500,000 people are under evacuation order in Oregon today, 10 percent of the population.
The west is on fire.
Donald Trump has not said one word about it. I guess he doesn’t even care about his voters out here. If they don’t live in a state that will go for him in the electoral college, fuck ’em.
This one is just unbelievable. In order to facilitate Chad Wolf and Bill Barr’s little “show of force” for Trump’s photo-op last June, they actually transported COVID across the country:
The Trump administration flew immigrant detainees to Virginia this summer to facilitate the rapid deployment of Homeland Security tactical teams to quell protests in Washington, circumventing restrictions on the use of charter flights for employee travel, according to a current and a former U.S. official.
After the transfer, dozens of the new arrivals tested positive for the novel coronavirus, fueling an outbreak at the Farmville, Va., immigration jail that infected more than 300 inmates, one of whom died.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the agency moved the detainees on “ICE Air” charter flights to avoid overcrowding at detention facilities in Arizona and Florida, a precaution they said was taken because of the pandemic.
But a Department of Homeland Security official with direct knowledge of the operation, and a former ICE official who learned about it from other personnel, said the primary reason for the June 2 transfers was to skirt rules that bar ICE employees from traveling on the charter flights unless detainees are also aboard.
The transfers took place over the objections of ICE officials in the Washington field office, according to testimony at a Farmville town council meeting in August, and at a time when immigration jails elsewhere in the country had plenty of beds available because of a dramatic decrease in border crossings and in-country arrests.
“They needed to justify the movement of SRT,” said the DHS official, referring to the special response teams. The official and the former ICE official spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal decisions. They and another DHS official briefed on the operation characterized the tactical teams’ travel on ICE Air as a misuse of the charter flights.
At a hearing in a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of four detainees who were already at Farmville, an ICE attorney told a judge that one reason for the transfer was that “ICE has an air regulation whereby in order to move agents of ICE, they have to be moved from one location to another with detainees on the same airplane.”
I know Bill Barr was in on this because he bragged about chartering a plane to pick up federal agents all over the country to go to Los Angeles back in 1992. It seems likely to me that the plan to deploy federal prison guards and ICE Agents to DC for the protests sprang from him.
And Trump has found his perfect little Himmler in Chad Wolf.
I’ve been thinking about the fact that I was very lucky to have lived most of my life in fairly peaceful times in a prosperous, safe country. There are a lot of people my age on this planet who weren’t so lucky. There has been much cultural tumult in the US in the post WWII years, of course, and plenty of drama, but as far as big world-changing events that shift the firmament of your existence, I think the last 20 years have been the most consequential for Americans, first with 9/11 and now the pandemic. (Obviously, climate change is the big kahuna but it’s been happening in slow motion so hasn’t been acutely felt — but it’s starting to.)
This piece by Greg Sargent brilliantly explores this question in light of Trump’s phony appropriation of the anti-war position even as he exploits and revels in all the excesses that 9/11 wrought on the culture:
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Time magazine’s cover vividly captured the explosive force pulverizing the first Twin Tower — a photo that, strikingly, was ringed by a black border. Nineteen years later, the magazine’s new cover powerfully memorializes the nearly 200,000 Americans who have died of coronavirus — in an image that’s again ringed by a black border.
With President Trump and challenger Joe Biden both commemorating the anniversary of the 2001 attacks on Friday, that bookending of the post-9/11 era captures something essential about our current moment: In a way, it exposes the entire mythos of the Trump presidency as an utter fraud to its very core.
The story Trump and his mythologists tell runs something like this: After 9/11, the country was essentially destroyed by a combination of neoconservative and liberal internationalist elite failures — by a hyper-militarized overreaction to the attacks, and by excessive diplomatic and economic engagement with the world.
This led to a series of catastrophic elite policy disasters that were sold with lies, the tale continues, including “Mideast Forever Wars” that killed thousands of Americans and globalized economic policies that destroyed the white working class through competition with immigrant labor and China.
Trump has brought his business smarts and personal knowledge of elite corruption to the task of extracting our country from these international entanglements — which were stupid and wasteful and only enriched elites — and put the American people first again.
In just about every way, this story has fallen to pieces. And the anniversary of 9/11 should drive this home.
