how the regime thinks things work.
The interregnum allots 35 days for the count and its attendant lawsuits to be resolved. On the 36th day, December 8, an important deadline arrives.
At this stage, the actual tabulation of the vote becomes less salient to the outcome. That sounds as though it can’t be right, but it is: The combatants, especially Trump, will now shift their attention to the appointment of presidential electors.
December 8 is known as the “safe harbor” deadline for appointing the 538 men and women who make up the Electoral College. The electors do not meet until six days later, December 14, but each state must appoint them by the safe-harbor date to guarantee that Congress will accept their credentials. The controlling statute says that if “any controversy or contest” remains after that, then Congress will decide which electors, if any, may cast the state’s ballots for president.
We are accustomed to choosing electors by popular vote, but nothing in the Constitution says it has to be that way. Article II provides that each state shall appoint electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Since the late 19th century, every state has ceded the decision to its voters. Even so, the Supreme Court affirmed in Bush v. Gore that a state “can take back the power to appoint electors.” How and when a state might do so has not been tested for well over a century.
Trump may test this. According to sources in the Republican Party at the state and national levels, the Trump campaign is discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority. With a justification based on claims of rampant fraud, Trump would ask state legislators to set aside the popular vote and exercise their power to choose a slate of electors directly. The longer Trump succeeds in keeping the vote count in doubt, the more pressure legislators will feel to act before the safe-harbor deadline expires.
To a modern democratic sensibility, discarding the popular vote for partisan gain looks uncomfortably like a coup, whatever license may be found for it in law. Would Republicans find that position disturbing enough to resist? Would they cede the election before resorting to such a ploy? Trump’s base would exact a high price for that betrayal, and by this point party officials would be invested in a narrative of fraud.
The Trump-campaign legal adviser I spoke with told me the push to appoint electors would be framed in terms of protecting the people’s will. Once committed to the position that the overtime count has been rigged, the adviser said, state lawmakers will want to judge for themselves what the voters intended.
“The state legislatures will say, ‘All right, we’ve been given this constitutional power. We don’t think the results of our own state are accurate, so here’s our slate of electors that we think properly reflect the results of our state,’ ” the adviser said. Democrats, he added, have exposed themselves to this stratagem by creating the conditions for a lengthy overtime.
“If you have this notion,” the adviser said, “that ballots can come in for I don’t know how many days—in some states a week, 10 days—then that onslaught of ballots just gets pushed back and pushed back and pushed back. So pick your poison. Is it worse to have electors named by legislators or to have votes received by Election Day?”
When The Atlantic asked the Trump campaign about plans to circumvent the vote and appoint loyal electors, and about other strategies discussed in the article, the deputy national press secretary did not directly address the questions. “It’s outrageous that President Trump and his team are being villainized for upholding the rule of law and transparently fighting for a free and fair election,” Thea McDonald said in an email. “The mainstream media are giving the Democrats a free pass for their attempts to completely uproot the system and throw our election into chaos.” Trump is fighting for a trustworthy election, she wrote, “and any argument otherwise is a conspiracy theory intended to muddy the waters.” In Pennsylvania, three Republican leaders told me they had already discussed the direct appointment of electors among themselves, and one said he had discussed it with Trump’s national campaign.
“I’ve mentioned it to them, and I hope they’re thinking about it too,” Lawrence Tabas, the Pennsylvania Republican Party’s chairman, told me. “I just don’t think this is the right time for me to be discussing those strategies and approaches, but [direct appointment of electors] is one of the options. It is one of the available legal options set forth in the Constitution.” He added that everyone’s preference is to get a swift and accurate count. “If the process, though, is flawed, and has significant flaws, our public may lose faith and confidence” in the election’s integrity.
Jake Corman, the state’s Senate majority leader, preferred to change the subject, emphasizing that he hoped a clean vote count would produce a final tally on Election Night. “The longer it goes on, the more opinions and the more theories and the more conspiracies [are] created,” he told me. If controversy persists as the safe-harbor date nears, he allowed, the legislature will have no choice but to appoint electors. “We don’t want to go down that road, but we understand where the law takes us, and we’ll follow the law.” Republicans control both legislative chambers in the six most closely contested battleground states. Of those, Arizona and Florida have Republican governors, too. In Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, the governors are Democrats.
