A little bit of beauty for an ugly time:
"what digby sez..."
Month: May 2020
Seriously, they are calling themselves the Death Star. Not only is it a grotesquely accurate description of Trump’s response to the pandemic, which they either don’t realize or are proud of — they don’t even seem to realize what they are saying about themselves politically:
Andrew Bates is the Director of Rapid Response for the Biden campaign. Has Parscale ever seen Star Wars?
By the way, like a true Trumpist, Parscale doubled down, tweeting “I didn’t give our campaign the name, Death Star, the media did. However, I am happy to use the analogy. The fact is, we haven’t used it yet. Laugh all you want, we will take the win!”
I’m sure they are happy to use the analogy. After all, before it was blown up, the Death Star did kill a whole galaxy full of innocent people. Something to strive for.
They’re going to get us one way or the other:
One week after Georgia allowed dine-in restaurants, hair salons and other businesses to reopen, an additional 62,440 visitors arrived there daily, most from surrounding states where such businesses remained shuttered, according to an analysis of smartphone location data.
Researchers at the University of Maryland say the data provides some of the first hard evidence that reopening some state economies ahead of others could potentially worsen and prolong the spread of the novel coronavirus. Any impetus to travel, public health experts say, increases the number of people coming into contact with each other and raises the risk of transmission.
“It’s exactly the kind of effects we’ve been worried about,” said Meagan Fitzpatrick, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.AD
“This is not an unpredictable outcome with businesses opening in one location and people going to seek services there,” said Fitzpatrick, who has reviewed the findings by the university’s Maryland Transportation Institute.
In the week after Georgia businesses reopened April 24, a total daily average of 546,159 people traveled there from other states. That included 62,440 more trips daily than in the week before the reopenings — a 13 percent increase, said Lei Zhang, the lead researcher and institute’s director. The trips were measured using anonymized location data in smartphone apps.
The vast majority — 92 percent — came from four adjacent states: Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee and Florida.
Even if your own state is doing the right thing, it’s no protection. We are one country whether we like it or not. Red or blue, people can bring the virus with them where they travel. And some people are just determined to flout the science and expose themselves to it. I wish I understood why sitting down to eat a burger is worth risking your health and the health of everyone you come across, including your loved ones. But apparently owning the libs is just more important than anything else.
These guys are clowns. But don’t think there aren’t more sophisticated operatives working on similar ratfucking operations:
A woman who had accused Dr. Anthony Fauci of sexual assault now claims she was paid to lie about the public health expert by a pair of President Donald Trump’s supporters.
The woman says right-wing provocateur Jacob Wohl and his frequent accomplice Jack Burkman persuaded her to cast Fauci as the assailant using details from an actual sexual assault she survived just after high school, and they paid her to do it, reported Reason.
“The reality is that I’ve known Jacob since 2018 and that he charmed me into taking money to do this (see attached picture of us together),” said Diana Andrade in an email to the website. “[They also] had me do something like this . . . back in January.”
Andrade said she decided to abandon her claims and try to record incriminating evidence against the pair after Wohl asked her to find another woman to accuse Fauci of sexual assault — as they’ve done to former special counsel Robert Mueller and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).
Burkman is a fool but he was on message:
“Let me tell you something, Diana,” says Burkman on the nine-minute, 35-second call. “This guy shut the country down. He put 40 million people out of work. In a situation like that, you have to make up whatever you have to make up to stop that train and that’s the way life works, OK? That’s the way it goes.”
Fox News and Trump have convinced tens of millions of people that Fauci and the other scientists are Deep State actors who pushed for the mitigation strategy in order to sabotage Donald Trump’s re-election campaign. People are calling the coronavirus “a scam.” #FiredFauci has trended on twitter.
Burkman and his little henchman aren’t serious players. But their rationale for doing what they’re doing is smack inside the mainstream of GOP thought.
Those who read this blog regularly know that my common warning about the election in November is that it’s not enough to “win” a close election because Republicans cheat. If you know anything about the 2000 election recount you know that they use every partisan lever they have in GOP states in a close election.
