StupidiNews!

• The White House says it has completed all contact tracing needed after Donald Trump and several WH staff contracted COVID-19; the Trump regime turned down CDC help with contact tracing.
• A GOP county chairman in Arkansas has died from COVID-19, Steven Farmer's Reagan Day event in Craighead County hosted several GOP members of Congress who did not wear masks last month.
• Joe Biden says that next week's scheduled Presidential debate in Miami should be postponed if Donald Trump still has COVID-19.
• Donald Trump is accusing the FDA of a "political hit job" with the agency's rules on approving any COVID-19 vaccine and is ordering a review of vaccine policy.
• The Nobel Prize in Physics has gone to three scientists, German Reinhard Genzel, Briton Roger Penrose, and America Andrea Ghez for their discovery of a "supermassive" black hole.
  

Last Call For Trump Literally Goes Viral, Con't

Donald Trump, facing a barrage of devastating polls with 4 weeks to go until the election, has now decided to burn it all down around him and take the GOP with him (and tens of millions of Americans as well) by completely changing his mind on COVID-19 relief legislation talks and now decreeing that nothing will happen on COVID-19 bills until after the election.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday called an abrupt end to negotiations with Democrats over additional COVID-19 relief, delaying action until after the election despite ominous warnings from his own Federal Reserve chairman about the deteriorating conditions in the economy.

Trump tweeted that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was “not negotiating in good faith” and said he’s asked Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to direct all his focus before the election into confirming his U.S. Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett.

“I have instructed my representatives to stop negotiating until after the election when, immediately after I win, we will pass a major Stimulus Bill that focuses on hardworking Americans and Small Business,” Trump tweeted.

The unexpected turn could be a blow to Trump’s reelection prospects and comes as his administration and campaign are in turmoil. Trump is quarantining in the White House with a case of COVID, and the latest batch of opinion polls shows him significantly behind former Vice President Joe Biden with the election four weeks away.

The collapse means that Trump and down-ballot Republicans will face reelection without delivering aid to voters — such as a pre-election batch of $1,200 direct payments, or “Trump checks,” to most individuals — even as the national jobless rate is about 8% with millions facing the threat of eviction. One endangered Republican, Maine Sen. Susan Collins, said “waiting until after the election to reach an agreement on the next Covid-19 relief package is a huge mistake.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden slammed Trump’s move.

“Make no mistake: if you are out of work, if your business is closed, if your child’s school is shut down, if you are seeing layoffs in your community, Donald Trump decided today that none of that — none of it — matters to him,” Biden said in a statement released by his campaign.

Trump’s move came immediately after he spoke with the top GOP leaders in Congress, who had been warily watching talks between Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Pelosi. Many Senate Republicans had signaled they would not be willing to go along with any stimulus legislation that topped $1 trillion, and GOP aides had been privately dismissive of the prospects for a deal.

Just on Saturday, tweeting from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Trump said, “OUR GREAT USA WANTS & NEEDS STIMULUS. WORK TOGETHER AND GET IT DONE.” But any Pelosi-sponsored agreement of close to $2 trillion raised the potential of a GOP revolt if it came to a vote.

Last week, the White House said it was backing a $400 per week pandemic jobless benefit and dangled the possibility of a COVID-19 relief bill of $1.6 trillion. But that offer was rejected by Pelosi, who continued to take a hard line in the talks, including insisting on repeal of a $254 billion GOP business tax break passed in the March package as a way to finance additional relief.

Pelosi had spoken with Mnuchin earlier Tuesday. After Trump’s tweets spiking the negotiations, Pelosi said Trump was “unwilling to crush the virus” and “refuses to give real help to poor children, the unemployed, and America’s hard working families.”

 

The threat from Trump could not be more clear: America surrenders and we re-elect Dear Leader or we suffer into 2021, and four months from now is going to be too late for millions of us.

It's possible that Trump gets talked out of this, but I doubt it. It seems to me that Senate Republicans came to Trump and said they needed this package to stay in power in the Senate and the White House, and Trump saw them as weak cowards who are trying to betray him.

So he just butchered them out of spite.

Again, if you think Trump's leaving without a literal fight, well, history says that the lame duck period is more than enough time to make sure he inflicts maximum damage before January 20, and really all he has to do is nothing for three months and he gets to hand Joe Biden a collapsed economy.

All bets are off now.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

The latest CNN/SSRS poll has Trump getting wiped out 57%-41%, down a whopping sixteen points to Joe Biden after last week's disastrous debate and COVID-19 cover-up.

 

 

Likely voters broadly prefer Biden over Trump on a number of issues that voters consider critically important in the race, including the coronavirus outbreak (59% prefer Biden, 38% Trump), health care (59% to 39%), racial inequality in America (62% to 36%), nominations to the Supreme Court (57% to 41%) and crime and safety (55% to 43%). The two are about even over who would better handle the economy (50% say Biden, 48% Trump), similar to where they have been among registered voters in recent polling.
Biden's favorability ratings have also improved, with 52% of Americans now saying they have a positive impression of the former vice president, compared with 39% who have a positive view of Trump. 

Likely voters are more apt to consider Biden the candidate who would unite the country (61% Biden to 33% Trump), who is honest and trustworthy (58% Biden to 33% Trump), who cares about people like you (58% Biden to 38% Trump), who has a clear plan to solve the nation's problems (55% to 39%) and who would keep Americans safe from harm (55% to 43%). 

Although this is the first national CNN survey to report results among likely voters, a comparison of results among registered voters now to those from a survey about a month ago reveals Biden has made substantial gains in support among several key voting blocs. 

Biden has expanded his edge over Trump among women, from 57% to 37% in September to 66% to 32% now. That shift includes substantial gains for Biden among white women with college degrees and women of color. Among people of color generally, Biden's advantage has increased from 59% to 31% in September to 69% to 27% now. The former vice president has also made gains among younger voters, moderates and independents over the last month. 

