James.galbraith

"Investigations" so transparently bogus it's impossible to treat them as anything else.

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Michael Caputo's out—for now. After the weekend exposure of emails showing that former Trump campaign operative turned Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Michael Caputo used his office to attack, water down, and delay Centers of Disease Control and Prevention scientific reports on pandemic dangers, an HHS statement announced that Caputo will be taking a 60-day "leave of absence to focus on his health and the well-being of his family."

Caputo issued a private apology to HHS officials after releasing a conspiracy-laced Facebook video in which he claimed that CDC scientists releasing data at odds with Donald Trump's nonsensical and often-conflicting pandemic declarations were operating as a "resistance unit" intent on politically damaging Trump, while urging Trump supporters to "buy ammunition" to fend off a possible political coup by Democratic candidate Joe Biden.

Caputo claimed in his rant that his "mental health had definitely failed." His 60-day leave from HHS will, coincidentally, remove him from the public eye from now until shortly after the November elections. If Trump wins, expect Caputo’s policies to be implemented even more aggressively, throughout the department.

Caputo is not the only official to be leaving HHS, however. In the same HHS statement announcing Caputo's temporary leave, the department announced that Caputo aide Dr. Paul Alexander "was hired to engage with the department on a temporary basis" and will now "be leaving the department." Alexander was singled out as the Caputo assistant most prominently responsible for attempting to alter CDC scientific statements—while making bizarre and unfounded claims that children face "essentially zero" risk from COVID-19 and blasting the agency's documentation of risks to American schoolchildren and university students as "hit pieces" meant to damage the Trump administration.

None of this is assurance that Trump's installed political hires will be backing down in their attempts to block the CDC from releasing accurate information about pandemic risks or their claims that agency scientists who release information at odds with Trump's own words are doing so not to save lives, but to damage Republicanism. It only means that the administration is cutting Caputo loose, temporarily, in an attempt to dodge these revelations of just how often his team attempted to alter agency science to hide the true dangers of Trump's "reopening" plans.

Reopening plans that rely on, in Trump's newest explanations, America developing a "herd mentality."

Since the beginning of his life, Donald Trump has been a liar. He lies big and he lies small. Everything from his strange hair down to his shoes are false or misleading in some way or another. Since the beginning of his administration, Trump’s penchant for lying has increased. The Washington Post put his rate of lying or misleading claims at around 20 per day at the end of 2019. That was before the pandemic, before Trump completely dropped the ball and his racist, cruel, xenophobic, and incompetent administration’s sins came back to claim us all.

Trump’s lying and the need for fact-checking has become one of the few jobs created by the current administration, since the administration is made up of so many scam artists and general hoodwinkery. CNN has reporter Daniel Dale doing the fact-checking for those moments when Trump is allowed to really talk for a while. On Tuesday night, Trump decided his campaign could use the illusion that he was speaking to Americans outside of his white supremacist cultish base, and have him sit down with Pennsylvania voters in a town hall. As you can imagine, Trump lied for most of the hour and a half event. CNN’s Don Lemon had Daniel Dale on to point out some of the inconsistencies in Trump’s assertions. 

At this point, we all know that Trump is a mediocre person, born into great power and wealth, buoyed by our rigged systems of inequality, and now failing on a global level. We all know Trump is a liar and that his lies are seemingly so transparent it is mind-numbing to watch millions of people continue to show their support for him. Daniel Dale has a great ability to really speak fast and thus perform the level of bullshit this current white supremacist in chief is shoveling out into the public sphere any chance he gets.

DANIEL DALE: There was just so much lying, Don. I'm going to go quickly, so literally just stop me if you need to. He said, again, Democrats won't protect people with pre-existing conditions. That is nonsense, as a voter told him, Democrats created those protections. He insisted he didn't praise China on the virus. He did so repeatedly. We know that. He claimed nobody knew at the time he was praising China that seniors were especially susceptible to the virus. That's one of the first things we learned out of China, Italy, and the U.S. He claimed Biden said in March, that the pandemic was, “totally overexaggerated.” I can find no evidence Biden ever said that. He said Winston Churchill was kind of like him playing down stuff because he went on rooftops in London, during the Nazi bombing and told people everything is going to be good. Churchill did not speak from the rooftops and did not say everything was going to be good, he warned of suffering and danger. 

Trump said he fired James Mattis, Mattis resigned. He said that protesters took over 20% of Seattle. It was a six block area, nowhere close to 20%. He took credit again, for sending in the National Guard in Minneapolis, saying that this happened after a week and a half of violence there. It was not even close to a week and a half. It was days and the Democratic governor is the one who activated the Guard. He said he essentially repealed Obamacare by getting rid of the individual mandate. Not even close to true with the Medicaid expansion, pre-existing conditions protections, other stuff remains.

He said the cupboards were empty of ventilators, his administration admits he inherited about 16,000 from Obama. He did his usual false-boast about so-called bans on travel from China and Europe. They were not complete bans. He said stocks are owned by, quote, “everybody.” Just about half of Americans own stocks. He repeated his nonsense about testing causing cases, testing merely reveals and helps fight cases. He said that Biden has agreed to a Bernie Sanders style of socialized health care. He fought Sanders on that issue. He has very much not agreed to a Sanders-style plan. And, Don, this is a preliminary list. i have hours of fact-checking tonight to do because there's even more than this so this was just a firehose of lying, again, from the president.

Dale subsequently debunks the right-wing talking point lie that the boost in shooting crime in New York City (Trump exaggerates the uptick by about 200%) is misleading since even though there have been more violent shooting crimes in NYC this year, the numbers are still way below the numbers in Giuliani’s last year in office as mayor of New York.

Lemon asks Dale if he needs to take a sip of water after that two-minute tour de force.

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The common story on COVID-19 has become very, very centered around the idea that everyone just needs to park in place until a vaccine comes along to save us. But with poll after poll showing that people are unwilling to accept a vaccine rushed into production under Donald Trump, that’s simply not going to happen anytime soon. And barring some ill-considered use of emergency authorization, a vaccine is still months away in any case. But as CDC director Robert Redfield testified at a Senate hearing on Wednesday morning, there is already a solution available that can reduce the spread of COVID-19 and allow the nation to bring the number of cases down to a level where life can return to a fair semblance of normality. It’s called masks. 

As Daily Kos reported back in June, reaching herd immunity by waiting for people to become infected—as Donald Trump suggested again on Tuesday evening—would absolutely overwhelm America’s healthcare system and result in the death of millions on top of the 200,000 who have already died unnecessarily. However, if more than 80% of Americans wore masks in their interactions outside the home, “the United States could achieve effective immunity almost overnight.” Since then, additional studies have shown that masks can be even more effective when the proper kind of masks are worn in the correct way. A national mask mandate could reduce the transmission of COVID-19 better than the release of a vaccine and it can do so immediately. In fact, even in the best circumstances, it would take many months for a vaccine to achieve the results that an enforced mask mandate could manage in just a few weeks.

And it’s not like there’s going to be a quick alternative in any case, because at the same hearing, Redfield testified that a vaccine is unlikely to be available to the general public until “late” in 2021.

Here’s Redfield on Wednesday morning. 

• Multiple surveys have demonstrated that Americans do not trust Trump to deliver a safe and effective vaccine. As a result, the percentage of people likely to take a vaccine over the first few months is likely to be low—far too low to provide general protection, and likely too low to reduce the transmission of the virus to the point where the pandemic cannot be maintained.
• As Redfield points out, a vaccine is likely to be far from 100% effective. In fact, the FDA has suggested that it will approve vaccines with an effective rate as low as 50%, making the vaccine literally more of a gamble than wearing a mask.
• Even if a safe, highly effective vaccine becomes available, it will take a period of months for this vaccine to be delivered first to front-line workers, then to high-risk candidates, then to the general public. This is true even if a vaccine were to be released using an Emergency Use Authorization. Vaccines alone are unlikely to be common enough across the community to halt the spread of COVID-19 until months after they first become available.
• Masks are cheap, available, and work instantly. A good multi-layer mask helps protects the wearer as well as others they encounter. Mask wearing is likely a primary factor in explaining why nations like Japan—which did everything wrong in terms of testing and case management—have a rate of deaths 55 times lower than in the U.S. 
• Unlike vaccines, masks do not generate even a small risk of adverse reactions. Flu vaccines may have a one in a million chance at a serious reaction; masks don’t. Everything you’ve heard about masks reducing oxygen is bullshit. So is the idea that masks “amplify” someone’s own virus. That cannot happen. Masks are all benefit with very little downside. If you are exercising vigorously in isolated circumstances—take off your mask—then put them back on. 

