Jacinda The Winner

Not that her reelection was in doubt, but New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern's handling of COVID-19 in her country went so well that voters this weekend gave her Labour Party not just a win, but an outright parliamentary majority, something that hasn't happened in modern New Zealand history.

 

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern won a second term in office Saturday in an election landslide of historic proportions.

With most votes counted, Ardern’s liberal Labour Party was winning 49% of the vote compared to 27% for its main challenger, the conservative National Party.

Labour was on target to win an outright majority of the seats in Parliament, something that hasn’t happened since New Zealand implemented a proportional voting system 24 years ago. Typically, parties must form alliances to govern, but this time Ardern and Labour can go it alone.

In a victory speech in front of hundreds of cheering supporters in Auckland, Ardern said her party had gotten more support from New Zealanders that at any time in at least 50 years.

“This has not been an ordinary election, and it’s not an ordinary time,” she said. “It’s been full of uncertainty and anxiety, and we set out to be an antidote to that.”

Ardern promised not to take her new supporters for granted and to govern for all New Zealanders.

“We are living in an increasingly polarized world, a place where, more and more, people have lost the ability to see one another’s point of view,” she said. “I think in this election, New Zealanders have shown that this is not who we are.”

A record number of voters cast early ballots in the two weeks leading up to the election.

On the campaign trail, Ardern was greeted like a rock star by people who crammed into malls and spilled onto streets to cheer her on and get selfies with her.

Her popularity soared earlier this year after she led a successful effort to stamp out the coronavirus. There is currently no community spread of the virus in the nation of 5 million and people are no longer required to wear masks or social distance.

Ardern, 40, won the top job after the 2017 election when Labour formed an alliance with two other parties. The following year, she became only the second world leader to give birth while in office.

She became a role model for working mothers around the world, many of whom saw her as a counterpoint to President Donald Trump. And she was praised for her handling of last year’s attack on two Christchurch mosques, when a white supremacist gunned down 51 Muslim worshippers.

She moved quickly to pass new laws banning the deadliest types of semi-automatic weapons.

 

And voters greatly rewarded her party for her decisions to do the right thing on COVID-19 and on white supremacist gun rampages.

 

Sadly, America went the opposite direct, but we have an opportunity to correct the problem. Early voting starts this week all over the country.

 

It's time to get your vote in for Biden-Harris and the Democrats down-ticket.

Sunday Long Read: The Government Went Viral

Our continuing COVID-19 crisis is also a legitimacy of government crisis, and no government agency has been rendered more pathetic in the last year more quickly than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a now utterly toothless, useless, and worthless shell of its former self, an agency that let Donald Trump destroy it, and an agency that allowed 215,000 Americans to die and counting as a direct result, as an in-depth ProPublica investigation into the agency's myriad failures reveals in this week's Sunday Long Read.

When the next history of the CDC is written, 2020 will emerge as perhaps the darkest chapter in its 74 years, rivaled only by its involvement in the infamous Tuskegee experiment, in which federal doctors withheld medicine from poor Black men with syphilis, then tracked their descent into blindness, insanity and death.

With more than 216,000 people dead this year, most Americans know the low points of the current chapter already. A vaunted agency that was once the global gold standard of public health has, with breathtaking speed, become a target of anger, scorn and even pity.

How could an agency that eradicated smallpox globally and wiped out polio in the United States have fallen so far?

ProPublica obtained hundreds of emails and other internal government documents and interviewed more than 30 CDC employees, contractors and Trump administration officials who witnessed or were involved in key moments of the crisis. Although news organizations around the world have chronicled the CDC’s stumbles in real time, ProPublica’s reporting affords the most comprehensive inside look at the escalating tensions, paranoia and pained discussions that unfolded behind the walls of CDC’s Atlanta headquarters. And it sheds new light on the botched COVID-19 tests, the unprecedented political interference in public health policy, and the capitulations of some of the world’s top public health leaders.

Senior CDC staff describe waging battles that are as much about protecting science from the White House as protecting the public from COVID-19. It is a war that they have, more often than not, lost.

Employees spoke openly about their “hill to die on” — the political interference that would prompt them to leave. Yet again and again, they surrendered and did as they were told. It wasn’t just worries over paying mortgages or forfeiting the prestige of the job. Many feared that if they left and spoke out, the White House would stop consulting the CDC at all, and would push through even more dangerous policies.

To some veteran scientists, this acquiescence was the real sign that the CDC had lost its way. One scientist swore repeatedly in an interview and said, “The cowardice and the caving are disgusting to me.”

Collectively, the interviews and documents show an insular, rigorous agency colliding head-on with an administration desperate to preserve the impression that it had the pandemic under control.

Some of the key wounds were self-inflicted. Records obtained by ProPublica detail for the first time the cataclysmic chain of mistakes and disputes inside the CDC labs making the first U.S. test for COVID-19. A respected lab scientist made a fateful decision to use a process that risked contamination, saw signs of trouble, but sent the tests to public health labs anyway. Many of those tests didn’t work, and the scramble to fix them had serious consequences.

