James.galbraith

IBM announced this morning that the company would be spinning off some of its lower-margin lines of business into a new company and focusing on higher-margin cloud services. Ars Technica reports: During an investor call, CEO Arvind Krishna acknowledged that the move was a "significant shift" in how IBM will work, but he positioned it as the latest in a decades-long series of strategic divestments. "We divested networking back in the '90s, we divested PCs back in the 2000s, we divested semiconductors about five years ago because all of them didn't necessarily play into the integrated value proposition," he said. Krishna became CEO in April 2020, replacing former CEO Ginni Rometty (who is now IBM's executive chairman), but the spin-off is the capstone of a multi-year effort to apply some kind of focus to the company's sprawling business model. The new spin-off doesn't have a formal name yet and is referred to as "NewCo" in IBM's marketing and investor relations material. Under the spin-off plan, the press release claims IBM "will focus on its open hybrid cloud platform, which represents a $1 trillion market opportunity," while NewCo "will immediately be the world's leading managed infrastructure services provider." (This is because NewCo will start life owning the entirety of IBM Global Technology Services' existing managed infrastructure clients, which means about 4,600 accounts, including about 75 percent of the Fortune 100.) See also: Cringely Predicts IBM 'Disappears Into Red Hat'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If suburban women heard it once during the vice presidential debate on Wednesday, they heard some version of it more than a dozen times. "Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking," Sen. Kamala Harris said, as she fought through Mike Pence's verbal badgering to make the point that Donald Trump lied to the country about how lethal the coronavirus is. 

Pence's manner wasn't nearly as bellicose as the disastrous performance Trump gave during last week's presidential debate, but he still repeatedly talked over Harris and sought to steal her time throughout the hour-and-a-half debate. MSNBC reported Thursday morning that Pence had interrupted Harris at least 16 times—giving the suburban women the Trump-Pence ticket so desperately needs at least 16 reasons to stick with the Biden-Harris ticket.

It's not like it was a small transgression. When debate moderator and USA Today Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page laid out the ground rules for the evening, she stipulated that Harris and Pence would have two minutes to respond to each question "without interruption." In fact, in an effort to preempt another debate circus, Page reminded both candidates that they had two minutes to respond "without interruption" or "uninterrupted" no less than 13 times.

But Pence, with all that honest-to-goodness white male privilege of his, clearly figured the rules didn't apply to him. He talked over Page, he talked over Harris, and frankly, Harris repeatedly lobbied to be afforded more time after Pence siphoned away her precious seconds.

In fact, some of Harris' biggest zingers came after she fought for extra time to make her points. Roughly 30 minutes into the debate, as Harris reminded viewers that Trump was in court "right now, trying to get rid of" the Affordable Care Act, Page started to cut her off.

"He interrupted me and I'd like to just finish, please," Harris noted, before continuing, "If you have a preexisting condition—heart disease, diabetes, breast cancer—they're coming for you. If you love someone who has a preexisting condition, they’re coming for you. If you are under the age of 26 on your parents' coverage, they're coming for you."

Pence tried to cut Harris off, calling her charge "nonsense," but it was a clear and forceful moment for Harris as she looked directly at the camera to address viewers watching from their living rooms across America.

But if Pence's 16 interruptions weren't enough reasons for suburban women to stay in the Biden-Harris camp, here's a 17th: Harris ultimately logged almost exactly as much speaking time as Pence, with Pence getting 36 minutes and 27 seconds to Harris' 36 minutes and 24 seconds. Any woman who's fought her way into a male-dominated conversation in a board room knows that equal time didn't come without a fight. 

And if those 17 reasons weren't enough, Trump's personal post-debate outreach to "Suburban Housewives of America" surely was.

Let's count Trump's two references to Harris as a "monster" on Thursday morning as reasons number 18 and 19 to flee the GOP ticket—as if the suburban women of America needed any more reasons to ditch Republicans altogether.

Watch Harris fight to make one of the most important points of the night.

Please donate now to help make Kamala Harris our next vice president!

My goodness, the White House really, really doesn’t want the public to know when Donald Trump last tested negative for COVID-19. Reporters once again tried to pin down an official—in this case White House Director of Strategic Communications Alyssa Farah—on this question, and once again got an impressive display of dodging and evading in response.

“I can't reveal that at this time,” Farah answered to a direct question about the date of Trump’s last negative. “Doctors would like to keep it private.” [Here pause to scoff.]

Pool reporter Noah Robertson reports that Farah’s responses to follow-ups included “My understanding is that it's his private medical history” and “I'm happy to raise that to the doctors, but my understanding is that we're not making it public.”

This isn’t about the doctors. This is about Trump having something to hide—quite possibly that Trump knew he was positive, or at least that he had been exposed, before the debate. Presidents traditionally give out more health information than average people because they understand that it’s in the public interest to know whether the leader of the country is healthy, and because part of what you trade for power is the responsibility to be transparent.

But Trump is extremely afraid to have information about his health become public even though, in this case, we know his diagnosis. It’s not like reporters are digging around to find out whether he has syphilis and if so, where he contracted it. They just want to know 1) a reliable timeline for the disease he has publicly talked about having and 2) a little bit more about how much the White House had previously been lying to the public about how often Trump was being tested for the coronavirus. And, okay, whether Trump knowingly debated and campaigned while infectious. That too. 

Trump’s doctor is being evasive, but it’s not that the doctor has some deep medical reason for wishing to keep the date of Trump’s last negative test a secret. It’s that Trump, who made doctors sign nondisclosure agreements during his very weird trip to Walter Reed in November 2019, is hiding something and his doctor is following Trump’s wishes. It’s one of the most obvious cover-ups in history, but the White House is sticking with it.

People buying this package probably understand that these sausages are not made of meat. | Tofurky

Consumers are not actually confused about whether veggie burgers are made out of beef, Tofurky argues.

As of October 1, a new law in Louisiana bans grocery stores from calling veggie burgers “veggie burgers,” as well as many similar product labels like “plant-based sausages” or “seitan-based vegan bacon.”

The justification? That consumers might get confused about whether veggie burgers are made of beef. It’s the latest of a series of attempts by meat companies to ban their plant-based competitors from grocery store shelves — and many legal experts say it’s probably unconstitutional.

Now, Tofurky — a 35-year-old company that makes plant-based deli products, sausages, and roasts — has sued, arguing that the vague, expansive restrictions Louisiana has put in place are an unconstitutional burden on free speech.

This debate has happened before. Last year, Arkansas tried a nearly identical law, and Tofurky sued. A judge issued an injunction a few months later, finding that the law violated the free-speech protections of the US Constitution and telling Arkansas it may not enforce the law while the case proceeds through the courts. Mississippi tried a similar law, too, and backed down, promising to revise it, when sued. That didn’t stop Louisiana from proceeding with its own, nearly identical law, but it is likely no more constitutional than the Arkansas or Mississippi ones.

Why are we fighting about Tofurky? There are no indications that consumers are confused about whether veggie burgers are made out of meat. But as plant-based products get more popular, these labeling laws are one of the meat industry’s favorite tools to fight back — even though courts keep on soundly rejecting them.

Plant-based products are getting big. Meat companies feel threatened.

In the last few years, the plant-based foods industry has seen extraordinary growth. Products from plant-based meat companies like Impossible Foods and Beyond Meat have become available around the country, and they’ve been a hit with customers.

The pandemic has seen the industry boom further, just as conventional meat production has taken a hit from supply-chain disruptions and news of inhumane policies killing workers. Plant-based meat producers have released improved products that taste even meatier, and have raised eye-popping sums of money. It used to be the case that plant-based foods were primarily marketed just to vegans and vegetarians, but they’re increasingly being consumed by meat-eaters — who might prefer plant alternatives for health, animal welfare, or environmental reasons.

“Plant-based eating trends are really blowing up now, with exponential growth,” Tofurky CEO Jaime Athos told me when we spoke last year about Tofurky’s nearly identical lawsuit in Arkansas. “We have this great moment of innovation in our industry where these products are better than ever. They’re more widely available, too. And suddenly people are worried consumers might be confused. The reality is that this is a proactive decision on the parts of consumers — they understand that plant-based products are healthier for them and healthier for the environment.”

That, of course, has made some livestock producers nervous — even though sales of animal-based meat haven’t fallen at all. Animal agriculture industry representatives have called plant-based foods one of the “major challenges” the industry faces.

So meat producers are pushing back. In testimony in the Louisiana state legislature, supporters of the bill argued it was necessary to “protect our industries” in the face of “a growing trend” of consumers deciding to purchase different products. “We must protect our industry in this state: agriculture. It’s the number one industry in the state of Louisiana,” the bill’s Senate sponsor, Francis Thompson (D-Delhi) argued during legislative hearings.

(Not all meat companies are fighting the rise of plant-based meats; many have invested in plant-based options themselves.)

The Louisiana law prohibits companies from “Utilizing a term that is the same as or deceptively similar to a term that has been used or defined historically in reference to a specific agricultural product.”

That is, since the word “burger” has historically been used to refer to a product made out of meat, it’s illegal to use the word “burger” to refer to a product that isn’t — like “veggie burger.” The same principle rules out labels like “plant-based deli slices” or “plant-based jumbo hot dogs.”

But is that constitutional? Would such a law run afoul of the First Amendment? Tofurky’s lawsuit filed today argues that it does. The lawsuit argues:

The Act imposes sweeping restrictions on commercial speech. It prohibits companies from sharing truthful and non-misleading information about their products while doing nothing to protect the public from any conceivable harm. By censoring familiar terms (like “veggie sausage”) that any reasonable consumer understands, the Act only creates needless consumer confusion. And it does so with the clear purpose of suppressing free market competition for the benefit of specific state-defined competitors. In so doing, the Act violates the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Past court decisions broadly support this constitutional argument.

Federal laws prohibit labeling food in ways that are deceptive to consumers. You can’t call a product gluten-free if it isn’t, or call it “olive oil” if it’s not made from olives. When laws have tried to push beyond that, they’ve generally met a skeptical audience in the courts.

