Russell Brand is unconventional on several fronts and he tends to see things from a comedian’s skewed perspective that catches less-noticed details.
In the video below, Brand describes the acting president as more of a “wrestling impressario” than a politician. (I’ll be listening to Trump speeches from now on as though Vince McMahon is delivering them.) His approach to being sick, for example, is to present himself as a COVID hero, and for jingoism and grandstanding.
Simple sentences. Simple problems. Simple answers for a cartoonish, mass media age. Policy nuance comes off as inauthentic. Rational skepticism doesn’t work against Trump. One might as well reason with a carnival barker. Grab another cup of coffee and have a listen.
(h/t SS)
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“Voting for Joe Biden is not about whether you agree with him. It’s a vote to let our democracy live another day.” – Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D- N.Y.)
“In the United States, the reality is that voting is not cool,” says climate activist and former Bernie Sanders activist Xiuhtexcatl Martinez. “Cool would be a country that empowers its citizens to vote…Cool would be a country where the candidate who gets the most votes wins the election. Cool would be a country where unpopular politicians couldn’t dismantle basic voter protections just because they know they can’t stay in office without disenfranchising young voters and people of color.”
The Sunrise Movement launched a swing-state voter mobilization campaign after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg aimed at GOP senators on the Senate committee charged with vetting the acting president’s nominee to replace her. But the effort is broader than that, says Martinez (via Common Dreams):
Instead of imploring young voters to unquestioningly take part in a system in which those in power have frequently ignored their demands, Martinez and the Sunrise Movement frame the general election and the choice between President Donald Trump—who openly denies the existence of the climate crisis—and Democratic candidate Joe Biden as the “one-time choice that allows us to make more meaningful choices down the line.”
“Young people have the power to crush Trump, and he knows it,” the Sunrise Movement tweeted on Monday. “Once he’s out, and we’re still in the streets, our movement can set the tone for the next four years, just like movements past.”
If young people vote, Martinez adds, “the odds dramatically shift.” That’s because exercising political power is not simply a matter of odds or money, but about voting clout.
The issue I have with reporting on the “youth” vote is, as Martinez notes, it is typically framed in terms of lack of engagement and presented as in the graphic below.
The graphic at the top I created with data-crunching help from my friend Dick Sinclair and a local designer.* It illustrates more than the relative turnout between those over 45 and those younger (AP curve). The population curve illustrates just how much political power remains available to bring to the fight.
Voters 45 and under do have the demographic clout to enact the policies they want if they wield the power that is theirs already. People on the right side of the chart dominate our politics not just because they have more money to donate to campaigns, but because they outvoted voters on the left side by 3:2 in 2016. In the 2018 off-year elections that spread increases to 2:1. This despite breathy reporting on how voting in the 18-44 bracket jumped 13-16 points in 2018.
Young people have the power to crush Trump, and he knows it. That’s why he’s trying to steal the election, but we’re going to be there to stop him.
Once he’s out, and we’re still in the streets, our movement can set the tone for the next four years, just like movements past. pic.twitter.com/HNuP4FEJ9I
The Sunrise ad compares former Vice President Joe Biden to President Lyndon Johnson, who signed the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act:
“Relentless activist movement” was behind the legislation Johnson signed in the 1960s, Martinez says. Facing civil rights leaders including Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lewis, he adds, “The narrative shifted and Johnson was forced to meet the moment. So while we do not approve of Biden’s record or even some aspects of his platform, we must elect him and work tirelessly towards hearing him sing the songs of our movement.”
“We have reached our most defining moment in electoral politics,” Martinez says. “Our ability to push forward the agendas of our generation will be determined not only by how we vote going into November but how we mobilize the morning after the election.”
Republican efforts to suppress votes, especially those of younger and minority voters who tend to vote on the left, cannot overcome the sheer amount of untapped power those voters possess. Common wisdom says demography eventually will favor Democrats. Examine again the chart at the top. It does already.
*The chart references data from North Carolina because the state makes its voting data so readily accessible. Truth is, the curves at the top are typical for most states. I chose age 45 as a reference point because approximately half the population is above and half below.
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In Alaska’s annual battle of heavyweights, a salmon-chomping bruin named 747 – like the jetliner – has emerged as the most fabulously fat.
The bear, one of more than 2,200 brown bears roaming Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve, was victorious on Tuesday after a week of frenzied online voting in what has become an international sensation: Fat Bear Week.
