Monday Reads: And so it Begins … Fear and Loathing in the US
Posted: November 2, 2020 Filed under: 2020 Elections, Afternoon Reads, Voting Rights 36 Comments
Good Day Sky Dancers!
This week will probably be one of the strangest we’ve ever had in the country especially during our long cherished democratic and patriotic duty of voting and counting the votes. Most of us had to wait a long time to get our demographic to the polls but now we got it we gotta use it!
In one of the strangest and unexpected moves of this presidency, we find the Trump building non scalable walls around the White House. What kind of President has to do that? Via CNN and Paul LeBlanc: “Federal authorities expected to erect ‘non-scalable’ fence around White House”. Not even Nixon got that paranoid!
Federal authorities are expected to put back into place a “non-scalable” fence around the entire perimeter of the White House on Monday as law enforcement and other agencies prepare for possible protests surrounding the election, a source with knowledge of the matter confirmed to CNN.
The fence, the same type that was put up during protests this summer, will encompass the Ellipse and Lafayette Square. It will go down 15th Street to Constitution Avenue and then over to 17th Street. The fence will then run up to H Street and across by Lafayette, and then come down 15th Street, the source said.
NBC News was first to report the new fencing. A Secret Service spokeswoman declined to comment to CNN, saying the agency does not comment on security measures.
The extra layer of security marks the most high-profile example to date of authorities preparing for unrest following this year’s election, particularly if there is no clear winner come November 4.
Meanwhile, a Trumpist Rally in Georgia ended in the same clusterfuck as the ones in Omaha, Florida, Pennsylvania, and now Georgia!
Both campaigns seriously have Georgia on their minds! I can’t imagine this is going to make any one very happy even if you’re a part of the death cult.
“The Polling” by William Hogarth (1755), scene 3 in his Humours of an Election series. While Hogarth’s goal is to mercilessly satire English politics, his painting also hints at the festive atmosphere of an actual 18th century Election Day. Credit: Sir John Soane’s Museum / The Yorck Project / Wikipedia.
Any one who has worked campaigns or been a candidate knows that yard signs basically disappear fast for a variety of reasons. My opponents husband was out daily taking down little yard signs and big road signs as fast as my wonderful team from the Firefighter’s union could put them up. It’s maddening; but this is the first I’ve heard of this, but I have to consider it’s Topeka, Kansas. “Man thought people were stealing Donald Trump signs; three shot”.
Three people were shot late Saturday in North Topeka after a man confronted people he thought had committed past thefts of signs promoting the campaign of Republican Presidential incumbent Donald Trump, a Topeka police supervisor said Sunday.
Police weren’t specifying who was thought to have shot whom or revealing the names, ages or genders of those who were wounded.
Officers responded about 11 p.m. to the scene in the 1300 block of N.W. Eugene, from which one person was taken by ambulance to a hospital with gunshot wounds that were considered potentially life-threatening, said police Lt. Joe Perry.
Eugene, which runs north and south, is located about a block west of N.W. Topeka Boulevard in the area involved.
Two other people later sought hospital treatment in Topeka after arriving by private vehicle after suffering from gunshot wounds, Perry said. The seriousness of their injuries wasn’t clear.
The names, ages and genders of those wounded weren’t available Sunday morning.
Close up detail of a mural by Philadelphia artist Nile Livingston entitled “To the Polls”
Meanwhile, armed hooligans in pickup trucks continue to terrorize their neighbors in cities throughout the country. Yesterday, groups of them stopped traffic on the Andrew Cuomo bridge in both NJ and NYC. Also, we learn that group in Richmond, Va circled like fucked up hick in hick up fucks around a confederate monument. This is basically the KKK trying to scare voters off. This is from the Richmond Times Dispatch: “Witnesses describe clash at Lee Circle between caravan of Trump supporters and a crowd of opponents.”
Tempers flared Sunday as a “Trump train” of cars tried to pass Lee Circle along Monument Avenue and clashed with opposing protesters, drawing a police presence that blocked off the area to traffic.
Witnesses said gunshots were fired during the encounter on Sunday afternoon two days before the presidential election, and one man showed a reporter a bullet hole in his car where it was parked on Monument Avenue near Lee Circle, which has been the site of racial justice protests for several months.
Several other witnesses said one or more of the supporters of President Donald Trump in the train of cars was spraying chemical irritants at an opposing crowd that was trying to block the cars from passing. One man said he narrowly avoided being run over by jumping onto the hood of a car. Another man said he ducked just in time as someone fired a gun at him from a truck, after someone else had pulled a Trump flag off one of the vehicles.
Richmond police said a woman reported at 4:18 p.m. that she had been pepper-sprayed by someone from one of the vehicles. A few minutes later, officers responded to Lee Circle to investigate a report of an unoccupied vehicle that had been struck once by gunfire.
“AMERICA’S WOMEN GET THE VOTE CALENDAR ILLUSTRATION” .Bernie Fuchs
1965 (Estimated)President Trump has failed the test of leadership. His bid for reelection is foundering. And his only solution has been to launch an all-out, multimillion-dollar effort to disenfranchise voters — first by seeking to block state laws to ease voting during the pandemic, and now, in the final stages of the campaign, by challenging the ballots of individual voters unlikely to support him.
This is as un-American as it gets. It returns the Republican Party to the bad old days of “voter suppression” that landed it under a court order to stop such tactics — an order lifted before this election. It puts the party on the wrong side of demographic changes in this country that threaten to make the GOP a permanent minority.
These are painful words for me to write. I spent four decades in the Republican trenches, representing GOP presidential and congressional campaigns, working on Election Day operations, recounts, redistricting and other issues, including trying to lift the consent decree.
Nearly every Election Day since 1984 I’ve worked with Republican poll watchers, observers and lawyers to record and litigate any fraud or election irregularities discovered.
The truth is that over all those years Republicans found only isolated incidents of fraud. Proof of systematic fraud has become the Loch Ness Monster of the Republican Party. People have spent a lot of time looking for it, but it doesn’t exist.
