Month: October 2020

With the aid of a mute button and some discipline from NBC News’ Kristen Welker Thursday night, America finally saw a semblance of a normal presidential debate between Acting President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden. That simply meant the acting president had some guardrails to observe and, as a Trump campaign adviser told Axios, “He finally listened.“

Trump was less nasty and interrupted less (Welker could have cut his mic more). That did not mean he did not spit out a torrent of lies and misinformation.

After Trump performances, we’ve come to expect CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale to recite a burst of Trump falsehoods as if singing Major General Stanley from “Pirates.” But last night was perhaps too much.

“For a fact checker, you’re kind of sitting there with Biden. Occasionally you’re like, oh, that’s wrong,” Dale told Wolf Blitzer. “With Trump, you’re like that ‘I Love Lucy’ episode in the chocolate factory. You don’t know which one to pick up because there’s just so much … a constant barrage, incessantly, of false and misleading stuff.”

CNN's Daniel Dale fact-checks President Trump's debate performance: "President Trump was better behaved tonight, but he lied more. … With this President, we just see a constant barrage incessantly of false or misleading stuff" #Debates2020 pic.twitter.com/YJxrHzf3sr

— CNN Politics (@CNNPolitics) October 23, 2020

The New York Times summarized the lowlights:

In their final debate, President Trump unleashed an unrelenting series of false, misleading and exaggerated statements as he sought to distort former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s record and positions and boost his own re-election hopes. The president once again relied heavily on well-worn talking points that have long been shown to be false.

The president appeared determined to reinvent the reality of the last four years — and the history of the pandemic in 2020 — as he faces judgment on his actions in just 12 days. He once again falsely dismissed the Russia investigations as a “phony witch hunt.” He insisted that aside from Abraham Lincoln, “nobody has done more for the Black community,” an assertion that people in both parties find laughable. And he tried again to wish away the pandemic, saying “we are rounding the turn” even as daily cases of the virus this week topped 70,000 in the United States for the first time since July.

If you must have a play-by-play accounting of Trump falsehoods, the Times assigned well over a dozen reporters to the task.

Countering charges that federal authorities are unable to reunite 545 children separated from parents at the southern border, Trump first tried to assign blame to human smugglers and drug cartels. He claimed, essentially, ‘they started it,’ meaning the Obama administration. Called out on that, he asserted without supplying details that he had a plan in development for reuniting traumatized children with their parents. In the meantime, “They are so well taken care of. They’re in facilities that were so clean.”

The debate is not likely to have changed any minds. Trump certainly did not reach out to voters outside his rabid base. Anyone outside the conservative/Fox/Breitbart conspiracy bubble might have thought Trump often was speaking Greek. To normal people and even to professional news-watchers, much of his “laptop from hell” and other conspiracy rambling was unintelligible.

Acyn Torabi summed up the night.

Does it look like he thinks he won? pic.twitter.com/jIHDnXfZJy

— Acyn (@Acyn) October 23, 2020

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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.

Axios:

Energetic Bear, a Russian state-sponsored hacking group, has stolen data from two servers after targeting state and federal government networks in the U.S. since at least September, the FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said on Thursday. Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe announced Wednesday that Iran and Russia had obtained voter registration information that could be used to undermine confidence in the U.S. election system.

Right. Ratcliffe held that ridiculous press conference yesterday trying to pretend that Iran was the “real hacker.” Today came the real story:

The FBI and CISA said Thursday they do not have evidence that Energetic Bear compromised elections data or government operations.

In at least one compromise of a state or local government server, Energetic Bear accessed documents related to sensitive passwords, vendors, and printing access badges, the agencies said.

 “To date, the FBI and CISA have no information to indicate this [advanced persistent threat] actor has intentionally disrupted any aviation, education, elections, or government operations. However, the actor may be seeking access to obtain future disruption options, to influence U.S. policies and actions, or to delegitimize [state, local, territorial, and tribal] government entities.”

 The New York Times reports that while Ratcliffe focused his Wednesday night press briefing primarily on the Iran findings, many intelligence officials remain “far more concerned about Russia, which in recent days has hacked into state and local computer networks in breaches that could allow Moscow broader access to American voting infrastructure,” according to the Times.

One official compared the Iranian efforts to Single A baseball, while the Russians are more like major leaguers, according to the Times.

First of all … this:

Bobulinski was the subject of a Breitbart article yesterday portrayed as a "bombshell" in which he says that he read Ron Johnson's report on the Bidens and got mad that he "connected the dots" to think they were making money behind his back.

— Edward-Isaac Dovere (@IsaacDovere) October 22, 2020

The Wall Street Journal is, like the New York Post and Fox News, another Murdoch property, but it's editorial standards are much higher than the Post's — and we know already that among those questioning the Post reporting has been questioned by the 1st main reporter on the story

— Edward-Isaac Dovere (@IsaacDovere) October 22, 2020

This is about emails purporting to show that Hunter Biden said his father was involved in some of the Chinese deals he was doing, which this guy was in on.

In 2017.

When Joe Biden was totally out of politics.

If they are going to say that private citizens can’t be doing business overseas before they run for president I would suggest that it’s Trump who has the bigger problem.

Anyway, this guy Bobulinski is being sued in California for failing to pay another partner $600,000 and seems to be a bit of an ass. But whatever. This so-called bombshell is absurd.