None of this means that we still don’t need a nationwide system of testing and case-tracing. But it means that we can, with masks, reduce the number of cases to the point where testing and isolation can drive down the number of new cases to a few hundred per day. COVID-19 can be a genuinely rare disease affecting a few, instead of something that is looking to double the death count before year’s end. 

If a national mask mandate had happened back in the spring when the benefits of using masks to fight COVID-19 became clear, we would already be back to a more or less normal life. Kids would be in school with little controversy, athletes would be playing with low risks, the economy would be genuinely recovering. That didn’t happen.

The best time to put a mask mandate in place was as soon as we understood the value of wearing masks. The second best time is now. Right now. This isn’t technically difficult or logistically challenging. It doesn’t require shutting down anything or calling out the National Guard.

Here’s what the Alaska Department of Health and Human Services had to say about mask wearing:

“For each week of the outbreak without masks, a 38.5% increase in per-capita mortality occurred. Mortality decreased by 4.6% for every week the country wore masks.” 

Every day that Trump fails to institute a national mask mandate, he is consigning thousands more Americans to death. We need a national mask mandate. Right now.

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I'm always surprised genie movies aren't just 2 hours of working over possible loopholes.

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Trump departs the White House en route to Philadelphia on Tuesday. | Alex Wong/Getty Images

He faced tough questions from voters — and had few answers.

President Donald Trump rarely sits down with reporters who don’t work for Fox News (his disastrous recent interview with Jonathan Swan being a notable exception), and even less frequently gives voters a chance to directly ask him questions. His Tuesday night town hall event on ABC illustrated why.

The 90-minute event, which took place in Philadelphia and consisted of him answering questions from a spectrum of voters and ABC host George Stephanopoulos, did not go well for Trump — so much so that Fox News’s immediate spin was that it was an “ambush.” Their evidence? That people had the gall to ask him about his own statements and policy positions.

Perhaps no moment illustrated the incoherence of Trump’s reelection messaging better than when he tried to blame Joe Biden for not implementing a national mask mandate, seemingly forgetting that he’s the president.

“They said at the Democrat convention they’re gonna do a national [mask] mandate. They never did it, because they’ve checked out and they didn’t do it,” he said, before going on to claim without evidence that “a lot of people think that masks are not good.” (In fact, public health experts broadly agree that wearing a mask around people can help prevent the spread of the coronavirus.)

Though Stephanopoulos at times let Trump go on extended, untruthful rants, he set the tone early by challenging a number of false claims Trump made about the “tremendous job” his government has purportedly done handling the coronavirus — spin belied by the reality that the US has endured by far the most confirmed cases and deaths in the world.

“You said we’re doing better in mortality than other countries, but here’s this chart right here. It shows the United States is right here, this is number of deaths per 1 million residents — here’s Western Europe [above the United States], Canada way down there. We’re not at the top of the list,” Stephanopoulos said.

Trump responded by citing misleading statistics comparing the US’s excess mortality rate to the rest of the world, prompting Stephanopoulos to interject and cut to the heart of the matter.

“We have 4 percent of the world’s population, more than 20 percent of the cases, more than 20 percent of the deaths,” he said.

“Well, we have 20 percent of the cases because of the fact we do much more testing,” Trump said, as if testing is the cause of cases or deaths instead of the underlying disease.

In response to a question from a voter, Trump denied he ever publicly downplayed the coronavirus — “I actually, in many ways, I up-played it” — even though he’s on tape admitting to downplaying the threat.

To cap off the coronavirus portion of the town hall, Trump defended his unscientific claims about how Covid-19 will “disappear” on its own, without robust government intervention, even after Stephanopoulos pointed out the high cost of that approach.

“It would go away without the vaccine, George,” Trump said.

“It would go away without the vaccine?” Stephanopoulos followed up.

“Sure,” Trump said, “over a period of time.”

“And many deaths,” Stephanopoulos said, alluding to the fact that pursuing “herd immunity” without vaccinations could result in as many as 3 million Americans dying.

“And you’ll develop, like, a herd mentality,” Trump said, before Stephanopoulos went to a commercial break.

It’s hard to imagine that any of this would convince undecided voters that Trump is doing a good job responding to a pandemic that continues to disrupt life in the US and killed more than 1,000 people on Tuesday. But things didn’t go much better when the town hall turned to other topics.

Trump won’t even acknowledge that systemic racism is a thing

Another vulnerability Trump faces headed into the home stretch of his reelection campaign is his record on race relations. While some voters might like his coded “law and order” messaging, Trump’s long history of racism came to a head this summer when he responded to a string of incidents of police violence against Black people by trying to demonize protesters and denying that systemic racism is even a problem in American society.

On Tuesday, Stephanopoulos confronted Trump with statistics pointing toward the reality of systemic racism — “Black Americans [are] more than three times [as] likely to be killed by police,” he noted, for example — and asked him what he plans to do (if anything) to rectify the situation.

But instead of engaging with the substance of the question, Trump immediately steered the discussion toward polling.

A voter then asked Trump to explain when America has ever been great for Black people. Again, Trump tried to twist the question into an opportunity to talk about polling.

“Well, I can say this, we have tremendous African American support,” Trump claimed, although polls friendly to him peg his approval with Black voters at under 25 percent. (A number that, in fairness, is much higher than the 8 percent Black support he had in 2016.)

But the voter pushed back, noting that Trump “has yet to address and acknowledge that there has been a race problem in America.”

“I hope there’s not a race problem,” Trump replied.

These comments aren’t surprising — Trump has consistently denied that America has a systemic racism problem. But with support for the Black Lives Matter movement growing over the summer in the wake of the Breonna Taylor and George Floyd killings, among others, his position is more out of touch than ever.

Of course, when reality doesn’t suffice, Trump has no shame about constructing an alternate one. At one point on Tuesday he insisted, dubiously, that before Covid-19 hit, he was close to solving racial strife in the country.

“I was starting to get calls from Democrats, that, ‘Hey, it’s starting to work, let’s get together,’” Trump said, when in reality he had just been through an impeachment trial.

Trump has no shame about just making stuff up

Pressed by a voter with preexisting conditions about why his administration is fighting in the courts to overturn Obamacare and strip legal protections from people like her, Trump again made stuff up, insisting that “you’re going to have new health care, and the preexisting conditions aspect of it will always be in my plan.” In fact, the health care plan Trump championed in 2017 would have stripped coverage from tens of millions of people, many of them with preexisting conditions, if it hadn’t been for John McCain’s vote in the Senate.

Along similar lines, Trump told a voter who asked him about immigration that he’ll unveil new legislation “in a very short time” — a talking point he often uses to buy time when he doesn’t really have a plan.

On the topic of law and order — one that Trump is trying to make a centerpiece of his campaign — Stephanopoulos grilled him on a disconnect between what he said back in 2016 and what he’s saying now.

“You promised four years ago at the Republican Convention, ‘I’m gonna restore law and order in this country,’” he pointed out.

Trump’s response was that he has — if you disregard all the large cities that are run by Democrats (so, most of them).

Trump went on to compare the unrest that took place in American cities over the summer with the fall of Berlin in 1945, seemingly unaware of how that analogy reflects on his stewardship of the country.