Even when the CDC was not to blame, the Trump administration exploited events to take control of the agency’s messaging. As a historically lethal pandemic raged, the White House turned the CDC into a political bludgeon to advance Trump’s agenda, alternately blocking the agency’s leaders from using their quarantine powers or forcing them to assert those powers over the objections of CDC scientists.

Once seen as an apolitical bulwark, the CDC endured meddling on multiple fronts by officials with little or no public health experience, from Trump’s daughter Ivanka to Stephen Miller, the architect of the president’s immigration crackdown. A shifting and mysterious cast of political aides and private contractors — what one scientist described as young protégés of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, “wearing blue suits with red ties and beards” — crowded into important meetings about key policy decisions.

Agency insiders lost faith that CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield, a Trump appointee who’d been at the agency only two years, would, or could, hold the line on science. One division leader refused to sign what he viewed as an ill-conceived and xenophobic Trump administration order. Redfield ultimately signed it himself.

Veteran CDC specialists with global reputations were marginalized, silenced or reassigned — often for simply doing what had always been their job. Some of the agency’s most revered scientists vanished from public view after speaking candidly about the virus.

The Trump administration is “appropriating a public enterprise and making it into an agent of propaganda for a political regime,” one CDC scientist said in an interview as events unfolded. “It’s mind-boggling in the totality of ambition to so deeply undermine what’s so vitally important to the public.”

The CDC repeatedly declined to make Butler, Redfield or any other employees mentioned in this story available for questions, and a CDC spokesperson declined to comment on behalf of the agency. The White House did not respond to an email seeking comment.

 

It will take year, if not decades, to fix the damage done by Donald Trump to the nation's executive branch agencies, but let's not forget that part of the damage was self-inflicted by people too cowardly to do the right thing when history needed them to stand up to Trump and save American lives instead.

Set some time aside for this one. It's vital.

The Road To Gilead, Con't

The end of the availability of abortion health care services in Kentucky is almost here, as a 2-1 decision by a three-judge Sixth Circuit panel finds the state's hospital services requirement TRAP law for clinics is Constitutional. 

A federal appeals panel has upheld a controversial Kentucky abortion law that opponents argued officials had used to try to close down the commonwealth's only abortion clinic and prevent another from opening.

In a 2-1 vote, the panel for the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Friday that Kentucky may require abortion clinics to obtain signed agreements with hospitals and ambulance services to transport and admit patients in an emergency.

In doing so, the panel struck down the 2018 decision by U.S. District Judge Greg Stivers that such rules were unnecessary and posed an undue burden on women seeking abortions. Stivers' ruling followed a legal challenge by EWM Women's Surgical Center and Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky.

The decision comes more than a year after the case was argued before the 6th Circuit panel in Cincinnati.

The two-member majority, judges Joan Larsen and Chad Readler, both appointed by President Donald Trump, declined to find the Kentucky law an undue burden or unreasonable, saying that argument "cannot be sustained."

They said clinics have options, such as seeking time extensions, should they be unable to obtain agreements with hospitals and ambulance services.

But in a forceful dissent, Judge Eric Clay, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, found otherwise, saying Friday's ruling was "deeply flawed."

"At the end of the day, no matter what standard this court is bound to apply, the majority’s decision today is terribly and tragically wrong," Clay's dissent said.

The ruling represents a victory for Republican Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who took over the case from the administration of former Gov. Matt Bevin, an anti-abortion Republican. Cameron praised the decision in a statement Friday.

“The Sixth Circuit’s ruling keeps in place an important Kentucky law for protecting the health and safety of patients" Cameron said. "Our office was proud to intervene in this case and ensure that the law was fully defended."

 

So even with Matt Bevin gone, it's looking like the future of abortion services in Kentucky and several other states will soon come to a Supreme Court decision next summer, in what will almost certainly be a 6-3 conservative court that will have the votes needed to overturn Roe and deny abortion healthcare to half the country, if not more.

It's already an undue burden for a third of women.

We're maybe a couple years out at most from a forced birth regime.

Gilead is right around the corner.

Last Call For It Backfired On Them

How I know the Trump regime's internal polling numbers out in Western states are abysmal? It took less than 24 hours for the White House to completely reverse its position on denying California federal disaster declaration for the state's record-setting wildfires this fall. See if you can spot the giveaway.

The federal government has reversed course on California's request for a disaster declaration for wildfires that have burned swathes of land across the U.S. state since early September.

The Trump administration had initially ruled against delivering the aid, before later approving it on Friday.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Friday afternoon he had spoken to President Donald Trump by phone and said he had approved the request. "Grateful for his quick response," Newsom said.

"The Governor and [House Minority] Leader [Kevin] McCarthy spoke and presented a convincing case and additional on-the-ground perspective for reconsideration leading the President to approve the declaration," deputy press secretary Judd Deere said in a statement.

Gonna stop you right there as you have all the info you need as to why the lightning-fast turnaround happened. 

The answer is Republican Congressman Kevin McCarthy, the House GOP minority leader and Representative of California's 23rd district, which includes Bakersfield and the San Joaquin Valley, some of the areas hardest-hit in this year's wildfires. In particular, CA-23 contains Sequoia National Park and the Sequoia National Forest, both ravaged by flames earlier this year in the Castle fire in September.

