Month: May 2020

If nothing else, the insanity that has dominated this year so far has found a comedian up to the task. Introducing Sarah Cooper. She has Twitter, but you really should check out her videos on TikTok.

Should I take insulin pic.twitter.com/ALEYQqzJir

— Sarah Cooper (@sarahcpr) May 27, 2020

And here’s the one that went viral in late April.

How to medical pic.twitter.com/0EDqJcy38p

— Sarah Cooper (@sarahcpr) April 24, 2020

Cheers!

My parents are 87 and 88 years old. They haven’t seen their grandchildren since March. This is only partly through choice, as we’re not allowed to visit their assisted living community and they face a rigorous and lengthy quarantine if they leave the premises. In any case, the soccer and baseball games they often attend were cancelled in the spring and there’s no sign of them resuming any time soon. The precautions are worth it though. Many of the retirement and nursing homes around where I live in Pennsylvania have been ravaged by COVID-19, but my parents’ community has so far managed to keep the virus out.

Still, this isn’t a great situation for us, as basic actuarial tables say my son and parents only have a limited amount of time left with each other. This isn’t time that we can get back. And yet, how would we feel if our desire to be together resulted in an outbreak in their community that resulted in hospitalizations and deaths? It’s not really a difficult choice for us stay apart. It’s clearly the responsible thing to do, and we all understand this.

I know that part of our calculation is related to our perception of risk. The Mid-Atlantic has been the hardest hit region of the country. Still, the principles involved hold just as true in areas where the immediate risk is lower. With no testing available and asymptomatic carriers, I have no idea if I’m infectious and so I can’t in good conscience walk into a retirement home. If school were in session, I’d never know if my son was carrying the virus home and putting his asthmatic mother at mortal risk. I don’t enjoy this situation, but I know I have to somehow endure and manage it.

That’s what I think about when I read stuff like this:

Rashell Collins Bridle, a 42-year-old mother of five who also lives in Nederland, [Texas] and makes her living selling items on eBay, said a minister she knew had died after contracting the virus. Even so, she said she and her friends were more focused on freedom than on health.

“I guess other people expect us to set our futures on fire to keep their fear warm,” she said. “I think that’s incredibly selfish — if you’re that fearful, then just stay home.”

…On the first weekend that Texas lifted the stay-at-home orders, Ms. Bridle took her family to a state park on the Gulf of Mexico. She said American flags were flying from many cars and trucks on the road “as if it were the Fourth of July.”

She said that if schools open with hefty restrictions on recess or how far desks must be spaced together, she will instead place her daughter in a Christian home school co-op. And if there is another stay-at-home order this year?

“We probably won’t stand for that again,” she said. “I myself won’t comply. I will never comply with anything else like this ever.”

I’ll admit that I’m a bit fearful, and more so than I’d likely be if I lived in Nederland, Texas. But my decision to abide by stay-at-home orders and the precautionary guidance of health professionals is driven much more by my sense of civic responsibility than any worry for myself.

What especially bothers me about Ms. Bridle’s behavior is that people who act like her make it less likely that I’ll be able to safely resume normal activities in the near future. She says that she’s defending freedom, but I don’t feel very free. My parents don’t feel free. My wife and my son don’t feel free. Pre-vaccine, the only thing that will change that is if the infection rate drops to a level where a newly infected person spreads the disease to an average of less than one other person. Everyone who fails to stay-at-home or take the recommended precautions delays the date by which we’ll reach that point. And that means one less day my son and parents will get to be together.

I’m only using my personal example here to make this more tangible for folks who might not immediately get it, but my concern is not at all just for how this affects my family. You can multiply my situation a couple hundred million times and get a better picture of why Ms. Bridle’s position is unsupportable.

It’s ironic that she says her response to schools taking precautions will be to keep her kids at home. I guess, whatever it takes to get her to do the right thing, right?

Tom Nichols of The Atlantic has a simple question:

…I have been baffled by one mystery in particular: Why do working-class white men—the most reliable component of Donald Trump’s base—support someone who is, by their own standards, the least masculine man ever to hold the modern presidency? The question is not whether Trump fails to meet some archaic or idealized version of masculinity. The president’s inability to measure up to Marcus Aurelius or Omar Bradley is not the issue. Rather, the question is why so many of Trump’s working-class white male voters refuse to hold Trump to their own standards of masculinity—why they support a man who behaves more like a little boy.