You are going to be hearing a whole lot more about all this bullshit so I would suggest you take the time to read through the following fact-check, even if it makes you crazy, so you can understand what the wingnuts are saying and why their other “Biden” charges are bunk.

I suspect this is going to continue through January regardless of whether Trump wins or loses and they right wing media machine will keep it alive long after. This is a perfect wingnut scandal, confusing, gossipy, irrelevant and false. That’s how they roll.

And, by the way, it’s a Peter Schweizer special, former partner of Steve Bannon and author of piece of shit book of lies called “Clinton Cash”

As Election Day nears, President Donald Trump and his supporters are urging greater scrutiny of Hunter Biden, the son of his opponent, Democratic nominee Joe Biden. They’re especially focusing on the younger Biden’s ties to China.

“Joe Biden must immediately release all emails, meetings, phone calls, transcripts, and records related to his involvement in his family’s business dealings and influence peddling around the world—including in CHINA!” Trump tweeted on Oct. 14. His campaign also ran an ad that said, “The question is not why Hunter Biden used his name to get these gigs. It’s why Joe Biden let him do it.”

This line of attack against Biden is crystallized in a new documentary distributed by TheBlaze, a conservative media site, and featuring the conservative author Peter Schweizer.

The film relies on Schweizer’s 2019 book, Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends. Previously, Schweizer wrote the book Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, which received some poor ratings for accuracy from PolitiFact.

We have previously reviewed some of the allegations leveled at Hunter Biden by Trump allies. However, because of the renewed focus on Hunter Biden’s dealings in China in the closing days of the campaign, we’ll look at some of the issues again here.

Late in the documentary, Schweizer offers a narration that summarizes some of the key arguments made by Trump’s allies.

“What we do know is that the Bidens have cultivated very close relationships with members of the Chinese elite, and some of those relationships would be very hard to defend. … We know the Biden family has a series of lucrative deals with the Chinese government. We know that these deals came despite a lack of experience by the Bidens in the areas they cover. We know that they happened while Joe Biden was steering policy towards China.

“We also know that these deals didn’t just make the Bidens money — they had dangerous consequences for our national security. We know that Hunter Biden’s firm, backed by the Chinese government, invested in a company that was actively stealing nuclear secrets from the United States. We know that China has been consistent in its efforts to acquire U.S. technology, and that their spies have been caught trying to steal our nuclear technology.

“We know that Hunter Biden’s firm bought a company that provides dual-use technologies for the Chinese military. We know that global powers have tried to stop China from monopolizing the world’s mineral resources. And we know that Hunter Biden’s firm bought a company that actually helped China in its competition with the United States for mineral resources.”

Many of the granular specifics that Schweizer cites have been documented, but foreign policy experts say the overarching conclusions reached in the documentary miss the mark because they do not add up to a picture of Joe Biden being corrupt or pursuing policies contrary to the national interest.

The documentary leaves the impression that former Vice President Joe Biden is willing to sell out his country’s national security for personal gain. But independent experts agree that this assertion is baseless. The documentary never says that either Biden broke the law, but its pairing of the Bidens with Chinese figures charged with espionage and other crimes, punctuated by spooky music, might give a viewer that impression. However, there is no evidence that Hunter Biden came close to breaking the law, much less any evidence that his father has done so.

Meanwhile, critics say that the Trump family’s financial entanglements are at least as problematic, if not worse.

“There needs to be financial disclosures of adult children of politicians, as well as politicians themselves,” said Yoshiko Herrera, a University of Wisconsin professor who previously headed the university’s Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia. “Let’s start with President Trump’s tax returns, then all the candidates’ adult childrens’ tax returns, and then we can dig deeper on other extraneous rumors about China.”

Here’s a look at some of the claims from the documentary, which we’ve divided into micro-level and macro-level allegations. The Trump or Biden campaigns did not respond to an inquiry for this article, though Schweizer did. Also, for clarity’s sake, the China allegations against Hunter Biden are separate from those involving alleged ties to Ukraine that were published on Oct. 14 by the New York Post, and that have drawn skepticism.

“We know the Biden family has a series of lucrative deals with the Chinese government.”

How “lucrative” these deals were for Hunter Biden is subject to divergent estimates, but the deals did exist, through Bohai Harvest RST, a company that Hunter Biden was involved in to pursue investment opportunities.

In September 2014, a deal was announced for Bohai Harvest RST to invest 6 billion Chinese yuan, or about $1 billion at the prevailing exchange rate, in Sinopec Marketing Co. Ltd, a subsidiary of a state-controlled oil and gas company. The investment, finalized in March 2015, was one of several simultaneous investments by various entities that added up to nearly a 30 percent stake in the firm.

In September 2015, Bohai Harvest RST paid $600 million to buy 49 percent of auto supplier Henniges Automotive Inc.; the Chinese state-owned AVIC Automotive Systems Holding Co., reportedly acquired 51 percent.

And in April 2017, Bohai Harvest RST paid $1.2 billion for 24 percent of Democratic Republic of Congo-based Tenke Fungurume Mining. Much of the rest of the company is owned by China Molybdenum Co., a private holding company with “state-owned capital participation.”

