Month: June 2020

Greg Sargent has a good rundown of the issues surrounding this inane DOJ lawsuit against John Bolton to stop him from publishing his book:

Typically, when an author wants to publish a book with potentially classified information, National Security Council officials review the manuscript and enter a dialogue with the author, who edits the book until concerns are satisfied.

Those officials are supposed to act in good faith. They are supposed to ask whether the information in question legitimately should or should not be classified and whether divulging it legitimately would or would not harm the national interest.

In this case, the evidence suggests bad faith infected the process. The lawsuit itself recounts that one NSC official reviewed the book and, after revisions by Bolton, cleared it. A second official then undertook to review it, the lawsuit says.

As time passed, Bolton’s lawyer repeatedly inquired as to what was going on with that review, the lawsuit itself recounts. Again and again, an NSC official informed him that the process remained ongoing and that no new information was available.AD

Bolton concluded that the process was not unfolding in good faith, the New York Times reports, and moved forward with publication. The lawsuit’s complaint insists the process was ongoing according to protocol.

But the complaint justifies the delay unconvincingly. It notes that the official doing the second review had a “broader base of knowledge” to identify what shouldn’t have been published, a thin rationale.

In an interview, Joshua Geltzer, a senior NSC official from 2015 to 2017, pointed to serious problems with this account. Geltzer noted that a career government official with experience in this sort of vetting did the first review, and that she cleared the book after an extensive process.

It was only after that, Geltzer pointed out, that the delays suddenly started taking place without explanation. And as Geltzer also noted, the official doing that second vetting — Michael Ellis, the NSC’s senior director for intelligence — is a political appointee.

Importantly, Geltzer points out, the lawsuit itself acknowledges that this second review took place “at the request” of the current national security adviser, Robert O’Brien.

“The claim by the government that the process was still ongoing does not feel in good faith,” Geltzer told me. “The official with genuine expertise had already weighed in. Bolton seemed to be getting the runaround with the goal of simply delay.”

What might have happened here? “We know Trump doesn’t want this book to see the light of day,” Geltzer said. “It seems natural to infer that O’Brien wanted to ensure the president got his way.”

It may be true that Bolton did violate his non-disclosure agreement. But that does not exonerate the government’s handling of this process.

One complication here concerns typical Beltway murkiness, this time around the status of former government officials who reenter the private sector and want to publicly recount their experiences. That act might be undertaken for self-interested purposes, but it constitutes protected speech and has a clear public-interest dimension.

The whole process is designed the way it is in order to ensure that former officials are allowed to exercise their first amendment rights without putting national security at risk. Recognizing that the classification process is insanely capricious to begin with — Trump said yesterday that he considers all conversations with him to be classified which is utter nonsense — this situation seems to be an obvious abuse, even under the current rules.

A career employee who does this for a living cleared the book then one of Trump’s cronies took over and got his personal Roy Cohn to step in and sue Bolton to try to stop publication.

As Sargent points out:

It doesn’t matter if Bolton’s views are loathsome (which they are), or that Bolton should have disclosed information during impeachment (which he should have). At issue is something much bigger: whether Trump and/or his loyalists are manipulating a process designed to balance competing public-interest imperatives, all to protect him politically.

I don’t care if Bolton fails to make any money on the book which is what the DOJ is requesting by saying the proceeds must be put into an escrow account payable to the US Treasury. I certainly won’t spend my money on it. But by using the government to do this, the White House gives away the game that they are really seeking to intimidate Bolton. (If they really thought they could stop publication they’d have sued the publisher .)

The whole thing stinks of the usual Trump and Barr corruption. I can’t stand Bolton but I’m happy to see him fighting Trump. Anything that divides the GOP coalition is good news for America.

UPdate: A copy of the book is circulating now. Apparently, Trump was bribing many foreign leaders to help him win re-election. He simply does not understand or care that this is corrupt:

First, one more person confirms that he’s a moron:

 It is a withering portrait of a president ignorant of even basic facts about the world, susceptible to transparent flattery by authoritarian leaders manipulating him and prone to false statements, foul-mouthed eruptions and snap decisions that aides try to manage or reverse.

Mr. Trump did not seem to know, for example, that Britain is a nuclear power and asked if Finland is part of Russia, Mr. Bolton writes. He came closer to withdrawing the United States from NATO than previously known. Even top advisers who position themselves as unswervingly loyal mock him behind his back. During Mr. Trump’s 2018 meeting with North Korea’s leader, according to the book, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo slipped Mr. Bolton a note disparaging the president, saying, “He is so full of shit.”