Here’s some evidence of it happening in a primary race. They will have no compunction about doing much the same thing in a close race in the general:
Colorado Republican Party Chair Ken Buck, a U.S. representative from Windsor, pressured a local party official to submit incorrect election results to set the primary ballot for a state Senate seat, according to an audio recording of a conference call obtained by The Denver Post.
“You’ve got a sitting congressman, a sitting state party chair, who is trying to bully a volunteer — I’m a volunteer; I don’t get paid for this — into committing a crime,” Eli Bremer, the GOP chairman for state Senate District 10, told The Post on Wednesday, confirming the authenticity of the recording. “To say it’s damning is an understatement.”
Buck says he was merely asking Bremer to abide by a committee decision.
At issue is the Republican primary for the District 10 seat currently held by Sen. Owen Hill, who’s term-limited. State Rep. Larry Liston and GOP activist David Stiver both ran for it. To qualify for the November ballot via the caucus and assembly process, a candidate must receive 30% of the vote from Republicans within the district.
During a district assembly in March, Liston received 75% of the vote and Stiver just 24%, according to documents filed later in Denver District Court. Stiver complained the election was unfair, and the issue was taken up with the state central committee, which agreed, Buck said in an interview Wednesday.
The central committee consists of nearly 500 members, including elected officials and county officers. About 200 were on the line during an April 17 conference call in which the group voted to place Stiver on the ballot for the seat, even though he failed to receive 30% of the district’s votes. After the vote, Buck asked Bremer, the District 10 chair, whether he would comply with the committee’s decision.
“Do you understand the order of the executive committee and the central committee that you will submit the paperwork to include Mr. Stiver and Mr. Liston on the ballot, with Mr. Liston receiving the top-line vote?” Buck said on the call.
“Uh, yes, sir, I understand the central committee has adopted a resolution that requires me to sign a false affidavit to the state,” Bremer replied.
“And will you do so?” Buck said.
Bremer: “I will seek legal counsel as I am being asked to sign an affidavit that states Mr. Stiver received 30% of the vote. I need to seek legal counsel to find out if I am putting myself in jeopardy of a misdemeanor for doing that. ”
Buck: “And you understand that it is the order of the central committee that you do so?”
Bremer: “I will consult with counsel. Yes, sir, I understand the central committee has ordered me to sign an affidavit stating that a candidate got 30% who did not. And I will seek legal counsel and determine if I am legally able to follow that.”
Buck: “All right, Mr. Bremer, I understand your position; we will now move on.”
Buck, a lawyer, told The Post on Wednesday that it has been the tradition in both parties for their committees to make such decisions.
“What I was asking Eli to do was not to commit fraud, I was asking Eli if he understood the decision of the central committee and if he was willing to follow the request of the Republican central committee,” he said. “It wasn’t like I was asking him to do something because I have a personal stake in the process.”
The assembly process to select the District 10 candidates, carried out as coronavirus was quickly spreading through the state, was flawed, Buck said.
“We have two choices,” he said. “We’re going to allow an unfair election to stand, or we’re going to require the chairman of the Senate district to put the candidate’s name on the ballot and let the primary voters decide.”
Bremer never filed the paperwork. Three days after the phone call, the district’s vice chair filed a “friendly lawsuit,” Bremer said, to prevent him from doing so. Bremer told the court he had no position and would abide by its decision.
District Court Chief Judge Michael Martinez ruled Monday that any certificate of designation filed with the Secretary of State’s Office showing Stiver as a candidate would violate state law because he did not receive at least 30% of the district’s votes.
They use the rationale that the election was “unfair” to excuse their corruption. You know who else whines like a five-year-old every single day that life is terribly “unfair?”
Yeah, I thought so.
I wish I was sure that vote by mail would solve this issue. But Trump is putting a big donor crony in charge of the Post Office now. And I have a feeling that the vote mechanisms are going to be so chaotic —some by design — that even if we know they cheated to keep him in office there just won’t be anything anyone can do to prove it.
The thought is terrifying.
The US response is looking more and more like the Soviet response to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. This is how super-powers on the brink of collapse behave in a crisis:
The Trump administration has shelved a document created by the nation’s top disease investigators with step-by-step advice to local authorities on how and when to reopen restaurants and other public places during the still-raging coronavirus outbreak.