It is important to note that these increases in support for Biden have not come alongside substantial decreases in backing for Trump. The President's core supporters remain as supportive of him as they have been, if not more. Among white men without college degrees, for example, Trump's support has increased from 61% in September to 67% now. But Trump does not appear to have made any gains among the groups his campaign needs to attract in order to dent Biden's longstanding lead. 

Compared with the last national CNN poll, the partisan composition of this poll is only slightly more Democratic (33% of all adults say they are Democrats now, compared with 30% in early September) and no less Republican (28% GOP now vs. 27% in early September). Among registered voters in the poll, 35% consider themselves Democrats, 30% Republican, those figures were 33% and 30% respectively in the previous CNN poll. When independents who lean toward one party or the other are added in, the results also show little movement, 53% of registered voters now are Democrats or lean that way, 43% are Republicans or lean that way. In last month's poll, those figures were 52% Democratic to 42% Republican. 

The shifts in this poll are similar to those seen in an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released Sunday, which was conducted after the presidential debate but before the President's diagnosis of coronavirus was revealed. 

 

The crosstabs are lethal for Trump.  It basically shows a huge shift towards Biden in two groups: Hispanic voters, and Seniors over 65. CNN doesn't break down their polls to show both Black and Hispanic voters generally, so it's an assumption, but for Biden to go from 59% of non-white voters to 69% in one poll means he picked up a *huge* swing in Hispanic (and Asian) voters. Clinton got 74% of non-white voters in 2016.

And Clinton still lost, because of Trump's sizeable lead among white voters. He does not have that big lead this time. Trump won 2016 on the strength of voters over 50, where he got 52% of the vote among 46% of total electorate, and white men, 62% of them, making up 34% of the electorate. Overall in 2016, Trump had a 20-point lead with white voters, 57%-37%.

 

This CNN poll has that lead now gone.  Voters over 50 now prefer Biden 55%-44%, and white voters side with Biden 51%-47%. In particular, Seniors have abandoned Trump. Seniors over 65voted for Trump 52-45% in 2016. In this poll Biden is winning Seniors by twenty-one points, 60-39%.

And the big one, Trump won men 52-41% in 2016, and Clinton won women 54-41%.

In this poll?

Trump's lead among men is 49-47% but Biden's lead among women is 66-32%.

.

If this is even close to being true, Trump is dust and memory.

I'll believe it when the votes are counted.

But dear God, he's collapsing.  Let's finish him off.

Vote.

A Supreme New Term

The first Monday in October means a new Supreme Court term, and this one started off with a doozy.

 

As battles rage over the independence of the judiciary and whether one political party has claimed partisan control of the third branch of government, the state of Delaware says it has a better idea.

For more than a century, the state has required its major courts be roughly balanced, so that no more than a bare majority of a court is made up of members of one political party. And then it required the minority be made up of the other political party.

The result, Stanford law professor Michael W. McConnell told the U.S. Supreme Court Monday, is that “Delaware’s courts are widely regarded as the least partisan and most professional in the nation.”

The problem, countered Wilmington, Del., lawyer David L. Finger, is that it is unconstitutional. The plan denies the chance for his client, lawyer James Adams, to serve on the courts because he is neither a Democrat nor Republican but a political independent, Finger said, and that violates his First Amendment rights of political association.

It seemed a fitting beginning for the Supreme Court’s new term, as the Senate is torn along partisan lines about whether to confirm just before the election President Trump’s nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died Sept. 18.

Ginsburg’s death left the court with five conservative justices, all named by Republican presidents, and three liberals named by Democrats. Barrett’s confirmation would install a 6-to-3 majority for conservatives.

That reality was unspoken, as the justices again gathered by teleconference to begin their traditional first-Monday-in-October arguments. As a concession to their scattered whereabouts, the marshal omitted the command in the familiar “oyez, oyez” cry that listeners should “draw near” to hear the business of the court.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. began the session by noting that the door and Ginsburg’s spot in the empty courtroom are hung with black crepe.

“Justice Ginsburg’s contributions, as advocate, jurist and citizen, are immeasurable,” Roberts said before the session began. “We at the court will remember her as a dear friend and treasured colleague.”

 

The reality is that Justice Ginsburg is gone, and she will be replaced by Amy Coney Barrett, and the ripple effects of that will resonate for decades. The first case heard could decide whether or not judges can even be partisan candidates, or if they must be appointed by state legislatures, allowing gerrymandered Republican strongholds like Ohio, Florida, NC and Michigan to simply remake the courts, and on voting issues, state courts would rule.

For everything else voting-wise, Republicans have a plan for that too. Cases from Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Wisconsin are already expected to get hearings from SCOTUS in a matter of weeks, and they could decide both states.

The Purcell principle, named for a dispute over an Arizona voter identification law taken to the court on an emergency basis in 2006, dictates that federal judges should generally refrain from causing confusion by changing voting rules in the lead-up to an election.

While the notion sounds simple enough, its application in practice can often be baffling. And just how to apply the idea of keeping election procedures stable in the midst of an extraordinary national health emergency like the coronavirus pandemic is far from clear.

“It’s being brought up in just about every case right now as we are getting closer to the election,” said University of California at Irvine law professor Rick Hasen, who coined the term “Purcell principle” in a 2016 law review article. “But it’s not a hard-and-fast-rule, and it’s not well developed.”

The jockeying over the principle is evident in the fight the justices are wrestling with right now — a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling last month that made some changes to the state’s usual voting procedures, including allowing absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day or lacking a postmark to be counted even if they don’t arrive until three days later.

Republicans have fought the changes by arguing that the state court usurped a role that the U.S. Constitution says can be played only by the state Legislature and that the Constitution also forbids allowing the receipt of ballots after Election Day. But GOP leaders of the Pennsylvania Senate have also cited the Purcell principle as a reason to reject the changes the state’s highest court ordered last month.