Bolton also reveals that he went to Cippollone and Barr about Trump’s corruption and they evidently did nothing.

Bolton has excerpted his China chapter in the WSJ. Trump is, as is obvious, a total sucker:

Trade matters were handled from day one in a completely chaotic way. Trump’s favorite way to proceed was to get small armies of people together, either in the Oval Office or the Roosevelt Room, to argue out these complex, controversial issues. Over and over again, the same issues. Without resolution, or even worse, one outcome one day and a contrary outcome a few days later. The whole thing made my head hurt.

With the November 2018 midterm elections looming, there was little progress on the China trade front. Attention turned to the coming Buenos Aires G-20 summit the following month, when Xi and Trump could meet personally. Trump saw this as the meeting of his dreams, with the two big guys getting together, leaving the Europeans aside, cutting the big deal.

What could go wrong? Plenty, in Lighthizer’s view. He was very worried about how much Trump would give away once untethered.

In Buenos Aires on Dec. 1, at dinner, Xi began by telling Trump how wonderful he was, laying it on thick. Xi read steadily through note cards, doubtless all of it hashed out arduously in advance. Trump ad-libbed, with no one on the U.S. side knowing what he would say from one minute to the next.

One highlight came when Xi said he wanted to work with Trump for six more years, and Trump replied that people were saying that the two-term constitutional limit on presidents should be repealed for him. Xi said the U.S. had too many elections, because he didn’t want to switch away from Trump, who nodded approvingly.

[…]

Trump spoke with Xi by phone on June 18, just over a week ahead of the year’s G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan, where they would next meet. Trump began by telling Xi he missed him and then said that the most popular thing he had ever been involved with was making a trade deal with China, which would be a big plus for him politically.

In their meeting in Osaka on June 29, Xi told Trump that the U.S.-China relationship was the most important in the world. He said that some (unnamed) American political figures were making erroneous judgments by calling for a new cold war with China.

Trump, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming U.S. presidential election, pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win.

Whether Xi meant to finger the Democrats or some of us sitting on the U.S. side of the table, I don’t know, but Trump immediately assumed that Xi meant the Democrats. Trump said approvingly that there was great hostility to China among the Democrats. Trump then, stunningly, turned the conversation to the coming U.S. presidential election, alluding to China’s economic capability and pleading with Xi to ensure he’d win. He stressed the importance of farmers and increased Chinese purchases of soybeans and wheat in the electoral outcome. I would print Trump’s exact words, but the government’s prepublication review process has decided otherwise.

[…]

And here come the quid pro quos:

Trump’s conversations with Xi reflected not only the incoherence in his trade policy but also the confluence in Trump’s mind of his own political interests and U.S. national interests. Trump commingled the personal and the national not just on trade questions but across the whole field of national security. I am hard-pressed to identify any significant Trump decision during my White House tenure that wasn’t driven by reelection calculations.

Take Trump’s handling of the threats posed by the Chinese telecommunications firms Huawei and ZTE. Ross and others repeatedly pushed to strictly enforce U.S. regulations and criminal laws against fraudulent conduct, including both firms’ flouting of U.S. sanctions against Iran and other rogue states. The most important goal for Chinese “companies” like Huawei and ZTE is to infiltrate telecommunications and information-technology systems, notably 5G, and subject them to Chinese control (though both companies, of course, dispute the U.S. characterization of their activities).

Trump, by contrast, saw this not as a policy issue to be resolved but as an opportunity to make personal gestures to Xi. In 2018, for example, he reversed penalties that Ross and the Commerce Department had imposed on ZTE. In 2019, he offered to reverse criminal prosecution against Huawei if it would help in the trade deal—which, of course, was primarily about getting Trump re-elected in 2020.

Aaaand… hes a sociopath:

I hoped Trump would see these Hong Kong developments as giving him leverage over China. I should have known better. That same month, on the 30th anniversary of China’s massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, Trump refused to issue a White House statement. “That was 15 years ago,” he said, inaccurately. “Who cares about it? I’m trying to make a deal. I don’t want anything.” And that was that.

Beijing’s repression of its Uighur citizens also proceeded apace. Trump asked me at the 2018 White House Christmas dinner why we were considering sanctioning China over its treatment of the Uighurs, a largely Muslim people who live primarily in China’s northwest Xinjiang Province.

At the opening dinner of the Osaka G-20 meeting in June 2019, with only interpreters present, Xi had explained to Trump why he was basically building concentration camps in Xinjiang. According to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do. The National Security Council’s top Asia staffer, Matthew Pottinger, told me that Trump said something very similar during his November 2017 trip to China.

