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Month: October 2020

Cutting their losses?

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 9, 2020

Axios reports this morning that Attorney General Bill Barr has begun telling Republicans on Capitol Hill that the Department of Justice will not release the long-anticipated Durham report into the origins of the Russia investigation before the Nov. 3 election:

“This is the nightmare scenario. Essentially, the year and a half of arguably the number one issue for the Republican base is virtually meaningless if this doesn’t happen before the election,” a GOP congressional aide told Axios.

Barr has so far ignored a flurry of crazed presidential tweets demanding that he arrest and incarcerate Donald Trump’s political enemies. Barr’s slowness to comply, along with signals from other Republicans and Trump’s tanking poll numbers, could indicate Trump’s allies have calculated it is time to cut their losses.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) put distance between himself and Trump on Thursday, telling reporters he has not visited the White House since August over differences in COVID-19 protocols. The Senate, he said, insists on masks and social distancing. McConnell believes Trump should be more transparent about his recent coronavirus diagnosis.

Barr also has indicated that no indictments are coming before the election. Republicans hoped indictments against Obama administration and intelligence officials over their handling of the Russia probe would undermine Democrats’ election chances in November.

Trump said of Barr in a Fox Business interview Thursday, “He’s got all the information he needs. They want to get more, more, more. They keep getting more. I said, ‘you don’t need any more.'” Trump recently has criticized both Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray for slowness in bringing charges against (in Trump’s mind) those what done him wrong.

Axios continues:

What’s next: Top Republicans are planning to pressure Barr to get ahead of Durham and temper expectations for the timing of the report’s release, as well declassify whatever remaining documents there are connected to the probe.

“Bill Barr should follow the instructions of the president to declassify and release all the documents the FBI are sitting on. There’s no good reason for him to withhold this information,” a senior White House official said.

Earlier this week, Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe approved the release of a large binder full of documents to the DOJ to assist their review of the Durham probe.

Yeah, that could backfire on the White House too, Politico’s Kyle Cheney suggests:

Expect Covid Donny to dial up his demands on Barr to 11 after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi this morning announces legislation to create a “Commission on Presidential Capacity.” Drawing on 25th Amendment powers conferred on Congress, the commission is meant “to help ensure effective and uninterrupted leadership in the highest office in the Executive Branch of government,” per Pelosi’s press release.

Congress is not in session and will not be taking up the legislation, but the announcement will focus attention on the aspiring monarch’s increasingly risky and unstable behaviors since contracting the coronavirus and taking experimental treatments.

Trump coughed his way through a telephone interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity Thursday night and suggested he might hold rallies in Florida and Pennsylvania in coming days. Trump evaded questions about whether he has tested negative for COVID-19 since leaving the hospital on Monday.

He’s going to get worse before the rest of us get better.

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Redfield is not going to be a hero in all this

Published by digby on October 8, 2020
One of Director Robert Redfield's predecessors at the CDC called on him to open up about failures in the coronavirus response.

Health care experts everywhere are appalled at what Trump and his henchmen have done to the public health institutions in this country. But I don’t think it will help to appeal to Trump’s toadies to do anything about it:

A former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and public health titan who led the eradication of smallpox asked the embattled, current CDC leader to expose the failed U.S. response to the coronavirus, calling on him to orchestrate his own firing to protest White House interference.

William Foege, a renowned epidemiologist who served under Democratic and Republican presidents, detailed in a private letter he sent last month to CDC Director Robert Redfield his alarm over how the agency has fallen in stature while the pandemic raged across America.

Foege, who has not been a vocal critic of the agency’s handling of the novel coronavirus, called on Redfield to openly address the White House’s meddling in the agency’s efforts to manage the COVID-19 crisis, then accept the political sacrifice that would follow. He recommended that Redfield commit to writing the administration’s failures – and his own – so there would be a record that could not be dismissed.

“You could upfront, acknowledge the tragedy of responding poorly, apologize for what has happened and your role in acquiescing,” Foege wrote to Redfield. He said simply resigning without coming clean would be insufficient. “Don’t shy away from the fact this has been an unacceptable toll on our country. It is a slaughter and not just a political dispute.”

[…]

Foege’s letter Sept. 23, which was obtained by USA TODAY and has not been previously reported, is a striking condemnation from a public health figure who spent decades helping prevent the spread of diseases while earning the respect of peers.

