Last Call For Mitch Quits On A Deal

The Senate has adjourned for August recess with no deal.

The Senate left Washington, D.C., on Thursday until September — the latest sign that a deal on a fifth coronavirus relief package is, at least, weeks away.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had kept the chamber in session this week, which was technically the first in its August recess, as a last-ditch attempt to create space for the administration and congressional Democrats to get an agreement.

But with talks stalemated, senators argue there is little reason for them to keep holding daily, roughly 1 1/2-hour sessions. The House already left town and isn't expected to return until Sept. 14.

“We will have our regular pro forma meetings through the end of the state work period. If the Speaker of the House and the minority leader of the Senate decide to finally let another package move forward … it would take bipartisan consent to meet for legislative business sooner than scheduled,” McConnell said as he wrapped up the Senate until next month.

McConnell added that he hoped the Senate would be able to “act sometime soon.”

Senators will get at least 24 hours notice to return if congressional Democrats, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows are able to break the impasse and votes are scheduled. Otherwise, the Senate will formally reconvene on Sept. 8.

The House passed the HEROES Act three months ago.  The Senate GOP has blocked everything since then. This is one hundred percent the GOP's fault. They can't even pass a bill with their own majority caucus.  Nancy Pelosi is running the show and Senate Republicans, facing angry voters, will crack.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday that the high-stakes talks between the White House and Democrats on coronavirus relief will resume only when Republicans come to the table with at least $2 trillion.
"When they're ready to do that, we'll sit down," Pelosi told reporters in the Capitol.

The comments foreshadow a rocky road ahead as the parties haggle over a fifth round of emergency relief designed to address the health needs and economic devastation caused by the pandemic, which has hit the United States harder than any other country.

Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) had huddled with the White House negotiators — Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and chief of staff Mark Meadows — for a full two weeks when the talks broke down last Friday.

Quite aside from specific policy prescriptions, the sides have not yet agreed to the overall size of the next aid package.

Pelosi and House Democrats had passed a $3.4 trillion relief bill in May, while Senate Republicans responded late last month with a $1.1 trillion counterproposal.

The Democrats last week had offered to meet in the middle — somewhere in the $2 trillion range — but the Republicans refused the offer, ending the talks indefinitely.

Things are going to change rapidly for the GOP when the polls start showing them losing by double digits, would be my guess. 

Lowering The Barr, Con't

Attorney General Bill Barr is making it very clear that results of the show trial investigations into the Obama administration and the Biden campaign will absolutely be released during the election to help Donald Trump, coming as Trump's direct orders.

Attorney General Bill Barr said he could reveal at least some findings of a federal prosecutor’s examination of the origins of the Russia investigation before the November general election.

Speaking at a roundtable in Cheyenne, Wyo., on Thursday, Barr said that U.S. Attorney John Durham, who Barr appointed to review the origins of the Russia probe, “is moving along purposefully, and we certainly are aware of the calendar,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

“We’ll develop this case to the extent we can before the election, and we’ll use our prudent judgment to decide what’s appropriate before the election and what should wait until after the election,” Barr said.

Thursday evening Barr said on Fox News that there will be "a development" in the investigation on Friday. 

Durham’s investigation follows Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report that found “significant inaccuracies and omissions” in the FBI’s application to a court to obtain permission to monitor Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

But the report also determined the FBI’s decision to investigate the campaign was not motivated by political bias, as President Trump has suggested. The president voiced his impatience with the speed of the investigation on Thursday.

There's no rhetoric here from Barr about the Justice Department's long-standing guidelines to not interfere with an election cycle, only about how much of the interference will be happening before and after November. Barr is not only making it clear that an obviously political snow job is coming, but that a selected group of the Justice Department will be in place to openly attack Biden, Harris, and the Democrats through the transition period after the election.

In other words, it's Barr actually executing what Trump accused the Obama administration of doing four years ago. And should Trump win, the investigations will almost certainly become indictments. If you thought Trump and Barr were unfettered now, wait until they've stolen the election and are locking up dissidents in a second term.

And a third.

And a fourth.

Again, the only way to stop them is to drown them in Democratic (and democratic!) votes, in margins too big to manipulate, in every state.

The Bluenami Tsunami Meets The Blue Shift

As I said yesterday, we're likely in for ore of Election Month than we are Election Day in November. It may take weks to count all the mail ballots, and the big Democratic voter shift to voting by mail is going to be the future of elections in the 21st century as The Atlantic's David Graham explains.