Foley, the Ohio State election scholar, has mapped the ripple effects if Republican legislators were to appoint Trump electors in defiance of the vote in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan. The Democratic governors would respond by certifying the official count, a routine exercise of their authority, and they would argue that legislators could not lawfully choose different electors after the vote had taken place. Their “certificates of ascertainment,” dispatched to the National Archives, would say that their states had appointed electors committed to Biden. Each competing set of electors would have the imprimatur of one branch of state government.
In Arizona, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who oversees elections, is a Democrat. She could assert her own power to certify the voting results and forward a slate of Biden electors. Even in Florida, which has unified Republican rule, electors pledged to Biden could meet and certify their own votes in hope of triggering a “controversy or contest” that would leave their state’s outcome to Congress. Much the same thing almost happened during the Florida recount battle of 2000. Republican Governor Jeb Bush certified electors for his brother, George W. Bush, on November 26 of that year, while litigation of the recount was still under way. Gore’s chief lawyer, Ronald Klain, responded by booking a room in the old Florida capitol building for Democratic electors to cast rival ballots for Gore. Only Gore’s concession, five days before the Electoral College vote, mooted that plan. In any of these scenarios, the Electoral College would convene on December 14 without a consensus on who had legitimate claims to cast the deciding votes.
And there's your nightmare scenario. Republican legislatures in all six battleground states appointing electors loyal to Trump, with Democratic governors in four of those six states certifying election results that clearly show a Biden win.
It would be a coup with neither side having 270 electoral votes, or, Trump claiming that his slate of electors gives him the electoral college results in order to claim victory.
So who breaks the logjam, the voters, or the electors?
The Supreme Court would decide and this is why they want someone confirmed before the election so that they can be the fifth vote for Trump holding on to power.
President Donald Trump refused Wednesday to commit to a peaceful transition of power if he loses the 2020 election to Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
“Well, we’ll have to see what happens. You know that. I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots. And the ballots are a disaster,” Trump said at a news conference at the White House. It appeared Trump was referring to mail-in ballots, which he has repeatedly condemned, without evidence, as susceptible to massive fraud.
The president had been asked by a reporter if he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power, “win, lose or draw.”
When the reporter noted that “people are rioting,” Trump replied: “Get rid of the ballots, and you’ll have a very – you’ll have a very peaceful – there won’t be a transfer, frankly, there’ll be a continuation.”
“The ballots are out of control,” Trump said, adding, “The Democrats know it better than anybody else.”
The Biden campaign issued the following statement in response to Trump declining to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he were to lose the election: “The American people will decide this election. And the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.”
Minutes later, the president abruptly left the briefing room, telling the press, “I have to leave to take an emergency phone call.”
The White House did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for details on Trump’s departure.
America is not prepared for this.
Trump is openly saying that he believes it will not be necessary to make a peaceful transition of power to Joe Biden, because he believes there's no way Joe Biden can win without "fraudulent mail ballots", that is, DOnald Trump is openly telling us that he thinks there are only two outcomes of the election, Trump wins the election, or Joe Biden cheated and that Trump will rely on the Supreme Court to rule him the victor.
There will be no transfer of power because it cannot happen in Trump's mind, therefore asking if Trump will commit to a peaceful transition if he loses is irrelevant.
That it may shatter the country into open conflict is a bonus for him.
As widely expected, the grand jury in the murder of Breonna Taylor by Louisville police returned no indictments for her slaughter, only that one of the officers may have damaged other apartments with gunfire. Her execution was fully justified, according to AG Daniel Cameron. The reaction by Louisville's Black community was swift and also justified.
Protesters vowed Wednesday to continue their fight for racial justice after learning that just one of three Louisville Metro Police officers who fired shots at Breonna Taylor's apartment will be criminally charged.
In an afternoon announcement, Jefferson County Judge Annie O'Connell said a Jefferson County grand jury has indicted former detective Brett Hankison on three counts of first-degree wanton endangerment. The grand jury declined to bring charges against Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly and detective Myles Cosgrove, who were also involved in fatally shooting Taylor on March 13 at her south Louisville apartment.
