Month: September 2020

The President of the United States is warning of commercial planes “completely loaded with thugs wearing…dark uniforms” and the dangers of canned soup in the hands of protestors. On Wednesday, he recommended that his supporters in North Carolina vote-by-mail and then attempt to vote again in person, which is a crime.

My ten-year-old son has taken to pointing at these stories on the television and laughing in disbelief, “Look! Look at what this moron said now! Watch out for ninjas with the Cream of Mushroom! You can’t vote twice in an election, you idiot!”

That’s where my household is with this spectacle. Maybe in some other households, it passes muster or simply goes unnoticed.

You can’t tell from the polls, though, which look the same as they did before the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, and the same as before Trump began retweeting conspiracy theories about a secret coup attempt by a “well-funded network of anarchists.”

According to Acting Secretary of Homeland Security, the Justice Department is now investigating protesters on the theory that they are secretly funded by shadowy figures. Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky asks, “Who are these people? Who paid for their hotel rooms? Who flew them in?”

Ever since 2017, when a voting integrity commission was launched to “explain” how Trump had lost the popular vote, the government has been bent and twisted to accommodate the president’s insanity. What it won’t do is actually protect the integrity of our elections:

House Democratic leaders on Wednesday criticized the Department of Homeland Security for withholding the release of a draft intelligence bulletin warning law enforcement agencies of a Russian effort to spread disinformation about Joe Biden’s mental health.

The July notice from the DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis, which warned of a Russian plan to promote “allegations about the poor mental health” of Biden, was never released to federal, state and local law enforcement, after a senior DHS official raised concerns about the bulletin over email, as ABC News first reported.

Instead of acting on the warning of Russian interference in the 2020 election, the report was buried for “poor context.”

In an appearance on Fox News, acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf confirmed that the bulletin was withheld, calling it “a very poorly written report.”

“I had questions about it when I talked to career officials … in the office that produced the report. They also had questions about it,” he said. “They’re hard at work on rewriting that report, putting it in better context. I hope to see that record out soon.”

Republicans and their media allies have been promoting “allegations about the poor mental health” of Joe Biden, so it was a little embarrassing to realize that this was the Russians’ idea.

Over 180,000 Americans have died of COVID-19. In fact, Trump is now hoping that more people get infected so that we can reach herd immunity. For this reason, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been instructed to change its guidelines and not test asymptomatic people.

This is the clearest example of how crackpot ideas get people killed. At the moment, Trump is in the process of killing the country, too. Any ten year old should be able to understand this.

Politicians who are behind in the polls frequently try to change the subject. Sometimes they say the polls shouldn’t be believed, and other times they say they have unpublished internal polling that looks much better for them. But a well-financed campaign should know where they actually stand with the voters. A presidential campaign should not only know if they’re winning or losing, but which issues are helping or hurting them.

For example, the Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday shows Trump trailing Joe Biden 40 percent to 47 percent. Trump is losing in part because 78 percent of voters are concerned about COVID-19, and 60 percent assign blame to Trump for both the high death count and the school and business closures.

Meanwhile, fewer than one in ten survey respondents listed crime as their top priority, and “62% of Democrats and 65% of Republicans, said crime was not increasing in their communities.” A small majority (53 percent) is sympathetic to protests for racial justice, including calls for fairer treatment of minorities by the police. This also holds true in the suburbs:

While support for the protesters has declined overall since the immediate aftermath of the police killing in May of George Floyd in Minneapolis, which sparked a national conversation on race, the poll showed more than half of suburban Americans and more than half of undecided registered voters are still sympathetic to them.

The Trump strategy flies in the face of these numbers. He constantly dismisses people’s concerns about the novel coronavirus and instead focuses on the traditional suburban aversion to urban crime and disorder. He demonizes protests that the people narrowly support, argues that the economy is actually good when millions of people are out of work and small businesses are going bankrupt every day; and he has almost nothing to say about health care, which is listed in the Reuters/Ipsos poll as people’s number one issue.

To be fair, the Trump campaign seeks to move these numbers. They want to make people focus on crime instead of police shootings. They want to drive a wedge between the Democrats’ suburban and urban supporters. They want to convince people that the economy was great before the COVID-19 outbreak and that the president is best positioned to help it recover.

However, as things stand, they’re just reinforcing issues where they have a disadvantage. When he talks about crime, he’s not talking about an issue at the top of people’s minds. When he talks about protestors, he’s attacking people who have the public’s sympathy. When he downplays the impact of the global pandemic, he reminds people why they blame him for school closures and persistent unemployment.