As he confronts losing, Trump has devoted his campaign and the Republican Party to this myth of voter fraud. Absent being able to articulate a cogent plan for a second term or find an attack against Joe Biden that will stick, disenfranchising enough voters has become key to his reelection strategy.
Here’s something new from the Plum Line and Greg Sargent: “Trump just revealed his plot to steal the election. Here’s a way to stop him.”
President Trump has revealed his endgame in all its corrupt glory. If Trump is on track to losing once all the votes are counted, he will seek to invalidate as many ballots as possible, while asserting that counting outstanding ballots constitutes an effort to steal the election from him.
In reality, of course, it’s that very act — trying to thwart the full counting of ballots — which would actually constitute an effort to steal the election.
To be clear: Trump will declare that the election is being stolen from him to justify trying to steal it himself.
But this plot constitutes a bet on massive institutional failure by the news media to render that basic situation with total clarity. So I’d like to suggest how the media might avoid such a disastrous outcome.
One way entails flipping the script so great emphasis in election-night coverage is placed on the percentages of uncounted votes, as opposed to the percentages of counted ones.
First, an aside: Saying Trump has a plot to steal the election doesn’t mean he can’t win. Trump still can win, if there’s a very large polling error, or if he hangs on in Pennsylvania, where Joe Biden’s lead is not overwhelmingly solid, which opens up an inside path.
However, Trump himself has a contingency plan to steal the election if he is set to lose once all the votes are counted. It’s to prevent all the votes from getting counted.
I’m just glad there are some very clever lawyers watching what this snake in the grass does. I only hope that state level law enforcement does the same.
So, I will get up to vote tomorrow. Wait for my farmer’s box to be delivered from the Farmer’s Market. Teach four hours. Then, I’m headed across the street to watch the returns with my neighbor Nancy. We will run a blog in the evening. Hopefully, my internet will hold because it’s been very dicey the last 5 or 6 days. I guess all cell phone towers here are being powered by generators and the local cable company has a lot of infrastructure damage. I think they got the city up and running and that voting places are up except for 3 which the city will power on generators. I vote at the fire station on the corner and its proximity is basically why I got my power back so quickly even though everything else is still hinky.
We can get through this. I want us to do it together. We are a community who cares and we are kind.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Georgia Please go blue!!!!! Get out there and vote my Georgia brothers and sisters and neighbors!!! Also a shout out to North Carolina! Texas and Arizona! Get us all out of this mess!!!
Friday Post Zeta Reads: We’re all hanging on and the bumpy rides keep comin’
Posted: October 30, 2020 Filed under: 2020 Elections, Mid Day Reads, New Orleans | Tags: Eye of the Hurrican, Hurricane Zeta, New Orleans, Trump's closing chaos and depraved heart murder events, Turkish Banks and Trump 12 Comments
This is an old fish/seafood market turned woodshop across the street from me. It’s lost its old tin roof.
Good Day Sky Dancers!
It’s been a few overwhelming days for me and I’m quite exhausted. New Orleans was very fortunate that Hurricane Zeta was a fast mover because she was like 1 mph off a Category 3 hurricane when she hit and hit she did. We’re going to be digging out of shredded leaves, downed trees, and infrastructure messes for awhile. Fortunately, only six families lost their homes and one person died. It could’ve been way worse.
I was really fortunate that the city and the power company had done several things to stop tree damage on my avenue and in my neighborhood just a few weeks ago. The Tree Trimmers got the old oaks trimmed of dead branches and the power company reinforced the lines with brackets and and pole supports. A large number of homes through out the metro area or still out of power. Mine came back on Thursday morning.
However, both my phone and my cable tv and internet at the house are acting hinky. I was about to check the weather channel one last time last night when I found that the only channel I had on the entire cable set up was MSNBC which was the last thing I was watching. Fortunately, the entire compliment of channels returned this morning. The Wifi has been slow off and on. I couldn’t get mobile data on my phone Wednesday night so I was completely cutoff from everything except texts and phone calls. My understanding is that the Sprint Tower had damage and that network completely went down so something similar must’ve happened with the Verizon Tower. My cable company still is showing a lot of outages and problems in the neighborhood so I’m just lucky I’ve got what I’ve got.
It looks like a leaf shredding bomb went off every where. Fortunately, our neighborhood kids decided to clean the avenue up for us old folks. They got some fresh bananas from my tree and some cash for their good work!
I spent Wednesday night reading the rest of a book on Kindle–which was amply charged for the event–by hurricane lamp light. We were totally in the center of the eyewall when it came through which was the most ethereal experience I think I’ve ever had. The city was texting us to stay inside but I wanted to get Temple out for a quick in and out walk. It was quiet and the clouds to the west, east, and north of me were swirly dark grey clouds with an eerie purple tinge. To the south, over the river, the sky was a brilliant orangish gold. I failed to bring my phone camera out with me but some others have captured the moment so I’m sharing some pictures I took but those were taken by others.
Today, I learned that a lot of polling places may not be up in time since about 70% of our schools are without power or damaged some how. I think my fire station is likely okay but I’m going to go check them out on Temple’s next Trot around the neighborhood.
And the final days of the 2020 presidential campaign look ugly.
I can’t really say I’ve been reading much or watching much TV on any of this because I’m rather traumatized enough from everything going on . But, everything I’ve seen
My kitchen stairs or one of the sites of the leaf shredding hurricane debris
makes me glad I’ve been incognito for a few days. The desperation around the Trump campaign is just frighteningly damaging to every one including his cult. I still can’t believe they abandoned a bunch of Omahans on an Airfield in freezing weather or let a group of Floridians pass out from heat exhaustion. Both were finally rescued by actions of the local fire departments which the Kremlin Potted Plant in the White House wasn’t going to praise until he found out if it was a friend or a foe. WTF?