As polling places closed on November 6, 2018, the expected “blue wave” looked more like a ripple. Not only had some of the highest-profile Democratic candidates lost, but the party’s gains in the House and the Senate looked smaller than anticipated.

The wave, it turned out, simply hadn’t crested yet. Over the ensuing weeks, as more ballots were counted, Democrats kept winning races—eventually netting 41 House seats. In Arizona, the Republican Martha McSally conceded the Senate race to the Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, who picked up more than 70,000 votes in post–Election Day counting. Democrats narrowed deficits in races in Florida and Georgia too. Republicans were stunned.

“California just defies logic to me,” then-Speaker Paul Ryan said in late November. “We were only down 26 seats the night of the election and three weeks later, we lost basically every contested California race.”

This sort of late-breaking Democratic vote is the new, though still underappreciated, normal in national elections. Americans have become accustomed to knowing who won our elections promptly, but there are many legitimate votes that are not counted immediately every election year. For reasons that are not totally understood by election observers, these votes tend to be heavily Democratic, leading results to tilt toward Democrats as more of them are counted, in what has become known as the “blue shift.” In most cases, the blue shift is relatively inconsequential, changing final vote counts but not results. But in others, as in 2018, it can materially change the outcome.

Although it is slowly dawning on the press and the electorate that Election Day will be more like Election Week or Election Month this year, thanks to coronavirus-related complications, the blue shift remains obscure. But the effect could be much larger and far more consequential in 2020, as Democrats embrace voting by mail more enthusiastically than Republicans. If the public isn’t prepared to wait patiently for the final results, and if politicians cynically exploit the shifting tallies to cast doubt on the integrity of the vote, the results could be catastrophic.

Imagine that as November 3, 2020, ticks away, President Donald Trump holds a small lead in one or more key states such as Pennsylvania—perhaps 10,000 or 20,000 votes—and seems to have enough states in his column to eke out an Electoral College win. Trump declares victory, taunts Joe Biden, and prepares for a second term. But the reported results on Election Night omit tens of thousands of votes, including provisional ballots and uncounted mail-in votes. Over the coming days, as those votes are counted, Trump’s lead dwindles and eventually disappears. By the end of the week or early the next, Biden emerges as the clear victor in Pennsylvania—and with that win, captures the race for the presidency.

If that’s how things unfold, Trump is unlikely to take defeat snatched from the jaws of victory graciously. He has already spent months attempting to delegitimize the election system. So imagine that he instead cries fraud and insists he’s the target of a criminal Democratic coup. What if he encourages his supporters to take to the streets, where there are violent clashes between partisans? He might even urge the Republican-led Pennsylvania General Assembly to submit a slate of Trump-backing electors, citing the Election Day returns, even if the full tally clearly shows Keystone State voters chose Biden.

The hypothetical of a blue shift reversing the early projected winner is the “nightmare scenario,” according to the election-law expert Rick Hasen. Either Trump or Biden could win by a sufficient margin to make the result clear on Election Night; it’s also possible that multiple states might see a decisive post–November 3 blue shift, creating even more chaos.

“You don’t need to worry about Russia,” Edward Foley, a law professor at Ohio State, told me. “Simply anxiety over a blue shift and willingness to litigate about it and fight about it could cause a raging contestation over a presidential election.”

In other words, November 2020 could make November 2000 look like a walk in the park, and there's no reason for me to believe the outcome if the voting goes to the Supreme Court that it would be any different than 2000.

We have to win in numbers too big to ignore.

StupidiNews!

• Russia is offering to share its "Coronavirus vaccine" with the United States, but US health officials are openly skeptical and warn that the vaccine falls far short of US standards.
• Convicted former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen's new book promises evidence of Russian collusion and Las Vegas sex parties, among other things.
• Israel and the UAE have reached a new deal on recognition of the Jewish state and normalization of diplomatic relations with US assistance as all three leaders face protests at home.
• The White House is now saying there are no plans to end the payroll tax permanently, despite Donald Trump making exactly that campaign promise earlier this week as a White House press conference.
• After attempts to skirt platform microtransaction rules, Epic Games is suing Apple for pulling popular game Fortnite from the App Store as Google plans a similar removal of the game.

