James.galbraith

In an interview with FOX News host Laura Ingraham, Donald Trump lied that he won the popular vote in 2016. He did not.

In fact: “More Americans voted for Hillary Clinton than any other losing presidential candidate in US history. The Democrat outpaced President-elect Donald Trump by almost 2.9 million votes, with 65,844,954 (48.2%) to his 62,979,879 (46.1%), according to revised and certified final election results from all 50 states and the District of Columbia.”

Some more choice moments:

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Bravo’s Andy Cohen shared some shirtless shots of his BFF Anderson Cooper on Tuesday, writing “If it were a normal year, I’d be on vacation with my pal…threatening to post shirtless pics of him. Well, it’s 2020 and I’m sitting on my deck so I figured I’d just post without asking and piss him off! #SilverFox.”

The internet didn’t complain.

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If it were a normal year, I’d be on vacation with my pal…threatening to post shirtless pics of him. Well, it’s 2020 and I’m sitting on my deck so I figured I’d just post without asking and piss him off! #SilverFox

A post shared by Andy Cohen (@bravoandy) on Sep 1, 2020 at 1:40pm PDT

Cohen later posted an Instagram story in which he said that the host of AC360 was not happy: “Anderson is so pissed at me, you guys. But listen, I’m just sitting here, bored under a blanket. I’m just sitting here under a blanket. There’s no one over there. All that’s here is Ben’s little drum set. Ben is sleeping, and I’m bored. So, what else am I supposed to do? Maybe I’ll do an Instagram Live later, I don’t know. I got Ben and Housewives cuts to watch. That’s what’s happening here… And maybe I’ll post more shirtless pictures of Anderson.”

The post Andy Cohen Shared Shirtless Anderson Cooper Photos ‘to Piss Him Off’ … and It Worked appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Melania Trump’s former aide Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who was in charge of organizing Trump’s inauguration, told Rachel Maddow on Tuesday night that she has tapes of the First Lady which she started making when she felt she was being thrown under the bus. In Winston Wolkoff’s new book, she says millions of dollars from Trump’s inauguration are still unaccounted for and “makes new allegations about how the Trump family tried to use the money to line its own pockets,” NBC News reports.

Wolkoff, as we reported earlier, also confirms the icy relationship between the First Lady and Ivanka Trump.

Said Winston Wolkoff to Maddow: “I’ve been accused of taping my friend, as the White House said, and how horrible of a human being I am for doing that. And they’re right. If she was my friend, it would be horrible. But Melania and the White House had accused me of criminal activity and publicly shamed and fired me and made me their scapegoat. At that moment in time, that’s when I pressed record. She was no longer my friend and she was willing to let them take me down.”

Winston Wolkoff also detailed conversations she had with Melania about caged kids at the U.S./Mexican border. Winston Wolkoff said a report is coming out that validates the existence of the tapes.

“The more they continue to lie about what they’ve said, done, and do, the more I will continue to prove their claims false. The last thing they should be doing is coming after me. …. I’m not going to let them take away my integrity anymore.”

Wolkoff said she has shared the tapes with three investigations, including the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and the District of Columbia.

The post Melania Trump’s Former Aide Stephanie Winston Wolkoff Reveals She Has Tapes of the First Lady: ‘She Was Willing to Let Them Take Me Down’ — WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

The Department of Homeland Security withheld an intelligence bulletin, titled “Russia Likely to Denigrate Health of US Candidates to Influence 2020 Election,” which warned of a Russian scheme to interfere in the 2020 election by promoting “allegations about the poor mental health” of Joe Biden.

According to ABC News, the bulletin was supposed to go out to federal, state and local law enforcement partners on July 9, but was held up and never circulated after being submitted for review two days earlier: “According to the draft bulletin, analysts determined with ‘high confidence’ that ‘Russian malign influence actors are likely to continue denigrating presidential candidates through allegations of poor mental or physical health to influence the outcome of the 2020 election.'”

ABC News reports: “Just one hour after its submission, however, a senior DHS official intervened. ‘Please hold on sending this one out until you have a chance to speak to [acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf],’ wrote DHS Chief of Staff John Gountanis, according to an email obtained by ABC News.”

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“His audience is tens of millions of people. Only a tiny percentage need to act to severely disrupt this country’s politics.”

Back in July, I was emailing with Erica Chenoweth — a professor at Harvard and an expert on protest and political violence around the world — about her take on Trump’s response to the protests for racial justice. One thing she warned about was the emergence of “pro-state/far-right militias who engage in vigilante violence and terrorism, sometimes with coordination or collusion with the state.”

This has happened in other times and places — think the Ku Klux Klan’s activities during Reconstruction, or neofascist militias in Italy in the mid-late 20th century. According to Chenoweth, such alliances between political parties and far-right militants sometimes work through escalation. Street fighting tends to increase “the desire for a law-and-order candidate” among certain segments population — and right-wing political factions reap the benefit.

In the wake of the shooting deaths of two people in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and murder charges against a Trump-supporting, self-described militia member, Chenoweth’s warning is chilling — all the more so because of the president’s reaction.

Trump has repeatedly refused to condemn the 17-year-old militia member’s behavior, giving a partial and one-sided rendering of the violence that cast it as justifiable self-defense in a Monday night press conference. “He fell, and then they very violently attacked him,” the president said. “He probably would have been killed.”