The 17-page report by a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team, titled “Guidance for Implementing the Opening Up America Again Framework,” was researched and written to help faith leaders, business owners, educators and state and local officials as they begin to reopen.
It was supposed to be published last Friday, but agency scientists were told the guidance “would never see the light of day,” according to a CDC official. The official was not authorized to talk to reporters and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.
The AP obtained a copy from a second federal official who was not authorized to release it. The guidance was described in AP stories last week, prior to the White House decision to shelve it.
The Trump administration has been closely controlling the release of guidance and information during the pandemic spurred by a new coronavirus that scientists are still trying to understand, with the president himself leading freewheeling daily briefings until last week.
Traditionally, it’s been the CDC’s role to give the public and local officials guidance and science-based information during public health crises. During this one, however, the CDC has not had a regular, pandemic-related news briefing in nearly two months. CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield has been a member of the White House coronavirus task force, but largely absent from public appearances.
The dearth of real-time, public information from the nation’s experts has struck many current and former government health officials as dangerous.
“CDC has always been the public health agency Americans turn to in a time of crisis,” said Dr. Howard Koh, a Harvard professor and former health official in the Obama administration during the H1N1 swine flu pandemic in 2009. “The standard in a crisis is to turn to them for the latest data and latest guidance and the latest press briefing. That has not occurred, and everyone sees that.”
The Trump administration has instead sought to put the onus on states to handle COVID-19 response. This approach to managing the pandemic has been reflected in President Donald Trump’s public statements, from the assertion that he isn’t responsible for the country’s lackluster early testing efforts, to his description last week of the federal government’s role as a “supplier of last resort” for states in need of testing aid.
A person close to the White House’s coronavirus task force said the CDC documents were never cleared by CDC leadership for public release. The person said that White House officials have refrained from offering detailed guidance for how specific sectors should reopen because the virus is affecting various parts of the country differently. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
The rejected reopening guidance was described by one of the federal officials as a touchstone document that was to be used as a blueprint for other groups inside the CDC who are creating the same type of instructional materials for other facilities.
The guidance contained detailed advice for making site-specific decisions related to reopening schools, restaurants, summer camps, churches, day care centers and other institutions. It had been widely shared within the CDC and included detailed “decision trees,” flow charts to be used by local officials to think through different scenarios. One page of the document can be found on the CDC website via search engines, but it did not appear to be linked to any other CDC pages.
Some of the report’s suggestions already appear on federal websites. But the guidance offered specific, tailored recommendations for reopening in one place.
For example, the report suggested restaurants and bars should install sneeze guards at cash registers and avoid having buffets, salad bars and drink stations. Similar tips appear on the CDC’s site and a Food and Drug Administration page.
But the shelved report also said that as restaurants start seating diners again, they should space tables at least 6 feet (1.8 meters) apart and try to use phone app technology to alert a patron when their table is ready to avoid touching and use of buzzers. That’s not on the CDC’s site now.
“You can say that restaurants can open and you need to follow social distancing guidelines. But restaurants want to know, ‘What does that look like?’ States would like more guidance,” said Dr. Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.
The White House’s own “Opening Up America Again” guidelines released last month were more vague than the CDC’s unpublished report. They instructed state and local governments to reopen in accordance with federal and local “regulations and guidance” and to monitor employees for symptoms of COVID-19. The White House guidance also included advice developed earlier in the pandemic that remains important like social distancing and encouraging working from home.
At a briefing Wednesday, White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany echoed the administration’s stance that state’s are most responsible for their own COVID-19 response: “We’ve consulted individually with states, but as I said, it’s (a) governor-led effort. It’s a state-led effort on … which the federal government will consult. And we do so each and every day.”
It is no longer debatable that the Trump White House has washed its hands of the problem and plans to blame the governors for the carnage and take credit for anything that goes right. Not that we didn’t know that. But they aren’t even trying to hide it now.
