Month: August 2020

President Trump plans to visit Kenosha, Wisconsin on Tuesday, even though he isn’t welcome. The Hill reports that both the governor of Wisconsin and the mayor of Kenosha have asked him not to come at this time, as the town is still reeling from the police shooting of Jacob Blake and the murder of two protesters by 17 year old Trump supporter Kyle Rittenhouse.

“I, along with other community leaders who have reached out, are concerned about what your presence will mean for Kenosha and our state. I am concerned your presence will only hinder our healing. I am concerned your presence will only delay our work to overcome division and move forward together,” [Gov. Tony Evers] wrote.

…”Realistically, from our perspective, our preference would have been for him not to be coming at this point in time,” Mayor John Antaramian (D) said on NPR’s “Weekend Edition.”

“All presidents are always welcome and campaign issues are always going on. But it would have been, I think, better had he waited to have for another time to come,” Antaramian added.

Their concern is well-founded, as Trump is not on a national healing tour. The New York Times described his weekend tweetstorm as “an especially intense barrage…embracing fringe conspiracy theories claiming that the coronavirus death toll has been exaggerated and that street protests are actually an organized coup d’état against him.”

In a concentrated predawn burst, the president posted or reposted 89 messages between 5:49 a.m. and 8:04 a.m. on Sunday on top of 18 the night before, many of them inflammatory comments or assertions about violent clashes in Portland, Ore., where a man wearing the hat of a far-right, pro-Trump group was shot and killed Saturday after a large group of Mr. Trump’s supporters traveled through the streets. He resumed on Sunday night.

In the blast of social media messages, Mr. Trump also embraced a call to imprison Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, threatened to send federal forces against demonstrators outside the White House, attacked CNN and NPR, embraced a supporter charged with murder, mocked his challenger, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and repeatedly assailed the mayor of Portland, even posting the mayor’s office telephone number so that supporters could call demanding his resignation.

The mayor of Portland responded appropriately by saying that Trump “has been perpetrating divisive and hateful language for four years — for him to now stand here and say that it’s unexpected and act as though he is shocked, is appalling to me.” He added, “I’d appreciate that either the president support us or stay the hell out of the way.”

With Trump, we’re never quite sure where the line is drawn between cynicism and insanity, so it’s not possible to know if he believes that “the real death toll from the coronavirus is only around 9,000 — not nearly 183,000,” or that “a well funded network of anarchists” are trying to take him down by causing disturbances in the streets. What we do know is that Trump sent those messages out this past weekend to his 86.5 million Twitter followers. There’s no reason to believe that he’s headed to Kenosha to calm the place down. That’s clear from the fact that he “liked” a Tweet stating that “Kyle Rittenhouse is a good example of why I decided to vote for Trump.”

As a reminder, Kyle Rittenhouse traveled 30 miles from his home in Antioch, Illinois. He then confronted Black Lives Matter protesters with a “a Smith & Wesson AR-15 style .223 rifle.” As a minor, it was a violation of Wisconsin law for him to brandish such a weapon in public. Following a confrontation in a parking lot, he shot and killed an unarmed Joseph Rosenbaum, who reportedly had thrown a plastic bag at him. When a group gathered in an effort to disarm and detain him, he fired more shots, wounding Gaige Grosskreutz and killing Anthony Huber.

Apparently, Trump considers this boy a model supporter. It’s no wonder that elected officials think Trump’s presence will exacerbate the fallout they are trying to contain.  As the New York Times reported on Thursday, increasing tensions is quite obviously a key component of his reelection strategy.

Kellyanne Conway, President Trump’s departing counselor, said on Thursday that Mr. Trump stood to benefit politically from the kind of unrest that erupted this week in Kenosha, Wis., after the police shooting of an unarmed Black man, Jacob Blake.

“The more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order,” Ms. Conway said on “Fox & Friends.”

If someone was coming to your community to boost chaos and anarchy and vandalism, would you welcome them?

I’ll be candid and admit that I’ve always been a bit lukewarm on the Kennedy political family. The old man was a bootlegging Nazi sympathizer, I’d give JFK an incomplete as president (obviously, no fault of his own) and his brother Robert owed his position as Attorney General to an unforgivable nepotism. I greatly admire what Teddy accomplished as a senator, but he really shouldn’t have had a political career after Chappaquiddick. Plus, by any measure, his treatment of women was deplorable.