Winner 747 was a worthy champion, the park said in a statement. “This year he really packed on the pounds, looking like he was fat enough to hibernate in July and yet continuing to eat until his belly seemed to drag along the ground by late September,” the park said.
Fat Bear Week pits 12 bears against each other in playoff-style brackets. Bear fans compared photos and voted online for their favorites from last Wednesday to Tuesday night.
He is a very big boy. He’s all set for a very comfortable hibernation.
PRESIDENT TRUMP, who knew early on the novel coronavirus was deadly but repeatedly reassured the American people it would go away, has been no more transparent about his own health. His visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in November 2019, and his current infection with the virus, have been shrouded in evasion and opacity. Why?
All presidents like to project robust health, and are loath to admit weakness, even if caused by events beyond their control. When President Ronald Reagan was shot in March 1981, after just weeks in office, the public was told he was cracking jokes long before they learned the seriousness of his injury. But when a president’s health is abnormal, the public has a right to know, especially if the problem has any effect on his fitness to perform his duties. In Mr. Trump’s case, the unanswered questions are glaring.
On Nov. 16, 2019, Mr. Trump went to Walter Reed, eight months after his annual physical, a trip not on his public schedule. His press secretary said he underwent a “quick exam and labs” and he “remains healthy and energetic without complaints.” Sean Conley, the White House physician, said Mr. Trump had an “interim checkup” that was “routine” and had not had any chest pain nor undergone any “specialized cardiac or neurologic evaluations.” If truly routine, then why were medical personnel at Walter Reed required to sign nondisclosure agreements, a highly unusual procedure above and beyond their professional duties, as reported Thursday by NBC News and The Post? What was being nondisclosed?
Dr. Conley has been similarly dodgy about Mr. Trump’s condition since he tested positive for the coronavirus. Mr. Trump went to Walter Reed on Oct 2. Dr. Conley avoided questions when asked the next day whether Mr. Trump had received supplemental oxygen and declined to say whether scans had revealed any lung damage. While Dr. Conley reassured reporters that the president “is doing very well,” the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, told journalists “the president’s vitals over the last 24 hours were very concerning” and “we’re still not on a clear path to a full recovery.” Mr. Trump, upon his return to the White House, acknowledged in a video, “I was very sick.”
Dr. Conley has refused to answer a key question: When was Mr. Trump’s last negative test for the virus? The president had been on the move for a week, largely without distancing or face masks, introducing Amy Coney Barrett as his Supreme Court nominee, attending the debate in Cleveland, campaigning in Minnesota and New Jersey. The testing timeline is vital to understanding when Mr. Trump got — and where he might have spread — the infection. Even now, as Dr. Conley says the president is ready to return to public engagements, he has provided no information about viral loads and whether Mr. Trump might still be contagious.
Leadership matters, and Mr. Trump has been calamitously unable to provide it. In the pandemic, he offered glib reassurances when the nation needed realism. On the question of his personal health, a matter of public interest, we need more than spin doctors. We need real doctors providing real information.
At the moment, I think he’s high on steroids. He’s saying “fuck” in public now, without even missing a beat. And I think it’s also obvious that he didn’t get tested before the debate and almost certainly wantonly exposed Biden and a bunch of other people in the days before he finally got symptoms he couldn’t ignore.
But there’s more to this. This is a man who brags about his superior genes and robust good health. You’d think he’d want his health records out on the internet. Why has he been so vague about the details?
This is because the roided up lunatic in the White House said he was “unhappy” with Pompeo for not releasing to the public the classified emails which they want to prosecute Hillary Clinton for having on her email server 8 years ago.
We are so far down the rabbit hole we’re coming out the other side …
By the way, here he is, totally not high on steroids with Rush Limbaugh this morning:
His “self-funded” presidential campaign was short on funds, and he was struggling to win over leery Republican donors. His golf courses and the hotel he would soon open in the Old Post Office in Washington were eating away at what cash he had left on hand, his tax records show.
And in early 2016, Deutsche Bank, the last big lender still doing business with him, unexpectedly turned down his request for a loan. The funds, Mr. Trump had told his bankers, would help shore up his Turnberry golf resort in Scotland. Some bankers feared the money would instead be diverted to his campaign.
That January, Mr. Trump sold a lot of stock — $11.1 million worth. He sold another $11.8 million worth in February, and $7.5 million in March. In April, he sold $8.1 million more.
