James.galbraith

In March, as New York City plunged into lockdown and became the epicenter of the world’s COVID-19 crisis, a group of “Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, business executives, and venture capitalists” met at the White House to offer help securing PPE for essential workers who had been filmed on the news wearing garbage bags because of the lack of protective gear.

They were asked to meet with Jared Kushner about the Defense Production Act, which would compel companies to produce PPE and help New York out in its dire situation, but that was far from what they got.

According to a new story in Vanity Fair, Kushner told them, “The federal government is not going to lead this response… It’s up to the states to figure out what they want to do.”

“Free markets will solve this,” Kushner added. “That is not the role of government.”

Vanity Fair reports: “One attendee reportedly pointed to a CNN article about New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s calls for help with supplies, which Kushner dismissed as ‘CNN bullshit.’ Kushner reportedly went on: ‘Cuomo didn’t pound the phones hard enough to get PPE for his state… His people are going to suffer and that’s their problem.’ … Though Kushner’s arguments ‘made no sense,’ said the attendee, there seemed to be little hope of changing his mind. ‘It felt like Kushner was the president. He sat in the chair and he was clearly making the decisions.'”

When Jared and Ivanka come slithering back into NYC I hope everyone in NYC remembers that he was fine with New Yorkers suffering and dying and said so explicitly. (He's also clueless about what govt does, but his callous disregard for humanity is worse.) https://t.co/A7duv9eYRl

— Elizabeth Spiers (@espiers) September 18, 2020

The post Jared Kushner Coldly Disregarded Andrew Cuomo’s COVID Aid Pleas to Room of Execs: ‘His People are Going to Suffer and That’s Their Problem’ appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

The House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday unanimously approved the Open Courts Act -- legislation to overhaul PACER, the federal courts' system for accessing public documents. The proposal would guarantee free public access to judicial documents, ending the current practice of charging 10 cents per page for many documents -- as well as search results. From a report: The bill must still be passed by the full House and the Senate and signed by the president. With Election Day just seven weeks away, the act is unlikely to become law during this session of Congress. Still, the vote is significant because it indicates the breadth of congressional support for tearing down the PACER paywall. The legislation is co-sponsored by Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.), whose bill we covered in 2018, and a fellow Georgian, Democrat Hank Johnson. Prior to Tuesday's vote of the House Judiciary Committee, the bill received a strong endorsement from Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.). "It is indefensible that the public must pay fees, and unjustifiably high fees at that, to know what is happening in their own courts," Nadler said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On the day Liberty University announced an investigation into disgraced former president Jerry Falwell Jr’s financial, legal, and real estate dealings, emergency responders in Bedford County, Virginia received a 911 call from Falwell’s wife Becki about her husband, describing “a lot of blood right now.”

Becki had received a call at church from Jerry, who had apparently fallen down the stairs. Becki said she had to break into the couple’s house with a chair.

ICYMI: Becki Falwell Blew Her Son’s Friend After Band Practice: Liberty University Student

HuffPost reports: “‘The more I tell you the name, the more you’re going to understand why we’re not talking to you right now,’ Becki Falwell said. Dispatch logs, obtained by HuffPost via a public records request, state that ‘He won’t let her take him to the hospital as he is stubborn. Caller was not forthcoming.’ But medics and emergency responders arrived at the residence later that night. A responder observed lacerations on Jerry Falwell Jr.’s face, including under his left eye, across the bridge of his nose, and above both his right and left eyes. The responder also recorded in a report that Jerry Falwell Jr. said he hit his head on a trash can, and that there was ‘blood in the area he indicated’ as well as ’empty alcohol containers.’ The officer also noted ‘Jerry had slurred and slowed speach (sic) and would repeat things already asked.'”

The Falwells did not respond to requests for comment from HuffPost.

See all our Jerry Falwell Jr. coverage HERE.

The post Medics Responding to 911 Call from Becki Falwell Found Jerry Falwell Jr. Drunk, Wounded, and Bleeding appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Read 24 remaining paragraphs | Comments

What we all want to hear, he thinks, is that racism is over and we should hate anyone who says otherwise.

[Before, tattoos could apparently be done only by M.D.s.]

From nippon.com:

Japan's Supreme Court for the first time has ruled that tattooing people without a medical license does not constitute a violation of the medical practitioners law….

[T]he top court's Second Petty Bench turned down an appeal by public prosecutors over a suit against a 32-year-old man who tattooed three people. It finalizes a high court ruling that overturned a district court verdict fining the man 150,000 yen.

The Second Petty Bench … said that "tattoos require artistic skills different from medicine, and that it cannot be assumed that doctors do the act exclusively," concluding that the practice is not a medical act.

Thanks to Jenny Wilson for the pointer.

In every election, a small percentage of mail-in ballots get rejected. But this election is likely to have a whole lot of mail-in ballots. And in an election where a record number of voters are expected to cast their ballots by mail, you’re likely to hear a whole lot about ballots that don’t count, especially because voters of color have ballots rejected at a higher rate than white voters.

It’s already happening. In North Carolina, absentee ballots have already been sent back and the state has been updating statistics on those ballots daily. As of September 17, Black voters’ ballots are being rejected at more than four times the rate of white voters, according to the state’s numbers.¹⁶ Black voters have mailed in 13,747 ballots, with 642 rejected, or 4.7 percent. White voters have cast 60,954 mail-in ballots, with 681 — or 1.1 percent — rejected. In addition, 434 ballots cast by white voters and 127 ballots cast by Black voters were marked “spoiled,” which can mean literally spoiled or something as simple as a voter informing the election office that the address they had requested a ballot to is wrong. (These are a tiny portion of the votes from one state, so obviously we have a long way to go before we know the full landscape of ballot rejection rates.)

The vast majority of these ballots were rejected because voters made a mistake or failed to fill out the witness information,¹⁷ according to state records. A rejected ballot does not necessarily mean the voter is denied his or her vote: North Carolina allows for a process called “vote curing,” where voters are notified that there’s a mistake and given a chance to fix their ballot. But that’s not an option in every state: only 19 states currently allow some form of ballot curing. And even that isn’t foolproof. In Nevada’s statewide primary in June, for example, 12,366 ballots had a missing or mismatched signature, but even after voters were notified to fix it, only 45 percent were successfully cured.

Meanwhile, the racial gap in rejected ballots is not a problem unique to North Carolina.

Black voters and other voters of color frequently have their ballots rejected at a higher rate than white votes (so do younger voters, on average). In Florida’s 2018 midterm elections, ballots cast by Black voters, Hispanic voters and voters from other racial and ethnic minorities were rejected at twice the rate of ballots cast by white voters, according to a report from the Florida ACLU. A team of university researchers found a similar pattern in Georgia that year, where ballots from Black voters were rejected at a higher rate than those from white voters, even when accounting for county-level differences in rejection rates.

Part of this gap could be due to the fact that many Black voters and voters of color casting mail ballots are doing so for the first time, and first time vote-by-mail voters tend to make more mistakes because they’re less familiar with the requirements. That’s true in North Carolina, too. Michael Bitzer, a political scientist at Catawba College in North Carolina, compared historical voter records in the state and found that most voters who had their ballot rejected so far voted in person in 2016.

“We’re seeing already a lack of familiarity with the process, whether it’s signing the ballot or having the witness information completed,” Bitzer said. “There tends to be a greater number from voters who were previously in-person voters. If you look at the numbers [from Sept. 14], the ballots denied due to incomplete witness information, 55 percent of those voters had voted in person in 2016.”

That the barrier to entry is hitting voters of color harder than white voters is indicative of broader, systemic issues with enfranchisement.

“When there’s a barrier, it’s going to fall hardest on the most disadvantaged and disenfranchised in the community, which is very frequently going to be poor voters and voters of color,” said Myrna Pérez, the director of the voting rights and elections program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

Even if inexperience is largely to blame, that’s still a reason for concern since we’re expecting a record influx in mail-in voters this year. In North Carolina alone, 837,685 of the state’s 7.1 million voters have requested absentee ballots so far.

And that’s part of the problem: In 2016, nationally, 1 percent of mail-in ballots were rejected, according to the Election Assistance Commission’s aggregation of state reports. (This number varies by state. In Oregon, which has had mail-only elections for 20 years, 0.69 percent of mail ballots were rejected. In Georgia, 5.8 percent of mail-in ballots were rejected.) But there were a lot fewer voters casting ballots by mail in 2016. Any vote lost is a problem, but 1 percent of a few million votes can be an election-defining one.

US President Donald Trump speaks to the press during a news conference in the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House on September 16, 2020, in Washington, DC. | Alex Wong/Getty Images

Trump faces allegations of sexual misconduct from more than 20 women.

