A white woman at a Starbucks in Santee, California was filmed attacking a black barista who asked her to put on a face mask. The customer was wearing the mask, which said Trump 2020 on it, below her chin.
“You’re discriminating against me because I’m a Trump supporter,” the woman said to the barista. “F**k Black Lives Matter.”
“And you’ll have to keep your mask on when you come back again, so I’m sorry,” the barista replied.
“It’s not a law,” the woman protested, “it’s not a law and I can show you the penal code and everything. It’s a hoax! I don’t have to wear a mask. I’m not going to wear a mask! This is America and I don’t have to do what you say. Trump 2020!”
After exiting the store, the woman returned to yell “F**k Black Lives Matter” one more time.
So brave to endorse Separate But Really Not Equal...
Pope Francis calls for civil unions for gay couples in a new documentary called Francesco, about his life and ministry. The remarks are “his clearest support to date for the issue,” according to the Washington Post.
America magazine reports: “The filmmaker, Evgeny Afineevsky, asked Pope Francis during an interview for the documentary about the place of L.G.B.T. Catholics in the church. Francis reemphasized his belief that L.G.B.T. people should be made to feel welcome in the church.”
Said the pontiff in the film: “Homosexuals have a right to be a part of the family. They’re children of God and have a right to a family. Nobody should be thrown out, or be made miserable because of it. … What we have to create is a civil union law. That way they are legally covered.”
Amy Coney Barrett served for years as a board trustee at Trinity Schools, which barred gay and lesbian teachers and forbid allowing children with same-sex parents.
“Interviewees told the AP that Trinity’s leadership communicated anti-LGBTQ policies and positions in meetings, one-on-one conversations, enrollment agreements, employment agreements, handbooks and written policies — including those in place when Barrett was an active member of the board,” the AP added.
Alphonso David, president of the Human Rights Campaign, reacted to the AP story in a statement provided to Towleroad.
Said David: “Amy Coney Barrett has shown us who she is – someone who is hostile to the rights of LGBTQ people. Her professional actions as a scholar and jurist raise significant concerns about her ability to be impartial and fair when considering cases that impact the LGBTQ community. In her hearing, she shockingly refused to say that landmark Supreme Court cases that decriminalized relationships between LGBTQ people and subsequently legalized marriages for same-sex couples were correctly decided. These cases go to the core of LGBTQ rights and her failure to even recognize their precedential value is enough to disqualify her to serve on the Court.”
“The fact that we have now learned – during a rushed hearing process that should not be occurring – that she held a position atop a network of schools that discriminated against LGBTQ parents and students, serves as yet another warning as to the type of anti-LGBTQ bias that she would bring to the Supreme Court if confirmed,” David continued. “There is no room for hate or discrimination on the Supreme Court. If Barrett is confirmed, our marriages, our families, our health care and our LGBTQ youth would be at risk. This upcoming term and beyond, we expect crucial cases about the future of LGBTQ rights to appear before the Court. Amy Coney Barrett poses a clear threat to any progress we can expect to see from the Court and her record shows she will take every opportunity to oppose us and scale back our rights.”
The United States is in the middle of one of the most consequential presidential elections of our lifetimes. It’s essential that all Americans are able to access clear, concise information on what the outcome of the election could mean for their lives, and the lives of their families and communities. That is our mission at Vox. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone understand this presidential election: Contribute today from as little as $3.
The 2020 election might feel like either a dream or a nightmare, depending on who you’re rooting for. But with our new interactive, you’ll at least be able to choose your own election adventure and explore how winning a state or a combination of states will affect President Trump’s and Joe Biden’s chances of winning the Electoral College.
When you first open the interactive, it’ll show you a map that’s shaded based on our presidential forecast and the 40,000 simulations we run each time we update the model. Deep-blue California, for example, is almost certain to go to Biden, while Trump is favored but not a lock in light-red Texas given their current odds. But what happens if, say, Trump gets some swing states called for him on Nov. 3? How might the probabilities change? That’s what this interactive is all about.
Unlike other tools that explore paths to 270 electoral votes — many of which are very cool and we like a lot! — ours focuses specifically on how the states are related to one another. Click on Kentucky to turn it red, for instance, and the forecast barely budges, since Trump is almost certain to win Kentucky anyway, and that assumption is already built into the forecast.
Upset wins or decisions in states that our model considers toss-ups could matter a lot more, though. If Biden wins Florida, for instance, his chances25 of winning the Electoral College shoot up to greater than 99 percent, which could be important on Nov. 3 because Florida generally counts its votes quickly and the networks might be able to determine who won the state on election night. But if Trump wins Florida, his Electoral College chances rise to 39 percent, making the race practically a toss-up.
Why such big swings based on just one state? It’s not simply that Florida’s 29 electoral votes are valuable, although they are. It’s also that Florida provides an indication of how other states might vote. Polling errors are correlated, so if Trump wins Florida — where he’s slightly behind right now — he could beat his polls in other states too.
You can also look at how states behave in combination with one another, according to our forecast. Say that Trump wins Florida but that Biden wins North Carolina, another state that usually tallies its votes quickly. This is a good trade for Biden, on balance. His projected number of electoral votes declines from our initial forecast — he’s averaging 345 electoral votes in our forecast as of Tuesday afternoon, and he’d drop to around 309 in this scenario — because without Florida, he won’t have any sort of runaway, landslide victory. But Biden’s probability of winning some combination of 270 electoral votes and therefore the Electoral College increases to 92 percent if he loses Florida but wins North Carolina, because it’s hard for Trump to win the Electoral College unless he wins both states.
In general, Biden has more paths to 270 than Trump, which reflects the fact that he has the polling lead in most swing states. But problems in the Upper Midwest could spell trouble for Biden, as it did for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Trump has a 75 percent chance of winning the election if he wins Wisconsin, for instance.
Another “fun” challenge is to seek out scenarios that could produce a 269-269 Electoral College tie. For instance, if Trump wins Florida, Pennsylvania and North Carolina but Biden wins Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Arizona, then we wind up with a tie about 12 percent of the time. And before you ask, yes: The interactive does let you choose the winners of each congressional district in Nebraska and Maine, states that give one of their electoral votes to the winner of each district — those single votes are sometimes important in breaking ties.
Our simulations also reflect that states that are more geographically and demographically similar are more likely to swing in the same direction. If Trump wins both North Carolina and Florida, for instance, then Biden’s chances of winning neighboring Georgia fall to just 4 percent. If Biden wins North Carolina and Florida, though, his chances in Georgia soar to 74 percent. By contrast, the candidates’ chances of winning Montana don’t go up or down much based on what you tell the interactive to do in Florida and North Carolina because Montana is so dissimilar to them.
But we’d encourage you to stick to relatively realistic scenarios. The interactive will allow you to do weird things, but only up to a point. Namely, it won’t let you call a state for a candidate if he has less than a 1.5 percent chance of winning it in our initial forecast. But say you want to see what happens if Biden wins Ohio but loses Michigan. You can test that, but be warned: Although both Ohio and Michigan are competitive, that combination of outcomes is rare, since Ohio and Michigan are similar states but Michigan is usually much bluer.
The model will still spit out an answer, but it’s hard to know how reliable it will be — very few of the 40,000 simulations we run in our forecast will have Biden winning Ohio but Trump winning Michigan. In cases like this where there are few simulations that match the map you’ve chosen, the interactive instead uses a regression-based technique and essentially runs some new simulations on the fly. Still, that could lead to a “garbage in, garbage out” problem.
The goal of our forecast is to figure out which scenarios are most plausible in the real world, and if you deliberately choose some implausible ones, it may be hard to know what to make of the output. Overall, though, we hope you’ll find the interactive both fun and informative — and if you’ve got any questions, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line.
dcblogs writes: A significant number of employees are avoiding co-workers because of political views, says one research group. "Not only are employees avoiding one another, but they're also having a tougher time staying focused," said Brent Cassell, a Gartner analyst. The firm, which has surveyed workers, say the office tensions over politics are at their highest level. Firms are also on guard against the possibility of workplace disruptions and arguments. In Florida, a battleground state, there's a lot of concern about rising office tensions. "I think we're going to see an interesting atmosphere over the next couple of weeks," said Heather Deyrieux, president of the HR Florida State Council.
New submitter Orolo shares a report from ScienceAlert: Medical researchers have made a surprise anatomical discovery, finding what looks to be a mysterious set of salivary glands hidden inside the human head -- which somehow have been missed by scientists for centuries up until now. This "unknown entity" was identified by accident by doctors in the Netherlands, who were examining prostate cancer patients with an advanced type of scan called PSMA PET/CT. When paired with injections of radioactive glucose, this diagnostic tool highlights tumors in the body. In this case, however, it showed up something else entirely, nestled in the rear of the nasopharynx, and quite the long-time lurker.
As for how the glands haven't previously been identified, the researchers suggest the structures are found at a poorly accessible anatomical location under the skull base, making them hard to make out endoscopically. It's possible duct openings could have been noticed, they say, but might not have been noticed for what they are, being part of a larger gland system. While the team concedes that additional research on a larger, more diverse cohort will be needed to validate their findings, they say the discovery gives us another target to avoid during radiation treatments for patients with cancer, as salivary glands are highly susceptible to damage from the therapy. The findings are reported in Radiotherapy and Oncology.
Michael Steele, former Chair of the Republican Party, has endorsed Joe Biden for president, writing in an op-ed that “America has watched as the Republican Party stopped pursuing its animating principles of freedom and opportunity” and “given up its voice on things that mattered and instead bent the arc of the party towards the baser motives of one man, who is neither a Republican nor a conservative.”
Wrote Steele: “Rather than binding up the nation’s wounds, Trump exacerbates division. Rather than standing up to the world’s dictators, Trump cravenly seeks the favor of thugs. Rather than fostering free enterprise, Trump embraces economic principles not only outdated in Lincoln’s time, but made even worse today by a leader who lost close to a billion dollars in a single year running a casino. Rather than seeking to build on the legacy of the Republican Party’s founders, of which Trump is surely ignorant, Trump has posited a single purpose for the GOP — the celebration of him.”
Added Steele: “I long to restore that trust with the American people. However, what many inside and outside the GOP fail to grasp now is that our lack of standing with the American people is not the fault of our ideals or the principles we espouse, but rather due to our failure to stand up against the arrogance of power and the erosion of our principles.”
Steele also appeared in a new Lincoln Project ad:
This election, former RNC Chair and a lifelong Republican, @MichaelSteele, is voting to restore the soul of our nation.
CNN analyst and New Yorker contributor Jeffrey Toobin apologized after he was caught masturbating on a Zoom “election simulation” in front of prominent journalists and producers.
Said Toobin: “I made an embarrassingly stupid mistake, believing I was off-camera. I apologize to my wife, family, friends and co-workers. I believed I was not visible on Zoom. I thought no one on the Zoom call could see me. I thought I had muted the Zoom video.”