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

Eventually, Trump always gives away his own con because he's impatient and undisciplined, and his efforts to destroy the US Postal Service in order to disenfranchise tens of millions of Democratic mail ballots is no exception.

President Trump said Thursday that he does not want to fund the U.S. Postal Service because Democrats are seeking to expand mail-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic, making explicit the reason he has declined to approve $25 billion in emergency funding for the cash-strapped agency.

“Now, they need that money in order to make the Post Office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said in an interview on Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo. He added: “Now, if we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting, they just can’t have it.

Trump has railed against mail-in balloting for months, and at a White House briefing Wednesday, he argued without evidence that USPS’s enlarged role in the November election would perpetuate “one of the greatest frauds in history.”

During the Wednesday briefing, Trump told reporters he would not approve the $25 billion in emergency funding for the Postal Service, or $3.5 billion in supplemental funding for election resources, citing prohibitively high costs. But he went further in remarks Thursday morning, blaming Democrats’ efforts to make it easier for Americans to vote amid the pandemic.

“There’s nothing wrong with getting out and voting. … They voted during World War I and World War II,” Trump told Bartiromo.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) pushed back Thursday in an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

“In the legislation we had $25 billion,” Pelosi said. “That is the number that is recommended by the Board of Governors of the U.S. Postal Service. … In earlier covid bills, the president has stood in the way of any money for the Postal Service.”

Pelosi noted that the among other things, the Postal Service delivers many prescriptions, which is particularly important in pandemic times.

“So they’re hurting seniors; it’s a health issue. … So, when the president goes after the Postal Service, he’s going after an all-American, highly approved-by-the-public institution,” she said.

The campaign of presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden criticized Trump’s statement, saying Trump was “sabotaging a basic service that hundreds of millions of people rely upon.”

“This is an assault on our democracy and economy by a desperate man who’s terrified that the American people will force him to confront what he’s done everything in his power to escape for months -- responsibility for his own actions,” Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement.

The US Postal Service is one of those constitutionally required things, and Trump is happy to destroy it if it keeps him in power. That's literally all that matters to him. He doesn't care how many of his own voters are hurt by the destruction of mail delivery in America.

And again, Trump wouldn't be saying this if he believed for a second that he hasn't already won this battle, and that the rest of the GOP will now be forced to go along with wrecking the Postal Service. He now expects the GOP to be in lockstep attacking your local Post Office, and the consequences will be political annihilation for those who don't play along.

President Trump on Thursday warned that GOP Senate candidates who don't fully embrace him will lose their elections, a warning shot to some moderates who have kept their distance from the president.

Trump called into Maria Bartiromo's show on Fox Business Network, where he predicted Republicans would take back control of the House despite little polling to support that argument. But he acknowledged it may be more difficult for the GOP to maintain its slim majority in the Senate.

"We’re fighting very hard in the Senate. I’ll be honest, the Senate is tough," Trump said. "We have a couple of people that aren’t as supportive of Trump as they should be, and those people are going to lose their elections."

"The ones that don’t support, and I’m just talking, take a look ... you have a few people that want to be cute, and those people are going to lose their elections," Trump added. "And that’s a problem for the Senate."

Trump is getting more and more desperate, more and more overt in his authoritarianism and anti-democratic actions. We're going to have to defeat him both because of these actions and in spite of them.

The Election Projection Connection

Nate Silver is once again reminding us that Donald Trump has a legitimate chance of winning, at about 30%, and won with similar odds four years ago. Take nothing for granted and fight for every vote in every state.

Joe Biden currently has a robust lead in polls. If the election were held today, he might even win in a landslide, carrying not only traditional swing states such as Florida and Pennsylvania but potentially adding new states such as Georgia and Texas to the Democratic coalition.

But the election is not being held today. While the polls have been stable so far this year, it’s still only August. The debates and the conventions have yet to occur. Biden only named his running mate yesterday. And the campaign is being conducted amidst a pandemic the likes of which the United States has not seen in more than 100 years, which is also causing an unprecedented and volatile economy.
Nor has it been that uncommon, historically, for polls to shift fairly radically from mid-August until Election Day. Furthermore, there are some reasons to think the election will tighten, and President Trump is likely to have an advantage in a close election because of the Electoral College.