Former model Amy Dorris has accused President Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her during a US Open tournament in September 1997, according to an exclusive report by the Guardian. Her account is now among more than 20 allegations of sexual misconduct that have been brought against the president.

Dorris alleges that Trump forcibly kissed her and groped her outside the bathroom of his VIP box at the US Open, allegations that he denied through his lawyers. Dorris says she was visiting New York City with her then-boyfriend Jason Binn, who introduced her to Trump. Both she and Binn watched the US Open in Trump’s VIP box, and attended events with him in other parts of the city that September. After she went to use the restroom at the US Open, Dorris says, Trump approached her.

“He just shoved his tongue down my throat and I was pushing him off. And then that’s when his grip became tighter and his hands were very gropey and all over my butt, my breasts, my back, everything,” Dorris told the Guardian, adding that she told him to stop. “I was in his grip, and I couldn’t get out of it.”

The publication confirmed that Dorris had told both a friend in the city and her mother about the incident — both of whom corroborated her account. The New York Times has also spoken with two additional friends of Dorris, who said she told them about the incident shortly after it occurred as well.

Binn told The Times he recalled the weekend but had no memory of any advances that were made by Trump to Dorris. He said The Guardian story was the “first time I heard or saw anything.” Dorris says she likely didn’t tell Binn the specifics of the incident, but asked him to tell Trump to back off more broadly.

Dorris said she had thought about coming forward in 2016 but was concerned about the potential backlash she and her family might face. She says she ultimately decided to do so this year, in part because she wants to set an example for her twin daughters. “Now I feel like my girls are about to turn 13 years old and I want them to know that you don’t let anybody do anything to you that you don’t want,” she told the Guardian.

Dorris’s account adds to more than 20 allegations of sexual misconduct that have been levied against Trump

Trump has now faced allegations of sexual misconduct from at least 22 women. He’s also openly bragged about committing sexual assault in a leaked Access Hollywood tape, during which he talked about grabbing women “by the pussy.”

As Vox’s Anna North has reported, the sexual misconduct allegations against Trump span decades, though it appears the Republican Party has been content to keep overlooking them as he runs for reelection this year:

There was Jessica Leeds, who said Trump grabbed her breasts and tried to put his hand up her skirt when they were seated on a flight together in the 1980s. “He was like an octopus,” she told the New York Times. “His hands were everywhere.”

There was Natasha Stoynoff, who said that when she visited Mar-a-Lago to write a People magazine story about Trump in 2005, he pushed her up against a wall and forced his tongue down her throat. Melania Trump was pregnant at the time.

And there was Summer Zervos, who said Trump invited her to dinner with him at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 2007. She went, hoping for career help. Instead, she said, Trump brought her to his private bungalow, where he touched her breast and pressed his genitals against her.

Writer E. Jean Carroll is one of the women who most recently came forward; she accused Trump of raping her in the dressing room of an upscale department store in the 1990s, which he has denied. Both Carroll and Zervos also have ongoing defamation lawsuits against Trump, who has publicly attacked their looks and their motivations for coming forward.

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden has also been accused of sexual assault — by former Senate staffer Tara Reade, an allegation he’s denied. High-profile Democrats have largely supported Biden despite the allegation, with many saying they’re satisfied with his denial.

The GOP’s response to the allegations against Trump this cycle also shows how the party’s attitudes on them have shifted during his presidency. In 2016, there was uproar from some members of the Republican Party after the Access Hollywood tape leaked, predominantly driven by women. Since then, however, it appears many GOP lawmakers have simply accepted the existence of these allegations and are continuing to back Trump for the presidency anyway. Last June, after Carroll came forward, many top Republicans said they were satisfied with Trump’s denial of her allegation, emphasizing that they stood by the president.

The party’s reaction to past allegations suggests that Dorris’s account is unlikely to affect support from many members of Trump’s base come November.

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People participate in the Women’s March in Washington, DC, on January 18, 2020. | Yasin Ozturk/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Fixing systemic inequities in voting power should be a high priority for Democrats.

The outcome of the 2020 presidential race is very much in question, but nobody — including President Donald Trump’s biggest boosters — thinks he stands much of a chance of winning more votes than former Vice President Joe Biden. Trump fell well short of that benchmark in 2016; he has never had an average job approval rating of 50 percent or higher; and he’s running weaker this year than he did four years ago. Trump’s strategy — which some analysts say has a decent chance of working — is to take advantage of the fact that the tipping point states in the Electoral College are likely 2-3 percentage points more favorable to him than the national electorate.

If Biden wins the election, the Democratic Party will almost certainly gain seats in the US Senate. But it’s far from clear whether Democrats will be able to secure a majority. In the 2018 Senate races that led to Republican gains, most votes were cast for Democrats. Democrats also won a majority of votes in Senate races in 2016, but again, Republicans secured a majority.

Republicans benefit from dynamics in states across the country. Two years ago in Wisconsin, for example, Democrats swept narrow victories in the statewide races and also secured 53 percent of the votes cast in elections for the lower house of the state legislature. But because of gerrymandering, the GOP won over 60 percent of the seats. And knowing they’d be insulated from public backlash, the legislature held a special lame duck session during which they stripped power from the state executive branch and reassigned it to themselves. Something similar happened in Michigan that same year, and in North Carolina two years earlier.

All of these outcomes — in which Republicans hold power despite winning fewer votes — are baked into the American system. They won’t go away if Trump is removed from office. It’s become commonplace for Democrats’ rhetoric to cast Trump’s presidency as a threat to American democracy. But it would be more accurate to say his presidency is a consequence of our constitutional system’s democratic shortcomings. If Democrats manage to win in November, they owe it to their voters to make a serious effort to lead a democratic revolution in the United States that would truly bury Trumpism once and for all.

The skewed Senate

“Democracy,” in the American context, is often taken to mean something like direct popular control through elections. So when George Mason University economist Garrett Jones writes a book titled 10 Percent Less Democracy, he means we should conduct more policymaking in institutions like the Federal Reserve that empower technical experts rather than being responsive to mass opinion.

That’s an interesting topic for debate. But the soul of democracy is not just in the act of voting for politicians. Nobody voted for Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch, but he, rather than Merrick Garland, is sitting on the Supreme Court as a direct consequence of election outcomes. And there’s nothing undemocratic about that. The core principle of democracy is political equality — the idea that all citizens are equal under the law and deserve to have their interests considered equally by the political system. That’s where Gorsuch becomes a problem for democracy.

Not only did Trump ascend to the presidency while winning fewer votes than his opponent, but the Senate that blocked Garland’s confirmation in 2016 was one where most Americans were represented by a Democrat — but most senators were Republicans, because the entire Senate is a massive violation of the principle of political equality.

America’s founders did not believe in either concept of democracy, so the fact that the hard-boiled compromise between large and small states is inegalitarian did not bother them very much.

Over the past 230 years, the population gap between the smallest and largest states has only grown. At the time of the 1790 census, Virginia had a bit less than 13 times the population of Delaware. Today that’s about the gap between Wyoming and Washington state, but Washington has only about one-fifth the population of California.

But the significance of the Senate’s skew has also changed. In the early years of the Republic, the Senate overrepresented the slower-growing South, and many political battles were fought over the admission of new states that could shift the balance between the North and South. During the relatively low polarization politics of the 20th century, the key thing about the Senate was it overrepresented rural interests — distorting policy around farm subsidies, for example — but mostly in ways that were unimportant to the main themes of political conflict.

Today, however, the electorate is increasingly polarizing around the interrelated lines of urbanization, population density, and race. The Senate, by happenstance rather than design, has evolved into what Jonathan Chait aptly terms “the most powerful source of institutional racism in American life.” Right now there are about 0.3 senators for every million people. But because the states that are overrepresented in the Senate are whiter than the national average, there are 0.35 senators for every million white people and only 0.26 for every million African Americans and just 0.19 for every million Hispanics.

“The Senate gives the average black American only 75 percent as much representation as the average white American,” writes David Leonhardt in the New York Times. “And the average Hispanic American? Only 55 percent as much.”

And yet the Senate is only the beginning of the ways racial inequity is perpetuated by America’s failures of political equality.

The scourge of gerrymandering

The term gerrymandering comes from an 1812 political cartoon that rendered it in essentially aesthetic terms. The district, drawn up by Massachusetts’s then-Gov. Elbridge Gerry, was characterized by his political opponents as a monstrous beast, the Gerrymander, rather than a more conventional shape.

Elkanah Tisdale/Boston Gazette

This focus on aesthetics leads to the conclusion that “both sides do it” since you can unquestionably find funny-looking maps drawn by both Democratic and Republican state legislatures.