This is your brain on Fox News

In a sign of how Trump thought the town hall went, while it aired on Tuesday night, he tweeted out Fox News clips. And while his performance was widely panned, on Wednesday morning Trump characteristically tried to turn reality on its head by thanking people for the “great reviews.”

Trump’s Tuesday was really a tale of two interviews. He began his day with a lengthy sit-down with Fox & Friends in which his lies and exaggerations went unchallenged, and ended with the ABC event in which his effort to construct an alternate reality wasn’t as successful.

To the extent that the latter served as a preview of what we can expect from the upcoming presidential debates, it doesn’t bode well for the incumbent.

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Donald Trump hates the Town Hall format because his failures are laid bare, and that’s what happened in last night’s ABC News forum with George Stephanopoulos in which he was grilled about his dismal COVID response and racial injustice.

But first, this must-see “let me finish” moment.

This moment. pic.twitter.com/lCs6ZT73IB

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) September 16, 2020

Trump was asked by Pastor Carl Day: “When has America been great for African Americans in the ghetto of America? Are you aware of how tone deaf [MAGA] comes off to the African American community?”

Trump replied by talking about polls.

“Well, I can say this,” Trump replied. “We have tremendous African American support. You’ve probably seen it in the polls. … If you talk about Make America Great, and I’m talking about for the black community, you look just prior to this horrible situation from China, when the virus came in, that was probably the highest point for the black community. … “was the best single moment in the history of the African American people in this country.”

“When has America been great for African Americans in the ghetto of America? Are you aware of how tone deaf [MAGA] comes off to the African American community?”

Trump answers by saying that he’s got good polls.
#TrumpTownHall

pic.twitter.com/xWcISGNeMV

— Holly Figueroa O’Reilly (@AynRandPaulRyan) September 16, 2020

Pastor Carl Day, who asked President Trump about his "Make America Great Again" slogan tells CNN's @DonLemon the President's response is what he expected.

"He tap danced around it," Day added. "He couldn't really give an answer because there is no answer to it." pic.twitter.com/2oNTpmfEgD

— CNN Tonight (@CNNTonight) September 16, 2020

Trump also attempted to blame Joe Biden for not implanting a national mask mandate.

The President attempts to blame Joe Biden for not implementing a national mask mandate pic.twitter.com/nq9J6cVFoR

— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) September 16, 2020

Trump also repeated his claims that coronavirus would go away on its own, and said that “herd mentality” would do the trick. He may have meant “herd immunity,” which is when the virus is allowed to rip through the population and kill millions of people. This has already been pushed by multiple Trump aides.

He doesn't even know the proper name for the crackpot theory he's backing to kill millions of Americans

It's "herd immunity," not "herd mentality," and it's how you handle the bubonic plague if you're living in Restoration-era England, not the g*ddamned United States in 2020 JFC https://t.co/IFLnPsF6mA

— Seth Abramson (@SethAbramson) September 16, 2020

Trump also denied that he downplayed the virus. But that’s not what he told Bob Woodward in March recordings.

“Yeah, well, I didn’t downplay it. I, actually, in many ways, I up-played it, in terms of action,” Trump claimed.

Added Trump: “I think what I did by closing up the country, I think I saved two, maybe two and a half [million], maybe more than that, lives. I really don’t think so. I think we did a very good job. I don’t know if that’s been recognized.”

President Trump dismissed questions from Pennsylvania voters about his handling of coronavirus, insisting he did act strongly to fight the pandemic and again denied he downplayed the situation despite saying so on tape. @JDiamond1 reports.https://t.co/PcEqSO7KA0 pic.twitter.com/fKGE1hCUes

— New Day (@NewDay) September 16, 2020

The post Flailing Trump Tries to Blame Biden for Lack of Mask Mandate, Says Polls Show ‘MAGA’ isn’t ‘Tone Deaf’ to Black Americans: TOWN HALL CLIPS appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Oklahoma state officials knew that Trump's Tulsa campaign rally, held in June, would kill people. That's the clear message in a series of emails obtained by The Hill, in which officials inside the Oklahoma public health department panicked about the upcoming event and weighed how far they could push to cancel it.

State epidemiologist Aaron Wendleboe was blunt. "I am concerned that the mass indoor gathering in Tulsa of 19,000 people will directly lead to deaths in Oklahoma. As the state epidemiologist, I feel I have a responsibility to speak out and warn of the estimated risk." Wendleboe's risk analysis estimated "at least 2 deaths and probably closer to 10" from Trump's event.

And in a warning to the state health department director: "I’m not sure of any instance where we would hold a public event and say, '...and by the way, there is a chance that attending this could lead to a minimum of two deaths.'"

While health officials appeared to believe that the rally would at some point be called off due to the obvious dangers and already-increasing COVID-19 cases in Tulsa, according to The Hill's reporting, Oklahoma's Republican governor, the Trump-supporting Kevin Stitt, did not back down, and neither did the state's other Republicans. So the event that public health officials were certain would lead to at least single-digit pandemic deaths indeed went forward, Trump bored the mostly-maskless crowd for an interminable hour-and-a-half, and Tulsa went on to see a spike in COVID-19 cases exactly one Average Incubation Time after the rally concluded. Determining the final death toll will largely be impossible—we do not have tracking efforts that could tease out which public outbreaks, months later, can be attributed to secondary or tertiary rally infections as each mini-outbreak washes through different populations.

Among the deaths suspected of being directly caused by Trump's rally, however: that of former Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain, who was photographed proudly maskless in his rally seat, entered the hospital with severe COVID-19 symptoms two weeks later, and died soon after that.

There are multiple lessons here, but the principal one is that public officials, the Republican Party, the Trump campaign, and all associated with it absolutely knew that Trump's demand for an indoor "reopening" rally would kill Americans. There was no controversy about this. Members of Trump's advance and security teams tested positive in the days before the rally. State and national health officials were warning of the clear and obvious dangers.

The rally went forward because the Trump campaign believed that multiple almost-certain deaths were an acceptable exchange for the footage they wanted to capture. That's it. There's no arguing otherwise; if Trump's campaign team truly did not "know" holding a superspreader-capable event in a city with rising COVID-19 cases would lead to additional deaths, it is just as unforgivable—but it's not possible. They knew. Gov. Kevin Stitt knew, and made the same estimation.

It's a bloody death cult, from top to bottom. Why the Republican base continues to go along will be a question for historians. It’s likely they will come to the same conclusions we have, but will be able to couch it in more … academic terms.

Trump's defenders wonder why he took the risk of taking tough questions from voters.

A new coronavirus survey conducted in late August reveals Donald Trump's approval ratings on the pandemic to be damn near disqualifying for anyone seeking reelection to the highest office in the land.  

In the nationwide poll of more than 21,000 adults fielded by a consortium of colleges—including Northeastern University, Harvard University, Rutgers University, and Northwestern University—Trump didn't clear 37% approval on the coronavirus in any single battleground state and he averaged about 33% across 13 of those states.

Here's Trump's approval rating in 13 swing states, according to "The COVID-19 Consortium for Understanding the Public’s Policy Preferences Across States"  survey:

• Arizona: 31%
• Florida: 29%
• Georgia: 35%
• Iowa: 34%
• Michigan: 32%
• Minnesota: 35%
• North Carolina: 34%
• New Hampshire: 33%
• Nevada: 32%
• Ohio: 36%
• Pennsylvania: 37%
• Texas: 30%
• Wisconsin: 29%

These are absolutely devastating numbers on one of the most defining issues of the 2020 election cycle. 

A separate national tracking poll released Tuesday by NBC News/SurveyMonkey found 52% of Americans don't trust what Trump has said about a coronavirus vaccine, while just 26% do trust his vaccine musings.

Naturally, that lack of trust has led to lower levels of people willing to take a government-approved vaccine under a Trump administration, with just 39% of Americans now saying they would get a U.S. government-approved vaccine, down from 44% a little over a month ago. Twenty-three percent said they definitively would not take a government-approved vaccine. And the number of people who are uncertain about what they would do has grown over the last month from 32% to 36%. That's exactly why having a transparent approval process is so critical to making any potential vaccine effective.