And the president’s long-hidden tax records, obtained by The New York Times, also reveal this: how he engineered a sudden financial windfall — more than $21 million in what experts describe as highly unusual one-off payments from the Las Vegas hotel he owns with his friend the casino mogul Phil Ruffin.
In previous articles on the tax records, The Times has reported that, in all but a few years since 2000, chronic business losses and aggressive accounting strategies have allowed Mr. Trump to largely avoid paying federal income taxes. And while the hundreds of millions of dollars earned from “The Apprentice” and his attendant celebrity rescued his business career, those riches, together with the marketing power of the Trump brand, were ebbing when he announced his 2016 presidential run.
The new findings, part of The Times’s continuing investigation, cast light on Mr. Trump’s financial maneuverings in that time of fiscal turmoil and unlikely political victory. Indeed, they may offer a hint to one of the enduring mysteries of his campaign: In its waning days, as his own giving had slowed to a trickle, Mr. Trump contributed $10 million, leaving many people wondering where the burst of cash had come from.
The tax records, by their nature, do not specify whether the more than $21 million in payments from the Trump-Ruffin hotel helped prop up Mr. Trump’s campaign, his businesses or both. But they do show how the cash flowed, in a chain of transactions, to several Trump-controlled companies and then directly to Mr. Trump himself.
The bulk of the money went through a company called Trump Las Vegas Sales and Marketing that had little previous income, no clear business purpose and no employees. The Trump-Ruffin joint venture wrote it all off as a business expense.
Experts in tax and campaign-finance law consulted by The Times said that while more information was needed to assess the legitimacy of the payments, they could be legally problematic.
“Why all of a sudden does this company have more than $20 million in fees that haven’t been there before?” said Daniel Shaviro, a professor of taxation at the New York University School of Law. “And all of this money is going to a man who just happens to be running for president and might not have a lot of cash on hand?”
Unless the payments were for actual business expenses, he said, claiming a tax deduction for them would be illegal. If they were not legitimate and were also used to fund Mr. Trump’s presidential run, they could be considered illegal campaign contributions.
Trump apologists have said that his “losses” are just standard operating procedure for real estate magnates and there’s no there there.
Getting a friend to give money through the backdoor for your presidential campaign and then writing it off as a business expense is not that.
We always knew Trump was hiding his tax returns for a reason. This is one of them.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) suggested Friday that Congress is “unlikely” to reach an agreement on a coronavirus rescue package before the Nov. 3 election, amid confusion and weeks of stalled negotiations.
During remarks at an event in Kentucky, McConnell reiterated that the upcoming election will only make it more difficult for Democrats, Republicans and the White House to find common ground on a package, even as millions of Americans remain unemployed and more than 210,000 people have died from the coronavirus.
“The situation is kind of murky and I think the murkiness is a result of the proximity to the election and everybody kind of trying to elbow for political advantage,” McConnell said. “I’d like to see us rise above that like we did back in March and April but I think that’s unlikely in the next three weeks.”
McConnell’s remarks come after President Donald Trump has sent mixed signals about whether he wants Congress to pass a coronavirus relief package. Earlier this week, Trump tweeted that he told key negotiators for the White House that he wanted to wait until after the election to come to a deal. But hours later, Trump called on Congress to pass standalone bills for a range of issues, including airline relief and stimulus checks.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin spoke Wednesday, but Pelosi rejected providing aid to the beleaguered airline industry, which is facing massive layoffs, outside of a larger bill.
Pelosi told reporters Friday that she plans to continue negotiating with Mnuchin and planned to speak with him later in the day. The speaker and Mnuchin have spoken by phone almost daily over the last two weeks as they’ve pushed for a longshot deal on a stimulus package.
And then there’s this:
TRUMP on Rush Limbaugh show: "I would like to see a bigger stimulus package frankly than either the Democrats or Republicans are offering."
Trump said he's going "the exact opposite now," reversing himself on what he said in recent days on virus relief spending negotiations.
The fact is that Trump should want to do a huge stimulus. He should have been insisting on it for the last month. But if he agrees to it now, it will jam McConnell who will have to openly buck the president if he refuses to put it on the floor and if he does he’ll have to push hard to keep 13 GOP senators from voting for it. I can’t see him dong that, but you never know.