The real issue, once again, is political equality. And the segregated nature of American housing patterns means it’s generally not possible for Democrats to gerrymander as effectively as Republicans do. A healthy chunk of the Democratic base vote consists of nonwhite people living in overwhelmingly nonwhite neighborhoods, that lend themselves to “packing” Democrats into inefficient lopsided districts.

Before the 2018 midterm elections, redistricting expert Dave Wasserman worked with the team at FiveThirtyEight to create an Atlas of Redistricting that makes the point well. Take a highly competitive state like Pennsylvania, for example. Under the most efficient GOP gerrymander, there are likely 13 safe Republican seats, with the Democrats packed into one Pittsburgh seat and four in and around Philadelphia. Under an aggressive pro-Democratic gerrymander, they likely secure just nine safe seats. Even in a blue-leaning state like Minnesota, the best Democratic gerrymander likely secures five safe seats while the best Republican one secures six.

This also filters down to state legislatures where “Republican-drawn maps in 2012 had a much larger partisan bias than Democratic ones,” says David Shor, a Democratic data analyst. He calculates that none of the top 15 most-skewed maps were drawn by Democratic legislatures — not because Democrats are uniquely virtuous, but because residential patterns in the United States don’t lend themselves to hyper-aggressive Democratic gerrymanders.

A lot of time and energy is wasted among analysts in debating how exactly to characterize skewed maps that result from residential segregation. Jowei Chen and Jonathan Rodden, for example, argue that “while conventional wisdom holds that partisan bias in U.S. legislative elections results from intentional partisan and racial gerrymandering, we demonstrate that substantial bias can also emerge from patterns of human geography.”

Intent, however, is simply not the main issue here. The Senate’s biases are largely unintentional, but even more severe. The problem is that state legislatures, the House of Representatives, and the Senate are all biased in the same way — and further reinforced by the Electoral College. If Democrats want to pull the country out of its current state of madness, they need to address it.

Political inequality is the source of our crisis

In June, Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID) warned that if Puerto Rico and Washington, DC, become states, “Republicans will never be in the majority in the United States Senate.”

Mathematically, this is absurd. Right now, the are 53 Republican senators and 47 in the Democratic caucus. If Puerto Rico and DC became states tomorrow and sent four Democrats to Washington, the balance would shift to 53-51 and Republicans would be still in the majority. One key reason: Admitting these two states would narrow the racial inequality in Senate representation, it would not eliminate it.

What’s telling about Risch’s remarks, however, is less the math than the defeatism behind it. The notion that Republican electoral victories require massive political inequality flies in the face of all kinds of common sense. Republicans are serving today as the governors of Massachusetts, Maryland, and Vermont while Democrats govern Kansas, Louisiana, and Kentucky. There’s always a pivotal voter somewhere, and always a basic contestation between the principles of the left and the right.

But Republicans — not just Trump but mainstream ones like Risch — have just given up on the idea of formulating an agenda that appeals to the majority of the population. That’s contrary to the interests of most people. But it also fuels dysfunctional habits like hyper-engagement with Fox News over external reality. And once you’ve habituated yourself to ignoring the normative force of political equality, you end up on a very slippery slope.

Today’s Republicans strip power from governors in lame-duck legislative sessions. They not only defend the life-long disenfranchisement of ex-convicts, they use control of the courts to subvert referendums that pass to re-enfranchise them. They try to subvert the accuracy of census counts, and block the use of safe voting methods in the middle of a pandemic.

In their defense, tradition is on their side. The United States de facto or de jure denied the vote to African Americans for most of its history, and until the Baker v. Carr (1962) ruling, it was standard practice to draw state legislative districts that violated the one person one vote principle. The generation or so after the passage of the Voting Rights, when the Electoral College never made a practical difference in presidential elections, was an exception rather than the rule. But the principle of political equality is a good one and worth fighting for.

The time for structural reform

If Democrats do well in November, pressure will be overwhelming on members of Congress to deliver in key ways for interest groups that supported them. For members representing swing districts, it will seem risky to spend time and energy on process issues that might be seen as partisan power grabs. But these are not power grabs.

People of color who live in cities should have equal voting rights as rural whites. It’s a core demand for justice, and the fact that the system does not work that way makes it exceptionally difficult to make enduring progress on any economic, racial, or environmental justice topic. These inequities have never been justifiable, and the fact that they align sharply with partisan politics makes them worse, not better.

The good news is that Democrats have begun some of the necessary work to get changes done. In 2019, House Democrats wisely made political reform a top priority by writing and passing HR 1 — a package of election reform measures that included automatic voter registration and federal curbs on partisan gerrymandering. It went nowhere in a Republican-controlled Senate, but that could change if the majority flips.

Senate staffers generally say that it’s good to look at what’s already passed in the House to get a sense of what a hypothetical Democratic-controlled Senate might take up. The House has also passed legislation to turn Washington, DC, into a state. This could get 50 or 51 votes in the Senate, too, if Democrats do well in November.

But as Vox’s Ian Millhiser writes, neither bill has any chance of securing 60 votes, so hopes for Democratic reform hinge entirely on the prospects for enacting another democratic reform — abolition of the filibuster.

If change happens, historians may look back on former President Barack Obama’s eulogy for Rep. John Lewis as a watershed. Speaking at Lewis’s funeral, he called for an end to gerrymandering, statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, a national holiday on Election Day, and other democratic reforms. Most of all, “if all this takes eliminating the filibuster, another Jim Crow relic, in order to secure the God-given rights of every American, then that’s what we should do,” Obama said.

Just because Obama says it doesn’t mean the rest of the party will agree. But Obama sees his role in the present moment as guiding a consensus among Democrats, not picking fights. He wouldn’t have taken those positions if he didn’t think they were viable as priorities with the party establishment. And the framing around Lewis was exactly right, underscoring that there can be no meaningful “reckoning” on race in America without reckoning with the way American institutions embed racial inequity in representation.

Structural reforms designed to advance political equality are also a viable legislative agenda in terms of public opinion. Civis Analytics, a top Democratic polling firm, tested a wide range of reform ideas complete with partisan framing to try to determine those popular enough to move forward on. They found that DC and Puerto Rico statehood, automatic voter registration, same-day voter registration, re-enfranchising ex-felons, requiring the use of independent redistricting commissions, and blocking corporate campaign contributions are all above water with the public. To get any of that done, Democrats would need to first secure a majority in the Senate and then end the filibuster.

Busting the filibuster and using a newly unleashed majority to uncork several major changes to the structure of American politics would be a shocking turn of events. Pressure will be intense after the madness of the Trump years to declare that things are “back to normal” and to avoid taking actions that the GOP will easily agree to oppose. But Democrats should consider how frequently and somberly they’ve intoned that the future of American democracy is at stake. The fact is that an undemocratic system doesn’t go away just because Democrats win one time.

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Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world: Contribute today from as little as $3.

President Donald Trump speaks to the press from the White House on September 15, 2020. | Alex Wong/Getty Images

Trump’s public remarks about the coronavirus were very different from what he told a journalist one-on-one.

President Donald Trump seemed to have very different things to say about Covid-19 when he spoke in public — at press conferences and TV appearances — than when he spoke to journalist Bob Woodward one-on-one.

In public comments, Trump took a tone that downplayed the coronavirus — making it seem like the virus would go away quickly, and emphasizing the need to reopen the country to try to get the economy going again.

With Woodward, Trump warned about the risks of the virus in frank and scary terms, calling it “the plague,” acknowledging it’s deadlier than the flu, and saying it could spread by air.

This was, apparently, deliberate. As Trump also told Woodward on March 19, “I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

Of course, this is not how viruses work. While Trump tried to downplay the risks, Covid-19 continued to spread across America. As of September 16, the nation has reported more than 6.6 million confirmed cases and nearly 200,000 deaths. It still reports the most daily new coronavirus deaths out of any developed country.

“There was a failure to realize what an efficiently spreading respiratory virus for which we have no vaccine and no antiviral meant,” Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, previously told me. “From the very beginning, that minimization … set a tone that reverberated from the highest levels of government to what the average person believes about the virus.”

In other words, Trump’s deception left America unprepared for the virus. The president claimed it was intentional, part of an attempt to keep the country upbeat. But we now know we were misled — to deadly results.

“Deadly stuff” versus “It’s going to disappear”

In February, Trump told Woodward that the virus was “deadly stuff,” more dangerous than the flu and potentially transmitting through the air. (CNN has audio recordings of Trump’s comments.)

February 7, to Woodward: “It goes through air, Bob. That’s always tougher than the touch. You know, the touch, you don’t have to touch things, right? But the air, you just breathe the air, and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one, that’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than your — you know, your, even your strenuous flus. … This is more deadly. This is five per — you know, this is five percent versus one percent and less than one percent. You know? So this is deadly stuff.”