"It's a tragedy. This is an embarrassment, and it's exactly why there have been protests for the last (119) days," said pastor Tim Findley, a regular at the protests. "This is a disappointing, hurtful, painful day in our city. What I just heard amounts to a slap on the wrist for him murdering, for them murdering Breonna Taylor.
At least two Louisville Metro Police officers were shot in downtown Louisville Wednesday night, just eight hours after an indictment was returned in the Breonna Taylor case.
Interim LMPD chief Robert Schroeder confirmed two officers were shot and sustained non life-threatening injuries. One officer is in surgery, and the other is alert and in stable condition.
A suspect has been arrested, Schroeder said.
One officer was shot in the abdomen below their bulletproof vest and is in surgery, and a second was shot in the thigh, according to a source with knowledge of the situation.
The shooting occurred at South Brook Street and Broadway Avenue, according to MetroSafe.
MetroSafe confirmed a second shooting occurred on West Broadway at 9:30 p.m. and said an officer was involved but did not say if the officer was a shooter or victim. Max Gersh, a photographer working for The Courier Journal, said he saw "a line of officers move toward a gas station with rifles up. Shortly after, they had somebody pinned to the ground and cuffed." He said he wasn't there when the officers got shot.
For nearly 200 agonizing days, Breonna Taylor's family has waited to know if three Louisville police officers would face charges in her death.
On Wednesday, they got their answer.
And it wasn't what they had hoped for.
At the youth homeless shelter in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she works as a residential adviser, Taylor's cousin Tawanna Gordon watched with tears in her eyes as Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron announced that only one of the officers was indicted by a grand jury — but not for killing Taylor.
"I'm not surprised," Gordon, 45, told The Courier Journal on Wednesday, minutes after Cameron's press conference ended. "But I'm mad as hell because nothing's changing. … Today's decision was an additional injustice on our family and this country. Until Americans start getting mad enough and speaking out and forcing legislators to change the laws for all races, nothing is going to change.
"And it needs to happen now. Not tomorrow, but today."
In his press conference, Cameron said he met with Taylor's mother, Tamika Palmer, and other family members before addressing the media.
"Every day this family wakes up to the realization someone they loved is no longer with them," he said. "There's nothing I can offer today to take away the grief and heartache this family is experiencing."
Palmer left without talking to media. And her attorneys said she would have no comment Wednesday.
We continue to be nothing more than animals to them, dumb beasts of burden who have to be put down at the slightest whiff of disagreement. The basis of policing in America today is "We require the right to kill Black people without consequence in order to protect white America."
The standing joke on Twitter about American political parties is 1) There's no policy difference whatsoever between the GOP and the Dems, and 2) in any other country, Democrats would be considered right-wing hardline conservatives. Neither one is true, neither one is funny, and the real problem is that in the developed world, the GOP is a straight up fascist white supremacist party with more in common with actual European fascist hate groups than the rest of democratic societies.
Experts on comparative politics say the GOP is an extremist outlier, no longer belonging in the same conversation with “normal” right-wing parties like Canada’s Conservative Party (CPC) or Germany’s Christian Democratic Party (CDU). Instead, it more closely resembles more extreme right parties — like Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz in Hungary or Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP in Turkey — that have actively worked to dismantle democracy in their own countries.
The Supreme Court saga can’t be considered in isolation. It is symptomatic of a profound brokenness in American politics, one party dragging us away from the developed-world political standards we aspire to and towards a fight over the most basic of democratic principles: whether power should be shared. And that’s a disaster for American democracy.
“The only way we move forward is when Republicans reform, and cease to be an increasingly authoritarian white nationalist party,” says Steven Levitsky, a Harvard professor and the co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die.
A 2019 survey of nearly 2,000 experts on political parties from around the world asked respondents to rate political parties on two axes: the extent to which they are committed to basic democratic principles and their commitment to protecting rights for ethnic minorities. The higher the number, the more anti-democratic and intolerant the party is.
The following chart shows the results of the survey for all political parties in the OECD, a group of wealthy democratic states, with the two major American parties highlighted in red. The GOP is an extreme outlier compared to mainstream conservative parties in other wealthy democracies, like Canada’s CPC or Germany’s CDU.
The US Democratic Party on the ol' racism/fascism scale is a relatively excellent 1.5 or so on racism and just over 2 on the authoritarianism. Plenty of parties are more liberal, but the Dems are very cool on minority rights. They're still more liberal than the median, which is pretty damn classically liberal at 2.5.