The Kennedys do represent a kind up-from-your-bootstraps noblesse oblige that I find appealing, but I don’t have a ton of patience for the way they’re mythologized as paragons of liberalism. In any case, I don’t have much use for political dynasties whether they’re named Kennedy or Bush or Clinton. That’s probably why I didn’t get excited when I learned that Joe Kennedy was abandoning his House seat to challenge Sen. Ed Markey. From what I’ve seen, Joe Kennedy is a perfectly fine congressman, but Ed Markey is one of the better people we have in the Senate. It didn’t seem like the left would be gaining much, if anything, from making this swap.

Since he entered the Senate in 2013 after a 37-year career in the House, Markey has mostly distinguished himself for his strong leadership on climate. He’s still basically a backbencher with no real power, but that would be same for Kennedy, just with seven fewer years of seniority. I don’t live in Massachusetts but, if I did, the seniority issue would be an important consideration because Elizabeth Warren is actually the junior senator there and may soon leave for a position in the Biden administration. The prospect of having two freshmen senators is a far cry from having lifers like Teddy and John Kerry chairing important committees.

Truth be told, however, I don’t think it would necessarily be a bad thing if Kennedy won this primary. If reelected, Markey would 80 by the end of his term. It’s quite possible that the 40 year-old Kennedy would use the example of his great uncle Teddy to craft a long and excellent record in the Senate. I don’t really care who wins this thing, except that I think Markey deserves to be reelected. I’d feel badly for him if he lost.

It’s interesting that Markey’s support is being driven by younger voters who are responding to his association with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Green New Deal. Kennedy is banking on winning more working class voters in communities like Lowell.

It’s also interesting that the Kennedy clan waited until it looked almost certain that Joe would lose before putting their backs into helping his campaign. Now their mystique is on the line, and it’s not looking good.

Just two years ago, Joe Kennedy’s star was so bright that he was asked to deliver the Democratic Party’s response to Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech. Now, if he can’t turn things around before Tuesday’s Massachusetts Senate primary, he’ll be out of politics.

A handful of recent polls show the 39-year-old congressman trailing incumbent Sen. Ed Markey — the septuagenarian incumbent whose campaign is improbably powered by younger progressive voters. Among voters under the age of 35, one of those polls reports, Markey is leading Kennedy by an almost 2-to-1 margin.

As I stated above that I’m ambivalent about the Kennedy dynasty, which also means that I have mixed feelings about the prospect of seeing them take a huge defeat on their home turf. My anti-dynastic disposition welcomes such a scenario, but I actually do value the family and what they’ve accomplished and sacrificed for the country.

We’ll find out what happens on Tuesday. The Kennedy campaign acknowledges they are behind in the early voting, but they’re hoping to make up the deficit with a big turnout on Election Day. If I were voting, I’d cast my ballot for Markey, but I don’t see a big win or big loss no matter how it turns out.

Near the end of New York Times piece by Katie Glueck, Annie Karni and Alexander Burns on the state of the presidential race, we learn that President Trump got a real kick out of violating ethics laws during the Republican National Convention.

Mr. Trump’s aides said he enjoyed the frustration and anger he caused by holding a political event on the South Lawn of the White House, shattering conventional norms and raising questions about ethics law violations. He relished the fact that no one could do anything to stop him, said the aides, who spoke anonymously to discuss internal conversations.

What’s odd about this is that the election is almost upon us, and that’s when someone can actually do something to stop him. In fact, since the Department of Justice clearly won’t do anything and the Senate Republicans inexplicably acquitted him at his impeachment trial, the people are the entity that can hold him to account.

Some people may have seen Trump’s decision to use federal property and federal employees for political reasons as an appealing show of strength, and most people will make their decision based on other grounds. But there actually are some conservative-minded people who don’t think it’s okay for a president to put himself above the law.

More important that his behavior at his convention is his motive. He broke the law in order to feel his own power. That’s an important part of his character, and if you think he’s bordering on megalomania now, imagine what a second term would look like.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of Wilderstein, the Hudson Valley home of FDR cousin Daisy Suckley. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly above.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 9×9 inch canvas panel.