CA-23 may be the reddest district not only in California but on the entire West Coast at R+17 by Cook Political Report reckoning, a capital reason as to why Kevin McCarthy is an elected in a state like California, but even his ass would be toast if he went along with Trump denying McCarthy's own constituents disaster money after the fall wildfires that California just had. Rural California is pretty red, and they got hit the hardest by the blazes. It wasn't downtown LA that burned down, folks, as much as the Trumpies would like to believe.

McCarthy and what's left of the California GOP would have been completely vaporized at the polls in a couple of weeks if this hold-up held up, so yes, McCarthy almost certainly made the pitch to Trump, and Gavin Newsom is smart enough to go with it to help his state.

Remember, it's not hard to appeal to Trump if you play to his ego, and McCarthy bringing Newsom to Trump, hat in hand? Yeah, Trump will take that and gloat, the idiot. Newsom will suck it up, and McCarthy might actually keep his seat and his job.

Would be a shame if Republicans in California lost seats anyway though.

Russian To Judgment, Con't

I love how Trump supporters are acting like the entire Russian disinformation campaign over the last five years was somehow a ghost story when the evidence is overwhelming (and I've documented a hell of a lot of it on this very blog) and the fact that the Russians are currently trying to use the Trump regime to spread disinformation against Joe Biden right now, as we speak, through Rudy Giuliani and his ridiculous Russian handlers.

US authorities are investigating whether recently published emails that purport to detail the business dealings of Joe Biden's son in Ukraine and China are connected to an ongoing Russian disinformation effort targeting the former vice president's campaign, a US official and a congressional source briefed on the matter said. 

The conservative-leaning New York Post claimed in a series of articles this week that it obtained "smoking-gun" emails about Hunter Biden and his dealings in Ukraine. CNN has not determined the authenticity of the emails. 

President Donald Trump and his allies have used this topic to smear the Bidens over the past year and seized on the recent articles to attack Biden in the final weeks of the presidential election. The specific new allegations touch on the same topics as the Kremlin's ongoing disinformation campaign against the Bidens, which the US intelligence community said this summer was intended to weaken Biden's candidacy against Trump. 

The FBI is leading the investigation, the official and congressional source said. NBC was first to report the inquiry. 

The probe is part of a larger investigation into Russian disinformation that dates back to before the impeachment inquiry last fall. The alleged disinformation campaign is aimed at tying the former vice president to his son's dealings with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, according to US officials familiar with the matter. 

The New York Post says it obtained the emails through two Trump confidants: His personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his former chief strategist Steve Bannon. 

Giuliani has openly coordinated with a known Russian agent to promote disinformation about the Bidens. The Washington Post reported Thursday the White House, and Trump personally, were warned in 2019 that Giuliani "was being used to feed Russian misinformation" to the President. Separately, Bannon was recently charged by the Justice Department with orchestrating a million-dollar fraud scheme and accused of deceiving thousands of donors to his nonprofit. 

In a Fox News interview Friday, Giuliani said Trump never mentioned the warning to him and that he hasn't been told by US intelligence officials that he is peddling Russian disinformation. 

Several experts on foreign disinformation quickly warned that there were major red flags about the articles published by the New York Post, including Giuliani's involvement, the changing stories about how the emails were obtained, and the digital metadata of images posted by the newspaper. 

The US government announced last month that one of Giuliani's Ukrainian allies is an "active Russian agent" who has targeted Western media with "false and unsubstantiated narratives" about alleged "corruption" by the Bidens. 

Facebook and Twitter took unprecedented steps Wednesday to slow the spread of the articles, triggering a wave of outrage from Trump and Republicans.

 

Like I said, by my count this is post two-hundred sixty one of the Russian To Judgment series of posts since July 2016, and I expect I'll be continuing to write about the subject for some time to come. We're going to be dealing with the fallout from having the Russians completely compromise the US government over the last four years (and in some cases, far longer, thanks Ed Snowden!) for decades to come.

A Supreme Count Of The Country

If confirmed, Amy Coney Barrett's first major case as a Supreme Court Justice could very well be the Trump regime's plan to eliminate undocumented immigrants from the official Census count, which would almost certainly cost states like California, Illinois and New York multiple Congressional districts, as well as billions in yearly federal funding.

The Supreme Court announced Friday that it will review President Trump’s attempt to exclude undocumented immigrants when calculating how congressional seats are apportioned among the states.

The unprecedented proposal could have the effect of shifting both political power and billions of dollars in federal funds away from urban states with large immigrant populations and toward rural and more Republican interests.

A three-judge panel in New York said that Trump’s July 21 memorandum on the matter was “an unlawful exercise of the authority granted to” him by Congress. It blocked the Commerce Department and the Census Bureau from including information about the number of undocumented immigrants — it is unclear how those numbers would be generated — in their reports to the president after this year’s census is completed.

The justices put the case on a fast-track, and said they will hold a hearing Nov. 30. By then, it will likely be a nine-member court again, if Judge Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed, giving the court a 6 to 3 conservative majority. The administration says timing matters, because it must present the plan to Congress in January.

It is unclear whether the matter would divide the court along ideological lines, but the issue is another mark of how the once-a-decade census has been transformed from a largely bureaucratic exercise into the centerpiece of a partisan battle.