I believe there actually is a simple answer.

For Nichols, he’s perplexed because the working class men he grew up around would generally look down on a person like Trump. They don’t easily show their emotions and they don’t brag about their sexual exploits. Their word is their bond, and a handshake means something. Working hard without a lot of complaint is considered virtuous even if individually there’s always some griping.

Trump exemplifies none of these ideals, but he’s able to accomplish something else that these men value. And the reason he can do it is because he has the one thing they definitionally lack–power.

Nichol eventually gets around to this explanation when he says, “I think that working men, the kind raised as I was, know what kind of “man” Trump is. And still, the gratification they get from seeing Trump enrage the rest of the country is enough to earn their indulgence.”

Ordinarily, a man who complains about how he has been treated is demonstrating weakness, and the same is true of someone who always tries to pass the buck. Someone who brags about his accomplishments is considered annoying and insecure, and even more so even they take credit for others’ work or exaggerate their own role. But Trump does these things from the White House as the commander-in-chief of the most fearsome armed forces assembled in the history of man. When he lashes out at his enemies, he’s not doing it as some ineffectual worker bee who can be squashed by his employer. This makes all the difference.

For months during the 2015-2016 Republican primaries, Trump most effective campaigning tactic was to dismiss every criticism by pointing people to the polls, which showed him in the lead. If people questioned his expertise, he said “I’m rich, I’m famous, I’ve slept with a lot of beautiful women.” These boasts were true enough, and they separated him from the average Joe who might try to elevate himself over his peers.

The most important thing that Trump does to win working class support is pick the correct enemies. He insults the people who make working class folks feel inadequate, or who at least seem to lightly regard their virtues. He also picks at the things that make white working class folks uncomfortable, which most definitely includes the increasing diversification of the country.

And, finally, Trump may play the victim in a very unmasculine way, but stoicism is much more of an ideal than a reality. Working class folks, with plenty of justification, feel like they’ve been getting screwed for decades. Trump gives voice to that, including in the realm of so-called “religious freedom.”

Some people have tried to argue that Trump’s support is rooted in male sexual insecurity, but that’s too narrow. It’s rooted in insecurity in general. People have enough to worry about with their jobs being outsourced that we don’t need to ask how many of them have been googling about erectile dysfunction.

Above all, Trump is a spectacle. He’s entertainment. And his show is almost entirely dedicated to insulting people who have either flourished while the working class has foundered, or who seem to look down on religious folks who work with their hands for a living. Trump goes after the cultural enemies of the white working class, and he actually makes them suffer. He’s not ineffectual, and so many people get a visceral thrill out of his performance.

There are still tens of millions of white working class men and women who see right through Trump and dislike him for all the reasons that Nichols believe they should dislike him. But they’re a minority.

Yet, the could be a majority before long. One key to Trump’s political success is that he doesn’t create negative consequences for his base. But that’s no longer true with 40 million Americans out of work. Suddenly, Trump’s act isn’t so funny, and more people understand directly that you can’t run America like a reality show.

If Hillary Clinton had won the presidency in 2016, there’s a high likelihood that Neera Tanden would have been her White House chief of staff. She has a message for you.

I only went out for necessities and wore masks. And did nature walks. This is obviously a very transmissible virus. People need to take a lot of care and the idea we can just reopen is very scary.

— Neera Tanden🌻 (@neeratanden) May 23, 2020

If you go to her Twitter page, you’ll see that she has a pinned Tweet. Presumably, it’s been there since she first posted it in July 2019.

You know what defeats the hatefulness of Trumpism? The largest electoral margin defeat since Goldwater. That is what he deserves. A humiliating, historic landslide loss. And that is actually possible.But it takes a bigger coalition than your twitter bubble. Build the army.

— Neera Tanden🌻 (@neeratanden) July 18, 2019

It’s interesting that she chose Goldwater. I guess that’s the most recent Democratic landslide but it was a temporary victory. Goldwater’s troops came roaring back and by 1981 they were running Washington DC. A better example would be Herbert Hoover in 1932.

Democrats and progressives can get very nostalgic for the good old days when FDR was winning landslide victories and implementing the New Deal. But, remember, how many of FDR’s supporters have left the party to side with the Goldwater/Reagan movement? Without those voters, Roosevelt doesn’t win in such convincing fashion or have such robust majorities in Congress.

