Month: July 2020

I don’t know how many people have been watching Joe Biden’s speeches or reading about his policy rollouts, but they’ve really been quite good. This week’s socially-distanced conversation between Biden and Barack Obama was exceptionally well done. These events may be under the radar but if the polls are any gauge whatever Biden is doing, or not doing, is working.

Biden is offering much more progressive policies than I think people expected and his rhetoric is exactly right for the moment. In contrast with Trump’s callous ignorance about what people are going through in this nerve-wracking crisis, Biden offers empathy and understanding in a way that is obviously authentic and heartfelt.

He has also demonstrated a willingness to sit down with people with whom he has policy differences and engage respectfully, in a way that shows he understands policy in a serious yet personal way. This dialogue with the health care activist Ady Barkan is an excellent example of his ability to listen and show open-minded consideration of views that challenge his own.

In this moment of national angst, it may just be that Joe Biden turned out to be the right man to challenge Donald Trump, for reasons we could not have anticipated six months ago.

So far, within the weird constraints of COVID-19, Biden is running a pretty skillful campaign designed to reassure progressives that he’s heard their demands, while also reassuring independents and some regretful Trump voters that he’s a safe harbor. Perhaps all concerned are so desperate to get rid of Trump that they are willing to cut him a lot of slack, but he hasn’t stepped on his own storyline and that in itself isn’t easy.

But the reality is that even if you set aside the three and a half years of chaos that had Trump’s campaign floundering even before the pandemic hit, his shocking demonstration of ineptitude and indifference to suffering has made that pitch more effective than it would have been before. I don’t think anyone would have predicted last January that the most technologically advanced nation in the world could be so incompetent and heartless that within a few months it would end up leading the world in death and illness in a global pandemic, all due to the lack of decent, capable national political leadership. This kind of failure really was unthinkable.

Donald Trump’s incompetence and narcissism contrasted with Joe Biden’s compassion and experience is the framework for a campaign that really isn’t about restoring America’s soul or its “greatness,” but rather about restoring Americans’ confidence that their government is even capable of recognizing their distress and delivering basic services, much less upholding its democratic ideals.

If Biden wins the election and we get through the transition without a constitutional crisis and civil unrest (and both are very possible) his administration will immediately have to deal with the economic fallout resulting from Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic. It’s highly likely that the health crisis will still be acute as well. On top of that, there will be an immediate need to deal with foreign policy and national security issues, as well as a full appraisal of the destruction wreaked on the administrative state, particularly with respect to environmental and financial regulation. It’s a lot.

But as much as I think that Biden’s campaign of unity and healing has been effective, I’m terrified that spirit will carry over too far into actual governance, to the extent that the assault on democracy we’ve seen under the Trump administration is swept under the rug — much as the electoral hardball and abuses of power during the Bush administration were ignored when Obama took office. He too ran as a “uniter” and was forced to face a major crisis from the moment he took office. Obama and his closest advisers decided they would not “look in the rearview mirror” because the new president was convinced he could deal with the Republicans in good faith. He set out his disastrous proposal for a Grand Bargain, including major budget cuts, even before he was inaugurated.

That mistaken assumption of goodwill was rewarded with total GOP intransigence and an obstructionist “grassroots” movement funded by big-money interests that fought the new administration every step of the way. And I would argue that the Obama administration’s unwillingness to hold the Bush administration accountable for its crimes and misdeeds led inexorably to the disaster we’ve experienced under Donald Trump. The lesson the Republicans took from what Bush did (and yes, what Reagan and Nixon did too) was that they could get away with anything.

The damage Trump and his accomplices have done to our democracy is just as thorough as the disaster of his incompetent pandemic response and the resulting economic chaos. Unless the next administration treats that with the same urgency there is every reason to believe that the corruption, the shattered norms, the nepotism and cronyism, and the desire to use federal law enforcement, the military and the courts for partisan and personal purposes will be a permanent fixture of any administration led by a president with authoritarian impulses. (Tom Cotton, Liz Cheney and Josh Hawley are all out there waiting.)

Right now, we have a rogue Department of Homeland Security and a corrupt Department of Justice literally sending paramilitary troops into American cities, largely or entirely to stoke a violent reaction because Trump believes that will help him get re-elected. The director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, is an unqualified Trump flunky put in place to protect him and provide partisan actors with information to smear their political enemies. God only knows what foreign actors are “helping” them do that.

This is not just a problem with Donald Trump. It’s a problem with the system that empowers him and the institutions that have rotted from within.