The campaign has to know that this isn’t a winning strategy and that voters are not responding, but they can’t convince Trump to adopt a strategy that meets his actual weaknesses or that effectively exploits Biden’s soft spots.

Trump appears to be running the campaign he wants to run, without much concern for whether it has a good prospect for success. Maybe this is because Trump is crazy, or maybe he’s not capable of anything else. Personally, I believe the explanation is simpler. Trump is running a white nationalist campaign because he’s a white nationalist. He wants to inflame racial feeling, on the theory that whites are still a majority in this country and will eventually rally to their own defense if they feel sufficiently threatened. He think this will win him reelection, but more importantly, this is his true purpose for being president in the first place. If he doesn’t try, it’s not worth having the position anyway. His ambition is to roll back nonwhite immigration, whether legal or not, with the purpose of enhancing and preserving white power.

So, the president doesn’t have internal polling that shows his strategy is working. He’s not poll-driven but goal-oriented. Fortunately, so far there is no majority supportive of his goals.

John Oliver’s latest segment on the RNC and Kenosha – reminding us that last week really was one hell of a week:

Not humor, really, but an extended clip from Rachel Maddow from Tuesday night, which includes an interview with Stephanie Winston Wolkoff (Melania Trump’s ex-bff).

And lordy, lordy, Stephanie has tapes.

I’ll leave with some music, from the one and only Pharoah Sanders. This is Morning Prayer, from the early 1970s. He plays a variety of woodwinds on the whole album, including on this very track.

Drinks are on the house. We’re in the middle of another week that feels like a month. Take care of yourselves.

Peace.

Our intelligence agencies are barely functioning at this point, so I’m a little surprised they still have the independence and wherewithal to combat any Russian meddling in our elections at all.

Facebook took down a small network of fake accounts and pages associated with Russian operatives that had recruited U.S. journalists to write articles targeting left-leaning readers on topics such as racial justice, the Biden-Harris campaign and President Trump’s policies, the company said Tuesday.

Facebook said it caught the network of 13 fake accounts and two pages early, before it had a chance to build a large audience — an action that the company said was evidence of its growing effectiveness at targeting foreign disinformation operations ahead of the 2020 election. The takedown emerged as a result of a tip from the FBI and was one of a dozen operations tied to the Russian Internet Research Agency or individuals affiliated with it that Facebook has disrupted since the last presidential election, when IRA-backed pages amassed millions of views on the platform. The pages had about 14,000 followers.

There are a lot of angles I could take on this story, but I want to focus on just a few of them. First, this wasn’t Facebook doing a great job of sleuthing. They got tipped off by the FBI, so don’t believe them when they try to take credit for better security.

Second, the Russians “recruited U.S. journalists to write articles targeting left-leaning readers.” Not only that, but it involved the “co-option of unwitting locals.” In other words, they sought out left-wing critics of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and amplified their voices to do maximum damage to the ticket.

I’ve seen the process happen first hand, or least I believe I have. I don’t have the FBI’s resources to confirm my suspicions. But it’s not as hard to pull off as you might think. It’s like all spy recruitment. Find a good progressive writer who is experiencing financial hardship through some misfortune, like poor health and unmanageable medical bills, and make them an offer. You don’t tell them you’re a Russian intelligence officer, you just dangle money in front of them and encourage them to focus on the shortcomings of the Democratic Party. One of the weaknesses of the liberal blogosphere has always been that we don’t make much money. And we’re the ideal recruits.

“Hiring people who are fluent in the language and culture avoids the kind of tells that can expose an operation,” said Renée DiResta, technical research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, which has tracked the strategy.

One of the interesting things is that this doesn’t necessarily require the writer to change anything they’ve been doing. If they’re anti-establishment enough to begin with, all the Russians want to do is give them more reach. If they’re suffering from hurt feelings over Bernie Sanders losing his bid for the nomination, they can just keep hitting that nail over and over again.

One unfortunate byproduct of this is that an entire strain of hard-left thought becomes broadly suspect, and people who are not wittingly (or unwittingly) taking money are seen as probable Russian agents or dupes.

Frankly, it’s not possible to distinguish between these different types of situations and that’s another disruptive benefit for Moscow.

All I know is that any progressive writer who is spending September and October focused on anything other than beating Donald Trump and the Republicans is not worth your time. Personally, I’ll be taking notes, and I won’t forget.