So where did the capital to make these investments come from? In 2019, the Wall Street Journal, citing business registrations, reported that Bohai Harvest RST was 80 percent controlled by Chinese entities.

George Mesires, a lawyer for Hunter Biden, told PolitiFact in 2019 that the younger Biden was an unpaid board member until October 2017, at which point he did take a 10 percent financial stake in Bohai Harvest RST.

Mesires later released a statement on Oct. 13, 2019, saying that Hunter Biden would be resigning from the board, without receiving any return on his investment or shareholder distributions. That decision was made around the time that Trump allies were targeting his activities publicly.

“We know that these deals came despite a lack of experience by the Bidens in the areas they cover.”

Hunter Biden had work experience in the financial services sector and had been a Yale Law School-educated attorney, but he does not appear to have had any significant training in Asia, oil and gas, mining, or aviation.

“We know that (these deals) happened while Joe Biden was steering policy towards China. We also know that these deals didn’t just make the Bidens money — they had dangerous consequences for our national security.”

Robert Ross, a Boston College political scientist who specializes in China, said that what was known as the Obama administration pivot toward Asia began in 2010. This predated the creation of Bohai Harvest RST.

“This policy shift aimed to resist Chinese security policy initiatives,” Ross said. “Overall security and economic trends reflected a significant hardening of U.S. policy toward China, as compared to both the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. For instance, U.S. policy developed greater security cooperation with South Korea, Japan, and the Philippines to strengthen the alliances and to better contend with Chinese policy.

But Ross said that he knows of “no U.S. agreements with China that entailed U.S. security interests, much less that compromised U.S. security.”

“We know that Hunter Biden’s firm, backed by the Chinese government, invested in a company that was actively stealing nuclear secrets from the United States. We know that China has been consistent in its efforts to acquire U.S. technology, and that their spies have been caught trying to steal our nuclear technology.”

Reuters has reported that Bohai Harvest RST also invested in China General Nuclear Power Corp, a state-owned company. The company employed a naturalized U.S. citizen and nuclear engineer, Allen Ho, who was indicted in the United States in 2016 for allegedly enlisting U.S.-based nuclear experts to assist in developing and producing special nuclear material in China. “Prosecuting those who unlawfully facilitate the acquisition of sensitive nuclear technology by foreign nations continues to be a top priority of the National Security Division,” the Justice Department said its news release about Ho’s sentencing to 24 months in prison.

“We know that Hunter Biden’s firm bought a company that provides dual-use technologies for the Chinese military.”

The Henniges Automotive deal was done in concert with AVIC, an aviation company that is involved in both military and commercial markets.

“We know that global powers have tried to stop China from monopolizing the world’s mineral resources. And we know that Hunter Biden’s firm bought a company that actually helped China in its competition with the United States for mineral resources.”

The mining deal involved the takeover of a mine that produces significant amounts of cobalt, which technically isn’t a rare-earth element but which is considered a critical mineral by the U.S. government, along with niobium, another commodity produced by the Chinese mining company.

The film acknowledges that the Obama administration was fighting China over rare-earth minerals at the time, which is the opposite of Biden steering U.S. policy towards his son’s benefit.

Problems with the macro-level allegations

Even if the granular details are correct, however, that doesn’t mean there is a widespread scandal. Here are a few reasons why:

The verifiable aspects of the story are about Hunter Biden, not Joe Biden.

In many of these allegations, Schweizer uses the term “the Bidens.” While the viewer is presumably meant to fill in the blank as “Joe Biden,” the allegations really refer to members of his family, particularly Hunter.

In our previous analyses, we’ve made it clear that Hunter Biden did cause a problem of appearances for his father.

“It is apparent to me that Hunter Biden did not do anything illegal in China, but it would have been much better for Joe Biden’s political fortunes if Hunter Biden had not been involved in either Ukraine or China,” Lincoln A. Mitchell, an adjunct research scholar at Columbia University’s Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, told us last year.

Barry Naughton, chair of Chinese international affairs at the University of California-San Diego, told us earlier this year that while it’s allowed, “it is certainly a bad thing that our political system allows deals like this, and a bad thing that Hunter Biden takes advantage of them.”

In a lengthy investigation of dealings by Hunter Biden and James Biden, the nominee’s brother, Politico concluded that “Biden’s image as a straight-shooting man of the people … is clouded by the careers of his son and brother, who have lengthy track records of making, or seeking, deals that cash in on his name.”

Regardless, there is no evidence that Joe Biden was orchestrating these activities, or benefiting from them.

Schweizer told PolitiFact that he does not “allege anyone broke a law. But I don’t know that the threshold for acceptable behavior for our elected leaders needs to be not committing criminal acts.”

There’s no evidence that Hunter Biden’s activities drove changes in policy.

Just because the deals happened at the same time doesn’t mean that Joe Biden acted corruptly in carrying out policy.

Much the same fallacy can be seen in the accusations that Biden acted to oust Ukraine’s top prosecutor in order to benefit a company where Hunter Biden was serving as a board member. In reality, much of the international community was united in the push to remove the prosecutor due to concerns over corruption.

The rare-earth minerals deal, for instance, ran counter to the administration’s policy, which suggests White House policy was running against Hunter Biden’s business interests.