In a California case, the courts ruled that a claim that terms like “soy milk” and “almond milk” would confuse consumers was nonsense. “The crux of the claims is that a reasonable consumer might confuse plant-based beverages such as soymilk or almond milk for dairy milk, because of the use of the word ‘milk,’” the US District Court for the Northern District of California wrote, dismissing the case. “The claim stretches the bounds of credulity. Under Plaintiffs’ logic, a reasonable consumer might also believe that veggie bacon contains pork, that flourless chocolate cake contains flour, or that e-books are made out of paper.”

A Florida case directly examined free speech rights as they apply to food labels. Skim milk is routinely fortified with vitamin A (which prevents blindness, and which is removed in the skimming process). A law in Florida prohibited producers of milk and milk products from selling their products if the vitamin A was left out, demanding that milk without added vitamin A be called “imitation skim milk.” A small Florida milk producer sued, arguing that its product was skim milk and that it should be able to be labeled that way. The courts sided with the milk producer.

And finally, a nearly identical law in Arkansas last year was suspended by an injunction. “Tofurky is likely to prevail on its arguments that its labeling is neither unlawful nor inherently misleading and that Tofurky’s commercial speech warrants First Amendment protection,” the judge in that case concluded. The injunction is still in effect, preventing Arkansas from enforcing its law while the court battle is ongoing.

The free speech question

Does it even make sense to say that a creamery or Tofurky manufacturer has a right to free speech? The answer is yes.

The First Amendment can be applied to commercial speech — though the law is a bit complicated. In the 1940s, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that there were no First Amendment protections for purely commercial speech. By the 1970s, the Court had reconsidered that and overturned it in 1976.

In 1980, the Court supplied the rules for First Amendment protections on commercial speech that are still applied today. Those rules are called the “Central Hudson” test because they were laid out in Central Hudson Gas and Electric Corp. v. Public Service Commission.

Here are the rules: First, commercial speech “must concern lawful activity and not be misleading.” Supporters of Louisiana’s law might argue that the term “almond milk” is misleading, while opponents argue that consumers know perfectly well what almond milk is — that, as Utah Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) put it, “No one buys almond milk under the false illusion that it came from a cow. They buy almond milk because it didn’t come from a cow.”

“There’s nothing misleading about the name of a veggie burger, or vegan hot dog, or seitan bacon,” Jessica Almy, an attorney and director of policy at the Good Food Institute, told me when we spoke about a similar Missouri case. “The packages clearly disclose that this is plant-based food that has the taste or texture of this familiar food.”

“There is not one consumer complaint to the AG’s office ever filed,” Amanda Howell, co-counsel on the Louisiana case, told me. “All plant-based products I’ve seen are doing their best to make sure consumers know that they’re plant-based.”

Even if the speech concerns lawful activity and is not misleading, the government can still regulate it. But it has to meet the following standards: The government must have a “substantial interest” at stake, the regulation must “directly and materially advance the government’s substantial interest,” and “the regulation must be narrowly tailored.”

There’s a strong case that bans on “veggie burger” and “tofu sausage” labels don’t meet this standard. “Tofurky Co.’s packaging and marketing materials clearly indicate that their products are plant based and accurately convey the products’ ingredients,” the ACLU wrote in the Arkansas lawsuit. “Consumers are not likely to be confused by the appropriate use of the word ‘meat’ or related terms on vegetarian or vegan products. A consumer who is looking for food that has the flavor, texture, and appearance of bacon but was not derived from a live pig would find the label ‘veggie bacon’ more useful than a label that says only ‘plant-based protein.’”

In the Louisiana case, “the Act does not meet the Central Hudson test, because the government’s interest in restricting the speech is not substantial, and the law does not directly advance that interest and is not narrowly tailored to serve that interest,” the lawsuit filed today argues. “The Act further does not meet the requirements of the Central Hudson test, because its stated purpose is protectionist favoritism of specific state industries.”

“It’s bemusing that these laws keep getting passed,” Howell told me. “It’s bemusing that given the win in Arkansas the states don’t see these laws as clear losers. It’s a waste of state resources and it’s insulting to all consumers. Passing laws to protect one industry over another is not the job of our government.”

The argument against the Louisiana law is one that has prevailed in court in other cases. It is exhausting, and somewhat frustrating, to be fighting it yet again. It’s past time for meat companies to move past trying to outlaw their competition and toward addressing the problems that are driving consumers toward plant-based meat: environmental concerns, the mistreatment of slaughterhouse workers, animal cruelty, and public health.

Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. Twice a week, you’ll get a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges: improving public health, decreasing human and animal suffering, easing catastrophic risks, and — to put it simply — getting better at doing good.

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Today's News:

The Office of Special Counsel on Thursday ordered Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue to reimburse taxpayers for using an official event to promote President Donald Trump’s reelection, a violation of ethics laws that prohibit certain political activity by executive branch employees.

Perdue's reprimand comes after the USDA chief has increasingly blurred the lines between his public duties and his political support for Trump, as POLITICO reported on Monday.

At an event with Trump and North Carolina food producers in August, meant to showcase the Agriculture Department’s coronavirus relief efforts, Perdue offered a lengthy endorsement of the president that sent the audience into a chant of “Four more years!” The secretary praised Trump as a champion for “forgotten people” and a tireless worker with “business speed, not government speed,” among other plaudits.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan watchdog group, filed a formal complaint that Perdue’s remarks were a clear violation of the Hatch Act. The special counsel's office on Thursday concluded that Perdue had indeed crossed the line and ordered him to reimburse the government for travel expenses and other costs of his involvement in the North Carolina event.

“Taken as a whole, Secretary Perdue’s comments during the August 24 event encouraged those present, and those watching remotely, to vote for President Trump’s reelection,” the office wrote. “His first words were not about USDA, but about the president’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns.”

“Provided that immediate corrective action is taken and the U.S. Treasury is reimbursed for such costs, OSC will decline to pursue disciplinary action and instead consider this file closed with the issuance of the cure letter,” it added.

The special counsel’s office also noted that, when asked to explain Perdue’s remarks, USDA argued that “at no point did the secretary encourage or direct the crowd to vote for the president,” but merely “predicted future behavior based on the president’s focus on helping ‘forgotten people,’” farmers and unemployed workers. But the office said that USDA “offered no legal basis for its conclusion.”

The department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the final decision.

Ethics authorities have already issued warnings to a dozen Trump administration officials for violating the Hatch Act, but Perdue’s straightforward appeal to reelect Trump was seen as especially flagrant.

“Even in an administration that has racked up a record number of Hatch Act violations, it is still shocking to see a Cabinet secretary violate the law in such an egregious manner,” said CREW Executive Director Noah Bookbinder in a statement.

White House chief of staff Mark Meadows hosted a large wedding for his daughter that appeared to violate a Georgia order and city of Atlanta guidelines aimed at stopping the spread of Covid-19, an Atlanta newspaper reported Thursday.

Photos of the event show that social distancing guidelines were not followed during the May 31 nuptials at the Biltmore Ballrooms Atlanta, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

About 70 guests, including U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, wore tuxedos and ball gowns but no masks at the indoor wedding, and photographs show groups of people clustered closely together in the same room throughout the evening, the newspaper said.

Gov. Brian Kemp’s orders at the time banned gatherings of more than 10 people. The governor later loosened some coronavirus restrictions.

The Biltmore Hotel was one of Atlanta's most lavish gathering places for many years after it opened in 1924. According to its website, the building still features “original handcrafted plaster relief ceilings, restored crystal chandeliers, Palladian windows and Tennessee marble floors."

Neither Meadows' staff nor the person who is listed as operations manager for the Biltmore Ballrooms responded to emailed requests for comment from The Associated Press on Thursday.

The weekend of the Atlanta wedding was a chaotic one in Washington, D.C., and across the country, as protests over racial injustice escalated into violence in some cities.

In the nation's capital, Secret Service agents at one point rushed Trump to an underground White House bunker previously used during terrorist attacks. The West Wing was mostly empty, and many staffers were told to stay home to avoid the protests. Meadows was out of town celebrating his daughter’s wedding, the AP reported at the time.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden at a campaign stop in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, on September 30. | Alex Wong/Getty Images

A fast, giant reconciliation bill could set the stage for a successful presidency.

If former Vice President Joe Biden wins the presidential election in November, he will almost certainly take office amid an ongoing public health and economic crisis that’s in urgent need of a big bill with a big price tag. His biggest obstacle will be GOP obstruction.

It would be politically advantageous for Senate Republicans to pass a stimulus package as they head into the election, but they are instead blocking it. Back during the Great Recession, they were reluctant to cooperate with Barack Obama on a stimulus bill, which Obama got done eventually by peeling off three Republicans. Two of those are out of the Senate now, and the third very possibly will be by next year.

If Biden wins, he’ll likely have control of both houses of Congress, but a simple majority isn’t good enough in the Senate — you need 60 votes to pass the kind of bill needed. Where Obama needed three Republican votes, Biden will very optimistically need five or six, and likely more than that.

The Biden camp’s current position on the filibuster appears to be that they will give Republicans a chance to negotiate in good faith before they even try to do anything extreme. The difficulty, as Jonathan Chait writes, is that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell already ran interference on this play in 2009, dragging Senate Democrats into 12 months of ultimately pointless negotiations that sapped progressive enthusiasm for health reform while allowing ugly process stories to dominate the news agenda.

“To allow the exact same Republican leader to fool them with the exact same trick,” Chait writes, “would be the proverbial definition of insanity.”

As my colleague Ezra Klein emphasizes, there’s simply no good defense of the filibuster on the merits other than attachment to the status quo. Nonetheless, you can’t take the politics out of politics. Nothing Biden says is going to make wavering senators decide to leap out of the gate with a rule change.

Instead, avoiding failure means recognizing two key points.

Breaking the filibuster is possible, but it will take a very particular set of circumstances and it would be reckless for Biden to stake his presidency on the idea that he’ll get it done.

The other thing to keep in mind: The Obama administration made a series of avoidable errors in how it handled the linked issues of economic stimulus, health care reform, and George W. Bush’s tax cuts. Biden does not face the exact same issues that his former boss had. But like Obama, Biden wants to stimulate the economy, expand the social safety net, and roll back his predecessor’s regressive tax policies.

What he really needs to do to make headway on all that is tackle it all at once.