The Supreme Court earlier this week agreed with the Trump administration that it could stop the count of Americans, despite fears that the coronavirus and other problems will lead to an undercount of minorities and those in hard-to-reach communities. Lower courts had said the count should continue until the end of the month. But that might have made it heard to get the information to Trump by year’s end — a timetable that carries additional importance in an election year.

In 2019, the justices rejected the Trump administration’s plan to add a citizenship question to the census form, which experts said would discourage participation by both legal and undocumented immigrants. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote the 5-to-4 decision, saying the administration did not follow proper procedure for introducing the question, and that its rationale was “contrived.”

“President Trump has repeatedly tried — and failed — to weaponize the census for his attacks on immigrant communities,” said Dale Ho, director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, which is a party to the litigation. “The Supreme Court rejected his attempt last year and should do so again. The legal mandate is clear — every single person counts in the census, and every single person is represented in Congress.”

The latest controversy involves the constitutional mandate that apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives be based on the “whole number of persons in each State.” That has been interpreted to mean every resident, regardless of immigration status.

But this summer, Trump issued a memorandum that said, for the first time, “it is the policy of the United States to exclude from the apportionment base aliens who are not in a lawful immigration status.”

Trump’s memorandum indicated he believed that some states would be getting more congressional seats than deserved — California was implied but not named — because of their numbers of undocumented residents.

Trump directed Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to provide him with two sets of numbers, one that includes unauthorized immigrants and one that does not, “to the maximum extent feasible and consistent with the discretion delegated to the executive branch.”

Even the administration does not indicate how that would be accomplished, as the census does not ask about citizenship. “The Census Bureau is still evaluating the extent to which, as a practical matter, administrative records pertaining to immigration status can be used to identify and exclude illegal aliens from the apportionment population count,” acting solicitor general Jeffrey B. Wall said in a filing to the Supreme Court.

This is going to most likely be a disaster, and most likely with Barrett we will see five votes to eliminate more than a century of precedent. If this ruling is broad enough, it could all but require proof of citizenship for anything and everything that the government provides as a service or benefit. Even if the question remains limited to the Census, it will cost blue states as many as a dozen House seats, and any seats reapportioned during redistricting where Republicans control the process will almost certainly see Democratic districts eliminated completely.

In other words, it could completely remake the House, possibly tilting the House towards the GOP for a decade or more.

This is what actual judicial activism looks like.

It's Not About Suppression Anymore, It's Voter Subtraction

Ibrim X. Kendi writes in The Atlantic that the GOP is about voter subtraction, and the Democrats are (mostly) about voter addition. But in 2020, voter subtraction is the only thing the GOP has going for them, and if Biden loses, you can look to the vile success of these efforts by a broken Republican party to remove millions of votes.

Republicans are literally subtracting untold numbers of individual votes as they suppress the overall Democratic vote. GOP voter subtraction preceded Trump, but not as the GOP’s sole lifeline. For most of the post-civil-rights era, the Republican Party has also been attracting and adding voters, putting the Democratic Party on the defensive after half a century of New Deal dominance.

But in recent years, Democrats have been more likely than Republicans to follow the demographic and ideological shifts of American voters, moving somewhat away from the bipartisan political bigotry of fears, fairy tales, and lies that especially attracted white voters. Republicans, by contrast, have doubled down on those politics under a president who refuses to condemn white-supremacist domestic terrorists, hardly pays taxes, denies racism and climate change, bashes dead soldiers, mocks Christians and disabled people, tells Americans not to let COVID-19 dominate their lives, berates and allegedly assaults women, calls Hispanic immigrants rapists and animals, claims that Muslims hate America, and suggests that unhappy Black people should go back to their urban hells and shithole countries—all the while saying he’s the least racist person anywhere in the world, and making money off of his presidency with impunity. Trump has alienated rising numbers of young voters, voters of color, feminist voters, anti-racist white voters, and Americans who desire presidential decency. Trump has alienated almost everyone except his shrinking base.

Trump’s game of alienation has made voter subtraction the existential game of the Republican Party. Subtracting voters at any cost is all that is saving the Republican Party from political death. Trump’s Republican Party must kill votes in order to survive.

On March 8, 2019, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed the For the People Act. The bill would have enacted a series of major reforms: automatic voter registration, early voting, automatic registration of felons completing their sentences, Election Day registration, and independent state commissions to redraw congressional districts. By the year’s end, House Democrats had also voted to reinstate the 1965 Voting Rights Act and federal oversight of state election laws to protect against voter subtraction and suppression.

The Democratic Party has primarily played a game of voter addition. Primarily, not totally. To maintain power, centrist Democrats have engaged in voter subtraction to fend off their primary opponents, opposing online voting and reducing the voting age to 16.

But although Democrats supported both voter-addition bills, almost all House Republicans opposed them. McConnell, the Senate majority leader, ignored them; instead of becoming law, the bills died in the Senate. In the meantime, Republican state lawmakers continued to pass voter-subtraction bills. Republican secretaries of state have been aggressively subtracting millions of names from the voting rolls, even as GOP legislators have made it harder for citizens to register to vote.