That, in a nutshell, is why the FiveThirtyEight presidential election forecast, which we launched today, still has Trump with a 29 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, despite his current deficit in the polls. This is considerably higher than some other forecasts, which put Trump’s chances at around 10 percent. Biden’s chances are 71 percent in the FiveThirtyEight forecast, conversely.1

If these numbers give you a sense of deja vu, it may be because they’re very similar to our final forecast in 2016 … when Trump also had a 29 percent chance of winning! (And Hillary Clinton had a 71 percent chance.) So if you’re not taking a 29 percent chance as a serious possibility, I’m not sure there’s much we can say at this point, although there’s a Zoom poker game that I’d be happy to invite you to.

One last parallel to 2016 — when some models gave Clinton as high as a 99 percent chance of winning — is that FiveThirtyEight’s forecast tends to be more conservative than others. (For a more complete description of our model, including how it is handling some complications related to COVID-19, please see our methodology guide.)

With that said, one shouldn’t get too carried away with the comparisons to four years ago. In 2016, the reason Trump had a pretty decent chance in our final forecast was mostly just because the polls were fairly close (despite the media narrative to the contrary), close enough that even a modest-sized polling error in the right group of states could be enough to give Trump a victory in the Electoral College.

The uncertainty in our current 2020 forecast, conversely, stems mostly from the fact that there’s still a long way to go until the election. Take what happens if we lie to our model and tell it that the election is going to be held today. It spits out that Biden has a 93 percent chance of winning. In other words, a Trump victory would require a much bigger polling error than what we saw in 2016.

The good news is if Biden;s current lead holds up for another 80 days, he has an extremely good chance of winning. I'd take 93 out of 100 any day of the week.

The bad news is Trump will absolutely find a way to change this current situation, and I don't know how much better or how much worse he will make it. But it will change, weekly if not daily.

Remember, 93% odds are pretty good in elections.  They're terrible in say, odds of your airplane landing in one piece. Anything can and most likely will happen between now and whenever the election results are finalized. Odds are very good we're going to be in for a long, long Election Month in November.

A Conspiracy Of Dunces, Con't

The Republican party is the white supremacist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic bigot party of Donald Trump. As of Tuesday night, it's officially the party of tinfoil hat lunatic and equally white supremacist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic bigot Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

Many top Georgia Republicans have watched with dread – but took little action – as Marjorie Taylor Greene rose from longshot candidate to the cusp of Congress. Shortly after her victory in Tuesday’s nationally-watched runoff, Greene showed why she made them so anxious.

In a hotel ballroom crowded with about 100 supporters, Greene promised to be the “worst nightmare” to the liberal left and news media that “hates my guts.” Then she turned her focus on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a way that went beyond the usual red-meat rhetoric.

“She’s a hypocrite. She’s anti-American. And we’re going to kick that bitch out of Congress.”

Greene’s runoff win over John Cowan, a Rome neurosurgeon, virtually assures that she’ll represent the deeply-conservative northwest Georgia district in the U.S. House. And it means Democrats have a new favorite target: A believer in the convoluted QAnon theory who has expressed anti-Semitic, racist and xenophobic views. 

With tight races up and down the ballot, Democrats quickly tried to brand her as the face of the Georgia GOP – and tie her to more vulnerable Republicans running for office in November. 

U.S. Rep. Cheri Bustos, chair of the political arm of House Democrats, called Greene a “next-generation Steve King” after the ousted Iowa Republican with a history of anti-immigrant and racist remarks. Scott Hogan, the executive director of Georgia Democrats, said “Republican extremism” won the night. 

“Georgia Republicans own this crisis,” he said, “and their mealy-mouthed statements can’t hide the fact that Marjorie Taylor Greene’s nomination is a stain on their party.” 

President Donald Trump offered a different assessment in a post-runoff tweet, calling Greene a “future Republican Star” who is “strong on everything and never gives up - a real WINNER!”

Democrats in Georgia don't have to lift a finger to brand Greene as the face of the Georgia GOP. Greene and Trump are doing all the work for them.

Never forget thought that the GOP is the party of white supremacy, a party that sees diversity as a sin and efforts to expand diversity as nothing less than a conspiracy to obliterate White Americans.

StupidiNews!

