James.galbraith

Majorities are rejecting Trump's efforts to tear our country in half.

By JM McNab  Published: September 03rd, 2020 

During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump disparaged Senator John McCain’s military service. “He’s not a war hero,” said Trump. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” Trump’s pettiness toward the former Republican presidential nominee didn’t end there. On McCain’s death, he blocked the release of a memorial statement from the White House and pointedly ignored ceremonies honoring McCain. But it wasn’t just McCain. Trump also called former President George H. W. Bush a “loser” for being shot down by the Japanese during World War II. These were just a few of the many moments reminding everyone that Donald Trump is a monster, without the slightest shred of respect or empathy for anyone not named Donald Trump.

But it turns out the disdain Trump focused on McCain and Bush was just a subset, just a spoonful, of the great ocean of contempt Trump feels for veterans in general. On Thursday, The Atlantic reported that Trump refused to visit a military cemetery because the fallen soldiers there were “losers.” And while planning a snazzy military parade to emulate those of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, Trump made it clear to organizers he wanted only active troops, no veterans, because he claimed that spectators didn’t want to see amputees. “Nobody wants to see that,” said Trump. And of course, Trump has denied the story. And of course, he’s lying.

Trump’s disparaging of McCain was unending, even after the veteran senator died in 2018. As plans began to be made for honoring McCain, Trump declared,  “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral.” Even just lowering the White House flag to half-staff—a common practice when any member of Congress dies—infuriated Trump. “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser.”

The story from The Atlantic focuses on a specific, particularly visible incident. Trump was expected to visit a cemetery for thousands of American soldiers who died at the battle of Belleau Wood. It was one of the first battles of the war in which Americans took part in large number, and the battle in which American troops were introduced to the horrors of the World War I battlefield. But rather than appear at the cemetery, Trump produced a series of excuses: the helicopter didn’t like the rain, it was too far to drive, he had bone spurs … sorry, that last one was an excuse from another military event. None of the excuses were true. Trump simply did not want to go. That much was clear at the time. What wasn’t known then was the condescension that Trump leveled at the fallen troops, many of them Marines.

Naturally, as soon as the story broke, Trump began throwing out tweets denying it ever happened. That included Trump saying he would “swear on whatever, or whoever” that he never called never called John McCain a “loser.” Which … he absolutely did.

The Atlantic story was attributed to four different sources inside the White House, three of whom confirmed Trump’s statements concerning veterans. Since Trump began exploding in denial tweets, The Washington Post reports that another former senior administration confirmed that Trump “frequently made disparaging comments about veterans and soldiers missing in action, referring to them at times as ‘losers.’” Trump has also called everyone who served in Vietnam a “loser” because, unlike him, they weren’t able to bribe a doctor into writing them an excuse.

In addition to lying about his statements, Trump frequently lies about his record of supporting veterans. It was President Obama who signed the Veterans’ Choice Act. And while military personnel have gotten a raise over the last three years, those raises have been smaller than the last three years under Obama. 

On Thursday evening, Joe Biden issued a statement after the original article was released. "If the revelations in today's Atlantic article are true, then they are yet another marker of how deeply President Trump and I disagree about the role of the president of the United States," said Biden. “I have long said that, as a nation, we have many obligations, but we only have one truly sacred obligation—to prepare and equip those we send into harm’s way, and to care for them and their families, both while they are deployed and after they return home.”

The Trump White House is in full sputtering crisis more, with denials coming from all directions. The trouble is … who would believe Trump after what they’ve already heard him say?

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris greet supporters outside the Chase Center in Wilmington, Delaware, at the conclusion of the Democratic National Convention on August 20, 2020. | Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images

Democrats may not want to defund the police, but they are more open than ever to reimagining public safety.

If you’re confused about where Democrats stand on policing reform, you have good reason to be.

On the one hand, protesters, activists, and professional athletes are demanding that Democrats at both a local and national level do more to address police brutality against Black Americans. On the other, several speakers at the Republican National Convention claimed that Joe Biden and Democrats are radical police abolitionists who, as Trump himself put it, will “defund police departments all across America” if given power.

So what’s the truth? The short answer is that while Democrats’ policing agenda is not nearly as ambitious as either defund activists or Republican politicians would like them to be, it is by far the most progressive in modern American history. The 2020 Democratic Party’s views on policing make the party of 2016 look regressive and the party of 2012 look almost unrecognizably backward.

“The first thing my colleagues wanted to do to address police violence was focus on accountability,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) tells me. “But the more of these videos that come out, the more they are realizing that just holding a few bad cops accountable isn’t enough — this is about an entire system. I think that’s a huge change.”

The most recent indication of where Democrats stand on policing is the criminal justice section of the 2020 Democratic Party platform. As my colleague Andrew Prokop explains, party platforms are consensus documents: They use inputs from a wide range of coalition actors within the party to provide a broad summary of what the party stands for and the direction it wants to move the country toward. And research has shown that, in 25 years, both Democratic and Republican lawmakers in Congress voted in accordance with their platforms more than 80 percent of the time.

The first thing that stands out about the Democrats’ 2020 criminal justice platform is its framing, which is unequivocal about the state of policing in America:

Democrats believe we need to overhaul the criminal justice system from top to bottom. Police brutality is a stain on the soul of our nation. It is unacceptable that millions of people in our country have good reason to fear they may lose their lives in a routine traffic stop, or while standing on a street corner, or while playing with a toy in a public park. It is unacceptable that Black parents must have “the talk” with their children, to try to protect them from the very police officers who are supposed to be sworn to protect and serve them. It is unacceptable that more than 1,000 people, a quarter of them Black, have been killed by police every year since 2015.

In terms of concrete policy proposals, the bulk of the platform’s policing agenda focuses on preventing officers from abusing their power and holding them accountable when they do. Drawing on the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020 — which received unanimous support among House Democrats but has since been stymied in the Senate — it proposes policies like reining in qualified immunity, banning chokeholds, developing stricter use-of-force standards, creating a national registry of officer misconduct, and limiting no-knock warrants.

It also outlines specific mechanisms for holding state and local departments accountable to these reforms, namely tying federal law enforcement funding to implementation of these measures and strengthening the Department of Justice’s ability to investigate police misconduct in individual departments (which can often result in concrete reforms).

“The Democratic Party is a big tent, which means that different coalitions tend to differ on most issues,” says Ed Chung, vice president for criminal justice reform at the Center for American Progress. “But what Democrats of all stripes tend to agree on is police accountability as well as improving and bettering police officers through things like better training.”

But the bigger ideological change in the Democratic Party is the openness to a new approach to public safety: moving away from criminalization and toward a model focused more on investment and public health interventions. The 2020 platform specifically calls for “reorienting our public safety approach toward prevention and away from over-policing” in order to “prevent law enforcement from becoming unnecessarily entangled in the everyday lives of Americans.”

Democrats propose two ways of doing this: First, by decriminalizing marijuana use and diverting those struggling with substance abuse away from the criminal justice system and into treatment-based interventions. Second, by investing more resources into underserved communities to prevent the problems typically associated with law enforcement from arising in the first place.

While Biden has consistently rejected the “defund the police” label, he has been supportive of a more investment-focused approach to public safety. “We need to prevent 911 calls in scenarios where police should not be our first responders,” he wrote in June. “This requires making serious investments in mental health services, drug treatment and prevention programs, and services for people experiencing homelessness.”

Biden has proposed policies like investing an ambitious $125 billion over 10 years to address the opioid epidemic, making housing vouchers a universal entitlement (a proposal that would help an additional 11 million low-income families get housing and would cut poverty by almost a quarter), tripling Title I funding for low-income schools, and doubling the number of school guidance counselors, social workers, and psychologists so that schools don’t have to turn to police to resolve issues.

Some Democrats are beginning to rethink a police-centric model of public safety in other ways as well. Biden has proposed additional funding for “co-response” teams, whereby mental health clinicians and social workers would respond to relevant calls alongside police officers. And some high-level congressional Democrats are even starting to support federal funding to create civilian first response units that would send unarmed professionals to deal with certain nonviolent emergencies (more on that later).

“The point is, Democrats have moved,” says Chiraag Bains, co-chair of the Biden-Sanders unity task force on criminal justice and director of legal strategies at Demos, “and if given the chance to govern, they’ll be much more open to dialogue and influence than the regressive, reactionary Trump administration. The way things are going, we can break the mold of mass incarceration being a bipartisan enterprise.”

The Overton Window on policing has shifted, quickly

The Democratic Party’s stances on policing have been routinely criticized by activists, experts, and progressive politicians who don’t believe they go nearly far enough. At the same time, the party has moved faster on policing than perhaps any other issue in recent years.

For instance, take the opening paragraph of the 2012 Democratic platform’s section on “Public Safety, Justice, and Crime Prevention”:

In the last four years, rates of serious crimes, like murder, rape, and robbery, have reached 50-year lows, but there is more work to do. President Obama and Democrats are fighting for new funding that will help keep cops on the street and support our police, firefighters, and emergency medical technicians. Republicans and Mitt Romney have opposed and even ridiculed these proposals, but we believe we should support our first responders. We support efforts to ensure our courageous police officers and first responders are equipped with the best technology, equipment, and innovative strategies to prevent and fight crimes.

It goes on to assert:

We must help state, local, territorial, and tribal law enforcement work together to combat and prevent drug crime and drug and alcohol abuse, which are blights on our communities.

From today’s vantage point, these statements — which came during the second term of the most liberal president in decades — read like versions of a slightly more restrained Trump speech (and even Trump has supported less punitive ways of dealing with substance abuse). The only policing-related policy recommendations in the whole platform involves putting more officers on the streets; there is no mention of police misconduct of any kind, let alone policies to combat it.

But we don’t even have to go back that far to see how much Democrats have shifted. This is how the party’s 2016 platform — which at the time was lauded as an important departure from the party’s “tough on crime” days — described the party’s views on policing:

We will rebuild the bonds of trust between law enforcement and the communities they serve. Across the country, there are police officers inspiring trust and confidence, honorably doing their duty, deploying creative and effective strategies, and demonstrating that it is possible to prevent crime without relying on unnecessary force. They deserve our respect and support, and we should learn from those examples and build on what works.

That’s a still far cry from calling police brutality a “stain on the soul of our nation.” You have to read in between the lines of the platform just to find recognition that there’s a problem with policing at all. But unlike its 2012 counterpart, the 2016 platform does suggest reforms like better officer training, use of force guidelines, national data collection, limiting military weapons, and requiring body cameras (all policies that the 2020 platform also supports).

However, unlike the 2020 platform, it contains no mechanisms to hold police departments accountable to those changes besides saying that Democrats will “work with police chiefs” to do so. It doesn’t even mention proposals like reforming qualified immunity, banning chokeholds, limiting no-knock warrants, or decriminalizing marijuana use. And it doesn’t call for nearly as bold of investments in issues like homelessness and substance abuse or link those investments to public safety.

In fact, the closest contemporary parallel to the 2016 Democratic platform’s policing recommendations is neither the 2020 platform nor the more limited Justice in Policing Act; it is the JUSTICE Act, a bill spearheaded by Republican Sen. Tim Scott in June. On issues like deescalation training guidelines, data collection, and body cameras, the bill’s policies read as though they were taken directly from the Democrats’ 2016 platform. In some areas, like limiting the use of chokeholds, it goes even further than the Democrats did in 2016.

“The Democratic 2016 criminal justice plan is eerily similar to the current Republican plan being pushed by Senator Scott,” says Arthur Rizer, director of the criminal justice program at the center-right R Street Institute. “It reminds me of how Obamacare was a total rip-off of the Republican Bob Dole plan.”

That makes what happened next even more surprising. When the JUSTICE Act came to the floor for a vote, every single Senate Republican, including staunch law-and-order advocates like Sens. Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz, voted for it. But the legislation still didn’t make it through the Senate because all but three Senate Democrats voted against it, arguing the bill lacked concrete accountability mechanisms and failed to address key reforms like ending qualified immunity.

It’s important not to underestimate the significance of this sequence of events: In 2020, Republicans put forward a policing bill that looked a lot like Democrats’ police reform wish list in 2016, and made the 2012 Democratic platform look harsh and regressive by comparison. Yet, Democrats almost unanimously rejected that bill for failing to include provisions that the majority of them did not support in 2016.

“The center of gravity in the country has changed a lot,” says Chung. “Five years ago, I don’t think anyone could have imagined a Republican senator would offer something like the JUSTICE Act and get Republican support, or that House Democrats would unanimously support a bill that ended qualified immunity.”

Of course, these shifts didn’t happen because Democratic and Republican politicians had a sudden awakening about the problems of police brutality — they are responding to massive changes in public opinion around policing that have remained strong, even months after the peak of the nationwide protest movement.

According to Sean McElwee, executive director of the progressive polling outfit Data for Progress, the speed of this shift will only be accelerated by demographic trends. “Across every poll we’ve conducted, we find that young people are most skeptical of police,” he tells me. “Police have lost credibility with an entire generation that’s increasingly having kids and voting. So the shift we’ve seen over the last few months is only going to continue.”

This shift will likely have a profound impact on criminal justice politics in America. In previous decades, Democrats moved sharply to the right on criminal justice issues to win over the majority of voters; in coming decades, it is possible the opposite will happen.

Republicans aged 18-29, for instance, overwhelmingly support reforms like ending qualified immunity, and do so at almost double the rates of older Republicans.