Bolton shakes his fist at China as he is wont to do and rides his own hobby horses. But it’s interesting to see all this, which we mostly already know, from the perspective of a right wing nut.

I won’t buy the book, of course. I have no interest in helping to make him rich. BUt it’s interesting to see some more details about Trump’s foreign policy dumpster fire. It’s important to know what the next administration (god willing) is going up against.

This is a very smart observation by Josh Marshall. The comparisons we see all the time between different states and different countries really misses the point. The useful comparison is the one above:

I have spent a lot of time analyzing the New York COVID epidemic both because it was the center of the storm in the United States and because it affects me, my loved ones and coworkers so directly. The graphed shapes of the New York outbreak and the nationwide outbreak are quite different. The former rockets upward and falls down again at a slower but still comparable arc. Nationwide it’s quite different. The numbers rocket upward and then basically plateau. It’s not a proper comparison. The epicenter of an outbreak has different dynamics than the more rolling spread of contagion in less hard hit areas.

This is why the proper comparison is not New York vs the United States or the United States versus any European country, all of which are dramatically smaller than the US, both in geography and population. The proper comparison is the United States (~330 million) vs the EU (~440 million). This brings together hotspots and peripheries, urban and rural and all the mix of population densities into one. As you can see here the progress has been very different and not at all good for the control of the epidemic in the United States.

Look again at those number. The US has 330 million people while the EU has 440 million people. They are literally different countries while we are simply different states that have been forced to act as sovereign entities because of a lack of leadership from the central government.

But the EU has done much, much better despite having an epicenter very similar to ours in Italy.

Marshall notes:

The EU had a comparably dramatic outbreak. But then the numbers fell back to relatively low levels. In the US the numbers shot up and then basically plateaued. Indeed, when you remove New York from the equation even the minor fall back over the course of April largely disappears.

Marshall calls this a “profound failure” which it certainly is.

The clearest explanation is the lack of any clear national mitigation strategy and a failure to follow even the limited strategy the federal government outlined for ending the lockdown. Since early May the federal government’s clearest strategy has been to turn the page and move on, both in messaging and action. Most of the country felt the epidemic only in a very limited way in March, April and May. It is simply human nature that people in those states would assume some level of invulnerability and be less mitigation-compliant. The federal government has encouraged and enabled this tendency. Indeed the President has single-handedly made resistance to masking – which a growing body of evidence suggests are quite effective at scale – a badge of right-wing political identity.

He goes on to illustrate how the chickens are now coming home to roost in Oklahoma as Trump stages his first rally in a state that is experience a major spike in cases. It is appalling.

And the higher case numbers are not because we are doing so much more testing that the EU countries. Per capita they are doing a comparable number. This is the relevant comparison:

Trump has managed to convince half the country, maybe more, that the pandemic is over and people are simply going back to normal. He believes this will result in the economy roaring back just in time for him to take credit for beating the pandemic and proving his magnificent leadership.

Unfortunately for him, he needs the entire country to buy into his delusion. The Trump Death Cult cannot make the economy come back all by itself. They can’t even make it come back if young people ignore the guidelines and start spending as they usually do. He needs everyone and he’s not going to get them. There are a whole lot of people in this country who believe in science and are not willing to put their lives on the line for Donald Trump.

Mike Pence has given up even trying to appear to be human:

Pence abruptly reinvented himself as a coronavirus skeptic this week, with comments and an op-ed article that stray into pandemic denialism. In a conference call with governors, Pence incorrectly argued Monday that the spike in cases that almost half of the states are experiencing is simply a function of more testing. In a Wall Street Journal piece published today and headlined “There Isn’t a Coronavirus ‘Second Wave,’” Pence wrote, “The media has tried to scare the American people every step of the way, and these grim predictions of a second wave are no different.”

The op-ed cherry-picked a handful of positive statistics — there are of course bright spots — and emphasized the administration’s record in increasing testing and pumping up the manufacture of personal protective equipment. He boldly predicted a vaccine would be available “by the fall.”

Perhaps most telling, Pence made it clear that the effort to eliminate the disease before a vaccine is ready is not really the goal anymore. Instead, Pence argued that the White House now measures success by a lower level of daily deaths.

“In the past five days,” he wrote, “deaths are down to fewer than 750 a day, a dramatic decline from 2,500 a day a few weeks ago and a far cry from the 5,000 a day that some were predicting.” This purportedly tolerable rate of 750 dead Americans a day would equal 270,000 deaths in a year.

It’s entirely possible that he’ll have that many deaths on his conscience (if he has one) by next March. 22,000 preventable deaths a month from this thing is perfectly fine with these ghouls.