“Changing the rules in the middle of the game by informing voters that they now have until November 6 for their ballot to be received risks confusion and the potential for fraud,” Republican election lawyer Jason Torchinsky wrote in a brief filed last week for the state lawmakers.

Lawyers for Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, a Democrat, seem to embrace the Purcell principle even more aggressively. In a brief filed Monday afternoon, they devoted four pages to arguing that the notion is as much about federalism as it is about timing. The idea behind the concept, they say, is fundamentally that federal courts shouldn’t be monkeying at the last minute with state-run elections, not that states lack the power to manage that process.

“Applicants’ request for this court’s intervention now is precisely the eleventh-hour federal meddling that the Purcell principle counsels against,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro wrote. “The senators appear to argue that this court should issue an order preventing those state courts from addressing Covid-19 related emergencies in their respective states. This is directly contrary to the Purcell principle.”

Legal experts say the Supreme Court could broaden the Purcell idea to cover last-minute state court orders, but it’s still unclear whether it would apply to changes sought or agreed to by the election authorities themselves. Also uncertain is whether a state court ruling issued six weeks before Election Day qualifies as the kind of disruptive, late-breaking order the judges in the Purcell case worried about.

“What is the cutoff time? How flexible is it? I think we don’t know what,” Hasen said.

 

The answer will be whatever SCOTUS and Justice Barrett decide. 

Oh, but it gets worse.

Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, lashed out on Monday at the religious liberty implications of the Supreme Court's 2015 decision that cleared the way for same-sex marriage nationwide. 

Thomas wrote that the decision, Obergefell v. Hodges, "enables courts and governments to brand religious adherents who believe that marriage is between one man and one woman as bigots, making their religious liberty concerns that much easier to dismiss." 

Thomas' strong opinion came down on the first day of the court's new term, and reflects the fact that critics of the landmark opinion from five years ago that was penned by now retired Justice Anthony Kennedy, are still infuriated by its reasoning. They believe the court should have left the decision to the political arena and have long said that it will infringe upon the rights of those who have religious objections to same-sex marriage. 

Supporters of LGBTQ rights are fearful that the court is poised to continue a trend from last term, ruling in favor of religious conservatives in key cases. 

The case that prompted Thomas' statement concerned Kim Davis, a former county clerk in Kentucky who gained national attention in 2015 and was jailed after declining to issue marriage licenses out of an objection to same sex marriages. The high court on Monday declined to hear an appeal in her case. 

Thomas called Davis "one of the first victims" of the court's "cavalier treatment of religion" in the Obergefell v. Hodges decision but warned "she will not be the last." He said that her case was not properly presented before the court, but he urged his colleagues to revisit the religious liberty implications of the landmark opinion down the road.

 

Thomas and Alito are begging for a case to overturn Obergefell and eliminate same-sex marriage, almost as eagerly as they are awaiting a chance to overturn Roe, and a host of other decisions could be history in the next several years.

You should be scared. If we don't win here, win now, and win overwhelmingly with a mandate to expand the court to eleven justices, we go back to 1950.

And a lot of us won't survive the trip.

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StupidiNews!

• Donald Trump's doctors say he's "not out of the woods yet" but he did return to the White House after spending three days at Walter Reed Medical Center for COVID-19.
• A team of three US and British scientists have won this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine for work on the Hepatitis C virus, allowing much more accurate testing and reduction in the disease.
• In an unsigned ruling the US Supreme Court sided with South Carolina Republicans in reinstating a witness signature requirement for all mail-in ballots for the November election.
• Eric Trump testified under oath in a deposition before a New York court in the state's probe of the Trump Organization's finances, Trump tried to delay the deposition until after the election.
• British archaeologists have confirmed the burial site of a 6th-century Anglo-Saxon warrior's grave near Berkshire, buried with bronze bowls, weapons, and metal fittings.
  

Last Call For It Just Took A Couple Decades Is All

Quite a bit of garbage has been heaped upon John Judis and Ruy Teixeira's The Emerging Democratic Majority over the years, the 2002 book that predicted "demography as destiny" in Sun Belt states becoming purple, if not outright blue, as they gained more Black and Hispanic voters. What the book failed to predict is that Rust Belt states would become redder at the same time for the opposite reason: more white voters.

But even RealClearPolitics columnist Bill Scher sees the writing on the wall here. Judis and Teixeira were right, just the timeframe was 15-20 years off the mark.

 

Biden is running a campaign based on de-polarization, treading very lightly on divisive cultural issues and eagerly welcoming support from Republicans tired of Trump. However, Biden’s shift from the last two Democratic campaigns is in tone, not substance. He hasn’t diluted the party’s position on abortion; he just talks about it infrequently. He’s subtly inviting pro-life voters who have soured on Trump to feel more comfortable crossing party lines.

Recently the New York Times interviewed just such a Republican voter. “You’d think I’d be glad to hear that [Trump] nominated a judge who is pro-life,” this voter said. “But I think what we need more than anything else is someone who is broadly pro-life, not just worried about the unborn, but about the living.”

Politico talked to two women at an event for a Michigan Democratic congresswoman who described themselves as longtime Republicans primarily because of their abortion views, but have since rethought their party affiliation. “I’ve had it with this idea that you’re only pro-life if you fight against abortion,” said one. “I can’t be that single-issue Republican anymore.” With Biden turning down the temperature on abortion, even in the face of a hotly contested Supreme Court nomination, some pro-life voters are finding it easier to voice nuanced views and shed any sense of obligation to choose a political team based on one’s abortion position.