Trump is now presiding over his own form of massive elite policy failure, one that has killed more Americans than 9/11 and the militarized overreaction to it many times over. Just like the Iraq War, it, too, was initially sold and is getting covered up with unrestrained official propagandizing and lying.
Meanwhile, some of the very worst abuses and pathologies of the Trump presidency represent continuations of our overreaction to 9/11. He has exacerbated the Islamophobia it helped unleash to an extraordinarily explicit degree, and he has politically weaponized the post-9/11 homeland security bureaucracy in just the way its initial critics feared.
We saw this when Trump endorsed a virulently Islamophobic congressional candidate, only the latest example in his long history of open anti-Islamic bigotry. And we’re seeing this now with extraordinary abuses at the Department of Homeland Security, which was birthed amid the post-9/11 climate of fear. While it committed serious abuses under former president Barack Obama, it has now been corrupted by Trump and his cabal in just about every conceivable way.
This goes far beyond immigration. We just learned from a DHS whistleblower that top officials appear to have manipulated intelligence to help fabricate the existence of an organized leftist domestic terror threat for Trump to run for reelection against. That comes after DHS sent armies of law enforcement into urban protest zones to provoke the civil conflict that Trump believes will boost that case.AD
All this rank Islamophobia and all this corrupt weaponization of DHS to target domestic dissidents and help manufacture Trump’s reelection agitprop are in many ways crucial aspects of our national 9/11 legacy. They will not be discussed at Friday’s commemorations.
Joe Biden, too, represents aspects of these post-9/11 failures. He supported the Iraq War, and he was a supporter of opening up China to trade, though the story there is complicated.
Trump is using these facts to continue casting Biden as a member of that failed, corrupt, militaristic, globalist post-9/11 elite, and himself as their scourge. When military officials leaked that Trump called our war dead “losers,” he positioned himself as an opponent of the military-industrial complex’s war lust.
But Trump cannot credibly tell this story. His trade wars with China are a disaster. He spent weeks covering for China’s coronavirus failures to sustain the lie that he had it mastered here. Biden, not Trump, is proposing concrete policies for rebuilding U.S. manufacturing.
Biden’s balance on China — build international coalitions to confront unfair trade practices while seeking cooperation on climate change and global pandemics — will prove far better. As a terrific New York Times piece chronicled, his approach is rooted in learning from his long and complex series of interactions with China, which included much good and bad. Trump cannot learn.
What’s more, Trump did not actually oppose the Iraq War. And the Trumpist vow to undo our post-9/11 militaristic excesses has always been mostly nonsense — he regularly boasts of building up the military and even talks about maximal weapons sales abroad as good business for the United States, which it has long been.
And while Biden’s brand of hawkish liberal internationalism badly needs a rethink, we are now seeing Trump’s own supposed hostility to hyper-militarization morph into hideous domestic abuses of the national security state right before our eyes.
Above all, Trump is responsible for the most catastrophic elite policy failure of the modern era.
When we learned Trump privately knew the airborne coronavirus threat was far deadlier than he publicly allowed — and that he admitted to publicly downplaying it — it exposed his disastrous mishandling of the pandemic in a new way.
When this is understood as exactly the sort of massive elite policy disaster — buttressed by extraordinary willful deception and deeply depraved unconcern for the lives of untold Americans — that the Trump mythos created as his foil, that mythos implodes further.
As the nearly 200,000 deaths help illustrate, Trump and his cronies have turned out to be a stupider, more corrupt, more incompetent, more dishonest and more depraved elite than even the caricature version of pre-Trump elites he created as a foil to gain power. Trump has carried forward the very worst of our post-9/11 pathologies.
Much of this will be taboo for our politicians on 9/11’s anniversary. But it shouldn’t be for the rest of us.
America’s 9/11 response was very, very bad and the ramifications of that failure will be felt for many decades. But Trump’s original and unique exploitation of that should be a wake-up call that the dynamics we all thought governed our country could be turned inside out.
It’s important to stay flexible of mind in times like these. It’s very, very easy for things to go sideways if you insist on continuously fighting the last war.
It’s amazing to me how Trump’s obvious personal financial corruption in office has basically been met with a collective shrug of the shoulders. No one has ever done what he did, which is simply carry on with his business as if there’s nothing unusual about a president openly financially profiting from his position.