Over the weekend, a convoy of Trump supporters in Portland opened fire on counter-protesters with paintball guns and pepper spray. On Saturday, the president tweeted a video of their behavior with a caption that all-but-openly cheered them on. At the Monday press conference, the president on his defense of this violence — noting that a pro-Trump demonstrator was killed in Portland and framing paintballs, by contrast, as a form of peaceful protest.

“Paint is a defensive mechanism; paint is not bullets,” he said. “These people, they protested peacefully.”

And Tuesday, Trump is visiting Kenosha in person. We know Trump well enough to know that the odds that he keeps to a responsible message border on nil. It seems that stoking conflict and raising the salience of street violence has become a core part of his reelection strategy. According to experts, the risks of violence with Trump’s rhetoric, as he tightens the connection between far-right street thugs and the official Republican Party, could get worse in the coming weeks.

“His audience is tens of millions of people. Only a tiny percentage need to act to severely disrupt this country’s politics,” says J.M. Berger, an expert on violent extremism at the VOX-Pol research network (no relation to Vox.com).

“We don’t seem to have any institutional actors who are willing or able to put the brakes on his rhetoric, so it’s hard to imagine that this won’t get much, much worse by Election Day.”

Donald Trump has a very long history of inciting violence. “If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously, OK? Just knock the hell ... I promise you I will pay for the legal fees,” he told his supporters at a 2016 rally.

But we’re going through an especially tense period in American politics, with a high-stakes election in two months and bouts of street violence in several cities. In such an atmosphere, Trump’s habit of engaging in violent rhetoric goes well beyond playing with fire.

Why we should take the risk of Trump’s rhetoric seriously

Judging by his tweets and the programming during the last week’s Republican National Convention, the president appears to genuinely believe that the chaos unfolding on American streets is good for him politically. The more violence there is, the more he can fearmonger about “Democrat-run cities” and “Joe Biden’s America” — distracting from America’s botched response to the Covid-19 virus.

“He believes this is his way out, given that economic recovery is slow and Covid-19 is never-ending,” says Cas Mudde, a professor at the University of Georgia who studies far-right politics. “Go to the old hit: racially infused authoritarianism.”

Remarkably, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway more or less admitted that this is the logic at work. “The more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order,” she said during a Fox News appearance last week.

The rhetoric from leaders seems to really matter. An experiment conducted last September by two political scientists, Lilliana Mason and Nathan Kalmoe, asked Democratic and Republican partisans about their views on political violence. Some were shown quotes from a party leader (Trump or Biden) condemning such violence before being asked the questions; others were not.

The results were striking. When party leaders condemn violence against their opponents, partisans become more likely to oppose it as well. Absent that, strong partisans were considerably more likely than average Americans to condone it. And this finding likely understates the risk of non-condemnation.

“Our survey was among ‘regular’ Americans — I doubt we had any militia members in that sample,” Mason told me.

Win McNamee/Getty Images

Biden seems to understand the risks here. In his speech on Monday, he forcefully condemned the violence that has erupted amid largely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests in places like Kenosha. “Rioting is not protesting. Looting is not protesting. Setting fires is not protesting. It’s lawlessness — plain and simple,” he said.

But there’s an asymmetry here. Early data on arrests during this summer’s protests suggests that the looters and vandals aren’t political activists, as the right suggests, but tend to be people with criminal records exploiting the situation. Even those avowedly left-wing groups that do engage in street violence, like antifa, are not supporters of the Democratic Party — in fact, they tend to be anarchists and far-leftists who disdain the liberal establishment.

By contrast, many of the far-right militant groups taking to the streets, including the one that the militia member charged with murder belonged to, tend to either support Trump openly or share some of his ideas. They don’t exactly act on Trump’s orders: the president isn’t that overt, and these groups don’t report to him in such a direct way.

Instead, you have loose coalitions of right-leaning armed groups — like the Oathkeepers — who take Trump’s decision to play footsie with violence as a permission structure to keep doing what they’re doing, or even to escalate. Berger, the extremism scholar, calls this “generalized incitement” — and worries that it has significant potential to make things worse.

“It’s not necessarily a situation where he has a very cohesive cadre of followers who will be violent in a strategic way, but his words land in a variety of communities that are primed for violence,” Berger says. “Some who act may not necessarily be supporters of Trump per se, but may be more inclined to act in an atmosphere of chaos. Some of them will be supporters, though, and that could be very problematic depending on the numbers.”

I’ve heard this kind of concern from experts before, when I’ve done investigations into violent internet subcultures like incels and neo-Nazi accelerationists. In these communities, message boards and chatrooms lionize mass killers — often walking right up to the line of actually calling for people to imitate them without crossing the line into outright criminal incitement to violence.

Most of these people are just keyboard warriors, aimlessly venting their bigotry online. But the concern among experts is that one isolated person will take what they read on these websites too seriously, to see a post about how “someone should do something” about feminists or Jews and decide that they are going to be that someone.

“It’s great that a lot of these guys aren’t violent,” Stephanie Carvin, a political scientist who studies terrorism at Canada’s Carleton University, told me during a conversation about incels. “But if they’re glorifying someone who was violent ... a very small percentage of these individuals may feel more justified in acting.”