“The Democratic Party has taken a really important step over the last few months,” says McElwee. “They’ve ended the Republican ownership of this law-and-order framework. This militarization of cities like Portland is not working. Republicans are being forced to move left on criminal justice issues. That means there is room for Democrats to be more ambitious — it will be interesting to see what they will do.”

The “next frontier” of criminal justice policy for Democrats

The fact that the ground is shifting so quickly on policing issues raises some important questions: What’s next for Democrats? Are there any policies currently absent from the party platform that could potentially become part of policing legislation in a future Biden administration?

When I put these questions to experts close to the party, I got back a fairly uniform answer: federal funding that would support local governments’ efforts to create unarmed civilian first response units to handle nonviolent emergencies.

“This idea is supported by a wide range of Democrats and the criminal justice movement as a whole,” says Chung. “Virtually every conversation I hear about policing and the criminal justice system involves a variation of this provision.”

The basic idea behind this proposal is simple. Police officers spend an overwhelming majority of their time responding to nonviolent emergencies, from mental health crises to traffic accidents to domestic disputes — situations that could be dealt with much more effectively, and with far less potential for unnecessary violence, by non-police professionals. If there’s anything that the police shooting of Jacob Blake and the police killings of Rayshard Brooks, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, and countless others have in common is that they would never have occurred if someone other than an armed police officer was the chosen first responder to a clearly nonviolent situation.

According to Data for Progress polling, 68 percent of likely voters support the creation of non-law enforcement emergency responders programs. And solid majorities support non-police responses for a variety of situations, including substance abuse, homelessness, and mental health crises. Already, cities across the country are developing their own civilian first responder programs.

Data for Progress

However, while likely voters tend to support investing in non-police responders, they are much more hesitant to dip into local police budgets to do so. Only about half of likely voters support reducing police budgets to invest in social programs, and direct questions about defunding the police are often opposed by majorities.

That’s where the federal government could play a significant role. Federal grants could help cities, states, and localities set up civilian first response units to address issues like mental health, homelessness, substance abuse, and low-level disputes without having to first slash police budgets. Cities could take the time to set up these programs with proper resources, present them as a win-win for police and civilians alike, and give them ample opportunity to demonstrate success — all without having to worry about drawn-out fights with police unions or police work slowdowns that could put the effort in jeopardy.

“The federal government’s role is generally limited on criminal justice issues, but this is one area where federal support could have a real impact,” says Emily Galvin-Almanza, founder and executive director of Partners for Justice. “Establishing successful models for non-police response can really help this idea spread to places that might initially be skeptical.”

In the wake of the nationwide protests against police brutality, this kind of idea is becoming increasingly mainstream for Democrats. The Biden-Sanders unity task force on criminal justice — which included establishment figures like Biden senior adviser Symone Sanders, former Attorney General Eric Holder, and Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA), chair of the House Committee on Education and Labor — decided to include this as one of its policy recommendations:

Federal funding to create a civilian corps of unarmed first responders such as social workers, EMTs, and trained mental health professionals, who can handle nonviolent emergencies including order maintenance violations, mental health emergencies, and low-level conflicts outside the criminal justice system, freeing police officers to concentrate on the most serious crimes.

And earlier this month, Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) proposed the CAHOOTS Act — named after the much-applauded initiative in Eugene, Oregon, that sends unarmed crisis specialists instead of police to address noncriminal 911 calls — which would provide startup grants and a 95 percent federal funding match through Medicaid to states and localities that decided to pilot non-police crisis response units with a mental health component.

“It’s long past time to reimagine policing in ways that reduce violence and structural racism, and health care can play a key role in that effort,” Wyden said during the bill’s unveiling. “Americans struggling with mental illness don’t always require law enforcement to be dispatched when they are experiencing a crisis — CAHOOTS is proof positive there is another way.”

Like many members of the Biden-Sanders unity task force, Wyden and Cortez Masto are not police abolitionists or even avowed progressives. Most ideological scorecards tend to place them squarely in the middle of the Democratic Party. Wyden in particular is one of the influential Democrats in the Senate to date — he is slated to chair the powerful Senate Finance Committee if Democrats retake the chamber in 2021.

And they aren’t the only ones who are pushing for legislation in this area. In a recent interview, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) announced that he and Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA) would soon be introducing a bill that would establish a $100 million-per-year grant program to fund an even wider range of community-based alternatives to police.

“If we’re talking about investing in alternative first responders, the party is already there,” says Stacey Walker, a Sanders appointee to the Biden-Sanders unity task force on criminal justice. “Criminal justice advocates on both sides of the aisle understand the wisdom behind it. This can be the next frontier for criminal justice reform come 2021 if the Biden administration takes it seriously.”

However, federal funding for alternative first responders is one of the only policy recommendations from the Biden-Sanders criminal justice unity task force that is not referenced at all in the 2020 party platform. And while Biden has explicitly called for bigger investments toward issues like homelessness and substance abuse and federal funding for police “co-response” models, he has not done the same for civilian first response teams. (After publication of this story, the Biden campaign pointed out that the candidate does support the broader idea that police shouldn’t be the go-to first responder in every situation.)

That’s probably intentional on the campaign’s part. Republicans have already tried, with limited success, to pin the unpopular “defund the police” label on Biden — namely by using a deceptively-edited clip of Biden approving of the broad idea of redirecting some police funding to priorities like mental health and social services. So while federal funding for civilian first responders wouldn’t necessarily reduce police budgets, it isn’t hard to imagine how Republicans could manipulate the idea to convince voters that Biden has a secret defund-the-police agenda.

Still, the experts I spoke with were confident that the Biden-Harris ticket will be open to progressive ideas like this one once it is no longer in the midst of an intense election. “I think right now the calculation is: Why create talking points for Trump at this point?” says Galvin-Almanza. “But I truly believe Biden and Harris are open to hearing from progressives on these issues and will do so once in office.”

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Thelasko shares a report from Medium: Earlier this summer, the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee set about crunching data on more than 40,000 genes from 17,000 genetic samples in an effort to better understand Covid-19. Summit is the second-fastest computer in the world, but the process -- which involved analyzing 2.5 billion genetic combinations -- still took more than a week. When Summit was done, researchers analyzed the results. It was, in the words of Dr. Daniel Jacobson, lead researcher and chief scientist for computational systems biology at Oak Ridge, a 'eureka moment.' The computer had revealed a new theory about how Covid-19 impacts the body: the bradykinin hypothesis. The hypothesis provides a model that explains many aspects of Covid-19, including some of its most bizarre symptoms. It also suggests 10-plus potential treatments, many of which are already FDA approved. Jacobson's group published their results in a paper in the journal eLife in early July. According to the team's findings, a Covid-19 infection generally begins when the virus enters the body through ACE2 receptors in the nose, (The receptors, which the virus is known to target, are abundant there.) The virus then proceeds through the body, entering cells in other places where ACE2 is also present: the intestines, kidneys, and heart. This likely accounts for at least some of the disease's cardiac and GI symptoms. But once Covid-19 has established itself in the body, things start to get really interesting. According to Jacobson's group, the data Summit analyzed shows that Covid-19 isn't content to simply infect cells that already express lots of ACE2 receptors. Instead, it actively hijacks the body's own systems, tricking it into upregulating ACE2 receptors in places where they're usually expressed at low or medium levels, including the lungs. The renin-angiotensin system (RAS) controls many aspects of the circulatory system, including the body's levels of a chemical called bradykinin, which normally helps to regulate blood pressure. According to the team's analysis, when the virus tweaks the RAS, it causes the body's mechanisms for regulating bradykinin to go haywire. Bradykinin receptors are resensitized, and the body also stops effectively breaking down bradykinin. (ACE normally degrades bradykinin, but when the virus downregulates it, it can't do this as effectively.) The end result, the researchers say, is to release a bradykinin storm -- a massive, runaway buildup of bradykinin in the body. According to the bradykinin hypothesis, it's this storm that is ultimately responsible for many of Covid-19's deadly effects. Several drugs target aspects of the RAS and are already FDA approved, including danazol, stanozolol, and ecallantide, which reduce bradykinin production and could potentially stop a deadly bradykinin storm. Interestingly, the researchers suggest vitamin D as a potentially useful Covid-19 drug. "The vitamin is involved in the RAS system and could prove helpful by reducing levels of another compound, known as REN," the report says. "Again, this could stop potentially deadly bradykinin storms from forming." Other compounds could treat symptoms associated with bradykinin storms, such as Hymecromone and timbetasin.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It’s not hard to imagine that in two months’ time, broad swaths of the country will be mired in Florida 2000-style chaos.

The pandemic is transforming the ways Americans will cast their ballots. Under-resourced election officials are straining to update voting processes in time, with fewer in-person polling locations and greater reliance on mail-in balloting. The president has repeatedly spread false claims that absentee voting is rife with fraud. Slow counts of those absentee ballots could very plausibly lead to replays of the infamous “Brooks Brothers riot”—when hordes of gray-suited DC-based Republican staffers descended on the Sunshine State—at election offices throughout the country.

“The pandemic is a once-in-a-century change in circumstances,” says Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount who specializes in election law. “And in many ways, continuing the status quo as if the world hasn’t changed is its own way to restrict voting.”

But those changes in long-familiar voting procedures have led to a bumper crop of lawsuits that could blow up into mini Bush v. Gore-style cases that further rupture the divide. Already, the pandemic-inspired election changes have prompted the filing of at least 228 lawsuits, according to Levitt, who tracks the litigation on his website.

And where the 2000 election was decided with a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling that ended the Florida recount and prompted Al Gore to concede and accept the legitimacy of the ruling even as he disagreed with it, it’s hard to imagine President Donald Trump voicing similar faith in the process if he loses in November.

“Remember, this is a president who claimed that there was a massive fraud in an election he won,” says Levitt. “We have had peaceful transitions of power because We, the People, have believed that it is possible that more people who disagree with us actually cast ballots—that the possibility exists that we might be in a minority. And if that is not even a conceptual possibility, that’s a real danger to democracy and to the election process. If you cannot conceive that you might be in the minority, there’s no possibility of achieving change through voting nor of achieving legitimacy through voting.”

Levitt, for his part, doesn’t think a Brooks Brothers riot is any more likely in 2020 than it was in 2000, but says there’s good reason for concern.

“The more the president attempts to suggest without evidence that the election is being stolen, the more that people feel like they’ve been aggrieved and need to take the process outside of the normal dispute-resolution mechanisms,” Levitt says.

He wants to remind people that the courts are one of those mechanisms. “There are always miniature Bush v. Gore cases, they just don’t always decide the presidency,” says Levitt. “They happen in every election cycle, usually in a race way down the ballot. It’s just you never hear about them.”

What do those 200+ lawsuits look like? Are we hyperventilating about this needlessly? And what pieces of litigation concern actual experts on voting rights? With early voting just days away from starting and Election Day two months away, POLITICO spoke to Levitt to sort through it all. A transcript of that conversation is below, condensed and edited for length and clarity.

Stanton: In terms of election lawsuits already in the works, what are we seeing?

Levitt: We’re seeing a lot. And we’re seeing it much earlier this year than past cycles—and that might well be a good thing. In part, that’s because when the pandemic arrived, it arrived during the primaries. And it arrived in a way where some executive and legislative officials were willing to make changes, some weren’t, and some couldn’t because the relevant rules are embedded in state constitutions and aren’t susceptible to change. And so, unsurprisingly, when we have circumstances that have really changed and rules that can’t change or don’t, people run to the courts—one other agent we have to modify rules for particular circumstances. And this once-in-a-century pandemic is a very particular circumstance.

We also got evidence in real time about how the pandemic would affect voting in the primaries. This was far less speculative than some cases are. In many ways, we knew which problems were encountered, and that gave the courts firmer footing to rule earlier in the cycle than we might otherwise see—we were getting decisions in June, July and August, when there’s still time to implement them, rather than waiting until October and running into chaos.

Stanton: You track the number of election-related lawsuits that have been filed. I understand that we’re now well above 150 cases?

Levitt: It was 226 the last time I checked. It’s moving very quickly.

Stanton: In terms of the number of voters potentially affected by these lawsuits, what are we talking about?

Levitt: Actually, I have to apologize: It’s 228 cases, and I haven’t added a couple, so it’s probably 230. It’s difficult to track. How many voters does this affect? I don’t honestly know. The better way to measure is this: There’s litigation now in 43 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico. And in a way, the litigation affects all of the voters in each of those states, not because it’s contesting the conditions that every voter will use to cast their ballots, but because it alters the framework under which the elections are held. Even a case that’s about just one candidate getting on the ballot affects the choices of who people will be able to vote for.

By the way, I'm tracking the pandemic-related election cases. But there are other cases, including a big one in Florida, that aren’t about the pandemic. So that is not to suggest that the states that aren’t on this particular list are free of election litigation; they just happen to be free of litigation based around the pandemic.

The second category has to do with mail-in ballots. Some of these lawsuits would’ve been brought in nonpandemic times. There is a string of litigation about how people get notified of mistakes in the absentee process—mismatches in signatures that voters sign to their absentee envelopes, which are then matched against their signatures in elections officials’ records—and whether they have a chance to fix those mistakes. Litigation about the absentee process picked up speed considerably when it became clear that far more of the public is going to vote by mail this year than normal. In 2016, I think about a quarter of ballots nationwide were cast by mail. So you see litigation over deadlines for mail-in ballots, or provisions about assisting people with ballots, or opportunities for voters to correct mistakes, or the excuse you may need to provide to vote absentee, or postage on absentee ballots, or the witnesses and notaries required by some states.