I don’t really know what this means. Clearly, Republicans will never say a peep about one of their own unethically profiting from the presidency. Since they don’t acknowledge the concept of hypocrisy and are totally shameless in every way, this will not stop them from shrieking about corruption in a Democratic politician. Witness the current absurd Senate “probe” by Dan Burton over false claims that Joe Biden did … something … years ago as vice president, to generate a profit for his son in Ukraine.
Nonetheless, it’s important to know exactly how this criminal, whose real finances are hidden from the American people, managed to profit from the presidency. Someday, if the fever ever breaks and his cult disappears, we may be able to put this country back together again.
The following excerpt is by Dan Alexander, Forbes business editor and author of White House, Inc.: How Donald Trump Turned the Presidency into a Business, scheduled for release Sept. 22, 2020.
It is astonishing:
Donald Trump never really got out of business. Sure, he handed day-to-day management of his companies to his children, like a lot of tycoons who get preoccupied with other interests late in life. But the president held onto ownership of his assets after taking office, ensuring that he would continue to generate money while serving in the White House. From 2017 to 2019, the president’s businesses raked in an estimated $1.9 billion of revenue.
It’s a significant sum, no matter how you look at it. Documents from various sources—including private lenders, local governments, federal officials and overseas regulators—help show where the money comes from and roughly how much of it turns into profit. An analysis that relies on those documents and conversations with industry experts, broken down for the first time in the forthcoming book White House, Inc., provides an unprecedented look at the president’s finances, which he has worked so hard to shield from public scrutiny.
Presidential Profits
Trump’s licensing, management and hotel empire has been fading, but his golf and club business has picked up the slack. The president’s commercial buildings remain his cash cows.
Trump’s golf course and club portfolio produced the biggest chunk of revenue, some $753 million in three years. The Trump National Doral golf resort in Miami, Florida led the way, bringing in $228 million of revenue from 2017 to 2019, about three-quarters of the total from the 10 other golf courses Trump owns in the United States. In Europe, another golf resort named Trump Turnberry generated $70 million. Holdings in Doonbeg, Ireland and Aberdeenshire, Scotland added $53 million, while Mar-a-Lago took in $69 million.
Golf Course and Club Revenues (2017 – 19)
Despite all the revenue it generates, the president’s golf and club business is not where he earns the biggest profits. Financial statements from the Trump Organization and conversations with golf industry insiders suggest that the president’s traditional golf clubs have operating margins of roughly 20%. His golf resorts produce even slimmer profits. In 2017, Trump National Doral earned just $4.3 million on $75.4 million in revenue. None of his three European properties have ever recorded an annual profit, according to the most recent financial data available.
Stuck In The Rough
Only one of Trump’s four golf resorts turned a profit in 2017 and 2018, according to a set of documents that is not yet available for 2019.
The second-biggest revenue generator is Trump’s collection of commercial real estate assets. New York City remains the hub. The president continues to own the commercial space inside Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, a lease to 40 Wall Street in the financial district, and a 30% stake in 1290 Avenue of the Americas, one of the broad-shouldered office buildings that defines midtown Manhattan. The New York City holdings generated an estimated $461 million in revenue from 2017 to 2019. Another $114 million or so came from Trump’s 30% interest in 555 California Street, a skyscraper in the heart of San Francisco.
The President’s Rent
Trump’s commercial real estate portfolio has drawn in hundreds of millions in revenue while he’s served in office, as these estimates show.
In contrast to the modest-margin golf properties, Trump’s commercial real estate assets convert more like 50% of their revenue into profit. That means that they have been far more lucrative than the golf courses and clubs, throwing off an estimated $313 million of income from operations in the first three years Trump sat in the White House. The commercial properties also come with greater conflicts. Golf assets generate smaller amounts of money from lots of people, whereas commercial real estate holdings tend to collect bigger sums from fewer customers. So although there’s a lot of talk about potential influence from Trump’s club members, the customers who can really impact his bottom line are those renting space in his buildings.
Skyscrapers Of Gold
Trump’s commercial real estate portfolio threw off more than $100 million in estimated profits from operations every year from 2017 to 2019.