For months, President Trump’s campaign boasted that its campaign operation was a “juggernaut” and compared it to the powerful Death Star. Nowhere was that more evident to the general public than on the television airwaves. According to data from Kantar/Campaign Media Analysis Group, from early May through July 28, 2020, the Trump campaign and Republican outside groups spent an estimated $80.1 million to air 161,744 ads on local broadcast, national network and national cable TV for the presidential general election. By contrast, Joe Biden’s campaign and Democratic outside groups spent an estimated $44.2 million and aired only 66,875 ads for the presidential general election during that period.

But as you can see in the chart below, the Republican Death Star stopped being fully armed and operational in late July — while Democrats began to step up their game. From July 29 through Sept. 14, Republican forces aired just 107,816 ads at an estimated cost of $71.5 million, while Democratic forces aired 183,341 ads for an estimated $107.1 million.

What happened in July? Trump appointed a new campaign manager, Bill Stepien, who was tasked with fixing the campaign’s cash flow problems and sudden fundraising woes. For most of the year, Trump and the Republican National Committee had comfortably outraised Biden and the Democratic National Committee, but that advantage had evaporated by the end of July. And in August, Bidenworld outraised Trumpworld $365 million to $210 million.

Accordingly, Stepien has reportedly been working to tighten the campaign’s belt — which has included cutting back on TV ads in several key states. For example, from early May through Aug. 24, Republicans outaired Democrats 20,904 ads to 18,548 in Arizona-based media markets.⁴⁰ But the Trump campaign went dark in the Grand Canyon State on Aug. 25, and after that Democrats outaired Republicans 8,922 ads to 3,226 in the state (all but two of the Republican ads were from outside groups).

It’s a similar story in Pennsylvania: From early May through July 29, Republicans aired 28,438 ads to Democrats’ 17,322. But from July 30 through Sept. 14, Democrats out-advertised Republicans 30,882 spots to 15,702 — in large part because the Trump campaign aired only two ads during those six weeks. That should be especially alarming to Republicans, since the FiveThirtyEight model believes that Pennsylvania is the likeliest state to decide the 2020 election.

The Trump campaign also didn’t air a single commercial in a Michigan-based media market from July 23 through Sept. 7. Although the campaign is now back on the air, Michiganders saw 38,261 pro-Biden ads from early May through Sept. 14 and only 15,866 pro-Trump ads.

Trump is still on the air in other crucial states, such as Florida, North Carolina and Wisconsin — but even in those states, Democrats have been airing more ads than Republicans since late July. Here are the shifts in each major swing state — defined as the states with more than a 1 percent chance of being the Electoral College tipping point, per the FiveThirtyEight model.

Democrats are now airing more swing-state ads

How many ads each party aired for the presidential general election on broadcast TV in the states with the highest chance of deciding the 2020 election, from May 5 to July 28 vs. from July 29 to Sept. 14

		May 5 – July 28		July 29 – Sept. 14
State	Tipping Point	Dem. ads	GOP ads	Dem. ads	GOP ads
Pennsylvania	31% chance	16,899	28,204	31,305	15,936
Florida	14	8,373	27,114	40,547	19,786
Wisconsin	10	13,150	17,817	24,400	17,701
Arizona	7	7,717	13,165	19,753	10,965
Michigan	6	15,486	10,043	22,775	5,823
Minnesota	5	0	1,814	3,621	3,345
North Carolina	4	4,303	19,339	21,603	16,248
Nevada	4	70	5,884	5,676	22
Colorado	3	0	49	30	1
Ohio	3	93	9,037	3,648	29
New Hampshire	2	13	0	8	0
Georgia	2	3	10,395	33	12,293
Texas	2	40	584	165	2
Virginia	1	0	0	16	0

“Tipping-point chance” is the chance that a given state will provide the decisive vote in the Electoral College. Tipping-point chances are as of Sept. 15 at 10 a.m. Eastern.

Source: Kantar/Campaign Media Analysis Group

In sum, these numbers look damning for Trump. And they are indeed another sign that Trump’s campaign may be in trouble, especially considering he is the incumbent and, as such, should have a larger war chest at his disposal. But it’s also important to remember that TV advertising isn’t the be-all and end-all for campaigns. In fact, political scientists disagree about whether TV ads even have a significant effect on elections at all! And the Trump campaign points to the fact that it is outspending Biden in other areas, such as field offices (Trump has opened more than 280, while Biden, due to the coronavirus pandemic, has opened none) and digital advertising (from Aug. 1 through Sept. 5, Trump spent $66.8 million on Facebook and Google ads while Biden spent $46.2 million). And of course, there are still seven weeks left in the campaign — plenty of time for Trump to return to dominance on the airwaves.

TALLAHASSEE — In the shadow of Walt Disney World, in one of Florida’s fast-growing metropolises, Democrats are assembling a political machine that they’re counting on to destroy President Donald Trump’s dreams of reelection.

The president must win Florida to capture a second term. But the increasingly Democratic Orlando region stands in his way as one of the few places in Florida with a bench of Democratic officials and a grassroots infrastructure to go along with it. As a result, the Biden campaign and Florida Democrats think it can help deliver the crowning blow to Trump in November.

That’s what brought Joe Biden to Central Florida Tuesday, where he had a campaign stop in the Puerto Rican-heavy city of Kissimmee. While the visit was ostensibly about connecting with Hispanic voters in honor of Hispanic Heritage month, the bigger target was populous Orange and Osceola counties, which have taken on heightened significance in 2020.

Orlando’s Orange County has voted Democratic in five consecutive presidential elections. But last month’s primaries provided ample evidence that the county is ready to turn an even deeper shade of blue after the party won two county commission races and nominated a rising star in Democratic and Florida Puerto Rican politics, state Rep. Amy Mercado, to become countywide property appraiser.

Driving the leftward momentum: explosive urban growth, fueled by young voters and those with Puerto Rican roots, like Mercado. They are spreading from Orlando and Kissimmee throughout the swing state’s swing area, the Interstate 4 Corridor, which the Orlando media market anchors in the middle of the state.

Recent Orange County elections — which showcased Democrats’ growing mastery of vote-by-mail absentee ballots amid the pandemic — served as a warning sign to Republicans who worry that the county could run up the score so much that it puts Biden over the top in this closely fought state.

“There’s a lot of nervousness from Republicans over the new wave of Democrats, their ability to turn out voters and their coordination. It should be an eye-opener for Republicans,” said former Republican state Rep. Mike Miller, who lost one of the county commission races.

Miller noted that Florida Republicans “have always dominated” casting absentee ballots, but Trump’s rhetoric against voting by mail led to a sharp dropoff in the practice in his and other races. At the same time, Democrats encouraged voting by mail and Miller’s opponent, freshman Democratic commissioner Emily Bonilla, essentially had the race won before Election Day on Aug. 18.

“The primary was a dry run for what we’re going to do in November,” said a Biden campaign official who was not authorized to speak on record about strategy. “What Orange has is a new and emerging Democratic population — Latinos, progressive whites, working-class voters — that we could not turn out before. We can now. We have more tools in the toolbox.”

Leading the way for Democrats is the Orlando-area congressional delegation. There’s Rep. Val Demings, who was on Biden’s running-mate shortlist and whose husband, Jerry Demings, is the mayor of the county. Rep. Stephanie Murphy is the first Vietnamese-American woman elected to Congress; Rep. Darren Soto is the first person of Puerto Rican descent from Florida elected to the U.S. House.

The diversity of the Democratic delegation, and the spate of recent local wins, are a testament to the rapidly changing demographics of Orange County — the fifth-most populous county in Florida with a population of 1.4 million.

Mercado, the state legislator who faces token opposition from a write-in in November to win the property appraiser’s office, said voters with Puerto Rican heritage like her are powering population growth in Orange County and neighboring Osceola County, which is home to Kissimmee.