Yet in public, Trump took a very different tone. He consistently suggested that the virus was under control, soon to disappear “like a miracle.” In early March, Trump totally contradicted his comments to Woodward by suggesting the coronavirus was less deadly than the flu.

January 30, in a speech: “We think we have it very well under control. We have very little problem in this country at this moment — five. And those people are all recuperating successfully.”

February 26, at a press conference: “When you have 15 people [infected by the coronavirus in the US], and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”

February 27, at a White House meeting: “It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

March 9, on Twitter: “So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!”

Acknowledging the risks to the young — but cheering for packed churches

Later in March, Trump acknowledged to Woodward that the coronavirus could affect not just old people but young people, too. But he added that he prefers to downplay the threat.

March 19, to Woodward: “Now it’s turning out it’s not just old people, Bob. Just today and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It’s not just old, older. Young people too — plenty of young people. … I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

In public, Trump soon started suggesting the economy should take priority over dealing with Covid-19, continuing to suggest that the virus wasn’t a major threat to the US. He even said that the recently initiated lockdowns and stay-at-home orders could end by Easter (on April 12).

March 22, on Twitter: “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!”

March 24, on Fox News: “Easter’s a very special day for me. … You’ll have packed churches all over our country. … I think it’ll be a beautiful time.”

“This thing is a killer” vs. “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!”

In April, Trump described the coronavirus in terrifying terms to Woodward.

April 13, to Woodward: “This thing is a killer if it gets you. If you’re the wrong person, you don’t have a chance. … So this rips you apart. … It is the plague.”

That was quite different from what Trump was saying in public at the time, indicating that the virus was already well on its way to defeat in the US. He soon after sent his “LIBERATE” tweets, demanding that states reopen their economies.

April 10, on Twitter: “The Invisible Enemy will soon be in full retreat!”

April 17, on Twitter: “LIBERATE MINNESOTA! … LIBERATE MICHIGAN! … LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd amendment. It is under siege!”

The one consistency: Avoiding the blame

There’s one thing Trump was consistent about: Whether in public comments or his interviews with Woodward, he never took responsibility for the virus spreading out of control in the US.

July 21, to Woodward: “The virus has nothing to do with me. It’s not my fault. … China let the damn virus out.”

August 14, to Woodward: “Nothing more could have been done. Nothing more could have been done. I acted early. I acted early.”

Trump took a similar stance when asked, in press conferences and interviews, about the US’s failures to build up testing and prevent the deaths of more than 1,000 Americans a day to Covid-19.

March 13, at a press conference, when asked about tests: “I don’t take responsibility at all.”

July 28, in a televised interview, referring to 1,000 deaths a day: “It is what it is.”

Trump failed, and more people have died as a result

This is not just something that makes Trump look bad or exposes the bullshitter that he is. During a major crisis, particularly a pandemic, clear and transparent communication is one of the most important things leaders can do to keep the public and other officials not only informed but also ready to act. By consistently downplaying the threat of the virus, Trump worked to disarm one of the country’s biggest weapons — public action — against a major disease.

As Céline Gounder, an epidemiologist at New York University, told me in the early days of the pandemic, “You really need very strong leadership from the top.”

Trump’s downplaying of the virus extended not just to his public comments, but the actions taken by him and his administration, too. He’s called for less testing, arguing that more tests make the US look bad by revealing more cases — and his task force successfully pushed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to, in effect, recommend less testing. His staff has simultaneously pushed the CDC to change scientific reports and studies because they might make Trump look bad by contradicting his evidence-less claims about Covid-19. He pushed the CDC out of a public leadership role after an official there made grim — but correct — comments about what to expect under the coronavirus.

Trump has even contradicted his own administration’s recommendations to push a rosy image of the country’s fight against Covid-1, demanding that states reopen quickly, before they met his administration’s recommendations, and getting parts of the public to think (wrongly) that masking is unhelpful or unnecessary, as his administration recommends public use of masks.

Now America is doing quite badly in its fight against Covid-19. The US hasn’t seen the most coronavirus deaths of all wealthy nations, but it’s in the bottom 20 percent for deaths since the pandemic began, and reports seven times the deaths as the median developed country. If the US had the same Covid-19 death rate as, say, Canada, 115,000 more Americans would likely be alive today.

Overall, Covid-19 cases in the US are now declining after the country’s recent surge. But that’s in large part because people have ignored much of what Trump has said: The public, as well as many cities, counties, and states, have embraced social distancing, particularly indoors, and masking — likely driving down new infections.

At the same time, the US’s number of cases and deaths remains unacceptably high; over the past week, nearly 900 Americans have died each day, on average, from Covid-19. Some US outbreaks continue to pop up as well, with states in the Midwest and South recently hit hard.

This is the reality Trump tried to downplay. And we’re stuck with those consequences — those infections, those deaths — no matter how the president tries to spin the pandemic.

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Democrats are once again doubling down on religion this year. Faith was on full display during the Democratic National Convention, where Joe Biden closed out the week with several pointed references to his Catholic faith. And the Biden campaign is also making an ambitious play for white evangelical Protestants and Mormons, two loyal Republican groups where Democrats hope to make some inroads.

Often lost in this, though, is the fact that Democrats are mostly ignoring a massive group of voters who are becoming an increasingly crucial part of their base: people who don’t have any religion at all.

Right now, voters with no religious affiliation look like they might back Biden in record numbers. According to a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center in early August, 72 percent of nonreligious voters — a group that includes people who identify as atheists, agnostics and nothing in particular — are planning to support Biden. That’s 4 percentage points higher than the 68 percent who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016. And that’s a big deal, because despite being frequently overlooked, nonreligious people make up a sizable part of the electorate. An analysis of validated voters by Pew found that religiously unaffiliated voters accounted for one-quarter of the electorate in 2016, and 30 percent in 2018.

The unaffiliated are a key demographic for Democratic candidates in particular. More than one-third of the people who voted for Clinton in 2016 were religiously unaffiliated, making them just as electorally important for Democrats as white evangelical Protestants are for Republicans. Yet despite constantly hearing about the importance of white evangelical voters in an election cycle, Democratic politicians have been slow to embrace the growing number of nonreligious people who vote for them. Why?

In the past, the challenges of organizing the religiously unaffiliated have made it easy to understand why Democrats haven’t made a real effort to appeal to them more. As most don’t regularly gather like a church congregation, religiously unaffiliated Americans can be difficult to reach. A lack of institutional leadership also means there aren’t many prominent people or groups showing up to nudge politicians to pay attention to their issues. And despite rising tolerance for atheists and nonreligious people in American culture, overt appeals to the nonreligious still run the risk of turning off the majority of voters who are people of faith.

But there are signs that antipathy toward President Trump has mobilized some religiously unaffiliated voters in unprecedented ways. Although Trump is not an overtly pious figure, he’s embraced a vision of American culture that privileges Christian identity and heritage. That’s a view that most nonreligious Americans reject, which is likely a part of the reason that their support for Biden is so high, despite the campaign’s minimal outreach efforts. In the coming years, though, that calculus might have to change, since the growing size of the country’s nonreligious population could make these voters more difficult for Democrats to ignore.

“I think in future elections we’re going to see more of an effort to reach a secular voting bloc and the reason is simply that they’re continuing to grow,” said David Campbell, a political science professor at the University of Notre Dame who studies religion and politics. “It’s too ripe a target for politicians to ignore.”

Over the past 10 years, the share of Americans who identify as Christian has fallen by 12 percentage points, while the share of people who say they have no religious affiliation is up 9 percentage points. That breaks down to 1 in every 4 Americans who are now religiously unaffiliated, including 40 percent of millennials. Meanwhile, there’s no sign that nonreligious Americans are returning to religion as they get older.

These shifts stand to benefit Democrats more than they benefit Republicans. Nearly two-thirds of religiously unaffiliated Americans identify as Democrats, a sharp increase from just a few decades ago, when the (much smaller) nonreligious population was fairly evenly split between the parties. And in 2018, a record-high share (75 percent) of religiously unaffiliated voters supported Democratic candidates. As the table below shows, that kind of extreme partisan tilt is rivaled by only two other major religious groups: Black Protestants and white evangelical Protestants.