Schweizer said his research shows that Chinese officials sought out Hunter Biden and his partner Devon Archer “to pursue an agenda of ‘soft diplomacy,’” and that Joe Biden “made numerous public statements in which he portrays China as a harmless rival. … That a sitting vice president is presenting our main rival in this light is not insignificant.”

However, a point that the documentary doesn’t note is that Biden’s policy now, as a candidate, has been tough on China. He has been framing “China’s rise as a serious challenge,” according to an analysis by the Council on Foreign Relations.

“He has criticized its ‘abusive’ trade practices — warning that it may pull ahead of the United States in new technologies — and its human rights record,” the analysis says. “He says he would mount a more effective pushback against China than Trump and work more closely with allies to pressure Beijing.”

For better or worse, these sorts of ties are common, and legal, among world leaders.

A wide range of China experts told PolitiFact that it’s not unusual for Chinese government and businesses interests to court prominent Americans or their family members.

“This is a standard operating procedure,” Naughton said. “Bring in an influential person, give him a small percentage of a firm as a ‘finders fee,’ and grow the business.”

It is a widespread belief of Chinese leaders “that a father always secretly helps his son,” said Zhiguo He, a finance professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. “Chinese business entities would like to give favors to the son in a proactive way, with the belief that if I am giving deals to the son, the father will remember it. Many lower level officials are doing it.”

Neil Bush, the younger brother of then-President George W. Bush, testified in a March 2003 divorce proceeding about a $2 million stock deal with Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., a firm backed by the son of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin.

HNA Group, a Chinese conglomerate, offered to buy a hedge fund owned by former White House official Anthony Scaramucci; retained the legal services of Gary Locke, the former U.S. ambassador to China, shortly before his confirmation; and provided financing to a private-equity firm backed by Jeb Bush, according to a 2019 account in the Intercept.

The Bank of China added Angela Chao, the sister of Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and sister-in-law of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., to its board of directors, the Intercept reported.

President Trump and his family have faced questions of possible conflicts of interest as well, including the granting of Chinese trademarks to Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who owned a fashion line.

Both the Biden and Trump examples involved a child of a powerful U.S. official getting special treatment or business opportunities from the Chinese government, but there are some differences. On one hand, Ivanka Trump’s trademark approval involved an expedited regulatory review, as opposed to an ongoing investment opportunity. On the other hand, unlike Biden, she was a White House official at the time, in addition to being the president’s daughter. And the president himself maintains extensive business interests around the world.

Schweizer told PolitiFact that “any time family members of politicians have business deals with foreign governments, it’s fair to raise the issue.” However, for the past four years, he said, “the Trump’s family members’ financial relationships seem to have been well covered,” while Biden’s have not.

Others, however, believe the reason for concern about China ties should tilt more heavily toward the Trump family. He of the University of Chicago said that in his exposure to China over the past 10 years, “I rarely heard about Hunter. I heard a lot more about Ivanka.”

It’s not something we want to think about but it’s important to gird ourselves to the possibility that Trump and his accomplices will try to steal the election through the courts. Some of the decisions we’ve seen come down already give us a hint of the possibilities. Brian Beutler takes a look at some of them, beginning with the horrifying possibility that the court will rule that all the votes in a particular state must be thrown out because of some alleged “taint” and a right wing legislature instead chooses the winner. Oh my God …

Most voting-rights supporters cheered this week’s 4-4 Supreme Court decision to shelve a GOP challenge to Pennsylvania’s extended absentee-ballot deadline. That decision leaves in place a state supreme court ruling that should allow Pennsylvania to count ballots that arrive by November 6, so long as they aren’t postmarked after Election Day. In reaching that determination, the state court overrode state law to vindicate the state-constitutional voting rights of Pennsylvanians, which have been threatened by pandemic conditions and intentional efforts to slow mail delivery.

But the fact that four sitting Supreme Court justices wanted to reach into Pennsylvania’s affairs and possibly overturn that state-court ruling troubled legal experts. They noted that the composition of the Court will soon change, and Barrett will likely side with the four most conservative justices on legal challenges Trump and the GOP might bring after the election—including to those late-arriving absentee ballots in Pennsylvania.

There should be an easy remedy to this problem: Vote early, make your ballot impossible to challenge. That’s wise advice voters everywhere should follow. But in Pennsylvania, some ballots will still inevitably arrive after Election Day, and the remote-but-terrifying risk is less that they’ll be discarded, than that the Supreme Court will declare them deficient after they’ve commingled with the larger pool of unchallenged votes. With no way to distinguish “valid” ballots from ones the Court has invalidated, the state Republicans who spoke to Gellman would have the real, actionable pretext they need to declare the election tainted, and seek to appoint electors who would loyally cast votes for Donald Trump. The missing piece will fall into place.

That sounds bad, but as Beutler points out this would not go unchallenged and the public disapprobation would be extreme. He quotes election-law expert Rick Hasen saying that it’s extremely unlikely that any court would step in once the votes have been co-mingled. He thinks this is the most unlikely scenario. However:

In other words, courts would have to be unabashed in their partisanship to help Trump pull this off. Lower courts, and ultimately the Supreme Court, would have to run roughshod over norms and the law to spoil ballots after they’ve already been stirred into the pot, and doing that would cashier whatever remains of their legitimacy in the public’s eye. But this is a problem we’ve seen with GOP-dominated courts in less high-profile cases over and over again: if they’re shameless enough, there’s nothing to stop them.