In an interview, Foege said he felt compelled to write to Redfield after the White House appointed Dr. Scott Atlas to the Coronavirus Task Force, even though he is not an infectious disease expert.

The Washington Post and other outlets reported that Atlas endorsed the controversial strategy of herd immunity, although Atlas denied doing so. The reports prompted Foege, who helped steer India away from such a strategy during the smallpox epidemic, to reach out to Redfield.

Foege said he sees an opportunity for Redfield to help the United States turn around its response to COVID-19 if he helps implement the lessons learned from decades of fighting pandemics.

“So much of this is the deaths. It’s the deaths,” Foege told USA TODAY, noting that he did not want the letter to become public for fear that it might create a political sideshow and add to Redfield’s burden.

“Going public can only embarrass him, and it doesn’t allow him to redeem himself,” Foege said. “By doing this privately, he has a chance to do the right thing.”

[…]

Dr. Tom Frieden, also a former CDC director, said Foege is not known for being especially partisan, having served in the Carter and Reagan administrations. Frieden called him the “best CDC director in history.”

“Bill Foege is the Babe Ruth of public health,” said Frieden, president and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives, an initiative aimed at preventing deaths from cardiovascular disease and epidemics. “Bill Foege really is in a league of his own in terms of accomplishment and is revered with reason by essentially everyone in the public health field.”

Foege’s letter to Redfield lamented that the CDC’s scientific experts have been rendered impotent during the most significant health crisis in a century while decades of experience have been ignored.

“This will go down as a colossal failure of the public health system of this country,” Foege wrote. “The biggest challenge in a century and we let the country down. The public health texts of the future will use this as a lesson on how not to handle an infectious disease pandemic.”

Foege said the CDC’s scientific reputation was tainted under White House pressure, citing the publication of official guidance not rooted in science.

“The White House has had no hesitation to blame and disgrace CDC, you and state governors,” he wrote. “They will blame you for the disaster. In six months, they have caused CDC to go from gold to tarnished brass.”

Foege described how morale among the agency’s staff broke down. “At the moment, they feel you accepted the White House orders without sufficient resistance,” he wrote. “You have a short window to change things.”

Foege called on Redfield to take a strong, public stance against the White House and accept that he would lose his job as a result.

“When they fire you, this will be a multi-week story and you can hold your head high. That will take exceptional courage on your part,” Foege wrote in closing. “I can’t tell you what to do except to revisit your religious beliefs and ask yourself what is right.”

Foege, in his interview with USA TODAY, said he’d like to see the CDC reclaim its leadership role from the White House.

“Dr. Redfield could still be a savior in all of this,” he said.

Redfield is nobody’s savior. The best you can say for him is that he’s a coward. And frankly, I think it’s more likely that he likes Trump very much:

Trump Visits CDC After Coronovirus Fears Throw Plans Into Chaos : NPR

He was just glowing that day.

The debates were always doomed

Published by digby on October 8, 2020
The first Trump-Biden debate shows that American democracy is in crisis - Vox

Eric Boehlert’s Press Run today is the final word on these atrocities they are calling debates this cycle:

The plug is thankfully being pulled on the 2020 presidential debates. For now at least, it appears that next week’s forum won’t take place with Trump present, since he went on Fox News Business and unleashed a temper tantrum, announcing he wouldn’t show up if the debate were done remotely. It’s a change organizers made in order to protect participants, given the GOP Covid-19 outbreak that has gripped the White House. (There’s always a chance Trump will change his mind before next week.)

Four years ago it would have been unimaginable for a United States presidential campaign to not feature a series of nationally televised debates. But in the Trump era, the cancellation is not only welcome news, it’s entirely predictable. Presidential debates cannot be staged when one of the two participants is a madman. When one of the two candidates opts out of the real world and occupies an alternative universe where the Covid-19 virus will soon “disappear” from America. At that point, the debates no longer serve any real purpose.

The simple, obvious truth is that Trump is not a stable individual — and that was true before he contracted the Covid-19 virus and was treated with a high dosage of powerful drugs known to induce dramatic side effects. His fevered, Covid state certainly isn’t helping. On Fox News Business, he called Kamala Harris a “communist” “monster” and raged about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama needing to be “indicted.”