The third category has to do with in-person voting. Even in states that are “universal” vote-by-mail, you almost always have an option to go down to the county office and drop off a ballot in person or fill out a ballot in person. It’s not truly universal vote-by-mail; it just means everybody has the option. The fight this election cycle has never been about moving literally everybody to vote by mail; it’s about increasing the opportunities to vote by mail to mitigate serious capacity constraints for those who have to vote in person. Just like there are people who are hard to count in the Census, there are people who are hard to mail, and populations that really depend on in-person voting—very rural and very urban, minority communities, those who face issues like language access, people with disabilities. So there’s litigation over the hours of early voting, over curbside voting opportunities, over the availability of dropboxes and other in-person places to return the ballot. And those lawsuits are almost entirely pandemic-related.

And then the fourth category is pushback back against all the other three: that the administration of the election shouldn’t change. The other three categories have to do with people asking the courts to change or modify the rules for this election because of the pandemic and because of changed circumstances. Sometimes, elected officials or legislatures have changed the rules, and this litigation is pushing back against those changes, mostly under the notion that the officials or legislatures have overstepped and may not have the authority to make the changes they've made.

Stanton: What are the most potentially consequential election lawsuits in the works?

Levitt: It really depends on how long your view is. There are cases where ballot initiatives to reform redistricting in states have been tossed off the ballot because they came in short of the number of required signatures because of the pandemic. If they had made it on the ballot, would those have changed the redistricting process, which changes the political landscape in a state for the next 10 years? Maybe. So, from one point of view, it’s enormously consequential long-term. From another point of view, it doesn’t affect the conditions of voting in the November election itself. It depends on your time horizon.

In terms of the way people vote, I think some of the more consequential cases are likely to be involve the opportunity to correct mistakes—sometimes mistakes by election officials, sometimes mistakes by the voters. And this is something I flagged because of a series of cases that aren’t specific to the pandemic, but definitely picked up speed and volume. They have to do with getting notice of a problem and getting the opportunity to fix it—core, basic fundamental legal concepts. “Procedural due process” is the legal name for it. Nonlawyers will recognize it as basic fairness: If you’re going to throw out my ballot, tell me why and give me a chance to fix the problem before you do.

There are more opportunities for unintentional error both by voters and by election officials in the mail-ballot process than with in-person voting. And as a consequence, the increase in voting by mail across the board increases the importance of these “notice and cure” procedures and the lawsuits to make sure that procedures are in place. More people will be voting using a system that’s less familiar to them personally, and election officials will have to work harder and faster to process many more things in a short amount of time. Both of those things are a recipe for predictable mistakes, which aren’t a problem as long as there’s a way to fix them. Those lawsuits may seem like a small thing over small procedural steps, but they may be among the most important in terms of the number of ballots cast and processed.

With respect to voting in the general election, there’s another “it depends”: It depends whether the case is consequential based on what it is arguing in theory, or whether it’s likely to work in practice. There are some cases asking for a fairly mammoth reconfiguration of local election practices, both to restrict access and to improve access—different cases in different places. Each is unlikely to succeed. Courts don’t like micromanaging all the aspects of an election. There are discrete elements that courts will address, but they don’t like putting themselves in charge of an election administration. And getting this close to an election, we’re just running out of time to make very big changes to the process. Those cases would be enormously consequential if they yielded an outcome, but it’s extremely unlikely they’re going to.

There are also cases that are brought by the political parties, either the Democratic National Committee, Republican National Committee and their affiliated parties, as well as the campaigns themselves. I don’t believe the Biden campaign has brought a case yet.

Stanton: But the Trump campaign has.

Levitt: They have. Three come to mind right off the bat. And those cases may be consequential not only in what they’re asking for, but in telling you where the major political parties seem to have priorities.

Stanton: One of the cases the Trump campaign filed is about restricting the number and location of drop-off boxes for absentee ballots in Pennsylvania, right?

Levitt: It’s about a bunch of stuff in Pennsylvania, drop-off boxes included—about whether there can be dropboxes, about whether individuals can poll watch at dropboxes, and a number of other procedures Pennsylvania put in place that the Trump campaign doesn’t like.

I should say that there are three suits that I'm aware of where the Trump campaign has brought the case in its own name. But they or the RNC have intervened in cases others have brought, as defense. When you see a party put its own name on a case, or when you see a campaign put its name a case, that is also a political statement about what they want you to know specifically they are fighting about. So it’s of messaging importance in addition to the legal importance attached to it.

Stanton: In the Pennsylvania case about ballot drop-off boxes, what is the basis for their case?

Levitt: The political basis or the legal basis?

Stanton: You can go either way.

Levitt: In terms of the political basis, the Trump campaign has claimed not only that there’s a particularized legal problem, but also that the implemented election measures open the opportunity for widespread fraud. This is very much in keeping with the president’s own messaging—founded or unfounded, warranted or unwarranted—about opportunities for widespread fraud.

In these instances, in addition to the narrow legal claim that the campaign is making—some of which has merit, some which are not crazy thoughts—there’s the messaging reinforcement: The Trump campaign wants you to know that these measures may increase the potential for fraud. I say, “wants you to know that,” but I don’t actually believe that these measures significantly increase the potential for widespread fraud. If you ask election officials, across the board they will tell you that they know how to run secure elections, and that while there are always opportunities for individual glitches or mistakes or even wrongdoing, the system is pretty secure against widespread fraud. And from all available evidence, they’re right. Nevertheless, the Trump campaign wants to put out a different message.

Stanton: Looking at the lawsuits still in play, which ones give you the most concern?

Levitt: Ah, that’s such a good question. There are particular resolutions I’m angry about. There are particular battles that I think are important. There are cases where I fear that relief that has been granted correctly will be overturned or paused. And there are cases where people have asked for tremendous changes, and where I'd be worried if they got what they were asking for, but I don’t think they’re going to get what they’re asking for. Among the 228 lawsuits, it’s hard to pick a favorite or least favorite child. [Laughter]

Stanton: You have an expertise in voting rights. You worked on the issue at the Department of Justice. If you were trying to restrict voting through lawsuits, what would you be doing at this point in time?

Levitt: Honestly, there aren’t many ways that the courts have accepted to clamp down on present procedures. The main claim for clamping down on present procedures, is “these procedures cause fraud”—lots of screaming, all caps. Whatever the efficacy of that position in the court of public opinion, the courts that are actually courts demand evidence. So I don’t know that there’s much utility in using the courts to restrict voting if we’re starting from the status quo.

But the pandemic is a once-in-a-century change in circumstances. And in many ways, continuing the status quo as if the world hasn’t changed is its own way to restrict voting.

The world has changed around us. Many officials in many places have acknowledged that. Some have not. Some can’t, because their state’s constitution embeds rules that aren’t pandemic-appropriate, and sometimes state actors have no legal ability to resolve those problems outside of the courts. But pretending that everything is the same in 2020 as in prior years actually amounts to an effort to restrict the vote, because everything is most definitely not the same in 2020 as it’s been in prior years. There are plenty of ways outside of the courts, unfortunately, to constrict the ability to vote. In the courts, the most efficacious way to constrict votes is not to ask for a change in current processes, it’s precisely to fight back against changes in a world that requires a different approach to voting than we’ve had in the past.

Stanton: Talk about that different approach. In light of the pandemic, what needs to change about voting?

Levitt: Three things—and a fourth is the predicate to changing any of it: money. Unlike the federal government, most local officials can’t spend money they don’t have. We’re getting to the point where if they don’t get the money they need, they may not be able to do what is necessary before the election.

What are the three things that really need to change? One, we need to recognize that in-person voting capacity will be limited—not unavailable, but limited. Locations won’t offer themselves as polling locations and poll workers won’t come to the polls to the same degree they have in the past. That means a shift to accommodate alternatives to in-person voting, which means voting by mail. That has to happen. People have to be encouraged to vote by mail, if they can, in order to relieve the pressure on in-person voting.

One really vivid example of this came in Wisconsin’s primary. A lot of attention was put on the fact that in Milwaukee, 185 polling places were originally planned, but only five opened on the actual day of the election. That’s appalling and the result of the pandemic—poll workers and locations canceled last minute. What was far less publicized is that there were 100 small rural towns the week before Election Day in Wisconsin that had zero poll workers. And when you have zero poll workers, there’s nobody to open the door. You can’t vote in person. This is not just an urban problem in any way. This is a problem that affects all of us, just like the pandemic affects all of us.

The second big change is reconfiguring the in-person experience so that it is safe and as efficient as possible to move a large number of people through a smaller number of spaces. And sometimes that means creativity in the polling locations. We recently saw the NBA deciding to make all of its arenas available as elections centers. That’s wonderful. That’s not the solution, but that is part of a solution. We need creativity like that in locating and staffing polling places with depleted resources so that polling places are equitably located.

And the third big change is communication about all of this. The ways in which people vote may be different than in the past. Communication and clarity about exactly what that means is incredibly important. There has to be more of it, more clearly in more channels and more media than before, from election officials, from campaigns, from nonprofits, letting people know how to deal with the two other changes.

Stanton: On that topic of officials communicating about the election, President Trump has said mail-in voting is rife with fraud and that is, in effect, a way that the election will be stolen from him. I was in high school during the 2000 election, but I remember watching the Florida recount and seeing Republicans’ so-called Brooks Brothers riot that disrupted the count and made it seem like elections officials had a thumb on the scale in favor of Al Gore. Given Trump’s statements and the fact November will see a slower ballot count than past elections, what is the potential for mini Brooks Brothers riots at election offices across the country?

Levitt: I think it’s as small as it was in 2000. Which is to say: It happened, but it was only a few dozen people, and it disrupted the count, but not tremendously. There is certainly concern about groups and individuals seeking to influence the electoral process outside of the normal rules. Do I think it’s likely? Not particularly. But there’s concern about it for good reason.

The more the president attempts to suggest without evidence that the election is being stolen, the more that people feel like they’ve been aggrieved and need to take the process outside of the normal dispute-resolution mechanisms. And there are a bunch of those mechanisms. There are administrative mechanisms. There are judicial ones. And then there is taking to the streets.

Remember, this is a president who claimed that there was a massive fraud in an election he won, without any proof whatsoever that the fraud actually existed. I have no doubt that he will be loudly screaming about massive fraud come November, whether he wins or loses. What people choose to do with that is a different matter.

There’s another aspect of communication we should all get used to: There will be a number of states where we don’t know the outcome of the election on election night. It may not be that the states are too close to call. It may be that they’re too early to call—where we just don’t know the answer, not where the answer is unknowable. The fact that we may not know the answer on election night doesn’t mean the system’s broken; it means the system is working. It means that we are actually giving the vote counters time to count the votes rather than jumping to conclusions about who won or lost.

We, the People, aren’t very patient. We have to learn to be a little bit more patient than we’re used to. It’s just not in our muscle memory anymore. It used to be, a couple decades ago, that you went to bed on election night and found out who won in the morning. And a couple decades before that, you went to bed on election night and found out next week. The expectation that we know who won on election night 30 seconds after the polls close is relatively new, and not particularly realistic—and particularly unrealistic in this election. Again, that doesn’t mean that the election teeters in the balance. It could well be that the vote is clear, and we just haven’t been able to count it up yet. It’s really important for all of us to give that process time to work.

The vote-tallying process is public in the vast majority of states. It is not a secretive, hidden process. It is open to being watched. There’s a very big difference between people gathering to ensure the integrity of that count, which is fine, and people gathering to disrupt the integrity of that count, which was in part the Brooks Brothers riot. This is not the Illuminati deciding which ballots to put into the box and which ballots take out of the box. It’s a number of extremely patriotic, extremely civic-minded officials, usually working at close to volunteer wages, who are simply counting up the ballots in as best and neutral fashion as they know.

Stanton: Part of that transparency in the ballot count, of course, is the legal process. Do you think that there’s a likelihood that there are going to be sort of miniature Bush v. Gore-type cases happening throughout the country?

Levitt: There are always miniature Bush v. Gore cases, they just don’t always decide the presidency. Court cases are part of the dispute-resolution mechanism. And they happen in every election cycle, usually in a race way down the ballot. It’s just you never hear about them.

Bush v. Gore came down to 537 votes in one tipping-point state. That’s a very small margin. We all focused on hanging chads, but that election was overdetermined. The margin of error vastly exceeded the margin of victory, based on a bunch of different things. There were problems at the polls. There were problems with registration. There were problems with purges of the voter rolls. There were problems with the butterfly ballot. There were problems with military ballots. There were problems with absentee ballots. These are little tiny problems that, in the normal course, would have been litigated and fought over, but wouldn’t determine a presidency. And it all mattered on a global scale because the presidency was in doubt.

Stanton: Final question: Bush v. Gore, as you noted, ended with the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling and then Al Gore conceding and talking about the need to accept the results of the process, even if he disagreed with the way it turned out. That sort of concession requires you to have some real belief in the importance of the process—some reverence for the rule of law. If President Trump loses reelection, it’s difficult to imagine him doing a similarly magnanimous concession and saying that we should trust in the process.

Levitt: Yes, it is difficult.