Most nonreligious voters voted for a Democrat in 2018

Share of voters who reported voting for Democratic and Republican candidates in 2018

	Dem.	Rep.	Margin
Black Protestant	94%	5%	D+89
Religiously unaffiliated	75	22	D+53
Hispanic Catholic	71	27	D+44
Jewish	72	28	D+44
Other	66	33	D+33
Protestant, other race	47	50	R+3
White mainline Protestant	42	55	R+13
White Catholic	39	59	R+20
White evangelical Protestant	17	81	R+64

Source: Pew Research Center

One reason we haven’t heard as much about religiously unaffiliated people is because they are often dismissed as less likely to vote, even as their share of the total population has grown. But that perception of nonreligious voters as less engaged could be increasingly wrong, as there are indications that the voting gap between secular and religious Americans has shrunk in recent elections. And surveys also indicate that nonreligious people are just as likely as religious Americans to donate and engage in other political activities. A recent working paper also suggests that a lack of religious engagement may not be the main driver of lower turnout among secular people. Instead, religiously unaffiliated voters were more likely to have other characteristics (in particular, being young) that also correlate with low turnout.

“It turns out that when you put in basic statistical controls, most of the secular voting gap in recent years disappears and nonreligious people appear to turn out at about the same rate as [religiously] affiliated people,” said Evan Stewart, the study’s author and a sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston. And because more religiously unaffiliated voters are now older — roughly one-third of nonreligious people are younger than 30 — it’s possible that this bloc will start voting more regularly, too.

Additionally, anger at Trump is motivating many nonreligious voters to get more politically involved. A majority (56 percent) of religiously unaffiliated Americans — including nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of atheists and agnostics — say Trump has been a “terrible” president. And there are signs that religiously unaffiliated people have become more politically engaged since Trump was elected — one survey conducted in 2018 found that nonreligious people were more likely than their religious peers to have attended a rally or contacted a political official.

That anger and energy could help drive up support for Biden among religiously unaffiliated voters this year, even without much outreach from the campaign. (Not to mention, nonreligious voters’ views on issues like abortion, immigration, health care and climate change do tend to align pretty well with Democratic policies overall — which might suggest that Democrats can reach this group simply by doing what they’re already doing.)

But Sarah Levin, a political consultant who focuses on secular groups and communities, said Democrats shouldn’t see this election as a sign that they can take nonreligious voters for granted. Secular people have values too, she said, and hearing politicians and parties speak to those values can motivate them to get more politically involved.

Meanwhile, support for progressive policies doesn’t necessarily translate to enthusiasm for mainstream Democratic candidates. Sen. Bernie Sanders, for instance, was consistently the favorite of religiously unaffiliated voters during the Democratic primary, and Democratic candidates appear to have gotten record-high support from nonreligious voters in the 2018 midterms in part because they peeled off people who voted for third-party candidates like Jill Stein and Gary Johnson in 2016.

Levin said there are ways to make appeals to secular voters that can also speak to religious Democrats — for example, emphasizing the importance of protecting religious minorities and nonreligious people through the separation of church and state, or focusing on science-based issues like climate change. That kind of big-tent strategy isn’t without risk, though. “The last thing Democrats want is to be portrayed as the godless party, because that would probably turn off a lot of voters,” Campbell said. But he added that Democrats may be missing a big political opportunity if they don’t start thinking about ways to engage with nonreligious voters as a group.

“Until parties and politicians start talking to secular voters as a bloc, voters won’t see themselves that way either,” he said. “What you have on the right with white evangelical Protestants is a distinct group that can be courted and discussed. The left hasn’t figured out how to do that with nonreligious voters. But we could see more efforts in that direction going forward.”

If Democrats manage to hold the House of Representatives and win back the Senate and the White House in November, the party will have full control of the federal government for the first time in 11 years. Police reform, climate change, and health care are all on their agenda. But before newly empowered Democrats get to any of that, they will very likely pass a relief package to address the coronavirus pandemic and the associated economic crisis. Then, they will aim to fundamentally change how voting and government work in the United States by expanding voting rights, reducing the influence of money in politics, strengthening ethics rules, and maybe even ending the Senate filibuster—reforms they hope will make America’s democracy work better and the rest of their agenda easier to carry out.

“If there is any political capital to be spent, the concerns over democracy reform take a front seat to everything in the agenda,” a senior aide to a progressive senator told me (the aide requested anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak on the record). It “would mean so much just in terms of building long-term power,” a senior aide to a progressive House Democrat added.

By starting with these reforms, Democrats are taking a risk: They’ll likely have only a short window of time in the majority to accomplish their most pressing agenda items. Prioritizing one item could mean sacrificing another—and failing to deliver on key issues.

But the Democratic lawmakers, staffers, and activists that I spoke with view government and voting reform as a kind of precursor to accomplishing any of their other policy goals. “The first attention will be to the economic implosion, but there are a group of [other] issues on people’s minds,” Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon told me. “We are at that moment where we have to succeed now in restoring the integrity of the American vision.” Democrats have given these process changes, which they call “democracy reform,” top billing on their legislative docket before. The For the People Act, more commonly known as H.R. 1, was the first piece of legislation the Democratic-controlled House passed in 2019. It contained a grab bag of reforms: establishing automatic voter registration for all Americans, making Election Day a national holiday, ending partisan gerrymandering, requiring presidents to disclose their tax returns, and creating a public-financing system for federal campaigns. These reforms would make it easier for most Americans to vote. They’d also, Democrats hope, make it easier for Democrats to win elections.

The Democrats’ plan is informed by experience. The last time Democrats controlled both the White House and Congress, they—under the leadership of President Barack Obama—attempted, at least at first, to foster a good working relationship with Republicans. Yet, after weeks of negotiations, the 2009 stimulus bill received only three GOP votes in the Senate. Not a single Republican voted to pass the Affordable Care Act, after a year of negotiations and floor debate—despite the fact that the legislation was modeled, in part, on a Republican template, and GOP amendments had been accepted to the bill. Obama had hoped to reach a “grand bargain” with Republicans but instead became acquainted with what his aides came to call “the party of no.” Many Democrats believe those times offer a lesson: They need to fix the structural issues that have long given Republicans political power disproportionate to the number of votes the party wins.

[Read: Obama couldn’t fix the system. Biden must.]

Republicans, naturally, are deeply resistant to many of the proposals included in H.R. 1. They argue that the provisions amount to extreme government overreach, and that expanding voting access through mechanisms such as automatic registration will open America’s elections system up to voter fraud. Not a single Republican voted to support H.R. 1 in the House last year, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has blocked it from coming to a vote on the Senate floor. “They’re trying to clothe this power grab with cliches about ‘restoring democracy’ … but their proposal is simply a naked attempt to change the rules of American politics to benefit one party,” he wrote in a Washington Post column.

With McConnell and House Republicans opposed to most of their priorities, Democrats will have to structure their agenda carefully—and move quickly. Some Democrats would prefer to take advantage of the increased appetite for health-care reform to pass Medicare for All or a public option in the first weeks of a Joe Biden presidency. Others see climate-change legislation as the first priority. But voting-rights expansion and campaign-finance reforms would likely be simpler and faster to pass, given that the framework already exists in H.R. 1, the Democrats I spoke with said. And everyone agreed that both health care and climate change could be addressed—at least to some extent—in an initial coronavirus-response package; Biden’s “Build Back Better” economic-recovery proposal already promises investment in clean energy sources.

By January 2021, America will likely still be experiencing the twin public-health and economic crises brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, and voters will likely have gone through a drawn-out and chaotic November election. Appetite for political reform will be high, Democrats argue. “Over four years, we’ve learned of weaknesses in our democracy,” Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress, a Washington-based liberal think tank, told me. “To move a progressive agenda, we need to restore faith in government.”

Another reason that many Democrats would like to prioritize H.R. 1: It’s one of the few issues that unites nearly all factions of the party, so it’s politically feasible. Every single House Democrat voted in favor of the bill. “There’s gonna be an element of, how can you show progressives that you’re in it to win it and willing to go big? There are some things on democracy reform that will really send that message and really do that,” said one aide to a centrist senator, who was not authorized to speak on the record. “Leadership knows that is an issue that would make the left very happy and allow the moderates to deliver on what they’ve promised,” Lanae Erickson, a senior president at the think-tank Third Way, told me.

Democrats believe their reform agenda could be a political winner. “Ending the culture of corruption in Washington” was the top issue for 75 percent of voters in swing districts in 2018, according to a poll from Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research. That year, 72 percent of candidates on the House Democrats’ list of highly competitive races rejected donations from corporate political action committees, a pledge that became a litmus test during the campaign. That was up from just 6 percent in 2016, according to End Citizens United, a political action committee working to pass campaign-finance reform.

Before they can pass their “democracy reform,” though, Democrats have to decide exactly what that entails. Most progressives interpret the phrase to include not only expanding voting rights, but also establishing D.C. statehood and abolishing the Electoral College, two proposals that are still controversial among rank-and-file members. Public support for both ideas is mixed: More than 60 percent of U.S. adults oppose D.C. statehood, according to a recent Gallup poll, while a majority of Americans support amending the Constitution so the presidential candidate who wins the popular vote wins the election.