VICE reported: “Two people who were on the call told VICE separately that the call was an election simulation featuring many of the New Yorker’s biggest stars: Jane Mayer was playing establishment Republicans; Evan Osnos was Joe Biden, Jelani Cobb was establishment Democrats, Masha Gessen played Donald Trump, Andrew Marantz was the far right, Sue Halpern was left wing democrats, Dexter Filkins was the military, and Jeffrey Toobin playing the courts. There were also a handful of other producers on the call from the New Yorker and WNYC. Both people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely, noted that it was unclear how much each person saw, but both said that they saw Toobin jerking off.”
The New Yorker has suspended Toobin, and he has taken a leave from CNN.
Wrote CNN in a statement: “Jeff Toobin has asked for some time off while he deals with a personal issue, which we have granted.”
No prize for guessing how Barrett will rule: as far to the right as she can
US President Donald Trump inspects border wall prototypes in San Diego, California, on March 13, 2018. | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
Trump’s border wall, the “Remain in Mexico” policy, and his attempt to weaponize the census against immigrants hang in the balance.
After the election, the Supreme Court will hear three major cases about immigration policies that seek to keep immigrants arriving on the southern border out and erode the political influence of unauthorized immigrants living in the US.
If President Donald Trump loses the election next month, Joe Biden as president is likely to at least attempt to reverse the policies in question, making the cases moot. But if Trump wins, the cases would be decided next year, potentially enabling his attempts to further his restrictionist immigration agenda in a second term.
The justices previously agreed to hear a case about Trump’s attempt to exclude unauthorized immigrants from 2020 census population counts that will be used to draw congressional districts. States with large populations of unauthorized immigrants — California and Texas among them — could lose seats in Congress as a result.
The justices announced Monday that they would hear two new cases as well, one of which concerns Trump’s attempt to divert billions in Pentagon funds for the construction of a wall on the southern border — a rallying cry among his base in 2016. The other is a challenge to his Migration Protection Protocols (MPP), also known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy, under which thousands of asylum seekers have been forced to wait in Mexico, often for months on end, for a chance to obtain protection in the US.
Biden has vowed to end the Remain in Mexico policy and revoke Trump’s census memorandum, if that’s possible. He has also criticized the border wall as a colossal waste of taxpayer money since most contraband is smuggled through ports of entry and the vast majority of unauthorized immigrants living in the US arrived legally but overstayed their visas.
And even if Trump prevails, it’s not clear that the Supreme Court would rule in his favor, even with the president’s nominee Amy Coney Barrett on the bench.
The Supreme Court has upheld some of Trump’s signature immigration policies, including his travel ban policy. But it has also thwarted him at key moments: It has temporarily prevented him from ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has allowed more than 700,000 young unauthorized immigrants to live and work in the US, and blocked him from putting a citizenship question on the 2020 census, which experts said would depress response rates in immigrant communities.
In those rulings against Trump, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s liberals and cast decidingvotes. It’s not clear whether Barrett would play a similar role or if she would tip the scales in favor of conservatives on these high-profile immigration cases.
The fate of Trump’s border wall rests with the justices
On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump made building the border wall a centerpiece of his platform. He pledged that Mexico would pay for it, but that never came to pass; instead, the administration transferred $2.5 billion in Pentagon funds in order to construct it after Congress refused to fully fund the project.
California, New Mexico, and environmental groups including the Sierra Club challenged the administration’s use of those funds, claiming that it did not have the authority to make the transfer. Lower courts have agreed, but the Supreme Court could overturn those rulings, announcing on Monday that it would hear the case.
The Secretary of Defense is permitted by law to transfer military funds appropriated by Congress if higher funding priorities arise due to “unforeseen military requirements” and, critically, if Congress has not objected. But as the environmental groups have argued, the border wall was one of Trump’s longtime political goals — not a response to an unanticipated military threat — and one that Congress rejected in the 2019 budget it passed after Trump had made the funding request.
The administration has argued, on the other hand, that the border wall is a legitimate response to the national emergency concerning unauthorized immigration and drug smuggling across the southern border, which Trump declared in February 2019. Though that emergency declaration remains in effect, migration appears to have drastically dropped over the last year. The US apprehended 400,651 people at the southern border over fiscal year 2020, which ended on September 30 — less than half the number apprehended in 2019.
The justices have already hinted at how they might rule: They intervened at an earlier stage of the lawsuit, permitting construction of the border wall to continue while the case made its way through the lower courts.
That has given Trump license to speed up construction ahead of the election, often cutting through national forests and wildlife preserves to do so.
The Remain in Mexico policy is essential to Trump’s strategy on the border
The Supreme Court will also weigh in on Trump’s Remain in Mexico program, one of Trump’s core policies on the southern border, which went into effect in January 2019. Since then, more than 60,000 asylum seekers have been sent back to Mexico, where they’re under threat from drug cartels and kidnappers and are dependent on volunteers for basic supplies.
The American Civil Liberties Union, among others, has challenged the policy on the basis that it has resulted in asylum seekers being sent back to their persecutors. But the Trump administration has credited the program as one of its key tools in reducing the number of migrants coming across the southern border.
Without explaining their reasoning, the justices previously allowed the program to remain in effect while the appeals process played out.
Before MPP, migrants who waited in line at the border, as well as those who were apprehended between ports of entry, would have been held at a US Customs and Border Protection processing facility until a border agent determined whether they should be released, transferred to immigration detention, or deported. But under MPP, they were mostly turned away at the border and allowed to enter the US only to attend their immigration court hearings.
Since the pandemic hit, however, the administration has turned to other methods of keeping them out. US Customs and Border Protection invoked public health authorities to turn away asylum seekers who might be carrying the coronavirus. Some of them are still waiting in Mexican border towns, where they have limited access to legal counsel and reside in tent encampments.
Trump wants to weaponize the census against immigrants
Last week, the justices announced that they would review a case over Trump’s memorandum excluding unauthorized immigrants living in the US from census population counts for the purposes of redrawing congressional districts in 2021 — a transparent attack on their political power that was struck down by lower courts. The justices will hear arguments in the case on November 30, ahead of a December 31 federal deadline for sending the population counts to Congress.
Most states currently draw congressional districts, determining the areas that each elected official represents based ontotal population, including unauthorized immigrants. Current maps are due to be redrawn across the country in 2021 after the results of the 2020 census come in, and the stakes are high: Each redistricting has a lasting influence on who is likely to win elections, which communities will be represented in Congress, and, ultimately, what laws will be passed.
Trump’s attempt to exclude unauthorized immigrants would reduce the counts in areas where foreign-born populations have traditionally settled — primarily Democrat-run cities — and therefore undermine their political power relative to more rural, Republican-run areas. But it could also impact red states with large immigrant populations, including Texas.
The administration has argued that, by law, the president has the final say over who must be counted in the census.
In a written statement issued after he signed the memorandum in July, Trump said that allowing unauthorized immigrants to be counted would undermine American representative democracy and create “perverse incentives” for those seeking to come to the US.
“There used to be a time when you could proudly declare, ‘I am a citizen of the United States,’” Trump said in the statement. “But now, the radical left is trying to erase the existence of this concept and conceal the number of illegal aliens in our country. This is all part of a broader left-wing effort to erode the rights of Americans citizens, and I will not stand for it.”
But on September 10, a panel of three federal judges found that Trump’s memorandum skirted the federal government’s constitutional obligation to count every person, no matter their immigration status, in the census every 10 years.
The United States is in the middle of one of the most consequential presidential elections of our lifetimes. It’s essential that all Americans are able to access clear, concise information on what the outcome of the election could mean for their lives, and the lives of their families and communities. That is our mission at Vox. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone understand this presidential election: Contribute today from as little as $3.
The White House is considering slashing millions of dollars for coronavirus relief, HIV treatment, screenings for newborns and other programs in Democratic-led cities that President Donald Trump has deemed “anarchist jurisdictions,” according to documents obtained by POLITICO.
New York, Portland, Ore., Washington, D.C., and Seattle could lose funding for a wide swath of programs that serve their poorest, sickest residents after the president moved last month to restrict funding, escalating his political battle against liberal cities he’s sought to use as a campaign foil.
The Department of Health and Human Services has identified federal grants covering those services, which are among the nearly 200 health programs that could be in line for cuts as part of a sweeping government-wide directive the administration is advancing during the final weeks of the presidential campaign and amid an intensifying pandemic Trump has downplayed.
Trump in a Sept. 2 order called on federal agencies to curtail funding to jurisdictions that “disempower” police departments and promote “lawlessness.” The memo argued that the cities haven’t done enough to quash riots stemming from this summer’s protests over systemic racism and police violence.
The HHS list offers the most detailed picture yet of the administration’s efforts to quickly comply with the Trump directive and the potentially large cuts facing these cities even as the pandemic strains local budgets. It isn’t immediately clear what criteria the budget office will use to evaluate the grants — or how or when cuts may be made.
But while the White House pores over existing funds, at least one department has already moved to implement Trump’s directive for new funding. The Department of Transportation earlier this month said Trump’s “anarchy” memo would factor into the department’s review of applications for a new $10 million grant program supporting Covid-19 safety measures.
"My Administration will do everything in its power to prevent weak mayors and lawless cities from taking Federal dollars while they let anarchists harm people, burn buildings, and ruin lives and businesses,” Trump tweeted shortly after releasing the Sept. 2 defunding memo.
Almost three weeks later, Attorney General William Barr labeled New York City, Portland and Seattle as “anarchist jurisdictions.” The White House budget office also instructed departments to also scrutinize funding for Washington, D.C.
The HHS list, which was sent Friday to the White House budget office, represents the 1,500-plus funding awards that have gone to the four cities since 2018. Each federal department also faced a Friday deadline to submit their own lists to the Office of Management and Budget, which will make the final decisions about funding.
HHS compiled the list with input from at least 12 agencies it oversees. The list includes 185 programs that touch on everything from Trump’s own initiative to end HIV transmission by the end of the decade to the opioid crisis and research into lung diseases. The list also includes funding for other programs, like $423,000 for universal hearing screenings for newborns in the District of Columbia, housing for people in addiction recovery in Seattle, and services providing nutrition and mental health counseling to elderly New Yorkers.
A spokesperson for HHS declined to comment. OMB declined to comment on the details of the review while pointing to two agency memos issued last month.
The White House budget office has previously said the administration will use the data to determine whether to bar cities from being eligible for new federal cash.A senior administration official did not rule out the possibility that cities could lose their existing funds.
“As the data comes in, OMB will collect it and make a decision,” said the official, who requested anonymity. The review is in the preliminary stages, and the official said the administration will make decisions about each grant individually.
“We need to review the information with agencies before we know,” according to the official. “Grant programs all have different authorities so it’s going to be case by case.”