“The VP’s visit today, to the heart of the Puerto Rican community, signals his understanding of the importance of this population and his continued work and advocacy for us,” said Mercado, whose mother, Carmen Torres, helped organize Puerto Rican voters in Florida for Barack Obama’s two successful presidential campaigns. Mercado’s father, Victor Torres, is a state senator.

As the population swells in Orange, it’s also exporting Democrats to neighboring communities, like once-red Seminole County.

“If you told me four years ago that Seminole would go blue, I would’ve laughed in your face. But it’s changing,” said Anthony Pedicini, a top Republican operative involved in state legislative races.

“It’s spreading from Orlando into the surrounding areas. Just look at the highway system, it’s like a heart pumping blue blood in every direction from Orlando,” he said.

Pedicini noted that Hispanic voters are not the ones driving the change in Seminole. “It’s suburban whites. We’re losing too many suburban women.”

Pedicini says he has seen enough GOP polling in other districts to still feel relatively good about Trump’s chances in Florida, where the president marginally trails Biden in polls. One reason for the GOP optimism is that other areas of the state — from Pasco County in the west of the I-4 Corridor to Daytona Beach in the region’s east — have gotten more Republican as a counterbalance.

But while GOP energy is high in those Republican areas, Pedicini acknowledges the presidential race is going to be “a dog fight” and Orange County has a reservoir of Democrats who appear enthusiastic about voting.

Democratic enthusiasm in Orange is of particular concern because the county — along with its Democrat-heavy neighbor, Osceola, and South Florida’s Miami-Dade and Broward — has often been plagued by lower turnout rates. Had those counties turned out at the statewide average, Democrats posit, Republicans would more than likely have lost the last two governors’ contests, the Senate race in 2018 and the presidential race in 2016.

“Osceola is always a challenge. It’s one of the counties with lowest turnout,” said Marcos Vilar, one of the top Democratic operatives in Central Florida. His United for Progress political committee played a pivotal role in the just-ended primaries and plans to turn out voters in November.

Vilar said the local races in Orange and Osceola, where Democrats have focused on electing Latinos in the Boricua-heavy community, has steadily increased turnout and vote share for Democrats. That could be crucial for Biden’s chances, especially as he struggles to attain the level of Hispanic support enjoyed by Clinton.

Trump lost Orange by 25 percentage points, or 135,000 votes, four years ago when he narrowly carried Florida. Republicans and Democrats alike believe the margin in the county could be worse for him in November, forcing him to need to make his margins elsewhere.

Orange County started slipping out of reach for Republican presidential candidates in 2008, after Obama’s campaign and liberal groups conducted massive registration drives that added more Black and Hispanic voters, allowing him to capture 59 percent of the vote. Just four years before, President George W. Bush narrowly lost the county by one-tenth of a percentage point.

The rising population and Democratic presence in Orange, Democrats believe, could soon make it rival the state’s biggest blue county, Broward, and help offset any Republican gains in Miami-Dade County to the south.

Outgoing Orange County Commissioner Betsy VanderLey, a Republican who recently lost her bid for another term, said population growth — including younger, Democratic-leaning voters and those from Democratic states such as New York — helped tipped the scales in her defeat.

VanderLey, who said the Central Florida metro area was at one point adding a net of 1,500 new people weekly, pointed out that her district’s Horizon West master planned community was the third-fastest growing in the nation.

“Four years ago, when I ran, my district was the last Republican stronghold of Orange County and there was only one Democrat on the [seven-member] board of county commissioners. Now there will be just one [Republican] left,” she noted. “The Democrats are clearly energized. If the Republican turnout in November mirrors what we saw in the primary, it doesn’t bode well for Trump in this county.”

 As health experts continue to encourage mask-wearing across the country, some anti-maskers just won’t give up. They have been refusing to wear masks since the start of the pandemic, despite research supporting that masks significantly prevent the spread of COVID-19. In Utah, maskless demonstrators have crowded city sidewalks and school-related meetings to protest mask mandates in and out of schools. In a video that went viral Monday, a woman can be heard comparing the moments leading up to George Floyd’s brutal murder to wearing a mask, in addition to other conspiracy theories.

“George Floyd was saying, ‘I can’t breathe,’ and then he died,” the woman, identified as Shauna Kinville, said. “Now we’re wearing a mask, and we say ‘I can’t breathe’, but we’re being forced to wear them.” The viral video, clipped from a news segment on ABC4 News, is from an anti-mask rally that occurred at a school district building last month. Hundreds of people attended the St. George rally on Aug.17 to protest children wearing masks, days after schools in the county reopened.

Parents gathered to argue that not only was “forcing” children to wear masks unconstitutional but that they were “tired of not being able to live their normal lives,” ABC News reported. In addition to this, rally attendees claimed that even if they have medical issues or health concerns wearing a mask should be their choice, and not up to the government. Some even tried to argue that masks were detrimental to one’s health, despite research proving the benefits of wearing a mask amid a pandemic. But it doesn’t stop there, as one individual connected wearing a mask to child molestation. “Let me tell you why I hate masks, they’re contaminated,” Betty Jake, a protester, said. “And because most child predators, most child molesters love them.”

Utah Gov. Gary Herbert mandated that students wear masks in school in July. Since then parents have protested the safety measure, claiming their children will be smothered, among other theories on lack of social development. School administrators told ABC News that they don’t understand why individuals are protesting the mandate if they want their children to return to school. “They blocked off the front entrance to the school district building, and we went out to ask them to move and they attempted to storm in,” Steven Dunham said. “We want to keep schools open. If a mask is helping protect teachers who are putting themselves at risk, that’s really a small price to pay for them to educate your children.”

Since going viral, the video has garnered a flood of criticism, especially the inappropriate and insensitive comment connecting the Floyd murder to wearing a mask. “Speechless...... She really just sat there and said wearing a mask causes her not to breathe like George Floyd....... This is probably one of the most stupidest things I have ever heard in my life!” one Twitter user said about the video.

Wearing a mask cannot be compared to the violent police brutality that Black folks face. Floyd was brutally murdered by an officer who kneeled on his neck for nearly nine minutes, despite Floyd repeatedly pleading with the officer that he could not breathe. Claiming you have difficulty breathing when wearing a mask does not compare, and it’s beyond inappropriate to tie it to police brutality and racial injustice. 

Anti-maskers continue to spread misinformation on the virus, including flawed comparisons to the seasonal flu and the number of deaths associated with it—but comparing wearing a mask to a horrific tragedy is far worse and unacceptable. As the Trump administration continues to downplay the virus and its severity, in addition to spreading false information including how it began, anti-maskers will only be more encouraged to protest. Despite the number of times people call this virus a “hoax,” numbers do not lie. The pandemic is real and deadly.

As of Sept. 13. Utah has at least 616 new cases reported in the state, with an average of 462 cases per day. As of this report the state has had at least 58,438 positive cases of COVID-19 and 436 deaths as a result, according to The New York Times. 

Since approximately forever, Republicans have been demanding we run the United States government "like a business," and Donald Trump has been quick to embrace that advice. So if government should be run like one of my businesses, thinks Trump, what would that look like?

Ah! It would mean skipping out on the bills! Got it!

Back in March, just as it was becoming apparent that the COVID-19 pandemic was spiraling out of control in the United States, the Trump administration mailed out glossy postcards advising Americans on what they could do to avoid the virus. The most jarring bit of it, however, was the title: "President Trump's coronavirus guidelines for America," it said, attempting to convey the rather ridiculous notion that Donald J. Trump had sound advice on the coronavirus pandemic that he was willing to share, when in fact it was Centers for Disease Control and Prevention experts who were advising these things. In reality, Trump was publicly discounting much of that advice, instead going off on tangents and sending the nation into a panicked rush to buy useless and/or dangerous anti-malarial pills.

In other words, the inclusion of Trump's name and attribution on these "guidelines" from the great hatepumpkin himself was a government-funded campaign stunt.