White House Chief of Staff is replacing all federal agency White House liaisons in anticipation of a mass executive branch purge heading into the lame duck period (for maximum shenanigans before Biden is sworn in) or God help us, a second term where all those deemed insufficiently deferential to Dear Leader are disappeared.
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told administration officials Monday to expect senior aides to be replaced at many government agencies, according to an internal email obtained by Axios.
Behind the scenes: Meadows asked the director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office John McEntee "to look at replacing the White House Liaisons (WHLs) at many of your agencies," according to the email. "John will be working with outgoing liaisons to explore other opportunities."
"Please welcome incoming liaisons as they begin their new roles," Meadows wrote. "I ask that you encourage your teams to equip the WHLs with everything they need to support your agency and the President's agenda."
"It is important that WHLs have direct access to principals and senior staff regarding all political hiring decisions."
Why it matters: As Meadows reminded the recipients of his email, these liaisons are the senior-level staff responsible for managing political appointees within each agency.
The White House declined to comment.
Between the lines: Liaisons are the White House's eyes and ears inside the agencies — and in the Trump administration they're charged with enforcing loyalty to the president and his agenda.
McEntee, the president's 30-year-old former body man who now runs hiring for the government, has become a controversial figure within the agencies.
Since taking over the role, McEntee has been systematically purging or reassigning agency officials deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump.
As we have previously reported, McEntee, in a highly unusual campaign, has been making significant staffing changes inside top federal agencies "without the consent — and, in at least one case, without even the knowledge — of the agency head."
This has not endeared him to some agency heads and career officials, but Trump expressed delight at McEntee's efforts, according to sources familiar with the president's private comments.
McEntee's "seismic generator in a china shop" approach hasn't produced the results that Meadows knows he will need in the Conversion To Fascism™ so he's doing the heavy lifting himself here and appointing loyalists to man the guillotines. Guess the kid doesn't have the instincts for the real pogrom action coming.
RedState blogger streiff has retired from his day job as a public affairs specialist at the agency Dr. Anthony Fauci heads after being exposed by the Daily Beast.
With both Mitt Romneyand Thom Tillis committing to confirm Trump's pick to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg -- and I remind you Trump has not made his decision yet and they are still pledging to vote for Trump's nominee unseen -- Trump has the votes to confirm during the election, an unprecedented assault on our country.
There is no silver bullet available to Chuck Schumer, the Democratic Senate minority leader, to block the nominee. Distraught Democrats should understand that senators’ options are limited, but Democratic senators should understand the depth of voters’ desire to see their senators do everything possible to stop Mr. Trump from replacing R.B.G. This is an illegitimate process, and that is how Democrats should approach it. A core function of the Senate is to “advise and consent” on federal court nominees. Jamming a Supreme Court nominee through in direct contradiction of Republican senators’ pledges not to do so, with votes already being cast in the election, will be a clear abdication of any reasonable claim to the institution’s constitutional responsibility.
There are a range of tools available to Democrats to apply constant pressure. The Senate operates on what are called “unanimous consent” agreements, or U.C.s — pacts that set the daily schedule and the terms of conduct for all business. As the name suggests, every senator has to agree to a U.C. If a single senator objects, the U.C. is blocked. Democrats can bring the business of the Senate to a halt by systematically denying U.C. agreements. This simply requires stationing one senator on the floor at all times — senators can rotate every few hours, they just need to be physically present on the floor to say, “I object,” anytime Republicans try to pass a U.C.
Denying U.C.s will gum up the works in countless ways, one of which will be to deny committees the ability to meet more than two hours after the Senate convenes. This applies to the Judiciary Committee, where any confirmation hearings would be held. Republicans will still be able to schedule them, but it will make the process arduous and abnormal.
Absent U.C.s, the Senate needs a quorum of 51 senators to be present to conduct business. Senate Democrats should force Republicans to produce quorums on their own. Republicans control 53 seats, but bringing 51 senators to the floor every time they need to conduct business is a major challenge. Notably, Republicans have more incumbent senators up for re-election than Democrats do, and every day they have to spend in Washington is a lost day of campaigning. It takes only one senator to do this: By noting the absence of a quorum, a Democratic senator can put the Senate into a state of suspended animation called a “quorum call” until 51 senators arrive on the floor.