This is a very strange dynamic. Clearly Mitch doesn’t want this deal for his own reasons. He wants to concentrate on Coney Barrett and call it a day. But Trump, in his manic state, has belatedly realized that people need money and he’s in a position to make them happy by giving it to them.
So, here we are:
the ol' "publicly break off talks, attack your negotiating partner with personal slurs, then come racing back to the table desperate for an agreement" play. classic dealmaking.https://t.co/VzHkXiIMfD
Okaay. There’s a chance that Trump will agree to give Pelosi almost everything she’s been holding out for which would be great. But I really doubt it will help him. There’s just too much going on and he’s acting too crazy.
If you didn’t know that President Trump was ill with COVID-19 and on some very strong drugs, or that even on a good day he tends to be impulsive and scatterbrained, you might think that he is trying to sabotage his re-election campaign. Some of his behavior the last few days has been downright self-destructive, so much so that it’s likely whatever staffers are still ambulatory after the virus swept through the White House wish his doctors had gone a little easier on the steroids and left him in bed, worn out and achy. Trump’s “proof of life” videos, the manic tweeting (even by his standards) and now the call-ins to his favorite Fox shows are downright surreal. But it’s the decisions he’s making that surely have them in despair.
The polling is brutal for Trump right now and he’s beginning to look like an albatross around the necks of Republicans in tough down-ticket races. The averages have Trump losing nationally by nearly 10 points and the battleground states are all going the wrong way. He is naturally “downplaying” these numbers, insisting to his voters that the polls are all fake and he’s actually leading across the board, but you could see the flop-sweat glistening under his makeup even before he developed a COVID fever.
Before Trump got sick, it seemed possible that he could keep the race close enough in certain swing states that Republican lawyers could challenge the vote count and find a way to squeak through with another Electoral College victory. It would be foolish to say that’s impossible, but the way Trump has been behaving ever since his first debate with Joe Biden in Cleveland has made it less likely to succeed. That flamboyantly vulgar performance was just one of a flood of poor decisions by Trump and his campaign.
Most important of those, of course, was the decision to treat the global pandemic like a political problem — or simply an image problem — that could be solved with spin and PR, rather than a serious public health crisis. But however grotesque and mercenary those decisions may have been, you could see a twisted logic at work, indecent as it was. Trump’s behavior in the last few days, on the other hand, has been politically suicidal.
There is a price to pay for that. According to an ABC/Ipsos poll taken last weekend, 72 percent of adults agreed that the president did not take “the appropriate precautions when it came to his personal health” and “did not take the “risk of contracting the virus seriously enough.” As a result, his diagnosis not only didn’t bring him any sympathy, he actually lost support.
Still, one might have expected that he would see contracting the virus as an opportunity to shake up the race and try to woo back some voters who have rejected him. He might have done as British Prime Minister Boris Johnson did: Express some remorse for his previous attitude and exhort people to wear masks and practice social distancing.
It’s absurd to think Trump would ever do such a thing, of course. He’s incapable of anything like that. But I didn’t actually expect him to sally forth with ridiculous pageantry, as in his Mussolini-esque triumphant return to the White House where he mounted the steps, ostentatiously ripped off his mask and saluted.
He could have used the moment to empathize with other victims and their families, and to try to turn the page on that odious debate performance. Instead he has repeatedly filmed bizarre videos in which he once again downplays the virus, plays up his pseudo-miraculous recovery and touts the experimental drug he took, implying that not only did he personally usher it into production but prescribed it for himself. These delirious messages, along with his exhortation that people not allow the virus to “dominate” their lives, have widely been received as unsympathetic to all those who have suffered and died — and also as obtuse about the state of America’s medical care, which is nothing like the VIP treatment he received, and which he is trying to now trying to make dramatically worse.
He didn’t stop there. Indeed, he seems unable to control himself. Apparently realizing that he’s hemorrhaging support among older voters — who now seem to favor Biden by a wide margin — Trump put out another surreal video in which he said this:
Trump speaks to senior citizens about COVID: "You're not vulnerable, but they like to say the vulnerable, but you're the least vulnerable — but for this one thing you are vulnerable." pic.twitter.com/eyZDRwur1p
Then he promised that all senior citizens would be getting his miracle cure. Now Trump is reportedly working on a “legally dubious” $8 billion plan to give seniors a $200 “gift certificate” for drugs, which is such a harebrained scheme it sounds like something he came up with when his fever was spiking. (He first tried to get drug companies to do it and they balked. Now he’s literally trying to steal money from the Medicare trust fund to benefit his re-election.)