The audiences for these sites are necessarily limited. But President Trump has the world’s biggest bullhorn: his not-so-subtle support for political violence goes out to hundreds of millions rather than thousands. Even if a much smaller percentage of Trump’s audience has any inclination to turn to violence, the huge numbers at work here make the risk unacceptably high.

Put differently: The president is acting less like a political leader than like a shitposter-in-chief. And the consequences could go beyond what any of us are comfortable anticipating.

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The president not only refuses to condemn right-wing violence — he actively defends it.

On Monday afternoon, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden addressed unrest in cities like Kenosha, Wisconsin, and Portland, Oregon, saying that President Donald Trump “long ago forfeited any moral leadership in this country.”

“He can’t stop the violence, because for years he’s fomented it,” Biden added during his speech in Pittsburgh. “You know, he may believe mouthing the words ‘law and order’ makes him strong, but his failure to call on his own supporters to stop acting as an armed militia in this country shows how weak he is.”

Within hours, Trump proved Biden right, delivering a press conference in which he stoked unfounded fears about “left-wing political violence” while refusing to condemn right-wing vigilantes — including a 17-year-old supporter of his who has been charged with first-degree murder in the shooting deaths of two protesters in Kenosha.

The contrast between the two events threw the stakes of the 2020 election into stark relief. On one hand is a challenger who has accurately pointed out that the interlocking crises currently afflicting America have only been exacerbated by the president. On the other is an incumbent president who believes that further inflaming tensions and divisions is his path to victory.

Trump just keeps pouring fuel on the fire

Trump’s news conference and a subsequent interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham in which he pushed nonsensical conspiracy theories about Biden secretly being behind left-wing civil unrest came a day before his planned trip on Tuesday to Kenosha — one he’s making against the wishes of local and state officials, and for the stated purpose of showing support for law enforcement following the shooting of yet another unarmed Black man and then a string of protesters.

Kenosha was rocked with protests following the police shooting of a Black man named Jacob Blake. While video of the incident indicates the force used against Blake was disproportionate, Trump and other White House officials have repeatedly refused to say so.

Amid the protests that erupted in Kenosha following the Blake shooting, the 17-year-old alleged shooter traveled to Wisconsin from Illinois and ultimately shot three protesters last Tuesday, killing two. Videos from the scene appear to show him at one point saying, “I just killed somebody,” and he has been charged with murder and attempted murder.

You might think that condemning this type of vigilante-style violence would be an easy thing for a president to do — but not for Trump. Asked about the case during Monday’s news conference, Trump defended the shooter.

“That was an interesting situation. You saw the same tape that I saw, and he was trying to get away [from protesters], I guess, it looks like, and he fell, and then they very violently attacked him,” Trump said. “I guess he was in very big trouble. He probably would’ve been killed.”

The Kenosha incident wasn’t the only high-profile case of right-wing violence last week. On Friday, a caravan of Trump supporters descended on downtown Portland, Oregon, where they clashed with protesters. Videos from the scene showed Trump supporters shooting people with paintball guns, macing people, and even driving through crowds in a manner that could have killed people.

While all this chaos was unfolding, a Trump supporter reportedly named Aaron Danielson was shot and killed in downtown Portland. Portland police say they have no suspect, but that hasn’t stopped Trump for leaping to conclusions that the shooting had a political motive.

During his news conference on Monday, Trump made an evidence-free accusation that left-wing protesters have “killed a lot of people,” and announced that the departments of Homeland Security and Justice are forming a joint operations center to “investigate violent left-wing civil unrest.” He refused to condemn supporters of his who were filmed shooting paintball guns and macing people, saying “that was a peaceful protest” and “paint is not bullets.”

Later Tuesday night, Trump’s interview with Ingraham began with him claiming that “Portland has been burning for many years, for decades it’s been burning” — a lie that’s obvious to anyone who has spent time in Portland.

Trump won’t even condemn murder if it means distancing himself from his supporters

Not only does Trump habitually refuse to acknowledge that police violence and right-wing violence are problems in the US, but he goes out of his way to justify it.

Asked by Ingraham if he wants his supporters to confront protesters, Trump said, “I want to leave it to law enforcement, but my supporters are wonderful, hardworking, tremendous people, and they turn on their televisions and they look at a Portland or a Kenosha ... they can’t believe it.”

The contrast with Biden’s speech is once again instructive. Instead of trying to condone rioters and looters who have damaged property in Kenosha and Portland — groups of people Republicans have linked to Democrats — Biden unequivocally denounced them, saying, “Rioting is not protesting. Looting is not protesting ... it’s lawlessness, plain and simple.”

Help keep Vox free for all

Millions turn to Vox each month to understand what’s happening in the news, from the coronavirus crisis to a racial reckoning to what is, quite possibly, the most consequential presidential election of our lifetimes. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work, and helping everyone make sense of an increasingly chaotic world. Contribute today from as little as $3.

Enlarge / A security guard walks on the grounds of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, US, on Saturday, March 14, 2020. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is promoting policies that will prolong the COVID-19 pandemic and, as such, states and local leaders should disregard the agency and strike out on their own. That’s according to Harold Varmus, the Nobel-prize-winning scientist and former director of the National Institutes of Health, and Rajiv Shah, the former administrator of the United States Agency for International Development and current president of the Rockefeller Foundation.