All of this while Trump needlessly puts the entire White House staff in danger by refusing to self-quarantine. “The White House has repeatedly refused to disclose when President Donald Trump last tested negative for COVID-19 before he announced his infection — information that could help determine who he exposed to the virus and the severity of his illness,” ABC News reported on Thursday.  

Any further debates this year now seem unlikely, and I wish the first presidential debate — the worst one in American history — hadn’t taken place. Yes, it was a political disaster for Trump, as polls show his national support took an even bigger dip after he spent the night childishly insulting and interrupting Joe Biden. Trump arrived with one goal — to make sure the debate was incomprehensible and that viewers learned as little as possible. But Trump didn’t deserve to have a Biden debate. He didn’t deserve to be on the national stage with an audience of 70 million viewers and given a chance to lie relentlessly for 90 minutes.

Bullying and hectoring not only Biden but also moderator Chris Wallace, Trump turned the once-serious forum into a circus, shredding yet another tradition of civic discourse in this country. In retrospect, what was the Commission on Presidential Debates thinking? Did organizers honestly think Trump would show up and politely abide by the rules and engage in a civilized debate?

Like so many other Beltway institutions, the debate Commission thought they could manage Trump. They thought if they prepared common sense rules that both campaign agreed to, that Trump would abide by them. This, despite the fact Trump has ignored every conceivable rule and protocol for decent behavior for the last four years. Given that proud track record, why on earth do D.C. elites still cling to the idea that this time Trump will behave; this time Trump will act like a sane, healthy adult.

He won’t. He never does. And yes, his behavior has become more erratic since the 2016 debates when, in retrospect, Trump at least pretended to occasionally follow some of the norms of public behavior. Now wallowing in full-on authoritarian grandiosity, Trump refuses to be questioned in person.

That failure to deal with the reality of Trump continues to be the media’s defining blind spot — refusing to be aggressively honest about him. There’s not a reporter, producer or editor in the mainstream who watches Trump and thinks, ‘He seems stable. There’s nothing wrong here.’ Everyone knows he’s unbalanced and dangerous. And everyone makes the same pledge not to discuss it in news coverage.  Everyone agrees not to run front-page stories and evening newscasts quoting mental health experts, detailing Trump’s likely disorders and what that means for America to have a madman in the Oval Office. That same ritual of denial just played out with the truncated debate season.

Prior to the first forum, Commission officials specifically said they didn’t want moderators fact-checking participants and that they should merely act as “facilitators.” The clear indication being that Biden and Trump would be trusted to engage each other respectfully, which was a fantasy given Trump’s nihilistic streak.

The presidential debate format isn’t designed to host a candidate who categorically refuses to be honest. It was never going to work with Trump.

An ignorant, dishonest, bullying, malignant narcissist can’t debate. It’s beyond his ability. He can only demand attention by any means necessary.

It’s not as if he didn’t already know this. In 2016 he talked about his penis size in a national presidential debate. He called Hillary Clinton “the devil” to her face and threatened to throw her in jail. It’s not s if he’s changed since then. Why would anyone expect that these debates would be any different?

If you haven’t subscribed to Press Run yet, you can do so here, with a nice little discount for Hullabaloo readers.

Disintegrating base

Published by digby on October 8, 2020
Macy's Department Store Detectives with Their Backs Turned So as Not to Reveal Their Identity Photographic Print by Nina Leen | Rare historical photos, Historical photos, Old photography

More evidence of Trump’s folly:

Something wild and unexpected unfolded in the second half of President Trump’s term, and now is accelerating: Elderly Americans, who helped elect him, have swung sharply against him. 

Why it matters: National and state polls show a total Trump collapse among Americans 65 and older.  If this chasm remains, it could help bring the whole Republican power structure down with Trump.

In what has been a 50-50ish nation, it’s stunning to see polling gaps this wide:

In a NBC/Wall Street Journal poll out Sunday, Joe Biden led Trump by 27 points among seniors (62% to 35%).

In a CNN/SSRS poll out yesterday, similar story — 21 points (60% to 39%).

This is a group Trump won by seven points in 2016.

The same gap shows up in state polling, including the critical battlegrounds of Florida and Pennsylvania.