Shameless? Republicans? Yeah …

Beutler points out that it’s even possible that Republicans have purposefully comingled potentially “tainted” ballots with legitimate ones for the express purpose of creating lawsuits in a friendly circuit. In Florida, for instance, they changed rules after the voting had already started, potentially creating this very situation. If there’s one place I could see such a nefarious scheme taking place, it’s there.

Slate legal writer Mark Joseph Stern noted that though this guidance lacks support in state law, it may nevertheless form the basis of a GOP legal challenge. “Presuming supervisors ignore McVay’s guidance, Florida’s largest counties will collect a huge number of absentee ballots in a manner deemed unlawful by the Department of State,” he writes. “If Joe Biden narrowly wins the state in November, Florida’s Republican-controlled government could argue that these ballots should be thrown out because they were cast through an illegal process. That claim could give rise to litigation that might allow the federal judiciary to call election results into question and invalidate ballots.”

As in Pennsylvania, though, the biggest risk may not be that Trump and the GOP will successfully challenge some ballots. It’s that those invalid ballots will have been irretrievably commingled with unchallenged ones. Republicans wouldn’t succeed in helping Trump throw out Democratic votes; they’d succeed in making a full count impossible.

Beutler explains why it’s important to think this through:

Indeed the purpose of gaming out possible schemes like this, however unlikely they are to succeed, is to pre-empt them, so they don’t catch the public and the media unaware, and so they aren’t mistaken for anything other than naked and illegitimate efforts to steal an election.

In theory, the state officials themselves could pre-empt this kind of chicanery—by segregating out ballots in states like Pennsylvania that are likely to be challenged, or by declaring that voters in states like Florida will not be punished for following the rules. And even after adverse Supreme Court rulings, the political and legal battles over which candidate is entitled to contested state electoral votes would continue, particularly in states with Democratic administrations, and Republican legislatures—including the key states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina.

[…]

But ultimately the power to discredit Trump’s underlying premise—that partisan courts and free-agent electors, loyal to the president, should dictate the winner of the election—rests with engaged citizens. Trump and his supporters haven’t committed to any particular species of legal challenge, but they have stood squarely behind the idea that his allies on the court should say which votes count and which don’t, and that they should do so in a way that guarantees him a second term.

It’s ultimately voters, spurred to action by their leaders, who have the power to reject this premise, by handing Trump a defeat outside the “margin of litigation,” and by preparing to march peacefully, day after day, if and when tries to disenfranchise them anyhow. The best way to help people do that is to alert them in advance to what Trump’s legal schemes might look like in practice, frame them before he can, so that he loses two key advantages: the power to misleadingly shape public perception, and the element of surprise.

He’s right, of course. But I would just ass that the “marching day after day” will be met with a right wing backlash in which the Trump people will say the Democrats are refusing to accept the results of the election and are staging a coup. They will take to the streets as well. And they will probably be armed.

Let’s hope it doesn’t come anywhere near that. If the election results are “outside the margin of litigation” we might just be able to have a normal transition. If not, all bets are off.

Update: this is a good point

This is a smart piece by @mjs_DC on why the dissent in the NC ballot receipt deadline case was so eye-popping, and what it would mean if SCOTUS was to sanction the dissent's approach https://t.co/WTEMy8tGC8

— Tierney Sneed (@Tierney_Megan) October 22, 2020

If the Supreme Court goes along with what the GOP is arguing in the NC case, it really will be a "heads I win, tails you lose" approach. state officials have discretion when they're restricting voter access, but not when they're expanding it.

— Tierney Sneed (@Tierney_Megan) October 22, 2020

This is an important observation. So far, we’ve seen the conservatives on the court deciding they can’t intervene in state election decisions when it benefits Republicans and also intervening when it … benefits Republicans. Justice Roberts was the swing vote — he voted to not intervene in both situations. But I think we know where Coney Barrett will come down, don’t we?

This could be a huge, huge mess.

Back in the early days of blogging, Atrios coined a phrase to describe Republicans: WATB (whiny ass titty baby.)

There has never been a better example of that that Donald Trump:

Grilled by Stahl about the irresponsibility of holding huge rallies that make a mockery of public health precautions during a pandemic, Trump has no defense other than insulting her and lying pic.twitter.com/UowM4rRrjE

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 22, 2020

Trump's 60 Minutes interview with Lesley Stahl ended with him whining about her asking him tough questions and storming out in a huff pic.twitter.com/zuiwYpKnFb

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 22, 2020

This is the strong, powerful leader these Trumpers worship?

As the man himself would say: sad!

Remember this?

In a surprising move on Tuesday, President Trump abruptly fired James Comey, the director of the FBI and the official leading the investigation into whether Trump aides colluded with Russia to sway the U.S. presidential election. In his letter dismissing Comey, Trump told him: “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the bureau.”

The White House said that Trump acted on the recommendations of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. The longest letter released was a memorandum to Sessions from Rosenstein laying out the case for Comey’s dismissal. In the memo, Rosenstein criticizes Comey for his handling of the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server, and offers examples of bipartisan condemnation of Comey’s actions.

We know that was bullshit, of course. Trump admitted to Lester Holt that he did it because of the Russia investigation.