The conservative movement doesn’t die until a huge number of those voters come back to the Democrats. When you’re looking for a historical drubbing, you can’t get picky about who votes with your side.

That doesn’t mean you pander to bigots or embrace putrid policies. It just means that you give people permission to support you. Some people need to be pushed away, if only to help you define your values and platform, but the actual number in this category cannot be very big.

If you’re spending your time policing Twitter, you’re not part of the solution.

I’ve been leafing through the results of a new Imperial College study on the current status of the pandemic in the United States, and I am not encouraged. The study is self-admittedly pessimistic in its assumptions, primarily because it doesn’t assume that we’ll do an effective job of mitigation through increased testing, contact tracing, and behavioral modification. So, for example, an increase in mobility to the pre-crisis baseline looks extremely bad, but if we’re not completely careless the rate of infection shouldn’t look quite so devastating.

Having said that, the study estimates that about half the states do not have the pandemic under control, meaning that the average initial reproduction number (Rt=0) is greater than one. Here’s their bottom line:

We predict that increased mobility following relaxation of social distancing will lead to resurgence of transmission, keeping all else constant. We predict that deaths over the next two-month period could exceed current cumulative deaths by greater than two-fold, if the relationship between mobility and transmission remains unchanged. Our results suggest that factors modulating transmission such as rapid testing, contact tracing and behavioural precautions are crucial to offset the rise of transmission associated with loosening of social distancing.

Overall, we show that while all US states have substantially reduced their reproduction numbers, we find no evidence that any state is approaching herd immunity or that its epidemic is close to over.

And here are the states that are in the worst shape:

In 24 states, however, the model shows a reproduction number over 1. Texas tops the list, followed by Arizona, Illinois, Colorado, Ohio, Minnesota, Indiana, Iowa, Alabama, Wisconsin, Mississippi, Tennessee, Florida, Virginia, New Mexico, Missouri, Delaware, South Carolina, Massachusetts, North Carolina, California, Pennsylvania, Louisiana and Maryland.

A simple way of looking at this is that none of the above states should be relaxing social distancing rules or encouraging businesses to operate if they involve the clustering of people in confined spaces.  This is because the rate of infection is growing as things stand, so letting their guard down is almost guaranteed to result in a massive flare-up of cases and deaths.

Some states are seeing an upsurge in cases after initially being little effected by the outbreak, and most of these are states with low population density. Large church congregations may be their primary risk factor, which is a good reason for them to keep those services virtual for the time being. Unfortunately, Trump has decided to make church reopenings one of the central themes of his campaign message. This is dangerous.

Trump’s drive to re-open churches comes despite a growing body of evidence tying church services to serious outbreaks of coronavirus. Just Tuesday, the Centers for Disease Control released a warning about Arkansas church meetings in March where more than a third of 92 attendees wound up infected. Another 26 members of the community wound up hit by the virus. Four people died.

Similar church-focused outbreaks have been reported in Washington state, South Korea and France. Experts theorize that hand-holding, singing and the fellowship typical of church services create robust vectors to transmit the virus, particularly through airborne droplets.

Pretty much everything Trump is pushing will make it harder to contain the virus, so I don’t really look at his choices for how they play politically in the moment. He’ll be judged above all by whether or not the virus is still raging or seems to be a crisis of the past. The economy is going to be bad either way, but will look far worse if we’ve made no headway on the virus.

I wish there was a way for Trump to do this badly politically without it costing hundreds of thousands of people their lives, but for now the two seem intertwined. He will not do the right thing either for the country or for his political future.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of Crumwold Hall, in the Hudson Valley, New York. I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on an 8×10 inch canvas board.The photo that I am using is seen directly below.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo direclty below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I have now painted the shadowed/ivied areas in dark blue. Lit and uncovered areas remain unpainted. Up on top the roof sports some reddish paint.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

The polls out of Michigan haven’t looked very good recently for Donald Trump or really any members of the Republican Party. This is a problem for both Mitch McConnell and the president. For McConnell, Michigan is probably his second-best chance to knock off an incumbent Democrat after Alabama, as he tries to protect his party’s slim Senate majority. But Sen. Gary Peters is leading in every survey taken this year, often by double digits. For Trump, it’s a cause for anxiety because he probably needs to carry Michigan if he wants to be reelected, and over the last couple of months he’s been down six to nine points.