Stanton: And you note that the courts are a way to resolve these disputes. But lawsuits also presuppose that the results of due process lend legitimacy to the outcome. And if you question the very basis of that legitimacy, I’m wondering if that makes it more likely that people—Trump supporters, if he loses; or Democrats, if it plays out the other way—I wonder if that actually makes it more likely that people feel like they had something stolen from them, if not for these pesky judges. And then what the effect of all of that is on public faith in institutions and the rule of law.

Levitt: That’s the question you’re ending on?! [Laughter] So, yeah, that sort of magnanimity not only depends on faith in the process and faith in institutions, but regard for anything other than yourself. And that is a quality that we have seen lacking, unfortunately, in the current holder of the presidency. There is no question that the president’s rhetoric has consequences, including consequences on what his followers and others believe. And there is no question, if you look at his record, that he has shown not only disregard, but disdain, for the rule of law. That’s unfortunate, because that contributes to the view that some people have about the stakes in this election, and that because of those stakes, if they don’t win, something might have been stolen from them.

I don’t think it’s unique to “stolen by judges.” The rhetoric the president has used implies that if he doesn’t win, it’s been stolen by “fill in the blank.” That is profoundly dangerous. And I don’t want to minimize the danger of that at all. We have had peaceful transitions of power because We, the People, have believed that it is possible that more people who disagree with us actually cast ballots—that the possibility exists that we might be in a minority. And if that is not even a conceptual possibility, that’s a real danger to democracy and to the election process. If you cannot conceive that you might be in the minority, there’s no possibility of achieving change through voting nor of achieving legitimacy through voting. So that is scary.

Donald Trump is not the only one on the ballot on Election Day. And in the past, we have had figures claim fraud or impropriety in the results receiving pushback where their claims are unwarranted, including from members of their own party. Again, Donald Trump is not the only one on the ballot. There are a lot of figures in public office who are used to both winning and losing, and who believe in the importance of the process.

No matter what the result of the election, if there is no reason to believe there was widespread fraud, it will be important for officials of both parties to say so and say so loudly, because the person with the biggest megaphone in the United States has a history of making claims without basis and evidence that tend to destabilize the whole process. That will be as much a part of their legacy as whether they win or lose their individual races.

A federal court on Thursday blocked President Donald Trump’s restrictions on federal family planning funding for Planned Parenthood and other clinics that provide abortions or make abortion referrals in Maryland.

In crafting the restrictions, the Trump administration “failed to recognize and address the ethical concerns of literally every major medical organization in the country,” wrote Judge Stephanie Thacker of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The court also said the administration “arbitrarily estimated” the cost to clinics of complying with the new rules, particularly the requirement that they construct a separate facility and maintain separate staff to divide their abortion and family planning services.

The ruling applies just to Maryland, but it creates a split in the judiciary — the 9th Circuit previously allowed the funding restrictions to move forward. That makes it more likely the Supreme Court will take up challenges to the Trump rules.

How we got here: The Trump administration last year implemented restrictions on Title X funding, prompting Planned Parenthood, independent clinics and some Democratic-leaning states to withdraw from the program. They argued the ban on referring patients for abortions amounted to a “gag” on physicians that compromised patients’ health.

The rules prompted lawsuits from physician groups and Democratic state attorneys general. The Trump policy was briefly blocked before the 9th Circuit last summer said it could take effect nationwide.

The 4th Circuit decision involved a lawsuit brought by the City of Baltimore. A three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit previously ruled against the city and said the restrictions could take effect statewide, but the full appellate court on Thursday overturned them.

Why it matters: For more than 50 years, Title X has provided millions of low-income people with family planning services, including contraception and health screenings. Abortion providers who participated in the program had already been barred from using federal dollars to fund abortions.

The National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, which represents clinics who comply with the new rules and those that quit the program, estimates that nearly 1,000 health centers across 30 states have the left program since the restrictions took effect. Those centers served 1.5 million patients, the group estimated.

What’s next: The Supreme Court could soon be asked to settle the conflicting circuit court rulings. Nearly 30 years ago, the court upheld similar Reagan-era Title X rules that had only taken effect briefly before they were reversed by the Clinton administration. It’s widely expected the current roster of conservative justices would uphold the Trump rules.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on Thursday rejected concerns that the Trump administration is rushing the approval of a coronavirus vaccine in the run-up to Election Day, after the CDC directed states to prepare to begin vaccine distribution by Nov. 1.

“I think it’s very irresponsible how people are trying to politicize notions of delivering a vaccine to the American people,” Azar told “CBS This Morning” in an interview.

“Any vaccine that comes out is going to meet FDA’s gold standards for authorization or licensure,” he added. “The president’s made that clear. I’ve made that clear. The FDA commissioner has made that clear.”

The secretary’s remarks come as three vaccine candidates produced by drugmakers AstraZeneca, Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTec have entered late-stage Phase 3 clinical trials.

Although Azar said it was unclear when the data from those studies would be reported, he argued that “if we get a vaccine, we need to be ready to distribute that.”

CDC Director Robert Redfield wrote in a letter to governors last week that federal health officials “are rapidly making preparations to implement large-scale distribution of the Covid-19 vaccines in the fall of 2020.”

He “urgently” asked states to assemble a “fully operational” plan for providing vaccines to the public by Nov. 1 — two days before the election — and he promised that any preparations “will not compromise the safety or integrity of the products being distributed.”

Pressed on how the CDC selected its target date, Azar denied that the decision was politically motivated and deferred to Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the agency’s director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

“You’d have to ask Dr. Messonnier, because that came out of the career people at CDC working to do the planning here,” he said. “It has nothing to do with elections.”

Public health experts have expressed concerns that administration officials might pressure the FDA into fast-tracking approval of a vaccine before the conclusion of Phase 3 trials — pointing to the agency’s controversial issuing of an emergency use authorization for convalescent plasma after coming under attack from President Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn has repeatedly sought to reassure Americans that the eventual vaccine will be safe and effective, even as he remains locked in a feud with HHS leadership over the administration’s coronavirus messaging.

At a news briefing Thursday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany insisted that “no one is pressuring the FDA to do anything.”

“This president wants to break through regulatory barriers to get a vaccine to the American people as quickly as possible because lives are at stake,” she said. “But he will not in any way sacrifice safety and making sure that this is 100 percent airtight for the American people [who] receive it.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, also told CNN in an interview Thursday that Americans should not be worried about politics affecting the vaccine approval timeline.

“I don’t think so. … I mean, the FDA has been very explicit that they are going to make a decision based on the data as it comes in,” he said, adding that the results of the trials as viewed by independent monitoring boards “will ultimately become public.”

“I think that we can have some confidence and have faith in what the FDA is saying,” Fauci said.

The potential vaccines’ Phase 3 trials can take months to complete, and definitive results about the candidates’ efficacy are not expected until late October at the earliest. Nevertheless, the White House’s rhetoric on vaccines has become increasingly optimistic.

Vice President Mike Pence said at last week’s Republican National Convention that the United States was “on track to have the world’s first safe, effective coronavirus vaccine by the end of this year.”

Trump made an even more definitive prediction in his nomination acceptance speech, saying the administration “will produce a vaccine before the end of the year, or maybe even sooner.”

Top Democratic senators are calling on the Trump administration to impose sanctions on Russia for seeking to interfere in the 2020 U.S. election.

In a letter to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, the group — led by Senate Finance Committee ranking member Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Senate Intelligence Vice Chair Mark Warner (D-Va.) — noted the nation’s top counterintelligence official publicly stated last month that Russia is interfering in the 2020 campaign to denigrate Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee.

“Congress has mandated a broad range of sanctions tools, and it is long past time for the administration to send a direct message to [Russia] President [Vladimir] Putin,” the senators wrote on Thursday.

The Trump administration has a spotty record when it comes to imposing mandatory sanctions aimed at punishing Russia for election interference in the 2016 campaign. After legislation was passed with nearly unanimous support in the House and Senate, various executive branch departments refused to implement some of the sanctions against Moscow.

On Aug. 7, National Counterintelligence and Security Center Director William Evanina publicly detailed the Russian threat for the first time after top Democrats urged intelligence officials to disclose additional information about the Kremlin’s intentions. Evanina said the intelligence community assesses that “Russia is using a range of measures to primarily denigrate former Vice President Biden and what it sees as an anti-Russia ‘establishment.’”

Evanina also revealed that China does not want President Donald Trump to be reelected — an assessment Trump and his allies have sought to highlight. But officials who have seen the underlying intelligence said the president is misrepresenting Beijing’s actions, asserting that there is no evidence of a concerted campaign aimed at interfering in the election.

A Wyden aide said Senate Intelligence Chair Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) was not asked to sign on to the letter. Rubio is the co-author of the DETER Act, a bill that mandates the imposition of sanctions against foreign countries deemed to be interfering in American elections.

Other Democratic senators who signed the letter included Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Gary Peters of Michigan, Jack Reed of Rhode Island, Robert Menendez of New Jersey, Dianne Feinstein of California, Dick Durbin of Illinois, Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota. With the exception of Durbin, the Senate minority whip, all serve as the top Democrat on a committee that handles election-security matters.

Thursday’s letter was the latest in a series of demands from top congressional Democrats to the Trump administration to try to ward off Russian interference in the November election. On Tuesday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) escalated their pressure campaign on Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, who recently said he would end in-person congressional briefings on election-security matters — implicitly threatening to issue subpoenas or cut off funding for the intelligence community if Ratcliffe does not reverse course.

Rubio indicated this week that the GOP-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee will still receive in-person briefings on the topic, even as the Democrat-led House Intelligence Committee remains cut off from those sessions.

Charles McMillon Jr., his 10-year-old son, and Kendrick Clemons had just dropped off a U-Haul van at Fountain Plaza parking lot, in Tallahassee, Florida, when suddenly bullets began whizzing around them. McMillon and the two others were reportedly sitting in the truck, typing in mileage onto the app, the way rentals like this work, when Wallace Fountain and his wife, Beverly Fountain, began shooting at them. Luckily, McMillon quickly drove off before anyone got hurt.

According to the Tallahassee Democrat, the Fountains are the owners of the strip mall and had decided to set up a vigilante sting, hiding inside of another U-Haul vehicle. The couple told authorities that they did this in order to stop people from syphoning off and stealing gas. Of course, McMillion, his son, and his friend weren’t doing anything illegal. In fact, they seem to be the only group of people in that parking lot following the law.

The Fountains are facing charges of aggravated assault. It seems that a Tallahassee police officer was parked in the same strip mall when he heard the shots and was able to verify that nothing out of the ordinary was happening between McMillon, his child, and their family friend.

"The driver then parked the GMC by the U-Haul and based on their interactions, I assumed both parties knew each other and the gentleman driving the GMC was picking up the driver of the U-Haul," the officer wrote in the arrest report. "Their actions were normal, nothing out of the ordinary."

According to the Fountains, they were not shooting at the family, but in the air, “only to scare the individuals they suspected were stealing gasoline." According to the police, the Fountains were carrying three pistols in hand at the time, with a shotgun in their stakeout U-Haul, along with an additional two magazines of ammo.

McMillon and Clemons are now suing both U-Haul and the Fountains over the ordeal, saying they hoped to bring more light to how Black citizens are living. Clemons told reporters that “We’re hopeful now more than ever that this country finally sees that Black lives do matter. This isn’t just a movement. This is a way of life for millions of minorities, a way of life in which we are targeted by police, the justice system and civilians all because we ‘fit the description.’"

As Clemons has also pointed out, the Fountains, while having to surrender their firearms, are out on bail, something that exposes the two Americas people live in. “If we’re the ones shooting at them, we would still be in jail right now, probably with no bond, probably with intent to kill. But they got to walk free." 

Beverly Fountain, who, according to Essence, worked as secretary for the state attorney’s office until 1996, said this wasn’t a race issue. “Were they Black? We weren’t going off on that at all. You’ve got vandalism and theft going on at your property. Trying to protect your property—that’s the only issue.” 

So, these two heavily armed property owners began shooting off their guns without seeing anyone. They didn’t know what color the people were, and while one of those people was literally bringing back the U-Haul, which is what you are supposed to do after you have finished with your rental time, the Fountains decided to try and scare them off?

The reason we have laws against vigilantism is because it is dangerous. But it is important to understand that there is no such thing as a Black vigilante in the American imagination, only white ones. A Black person taking “the law into their own hands” is simply a criminal, a felon, or a “thug.” 

In covering administration appointees to various government agencies, it seems like certain phrases are coming up a lot more often then they used to. We seem to quite often be hearing that a new Donald Trump hire is "paranoid," or "obsessed," or the shrieking offspring of a wolverine and a industrial shredder, or "carries a whip around his government office for some reason." The phrase "This person is supremely qualified for the job they now hold," however, seems to have gone the way of the thylacine.

Apropos of that, we've been waiting to see what the results would be from Trump's installation of a Steve Bannon-associated hack as head of the U.S. Agency of Global Media (USAGM), the agency responsible for the U.S.-funded Voice of America. USAGM CEO Michael Pack took control in June, and—surprise! A new NPR report finds that Pack has "upended" the agency, inserting himself and fellow Trump appointee Samuel Dewey into news reporting decisions. He says it's because his job is to "drain the swamp."

Also, if you believe some of the staunch Republicans who Pack has booted out of the way, in this quest to do what is most certainly not his job, he appears to be slightly off his rocker.