Nonetheless, Trump’s shamelessness and hypocrisy is unparalleled and this is where he is today:

President Donald Trump, angry that he hasn’t received the damaging pre-election bombshell on Democratic rival Joe Biden that he’s been pushing for, has reportedly been discussing with aides the possibility of firing FBI Director Christopher Wray for not handing Trump said bombshell in the form of an investigation into Biden.

The Washington Post reported on Wednesday night that Trump wants a public announcement of a federal probe into Biden and his son, Hunter, that could damage the Democrat similar to how then-FBI Director James Comey had announced a renewed investigation into 2016 Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s emails less than two weeks before Election Day four years ago.

As the elections draw nearer with little indication that the FBI director will deliver Trump that kind of campaign boost, the President has reportedly been telling advisers that Wray was one of his worst appointees.

The Washington Post article suggests that Trump might fire Wray, which I actually expect. In fact, if Trump loses, I don’t even want to think about the vengeful purge that could take place. This lame duck period will be a very dangerous time for America and the world.

… that is brainwashing people. Read this report from Mother Jones and you will understand why so many Americans are hooked on Donald Trump and right wing conspiracy theories.

Near the close of the first year of the Trump presidency, executives at Facebook were briefed on some major changes to its News Feed—the code that determines which of the zillions of posts on the platform any one of us is shown when we look at Facebook. The story the company has publicly told is that it was working to “bring people closer together” by showing us more posts from friends and family, and to prioritize “trusted” and “informative” sources of news. The changes would also reduce how much news most people see, and therefore decrease revenue for many publishers.

What wasn’t publicly known until now is that Facebook actually ran experiments to see how the changes would affect publishers—and when it found that some of them would have a dramatic impact on the reach of right-wing “junk sites,” as a former employee with knowledge of the conversations puts it, the engineers were sent back to lessen those impacts. As the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, they came back in January 2018 with a second iteration that dialed up the harm to progressive-leaning news organizations instead.

In fact, we have now learned that executives were even shown a slide presentation that highlighted the impact of the second iteration on about a dozen specific publishers—and Mother Jones was singled out as one that would suffer, while the conservative site the Daily Wire was identified as one that would benefit. These changes were pushed by Republican operatives working in Facebook’s Washington office under Vice President of Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan (who later made headlines for demonstratively supporting his friend Brett Kavanaugh during confirmation hearings).

Asked for comment, Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone would only say, “We did not make changes with the intent of impacting individual publishers. We only made updates after they were reviewed by many different teams across many disciplines to ensure the rationale was clear and consistent and could be explained to all publishers.”Facebook used its monopolistic power to boost and suppress specific publishers’ content—the essence of every Big Brother fear about the platforms.

Glossed over in that non-answer answer is the fact that the changes were made with at least the knowledge of the disparate impact they would have on specific publishers. And that those changes appear to have been based, at least in part, on internal partisan concerns.

Stone would not comment on the slide deck. But according to someone who has seen it, it contained bar graphs indicating how much reach various news organizations would gain or lose under the revamped algorithm. One chart showed the Daily Wire, a site headed by conservative pundit Ben Shapiro that routinely shares false claims and malignant ideas (being transgender is a “delusion,” abortion providers are “assassins,” US Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., is not “loyal to America”). Another graph showed Mother Jones, whose rigorously fact-checked investigative work has garnered many of journalism’s highest awards, including—just months before that Facebook presentation—being honored as Magazine of the Year at our industry’s version of the Academy Awards.

Allow us to pause briefly while we scream out of the window. This kind of false equivalence is enraging enough when lazy pundits do it. But when the most powerful media company in the world uses it as the basis for deciding what information users should see or not see, it’s more than that. It’s an attack on your ability to stay informed. It’s an attack on democracy.

To be perfectly clear: Facebook used its monopolistic power to boost and suppress specific publishers’ content—the essence of every Big Brother fear about the platforms, and something Facebook and other companies have been strenuously denying for years.

It’s also, ironically, what conservatives have consistently accused Facebook of doing to them, with the perverse but entirely intended effect of causing it to bend over backward for them instead. This past Thursday the Daily Wire’s Shapiro inveighed against Twitter and Facebook suppressing a widely discredited New York Post story on Hunter Biden: “Social media companies are so afraid of Democrats that they will voluntarily do what Democrats want so Democrats don’t come after them. This is a blackmail routine by Democrats against social media.” He calls it an “inside job” at Facebook and Twitter in which “top Democrats at these places decide that it’s time to shut down material.”

Replace “Democrats” with “Republicans” in those comments from Shapiro—who is also one of the conservative luminaries Zuckerberg has invited to his home for hours-long gab sessions—and you have exactly what appears to have happened in January 2018.

There’s more at the link and it’s extremely disturbing.

This should not be a surprise. Facebook’s executive suite is filled with conservatives and Zuckerberg himself seems either cowed by the wingnuts or actively affiliated. Facebook is as pernicious as Fox in disseminating right wing lies, often to unsuspecting people who don’t realize they’re being propagandized. One of the main reasons that 50% of Repu blicans think the Democratic leadership are pedophiles is Facebook. Seriously…

Okay, buckle up. My neurons fire funny.

Last night Susie Madrak mentioned she was watching Apollo 13 again. She watches it whenever it is on. Even at the laundromat.