To demonstrate what I mean, if we were to spot Trump every swing state but Michigan and Pennsylvania, and give Trump one Electoral College vote from Maine for good measure, he would lose 271-267. If we were to give Trump Pennsylvania but take away Arizona and Wisconsin, he’d lose 272-266. If Trump loses both Michigan and Florida, he could carry Minnesota, Wisconsin, Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia and still lose 270-268.

Finding winning scenarios without Michigan is therefore hard for Trump to accomplish, After all, he’s currently behind or basically tied in every state that I just mentioned. Perhaps that’s why Trump decided to visit Michigan on Thursday, but his strategy for to winning the state is questionable.

He’s been picking a fight with Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer ever since the Covid-19 pandemic started, but he’s not getting the better of the fight. Polling consistently shows that Michiganders like their governor and approve of her approach to handling the virus. In fact, the numbers are so stark that Trump is probably increasing the chances that Whitmer will be selected as Biden’s running mate. It must be tempting to Biden to pick someone who should help him lockdown a critical state.

During his trip, he violated state guidelines by refusing to wear a mask while in enclosed public spaces, which has caused a giant row with the state attorney general Dana Nessel who called him “a ridiculous person” and “a petulant child,” while adding that she she is “ashamed to have him be president of the United States of America.”

The symbolism was particularly bad not only because Michiganders support the governor’s policies, but because he was visiting a Ford factory that has been repurposed to produce ventilators and masks.

Ford did not respond to a request for comment from The Washington Post early Friday. But in a statement to reporters after Trump’s visit, the company said that executive chairman Bill Ford had “encouraged” the president to wear a face covering on his tour inside the Detroit-area factory that has been repurposed to produce ventilators and masks.

“He wore a mask during a private viewing of three Ford GTs from over the years,” the company’s statement said. “The President later removed the mask for the remainder of the visit.”

Trump said as much to reporters Thursday after he was questioned about his decision to go without a mask.

“I had one on before,” he said, standing barefaced in front of several men wearing masks and a large sign advertising the facility’s mask-making efforts. “But I didn’t want to give the press the pleasure of seeing it.”

…When asked to confirm Trump’s comments, Bill Ford only shrugged and responded, “It’s up to him.”

Dana Nessel pointed out that if Trump infected anyone, it could cause the plant to close down, and that’s one reason to be concerned about Trump’s childish behavior. But the main reason is that we want him to model good behavior to American citizens and particularly his supporters.Apparently, he feels that doing the right thing would give the media satisfaction, and he cannot abide that.

It’s probably safe to say that Trump didn’t help his chances of winning Michigan on Thursday, he that’s not the only self-injurious thing he did this week. He also chose the day that two dams broke and inundated whole communities to threaten to withhold all federal aid from the state.

Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer said she told President Trump they need to focus on the “true enemy” of coronavirus during a phone call after catastrophic flooding forced her to declare a state of emergency. Mr. Trump, who will be visiting a Michigan Ford auto plant Thursday, has been encouraging protests against several states’ lockdown orders, including Michigan, and recently threatened to cut funding to the state over mailing out absentee voting ballots.

“To have this kind of distraction is just ridiculous to be honest,” Whitmer said on “CBS This Morning” on Thursday. “Threatening to take money away from a state that is hurting as bad as we are right now is just scary. And I think something that is unacceptable.”

This would be bad timing in the best of times, but it was based on a faulty premise, too. Michigan isn’t mailing absentee ballots to its citizens, but only applications for ballots, which is something that several Republican-run states are also doing. Coinciding with his Thursday visit, the president eventually approved an emergency declaration for the state, but the damage was done.

It seems that Trump knows he needs to win Michigan but he doesn’t know how to make that more likely.

For what seems like the umpteenth time, there’s an article out describing how difficult it is for intelligence officials to brief the current president of the United States. The new one is authored by Julian Barnes and Adam Goldman of the New York Times, and it relies on “interviews with 10 current and former intelligence officials familiar with his intelligence briefings.”

There’s not a whole lot of fresh information in the piece, so it mostly reads like something you already know. Donald Trump is a colossal moron with the attention span and memory capacity of a gnat who doesn’t read his intelligence reports, ignores the advice of experts, spouts conspiracy theories, grows impatient when his nonsense is contradicted, and is generally unpleasant to be around. As a result, his briefers are always thrashing around trying to come up with ways to get Trump to actually pay attention, learn, remember and believe what he is being told.