After the postcards were released, USA Today reported that the cost for printing out and mailing "President Trump's coronavirus guidelines" postcards was $28 million. So who paid for them to be sent?

Nobody did, USA Today now reports. The Trump administration stiffed the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), which has so far been left holding the bill.

This turns out to be an important bit of bookkeeping, because while the overall USPS budget dwarfs the $28 million outlay here, the nation's post offices remain in genuine crisis due to congressional sabotage, Trump administration sabotage, and the pandemic itself. Putting the Postal Service on the hook for $28 million in Trump pandemic advertising is adding insult to injury.

But “add insult to injury” is the Donald Trump personal, business, and governance motto, and the man is widely reported to take glee in inflicting petty pain on those around him—a trait that he seems to be able to rapidly infect others with. The Trump administration not paying for a nationwide mail campaign they themselves ordered be sent out cannot exactly be dismissed as mere oversight, not from the crew that treats the sabotage of government agencies, and this agency in particular, as one of their most pressing Republican concerns.

So yes, the administration probably has made the explicit decision to not reimburse the Postal Service for the mailings. Why? Because they're assholes, that's why. Never presume mere incompetence with this crowd, not when they're so devoted to full-on malevolence.

Trump speaks in California on Monday. | Gabrielle Lurie/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

Trump in an April 10 tweet: “The Invisible Enemy is in full retreat!” Trump three days later: “This thing is a killer.”

Newly released audio of a conversation President Donald Trump had with Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward on April 13 reveals more starkly than ever how Trump misled the American public about the threat posed by Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus.

Trump told Woodward that “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,” Trump added. “It is the plague.”

CNN broadcast the audio on Monday. Listen:

Covid-19 is estimated to have a 3 percent observed case-fatality rate in the US, making it far deadlier than the flu, which kills people in about 0.1 percent of cases. (The rate was likely even higher back in April, while the US was struggling to ramp up coronavirus testing and develop effective treatments.) And as the president alluded to, Covid-19 is especially deadly for people with comorbidities, such as heart disease or diabetes.

But while Trump leveled with Woodward, he said very different things publicly. On April 10 — three days before the aforementioned conversation — Trump tweeted, “The Invisible Enemy will soon be in full retreat!”

Four days after his conversation with Woodward, Trump posted his infamous string of tweets urging people to “LIBERATE” Minnesota, Michigan, and Virginia — states with Democratic governors who had imposed public health measures to slow the spread of Covid-19 — despite the fact he clearly understood the deadliness of the pandemic.

Trump said one thing privately, and another thing publicly. As a result, people who listened to him might not have taken the necessary precautions to avoid exposure to a virus that has now killed more than 194,000 Americans and counting. Now, he continues to flout public safety recommendations, holding political rallies that double as potential superspreader events, at which Trump has been undercounting the number of deaths.

Trump is having a hard time explaining the Woodward tapes

Since the Washington Post starting publishing audio clips of Trump’s conversations with Woodward last week, Trump has downplayed evidence he misled the public about Covid-19 by saying he was simply trying to keep people “calm” and avoid inciting a “panic.”

Those talking points are absurd: Trump’s entire reelection campaign is premised on whipping up hysteria about the dangers he says are presented by Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his party’s agenda. But even if it were true that Trump was just trying to project calm, there are ways to do so that don’t involve spreading misinformation aimed at encouraging Americans to underestimate a deadly virus in a way that could put them at risk.

So why did Trump mislead people? There are only speculative answers to that question, but one thing we know for sure is that short-term thinking has been central to Trump’s coronavirus response from the very beginning last winter, when he reacted to the first US cases by claiming that the virus would go away on its own “like a miracle.”

Trump wanted to keep the stock market strong, because he viewed doing so as important to his reelection chances. But at the same time, he seemingly wanted to signal to Woodward that despite what he was publicly saying, he was savvy to what really was going on with coronavirus.

But in another illustration of his short-term thinking, Trump apparently never considered that audio of his conversations with Woodward could be published before the election and serve as a reminder of his coronavirus failures. And now that it has, the president has resorted to attacking the messenger with personal insults, while trying to spin the recordings in an implausible way.

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Is this another example of the levers of government being used to bolster Trump's campaign narratives?

The White House is quite put out that Donald Trump's efforts to destroy Social Security are not being wholly embraced by American businesses. The payroll tax deferment to employees that Trump tried to force through executive order after it was roundly rejected for months by everyone in Congress is just not being deployed, even though plenty of employers have decided to take the employer-side deferment they got earlier this year.

It has Team Trump baffled and angry. "Businesses got their own tax holiday," National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow said recently. "I don't know why they don't want to give their workforce a holiday." Clearly Kudlow has never been in a position of making payroll. Most large businesses took Congress up on the offer to postpone their part of payroll taxes. It was included in relief legislation to give those businesses incentive to keep people on payroll during the pandemic, and tens of thousands of businesses took them up on it. They will pay half of the deferred taxes at the end of 2021, and the other half at the end of 2022. But they're betting on the possibility that the next Congress will just forgive that and they'll end up not having to pay. As it is, though, it's like getting an interest-free loan from the Treasury, and they're taking it. Extending it to the employee part of the tax, however, is a much more complicated and problematic prospect.

For one thing the employee has to opt for it, so employers would need to get permission from their workers. That means explaining how the plan would work, including the fact that this is a deferment, and the money will have to be paid anyway by the the end of April next year with larger withholdings from their paychecks starting in January. It would involve tracking which employees decided to do it and which didn't, tracking who is eligible—only those making less than $4,000 every two weeks—and for employees who make variable pay, doing it every pay period. The other deterrent is that employers would be liable for repaying whatever wasn't paid in for any worker who quits.

This part of it is where the reporting on this by Politico gets unintentionally horrifying. "Employers," Politico reports, "fear their employees will be surprised to see suddenly smaller paychecks, and could have trouble meeting their living expenses." Employers know that they have their employees living on such tight margins that the extra withholding could make meeting their expenses difficult. They are also realistic in recognizing that while chances are good they'll get Congress to relieve them of the burden of paying back their portion of the taxes, it would be unlikely to extend that courtesy to the entire workforce. Because that's just how it works in America.

Here's how UPS explained their decision to take the company holiday but not offer it to employees: "We believe our decision was in the best interest of employees," said spokesperson Glenn Zaccara. "We recognize that, for some, it may have been helpful to have more money in their paychecks in 2020. […] Yet, not all employees have professional tax planning needed to prepare effectively for the added obligation they would face in 2021."

That's not something that Trump is concerned about, and not a burden he wants to spare his own captive workforce from—he's ordered that federal employees have to take the tax holiday, and you can bet he wouldn't have any problem docking their pay next year to make it up. (That is if they're not all furloughed because he's decided to shut down the government.) The House of Representatives, at least, has refused to go along with it.

Apple on Tuesday announced it would no longer be including USB power adapters with Apple Watch devices as part of an effort to reduce its environmental impact. From a report: Removing the power adapter means new Apple Watch customers won't have access to the device that plugs into the wall, but they should still receive Apple's custom Apple Watch cable that recharges the device wirelessly. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, this move won't be restricted to Apple Watch devices; it will also include upcoming iPhones.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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As Donald Trump's horrific handling of the coronavirus dominates the media landscape, Republican candidates are doing their level best in their campaign ads to entirely erase Trump from voters' minds.

During the primary season, Republicans featured Trump in 42% of their ads, according to Wall Street Journal reporting informed by Kantar/CMAG. But in the general election, Trump has snuck into just 4% of GOP ads—almost like Republican candidates are ghosting him in the general.

Pennsylvania Republican candidate Jim Bognet, for instance, wrapped up his primary race with an ad featuring him on a football field telling voters that “President Trump fights for us, but he needs teammates.” Now Bognet tells the Journal: "I’d rather tell people things they don’t know about Matt Cartwright’s policies and record and introduce myself to voters"—without Trump dragging him down was the unspoken part of that sentence.