The COVID 19 pandemic–despite Trumpist attempts to ignore and downplay it–is getting worse. NPR reports that they’ve been hiding statistics also. No surprise that! “Internal Documents Reveal COVID-19 Hospitalization Data The Government Keeps Hidden”
As coronavirus cases rise swiftly around the country, surpassing both the spring and summer surges, health officials brace for a coming wave of hospitalizations and deaths. Knowing which hospitals in which communities are reaching capacity could be key to an effective response to the growing crisis. That information is gathered by the federal government — but not shared openly with the public.
NPR has obtained documents that give a snapshot of data the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services collects and analyzes daily. The documents — reports sent to agency staffers — highlight trends in hospitalizations and pinpoint cities nearing full hospital capacity and facilities under stress. They paint a granular picture of the strain on hospitals across the country that could help local citizens decide when to take extra precautions against COVID-19.
Withholding this information from the public and the research community is a missed opportunity to help prevent outbreaks and even save lives, say public health and data experts who reviewed the documents for NPR.
“At this point, I think it’s reckless. It’s endangering people,” says Ryan Panchadsaram, co-founder of the website COVID Exit Strategy and a former data official in the Obama administration. “We’re now in the third wave, and I think our only way out is really open, transparent and actionable information.”
Super Dome in the middle of the eye and yes these were the colors I saw.
Susan B Glasser writes this at The New Yorker: “Denialism, Dishonesty, Deflection: The Final Days of the Trump Campaign Have It All. The President is ending his reëlection bid with scandals that call into question the legitimacy of next week’s vote.”
Whether or not Trump once again succeeds in pulling an unlikely win out of a near-certain defeat, this fall’s campaign may well go down as one of the most scandalous periods of his norm-shattering Presidency. Trump in recent weeks has openly flirted with white supremacy and bizarre conspiracy theories. He has demanded that the U.S. government investigate and jail Biden—it is not clear for what—and he has publicly threatened to fire the F.B.I. director and the Attorney General for failing to do so. He has held rallies at which his supporters chanted “Lock him up,” and did and said nothing to stop them. He has broadcast so much misinformation that social-media platforms such as Twitter have, for the first time, regularly warned readers about the veracity of his posts. He has lied so much that the Times found seventy-five per cent of his statements during a single rally to be untrue. He has issued orders that threaten to politicize the government long after he is gone, including an executive order, last week, which would remove key protections from the professional civil service; the potential consequences of this move are so significant that, on Monday, the Republican Trump appointee who would have to oversee it resigned in protest, warning that the decision will “replace apolitical expertise with political obeisance” across the government.
In recent weeks, scandalous revelations about Trump’s corruption include the Times’reporting on hundreds of millions of dollars of debt that Trump is personally liable for. (He will not say to whom.) The Washington Post disclosed this week that Trump has used his power to direct at least eight million dollars from the U.S. government—–and his political supporters—into his personal businesses since he took office. The consequences of Trump’s Presidency, meanwhile, include the forcible separation of at least twenty-six hundred migrant children from their parents at the southern border, and last week the awful news came out that five hundred and forty-five of these children are now stranded alone in the United States, owing to the authorities being unable to locate their mothers or fathers.
And this parade of horrors, of course, also includes Trump’s record on the coronavirus, a disastrous performance that, as of this week, has left more than two hundred and twenty thousand Americans dead. Universal mask-wearing could prevent perhaps a hundred and thirty thousand Americans from dying, according to a study in the scientific journal Nature which was released earlier this month. Yet Trump not only refuses to issue a national mask mandate; he has repeatedly and publicly questioned the need for mask-wearing during the fall campaign and has held numerous White House events with packed crowds of unmasked attendees.
This is my friend Grace Athas’ photo of the center of the eye over her uptown home.
Then, yesterday, the NYTs dropped what would be an October Surprise that kills Trump’s chances if we still lived in what was the normal United States of America. Here it is summed up by New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait: “Trump Corruptly Meddled With Probe Into Crimes by Bank in Turkey.” The MSNBC coverage of this is evidently what got my TV stuck on the channel. I was glued to the screen. This is like immediate impeachment material for Trump, Barrett, and the Goddesses know who else?
In 2016, Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan asked then-Vice-President Joe Biden to lean on federal prosecutors who were investigating a Turkish bank for financial crimes and to hand over a dissident cleric living in the United States. The requests seemed to be on Biden’s mind when he publicly addressed reporters and piously explained that, in the United States, the justice system doesn’t work like that. “I suspect it’s hard for people to understand that as powerful as my country is, as powerful as Barack Obama is as president, he has no authority under our Constitution to extradite anyone,” Biden explained to reporters. “Only a federal court can do that. Nobody else can do that. If the president were to take this into his own hands, what would happen would be he would be impeached for violating the separation of powers.”
Well, the justice system works like that now.
The New York Times has a comprehensive report on Erdogan’s successful efforts to recruit top Trump administration officials into his corrupt scheme.
Scandals tend to be complicated, especially scandals involving banks. But this one is extremely simple. The basic elements:
1) The Justice Department was prosecuting financial crimes by a Turkish bank.
2) Turkey’s president asked President Trump to quash the investigation.
3) Trump has personally received more than $1 million in payments from business in Turkey while serving as president.
4) Two attorneys general loyal to Trump, Matthew Whitaker and William Barr, both pressured federal prosecutors to go easy on the Turkish bank.
The Times adds plenty of new detail to the last point, which is yet another blow to anybody who hoped Barr might preserve some shred of respect for the rule of law. “In mid-June 2019, when [Geoffrey] Berman met with Mr. Barr in Washington, the attorney general pushed Mr. Berman to agree to allow the Justice Department to drop charges against the defendants and terminate investigations of other suspected conspirators,” the Times reports. When Barr subsequently fired Berman, who resisted his pressure, Justice Department officials cited his stubbornness on the Turkey case “as a key reason for his removal.”
If you read one thing today make it this article. It is imperative he be voted out of office and removed as quickly as possible along with his appointments at the DOJ.