Embracing the miracle of budget reconciliation

The filibuster, it turns out, has a huge loophole — the budget reconciliation process.

Reconciliation is weird. First, Congress needs to adopt a budget resolution (which it doesn’t always do) laying out tax and spending priorities for the future. These resolutions are not laws, the president doesn’t have to sign them, and they pass by simple majority vote. Then with a budget in place you get to write one — but only one — bill that aims to “reconcile” national tax and spending priorities with the framework laid out in the budget. This reconciliation bill cannot be filibustered. It also cannot change Social Security, or otherwise make big legislative changes that are not directly focused on the budget.

At Vox, we have often focused on the limits the reconciliation process places on what can be achieved on climate policy or aspirations for Medicare-for-all. A reconciliation bill also needs to reduce the budget deficit over the long run.

But while these limits are very real, they also do open up some fairly large horizons.

In particular, a reconciliation bill can do the following:

• Increase the generosity of the social safety net
• Raise taxes on the rich
• Impose the tax increases after the safety net increases, generating short-term stimulus

Obama did not handle his legislative agenda this way. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was a ring-fenced stimulus measure that launched no new programs and was not “paid for” in any way, so it required 60 votes in the Senate. And Obama wanted to use the looming expiration of the Bush tax cuts later in his term as leverage to get a bipartisan tax bill that expanded the middle-class cuts while raising taxes on the rich done.

That left Obama’s health care bill as a freestanding entity, one which ultimately did use the reconciliation process, but which was not designed to stimulate the economy, and thus had benefits only come online years after enactment.

But with a Senate majority — and if Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi can convince Biden to move fast — Democrats can do it all.

What an emergency reconciliation bill could achieve

Reconciliation does, of course, have very real limits. It’s hard to use it to ban fossil fuel extraction, to legalize undocumented immigrants, or to alter labor law. But from the right point of view, these are the virtues of reconciliation. The topics it won’t let Democrats touch are precisely the areas where moderates have the most qualms about a majority rules Senate. What top Democrats need to do is convince nervous moderates that a very aggressive reconciliation strategy is the key to getting the left off their back.

Consider the following ideas Biden has embraced:

• Creating a new universal child allowance to help parents and slash child poverty.
• Creating a fully funded rental housing voucher program to ensure that every family that needs help gets it.
• Expanding the Affordable Care Act to cover millions more and make coverage more generous for those who get it.
• A climate plan that centers investments in clean energy, rather than taxes on dirty energy.
• A huge increase in funding to low-income school districts.

Biden does not need to treat these ideas as separate from the short-term need to stimulate the economy. He can simply do all five of them, and throw in a short-term boost to unemployment insurance and state/local budgets and some cash for specific public health interventions. Then the long-term increases in spending can be offset by enacting his proposed tax increases on the rich. That will ensure the deficit falls over the long run. But since the short-term deficit is not a problem and the whole idea is to stimulate the economy, the tax cuts can be delayed until 2023.

Legislating in this manner would cut against a lot of congressional traditions. The budget would need to get written quickly, with most of the work effectively done in the lame-duck period. And a sprawling piece of legislation that touches on the jurisdictions of many committees would need to be written via a centralized process.

But this is how Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell handled the ACA repeal and tax cut battles of 2017 and 2018 when they controlled both chambers of Congress — sharply curtailing the committee process in the name of speed.

To get it done, Biden needs to convince members of Congress that it’s in their collective interest for him to have a successful presidency with a roaring economy and real accomplishments. And if they don’t want to curb the filibuster, they need to get the job done with a massive reconciliation bill. Once that’s done, Biden can pivot to the filibuster.

A minimum wage fight for the ages

Or, Biden can turn to a fight over his proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.

This is a great issue to fight on for several reasons.

• A bill has already been written and passed the House, so it can just be done again.
• It’s overwhelmingly popular, with 67 percent support according to Pew and 68 percent support according to Data for Progress.
• These poll results have held up in real world field tests, with minimum wage ballot initiatives passing in Arkansas, Missouri, Colorado, and Maine in recent years.
• The issue contains very little in the way of complicated moving pieces to negotiate over; Republicans either need to say yes or no to it.
• A minimum wage increase clearly requires a new act of Congress, so recalcitrance on the part of Senate Republicans doesn’t simply ratchet up pressure on the executive branch to take unilateral action.

This last point is important and underrated. The GOP was often able to weaponize its intransigence against Obama into coalition-wrecking infighting. So rather than Republicans taking the blame for inaction on climate change and immigration, protesters came to blame Obama for not unilaterally blocking the Keystone XL pipeline or halting immigration enforcement.

But the minimum wage is a popular issue. It’s popular in all kinds of geographies. It contains very little complexity. And only Congress can act on it. Biden can show up at any state in the union and find local politicians and workers happy to rally with him on behalf of a wage hike. And the focus will remain squarely on the GOP.

Under those circumstances, maybe Biden’s optimistic rhetoric about the opposition party would prove prescient. Maybe the “between six and eight Republicans who are ready to get things done” would emerge.

Not only could Biden then sign a minimum wage increase, he’d have the ability to pivot to bipartisan legislation on popular priorities like the DREAM Act, money-raising investments in making sure rich people pay their taxes, and a big new infrastructure bill. That would be a very successful term, which is precisely why I think it’s unlikely Republicans will allow it, but if they do that’s great. If not, the hammer.

After the filibuster

The point of all this: A fight over the minimum wage, unlike one over court-packing or statehood for Washington, DC, or comprehensive immigration reform, is what genuinely might move wavering senators into deciding that they’ve had enough.

If American politics amounts to nothing but symbolic culture war posturing over Goya beans and the singing of the national anthem at NFL games, then it’s vulnerable Senate Democrats more than anyone who stand to lose. Empowering a left-wing policy agenda doesn’t necessarily help them, but totally neutering a moderate one could endanger their seats.

Biden’s task would be twofold — convincing moderates to be bold in the fact of GOP obstructionism on an overwhelmingly popular issue, and persuading them that he is willing to take the heat from the base in terms of blocking legislation they fear.

What should follow instead is a series of lower-profile reforms that nonetheless all poll well across the country:

• Admitting new states, potentially including Guam and the US Virgin Islands along with DC and Puerto Rico.
• Automatic voter registration to make voting easy, stop needing to waste money on voter registration drives, and calm down the perennial wrangling over ID laws.
• Strict curbs on partisan gerrymandering.

Expanding the Supreme Court is very unlikely to be popular with voters, absent concrete, unpopular action by the Court.

But expanding the size of federal district and circuit courts to keep pace with the increase in the volume of cases since the last expansion would be a good idea and serve as a shot across the bow of the high court. Beyond process issues, a filibuster-free Senate would let Democrats move forward with other popular legislation like marijuana legalization, universal background checks, creating a path to citizenship for most long-term undocumented residents, and a public option for generic pharmaceutical manufacturing to increase competition and keep prices down.

This would be a historic record of progressive achievement, and many voters would like it. But Biden would need to take it upon himself to keep losing ideas like drastically curtailing immigration enforcement, excessively broad student debt cancellation, reparations, or banning private health insurance off the table.

A post-filibuster Senate would be flying without a net, and vulnerable senators don’t want to walk the plank, nor anger party leaders. After winning the primary with more moderate stances, Biden is ideally positioned to make the case both privately and publicly that he understands the importance of running on popular ideas and recognizes that there’s an ample list of them for Democrats to focus on if they can restore Congress’s legislative capacity.

A legacy of healing

In his rhetoric, Biden is not really a policy-first kind of politician.

Before Covid-19, he tended to define his candidacy in terms of healing the moral and psychic wounds of the Trump era. And for the past six months, he’s been heavily focused on the pandemic itself. Biden’s primary super PAC was called “Unite The Country,” illustrating his key campaign theme that a low-key, decent, widely respected veteran politician with a moderate platform can end the era of toxic political polarization.

It’s a great message. But if Biden thinks that his personal charm can bring back the low-polarization Senate he remembers from his service there in the 1970s and ’80s he’s mistaken. And if he genuinely tries to do that, he’s setting himself up for catastrophic failure. Times have changed, the media has changed, institutions have changed, and incentives have changed. The good old days aren’t coming back.

Still, Biden can break the toxic allure of obstruction by refusing to be obstructed.

McConnell’s key insight back in 2009 was that if you block everything, the consequences of failure ultimately hurt the president and his party. But if you’re an even slightly vulnerable member of Congress, what’s the point in casting futile “no” votes against popular bills that pass anyway?

Majority rule, more than anything else, promises to bring back bipartisanship. An empowered majority makes it potentially worthwhile for members of the minority party to come to the table and try to win concrete small-scale concessions in exchange for their votes.

Changes to bring back some semblance of political equality to America’s voting system and legislatures would have an even more salutary effect. We know from the success of governors like Larry Hogan in Maryland, Charlie Baker in Massachusetts, and Phil Scott in Vermont that Republicans can still win elections on a level playing field. What they’d have to do is put a less-unreasonable, more-disciplined foot forward as they attempt to appeal to the interests and ideas of a majority of the electorate.

Getting there would take a fair amount of hardball, but unlike musing about friendly chats with McConnell over a couple of glasses of bourbon, it could actually work. And along the way, greatly ameliorating a number of egregious social problems.

Will it happen? After living through the past nine months, I hesitate to tell anyone to hope for good things. But a tenacious Biden presidency could make it happen.

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President Trump returns to the White House from Walter Reed medical center on Monday. | Win McNamee/Getty Images

The president’s unhinged performance squandered any goodwill he may have garnered.

One day after President Donald Trump posted a video on his Twitter account that raised more questions about his health than it answered, he called into Maria Bartiromo’s Fox Business show for his first live interview since he announced his positive test for the coronavirus nearly a week ago.

Trump sounded hoarse, but ultimately the interview will likely raise more questions about his mental than physical health. That’s because over the course of an hour, Trump made comments that were nonsensical — even by his standards — about a variety of topics, including the coronavirus and how he possibly got it, and his desire that his political rivals be prosecuted for unspecified crimes just weeks out from the election.

The interview began with Trump announcing, “I’m not going to waste my time on a virtual debate” and that he will pull out of next week’s scheduled second debate with Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, which is to be held remotely because of Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis.