The two laid out their argument against the CDC in a searing opinion piece in The New York Times Monday, titled: “It Has Come to This: Ignore the CDC.”

Varmus and Shah’s dramatic disavowal of the country’s leading public health agency was spurred by its abrupt changes last week to COVID-19 testing guidance, which now discourages testing of people who have been exposed to the pandemic coronavirus but do not have symptoms.

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The region’s monopoly utilities are holding it back.

Public understanding of clean energy has not kept up with reality. The popular perception is still that clean energy is virtuous but expensive and unreliable, that it needs special favors to compete in the marketplace.

In fact, in a growing number of places, the inverse is true. Clean energy has become cheaper than the dirty stuff, but it has trouble competing because markets are rigged on behalf of fossil fuels. More open, competitive markets would benefit clean energy.

For a convincing illustration, look no further than the states in the American South (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee).

While clean electricity has begun transforming markets in almost every area of the US, it has largely bypassed the South, which has the lowest installed solar and wind capacity of any US region, despite fairly abundant renewable energy resources.

That’s not because fossil fuel electricity is winning in the market. It’s because there are no markets. The entire system is run by monopoly utilities with little incentive to innovate.

The research firm Energy Innovation recently took a close look at what would happen if the South’s electricity system was opened up to greater market competition — if the cheapest options could be selected and shared across the region.

The effect would be dramatic: By 2040, vastly more renewable energy and batteries would be deployed, average retail electricity prices would be down by 23 percent, cumulative savings for the region’s ratepayers would reach approximately $384 billion, greenhouse gas emissions would fall by 37 percent from 2018 levels, air pollution would plunge effectively to zero, and 385,000 additional jobs would be created. It’s a win-win-win-win-win-win situation.

And keep in mind: this is only through market competition, without assuming any additional policies to support clean energy. Given the current cost environment, competitive energy markets, left to their own devices, rapidly decarbonize.

We’ll look at the details in a moment. First, a little background.

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The South’s electricity system is run by energy monopolies

In the beginning, there were monopoly utilities. Around the turn of the 20th century, they were established with the goal of electrifying America. The deal, their “social contract,” was as follows: In a given region, a single entity would be given monopoly control over electricity, from generation to delivery (it would be “fully integrated”). It would not make money from the sale of electricity — it would not be fair for a monopoly to set its own prices. Rather, it would sell electricity at cost. Its profits, its incentives, would come from the building of electricity infrastructure, the power plants and power lines needed to extend electricity to everyone in the country. Utilities receive a guaranteed rate of return (around 8 percent) on those investments.

In exchange for these guaranteed profits, utilities agreed to provide universal access to reliable, low-cost power and to answer to state regulators, who would set their power rates and determine their returns. These regulators are known as public utility commissions, or PUCs.

This worked well for a while, but toward the end of the 20th century, it became clear that it isn’t efficient for each utility to build its own power plants and maintain its own reliability reserves. It led to massive overbuilding and unnecessarily high prices. So in the 1980s and ’90s, a wave of “restructuring” washed over the industry.

In restructured markets, energy generation (building and operating power plants) was separated from power delivery through local distribution grids. Generation companies (gencos) built and operated power plants and sold their power in competitive, cross-utility regional markets; distribution companies (discos) bought power from those markets and delivered it to customers. Regional markets and long-distance, inter-state energy transmission are overseen by Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs) or Independent Service Operators (ISOs). (They are, for all intents and purposes, the same thing.)

ISOs and RTOs now serve about 70 percent of power customers across the nation. And though energy wholesale markets have been, and are, the subject of much dispute, it is generally agreed that competition has served ratepayers well.

But not in the South. The South remains entirely dominated by old-school, unrestructured, fully integrated utility monopolies like Florida Power & Light and Duke Energy. Each utility operates its own fiefdom, builds its own power plants and transmission, maintains its own reserve margins, and enjoys a cozy relationship with its PUCs.

This setup has several consequences. First, because these utilities make their profits based on how much they invest in power plants and power lines, they want to build (and maintain) power plants and power lines. They have no incentive to share across territories, or to economize.

Second, each fiefdom must maintain its own reserve margins, so there is a built-in excuse for overbuilding. Third, there is no competitive power procurement or deployment process. Utility executives decide what to build and then convince regulators, so there is little restraint on overspending.

Finally, once a fully integrated utility builds a power plant, it has every incentive to keep that plant running — even if it’s losing money, even if there are cheaper alternatives — because it gets paid a guaranteed rate of return on the investment.

All of this adds up to a lousy way to run a railroad: utilities with every incentive to overspend, overbuild, overcharge consumers, and fight off competitors.

How much better could they do with a little competition? That is what Energy Innovation — with the help of the energy modelers at Vibrant Clean Energy — set out to determine. Their results are here, including a modeling report, a policy report, and a data visualization dashboard.

The short answer is that the South could lower emissions, improve public health, and reduce the cost of power by establishing a competitive region-wide energy market.

George Rose/Getty Images

Competition would reduce power costs in the South

There are different levels of reform the South’s regulators and utilities could undertake.

The milder reform, called an energy imbalance market (EIM), is currently being discussed by Duke, Southern Company, and a few other southern utilities.