And this is the issue. The evidence exists that Trump's 2016 victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Florida were manufactured from voter subtraction.  We're already seeing it happening now with rejected mail ballots, long lines at early voting polling places, and onerous burdens placed on voters by states and backed by courts. Millions of voters nationwide have been kicked off rolls, and millions more will have their votes thrown out, maybe enough to give Donald Trump the win.

And the massive majority of voters removed from registration are Black and brown, and Republicans damn well know it.

The future of the republic depends on us overcoming these barriers, but then again that's been true for 400 years.

Last Call For Mitch Better Have My Money

There will be no COVID-19 relief bill as long as Mitch McConnell is Senate majority leader, and I really don't understand why people won't just admit that instead of screaming at Nancy Pelosi like this is all her fault somehow.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Thursday that he would not put a potential $1.8 trillion+ deal struck by Democrats and the Trump administration on the Senate floor. "My members think half a trillion dollars, highly targeted is the best way to go," he said.

Why it matters: The economy and American workers need help. Democrats say so. President Trump says so. Fed chair Jay Powell says so, adding that there's a low risk of "overdoing it." At some point, such inaction will catch up to investors. This comes against a backdrop of a still-raging pandemic. Yesterday, for example, showed increased COVID-19 caseloads in all 50 states, while over 100 million Americans remain out of the labor force.

State of play: House Speaker Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Mnuchin talked yesterday and will talk again today. One possible breakthrough is on the Democrats' ask for a national testing plan, which Mnuchin this morning said on CNBC that the White House will now support. No word yet on if the WH will relent on another sticking point, related to expansions of the child tax credit and earned income tax credit. Or if Pelosi will give the WH a win on virus-related liability protections for businesses and schools.

What to know: President Trump said on Fox Business this morning that he would "absolutely" go higher than a $1.8 trillion proposal, and that he has directed Mnuchin to do so. But there isn't actually a WH proposal to negotiate against, at least not in document form.

The biggest hurdle is Senate Republicans, who have been left out of negotiations and who seem uninterested in comprehensive stimulus. One explanation is that McConnell is laser-focused on SCOTUS, but it's unclear why he won't walk and chew stimulus at the same time — particularly given how much Trump wants a deal before the election.

 

It's not unclear at all. Mitch McConnell doesn't want a bill now. There will be no bill in the lame duck, and there will definitely be no bill if he's still Senate majority leader in January with a Biden presidency. In fact, no COVID-19 bill is exactly the sabotage McConnell will want heading into a Biden administration so he can blame them for "failure" and history shows that he'll get away with it.

 

The problem is Mitch McConnell, period.

Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion, Con't

 Here's everything you need to know about 2020.

First, in the early days of the pandemic, the Trump regime, while telling America that everything was under control, was secretly telling the titans of Wall Street that the pandemic was a real threat. Wall Street sold off the markets and made trillions.

On the afternoon of Feb. 24, President Trump declared on Twitter that the coronavirus was “very much under control” in the United States, one of numerous rosy statements that he and his advisers made at the time about the worsening epidemic. He even added an observation for investors: “Stock market starting to look very good to me!”

But hours earlier, senior members of the president’s economic team, privately addressing board members of the conservative Hoover Institution, were less confident. Tomas J. Philipson, a senior economic adviser to the president, told the group he could not yet estimate the effects of the virus on the American economy. To some in the group, the implication was that an outbreak could prove worse than Mr. Philipson and other Trump administration advisers were signaling in public at the time.

The next day, board members — many of them Republican donors — got another taste of government uncertainty from Larry Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council. Hours after he had boasted on CNBC that the virus was contained in the United States and “it’s pretty close to airtight,” Mr. Kudlow delivered a more ambiguous private message. He asserted that the virus was “contained in the U.S., to date, but now we just don’t know,” according to a document describing the sessions obtained by The New York Times.

The document, written by a hedge fund consultant who attended the three-day gathering of Hoover’s board, was stark.“What struck me,” the consultant wrote, was that nearly every official he heard from raised the virus “as a point of concern, totally unprovoked.”

The consultant’s assessment quickly spread through parts of the investment world. U.S. stocks were already spiraling because of a warning from a federal public health official that the virus was likely to spread, but traders spotted the immediate significance: The president’s aides appeared to be giving wealthy party donors an early warning of a potentially impactful contagion at a time when Mr. Trump was publicly insisting that the threat was nonexistent.

Interviews with eight people who either received copies of the memo or were briefed on aspects of it as it spread among investors in New York and elsewhere provide a glimpse of how elite traders had access to information from the administration that helped them gain financial advantage during a chaotic three days when global markets were teetering.

The rest of us got screwed. And for millions of us, without jobs, without help from an indifferent Senate GOP blocking any further CVOID-19 legislation, and without a place to go, millions of us now find ourselves in poverty over the last several months.

The number of people in the United States living in poverty grew by 8 million since May, according to a study by the Columbia University Center on Poverty & Social Policy released Thursday — a surged fueled by the economic downturn during the pandemic and the expiration of added weekly unemployment payments back in July.