Trump clearly wanted people to believe that his reasons for doing so are about his objections to the format, but the rest of his public therapy session with Bartiromo suggested his team might also have concerns about the debate turning out to be even more of a debacle than the widely panned performance at the first debate last week.

“Remember this: When you catch it you get better, and then you’re immune”

As you’d expect, Bartiromo began by asking Trump a string of questions about his health and how he’s feeling after his hospitalization and at least two coronavirus-related health crises. Trump responded with wild boasts — “I‘m back because I’m a perfect physical specimen, and I’m extremely young” he claimed — and dangerous lies.

Echoing the line he’s recently been pushing about how Americans shouldn’t let the coronavirus dominate their lives, Trump told Bartiromo, “Remember this: When you catch it you get better, and then you’re immune.”

But not everyone gets better. The coronavirus has killed 210,000 Americans and counting and has ruined the health of thousands of others who survived. Furthermore, there are documented cases of people being infected more than once, so it is not true that someone who gets Covid-19 ends up being “immune.”

As the White House refuses to say when Trump’s last negative coronavirus test occurred — fueling speculation that he may have exposed Biden to it at last week’s presidential debate — Trump suggested he might’ve gotten infected by Gold Star families at an event that took place the day after a reckless event nominating Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, which has been linked with a number of cases.

“I met with Gold Star families. I didn’t want to cancel that,” he said. “I can’t say, ‘Back up’ ... they wanna hug me and they wanna kiss me, and they do.”

Blaming military families for his coronavirus diagnosis is on brand for Trump, but there’s no reason to believe it’s true. And instead of doing robust contact tracing to determine the origins of the White House case cluster, the Trump administration has instead tried to sweep the whole issue under the rug and move on with campaigning as quickly as possible.

Regardless of how he got it, Trump wants people to believe he’s the first person in the world to contract the coronavirus and feel better less than a week later. Despite his haggard voice and sickly appearance in the Twitter video he posted Wednesday, Trump told Bartiromo he feels “perfect.” He said he hadn’t been tested for coronavirus recently but added, “I’m essentially very clean.”

Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric about Democrats is completely over the top

On the topic of Wednesday’s vice presidential debate, Trump’s analysis was basically limited to smearing Sen. Kamala Harris as a “communist” and “monster.” Without a shred of irony, Trump repeatedly made dark insinuations about Biden’s health, claiming at one point that the former vice president “won’t make it two months as president.”

But arguably even more unhinged was Trump’s repeated calls for Attorney General Bill Barr to bring charges against Biden, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton for unspecified crimes, just weeks before the presidential election.

“Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for crimes — the greatest political crime in the history of our country — then we’ll get little satisfaction,” he said. “And that includes Obama and it includes Biden ... we have everything ... I say, Bill, we have plenty.”

Later, as Bartiromo tried to bring the interview to an end, Trump shouted, apropos of nothing, “Why isn’t Hillary Clinton being indicted?!”

To be clear, Trump is not making a credible accusation in saying that Biden, Obama, or Clinton actually committed crimes. But he appears to be trying to recreate October 2016, when he exploited the FBI’s renewed attention on the Clinton email investigation to damage her just enough to eek out his victory in the Electoral College.

The problem for Trump is that polls currently show him trailing Biden by about nine points nationally — a spread far wider than the lead Clinton enjoyed over Trump at a comparable point in the 2016 campaign. Instead of grappling with that reality, however, Trump told Bartiromo “I don’t believe the polls” and touted MAGA boat parades and truckers.

“They have a boat thing, they have 5,000 boats, they have thousands of trucks all over the country. I don’t believe the polls,” he said.

While it might be tempting to surmise that Trump’s compromised health has resulted in his odd behavior since his coronavirus diagnosis — including a number of bizarre photo ops and incoherent, angry binges of posting on Twitter — the truth is all of this is more or less on brand for Trump.

For instance, during his interview with Bartiromo, Trump repeatedly made a total mess out of easy questions about what he hopes to accomplish in a second term. But mangling softball questions of that sort has been a staple of his Fox News interviews going back months.

Ultimately, to the extent that Trump’s interview with Bartiromo indicates he’s feeling better physically, that’s a good thing. But amid questions about the side effects of his ongoing Covid-19 treatments, he will need to do more to convince voters he is mentally and emotionally prepared for the rigors of the presidency — and the campaign trail.

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Participants hold signs while protesting the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act in New York on July 29, 2017. | Albin Lohr-Jones/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

Many voters simply don’t believe a politician could hold toxic policy stances on health care.

Prior to the passage of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, health insurance companies could (and routinely did) decline to offer coverage to patients with preexisting health conditions. This behavior is common sense from the standpoint of insurance underwriting — nobody is going to sell you a homeowners’ insurance policy if your house is already on fire — and the idea that it should be allowed is a straightforward aspect of free market thinking.

Congressional Democrats and President Barack Obama banned the practice. But Donald Trump and congressional Republicans tried to bring it back with their various ACA repeal efforts, and this has become one of Democrats’ most potent political attacks against Republicans. Not only did Republicans try to scrap these regulations back in 2017 and 2018, they are still trying to scrap them in the form of a lawsuit pending at the Supreme Court — even though Trump himself keeps lying and claiming he supports these protections.

Some people believe him. And according to Sarah Kliff and Margot Sanger-Katz of the New York Times, some of them believe him because they recognize that his real position is politically toxic:

“There is not a single guy or woman who would run for president that would make it so that pre-existing conditions wouldn’t be covered,” said Phil Bowman, a 59-year-old retiree in Linville, N.C. “Nobody would vote for him.”

Mr. Bowman cast his ballot for President Trump in 2016, and supports him in this election as well.

Bowman is, of course, mistaken. But the heuristic he’s using isn’t crazy. I don’t really know anything about Al Gross, the independent running to unseat Sen. Dan Sullivan in Alaska, but if someone told me that Gross wants to ban fossil fuel extraction I wouldn’t believe him. Why? Because even though there are plenty of Americans who do want to ban fossil fuel extraction, anyone running on that platform in Alaska would obviously lose, so there’s just no way he's doing it.

But in Trump’s case, the inference is wrong. It’s true that his position on preexisting conditions is politically toxic. But it’s still his position. And there’s a long tradition of Republicans taking advantage of voter incredulity in this way.

The politics of incredulity

The Kliff/Sanger-Katz story reminded me of Robert Draper’s reporting from the 2012 cycle on the challenges that the then-new Priorities USA Super PAC faced in trying to develop effective ads to use against Sen. Mitt Romney.

One of their first ideas was to take note of the fact that Romney was advocating a bunch of unpopular ideas, and run ads highlighting that. It didn’t work, because the actual Romney policy mix — huge long-term cuts in Medicare in order to create budget headroom for large tax cuts for the rich — sounded so absurd (emphasis added):

Burton and his colleagues spent the early months of 2012 trying out the pitch that Romney was the most far-right presidential candidate since Barry Goldwater. It fell flat. The public did not view Romney as an extremist. For example, when Priorities informed a focus group that Romney supported the Ryan budget plan — and thus championed “ending Medicare as we know it” — while also advocating tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, the respondents simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing. What became clear was that voters had almost no sense of Obama’s opponent.

Since Romney’s defeat, Republicans have invested a lot of time and energy into being mad about the ways Democrats attacked his character.

I cover economic policy for a living, and have done so for 17 years now. So I know that a lot of smart, competent people who are kind and friendly in their interpersonal behavior sincerely believe that depriving working and middle-class families of economic resources to reduce taxation on the rich is the right thing to do. I am not sympathetic to that agenda, but a healthy number of decent people do think that way, and they are extremely influential in Republican Party politics.

But most voters find these ideas so outlandishly bad that they’ll only believe someone espouses them if you can convince them first that the person in question is a heartless monster. Priorities USA ultimately did, somewhat wrongly, convince people to think of Romney this way, and in doing so succeeded in driving home the larger (and completely accurate) point that these were his policy ideas.

Still, it’s continually a struggle. Consider what happened when congressional Republicans tried to respond to 9/11 with a capital gains tax cut (emphasis added):

The struggle really began less than 48 hours after the terrorist attack, when Bill Thomas, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, tried to ram through a sharp cut in the capital gains tax. Even opponents of the capital gains tax generally acknowledge that cutting it does little to stimulate the economy in the short run; furthermore, 80 percent of the benefits would go to the wealthiest 2 percent of taxpayers. So Mr. Thomas signaled, literally before the dust had settled, that he was determined to use terrorism as an excuse to pursue a radical right-wing agenda.

A month later the House narrowly passed a bill that even The Wall Street Journal admitted ‘’mainly padded corporate bottom lines.’’ It was so extreme that when political consultants tried to get reactions from voter focus groups, the voters refused to believe that they were describing the bill accurately. Mr. Bush, according to Ari Fleischer, was ‘’very pleased’’ with the bill.

The point is simply that the roots of this dynamic are deep, and Trump is only somewhat incidental to them.

On a policy level, the Republican Party is deeply committed to a profoundly unpopular world view that says that progressive taxation to support broad social programs is immoral (see former Bush administration economist Greg Mankiw’s thoughts on moral philosophy) and inimical to economic growth. But these ideas are very unpopular, so Republican Party politicians tend to obscure them with deceptive rhetoric and try to keep the focus of national politics on other topics.

Consequently, people who align with Republicans on broad values themes — whether opposition to abortion rights, love of guns, patriotism, or panic at the thought of a diversifying country — find it simply not credible that their champions are actually running on a politically toxic agenda that would clearly lose elections.

The case for normalization

This adds up to a powerful case for Trump’s opponents to try to “normalize” his presidency — to try to focus more media attention on the banal policy stakes in the election and less on the president’s bizarre personal behavior and scandals. Conservative writer Charles Fain Lehman coined the term “diminishing marginal offensiveness” to describe the phenomenon in which new outrageous conduct does nothing to further erode the standing of a president who has been unpopular from the beginning.

By contrast, Trump’s opposition to raising the minimum wage is even less popular than his overall rating. A solid 64 percent of the public says it favors higher taxes on the rich. And there’s overwhelming public support for stricter air pollution rules.

