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Month: October 2020

The “see no virus” strategy

Published by digby on October 26, 2020
https://twitter.com/AdamWeinstein/status/1320714846690856961

Trump has always lied, we know that. And he often lies in an obvious way. But this is something else again. He’s telling people that COVID is no longer a problem. It should be criminal for him to do this.

A.T. Rupar at Vox, documents the atrocity:

With the pandemic getting worse, not better, President Donald Trump tried to turn reality on its head during a series of rallies on Saturday in North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin.

“We’re rounding the turn. Our numbers are incredible,” Trump claimed in Lumberton, North Carolina, before blasting the media for its alleged fear-mongering.

But the US is not rounding a turn for the better. Friday and Saturday saw new daily coronavirus infections in the US surge past 80,000 for the first time ever. And it’s not just cases — hospitalizations are up more than 33 percent over the last month, and the seven-day average of deaths is now back above 800.

“That’s all I hear about now. Turn on television, ‘Covid, Covid, Covid Covid Covid.’ A plane goes down, 500 people dead, they don’t talk about it. ‘Covid Covid Covid Covid.’ By the way, on November 4, you won’t hear about it anymore,” Trump said. (In case it’s not clear, the plane crash he referred to was made up.)

Then, on Saturday night in Waukesha, Wisconsin, Trump argued, falsely, that the main reason cases in the US are going up is because the US does so much testing — “if we did half the testing, we’d have half the cases,” he said, as if testing causes cases — and insisted the coronavirus is “going away.” (In recent weeks, new cases have actually grown at a much faster rate than testing has expanded.)

https://twitter.com/ShironRedshift/status/1320451853205807104?s=20

Not only is Trump’s rhetoric irresponsible, but the fact is, he’s holding rallies that make a mockery of social distancing and mask-wearing guidelines recommended by his own government. And these rallies appear to be actively making the pandemic worse by spreading the virus.

Perhaps the strongest evidence of this came on Friday, when Erin Mansfield, Josh Salman, and Dinah Voyles Pulver authored a piece for USA Today that examined how coronavirus cases surged in a number of places where Trump recently held rallies.

From the article:

The president has participated in nearly three dozen rallies since mid-August, all but two at airport hangars. A USA TODAY analysis shows COVID-19 cases grew at a faster rate than before after at least five of those rallies in the following counties: Blue Earth, Minnesota; Lackawanna, Pennsylvania; Marathon, Wisconsin; Dauphin, Pennsylvania; and Beltrami, Minnesota.

Together, those counties saw 1,500 more new cases in the two weeks following Trump’s rallies than the two weeks before – 9,647 cases, up from 8,069.

But to the extent that Trump actually engages with this reality, his message is that people have to learn to live with it.

“You have to lead your life, and you have to get out,” he advised his fans on Saturday in Ohio.

Beyond the mounting human toll — more than 220,000 Americans have now died from the coronavirus — the latest spike in cases comes at a politically inopportune time for the White House, with Election Day now just nine days away.

But at this point, the Trump administration isn’t even pretending to have a plan to slow the spread of the virus. Instead, during a CNN interview on Sunday, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows said, revealingly, that “we’re not going to control the pandemic.”

Meanwhile, the White House is dealing with yet another cluster of cases — five people close to Vice President Mike Pence have tested positive for the virus in recent days. Pence, the chair of the White House coronavirus task force, was exposed. But instead of following Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance, which calls for exposed people to self-quarantine for 14 days, he plans to travel to pandemic rallies on Sunday and Monday.

They’re holding another Amy Coney Barrett event at the White House for her swearing in.

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It’s not gatekeeping, it’s journalism

Published by digby on October 26, 2020
How Facebook plays content gatekeeper - Digiday

The New York Times’ Ben Smith has a bombshell column today revealing that the White House and some other political operatives thought they had the Wall St Journal news pages all teed up with a story about Hunter Biden and his emails. The idea that people from the White House counsel’s officer were involved in a campaign smear job is shocking and there’s not much left that shocks these days.

The Journal ended up publishing a small story which stated there was no proof that Joe Biden had done anything wrong after Rudy Giuliani spilled the dirt in the New York Post. It’s one of the rare occasions in which the mainstream media refused to accept the juicy, hand-fed tid-bits of scandal and gossip the right wing feeds them.

Smith goes on to say that this represents the return of the “media gatekeeper” which those of us in the early days of blogging and internet journalism were fighting against. I disagree. This is an example of the mainstream media refusing to allow the right wing to work the refs and accept their narratives and story angles for fear of being called “biased.” It’s a return to journalism.