The good news is that if a state or local health official can get through to someone at the CDC they will still share the important information with them. So that’s good. The administration justdoesn’t want to let the public know what the scientists are recommending so they don’t hold their employers and local governments to a standard they don’t want to uphold. That would make it look like the federal government bears some responsibility and we can’ have that.
At this point I think all we can do it grit our teeth, try to protect ourselves and our loved ones as best we can and get through the next few months. The government is actively enabling the deaths of thousands of us in order to cover up for Donald Trump’s monumental ineptitude and there’s not a lot we can do about it except hunker down and get through it.
March 8th:
President Donald Trump has grown fixated on the number of novel coronavirus cases in the United States and has expressed that he wants them kept as low as possible, Politico reported Saturday evening.
Trump has been monitoring the daily counts of US cases and how they compare with other countries’, according to Politico.
As of Saturday, 17 people in the US had died after contracting the virus and more than 400 people had tested positive. But the actual number of coronavirus cases is most likely far higher given the US’s limited testing capacity.
Trump even publicly acknowledged wanting to keep a quarantined cruise ship offshore to keep the number of US coronavirus cases low.
“I like the numbers being where they are,” Trump said during a visit to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday. “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”
Politico, citing 13 current and former White House officials and people close to the Trump administration, reported Saturday that Trump had handled the coronavirus outbreak by rewarding those who bore good news and spurning those with bad news.
For instance, health officials have sought to appease Trump by emphasizing any positive news in briefings, according to Politico.
Other officials have also sought to keep a lid on other, negative information. For instance, the CDC hasn’t confirmed how many people in the US have been tested, Politico noted.
That was then, right? He’s learned since then how devastating this is.
Well:
“In a way, by doing all this testing we make ourselves look bad,” — Wednesday
He cannot learn anything. Ever.
Ironically, yesterday one of his valets showed up for work with symptoms and tested positive. CNN reports that Trump was irate to hear it. He and Pence were immediately tested and came back negative. How nice for them, right? In fact, that’s how we’d all like things to work but he doesn’t want any more testing because it makes him “look bad.”
Trump will not self-quarantine. He doesn’t need to. He can get tested any time he wants to. Nice for him. Too bad for everyone else.
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We think that voting actually is not just a private vote for the person who gets the vote, but a public good, and that the more people who vote, the more legitimate the elected officials are, and that they represent the actual values of the electorate.
– Former Colorado Senate Majority Leader Ken Gordon (D-Denver), 2012.
With Republicans still in control of the state legislature, North Carolina cannot expect universal vote-by-mail this November. But the state does allow “no-excuse” absentee voting. An investigation of a Republican-funded effort to manipulate absentee ballots in the Ninth District in 2018 led to a new election and made that national news.
Nonetheless, voters in North Carolina and elsewhere will need to utilize alternates to in-person voting this fall. Vote-by-mail (all voters receive their ballots in the mail) or absentee-by-mail (voters may request a ballot to mail in) can both help minimize voters’ chances of exposure to COVID-19 and reduce systemic strain on election day. Boards of Elections expect the pandemic will make it difficult to staff polling places on Nov. 3.
A USA Today/Suffolk Poll shows two-thirds of voters support voting by mail as an alternative to standing masked in Wisconsin-long lines during a pandemic:
The poll found even greater support for absentee voting as an alternative during the pandemic –74% of Americans in favor and 21% in opposition – and in-person early voting, 74%-24%. Americans are split on online voting, with 48% opposing and 47% supporting.
Four political scientists writing in the New York Times this week found that the advent of universal vote-by-mail boosted turnout in Colorado by over 9 percent. “Historically disenfranchised” voters benefited most: young people, voters of color, less-educated people and blue-collar workers.
But vote-by-mail did not hold an advantage for either major political party. They found, “Looking at voters by political party, we find that Democrats and Republicans benefit about the same amount: around 8 percentage points.”
Contrary to Republicans’ objections:
As election security experts have pointed out, fraud is exceptionally rare, hard to commit without getting caught and nearly impossible to do on the scale necessary to affect election results. And because mail voting leaves behind a paper trail — which election officials can audit to verify that votes were counted as cast — it may actually be even more secure than in-person voting.