November 16, 2019 was sunny and warm in Washington DC–perfect for golf. But President Trump didn’t hit the links that Saturday. Instead, at around 2 pm, he was abruptly hustled into an armored Chevrolet SUV and driven to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

POTUS health. WH says Saturday trip to hospital was “routine” & he’s “fine” despite break from past practices. Here is glimpse of Pres Trump and what appears to be WH physician Sean Conley getting into motorcade. Watch. (h/t @WinstonNBC) pic.twitter.com/8ZynFF2ytQ

— Kelly O'Donnell (@KellyO) November 17, 2019

The White House portrayed this as normal, with then press secretary Stephanie Grisham issuing a statement that Trump was simply being proactive about his health in anticipation of a very demanding election ahead. This was met with widespread skepticism for a plethora of reasons, including Trump’s well-established distaste for doctors, its absence on the president’s schedule, and the press being forbidden to report on his movements prior to arrival at the hospital, that the medical staff at Walter Reed wasn’t notified of his visit in advance, and that it was a break with Trump’s normal weekend activities. Additionally, Trump had used his Marine-One helicopter for prior visits to Walter Reed. One possible advantage of traveling by car was that the presidential motorcade comes equipped with an ambulance.

The following Monday, the president’s doctor, Sean Conley, released a memorandum claiming that “scheduling uncertainties” explained why the trip seemed to be spur of the moment, it had in fact been “part of the regular, primary preventative care he receives throughout the year.” He called it an “interim checkup,” which would be followed up with a “more comprehensive examination” in 2020.

This made no sense at all, which many doctors were quick to point out.

Several medical experts have questioned why Trump would begin his annual physical in November, just nine months after his last exam, and not complete it until 2020. Leaving a months-long gap between beginning and completing the exam is unusual and potentially counterproductive, said [cardiologist John] Sotos, who has served as a physician for the Air National Guard.

“When they complete the physical in six months, the information they got on Saturday would be six months old,” he said. “I haven’t seen such a thing by presidents in the recent past.”

The trip to Bethesda made much more sense if Trump had been experiencing a medical scare, like chest pains or symptoms of a stroke. It had to be something that the White House medical staff’s facilities were ill-equipped to handle, and that could only be something rather serious.

But Dr. Conley’s memo assured the public that this was not the case:

“Despite some speculation, the President has not had any chest pain, nor was he evaluated or treated for any urgent or acute issues,” Conley wrote in the memo. “Specifically, he did not undergo any specialized cardiac or neurologic evaluations.”

As Aaron Rupar of Vox reported at the time, “there would likely be fewer questions surrounding Trump’s health if the White House hadn’t long established a reputation for lying about everything,” but I’m not sure that’s true. I don’t believe any president would have been believed when presenting the public with such a nonsensical explanation.

There are additional things we’ve learned about this hospital visit since last November. For example, we knew it wasn’t on Trump’s public schedule, but now we know it wasn’t on his private, internal schedule either. What’s more, a forthcoming book by New York Times reporter Michael Schmidt claims that Vice President Mike Pence was notified that afternoon that he should be prepared to assume the powers of the presidency on a temporary basis if Trump required general anesthesia. That’s not consistent with Trump getting routine preventative care.

It might seem that there are more important concerns about Trump’s fitness to be president than the status of his physical health. But it’s important to know if any candidate for the presidency has medical concerns that could affect their ability to do the job. What’s more, Trump applied this standard to Hillary Clinton in 2016 when she fell ill and had difficulty walking after attending a 9/11 memorial service in Manhattan. Trump and his surrogates have obsessively raised questions about Joe Biden’s health and stamina. On Sunday, Donald Trump Jr. continued in his vein while appearing on Mark Levin’s show, “Life, Liberty & Levin.”

The mainstream media has largely avoided coverage of Joe Biden’s health and fitness for office, but the question remains whether he possesses the physical and mental capacity to hold the most powerful office in the land, Donald Trump Jr. said Sunday.

“You see how draining this job is on people. I mean, Joe Biden refuses to campaign. He’s not even doing Zoom calls. He’s staying in his basement.”

…Trump wondered, “Is it that he can’t do it or is it that he’s just not physically able?”

This could be a case of “the best defense is a good offense,” where the president’s infirmities are covered over by focusing on Biden. Videos show Trump seeming to have trouble drinking water, and his impaired coordination was on full display when he had trouble walking down a slight incline in June following his commencement address at West Point

It’s only fair for the press to focus on the Walter Reed visit as they repeat Trump’s unfounded accusations about Biden’s health. We don’t know why Trump was whisked off that day, but we know Mike Pence was ready to assume the powers of the presidency. If there’s a next time, perhaps Pence actually will assume those powers, and that’s a prospect voters should consider.