Biden can be quite blunt when talking about race, even calling Trump a “racist” to his face in last week’s debate. But he consistently balances his rhetoric on racism with reminders of his own white working-class roots. During a CNN town hall in Pennsylvania last month, Biden was asked if he benefited from “white privilege.” Biden responded without hesitation, “Sure, I've benefited just because I don't have to go through what my black brothers and sisters have had to go through.” But recognizing that many in the white working class bristle at the notion that they are privileged, Biden quickly added, “Grow up here in Scranton, we're used to guys who look down their nose at us. … We are as good as anybody else. And guys like Trump, who inherited everything and squandered what they inherited, are the people that I've always had a problem with.” Without crudely equating the black and white working-class experiences, Biden is attempting to display understanding of both and close the racial divide.

If Biden’s de-polarization strategy works as intended, and polls show it is, he will win with a geographically broad coalition. In fact, if Biden wins everywhere he is leading in the RealClearPolitics averages as of Saturday, he will win 375 Electoral College votes, 10 more than Obama did in his historic 2008 victory.

A President Biden would certainly have challenges in maintaining a big tent party while being pressed by his left flank to move, and speak, aggressively on a slew of fronts. But if successful, the Republican Electoral College advantage would be no more.

The Republican skew manifested first in 2000, as Al Gore’s environmental and gun control record -- and Bill Clinton’s personal behavior -- eroded gains Clinton had made in the Sunbelt and the Midwest. Even though Gore won the popular vote, with the help of the Supreme Court he lost Florida and the Electoral College.

But Democrats are not without their own Electoral College advantages. In 2004, if 60,000 Ohioans who voted for George W. Bush had voted instead for John Kerry – out of 5.6 million votes cast – Kerry would have become president without a popular vote majority. Democrats have won 20 states, and Washington, D.C., three times in row, totaling 232 electoral votes. Democrats may have “wasted votes” in densely populated states like California, New York and Illinois, but that also gives Democrats a big head start in any election year.

Republicans have won 22 states three times in row, but only get 179 electoral votes out of them. And some of those Republican states — Arizona, Georgia, Texas and South Carolina — have shown signs of shift, with Democratic House or Senate gains in 2018 and surprisingly close margins in presidential or Senate trial heat polling. If one or more of these states turns firmly blue, while no currently blue states becomes less so, the Republican Party will be at a massive disadvantage, irrespective of the small shift in electoral votes that will come after the 2020 census.

Perhaps American democracy would be better off without the Electoral College, but that day is highly unlikely to ever come, as both parties would have to see the wisdom in abolishment at the same time to enact the necessary constitutional amendment, or adopt any sort of workaround on a state-by-state basis. Fortunately for Democrats, they are perfectly capable of winning the Electoral College this year. And after 2020, if Democrats can continue to avoid the pitfalls of polarization, winning may become even easier.

 

Right now the most obvious candidate is a Blue Arizona. If Mark Kelly wins and Biden takes the state, the GOP is in real trouble in the future if Democrats can hold the Upper Midwest. 

How big of an "if", well, we'll see.

Actual Pro-Life Catholicism

Pope Francis has officially committed the Catholic Church to ending the death penalty with a new papal encyclical on Sunday.

Pope Francis’ new encyclical, “Fratelli Tutti,” does something that some Catholics believed could not be done: It ratifies a change in church teaching. In this case, on the death penalty.

In 2018, Pope Francis ordered a change in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the official compendium of church teaching, when he termed the death penalty “inadmissible.” Today the pope placed the full weight of his teaching authority behind this statement: The death penalty is inadmissible, and Catholics should work for its abolition. A papal encyclical is one of the highest of all documents in terms of its authority, removing any lingering doubt about the church’s belief.

“There can be no stepping back from this position,” says Francis, referring to the opposition to capital punishment expressed by St. John Paul II. “Today we state clearly that ‘the death penalty is inadmissible’ and the Church is firmly committed to calling for its abolition worldwide.”

Helen Prejean, C.S.J., author of Dead Man Walking and a long-time opponent of capital punishment, whose work helped to alter the catechism, praised today’s news.

I rejoice in Pope Francis’s ringing proclamation of the inviolable dignity of all human life, even the life of murderers, and I am heartened by the church’s unequivocal opposition to governments’ use of the death penalty in all instances. In killing chambers, I’ve seen close-up the torture and suffering of human beings, rendered defenseless and killed by the state, their lives stripped of all dignity. I rejoice that now this clarity of church teaching will help end this unspeakable suffering and spark the Gospel of Jesus to be lived in its fullness: restoration of human life, not humiliation, torture and execution.

In past centuries, the church was generally accepting of the death penalty. Both St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas declared it licit not only for the sake of punishment, but also as a way for the state to protect itself, ideas that took hold in the church and influenced civil society. In the Roman Catechism, written after the Council of Trent in the 16th century, the church supported the death penalty for those two reasons: “Another kind of lawful slaying belongs to the civil authorities, to whom is entrusted power of life and death, by the legal and judicious exercise of which they punish the guilty and protect the innocent.”

As recently as the 1990s, the Catechism of the Catholic Church said that the state could still use capital punishment to protect people from violent criminals: “The traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude, presupposing full ascertainment of the identity and responsibility of the offender, recourse to the death penalty, when this is the only practicable way to defend the lives of human beings effectively against the aggressor.”

In 1995, however, in his encyclical "Evangelium Vitae," St. John Paul II tightened the restrictions, saying that the times that the state needed to use capital punishment to protect other citizens were “very rare, if not practically non-existent.” Four years later, he called for its abolition. So did Pope Benedict XVI, in 2011. The door to the death penalty was gradually closing. Today it was shut. It is a clear example of the development of doctrine over the centuries.

In his new encyclical, Francis also traces a lesser known counternarrative, showing a theological thread that has always been against the death penalty: “From the earliest centuries of the Church, some were clearly opposed to capital punishment,” he writes and includes commentary from St. Augustine, who argued for mercy in the case of two assassins.