In Georgia, incumbent Sen. David Perdue only mentions Trump in mailers and digital ads targeted at diehard Republican voters, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution (AJC). "With U.S. Sen. David Perdue’s re-election chances teetering on a knife’s edge, the Republican is talking more about himself as a ‘bipartisan problem solver’ — and less about his reputation as one of President Donald Trump’s most loyal allies," AJC writes.

Tellingly, at this point in 2018 Trump got more mentions in GOP ads than he does now when he's actually running for reelection. 

Democratic candidates are also focusing their advertising attention on the issues rather than on Trump. Among both Democrats and Republicans overall, Trump has made an appearance in just 6% of more than 771,000 general election broadcast ads. In 2012 when Barack Obama was the presidential incumbent, congressional candidates had featured him in closer to 20% of their ads by this point in the election cycle.

Ken Goldstein, a University of San Francisco professor who has studied political ads for about three decades, called Trump's absence the "ultimate tell."

“There’s a realization that in a general election, very few people don’t have their minds made up about Trump," Goldstein concluded. "For Democrats, there is nothing they can do to fuel Trump anger, and for Republicans, there is nothing they can do to mitigate it.”

Yep. No escape for Republican candidates other than trying to gaslight voters.

Young voters respond to text messages, and NextGen America is reaching out to young voters in 11 battleground states to make sure they have their vote-by-mail ballots. Sign up to volunteer, and spend some time sending text messages to get out the vote.

CNBC’s Jim Cramer has created a brand of business news host based on his “wild” antics, his “crazy” way of speaking and straight-shooting. His “crazy” way of acting and speaking is supposed to not only be entertaining for viewers, but to bely a secret, no-nonsense intelligence about the financial markets. 

On Tuesday, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi came on Cramer’s show to discuss what deals are either in the works, or not, between Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and the Democratic-led House. Cramer interrupted Pelosi ostensibly to question her on a statement she made a couple of days ago where she said she was “optimistic” that a deal to provide stimulus aid to the American public could be reached. Unfortunately, Cramer really let his misogynist foot get stuck in his mouth.

We need to turn out Democratic voters to defeat Trump in November, even during a pandemic. You can help out from home, no matter where you live, by writing personalized letter to infrequent, but Democratic-leaning, voters in swing states. Click here to set up an account with Vote Forward, the all-time most popular get-out-the-vote activity among Daily Kos activists.

Referring to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, saying he was happy to be “the skunk at the garden party,” and nix any and all agreements between Democratic leadership and the U.S. Treasury, Cramer said this: “I mean what deal can we have Crazy Nancy—I’m sorry, that was the president—I have such reverence for the office, I would never use that term.”

Huh?

Speaker Pelosi replied that “But you just did.” To which Cramer attempts to say he has a great reverence for the office and Pelosi understood what he meant. Pelosi, very diplomatically says she does understand exactly what he meant. Cramer sort of mumbles away something of an apology for this bizarre outburst on his part, and Pelosi redirects a reminder to the audience that it is Donald Trump that is the great antagonist right now.

PELOSI: Let me just say this, anything the president says is a projection of his own insecurities. He calls other people “crazy,” because he knows he is. He complains about this that and the other thing, because he knows his own shortcomings. He’s a master of projection, so anytime he says something you go “uh-oh,” because that’s what he’s thinking about himself.

Promoting a sexist slur just because the president of the United States coined it doesn’t make it right. The clip has made its way around the internet very … briskly. Cramer seems to realize that what he’s said is very disrespectful just moments after saying it. It begs the question: why would you say it at all? To what end? Entertainment? Because it doesn’t further the topic of what and how and when a deal or stimulus package will make its way through our government in order try and help our precariously failing economy. 

What it will mean for Cramer remains to seen. Many are calling for Cramer to be fired or resign over this insult, while others have wondered how Cramer has been able to keep a job that he’s been terrible at for more than a decade.

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Most American workers won’t be getting the payroll tax break pushed by President Donald Trump, thanks to widespread opposition from employers. But many businesses are using a similar break to punt their own payroll tax bills.

Tens of thousands of companies are taking advantage of little-noticed provisions approved by Congress allowing them to postpone paying their payroll taxes until next year and beyond. Among them: Chipotle Mexican Grill, UPS, American Airlines, Wendy’s, AMC Entertainment, SeaWorld and Chico’s.

Intended to prevent job losses by putting cash in business coffers, the provisions have become one of the most widely used parts of lawmakers’ coronavirus relief efforts.

That popularity comes even as the administration’s separate bid to extend the same sort of tax deferral to workers increasingly looks like a bust.

The diverging fates of the two deferrals, with one heavily subscribed and the other not, has irked the White House.

“Businesses got their own tax holiday,” National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow said recently. “I don’t know why they don’t want to give their workforce a holiday.”

Trump’s order to allow individuals to postpone their payroll taxes has gotten most of the attention, but it’s not the only deferral out there.

As part of the last coronavirus stimulus package, lawmakers agreed to allow employers to postpone paying their share of the Social Security tax for the rest of this year. (The 12.4 percent charge is split evenly between employers and employees, with businesses withholding the tax from workers’ paychecks). Half of companies’ deferred taxes are due at the end of next year, with the rest owed at the end of 2022.

Those provisions haven’t gotten nearly as much attention, or been as controversial, as the other deferral, which Trump unilaterally created in August. But they’ve been much more widely used — ADP, the payroll processing company, says more than 40,000 of its clients are now taking advantage of the break.

In regulatory filings, companies say it is saving them millions. UPS expects to save $370 million. American Airlines figures it will save $300 million. Chipotle says it will have an extra $100 million thanks to the provisions, and another break approved by lawmakers. Tenet Healthcare Corporation puts its savings at $89 million. Wendy’s expects an additional $12 million while Chico’s says it's saving $11 million.

“It makes good sense from the large employers’ perspective,” said Pete Isberg, vice president of government affairs at ADP. “Do they want to pay millions of dollars now? Or put that money to use — maybe invest it or whatever they do with their money?”

“It’s an interest-free loan from the IRS.”

By contrast, a long list of big-name trade associations, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Retail Federation, have warned employers won’t participate in Trump’s plan for workers’ payroll taxes.

And though they backed deferrals for businesses, Democrats have roundly criticized the administration’s plans for workers. So far, it’s hard to find employers making use of it, aside from much of the federal government, which says it is now implementing the order. (On Friday, the House of Representatives said it would not participate).

It’s not surprising businesses would want to do one, but not the other, Isberg says.

It’s relatively simple for employers to postpone their own payroll taxes.

Not so, though, for their employees.

Many businesses would want to first get their workers’ permission, which means some legwork: explaining how the plan will work, getting employees to make a decision and keeping track of who is in and who is out. The break is limited to those earning less than $4,000 per biweekly paycheck, so it's possible that some workers whose pay varies because of, say, bonuses would be eligible in one pay period but not another.

It also comes with some financial risk to employers because, if a worker later quits, the IRS will likely ask the company to cover that person’s deferred tax bill.

And while businesses are happy to take interest-free loans from the government, many worry offering the same to their workers could be an employee-relations nightmare.

Under recently released guidance from the Treasury Department, workers having tax deferred will have to begin paying it back in January by having twice as much in payroll taxes withdrawn as they normally do. The money must be paid back by April 30 to avoid penalties.

Employers fear their employees will be surprised to see suddenly smaller paychecks, and could have trouble meeting their living expenses.

Trump is betting Congress will eventually step in and waive the tax bills, though companies don’t think they can count on that.

“It was relatively easy for employers to defer their own tax obligations,” said Isberg. “It’s a substantially different question” with employees.

UPS is among the companies that is deferring its own payroll taxes while declining to do the same for its workforce.

“We believe our decision was in the best interest of employees,” said spokesperson Glenn Zaccara. “We recognize that, for some, it may have been helpful to have more money in their paychecks in 2020.”

“Yet, not all employees have professional tax planning needed to prepare effectively for the added obligation they would face in 2021.”