This is important. It’s not just the pandemic:

The movement predates the virus. CNN polling guru Harry Enten notes that a year ago, Biden was up 11 points over Trump with seniors in a CNN poll.

The main pre-pandemic reasons were health care and his strength with women, Axios’ Alexi McCammond and Margaret Talev wrote in May.

Republicans believe the big reason for the current chasm is the coronavirus, which has hit seniors far harder than any age group. A former senior White House official who remains close to the team told Axios:

“[A] few of us screamed from the rooftops to them about in March. Who [cares] what anyone else thinks? If you can’t win seniors, you can’t win.”

“And, if you don’t take something that is killing old people seriously, you will lose seniors.”

Between the lines: More women vote than men. More women go to college than men. More women than ever are running for election and winning. And more women than ever are turning on Trump and the GOP.

The bottom line: Younger, white men alone do not a victory make. So the 65+ trend represents a clear and present danger to the vitality and viability of the GOP.

Trump has undermined himself with old people, women and minorities.

National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar tweeted yesterday: “That’s going to be the story of this election: Pivotal Trump voting bloc in 2016 becoming part of the Biden base.”

A lot of people saw through him. It restores your faith a little bit.

Vote of confidence

Published by digby on October 8, 2020

Via CNN:

A clear majority of people across the 14 countries said their own nation had handled Covid-19 well: 73% agreed, while 27% disagreed.But in the United Kingdom and the United States, the figures were much lower: 46% and 47% respectively.

They’re the only two countries where a minority of people said the government had done well. In every other country polled, most people said their government had done well, from Japan with 55% up to Denmark with 95%.The United States is not the only country where support for the government’s coronavirus response broke along partisan lines — the Pew survey detected the same pattern in the UK and in Spain.

Those results show it’s not a matter of whether you’re on the left or the right of the political spectrum that predicts whether you think your government has done well. The US and UK have right-leaning governments, while Spain has a left-leaning one. In each country, people with the same political bent as the government tend to say it’s done well in the crisis.

Maybe it’s because the governments in those three countries dropped the ball?

But this is interesting. The UK doesn’t feel more divided while a bunch of other countries do:

Notice the extreme outlier there. I wonder why?

One possibly surprising area where the United States falls smack in the middle of the pack is on the question of whether more international cooperation would have reduced the number of coronavirus cases in their country. Across the whole 14-country survey, 59% of people said it would, while 36% said it would not.

In the United States, 58% said more cooperation between countries would have helped and 37% said it would not.

Among other findings in the survey, women in every country are more likely than men to say their lives have changed because of the crisis, with a gap as high as 15 points in the United States, France and Sweden.

And perhaps most surprising of all, in Sweden — which famously put almost no restrictions in place to stop the spread of the virus — more than seven out of 10 people (71%) said their lives had changed a great deal as a result of the outbreak. That’s the second highest percentage of any country in the survey, behind South Korea (81%), which put sweeping restrictions in place.

I’m not sure what it all means but it clear that the US scores very poorly which is predictable. We had the worst response of all.

COVID crazy

Published by digby on October 8, 2020

Does this sound like a well man?

Use condoms

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 8, 2020

“Everybody wanted the belt,” beams Acting President Donald J. Trump in one of his first video tweets this morning. (The Army has new uniforms … with belts. Did you know?) “Our great vets, our great heroes” — the ones Trump in candid moments describes as suckers and losers — love him, he boasts.

Yesterday morning was a barrage of increasingly bizarre Trump tweets (perhaps steroid-fueled) that became all-caps screams as he spun them out.

“VOTE TRUMP CALIFORNIA!” read one. (Spend all the money you want there, Donald.)

“Where are all of the arrests?” he demanded, referencing his political enemies, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama among them. “Can you imagine if the roles were reversed? Long term sentences would have started two years ago. Shameful!”

Minutes later:

“They went for a Coup. Almost destroyed our Country. You had the right President at the right moment. Current Voters, REMEMBER THIS WHEN YOU VOTE!”

Twitter flagged him for spreading misinformation about voting:

The frenzy continued, becoming all-caps by about 11 a.m.:

“NOW THAT THE RADICAL LEFT DEMOCRATS GOT CAUGHT COLD IN THE (NON) FRIENDLY TRANSFER OF GOVERNMENT, IN FACT, THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN AND WENT FOR A COUP, WE ARE ENTITLED TO ASK THE VOTERS FOR FOUR MORE YEARS. PLEASE REMEMBER THIS WHEN YOU VOTE!”