In “Fratelli Tutti,” the pope grounds his opposition to capital punishment not only in mercy, perhaps his most characteristic spiritual theme, but also in opposition to revenge. “Fear and resentment can easily lead to viewing punishment in a vindictive and even cruel way, rather than as part of a process of healing and reintegration into society,” he writes.

 

This is, as both Zandardad and Joe Biden would put it, a Big Effing Deal.

 

Zandardad introduced me to the works of Sister Helen Prejean long ago, and it's how he got involved with the Southern Poverty Law Center. I know the Catholic Church has been in real trouble over the last couple of decades (centuries?) but there are still good liberal, actual, merciful, "teachings of Jesus" Catholics out there and my parents (and Joe Biden) are some of them, and to see that Pope Francis is doing the right thing here reminds me that just for a millisecond, not all Church officials are bad all the time.

 

Some still have faith in a better world, driven by people making a difference, one life at a time, even if I'm not really one of them. 

Maybe that's okay.

 

The Blue Tsunami's Future

Even should the Democrats perform beyond my wildest dreams in the Senate this year, and they run the table on all the GOP seats in play (NC, SC, IA, MT, ME, AZ, CO and both GA seats) and Doug Jones keeps his seat in Alabama? The Dems would be up 56-44 in the Senate, still a long way from a 60-seat majority in 2008, and probably less so as we'd have quite a few folks lining up to be mavericks like Kyrsten Sinema, America's favorite Democratic Senator who sided with Trump more often than not in her first four years in office.

Having said that, 2022 does present another map where Republicans are on the defensive in the Senate, and one of the big fights will be for Pennsylvania Republican Pat Toomey's seat, because Toomey apparently won't be there to defend it.

Sen. Pat Toomey has decided not to run for reelection or for governor of Pennsylvania in 2022, according to two people familiar with his plans, a surprise decision by the Republican with significant implications for the state’s next elections.

He will serve out his current Senate term but won’t run for either of those offices, seemingly ending his career in elected office, at least for now. A formal announcement is expected Monday.

Toomey’s office on Sunday neither confirmed nor denied the senator’s plans. The people familiar with his plans spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

As the only Republican now holding statewide office other than judges, Toomey was widely seen as the likely Republican favorite for governor in 2022. His decision not to run for that office or for Senate could create two wide open contests on the Republican side, while depriving the party of running its most established current political figure in Pennsylvania.

It will also open a prime Senate target for national Democrats, regardless of who controls the chamber after this year’s election.

Most political insiders had expected that Toomey, 58, would wait until after the 2020 election to decide his political future. It was not immediately clear why he had decided to make an announcement now, weeks before the Nov. 3 presidential election.

Toomey’s surprise decision comes at an already tumultuous and perilous time for Republicans in Washington. President Donald Trump is hospitalized with the coronavirus. Three GOP senators have also contracted the virus, which could hamper the party’s push to install Judge Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court. And Trump and fellow Republicans face increasingly dire poll numbers, threatening their holds on both the White House and Senate.

“It’s incredibly surprising,” said Charlie Gerow, a Republican consultant in Harrisburg. “It throws dozens of wild cards into the mix.”

 

As I said,  Republicans will have at least 20 out of 34 seats to defend, including Lisa Murkowski, Rob Portman, Richard Burr, Roy Blunt, Todd Young, and Toomey, all winnable seats. Dems on the other hand will have to defend tough races in Nevada (Catherine Cortez Masto), New Hampshire (Maggie Hassan), and Colorado (Michael Bennet).

Toomey's impending retirement could be very important two years from now.

We'll see.

 

StupidiNews!

• Only Texas, Missouri, and South Carolina reported a decrease in new weekly COVID-19 cases from last week, nationally the country has topped 54,000 daily cases for the first time since August.
• The Biden campaign reports both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris continue to test negative after Biden's exposure to COVID-19 with Donald Trump's illness at the debate last week. 
• British authorities are planning a possible three-stage lockdown if the country cannot get COVID-19 cases under control, PM Boris Johnson denies any suggestion that current measures aren't working.
• Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer says that it's not safe to hold Senate proceedings with three GOP senators reporting COVID-19, Republicans say the Senate will reconvene on Oct. 19.
• A group of hackers that stole data from an "unidentified federal agency" in May appear to be Russia's GRU-sponsored Fancy Bear team, behind much of the 2016 election and DNC hacking.
  

Last Call For Lindsey Faces The Graham Cracker

Sen.  Lindsey Graham's debate with Democratic challenger Jaime Harrison didn't go well at all for the Republican, as Slate's Jim Newell explains:

Towards the end of Saturday night’s first Senate debate between South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and his Democratic opponent, Jaime Harrison, the candidates were asked on what issues they would dissent with their parties. Graham, who’d been sticking for most of the hour to a controlled strategy of reciting warnings against what Democrats would do with power, seemed to loosen up.

“How long do you have?” Graham said. “So, Lindsey ‘Grahamnesty’ is my name on talk radio.” He spoke about how he’d worked for “over a decade to get a comprehensive immigration solution.” He’d worked on climate change, and when he voted for Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, he “got the crap beat out of me here at home by Republicans.

“When it’s talking about working with the other side, it’s not just talk with me,” he said. “And I’ve got the political scars to prove it.”

It was less self-flattery than reminiscence. Graham was waxing nostalgic about a once-prominent version of himself that hasn’t been seen in recent years. Following the 2016 election, Graham rebuilt himself from a Trump skeptic to a vocal and loyal ally of the president, and those moments of working across the aisle at significant personal risk stopped coming. He’s now a partisan warrior who broke an airtight vow against confirming a Supreme Court nominee in the last year of President Donald Trump’s first term.

Harrison had said in his opening statement that Graham would likely “scare you to vote for him.” The once freewheeling senator, indeed, had straitjacketed himself into that strategy, drawing from a grab bag of fears about the left at each opportunity.