In the eye of a hurricane
There is quiet
For just a moment
A yellow sky
So, we’ve got a bit further to go on our Country’s Bumpy Ride. Tomorrow is Halloween. Sunday is All Saints Day. Tuesday the votes are counted and I take my soul to the poll. Wednesday I turn 65. What a long strange ride this is.
Take care! Check in !
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Monday Reads: Time to send the Republican Party to the Ash Heap of History
Posted: October 26, 2020 Filed under: 2020 Elections, Afternoon Reads 15 Comments
Good Day Sky Dancers!
In typical 2020 fashion, there is another hurricane aimed at New Orleans. It’s named Zeta because they’ve run through both alphabets now. November one marks the end of the official Hurricane Season and this one is coming at us on Wednesday. November three should be a death knell for Trump and the Republican party. We’ve seen this before. Remember the Whigs? The Federalist party that fell apart eventually but still tried stacking the courts in the process and passed the Alien and Sedition Acts because they wanted to control immigration and citizenship tightly.?
It’s just American History kinda repeating itself with the same base arguments and tricks. Let’s investigate this as the Republican party tries to sandbag the process by stacking and continuing to appoint incredibly unsuitable people to all levels of our Federal Court System. Today’s it’s OfDonald or OfMitch or whatever old white man owns Amy Coney Barret’s soul. today. The good news is that this may stop but it will take a long time to undue the damage. That’s something Thomas Jefferson was worried about back when the Whigs were trying it.
Ronald Brownstein wrote this amazing piece about Republican Court Stacking and its purpose at The Atlantic last week. “What the Rush to Confirm Amy Coney Barrett Is Really About. The Republican Party wants to shield itself from the growing Democratic coalition.”
Nothing better explains the Republican rush to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court than the record crowds that thronged polling places for the first days of early voting this week in Georgia and Texas.
The historic number of Americans who stood in long lines to cast their ballot in cities from Atlanta to Houston symbolizes the diverse, urbanized Democratic coalition that will make it very difficult for the GOP to win majority support in elections through the 2020s. That hill will get only steeper as Millennials and Generation Z grow through the decade to become the largest generations in the electorate.
Every young conservative judge that the GOP has stacked onto the federal courts amounts to a sandbag against that rising demographic wave. Trump’s nominations to the Supreme Court of Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Barrett—whom a slim majority of Republican senators appears determined to seat by Election Day—represent the capstone of that strategy. As the nation’s growing racial and religious diversity limits the GOP’s prospects, filling the courts with conservatives constitutes what the Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz calls “the right-wing firewall” against a country evolving electorally away from the party.
This dynamic suggests that the 2020s could reprise earlier conflicts in American history, when a Court majority nominated and confirmed by the dominant party of a previous era systematically blocked the agenda of a newly emerging political majority—with explosive consequences. That happened as far back as the first years of the 19th century, when electoral dominance tipped from John Adams and the Federalists to Thomas Jefferson and his Democratic-Republican Party. At the time—and in language today’s Democrats would recognize—Jefferson complained that the Federalists “have retreated into the judiciary as a stronghold … the tenure of which renders it difficult to dislodge them.”
Some lag time between the composition of the courts, particularly the Supreme Court, and the country’s electoral balance is built into the constitutional system, with federal judges receiving lifetime appointments.
But just as in earlier eras, conflict is likely to be on tap for the 2020s once Barrett’s seemingly inevitable confirmation cements a 6–3 conservative majority. Because the oldest Republican-appointed justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, are only 72 and 70, respectively, this majority might hold the last word on the nation’s laws for at least the next decade. The oldest Millennials may be in their 50s before any of these Republican justices step down from the high court.
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The Democratic party has consistently won more voters in seven of the last eight presidential elections and this can only continue with the population dynamics we see today. White men are aggrieved and scared and dragging their women with them if they can into a national twilight zone that reflects xenophobia and racism under the guise of economic distress, religious ‘freedom’, and cancel ‘culture’.
All of these are monikers for racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia and hatred towards what is not white, not christian in a narrowly defined sense, and not patriarchal. You can read this kind of nonsense from Rich Lowry at the National Review. This is exactly the kind of person that needs to fade into history so the rest of us can live long and prosper.
Charles Blow sums it up pretty clearly today in this NYT’s Op Ed.
The white racist, sexist, xenophobic patriarchy and all those who benefit from or aspire to it are in a battle with the rest of us, for not only the present in this country but also the future of it.
The Republican Party, which is now without question the Party of Trump, has become a structural reflection of him. They see their majorities slipping and the country turning brown with a quickness, and they are becoming more tribal, more rash, more devious, just like him.
Like Trump, the Republican Party sees a future in which the only way they can win is to cheat. That is why they are stacking the courts. That is why they openly embrace tactics that are well known to result in voter suppression. That is why they gerrymander. That is why they staunchly oppose immigration.
Trump’s base of mostly white men, mostly without a college degree, see him as the ambassador of their anger, one who ministers to their fear, consoles their losses and champions their victimhood. Trump is the angry white man leading the battle charge for angry white men.
The most optimistic among us see the Trump era as some sort of momentary insanity, half of the nation under the spell of a conjurer. They believe that the country can be reunited and this period forgotten.
I am not one of those people. I believe what political scientist Thomas Schaller told Bloomberg columnist Francis Wilkinson in 2018: “I think we’re at the beginning of a soft civil war.” If 2018 was the beginning of it, it is now well underway.
Trump is building an army of the aggrieved in plain sight.
It is an army with its own mercenaries, people Trump doesn’t have to personally direct, but ones he has absolutely refused to condemn.
When it comes to the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, the young neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville and the far-right fight club the Proud Boys, Trump finds a way to avoid a full-throated condemnation, often feigning ignorance.
“I don’t know anything about David Duke,” Trump said when he ran in 2016. That of course was a lie. In fact, Trump is heir to Duke’s legacy.
In 1991, when Duke ran unsuccessfully to be governor of Louisiana but received a majority of the white vote in the state, Trump told CNN’s Larry King, “I hate seeing what it represents, but I guess it just shows there’s a lot of hostility in this country. There’s a tremendous amount of hostility in the United States.”