Anyway, Josh Marshall had a good twitter thread on this topic that speaks for me:

This is a very good column. And it includes details of what sounds like yet more White House lawbreaking. But I disagree with Ben that this is a reassertion of an elite media gate keeping role. There’s hardly a blackout of the purported hunter biden hard drives. There are lots of stories about it in msm publications. Not to mention the fact that I think it’s dubious to say that fox, wsj, nypost et al aren’t part of the elite press. The key is really who decides what the story is.

For decades the elite political press has been wired for the GOP. This has been true for a number of reason. But the upshot is a pattern that right media defines what the question and then more elite corporate media engages that question, even if their conclusions are sometimes different.

The fact that the gaming rogue Bannon was able to fund a deeply tendentious, error-riddles loaf of poo by this clown Schweitzer and have it run in the countries two most influential news publications as hard news was the ultimate example of this pattern. [He’s talking about “Clinton Cash” which ran in 2016 “in partnership” with the NY Times and the Washington Post, an egregious example of this practice.]

The Wikileaks drama is a different sort of example. It’s not just we now know that it was the product of a Russian intelligence operation which involved the Trump campaign. It’s more that there really wasn’t anything in them that was remotely controversial. That didn’t stop most elite media from being transfixed by them as if they were. That’s largely because the right media ecosystem said so. And elite media was scared to say otherwise. With this laptops story the two examples collide. What’s the story?

Well, the story seems pretty obviously to be another dirty tricks operation either run by the Presidents pals in Russia or stateside criminals working on his behalf. So do reporters explode with yada yada! Hunter Biden yada! It’s probably all fake but it raises question and how will it effect the horserace?

Or do they see whether the basic facts are confirmable (they aren’t) and look to the fairly obviously story: an almost absurd attempted replay of the 2016 games. This isn’t gatekeeping. It’s reporting.

This isn’t like the news media that simply refused to report on jack Kennedy’s numerous affairs because it wasn’t suitable for print. That’s gate keeping. The Journal story at the center of Bens piece really tells the tale. They published a story. They didn’t hide anything or sit on anything.

They just embarrassed the Trump team because they reported it out and didn’t just repeat credulous what Bannon brought them like the Times and WaPo did in 2016.

We see it as gatekeeping because again elite media has been largely wired for the gop for three or four decades. That breaking down seems like gatekeeping. It’s not.

Originally tweeted by Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) on October 26, 2020.

What will they do if they lose?

Published by digby on October 26, 2020
Trump Supporters Say They Want a Revolution. They Don't. | The New Republic

One of the more interesting (and somewhat confounding) polling results in this election cycle has been the belief among members of both parties that Donald Trump will win re-election, regardless of who they’re actually planning to vote for. His approval rating has been stuck in the low 40s throughout his term, which is unprecedented, and he’s been behind in the polls from the beginning of the campaign. Yet most Americans still remain convinced that he is going to win. This is from Gallup in early October:

Regardless of whom they personally support, 56% of Americans expect Trump to prevail over Biden in the November election, while 40% think Biden will win. Republicans are more likely to believe Trump will win (90%) than Democrats are to think Biden will (73%). Fifty-six percent of independents predict that Trump will win.

How can this be? Well, of course it all depends on what the definition of “win” is.

The explanation for the Democrats and many Independents is obvious. With all of Trump’s talk about mail-in voter fraud and lawsuits and promises of intimidation at the polls, they believe it’s possible that he will pull out all the stops to create or fake a victory regardless of the legitimate electoral outcome. With his statements to the press that he wants the ninth Supreme Court seat filled in order to ensure a victory, it’s not being all that paranoid to assume it could happen.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are living in an alternate universe in which Trump holds a massive lead in all the polls and is heading for a landslide. They believe this because he tells them that every day.

It’s unlikely we will have full results on election night next week, since some states won’t even begin counting mail-in votes until that day, while others allow ballots to arrive some time after Election Day. There’s certainly the possibility of lawsuits if contests are close. Nonetheless, we will probably know the winner within a few days — Trump’s scenario that it could take “months” is hot air — and it’s worth pondering how the two sides will react.

According to this Reuters-Ipsos poll, more than four in 10 voters on either side will not accept the results of the election. It doesn’t go into details, except to say that 22% of Biden supporters and 16% of Trump supporters say they would engage in street protests or violence if the other side prevailed. But let’s look at the reasons that might happen.