• The White House says it will provide 125 million masks for students to protect from COVID-19, but CDC recommendations still stop at requiring schools to use masks.
• Defense Secretary Mark Esper may be leaving the regime as early as after the November election, the White House says that second term speculation of any Trump cabinet position is inappropriate.
• Trump regime lawyers are asking a federal court to dismiss a lawsuit by social media companies, over a May executive order that could make internet companies liable for billions in lawsuits.
• Finland is backtracking on a policy that would require 14-day COVID-19 quarantines for nearly all foreign travelers after massive complaints from citizens and businesses.
• Chinese insect researchers have discovered a pheromone that makes locusts swarm, and have tested genetic engineering changes that eliminate the swarm response.

Last Call For Getting Sick Of Massie

My own (unfortunately) Congressman, Rep. Thomas Massie, tells Glenn Beck that he tested positive for COVID-19 in January recovered fully, and is now openly questioning why America is worried about something he considers no more dangerous than the common cold.

U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie has tested positive for coronavirus antibodies, he recently said on right-leaning political commentator Glenn Beck's radio show.

Massie, a Republican representing Kentucky's Fourth Congressional District, told Beck that he took both a coronavirus test and antibodies test at the end of July, and he received a positive result for the latter at the end of last week.

"I've had the 'rona, and I have recovered from it," Massie said on Friday.

Massie said he is "convinced" he had it in January "before we knew what 'rona was" while Congress was still adjourned for the holidays. During that time, Massie said he laid out on his couch for four days with a fever, sore throat and low energy — all symptoms of COVID-19.

"I went to the doctor — I hadn't been to the doctor for sickness in like 10 or 15 years. That's how sick I have to be to go to the doctor," Massie said, "and I said, 'look, I gotta go back to Congress, give me whatever you got,' and they gave me a strong antibiotic, shot in an antihistamine and I was feeling better within a day." 

I don't believe Massie for a second. But in grand Trumpian fashion, he's making COVID-19 all about him, about how he's donating his plasma, rather than the sick and unemployed here in KY-4.

Granted, this area is better off than most of the country. Kentucky's unemployment rate is under five percent, but that's because the number of people looking for active work dropped like a rock in the last few months.

The state is still suffering thanks to Republicans like Massie and Mitch, and Massie is babbling about plasma rather than helping people here in NKY.

About five months after Kentucky reported its first loss of life from covid-19, its economy continues to sputter amid the coronavirus pandemic. Many unemployed workers say their benefit checks aren’t enough to afford their bills, and some here simply have stopped looking for jobs. Businesses say they’re also hemorrhaging cash, and local governments fear they’re on the precipice of financial ruin, too.

The economic tumult in Kentucky is vast, and it has added new urgency to the political standoff on Capitol Hill, where the prospect of a prolonged deadlock could worsen the financial woes in a state that was hurting long before the pandemic arrived. Caught in the middle is McConnell, 78, who some critics say has struggled to navigate the priorities of the president, the political desires of a fractious Republican conference and the economic needs in his own backyard.

McConnell declined to be interviewed for this story. His spokesman, Robert Steurer, said in a statement that the Senate majority leader’s efforts have directed approximately $12 billion to Kentucky. The aid originates in large part from previous coronavirus relief legislation, which Steurer said would help “address urgent housing, transportation, health care, education and economic development priorities” in the state.

For Kenny Saylor, the money was good before the pandemic began this spring. The 42-year-old in Corbin, Ky., once a bustling railroad shipping hub in the southeast part of the Bluegrass State, had been driving his own truck, hauling returns six days a week for Amazon to the pallet stores that sell off consumers’ unwanted purchases.

But business began to slow around April, “and that’s when everything went south for me,” Saylor said. Unemployment payments helped fill the gap, but the reprieve proved short-lived after lawmakers in Washington failed to authorize additional coronavirus stimulus aid. A self-described “die-hard Republican” his entire life, Saylor said he has now found himself angry with some of the GOP leaders who had long represented him, including McConnell.

“I’m scared to death of losing everything,” he said.

The country’s economic unraveling — the worst in a generation — has spared no community from severe hardship. But in a state like Kentucky, where some communities already had been grappling with joblessness, poverty and stagnation, the coronavirus often has made matters worse. About half of all adult residents have seen some reduction in their employment income. Meanwhile, about a quarter of a million residents say they do not get enough food to eat, and nearly one-third of households are struggling to pay their rents and mortgages, federal data show.