Democrats can also boycott the confirmation hearings. The hearings are unlikely to influence the outcome. If the hearings for Brett Kavanaugh did not change any votes, neither will these hearings. Attending confers legitimacy, and refusing to attend will send a powerful statement that they deem the process and the nominee illegitimate.
Together, these tactics will hang an asterisk around President Trump’s nominee. Democratic senators should keep in mind that if they participate in the process, even aggressively, history will record it as a “contentious” confirmation process, a common occurrence. Boycotting the process and disrupting Senate business, on the other hand, will brand it as fundamentally different from anything that has come before.
This is the same weak sauce offered before with Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation, ultimately it went nowhere. But there's more this time.
This brings us to the most important step: Democrats should commit to the structural reforms necessary to undo the damage Republicans have wrought. Republicans were able to block Judge Merrick Garland and install a conservative majority on the Supreme Court despite representing less than half of the population. The Senate overrepresents white conservatives, while minority voters are more underrepresented than at any time since 1870. A white conservative minority imposing its will on a diverse majority — in part through federal judges serving lifetime appointments — is a fundamentally unhealthy dynamic for our democracy.
If Democrats win the White House and the Senate in November, they can pass reforms to rebalance our democracy through simple majority votes. The only thing standing in the way will be the filibuster — a procedural mutation that was not a part of the original Senate and that has been manipulated in recent decades to transform the Senate from the framers’ vision of a majority-rule institution into one where most business requires 60 votes (or a “supermajority”) to pass. There are many good reasons to get rid of the filibuster, but Republicans jamming through a nominee should motivate any hesitant Democrats to commit to eliminating it if they take back power.
Without the filibuster, reforms can be passed by simple majority votes, as the framers intended. Democrats should commit to reforming the Supreme Court: They can add seats to the court; apply age or term limits; or pass any of a range of credible proposals. Congress has the prerogative to change the court, including its size, which it has done six times since the founding.
Democrats should also reform the Senate so it better represents the nation. They can start by inviting territories bound by federal law but lacking voting representation in Congress to become states. The District of Columbia has roughly a similar or greater population as Wyoming or North Dakota, while Puerto Rico has more people than 20 states. Both deserve to become states if they so choose.
Committing to these changes now will enable Democrats to move quickly if they take back power.
It's a bold move, and Democrats will have to absolutely and fully committ and follow through for this to happen, but it's the only shot we have.
The alternative is 1952 America, Jim Crow, and white supremacy as the law of the land, based on Christian conservative bigotry being used to justify discrimination of everyone who isn't white, male, and straight.
In a sign of how critical Pennsylvania is to the Republican Party’s election litigation strategy, the state GOP wants the U.S. Supreme Court to review a state case that opened up absentee voting, while the Trump campaign is seeking to revive a federal lawsuit targeting Pennsylvania’s plans for pandemic voting.
The indication Tuesday that the U.S. Supreme Court will be asked to get involved in the state court case marks the first time the high court’s intervention will be sought since the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Democrats and Republicans have been engaged in a multi-front court battle over several aspects of Pennsylvania’s absentee voting process.
Last week, in a lawsuit brought by Democrats, the state Supreme Court okayed Pennsylvania’s plans to set up ballot drop boxes and it upheld the state’s requirement that poll watchers reside in the county they are assigned to. It also ruled that election officials should count ballots that arrive in the three days after the election.
The Pennsylvania GOP as well as the Republican leaders of its legislature indicated on Tuesday that it would appeal that decision — and particularly its extension for the receipt deadline for absentee ballots — to the U.S. Supreme Court. The notice came in requests to the state Supreme Court that it put its opinion on hold while U.S. Supreme Court review is sought.
All indications now are that the PA GOP will get a ruling in their favor, one that will be repeated nationally in order to disenfranchise millions of mail ballots.
And we're just getting started on the massive voter suppression now available to the GOP in the next six weeks.
According to the Des Moines Register, Iowa is now in play for Biden on top of the rest of the battleground states as he is tied there with Trump at 47% a piece.
It's a dead heat in Iowa as a new Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll shows President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden locked in a tie just six weeks to Election Day.