By this afternoon, the news pages of the Journal contradicted much of what Pence had to say. In an interview with the paper, Fauci reiterated that the jump in cases “cannot be explained by increased testing.” He warned that relaxed approaches to social distancing, such as congregating close to lots of people in large venues, and an aversion to mask-wearing would cause the disease to spread.

Pence is scheduled to be with Trump at a rally in Tulsa, Okla. on Saturday, while Fauci told NPR that he hasn’t talked to Trump in two weeks.

But Fauci did agree with Pence on one thing. “People keep talking about a second wave,” he told the newspaper. “We’re still in a first wave.”

It appears that we are in a thousand year flood rather than a wave. It just keeps coming and the levees are breaking and the national government is telling each state to figure out a way to stop it at their own borders.

It’s not working.

I caught this over at Daily Kos:

Top infectious disease specialist Dr. Anthony Fauci sat down for an interview with The Street on Friday to explain what was going on in those early months, when government professionals, under the White House direction, began to give out what is clearly incorrect medical information about masks and their function to the general public. It turns out, our country’s lack of preparation for this pandemic, mixed in with our country’s completely incompetent and narcissistic leadership, meant that officials like Fauci felt compelled to tell half truths as damage control.

First, Dr. Fauci was asked the burning question that anyone reading this site has known the answer to for about four months now: are masks important to wear when you leave your home? “Masks are not 100% protective. However, they certainly are better than not wearing a mask. Both to prevent you, if you happen to be a person who may feel well, but has an asymptomatic infection that you don’t even know about, to prevent you from infecting someone else. But also, it can protect you a certain degree, not a hundred percent, in protecting you from getting infected from someone who, either is breathing, or coughing, or sneezing, or singing or whatever it is in which the droplets or the aerosols go out. So masks work.”

But why oh why did government health officials say it wasn’t important in February? Dr. Fauci, a considerably more diplomatic person than myself gives this explanation: “Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people, namely the health care workers who were brave enough to put themselves in harm’s way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected.” 

Everything I have read about standard pandemic response is that it is vital for public health officials to tell the truth. If they don’t, they lose credibility and nobody will believe them when they give the public health guidance.

Can you see the problem here? By lying to the pubic instead of saying “we don’t have enough medical masks to go around so please just make a cloth mask or use a scarf or bandana” from the very beginning we might not be dealing with this nonsense where people think masks are some kind of political plot. Instead, they very adamantly insisted that masks were bad and would actually cause you to get the virus, even though they knew that wasn’t so. It was a major error.

I started writing about the virus in January before it we even knew it was here. And in the earliest news reports from China and Japan and South Korea, everyone was wearing masks. I knew from the beginning that all those people who had already gone through SARS understood that it was important. And also, it is just common sense.

I’ve been wearing a mask when I go out since February.

I understand the pressure these public health experts were under from Trump. We’ve watched them squirm through the last four months trying to keep the Manchild appeased while trying desperately trying to warn the public and give them guidance about what they can do. But I think the mask thing was an unforced error they did on their own. All the TV experts went right along with it. And it hurt their credibility right out of the gate.

It’s not the only thing, unfortunately. Their approach to the protests was similarly off base. Obviously, I totally agree with the goals of the demonstrations but there is no doubt that it was risky to go out in big crowds even if it was mitigated by masks and being outdoors. I don’t think the public health experts were adamant enough about the proper protocols for doing that which includes getting tested and isolating from people who are older or vulnerable. I certainly didn’t hear very many TV experts saying that and instead it was all about how Black Lives Matter is a public health issue too — which is true of course, but completely irrelevant to the fact that we are still in the midst of the pandemic. Even if the protesters were young and healthy, which most of them seemed to be, a whole lot of Black and Hispanic people, as well as older white people, were at risk of getting sick if these people didn’t follow proper protocols which they weren’t even being told to do.

Clearly, experts were in the right to argue for the goals and purposes of the protests and express their solidarity with the movement. And I don’t think you could have stopped those protests even if you wanted to which I certainly did not. But it was very depressing to see the public health experts punt once again and not be straight with the American people about the risks and the proper way to deal with them. I think they lost another bit of their credibility from that.

Needless to say, Trump used that as the excuse he needed to start holding his rallies again and it’s probably going to make a bunch of people sick. He probably would have anyway so I don’t hold that against the experts. But we’d all be better off they just did their jobs and told it like it was.

There are enough lies and fudging of the facts coming from the Trump administration officials We can handle the truth from the public health experts, whether from the government or the professionals who appear on our TV. We desperately need it.