Just as Trump seems incapable of perceiving that he cannot get the economy back on track without dealing with the pandemic, Democrats have refused to accept that they cannot attempt to fix the nation’s problems until they fix the underlying wreckage of our democracy. That means they must hold hearings, form commissions, write new laws and otherwise tackle this ongoing Republican assault on our democracy once and for all. If Biden’s Department of Justice independently finds that laws were broken, they should prosecute. This simply cannot be ignored any longer.

I don’t think anyone would argue that America isn’t sick right now, both literally and figuratively. Joe Biden sees himself as a healer and, as I’ve shown, it’s a compelling part of his appeal. But you don’t heal a deep, festering wound just by putting a Band-aid over the problem and pretending that everything is fine. I think Trump has proved that. Biden and the Democrats must face up to the hard work of fixing our democracy if we expect it to survive. I wish I had more confidence that they were up to the task.

My Salon column reprinted with permission

Odd little survey. The Cato Institute looked at the “walking on eggshells” thesis. They asked if people tend to self-censor their political views for fear that expressing them could negatively impact their lives. Cato finds “the political climate these days” keeps 62% of us from saying things others might find offensive.

Cato slices its data this way and that, comparing liberals to conservatives, the less-educated to the better, the young to the old, etc. The article spreads a lot of pixels fretting about how people now feel less free to express their political opinions at work for fear of financial penalty:

Americans with diverse backgrounds share this concern that their employment could be adversely affected if their political views were discovered: 38% of Hispanic Americans, 22% of African Americans, 31% of White Americans, 35% of men, 27% of women, 36% of households earning less than $20,000 a year, and 33% of households earning more than $100,000 a year agree.

Self‐​censorship is apparently “on the rise” in the U.S. We know because Cato tracks these feelings all the way back to 2017.

A particularly surprising finding was that Americans who have these concerns are somewhat more likely to support the firing of Biden or Trump donors. A third (33%) among those who worry that their political views could harm their employment supported firing either Biden or Trump donors, compared to 24% of those who were not worried about their views impacting their jobs. This suggests that those who fear reprisal or economic penalty for their political views are not entirely distinct from those who seek the same for others.

Okay, that is surprising. Charles Koch’s libertarian think tank presents its other findings as somehow aberrant and a threat to free expression. But how many people feel free to discuss their religion at work? Their sexual fantasies?

Having a degree of self‐​censorship is part of being a mature, well-adjusted adult. It likely was so long before 2017. We have no way of knowing from Cato’s surveys whether or not 62% of people feeling a need to self‐​censor certain views is what we once called normal.

Futurist Sara Robinson (formally of Orcinus and AlterNet) posted observations on the Cato survey to Facebook:

Lots of stuff in the article that’s worth consideration, not least the tremendous political, economic, and cultural costs to the country that come when people can’t trust each other enough to say what they’re honestly thinking. I know that I’ve got a long and growing list of stuff that I shut up about, and the list of people I’m willing to open up with is getting shorter just about as fast. The loss to everyone is real, and it’s a discussion worth having.

But the other part that struck me was that, being Cato, they also played up the research showing how many Democrats won’t hire a Trump voter — and strongly implied that this was about anti-Trump bigotry. I think that’s wrong — for reasons that I’m frankly surprised that Cato, of all orgs, missed. Let me explain.

As an employer, I have a legal obligation to provide my workers with a safe workplace where they can do their jobs free of harassment and bigotry. If I fail, I can be sued, so there’s serious liability attached here.

If I hire a Trump follower, that liability goes straight to 11. How can I convince my female employees that they’ll be safe if I hire someone who thinks it’s fine for a man to grab a woman by the pussy? How do I look my Iranian clients in the eye after I bring in an employee who approved of the Muslim ban? What can I say to reassure my Jewish staffers when I’ve put their futures in the hands of a supervisor who agrees that the Charlottesville mob included “some very fine people”? What do I tell our Mexican-American vendors when they have to deal with someone who’s cool with seizing their nieces and nephews and sticking them in baby cages?

This isn’t hypothetical. These are the precise questions my employees’ attorneys will ask in court if I hire a Trumper who harasses them on my dime and my time. That attorney can argue that I have full liability for this situation, because I should have known better. And if I knew up front that this person supported Trump, that inference wouldn’t be far wrong.

You don’t need to be a bigot to steer clear of these people. All you need is enough common business sense to keep a potential walking EEOC complaint off your payroll in the first place. These attitudes have no place in the context of a modern business, and people who are likely to drag them in should rightly be considered too risky to hire.