NPR reports the discovery of a specific case of Pack-Dewey interference in the news, the "formal review" of an Urdu-language story about Biden's outreach to Muslims. ("Typically such reviews would be conducted by journalists well versed in the profession's standards and ethics," notes NPR. Dewey ain't that. Dewey is a Trump partisan.) Left unmolested by investigations, however, was a Spanish-language story featuring a Trump campaign adviser "warning Latinos against voting for Biden." And Dewey has "repeatedly pushed to participate in planning for election reporting and overarching news coverage."

Beyond the specific example of Pack and Dewey doing the exact thing critics were pretty darn sure they were going to do, which is repurposing Voice of America as a pro-Trump platform through a campaign of simply removing anyone who objects, NPR's report has a few eye-catching details to it. It reports that Pack, who has already "fired or suspended most of the executive staff," has been starving the networks by blocking the approval of their normal budgets and refusing to grant visa extensions to foreign employees—potentially forcing them to return to countries with governments with grudges against their U.S. networks.

It also notes that many of the people Pack has removed themselves had "sterling conservative credentials," with stints working for prominent Republican lawmakers or under George W. Bush.

The overriding theme of all this, in fact, is that Pack's bulldozing of the agency is based on personal, rather than ideological obsessions. NPR's sources say Pack "openly broods over questions of loyalty." Ex-USAGM CEO Grant Turner directly calls Pack "paranoid."

So there's your answer, America. It turns out that Trump's new hires are doing more damage to Voice of America and other U.S. broadcasting networks than even critics had expected, not only reaching directly down into journalistic decision-making but willingly sabotaging even basic network operations. And the reason is the familiar one: Trump's team looked for unqualified hacks, people who "brood" over government workers' loyalty to Dear Leader, are "paranoid" about the same, and who treat each department and agency as their own personal fiefdom, to be upended and dismantled according to personal whim.

Fascism is, at heart, governance by loyal incompetents. Trump hires according to loyalty; Trump's hires are free to wreck anything and everything, so long as the loyalty part does not waver.

About two months before a Minneapolis cop kneeled on George Floyd's neck for more than eight minutes in a deadly detainment, another Black man was killed in similar fashion on March 23 in Rochester, New York. That man's name, Daniel Prude, and officer-worn body-camera video of his violent detainment were released Wednesday by the racial justice organization Free the People Roc.

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Prude was naked, unarmed, and having a “mental health crisis” when his brother Joe Prude called police for help, and multiple Rochester police officers responded, Free the People Roc reported in a Facebook post. “While cuffed, naked, and laying on the freezing cold ground, RPD officers mocked Daniel Prude and cracked jokes, and put a bag over his head,” the organization said. “RPD officers Mark Vaughn, Troy Talladay, and Francisco Santiago then proceeded to swarm him. While Talladay forced his knee into Daniel’s back and Santiago held down his legs, Vaughn pushed Daniel’s head into the ground using all of his body weight—essentially doing a triangle pushup on his head. Less than ten minutes after he was cuffed, Daniel Prude breathed his last conscious breath.”

The police department, which reviewed the body-camera footage and surveillance footage of the incident, stood by the officers’ actions in an investigative action report Free the People Roc obtained. "Based upon the investigation, the officers' actions and conduct displayed when dealing with Prude appear to be appropriate and consistent with their training," officers said in the report.

(Warning: This video contains violence, police brutality, murder, nudity, and abuse of the mentally ill.)

Joe Prude, the man who called police when his brother suddenly ran out of a back door, told The Appeal Daniel Prude was visiting from Chicago when he started to exhibit signs that he was not well, so Joe Prude took his brother to the hospital, where he was released within hours. When Joe Prude called police, he asked them not to kill the man who was only a danger to himself, The Appeal reported. Officers arrived to find Daniel Prude bleeding and naked at about 3 AM. Vaughn pulled out his Taser, told Daniel Prude to get on the ground and handcuffed him. "That was easy and fast," Vaughn said. Video of the detainment shows at least five cops surrounding Prude as he laid naked on the ground while it snowed. “Sir, you don’t got AIDS do you?” Vaughn asked Prude at one point.

Elliot Dolby-Shields, the Prude family’s attorney, told The Appeal: “He complied with all of their demands, and then they treated him like a piece of garbage with not even one speck of basic humanity. No, ‘Hey are you alright? Hey, can we get you a blanket?’ … It’s freezing out and he’s naked. They don’t offer him anything.”

Joe Prude called the detainment a “lynching” in his interview with The Appeal. “That was cold-blooded murder,” he said. “My brother was a loving individual. He was a likable guy and a damn good brother. He made people laugh. He brought joy to people. He didn’t deserve what happened to him.”

Free the People Roc is calling for all officers involved in the incident, those complacent in it, and those involved in the “cover up” to be fired. “Stop funding those who terrorize, brutalize, and dehumanize the most vulnerable residents of our city,” the organization said. “Defund and disband the Rochester Police Department. Move swiftly and decisively to implement real solutions to the multiple crises facing Rochester.”

New York State Attorney General Letitia James is investigating Daniel Prude’s death and will determine if charges are appropriate, according to an executive order The Appeal obtained.

Mayor Lovely Warren offered the family condolences and explained the delay in a decision on charges during a press conference with Police Chief La’Ron Singletary Wednesday. “Once Mr. Prude passed away, the Rochester Police Department turned the case over to the Attorney General’s office and since that time we have been waiting for the Attorney General’s office to make a determination on how this case is to proceed,” Warren said. “The reason why that is the case is because we want to make sure the investigation is fair, unbiased—something people have confidence in—and that the entity that is being investigated is not the entity that’s conducting the investigation.

“Unfortunately it has taken some time and I sympathize with the family because I too, when I saw the video, was very disturbed.” 

Update by Kos: Clearly sensing the damage this is doing to him politically, Trump issued a three-tweet denial Thursday night. 

Trump swears “on whatever, or whoever” that he never called any of our troops losers, and specifically says he didn’t call John McCain a loser. But, as you know, there’s always a tweet. 

So given his clear denial, and the clear evidence that he’s lying about part of his denial, why would anyone believe anything else he says? He can’t even get his lies straight. Back to Walter’s original post: 

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In 2018, Donald Trump canceled his visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris. At the time, his excuse was it was too wet outside to see the final resting place of nearly 2,300 Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice in the first world war. The Atlantic has just published an unbelievable account of what happened during that trip to France, as well as allegations concerning Trump statements about fallen soldiers that, if true, are abhorrent. 

While it was widely accepted that Trump’s excuse that the rain scared his Secret Service detail from bringing him to the cemetery that day was bogus, the details The Atlantic has, from a handful of sources, paint the Donald in the sad, pale, monstrous light we have come to expect from the president. One example is that Trump allegedly called the 1,800 American soldiers who died at the battle in Belleau Wood during World War I “suckers.” That is not a typo. He reportedly also asked who the “good guys” were in the war and “didn’t understand why the United States would intervene on the side of the Allies.” 

According to the article, Trump questioned senior staff members as to why he had to go to visit the cemetery in the first place, as it was “filled with losers.” Various sources “with firsthand knowledge” said Trump feared his hair would get messed up if he traveled in the rain. Nobody pointed out to him that his hair has been messed up for about 70 years. This is not surprising, of course, as many will remember Trump’s attack on the late Sen. John McCain for being a POW in Vietnam.

But even more telling is the story The Atlantic relays that took place on Memorial Day in 2017, when Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery. Trump was accompanied by John Kelly, then secretary of homeland security, and this exchange took place:

The two men were set to visit Section 60, the 14-acre area of the cemetery that is the burial ground for those killed in America’s most recent wars. Kelly’s son Robert is buried in Section 60. A first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, Robert Kelly was killed in 2010 in Afghanistan. He was 29. Trump was meant, on this visit, to join John Kelly in paying respects at his son’s grave, and to comfort the families of other fallen service members. But according to sources with knowledge of this visit, Trump, while standing by Robert Kelly’s grave, turned directly to his father and said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” Kelly (who declined to comment for this story) initially believed, people close to him said, that Trump was making a ham-handed reference to the selflessness of America’s all-volunteer force. But later he came to realize that Trump simply does not understand non-transactional life choices.

Trump’s blunt mediocrity and ghastly view of everyone not named Donald Trump seems to have allowed many people around him to believe he was simply crass and vulgar, not the straight-up monstrously self-involved and corrupt failure of the cosmos we all know him to be. And while this story does feel like the lazy depiction of a 1990s action film villain, Donald Trump has repeatedly proven himself to be as dumb and dangerous as one would imagine a cartoon villain to be. 

You'd think this might give Trump pause, but of course it won't.

[Those of you who dislike the Electoral College should find this idea of interest]

UC Berkeley professor Michael Eisen has been involved in a number of initially-crazy-sounding projects over the years, an alarming number of which (open access to scientific publication (PLOS), home genetic sequencing (23andme), plant-based "meat" (Impossible Foods) have actually borne much fruit.  Here is his latest—he himself calls it "disturbing and terrifying."
Eisen's idea is a variation on the "National Popular Vote" (NPV) scheme.  For those of you unfamiliar with how NPV works, the basic idea is as follows (and many more details are available at the NPV website here):

A State—let's call it New York—enacts a statute with two basic provisions:

1.  The Governor shall appoint, as presidential electors, the slate of electors submitted by the presidential candidate who receives the largest number of votes cast nationwide in the presidential election. [Currently, of course, it is the candidate winning a plurality of votes cast in NY who gets all of NY's electors.]
2. Paragraph (1) shall only come into effect if and when a sufficient number of other States enact laws with the identical Paragraph (1) provision to cumulatively account for 270 (or more) electoral votes.

You have to admit, whatever your position might be on whether the Electoral College is or is not a useful institution, that it's a devilishly clever scheme. Without the need for a constitutional amendment, but relying instead on the power granted to the States in Article II to "appoint [electors] in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct," it would guarantee that the Electoral College would elect the winner of the nationwide popular vote, once the 270-electoral-vote threshold were met.

The NPV statute has been enacted into law in 16 jurisdictions, accounting cumulatively for 196 electoral votes (CA, CO, CT, DC, DE, HI, IL, MA, MD, NJ, NM, NY, OR, RI, VT, WA), leaving it 74 electoral votes short of the trigger. In nine additional states with 88 additional electoral votes (AR, AZ, ME, MI, MN, NC, NV, OK, VA) the NPV statute has passed in one house (but not the other) of the state legislature.

One obstacle which makes it difficult for the NPV to achieve the required level of support is the diminishing incentive for the "swing states"—the states that, in the current scheme, hold virtually all of the power in the presidential election (OH, PA, WI, FL, MI, VA, NC)—to join in the NPV scheme. The swing states are "swing" precisely because, unlike CA and AL and NY and KS and …, their electorates are pretty evenly divided between the two parties; because the NPV initiative is widely—though perhaps wrongly—seen as favoring the "blue" team at the expense of the "reds," the political battle over the NPV, and the political opposition to joining with the NPV States, are likely to be particularly intense in these swing states.

Moreover, precisely because these are the States that effectively hold all the power in the current scheme, they might well be unwilling to give up that power by joining the NPV coalition. Votes, and voters, in the swing states matter a lot more, in the current presidential election environment, than the votes and voters in NY or AL or CA or KS.  The presidential candidates—both of them—will be paying an enormous amount of attention to the voters in swing states. The issues about which swing state voters are concerned will be front and center in the campaign—and the hundreds of millons, if not billions, of dollars that the candidates will be pouring into their states during the campaign, ain't bad, either.

And if you think about it, as the NPV gets closer and closer to the 270 trigger, the "swing states" who don't join in get even more power (and a bigger slice of those advertising dollars) than they have now.  Imagine if, say, PA (20 electoral votes), MI (16), and VA (13) had enacted the NPV statute.  The total would now stand at 196+49=245—a mere 25 votes short.  The voters in these states (PA, MI and VA) would now be just like voters in NY and AL; their votes would count (for purposes of the national popular vote), but they would no longer get any special additional weight from having come from a "swing state." On the other hand, the non-joining swing states—FL, OH, WI, NC—become even swing-ier than before, with even more attention being paid to corralling their contested electoral votes than before.

If you are a supporter of the NPV, this is not a great position to be in; as the network of joining states gets larger, those states that have not yet joined are under more of a disincentive to join. It's a kind of negative feedback, and negative feedback's not the best way to grow a network.

Enter Mike Eisen.  Here's what he's proposing as a substitute for the current NPV statute:

1.  The Governor shall appoint, as presidential electors, the slate of electors submitted by the presidential candidate who receives the largest number of votes cast, in the aggregate pool of voters in those states (the "Joining States") that have enacted a paragraph identical to this one.
2.  Paragraph (1) shall only come into effect when the cumulative electoral votes in the Joining States equals or exceeds 270.

Notice how this works.  The States enacting this revised NPV law would be agreeing (once the 270 trigger is achieved) to pool their votes with all the other States that have signed onto this scheme, and to give all of their electoral votes to the candidate who receives a plurality of the pooled votes from those Joining States.

And notice that if this statute ever were to come into effect because the 270-vote threshold was met, it would render the votes in the non-joining states completely worthless; votes from non-joining States would play no part whatsoever in determining whom the Electoral College would select as the next president.