Has Donald Trump changed his tune since Charlottesville? Forget it — he hasn’t changed since New York in the 1980s

Donald Trump can never, ever learn from his own mistakes — so we all have to keep reliving them over and over again. Right now Americans are in the midst of a necessary but gut-wrenching confrontation with the racism that permeates our culture and our justice system, and Trump is once again doing what he did three years ago this August, after the horrifying events in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Sure, the circumstances are slightly different. Instead of demonstrations in the street to protest neo-Nazis marching with tiki torches and chanting “Jews will not replace us” as they “defend” statues of Confederate generals, we have demonstrations in the street to protest the killing of unarmed Black men at the hands of police. But it doesn’t take a very stable genius to see that these events are closely related.

Trump had only been president for a few months when Charlottesville erupted. The sight of those alt-right fascists chanting in the streets with their torches was a frightening spectacle. The street clashes that happened the following day were violent, and the gruesome murder of Heather Heyer by a white supremacist who drove his car through a crowded street was the most horrifying moment of all. Nobody knew what to expect from the new president faced with this sort of cultural upheaval for the first time, particularly since the neo-Nazi demonstrators included many visible Trump fans, including former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, were big Trump fans.

The president was on a “working vacation” at his New Jersey golf club — neither the first nor the last! — and didn’t say a word for 48 hours. Finally, he came before the press for a photo-op to welcome some veterans and gave a perfunctory speech in which said, “I condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.” (The emphasis was his.)

Trump went on to declare that the problem had been with us for a long time and called for law and order, bizarrely asserting, “No child should ever be afraid to go outside and play or be with their parents and have a good time.” What that had to do with anything that had happened in Charlottesville was not clear. He complimented the police and the National Guard at great length.

That terrible speech did not go over well for obvious reasons so he gave prepared remarks the next day in which he bragged about the economy and claimed he had created a million new jobs as usual but then announced that he had met with FBI Director Chris Wray and then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and they had decided to open a civil rights investigation into the events in Charlottesville. He said, “Racism is evil. And those who cause violence in its name are criminals and thugs, including the KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups that are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans.”

It sounded like a speech a normal president might make in such circumstances. It was one of the best he ever gave. Unfortunately, two days later Trump met with the press and turned back into himself. It was at this appearance that he made his famous comment, “You had people that were very fine people, on both sides,” and defended the Confederate statues: “I looked the night before — if you look, there were people protesting very quietly the taking down of the statue of Robert E. Lee.”

That, of course, was the neo-Nazi demonstration which Trump seemed to think was populated with a lot of “very fine people” who just wanted to defend the confederacy. He said, “There are two sides to the country,” leaving little doubt which side he was on.

There’s been a lot of water under the Trump bridge since then but the events of the last couple of weeks have proved that he hasn’t really changed since 1989, when he took out this infamous ad in all the New York newspapers:

https://twitter.com/scottbix/status/962352937270956033?s=20

We have seen Trump screeching about “domination” and “law and order” ever since the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis drove people into the streets two weeks ago. I don’t have to relate here the horrific spectacle of the feckless photo-op and the gassing of peaceful protesters or the near-insurrection of the military over his threats to order active duty troops into the streets. His reaction to the uprising has been as tin-eared as it was after Charlottesville.

After days of criticism for his destructive comments, on Tuesday he met privately with some of the families of recent victims of police violence and held a press conference at which he signed an executive order to deal with police reform. It was ungracious and virtually free of substance, as usual. The executive order itself is thin gruel, essentially just encouraging police to promote better training and try not to use chokeholds — unless they really, really feel they need to. It creates a national database “concerning instances of excessive use of force related to law enforcement matters, accounting for applicable privacy and due process rights” that does not require police departments to actually participate.

In his speech Trump, said a few nice words about the families, bragged about the economy that doesn’t exist anymore, spoke as though the pandemic was over (but if it isn’t, a vaccine, a treatment or a cure is definitely right around the corner) and took cheap shots at Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s criminal justice record:

Trump: "President Obama and vice president Biden never even tried to fix this during their eight-year period. The reason they didn't try is because they had no idea how to do it." pic.twitter.com/VnCwEo7imZ

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) June 16, 2020

All of that was lies. Trump has blindly reversed a whole package of reforms undertaken by the Obama administration in the wake of the Ferguson protests in 2014.

But the bulk of the president’s time at the podium was spent extolling the virtues of the police, making it very clear once again that he believes there are “two sides to the country ” and that he and the police are on one side, while those who see the need for the killing of unarmed Black men to stop are on the other.

After he signed the order, the photo of Trump surrounded by smiling leaders of police organizations as they received commemorative pens spoke volumes about the toughness of the supposed reforms.