I named my first blog Undercover Blue because working at the time in the reddest part of South Carolina I kept my politics to myself. Dittoheads in the office 25 years ago listened to El Rushbo on headphones and (wisely) pretty much kept their opinions out of the aisles. More to the point, our employers were not paying us to stand around the coffee pot discussing politics and we didn’t. That wasn’t self-censorship as much as being responsible employees.

Still, I wrote under my own name while regularly employed for a decade and a half: online, in the newspaper, and here. Any H.R. staffer with limited Google skills could find me and in seconds know my politics. But I had a rarefied skill and a reputation for being good at my job, reliable, and easy to get along with. And since I kept to work at work, I never caught any blowback even in Trey Gowdy’s backyard.

A psychologist friend had a father who was a hoarder decades before the condition had a TV show. At her wedding reception, it became instantly clear her sister had no “filter.” She blurted out whatever came into her head, no matter how creepy. I kept my distance and have no idea how she made her living.

Update: In this context, how could I forget to mention Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) smackdown of Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL) and his filterless ilk?

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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.

I will admit that I enjoyed this just because it wasn’t a crude imbecile making everything worse.

Trump was given a briefing on the Russian interference in the election in August of 2016. They have just released a transcript of that briefing. And Trump asked the briefer, “Joe, are the Russians bad?”

That man would be elected president of the United States just three months later.

This document was declassified by Trump’s DNI flunky John Ratcliffe and provided to the ridiculous Senate Russia investigation. Apparently, they think this somehow helps Trump because the briefing was held by Peter Strozk and they were on the lookout for anything Trump said that could give them clues if he was aware of the Russian interference. As usual, these people see this as a grotesque abuse of power even though they were cheering on the ongoing investigations of Hillay Clinton at the time and demanding more.

But what these documents really show is that candidate Trump was an ignoramus. Surprise.

Let’s not forget that what Trump did know during this period was that he was in the midst of a deal to build Trump Tower Moscow and that would require the approval of Vladimir Putin. I’m sure he was planning to leverage such briefings into a close personal relationship with him after the election should he lose. And I would guess that he still is.

By the way, he said he spoke with Putin yet again today. Indeed, he’s been talking to him very regularly of late. We have no idea what they’ve been talking about.

Just kidding. Trump had another briefing today:

Trump: The northeast has become very clean. The country is in very good shape, other than if you look South and West pic.twitter.com/6hfaeRSCp6

— Acyn (@Acyn) July 23, 2020

Trump mentions that he had calls with his allies — Putin and MBS pic.twitter.com/z3yRti4EYb

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 23, 2020

I think the plan is that when Trump starts struggling, Rivera comes in and takes over the briefing https://t.co/3KxpreRcgT

— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) July 23, 2020

Trump announces he's planning to throw out the first pitch before a game in an empty Yankees Stadium on August 15 pic.twitter.com/h6ztR5lOd3

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 23, 2020

I don’t know about you, but I feel very reassured.

Trump has a new campaign manager and he’s telling him to change strategy.

It will do no good. If the polls don’t immediately reverse themselves, he will go back to what his gut is telling him. And what it tells him is to BS his way through the crisis.

.

Twitter cracked down this week on the cracked conspiracy theory QAnon. But this thing is much bigger than twitter. There is even a handful of QAnon GOP congressional candidates.

The Daily Beasts Will Somer who follows the kooky right wing has this:

In the real world … QAnon isn’t concerned about being banned. Its promoters earn invites to the White House, as the president retweets QAnon followers and Trump social media chief Dan Scavino posts a cartoon from avowed QAnon supporter Ben Garrison. Presidential son Eric Trump recently posted a QAnon graphic with a giant “Q” on it—probably not a sign that Trump is a closet Q-head, but more proof of QAnon’s ubiquity within MAGA world. 

Former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn recently filmed himself taking a QAnon oath with his family, thrilling QAnon followers desperate for proof that their dream of mass executions will come true. All of these Trumpworld nods to QAnon come even as the FBI considers QAnon a source of domestic terrorism. 

QAnon’s rise to real-world power is especially baffling when you consider its origins: a handful of posts on the 4Chan message board in October 2017. The posts, from a still-anonymous figure calling themselves Q, claimed that Hillary Clinton would be arrested by the end of the month. 

That prediction failed to come true, but those posts and the many Q “breadcrumbs” posted since then have spawned a thriving, and often lucrative, far-right subculture. QAnon encompasses a wide range of beliefs, from anti-vaccine activism to, for some, the theory that John F. Kennedy Jr. faked his death to team up with Trump. But just about all QAnon believers agree on the theory’s core tenets: that the world is controlled by a global pedophile cabal run by Democrats, and that Donald Trump is poised to arrest and execute them in a much-anticipated event called “The Storm.”  