Obviously, if Trump prevails there will be an uproar among Democrats despite the fact that a large number of them believe he’s going to win anyway. But in the unlikely event that he wins outright without any legal shenanigans, partisan court victories, discarding of valid votes or intimidation at the polls, I suspect they will be even more shell-shocked than in 2016, but will accept the outcome with depressed equanimity. If they take to the streets under that circumstance, it might be to stage a protest against pollsters for their overwhelming incompetence. Joe Biden has had a steady and substantial lead in all the polls for months now.

On the other hand, if despite a clear defeat at the ballot box, Trump nonetheless finds a way to “win” through lawsuits decided by right-wing judges who throw out legal votes or takeovers by GOP state legislatures, there will be a massive outcry. People understand that Republicans might try this, but that doesn’t mean they’ll stand for it. In that scenario, our nation would face the worst constitutional crisis since the Civil War. God help us if that comes to pass.

But what about Republicans? They’re already living in a miasma of disinformation, conspiracy theories and lies. Alex Wagner of Showtime’s “The Circus” interviewed a bunch of fanatical Trump-supporting militia members and reported tat for whatever reason they believe Trump will win in a 50-state landslide:

Reporting from Trump rallies on cable news inevitably shows the same attitude even among the more mainstream voters. Trump’s supporters simply do not believe that he can legitimately lose. And why should they? Their Dear Leader — the only source of information they trust — has said so explicitly, over and over again. In fact, that claim has already been institutionalized:

Multiple social media analyses, including one conducted by a group of nonprofit researchers on behalf of NBC News, have detailed how a collection of the president’s relatives and members of his inner circle, along with far-right media manipulators and an online army of disciples, has created or spread false or misleading content that supports his “rigged” narrative, while his campaign is urging supporters to join an “army” and “defend their vote.”

Every single day, Trump is out on the campaign trail threatening to defy the election results. His newest rationale (one of many) is that “they spied on his campaign” and he didn’t get a “friendly transition” in 2016, so he sees no reason to give the Democrats one in 2020:

What this adds up to is this: if the polls are right and Biden wins the election by a healthy margin, Trump voters almost certainly won’t accept the results. Put yourself in their shoes and it isn’t that hard to see why. Four years ago, a lot of Hillary Clinton voters felt as if they’d had the wind knocked out of them by that shocking and unexpected result. That’s what these Trump voters are going to feel, except that the dissonance will be a thousand times worse. They are expecting a Trump landslide, and have been told by him that the only way he can possibly lose is through fraud on a massive scale.

The difference between then and now, of course, is that Clinton and Barack Obama and every Democratic official immediately accepted the results and their supporters largely agreed voters that Trump had won, at least under the antediluvian constitutional machinery of the Electoral College. There is every reason to think that Trump will do quite the opposite, and I’m afraid there’s no reason to believe we can depend upon Republican officials to step up and do the right thing.

And there’s that undeniable pall that hangs over the whole process, with the possibility that well-armed Trump supporters who have been told they simply cannot lose the election will try to take matters into their own hands. After all, some militia-style goons have already plotted to kidnap and “try” Democratic officials for “treason.” We can’t predict how far they’ll be willing to go if their world is turned upside down by an unexpected electoral defeat.

Shortly after the election in 2016, I wrote an column about the “sore winner” syndrome, in which angry Trump supporters were assaulting Democrats and screaming at them on the streets, even though their guy had won the election. This reflects a longstanding attitude among this political faction in which it’s never enough to win by normal means — they can’t be happy about it until they force their rivals to admit they were wrong and offer an unconditional surrender.

Imagine what these people might do when they lose.

My Salon column

The Choice

Published by digby on October 26, 2020
How Biden Should Debate Trump - WSJ

You can see more highlights on the 60 Minutes twitter feed if you don’t want to slog through the entire interviews. The contrast between the two tickets is off the charts. It’s hard to believe it’s even a question.

Imagine how Wall Street would react

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 26, 2020

As is standard procedure with competent campaigns, the Biden team is already planning to staff a new administration.

NBC reports:

WASHINGTON — Progressives are pushing hard to see Elizabeth Warren leading the Treasury Department in an opening salvo of a coming ideological struggle for control of key government posts if Joe Biden wins the presidency.

Donors, activists and leaders on the left want Warren, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, as treasury secretary, more than a half-dozen of them said. And people Warren has spoken to are under the impression that she wants the job if she is offered it.