“We used to do big things. I have hope we will again,” Madrak tweeted.

We used to do big things. I have hope we will again.

— Suburban Guerrilla 💙 (@SusieMadrak) October 21, 2020

I get that. After four years of the Trump administration, brother, do I get that. (Yeah, we’re both boomers.)

My Depression-era grandmother marveled that she’d lived to see the first moon landing in 1969. For me as a teen, it was just a natural evolution of American technological advancement. That was a given, a source of national pride. Remember national pride? Before waterboarding? Before extraordinary rendition? Before a president corrupt beyond the wildest banana-republics of TV fiction? Before QAnon?

Technology has advanced since the 1960s, but not necessarily Americans’ standard of living. Unions are atrophied. The middle class is shrinking. We’d rather allow tax cuts for rich people and fight each other for scraps that fall from their tables. Our interest in doing big things has waned and it especially shows this year.

“Infrastructure week” is a running joke during the Trump administration because we have not done big things in decades. We’ve become an Idiocracy. It just didn’t take America electing President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho 500 years from now. We elected Donald J. Trump four short years ago. It wasn’t as catastrophic as Earth being hit by a comet. But combined with the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 feels like a mini-apocalypse.

Susie’s wish that we might do big things again reminded me of Pvt. Joe Bauers’s speech at the end of Idiocracy (you have to have seen the film):

Pvt. Joe Bauers: … And there was a time in this country, a long time ago, when reading wasn’t just for fags and neither was writing. People wrote books and movies, movies that had stories so you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting, and I believe that time can come again!

After a trip through California’s Central Valley in 2013, I reminisced about an America that did big things more inspiring than movies about farting asses:

Has America – and the American Dream itself – gone into retreat? Once the largest, most prosperous in the world, the American middle class is faltering, crumbling like our nation’s schools and bridges.

Flag-pin-wearing American exceptionalists tell crowds this is the greatest nation on Earth, and then repeat “we’re broke.” They hope to dismantle safety net programs, telling Americans working harder than ever – at jobs and looking for jobs – that they don’t have enough “skin in the game.” Wake up and smell the austerity. America can no longer afford Americans.

Some of us remember a time when America’s dreams were boundless.

One summer when I was a child, I traveled with my grandparents to visit my aunt and uncle in Lawton, Oklahoma. My uncle was serving in the U.S. Army at Fort Sill. They lived off-base with their toddler son. The apartment backed up to a drive-in theater. “Old Yeller” was playing.

We left from Chicago driving Route 66. (The Nelson Riddle theme to the TV show is still the hippest ever.) The trip took a couple of days. The highway was still two lanes as you went further west. That was already changing.

Beside Route 66 and elsewhere, Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System – the vast system of roads most of us take for granted – was taking shape from border to border and from coast to coast. It was a national project worthy of a great nation. The country was on the move.

Astronaut Alan Shepard was a national hero. Our parents wanted us to go to college. Our president wanted us to go. Our country wanted us to go. Getting an education was not just a key to a future better than our parents’. It was a patriotic duty. Not just something you could do for you, but what you could do for your country.

America was going to the moon by the end of the decade. We needed scientists and engineers and new technologies. Between the G.I. Bill and government-backed student loans, America was making it more affordable than ever to get an education. It was good for you. It was good for your community. It was good for all of U.S.

On another trip last month through California’s dry Central Valley, I rode past miles and miles of crops and orchards. Tomatoes. Lettuce. Vegetables. Strawberries. Walnuts. Cherries. Pistachios.

San Joaquin Valley agriculture accounts for more than 12 percent of the nation’s output by dollar value, according to Associated Press. It produces 25 percent of America’s food on about one percent of U.S. farmland.

What goes onto your dinner plate and into your mouth is made possible in large part, not by daring, bootstrap entrepreneurs, but by the huge public works project we saw on our journey. Sierra snowmelt harnessed to grow food on dry lands. Dams. Reservoirs. Pumps. Pipes. Aqueducts.

And beside those canals, farms providing food and jobs along 700 miles of the California Aqueduct and the Central Valley Project. Begun during the Great Depression. Built with public money. By Americans. For Americans.

But today, that America is in retreat. Its dreams are shriveled. Instead of investing in public infrastructure like aqueducts, highways and bridges, we watch ours collapse as China’s rise. In Washington, pundits and politicians wring their hands over nickels and dimes for Americans while spending hundreds of billions of deficit dollars to maintain a global empire. Almost 900 overseas military bases? Was that our Founders’ vision of greatness?

Meanwhile, tax cuts starve cities and states of revenue until grasping investors – foreign and domestic – can gobble up public infrastructure built with your sweat equity. The privateers hope to extract the last drop of value out of what we, our parents, and our grandparents built to benefit all Americans. These patriots will hide their gains offshore and whine about tax rates they don’t pay while pocketing billions in public subsidies.

Tom Sawyer conned friends into paying him for the privilege of painting his aunt’s fence. Tom Sawyer, Inc. is not far behind. These guys won’t be satisfied until we are paying them to work for them.

When they have stripped America bare, the vulture capitalists will move on. Hands over their hearts, still waving their flags and humming the national anthem, they’ll move on, leaving America to crumble to dust. And they will shake the dust from their feet.

How much longer will We the People tolerate that?

Not beyond November 3, 2020. No way. That is, if we have the stomach for it.