I suppose the nation needs to be reminded of this dangerous state of affairs from time to time, but it’s something we’ve been told repeatedly for four years now. The reason it is cropping up again now is that Trump did his Fox News interview at the Lincoln Memorial and used the occasion to blame his intelligence briefer for his slow response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

“On Jan. 23, I was told that there could be a virus coming in but it was of no real import,” Mr. Trump said in a recent interview with Fox News at the Lincoln Memorial. “In other words, it wasn’t, ‘Oh, we’ve got to do something, we’ve got to do something.’ It was a brief conversation and it was only on Jan. 23.”

Trump didn’t name his briefer, but her name is Beth Sanner and she’s a 56 year-old senior analyst at the CIA. Apparently, she made the mistake of explaining the virus by comparing it to the first SARS virus, which obviously wasn’t nearly as contagious as this second one, and was quickly contained. So, now she’s the fall gal.

As the article points out, Trump had plenty of other information flows and warnings available to him, including several that predated his intelligence briefing on January 23, so this isn’t a viable excuse. On Wednesday, the New York Times reported on a new study from disease modelers at Columbia University who estimate that Trump’s slow response cost at least 36,000 lives.

But in blaming Ms. Sanner, a C.I.A. analyst with three decades of experience, Mr. Trump ignored a host of warnings he received around that time from higher-ranking officials, epidemiologists, scientists, biodefense officials, other national security aides and the news media about the virus’s growing threat. Mr. Trump’s own health secretary had alerted him five days earlier to the potential seriousness of the virus.

By the time of the Jan. 23 intelligence briefing, many government officials were already alarmed by the signs of a crisis in China, where the virus first broke out, and of a world on the brink of disaster. Within days, other national security warnings prompted the Trump administration to restrict travel from China. But the United States lost its chance to more effectively mitigate the coronavirus in the following weeks when Mr. Trump balked at further measures that might have slowed its spread.

Obviously, it’s not just lives that were lost, but also money. Almost 40 million new unemployment claims have been made since the pandemic arrived in America, which is why Oxford Economics now projects that Trump will lose in a landslide and get approximately 35 percent of the popular vote. They see Biden winning the Electoral College by a margin of 328 to 210, which seems far too good for Trump if he’s only pulling in the mid-thirties nationally. Personally, I will be appalled if Trump tops 200 Electoral College votes.

Back in November 2013, Joseph Fitzanakis of Intel News wrote a piece explaining that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is responsible for monitoring the activities of foreign diplomats on American soil. It was mainly cribbed off a Foreign Policy article authored by Matthew Aid, but unfortunately we can’t access the orginal for free on the internet. In the lengthy citations below, you’ll see that the National Security Agency is not in charge of spying on, say, the Russian ambassador in Washington, DC. That’s admittedly some esoteric knowledge for the average citizen, but it shouldn’t be news to anyone who wants to be confirmed as the next Director of National Intelligence.

Over the past several months, the Edward Snowden affair has turned the typically reclusive National Security Agency into a news media sensation. The signals intelligence agency, which is tasked by the United States government with communications interception, is said to have spied on a host of foreign government officials and diplomats. But in an article published this week in Foreign Policy, the American military historian and author Matthew Aid reminds us that American intelligence operations against foreign diplomats do not usually involve the NSA. They are typically carried out by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has been in the business of monitoring the activities of foreign diplomats on US soil long before the NSA even existed.

The author of Intel Wars and The Secret Sentry states in his article that the FBI’s cryptologic operations targeting foreign envoys are today far more sensitive and the NSA’s. The vast majority of these operations take place on US soil. There are currently over 600 foreign embassies, consulates and diplomatic missions in the US, maintained by 176 countries. They include over 200 consulates located in cities ranging from Miami to Los Angeles and from San Francisco to Boston. New York alone hosts over 100 permanent diplomatic missions at the United Nations headquarters.

If you’re worried about the reach of the Deep State, you ought to pay more attention to the FBI. They are pretty aggressive:

Aid points out that “every one of these embassies and consulates is watched by the FBI’s legion of counterintelligence officers” in varying degrees. Additionally, the Bureau relies on the close cooperation of large American telecommunications providers in its effort to intercept the landline and cellular communications “of virtually every embassy and consulate in the United States”. FBI communications technicians also intercept the personal telephone calls and emails of foreign diplomats on a regular basis, adds Aid.