“There’s a huge gap between Sen. Warren and any other likely candidate,” said Larry Cohen, former president of the Communications Workers of America union and a close ally of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. “She, first of all, understands finance capital and second of all is prepared to wrangle with it. Some of the other candidates I’ve heard about are not prepared to wrangle with it.”

Imagine how Wall Street would react.

“You want to know how it’ll be? I’ll tell ‘ee … the heavens will open up, and blood will come raining down … and there’ll be plagues of frogs and locusts … and the earth’ll crack, and the seas will boil over … and nameless abominations will come forth, crawling from the slimy depths … there’ll be storms, there’ll be sleet, and fire will engulf the whole earth … er, the rest of the night will be fine except for outbreaks of rain”.

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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.

Prime them for surrender

Published by Tom Sullivan on October 26, 2020
Surrender Of General Lee To General Grant 9 April 1865. Oil On Canvas By Louis Guillaume 1867.

A couple of tweets from more knowledgeable people have me thinking it is time again to, as they say, walk and chew gum at the same time. Progressives need to prepare to lock in our wins between now and Nov. 3 as well as lay groundwork for not losing Reconstruction a second time.

With more than a week to the general election, tensions are running high even as incidents at polling places have been minor. There have been at least two fires set in ballot drop boxes at opposite ends of the country. The acting president’s “implosion on 60 Minutes is much worse than you might think,” tweets Plum Line’s Sargent Greg Sargent. Trump is fuming that he could not intimidate Lesley Stahl into living in a “fictional universe of his own creation.”

Trump’s supporters still do. Both he and they will be more than mildly peeved when it comes crashing down. A Sunday tweet by Dave Wasserman hinted it would.

Progressive messaging guru Anat Shenker-Osorio insists that this side of the cultural divide must do some counter-programming to prepare the Trump cult for a loss:

This is not a matter of counting chickens too early. This is strategic. Building a “Biden wins” narrative now will make it harder for Trump to keep his foot soldiers fighting a war that’s already lost. The North won the Civil War and lost Reconstruction, after all. That sad legacy is still with us. Let’s not do that again. Erode the other side’s will to fight.

A couple of tweets from Tory Gavito of Way to Win reinforce the notion that any red mirage IS a mirage:

Younger voters are turning out as never before. The power they seek to affect change is theirs to grasp right now. Now! Nov. 4th will be too late. That is where the growth potential is for building a Democratic landslide.

Don’t buy into the media’s horse-race narrative. If Wasserman is right, then as Shenker-Osorio says, “beat drum hard [that] we are winning” if we want to win the peace too.

“This is our moment,” Stuart Stevens wrote last week. Act like it:

Now is when you turn a victory into a rout. We are all tired, but the other side isn’t just tired. They are frightened and confused. As they should be. Because they are losing the fight for the soul of this country. And they know it.

Victory is near.

But work your tails off anyway. Push it all the way to the finish line.

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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.

They aren’t even pretending to try anymore

Published by digby on October 25, 2020
Donald Trump's Dancing Video Compared To 'Seinfeld'

Trump isn’t even praying for a vaccine anymore. He’s just living in total denial.

And his fans are as well, apparently. Including VP Mike Pence:

At least five people in Vice President Mike Pence’s orbit have tested positive for coronavirus in recent days, including chief of staff Marc Short, close aide Zach Bauer and outside adviser Marty Obst, sources told CNN.There are concerns that more people within Pence’s inner circle will test positive in the coming days, a source said. “They’re scared,” the source said of staffers in the vice president’s office.

Vice President Mike Pence and second lady Karen Pence each tested negative for coronavirus on Sunday, a White House official said. Despite contact with multiple people who recently tested positive, Mike Pence is refusing to quarantine in defiance of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines.

Meanwhile:

“You should be prepared for how bad it’s going to get.”

The words of Dr. William Haseltine, an internationally renowned infectious disease expert, summarized the resounding—and sobering—takeaway from several public health experts and epidemiologists who spoke to The Daily Beast on Saturday, hours after the U.S. smashed its previous record of new daily COVID-19 cases. The country hit 83,757 reported infections in one day on Friday, while hospitalizations skyrocketed across the nation by 40 percent.

The problem, experts say, isn’t Friday’s number. It’s the upward trajectory.

“It’s going to get a lot worse,” said Dr. Haseltine, who was at the heart of the U.S response to the HIV/AIDS and anthrax crises. “We’re looking at easily an excess of 100,000 infections a day and overwhelmed hospitals all over the country.”