Other companies contacted by POLITICO declined to comment or did not respond to inquiries.

Though critics have scoffed at Trump’s presumption that Congress will tear up individuals' deferred tax bills, some say that’s precisely what could happen with those put off by businesses.

They wonder if companies, having deferred millions in taxes, will eventually come back to Congress later, lobbying lawmakers to further postpone or forgive them altogether.

President Barack Obama entered the White House in 2009 during a brutal recession, quickly pushed through a sizable stimulus package and then spent the next several years realizing it wasn’t nearly big enough.

Joe Biden is determined not to have the same regrets if he wins.

The Democratic nominee and former vice president is surrounding himself with a more aggressive cadre of economic advisers who lean toward the liberal wing of the party, one that has itself moved significantly to the left since 2009 and shed most of its concern with appeasing budget hawks and Wall Street bankers who tend to worry about soaring deficits.

Should Biden take the White House and get a Democratic Senate, it will likely all translate into an immediate push to roll back President Donald Trump’s corporate tax cuts, slap significantly higher taxes on wealthy Americans and push through a multitrillion-dollar stimulus spending package aimed at fighting the Covid-19 virus, sending cash directly into people’s pockets, renewing enhanced unemployment benefits, rescuing struggling state budgets and investing in new infrastructure projects.

“The magnitude of the crisis in 2008 was enormous, but this time we’ve got multiple overlapping crises,” said Jake Sullivan, the Biden campaign’s senior policy adviser who served in a similar role for Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016. “As a result, the sense of possibility in both policy terms and political terms is big both in the scope of the agenda and the size of the investments the vice president wants to make.”

In Obama’s early years in the White House, liberals complained about the influence of some of his more center-left advisers including former Treasury Secretaries Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner.

Some progressives spent years criticizing Obama for decisions they saw as too friendly to Wall Street. They also saw Obama’s roughly $800 billion stimulus package as too small to address the scope of the Great Recession, a mistake they say helped lead to years of slow growth — for which Obama and Biden are still getting hammered politically — and increasing income inequality.

Defenders of the stimulus say it largely worked to end the recession and that the White House faced constraints on size forced on them by the Senate. But they acknowledge that state and local job losses and other budget cuts were among the problems that sapped the recovery for years — a point House Democrats have maintained as a top-of-mind concern this year.

Whatever the case, Biden’s group of internal and external advisers leans decidedly more to the left of Obama’s and includes Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), left-leaning economists Heather Boushey, Lisa Cook, Raj Chetty, William Spriggs and Jared Bernstein, all of whom support bold tax and spending policy to fulfill the former vice president's pledge to create “most progressive administration” since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The broad economic advisory group is not totally dominated by hardcore liberals. Gene Sperling, who served in both the Obama and Bill Clinton administrations, is also an important voice in Biden’s ear as is Jeff Zients, who served as Obama’s National Economic Council director and is now a co-chair of the Democratic nominee’s transition team. Zients is a wealthy investor with deep business ties, giving the campaign the ability to reassure corporate America that their concerns won’t go entirely unaddressed. Ben Harris, who also served as Biden’s top economic adviser in the Obama White House, is also said to be a somewhat more moderate voice with experience in the financial industry. But even people like Sperling have trended left in recent years — though they may stop short of pushing Medicare for All.

Biden also talks to Summers, who has moved decidedly to the left since serving in the White House. The former Clinton Treasury secretary and Obama NEC director has become less concerned with deficits, given structural problems in an economy that has tilted most of its gains toward the upper end of the income spectrum in recent years. Covid-19 has only worsened that problem for blue-collar workers who don’t have the luxury of working from home like many high-earning, white-collar workers.

Biden and his advisers have avoided putting a dollar figure on the size of the stimulus the former vice president would seek if he wins. Some of it depends on whether Congress approves any further spending this year on top of the nearly $4 trillion already approved to fight the economic devastation wrought by Covid-19, which led to the biggest quarterly economic decline on record and has left nearly 30 million people still receiving some type of unemployment assistance.

Biden told POLITICO earlier this year that he wanted a package “a hell of a lot bigger” than the initial $2 trillion CARES Act. He is said by close advisers to be deeply concerned with economic “scarring” from the Covid-19 crisis, meaning lasting impacts on younger workers if they can’t quickly return to the labor force and begin forming households. Many of these lessons stem from the grinding nature of the recovery from the Great Recession.

In a recent interview, Bernstein suggested that if he wins, Biden is anticipating an economy still operating well below potential — the so-called “output gap” — and in desperate need of massive federal intervention.

“Every forecast I've seen, including my own, suggests that the output gap and the unemployment rate will be very high at the beginning of next year,” he said. “I'm not going to give a number in terms of trillions, but it would need to be definitely very significant in the spirit of the magnitudes of the bills we've seen so far.”

And Biden will come under immediate pressure from the left, if he wins and Democrats take the Senate, to go as big as possible on stimulus spending, tax hikes on the wealthiest and new regulations on Wall Street. Progressives are already concerned about some of Biden’s comments suggesting a concern about long-term deficits and paying for spending bills.

“The idea that the U.S. faces any major risk from our debt burden is simply wrong,” said Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic Policy and Research and a frequent critic of the size of Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill. “If for some reason private investors became more reluctant to hold U.S. debt, the Fed could simply step in and buy it. If the U.S. is struggling to recover from this recession, there is no reason to be concerned about running large deficits.”

Baker added that he was pleased for the most part with the makeup of Biden’s economic advisory team and suggested that any stimulus bill should be around 4 to 5 percent of annual GDP or around $1 trillion per year.

“As a group these people are pretty progressive and at the very least they will have his ear. Whether they carry the day in arguments or not who knows,” Baker said. “But Biden was there under Obama and I think he recognizes what is universally recognized among Democrats that they made a really big mistake in not getting more.”

Biden last week also said that boosting the corporate tax rate would be among his first acts as president. “I'd make the changes on the corporate taxes on day one. The reason I'd make the change on corporate taxes is it could raise $1.3 trillion if they just start paying at 28 percent instead of 21 percent,” he said on CNN. “What are they doing? They're not hiring more people. What are they doing? They are buying back their own stock.”

In addition to a large stimulus and an increase in the corporate tax rate, Biden has pledged to dismantle the Trump tax cut that took effect in 2018, instituting higher marginal rates on individuals with incomes over $400,000. “I’m going to get rid of the bulk of Trump’s $2 trillion tax cut,” Biden told wealthy donors in June. “And a lot of you may not like that but I’m going to close loopholes like capital gains and stepped-up basis.”

Biden’s pledges to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations have not hit his fundraising ability. The campaign and the Democratic National Committee raised a record-shattering $365 million in August, blowing away the $210 million raised by the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee.

He’s also essentially erased Trump’s advantage on the economy as an issue in the last several months. Several polls show the two candidates tied on an issue where Trump enjoyed double-digit advantages in the spring. Biden is also trying to cut into Trump’s 2016 numbers among Midwestern blue-collar workers with a plan to impose higher taxes on companies’ foreign profits and offer tax breaks for domestic manufacturers.

And the Democratic nominee does not plan to shy away from hammering a message of boosting taxes on high earners and big companies, despite Trump’s constant attacks that Biden’s approach would tank the stock market and kill the economy.

The Biden campaign is well aware of polling data suggesting Americans overwhelmingly support such higher taxes and the numbers have only risen since Covid-19 slammed blue-collar workers especially hard.

Of course, all of Biden’s big plans for taxes and spending depend on Democrats controlling all of Congress and perhaps jettisoning the legislative filibuster, a dramatic move that would mean needing only 51 votes in the Senate to move major spending bills beyond tax legislation.

“People recognize that we are going to need a significant magnitude of investment,” said Sullivan, Biden’s policy adviser. “That’s not to say the GOP wouldn’t try and resist, and all of a sudden put on their green eyeshades again on spending. But the realities today, in terms of what can be invested to get back to full employment, are just different than they were back in 2009.”