The wild accusations of treason, of coups, and his all-caps tantrums demanding jail for political opponent reminded me of … something.

Oh, right:

https://youtu.be/1QRcUFKVsAw

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Marching to Shibboleth

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 8, 2020

“Whenever Pence talks he sounds like a serial killer calmly explaining why he has to do this to you,” TV comedy writer Jess Dweck observed after Wednesday night’s vice presidential debate.

Vice President Mike Pence repeatedly talked over Sen. Kamala Harris when he was not mansplaining or running over his agreed speaking time. Moderator Susan Page’s “Thank you, Vice President Pence” was the line of the evening, spoken over and over and ineffective in shutting him up.

The cadaverish Pence appears to have “pink eye.” A fly sat unnoticed by Pence on his white hair for two minutes. Otherwise, save for the plexiglass screens, the debate last night was a refreshing return to boring normalcy. Harris won even among men and saw her favorability numbers climb seven points in CNN’s snap poll. The internet exploded in fly jokes.

Pence was white, male, and privileged. When the debate ended, Pence’s wife joined him on stage — maskless, in violation of debate rules. Rules don’t apply to them.

Rebecca Solnit ponders how the coronavirus pandemic reinforces the connectedness of us all. The conservative failure to acknowledge that contributed to the Trump administration’s failure to curb the virus that has claimed 212,000 American lives:

The contemporary right has one central principle: nothing is really connected to anything else, so no one has any responsibility for anything else, and any attempt to, say, prevent a factory from poisoning a river is an infringement on freedom. They reject the evidence of climate change and other scientific realities on the grounds that it displeases them by undermining their ideology, rather than on the evidence. Freedom as they uphold it is the right to do anything you want with utter disregard for others (and taken to extremes, to believe anything you want, as they have about climate). To smooth over the ways this is amoral requires disassembling cause-and-effect and, ultimately, denying the systemic nature of all things.

Freedom is their shibboleth, a tribal worship word separating them from unbelievers. Donald J. Trump is the high priest of utter disregard for others.

In their logic, poverty must be caused by individual failings, not by systematic inequality and obstacles. Gun deaths must be disassociated from the deregulation and proliferation of guns. Taxes are a form of oppression, since no one owes anyone anything. Those who benefit from the system that taxes underwrite – infrastructure, law enforcement, education of workers – deny that their success has anything to do with anything but their own bootstrapping virtue and hard work. Climate change’s underlying message that what we do has longterm planetary consequences outrages their sense of autonomy.

And their notions of masculinity, Solnit adds. This makes mask-wearing to protect others “emasculating women’s work [because] absolute freedom and irresponsibility was granted to men in particular.”

Casting the wearing of masks as a form of infringement on individual liberty made masks the focus of rage, protest, and violation over the last six months, as well as violence, including murder, directed against those trying to enforce masking regulations. That the disease was disproportionately affecting poor and nonwhite people in the US meant that it was easy for these white protesters to imagine the disease as someone else’s problem (as did the fact that it first emerged in urban areas in blue states). Donald J Trump reportedly mocked and discouraged the wearing of masks in the White House. “I don’t agree with the statement that if everybody wears a mask, everything disappears,” he said to Chris Wallace in July.

Authoritarianism is always inseparable from ideas of masculinity, and in the Trumpworld version, facts, laws, historical records, and science are another thing to which a real man need not submit. He can have his own version of reality as part of his endless entitlement to freedom, and so Trump spewed out his own version of how this disease worked and what would work in response as medical experts shook their heads. Now this has caught up with him and his staff and the donors, White House employees, and press corps members their recklessness has exposed.

The coronavirus outbreak in the White House has infected “34 White House staffers and other contacts,” according to an internal FEMA memo obtained by ABC News, many more than previously admitted:

The new figures underscore both the growing crisis in the White House and the lengths to which government officials have gone to block information about the outbreak’s spread. ABC News had previously reported that a total of 24 White House aides and their contacts had contracted the virus. It was not clear in the FEMA memo with the larger number what “other contacts” referred to.

Freedom’s just another word for countless lives to lose.

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