Trump’s hotels also tend to get a lot of attention, particularly his Washington, D.C. palace down the street from the White House. Trump’s revenues at the place totaled $122 million from 2017 to 2019. The real estate titan has sold off a chunk of hotel rooms in Chicago and Las Vegas, allowing outside investors to buy into those buildings. The Chicago hotel, where Trump still holds 175 of the 339 units, generated $102 million of revenue from the start of 2017 to the end of 2018, according to documents obtained by the Washington Post. In Las Vegas, the president disclosed about $69 million of hotel revenue from 2017 to 2019. At a handful of other properties—in Canada, Uruguay, Panama, Turkey and elsewhere—Trump either licensed his name or managed buildings on behalf of other owners. Altogether, Trump’s licensing, management and hotel businesses reaped an estimated $410 million in revenue during the first three years their owner served as president.
Capital Appreciation
The president has disclosed remarkably consistent revenues at his D.C. hotel every year since taking office.
Running a hotel, like operating a golf course, is a hands-on, high-cost business, cutting into potential earnings. Trump’s property in Washington generated profit margins (calculated using earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) of just 11% in the first four months of 2017. The president’s Chicago hotel fared even worse, producing margins of 9% in 2017 and 4% in 2018.
Falling Fortunes
Estimated profits inside Trump’s licensing, management and hotel empire have slipped each year.
Trump gets additional revenue from a variety of sources, including some that other real estate barons would never consider. In New York City’s Central Park, his business operates a skating rink and a carousel that generated $29 million during the first three years he served as president. There are also restaurants, like the Trump Grill inside Trump Tower, home to the famous taco bowl, which then-candidate Trump touted on Cinco de Mayo, 2016. He has gotten money from selling books, renting mansions, leasing aircraft, and so on. All the miscellaneous revenue added up to an estimated $90 million from 2017 to 2019.
Random Revenue
Trump receives more money from properties he sells. The president ditched his 4% stake in a Brooklyn housing project for an estimated $33 million in 2018. He sold 11 oceanside lots outside of Los Angeles for another $23 million. He offloaded about 100 units inside the Las Vegas tower, generating $17 million. A single condo on Park Avenue in Manhattan, dealt to a woman who publicly boasts about her connections to government officials, brought in $15.9 million. A mansion in Beverly Hills, sold to a company connected to an Indonesian tycoon, produced another $13.5 million. Trump’s team promised he would do no new foreign deals while in office, but then he sold $3.2 million worth of land in the Dominican Republic. And on and on. Added up, all those transactions produced an estimated $118 million over three years.
The Donald’s Deals
The president sold an estimated $118 million of property from 2017 to 2019, through more than 100 under-the-radar transactions.
The flow of money has likely slowed down in 2020, thanks to the coronavirus. But the spigot hasn’t shut off completely. Day after day, new visitors arrive at Trump’s hotels, dine at his restaurants, golf on his courses, and rent his buildings. It’s difficult to put precise figures on all of that without seeing more documentation (which won’t be available until next year). But it seems certain that Trump’s businesses will accept more than $100 million in 2020. And that means that, even if his tenure ends in January 2021, Trump should still be the first president to literally rake in billions of dollars while serving in office.
If we know one thing about Donald Trump it’s that people who pledge fealty t him, in word, deed or piles of cash, will be rewarded by him. These “transactions” form the entirety of his worldview.
It figures that Bob Woodward, the man who helped to take down Richard Nixon 45 years ago, would follow up with a big book about Nixon’s natural heir to the presidency, Donald Trump. Just as Nixon was undone by tape recordings he foolishly made to document his own corruption, so too Trump foolishly allowed himself to be recorded by Woodward. That’s what sets Woodward’s book “Rage” apart from all the other Trump books that have come before: We can hear the quotes in Trump’s own voice, so he can’t get away with calling it fake news.
I think most of us who have been observing this surreal presidency for the past four years have wondered whether Trump is more ignorant than malevolent or vice versa. (Obviously, he’s both: It’s just a question of which is dominant.) It’s been especially hard to know during this pandemic catastrophe because the president has made so many ill-informed comments and odious decisions, from the inane hydroxychloroquine campaign to his decision not to implement a national testing program because most of the people dying in the early days were in blue states.