But the fact that the minimum wage, higher taxes for the wealthy, the stringency of clean air rules, and a dozen other “normal” policy issues are on the ballot is rarely a focus of media coverage. To the extent that voters hear about these issues, it tends to come from Democrats’ ads where, as we have seen, it is somewhat challenging to get voters to believe that anyone could seriously be running on GOP economics.

That’s why Sean McElwee of Data for Progress told me that an effective use of time as someone nervous about the future of the country is to “harass you and other journalists personally to get you to cover health care instead of whatever else is in the news.” In the real world, journalists cover all kinds of stories. But which topics get flood-the-zone style treatment largely depends on audience response.

My colleague Dylan Scott has written that if Trump gets his way on health care, 20 million Americans could lose insurance, and Joe Biden’s plan would extend coverage to 25 million people. If those kind of stories routinely went viral, campaign coverage would be more issues-focused, and more people would know that this really is what Trump and other Republicans believe.

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Used couches are a hot property for buyers and sellers alike. | Jose A. Bernat Bacete/Getty Images

The pandemic has people selling and buying old couches like never before.

For Jeremy Adams, a software engineer living in the San Francisco Bay Area, the score was a Pottery Barn sectional for $400 on NextDoor.

For Anne Hersh, it was a $800 sideboard buffet she bought on Facebook Marketplace for $30.

And for Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt, it was a $13,000 Roche Bobois sofa set she got for free from a neighbor.

The furniture resale market is having a moment. With people fleeing cities for more space in the face of coronavirus lockdowns, unemployed millennials moving back home with their parents, and boredom-induced redecorating taking the country by storm, tons of people have been selling their furniture, often at rock-bottom rates. For prowlers like Chizhik-Goldschmidt, Adams, Hersh, and many, many others, their neighbor’s trash is their latest treasure.

“It is like Black Friday every single day, where I can just type a piece of furniture I’m looking for into Facebook Marketplace and buy it for, like, 80 percent off,” Adams gleefully said. He’s been redecorating his apartment with used furniture sold by other engineers leaving the Bay Area. “I will probably never buy another new piece of furniture again.”

Facebook Marketplace, the social media giant’s portal for buying and selling used goods, has seen a spike in furniture action over the last few months, the company told Vox. Furniture listings have increased nearly 100 percent since April.

Over at NextDoor, a local social networking service for neighborhoods, furniture sales were up 28 percent in August 2020, the company said, compared to the same time last year. Pieces from Ikea, Pottery Barn, and Ashley HomeStore are flooding the app.

On AptDeco, a furniture resale marketplace serving New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, listings of furniture have nearly tripled since May, said Reham Fagiri, the company’s co-founder and chief executive.

This all spells for victory for furniture buyers, but it’s not a win-win. Besides the inevitable losses for individual sellers, sales at furniture companies could also be impacted, as shoppers who turn to used furniture might abandon retail all together.

“If resale furniture does continue to soar, there could be more of an impact on the retail part of the market,” said Neil Saunders, a retail analyst and the managing director of GlobalData Retail. “Unlike fashion, where people buy a lot of apparel items in any given year, furniture is purchased more infrequently — so if you buy a dining room table via resale, you’re not likely to go out and buy another one anytime soon from a retailer. This is one of the reasons why players like IKEA are looking more seriously at resale and starting to open new concepts as bolt-ons to the main parts of their business.”

The used-furniture market also illustrates which brands do and don’t have resale value — and some of the findings might actually surprise you.

The coronavirus has city dwellers fleeing their apartments — and turning to the resale market to get rid of their furniture

One large segment of people selling their furniture today are city dwellers leaving for the suburbs, favoring more space and cheaper rent.

During the second quarter of 2020, 51 percent of properties seen in America’s most populated metro areas were in the suburbs, according to Realtor.com. An economist at the real estate company Zillow said in July that 64 percent of homebuyers were looking at the suburbs — a stark contrast from the 2010 US census, which found that eight in 10 Americans lived in cities.

“A lot of our friends and neighbors left the city because they were scared of the pandemic, or realized they needed more space when they were under lockdown and were just desperate to get rid of their stuff,” said Chizhik-Goldschmidt, who picked up her new furniture from a fellow synagogue congregant in New York City’s Upper East Side.

Many have argued that the narrative of American cities facing an empty, apocalyptic future because of coronavirus is a huge exaggeration. But lots of former city residents say the pandemic changed their perspective.

Jessica Green, a mother of 1-year-old twins and a fashion retail associate, has been camping out at her parents’ summer house in New Jersey since May. “It was horrible being trapped inside a tiny apartment with two small children,” she said.

Green, whose lease is up in October, decided to let go of her Brooklyn apartment and is now selling all of her furniture on Facebook Marketplace. Her wares include new pieces from AllModern and Room and Board, which she’s had to “sell for pennies.”

“I didn’t want to deal with paying movers and I’m definitely not looking to pay for storage, so at this point it’s not about making money — it’s about unloading,” Green said. “I would rather just post stuff at prices people will buy.”

Green joined a growing list of young people who moved home during the pandemic due to financial or social hardships. In a September poll from the Pew Research Center, 52 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds reported living with their parents because of Covid-19. Before that, “The highest measured value was in the 1940 census at the end of the Great Depression, when 48% of young adults lived with their parents,” according to the center.

Rebecca Davis recently gave up her Manhattan apartment after fleeing in March to her secondary residence in Florida with her three kids. She convinced her landlord to let her out of her lease and had three weeks to empty her apartment, which was filled with furniture from Pottery Barn, CB2, Article, and Wayfair.

“The hardest part was that I wasn’t on the ground, so I really stuck with selling everything for whatever people wanted to give me,” said Davis, who sold most of her stuff on Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace.

A lot of the flight has been residents living in cities with big tech companies, where rents are rising as a result. Now that many tech employers are allowing employees to work from home indefinitely, it’s hard to justify city rent.

But people are also purging their stuff and fleeing out of panic, said Michael Solomon, a consumer psychologist and marketing professor at the Erivan K. Haub School of Business at Saint Joseph’s University.

“It’s a catharsis of some kind because it means people can start over, leave a city, not be tied down to an old life, and just get rid of stuff and make a positive change,” said Solomon. “Selling all your furniture can be about a restoration sense of agency.”

Covid-19 is pushing people to redecorate

Just as a natural market of sellers popped up, so too have buyers — not necessarily out of the same sense of panic, but from a homebound desire to redecorate. What else are they going to do with their time?

“You go to your nest — it’s what people do to feel safe,” Solomon said. “Medically, politically, environmentally. Nothing is going right, but people can decorate as a creative outlet that also allows them to exert some sort of control, especially when they can’t control anything outside of your four walls.”

Victoria Lesina Smith, a research pharmacist at Cornell Medical Center and a former Brooklyn resident, recently moved her family to New Jersey. She’s been selling much of her furniture from West Elm, Pottery Barn, and Anthropologie on Facebook Marketplace and LetGo, another resale marketplace.

“A lot of this furniture I got when I had my first apartment, and I felt like I’ve grown from that taste,” she said. “You want a clean slate with a new place, as opposed to designing around pieces.”

Consumers like Lesina Smith, who’ve turned to redecorating during the pandemic, are helping spotlight home-improvement companies as one of retail’s few shining spots in an otherwise dismal shopping environment. Home Depot’s revenue rose by 23 percent to $38 billion from May through July, up from $30 billion in the same period last year. Lowe’s same-store sales rose 30 percent in the second quarter to $27 billion, compared with $21 billion in the second quarter of 2019.

“People are using their time at home to do projects and to make the living and working spaces in their houses more comfortable and functional,” said Saunders. “When stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment benefits were paid, a large number of consumers used those funds to do things around the house, including decorating and remodeling.”

Fagiri, AptDeco’s CEO, said the company has seen different segments in home goods rise and fall along with Covid-19 habits.

“With phase 1 of [coronavirus], everyone was saying, ‘Let me get these things for utility, like organization-type products and bookcases,’ and once everyone started realizing they were working from home and doing Zoom school long term, we saw people buying stuff to make home and work more comfortable, like desks,” Fagiri said. “Now we’re seeing people replacing sofas and living-room furniture because they want their homes to be cozy and to upgrade to better-quality pieces.”

Some brands hold their value while others don’t

The resale market for furniture has become way more sophisticated since Craigslist was the only game in town. Platforms like AptDeco provide shipping and disassembly, while many users I spoke to say they prefer Facebook Marketplace because sellers are real people with Facebook profiles.

Of course, this route isn’t for everyone. Facebook Marketplace and NextDoor are convenient ways to buy items locally or within driving distance, but it still requires more time than ordering something online.

There’s also the buyer’s remorse that can come with shopping in the resale market: feeling pressured to beat out other shoppers by buying something immediately, as well as the lack of returns. Not being able to get a sense of a product is another concern that’s been exacerbated by Covid-19, since most sellers are opting for curbside pickup and won’t let strangers into their homes to test-drive a couch or table.

Not all brands are created equal when it comes to resale. On AptDeco, Fagiri said that furniture with the millennial-favorite mid-century design tends to get snatched up quickly. And even though it has a bad reputation, West Elm is one of the most in-demand furniture brands in resale, Fagiri said.

“West Elm typically retains its value; if you spend $1,000, you can definitely sell it at a 30 percent discount,” she said.

Ikea, Fagiri noted, also has a high resale value. “Many shoppers are willing to pay a premium to buy Ikea used because their furniture takes forever to assemble,” she added.

Meanwhile, furniture from Wayfair and sister brands like AllModern also sell for close to their retail price — they’re not priced that high to begin with, plus they’re trendy.

But much to the chagrin of sellers, expensive furniture has a harder time moving in resale. Lesina Smith has found that her (notoriously expensive) Anthropologie furniture has plenty of allure — lots of views and messages on Facebook — but few shoppers are willing to spend so much on the brand’s home goods, even for half off.

Fagiri said high-end brands like Restoration Hardware and Ethan Allan also take longer to sell on AptDeco, and usually sell for a steeper discount.