Just in case his followers didn’t get the message, the president’s final words were a shrill dog whistle to the Confederate faithful: “We must build upon our heritage, not tear it down.” MSNBC legal analyst Maya Wiley called it a “victory lap on the coffins of black people.” Indeed it was. He might as well have led the group in the Rose Garden in a stirring rendition of “Dixie.”

My Salon column reprinted with permission.

“Welp, Florida opened back up & my ass should’ve stayed tf home this past weekend cause I just tested positive for the damn COVID,” Erika Crisp wrote on Facebook June 10th. “#IKnowBetter #MyFault #WearYourMasksPeople”.

One night out at a Jacksonville bar was enough exposure for Crisp and 15 friends to contract the coronavirus. Crisp told a local TV station she and her friends had been “doing everything the right way,” but went out that night not wearing masks. That one night was the common denominator between them.

Crisp, 40, is a healthcare worker. BuzzFeed News reports:

“I think we were careless and we went out into a public place when we should not have,” she told the news station. “I think we had a whole ‘out of sight, out of mind’ mentality. The state opens back up and said everybody was fine, so we took advantage of that.”

The bar Crisp and her friends went to, Lynch’s Irish Pub, closed voluntarily last Friday for cleaning after learning one customer had tested positive. They also tested their employees, and seven workers tested positive as well.

Twenty other people Crisp doesn’t know who were there that night messaged her to say they too tested positive. The carrier was likely asymptomatic, she believes.

Florida’s Department of Health confirmed a record high 2,783 new cases on Tuesday.

Masks wearers are sheep, believes Ashley Smith of Morganton, NC. The co-founder of ReopenNC responded to Gov. Roy Cooper’s (D) consideration of mandatory mask use in public spaces with the “Burn Your Masks” challenge.

Smith posted a video to the group’s Facebook page explaining her views (WRAL):

“As you know, we are a group that is completely against mandatory anything,” she said. “We are for personal liberty and the constitution and personal freedom.”

Smith, holding a blue medical mask, the kind used by many workers in healthcare settings, read the description on its packaging, which cautions users, “When properly worn … the mask reduces potential contact by the wearer to fluids but does not eliminate the risk of contracting any virus, disease or infection.”

“This does not prevent the spread of COVID,” Smith addressed viewers in the video. “This is not a sign of your compassion or how much you care for another human being. This is a sign of control.”

Perhaps. But for Trump cult members wearing a mask is also a sign of apostasy. Those of little faith are not worthy of the love Dear Leader does not have to give them. Mask wearing is a public confession, an admission that Donald Trump was wrong when on February 26 he assured, “when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.”

That was over two million U.S. cases and 117,000 dead Americans ago. Give or take a few thousand graves.

Not wearing a mask in public spaces is also an admission that you could not care less that neighbors might die if you are the carrier. “Conservatives Without Conscience,” John Dean called such people in 2007.

Perhaps the description fits. “Are we willing to kill people? Are we willing to lay our lives down? We have to say yes,” Adam Smith, husband to Ashley, said in a Facebook Live video opposing the shutdown on May 22. “If you bring force, we’re gonna bring force. If you bring guns, we’re gonna bring guns. If you’re armed with this, we’re gonna be armed with this.”

Adam Smith armed during a "Blue Igloo" event in Raleigh on Saturday, May 16, 2020. pic.twitter.com/qm3qvl9dWM

— Travis Long (@vizjourno) May 24, 2020

The Winston-Salem Journal reported Adam Smith attended a Raleigh protest in May alongside “Boogaloo bois” interested in provoking a second civil war. Another Boogaloo extremist, an Air Force staff sergeant, was charged in California on Tuesday in the killing of a Santa Cruz County deputy and the attempted murder of a federal officer. Recall your Maya Angelou.

New from me + @anblanx:

The Boogaloo extremist who ambushed a cop last week killed another cop in Oakland, trying to stoke unrest at protests

"Use their anger to fuel our fire. We have mobs of angry people to use to our advantage," he wrote on Facebook.https://t.co/H9f6vZZg5C

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) June 16, 2020

But that disclaimer Smith read on the surgical mask box reminded me of something else. Oh, yes:

Latex condoms are intended to prevent pregnancy, HIV/AIDS, and other sexually transmitted infections…. However, they do not completely eliminate the risks of pregnancy and STIs. 

So, useless. Clearly. Personal liberty without personal responsibility. That’s Donald Trump in a nutshell, emphasis on nut. Freedom? A worship word. MAGA worship. Now only a shibboleth. God Bless America.