The study found that the $1,200 one-time payments to those earning under a certain income threshold, coupled with an added $600 per week of unemployment insurance for laid-off workers received, helped stave off an increase in poverty at the beginning of the pandemic.

However, once Senate Republicans allowed those payments to expire in July, the number of people living in poverty began to climb — hurting children, as well as Black and Hispanic populations, the most, the study found.

"Due to the expiration of the CARES Act’s stimulus checks and $600 per week supplement to unemployment benefits, the monthly poverty rate in September was higher than rates during April or May, and also higher than pre-crisis levels," the study found.

House Democrats have twice passed an extension of the $600 weekly unemployment checks — once in May, before the payments expired, and again in early October.

However, the Senate — led by Republican Mitch McConnell of Kentucky — has refused to take up those bills, claiming they were too expensive and not needed.

Senate Republicans let the payments expire at the end of July, before leaving Washington, D.C., for nearly a month. Upon their return, the GOP-led Senate has been unable to pass coronavirus aid.

If the GOP remains in power, millions of Americans will fall into poverty, period. We have a clear choice, now, and we need to make it. 

Trump Like A Egyptian

So not only did the Muller team suspect and investigate Russian, Ukrainian, Saudi, Cypriot and German money laundering for Team Trump, turns out the most egregious example was Egyptian money laundering too. And all of it was blocked by the Justice Department and in the case of the Egyptian money laundering, we now know it was the Supreme Court that refused to hear the case on a subpoena of financial records.

 

By summer 2017, Mueller's office was handling the Egypt investigation gingerly, with the team of prosecutors and FBI personnel often working without sharing full details with the other teams in the office, according to multiple accounts of the office's dynamics.
CNN sent Mueller detailed questions about the Egypt investigation for this story. He declined to comment. 

One official familiar with the work said some investigators believed the Egypt inquiry presented a more direct avenue for Mueller's team to examine Trump's finances, in part because it did not have an obvious tie to Russia. 

Diving into Trump's finances, however, was highly sensitive -- so much so that Mueller suspected the President would fire him if the White House learned his finances were being probed, crossing a so-called "red line" Trump set early in the Mueller investigation.
Yet understanding Trump's finances was crucial to the Egypt investigation -- especially regarding the $10 million he gave to his campaign. 

Needing a final push before Election Day as the polls tightened in 2016, the Trump campaign was running low on cash. Trump's top campaign officials scrambled to convince Trump to inject money, according to memos of witness interviews from the investigation and contemporaneous news reports. 

Trump lagged well behind a pledge he made to spend $100 million of his own money on his campaign. Less than two weeks before Election Day, Trump wrote his campaign a $10 million check, publicly calling it a loan. Campaign finance records showed it as his single largest political contribution, by far, and not one the campaign would reimburse him for.
Federal law enforcement officials suspected, in part because of intelligence information, that there was money moving through the Egyptian bank that could connect to Trump's campaign donation, according to the sources. Yet untangling the web of Trump's complex business interests ultimately remained out of reach. 

Campaign finance law prohibits foreign political contributions to campaigns for public office. A financial tie between a sitting president and a foreign country could also have explosive national security consequences. 

Mueller's office pressed witnesses to explain how the Trump-Sisi meeting in late 2016 came about. Ahmad, whose aims on the investigation were cloaked in secrecy, was repeatedly present in interviews touching on both Trump's $10 million contribution to his campaign and the campaign's ties to Egypt. 

For instance, in one witness interview in November 2017, Ahmad and the FBI pressed an unnamed former staffer on the Trump campaign, transition and National Security Council about Trump's meeting with Sisi and her interactions with Egyptian nationals. Another witness, according to the interview memos, spoke to investigators in August 2018 about the Trump-Sisi meeting and Egypt's stance on US presidential elections. 

Mueller's team repeatedly asked witnesses questions about Trump foreign policy campaign adviser Walid Phares and his ties to Egypt, after intelligence pointed them toward him. The New York Times first reported in June about the special counsel's investigation into Phares' suspected role in an Egyptian influence effort. It led to no charges. The FBI has not made public records that show Mueller's team interviewing Phares, though the former Trump adviser has said he spoke to investigators. Phares' assistant declined to comment. 

In an initial interview with the special counsel's office, senior campaign official and White House adviser Stephen Bannon also discussed his role in setting up the meeting between Trump and Sisi. 

In a session months later, Bannon was asked about Trump's $10 million contribution to his campaign, according to another recent release of Mueller's interview memos. 

Bannon explained to Mueller's investigators how Trump initially resisted cutting his campaign such a large check, and that Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner doubted that Trump would do so, saying, "that was not going to happen," according to Bannon. But Trump was talked into providing the last-minute money by future Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Kushner, Bannon said. Mnuchin described the money as a "cash advance," Bannon said, and Trump eventually agreed to wire the money. "Trump was convinced the cash would be there," Bannon said, according to the interview summary. 

A spokesperson for Mnuchin at the Treasury Department confirmed Bannon's description of convincing Trump to make the loan, and said that Mnuchin had no knowledge of how Trump had $10 million available to him. 

Records of the special counsel's office interviews, which remain heavily redacted, do not make clear whether witnesses were asked directly about money connected to Egypt. At the same time, investigators may have sought not to tip their suspicions to witnesses -- especially those like Bannon who were close to the President. 