That is, if we were to reach the 270-Electoral-vote trigger point, the Joining States would pool their votes together in a pile, determine the candidate who received the most votes in the entire pool, and then they would all designate their Electors to vote for that candidate.  And, under the premise that we had reached the 270-vote trigger, that would be sufficient to elect that candidate president no matter what happened in the other non-Joining States.

I think you can see why Prof. Eisen called this "disturbing."  Votes in non-Joining states no longer count at all in determining who gets to be president. Under this scheme, if Ohio does not Join and agree to pool its vote with other Joiners, it runs the risk that enough other States will Join to make Ohio voters completely irrelevant in the presidential election.  

And that risk—the risk that the voters in your State will be rendered a total irrelevance the moment the 270 threshold is met—intensifies as the Joiners get closer and closer to 270.

Voila! Positive feedback; the more States that Join, the greater the incentive for non-Joiners to Join, which adds more States to the pool, which increases further the incentive for non-Joiners to Join, and so on.

Could this actually work?  Is it really constitutional?

I think the answer to both questions, surprisingly, is "yes."  Neither is simple, so I'll save my more detailed thoughts for subsequent postings, and just make these observations:

Whether it would work depends a bit on what it means to "work."  If your goal is to create a system under which the winner of the popular vote gets to be president, I think this will do it for you.  Notice that under this scheme any non-Joining State can, at any time, enter the ranks of the Joined States. So suppose that Ohio refuses to Join.  If the statutory trigger is activated, it faces a simple choice: Watch the next presidential election from the sidelines, with your voters playing no role in determining the outcome, or Join so that Ohioans' votes count for something. And the same choice would be facing Nebraska, and Alaska, and any other non-Joiners.  Indeed, I think this little statute has an almost unstoppable dynamic behind it, and that it would—possibly quite quickly—become law in all states; what State would not want its voters to have any say at all in who becomes the next president?

And there you'd have it; the "pool" would then consist of the entire country, each State's electors would be pledged to the candidate winning the nationwide pooled popular vote, and that candidate would be elected—unanimously—by the Electoral College. So if that's your goal, this will, I think, get you there.

As for the constitutional question(s), the Supreme Court just this past term (in the "faithless elector" cases, Chiafalo v. Washington and Colorado v. Baca) strongly, and unanimously, re-affirmed the broad, plenary authority given to the States in Article 2 to appoint electors in any manner they see fit. As I read these and other precedents on this matter, NY is perfectly free to declare, in its election law, that it will appoint electors in accordance with the popular vote count in New Jersey; it would be odd if it did so, but it would not be unconstitutional.  And if NY can do that, why can't it say that it will appoint electors in accordance with the popular vote count in NY+NJ+any other State that wants to be in the common pool.

State power in this regard is, presumably, subject to the other binding provisions of the federal constitution; NY cannot declare that it will only appoint white males as electors, for example.  But I'm having trouble seeing how Eisen's proposal runs afoul of any superseding constitutional provision.  I suppose that an Ohioan could assert that the scheme violates the principle of "one person/one vote" under the Equal Protection Clause, by causing his/her vote to count for nothing in NY's determination of who to appoint as an elector while a New Jerseyan gets a say in the matter. But does an Ohioan have standing to challenge NY election law? And in any event, it's hard to see how an Ohioan somehow has a constitutional right to have his/her votes counted by NY; it's not as though under the current, and presumably constitutional, scheme NY takes Ohioans' preferences into account when choosing its electors—so how can an Ohioan contend that this "right" was violated by the NPV scheme?

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Liu Yifei as Mulan. | Disney

The Mulan remake jettisons everything great about Disney’s animated classic and delivers nothing new.

“Let’s get down to business!” orders the commander of the conscripted army in 1998’s Mulan, as he’s trying to whip his ragtag officers into shape. The line kicks off the excellent montage song “I’ll Make a Man Out of You,” a number steeped in irony, because it’s the one thing that the commander can’t do to Mulan — a girl who’s disguised herself as a boy and run away from home to join the imperial forces.

That song, and all of its cheeky irony, doesn’t make it into Disney’s new live-action adaptation of the animated hit Mulan. Though it may be the most highly anticipated of all Disney’s recent remakes, spiritually, there’s little connective tissue between the 2020 version and its predecessor.

But then, there’s also little connective tissue within the new film. Instead, for all its screenplay’s threadbare talk about the importance of cultivating deep understanding, Mulan stays superficial and perfunctory. It gets down to business — and little else.

Mulan’s few bright spots can’t save it from clunky writing

To a degree, every one of Disney’s recent string of live-action adaptations of its animated classics has had to justify itself — its reason for existing. The many films Disney has tried to put new spins on have ranged from beloved ’90s films whose remakes failed to serve much purpose, like Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, to older films, like Dumbo and The Jungle Book, which unquestionably benefited from applying more progressive contemporary lenses to their initially problematic tellings.

Mulan seems to fall outside of these two extremes. The 1998 animated film won high critical praise and legions of devoted fans. The plot of this version of Mulan is fairly simple: Mulan has been struggling to behave as a proper young lady when she learns her aging father has been drafted into the emperor’s army.

Disguising herself as a man, Mulan joins the regiment in her father’s place. There, she learns to fight, builds character, and makes friends with the guys. After her gender is inadvertently revealed and she faces disgrace, she chooses to fight as a girl, ultimately saving the emperor, winning honor, and becoming a hero. It’s all straightforward, but the presence of lots of fun side characters, a few strong musical numbers, and thrilling battle sequences, all gorgeously animated, make the original Mulan a standout in the Disney canon.

There’s plenty of potential for expansion and development in its narrative about the Chinese folk hero Hua Mulan, who rose to fame as a great warrior after risking her honor and her life to join the army in an era where no women were allowed. Hua Mulan is the stuff of legend, and like all legends, her character can stand the tests of revision and recalibration. The film also has some awkward cultural stereotyping to undo; and as a story where the hero unquestionably defends the Chinese empire, the new film could also have done more to critique the geopolitics of the 1998 film through the lens of this era of protests and populism.

But the new Mulan doesn’t seem concerned with deeper characterization, deeper world-building, or even a deeper plot. Sure, it’s stylish, colorful, and decently acted, with entertaining action sequences — overall, though, the movie is a rote, flat, paint-by-numbers version of the story you already know.

Disney

There is some new stuff added to Disney’s 2020 take on Mulan. In particular, where the first film’s villain was an invading, genocidal child-killer, Mulan’s primary antagonists are both new characters, Böri Khan (Jason Scott Lee) and the fighting female sorcerer Xianniang (Li Gong), who each have their own reasons for standing against the emperor. Their backstories and individual motives could have made for a rich and complicated story arc, but instead, like every other potentially interesting thing in Mulan, they’re barely given more than a few lines of exposition — never enough depth or screen time to be made interesting.

At primary fault here is a weak and non-cohesive screenplay. Mulan credits four cisgender white people for the script, and I spent the entire film being mad at all of them. The script is clunky, humorless, and full of jarringly awkward exposition. Characters we love, in particular Eddie Murphy’s comical dragon Mushu, have been excised. Others who’ve been imported from the 1998 version get introduced without clear definitions, as though the writers hope the audience will simply insert pre-established characterizations from that other film into this one. That would be fine if this were a Mulan fanfic or direct sequel, but it’s incredibly frustrating to see in a standalone film more than 20 years removed from the animated feature.

Again and again, plot ideas are introduced but never delved into. Mulan apparently has extraordinary qi (the energy that powers all living things according to many Chinese spiritual practices), but we don’t know why hers is so much stronger than most people’s, or why she’s so inherently ashamed of it, since powerful qi is a highly desirable (and non-gendered) attribute in Chinese culture. A couple of nonsensical third-act plot points are tossed in for convenience and then hand-waved away.

At a few points, narration attempts to wedge in whole emotional arcs that would have been nice to have seen unfold onscreen. This voiceover thing happens most distressingly at the film’s emotional climax, which was so muddy, I wound up having to stop and rewind to see if I’d missed some major dramatic shift that led up to it. I hadn’t missed it — it just wasn’t there.

The weak writing makes Mulan’s gender issues a lot messier

The lack of emotional development especially shortchanges the movie’s main plot thread — Mulan battling, and ultimately coming to terms with, her gender. The new Mulan, I’m sorry to say, offers a much more binary reading of gender than its predecessor, which was frequently unsubtle in the way it coded Mulan’s refusal to accept her assigned gender, offering multiple readings of the character.

In the original film (as in the folklore), Mulan was able to pass successfully as a man until she was inadvertently unmasked; in the new film, she isn’t fully able to pass. It’s implied that her love interest, the new character Honghui (Yoson An), knows her gender long before she decides to reveal herself. And that’s a key difference that the live-action film doesn’t come close to pulling off — making Mulan’s gender reveal make sense and feel satisfying.

To be clear, Mulan doesn’t need to work as a narrative story of trans or nonbinary identity to be successful. The original Mulan is a great film, whether you read it as a trans man coming to embrace his identity or as a cisgender girl finding empowerment to be herself.

But in this film, regardless of how you read Mulan’s gender, the story fails to present this giant conflict in a way that feels compelling. Mulan’s guilt over hiding her cis identity is what drives her big emotional shift — only we don’t really see or feel Mulan’s internal conflict, apart from a couple of repeated references to her failure to embody “truth.” What we see onscreen far more often than Mulan feeling guilty for deceiving everyone is Mulan being preoccupied with successfully passing as a man, a classic trans mentality that invites us to empathize with her as a potentially trans character.

Disney

And because we see Mulan leaning so strongly toward presenting as transmasculine, the film’s conflation of “true” identity with the gender you’re assigned at birth, and Mulan’s ultimately abrupt embrace of her womanhood, feels a little like ... transbaiting. If queerbaiting in the modern sense involves intentionally including overt queer subtext in a work in order to capitalize on a queer audience, only to later textually reject the possibility of queer relationships, then this version of Mulan feels a lot like that for trans identity, a tantalizing tease to trans viewers that ultimately reinforces a gender binary — like it wants to have its gender reveal party cake and eat it too.

I’m reluctant to place too much blame on the film’s director, Niki Caro, for this, especially when her most famous film, Whale Rider, deftly explores a girl’s emotional growth in very similar circumstances to Mulan, without ever shortchanging her female empowerment. I’m even less reluctant to blame Mulan’s actress Liu Yifei, who does her best to imbue personality into a lifeless and humorless script. But the script problems seem to dictate how flat the movie feels as a whole, and neither director nor star succeeded in rejuvenating the words on the page.

It’s still nice seeing Mulan as a live-action story; it’s a relief that the original film’s stereotypical jokes, language, and characterizations have been excised, and there’s enough entertainment happening onscreen that most viewers will feel like they’ve, you know, watched a movie. As you’d expect from a Disney film, the art direction and scenic design are especially well done. Caro’s direction is strong at various points throughout the film, particularly during the action sequences, which are often clever despite some awkward editing. The cast boasts a litany of Asian all-stars, from martial arts legends Donnie Yen (Mulan’s commander) and Jet Li (the emperor) to Li Gong’s fascinating antihero.

But the film doesn’t really do anything with them. The original film, with all its moving parts, still managed to nudge multiple characters along paths that felt like growth. Without more attention paid to character development, in this film, character decisions largely just seem to happen out of nowhere. And it’s not like the film gives us anything else interesting in exchange for all the things it’s left out.

The new Mulan is about 20 minutes longer than the original film, yet I honestly couldn’t tell you what the new film spent most of its time on, given how fully it dropped so much of the original film. There’s none of the animated movie’s well-drawn characterization, comic relief, or fun singing and dancing, which was often juxtaposed against its sobering commentary on the horrors of war. In live action, Mulan is just bland, dry storytelling, perfunctory and joyless.

Like many viewers, I’d wanted great things from this film. Indeed, many hoped Mulan would be the crown jewel of Disney’s recent remake project. This film falls far short of that — and that’s not even considering its controversially high $30 streaming ticket price. Most viewers will be watching the new Mulan on Disney+ alongside the 1998 version. With the original Mulan right there, this kicker is just too easy: Accept no substitutes.

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When the SARS-CoV-2 virus first began circulating, it was easy to think of it as a respiratory disease. After all, from coughing to low oxygen levels, the most noticeable symptoms involve the lungs, and the connection between people contracting COVID-19 and ending up requiring a ventilator to breathe is absolutely real. This pneumonia-like response, in which inflamed material collects in the lungs and increasingly makes it difficult to absorb oxygen, is the most widely recognized means of death following infection. As the mechanism of the virus has become better known, it’s become clear that SARS-CoV-2 generates blood clots. These clots can be small, causing damage to the tiny vessels in organs. They can be larger, leading to a high rate of heart attacks and strokes even among patients who appear to have recovered from COVID-19. They can even become so numerous that they clog dialysis machines and prevent treatment of patients suffering from kidney damage and diabetes. 

But it also appears that there’s still another effect of COVID-19. One that comes from a direct infection of the heart. Infection of heart tissue can lead to damage even among patients who have mild cases of COVID-19. It can even happen among patients who are completely asymptomatic. This effect of COVID-19 on heart tissue now appears to be far more widespread than previously understood, and lingers long after the initial infection is gone. This heart damage is hitting even the youngest and fittest patients—like college athletes.

As Scientific American reports, athletes at both the college and professional levels are finding that their bodies are not the same after experiencing COVID-19. Over a dozen athletes at “Power Five” conference schools have had myocardial injuries following coronavirus infection. Boston Red Sox pitcher Eduardo Rodriguez left for the season after suffering myocarditis following his encounter with COVID-19. Rodriguez told reporters that he felt “100 years old.” He’s 27.