QAnon’s incipient takeover of the right isn’t just confined to social media. Boosted by a pandemic and a president who believes Barack Obama was born in Kenya, QAnon and the conspiratorial thinking that spawned it has never been more prominent. A QAnon believer who compared Q to Jesus won the Republican Senate nomination in Oregon. Another QAnon fan and congressional candidate is poised to win a runoff in Georgia in a heavily Republican district, meaning the conspiracy theory could soon be represented on the House floor next year.

Meanwhile, QAnon has started to seep into American life in other unexpected ways. QAnon billboards have appeared across the country. A boxing trainer appeared on a UFC broadcast decked out in QAnon slogans. The head of New York City’s police union appeared on television with a QAnon mug in the background—an ominous nod to a theory that’s predicated on vigilante justice.

It’s not just twitter and unless Facebook and Youtube follow suit, they’ll just gather elsewhere:

Hashtags aside, there are even more obvious downsides to QAnon’s growth—ruined families, split apart by one member’s conviction that Hillary Clinton eats children, or the swathes of Republican voters who are increasingly divorced from reality. 

There’s also real-world violence. One QAnon believer allegedly drove a Samurai sword into his brother’s head, convinced of the stories told by a splinter QAnon faction that the world was controlled by lizard people. Another allegedly shot the head of a Mafia family in an attempt to bring him to Trump’s mythical QAnon tribunals, ruining his own life in the process. 

A military veteran in Arizona who became enamored with QAnon now faces a lengthy prison sentence after using an armored vehicle to shut down a bridge near the Hoover Dam to protest QAnon clues that had failed to come true. 

Another man tried to burn down Comet Ping Pong, the Washington pizzeria QAnon believers are convinced is the hub of a global pedophile cabal. The arson attempt could have killed countless patrons, including children, if employees hadn’t put out the fire. Two women have been charged with QAnon-related plots to kidnap their own children.

So far, Twitter’s purge hasn’t extended to some of QAnon’s leaders on the site. As of this writing, many of the most visible QAnon accounts—including Jordan Sather, a QAnon promoter who encourages his fans to consume a substance the FDA warns amounts to drinking bleach—are still active on the site. 

Oy vey. I don’t know how many people are involved in this. But there re more than I might have expected, judging from some of the prominent people who seem to be believers.

I guess it’s unsurprising considering that Donald Trump is president. Obviously, this country is full of people who will believe anything. But this is really creepy.

Joe Nocera of Bloomberg was a big booster of Ron DeSantis’s response to the COVID crisis. He’s big enough to admit he was wrong:

A little after 11 a.m. each weekday, I receive an email alert from the Miami Herald. It contains the latest Covid-19 numbers for Florida. And every day, I wince a little when I see them.

Florida is now the epicenter of the pandemic in the U.S. Since July 10, the number of new positive cases has averaged more than 10,000 a day. As of Wednesday, the total number of cases was nearly 380,000 according to the state’s health department. The positivity rate — the percentage of those tested who turn out to be infected — is well above 18%. Hospitals in Miami-Dade County are approaching capacity. “The residents here are terrified and I’m terrified,” Donna Shalala, Miami’s Democratic congresswoman, said over the weekend. She called for Governor Ron DeSantis to impose a lockdown. 

And who claimed that Florida was doing a good job containing the pandemic? Oh, right. It was me.

I’ve been living in Boca Raton with my family for a little more than a month now. We came here so my youngest son could attend a tennis camp, and that’s turned out to be a good call. 1 We also thought we were going someplace where the coronavirus would be less of a threat than it had been in New York. That was not such a good call.

As regular readers know, I wrote not one but two columns praising Florida’s response to the pandemic. The first time, in mid-May, I made my case by comparing Florida’s results with those of states with much smaller populations such as Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Massachusetts alone had nearly twice as many positive cases and almost three times the number of Covid-related deaths. Indeed, with a population of more than 21 million, Florida had reported astonishingly few deaths — fewer than 2,000

I gave DeSantis credit, noting that he was among the first governors to realize the importance of locking down nursing homes and insisting that staff and residents be tested regularly. He was also skeptical of the need for a statewide sheltering-in-place order. “There was really no observed experience of what the negative impacts would be,” he told the National Review.