According to OMB’s own guidelines, just a small fraction of the grants flagged by HHS may be protected from cuts. A Sept. 21 memo from OMB Director Russ Vought instructed agencies to assess whether grants supported law enforcement activities, indicating those would be less vulnerable to elimination. “[S]uch programs and activities, when properly designed and implemented, can help prevent the deterioration of municipalities into lawless zones,” Vought wrote.
HHS identified that just six of the 185 grant programs directly or indirectly have a connection to law enforcement, including some public health measures, hospital emergency preparedness and child support enforcement.
Programs that don’t meet the law enforcement exception include a two-year $4.6 million grant to D.C.’s Department of Health Care Finance that funds addiction treatment and recovery services through next September. Another includes $850,000 through 2025 to King County, which includes Seattle, to support the HIV initiative Trump announced at his State of the Union address last year.
A $1.8 million grant for Oregon’s Multnomah County, which includes Portland, and a $880,000 grant to King County, both to help community and migrant health centers care for Covid-19 patients, are also under review.
Public health advocates and city officials panned the administration's review, warning that the consequences of pulling funding from these cities — especially during the pandemic — could be dire.
“The bottom line is there's no extra money lying around, and this is not a time to be playing politics with people’s health,” said Chrissie Juliano, executive director of the Big Cities Health Coalition, a national group that represents health departments in major U.S. cities — including the four targeted by Trump.
Officials from New York City and Seattle — as well as the United States Conference of Mayors — have already threatened legal action if the administration moves to block funds.
“This is nothing more than political retribution,” said Laura Feyer, a spokesperson for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.
At the White House on Tuesday afternoon, President Donald Trump ended a fiery interview taping with CBS News’ “60 Minutes,” proceeded to launch an attack against the interviewer on Twitter for not wearing a mask, and threatened to post the interview before it aired.
The drama unfolded after Trump was frustrated with the line of questioning and how the interview was being conducted, said one person familiar with the episode, while another in the room described the president as “pissed.”
The president spent more than 40 minutes with CBS News correspondent Lesley Stahl, and did not proceed to shoot a second portion of the interview that included Vice President Mike Pence. Following a short break, the president decided he had spent enough time in the interview, one White House official said. Pence went on to spend 15 minutes with Stahl and the “60 Minutes” crew.
After the interview, the presidenttweeted a video of Stahl speaking to producers inside the White House without a mask accompanied by the message: “Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes not wearing a mask in the White House after her interview with me. Much more to come.”
“This is moments after she criticized me for not wearing a mask while working at my desk,” tweeted assistant White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. “Rules for thee but not for me, Lesley?”
Both Stahl and Trump were hospitalized with the coronavirus, and Leavitt was one of the press staff who contracted the virus in early October.
Another person familiar with the interview said of the video clip: “This image is from immediately following the interview with the CBS team, who had all been tested. Lesley had a mask on leading into the interviews, as appropriate.”
On Tuesday evening, just before leaving the White House for a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, the president implied that the “60 Minutes” broadcast would not reflect what actually happened in the interview.
“I am pleased to inform you that, for the sake of accuracy in reporting, I am considering posting my interview with Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes, PRIOR TO AIRTIME!” Trumpwrote on Twitter. “This will be done so that everybody can get a glimpse of what a FAKE and BIASED interview is all about…”
A CBS representative later said that White House had agreed it was taping the interview for archival purposes only.
At his rally in Erie, Pa., on Tuesday night, the president said: “You have to watch what we do to ’60 Minutes.’ You’ll get such a kick out of it. You’re going to get a kick out of it. Leslie Stahl’s not going to be happy.”
The president also taped a town hall in the Rose Garden on Tuesday with former Fox News host Eric Bolling that is airing on the Sinclair Broadcasting Network.
CBS News did not respond to a request for comment on the interview’s abrupt conclusion, which was first reported by CNN.
“60 Minutes” plans to broadcast the interview on Sunday night in a special that will also feature Joe Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris.
Billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s $100 million investment in Florida to defeat Donald Trump is recasting the presidential contest in the president’s must-win state, forcing his campaign to spend big to shore up his position and freeing up Democratic cash to expand the electoral map elsewhere.
Bloomberg’s massive advertising and ground-game spending, which began roughly a month ago, has thrown Trump into a defensive crouch across the arc of Sunbelt states. As a result, the president‘s campaign has scaled back its TV ad buys in crucial Northern swing states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan — a vacuum being filled by a constellation of outside political groups backing Joe Biden.
“It’s forced the Trump campaign to retrench in Florida. You can see it in the spending habits, in television and digital. They’re investing more at the expense of places they need to win,” said Steve Schale, who leads the pro-Biden Unite the Country super PAC.
“Basically, Trump has now been committed to the equivalent of land war in Asia by having to spend so much of his money in Florida, a state he has to win to get to 270 Electoral College votes,” Schale said. “And as a result, he doesn’t have the resources to compete everywhere he would like.”
Schale said his group and the other major Democratic super PAC, Priorities USA, have been able to focus their dollars in other parts of the country, particularly the Upper Midwest. Democratic super PACs, meanwhile, have been able to focus more attention on Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia — once-reliably red states where the president has also had to commit additional resources for the past month, in addition to Florida.
Florida, the largest and most-expensive swing state, has 10 media markets and is so competitive that outside groups and the presidential campaigns have spent and reserved a record $263 million on TV ads from June through Election Day, according to data compiled by the media tracking firm Advertising Analytics.
Since the beginning of September, Trump has added more than $6 million to his total in ad spending in Florida, according to Advertising Analytics. During that same period of time, with Democrats freed up to attack elsewhere, the Trump campaign has also been forced to plow more than $7 million in ad spending into Georgia — a state he was once expected to win easily — and nearly $6 million in Arizona, another state he won in 2016.
Trump also decreased planned spending by nearly $13 million in Ohio, more than $6 million in Minnesota and nearly $3 million in Wisconsin, reducing his advertising footprint in the region.
David Johnson, former Florida GOP executive director, said the Bloomberg money has had a clear effect on forcing Trump to withdraw to his core states, instead of competing across a wider national map.
“This is not your 2016 election, so abso-freaking-lutley the Trump team knows they have to maintain something closer to parity in [gross rating] points and spots in the home stretch,” Johnson said. “You best not be massively outspent in Florida the last two weeks and expect to perform well on Election Day, where Republicans have to turnout in vastly larger numbers to win.”
In Pennsylvania, former Republican Congressman Phil English said Trump’s campaign has a clear advantage on the ground, where the GOP spent all summer organizing and knocking on doors. But on TV, English said, there’s a huge disparity in the area he once represented, Erie County, one of the bellwethers of the swing state.
“The Democrats are literally flooding everything with anti-Trump and pro-Biden advertising. It’s a concern,” English said. “We’re definitely seeing seniors reacting to the coronavirus here, and the steady messaging from Democrats over how the Trump administration has handled coronavirus has moved a lot of people.”
Trump’s advisers say they are confident about the amount of money they have to spend on TV across the map —announcing a $55 million ad buy this week — and outside groups are backfilling for Trump in some states where he has drawn down his own spending.
The pro-Trump super PAC America First Action, for example, has added nearly $17 million in ad spending in Pennsylvania and more than $5 million in Wisconsin since the beginning of September, according to Advertising Analytics. It has added nearly $8.8 million in Florida.
Even so, Biden’s financial advantage in the home stretch — and Trump’s vulnerability in once-safe states — has unexpectedly forced the former vice president to make difficult decisions about where to spend it all.
“The contraction of the Upper Midwest and the failure to keep TV advertising there speaks to [Trump’s] flagging possibilities to win,” said Doug Herman, who was a lead mail strategist for Barack Obama's 2008 and 2012 campaigns.
Fernand Amandi, a veteran Democratic pollster and consultant in Florida, said “In the closing days of a campaign, follow the money means follow the problems. Clearly there is concern in the Trump camp as they vote with their wallets to try and restore states that, if they’re in jeopardy, spell real problems for their campaign.”
Trump’s Florida squeeze isn’t all Bloomberg‘s doing.At the same time the former New York City mayor was ramping up his Florida spending, Trump’s campaign was experiencing a cash crunch from too much spending and too little funding. But Bloomberg’s money, by design, has added to the pressure on the president
“It’s virtually impossible for Trump to win the presidency without Florida, and that is why Mike Bloomberg is investing $100 million into the race there — to turn it into a state Trump and Republicans have to work hard to win, and to free up Democratic resources to other states like Pennsylvania that can solidify a Biden victory,” said Kevin Sheekey, Bloomberg’s senior political adviser. “Florida is a key state for winning the presidency — and where we hope Donald Trump makes his residency permanent after he loses.”
Max Steele, a former Florida Democratic Party spokesman and current senior communications advisor with the liberal group American Bridge, said his organization has noticed Trump’s scaling back in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. That’s where American Bridge has been focusing on getting Obama-Trump voters to flip back to the Democratic fold.
“That’s the point of Bloomberg’s spending: keep him mired down. Florida is a money pit,” Steele said.
One thing remains unclear about Bloomberg’s TV ad spending — the efficacy, compared to social media or news coverage of the final two weeks of the campaign.Both sides recognize it’s taking place against the backdrop of a highly polarized electorate in which few voters remain undecided.
“I think one of the things we’re going to find this year is that there has been a much higher percentage spent on social media and voter contact,” said Saul Anuzis, a former chairman of the Michigan Republican Party. “I think this is a base election, not a swing selection, so you’re having a much larger percentage of money spent on get-out-the-vote and communicating with your supporters.”
Samantha Zager, a Trump campaign spokesperson, pointed to the Trump’s campaign’s ground game, his digital spending and his data operation as advantages over Biden that counteract Democrats’ TV spending.
“Considering President Trump won in 2016 and the DC establishment got itself worked up over the exact same issue then, maybe it’s time for the mainstream media to accept our winning strategy and start questioning why Joe Biden is needlessly overspending on TV.”
No shit. Dept of Ed is another one that's going to have to be burned down to the ground after 4 years of determined corruption
A federal judge scrapped a settlement Tuesday over the Trump administration’s slow processing of loan forgiveness for borrowers who have accused their colleges of fraud, ruling that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos undermined the deal.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup said in a sharply worded decision that DeVos undercut the settlement by denying large swaths of the claims without sufficient explanation.
The class-action settlement, which was reached earlier this year and received preliminary approval from the court, was meant to force the Education Department to move faster on final decisions for roughly 160,000 of the backlogged requests for loan forgiveness, known as “borrower defense” claims. Some of the claims have languished at the department for years.
Alsup said he is alarmed that DeVos has in recent months responded by swiftly rejecting tens of thousands of the applications through “perfunctory” denial notices. Of the applications in question in the class-action lawsuit, DeVos has denied 74,000 applications and granted 4,400 applications, which the judge noted was a denial rate of 94 percent.
Ruling justification: Alsup called the denial notices “potentially unlawful” and said he was considering blocking DeVos from issuing any further denial notices as the lawsuit proceeds.