Listening to Trump blithely tell Woodward at the beginning of February that he knew the pandemic was going to kill a whole lot more people than the flu and that it was an airborne disease proves that he is malevolent first and foremost. You can hear it in his voice — so blandly detached and dispassionate as he talks about what he describes as “deadly stuff.” We know he’d been warned about the likelihood of the virus coming to America by this point. Woodward even reports that national security adviser Robert O’Brien had told Trump in January that the virus would be the “biggest national security threat you face in your presidency.”
It’s clear that Trump simply didn’t care about that. And he never changed. CNN reports this anecdote from the book that backs up that impression:
On March 19, as the coronavirus pandemic was exploding, Woodward asked Trump if he ever sat down alone with Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to learn more about the virus.”Yes, I guess, but honestly there’s not a lot of time for that, Bob,” Trump said to Woodward. “This is a busy White House. We’ve got a lot of things happening. And then this came up.”
Woodward notes in the book that Trump had found the time to “carve out hours” to do interviews with him throughout the crisis.
When Trump says he didn’t want to start a “panic” it’s obvious that he meant he didn’t want a stock market panic. Recall that he reportedly went nuts when Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the CDC, did what any public health scientist would do and announced on Feb. 25 that the coronavirus (which Trump already knew was “deadly stuff”) was likely to cause massive disruption in the United States. The markets nosedived and Trump was livid, threatening to fire her for doing her job.
The markets had already been dropping before that, but Trump was convinced that he could prop them up with lies and rosy scenarios. They did rebound after the big crash in March, which Trump undoubtedly attributes to his happy talk and his forceful demands that the economy open up regardless of the death and destruction that might result. And maybe he’s right about that.
Recall that when states started to open up their economies and the markets began to rebound in May, Trump initially announced he would disband the coronavirus task force altogether. As far as he was concerned, the problem had been solved. (After an outcry, the White House kept the task force, although they stopped meeting as often.)
It’s obvious that Trump has never, from the beginning, cared in the slightest about the pain and suffering caused by this deadly virus. I’m reminded of that anecdote about an early April task force meeting in which Trump wanted to open up the economy immediately and just let the pandemic “wash over the country.” He was told that would result in many, many deaths. Yet, according to the Washington Post, he raised that idea repeatedly — and essentially, that’s the plan he ultimately implemented by default. (Indeed, Trump has now elevated Dr. Scott Atlas, a radiologist he saw on Fox News who believes in herd immunity — but has no particular expertise in epidemics or infectious disease — to a high-status advisory position in the White House.) .
We can say now that when it comes to the pandemic at least, malevolence was the driving force behind Trump’s decisions.
But I think the other revelations reported in this book so far can better be attributed to ignorance. For instance, in the very first conversation they had, he told Woodward all about his new secret nuclear program that he claimed Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping knew nothing about — but would be very impressed if they did. Woodward confirmed this with other sources, but was told that people in the national security realm were a bit shocked that Trump had told a journalist about it.
That’s just dumb. So is all the ridiculous folderol over North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un, whom Trump believed could be cajoled into giving up his nuclear weapons by snuggling up to him. Woodward asked people in the CIA about Kim’s “beautiful letters” to Trump and was told that while intelligence officials didn’t know who had actually written them, they were “masterpieces.”
The analysts marveled at the skill someone brought to finding the exact mixture of flattery while appealing to Trump’s sense of grandiosity and being center stage in history.
It’s pretty obvious who was being played in that relationship.
Meanwhile, Trump’s former Defense Secretary James Mattis and former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats went on the record with Woodward. Coats told him that Trump “doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie,” while Mattis said the president “has no moral compass.” And those were the nicer quotes.
Mattis in particular is scathing, telling Woodward, “What we’re doing is we’re actually showing [enemy nations] how to destroy America. That’s what we’re showing them. How to isolate us from all of our allies. How to take us down. And it’s working very well. We are declaring war on one another inside America. It’s actually working against us right now.”
When asked whether he thinks it’s possible for a president to be tough and also keep the peace he replied. “Not with the current occupant. He doesn’t understand. He has no mental framework for these things. He hasn’t read.”
So, malevolence or ignorance? When it comes to politics and domestic policy, the evidence strongly suggests that malevolence governs Donald Trump — but that ignorance rules when it comes to national security.