(The North Carolina case proves the rule: Leslie McCrae Dowless got caught and faces prison. Adjudication of the election fraud case against him is still in progress. Federal officials added Social Security fraud to the list in April.)
The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin adds:
Nevertheless, many Republicans, who are overwhelmingly white, are convinced that the bigger the electorate, the more it will resemble an increasingly diverse electorate — and therefore disadvantage them. It is quite an admission of their inability to win elections in a truly representative democracy, but it also fails to recognize that many older, traditionally Republican voters may not make it to the polls for fear of contracting the coronavirus. The negative take on voting by mail also ignores how prevalent voting by mail already is. Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah and Washington already conduct all-mail voting; Arizona, California and Montana conduct elections primarily using voting by mail. Thirty-four states (including most of the battleground states) use no-excuse absentee voting (which still requires that ballots be requested).
Legal efforts are underway, Rubin notes, to pressure states to ease restrictions on voting by mail.
Still, voting by mail is not without potential pitfalls. In my county, absentee-by-mail is complicated by the cost-cutting closure of the local postal processing center in 2015. Mail sent from here to here gets trucked first to South Carolina for processing. The extra turnaround time leaves a fractional percentage of voters’ ballots uncounted. Even ballots mailed by the legal deadline can miss the cutoff date for receipt by the Board of Elections. Plus, some arrive after election day with no postmarks, rendering them uncountable. These are issues voter education and/or legislative action can overcome. Hand delivery and drop boxes are a failsafe.
Postal delivery issues also make it worrisome that the acting president has made businessman Louis DeJoy, a top GOP fundraiser from North Carolina (with no postal experience, naturally), the new head of the Postal Service. DeJoy’s wife, Aldona Wos, headed the state’s Department of Health and Human Services during Republican Gov. Pat McCrory’s administration. She resigned in 2015 under federal investigation of contracting practices at her department. Authorities found no criminal wrongdoing. Watch this space … and your mailboxes.
Nonetheless, Allison Riggs, chief counsel on voting rights and interim executive director at the Southern Coalition for Social Justice, recommends spreading out votes this fall across every avenue for voting. Riggs argued North Carolina’s partisan gerrymandering case before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2019.
Conducting an election under COVID-19 will be challenging. Riggs says, “[T]he more we can spread out the flow through each of those three mechanisms [absentee by mail, in-person early voting, and election day voting], the less stress we put on any one of those inputs.”
If you are a North Carolina DMV customer with a N.C. driver’s license or DMV-issued ID, you may now register to vote or change certain parts of your registration online. Having a Democratic governor and a state voting director appointed by a Democrat-led state elections board has advantages, and not only during a pandemic.
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.
In the years following World War II, polls found the only thing Americans feared more than polio was nuclear war.
A year after his nomination as a Democratic vice presidential candidate, rising political star Franklin D. Roosevelt contracted polio while vacationing at his summer home on Campobello Island in 1921. The disease left the legs of the 39-year-old future president permanently paralyzed. In 1938, five years after entering the White House, Roosevelt helped to create the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, later renamed the March of Dimes Foundation, which became the primary funding source for Salk’s vaccine trials. Employing “poster children” and enlisting the star power of celebrities from Mickey Rooney to Mickey Mouse, the grassroots organization run by Roosevelt’s former Wall Street law partner Basil O’Connor was raising more than $20 million per year by the late 1940s.
While most scientists believed that effective vaccines could only be developed with live viruses, Salk developed a “killed-virus” vaccine by growing samples of the virus and then deactivating them by adding formaldehyde so that they could no longer reproduce. By injecting the benign strains into the bloodstream, the vaccine tricked the immune system into manufacturing protective antibodies without the need to introduce a weakened form of the virus into healthy patients. Many researchers such as Polish-born virologist Albert Sabin, who was developing an oral “live-virus” polio vaccine, called Salk’s approach dangerous. Sabin even belittled Salk as “a mere kitchen chemist.” The hard-charging O’Connor, however, had grown impatient at the time-consuming process of developing a live-virus vaccine and put the resources of the March of Dimes behind Salk…
On April 12, 1955, the day the Salk vaccine was declared “safe, effective and potent,” legendary CBS newsman Edward R. Morrow interviewed its creator and asked who owned the patent. “Well, the people, I would say,” said Salk in light of the millions of charitable donations raised by the March of Dimes that funded the vaccine’s research and field testing. “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”
A different time …
I was a little kid in the 60s and remember that we all stood in line for the oral vaccine delivered in a sugar cube at school. It was a public health initiative.