[Read: How to—carefully—surmount the Electoral College]

But far and away the most serious threat to the effectiveness of a Biden presidency and a Democratic House and Senate is the filibuster, the Senate rule that requires 60 senators, instead of a simple majority of 51, to move forward on most legislation. Even if Democrats win the Senate in November, they very likely won’t have 60 votes, meaning that Republicans could still block legislation from being debated. Progressives have long wanted to abolish the supermajority voting threshold, but the idea has begun to gain traction among other Democrats, too, in recent weeks. Perhaps, some Democrats argue, the filibuster is a natural place to launch their democracy-reform initiative: They can put forward a slew of policies strengthening ethics guidelines and expanding voting rights—including a bill that would restore the Voting Rights Act of 1965—and dare Republicans to vote against it. (The VRA had strong bipartisan support until the mid-2000s.) “It’s a pretty easy argument to make,” the aide to the centrist senator told me. “Democrats would be happy to be like, Look at these fuckin’ guys! They still want to make it difficult for people of color to vote!”

Progressives are enthusiastic about that plan. “If I had to guess how it’s going to happen, it’s going to be, If we can’t pass the VRA, we’re going to get rid of the filibuster,” Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, told me. “Starting with H.R. 1 is a good idea,” Representative Ro Khanna of California told me. “The filibuster could come right next.”

Then again, Democrats might not have any of these options in January. Trump could win the election; Republicans could hold the Senate or even win control of the House. The Democrats could sweep, but have something else at top of mind. Or, some of my Hill sources suggested, Biden may want to start off his first term by pursuing legislation that is more amenable to Republicans, though none of the aides I spoke with could identify what that unifying project might be. When asked about Biden’s own legislative priorities, a campaign spokesperson responded that his No. 1 goal will be “repairing and rebuilding from the economic ruin and public-health crisis caused by Donald Trump’s utter failure to fulfill his basic duty as president: protect America.”

Even if they win full control, though, Democrats won’t have a lot of time. As my colleague Ronald Brownstein noted recently, “the last four times a president—of either party—went into a midterm with unified control, voters have revoked it. … No party has controlled all the levers of government for more than four consecutive years since 1968.” And a President Biden and an incoming Democratic Congress will be facing a mountain of tasks. There will almost certainly be early battles over government funding and coronavirus-response packages.

If Democrats find themselves in the majority again for the first time in more than a decade, though, they are determined not to squander the opportunity. In his July eulogy for Representative John Lewis, Obama implored lawmakers to quickly make changes that protect and expand the right to vote—not for partisan advantage, he insisted, but in an effort to form a more perfect union. Republicans remain skeptical. But Democrats were listening.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine, announced that August 2020 ended in over 2 billion total searches via its search platform. While Google remains the most popular search engine, DuckDuckGo has gained a great deal of traction in recent months as more and more users have begun to value their privacy on the internet. DuckDuckGo saw over 2 billion searches and 4 million app/extension installations, and the company also said that they have over 65 million active users. DuckDuckGo could shatter its old traffic record if the same growth trend continues. Even though DuckDuckGo is growing rapidly, it still controls less than 2 percent of all search volume in the United States. However, DuckDuckGo's growth trend has continued throughout the year, mainly due to Google and other companies' privacy scandal.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Today's News:

One of the suits brought by states attempting to prevent Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and Donald Trump from continuing sabotaging the agency's operation has resulted in an injunction. Judge Stanley A. Bastion, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Washington, has temporarily blocked DeJoy's operational changes from continuing.

Ruling from the bench directly after a two-and-a-half hour hearing Thursday, Bastion said that Trump and DeJoy are “involved in a politically motivated attack on the efficiency of the Postal Service” that could disrupt the 2020 election and that harm to the public “has already taken place” by DeJoy's operational changes. “The states have demonstrated that the defendants are involved in a politically motivated attack on the efficiency of the Postal Service. They have also demonstrated that this attack on the Postal Service is likely to irreparably harm the states’ ability to administer the 2020 general election,” he said.

He warned that the backlogs of mail will “likely will slow down delivery of ballots, both to the voters and back to the states” in November. “This creates a substantial possibility that many voters will be disenfranchised and the states may not be able to effectively, timely, accurately determine election outcomes,” he said. He will provide a more detailed written order later Thursday or Friday to clarify the scope and the duration of his injunction.

The suit, brought by Washington state along with Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Wisconsin sought a broad injunction to stop DeJoy from pushing any of his operational changes, closing distribution centers, or removing any more machines. Additionally they sought to stop any other “change in the nature of postal services which will generally affect service on a nationwide or substantially nationwide basis” until the Postal Regulatory Commission can provide an advisory opinion on moving forward. That would presumably include the strict transportation schedules DeJoy has imposed that has left mail sitting for days and created chaos within the agency's operations.

"Acting" Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf, who the Government Accountability Office believes is not legitimate even in his "acting" role because he was appointed in violation of federal laws governing such appointments, had been subpoenaed by the House Homeland Security Committee to appear today.

He didn't show up. He instead ignored the subpoena; CNN reports he is instead meeting with Senate staffers about his new Trump nomination to the same role on a permanent basis. House Democrats were, of course, outraged, and said so. All right, now what? Members of the Trump administration are once again simply ignoring congressional orders to explain their actions—not requests, but legal orders. And the response will be what, exactly?

The normal process when an official or anyone else defies a congressional subpoena is for Congress to find the official in criminal contempt, then refer the matter to the United States Department of Justice for prosecution. But this relies on the Department of Justice not itself being intentionally corrupt—a norm that has collapsed after Trump Attorney General William Barr ordered the department to ignore such referrals, in large part because Barr himself has been one of the Trump figures withholding subpoenaed documents and testimony from congressional investigators.

Trump's team has adopted yet another of the central tenets of fascist rule, determining that violations of the law done to protect or enhance the powers of the authoritarian-minded political leadership cannot be challenged by other state institutions. So that's that. The prior presumption that the Department of Justice would at bare minimum not stand in the way of congressional investigations of corruption is null and void.

There is no judicial path towards restoring congressional powers. Even where the courts agree to intercede in the dispute, which has been rare, Barr is no more likely to follow court orders affirming the congressional power to compel witness testimony than he has been without such orders.

The only remaining power Congress has to enforce its subpoenas is, at this point, the power to themselves arrest and detain officials who have refused to testify. Congress has the constitutional power to drag Wolf into the room against his will, or to jail him in their own facilities until he feels compelled to testify, but that's about it. And Congress has not used that power in a very long time due to the previous government-wide agreement that the Department of Justice would intervene before it ever got to that point. But it still exists.

There's an obvious reason House Democrats do not want to go that route. It sets up the ultimate confrontation in which officials sent by the House, using their explicit constitutional powers, arrive to collect an administration subpoena-defier only to be met with federal law enforcement officials on Barr's order blocking them from carrying out that duty. It would be a constitutional crisis of impossible magnitude—a confrontation to determine whether the Constitution itself would be defied. Barr's blatant corruption make it clear that he would, indeed, welcome the chance to permanently eliminate Congress' only remaining means of investigating Trump's underlings.

So what next? The choices before the House are to allow Wolf to ignore Congress' own powers, effectively nullifying them; to file another mostly impotent lawsuit, allowing Wolf to continue hiding from testimony until, at minimum, after November determines the fate of all Trump appointees; or to go get Wolf and either set him down before the House Committee themselves or challenge the Trump administration to block that testimony by force.

There's no fourth option. It's pretty much between using congressional powers or losing those powers—either temporarily or permanently.

As Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin nears the completion of an investigation on Joe Biden he has claimed "would certainly help" Donald Trump, he remains bullish about its prospects for influencing the upcoming election. “What our investigations are uncovering, I think, will reveal this is not somebody we should be electing president of the United States,” Johnson told a local Wisconsin TV station Tuesday of Biden, according to the Daily Beast.

Johnson currently has two probes going: one into Biden's diplomacy in Ukraine as vice president and one into the work of Obama officials during the transition period to Trump's presidency. The fact that they are politically motivated is patently obvious. Not only is Johnson openly declaring they'll hobble Biden's chances of winning in November, he also officially launched the Biden/Ukraine probe shortly after Biden decisively won South Carolina earlier this year, cementing him as the frontrunner to win the Democratic nomination. What an extraordinary coincidence.

With the release of Johnson's first report imminent, the Daily Beast decided to take an extensive look at the origins of Johnson's Biden/Ukraine probe, and they're as seedy as we all suspected. Though Johnson has repeatedly denied that sources for investigation include pro-Russian Ukrainians peddling Russian disinformation, the parallels between the theories he's advancing and the propaganda being peddled by Russian intelligence agents are unmistakable. 