Um, the Kremlin has now confirmed that no one can see Vladimir Putin without first passing through a [checks notes] "disinfection tunnel." https://t.co/v3ap2C0kcI

— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) June 17, 2020

Don’t expect POTUS to follow his mentor on this one.

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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, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.

Oh boy:

Add this to our list of worries in these anxious times: coronavirus-containing clouds that waft into the air when a toilet is flushed.

Scientists who simulated toilet water and air flows say in a new research paper that aerosol droplets forced upward by a flush appear to spread wide enough and linger long enough to be inhaled. The novel coronavirus has been found in the feces of covid-19 patients, but it remains unknown whether such clouds could contain enough virus to infect a person. The authors say the possibility of that mode of transmission calls for action in the midst of a pandemic — first and foremost, by closing the lid.

“Flushing will lift the virus up from the toilet bowl,” co-author Ji-Xiang Wang, who researches fluids at Yangzhou University in Yangzhou, China, said in an email. Bathroom users “need to close the lid first and then trigger the flushing process,” Wang said, and wash their hands thoroughly if closure isn’t possible.

Those self flushing public toilets were problematic for women already. Now this.

Read the whole thing for the full rundown.

Here’s the latest from Real America:

Police have made arrests and are investigating “scuffles” after a small protest in Bethel, Ohio was overrun with biker gangs on Sunday, leaving the village in an ongoing state of tension. 

Bethel Police Chief Steve Teague told TPM that five arrests were made Monday evening, by which time the southern Ohio village was under curfew. Four of those were for “disorderly conduct” after being “engaged in fighting” and one was for “intoxication in the roadway.” None, per the chief, were for curfew violations.

Just a few days ago, the protest planned for the small village, shy of 3,000 inhabitants and about 40 minutes outside of Cincinnati, seemed likely to be a modest affair.

Sunday’s protest, billed as Bethel’s Solidarity with Black Lives Demonstration, was expected to have a turnout of 80 to 100 people. But soon, per a joint statement by the village’s mayor, chief of police and administrator, “several motorcycle gangs, back the blue groups, and second amendment advocates” caught wind of the event and decided to show up, armed with guns and bats. 

An hour before the event was scheduled to begin, village officials said, 250 motorcycles flooded the area. By the protest’s official start time, the demonstrators were outnumbered and around 800 people were present.

At the same time, most of the police stationed to monitor the event were called away. All six of Bethel’s police officers had been assigned to the event, and six more from nearby Clermont County were on standby. But, per village officials, another “urgent matter in the county” meant that all but one of the officers were absent from the scene as the counter-protesters descended on the area. Eventually, nine deputies were called in as backup.

Though police called the influx of counter-protesters “manageable,” video shows several instances in which nothing separated the angry crowd from the demonstrators. In some cases, violence ensued. 

“Towards the latter part of the event, the various other groups began to move toward the Bethel’s Solidarity with Black Lives Demonstration area,” the officials said. “This resulted in approximately 10 incidents, which were primarily minor scuffles.”

Online ahead of Sunday’s protest — and again ahead of a second protest on Monday — rumors flew that buses full of outside agitators were coming to town. 

Bethel village administrator Travis Dotson told TPM on Tuesday that “the village received one anonymous call yesterday morning stating that buses were ‘on their way.’” He said that, “out of an abundance of caution,” the information was relayed to local businesses, but that the police department did not view the threat as serious enough to force early closures.

The seemingly baseless rumor had been spreading on social media for days.

“From what I understand, the two buses — or there could be three buses, I’m not sure — are outside of Bethel, full of antifa,” one local man said in a Facebook video ahead of Monday’s protest, without citing any evidence. “It doesn’t have nothing to do with Black Lives Matter. It’s antifa. The rumors are true. They’re busing them in today.” 

A Facebook page that shared the man’s post, “• Home of The Right Wing •,” said earlier Monday that “The Word Is Antifa Has 2 Buses Outside Of Town Of Bethel, OH Threatening To Burn The Town Down over Yesterday’s Protest…” 

The rumors followed what has become a nationwide pattern of unfounded speculation about roaming bands of “antifa” — short for antifascist — destroying towns under the pretext of Black Lives Matter protests. The whispers frequently center on “busloads” of outside infiltrators and often inspire heavily armed counter-protesters to stand guard.

Alicia Gee, one of the organizers of Sunday’s protest, tried to dispel the rumors in a series of Facebook videos. 

“I think you may have probably heard that there are rumors about another Black Lives Matter protest, people coming in from outside that are Black Lives Matter protesters,” she said in a video posted Monday. “We personally who organized the event are not planning a protest, we are not flocking downtown, I want things to stay peaceful.” 