I also believed that full-scale lockdowns cause more harm than good. I admired his willingness to buck the conventional wisdom. As a result, I was willing to overlook other things he was doing — or not doing — such as refusing to impose a statewide mask requirement. At least he wasn’t like Greg Abbott in Texas, overruling local communities wanting to issue mask mandates, I rationalized.

By the time I wrote my second Florida column, I had been living in Boca Raton for a little more than a week. Under pressure from all sides, DeSantis had grudgingly ordered a brief shutdown, but by the time my family and I arrived, we could eat in a restaurant, work out in a gym, have a drink in a bar and watch a film at a movie theater. Every one of these activities could spread the virus. 

It was clear by then that the surge had begun; the daily positive cases had risen from about 2,500 to more than 5,000 in a week. I felt safe in my neighborhood; people were wearing masks and practicing social distancing. But in Miami, 45 minutes to the south, 20-somethings were said to have thrown all caution to the wind. 

DeSantis attributed the growth of positive cases almost entirely to careless young adults. “I mean, they’re young people,” he said at a news conference. “They’re going to do what they’re going to do.”

Watching DeSantis’s news conferences became one of my new Florida rituals. It was easy to see why so many people disliked him. His office had promised to post data on hospitalizations, but when reporters asked him a week later why it hadn’t happened, he wouldn’t give a straight answer. He would rattle off Covid-19 statistics but never acknowledge that they meant things were going south. He urged people to wear masks but often didn’t wear one himself. He lacked empathy. And he often treated the media as if they were children who didn’t understand the science the way he did.

So why was I once again sanguine about Florida? Because despite the surge in positive cases, the number of deaths remained extremely low, and I believed that deaths were the most concrete way to measure the pandemic’s toll. It’s not that hospitalization data isn’t important, but it’s hard to come by and often unreliable. Some people have reported long-lasting and debilitating symptoms, but we don’t know yet whether they are common or rare. All through June, the average number of daily Covid-19 deaths in Florida remained below 40. I thought then — and I think now — that that was remarkable.

In retrospect, it’s clear that DeSantis — as well as governors in Texas, Arizona, California and a lot of other states — reopened too early because they too were swayed by their low death rates and were eager to get their economies back on track. They didn’t anticipate how opening bars, in particular, would spread the virus. They weren’t willing to get tough on people who refused to wear masks. Perhaps most important, they didn’t pay enough attention to the reproduction rate — that is, the estimate of the number of people each Covid-positive person would infect. (In Florida, according to one model, it is 1.42)

Nor did I. After my second Florida column, Felix Salmon, the financial journalist, tweeted: “I’m still unclear what exactly it is that you think DeSantis did that was so effective. Tell old people to be cautious?” His tweet caught me up short. I realized that I was giving the governor credit not because of any particular action he’d taken — other than sealing off nursing homes — but because so few Floridians had died. More likely, Florida was lucky rather than good.

Even now, with the staggering number of positive cases, DeSantis won’t issue a statewide mask mandate. Aside from bars, which he ordered closed, the governor has left decisions about shutting down businesses to the counties and cities. Early on, DeSantis took great pride in the low number of positive cases at The Villages, a huge retirement community in Central Florida with more than 120,000 residents. 2 He even cited it as an example of how the naysayers were wrong.

But now hundreds of people who live there are coming down with Covid-19, and the infection rate is 9%. The New York Times reported a few days ago that in the space of two weeks, the percentage of Covid-19 patients in their 80s who had been hospitalized in the Jackson Health System in Miami-Dade County had jumped to 18% from 9%. So much for DeSantis’s theory that only 20-somethings were getting sick.

When you look at the states that are facing surges right now — Florida, Texas, Arizona, Mississippi, Nevada, and others  — they follow the same pattern. They saw very little of the virus when the Northeast was getting crushed. They let their guard down — even bragged about their success. Then, when it turned out that virus had simply taken its sweet time making its way south and west, it took them too long to awaken to the threat.

Although the positive case numbers are terrible across the board, the death rates are still low. Texas has 347,000 cases but only 4,100 deaths. Mississippi has 45,000 cases and 1,400 deaths. Arizona has 149,000 cases, and less than 3,000 deaths. Florida’s 380,000 positive cases had yielded 5,435 deaths as of Wednesday.

Whenever I bring this up, I’m reminded that deaths are a lagging indicator. But this surge began in early June; if the virus were acting the same way it did in the Northeast, the death rate would be far higher by now. I also realize that doctors know a lot more about how to treat Covid-19. But that can’t be the whole answer either. For reasons not yet understood, the virus simply isn’t killing as many people in these states as it did in New York and New Jersey in March and April. The one thing we can say with some certainty is that it’s not the governors’ doing.