In the West — the only other region of the country not covered by RTOs and ISOs — they have what’s called the Western Energy Imbalance Market, which allows some trading of energy among utilities on an hour-by-hour basis. Southern utilities are discussing a similar “centralized, region-wide, automated intra-hour energy exchange” called the Southeast Energy Exchange Market (SEEM).

The Energy Innovation report warns that SEEM “is likely even less transformative than the more incremental [Western] EIM, as SEEM details to date do not indicate EIM benefits such as an independent operator, transparent pricing, or transmission access rules.” They call the approach “an unambitious and incremental approach to increasing competition.” It would help — more on that in a moment — but it falls far short of what a full regional market could do.

And then there’s the more ambitious option, a competitive regional energy market administered by an RTO, with enough transmission to share energy and reserves across territories.

Vibrant Clean Energy modeled the RTO scenario using “the first commercial co-optimization model of energy grids that was built from the ground up to incorporate vast volumes of data, starting with high-resolution weather and demand data.” The model automatically seeks the lowest-cost resources that will maintain reliability.

Vibrant compared a business-as-usual scenario, based on the Integrated Resource Plans (IRPs) of the utilities themselves (assuming no additional policy), to a scenario with full market competition.

The results are dramatic, most notably in that market competition would wipe coal out in short order, along with most natural gas.

In 2019, Energy Innovation and Vibrant partnered to compare the cost of running the nation’s existing coal plants to the cost of building new, local wind and solar power plants. The report found that about two-thirds of US coal plants are more expensive to run than new renewables are to build and run. But for the Southeast, the results were even more striking: 92 percent of the region’s existing coal plants are more expensive to run than new renewables are to build and operate.

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In the IRP scenario, the South’s uneconomic power plants mostly stay in place and more gas plants are added. When the region’s power system is opened up to competition, it prompts a wave of fossil fuel plant retirements and new renewable energy capacity.

“In the IRP Scenario, there is almost no wind generation and solar PV provides just 4 percent of annual generation,” the report finds. “In contrast, wind and solar provide 22 percent of generation in the RTO Scenario; when aggregated with nuclear (20 percent), geothermal/bioenergy (5 percent) and hydropower (4 percent), 51 percent of the Southeast fleet is zero-carbon by 2040 in the RTO Scenario.”

Overall, the RTO scenario produces 131 gigawatts of new renewables and storage (52 GW of solar, 42 GW of wind, 37 GW of storage), compared to 21 GW under the IRP scenario. It would also retire all coal plants and most natural gas peaker plants by 2040.

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The substitution of cheaper renewables for uneconomic coal and natural gas plants would bring a whole range of benefits.

First, it would immediately start saving ratepayers money. In 2025, the first year the RTO is fully set up and running, it would already be $13 billion cheaper to operate. And by 2040, the cumulative savings add up to $384 billion, with rates eventually falling 29 percent lower than in the IRP scenario.

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These savings are accomplished through “improvements on the inefficiencies of a balkanized, uncompetitive approach to transmission planning, resource adequacy, integration of distributed energy resources, and dispatch throughout the region,” the report says. It is simply cheaper and more efficient for utilities to cooperate.

(Worth noting: Around $38 billion of these savings, or 10 percent, come from optimizing distributed resources — rooftop solar panels, batteries, etc. — to which southern utilities have traditionally been quite hostile.)

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Recall that each utility has to maintain its own reserve margin — spare generation capacity that can be brought online in case of unexpected surges in demand or the loss of a power plant. If all the reserves of all the utilities across the South are added up, the “combined planning reserve margin (PRM) of the region reaches 48 percent in 2040,” the report says. That means there will be enough power capacity to meet a simultaneous demand peak across the entire region — plus 48 percent.

It’s ludicrous. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which develops and enforces reliability standards for the North American grid, sets a reference PRM target of 15 percent. Cumulatively, the South is heading for a situation in which it has more than three times the reserve power capacity it needs. Monopoly utilities are profiting off all those pointless extra power plants, but they are costing ratepayers money.

The RTO scenario would bring the region-wide PRM down to a more reasonable 16 percent.

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Market competition would also reduce pollution and create jobs

Because market competition would draw in a flood of zero-carbon renewables, the RTO scenario would also accelerate carbon reductions. Specifically, it would reduce greenhouse gas emissions 46 percent relative to the IRP scenario (in which emissions actually rise). By 2040, emissions would be 37 percent lower than 2018 levels.

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In addition, emission of common air pollutants like soot and sulfur dioxide would fall to near zero by 2040. As recent research has shown, air pollution is doing much more damage to human welfare than has been appreciated. When the public health and economic benefits of reduced air pollution are added to the financial savings, the case for a rapid clean energy transition becomes unassailable.

Finally, competitive energy markets would also bring many more jobs to the South. “Overall, by 2040, the RTO Scenario leads to an additional 408,000 jobs in the sector,” the report finds, “compared to just 122,000 new jobs in the IRP Scenario.” That’s a net advantage of 285,000 jobs for clean energy.

Most of these jobs would come in building out wind, solar, and batteries. Jobs maintaining old, unnecessary fossil fuel power plants would be lost, but nowhere near as many as would be created.

The report doesn’t consider manufacturing jobs that might be attracted to the region, or the economy-wide stimulus that might be provided by cheaper electricity, so these job estimates are almost certainly conservative.