Forty-seven percent of likely voters say they would support Trump for president, and 47% say they would support Biden. Another 4% would vote for someone else and 3% are unsure.
A stark gender divide appears to be driving the race as men of nearly every demographic cast their support for Trump, a Republican, and women do the same for Biden, a Democrat.
“I don’t know that there’s any race in the history of presidential polling in Iowa that shows this kind of division,” said J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., the firm that conducted the poll.
Trump leads by 21 percentage points with men, 57% to 36% over Biden. And Biden leads by 20 percentage points with women, 57% to 37% over Trump.
Data from the Iowa Secretary of State’s office show similar voter turnout rates for men and women over recent elections, though more women typically cast ballots.
The race — despite ongoing uncertainty around the coronavirus pandemic, continued protests over racial justice and raging wildfires in the west — is largely holding steady from June, when Trump led Biden 44% to 43%.
“We've had two polls in a row putting it very, very close,” Selzer said. “I think all eyes will be on Iowa.”
If Trump is now in danger of losing Iowa, his firewall has completely cracked. By my count, that means Iowa can be added to NC, Florida, Ohio, and Georgia as all "must-win" states for Trump that are now tossups, and even then Biden leading in PA, WI, AZ and MI gives him the win regardless of how the toss-ups turn out.
We're on the verge of a Biden blowout scenario with six weeks to go.
Again, as 2016 showed, a lot can happen in the last six week, hell, the last two weeks of an election, that turn a strong Democratic lead into a Trump electoral college victory.
The Justice Department announced Monday that New York City, Seattle and Portland, Ore., would be designated as jurisdictions "permitting violence and destruction of property" under President Trump's early-September order requiring federal agencies to submit potential funding cuts for cities "permitting anarchy."
In a statement, the agency hit leaders of the three cities for rejecting federal law enforcement assistance in quelling protests while pointing to ongoing demonstrations that have continued for weeks over the treatment of Black Americans by law enforcement.
“When state and local leaders impede their own law enforcement officers and agencies from doing their jobs, it endangers innocent citizens who deserve to be protected, including those who are trying to peacefully assemble and protest,” said Attorney General William Barr. “We cannot allow federal tax dollars to be wasted when the safety of the citizenry hangs in the balance. It is my hope that the cities identified by the Department of Justice today will reverse course and become serious about performing the basic function of government and start protecting their own citizens.”
The news release also highlighted New York and Portland's efforts to cut police funding in the wake of demonstrations, which began in late May following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody.
In Seattle, the news release pointed to the area formerly known as the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP), a zone of downtown Seattle occupied by protesters for days after they forced police to withdraw from the area. The CHOP was finally closed down by police, who returned to the area following several late-night shootings.
"For nearly a month, starting in June, the City of Seattle permitted anarchists and activists to seize six square blocks of the city’s Capitol Hill neighborhood," the Justice Department charged. The news release added that other cities could be added to the list of so-called anarchist jurisdictions if necessary: "The Department of Justice is continuing to work to identify jurisdictions that meet the criteria set out in the President’s Memorandum and will periodically update the list of selected jurisdictions as required therein."
This is all fantastic horsecrap, with the usual caveat that the answer to "Can Trump actually do this?" is always "If we let him, sure." This will be fought in court of course, to which all I can say is "Well, the Supreme Court certainly is important and maybe Democrats should vote as such."
Because the next step is clearly going to be "sending in federal troops to liberate these jurisdictions as a matter of national security".
The last shred of independent, objective authority in the Food and Drug Administration has been lit on fire in Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar's office trashcan, as the agency is now fully and totally under control of Azar and by default, under control of Donald Trump.
In a stunning declaration of authority, Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of health and human services, this week barred the nation’s health agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, from signing any new rules regarding the nation’s foods, medicines, medical devices and other products, including vaccines.
Going forward, Mr. Azar wrote in a Sept. 15 memorandum obtained by The New York Times, such power “is reserved to the Secretary.” The bulletin was sent to heads of operating and staff divisions within H.H.S.
It’s unclear if or how the memo would change the vetting and approval process for coronavirus vaccines, three of which are in advanced clinical trials in the United States. Political appointees, under pressure from the president, have taken a string of stepsover the past few months to interfere with the standard scientific and regulatory processes at the health agencies. For example, a much criticized guideline on testing for the coronavirus was not written by C.D.C. scientists, and was posted on the agency’s public website over their objections. It was reversed on Friday.