Representatives for Bannon didn't respond to CNN's requests for comment.

 

Donald Trump took a $10 million bribe from Egyptian strongman Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

So who's he taking money from now in this campaign cycle?

 

Why, you and me.

The farther behind Donald Trump has fallen in the competition for campaign dollars, the more he’s milked government resources to make up the difference.

Millions of boxes of food doled out to needy families — with letters signed by the president taking credit stuffed inside. An $8 billion program for drug-discount cards to seniors featuring Trump branding — intended to arrive before the Nov. 3 election. A $300 million advertising blitz to "defeat despair" over the coronavirus pandemic — the biggest threat to Trump’s reelection.

Each of those initiatives have two things in common: They’re paid for with taxpayer money, and they are plainly intended to help Trump’s flagging reelection campaign. The actions are just the latest examples of how the president has eviscerated the traditional boundaries separating politics from government.

His heavy reliance on federal resources and his own executive powers to win reelection come as Trump has fallen more than $100 million behind Joe Biden in TV ad spending, and slipped to a double-digit deficit in national polls.

As the election approaches, Trump has moved beyond using his control over federal resources to deploying government officials to carry out his political messaging. Last week, Trump suggested that his attorney general prosecute some of his political enemies. Days ago, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo vowed he would release Hillary Clinton’s emails “before the election,” moving to resurrect a volatile issue from the 2016 race. And Attorney General William Barr has put the weight of the Justice Department behind Trump’s unfounded allegations of voter fraud.

“The president is increasingly using all the levers he’s got for political purposes,” says Donald Ayer, a former deputy attorney general under George H.W. Bush who has endorsed Biden. “You can wonder whether he’s getting a bit desperate … It appears to me that the president is making increasingly outrageous demands and comments as time goes along.”

 

It's always about the grift.

StupidiNews!

• The Trump regime has rejected California's request for emergency disaster assistance for wildfires, Gov. Gavin Newsom says the cost to the state could top a quarter-billion in damage.
• Citing Attorney General Bill Barr's "slavish obedience" to Donald Trump, a 36-year veteran of the Justice Department's San Diego office is resigning in protest.
• Former Trump regime fundraiser and GOP financial chair Elliot Broidy is expected to plead guilty next week on charges of illegal lobbying in exchange for dropping a probe into a Trump donor.
• Mitch McConnell say he has enough Republican Senate votes to confirm Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court as soon as next Friday.
• YouTube says it will crack down on conspiracy group QAnon ahead of the election, but is stopping short of banning the group entirely from its platform.
  

Last Call For The Small Things Add Up Big

Democratic candidate fundraising platform ActBlue has just reported the most successful fundraising quarter of its kind in history: a staggering $1.5 billion raised in three months by individual donors to help Democrats in all 50 states.

 

Democratic candidates and left-leaning groups raised $1.5 billion through ActBlue over the last three months — a record-smashing total that reveals the overwhelming financial power small-dollar donors have unleashed up and down the ballot ahead of the 2020 election.

From July through September, 6.8 million donors made 31.4 million contributions through ActBlue, the Democratic Party’s favored online donation platform, averaging $47 per donation. More than 14,223 campaigns and organizations benefited from the surge in donations, the largest single quarter in the platform’s 15-year history, according to figures shared first with POLITICO. Just in September, ActBlue processed $758 million.

It’s the latest example of ActBlue’s exponential growth and how online fundraising is fundamentally reshaping politics. During the entire 2018 election cycle, ActBlue donors gave candidates and groups nearly $1.6 billion, a total almost matched in a single quarter this summer and fall.

Joe Biden is responsible for a large slice of the total, after announcing Wednesday night that his campaign, along with the Democratic National Committee and the campaign’s joint fundraising committees, hauled in $383 million in September, including $203 million that was raised online. It was the biggest fundraising month ever for a presidential campaign.

Jaime Harrison, a Democrat challenging South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, raised $57 million in the third quarter, breaking the record Beto O’Rourke set for the biggest-ever Senate fundraising quarter two years ago. Overall, donations to Democratic Senate candidates more than tripled in 2020 over the same period in 2018.

And the money stretches much further down the ballot. Contributions to state legislative candidates have also tripled in 2020 compared to the same period in 2018. Democratic state parties, once largely ignored and underfunded, also drew more than seven times the number of donors over the last three months than they did over that same period in 2018.

Democratic donor enthusiasm has transformed Biden’s campaign from an effort that once looked in danger of running out of money during the primaries to a juggernaut that has overtaken a sitting president. By August, Biden had topped Trump, who once held a nine-figure cash lead, in both fundraising and spending.

“Small-dollar donors are showing an unparalleled commitment to change,” Erin Hill, ActBlue’s executive director, said in a statement shared with POLITICO. “In the final weeks of the 2020 election, they are showing up and investing in races across the board. This people-powered movement will expand the map for Democrats for years to come and sets a powerful precedent for civic engagement. Small-dollar donors are leading the way to victory.”