King responded, “Anger?”
Then Trump explained: “It’s anger. I mean, that’s an anger vote. People are angry about what’s happened. People are angry about the jobs.”
It is that very anger that Trump harnessed to win the presidency: anger over racial displacement disguised as economic anxiety.
A Swedish University has studied the Republican Party and come up with this analysis as reported by The Guardian. “Republicans closely resemble autocratic parties in Hungary and Turkey – study. Swedish university finds ‘dramatic shift’ in GOP under Trump, shunning democratic norms and encouraging violence.”
The Republican party has become dramatically more illiberal in the past two decades and now more closely resembles ruling parties in autocratic societies than its former centre-right equivalents in Europe, according to a new international study.
In a significant shift since 2000, the GOP has taken to demonising and encouraging violence against its opponents, adopting attitudes and tactics comparable to ruling nationalist parties in Hungary, India, Poland and Turkey.
The shift has both led to and been driven by the rise of Donald Trump.
By contrast the Democratic party has changed little in its attachment to democratic norms, and in that regard has remained similar to centre-right and centre-left parties in western Europe. Their principal difference is the approach to the economy.
The new study, the largest ever of its kind, was carried out by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, using newly developed methods to measure and quantify the health of the world’s democracies at a time when authoritarianism is on the rise.
Anna Lührmann, V-Dem’s deputy director, said the Republican transformation had been “certainly the most dramatic shift in an established democracy”.
V-Dem’s “illiberalism index” gauges the extent of commitment to democratic norms a party exhibits before an election. The institute calls it “the first comparative measure of the ‘litmus test’ for the loyalty to democracy”.
The Daily Beasts reports that “In violation of the law, the FBI won’t deliver a legally required report on domestic terrorism before an election that many security veterans fear may spark some level of violence.”
The FBI has failed to produce a legally required report detailing the scope of white supremacist and other domestic terrorism, despite mounting concerns that the upcoming election could spark far-right violence.
According to a key House committee chairman, that leaves the country in the dark about what the FBI concedes is America’s most urgent terrorist threat, as well as the resources the U.S. government is devoting to fight it.
In June, the bureau was supposed to release a report compiling a wealth of currently unavailable data on domestic terrorism, a category that includes white supremacist violence. The most recent National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) requires the FBI, in accord with Department of Homeland Security and consultation with the Office of Director of National Intelligence, specify not only known acts of domestic terrorism, but “ideologies relating to domestic terrorism,” and what the FBI and its partners are doing to combat it all.
Yet the FBI is over four months late. While President Trump falsely portrays left-wing property damage as terrorism, suspicion is building that the FBI, whose director Christopher Wray is on the outs with Trump, will keep the public from seeing the scope of its premier terror threat before an election that may feature violence emerging from it.
“I would hate to think that they are reacting to President Trump’s machinations about his dislike for senior leadership in the FBI,” Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, told The Daily Beast. “This report probably would not be viewed favorably by this administration. That, I think, precipitates the report not being released by Nov. 3.”
It’s time to Drive Old Dixie Down, again and this time the party that needs to go with it is what used to be the Party of Lincoln. Read that National Review crap and you’ll see that it’s the same stuff that’s be floating around the country since its inception that we keep trying to flush. The Alien and Sedition Act was one of the things that took the Whigs down. Will Children in Cages take take the Republicans down?
Let us know if you got to vote and if you’re okay!!! Take care and be gentle with yourself and those around you!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Foggy Friday Reads
Posted: October 23, 2020 Filed under: 2020 Elections, Afternoon Reads | Tags: Covid-19, the grim reaper 17 Comments
Danse Macabre 1918 by Rob W Harrison, 2017
Good Day Sky Dancers!
It’s the second time this week I’ve awakened in the middle of the night to the sound of fog horns on the Mississippi River. The sun has yet to burn off the thick clouds. The big ships blare their horns as they make their way from the wharfs of New Orleans down to the mouth of the river and out into the Gulf. It’s a somewhat haunting and ominous sound as they continually fade only to be followed by another one up river starting the loud blare all over again.
This is totally great for the upcoming Halloween festivities which are supposedly still on despite the country’s uptick in COVID-19 Pandemic cases and deaths. But wow, it sounds like something ominously tolling for the Covid Dead and foreshadowing the upcoming election. Further up the Mississippi, the state of Missouri has hospitals that are turning away ambulances at their emergency rooms. Up the mighty Missouri river–which I spent most of my life living near until now– Kansas City, MO has overwhelmed their care facilities.
Some medical facilities in Kansas City, Mo., have turned away ambulances due to an influx of hospital beds occupied by COVID-19 patients.
Metro hospitals and emergency departments reported Wednesday night high enough volumes of patients that facilities temporarily stopped accepting ambulances, a leading physician at St. Luke’s Health System told The Kansas City Star.
Marc Larsen, operations director of St. Luke’s COVID-19 Response Team, said the influx in cases affected eight facilities Wednesday evening. The official did not specify the names of the other facilities.
“We’re bursting at the seams in the metropolitan area, and really across the state and the region,” said Larsen, who is also an emergency physician.
Two of the facilities belong to the St. Luke’s system, a hospital spokesperson said.
St. Luke’s Health System admitted more than 100 COVID-19 patients Tuesday, setting record numbers since the start of the pandemic. On Thursday, the system still averaged 90 virus patients across St. Luke’s facilities.
Danse Macabre 1918 (redo), RW Harrison, drawing, 2017
Anecdotally, my friend Michelle went to have lunch with a nurse friend of hers and, while she was waiting at the Touro hospital here in New Orleans, a nurse at the ER said they are seeing more patients now than they were even in the beginning. So, much for rushing to get those bars back open!
Looking strictly at the data, there’s this from NBC: “Coronavirus case increase sets new U.S. record, rising to over 77K in one day ”
But, according to Trumperz, we’ve rounded the corner. I’m not sure which corner he means but these drawings kind’ve express my thoughts on that.