Myocarditis is far from a death sentence. It can go away on its own over time. But that’s far from a guarantee. It can also be the first state in chronic heart failure or even sudden death. Pro basketball player Michael Ojo collapsed during training in August and died of a heart attack just days after supposedly recovering from COVID-19. That experience mirrors that of many others who have come out of the disease with damage to the heart or other organs, even if their experience of COVID-19 was “mild.”

As Centre Times Daily reports, the frequency of heart damage for athletes infected with COVID-19 is extraordinarily high. In a Monday night meeting, Penn State director of athletic medicine Wayne Sebastianelli revealed that about one third of Big Ten athletes who have recovered from COVID-19 have been found to have myocarditis. “When we looked at our COVID-positive athletes, whether they were symptomatic or not, 30 to roughly 35 percent of their heart muscles are inflamed,” said  Sebastianelli. That percentage may be mirrored in the general public, it’s just that the hearts of college athletes have been given a closer look.

Sebastianelli made this announcement two days before Donald Trump called Big Ten commissioner Kevin Warren to insist that the Big Ten needed to play as soon as possible. "I think it was very productive about getting Big Ten playing again and immediately," said Trump said. " ... I think they want to play, and the fans want to see it, and the players have a lot at stake, including possibly playing in the NFL.”

The players do have a lot at stake. They have their lives at stake. With a third of all athletes showing signs of at least temporary heart damage following COVID-19, what Trump is asking is nothing less than that these students get back out there and give him a “win” he can brag about … even if they pay the ultimate price.

In addition to the high rate of heart damage, there’s a previous study from July indicating that about 10% of COVID-19 patients suffered from blood clots. About 5% suffered from clotting severe enough to obstruct flow through a major blood vessel, with most suffering deep vein thrombosis in the legs. That was the issue that led to the amputation of Broadway star Nick Cordero’s leg back in April. The actor and dancer died some weeks later at age 41. 

Some of the fittest people imaginable are suffering from the damage done to their bodies by this virus. Some of them may never recover enough to resume their athletic careers. Some of them could very possibly die. Exposing thousands of student athletes to COVID-19 is asking far too much for kids, 90% of whom will never earn a dollar from their appearance on the field. The myth that COVID-19 is “almost perfectly safe” for younger people is exactly that, a myth. And a sick one.

Unfortunately, as ESPN reports, while the Big Ten may still be insisting that all the medical data is not in, three other major conferences—the ACC, Big 12, and SEC—have decided to play games this fall. After all, it’s not school administrators or coaches who have their hearts on the line.

Sen. Ted Cruz, a man who’s been convinced of his own brilliance at least since he was a teenager, decided Wednesday to show just how willfully ignorant he is. Tweeting about the medical abortion drug Mifeprex, Cruz wrote, “Pregnancy is not a life-threatening illness, and the abortion pill does not cure or prevent any disease. Make no mistake, Mifeprex is a dangerous pill. That’s why 20 of my Republican colleagues and I are urging @US_FDA to classify it as such.”

Reaction on Twitter was swift and brutal and centered around a few key points: Pregnancy, while not an illness, is absolutely a life-threatening condition. Many women die in pregnancy or childbirth—and Cruz’s own state of Texas has the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world, at 35.8 per 100,000 live births. High rates of maternal mortality in the U.S. hit Black women especially hard—the numbers are 17.4 per 100,000 live births overall and 37.1 per 100,000 for Black women. Abortion is safer than pregnancy and childbirth, and, as many noted, erectile dysfunction drugs like Viagra are more dangerous than medical abortion drugs like Mifeprex.

Cruz has children, yet he is either ignorant of or willing to pretend to be ignorant of the physical dangers of pregnancy in pursuit of closing off healthcare options for women. He’s doing this at a time when COVID-19 is making pregnancy even more dangerous, especially for Black women. 

Many, many people let Cruz know not just how wrong he is on the facts but to tell him about their own experiences with the fact that pregnancy is absolutely life-threatening.

US Attorney General Bill Barr watches Trump speak in Wisconsin on September 1. | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

From Black Lives Matter to election fraud, Barr didn’t seem interested in even pretending he’s doing anything other than Trump’s bidding.

Attorney General Bill Barr went on CNN on Wednesday — and quickly demonstrated why he rarely strays outside the friendly confines of Fox News for TV interviews.

Barr’s interview with Wolf Blitzer began with the attorney general making unsubstantiated claims about circumstances surrounding the shooting of Jacob Blake by police in Kenosha, Wisconsin. It wound down with him going to desperate lengths to substantiate Trump’s baseless, politically motivated claims about how mail-in voting will result in a rigged election. On more than one occasion, Blitzer seemed surprised at how unpersuasive Barr’s arguments were.

The whole spectacle demonstrated how, under Trump, the office of the nation’s top law enforcement official has been diminished to something akin to a campaign surrogate for the president.

Barr’s comments about Jacob Blake and Black Lives Matter revealed how unserious he is about racial unrest

The half-hour interview got off to a bad start when Barr presented a flawed argument to try and justify the August 23 shooting of Blake — which sparked protests, looting, and right-wing vigilante violence in Kenosha — then stuck with his case even after Blitzer corrected him.

Barr claimed that Blake was “armed” — the implication being that officers had good reason to shoot him seven times in the back. In fact, while there was a knife in Blake’s car, no evidence has emerged that he brandished it at police officers.

“His family says he wasn’t armed,” Blitzer pointed out to Barr. “There may have been a knife in the car, but he wasn’t armed when he was shot. That’s what his family and his lawyer said.”

But Barr’s narrative seemed impervious to facts.

“Well, I stated what I believe to be [the case],” he replied.

From there, Barr made an unpersuasive case that systemic racism is not a factor in police violence against Black men like Blake, insisting that “the narrative that the police are on some, you know, epidemic of shooting unarmed Black men is simply a false narrative and also the narrative that that’s based on race.”

In reality, a number of studies have found that Black Americans are far more likely to be police shooting victims than whites. For instance, a Washington Post analysis of data about police shootings found that while Black Americans represent 13 percent of the US population, 36 percent of unarmed officer shooting victims are Black.

Barr wouldn’t even acknowledge that voting twice is a crime

If Barr’s ignorance about the reality of racial disparities in the country was galling, his comments about voting by mail were arguably even worse.

Barr’s interview with Blitzer came hours after Trump encouraged his supporters in North Carolina to vote twice to test the state’s mail-in voting system — comments widely interpreted as encouraging felony voter fraud.

“It sounds like he’s encouraging people to break the law and try to vote twice,” Blitzer told Barr. But Barr wasn’t willing to acknowledge the sky is blue.

“I don’t know what the law in the particular state says,” he replied, prompting Blitzer to point out the obvious fact that “you can’t vote twice.”

“I don’t know what the law in the particular state says,” Barr retorted. “If you know what he’s saying, why are you asking me if you’re saying.”

“You’re the attorney general of the United States,” Blitzer said.

Trump’s remarks were meant to create the impression that mail voting is ripe for fraud. In fact, the experience of a number of states that already conduct elections almost entirely by mail demonstrates that’s it’s relatively safe not only in terms of preventing fraud, but also in terms of allowing people to safely exercise their right to vote amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

Alluding to this disconnect between reality and Trump’s rhetoric, the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent interpreted Barr’s defense of Trump as “telegraphing his willingness to legitimize Trump’s eventual effort to try to invalidate untold numbers of mail ballots, which Trump has already told us is coming.”

When Blitzer pressed Barr to cite evidence that mail voting is as ripe for fraud as Trump says it is, Barr couldn’t. Asked whether he had seen any evidence substantiating his own claims that a foreign government would counterfeit ballots to sway the election, Barr instead resorted to saying these concerns are “a matter of logic.” Blitzer seemed taken aback at the weakness of Barr’s case.

Barr was later unable to answer straightforward questions from Blitzer about how many people Barr’s DOJ has indicted for voter fraud. And the interview concluded with Barr making an extremely unpersuasive case that China is a bigger threat to American elections than Russia — comments at odds with the findings of the intelligence community but consistent with Trump’s desire to downplay Russian interference.

“I’m not gonna discuss that,” Barr said, pressed by Blitzer to substantiate his claim. “I’m not gonna get into that.”

The attorney general has been reduced to something akin to a fixer for the president

It’s not a surprise that Barr is using his office to do Trump’s bidding — he’s been doing that since the earliest weeks of his tenure early last year when he got ahead of the Mueller report by releasing a misleading summary of its key findings aimed at exonerating the president.

As my colleague Andrew Prokop explained, the DOJ may not have become “a well-oiled machine that does President Trump’s bidding immediately at all times,” but Barr has proven he’s “unafraid of criticism that he’s acting politically to help the president or his friends”:

Barely a month after Barr was sworn in, he released his misleading spin on special counsel Robert Mueller’s findings a month before the report itself. His Justice Department decided Trump’s request that Ukraine’s president investigate the Bidens wasn’t worth investigating, and other federal investigations into Trumpworld appear to have fizzled out. Barr personally instructed prosecutors to weaken their sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone, and he is trying to have the case against Michael Flynn dismissed entirely. He instituted a new rule requiring his personal approval for any investigations into presidential candidates or campaigns. And he’s attempted to place loyalists into key US attorney posts, such as the Southern District of New York and the District of Columbia.

Wednesday was the case in point. Rudimentary questioning from Blitzer revealed that he’s unfamiliar with basic facts surrounding key cases, the reality of racial disparities in America, and apparently even the fact that it’s illegal to vote twice in America. And he seems more intent on repeating his boss’s talking points than he does in getting up to speed.

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The real threat of civil breakdown doesn't come from Joe Biden. It comes from Donald Trump.

Donald Trump’s reelection strategy has been clear for some weeks—destroy America’s great cities, including deliberately refusing to provide the systems needed to fight COVID-19—then point to the damage he’s done and blame “Democrat mayors.” It’s a strategy that plays directly to Trump’s rural—urban divide, and is inspirational … to people like Kyle Rittenhouse. To people who think that cities are places where they can go and commit murder with impunity, because the folks who live there are not “real” Americans.

For months, Trump has done everything he can to throw gasoline onto protests sparked by demands for an end to racist police violence. He has repeatedly sided with police, repeatedly demeaned protesters, and delivered into the middle of cities camo-wearing troops derived from either the bureau of prisons or the border patrol, whose apparent orders are to keep attacking until they get a response. 

Even so, it appears that cities are just not being damaged enough to feed Trump’s campaign strategy. So on Wednesday he decided to turn up the screws again, by deciding to cut off funding to cities and states on the basis of “lawlessness”—a standard to be determined by Trump. This appears to include any city where people are protesting, any city where people are trying to address the problem of police violence, just … any city that Trump chooses. Starting, improbably enough, with New York City.

As The Washington Post reports, Trump approved a memo to defund cities and states that contain “lawless zones” or “anarchist jurisdictions.” With the decision on whether this is the case entirely up to Trump. Funds could be denied to any area that is attempting to restructure public safety in a way that the White House represents defunding the police department, or any city where “illegal protests” are taking place. The memo gives William Barr’s Department of Justice jurisdiction to draw up this list, with a deadline of two weeks.

This attack on cities represents an extraordinary escalation of Trump’s divisive attack on urban areas. Not only would it attack cities for allowing people to express their First Amendment right to protest, it would usurp local authority to an unprecedented degree. Through this memo, Trump is claiming the ability to define how cities or states conduct policing and how they spend their money. It’s yet another declaration of what Trump has said in the past; that he has “ultimate authority” to override Congress, state governments, and local mayors.

And of course, the money that Trump is denying to these cities came from the same cities. These same cities and states provide far more in taxes to the federal government than they receive in return. Trump is threatening to starve locations of their own money. The memo would cut off money used for housing, transportation, and, perversely, law enforcement. To do so, Trump is essentially drafting himself a “line item veto” over funds already allocated by Congress. But even though Trump visited Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Tuesday to lie about visiting a store damaged by fire, the names specifically mentioned in the memo are New York City, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon.

Portland, which was the site of Trump’s latest attempt to deliver a camo-wearing assault force which repeatedly took violent action against nonviolent protesters. On Wednesday, the DOJ dredged up the rarely used charge of civil disobedience against three people in Portland on Wednesday. This is a charge based on a law passed in 1968 specifically to empower action against Civil Rights protesters. The vaguely written law allows the DOJ to cherry-pick specific incidents, even if unconnected, and even if no federal officers or federal property, and string them together to create a charge of “civil unrest” that justifies action against a whole group, even if they were not involved in the actions cited.

Seattle appears to be on the list because for months Trump and Fox News built up the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” as if it represented a complete anarchist takeover of the city, rather than a couple of blocks around a park where people were handing out free meals. In any case, Black Lives Matter protesters agreed to leave the Zone all the way back in June, and the Seattle police officially closed down the area on July 1. But these facts are unlikely to prevent Trump from declaring Seattle a dangerous den of extremists that has to be cancelled.

For New York City, Trump has … well … he has that they allowed the painting of “Black Lives Matter” on the street across from Trump Tower. And, by sifting crime statistics for values that have gone up to almost half the levels that existed when his buddy Rudy Giuliani was nominally in charge, Trump will likely claim that there’s rising crime.