Earlier this month, DeSantis issued an emergency order that schools would have to reopen physically five days a week. Again, I find myself agreeing with him. There is scant evidence that grade-school children can transmit the virus to their elders, and keeping schools closed is likely to inflict enormous societal harm.

But in what I now realize is his modus operandi, DeSantis offered nothing besides his order. No sense that he understood the fears of parents or teachers. No offer of state money to help school districts prepare to open safely. No willingness to delay the opening of school to give everyone more time to get ready. 

Teachers are furious, and so are many parents. School boards are protesting. The teacher’s union has sued the state. When I turn on the South Florida call-in shows, I hear angry voters pummeling DeSantis. 

This time, I can’t disagree: He’s earned it fair and square.

Ron DeSantis is one of the most obnoxious Trumpist politicians in the country and he’s clearly in over his head. His insistence that the best way to deal with the crisis is to demand that people believe him or believe their lying eyes is an ongoing disaster.

Other states are suffering from this, including California, where I live. Much of what Nocera says about hubris applies to us as well. I was writing on this blog a month ago about how (mostly) young Californians all around me were acting as though the virus didn’t exist the minute the state opened for business. It was clear that the message they had received was that they wouldn’t get sick and also that they needn’t worry about spreading it. (I maintain some hope that they weren’t all so selfish that they knew and didn’t care…) That failure applies to Democratic Governors as well as Republicans.

But Republicans like DeSantis and Ducey in Arizona have been something special. They went out of their way to imply that the virus wasn’t something to take seriously because just like Trump, they didn’t give a damn if people were dying and assumed it was a small price to pay for a thriving economy. And, like Trump, they showed their ignorance by assuming they could bullshit people into going along with this. In fact, they managed to do that with a whole lot of people and look where we are today.

People cherry pick “evidence” to support their priors which Nocera admits that he did. We all do it. But some people do have strong bullshit detectors which kick into high gear when a jerk like DeSantis starts ranting and raving about how unfair everyone is for questioning him. Mine was clanging like Big Ben when I saw this idiotic performance:

Note the potted plant standing next to him.

So Michael Cohen really was taken back to jail simply because he refused to sign some paper that he wouldn’t write a book about Trump? That seems to be the case …

Sure, there’s nothing dicey about that at all. It’s perfectly normal for the Bureau of Prisons to take such an interest in such things. Perfectly normal…

It looks like a judge wasn’t having it:

Michael Cohen will be released to home confinement, a judge ruled on Thursday, finding that the government acted in a retaliatory manner when it took President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney and fixer into custody earlier this month.”The purpose of transferring Mr. Cohen from furlough and home confinement to jail is retaliatory and its retaliatory because of his desire to exercise his first amendment rights to publish a book and discuss anything about the book or anything else he wants on social media and others,” Judge Alvin Hellerstein ruled during a telephonic hearing.

Cohen, who has been held in solitary confinement at federal prison in Otisville, New York, since he was remanded on July 9, will be released by 2 p.m. ET Friday after he takes a test for the coronavirus.

Cohen and prosecutors will have one week to negotiate the terms of his release as it relates to his involvement with the media.”Just as you wouldn’t have a press conference from a jail cell, you shouldn’t be able to have a press conference from your home. You can communicate, you can discuss, you can post on social media, but you can’t make a confinement into a free person. You can’t make a person confined in jail or at home into totally free person. There’s got to be a limit,” Hellerstein said.

Cohen’s attorney called the judge’s order a “victory for the First Amendment.”The ruling confirms “that the government cannot block Mr. Cohen from publishing a book critical of the president as a condition of his release to home confinement,” Danya Perry, who argued on behalf of Cohen at the hearing, said in a statement. “This principle transcends politics and we are gratified that the rule of law prevails.”

Maybe Cohen can stop himself from being the dumbest man on the planet and going out to dinner when he’s under house arrest.

Oh my god. pic.twitter.com/hP3h20Oxuc

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) July 23, 2020

Lol:

Having taken the functional equivalent of a blood pressure test to evaluate his mental acuity, President Trump has repeatedly bragged about the results. The president, who claims to be a genius with a remarkable IQ, has on at least five occasions in the past 2 ½ years touted the results of his Montreal Cognitive Assessment test, a test meant to ensure mental integrity, not prove mental excellence.

It started shortly after he took the test, when he told an interviewer from Reuters in January 2018 that tensions with North Korea had not been solved by previous presidents because “I guess they all realized they’re going to have to leave it to a president that scored the highest on tests.” Which, again, is like saying that past presidents wanted to ensure that the situation was left for the guy whose cholesterol levels were lowest.