In Graham’s own opening statement, he observed that “this is a big-choice election between me and Mr. Harrison: capitalism versus socialism, conservative judges versus liberal judges, law and order versus chaos.” This apocalyptic vision was everywhere. Responding to a question about whether teachers and students should be asked to return to an in-person, five-day school week without rapid COVID-19 testing available, Graham ended with a warning about how Democrats would pass “Medicare for All” and stack the Supreme Court. After fleshing out his position on enhanced unemployment benefits, Graham warned, again, that Democrats would pack the Supreme Court and eliminate the Electoral College. Graham said the worst thing that could happen to Myrtle Beach’s economy is a Democratic administration and Congress that would tax and regulate it.

When Harrison hammered Graham on his reversal over filling a Supreme Court seat in the final year of Trump’s term, Graham’s strategy required him to just take it.

“Senator, how good is your word when you made a promise to the American people—even more, you made a promise to the folks in South Carolina—that you wouldn’t be doing what you’re doing right now?” Harrison said. “And that’s the problem that I have, the greatest heresy that you could do as a public servant is to betray the trust of the people that you took an oath to serve.

“Just be a man about it,” he said, “and stand up and say, ‘You know what? I changed my mind. I’m going to do something else.’ But don’t go back and blame it on somebody else for a flip-flop that you’re making yourself.”

 

Ouch.

 

I expect we'll see at least a few more polls in SC for the Senate race, and I also expect they are not going to be good numbers for Graham.  We'll see in the weeks ahead, but in case Cal Cunningham crashes and burns next door in NC, we'll need Harrison's win here in SC to help take the Senate back.

Vote!

Biden, His Time, Con't

The post-debate polls are in and Biden has gotten a significant boost this week. Reuters/Ipsos now has him up by 10 points over Trump.

 

Democrat Joe Biden opened his widest lead in a month in the U.S. presidential race after President Donald Trump tested positive for the coronavirus, and a majority of Americans think Trump could have avoided infection if he had taken the virus more seriously, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Sunday.

The Oct. 2-3 national opinion poll gave little indication of an outpouring of support for the president beyond Trump’s core group of followers, some of whom have gathered outside Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where the president has been hospitalized.

Trump has repeatedly dismissed the severity of the pandemic as something that would disappear on its own, chiding Biden as recently as last week for wearing a protective mask, even as the coronavirus infected millions of people and forced businesses and schools to close.

Among those adults who are expected to cast ballots in the Nov. 3 election, the poll found that 51% were backing Biden, while 41% said they were voting for Trump. Another 4% were choosing a third-party candidate and another 4% said they were undecided.

Biden’s 10-point edge over Trump is 1 to 2 points higher than leads Biden posted over the past several weeks, though the increase is still within the poll’s precision limits of plus or minus 5 percentage points.

 

It's even worse news for Trump in the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll this week. 

Joe Biden’s national lead over President Donald Trump nearly doubled after Tuesday’s presidential debate, with voters saying by a 2-to-1 margin that Biden has the better temperament to be president, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

The poll was conducted in the two days after the unruly and insult-filled Sept. 29 debate, but before Trump tested positive for Covid-19 and was hospitalized Friday at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

The Democratic nominee is now ahead of Trump by 14 points among registered voters, 53 percent to 39 percent — up from his 8-point lead in the previous poll before the debate.

That 14-point advantage represents Biden’s largest lead in the NBC News/WSJ poll during the entirety of the 2020 presidential campaign; his previous high was 11 points in July.

 

Having said all that, remember the polls had Clinton ahead by a similar margin (12 points) as late as October 23, 2016. 

We all know how that turned out. 30 days is a lifetime in politics.

Take nothing for granted, and vote early.

 

Sunday Long Read: The Watchmen, Watching

New Yorker Magazine's Patrick Radden Keefe gives us this week's Sunday Long Read, where in 2020 corporate espionage isn't about how good your spies are, it's how good your counter-spies are. The private investigator is just as much a tool of law enforcement and detective work as police and federal agents are, and their services are a lot more accessible for Americans in a digital world where analog criminology still matters.

One day in 2016, a Manhattan private investigator named Tyler Maroney went to doorstep a seasoned criminal. In this era of the ubiquitous smartphone, even an unscheduled call can feel like an intrusion; showing up unannounced at someone’s house can seem outright belligerent, and a bit antique. But Maroney, who is a careful student of human interaction, figured it’s easier to hang up on someone than it is to slam a door in his face. The man he was looking for, Bill Antoni (a pseudonym), had a rap sheet that included charges for assault, burglary, and attempted manslaughter. He had recently been released from prison, and Maroney consulted a proprietary database to find his new address. When Maroney arrived at Antoni’s apartment building, he found that the buzzer was on the fritz, so he waited until another tenant walked out, then slipped inside. As he was climbing the stairs, Maroney ran into a man who was walking out. He had tattooed arms and wore a gold chain around his neck.

“Mr. Antoni?” Maroney said.

In such encounters, some investigators adopt what is known as a “pretext,” telling a fib about the purpose of their visit, or assuming a fake identity. Occasionally, the ruse is more elaborate, involving a fictitious business, with phony business cards, e-mail addresses, and social-media accounts. But Maroney takes a dim view of such subterfuge. “I’m a private detective,” he said to Antoni. “I’m here to ask for your help on a case.”

He had rehearsed this overture, hoping to make Antoni feel enlisted, rather than antagonized. “My client is a man who spent more than ten years in prison for a crime he did not commit,” Maroney said. “He was a victim of police misconduct, and you may have information that can help.”

Antoni had a sideline as a police informant, and, two decades earlier, he had offered sworn testimony to help convict Maroney’s client of murder. Now the man was suing city authorities, and his attorneys hired Maroney, who runs a detective agency called QRI, to find the jailhouse snitch and see if he might recant.