They must be pleased that the NSA took almost all the heat for this kind of stuff. They don’t limit themselves to listening to phone calls and reading emails, and they might not want to know about that either.

Sometimes the Bureau employs specially trained teams of agents who physically break into embassies and consulates, in what is known in intelligence lingo as ‘black bag jobs’. These surreptitious entry operations are conducted in order to steal encryption codes, cryptological hardware, to install listening bugs or to compromise security systems. In other cases, says Aid, the FBI resorts to aerial surveillance in order to evaluate the structural features of foreign diplomatic missions. He gives the example of the recently constructed Chinese embassy on Washington DC’s Van Ness Street. Bureau helicopters conducted regular flights over the embassy while it was being constructed, between 2006 and 2009, taking “high-resolution photographs” of the construction site. The goal was allegedly to locate the embassy’s communications center.

However you feel about this, the Bureau is authorized to carry out these operations, and that is why they were the agency that intercepted Michael Flynn’s phone calls to Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak in December 2016. People who are familiar with how the American intelligence community functions would have either known this or assumed it to be the case, but Trump’s nominee to be DNI did not know it.

The president’s GOP allies, including his probable next DNI, Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Tex.), have long pressed to learn who provided the media with information on Flynn’s calls. “It does appear that there were crimes committed during the Obama administration,” Ratcliffe told Fox News last July. “His phone call with the Russian ambassador was a highly classified NSA intercept,” he said, apparently not realizing it was an FBI intercept. “Someone in the Obama administration leaked that call to The Washington Post. That’s a felony.”

One reason why it matters that the FBI, and not the NSA, monitored the Flynn-Kislyak calls is that the FBI isn’t as meticulous about “masking” the identities of Americans in its intelligence reports. This is probably because the vast majority of the FBI’s work involves domestic surveillance, while the CIA is theoretically barred from doing that work and the NSA has strict protocols it needs to follow to protect the rights and privacy of American citizens.

Whatever the reason, the FBI did not hide Flynn’s identity in the intelligence reports on the calls that they distributed. This means that an enormously long list of people could be responsible for leaking the information to David Ignatius of the Washington Post in January 2017. It also means that all the talk Trump and his minions have been making about “the unmasking of Michael Flynn” was based on a badly flawed premise.

When the NSA inadvertently captures an American talking to a foreign national and needs to report on the foreign national, they will hide the identity of the American. Anyone who wants to know the American’s identity has to have the proper authority and put in a formal request. There is a record kept of all these “unmasking” requests, and the Republicans have been seeking those records for quite some time. When they finally got them, there were a little confused:

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) announced this week that he wants to subpoena witnesses over the unmasking of Flynn, as part of a larger effort to unearth information about the FBI’s investigation of Trump campaign officials.

On Tuesday, he sent a letter to acting director of national intelligence Richard Grenell asking why a declassified list of Obama administration officials who had made requests that revealed Flynn’s name in intelligence documents “did not contain a record showing who unmasked” Flynn’s identity in relation to “his phone call with” the Russian diplomat, Sergey Kislyak.

See, Flynn wasn’t “unmasked” by a request. He was never masked in the first place:

The list, prepared at Grenell’s request by the National Security Agency, covered requests made between Nov. 30, 2016 and Jan. 12, 2017. The majority of requests occurred before Flynn’s communications with Kislyak on Dec. 29.

It was the FBI, not the NSA, that wiretapped Kislyak’s calls and created the summary and transcript, the former officials said.

“When the FBI circulated [the report], they included Flynn’s name from the beginning” because it was essential to understanding its significance, said a former senior U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive intelligence. “There were therefore no requests for the unmasking of that information.”

All was not lost, since Lindsey Graham and his moronic cohorts did get the Washington Post to run idiotic headlines like this: GOP senators release list of Obama officials, including Biden, who “unmasked” Mike Flynn. Still, they were not prepared to learn that the NSA didn’t do the collection and that they had therefore never had to hide Flynn’s identity from anyone.

The president is lying again. No shock there. But to what effect?

President Trump on Wednesday escalated his assault against mail voting, falsely claiming that Michigan and Nevada were engaged in voter fraud and had acted illegally, and threatening to withhold federal funds to those states if they proceed in expanding vote-by-mail efforts.