Haseltine said that prediction was supported by several factors: The weather will only get colder, forcing people indoors. Flu season is approaching. The holidays will tempt people to gather in groups. There are no silver bullets coming. The smaller—but still devastating—peaks in the spring and the summer were largely contained to specific regions of the United States.

“Now it’s just about everywhere across the country,” said Haseltine, noting that cases are impacting more age groups, environments, and facilities. While many states saw clusters originating in meatpacking plants, prisons, and retirement facilities earlier in the year, they’re now being traced more often back to private family gatherings, religious services, bars, athletic events, colleges, high schools, and more.

That news might be shocking to anyone who believed President Trump’s declaration this week that the country is “rounding the corner” on the pandemic and that the virus is “going away.”

But Haseltine’s prediction that “we’re not even near the peak” of the latest surge was backed by other experts who spoke with The Daily Beast on Saturday.ADVERTISING

“What we can hope for,” said Haseltine, “is that this will plateau at 100,000 [new cases per day], and that enough people will get enough scared and that enough hospitals will get overwhelmed” that it convinces the American public to wear masks, social distance, and exercise caution.

The good news will be that we plateau at 100,000 new cases per day.

Dear god.

By the way, in case you are still worried about voting for Joe Biden, he tweeted this one year ago today:

There is no doubt we will be better off with him as president. None.

Just a few of the low points

Published by digby on October 25, 2020

The Boston Globe’s Michael Cohen gathered some of the minor and major Trump atrocities of the past four years in a twitter thread. I can’t even imagine what he’ll do if he pulls off a win.

I’ve been working on a piece charting the worst indiscretions of Trump’s presidency and I’d completely forgotten about the speech he gave to the Boy Scouts Jamboree in which he talked about a friend who had orgies on a boat

Or the time he pushed the Prime Minister of Montenegro out of his way for a photo op

Or that time he cancelled a summit with the Danish prime minister because she wouldn’t sell him Greenland

Remember when Sean Spicer referred to concentration camps as “Holocaust centers” leading to this reaction from @AshleyRParker and the defining gif of the Trump years

And I had completely forgotten that Trump wanted to build a moat around the US-Mexico border wall and fill it with snakes and alligators

One of my favorite Trump outrages – the time he attacked Nordstrom’s on Twitter because they said they would no longer carry Ivanka Trump’s fashion brand

Somehow I had forgotten this …

Sharpiegate!

The short arc of a Sharpie captures the long arc of Trump - POLITICO

Then there was the time he gave a smiling thumbs up with a baby whose parents had been orphaned in the El Paso mass shooting

And who can forget the time he threw paper towels at hurricane survivors in Puerto Rico

Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV (it even has its own Wikipedia page!)

The Mike Pence Water Bottle Video!

This was 19 days ago!

On Halloween he complimented children for not having a weight problem!

Ok, here’s one – how many of you remembered that he commuted Rod Blagojevich’s prison sentence? It happened this year!

Shithole countries!

I know that @Scaramucci has become a punch line but it’s hard to do justice to how bats**t this interview with @RyanLizza was … and how insane it seemed at the time

How about that time he referred to @SenWarren as Pocahontas at a White House event HONORING NATIVE AMERICANS

Covfefe … how did we forget covfefe!

HE MOCKED A CHILD FOR BELIEVING IN SANTA CLAUS!

On his first full day in office he went to the CIA, stood before a wall memorializing the 117 CIA agents who have died in the line of duty “and boasted of his appearances on magazine covers and exaggerated about the size of the crowd at his inauguration.”

I’ve got more! Like the time Trump didn’t know that Frederick Douglass is no longer alive

He bragged about recognizing an elephant!

I had forgotten that he offered well wishes to an accused sexual predator – twice!

He publicly mocked Christine Blasey Ford at a campaign rally

His press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said every woman who accused Trump of sexual assault was a liar

h/t yo @jacklerner but this one is unforgettable

A personal favorite: the time he had the Clemson Tigers to the White House & served them fast food

Originally tweeted by Michael Cohen (@speechboy71) on October 23, 2020.

And they wonder why people say they should be defunded

Published by digby on October 25, 2020
https://twitter.com/itsa_talia/status/1320221878875815936?s=20

Obviously, this is against policy and common sense. These police are taunting Black people in their own neighborhoods, knowing that nothing will happen to them. It’s is the behavior of lawless punks.

In too many places, policing has become a radical, right-wing, extremist sub-culture with no respect for the rule of law. The people who have to deal with it day in and day out are at the breaking point and you cannot blame them.