On Wednesday night, Trump told Sean Hannity on the latter’s Fox News prime-time show, “I probably, almost definitely won’t read [Woodward’s book] because I don’t have time to read it.” He won’t be calling it fake news, though. Because, lordy, there are tapes. Richard Nixon must be rolling over in his grave with laughter.
A Trump administration appointee at the Department of Health and Human Services is trying to prevent Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, from speaking about the risks that coronavirus poses to children.
Emails obtained by POLITICO show Paul Alexander — a senior adviser to Michael Caputo, HHS’s assistant secretary for public affairs — instructing press officers and others at the National Institutes of Health about what Fauci should say during media interviews. The Trump adviser weighed in on Fauci’s planned responses to outlets including Bloomberg News, BuzzFeed, Huffington Post and the science journal Cell.
Alexander’s lengthy messages, some sent as recently as this week, are couched as scientific arguments. But they often contradict mainstream science while promoting political positions taken by the Trump administration on hot-button issues ranging from the use of convalescent plasma to school reopening.
The emails add to evidence that the White House, and Trump appointees within HHS, are pushing health agencies to promote a political message instead of a scientific one.
“I continue to have an issue with kids getting tested and repeatedly and even university students in a widespread manner…and I disagree with Dr. Fauci on this. Vehemently,” Alexander wrote in one Aug. 27 email, responding to a press-office summary of what Fauci intended to tell a Bloomberg reporter.
And on Tuesday, Alexander told Fauci’s press team that the scientist should not promote mask-wearing by children during an MSNBC interview.
“Can you ensure Dr. Fauci indicates masks are for the teachers in schools. Not for children,” Alexander wrote. “There is no data, none, zero, across the entire world, that shows children especially young children, spread this virus to other children, or to adults or to their teachers. None. And if it did occur, the risk is essentially zero,” he continued — adding without evidence that children take influenza home, but not the coronavirus.
In a statement attributed to Caputo, HHS said that Fauci is an important voice during the pandemic and that Alexander specializes in analyzing the work of other scientists.
“Dr. Alexander advises me on pandemic policy and he has been encouraged to share his opinions with other scientists,” Caputo said. “Like all scientists, his advice is heard and taken or rejected by his peers. I hired Dr. Alexander for his expertise and not to simply resonate others’ opinions.”
Neither Alexander nor NIH spokespeople responded to requests for comment.
Fauci, an infectious disease expert whohas led NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for nearly four decades, told POLITICO that he had not seen the emails and his staff had not instructed him to minimize the risk coronavirus poses to children or the need for kids to wear masks.
“No one tells me what I can say and cannot say,” Fauci said. “I speak on scientific evidence.”
Alexander, a part-time professor of health research methods at McMaster University in Canada, joined HHS in March. He was appointed by Caputo, a longtime Trump ally now overseeing HHS’s media strategy.
Only the best.
I thought this was interesting in light of Trump’s insistence that he’s just trying to calm the waters with his happy talk about miracle cures and disappearing virus:
In July, the Washington Post reported that Alexander had cracked down on the CDC after it warned pregnant women about the virus. The agency’s warning “reads in a way to frighten women . . . as if the President and his administration can’t fix this and it is getting worse,” Alexander wrote in an e-mail, according to the Post.
There you have it. KIll people so they don’t get the idea that the president doesn’t know what he’s doing.
That’s the logic.
The Trump administration appointee has also argued against the scientific consensus on the need for widespread testing to contain the virus, and randomized, controlled clinical trials to determine whether a drug or vaccine works.
In an Aug. 27 message to NIH staff, Alexander said there is no reason to test people without coronavirus symptoms — mirroring controversial CDC guidance issued days earlier. Public health experts say that testing people without symptoms is crucial because they can spread the virus to others before they feel ill.
“Testing of asymptomatic people to seek asymptomatic cases is not the point of testing,” Alexander wrote, adding he agrees with the CDC guidance “to not test asymptomatic people carte blanche as it makes no logical sense.” He added that people who are going into high-risk areas, such as nursing homes, should still be tested.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly asserted that testing is driving the U.S.’s soaring case count, which hit more than 6.3 million cases this month.[…]
In a different email chain, Alexander pushed back on NIAID’s draft response to a reporter who had asked the agency about a viral social-media post that alleged Fauci “has known for 15 years” that the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine could treat and prevent coronavirus infections.