“Lucifer’s Hammer,” the 1977 post-apocalypse-survival novel by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, takes place in that same Central Valley. A comet strike destabilizes fault lines and triggers tsunamis that sweep away coastal cities and turn much of the Central Valley into an inland sea. Survivors of a battle with anti-technology religious cultists ponder eking out a minimal future as rat catchers and swineherds, “good peasants, safe peasants, superstitious peasants,” when once “we used to control the lightning!” Risking themselves to save a nearby generating station from the marauders could cost more lives, but give them the power needed to rebuild, to do big things.

“Give my children the lightning again,” pleads Senator Jellison with his dying breaths.

In hospitals across this country today, Americans are dying with no family or friends to hear their dying words. Fuck this. Crush the cultists at the polls. Build back better.

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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.

James Randi, a.k.a. The Amazing Randi, has died. We will get to what his life and death has to do with the politics of the moment … in a moment.

The New York Times obituary begins:

James Randi, a MacArthur award-winning magician who turned his formidable savvy to investigating claims of spoon bending, mind reading, fortunetelling, ghost whispering, water dowsing, faith healing, U.F.O. spotting and sundry varieties of bamboozlement, bunco, chicanery, flimflam, flummery, humbuggery, mountebankery, pettifoggery and out-and-out quacksalvery, as he quite often saw fit to call them, died on Tuesday at his home in Plantation, Fla. He was 92.

[…]

“People who are stealing money from the public, cheating them and misinforming them — that’s the kind of thing that I’ve been fighting all my life,” he said in the 2014 documentary “An Honest Liar,” directed by Tyler Measom and Justin Weinstein. “Magicians are the most honest people in the world: They tell you they’re going to fool you, and then they do it.”

Randi made it his mission in life to expose “pseudoscience, in all its immoral irrationality” to the light of scientific rationalism. What must he have thought of QAnon? Or Acting President Donald J. Trump?

I once met Randi while in college. One of the theater department professors, an amateur magician, invited him to speak and perform. A couple of things Randi wrote since about claims of the paranormal stuck with me.

Intelligence can be a weakness. Educated people who believe themselves too smart to be fooled make easy marks. Even scientists testing psychics’ abilities get fooled. They are unaccustomed to their data actively trying to lie to them.

Mountebanks and charlatans like the temporary occupant of the Oval Office lie for a living. Prior to elected office, the acting president surrounded himself with fawning sycophants. He carried that habit to Washington, D.C. His whole life he has been unaccustomed to being challenged. As recent questioning by women reporters demonstrates, he has found the experience of being a politician in the public eye corrosive to his manufactured image.

The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent considers why Donald J. Trump fumed and walked out of his “60 Minutes” interview this week after aggressive questioning by CBS’s Lesley Stahl. It is his second such public fight with under two weeks to go to the general election. The first was with his own infectious-disease expert, the widely respected Anthony S. Fauci.

Sargent suggests that the two stand in the way of Trump selling his marks an entirely fictional reality, one in which He-Trump has vanquished the coronavirus and built a wildly prosperous economy. Pay no attention to the piles of corpses and hungry children behind the curtain.

Stahl reportedly asked Trump tough questions about his handling of the pandemic and his rhetoric regarding the kidnap plot against Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D). The Post reported Tuesday:

Stahl also told him during the interview that allegations about Biden’s son Hunter were not verified and that the Obama administration did not spy on the Trump campaign. Many of the questions were about the coronavirus pandemic and his handling of it, said the person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the interview frankly.

“Why might this have enraged Trump?” Sargent asks. “Because Trump has gone to tremendous lengths to manufacture precisely the illusions that Stahl apparently sought to puncture, yet these efforts are failing.”

Trump demanded that the Department of Justice produce a report that made Hunter Biden pseudo-revelations seem verified. Trump expected Attorney General William P. Barr to produce a report on the origins of the Russia investigation that would make the phony “Obamagate” scandal seem verified as well.

Sargent continues:

During his recent NBC town hall, Trump grew incensed because the arguments were unfolding in reality, where the biggest domestic extremist threat is right-wing in nature — which his own Department of Homeland Security has attested to. This wasn’t supposed to happen: Extensive government resources were devoted to manufacturing the illusion of an organized leftist terror threat for him to campaign against, but that’s failed.

Trump got impeached for subverting U.S. foreign policy to the goal of strong-arming Ukraine into announcing an investigation into alleged Biden corruption — not actually finding corruption, but merely announcing it — because again all that mattered was what could be made to seem true.

Which makes Trump another of the charlatans James Randi spent his life unmasking. Daddy Fred’s money helped Donald create the illusion that he himself was a successful businessman. Donald’s ghost-written books painted him as the consummate dealmaker he was not. He gold-leafed his gaudy Manhattan penthouse and, calling himself John Barron and disguising his voice, duped Fortune magazine into ranking him a billionaire among its 1984 Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans. His net worth as approximately $5 million in 1982, not the billion he claimed two years later. Self-promotion is Trump’s only real talent. The only thing keeping his ego inflated is the adulation of the credulous.

Randi appeared on the “Tonight Show” multiple times. Johnny Carson began in show business as a magician (hence Carnac the Magnificent). This demonstration of psychic surgery will leave an impression.

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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.