I know this will shock you but the “re-open America” protests aren’t on the up and up:
Since April 15, protests against coronavirus lockdown measures have been sweeping across various American states. Informally unified under the ‘Reopen America’ slogan, they seek an end to measures intended to curb the spread of the coronavirus. They’ve arguably been flared up by tweets President Donald Trump posted on April 17.
But according to new research from cybersecurity researchers, many of these protests are neither spontaneous nor organic. Cybersecurity expert Brian Krebs and researchers at DomainTools have separately analysed web addresses including the word “reopen.” And interestingly, they’ve found that many of these can be linked to domains associated with gun advocacy groups, lobbyists, and other conservative organisations.
Published today, a report from DNS-focused cybersecurity firm DomainTools concludes that over 500 new domains related to the protests have been registered in the past month. Many of them are linked to only a few groups.Today In: AI
By gathering domain names that include the same words, and by analysing the domains for other similarities, DomainTools was able to determine that many of them “redirect to a state-based firearms coalition group.” And according to its senior security researcher, Chad Anderson, these groups tie back to Aaron Dorr, a registered lobbyist for the state of Iowa.
Anderson goes on to explain that the “reopen” websites linked to Aaron Dorr bear various similarities, including the fact that they were built using One Click Politics and WordPress. By looking at one of them, the Iowa Gun Owners website, DomainTools was able to find Dorr’s telephone number.
DomainTools then examined the historical SSL certificates used for each of the firearms advocacy domains, finding Mr. Dorr’s personal domain and also numerous other domains associated with other firearm’s coalitions elsewhere in the US. For Chad Anderson and his colleagues, this “raised the likelihood for us that Mr. Dorr was the one running these campaigns.”
In other words, a batch of the “reopen America” domains are the work of a single gun advocacy network. And something very similar is suggested by recent research published by Brian Krebs.
On April 20, Krebs published an article titled, “Who’s Behind the ‘Reopen’ Domain Surge?” In it, he also reports on running a domain search for any domains registered in the past month with “reopen” in them.
This search brought up a list of around 150 domains. Startlingly, Krebs concludes that “a review of other details about these domains suggests a majority of them are tied to various gun rights groups, state Republican Party organizations, and conservative think tanks, religious and advocacy groups.”
As Krebs explains, “reopenmn.com” redirects to “minnesotagunrights.org,” which is linked to an individual living in Florida. According to Krebs, this same person registered “reopenpa.com,” a site that redirects to the Pennsylvania Firearms Association, and which “urges the state’s residents to contact their governor about easing the COVID-19 restrictions.”
Krebs also finds evidence that “Reopen.pa” is tied to a Facebook page named Pennsylvanians Against Excessive Quarantine. It has 68,000 members, and attempted to arrange an “Operation Gridlock” protest at midday on April 20 in Pennsylvania.
He finds other similar links. The domains “reopenoureconomy.com” and “reopensociety.com” are linked to FreedomWorks, a conservative group that has reportedly been holding virtual meetings with members of Congress.
Remember, none of this means that the poeple who are protesting aren’t authentic. They are. They are just people who once followed the same sort of organizing for the Tea party and Gun Rights groups which have now switched to Trump Cult organizing. These have always been the same people. They aren’t “issues based.” After all, they claimed to care deeply about deficits during the Great Recession but sat by idly as Trump spent like a drunken sailor while cutting taxes.
These groups are soldiers in the culture wars, organized around fighting Democrats. Period. The “issues” aren’t the point.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Donald Trump himself is directing this stuff. He seems to have a lot of time on his hands, anyway. And he’s motivated by exactly the same animosity toward his political enemies. The only thing he cares about is beating his opposition. If that takes killing massive numbers of Americans, he’s down.