One telling statistic from ActBlue: More than half of the unique donors who gave in the third quarter gave more than once. That frequency shows how small-dollar donors can turn into a renewable resource for candidates, who can extract a few dollars at a time multiple times throughout a campaign.

 

This is something that actually gives me a lot of hope, to know that Democrats are raising money the right way, not just through $50,000 per plate closed-door galas, but through open and transparent donations made by millions to give more than one billion.

 

And the real fight is going to be a state legislatures in preparation for 2022 redistricting, a fight that the Supreme Court has ruled must be left to states. We're going to be able to undo a lot of damage hopefully over the last ten years from the disaster of 2010.

And a lot of that is thanks to ActBlue.

Turkey Day Gets Trumped

Thanksgiving is going to be pretty rough this year for a lot of families, but between the election and COVID-19, it's probably worth listening to Dr. Fauci and consider skipping it this year altogether.

Coronavirus precautions will result in a very different kind of Thanksgiving for many people this year, himself included, Dr. Anthony Fauci said Wednesday.

“It is unfortunate, because that’s such a sacred part of the American tradition, the family gathering around Thanksgiving, but that is a risk,” Fauci, the nation's leading infectious disease expert, told CBS Evening News anchor Norah O'Donnell.

Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that given the current spread of Covid-19 and the uptick in infections, people need to be very careful about social gatherings, especially older people and those with underlying conditions.

“You may have to bite the bullet and sacrifice that social gathering, unless you're pretty certain that the people that you're dealing with are not infected. Either they've been very recently tested, or they're living a lifestyle in which they don't have any interaction with anybody except you and your family,” he said.

He added that travel on planes and public transportation could increase exposure to the virus.

“My Thanksgiving is going to look very different this year,” Fauci noted.

 

Just stay home this year. It's not worth it.

 

Oh, and don't forget, this is Donald Trump's fault for the abysmal response by the federal government to an ongoing pandemic, now in it's tenth month, that we're no longer pretending exists.

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Above all, Donald Trump made it socially acceptable again to assault, harm, and even kill Black people because we are Black. And in 2020 hate crimes still happen.

 

Devin Freelon Jr. and two friends were playing music while walking to the parking lot in a waterfront park in Monroe County, Mich., when they saw a White man walking toward them.

“N------ don’t belong on this beach,” Lee James Mouat yelled at the boys, who are Black, on June 6, according to a criminal complaint released this week.


Mouat, 42, then grabbed a bike lock and struck Freelon, 18, in the face, said several witnesses. The blow knocked out several of Freelon’s teeth and shattered his jaw.

Federal prosecutors charged Mouat on Tuesday with a hate crime for “willfully causing bodily injury to an African-American teenager because of the teenager’s race.” If convicted, Mouat faces up to 10 years in prison.

The case is the latest hate-crime charge filed by federal prosecutors this year against White suspects accused of attacking Black people in racially charged assaults. Federal prosecutors charged a man in September for allegedly stabbing a Black man in Oregon, unprovoked, several times last December. A woman in Queens, who is accused of throwing a glass bottle at a Black woman who was jogging and yelling “go back to Africa” in August, also received hate-crime charges last month.

At least four people witnessed the alleged assault in Michigan, according to the criminal complaint written by Sean D. Nicol, a special agent with the FBI’s Detroit Division in Ann Arbor, Mich.

It was the evening of June 6, and Freelon and his two friends had been walking in William C. Sterling State Park, a public park with a lakeside beach about 35 miles south of Detroit, and listening to music on a portable speaker.

Two witnesses told the investigator that they heard a White man, later identified by police as Mouat, loudly complaining about the music, calling the boys the n-word and “monsters.”

“These n------ are playing gang music,” Mouat said, according to one of the witnesses. “I want to hit them with this cooler.” And, “I wish someone would say something to me so I can beat them.”

The second witness observed Mouat, who was walking with his family, approach the boys in the parking lot. The witness heard the man threaten to “bash their heads in if they don’t turn [their music] down,” he told the investigator.

 

The difference is there are federal hate crime laws, laws that need to be strengthened, and the strengthening of those laws continue to be blocked by racist white Republicans like Rand Paul who say racism is over, and that laws like this are more likely to be used against white people through false accusations.

Devin Freelon got his teeth smashed out for being Black.

But we don't need laws to protect us from assault and murder?

"But we already have laws against assault and murder, they still happen!" Well, we have laws against discrimination too, but that happens daily in America.

So maybe they need better punishment to keep them from happening?

Black Lives Still Matter.

StupidiNews!

•  A Canadian woman has returned five artifacts taken from Pompeii after 15 years, saying she was "young and dumb" at the time and arguing that she was cursed ever since.
• Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned of "irreparable harm" to the American people in her dissent against an unsigned SCOTUS order allowing the Trump regime to end Census counting.
• The Trump regime is once again asking the US Supreme Court to block Manhattan prosecutors from seeing Trump's tax returns, saying it would cause "permanent harm" to the Executive. 
• China, Cuba and Russia will join the UN Human Rights Council as Saudi Arabia's bid was blocked, the Trump regime says it refuses to recognize the council containing states with "abhorrent" records.
• The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating the battery packs from the Chevy Volt EV after three fire and explosion incidents have been reported over the last two years.