Speaking at a Republican fundraiser a few days later, he insisted that his performance was something special.

“Let me tell you,” he said of the 30-question test, “those last 10 questions are hard. There aren’t a lot of people that can do that.”

Except, of course, for people with unimpaired cognition.

Over the past few months, the subject has reemerged because Trump and his reelection campaign are trying to paint former vice president Joe Biden as suffering from mental decline. Biden, Trump’s likely opponent in November’s general election, has a habit of fumbling words and phrases, allowing the Trump campaign to produce a battery of video snippets suggesting that something more significant is going on.

Late last month, that line of attack was picked up by a Fox News reporter, who asked Biden directly if he had been tested for cognitive issues.

“I’ve been tested. I’m constantly tested,” Biden said in response. “Look, all you’ve got to do is watch me, and I can hardly wait to compare my cognitive capability to the cognitive capability of the man I’m running against.”

In a conversation with Fox News’s Sean Hannity a few days later, Hannity asked the president about Biden’s response.

“I aced it. I aced the test,” Trump said. “And he should take the same exact test, a very standard test. I took it at Walter Reed Medical Center in front of doctors.”

Those doctors, Trump claimed, “said that’s an unbelievable thing. Rarely does anybody do what you just did.” Which — to belabor the point — is akin to saying the doctor fawned over the unprecedented extent to which your lower leg jerked forward when he tapped your knee with his rubber hammer.

This bizarre insistence that he is particularly good at this test dropped the president into a spiral of his own creation: bemused reactions about his crowing led to more questions about it and more boasting from Trump.

In an interview with Fox News’s Chris Wallace, Trump insisted that “the first few questions are easy, but I’ll bet you couldn’t even answer the last five questions” because they “get very hard.”

He was objecting to Wallace’s noting that one question demanded that the test subject properly identify an elephant.

In an interview that aired on — you guessed it — Fox News on Wednesday night, Trump offered the lengthiest and oddest defense of his successful test.

“The first questions are very easy; the last questions are much more difficult,” he explained. “Like a memory question. It’s like” — he looked around him — “you’ll go: person, woman, man, camera, TV. So they’d say, ‘Could you repeat that?’”

“So I said, ‘Yeah.’ So it’s person, woman, man, camera, TV. ‘Okay, that’s very good,'” he continued. “If you get it in order, you get extra points. If you — okay. Now he’s asking you other questions, other questions, and then 10 minutes, 15-20 minutes later, they’d say, ‘remember the first question?’ Not the first, but the 10th question — ‘Give us that again, can you do that again?’ And you go, ‘person, woman, man, camera, TV.’ If you get it in order, you get extra points.”

“They said, ‘Nobody gets it in order,’” Trump claimed. “It’s actually not that easy. But for me it was easy.”

By now, we’re all sufficiently familiar with Trump to track what’s happening here. He bragged about how well he did at something, because this is what he does — but when challenged on that boasting, he couldn’t resist doubling down. And so here we are, with Trump spending an extended period of time repeating five words in a television interview by way of proving how mentally sharp he is.

As for his campaign’s goal of getting people talking about Biden? It’s not working as intended.

A review of discussion on cable news shows that while Fox News and Fox Business spent more time talking about Biden in the context of mental acuity or decline, CNN and MSNBC spent more time focused on Trump. It’s not the case that the coverage posited that Trump or Biden was necessarily suffering a decline. It is the case, though, that Trump was spurring a lot of conversation that probably wasn’t what was intended.

Even on Fox itself, there have been seven days this month when Trump was more of a topic of conversation in the context of mental capacity and capabilities than Biden.

The data above are a summary of Internet Archive closed-captioning data compiled by the GDELT Project. GDELT also tracks online news sources; that analysis shows far more discussion of Trump than Biden.

In public Facebook posts, the effect has been remarkable, according to data from the social metrics site CrowdTangle. While Biden was more a subject of conversation at the beginning of the month, Trump’s repeated seizing of the conversation has had the effect of redirecting attention to himself.

Again, this wasn’t the goal. The Trump campaign wanted everyone raising eyebrows at the things Biden was saying. Trump, though, got every person — every woman and man — talking about himself, thanks to looking into that camera and appearing on TV.

I get extra points for using the words in order.

On the heels of Digby’s post yesterday about the right’s Avenging Angel myth comes a column by Thomas Edsall on the rise of authoritarian conservatism.