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

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

I have spent time further adding to the shadowed portions of the building. Note the dark blue color with faint details within. I have also added a bit of paint to the lawn.

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.

I didn’t know there was a recurring survey called the DTN/The Progressive Farmer Agriculture Confidence Index until today. The current results, which were measured August 6 to August 14, show significant deterioration in President Trump’s rural support since April.

This is the third ACI survey in which DTN examined farmer support for the current president. Asked how they would vote if the election was held now, 71% said they would likely vote to retain the Trump administration. While a solid majority, that is significantly lower than the 89% of farmers who said they would vote that way in the April 2020 DTN survey.

That change in support also showed up in questions regarding the current pandemic. In both the spring and pre-harvest ACI surveys, farmers were asked if they were satisfied with the way the Trump administration was handling the coronavirus crisis. In August, only 43% said they were satisfied, while 20% said they were not satisfied and 37% said they were undecided. In April, as the pandemic was just beginning to take a hold and the administration was downplaying its severity, 84% said they were satisfied with the way the pandemic was being handled, only 9% said they were dissatisfied and a smaller amount, 6.7%, said they were unsure.

The reason for that dissatisfaction likely has many prongs. Social media commentary from rural America seems divided between those concerned with the rise in COVID-19 cases and the lack of answers to stop that rise, while others feel the issue has been overblown and control methods such as lockdowns and social distancing have overly hurt the economy.

It appears that almost one in five Trump-supporting farmers has reconsidered their position in light of his COVID-19 performance. This makes sense. I know that I’d have to see real ineptitude from a Democratic president before I’d consider voting for a Republican challenger, but if I thought the country was in legitimate danger I’d have to make that call.

A lot of people are wondering why Trump is still playing to his base rather than making a serious play for the center, but one reason is that his base needs shoring up.

Robert Tracinski of The Bulwark makes a good point when he warns that the “Republicans will spend hundreds of millions of dollars over the next ten weeks trying to convince voters that they should punish Democrats for tolerating or excusing lawless violence.” This was clear during the Republican National Convention. Tracisnki is also correct in advising Joe Biden to tackle the issue head-on, but his recommendation that Biden dedicate a whole month to revisiting Bill Clinton’s 1992 Sister Souljah Moment shows just how out of touch he is with the politics of the left.

In the aftermath of the Rodney King riots, the rapper Sister Souljah made some very impolitic remarks. Most controversially, she suggested it would be a good idea if Black gang members took a week off from killing each other to focus on killing white people. She then appeared at Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Convention in June 1992, the day before Bill Clinton was scheduled to speak. The Clinton campaign team wanted to create some distance from Jackson and they didn’t want to be tarnished by association with Souljah, so the future president took the opportunity to condemn some of Souljah’s most incendiary lyrics and remarks. Jesse Jackson was furious, but the press loved it and has spent the last 28 years celebrating Clinton’s act of independence.

Of course, Bill Clinton did not win an election in November 1992 because of remarks he made five months earlier at the Rainbow Convention.  It was a conversation piece in June, well before the party conventions or the debates with Poppy Bush and Ross Perot. Most observers credit Clinton’s laser focus on the economy as the reason for his success, and they’re probably right.

It’s true that Toni Morrison once called Bill Clinton “American’s first black president,” but the Sister Souljah Moment caused lasting hurt. It wasn’t because he had objected to the idea that Black gang members kill some white people for a change, but because he used the stage at Jackson’s convention to seemingly marginalize the movement. It would have been worse if Clinton dwelled on the rapper for a whole month.

The Republicans don’t want to talk about the racial justice protests, so they focus on the looting. The Democrats don’t want to talk about the looting, mainly because it’s a distraction from the need for police reform. Biden’s response has been to praise the protesters and their cause while condemning violence and lawlessness. He will have to go through many iterations of this dance between now and November, but the steps should remain the same.

In the wake of the Jacob Blake shooting in Wisconsin, the Black community is in tremendous pain. Black athletes are boycotting games and practices, not only to protest but also to mourn. It’s hard to focus on your job when you’re overcome with grief.

Biden needs to take this moment to show he can lead us to a better place. He can’t do that by joining the Republicans in making this all about the looting. The last thing we need right now is for both white presidential candidates using the Black community as a punching bag by associating their grievances with lawlessness.