“The used-furniture shopper is someone who is looking for a deal and has done their research, and a brand like Restoration Hardware doesn’t have the same type of brand equity to Gucci, or another high-end brand that would retain its value,” Fagiri said. “There’s no level of scarcity at Restoration Hardware, and the stuff is expensive. So with a lot of supply, people want deals.”

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There are few things as revealing as a person's search history, and police typically need a warrant on a known suspect to demand that sensitive information. But a recently unsealed court document found that investigators can request such data in reverse order by asking Google to disclose everyone who searched a keyword rather than for information on a known suspect. From a report: In August, police arrested Michael Williams, an associate of singer and accused sex offender R. Kelly, for allegedly setting fire to a witness' car in Florida. Investigators linked Williams to the arson, as well as witness tampering, after sending a search warrant to Google that requested information on "users who had searched the address of the residence close in time to the arson." The July court filing was unsealed on Tuesday. Detroit News reporter Robert Snell tweeted about the filing after it was unsealed. Court documents showed that Google provided the IP addresses of people who searched for the arson victim's address, which investigators tied to a phone number belonging to Williams. Police then used the phone number records to pinpoint the location of Williams' device near the arson, according to court documents. The original warrant sent to Google is still sealed, but the report provides another example of a growing trend of data requests to the search engine giant in which investigators demand data on a large group of users rather than a specific request on a single suspect. "This 'keyword warrant' evades the Fourth Amendment checks on police surveillance," said Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. "When a court authorizes a data dump of every person who searched for a specific term or address, it's likely unconstitutional."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dr. Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD, has today announced the company's next generation mainstream Ryzen processor. From a report: The new family, known as the Ryzen 5000 series, includes four parts and supports up to sixteen cores. The key element of the new product is the core design, with AMD's latest Zen 3 microarchitecture, promising a 19% raw increase in performance-per-clock, well above recent generational improvements. The new processors are socket-compatible with existing 500-series motherboards, and will be available at retail from November 5th. AMD is putting a clear marker in the sand, calling one of its halo products as 'The World's Best Gaming CPU.' With the new Ryzen 5000 series, AMD is keeping a similar structure to the previous generation. The first four processors to market will include products in the key Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 segments, as well as a pair of high-performance parts with Ryzen 9. These will stretch from six cores to sixteen cores, with increased frequencies and increased performance-per-clock, but with no additional increase in power. The processors are still chiplet-based, with one chiplet having either six or eight cores. Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 will have one chiplet, while Ryzen 9 will have two chiplets -- the easy way to identify this is through the amount of L3 cache each processor has. Full details here.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

He's so desperate to keep the state of his health a secret that he's forcing doctors to sign nondisclosure agreements.

Trump's illusion is collapsing, and all of his men cannot put it together again.

The FBI made a shocking announcement on Thursday, saying they’d disrupted a violent plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. From The Detroit News:

"Several members talked about murdering 'tyrants' or 'taking' a sitting governor," an FBI agent wrote in the affidavit. "The group decided they needed to increase their numbers and encouraged each other to talk to their neighbors and spread their message."

The FBI affidavit named six men who were involved in the plot: Adam Fox, Barry Croft, Ty Garbing, Kaleb Franks, Daniel Harris, and Brandon Caserta. FBI agents raided Ty Garbing’s home on Wednesday night. 

The group wasn’t just planning to kidnap Whitmer; they also discussed killing police officers, which prompted one of the militia members they contacted to do the right thing and reach out to law enforcement. Like a lot of extremists, Fox and the other men named in the affidavit were openly plotting and operating on Facebook.

In late June, Fox posted on Facebook a video in which he complained about the state’s judicial system and COVID-19 restrictions on gyms operating in Michigan.

“Fox referred to Governor Whitmer as ‘this tyrant b----,’ and stated, ‘I don’t know, boys, we gotta do something,” according to the court affidavit. “You guys link with me on our other location system, give me some ideas of what we can do.”

Whitmer has faced several challenges from right-wing extremists in the state during the pandemic after she implemented a statewide mask mandate. Michigan’s Republican-packed Supreme Court recently tossed out a law mandating mask coverage, saying the governor did not have the authority to issue it without the approval of the Republican-led state legislature. 

You may recall gun-toting extremists flouted the mask mandate when they turned up at the Michigan Capitol building to protest the lockdown at the height of the pandemic this spring. 

Make no mistake about it, these extremists have been encouraged by Donald Trump.

Michigan has long had militia extremists. Oklahoma City terrorists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols reportedly attended Michigan militia meetings before carrying out the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995. 

The FBI is holding a press conference at 1 PM ET to provide additional information. Stay tuned.

The two Tom the Dancing Bug books, Tom the Dancing Bug: Into the Trumpverse, and The Super-Fun-Pak Comix Reader, are now available. Information about the books, including how to order, and special offers here.

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Donald Trump’s obsession with nondisclosure agreements is well known, but this is next level. During Trump’s mysterious trip to Walter Reed in November 2019, he demanded his doctors sign NDAs—and two doctors who refused to sign weren’t allowed to treat him. That’s important context for interpreting the information his doctors are giving out now about his status with COVID-19.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, already offers patients legal privacy protections, so why did Trump think an extra layer of gag was necessary? And in November 2019, Trump was at Walter Reed unexpectedly, without the staff there having been warned he was coming, for what the White House later claimed was part of a routine physical (except that nothing about it was routine, including the fact that physicals aren’t usually done in multiple parts). But NDAs were required. 

This is all especially relevant now that Trump has COVID-19 and his doctors are offering conflicting timelines of when he got sick and when he started which medications. They’re refusing to say when he last tested negative for the virus. They’re telling the public Trump is doing great even as they are prescribing him medications intended for seriously ill people.

Trump’s doctors are not telling the public information we need to have not about Donald Trump the individual but about how well the president of the United States is or isn’t functioning. Can he breathe? When was he potentially exposing other people to a deadly virus, and did he know he was doing so? Is his personality being affected by steroids?

But his policy is to lie, even when it’s obvious, and, we now learn, to only allow himself to be treated by doctors who will sign nondisclosure agreements. We can’t trust anything we’re being told about Trump’s health. He’s telling us that himself, again and again.

Mike Pence was asked point blank at Tuesday night's vice presidential debate to explain Donald Trump's plan to protect health care coverage for people with preexisting conditions. And despite Pence's earlier claim that such a plan exists, he ran for the hills.

"You mentioned earlier, Vice President Pence, that the president was committed to maintaining protections for people with preexisting conditions," said moderator Susan Page of USA Today. "Tell us specifically, how would your administration protect Americans with preexisting conditions to have access to affordable insurance if the Affordable Care Act is struck down?"

Pence had two minutes. He never once used the words "preexisting conditions" in his answer, nor did he even feign an answer to the question. Instead, he changed the subject. 

"Let me just say," Pence said, "I couldn’t be more proud to serve as vice president to a president who stands without apology for the sanctity of human life."

Oh, apparently this was a question about abortion.

"I’m pro-life," Pence continued. "I don't apologize for it." 

Having skipped the preexisting condition question altogether, Pence then decided to make his own query: "Are you and Joe Biden going to pack the court if Judge Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed?"

Harris, appropriately, decided she wasn’t obligated to answer Pence’s question either. But the subject of Pence's epic dodge also never came up again.

Mission accomplished: Trump and Pence don't have a health care plan and they certainly don’t have a plan to protect coverage for people with preexisting conditions. In fact, they've never even tried to explain such a plan and, after tonight, they still haven't. Hey, it’s only a matter of life and death. No biggie.

Here’s the start of that exchange.

It’s not surprising, but the vice presidential debate in Utah on Wednesday between Sen. Kamala Harris and Vice President Mike Pence has consisted of Mike Pence lying a lot. Like a lot a lot. It’s not surprising because the Trump administration lacks any meaningful policy ideas, and has done nothing to build off of the strides the previous Obama administration made in bringing our country back from the last Republican-led economic collapse.

As the questions turned to our economy, the Republican talking point, ringing more and more hollow every day and parroted by Pence, is that Democrats will raise your taxes and Donald Trump created tons of jobs. This, of course, is not true. Then, Pence attacked Biden and Obama, saying that everybody lost their jobs under them and Trump has brought those jobs back. This is also not a real thing. Sen. Harris was tired of this BS line of BS and told the moderator that she had to be given 15 seconds. She only needed seven seconds.

“Joe Biden is responsible for saving America's auto industry, and you voted against it. So let's set the record straight. Thank you.”

No. Thank you.

what about alien ghosts though

The vice presidential debate is happening Wednesday night. So far, besides the slower, quieter, more condescending version of lying that Vice President Pence practices compared to Donald Trump, both candidates have been able to be heard. Pence’s earliest defenses of his and the Trump administration’s late and haphazard handling of the COVID-19 pandemic has been to backhandedly blame the American people for any of the problems we may be facing.

He’s done this by saying that he and Donald Trump “respect the American people” so much that … it’s not much of a defense. In fact it is mostly just a reworking of the old conservative trope of attacking their opponents for not respecting the “troops.” The next vice president of the United States, Kamala Harris, was not going to have that, and schooled Mr. Pence on what “respect” actually means.

SEN. KAMALA HARRIS: Let's talk about respecting the American people. You respect the American people when you tell them the truth. You respect the American people when you have the courage—

At this point, Pence saw that he had just walked into a real bad situation and attempted to interrupt, and Sen. Harris just walked right through this chauvinistic bogus religious zealot prick.

SEN. KAMALA HARRIS:  ...to be a leader speaking of those things that you may not want people to hear but they need to hear so they can protect themselves. But this administration stood on information that if you had as a parent, if you had as a worker knowing you didn't have enough money saved up, and now you're standing in a food line because of the ineptitude of an administration that was unwilling to speak the truth to the American people. So let's talk about caring about the American people. The American people have had to sacrifice far too much because of the incompetence of this administration. It is asking too much of the people. 

Pence tried once again to interrupt and Harris repeated once again what respecting the American people really means.

SEN. HARRIS: It is asking too much of the people. That they would not be equipped with the information that they need to help themselves to protect themselves and their children.

Pence is supposed to be a “Christian” man of some kind, but the lying makes whatever sect of Christianity he’s a part of clearly the work of something dark. 