The judge, who President Bill Clinton appointed for the Northern District of California, also took the unusual step of authorizing the depositions of up to five Education Department officials to probe the Trump administration’s decision to deny the claims and its months-long delays in processing them. He wrote that DeVos “at this time” would not be required to personally sit for a deposition but said it is a possibility in the future.
In many cases, the department used form letters in its recent string of denials, stating that student loan borrowers had provided insufficient evidence, without any further explanation.
As a result, borrowers face a process that “rings disturbingly Kafkaesque,” Alsup wrote in describing the system as oppressive. The Education Department said borrowers could appeal the denials by explaining why they believed the department incorrectly decided their claim, but it never provided any meaningful explanation for how it came to those conclusions, he said.
Key context: The now-scrapped settlement, which was reached in April and earned Alsup's preliminary approval in May, would have required DeVos to wade through some 160,000 applications and make final decisions within 18 months. At the time, both the Education Department and attorneys for the students said they thought it was a reasonable approach.
But in recent months, the Education Department's rash of denials led many of the students to object to the settlement. A court hearing conducted virtually earlier this month was attended by 650 participants, including hundreds of students, many of whom described their concerns with the settlement in light of DeVos’ denials.
“Students came together to speak up for themselves and show the court the massive scope of the trauma they have endured at the hands of the Department of Education, and the courts are listening,” said Eileen Connor, legal director at Harvard Law School’s Project on Predatory Student Lending, which represents the students in the class action lawsuit along with legal group Housing & Economic Rights Advocates. “We look forward to the next stage of litigation in which we depose Department of Education officials to explain their actions under oath.”
DeVos' record: An Education Department spokesperson did not immediately have a comment on the decision.
DeVos’ handling of the “borrower defense to repayment” program has repeatedly been rebuked by federal judges and has been among her most politically contentious higher education policies over the past four years.
The secretary argues that the Obama administration’s approach to addressing student loan fraud claims was too lenient and expensive for taxpayers. She has sought to curtail loan forgiveness for defrauded students — an effort that has enraged her Democratic critics.
When DeVos took office, she moved to delay the implementation of the Obama-era standards for loan forgiveness. But she was thwarted by a judge who ruled that she had illegally postponed the regulations.
The opinion is here; you can also see a long summary by Colin Kalmbacher (Law & Crime). Here's a passage that might serve as a warning to lawyers:
The Commonwealth also asserts that to release information about the grand jury proceedings in this case would "destroy the principle of secrecy that serves as the foundation of the grand jury system." To be clear, this Court's ruling on this motion is applicable only to this case. Further, when considering the Attorney General's swift compliance with the trial court's order to release the grand jury recordings, coupled with the Attorney General's multiple public statements and characterizations about the grand jury and the resulting indictment, the Commonwealth's objection now reads as theatrical sturm und drang.
And a follow-up that goes more towards explaining the court's decision:
There exist additional interests to consider in making this decision: the interest of the citizens of the Commonwealth of Kentucky to be assured that its publicly elected officials are being honest in their representations; the interest of grand jurors, whose service is compelled, to be certain their work is not mischaracterized by the very prosecutors on whom they relied to advise them; and, the interest of all citizens to have confidence in the integrity of the justice system. Considering those interests, there is no doubt that justice requires disclosure of the grand jury proceedings in this case.
Here we go again. As the country careens toward an election outcome which thus far (fingers crossed!) appears to portend a significant, wide-ranging Democratic victory—much like it did two years ago—we are once again hit with a deluge of well-intended advice and explanations (from both the leftand right) reminding us how we Democrats must learn to understand, if not necessarily empathize, with the views of those who, in spite of all that has occurred over the last four years, will continue to support Donald Trump. That we need to reach out and extend our hand to those who—despite an out-of control pandemic that has taken over a quarter million American lives, and despite an economy that continues to teeter over a vast abyss—have clung to the belief that a future under the aegis of Donald Trump and the Republican Party is somehow preferable to Democratic governance.
There are myriad keen, sympathetic analyses explaining the reasons why Trump voters support authoritarianism, ignore or rationalize Trump’s racism, abusive acts, and repugnant policies. Many of these seem to imply that Democrats need to come to terms with the belief systems of these people in order to somehow “bring them around.” Nope.
To their credit, not all of these exhortations place much faith in making such an effort. Some, such as this piece by Sarah Longwell in The Atlantic, are satisfied to simply point out the daunting challenge Democrats face in “understanding” Trump’s base of support, the diehard stalwarts who, due to their inherent hatred for Democrats, will refuse to cast a vote for Joe Biden even though they may think Trump himself has done a terrible job as president.
Some meaningful number of voters who are clear-eyed about Trump and his manifest failures—even those who think he is plainly doing a bad job—will stick with the president because they believe Democrats are worse and the media aren’t to be trusted. And these aren’t voters who are glued to Fox News and reading Breitbart News. Often they don’t think about politics at all—and they certainly don’t follow the daily machinations of Washington. They’re typically not on Twitter. Instead they swim in a cultural soup of Trumpism, surrounded by friends, family, and social-media acquaintances who do live more exclusively in a right-wing-media ecosystem.
Some, such as this piece by Jack Luna for Medium, emphasize the vital need to accommodate what the author describes as a need for white identity and “heritage” outside the accusations of “racism” that’s so commonly hurled at these people.
For the sake of the country and to increase their chances of winning the election decisively, Democrats need to emotionally connect with white voters and convince them that President Trump is not the only person in American politics who can help them feel proud of themselves and their heritage.
But what we don’t see—in fact, what we almost never, ever see—are any appeals or arguments urging Trump supporters to “accommodate” Democrats and Democratic views. Nowhere, it seems, is there a treatise or article or publication or even a website out there that patiently extols to stalwart Trump supporters the virtues of why they should undertake a similar sympathetic analysis of Democratic values and belief systems. That suggests to them they should sublimate their personal prejudices or convictions for the good of the country, or even consider the opinions of others, for that matter.
Nowhere is there any effort being made on the part of the right, as far as I see, to even comprehend, much less “accommodate” perceptions on the left. Rather the carefully cultivated position of the Trump-supporting right, I think fairly stated, is to never compromise, never give ground, and treat all Democrats as illegitimate. These “principles”—such as they are—are fixed and immutable. They will not and do not brook any deviance from the one true path, and they are reinforced ad nauseum by Fox News and other right-wing media.
So be it. We aren’t engaging in some type of “false equivalency” here. Democrats abhor racism, for example, because racism is objectively wrong for people to engage in. It is evil, it is bad, it hurts people—even kills people, for the purpose of maintaining one race’s untrammeled power and control over another. The consequences of American racism are as patent and horrific as they are historically obvious. There is no bogeyman spun and hurled by the right toward the left which even approaches the degree of unbridled moral clarity as the Democratic opposition to racism. Not “socialism,” not “political correctness,” not “cancel culture,” not any of the tropes the right typically employs to criticize or vilify the left. To the extent they have any tiny kernel of legitimacy at all, what all of these right-wing slurs have in common, in fact, is that they all boil down to complaining about the right being “denied” from acting on their worst, most unjust impulses.
What about the next time you hear or read someone telling you that we should all work to understand the motivation of these Trump supporters; that we must somehow bridge this chasm between a wide-ranging spectrum of views on the left and a totally insular, rigid and intolerant right? Just ask yourself when, if ever, have these people on the right—now embodied in the inflexible 40% or so who have wedded themselves to the likes of Donald Trump—ever made a similar effort? When have any of them ever expressed the slightest inclination toward unity with their fellow Americans in any capacity beyond exchanging their occasional labor and currency, before quickly retreating back into their enclaves to generate ever more spite and vitriol?
Former President Barack Obama famously said in 2004 that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America." That was a heartfelt expression of hope. But one of those Americas has voluntarily resolved to never compromise, as Obama’s presidency clearly showed, and as the Trump presidency has revealed in spades.
If Democrats win this election, they should never, ever forget that lesson.
Good news everybody! Not everybody is being hurt by our global pandemic and economic crisis! In fact, one group of very special people, best known for making lots of money—usually for one silly thing like being wealthy enough to invest in PayPal—are making a killing! Billionaires!
Business Insider reports that since March of this year, the American billionaires amongst us (who are we kidding? They are usually above us … frequently on private planes and such) were able to add $930.7 billion to their collective net worth. Hold on while I respect the flag and listen to the playing of the National Anthem by some public school kids who have had their school’s music program cut.
These 644 people retain $3.88 trillion in wealth, almost double what the rest of us—165 million Americans—collectively have. U-S-A, U-S-A. Surprisingly, or not surprisingly at all, our economy has “contracted” a world-beating 33% percent since last year. But somehow, these (mostly) men of industry have been able to horde more and more wealth. Shocking in a not-really-shocking sort of way.
The top winners this pandemic were Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Quicken Loans’ Dan Gilbert. But don’t you worry, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is still on top, worth somewhere around $200 billion. In a side note, the median monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment is about $1,216, and there are upwards of 35 million Americans facing evictions because of late rent.
$1,216 x 35,000,000 = $42,560,000,000.
Those 644 billionaires could give that net worth back, pay for almost two years worth of rent … and still be billionaires. Considering that there are somewhere around 43 million Americans renting, and considering how much money people and their family have to spend on basic housing, it is obscene that people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are allowed to horde the amount of money they horde.
A fool leading a pack of idiots and suckers. They deserve each other...and jail.
Suckers. That's clearly how major GOP donors feel after realizing that Trump's campaign is basically dead broke, he's dragging down the entire party, and he's even put Democrats in position to potentially take back the Senate.
“The Senate majority is the most important objective right now,” said Dan Eberhart, who has given over $190,000 to Trump’s reelection effort, according to the AP. “It’s the bulwark against so much bad policy that the Democrats want to do if they sweep the elections.”
Eberhart and others feel burned after the state of Trump's campaign war chest has come into clearer view in the final months of the race. Some Republicans donors even founded a separate pro-Trump super PAC, Preserve America, that was explicitly not run by Trump's people because he's clearly not sending his finest. Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson recently poured $75 million into that PAC instead of just handing it over to the Trump campaign.
“You could literally have 10 monkeys with flamethrowers go after the money, and they wouldn’t have burned through it as stupidly,” veteran GOP strategist Mike Murphy told the AP of the Trump campaign's spending habits.
On the one hand, the Biden campaign is spending more than twice as much in the closing days of race—$142 million to the Trump campaign's coordinated buy with the Republican National Committee (RNC) of $55 million. On the other, Trump and his campaign aides burned through $1 billion like they were on a drunken Beverly Hills lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous bender.
There's the already reported $10 million Super Bowl ad bought by the campaign so Trump could feel powerful before Democrats had even settled on a nominee. There's also more than $310 million in spending that's concealed by a web of limited liability companies, notes the AP. And somehow, former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale managed to purchase a Ferrari, a Range Rover, a $400,000 yacht, and several million-dollar-plus condos after siphoning some $40 million from the Trump campaign alone.