So, I didn’t live blog the debate last night since I went across the street to my neighbor’s house with a shepherd’s pie and a bottle of chardonnay to watch with her. We two ladies who are mostly cooped up in our houses have been neighbors for almost 20 years although her job used to take her all over the world and she’d lease it out in the interim to others.
We both wondered if Trump had been sedated since he seemed unusually calmer than his full blown Roid Rage performance last time. Maybe, a few calmer folks than Rudy or Chris Christie prevailed in Debate prep. Republicans are saying that his presentation was so almost normal that he won the debate. I guess we really are in the post-truth and venomous age of enraged white men because a calm presentation of lies and personal slurs is not my idea of an actual debate.
We’re going to repeat this on election day with the hope of ringing out the old and craven administration.
Unknown Title, Joan Miro, 1918
Mike Allen from Axios had this to say this morning: “Trump-Biden venom on display during final debate”. So how is this for equivocation and bothersiderisms that we’ve come to hate so much?
Joe Biden twice referred to President Trump as “this guy,” and Trump called the former vice president’s family “like a vacuum cleaner” for foreign money.
Why it matters: The personal venom — during Thursday’s final presidential debate, in Nashville — was a reminder that even during a more normal debate, nothing this year is normal.
- A prime example: “Oh, God,” Biden said during an exchange on race.
Foreshadowing the crises he’d face if elected, Biden said America is “about to go into a dark winter” because of the coronavirus:
- “220,000 Americans dead. If you hear nothing else I say tonight, hear this: … Anyone who’s responsible for that many deaths should not remain as president of the United States of America.”
- Trump responded that he expects a vaccine “within a matter of weeks”: “I don’t think we’re going to have a dark winter, at all. … We have to open our country.”
An exchange that captures the two in a nutshell:
- Biden: “It’s not about his family and my family. It’s about your family. And your family’s hurting badly. … [Middle-class families are] sitting at the kitchen table this morning deciding: ‘Well, we can’t get new tires — they’re bald — because we have to wait another month or so.'”
- Trump: “That’s a typical political statement. Let’s get off this China thing, and then he looks [in mocking tone]: ‘The family around the table,’ everything. Just a typical politician when I see that. I’m not a typical politician. That’s why I got elected.”
Japan’s 1918 Pandemic Prevention Posters
Trumperz is obviously projecting about the China thing which is always his political strategy it seems. You accuse the other guy of doing what you’re doing. Grade school playgrounds have better shout outs than this.
Most polls today show that Biden won the debate. This is from CNN’s polling director Jennifer Agiesta: “CNN Poll: Biden wins final presidential debate”.
Joe Biden did a better job in the final debate on Thursday, according to a CNN Instant Poll of debate watchers. Overall, 53% of voters who watched the debate said that Biden won the matchup, while 39% said that President Donald Trump did.
Viewers once again said that Biden’s criticisms of Trump were largely fair (73% said they were fair, 26% unfair), and they split over whether Trump’s attacks on Biden were fair (50% said yes, 49% no).That’s a more positive outcome for Trump. In a CNN Instant Poll after the first presidential debate, just 28% said they thought the President had won the debate, and 67% called his criticism of Biden unfair.All told, though, the debate did not do much to move impressions of either candidate. Favorable views of Biden before the debate stood at 55%, and they held steady at 56% in post-debate interviews. Likewise, Trump’s numbers held steady, with 42% saying they had a favorable view of the President in interviews conducted before Thursday’s debate and 41% saying the same afterward.More debate watchers, though, said Trump’s performance raised concerns about how he would handle the presidency (55%) than did Biden’s (41%).
And while we’re on the subject of looking like death, what is with the Grim Reaper’s hands and bandages?
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s hands have become the unlikely subject of wild speculation on social media as people obsess over how badly bruised they look this week, but Kentucky’s longtime senator isn’t saying much about it.
A photograph taken earlier this week showed McConnell’s noticeably discolored hands, which had a couple of small bandages on them. A little bruising around his mouth also was noticeable during a public appearance.
People theorized online that the reason for the apparent bruises could be that he has COVID-19, is taking blood thinners or has some other health issue. Snopes, the well-known fact-checking website, even put out a post confirming the photograph of the senator’s hands is real.
In light of all the rampant conjecture on the internet, a few reporters in Washington, D.C., asked McConnell about it Thursday, according to dispatches from the Capitol Hill press pool.
Bresnahan said he was feeling OK. “Good for you,” McConnell replied.
“But I’m serious, is there anything going on we should know about?” Bresnahan followed up.
“Of course not,” McConnell said.
Another journalist asked about the bruising, too, and McConnell said there were no concerns. He did not respond when asked if he was being treated by a doctor.
During a debate in Lexington on Oct. 12, McConnell had no discernible bruising on his hands, according to photographs from the event.
This isn’t the first time the senator has dismissed questions about his personal health.
Earlier this month, after President Donald Trump and Republican U.S. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah both confirmed they had contracted COVID-19, McConnell refused to say whether he had recently been tested for the virus.
Egon Schiele, Portrait of the dying Edith Schiele, 1918,
Mask Up Ya’ll! This is a pandemic data chart about the efficacy of masks.
Despite the clear opposition to masks within the Trump White House and among its allies, Americans of all political stripes overwhelmingly support their use as a public health measure and say they wear them whenever they’re in public.
Still, there are significant differences in mask-use rates at the state level. And data from Carnegie Mellon’s CovidCast, an academic project tracking real-time coronavirus statistics, yields a particularly vivid illustration of how mask usage influences the prevalence of covid-19 symptoms in a given area.
There’s a really interesting graphic there about the frequency of mask wearing per state and the infection rates that you should check out.
Meanwhile, back in Grim Reaper Territory:
We do have confirmation today that Alaska Senator Lisa Murskowski will vote no on the SCOTUS nomination Of Donald. This is from Newsweek.
Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski signaled on Thursday that she will vote against confirming Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court next week.