“We’re seeing huge numbers of people needing help,” said Jason Bailey, the executive director of the left-leaning Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, who added: “I can’t imagine a state that needs additional relief more than Kentucky does.”

Sure wish Republicans gave a damn.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Trump is not handling the Biden-Harris ticket news well.

Trump has a total meltdown, mispronounces Kamala Harris's name, accuses Obama and Joe Biden of treason, and calls Elizabeth Warren "Pocahontas" all in the same rant. Trump is not handling the Harris news well. pic.twitter.com/z0hePzH5oa

— Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) August 11, 2020

He wanted to run against Liz Warren so very, very badly.

Do note however that Trump is now openly accusing Barack Obama and Joe Biden of committing treason, and that he basically believes both men should be executed.

Trump will not go quietly.

We will have to rip him out like cancer come January.

Hannity made the exact same mispronunciation of Harris's name multiple times on his White Power Hour last night, too.  The attacks are that Harris isn't Desi enough, and that Harris isn't black enough, and will drive both Black and Asian-American voters to stay home.

This is being done on purpose.

Tucker Carlson loses it when a guest corrects his pronunciation of Kamala Harris's name pic.twitter.com/1fHIrPGuwN

— nikki mccann ramírez (@NikkiMcR) August 12, 2020

If this is the right's strangest stuff against Kamala, Biden might actually win 40 states.

Russian To A Vaccine

Vladimir Putin made his move yesterday to help Donald Trump by announcing a "vaccine" for COVID-19, despite the fact that it hasn't been rigorously or thoroughly tested yet. We're supposed to trust him, and the one person we know who will take Putin at his word 100% of the time, even when he's lying, is Donald Trump.

Russia on Tuesday became the first country to approve a coronavirus vaccine, a move that was met with international skepticism and unease because the shots have only been studied in dozens of people.

President Vladimir Putin announced the Health Ministry’s approval and said one of his two adult daughters already was inoculated. He said the vaccine underwent the necessary tests and was shown to provide lasting immunity to the coronavirus, although Russian authorities have offered no proof to back up claims of safety or effectiveness.

“I know it has proven efficient and forms a stable immunity,” Putin said. “We must be grateful to those who made that first step very important for our country and the entire world.”

However, scientists in Russia and other countries sounded an alarm, saying that rushing to offer the vaccine before final-stage testing could backfire. What’s called a Phase 3 trial — which involves tens of thousands of people and can take months — is the only way to prove if an experimental vaccine is safe and really works.

By comparison, vaccines entering final-stage testing in the U.S. require studies of 30,000 people each. Two vaccine candidates already have begun those huge studies, with three more set to get underway by fall.

“Fast-tracked approval will not make Russia the leader in the race, it will just expose consumers of the vaccine to unnecessary danger,” said Russia’s Association of Clinical Trials Organizations, in urging government officials to postpone approving the vaccine without completed advanced trials.

While Russian officials have said large-scale production of the vaccine wasn’t scheduled until September, Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova said vaccination of doctors could start as early as this month. Officials say they will be closely monitored after the injections. Mass vaccination may begin as early as October.

Trump of course will ask Putin to share his "miracle vaccine" with the American people, and his MAGA faithful will line up, some of them. (Some will never take a vaccine if offered, but they will if Trump's cult tells them to.)  Look very soon for an announcement from Trump that the Putin vaccine will be readily available before the election, and that it will have "solved" the COVID-19 problem here in the US just in time to reelect Dear Leader Donald.

Watch the space on the "Russian vaccine" closely.  It's definitely Putin's play for four more Trump years...at the minimum.

StupidiNews!

• French police now say a corpse found in the basement of a remodeled Paris mansion after 30 years is being investigated as a homicide.
• Acting US Solicitor General Jeff Wall told a full panel of DC Circuit Court judges hearing the motion for Michael Flynn's case dismissal that AG Bill Barr had undisclosed reasons for dropping charges.
• Medical and immigration experts are blasting a Trump regime plan that could bar US citizens from re-entering the US if they test positive for COVID-19.
• The Trump regime wants to re-impose sanctions on Iran lifted by the UN as part of an international nuclear deal, something that could cause a crisis on the UN Security Council.
• A UK appeals court has ruled that facial recognition software used by police cameras violates human rights laws and is ordering police to substantially narrow use of it in public areas.