Outside observers were alarmed by the new memo and worried that it could contribute to a public perception of political meddling in science-based regulatory decisions. Dr. Mark McClellan, who formerly headed the F.D.A. and now runs Duke University’s health policy center, praised the agency’s work on vaccine development but said the policy change was ill-timed.
“We’re in the midst of a pandemic, when trust in the public health agency is needed more than ever,” he said. “So, I’m not sure what is to be gained with a management change with respect to F.D.A. when they are doing such critical work.”
Dr. Peter Lurie, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest and a former associate commissioner of the F.D.A., called the new policy “a power grab.”
Many rules issued by federal health agencies are signed by lawyers or by the heads of agencies, including the F.D.A., under the umbrella of H.H.S. The new memo requires the secretary to sign them, which Dr. Lurie said could lead to delays in the regulatory process.
“It will introduce an element of inefficiency within government operations that is wholly unnecessary and likely to gum things up,” he said.
Brian Harrison, chief of staff for Mr. Azar, described the new policy as “a housekeeping matter,” aimed at no agency in particular. He said it would have no bearing on how the agency dealt with coronavirus vaccines.
“This was simply pushing a reset button,” Mr. Harrison said. “This is good governance and should have no operational impact.”
The funny part is Brian Harrison is right: this won't have an "operational impact" on the FDA approval process for a COVID-19 or other vaccines going forward because the process was always going to be Azar approving a vaccine to help Trump politically no matter what FDA testing and protocols say.
I practically guarantee you there will be a vaccine "approved" and distributed to medical personnel before the election. There's going to be a big fight about this and whether or not anyone takes the vaccine, but it will absolutely be announced in late October and will be made available "soon" for widespread use.
That "soon" part will be a lot trickier should Trump win, but the point is Azar and Trump believe it will win him the election. Actually having the vaccine work, well, that will come later.
A majority of Americans, including many Republicans, want the winner of the November presidential election to name a successor to Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the U.S. Supreme Court, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Sunday.
The national opinion poll, conducted Sept. 19-20 after Ginsburg’s death was announced, suggests that many Americans object to President Donald Trump’s plan, backed by many Senate Republicans, to push through another lifetime appointee and cement a 6-3 conservative majority on the court.
The poll found that 62% of American adults agreed the vacancy should be filled by the winner of the Nov. 3 matchup between Trump and Democratic former Vice President Joe Biden, while 23% disagreed and the rest said they were not sure.
Eight out of 10 Democrats - and five in 10 Republicans - agreed that the appointment should wait until after the election.
Trump needs the support of the Senate, which currently has a 53-47 Republican majority to confirm a nominee. So far two Republican senators - Maine’s Susan Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski - have said publicly since Ginsburg’s death Friday that they think the winner of the election should make the nomination.
Vast majorities of Americans want a lot of things, including healthcare, affordable prescriptions, a raise to the minimum wage and universal firearms background checks, but Republicans keep ignoring that anyway. No reason to think anything different will happen here.
Leading Florida Republican politicians are launching an all-out effort to convince President Donald Trump to nominate federal Judge Barbara Lagoa to the U.S. Supreme Court — a move they say would boost his reelection chances in the must-win swing state.
The biggest names in the Florida GOP are working behind the scenes to advocate for Lagoa: U.S. Sens. Marco Rubio and Rick Scott have sprung into action, along with Gov. Ron DeSantis, Rep. Matt Gaetz, Florida campaign director Susie Wiles and the president’s former impeachment defense lawyer, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, according to interviews with a dozen Republicans familiar with the effort.
The Republicans are said to be making the case that the longtime judge and devout Catholic has the legal chops to do the job and the conservative background to appease the GOP base, these people said.
But it’s Lagoa’s background as a Florida Cuban-American that could have the most salience for Trump. His reelection hinges on the too-close-to-call battleground state, where his campaign has made outreach to Hispanic voters a top issue, worrying some Democrats.
“If the president picks Barbara Lagoa, they will be dancing salsa with joy in Hialeah well past November,” said Gaetz, referring to Lagoa’s home town, a blue-collar majority Cuban-American city that borders Miami and leans Republican.