Rick Perlstein’s 2016 Washington Spectator column recounts the tumultuous New York of the 1970s, the milieu which as much as Fred Trump shaped young Donald’s view of the world. It often seems the acting president’s views are frozen in time. That time. It’s not combed straight back, but he even sculpts his hair every morning as carefully as John Travolta in 1977’s Saturday Night Fever.

The federal civil rights lawsuit against Fred’s company (1973), “coming of age in the New York of the 1977 blackout, the search for the Son of Sam,” the release of Death Wish (1974) and Taxi Driver (1976), contributed to the rise of what Perlstein describes as “vigilante conservatism.”

Edsall provides some scholarly takes on the relative difference in open-mindedness between conservatives and liberals, as well as differences in cognitive styles. Little of this is new to readers here. Nor are the results of studies showing conservative thinkers are “particularly susceptible to misinformation” more prone to accept conspiracy theories.

More important to this Trumpian period is the difference between authoritarians and non-authoritarians.

Karen Stenner, the author of “The Authoritarian Dynamic,” wrote Edsall to explain the threat to liberal democracy posed by the “authoritarian revolution … which in the U.S. has been creeping up since the 1960s” beside “laissez faire conservatism.”

Stenner believes the “overriding objective of the authoritarian is always to enhance oneness and sameness; to minimize the diversity of people, beliefs and behaviors.” Threats to these norms activate an “authoritarian dynamic.”

Edsall writes:

Stenner makes the case that the authoritarian revolution began in the 1960s: “Once the principle of equal treatment under the law was instituted and entrenched by means of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act,” traditional conservatism — “fidelity to the laws of the land and defense of legitimate institutions” — took a back seat to authoritarianism “as a factor driving expressions of racial, moral and political intolerance.”

Stenner takes the analysis of contemporary conflict and polarization full circle back to the fundamental American divide over race, a subject that touches on virtually every issue facing the nation.

And Trump is determined to use authoritarian means to restore race to the core of his campaign.

The urban disorder Trump saw in New York the 1970s is central to how he sees the world now. It feeds his Bronsonesque sense of self and purpose. He has introduced federal police in Portland hoping to provoke a violent response from protesters that will, in turn, justify a violent crackdown and activate “vigilante conservatism” among his base voters. Next comes New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore and Oakland, all cities run by “liberal Democrats.”

The important thing now is that protesters not give Trump what he so clearly wants. Continue to oppose police violence without giving his internal security forces the justification Trump wants for his proposed crackdown.

Stay with me here.

In a Daily Kos posting Wednesday, Markos Moulitsas made an intriguing pitch for why he, reluctantly, no longer thinks Sen. Elizabeth Warren is Joe Biden’s best pick for vice president. Winning is the prime directive:

In practical terms, impeached president Donald Trump’s poll numbers have cratered—both his job approvals and his head-to-head numbers against Biden, including in key battleground states. In fact, what were originally just seven battlegrounds (Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) have expanded dramatically, as Alaska, Iowa, Montana, Ohio, and Texas are now also in play. 

Trump is flailing, unable to do what he needs to do to turn things around, and he’s bringing down the entire GOP with him. Democrats are poised to retake the Senate and gain seats in the House, as well as log big gains further down the ballot in critical state legislative races. 

Trump has gotten no traction in his attacks against Joe Biden. “Trump’s best work comes when he is being racist or sexist. It’s what personally motivates him the most, and it’s what best motivates his base.” Without someone he personally loathes, “Trump’s campaign is moribund, listless, low-energy. He just can’t seem to get excited about reelection to a job he clearly hates.”

Kos proposes Biden choose California Rep. Karen Bass. She is the current chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and former speaker of the California Assembly and, he writes, “a bona fide, unimpeachable progressive.” Best of all, “Donald Trump has no idea who she is.”

Remember, the more Trump flails, the more we win. If you give him a known target, he can build off existing attack narratives, giving the right-wing media machine easy ways to rile up and motivate their racist base. 

With Bass, he has no existing narrative he or his Fox News enablers can pull from a drawer. It will take time to construct one against a relative unknown while “Biden is running away with the map.”

I’m not jumping on the Bass bandwagon but see some merit in Kos’s logic. To use the vigilante analogy, Trump’s magazine is empty and his slide is locked back. The last thing Biden needs to do is hand him a fresh box of ammunition.

The same is true for protests in cities where Trump plans to send his goon squads. He wants a violent response. He needs one to give his coronavirus-weary base oxygen. He’s bent on provoking one. Nonviolent confrontation is more important than ever.

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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.