Last Call For Kamala's Karma

The ticket is Joseph Robinette Biden and Kamala Devi Harris. Former Obama strategist David Axelrod, who made it very clear Harris was not his choice, explains why Biden picked her for this historic selection.

It is a measure of these extraordinary times that Joe Biden's historic choice for vice president was also the most conventional. 

In choosing Kamala Harris, Biden selected the candidate who had been the frontrunner among political handicappers and betting markets for months. The senator from California fulfills Biden's pledge to name a woman and responds to the expectation that he would pick the first woman of color ever to serve on a national ticket. 

Pressure to make such a choice has been building since the killing of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer triggered nationwide protests over racial inequity. And beyond the historic nature of Harris' selection, many supporters argued that the presence of a person of color on the ticket was necessary to motivate Black voters. Tepid turnout by Black voters in 2016 helped doom Hillary Clinton in her race against Donald Trump. 

Harris is a charismatic and telegenic politician. And as a US senator and recent presidential candidate, Harris also meets another important test for Biden. People familiar with research the campaign undertook to inform its decision told me voters viewed her as among the most qualified to be president on Day One -- a key positive, given Biden's status as potentially the oldest politician to ever serve as president. 

She is also familiar with the maelstrom of a national campaign, having spent a year running for president, albeit unsuccessfully. Though she was at times less than sure-footed in dealing with incoming criticism from the media and opponents, she understands the pace and nature of it, which will only intensify in a fall race against Trump. 

One of the principal tasks of a running mate is to play a lead role in bringing the case against the other ticket, particularly in the vice-presidential debate. 

A former prosecutor, Harris is known as a fierce interrogator on Capitol Hill and proved herself, at times, to be a sharp-edged debater during the campaign. Biden knows this well. He famously was her target in the first primary debate 14 months ago, when she theatrically confronted him over his position on mandatory school busing in the 1970s. 

That exchange, in which Harris played up her own experience as a child who benefited from busing, briefly vaulted her to the top echelon of candidates in polling. It also was a source of friction with Biden and his family that could have upended his choice. 

In the end, Biden seriously considered others but returned to Harris as the "do no harm" candidate, unlikely to thrill or outrage many. She may not seem the most comfortable fit as a governing partner, a quality Biden said he was seeking, but Harris was viewed as the safest pick to win in November. 

By naming her, Biden likely also has set the dynamics for the 2024 election, not just the current one. The former Vice President has not said he would stand down after one term, though given the fact that he would be 81 by the next election, it is widely assumed he would not run. 

This also will place Harris in not only an historic but a historically challenging position if the Biden-Harris ticket wins. She immediately would be installed as heir apparent and putative frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination four years from now. 

Imagine a world where a woman of both Black and Desi heritage is the "safe, conventional" choice to put on an American Presidential ticket. It's a world where Donald Trump is currently destroying to country on a daily basis, too.

I can already tell that Harris was the right choice based on the immediate reactions from the Trump camp, that Harris is a communist, an "anti-Catholic", and an authoritarian, attacks all made on Biden that have failed to stick and won't touch Harris either.

I think it's going to not only fulfill the oldest saw in the veep playbook -- "First do no harm to the top of the ticket" -- but it's going to help Biden more than the pundits are saying. The running mate gets to throw the elbows like Biden did in 2008, and Kamala Harris is absolutely up for the task compared to Mike Pence.

She's going to cut them so badly they won't bleed until she says so.

New Tag, Biden-Harris.

 

A Government Held Accountable For Its Failures

Imagine a government that resigned after its failures killed people and destroyed the country's economy? It happened in Lebanon on Monday, just days after a deadly explosion in a port warehouse leveled buildings and killed more than 160 people.

Lebanon's government stepped down on Monday night, less than a week after a massive explosion in Beirut killed more than 160 people and sparked days of violent protests. 

Prime Minister Hassan Diab addressed the nation, announcing his resignation and that of his government in the wake of the blast, which he called a "disaster beyond measure." 

In an impassioned speech, Diab berated Lebanon's ruling political elite for fostering what he called "an apparatus of corruption bigger than the state." 

"We have fought valiantly and with dignity," he said, referring to members of his cabinet. "Between us and change is big powerful barrier." 

Diab compared Tuesday's explosion to an "earthquake that rocked the country" prompting his government to resign. "We have decided to stand with the people," he said. 