The Alaska lawmaker, who met with the conservative nominee earlier this week, would join the likes of Senator Susan Collins of Maine, the only other Republican who plans to vote against the Trump nominee on Monday. Barrett’s nomination was advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday by unanimous consent after Democrats boycotted the vote.
“I’ve shared for a while that I didn’t think we should be taking this up until after the election, and I haven’t changed,” Murkowski said, according to a congressional pool report.
Maine’s Susan Collins indicated on Oct. 16th that she did not support the nomination.
So, that’s some of the grim news today.
What’s on you reading and blogging list today?
Monday Reads! Vote Him OUT!
Posted: October 19, 2020 Filed under: 2020 Elections, morning reads 19 Comments
Pierre Edouard Baranowski, 1918 – Amedeo Modigliani
Good Day Sky Dancers!
Tis the season to be Voting! And we all really, really, really need to do that and take as many people with us as possible!
I can hardly turn on the TV any more.
Here’s all I want to say from The Rolling Stone: via The Hill: “Rolling Stone endorses Biden, calls Trump ‘categorically unfit to be president'”. How can such a strongly worded statement be such an understatement? But that’s been our upside down country for the past nearly 4 years.
Rolling Stone magazine is endorsing Democratic nominee Joe Biden for president, saying in a piece on Monday that the U.S. has lived “under a man categorically unfit to be president” for the last four years.
“Fortunately for America,” the magazine said at the top of its endorsement of the former vice president, “Joe Biden is Donald Trump’s opposite in nearly every category: The Democratic presidential nominee evinces competence, compassion, steadiness, integrity, and restraint.”
“Perhaps most important in this moment, Biden holds a profound respect for the institutions of American democracy, as well as a deep knowledge about how our government — and our system of checks and balances — is meant to work; he aspires to lead the nation as its president, not its dictator,” the magazine continued. “The 2020 election, then, offers the nation a chance to reboot and rebuild from the racist, authoritarian, know-nothing wreckage wrought by the 45th president.”
Trump’s only plan for America is one that keeps him in office and in the position of not being held accountable for anything including the massive grifting.
Amedeo Modigliani – Christina
So, what kind of things are going on right now?
Well, first, Trump is trying all kinds of ways to make Dr. Fauci look bad and to convince us all the virus is no big deal. This is from CBS’ 60 Minutes as reported by Jonathan LaPook: “Fauci admits administration has restricted his media appearances, says he’s not surprised Trump got COVID”.
Dr. Anthony Fauci has been a voice of logic and stability since the pandemic began. And right now, he’s worried we’re heading in the wrong direction. Worldwide the number of new cases is surging at an alarming rate, as seen in this map by Johns Hopkins University. This week, Russia reported a record number of infections, and cases are spiking in the UK, France, and Italy.
Dr. Anthony Fauci: When you have a million deaths and over 30 million infections globally, you can not say that we’re on the road to essentially getting out of this. So quite frankly, I don’t know where we are. It’s impossible to say.
What Dr. Fauci knows for sure is, here in the United States, infections are beginning to rise as the weather gets colder and people congregate indoors. Over the last two weeks, new cases have gone up in at least 38 states.
Dr. Jon LaPook: How bad would things have to get for you to advocate a national lockdown?
Dr. Anthony Fauci: They’d have to get really, really bad. First of all, the country is fatigued with restrictions. So we wanna use public health measures not to get in the way of opening the economy, but to being a safe gateway to opening the economy. So instead of having an opposition, open up the economy, get jobs back, or shut down. No. Put “shut down” away and say, “We’re gonna use public health measures to help us safely get to where we wanna go.”
Those measures were not in place last month in the rose garden when President Trump announced the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.
Dr. Jon LaPook: Were you surprised that President Trump got sick?
Dr. Anthony Fauci: Absolutely not. I was worried that he was going to get sick when I saw him in a completely precarious situation of crowded, no separation between people, and almost nobody wearing a mask. When I saw that on TV, I said, “Oh my goodness. Nothing good can come outta that, that’s gotta be a problem.” And then sure enough, it turned out to be a superspreader event.
The good Doctor intends to vote in person on election day and says it can be done safely. Read or watch the entire interview at the link.
Yes. Please vote.
The AP went in search of the not so elusive Burbie women in Michigan and low and behold they found more than a few women of color! Wow! Some one tell the Russian Potted Plant occupying the Oval Office! Claire Galofaro reports: ‘Our house is on fire’: Suburban women lead a Trump revolt . However, the lede feature is a suburban white woman so there’s still that. (sigh). But it’s Michigan and that’s an important state.
For many of those women, the past four years have meant frustration, anger and activism — a political awakening that powered women’s marches, the #MeToo movement and the victories of record numbers of female candidates in 2018. That energy has helped create the widest gender gap — the political divide between men and women — in recent history. And it has started to show up in early voting as women are casting their ballots earlier than men. In Michigan, women have cast nearly 56% of the early vote so far, and 68% of those were Democrats, according to the voting data firm L2.
That could mean trouble for Trump, not just in Oakland County but also in suburban battlegrounds outside Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Phoenix.
Trump has tried to appeal to “the suburban housewives of America,” as he called them. Embracing fear and deploying dog whistles, he has argued that Black Lives Matter protesters will bring crime, low-income housing will ruin property values, suburbs will be abolished. Campaigning in Pennsylvania last week, he begged: “Suburban women, will you please like me?”
There’s no sign all this is working. Some recent polls show Biden winning support from about 60% of suburban women. In 2016, Democrat Hillary Clinton won 52%, according to an estimate by the Pew Research Center.
Talk to women across suburban Michigan, and you’ll find ample confirmation: the lifelong Republican who says her party has been commandeered by cowards. The Black executive who fears for the safety of her sons. The Democrat who voted for Trump in 2016 but now describes him as “a terrible person.”
Together, they create a powerful political force.
All I can say is whatever it takes to get that Monster out of the White House.