One pivotal figure is Andriy Derkach, who was recently tagged by the U.S. Treasury Department as an "active Russian agent for over a decade." Johnson has denied getting information for his supposed investigation directly from Derkach, but Derkach has developed conduits for pushing information among Trump allies, such as Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Derkach also has ties to a self-described source of the Johnson investigation, former Ukrainian diplomat Andrii Telizhenko.

U.S. intelligence services have had their eyes on Derkach since the spring of 2019, when they started circulating reports that named him in new Russian efforts to disrupt the 2020 U.S. elections. Around that same time, Derkach upped his activity, reaching out to Giuliani and other U.S. officials. Giuliani intended to meet with Derkach in May 2019 in Ukraine but ultimately met with Telizhenko, effectively a Derkach carve out, that same month in New York. The increasing communication between Derkach and Trump allies corresponded with the smear campaign targeting former U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, who was ultimately hung out to dry by the State Department leadership and recalled from her post. Derkach has told both Politico and the Washington post that he's sent materials to Johnson and GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa to aid their Biden/Ukraine probe. 

It's not that Johnson hasn't been warned that nearly everything he's claiming has its roots in a Russian propaganda campaign. Though Johnson has declined to say whether he has been briefed by U.S. intelligence officials about the threat of pro-Russian Ukrainians to the election, Politico reported in December 2019 that then-Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr of North Carolina had warned Johnson that his investigation could be benefitting Russia. 

But Johnson clearly doesn't care. 

“The nature of the Trump inner circle—whether that’s the president himself, people in or out of the administration, on Capitol Hill, or Rudy Giuliani—is that because of their views towards the intelligence community, if you come to them and say this guy might be an asset of so and so, it just makes it more likely that they double down on the relationship. That’s how toxic things are now,” one Republican close to the administration told the Daily Beast.

The notion that these Trump allies simply don't trust the U.S. intelligence community is a charitable explanation. The other explanation, which hasn't been proven but is certainly worthy of consideration, is that U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson is a Russian asset himself. If he isn't, he has certainly behaved like one. 

That's clearly the frustration that spilled on to the Senate floor from Senate Democrats Wednesday when they introduced a resolution calling for the cessation of any Senate activities furthering the dissemination of Russian disinformation.

“Members of the Senate,” said Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, “have been presented with specific warnings about these Kremlin-backed conspiracies and lies, again and again, including in classified settings.”

Nevertheless, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson persists. 

Former FBI Director James Comey will testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee later this month, Chair Lindsey Graham announced.

Graham (R-S.C.), whose committee is conducting a review of the FBI’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, added that former special counsel Robert Mueller declined to appear before the panel.

“I talked to Mr. Mueller. He felt like he didn’t have enough time to prepare. And I will honor that request,” Graham said on Thursday before a Judiciary Committee meeting.

Comey’s Sept. 30 testimony will be public, according to a Judiciary Committee aide. Securing his testimony is a significant step for Graham, who has vowed to investigate the origins of the 2016 Russia probe — specifically, the inquiry involving possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Democrats have dismissed the investigation as a partisan exercise intended to boost President Donald Trump’s reelection bid.

Comey agreed to testify without a subpoena, according to Graham, who added that his staff is “having issues” with former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, whom Graham has also been pursuing as part of the committee’s investigation. Graham first revealed his plans in a Fox News interview on Wednesday night.

Mueller’s refusal to appear before the committee, as Graham described it, could complicate the Senate GOP-led investigation, which Trump has openly encouraged. Last week, the Justice Department released documents suggesting that top Mueller deputies erased information from at least 15 phones, citing forgotten passwords, physical damage and missing hardware.

Graham said he intends to further pursue the issue with the DOJ in light of Mueller’s unwillingness to testify.

A spokesperson for Mueller did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The committee has already heard from several witnesses in front of the cameras and in private, including former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and former Acting Attorney General Sally Yates.

FBI Director Christopher Wray on Thursday described “very active efforts” by Russia to interfere in the 2020 election, primarily by working to damage former Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

Wray said Russians have been using social media, as well as “proxies, state media, online journals" and other vehicles to hurt Biden and what it views as anti-Russian factions in U.S. politics.

Wray’s assessment affirms the findings of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which last month described Russia’s efforts to damage Biden and specifically identified Andriy Derkach, a pro-Russian Ukrainian lawmaker who has met with President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, as an agent of Russia’s influence operations.

Wray’s testimony to the House Homeland Security Committee affirmed that Russia is continuing to take an active role in the 2020 campaign with less than 50 days until Election Day. He offered no new specifics in the early-going of the hearing, but emphasized that the intelligence community has not seen evidence that Russia is reprising its 2016 attempt to target election infrastructure, such as voter databases.

In testimony to the Homeland Security Committee, Wray also diverged from Trump’s claim that “antifa” is a terrorist organization. Rather, Wray said antifa is “more of an ideology or a movement than an organization” and though there has been violence by some who self-identify as antifa, it has not appeared to be part of a central organization.

“Antifa is a real thing,” Wray said. “But it’s not an organization or a structure.”

Under questioning from Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), Wray indicated that white supremacist violence is the largest portion of what he described as the most significant domestic terrorism threat in the country: “racially motivated violent extremism.”

Though racially motivated violence is a broader term that encompasses multiple ideologies, he said “people ascribing to some white supremacy type of ideology is certainly the largest chunk of that.”

Under questioning from lawmakers, Wray also characterized Qanon as “a sort of complex set of conspiracy theories” that has, at times, inspired violent acts. Believers, some of whom have won congressional primary elections, have embraced outlandish, baseless claims — some rooted in antisemitic tropes — about a secret cabal of Satan worshipping government leaders running an international child sex ring. Its adherents have characterized Trump as a hero fighting to put a stop to it.

Wray said the FBI doesn’t investigate any particular set of beliefs but would pursue any violence that might stem from it. “I don’t think we’ve seen lethal attacks involving that kind of motivation,” he added.

A federal judge has ordered all federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York to read a ruling she issued Wednesday that blasts prosecutors for their handling of evidence in a criminal case involving alleged violations of sanctions against Iran.

U.S. District Court Judge Allison Nathan also said she was unsatisfied with the completeness of the government’s account of why prosecutors failed to turn over one key piece of evidence to the defense until the middle of trial, with one government attorney discussing with colleagues a plan to “ bury” the previously undisclosed letter among other documents being emailed to defense lawyers.

“No responsible Government lawyer should strategize how to ‘bury’ a document that was not, but should have been, previously disclosed to the defense. A responsible Government lawyer should—at a minimum—forthrightly and truthfully reveal late disclosures to the defense,” Nathan wrote, emphatically disagreeing with the conclusion from U.S. Attorney’s Office leaders that there was nothing to “condemn” in the prosecutors’ actions.

“This Court disagrees and hereby strongly condemns this conduct,” Nathan wrote in her 34-page opinion.

Nathan called some of the omissions by prosecutors “shocking.” And she expressed the greatest concern over the explanation prosecutors gave her after the defense for Iranian banker Ali Sadr questioned the late disclosure of the letter prosecutors discussed burying.

“The Court finds that the Government’s representation was misleading, as it implied that it had explicitly informed the defense that [the exhibit] was being disclosed for the first time. Indeed, the Court was misled,” the judge wrote.

A jury convicted Sadr in March of five felony counts related to the alleged sanctions violations. However, in June, prosecutors abruptly sought to abandon the case due to the evidence issues that emerged.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office has now acknowledged that a draft of a letter sent to the judge indicated the document was not turned over to Sadr’s defense until the middle of the trial, but the letter from prosecutors was later revised to use more opaque language.

“It is the fervent hope of the Court that no sanctions are necessary. But it is the firm view of the Court that if Government lawyers acted in bad faith by knowingly withholding exculpatory material from the defense or intentionally made a misleading statement to the Court, then some sanction or referral to the Grievance Committee of the Southern District of New York would be appropriate,” the judge added.

In an unusual step, Nathan ordered the prosecutors involved to submit sworn declarations by Oct. 16 answering various questions about their handling of the disputed exhibit, its belated disclosure and the court’s subsequent inquiry.

“The Court cannot yet firmly conclude based on the existing factual record whether any of the Government lawyers deliberately withheld exculpatory information,” wrote Nathan, an appointee of President Barack Obama.

A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan declined to comment on the order.

The problems related to the Sadr case took place while the office was under the direction of U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman. He left his post in June after a bizarre episode in which Attorney General William Barr announced that Berman was stepping down, only to have Berman announce that he was not resigning.

Democrats and former prosecutors said Barr’s move appeared to be intended to give President Donald Trump and his allies more control over politically sensitive investigations in the lead-up to the November election.