But really, that's just the tip of the iceberg. Here're some other choice purchases made by the Trump camp and RNC, according to the AP:
— Nearly $100,000 to prop up the release of Donald Trump Jr.’s book, “Triggered,” pushing it to the top of The New York Times’ bestsellers list.
— Over $7.4 million spent at Trump-branded properties since 2017
— At least $35.2 million spent on Trump merchandise
— $38.7 million in legal and “compliance” fees, including the legal costs of his impeachment proceedings
— At least $14.1 million spent on the Republican National Convention, which was relocated several times and ended up being a mostly virtual event
— A $250,000 ad run during Game 7 of the 2019 World Series after Trump was booed by spectators for attending Game 5
— $1.6 million on TV ads so Trump could see himself in the Washington, D.C., media market, where Biden is polling at about 87%
Perhaps the best strategic decision was back in May, when Parscale unleashed $176 million in spending to drag down Biden in public polling. That worked out well.
If you're surprised, you haven't been paying attention
A Republican-dominated U.S. Postal Service Board of Governors is having more success than it could have imagined when it set out months ago to undermine the institution. The pandemic and the need for so much of this year's vote to have to be conducted by mail has presented them the perfect opportunity to accelerate their efforts, and while they're at it, help Donald Trump. They've targeted their efforts well, if evilly, on communities of color and on critical swing states.
Even before Postmaster General Louis DeJoy was installed in May and initiated his sabotage, complaints about slowed and missing delivery had increased, "especially in communities with more Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color (BIPOC), according to new research by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS)." Through Freedom of Information ACT requests, the UCS reviewed USPS data on customer complaints and found a sharp increase in mid-March that lasted through July. It found that, when controlling for population, "people in zip codes where more than 45 percent of the population are BIPOC submitted 50 percent more mail delay complaints than other zip codes."
We've already seen how that's effected elections; in Wisconsin's primary in April, at least 9,000 requested absentee ballots either were never sent or got lost on the way to voters. Thousands of the ballots voters received and sent back to elections offices were either delivered too late to be counted or just not delivered at all. Then came DeJoy's summer of sabotage, compounding the problems for Wisconsin and other swing states.
While DeJoy has supposedly called a stop to some of the measures that caused slowdowns in mail delivery—a strict delivery schedule that had trucks leaving distribution centers empty and postal carriers having to leave mail behind as well as restrictions on overtime—the delays are still a problem. The Washington Post reviewed agency data, and found that in "17 postal districts comprising 10 battleground states and 151 electoral votes, first-class mail service is down 7.8 percentage points from January benchmarks and nearly 2 percentage points below the national average." That means that right now in those districts, 16 out of 100 pieces of mail aren't reaching their destinations in the 1-3 day delivery window the USPS has set. In January, it was fewer than 10 in 100 pieces.
This is particularly concerning for Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia as key states that will not count ballots that arrive after November 3, even if they are postmarked before. In North Carolina and Pennsylvania, they'll have to be received at elections offices on or by November 6 and have an earlier postmark to be counted. Detroit has been one of the cities where mail has been particularly erratic, with just 70.9% first-class being delivered on time through the first part of October, compared to 92.2% at the beginning of 2020. With nearly 85% Black and Latinx population, Detroit is a prime city for Republican officials to target, especially since it's in swingy Michigan.
The Post talked to mail carriers in Detroit, who said "they receive messages daily telling them to prioritize packages—which often have guaranteed delivery windows—over other items, including election mail." They also report that they've taken it on themselves to sort their mail on their own routes, making sure that ballots and voting information gets delivered. There's also this: "In facilities that serve Detroit’s mostly White suburbs, staffing has remained steady, the workers said, and residents can expect delivery daily. If a piece of mail is late, they said, it likely will arrive the next day." Unless residents in non-white neighborhoods have a prioritized package, the workers said, they'll likely only get mail two or three times a week. "I walked around a little bit; it was a mess in there," a letter carriers said of one Detroit post office. "There was mail everywhere. And not mail everywhere in the sense that 'Carriers come in the morning and this is my route for the day, I've got to [sort] this up and get out of here.' This was mail everywhere because no one is there to carry that mail."
On top of all that, the DeJoy has taken all its police officers (yes, there are postal police) off the job. The force accompanies letter carriers in unsafe routes and also patrols to keep mail vehicles and blue collection boxes protected, to guard against theft. This means that nefarious political parties can more easily tamper with mail to steal ballots. The union that represents the officers filed suit last month, alleging "the U.S. mail and postal personnel are receiving less protection" and are "in increased danger" because of DeJoy's order. The Department of Justice is defending the USPS, and has asked the federal judge to dismiss the suit.
The USPS and Justice contend that officers should only be protecting USPS "property," the actual post office buildings, not the mail and carriers. The union and officers see it as one more in the list of actions DeJoy has taken to sabotage the election. Jim Bjork, business agent for the Postal Police Officers Association and a former letter carrier and police officer said if that wasn't what was intended "then why not wait until after the election to neuter the postal police?"
If this isn't a partisan effort by DeJoy, who got this job right after a large donation to Trump's RNC, and who is a long-time major Republican donor, then it sure is all very coincidental that his efforts to increase "efficiency" of the Postal Service are working against Democrats in this election.
Donald Trump’s use of the Justice Department as his personal lawyer—and Attorney General William Barr’s enthusiastic participation—has the department claiming in court that Trump denied having raped E. Jean Carroll as part of his official duties. Federal employees are immune from defamation claims over things said and done while performing their jobs, so if Trump’s denial of a rape that happened in the 1990s was an official act, then he’s immune and the lawsuit is effectively dismissed.
According to Justice Department lawyers, Trump’s denial of Carroll’s allegations—and, apparently, his accompanying sneer that “She’s not my type”—“addressed matters relating to his fitness for office as part of an official White House response to press inquiries.”
Trump’s private lawyers originally tried to get Caroll’s lawsuit tossed from state court because, essentially, he’s the president and that means he can do what he wants. When that didn’t work, raising the prospect that Trump would have to provide a DNA sample to be tested against the dress Caroll was wearing at the time, Trump brought in the Justice Department (which, bonus, means he doesn’t have to pay his lawyers!) to try and make the whole thing go away.
As Carroll’s lawyers wrote in response to the Justice Department’s argument, “There is not a single person in the United States—not the president and not anyone else—whose job description includes slandering women they sexually assaulted.”
Trump’s efforts to bury yet another credible accusation of sexual assault against him are one thing. The Justice Department being perverted from a federal agency with a mission “to ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans” to being a taxpayer-funded personal law firm for one family—don’t forget that the Justice Department is also taking action against a book about Melania Trump—is far, far worse. Donald Trump thinks the presidency means the entire government works for him, not for the people. He’s found top officials, like William Barr, to go along with that. And, terrifyingly, despite Barr’s eagerness to act as Trump’s personal lawyer, Trump still doesn’t think Barr has gone far enough and is suggesting that he might find an attorney general who will travel even further down that path.
Operators of Trickbot—a for-hire botnet that has infected more than 1 million devices since 2016—are looking for new ways to stay afloat after Microsoft and a host of industry partners took coordinated action to disrupt it last week.
In an update published on Tuesday, Microsoft Corporate VP for Security & Trust Tom Burt said the operation initially managed to take down 62 of the 69 servers Trickbot was known to be using to control its vast network of infected devices. Trickbot operators responded by quickly spinning up 59 new servers, and Microsoft was able to eliminate all of them except for one.
In all, the industrywide operation has taken down 120 of 128 servers identified as belonging to Trickbot. Now, Trickbot is responding by using a competing criminal group to distribute the Trickbot malware.
Donald Trump holds a rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania, in 2016. | Mark Makela/Getty Images
If Biden wins, he’ll have to be ready to do something about the opioid crisis.
Several months after his inauguration, President Donald Trump said the opioid epidemic would end under his watch. “Watch what happens, if we do our jobs, how the number of drug users and the addicted will start to tumble downward over a period of years,” he said in 2017. “It will be a beautiful thing to see.”
It’s similar to the kind of empty promise Trump made on Covid-19 — when he said it would disappear “like a miracle.” And just like the coronavirus, the opposite has happened: Under Trump, drug overdose deaths actually increased, even before the Covid-19 pandemic took off.
While overdose deaths dipped in 2018, that seemed to be only a temporary reprieve — and experts say Trump and the federal government more broadly haven’t done enough to stop the crisis. Referring to the 2018 drop in overdose deaths, Stanford drug policy expert Keith Humphreys previously told me, “I’m not sure that’s because of anything we did.”
So overdose deaths increased again in 2019 and are set to increase further in 2020.
If former Vice President Joe Biden defeats Trump in November, experts and advocates argue that it will be on him to right the government’s response. Once the coronavirus is finally gone, another public health crisis will remain in the opioid epidemic — killing tens of thousands of Americans a year.
The same structural problems that led to the opioid crisis and allowed it to fester remain. America still doesn’t support addiction treatment anywhere near enough. The treatment facilities that do exist often don’t follow the evidence on what works and are often frauds. Harm reduction services, like needle exchanges, remain underused. And there’s still too much opioid prescribing. For years, experts have called for a big investment — including health care reform and tens of billions of dollars — to fix these problems, but nothing from the federal government, including under Trump, has approached the scale warranted.
Despite rarely mentioning it on the campaign trail, Biden has a good plan to do something about drug addiction and overdoses, making a serious investment into treatment and harm reduction and cracking down on excess opioid prescriptions.
It’s also the kind of plan that could potentially pass with bipartisan support, with Republican leaders from states hit hard by drugs like Sens. Rob Portman (OH) and Shelley Moore Capito (WV) deeply interested in doing something about the issue.
But getting ready to do something means acknowledging one thing: What Trump and the federal government have been doing for the past several years hasn’t been working. The US needs to change its approach.
Trump’s approach to the opioid crisis has failed
Based on the preliminary federal data, drug overdose deaths spiked in 2019 to nearly 72,000. That was slightly higher than the previous record high for a single year in 2017 — meaning, if the early data is right, all the gains from 2018’s decline were erased and then some.
At the same time, there are several signs that things will be even worse in 2020. Fentanyl, which has increasingly supplanted heroin in illegal drug markets, appears to be spreading to the western US — a huge point of concern because fentanyl, as a more potent opioid than heroin, is more likely to cause overdoses. Overdoses involving stimulants, like cocaine and meth, are also going up.
This, experts say, is partly a result of federal inaction. It’s not that Trump and Congress have done literally nothing, but what they’ve done has been far too little: The single-digit billions they’ve put toward the issue fall short of the tens of billions experts say is needed, and their regulatory tweaks to improve access to treatment amount to too little, too late. The addiction treatment system remains not just underfunded but underregulated, allowing fraud and abuse to take root in many facilities and a failure to follow any evidence-based practices in others.
Leana Wen, a health policy expert at George Washington University, summarized much of the expert consensus when she described the federal moves so far as “tinkering around the edges.”