Before the vice presidential debate got underway in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, Pete Buttigieg dropped by a Fox News pre-debate segment and absolutely leveled the place. This is precisely how you slice and dice a Fox News talking point.

WATCH:

Former US Attorney General Jeff Sessions delivers remarks during a farewell ceremony for Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein at the Robert F. Kennedy Main Justice Building May 9, 2019, in Washington, DC. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

A government watchdog reportedly found that Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein directly pushed to take children away.

Trump administration officials have repeatedly denied that they pursued a policy of intentionally separating immigrant families arriving at the southern border in 2018 — depicting the separation of parents from their children as a side effect of a “zero tolerance” policy of prosecuting all border crossers.

A new draft report from a government watchdog obtained by the New York Times shows they were lying.

“We need to take away children,” then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions reportedly told five US attorneys on the border during a meeting in May 2018 (to the lawyers’ alarm), adding that if parents care about their children, they shouldn’t bring them to the US in order to seek “amnesty.”

The Times’s description of the 86-page report from the Justice Department’s inspector general represents a damning indictment of the officials who were at the center of one of the Trump administration’s most heinous immigration policies, which generated widespread protests and came to symbolize his punitive approach to immigration enforcement.

While former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has largely taken the blame for the policy publicly, it turns out that Sessions and his deputy Rod Rosenstein were much more directly involved in pushing for family separations than previously known.

When Chief of Staff John Kelly left the White House, he previously suggested that Sessions, who once infamously cited a Bible passage about law and order to defend the practice, was the architect of family separations.

And according to the Times, Sessions considered separating families to be a feature of the “zero tolerance” policy meant to deter immigrants from attempting to cross the border without authorization.

Rosenstein also emphasized the policy, telling the US attorneys that no children were too young to be separated from their parents. One of the prosecutors, John Bash, decided not to prosecute two cases involving families in which the children were just babies, and Rosenstein told him he should have gone ahead.

Bash later told his staff that the cases should not have been declined: “Per the A.G.’s policy, we should NOT be categorically declining immigration prosecutions of adults in family units because of the age of a child,” he said.

Rosenstein has largely evaded public scrutiny over family separations. But he had defended the practice during an American Bar Association conference in August 2018, arguing that it was consistent with the law concerning unauthorized immigration to the US, which he said must be applied equally to everyone, including those with children.

But for the duration of the zero-tolerance policy, prosecutors actually had a harder time enforcing the law in serious felony cases because they were overwhelmed in trying to prosecute every person who crossed the border without authorization. According to the report, a Texas prosecutor informed the DOJ in 2018 that “sex offenders” were consequently freed from custody. The US Marshals Service was also unprepared for the implementation of the zero-tolerance policy, meaning that it had to divert resources from serving warrants in other cases, the report said.

How the zero-tolerance policy led to family separations

Beginning in mid-2017, the federal government ran a pilot program in El Paso, Texas, under which it began filing criminal charges against anyone who crossed the border without authorization, including parents with minor children — even though many of them intended to seek asylum in the US.

Parents were sent to immigration detention to await deportation proceedings. Their children, meanwhile, were sent to separate facilities operated by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement and, in some cases, released to other family members in the US or foster homes. (Previous administrations would have simply released the families from detention altogether in most cases.)

The Trump administration formalized the policy in May 2018. At least 5,000 families were separated before a California federal court ordered the federal government in June 2018 to reunify the families affected and end the policy.

The federal government, however, neglected to link the children to their parents in its databases, making the reunification process difficult, especially in the hundreds of cases of children who were under the age of 5, including one who was just 4 months old.

Unlike the Trump administration, the Obama administration did not have a policy of separating families, but it did try to detain families together on a wide scale and deport them as quickly as possible during the 2014 migrant crisis. Cecilia Muñoz, director of the Obama administration’s Domestic Policy Council, told the New York Times in 2018 that the administration had briefly considered pursuing family separations but quickly dropped the idea.

“We spent five minutes thinking it through and concluded that it was a bad idea,” she told the Times. “The morality of it was clear — that’s not who we are.”

Senior Trump administration officials, including Nielsen, have repeatedly denied that they pursued a policy of family separation:

Nielsen also told Congress in December 2018 that the administration “never had a policy for family separation.”

It was later revealed that she had, in fact, signed a memo greenlighting the practice, which clearly stated that DHS could “permissibly direct the separation of parents or legal guardians and minors held in immigration detention so that the parent or legal guardian can be prosecuted.”

Amid the Covid-19 pandemic, the administration has tried to carry out what immigrant advocates call a new kind of family separation. This time, it’s pressuring parents already detained within the US to voluntarily separate from their children by presenting them with what the administration has called a “binary choice.” Either allow their children to be placed with relatives or a foster family in the US while the parents remain detained, or stay together as a family in indefinite detention and risk contracting the coronavirus.

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Donald Trump's White House doctor, Dr. Sean Conley, vouched for Trump's infectious well-being in another press release today. As usual, the contents are a bit ... sketchy. Really sketchy, as a host of alarmed doctors pointed out on the news networks and on Twitter.

"The President this morning says ‘I feel great!’ His physical exam and vital signs, including oxygen saturation and respiratory rate, all remain stable and in normal range. He's now been fever-free for more than 4 days, symptom-free for over 24 hours, and is not needed or received any supplemental oxygen since initial hospitalization. Of note today, the President's labs demonstrated detectable levels of SARS-CoV-2 IgG antibodies from labs drawn Monday, October 5th; initial IgG levels drawn late last Thursday night were undetectable. We'll continue to closely monitor, and I will update you as I know more."

There are (ahem) several problems here. First, the mood-altering steroid Trump is taking that Conley has refused to disclose information about is an efficient fever suppressor, so it's not necessarily noteworthy that Trump is "fever-free." His oxygen saturation levels being "in normal range" tells us that he is stable, but not that he is recovered: If his oxygen levels were again falling low enough to require supplemental oxygen, he would immediately have been spirited back to Walter Reed because it would show the tripled-up treatment plan used for Trump was on the verge of failure.

But most weirdly, the antibodies detected on Monday that weren't there on Thursday? Trump was injected with IgG antibodies as part of his treatment. It would be far more alarming if Conley had pumped Trump full of Regeneron's monoclonal antibody therapy and could not find antibodies in tests performed afterwards.

So what we know from Conley’s new press release is that Trump is currently Not Dead, basically ambulatory, and (by omission) still ragingly contagious as he wanders around the virus-riddled White House. We can't take much of anything from the patient's self-declared claims of awesomitude given the mood-altering effects of dexamethasone, and his puffing, huffing performance on returning from the White House seems to indicate that he was still suffering from viral pneumonia—another data point Conley has absolutely insisted on telling the public absolutely nothing about, even as he freely shared details of Trump's other medical tests.

Yeah. Sketchy. Around the internets, real doctors are calling bullpoop on these latest declarations, and you can't really blame them. And yet again, the White House is refusing to say whether they knew Trump was infected before Trump showed up to debate Joe Biden. Not dodging around the question, but refusing to answer it outright.

Nope, he’s not kidding. The White House is continuing to release highly selective data attempting to prove Trump is out of danger when we know, from 210,000 data points and counting, that is not how this disease works. And they’re still hiding when Trump was first known to be infected, as all other evidence suggests it was before the Trump-Biden debate, not afterwards.

The fact that Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett "served as a ‘handmaid’ in Christian group People of Praise," in the words of The Washington Post, is a thing. It's a thing that is concerning to a lot of not evangelical or fundamentalist Christian Americans. Republicans are, however, trying to make that a landmine for Democrats, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell leading the way. They're saying any questions about her rather out-of-the-mainstream practice is an attack on faith. They are in fact itching to have a fight about her religion.

But that's eliding a larger problem: Barrett has been actively trying to cover-up her association with People of Praise and her fundamentalist beliefs, and People of Praise have been helping. This is what Democrats need to be focusing on. The Post reports that while Barrett has disclosed "serving on the board of a network of private Christian schools affiliated with the group," People of Praise will not confirm that she is a member. Furthermore, in the last few years it has "removed from its website editions of a People of Praise magazine — first those that included her name and photograph and then all archives of the magazine itself." Why are her ties to the group being scrubbed and who is helping her do that?

That goes along with Barrett's failure in 2017 and again this year to disclose that she had signed on to a newspaper ad in 2006 taking the most extreme position on abortion possible, advocating for the overturning of Roe v. Wade and going further, saying she  opposed "abortion on demand" and defended "the right to life from fertilization to the end of natural life." That's leaving the door open for banning types of birth control and for investigation and potential prosecution of women who've had miscarriages, the furthest forced birth extremists tend to go. Of course she doesn't want that information in front of the Judiciary Committee or the American public, which supports abortion rights.

So who's covering it up for her? Is the White House advising her to withhold information? Is the Republican-majority Senate  Judiciary Committee staff helping her pick and choose the information senators and the American public get to weigh when considering the nomination? Because it sure seems like a concerted effort, and the kind of thing that raises eyebrows for investigators. What else might she be failing to disclose—and why? This should at least require more time for a more thorough investigation and Democrats should demand that. It's not about her religion: It's about why she is trying to cover up her religion!

Clearly the investigation into Brett Kavanaugh wasn't thorough enough because McConnell and Sen. Chuck Grassley, who was then chair of the committee, wouldn't let it be. They didn't give enough time. That means there are still outstanding questions about Kavanaugh, and big ones. Like who paid his $92,000 country club fees, his $10,500-a-year private school for his kids, his $60,000 to $200,000 credit card debt, and his $1.2 million mortgage before his confirmation hearings. Which is a question for another time and potentially an impeachment investigation when there's a Democratic-controlled Senate. Potentially.

But on this nominee, there needs to be an investigation. The FBI needs to figure out why there was a coordinated effort to cover this information up, why the People of Praise group has been erasing her from existence in their organization, and what else she could be withholding from the committee. It's not about the organization itself: It's about the effort to prevent the Senate and public from knowing. She, and the Republicans, demean the process by hiding things.

There are already serious questions about her fitness to serve. First and foremost, Barrett accepted the nomination in the first place, in these extraordinary circumstances and mere weeks before a presidential election. Then she participated willingly and knowingly in what turned out to be a coronavirus superspreader event that violated the rules the District of Columbia has in place for public gatherings. Yes, the White House is federal land and not governed by D.C.'s ordinances, but it shows an appalling lack of judgement on the part of this would-be justice to participate in the whole fiasco.