Antoni invited his visitor in. A good sign. Prior to becoming a private investigator, Maroney had worked as a journalist, and he had an eye for detail. Surveying the apartment, he noticed moldings blurred by layers of accumulated paint, a CCTV camera, and, on a table, a holstered Glock. One wall was decorated with a homemade collage of J.F.K. memorabilia: photos of Jackie Kennedy, Hyannis Port, the grassy knoll. Unprompted, Antoni declared, “Kennedy was the last great American.” And, when he said that, Maroney knew: this guy was going to talk.

People talk to a detective for different reasons. Sometimes they want absolution, or credit, or justice. Sometimes they’re lonely, seduced by a sympathetic ear. Antoni revealed that he had been induced to supply fraudulent testimony in the case by crooked cops who offered him a break on his prison sentence. Maroney’s client ended up receiving nearly ten million dollars in a settlement. A third of that went to the lawyers. Maroney’s firm got seventy-five thousand dollars.

More than thirty thousand private investigators now work in the United States, Maroney reports in his new book, “The Modern Detective: How Corporate Intelligence Is Reshaping the World” (Riverhead). They engage in a dizzying variety of low-profile intrigue: tracking missing people, tailing cheating spouses, recovering looted assets, vetting job applicants and multibillion-dollar deals, spying on one corporation at the behest of another, ferreting out investment strategies for hedge funds, compiling opposition research. Contemporary private eyes, Maroney explains, are often “refugees from other industries,” including law enforcement, journalism, accounting, and academia. One hallmark of the business is discretion—like spy agencies, private eyes must often keep their greatest triumphs secret—so it is notable that Maroney would write a book like this. In a disclaimer, he says that he has had to change names and alter some details, presumably to protect client confidentiality. But “The Modern Detective” is not an exposé. It is part memoir, part how-to guide, a celebration of the analytical and interpersonal intelligence that makes a great investigator. When Maroney showed up for work at the giant detective firm Kroll, back in 2005, he e-mailed an executive to ask where that executive’s office was, hoping to introduce himself. 

 

“You’re an investigator now,” the man replied. “Find me.” 

 

Private investigators are the information warfare side of the private mercenary company mentality that corporations, the very rich, and even regular Americans can access. No matter how complex technology gets, old-fashioned detective work, psychology, and information gathering never goes out of style. And these days, the PI's world is the Wild West of intel work.

As Tom Clancy once wrote, news organizations are the real intelligence agencies of our era. 

 

And like everything else in 2020, it's become decentralized gig economy work.

Last Call For Just As Corrupt As Trump

Republicans are just as corrupt as Trump, never forget that. The major takeaway from a Justice Department run by Bill Barr is that Republicans are assured they'll never be caught. Well, short of being turned in, that is.

Top aides of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton have asked federal law enforcement authorities to investigate allegations of improper influence, abuse of office, bribery and other potential crimes against the state’s top lawyer.

In a one-page letter to the state agency’s director of human resources, obtained Saturday by the American-Statesman and KVUE-TV, seven executives in the upper tiers of the office said that they are seeking the investigation into Paxton “in his official capacity as the current Attorney General of Texas.”

The Thursday letter said that each “has knowledge of facts relevant to these potential offenses and has provided statements concerning those facts to the appropriate law enforcement.”

Paxton, a 57-year-old Republican, was elected in 2014. His office said in a statement Saturday evening: “The complaint filed against Attorney General Paxton was done to impede an ongoing investigation into criminal wrongdoing by public officials including employees of this office. Making false claims is a very serious matter and we plan to investigate this to the fullest extent of the law.”

The statement did not elaborate.

The letter to human resources was signed by Paxton’s first assistant, Jeff Mateer, who resigned Friday, as well as Mateer’s deputy and deputy attorneys general overseeing divisions that include criminal investigations, civil litigation, administration and policy.

“We have a good faith belief that the attorney general is violating federal and/or state law including prohibitions related to improper influence, abuse of office, bribery and other potential criminal offenses,” the letter states.

 

Also, let's not pretend anyone who voluntarily works for someone like Ken Paxton is a good person, either. The main whistleblower, Jeff Mateer, may have resigned, but he's just as terrible.

Their decisions to report possible illegal activity involving their employer represents a stunning development in an agency that prizes loyalty, particularly from within Paxton’s inner circle. It places a renewed spotlight on Paxton, who is already under indictment for alleged securities fraud.

The complaint concluded by saying that they notified Paxton in a text message Thursday that they had reported the alleged violations to law enforcement.

The whistle blowers, who notified human resources to protect their jobs, offered no other details about the allegations and do not describe what they believe Paxton did that was illegal. Efforts to reach them were unsuccessful Saturday.

Mateer’s inclusion in the complaint letter, and his departure as Paxton’s second in command, was particularly significant, coming from a political ally who shared a conservative Christian perspective on many social and legal issues.

When President Donald Trump tapped Mateer to become a federal judge in 2017, Paxton lauded him as “a principled leader — a man of character — who has done an outstanding job for the State of Texas.”

Mateer’s nomination was later withdrawn after revelations of anti-LGBT remarks, including calling transgender children part of “Satan’s plan.”

 

Ken Paxton is leading the charge to destroy the ACA and take health care coverage for tens of millions of Americans away. He is a monster. And he's so corrupt, not only is he facing securities fraud charges, he got ratted out by his own office for taking bribes. 

Never forget that Donald Trump is just the orange face on a nationally corrupt and evil political party of racist psychopathic assholes.

Trump Literally Goes Viral

Donald Trump has COVID-19, he's been hospitalized at Walter Reed, he's 74 years old, obese, and most likely has a number of health issues.  His odds are not great. Republicans are getting very, very worried. 

 

President Trump’s vital signs were concerning over the last day and he was not out of danger, a person close to the situation said on Saturday, even as doctors mounted an aggressive effort to treat him and the coronavirus infected an ever widening swath of the president’s aides and allies.