In its draft reply, sent to HHS for clearance, NIAID noted that a 2005 study cited by the viral post concerned experiments with a coronavirus related to the one behind the current pandemic.
“Dr. Fauci has previously stated that there is a lack of good evidence from randomized placebo-controlled trials to indicate that hydroxychloroquine is an effective therapeutic for COVID-19. The 2005 paper you are referring to was a cell-culture experiment with a different virus than SARS-CoV-2, and the study was conducted by CDC investigators,” the statement read.
Alexander responded by suggesting that the viruses were not different — despite clear evidence that they behave differently in the body and are genetically distinct.
“The 2005 paper refers to SARS-Cov-1 which is quite similar to SARS-CoV-2 or COVID-19. So it is not entirely accurate to say they are different,” Alexander replied. He added that the 2005 paper showed hydroxychloroquine worked well against the older virus.
The guy is a joke but that’s to be expected since he was hired by notorious Trump hack Michael Caputo, a man who should never be anywhere near the government.
This is probably happening all over the government.
Politico’s Garrett Graff interviewed children born on September 11, 2001. They will be eligible to vote in their first presidential election this year:
The children of 9/11 are among the youngest cohort of Americans who will go to the polls this fall—Gen Z voters who came of age in a country that had long since been transformed by the terror attacks.The signature news events of their lives have often been other tragedies—the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, when they were 11, and at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, when they were 16. They barely remember the financial crisis of 2008 and many have only the foggiest memories of Barack Obama’s historic presidential victory. Many weren’t even paying that much attention to politics at 15 when Donald Trump’s surprise victory over Hillary Clinton upended American politics.
Graff finds these members of Gen Z, “lean left but they include plenty of independents and Trump admirers, too, even as they profess sympathy for Black Lives Matter and same-sex marriage, which has been legal somewhere in the country for nearly half their lives.”
“We haven’t been in a time where we’re at peace,” says biracial Chloe, a medical secretary in Salt Lake City, Utah.
The sense that 9/11 changed everything is palpable:
Hillary: From what I understand, there’s a certain aspect of fear now that didn’t necessarily exist before. It’s weird when I talk to my parents and they say, “This is not what it was always like.”
Aidan: I hear things about pre-9/11 safety and security. I get the gist that people were nicer and people didn’t have to worry about locking your cars or worry about carrying a gun on you or if you were going to go to a movie theater and get shot. It wasn’t even a thought in their head—and now it is.
But so has the pandemic changed things. No traditional graduation, schools closing, memories they won’t have.
Jacob:I don’t know if other people outside of America think of America as being so great, but we’re actually not that great.
Lilly: After 9/11 and living through this pandemic, I’m hoping that our country can continue to stay together as one and not fall apart. I hope that we’ll learn from things like this.
That’s a tough ask even for those of us born into more hopeful times. Naturally, these newly eligible voters have no memory of 9/11. And almost no mention of the climate crisis in these interviews. A couple generations down the road may have no memory of Florida.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
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.
If you can vote early, do vote early, as early as possible. By mail or in person (observe health precautions). North Carolina began mailing absentee ballots last Friday (60 days before the election). Mine arrived on Saturday. (Yes, we were surprised too.)
I returned my absentee ballot in person at my local Board of Elections office Tuesday morning. The ballot should be processed and my votes “in the bank” next Tuesday evening (Sept. 15). When your state begins sending out ballots and when it begins processing ballots returned by mail will matter on Election Day.
Prepare for election week, Fareed Zakaria cautions, because the presidential election will not likely be over on Nov. 3. Donald Trump could be ahead in the day’s vote count in a number of key states. The “blue shift,” however, means that as absentee-by-mail or vote-by-mail votes are processed later, tallies will swing towards the Democrats and Joe Biden. The delay gives Trump time to flog his narrative that he won on Nov. 3 and what happens after represents cheating.