But there are also questions about her actual ability to judge. She actually authored a Seventh Circuit opinion last year "that threatened to hurl corporate insurance policies into chaos" and was quickly and quietly withdrawn to allow the lower court judgement she had initially overturned stand. It was an "episode that stunned attorneys and raised questions about her judgment." Because she made an extremely basic and big mistake. She ignored state law, in this case Indiana’s, in her initial ruling. "Her opinion, absolutely, 100 percent, ignored Indiana law with respect to how those things would be decided," one lawyer involved said. "It was the only time in my career where I had to file a brief that raised this point."

It's a given, even among conservatives, that Barrett got this nomination not for her legal qualifications but because of her ideological ones. That's not even debatable in 2020, after the Trump administration and the kinds of judges—even those rated unqualified—he's promoted. What's remarkable is the extent to which Republicans are still committed to covering up her background. That's a problem, and one that gives Democrats absolutely every reason to fight this nomination. Not on religious grounds: on the cover up.

The Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency has asked the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) for the green light to erase its paper trail and destroy internal documents, including records concerning alleged misconduct, as soon as four years from now.

The purpose of the ask to the National Archives is clear, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said. CBP, among the most corrupt law enforcement agencies in the nation, would be able to sabotage investigations into its abuses by simply pressing delete. “That’s why this week, the ACLU of Texas Border Rights Center, along with more than 100 partner organizations, filed a public comment urging NARA to reject CBP’s proposal.”

“CBP misconduct often only becomes public via leaks, investigative reporting, or lawsuits,” the ACLU cautioned, “meaning the loss of internal records could forever bury unknown abuses. For example, the first death of a child in CBP custody in over 10 years was revealed by journalists, after CBP failed to report the death to Congress, as required.” A medical expert later told Congress that Jakelin Ameí Rosmery Caal Maquin, the 7-year-old indigenous girl from Guatemala who died while in CBP custody in December 2018, could have been saved.

Following her death, Congress gave the agency emergency humanitarian funds for food and medical supplies in an attempt to prevent further tragedies. But in a blockbuster report this year, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) said the agency violated law by spending some of those funds on dirt bikes, computer network upgrades, and a canine program. In response to the report, CBP said it would “correct our accounts as recommend by the GAO,” but clearly only because it had been found out.

“Independent lawyers uncovered children held in deplorable conditions at a Border Patrol station in Clint, TX,” the ACLU continued. “Border Patrol’s racist and xenophobic Facebook page was uncovered by a reporter, and the prevalence of sexual harrassment and rape within the agency has been revealed only when survivors and former officials spoke up. Lawsuits have similarly uncovered severe agent misconduct, including kidnapping, sexual assault, and an agent intentionally running over a migrant.” The U.S. has in fact shelled out tens of millions of dollars to settle case allegations of wrongful detention, assault, and death at the hands of border agents.

Those are the kinds of abuses the agency is seeking to forever hide—and it hasn’t been alone. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), another out-of-control federal immigration agency, also asked for—and got—authorization from the National Archives to begin deleting records. While the ACLU and other organizations filed an emergency request seeking to preserve those records, the status of that request is unclear.

Internal records for this truly bloated agency (“CBP employs more than 44,000 Border Patrol agents and CBP officers, and maintains a budget of nearly $17 billion,” the ACLU said) must be preserved as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has also taken truly unprecedented actions in the name of white supremacy. Under a Stephen Miller-led order exploiting the novel coronavirus pandemic, the administration has violated U.S. and international law by blocking thousands of asylum-seekers, including children.

A possible end to the Trump administration within the next couple months could mean we begin a true period of accountability. CBP knows that too. “With systemic failures of oversight, CBP’s abject failure to hold its own personnel accountable, and a complete lack of transparency, the last thing the agency should be permitted to do is purge its own records,” the ACLU said. 

If you want further evidence that Republicanism stands for nothing, that the party is broken, that the shattered remains of whatever "ideas" they once pretended to prop up are now swirling around a toilet bowl in preparation for joining the imaginary alligators of the nation's sewer systems—I know, you don't, but bear with me here—here's Republican freaking Senator Martha McSally going blue-screen after being asked the simple question of whether she still supports Dear Infectious Leader.

Oh, go on. It will be fun. It’s like watching a nature documentary.

Well, that was truly impressive. There may be no more shallow person in America—you can really see the gouge marks, there, where she took an ice cream scoop and scraped off as much integrity as she could manage in order to fit the new role required of principle-averse Republican sycophants. And it really speaks to the Republican Party's state that McSally is not just any Republican, but one chosen by the state party as representative of their highest possible talent.

Could have chosen any Republican in Arizona to fill the vacant Senate seat. Chose her. That's what they went with.

McSally had other humiliating moments during her, ahem, very weird debate with challenging Democrat Mark Kelly. Of special note was her insistence that Kelly was connected to an "extreme left-wing" group with "ideas that are dangerous for Arizona." Asked to explain What The Cactus-Studded Hell she was talking about, she refused to say the name, only continuing her insinuations.

While viewers attempted to parse for themselves just what McSally was trying to claim, Mark Kelly cleared up the mystery: McSally was talking about the gun control group founded by Gabby Giffords, a House Democrat shot in the head in an attempted assassination attempt in 2011.

Giffords is Kelly's wife.

McSally really is the poster child for Republicanism in the Trump era. She used to declare that she had certain specific principles; when Trump said otherwise, she fell in line behind the new stuff. When challenged on her support for Trump's erratic, devoid-of-morality fascism, she flings unrelated talking points at her questioner while the rest of her brain hunkers down in its safe room. Everything is now a conspiracy; every idea is now whatever the pre-prepared party line is this week, and heaven knows what it will be next week.

The whole party is broken. Unfortunately, that means they'll be taking more and more extreme measures to sabotage voting, rather than admit they've lost the plot (Hello, Texas Gov. Abbott!), and unfortunately Donald Trump has demonstrated that breaking laws and spouting conspiratorial insanity is the surest way to radicalize their remaining Fox-tainted base.

But jeez, Martha. Don't you have even a little dignity? That was terrible.

For decades, the American public has been working under the assumption that if someone were nominated to the Supreme Court, that person must be qualified. How else could that individual get to a place where they would even be considered for nomination? That slipped a little with President Ronald Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork, who ended up being rejected even by Republicans—enough of them to sink his confirmation. Everything's changed with Donald Trump, however. First Republicans broke all norms and regular procedures by refusing to even talk to President Barack Obama's nominee, Merrick Garland, for more than half a year before the election. Then we had the Brett Kavanaugh debacle, where the whole country could see the blunt force Republicans would employ to get a guy everyone recognized as the frat-boy bully of their school nightmares onto the court.

Now we've got the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, and an electorate not giving her the benefit of the doubt as to qualifications. CNN reports: "Initial reactions to Barrett are among the worst in CNN and Gallup polling on 12 potential justices dating back to Robert Bork, who was nominated by Ronald Reagan and rejected by the Senate." Barrett has the distinction, along with Kavanaugh, of being "the only two for whom opposition outweighed support in initial polling on their nominations." A plurality does not want her confirmed, 46% to 42%, and 56% say she should recuse herself from any cases resulting from the 2020 election, including 32% of Republicans. Which leads us to the fight Democrats have to have against her confirmation. There's absolutely no downside to Democrats doing everything in their power, limited though it may be, to fight this.

Most of that fight is going to have to be in the Judiciary Committee. The No. 1 thing Democrats should be doing is boycotting the hearings and refusing to allow Lindsey Graham, the chairman, a quorum to conduct most of his business. With any number of Republican senators unavailable at any given time because of quarantine, Democrats need to be nimble and flexible in when they choose to participate. But senators, Democratic or Republican, aren't likely to miss an opportunity to get some video clips of themselves scoring points out there. Knowing they aren't going to give up a chance at their 15 minutes, they need to follow a plan. Chuck Schumer needs to make them do it.

For once, they have to coordinate. They have to find a single plan of attack and stick to it, with their questions coordinated and designed to build a narrative. Already we're seeing the opening—this is a rushed confirmation that Republicans are intent on ramming through before the election and in that rush, they're covering stuff up. We saw the initial evidence of that when Barrett did not submit a newspaper ad she signed on to in 2006 on behalf of a forced-birther group with the materials she provided to the Judiciary Committee—either for this nomination or for her 2017 nomination to an appeals court position. In the ad, she said she opposed "abortion on demand" and defended "the right to life from fertilization to the end of natural life." That's not all: In 2017, The Washington Post reports she didn't disclose her affiliation with the radical Christian group People of Praise. The group has scrubbed all references to her from its website. What else is she hiding?

In pushing that narrative, they should also have the less effective of their members step back. Let Sens. Kamala Harris (she has said she intends to participate), Amy Klobuchar, Mazie Hirono, and Sheldon Whitehouse—the sharpest interrogators—take the lead. They were the sharpest and most effective questioners in the Kavanaugh hearings and we need that acuity again now. 

That's not the only Democratic coordination we need to have happen. Schumer should be quietly working with his conference and with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on measures they can take to gum up the works for the Senate after the almost inevitable vote out of committee happens. There are things like War Powers resolutions Democratic senators can bring to the floor that will take precedent over a confirmation vote. Likewise, there are resolutions—most notably impeachment—that the House can send over that have to be considered before nominations. Note that this kind of coordination could be happening already. We're not supposed to see it. To be most effective, it can't be seen coming. McConnell is likely already figuring out how he can combat such measures, so Democrats have to be as wily in figuring out when and how to spring them. Which they should be working on. Right now.

Stopping this is going to be nearly impossible, barring the coronavirus continuing to sweep through Republican ranks and reducing the number of senators McConnell has available at any given time. But that doesn't mean Democrats are powerless, and it doesn't mean they shouldn't find every possible avenue for getting this delayed past the election. It probably won't work, but they've got to try it anyway.

For one thing, it will give them practice on coordinating their messaging and their efforts to reform the courts when they have the White House and Senate in 2021.