While doctors maintained during a televised briefing that Mr. Trump was “doing very well” after a night at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, they refused to provide critical details and left open the impression that the president was known to be sick a day earlier than previously reported.

Shortly after the upbeat briefing by the doctors, a person familiar with the president’s health gave a more sober assessment to reporters at Walter Reed on the condition of anonymity. “The president’s vitals over the last 24 hours were very concerning and the next 48 hours will be critical in terms of his care,” this person said. “We’re still not on a clear path to a full recovery.”

Two people close to the White House said in separate interviews with The New York Times that the president had trouble breathing on Friday and that his oxygen level dropped, prompting his doctors to give him supplemental oxygen while at the White House and decide to transfer him to Walter Reed where he could be monitored with better equipment and treated more rapidly in case of trouble.

Dr. Sean P. Conley, the White House physician, told reporters outside Walter Reed that the president was not currently on supplemental oxygen on Saturday but repeatedly declined to say definitively whether he had ever been on oxygen. “None at this moment and yesterday with the team, while we were all here, he was not on oxygen,” he said, seeming to suggest that there was a period on Friday when he was.

Dr. Conley likewise seemed to suggest that the president was first diagnosed with the virus on Wednesday rather than Thursday night when Mr. Trump disclosed that he had tested positive on Twitter. While describing what he said was the president’s progress, he said Mr. Trump was “just 72 hours into the diagnosis now,” which would mean midday on Wednesday. 

 

The bigger problem is that Trump basically spent a week infecting people. Three GOP senators and multiple White House staffers are now ill.

 

Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has tested positive for coronavirus after being exposed to someone with the virus earlier this week, according to his spokesman, making him the third GOP senator to test positive in 24 hours and threatening the quick confirmation prospects of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.

Sens. Mike Lee of Utah and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who sit on the Judiciary Committee, tested positive for Covid-19 on Friday -- just days after attending a White House event where President Donald Trump nominated Barrett. Multiple attendees of that event, including Trump, have tested positive in the week since the ceremony, which featured many people not wearing masks and not observing social distancing protocols.

Johnson did not attend the Barrett nomination ceremony — where several people appeared to have been exposed to the virus — because he was quarantining from a prior exposure, during which he twice tested negative for the virus, according to the spokesman.
Unlike Democratic senators, Senate Republicans meet three times a week for lunch. And while they sit in a large room, they remove their masks to eat and to speak. Johnson, Lee and Tillis all attended Senate GOP lunches this week.

If the three senators remain out this month, it would effectively prevent Barrett from being confirmed to the Supreme Court until they return, which could be after Election Day during a lame-duck session. A lame-duck confirmation is a situation that GOP leaders are eager to avoid in case they lose control of the chamber next month.

 

This is where things get very chaotic.  I don't know where Trump is going to be in 24, 48, 72 hours health-wise. I don't know how many more Republican members of Congress and executive agency heads are sick and may still test positive in a few days. I don't know if Joe Biden is 100% okay, although it looks like he is.

 

And this week's Vice Presidential debate suddenly became exponentially more important.

Some Unfortunate Cal On California Action

Wouldn't be an election cycle without at least one Democratic candidate blowing an important and winnable race, in 2018 it was Claire McCaskill, and in 2020 it's apparently going to be NC Senate candidate Cal Cunningham.

North Carolina U.S. Senate candidate Cal Cunningham, a married father of two, sent text messages of a sexual nature to a woman who is not his wife, his campaign confirmed Friday night.

The text messages between Cunningham and Arlene Guzman Todd, a public relations strategist from California, were first reported Thursday night by NationalFile.com.

The report included pictures of the text messages, in which Cunningham and Guzman, who is also married according to the report, talked about kissing each other and more.

“Would make my day to roll over and kiss you about now,” said one text message from Cunningham.

In one text from Guzman, she says: “I have flexibility this month — done with school, training, big RFPs, etc. So the only thing I want on my to do list is you.”

The Cunningham campaign confirmed the authenticity of the text messages.

Cunningham, who has been leading in polling in his pivotal U.S. Senate race against Republican incumbent Thom Tillis, said Friday night that he is not dropping out of the race.

“I have hurt my family, disappointed my friends, and am deeply sorry. The first step in repairing those relationships is taking complete responsibility, which I do. I ask that my family’s privacy be respected in this personal matter,” Cunningham said in a statement sent to The News & Observer.

“I remain grateful and humbled by the ongoing support that North Carolinians have extended in this campaign, and in the remaining weeks before this election I will continue to work to earn the opportunity to fight for the people of our state.”

National File is a dirtbag right-wing nutjob site, but somebody handed them the goods and Cunningham is most likely going to lose now in a race he was ahead by 5-10 points.

If this ends up costing Democrats control of the Senate, well, now that's the point, isn't it? 

Pretty mild stuff frankly, but Dems get held to standards and Republicans don't, and that's all that it will take to put this race into a tailspin and maybe keep Mitch McConnell in charge of the Senate down the road.

Thom Tillis, the Republican senator that Cunningham is trying to beat, just tested positive for COVID thanks to Trump's superspreader event for Amy Coney Barrett at the White House last Saturday, so that may keep the Tillis campaign from being able to take full advantage of the huge opening they've just been given, but short of something really bad happening to Tillis as a result (or Trump!) this is going to be on every TV for the next 30 days in NC.

The other thing Cunningham has going for him is that NC's early voting has already taken off like a rocket and hundreds of thousands of votes have already been cast.

We'll see if it's enough to beat Tillis, but the larger problem is somebody sure as hell got a hold of Cunningham's phone messages and gave them to a right-wing tabloid political site, knowing full well the consequences.

The even larger problem remains though that Cal Cunningham showed very poor judgment, hurt his wife, and it could become a serious issue down the line for all of America escaping from the GOP.