On these fronts, Trump hasn’t suggested going much bigger — and has at times proposed significant cuts to agencies involved in fighting the opioid epidemic.
The other actions Trump has proposed wouldn’t do much about the issue, either. He’s said his wall at the US-Mexico border would help keep drugs out, but the evidence suggests it wouldn’t. He’s called for tougher prison sentences and the death penalty for high-level drug dealers, but that’s discredited by a body of research finding that tougher criminal penalties don’t slow the flow of drugs into the US.
In fact, Trump has put out multiple proposals that would make the overdose crisis worse. For one, he’s repeatedly called for repealing the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) and advocated for cutting Medicaid. The ACA alone expanded access to health care, including addiction treatment, to hundreds of thousands of people with addictions. A recent study in JAMA Network Open linked Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion to a 6 percent reduction in opioid overdose deaths.
Trump did declare a national emergency over the opioid crisis. But that led to almost nothing, as the Government Accountability Office concluded in a report. (The emergency declaration lapsed for nine days in January, as Dan Diamond reported for Politico, and no one even seemed to notice.)
These failures were in some ways a prelude to the Covid-19 pandemic. The opioid crisis is an issue Trump should have taken seriously — it’s important to the country, but particularly to his base of white voters without a college education, whom the crisis has hit especially hard. Yet Trump simply hasn’t taken the issue seriously or made it a top priority throughout his administration. As with Covid-19, the political incentives are there, but the president’s magical thinking and refusal to do the tough work of policymaking and governing have left a void of federal inaction on a serious public health issue.
And, unfortunately, there’s very little sign that will change if Trump wins a second term.
Biden has a plan. He should push for it.
Given Trump’s failures, the biggest chance that something will change in the coming years may be Biden winning the election.
Biden does have a plan to fight the opioid crisis. It would dedicate $125 billion over 10 years — the largest commitment of any 2020 campaign — to scaling up addiction treatment and other prevention and recovery programs, paid for with higher taxes on pharmaceutical companies’ profits. It would take steps to stop the overprescription of opioid painkillers while encouraging better care for chronic pain, and it would try to slow the flow of illicit drugs from China and Mexico. It would also move to “reform the criminal justice system so that no one is incarcerated for drug use alone.”
It’s the kind of comprehensive approach and large investment that experts have demanded for years, even before Trump.
But now it could actually happen. While Democrats have spent a lot of the campaign talking about sweeping health care reform, a Green New Deal, and massive economic investments, these are proposals that are, frankly, not very likely to become law even if Biden wins the White House, especially if Republicans keep control of the Senate.
The opioid crisis is different. Several Republican senators, including Portman and Capito, have shown interest in getting work done on the crisis. It’s telling that one of the few major pieces of legislation Trump has done was related to the opioid epidemic, even if experts agree it was too little, too late.
Simply put, starting from a place in which some Republicans and all Democrats are willing to work on an issue is certainly much better than a place in which no Republicans and not even all Democrats are willing to do something significant.
The issue could become even more relevant in the next few years. As Covid-19 (hopefully) fades, the overdose crisis will, unfortunately, stick around — and, based on the data, may even get worse as fentanyl spreads and stimulants make a comeback. With better leadership, that could push the federal government to more action.
There are good reasons to be skeptical about whether Biden could get the full $125 billion he’s proposing to fight the opioid crisis. One thing I’ve heard consistently from sources in Congress is that Republicans in particular are skeptical of spending too much money on addressing the overdose crisis. That will continue into a Democratic administration, likely even more so as Republicans become resistant to giving a Democratic president a victory.
But at this point, any kind of sizable investment would be a step in the right direction. As Biden and Democrats prepare for the possibility of taking the White House and Senate, it’s an issue that should be at the top of their minds — a chance to succeed where Trump failed.
Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world: Contribute today from as little as $3.
And why the November election is an opportunity to fix it.
It sounds hyperbolic to say that American democracy is broken, but an honest glance at the country — at our institutions and the broader political culture — makes it hard to conclude otherwise.
As things stand, one of our two major political parties is committed to suppressing as many votes as possible, and the leader of that party, the president of the United States, has said outright that he won’t accept the legitimacy of the election process if he doesn’t win.
If, under those conditions, Trump either wins the election or loses and throws the country into a bitter, protracted fight over the results, it doesn’t seem all that alarmist to suggest the US will have descended into what political scientists sometimes call a “weak democracy” or even “competitive authoritarianism.”
But I really don’t want to be overly alarmist, so I reached out to Pippa Norris, a political scientist at Harvard University and one of the leading authorities on global democracy. I wanted to know her honest assessment of the state of American democracy, why she thinks the upcoming election is a true turning point for the country, and what the US will have to do moving forward to undo the damage done in the past several years.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
If American democracy was a patient, how would you describe its condition?
Pippa Norris
I’d say the patient has not been well for a long time. The patient is obese and doesn’t exercise.
Sean Illing
You like to say that democracy is not an “all or nothing” process — it’s more like a continuum with peaks and valleys and lots of movement over time. Would you say that the biggest weakness in the American system right now is this combination of the intractability of our Constitution and the fact that one of our major parties, the Republican Party, is basically invested in an anti-democratic, countermajoritarian agenda?
Pippa Norris
It’s true that we’re facing an existential crisis in part because the Republican Party has put all of their appeals into a shrinking sector of the electorate — mostly white, mostly older. And they’re using their power to change the rules of the game to favor their own party. That’s all true.
The point about the intractability of the Constitution is also true. There’s something called the Comparative Constitutions Project. They look at the longevity of constitutions and how much change is ideal and how much change is dysfunctional. So you don’t want a constitution that changes all the time because that leads to instability and you need to have rules of the game that everybody can agree upon. But you also can’t have a constitution that’s fundamentally unchangeable.
America is just off the charts in terms of the rarity of changes. It’s not just that we have so few changes; it’s the combination of institutional arrangements that make change almost impossible. America’s Constitution really doesn’t change, and we don’t look abroad for constitutional innovations.
Sean Illing
Can you give me an example of a good constitutional innovation from around the world?
Pippa Norris
Almost every new democracy or country going through a transition always sets up a central and effective independent election management system. Now, they’ve all got different degrees of independence. But nevertheless, if there’s an election dispute, there’s an independent executive to say what the results are and to provide a mechanism for handling legal disputes that isn’t tainted by politicized courts.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be a Supreme Court. It can be an election court, often common in Latin America. Or there may be other mechanisms which provide informal resolutions. America has all these decentralized forms of electoral administration, which means that just one local area, which had one local problem in its ballot or its count or its regulations, could really derail the whole of the presidential election, particularly if it’s Broward County in Florida or somewhere else in Georgia or somewhere else in Michigan or wherever it is.
The point is that other countries around the world have developed ways of dealing with these issues and America just hasn’t learned or adapted.
Sean Illing
Is the Republican Party, in its current manifestation, the biggest obstacle to making the sorts of changes we need to make?
Pippa Norris
It is. I’ve done a global party survey in December 2019, asking over 2,000 experts where they place mainstream political parties worldwide on a range of issues, from taxes to health care to environmental policy. And the US results are quite remarkable. If we’re just looking at OECD [post-industrial] countries and trying to measure whether parties favor or oppose checks and balances on the executive, if they’re committed to basic pluralistic values, and if they respect or undermine liberal democratic principles, what you find is that the GOP is surprisingly extremist.
The position of the GOP on these issues is close to parties like Golden Dawn in Greece [a neo-fascist party], Fidesz in Hungary, or the Law and Justice party in Poland. These are illiberal parties cutting back on the freedom of press and stamping out democratic freedoms in their countries. And these are the only parties in the developed world that really compare to the Republican Party in terms of their commitment to what we’d call authoritarian values.
So in a two-party system, you would expect a party like the GOP to naturally position itself somewhere around the center of the ideological spectrum to appeal to the median voter and to maximize its vote in general elections, like the Democratic Party tends to do. And the Democratic Party, for what it’s worth, basically scores the same as most of the standard middle-of-the-road European center-left parties.
But what’s happened is that the GOP has now gradually moved much, much further away from that center, a process that Trump has accelerated. Now, the problem is that you’d expect them to change course if they lose badly in the election, because that’s where most American voters are located in a normal curve.
The problem is that primary voters and donors are often more extreme than ordinary Americans. Seats are often uncompetitive, due to gerrymandering. And it often takes more than one heavy electoral defeat to get a party to shift course. You can think of them a bit like ocean liners. They’re sailing along in one direction. Under new leadership, they may try and move to port or to starboard, but it takes time to turn around, partly because after defeat, the incumbents who are reelected can blame Trump’s leadership and events like Covid-19, rather than their core policy appeals.
It may take a couple of electoral shocks for the GOP to learn the lessons, reverse course, and begin to nominate more moderate Lincoln Republicans and mainstream appeals.
Sean Illing
Is it still accurate to call the US a liberal democracy?
Pippa Norris
Well, remember, I like to think of democracy as a continuum. What that suggests is that you can slide up or down as things improve or deteriorate.
So we could, for example, be closer to what’s called an “electoral democracy,” meaning that elections still work but many other institutions don’t. The judiciary may be undermined or press freedoms may be undermined. These are the kinds of things you see in countries in which democracy is backsliding. When this happens, strongman rulers come to power and they basically reinforce their position through amending or changing constitutions. That’s a very common strategy to make sure that they get elected time and time again.
America is still a liberal democracy insofar as we still have the formal institutions you’d expect to find in a liberal democracy. And there’s still freedom of speech and assembly. There’s still the expectation that the loser of an election will step aside. But the US is sliding toward electoral democracy. Whether it gets even worse depends on what happens this November.
Sean Illing
You say, rather ominously, that everything turns on what happens in November. If Trump wins, if the GOP’s countermajoritarian strategy is rewarded, what then?
Pippa Norris
We’ve got at least these two scenarios. Number one, there’s a landslide and the Democrats win so overwhelmingly that the system essentially staggers back to where it was and, hopefully, Biden brings in some much-needed reforms. If confidence in elections returns, if there is basically a change in the Senate, as well as in the presidency, then you could see America returning to the system that was there with Obama — deeply imperfect, but working.
If there’s a narrow result and the Electoral College is very narrow, and it is one where Biden gets the edge, then there’s going to be so many disputes and confidence is going to go down. We’ve already seen the cracks in places like Michigan, where, let’s be honest, domestic terrorists were plotting to kidnap the governor, and we can expect to see more of this extralegal violence as social trust and tolerance keeps eroding. That’s hard to get your head around, but it’s real and it’s absolutely on the table.
If Trump returns to office, then things are going to get worse. We know that when authoritarian populists come in the first term, they’re just trying out ideas, seeing what works and what doesn’t. But they’re almost always more moderate. The second term is when it’s much more problematic. And the worst case would be something like Hungary, where illiberal populists have destroyed the foundations of the electoral system in ways most people don’t really understand. It all happened right in front of people’s eyes, but not enough attention was paid early on — and now it’s too late.