I watched some of Trump’s speech tonight at his ridiculous “convention.” I don’t even care anymore. He moves his lips. I don’t care. It doesn’t make any difference what he says. No clever speechwriting or better-than-average delivery is going to affect this election. People don’t give a shit. Everything’s fucked up, and either you can recognize that Trump is responsible or you can’t.

We could just have the election by counting how many are in each of those two camps. Is America a majority moron country or not? Do we have a death wish? Do we actually deserve to have our lives ruined by this colossal asshole?

It won’t be long before we find out. Trump has until January 20, 2021, at least, to set us at each other’s throats. That might be too late to salvage anything but I’m hoping we can begin patching things up then, as best we can.

Not just his speech, but the choice of setting for the speech and the whole rotten “convention,” were absolute low points in the modern history of this nation. But we already knew this would happen. It’s what this election is all about. Do we accept this? Do we actually like it?

I don’t see the point in arguing with what he said. Not tonight, at least. None of it had enough merit to warrant the energy it takes to make a response. It was just lie piled upon lie piled upon lie. Pure, racist, xenophobic demagoguery, with the people’s White House as a backdrop and an audience of COVID-19 super-spreaders yelling “Four More Years!”

Now he’s had his say. It didn’t come from Charlotte, as originally planned, nor from Jacksonville or the Gettysburg Battlefield, as were discussed. It’s over now and we can move on to next travesty, and the next travesty after that.

This man and his movement must be stomped out of existence just as surely as we stomped out the Third Reich, but we have to do with nearly have our fellow citizens fighting against us.

Arizona is not only the birthplace of Goldwater libertarianism, it’s a giant retirement home for relatively well-to-do white transplants. The large Latinx population has created a Deep South dynamic where, to assure a monopoly on power, whites have tended to vote as a group. It’s a rock-ribbed conservative state that seldom elects Democrats to statewide office and has only voted for one Democrat for president since 1948. Yet, it’s still trending blue.

As Igor Derysh explains at Salon, the Democrats have been dreaming about carrying Arizona in a presidential race since 2004, but so far it has been reminiscent of Charlie Brown’s efforts to kick a football. This could be the year that the Dems carry Arizona, but it could also be much bigger than that.

FiveThirtyEight’s average of polls currently has Joe Biden ahead by 3.7 percentage points. It’s not a big lead, but it has been persistent. The polls of the U.S. Senate race between incumbent Republican Martha McSally and Democratic challenger Mark Kelly have been all over the place, but most agree that Kelly has a substantial lead. The most recently released survey, conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies, has him up by 19 points.

But these are federal races. On the local level, the Republicans are at risk of losing control of both chambers of their state legislature.

Democrats are “very confident” of their chances to flip the state legislature, Felecia Rotellini, the chairwoman of the Arizona Democratic Party, told Salon.

“Both chambers are on the precipice of turning blue for the first time in 50 years,” she said. “We need three seats in the Senate and two in the House to gain control. We are fighting for each and every seat and the path to achieving these majorities is clear.”

Republican Governor Doug Ducey’s term doesn’t end until 2022 and he’ll be ineligible to seek the office for a third time, so he’s insulated from the wrath of the public. But that doesn’t mean that people aren’t angry with him, especially with respect to his handling of the COVID-19 crisis. In July, a survey from OH Predictive Insights showed Ducey with a 35 percent approval rating, down 22 points from June when coronavirus cases began to spike in his state.

It appears that Trump will run stronger than McSally, owing mainly to more firm support from the Republican base, but that’s not particularly good news for the other Republicans who will be on the ballot. The party’s brand is severely tarnished in Arizona, and it’s more likely to drag Trump down than he is to lift them up. I can’t say that this makes a tremendous amount of intuitive sense, but that’s what the numbers are telling us.

For non-Trumper Republicans, however, they need to be primarily concerned about life after the president, because win or lose this will be his last election. Without him on the ballot, they may discover that Arizona has turned not just purple but fully blue. After November, there may be two Democratic U.S. Senators and a Democratically controlled state legislature. They may lose the governorship in 2022. Arizona could be the next Virginia, and that would be a remarkable shift for the land of Goldwater.