Zakaria writes:
Several surveys have found that, because of the pandemic, in-person and mail-in ballots will show a huge partisan divide. In one poll, 87 percent of Trump voters said they preferred to vote in person, compared with 47 percent of Biden voters. In another, by the Democratic data firm Hawkfish, 69 percent of Biden voters said they planned to vote by mail, while only 19 percent of Trump voters said the same. The firm modeled various scenarios and found that, based on recent polling, if just 15 percent of mail-in ballots are counted on election night, Trump would appear to have 408 electoral votes compared with Biden’s 130. But four days later, assuming 75 percent of the mail-in ballots are counted, the lead could flip to Biden, and after all ballots are counted, Biden would have 334 electoral votes to Trump’s 204.
Recall what happened in 2018. Election Day returns showed a modest blue wave for House and Senate Democrats. The tsunami did not arrive for days. Once states finished counting their mailed ballots over a week later, Democrats had won over a dozen more races.
Republicans will attempt to work the media refs and declare Trump the victor on Nov. 3, of course. But that 15 percent figure is important. First, because it represents one modelling scenario, and second, because for the presidential race it matters where those votes are counted and when.
Here in the Tar Heel State, absentee-by-mail votes delivered weeks in advance of Election Day will appear in vote tallies released after 7:30 p.m. EST on Election Day. If Democrats here have done their jobs, those by-mail votes will represent the bulk of them, not a mere 15 percent. The presidential race here could be close, so late-arriving absentees will change the final tally. By how much and whether it changes the final result in this swing state is to be determined.
Other key states do not even begin processing mailed ballots until Election Day. Among them are key swing states: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Those states mail out ballots 45-50 days ahead of the election.
Other states beside North Carolina where late-arriving, late-processed mailed votes could swing results are Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and Minnesota. Arizona does not begin mailing out ballots until 24-27 days ahead of the election.
There are several other ways Trump might attempt to rig an election he loses, as Zakaria notes, including calling for recounts, constitutional maneuvering, using the media to allege fraud, and street actions. Admittedly, Democrats should be prepared to do the same if results are that close. But the way to help neutralize those nightmare scenarios is to lock in your votes early (by mail or in person) and to encourage your friends to as well.
If you live in Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin and can tolerate the COVID-19 risk, you just might consider voting early in person to help make Election Day returns more definitive.
Either way, remind everyone there is no Election Day in 2020, or even an election week. Voting is already underway with votes being counted in September. In Yoda-speak, begun the Election Quarter has.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
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.
Ed Yong of The Atlantic has written one of the best articles on the pandemic that I’ve read. It’s a bit depressing, but also bracing because it gives a clear and credible account of what we did and where we are. It’s not pretty, but it’s honest. And I think we need honesty on this subject more than anything right now:
Army ants will sometimes walk in circles until they die. The workers navigate by smelling the pheromone trails of workers in front of them, while laying down pheromones for others to follow. If these trails accidentally loop back on themselves, the ants are trapped. They become a thick, swirling vortex of bodies that resembles a hurricane as viewed from space. They march endlessly until they’re felled by exhaustion or dehydration. The ants can sense no picture bigger than what’s immediately ahead. They have no coordinating force to guide them to safety. They are imprisoned by a wall of their own instincts. This phenomenon is called the death spiral. I can think of no better metaphor for the United States of America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The U.S. enters the ninth month of the pandemic with more than 6.3 million confirmed cases and more than 189,000 confirmed deaths. The toll has been enormous because the country presented the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus with a smorgasbord of vulnerabilities to exploit. But the toll continues to be enormous—every day, the case count rises by around 40,000 and the death toll by around 800—because the country has consistently thought about the pandemic in the same unproductive ways…
The spiral begins when people forget that controlling the pandemic means doing many things at once. The virus can spread before symptoms appear, and does so most easily through five P’s: people in prolonged, poorly ventilated, protection-free proximity. To stop that spread, this country could use measures that other nations did, to great effect: close nonessential businesses and spaces that allow crowds to congregate indoors; improve ventilation; encourage mask use; test widely to identify contagious people; trace their contacts; help them isolate themselves; and provide a social safety net so that people can protect others without sacrificing their livelihood. None of these other nations did everything, but all did enough things right—and did them simultaneously. By contrast, the U.S. engaged in …
Click to page 2 for a rundown on America’s 9 mistakes: a serial monogamy of solutions, false dichotomies, the comfort of theatricality, personal responsibility over systemic fixes, the normality trap, magical thinking, the complacency of inexperience, a reactive rut and the habituation of horror. It’s stunning how bad we were at dealing with this crisis.