Barr had planned to move Securities and Exchange Commission chief Jay Clayton into the job, but after the reshuffle drew fire, the attorney general agreed to leave Berman’s deputy, Audrey Strauss, in the U.S. Attorney role in an acting capacity.

President Donald Trump’s campaign wants a federal judge to act soon to prevent New Jersey from counting mail-in ballots starting 10 days before the Nov. 3 election.

In a court filing Wednesday, the campaign also asked U.S. District Court Judge Michael Shipp to bar elections officials from accepting mail-in ballots that do not have a postmark for two days after Election Day.

The campaign and its co-plaintiffs, the Republican National Committee and the New Jersey Republican State Committee, filed an “an order to show cause why a preliminary injunction should not issue” — its first move to hasten the lawsuit they filed Aug. 18.

But the motion, signed by state Sen. Michael Testa (R-Cumberland), does not seek to immediately pause the larger plans for a mail-in election, despite the Trump campaign’s claims it violates the U.S. Constitution and three federal laws.

Context: Gov. Phil Murphy on Aug. 14 ordered that the general election be conducted primarily by mail, with all active voters automatically sent a mail-in ballot. Voters can also fill out provisional ballots in person at polling places. The law also allows county election officials to begin counting mail-in ballots 10 days before Election Day, and for them to accept un-postmarked ballots through Nov. 5.

The Trump campaign sued on Aug. 18, calling the plans a “recipe for disaster” and alleging potential for voter fraud. But it did not file a motion to temporarily halt the election plans while the lawsuit was decided. Shipp last week told attorneys on the case to hurry up, saying the case was “butting up against the election.”

“I’m just not sure why this was not filed with any urgency,” Shipp said.

Some county clerks began sending mail-in ballots to voters last week.

Impact: If Shipp sides with the Trump campaign and bars elections officials from counting ballots early, it could take days or even weeks to know the results of close races and could make it hard to certify election results by the late November deadline.

What’s next? Arguments and briefings on the lawsuit are expected to be scheduled later Wednesday, Testa said.

tedlistens writes: The CEO of Taser maker Axon, Rick Smith, has a lot of high-tech ideas for fixing policing. One idea for identifying potentially abusive behavior is AI, integrated with the company's increasingly ubiquitous body cameras and the footage they produce. In a patent application filed last month, Axon describes the ability to search video not only for words and locations but also for clothing, weapons, buildings, and other objects. AI could also tag footage to enable searches for things such as "the characteristics [of] the sounds or words of the audio," including "the volume (e.g., intensity), tone (e.g., menacing, threatening, helpful, kind), frequency range, or emotions (e.g., anger, elation) of a word or a sound." Building that kind of software is a difficult task, and in the realm of law enforcement, one with particularly high stakes. But Smith also faces a more low-tech challenge, he tells Fast Company: making his ideas acceptable both to intransigent police unions and to the communities those police serve. Of course, right now many of those communities aren't calling for more technology for their police but for deep reform, if not deep budget cuts. And police officers aren't exactly clamoring for more scrutiny, especially if it's being done by a computer.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Patagonia has been very openly in opposition to every terrible move made by the current Republican administration. They have dedicated the ill-gotten Republican tax-cut money to climate change grassroots activism. They have launched lawsuits against the Trump administration and its move to take away federal land from the people and give it to private industry.

On Tuesday, photos went viral across the internet, purporting to show a new label on a Patagonia item of clothing. The new tag, when flipped over, read “VOTE THE ASSHOLES OUT.” Was this real? Was this something new, or old? There were many questions, but now there are answers.

According to Patagonia the tag is indeed real, taking inspiration from the end of a company letter by Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard, from April of 2020, in celebration of Earth Day, Chouinard wrote “And vote the assholes out—all of those politicians who don't believe we should do anything about climate change.” The company says that the special voting message can be seen on their Road to Regenerative Stand Up® Shorts.

I don’t need the shorts to remind me to vote these assholes out, but I support its sentiment across the board.

An anonymous reader writes: "Billions of smartphones, tablets, laptops, and IoT devices are using Bluetooth software stacks that are vulnerable to a new security flaw disclosed over the summer," reports ZDNet. Named BLESA (Bluetooth Low Energy Spoofing Attack), the vulnerability impacts devices running the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) protocol, and affects the reconnection process that occurs when a device moves back into range after losing or dropping its pairing. A successful BLESA attack allows bad actors to connect with a device (by getting around reconnection authentication requirements) and send spoofed data to it. In the case of IoT devices, those malicious packets can convince machines to carry out different or new behavior. For humans, attackers could feed a device deceptive information. BLESA impacts billions of devices that run vulnerable BLE software stacks. Vulnerable are BLE software libraries like BlueZ (Linux-based IoT devices), Fluoride (Android), and the iOS BLE stack. Windows' BLE stack is not impacted.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Joe Biden held a campaign event late Wednesday afternoon in Wilmington, Delaware. Addressing reporters, the Democratic presidential nominee spoke very eloquently on the true destructive nature of Trump’s politicization of our current public and economic health crisis, saying that the lack of “trust” in the current occupant of the White House was more than simply a political problem. Polls show that Trump’s anti-science agenda has led to people not trusting his “word” on anything scientific, and this lack of trust is affecting whether or not the American public can trust the scientific community we must rely on in order to successfully and safely navigate our way out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The fact is the majority of Americans do not trust that any vaccine Trump touts without any verifiable evidence. This is in no small part because Trump has repeatedly attacked science and scientists, and has also been trying to treat the potential release of a vaccine like a gameshow. Of course, reporters at the event—in some general attempt to cast Biden’s statement in the most sweeping politicized light possible—asked whether or not Biden’s statement on Trump’s untrustworthiness was somehow counterproductive. Biden answered the question like a champion, and then was asked a second time in a different way and answered it again, dropping some truth bombs about science and Trump along the way.

BIDEN: They know he doesn’t have any respect for scientists. He basically said this. You saw what he said when he was out in California, about wildfires and “scientists don’t know” and “it’s going to go away like a miracle.” It’s necessary so people can trust the vaccine, and that’s why I said you have to have this board of scientists who are going to say “This is why with think this is a good vaccine,” and it has to be total transparency. So scientists outside the government know exactly what is being approved, the context in which it is being approved, and why it's being approved. That’s the only thing that takes care of that.

The reporter followed that up by conflating the American public being test guinea pigs with the phase 3 vaccination trials that Biden is saying need to be transparent and peer reviewed.

BIDEN: No, I'm not. I'm saying trust the scientists. Trust the scientists. It's one thing for Donald Trump to say the vaccine is safe. Okay, then give it to the board of scientists. Have total transparency—so independent operators, scientists, and companies can take a look at it. What did you base that decision on? What did you do? Did you pressure the head of the FDA? Did you pressure whomever? I'm not saying he won't or will. That's what has to happen. Because you know yourself. You know the polls better than I do. The American people right now don't trust what the president says about things relating to science.

Then the fake gotcha question from the reporter: “Would Biden take the vaccine if scientists verified its efficacy and safety?” Biden could have just said, “Duh!” Or he could have said: “Repeat back to me what I literally just said.” But because he isn’t a complete asshat like our current president, he reiterated the basic logic of his position, saying: “Absolutely, do it. Yes. If those three questions I laid out can be answered, yes, absolutely.”

The next reporter then asked if in saying Biden didn’t trust Donald Trump, he was also saying he didn’t trust the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

BIDEN: No. I don't trust some of the people, like the fella who took a leave of absence. He didn't run it. He was a spokesperson for it. When I met with the seven scientists today on the screen in this room, they told me the people they had worked with in the CDC and the FDA and all of the various agencies, [and] there's some very, very good people there in the ranks. The everyday folks, they’re not “everyday”—they’re scientists, but the people who do the daily work in there, there's some very, very good people. But you know from some [news] items that they've been quashed with things they have said. And they've been pressured. The heads of those agencies—politically appointed, some of them—have been in fact moved. Moved to say: “Yes, we can do this or that, this will work or that will work.” It's a simple proposition. If a vaccine is really [ready] to go, it should be totally transparent. The basis upon which that decision was made, what scientists have looked at, and said this is a useful, safe vaccine to take.

So that's all I'm saying that's going to be necessary. I respectfully suggest, no matter what I said in this process, all the polling data shows that only like 30-something percent of people say if Trump said it's okay—this is the same guy that said: “Inject bleach!” This is the same guy that said: “If you want to keep hurricanes from getting to the United States, why don't we drop a nuclear weapon on it?” You know, I mean, there’s a reason why they’re not so certain.

Yes. That is one of the million reasons.

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If and when Trump declares himself the winner early, Republicans will be primed to believe him.