This NYT Times Op-ED asks a question we can only hope isn’t rhetorical. “Has Trump Drawn the Water for a ‘Republican Blood Bath’? And if he has, what should Biden do with his first term?” It’s a conversation between Gail Collins and Bret Stephens.
Gail: Speaking of the competition between Trump and Biden, what did you think of those town hall pseudo debates?
Bret: I think they’re a public service. Biden continues to dispel the myth that he no longer has a brain. And Trump continues to dispel the myth that he’s ever had a heart. The more voters are reminded of these two facts between now and the election, the likelier we are to send Trump into permanent exile in Mar-a-Lago or wherever else he goes from here.
Gail: Well thanks to great reporting from our Times colleagues, we are able to hope that the first place he goes from here is bankruptcy.
Bret: From Here to Bankruptcy? Wasn’t that a film with Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift?
Gail: If it was a new version, we’d have to watch the scene where Trump goes to the beach and embraces Melania (or Stormy? Or someone in between?) in the waves. Definitely don’t want to go there.
Bret: In the meantime, it looks like Amy Coney Barrett is heading toward confirmation, and some progressives are advocating all manner of retaliation against Republicans for pushing the nomination through: ending the Senate filibuster for legislation, packing the Supreme Court, even pushing for statehood for Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia.
All this assumes Democrats win back the Senate and the White House. If they do, is any of that warranted or wise?
Gail: None of those would be on the top of my priority list, but I can understand why they’re coming up. The way the Republicans have handled court appointments is shocking, including their decision to break all the precedents they set during the Obama administration and ram Barrett through just days before the election.
Bret: Well, I wouldn’t object to any president’s right to nominate a justice at any point in his presidency if Mitch McConnell hadn’t held up Merrick Garland’s nomination to replace Antonin Scalia on transparently bogus grounds. But the hypocrisy rankles and reeks. If Senate Republicans had integrity — ha! — they would have held themselves to their own standard and held the nomination until after January.
Frans Hellens, 1919 – Amedeo Modigliani –
Trump’s constant trips to the Courts appear to be paying off for everyone but Trump Policy. This is from WAPO. “Federal judge strikes down Trump plan to slash food stamps for 700,000 unemployed Americans” as reported by Spencer Hsu.
A federal judge on Sunday formally struck down a Trump administration attempt to end food stamp benefits for nearly 700,000 unemployed people, blocking as “arbitrary and capricious” the first of three such planned measures to restrict the federal food safety net.
“In a scathing 67-page opinion, Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell of D.C. condemned the Agriculture Department for failing to justify or even address the impact of the sweeping change on states, saying its shortcomings had been placed in stark relief amid the pandemic, during which unemployment has quadrupled and rosters of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program have grown by more than 17 percent, with more than 6 million new enrollees.
The rule “at issue in this litigation radically and abruptly alters decades of regulatory practice, leaving States scrambling and exponentially increasing food insecurity for tens of thousands of Americans,” Howell wrote, adding that the Agriculture Department “has been icily silent about how many [adults] would have been denied SNAP benefits had the changes sought . . . been in effect while the pandemic rapidly spread across the country.” The judge concluded that the department’s “utter failure to address the issue renders the agency action arbitrary and capricious.”
Howell temporarily enjoined the proposal on March 13, the same day President Trump declared the coronavirus outbreak a national emergency. Congress then waived the requirement for the duration of the emergency as part of economic relief legislation, and the Trump administration suspended its planned April implementation date.
However, the Agriculture Department appealed the judge’s earlier order, and absent court intervention the rule would have taken full effect at the end of the state of emergency. Spokesmen for the department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Also going to SCOTUS is the Trump Wall debacle and his “remain in Mexico policy (via Reuters) “U.S. Supreme Court to review legality of Trump’s ‘remain in Mexico’ asylum policy”.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide the legality of one of President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies that has forced tens of thousands of migrants along the southern border to wait in Mexico, rather than entering the United States, while their asylum claims are processed.
The justices will hear a Trump administration appeal of a 2019 lower court ruling that found that the policy likely violated federal immigration law. The “remain in Mexico” policy remains in effect because the Supreme Court in March put the lower court’s decision to block it on hold while the legal battle continues.
The Republican president has said the policy, which took effect in January 2019, has reduced the flow of migrants from Central America into the United States. Restricting both illegal and legal immigration has been a central theme of Trump’s presidency. He has sought to reduce asylum claims through a series of policy and rule changes.
Immigration advocacy groups and 11 individual asylum seekers who fled violence in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras were returned to Mexico after entering the United States filed suit to challenge the legality of the policy.
Portrait of Jeanne Herbuterne – Amedeo Modigliani
Further information on this can be found at WAPO: “Supreme Court to review Trump’s border wall funding and ‘remain-in-Mexico’ program”.
The Trump administration had asked the court to intervene in both because of decisions against it in lower courts.
Also in both cases, the justices have previously allowed the administration to proceed with its plans while the merits of the issues were litigated.
In July, the court rejected a last-ditch effort from environmentalists to stop the ongoing construction of parts of the border wall. A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled in late June that the administration’s use for the wall of funds intended for the Defense Department was unlawful.
By the time the court hears the case, lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the Sierra Club and the Southern Border Communities Coalition, say the Trump administration will have used all of the money.
But the administration told the court it was important for it to weigh in to correct the decision that the president did not have the authority to redirect military funds to pay for border wall construction.
Trump, who ran for office in 2016 promising that Mexico would pay for the border wall, has obtained more than $15 billion in federal funds for his signature project, including $5 billion provided by Congress through conventional appropriations. The president has tapped into Pentagon accounts for the remaining $10 billion, including the $2.5 billion transfer last year that the 9th Circuit said was unlawful.
In 2019, the Supreme Court in an emergency order allowed the administration to proceed with the transfers and contracts for construction, even though House Democrats, affected states and environmental groups said that violated the will of Congress, which withheld the funds from the administration.
So, if you’re like me and getting very tired, wistful, and full of wishing you will never hear anything negative about dull moments again, just join us and vote! VOTE! VOTE!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
Sky Dancing 
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