If it’s somewhat a mystery that Trump remains more popular there than the local officials who followed his COVID-19 advice, he’s still responsible for a lot of the state party’s woes. Primarily this is due to white well-educated suburbanites turning against the GOP. When combined with the manifestly failed containment efforts with the virus, there are just too many traditional Republicans who have seen enough bad leadership and are ready for a change.

None of this is written in stone. Arizona’s 2020 elections will be hard fought, but there could be a much deserved and long-awaited reckoning there for the Republicans.

I have a confession to make. The Republicans make me feel so physically ill that I couldn’t watch one second of their convention on Tuesday and I didn’t watch one second on Wednesday. This isn’t healthy for my ability to cover this campaign, but neither is having a stroke, so I have to choose my poison. I choose to do something else with my time but have my intelligence and basic sense of decency insulted.

I get enough of that reading through the news. For example, Byron York helpfully provides us with a transcript of an interview he did with President Trump in the Oval Office on Wednesday. Here’s a sample of their conversation:

TRUMP: Nobody thought that [Joe Biden] was even going to win. Because his debate performances were so bad. Frankly, his best performance was against Bernie. We’re going to call for a drug test, by the way, because his best performance was against Bernie. It wasn’t that he was Winston Churchill because he wasn’t, but it was a normal, boring debate. You know, nothing amazing happened. And we are going to call for a drug test because there’s no way — you can’t do that.

YORK: What do you think was going on?

TRUMP: I don’t know how he could have been so incompetent in his debate performances and then all of a sudden be okay against Bernie. My point is, if you go back and watch some of those numerous debates, he was so bad. He wasn’t even coherent. And against Bernie, he was. And we’re calling for a drug test.

Trump is projecting here again. But he wants us to think he is serious:

TRUMP: I think [a drug test is] appropriate. I don’t know that they’ll let me do it, but I think that they should do it.

Go back and watch his performances in some of those debates. He didn’t know where he was. And all of a sudden, he was not good, he was normal, and I don’t understand how. I don’t know if there is or not, but somebody said to me, ‘He must be on drugs.’ I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I’m asking for a drug test. Both candidates. Me, too. I take an aspirin a day.

This guy is so disrespectful to everything, whether it’s his opponent, or the process, or the truth, or his job. And there’s just not much to say about it except that I hope to hell the American people have had enough. I know I can’t take much more, and there just has to be a strong majority in this country that actually doesn’t take pleasure out of having a professional troll for a president.

Honestly, if Trump wins, I don’t know what I’ll do. Whatever it is, it won’t be like what came before. I’m not doing this for another four years.

Over the years, I’ve noticed that a lot of religious conservative leaders will interpret natural disasters or even events like 9/11 as divine punishment for some perceived sins of the American public. It’s usually part of their scam, but it’s a natural human instinct to think that everything happens with God’s approval. In another sense, tragedies that might make someone question the existence of a benevolent God can cause people to double down on their faith. It’s always somewhat interesting to see who gets blamed when things go horribly wrong.

Any objective observer will note that ever since the Senate acquitted President Trump at his impeachment trial, on February 5, the country has been receiving one crippling blow after another. The timing suggests that God has responded with overwhelming disapproval of the verdict. If you’re inclined to believe that God communicates with us in this way, this conclusion is hard to avoid. There’s obviously the COVID-19 pandemic, in which the first confirmed case arrived at our shores during Trump’s trial. There the massive job losses associated with the novel coronavirus and other signs too, like mass protests, widespread looting, and a spike in violent crime. Then there’s Mighty Zeus sending down at least 12,000 dry lightning bolts on California that set much of the state on fire. We’ve had fire tornados and murder hornets, and even a case of bubonic plague. The mercury recently reached a world record 130 degrees Fahrenheit in Death Valley.

I knew something was definitely awry when I learned that two hurricanes had formed at the same time in the Gulf of Mexico. Apparently, meteorologists have never seen that happen before. The first of these storms, Hurricane Laura, appears to have timed its arrival perfectly to disrupt the Republican National “Convention.” It’s set to hit the Texas-Louisiana coast on Wednesday night or early Thursday morning. Not only that, but it was a bit sneaky about it.