Even competitive procurement within utilities would save Southerners money

Vibrant also ran a couple of side scenarios that are worth highlighting.

One models the RTO scenario, but with all the region’s nuclear power plants kept open rather than retired. It results in total system costs just a smidge (0.5 percent) higher than the straight RTO scenario, but because it avoids lots of natural gas capacity, it has substantial air quality benefits.

In the other scenario, called “economic IRP,” there’s no regional market or RTO or trading among utilities; each utility territory remains a self-contained island. However, power procurement and dispatch are done based on a cost-optimization model rather than the utilities’ IRPs.

Remarkably, by 2040, this change alone produces about three-quarters of the cumulative savings ($298 billion) produced by the RTO scenario.

“Simply optimizing for cost generates orders of magnitude greater deployment of wind, solar, and batteries, plus rapid coal phase out,” says Energy Innovation’s Mike O’Boyle. “Utilities and their planning regimes, rather than economics, seem to be the main barrier to regional renewables deployment.”

Fully integrated monopoly utilities are not truly set up to provide consumers with least-cost power, despite their social contract. They are slow to change, much too slow to keep up with the precipitous decline in renewables costs. They make money by keeping fossil fuel plants open; consumers save money when fossil fuel plants close. “Nothing in monopoly regulation encourages the adoption of new technology or risk taking,” O’Boyle says.

Southern utilities should establish an EIM if that’s the best they can do — it’s better than nothing. But Southerners should push for more. They should strive to break the grip of hidebound monopoly utilities and create a fully regionalized market that reduces power prices, air pollution, and greenhouse gases.

And advocates should carry the message to the public: Clean energy is cheaper than the dirty stuff, and the freer and more competitive markets become, the more clean energy they will produce. Every American, including those in the South, deserves to share in the benefits.

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The GOP’s long-standing advantage in judicial politics is eroding fast.

There’s a widespread perception — shared by both Democrats and Republicans — that GOP voters are far more motivated by a desire to control the judiciary than Democrats. It’s the reason why Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell claimed, somewhat hyperbolically, in a 2019 address to the Federalist Society that “the single biggest issue that brought nine out of 10 Republican voters home to Donald Trump ... was the Supreme Court.”

It’s also the reason President Trump bragged, falsely, that he’s appointed “more than 300 federal judges” in his speech at the Republican National Convention (in reality, the number is closer to 200), while Democrats barely mentioned the courts at all at their convention the previous week.

But a recent poll by the Pew Research Center suggests that this perception that judicial politics favor Republicans is outdated. Pew asked Democratic and Republican voters which issues are “very important” to their vote in the 2020 presidential election. In their poll, 66 percent of Democrats and only 61 percent of Republicans named “Supreme Court appointments.”

Pew Research Center

By comparison, a similar poll from Pew taken in the summer before the 2016 election found that Trump supporters were 8 points more likely to view Supreme Court appointments as “very important,” as compared to Clinton voters.

Democrats’ new interest in the judiciary feels a lot like latching the barn after the horse has escaped. In 2016, Justice Antonin Scalia’s death gave Democrats their first opportunity to build a Supreme Court with a liberal majority since President Richard Nixon appointed four justices and began that Court’s decades-long march to the right.

But Senate Republicans, led by McConnell, held Scalia’s vacant seat open for more than a year until Trump could fill it with Justice Neil Gorsuch in 2017. Then, in 2018, the relatively moderate conservative Justice Anthony Kennedy retired, and he was replaced by a hard-line conservative, Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

There are many reasons why Democrats missed their chance to reshape the Court in 2016. The biggest one is Senate malapportionment. In 2016, when Republicans blocked Obama Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland, Democratic senators represented about 20 million more people than their Republican counterparts. Republicans owed their majority to the fact that small red states like Wyoming receive exactly as many senators as large blue states like California — even though California has 68 times as many people as Wyoming.

But Democrats do bear some responsibility for the GOP’s dominance of the Supreme Court. In the 2014 midterms, turnout was just 36.3 percent — the lowest level of voter turnout in 72 years. Republicans picked up nine Senate seats in that election, and with them, the power to keep Garland off the Supreme Court.

As my colleague Ezra Klein wrote shortly after Kennedy’s retirement, “I remember covering the 2014 election, and the narrative was that it just didn’t matter. Barack Obama had won reelection in 2012 and gotten filibustered on virtually everything he tried.” But the 2014 election mattered a great deal: “Turns out the Supreme Court was the point.”

If Democrats had turned out at higher rates in 2014, Garland could be the swing vote on the Supreme Court right now, and a wide range of Trump policies — from the travel ban to the asylum ban — would likely be off the table. Even more importantly, we would not have a Supreme Court that is often actively hostile to the right to vote.

But the new Pew poll suggests that Democrats are beginning to wake up to the fact that a Republican judiciary is an existential threat to much of the Democratic Party’s agenda, and, as a result, they are beginning to prioritize it.

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Despite consistent recommendations from healthcare officials in the U.S. for individuals to wear masks and avoid large gatherings in an effort to decrease the spread of the novel coronavirus, some Americans continue to do otherwise. Republicans nationwide are encouraging this behavior by allowing and attending events that lack both social distancing efforts and masks, even when state mask mandates are in place.