“Don’t come downtown, don’t come to Bethel,” she implored any non-local protesters, saying that there are people in town who “want to start stuff.” Her videos showed clumps of men lining the streets and congregating outside of storefronts. Some of them appeared to be armed. 

Video from Sunday showed several counter-protesters hurling racial slurs at the demonstrators. Other footage also captured counter-protesters appearing to shove and hit the demonstrators with impunity. In one instance, as at least two uniformed police officers looked on, a man, surrounded by an angry crowd, was punched in the back of the head. 

“Sir, I just got punched in the back of the head,” the man told the police officer standing in front of him. The officer suggested the man file a report.

Later video captured a counter-protester saying of the incident, “He’s lucky he didn’t get shot.”

This video is something else. I can’t imagine where the stereotypes of MAGA cultists come from …

Separately, counter-protesters were recorded getting in demonstrators’ faces and ripping away their signs.

“This ain’t Seattle. We’re not in a Democratic state here. We don’t put up with this shit. All lives matter here,” one counter-protester told a woman recording video Sunday, footage shows. “Y’all came to the wrong fucking town!” another added.

Protests continued into Monday, albeit with a seemingly much larger police presence. 

Monday evening, Bethel Mayor Jay Noble put the village under curfew from 9:00 pm to 6:00 am until he rescinds the order. 

“The need for this order arises from the threat of continued and escalating violence, the need for security and enforcement support for the Village of Bethel Police Department, and the need to protect the Village’s first responders from the spread of COVID-19,” read the order. Violating curfew would result in a misdemeanor.

Dotson, the village administrator, confirmed to TPM that the arrests made so far were all in conjunction to the Monday demonstrations, but that investigations into incidents from Sunday’s event are “active and continuing.”

No word on if Bill Barr told the Feds to arrest the “Antifa” protester.

The WaPo reporting:

Protesters in Albuquerque wrapped a chain around the neck of a bronze statue and began tugging and chanting, “Tear it down,” shortly before sunset on Monday. Their efforts to pull down a monument of Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate suddenly stopped as four shots rang out.

Most people instinctively turned toward the noise, videos from the scene show. A few screamed. Just yards away, a group of men sporting militarylike garb and carrying semiautomatic rifles formed a protective circle around the gunman.

The gunshots, which left one man in critical but stable condition, have set off a cascade of public outcry denouncing the unregulated ‘militia’’s presence and the shooting. On Tuesday morning, the Albuquerque Police Department announced that detectives had arrested Stephen Ray Baca, 31, in connection with the shooting.

Baca was charged with aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and firearm enhancement, according to a criminal complaint.

Please don’t misunderstand. I’m very glad this thug was arrested. I’m also very glad that he was arrested alive even after the shooting began. It shows that at least when it comes to right wing militia types, the police are perfectly capable of capturing even highly dangerous and armed suspects without kneeling on their necks for 9 minutes or shooting them in the back.

MOMENTS AGO: President @realDonaldTrump signs police reform executive order https://t.co/OjR9KNIVVm pic.twitter.com/BUJal6hcF1

— The Hill (@thehill) June 16, 2020

The White House isn’t even observing the no handshake and touching surfaces rule, much less social distancing and wearing masks.

If you listened to his odious speech this morning, you heard him speak about he pandemic as if it’s in the past in one breath while touting cures and vaccines in the next. He even said at one point that “it’s going to go away.”

If you want to see how great it’s going you can compare us to other countries:

Trump said yesterday that this is because we are doing so much testing. In fact he insisted:

“If we stopped testing right now, we would show very few cases, if any,” Mr. Trump said.

Needless to say, just because you aren’t testing, it doesn’t mean we have no cases. And even if you believe that these numbers are just showing more cases because of more testing, Medical experts refute that.

“It’s not just there’s more testing,” says Dr. Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. “The percent of the people testing positive are also increasing.”

Trump has been told that, I’m sure. But they’ve decided that their best bet for re-election is to try to convince people that they are no longer in danger and just hope that most of their own voters continue to put believe him instead of his lying eyes. It’s quite clear that none of them care about the vast number of daily preventable deaths.

This could be a problem for him though. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell:

POWELL: "Until the public is confident that the disease is contained, a full recovery is unlikely."

— Ryan Struyk (@ryanstruyk) June 16, 2020

Unless he has Bill Barr’s Robocops come to my door and drag me out to a restaurant or the mall or really, anywhere else, I’m not going.

I love to go out to bars and restaurants. But I’m not dying to do it. I doubt I’m alone.