Sean Illing
If Trump loses, what’s the path to democratic restoration look like?
Pippa Norris
We need reforms — lots of reforms. Corruption and the role of money in politics is a core problem. We haven’t heard much about this lately because more attention has been paid to issues like voter suppression, with good reasons, but it’s a fundamental issue standing in the way of nearly everything else.
We have to restore theintegrity of the Department of Justice. If you don’t have an umpire you can trust, then where can you go? We need impartiality and independence. There are two meanings of the “rule of law” and they often get misunderstood. When Trump says “rule of law,” what he really means is the power of the law to control the system, as opposed to the power of the law to check the executive and the legislative branch in effective, independent, impartial ways. It’s clear which one we need.
It will sound nuts, but I really think we need a bipartisan commission to start a conversation among moderate Republicans and Democrats and progressives about the larger problems of American democracy beyond voter suppression and beyond gerrymandering and beyond corruption in politics. When there’s a real crisis in governance, you have to get out of single party and you have to forge a new consensus. Many countries, including Britain, have done things like this and it’s important. You can think of it like a democratic audit, one that engages the public in a real dialogue.
Again, I know this sounds silly, but when the problems run this deep, all of civic society has to be engaged in this enormous rebuilding effort. We all have to ask, “What are the key issues in America?” and frame them in ways that cut through the conventional Republican-Democrat frame.
Sean Illing
What gives you the most hope about our political future?
Pippa Norris
The mobilization has been fantastic. A lot of the mobilization has gone in dangerous directions, as we just saw in Michigan. But on the other side, we have all this energy dedicated to improving the country in big and small ways. If you look at the number of women running for office, if you look at the Black Lives Matter movement, if you look at how many people have taken to the streets to call for change — that’s all exciting and necessary. We need that energy. It tells us the country isn’t asleep at the wheel any longer, that people are waking up.
Democracy is on the ballot in this election — everybody knows it. And people are mobilized either for or against it. As long as this energy can be contained and positively channeled, there’s hope for real, lasting change. We just have to avoid violence. Plenty of countries have disputed elections, but we have to manage that conflict without violence. Once that line is crossed, it’s hard to go back.
I’ll just end by saying that a crisis is an opportunity. Just like Covid is an opportunity to rethink the nature of work, so the crisis which America’s going through is an opportunity to rethink how we’re running our liberal democracy and explore the possibilities of serious and moderate reforms, and maybe learn from other countries. Our problems won’t disappear, but with effective reforms and a renewed commitment to change, there is at least hope.
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Students walk past a safety sign in Oxford. Covid-19 cases have been rising in England and across the European continent. | Steve Parsons/PA Images via Getty Images
Europe’s new coronavirus wave may be worse than the first.
“How could we possibly be here again?” Clare Wenham,an assistant professor of global health policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), asked of the UK,where the death rate from Covid-19 is among the highest in the world. It’s because “the government didn’t spend the last six to eight months investing and getting a good track, trace, and isolate system in place.”
Christina Animashaun/Vox
For months, scientists and health experts warned that governments must build up coronavirus testing and tracing capacity, put in place strict quarantine and isolation measures, ready hospitals for Covid-19 patients, protect the elderly and vulnerable, and, especially, get people to wear masks. Taking these steps, said Anthony Costello, a professor of global health at University College London, avoids “the bluntest weapon to control the epidemic”: the lockdown.
In the absence of stricter anti-virus measures now, Hans Kluge, the World Health Organization’s regional director for Europe, warned last week, daily mortality rates from Covid-19 could reach “levels 4 to 5 times higher than what we recorded in April.” And what makes this wave even more challenging than the last: People have already endured the pain of lockdowns once. They’re tired of the pandemic, and leaders in some cities and states are even fighting back against federally imposed measures. If pandemic restrictions are abandoned, the new wave in Europe could rival the severity of the last one.
Europe’s new coronavirus wave, explained
The springtime lockdowns around the world came with a level of economic, psychological, and social pain we haven’t seen since the Second World War. Millions of people saw their lives shift dramatically: They changed how they work, lost jobs, or risked their health to carry on. They stayed away from loved ones, died alone, and delayed funerals. They put off weddings, canceled holidays, and kept their kids home from school.
These sacrifices, at least in the short term, appeared to pay off: By early summer, the first coronavirus wave was largely under control, and related hospitalizations and deaths were declining. But shortly after leaders began to lift the pandemic restrictions, people started socializing again, and, in many places, the virus started to move.
“This idea was you lift all restrictions, and we’ll have our life back,” Devi Sridhar, chair in global public health at the University of Edinburgh, told Vox. “But in no scenario do you lift restrictions and does life go back to how it was pre-Covid.”
To be sure, you can’t “take the numbers today and place them on top of the earlier curve and assume it’s the same thing,” as Flavia Riccardo, a researcher at the Italian National Institute of Health, told Vox in September. That’s because this new peak can — in part — be explained by more robust testing across the continent: Health authorities in many countries are simply testing more than they were in March, when tests either weren’t available or the indication for testing was limited.
But the expansion of testing doesn’t fully explain what’s happening. As you can see in the next chart, the daily share of positive tests began increasing in July from a summer low. This means health officials in many countries didn’t keep up with the predictable, post-summer increase in demand for testing — and therefore aren’t finding where new pockets of disease are spreading. In other words, they’ve lost control of their epidemics.
But by September, that younger group had spread the virus to their older friends, colleagues, and relatives. And by mid-October, Covid-19 hospitalizations and ICU admissions were either high (at a quarter of the spring pandemic peak) or had increased compared to the previous week in 20 countries in Europe, according to the ECDC. And with more hospitalizations and ICU admissions come more Covid-19 deaths.
As you can see in this chart, the deaths per million so far are nowhere near the last peak. “Although we record 2 to 3 times more cases per day compared to the April peak, we still observe 5 times fewer deaths,” the WHO’s Kluge noted in an October 15 update.
The doubling time for hospital admissions has also slowed down in Europe: it’s “still 2 to 3 times longer” than it was in the spring, Kluge said. And, thanks in part to improved treatment approaches, people have better odds of surviving a hospital admission. According to the Financial Times, in March, people over the age of 70 had a 50 percent chance of living; by August, that number climbed to 74 percent.
Still, the increases in deaths have sparked renewed fears that the new wave is going to overwhelm hospital systems again — and once they’re overwhelmed, doctors will have a tougher time keeping patients alive. (At the height of Italy’s epidemic last March, doctors were forced to ration care while the army was drafted to help move corpses piling up in the outbreak’s epicenter.)
To stave off these nightmare scenarios, broader lockdowns become inevitable. The simple math of Covid-19 explains why. As Tom Inglesby, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, explained on Twitter: “We have had [10 times] the numbers of Covid deaths as compared to influenza last year, and that is with huge social distancing, masking and restrictive policies in place. Without those things in place, the numbers of Covid deaths would have been many, many times higher.”
So back to the answer to the opening question – is COVID now just like a strong flu? Not at all. COVID has far higher mortality. Most are still susceptible to it. It’s year round. We have no vaccine, and only dex as a highly valuable treatment. 16/x
Or as Sridhar told Vox in September, “If you see hospitals filling up and ICU beds full, [politicians will] have no choice but to implement some kind of lockdown unless you want your health system to collapse. ... You can’t have people dying in hospital doorways because they can’t get access to oxygen.”
That’s why countries are imposing social distancing measures anew — and why there may be more to come soon.
The Czech Republic, currently the country with the fastest-growing infection rate in Europe, went from around 100 new cases per day in mid-July to a high of 15,000 in mid-October. To stave off the collapse of the health system, the government imposed a new lockdown that will last until at least November 3.
Ireland is back in lockdown as of October 21: nonessential businesses are closed and people are asked to once again stay home. The main exceptions: essential work and outdoor exercise within 3 miles of home.
Barbara Gindl/APA/AFP via Getty Images
An empty market square in Kuchl, near Salzburg, Austria, on October 17.
In Austria,the federal government is focused on restricting the size of gatherings: a maximum of six people are allowed to meet indoors, and a maximum of 12 outdoors, at places such as bars, restaurants, and sporting events. But at least one community, where infections are rising rapidly, has already gone ahead with a lockdown.
So far, most of the restrictions are more limited than the national lockdowns we saw in the spring, but the worst-hit countries — such as Czech Republic and Belgium — are shutting down entirely or threatening to. And the most troubling part is that this was both predictable and preventable.
The first lockdowns were supposed to buy countries time to avoid more pain
Just about everyone who has been watching this pandemic closely warned that, as the first set of lockdowns lifted and people started mingling indoors after the summer, we’d see cases rise again.
But it wasn’t inevitable that cases would rise this much in Europe. To understand how the new wave could have looked different, let’s contrast the German coronavirus situation with what’s happening in the UK.
Germany, which has consistently had a lower case and death rate than much of Europe, used the early days of the pandemic wisely: It quickly locked down, scaled up testing capacity, established a contact tracing network, made masks mandatory, empowered local health authorities to tailor policies to meet their local needs, and put in place a system for isolation and quarantine of confirmed and suspected cases. When local outbreaks have begun to grow swiftly, leaders reacted with localized lockdowns.
From the beginning of the pandemic, health authorities and politicians also listened to scientists, adapting policies as the evidence evolved. Most recently, for example, the government in the southern state of Bavaria gave schools money to improve classroom ventilation ahead of the winter.
These measures didn’t bring Covid-19 cases to zero. And when states across Germany relaxed social distancing measures this summer, cases started creeping back up — and they could still spike further. But the country’s epidemic is so far growing at a slower rate compared to the rest of Europe, and on a per capita basis, the outbreak in Germany is still milder.
What’s more, the systems in place should also help Germans stay on top of where the virus is spreading, and more quickly snuff out new outbreaks when they arise.
“Lockdowns only make sense if they’re followed by testing and tracing,” Steven Hoffman, director of York University’s Global Strategy Lab, summed up. “Otherwise you’ve endured a painful experience without any longevity in its benefit.”
Indeed, countries that didn’t use the lockdown, and post-lockdown, period as effectively are now faring worse in the second wave. Consider the UK, which has one of the fastest-growing outbreaks in Europe. Like the US, the UK government repeatedly failed to heed the advice of scientists and establish an effective testing, tracing, and isolating protocol.
There’s also little follow-up or support to ensure people actually isolate and quarantine, said University College London’s Anthony Costello. “In the progressive European countries like Germany, and in South Korea and China, [the government] would pay your salary when you isolate. And if you’re not working, there’s a proper sickness benefit,” he said. Britain has no such program.
Scientists “have been saying testing, tracing, isolating hasn’t been working here. The testing was wrong, the tracing was wrong,” Costello added. “I’m realizing now nobody listens.”