In Colorado, despite a state mandate requiring face coverings to be worn by individuals over 10 years of age, both Sen. Cory Gardner and Congressman Ken Buck were spotted spending their weekend not wearing masks. Not only were the two Republican officials themselves maskless, but the event they attended included other maskless individuals all gathered to advocate for their second amendment rights.

Images of the event, taken by local media, were shared on social media by former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper’s deputy communications director, Alyssa Roberts. The Saturday event took place at a shooting range and was called the BBQ and Guns Rally, during which attendees were given the opportunity to go shooting. According to NBC News, in addition to Buck and Gardner, Republican congressional candidate and QAnon supporter Lauren Boebert was in attendance. Buck told NBC News that they picked a shooting range as the location to support individuals in not only advocating for their second amendment rights, but because nothing smells better than gunpowder and barbecue.

Policies regarding the second amendment have been controversial in Colorado for years. While some legislators have attempted to mandate extensive background checks and ban high capacity magazines, dozens of Colorado counties have designated themselves as “Second Amendment sanctuaries,” CPR News reported. Despite the number of shootings, the state has seen some Republican officials refuse to budge and create gun control bills using the excuse that they would violate the Constitution. “I hope that I have time to shoot. We are pretty jam-packed in our schedule,” Boebert told NBC News on Saturday. “We are going to see what we can squeeze in, and hopefully I can fire off a few rounds.”

A lack of masks and social distancing weren’t the only noticeable things at the rally. During a speech addressed to attendees, Buck wore a shirt that said “Kill em all.” Pretty interesting choice of attire to wear to a rally for open carry amid ongoing nationwide protests against police brutality and racial injustice.

But the controversy doesn’t end there. Local news outlets have been quick to notice that while some Colorado Republicans present themselves as mask-wearers on public platforms, they lack masks at conservative events. According to the Colorado Times Recorder, in multiple incidents, Gardner’s social media has depicted him wearing a mask. However, photos taken by his Republican supporters on his campaign trail often depict him maskless.

Up against Democrat Hickenlooper in the race for Congress, it seems Gardner is trying to appeal to both mask-wearing voters and those who are against masks. The outlet found that all official photos on Gardner’s social media since Colorado’s statewide order show him wearing a mask in all settings, but photos taken during the same time period by individuals outside of his campaign staff show otherwise. According to a Policy Polling survey publicized by Giffords Courage, a gun safety group, Hickenlooper is ahead of Gardner 51-42 in the polls, Daily Kos reported.

An appeals court panel agreed Tuesday to delay Manhattan prosecutors’ effort to obtain President Donald Trump’s financial records, a decision that could likely punt resolution of the issue into early October — and possibly past the Nov. 3 election.

Following a morning oral argument session held by telephone, a three-judge panel issued an order granting Trump lawyers' request to block Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance from accessing the disputed documents until the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals resolves the issue.

The court's one-page order offered no rationale for the stay, but set a schedule for legal filings in the appeal over the next few weeks, followed by arguments September 25.

During the court session, Trump’s personal attorney William Consovoy urged the judges to prevent Vance from immediately accessing the documents, which Vance has said he urgently needs to pursue potential criminal activity involving the Trump Organization.

One of the three judges, John Walker Jr., sounded particularly receptive to arguments from Trump’s lawyers that grand jury subpoenas Vance’s office issued are too broad.

“It has the feeling of overbreadth,” said Walker, an appointee — and first cousin — of the late President George H.W. Bush.

Although the Supreme Court issued a ruling in July unanimously rejecting Trump’s claims of absolute immunity from such criminal investigations while in office, Walker stressed that the opinion still endorsed “heightened respect that’s due the president” and called for “necessarily meticulous review.”

Walker also questioned Vance’s need to pursue information from abroad, although Manhattan-based prosecutors have long prized their ability to use New York’s role as a financial nerve center to assert jurisdiction over transactions that span the globe.

“It just seems to me that it's really very broad. … You’re asking [about] activity in Europe and Dubai and so forth. You’re a prosecutor in New York — in New York County, specifically,” Walker said.

Vance’s general counsel, Carey Dunne, said it is commonplace for the DA’s office to probe alleged wrongdoing in business dealings worldwide.

“There’s nothing unusual about our office asking about entities out of state or foreign transactions. New York City is a center of worldwide commerce,” Dunne said.”There’s a lot of international financial activity we have jurisdiction over.”

The other two judges on the panel — Clinton appointee Robert Katzmann and Obama appointee Raymond Lohier — gave fewer hints about their views of the substance of the Trump legal team’s arguments.

However, there seemed to be at least some openness among the judges to giving Trump’s lawyers time to fully brief the legal issues before the appeals court on an expedited basis, which could take the better part of a month.

At the conclusion of the roughly 30-minute argument session, Katzmann promised the panel would issue a decision on the president’s stay request by the end of the day.

Walker’s views could ultimately be of little significance on anything besides the timing of the case. Although he was on the panel that decided to grant the stay, he may not be one of the three judges assigned to rule on the merits of Trump’s appeal.

If Trump ultimately fails to win relief from the 2nd Circuit, his lawyers have already indicated they plan to take the dispute to the Supreme Court for a second time. That could leave the justices facing a politically sensitive emergency request from the president with just weeks or even days to go before Election Day.