It doesn’t really matter. What matters to Trump is that he gets the chance to rail against “Democrat run cities.” The fact that any move to cut off funds will immediately be fought in court doesn’t bother him—it’s just more publicity for his actions. It’s all part of the “war on antifa.” A war that, since it faces a fairy tale foe, can be waged over imaginary wrongs. And since this is entirely a play to his rural red audience, how much it hurts people who live in America’s cities doesn’t matter to Trump one bit.

Facebook will stop accepting political advertising in the United States a week before Election Day on Nov. 3, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a post on Thursday. From a report: But the social network will continue showing users all political ads that candidates or political action committees buy before that day, and continue to let these groups adjust who they target. Candidates for political office will also still be able to run ads containing lies. In Thursday's announcement, Zuckerberg claimed he was putting in the one-week ban on new ads prior to the election because he was "concerned" about the challenges people could face while voting. "I'm also worried that with our nation so divided and election results potentially taking days or even weeks to be finalized, there could be an increased risk of civil unrest across the country," Zuckerberg said. Social networks are facing increasing pressure to police political advertising on their platforms ahead of the US elections, and some critics have urged tech companies to stop running political ads altogether. Last year, Twitter banned all political advertising from its platform, and Google restricted micro-targeting of political ads on certain products.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this week, I gave you several reasons not to panic. There are even fewer reasons today after yesterday’s flood of good-news polls, all of them roses for the Biden campaign and Democrats. 

Let’s start with Fox News, which is fun because it means that Donald Trump can’t avoid seeing these numbers on his television screen: 

So Biden +9 in Arizona, +8 in Wisconsin, and +4 in North Carolina is utterly devastating to Republicans. Arizona and North Carolina also have critical Senate races down-ballot, and the strong presidential showings only increase our chances of taking the Senate. 

Back on June 25, Fox News had Biden winning North Carolina by just two, 47-45. So this new poll shows that post-convention, it was Biden who made gains. In other words, the trend is in our direction. In an early June Fox News poll of Arizona, Biden had a mere 4-point lead, 46-42, once again suggesting that all momentum has been on the Biden side

Meanwhile, in the last Fox News poll of Wisconsin, also in early June, Biden led Trump 49-40; thus the current 50-42 result shows an equally bad result for Trump. But speaking of Wisconsin, which is now ground zero for Black Lives Matter protests, check this out: 

Turns out, Trump’s “law and order” messaging isn’t the electoral killer he thinks it is, even in the Kenosha’s home state. 

Meanwhile, Morning Consult took a look at a bunch of battlegrounds. The number in parenthesis is their previous result, prior to the conventions: 

Arizona Biden 52 (45) Trump 42 (47)

Florida Biden 49 (50) Trump 47 (45)

Georgia Biden 49 (46) Trump 46 (47)

Michigan Biden 52 (50) Trump 42 (44)

North Carolina Biden 49 (49) Trump 47 (46)

Pennsylvania Biden 49 (50) Trump 45 (44)

Wisconsin Biden 52 (49) Trump 43 (43)

As you can see, Biden is winning every single one of the core seven battleground states. And, he’s increased his lead in five of them, with Florida and Pennsylvania narrowing slightly (all within an expected statistical float). And the toplines are massive: Arizona +10, Michigan +10, and Wisconsin +9. Flip those three states alone and nothing else, and … oh crap, it’s 269-269! We’d need to grab one more of anything else, either the rural Maine electoral vote that Trump grabbed in 2016, or the Omaha, Nebraska-based electoral vote that we’re looking good to grab this year (it’s suburban). It’s a good thing Biden has lots of avenues to get there. 

Looking at the national picture, CNN released a new poll yesterday as well. The news network caused a stir a week ago or so by releasing a convention-time poll showing Biden leading by “only” 50-46. This was the poll that got Michael Moore to do an alarmist “WE’RE ALL DOOMED” Facebook post calling the results “tied.” It’s the poll that motivated that “stop panicking” post I wrote earlier this week, because reacting to an outlier poll is never a good thing to do. So, what does CNN’s new poll say? 

National, CNN Biden: 51 (50) Trump: 43 (46)

See? Reacting to a single poll is stupid. Look at the overall trends. Look at the aggregate. And wait and see if that same pollster arrives at the same numbers next time they poll. As of now, the polling aggregate continues to give Biden an 8- to 9-point lead, so this CNN poll tracks. Here’s the aggregate from the Economist: 

Also this week, Quinnipiac released a national poll giving Biden a 52-42 lead. And Selzer, the wunderpollsters out of Iowa, had Biden ahead 49-41. See? Those polls track. Don’t think “Biden is winning by 10 because of Quinnipiac,” or “Biden is tied because of CNN!” Instead, look at that aggregate, because historically, the aggregate is pretty darn accurate. 

The entire premise of that hysterical Michael Moore Facebook post is now kinda shot. 

Of course, if his point was “Donald Trump can win!”, then sure. Stipulated. We learned in 2016 that our country is racist, sexist, and chock-full of deplorables. But the lesson wasn’t “ignore the numbers” or “cherrypick the ones that give me reason to panic.” 

And again, it’s okay to feel good about these numbers! There’s this obnoxious liberal tendency to have to catastrophize the news, lest “people become complacent.” Do you see anyone around you being complacent? I certainly don’t. Everyone is amped up. That’s why Biden raised record amounts of cash in August. Do you think they’ll see a poll with Biden leading and say “ah good, mission accomplished!”? No one is resting until Election Day, and maybe not even then. So please, for the love of the gods, stop trying to scare people into action. Trump is scary enough. His Republican Party is scary enough. 

The truth right now is that we’re in a great position to win. FEEL GOOD about it! You’ve helped create this political climate! Your work is paying off! 

Now use that positive energy to be the happy warrior—joyfully doing everything you can to guarantee Republican losses up and down the ballot this November. Get your rest! Staying up all night worrying helps no one. Be mindful! I’ve established a daily Yin Yoga practice to lower my stress levels. Find what works for you—meditation, breathing exercises, gardening, whatever! Being amped up to 100% all the time isn’t healthy, and doesn’t make you a productive activist. Get some exercise! Even a 20-minute walk is great for your heart and also helps lower stress. 

And be grateful that you’re a Democrat this year, because Republicans need every bit of their anti-reality bubble to avoid the truth of their current situation. We don’t have to fear reality. Embrace it, let it nourish you, and then work to maximize our November victories. 

Facebook said Thursday that it will stop accepting political ads one week before the 2020 election and add a label to posts by candidates who try to declare early victory that will direct people to the official results from Reuters and the National Election Pool.

The social network also said it would “attach an informational label to content that seeks to delegitimize the outcome of the election or discuss the legitimacy of voting methods, for example, by claiming that lawful methods of voting will lead to fraud.”

And, Facebook said it would “remove posts that claim that people will get COVID-19 if they take part in voting, and attach a link to authoritative information about the coronavirus to posts that might use COVID-19 to discourage voting.”

Said Mark Zuckerberg: “It’s important to recognize that there may be legitimate concerns about the electoral process over the coming months. We want to make sure people can speak up if they encounter problems at the polls or have been prevented from voting, but that doesn’t extend to spreading misinformation. We’ll enforce the policies I outlined above as well as all our existing policies around voter suppression and voting misinformation, but to ensure there are clear and consistent rules, we are not planning to make further changes to our election-related policies between now and the official declaration of the result.”

Read Zuckerberg’s full post:

And a report on the measures from CBS News.

The post Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook Will Label Posts by 2020 Candidates Who Try to Declare Early Victory, and Halt Political Ads a Week Before Election appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Donald Trump’s re-election campaign on Wednesday sued the Democratic governor of Montana, Steve Bullock, to try and halt expansion of mail-in voting in the state ahead of the November election

Reuters reports: “Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee allege in their lawsuit that Montana Democratic Governor Steve Bullock’s directive last month allowing counties to employ universal vote-by-mail because of COVID-19 was an unconstitutional ‘brazen power grab’ not authorized by state law. The Trump campaign has also taken legal action to block mail-in voting procedures in Nevada and New Jersey. Election experts have said there is scant evidence of fraudulent postal voting in past elections.”

Said Bullock in a statement: “This template lawsuit appears to be part of a pattern of lawsuits across the country by Republican Party operatives to limit access to voting during the pandemic. Voting by mail in Montana is safe, secure, and was requested by a bipartisan coalition of Montana election officials seeking to reduce the risk of COVID-19 and keep Montanans safe and healthy.”

On Wednesday, Trump also encouraged voters to break the law by voting twice.

The post Trump Sues Montana Governor to Halt Expansion of Mail-in Voting appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

It turns out a white Virginia police sergeant who levied felony criminal charges against Black Virginia Sen. Louise Lucas for an alleged conspiracy to "injure" a Confederate monument may have done so to feed a longstanding grudge, according to The Huffington Post. A scathing email Portsmouth Sgt. Kevin McGee sent to city officials placed him squarely at the center of an internal investigation when he then brought criminal charges against Lucas and other Black leaders, the very people he criticized in the email, HuffPost reported.

In the June email, McGee called Lucas' criticism of the police chief “disgusting” and “repulsive” and two months later went on to charge Lucas. She is one of 14 Black leaders, including Lucas’ daughter Portsmouth Vice Mayor Lisa Lucas-Burke, who has been targeted with criminal charges. Some were charged simply for advocating for the removal of the racist memorial and others for calling for Portsmouth City Manager Pettis Patton and Police Chief Angela Greene to be fired for allowing a racist vendetta to result in criminal charges against the city’s Black leaders.

McGee presented the charges before a Virginia magistrate, then stood behind the police chief when she announced them. “Chief Greene deserves nothing less than the highest praise and she should be given the resources to continue to rebuild this Police Department,” he reportedly wrote in his earlier email. “If Senator Lucas wants to place blame on anyone for this incident, she should start by looking in the mirror."

Lucas isn’t the only Black woman McGee has apparently had it out for. Before Tonya Chapman, the city's first Black woman to serve as police chief, was forced to resign last April after expressing her dedication to fighting systemic racism within the police department, McGee asked the local Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) to take a vote of no confidence in her. She allegedly wouldn't promote him, HuffPost reported.

Chapman told The Virginian-Pilot the organization ultimately couldn’t go through with the vote because it couldn’t "articulate valid reasons." She also noted that the only other time the local Fraternal Order of Police pursued a no-confidence vote was against a Black male chief. She told HuffPost the FOP “did not want to take direction from me because I’m not a white male.”

Even though Black Portsmouth residents account for nearly 55% of the population, the Portsmouth Police Department has long faced allegations of racism. The white president of the FOP was even accused of calling a Black cop a "trunk monkey" in 2018, according to The Virginian-Pilot.  

“The majority of those officers don’t live in Portsmouth,” Don Scott, who is representing Lucas, told HuffPost. ”The chief doesn’t even live in Portsmouth, which is amazing. So nobody is invested in the well-being of our community, they come here for a check. We’re being controlled by a hostile force.”

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If you're a white guy, and you've ever been in a job interview in which you were told "I can't hire you because you're not Black or a woman," I have important news for you: That wasn't why you didn't get hired. When a white man is up for a position and someone trots out the sad, "Oh, but I've got quotas" excuse, it is not a real thing. It is never a real thing. Never. Like … never ever. The real reason you didn’t get hired may be because your resume was light, or the interviewer is holding the position for a pal, or the interviewer just did not like the ketchup stain on your tie. It is not about hiring a woman or person of color. 

Read 9 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Maybe Joni Ernst got some backlash from Team Trump for "running on local issues" and trying to avoid the Trump racist conspiracy theory trap. To prove her bizarro bona fides, she decided to go QAnon and accuse Iowa's medical community of falsifying COVID-19 data for the money.

Ernst told a gathering of about 100 supporters that she's “so skeptical” of the official death count from coronavirus. “They’re thinking there may be 10,000 or less deaths that were actually singularly COVID-19,” Ernst said. “I’m just really curious. It would be interesting to know that.” Uh-huh. "They're" thinking. They being the whack-job QAnon proponents who've found a side-line from Democratic pedophiliac pizza parlors in COVID-19 trutherism. She went even beyond that, though, to skate up to the line of accusing Iowa's medical community of fraud. “These health care providers and others are reimbursed at a higher rate if COVID is tied to it, so what do you think they’re doing?” she questioned the crowd. That'll sure boost her standing with Iowa's front-line medical community, which is right now dealing with the nation's second-highest rate of virus spread.

There is no place for this in the Senate. Donate now to help get Ernst out.

Ernst walked it back a tiny bit in follow up with a reporter, saying she had “heard the same thing on the news,” but wasn’t wasn't sure it was true. But she had no problem speculating about it with her supporters, who will tell all their friends their senator says doctors can't be trusted and that really, coronavirus is not running rampant through Iowa's population. That's ever so helpful.

This happened Monday, the day after a tweet pushing the same conspiracy theory elevated with a Trump retweet was removed by Twitter. It repeated the QAnon theory that the CDC had "quietly" admitted that "only 6%" of people listed as coronavirus deaths "actually died from COVID," because "the other 94% had 2-3 other serious illnesses." Which is of course not what the CDC said. The fact that otherwise entirely healthy people, with no underlying conditions, are dying from the virus should be the takeaway from that CDC report.

So all the Republican hand-wringing about QAnon being on the ballot and about to invade the House? Too late. It's already in the Senate.