No doubt Trump has visions of standing up at his hate rallies and belching out how he's "done more for women, done more for Latinos than any president in history" with a Lagoa pick in a city like Orlando or Tampa. It might actually work.
Jason Leopold and the team at BuzzFeed News give us the "FinCEN Files", a massive collection of documents that show just how pervasive international money laundering by big banks, and the hundreds of billions of dollar that get moved each year by drug cartels, crime lords, and dictators through the global financial network. And under Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin, the Trump Regime has made it harder than ever to catch these bad guys -- bad guys including Vladimir Putin.
A huge trove of secret government documents reveals for the first time how the giants of Western banking move trillions of dollars in suspicious transactions, enriching themselves and their shareholders while facilitating the work of terrorists, kleptocrats, and drug kingpins.
And the US government, despite its vast powers, fails to stop it.
Today, the FinCEN Files — thousands of “suspicious activity reports” and other US government documents — offer an unprecedented view of global financial corruption, the banks enabling it, and the government agencies that watch as it flourishes. BuzzFeed News has shared these reports with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and more than 100 news organizations in 88 countries.
These documents, compiled by banks, shared with the government, but kept from public view, expose the hollowness of banking safeguards, and the ease with which criminals have exploited them. Profits from deadly drug wars, fortunes embezzled from developing countries, and hard-earned savings stolen in a Ponzi scheme were all allowed to flow into and out of these financial institutions, despite warnings from the banks’ own employees.
Money laundering is a crime that makes other crimes possible. It can accelerate economic inequality, drain public funds, undermine democracy, and destabilize nations — and the banks play a key role. “Some of these people in those crisp white shirts in their sharp suits are feeding off the tragedy of people dying all over the world,” said Martin Woods, a former suspicious transactions investigator for Wachovia.
Laws that were meant to stop financial crime have instead allowed it to flourish. So long as a bank files a notice that it may be facilitating criminal activity, it all but immunizes itself and its executives from criminal prosecution. The suspicious activity alert effectively gives them a free pass to keep moving the money and collecting the fees.
The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, is the agency within the Treasury Department charged with combating money laundering, terrorist financing, and other financial crimes. It collects millions of these suspicious activity reports, known as SARs. It makes them available to US law enforcement agencies and other nations’ financial intelligence operations. It even compiles a report called “Kleptocracy Weekly” that summarizes the dealings of foreign leaders such as Russian President Vladimir Putin.
What it does not do is force the banks to shut the money laundering down.
In the rare instances when the US government does crack down on banks, it often relies on sweetheart deals called deferred prosecution agreements, which include fines but no high-level arrests. The Trump administration has made it even harder to hold executives personally accountable, under guidance by former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein that warned government agencies against “piling on.”
Suspicious payments flow around the world and into countless industries, from international sports to Hollywood entertainment to luxury real estate to Nobu sushi restaurants. They filter into the companies that make familiar items from people’s lives, from the gas in their car to the granola in their cereal bowl.
The FinCEN Files expose an underlying truth of the modern era: The networks through which dirty money traverse the world have become vital arteries of the global economy. They enable a shadow financial system so wide-ranging and so unchecked that it has become inextricable from the so-called legitimate economy. Banks with household names have helped to make it so.
And on top of it all is one underlying truth: there is ample evidence to believe that the current occupant of the White House is up to his neck in this mess.
Even with the Biden Administration adults in charge and Democrats in control on Congress (barely), there remains an increasingly crumbling global economy imperiling the world, rising nationalism and deadly racism across Europe and Asia, a seemingly endless war against terror, a federal government nobody trusts or believes in, global climate change putting us on the brink of destruction and a Village media that barely does its job on even the best day.
Needless to say there's a lot of Stupid out there when we need solutions. Dangerous levels of Stupid.
Into the fray, dear Reader. Tray tables, crash helmets, arms inside blog at all times.
Zandar's Tip Jar
If you like what you're reading, drop in two bits.
It's ZVTS, now in a 60-minute podcast!
Get your Zandar and Bon every Saturday and Wednesday!
Also, click on the iTunes button to put the show on
your iTunes podcast list and take us with you!
Or, check out the episode archive page!
Posts