The president inaccurately accused the two states of sending mail ballots to its residents. In fact, the secretaries of state in Michigan and Nevada sent applications for mail ballots, as election officials have done in other states, including those led by Republicans.

This is part of a more general effort to resist an increase of vote-by-mail in the 2020 elections. Ground zero has been Texas where attorney general Ken Paxton has threatened to prosecute anyone who facilitates the practice. Yet, on Tuesday, a federal district judge put an injunction on any effort to restrict vote-by-mail.

Days after a two-hour preliminary injunction hearing in San Antonio, U.S. District Judge Fred Biery agreed with individual Texas voters and the Texas Democratic Party that voters would face irreparable harm if existing age eligibility rules for voting by mail remain in place for elections held while the coronavirus remains in wide circulation. Under his order, which the Texas attorney general said he would immediately appeal, voters under the age of 65 who would ordinarily not qualify for mail-in ballots would now be eligible.

Biery’s ruling covers Texas voters “who seek to vote by mail to avoid transmission of the virus.”

Without getting into the complexities of Texas’s law, there’s a bit more logic to the effort there than any nationwide approach. Trump will presumably win with voters over 65, although that’s no longer a safe bet. Any system that is more permissive of vote-by-mail for seniors than everyone else makes some sense for the president, but as a more general matter it’s seniors who are most vulnerable to Covid-19 and the most apprehensive about voting in person. Trump could easily lose in November if turnout among older voters is depressed for this reason. Vote-by-mail is the most logical way to reduce that risk.

Trump doesn’t seem to grasp this. Both he and Paxton argue that vote-by-mail will increase the risk of voter fraud, but you can safely ignore that as a genuine reason for their concern. They know voter fraud is not going to decide the election. What they want to avoid is high turnout, which they believe will help Democrats up and down the ballot.

Before the Covid-19 outbreak, this was a cynical and undemocratic ploy based on dishonest rhetoric and contemptible legal arguments, but at least the theory that low turnout helps the GOP had some statistical support. In the midst of this pandemic, however, there are good reasons to doubt that past patterns will hold.

Democrats do very well with young voters, but young people are notoriously disengaged from politics and lack strong roots. Few of them own homes, and many move around between apartments or for work or college. They’re the least likely to be registered to vote at a current address. They, along with recently married women, are the least likely to have a picture ID that matches up with their voter registration information. Urban Democrats who don’t drive or own a car are the least likely to have any kind of photo identification. This is why the Republicans work so hard to make having a photo ID a prerequisite for voting, but that restriction cannot work if people aren’t required to show up to vote in person.

The idea is to selectively drive down turnout so that it has more impact on the Democrats than the Republicans. It can be very effective, but it only works if older voters skew heavily Republican and show up at a higher rate than younger voters. Because older voters are generally well-rooted in their communities and have all their paperwork up-to-date, they historically have had the highest turnout of any age group. When you further suppress the Democratic base vote, this gives the Republicans a healthy advantage.

This advantage is muted in presidential years because young voters are far more likely to take an interest in the leader of the country than in who represents them in Congress or at the local level. But it’s still an advantage. But young people are far less to fear voting in person because of the coronavirus than their parents and grandparents. That’s why opposing vote-by-mail this year may not be a solid electoral strategy for Trump and the Republicans.

Now, if you’re a long-term GOP strategist, you might worry that widespread acceptance of vote-by-mail in 2020 might not hurt this year but will be impossible to put back in the box. After the pandemic subsides, the previous turnout differential will probably resume, and the GOP will have lost the Voter ID suppression tactic.

Yet, remember, Trump is neither a long-term thinker or someone who gives a rat’s ass about the future health of his party. He is running his last election, and if he were to understand what’s good for him, he wouldn’t be opposed to vote-by-mail. He wants every senior who wants to vote for him to have their ballot cast and counted. As things stand, many will stay away from voting places on Election Day, and this will cost Trump dearly.

There is some limited value in arguing that the Democrats are cheating, as it riles up the base. But efforts to suppress the black vote usually backfire as it just ramps up interest in the right to vote so that people show up even if they’re not there out of any particular enthusiasm for the candidates. Likewise, efforts to force people to vote in person will make them more determined to punish their people responsible.

On the whole, I think this is a foolhardy approach by Trump, and I’d cheer him on except that I don’t want people disenfranchised and I don’t want to see them have to choose between voting and dying.