Along with all this, Trump impulsively announced his administration would end negotiations on a new coronavirus relief bill, only to backpedal after someone reminded him that he could once again send out checks to million of people with his name on them. It’s possible some new legislative package can be thrown together before the election, but Trump’s confused meddling has probably erased any possible political benefit for him.
Flying in the face of his own PR campaign to be seen as a Man of Steel who is afraid of nothing, on Thursday he refused to acquiesce to the debate commission’s requirement that next week’s scheduled town-hall debate with Biden be held virtually. Pete Buttigieg handily dispatched his whining:
Once again Trump had to reverse course after someone in his campaign, no doubt, gently suggested that he might want to debate since they are behind by 10 points! The Trump campaign suggested rescheduling the event but so far the Biden camp is having none of it. Another opportunity to shift the race, assuming that’s even possible, squandered.
And he’s been calling into Fox shows and sounding very confused, even for him. On Thursday morning he appeared on Fox Business and produced this gibberish:
Trump said in one of his videos this week that getting COVID was a blessing from God. He meant it in some “I am Jesus, here to save the world” sort of way that didn’t make sense, but he wasn’t entirely wrong. He was offered an opportunity to change the trajectory of a campaign that was rapidly going south for him. He could have tried to milk his illness for sympathy and at least fake some compassion for the millions of other people who have suffered. But that’s just not in him. Instead, he’s used it to double down on everything the majority of Americans have come to loathe about him. Of course he did. It’s all he knows how to do.
These are two of the men arrested today in a massive anti-terrorism operation conducted by @FBIDetroit @MichStatePolice, seen previously in the state capitol during a protest. More details on the movement they’re allegedly associated with on @wxyzdetroit pic.twitter.com/0eWb7kkAtz
…today that they foiled a dangerous plot against the Governor of Michigan. Rather than say thank you, she calls me a White Supremacist—while Biden and Democrats refuse to condemn Antifa, Anarchists, Looters and Mobs that burn down Democrat run cities…
He went on to say that he condemns all “extreme violence” and then lectures her that she needs to “open up your state, open up your schools, and open up your churches!
The shutdown, of course, is the reason those terrorists decided to kidnap Whitmer and put her “on trial.” He is completely in line with their agenda. No wonder they felt free to carry out their terrorist activities.
Laura Ingraham said on he show last night that the terrorists aren’t right wing. She is wrong. Here’s the real story.
In Ohio where the acting president and former Vice President Joe Biden are tied in the polls:
A federal judge on Thursday blocked an order from Ohio’s secretary of state that would have required counties in the state to install ballot drop boxes just at the local election office, allowing additional drop boxes to be placed in areas that need them.
At issue was an order earlier this week from Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose that limited ballot drop boxes to one location per county: a county’s election office. LaRose had been interpreting an Ohio law that states the only two ways to return an absentee ballot are to mail it or “personally deliver it to the director” as meaning that if a voter chooses to use a drop box, it must be at the County Board of Elections office, because that is still considered to be delivering the ballot directly to the director.
But federal Judge Dan Polster said LaRose’s order puts a burden on more populous counties — like Cuyahoga, which includes Cleveland — and which he says has “a very serious looming problem” that could jeopardize the right to vote.
That’s not over. Stay tuned.
And in Texas, voting rights advocates are pushing back against Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s box-blocking directive (Austin Statesman):
Lawyers for voters and voting rights groups asked a federal judge Thursday to block Gov. Greg Abbott’s recent order limiting counties to one location where voters can hand-deliver mail-in ballots.
Abbott waited too long to issue his order on Oct. 1, they argued, not only because it came the same day Travis County opened four drop-off locations after a monthlong public information campaign, but also because voting had already begun in the Nov. 3 general election.
“It is too late and too dangerously burdensome to change election rules midstream,” lawyer Chad Dunn told U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman in a hearing that was held via Zoom as a pandemic precaution.
This whole democracy thing is just so annoying for royalists and autocrats, as these tweets from Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee illustrate. They were everywhere this week:
They don’t want you voting if they don’t think they can control the outcome. Do you really need reminding?
Okay, after all that, you may need a palate cleanser. It’s Wayne Knight, Seinfeld‘s obnoxious mailman, to the rescue.
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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.