Three cabinet ministers had already quit, along with seven members of parliament.
Violent protests erupted outside the prime minister's office in the run-up to the scheduled speech on Monday evening. 

Dozens of protesters hurled stones, fireworks and Molotov cocktails at security forces who responded with several rounds of tear gas. Some demonstrators tried to scale the blast walls outside Parliament Square.  

Lebanon was already suffering through its worst economic crisis in decades, coupled with rising coronavirus rates, and the government has been plagued by accusations of corruption and gross mismanagement. 

Tuesday's blast, which damaged or destroyed much of the Lebanese capital and was linked to a long-neglected stash of potentially explosive chemicals, was the last straw for many Beirut residents. 

Diab, a self-styled reformer, was ushered into power last December, two months after a popular uprising brought down the previous government. His government is composed of technocrats and had been supported by major political parties, including the Iran-backed political and militant group Hezbollah. 

Now the country will be tasked with finding its third prime minister in less than a year, to contend with the spiraling crises Lebanon faces on a number of fronts.

So now, as Lebanon literally tries to put a government and a capital city back together again, the world wonders how long Beirut can hold on.

 

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

Republicans are running out of time before the election to create a racist, white supremacist backlash against Black Lives Matter and they know it.

For a brief moment after George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis policeman in late May, some members of the GOP joined calls for change as protests exploded onto streets across the country. That moment is over.

Facing possible electoral calamity, Republicans are now turning to a familiar playbook: stoking fear by trying to redefine the Black Lives Matter movement as a radical leftist mob looking to sabotage the white, suburban lifestyle.

Republicans are using two lines of attack: the Trump administration, candidates in safe red seats and right-wing social media channels seek to label the entire movement “Marxist” and anti-family as they try to energize their conservative base. Republicans running in swing districts and states, meanwhile, are tying their Democratic opponents to activists’ demands to defund police departments, while avoiding explicitly mentioning Black Lives Matter. Instead, Republicans running in competitive general election races have focused recent ads on more abstract targets like “left-wing radicals" and the "liberal mob."

It’s a distinction Democratic pollsters and lawmakers attribute to the dramatic shift in public views on police brutality, and who and what people associate with the declaration that “Black Lives Matter.” The new broad support for the movement, they say, makes it harder to tie Black Lives Matter to one person, organization or ideology.

“People putting ‘Black Lives Matter’ signs on their lawns, it's not an endorsement of a particular organization so much as a value statement uniting a lot of people from many backgrounds,” said Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowksi, whose predominantly white New Jersey district was held by Republicans for decades before he won in 2018.

That hasn't deterred Republicans, who have increased their criticism of the movement over the past month. On the same day President Donald Trump tweeted that Black Lives Matter was “a symbol of hate,” his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, declared to a group of reporters at the White House that "Black Lives Matter is a Marxist organization … Black Lives Matter has been planning to destroy the police for three years.”

Other Trump administration officials and Republican lawmakers, particularly those running in tough primaries, followed suit, warning, in addition, that the movement wanted to destroy the “nuclear family.” Fox News hosts, conservative talk radio personalities and think tanks such as The Heritage Foundation joined in, as well. Prager University’s “Black Lives Matter is a Marxist Movement” video released this month has over a million views on YouTube and is one of several popular videos it has produced on the topic.

So far, the GOP attempts to discredit the movement have yet to stick. With just under three months until the election, Black Lives Matter has won mainstream support across racial and partisan lines that would have been almost unthinkable six months ago. But the battle to define the movement is not over, as Trump bets he can turn the suburbs, lost to Republicans in 2018, in his favor by attempting to cast a movement for racial equality as a threat to white voters.

“We recognize that this is not simply an issue fight, this isn't simply a narrative war — what we think we're experiencing is a social and cultural and political realignment,” said Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party and a leader with the Movement for Black Lives coalition. “We continue to give that backlash the adequate concern and respect one would give any dangerous opponent, even one that clearly is on the wrong side of history.” 

The latest iteration of this is concern trolling by Republicans that Black Lives Matter will drive Black voters who fear the "liberal mob" more than police brutality into Trump's arms as LAW AND ORDER!!1! president, a narrative that still isn't supported by actual numbers but is being packaged for White suburban consumption.

When this fails to materialize, how far will the regime go to manufacture it?