Europe’s new coronavirus wave is a devastating political failure — especially for the poorest and most vulnerable
Make no mistake: The new wave of lockdowns in Europe are the result of a political failure. “It was understandable that countries imposed lockdowns in the initial weeks when countries first got hit and were quickly overwhelmed,” said Adam Kamradt-Scott, a global health professor at the University of Sydney. “But six months on, countries should have sufficient systems in place to undertake the necessary contact tracing and have a range of other measures they can use to limit the spread of the virus, rather than looking to hard lockdowns as the answer.”
The lack of systems to manage the pandemic is also a failure that the public will have to keep paying for, said LSE’s Clare Wenham. “Unless governments crack [testing, tracing, and isolating], we’re going to see these endless cycles of lockdowns every four to five months. There’s no other way.”
Wiktor Szymanowicz/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Hundreds of hospitality workers take part in a demonstration in Parliament Square in London on October 19.
In some cases, governments may not be able to revert to spring-style closures. The highest court in Austria, for example, determined the March and April ban on entering public places, and a tiered rollout for shops reopening according to their size, was partly unconstitutional. Similar legal battles are unfolding at the city and state level in other countries in Europe.
But with disease spread out of control, economic activity may contract even without government lockdowns because people may start to voluntarily restrict their movements, according to an analysis from the International Monetary Fund. “When we looked backward at the economic impact of the pandemic in the first half of the year, it’s true that lockdowns contributed to the economic contraction,” said Damiano Sandri, an IMF analyst who has been studying the impact of the virus. “But economic activity also contracted because people got scared and didn’t go out as they would otherwise when infections increased.”
In other words, the social and economic toll of the pandemic isn’t only caused by lockdowns. “The damage is also done if you get a strong wave of infections,” Sandri added, “and people start dying.”
In either scenario, businesses will have to restrict their hours or shutter altogether this winter. More people will lose wages or lose their jobs. And the economic toll of the pandemic has already been devastating: the worst recession since World War II. “The worst outcomes for governments are the repetitive lockdown,” Wenham added. “It’s better to be in one lockdown longer and have one economic shock than have these rolling shocks for two years.”
As the cold weather sets in across the Northern Hemisphere, people will have to stay away from their loved ones again. Parents will have to juggle work and child care, or choose between the two, again. Older and sick people will have to endure another bout of isolation and loneliness, in some cases gasping their last breaths alone.
Or maybe pandemic fatigue will deepen: The public will behave differently this time around and resist coronavirus measures, helping the virus spread.
“Decades from now, researchers may be talking about the ‘pandemic generation’”
Woolf expects, in the years ahead, we’ll find there was a lot more devastation than is currently visible, such as a surge in deaths from chronic conditions — like diabetes, congestive heart failure, and HIV — as a result of Covid-19 disruptions in health care. The pandemic could also bring a “spike in overdose deaths” from loneliness and addiction services disruptions, and a long-term toll on childhood development.
“Decades from now, researchers may be talking about the ‘pandemic generation,’” Woolf said, “and some of the health effects they tolerated because they grew up in the midst of this.”
This will be especially true for the poorest and most vulnerable among us. Covid-related job losses, and even infections and deaths, have disproportionately affected low-income and minority groups around the world. Blunt tools like city- or nationwide lockdowns only exacerbate those impacts, York’s Steven Hoffman said.
“It’s easy for some people to lock down, particularly when they’re able to work from home. It’s far more difficult for those working in the service industry, who can’t work from home and might be living paycheck to paycheck,” Hoffman added. “The story of this pandemic is that it’s been a grand revealer for the inequalities in our society.”
Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world: Contribute today from as little as $3.
Two recent articles from Electrek may have current and/or future Tesla owners concerned. According to Electrek, Tesla is now admitting that a design flaw in the Model 3 could cause the vehicle's rear bumper panel to fall off when driving through standing water. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: Tesla admits that a problem with Model 3 vehicles led to them losing the body panel on their rear bumper when driving in puddles of water. Early on, the Model 3 had some issues with the body panel on the rear bumper falling off after driving through what drivers have described as heavy rain or water puddles. That's obviously not normal, and Tesla said that it was investigating the situation, but we never heard back from the automaker. Some owners had issue with Tesla performing the repair under warranty as the company argues over how deep the water was that car owners drove through.
Now fast-forward to earlier this year when a video of Tesla Model 3 losing its rear bumper panel in puddle of water went viral. It looks like this event made Tesla finally acknowledge [in a service bulletin] that a design defect on Model 3 vehicles built before May 21, 2019, lead to this problem. It apparently affects all Model 3 vehicles built up to May 2019, at which point Tesla apparently changed the rear fascia diffuser as well as the front and mid aero shields. Therefore, it seems like the previous design of these parts contributed to the problem with the water pulling off the rear panel. Thankfully, Tesla will perform the repair under warranty but the fact that it took over a year between when the defect was first reported and fixed, and two years before Tesla acknowledged it, "doesn't show the company at its best," writes Fred Lambert via Electrek.
That leads us to the second bit of news from Electrek: Tesla has weakened its used car warranty. From the report: Tesla used to offer 2 to 4 -year warranty on used Model S and Model X vehicles. Now Tesla has updated its used vehicle warranty to only one year or 10,000 miles over the original warranty: "Tesla used vehicles are covered by the remainder of 4 years or 50,000 miles left on the Basic Vehicle Limited Warranty. After expiration, the Used Vehicle Limited Warranty provides additional coverage of 1 year or 10,000 miles. If the Basic Vehicle Limited Warranty has already expired, the Used Vehicle Limited Warranty will provide coverage of 1 year or 10,000 miles, starting from your delivery date."
While the new used car warranty being added on top of the new car warranty is good for more recent used vehicles purchased from Tesla, it really cripples any kind of warranty on used Tesla vehicles from 2016 and older. Instead of getting 2 to 4 years of warranty, now they only get 1 year or 10,000 miles. The weakened warranty announcement comes just one week after Tesla canceled its "no questions asked" 7-day return policy.
We've been seeing this for ~10 years. Let's hope, but it's been waiting in the wings for a long time.
Researchers from Australia have discovered that the widely acclaimed mineral perovskite can be used to transform the solar industry through cheaper and more efficient photovoltaics. The Independent reports: Perovskite, which is forged deep within the Earth's mantle, has been hailed for its unprecedented potential to convert sunlight into electricity. Researchers have already improved its sunlight-to-energy efficiency from around 3 per cent to over 20 per cent in the space of just a few years. "It's unbelievable, a miracle material," Z. Valy Vardeny, a materials science professor from the University of Utah, said about perovskite in 2017. At the time it was thought that it would be at least 10 years before it reached a point that the material could be used in commercial solar cells, however the latest breakthrough could see the wide uptake of the technology much sooner. "It was one of those unusual discoveries that you sometimes hear about in science," said Dr Hall from the University of Melbourne.
With the help of researchers at the University of Sydney, the scientists were able to use computational modeling to solve the problem of instability within the material when exposed to sunlight. The unlikely solution was to undo the disruption caused by light at lower intensities by focussing the light into a high-intensity beam. Dr Hall added: "What we've shown is that you can actually use the material in the state that you want to use it, for a solar cell - all you need to do is focus more light onto it." The research could also have significant implications for data storage, with perovskites offering a way to dramatically increase a device's potential capacity. The study has been published in the journal Nature Materials.
Where’s William Barr? Actually, on Tuesday morning he was in Florida, giving a speech to the National Association of Police Organizations and, of course, posing for photos with elderly retired cops without a mask or even a token gesture toward social distancing. Last week, Barr was in St. Louis to talk about the “success” of the plan to send in federal forces to bolster local police. On Thursday, he’s heading for Indianapolis.
The point is, the attorney general has not actually been invisible over the last few weeks. Neither has he been particularly quiet. He’s still out there doing what he always does—playing up the dire threat of nonexistent left-wing terrorists, while completely ignoring the actual threat from very real white supremacist militia groups. And, of course, he’s still tossing in his support behind the idea that voting by mail generates fraud, without bothering with evidence. It’s not like he’s an attorney, after all.
But what Barr isn’t doing, or at least, isn’t doing so far, is sending a SWAT team to take Joe Biden off the campaign trial, or breaking down the gate at President Obama’s home to slap the cuffs on Michelle. And that, right there, makes him invisible to Trump. Just like that, Barr has gone from the guy who saved Trump from being hurled from office—which he absolutely did with his wholly inaccurate “summary” of the Mueller report and his personal decision to dismiss any possibility of holding Trump accountable—to someone who Trump no longer believes is part of his team.
On Wednesday morning, Donald Trump returned to a theme he’s hit several times at recent rallies—telling Attorney General William Barr to get off his ass and arrest Joe Biden. On a phone call to Fox News, Trump claimed the widely and thoroughly debunked Russian disinformation about Hunter Biden is “major corruption.” And, insisted Trump, “We've got to get the attorney general to act. He's got to act. And he's got to act fast. He's got to appoint somebody."
It’s not like Trump is completely alone in this. After all, Rupert Murdoch has thrown every crumb of his crumbly media empire behind the effort, even when that took running a piece of obvious propaganda so odious not even a New York Post reporter would stand behind it. And on Monday, a handful of Trump’s most adamant supporters in the House joined in to demand that Barr open an investigation into a hard drive “purportedly” belonging to Joe Biden’s son. Only … here’s the measure of how obviously awful this setup really is: Trump got just eleven Republican House members to sign on. That means he still has Louie Gohmert and Steve King, because, of course he does, but even Devin Nunes did not add his name to this effort. Yeah, that’s where Trump has gone; into territory too far for the guy who sues cows.
It’s not as if Barr isn’t pedaling as fast as he can to support Trump—see fraudulent claims of mail fraud and absolute distortion of his own department’s findings about the source of violence at protests. It seems more that Barr, like the nation, is simply staggered by the effort of keeping up with all the standards Trump wants him to break.
There has also been the pesky problem that Trump’s baseless conspiracy theories keep turning out to be baseless conspiracy theories. After months of investigation, the Nunes-endorsed look into “unmasking” turned up nothing and the prosecutor Barr appointed for the job ran for the exit. And following this was the really disappointing news, from a Trump point of view, that Barr’s protege John Durham was not going to be done with his report on the Russia investigation, Ukraine, and whatever else was set on his plate, in time for a pre-election release. All of it together makes Barr seem like a no-show for Trump in his time of need.
This isn’t the first time Trump has taken to Fox News to berate a member of his own cabinet, or even an attorney general—Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III used to be frequent target for both Trump’s media complaints and his tweets—but the fact that Trump’s most loyal toady is now the subject of complaints that have Trump’s supporters, and this is real, claiming that Barr is “part of the deep state conspiracy” is really … an incredible example of panic, confusion, and weakness that has overcome Trump in his final days.
By the way, Devin Nunes, you’re also part of the deep state now. Should have signed that letter.
#starbucks #karen @Starbucks pic.twitter.com/six8s4qCAx
(@Alex_beckom) October 18, 2020
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