While such a delay seems like an obvious goal for the president’s lawyers, Consovoy insisted Tuesday that his side is not trying to drag out the proceedings.

“Throughout this case, we have always accepted, and not resisted, expedited review,” he said.

Vance issued a subpoena a year ago for documents held by financial institutions connected to Trump, as well as overseas affiliates. Trump’s team initially claimed the president was exempt from such demands for as long as he remains in office, but that argument struck out in the Supreme Court, which turned aside his claim of “absolute immunity.”

However, the justices ruled that Trump may fight the subpoena on other, largely more conventional grounds, which triggered another, faster-paced round of litigation.

Within days, Trump’s team renewed its argument in federal district court, arguing that the subpoena is an overbroad fishing expedition issued for political purposes. The lower court judge, Victor Marrero, said the new claims had no merit and quickly ruled in Vance’s favor, tossing out Trump’s suit. But the appeals court appears poised to slam the brakes again.

Dunne told the three-judge panel that Consovoy’s new claims about the subpoena had no factual basis and the Trump legal team has presented no evidence to support claims of bad faith, he said. And further delays, he argued, hurt the DA’s ability to pursue potential crimes.

Dunne also stressed, as the DA’s office has repeatedly signaled in court filings in recent weeks, that the office’s investigation is not limited to probing the so-called hush money payments made in 2016 to women who appeared to be considering claiming sexual liaisons with Trump.

“We have tried to spell out, consistent with grand jury secrecy, all along, and I can represent to the court now, that each of the category of documents that was sought is directly relevant to a subject matter of our inquiry and, importantly, virtually all of those subject matters have been previously identified in public reports as examples of possible corporate wrongdoing,” the DA’s office lawyer said.

Dunne said Trump hadn’t shown any impropriety on the part of Vance’s office and that “the burden doesn’t shift to the prosecutor” to justify all aspects of the subpoenas just because Trump objected.

Lohier said he was worried that giving Trump the ability to continue to pursue his complaints would lead to grand juries at all levels being “mired in civil litigation.”

However, Consovoy said challenges to state grand jury proceedings in federal court are and will remain a rarity, but that, as president, Trump has the right to take the issue before federal judges. “I do not think this is the ordinary situation,” Trump’s attorney said.

Donald Trump continues to treat the federal government as his personal toy, with a letter signed by Trump going into food boxes distributed to struggling families. Less than three months before the election, that’s a not-so-subtle use of the presidency as a campaign tool.

The letter, which apparently isn’t being included in all of the food boxes—yet, anyway—takes credit for the Farmers to Families Food Box program, saying, “As President, safeguarding the health and well-being of our citizens is one of my highest priorities.” Not a high enough priority to respond to the coronavirus before it had a major foothold in the U.S., or to make testing widely available, or to work with Congress to renew expanded unemployment, or, well, a lot of other things. But high enough to take credit for the food boxes people have sitting on their tables as they read this letter.

Forty-nine House Democrats, led by Rep. Marcia Fudge of Ohio, objected to the Trump letter, writing to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, “Using a federal relief program to distribute a self-promoting letter from the President to American families just three months before the presidential election is inappropriate and a violation of federal law.”

As we know, though, Team Trump enjoys breaking the law and laughing at people who bother to care that laws are being broken. And since the letter doesn’t refer directly to the upcoming election, it’s a borderline case as far as the law goes—even though we all know what it’s about. Some food banks say they’ll remove the letters as too political. “As a non-profit, we would have to take the letter out of the boxes if they were included because we can’t publicly support political candidates,” one New York food bank director told ProPublica.

The letter also urges people to follow Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines to prevent the spread of COVID-19 … and then goes on to misrepresent one of the guidelines, calling on people to “consider wearing a face covering when in public” rather than to “Cover your mouth and nose with a mask when around others.”

The Farmers to Families Food Box program actually isn’t something that brings big bragging rights. Some contracts went to companies without the needed licensing for food distribution, and a Trump official admitted some regions of the country were “underserved.”

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On August 20, it was announced that former White House chief strategist and CEO of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign Steve Bannon had been arrested. Bannon along with We Build the Wall frontman Brian Kolfage, possible career criminal Andrew Badolato, and real estate broker Timothy Shea, were indicted on charges that they were using the non-profit wall fundraising machine as a money laundering scheme.

One of the people not indicted, but seemingly financially connected to the We Build the Wall scam is Jason Miller. If you don’t remember Jason Miller, he was the goatee wearing sketchball that resigned two days after being named by Trump as his White House communications director. His resignation came with stories of an extramarital affair with another Trump campaign operative A.J. Delgado, and general scumbaggery. Salon reports that recently rehired Senior Trump campaign official Jason Miller seems to have been receiving about $20,000 per month to do a “podcacst” and “radio” appearances for Steve Bannon’s nonprofit Citizens of the American Republic (COAR). This is problematic because prosecutors may be looking at COAR as a part of the money laundering operation Bannon and others have been indicted for.

As Salon explains, while the nonprofit has not been named, Bannon’s COAR fits the description in the prosecution’s documents filings for “Non-Profit-1.” The money that Miller has been receiving from COAR is different than the possibly hidden money Miller has been receiving from the Trump campaign—according to FEC records obtained by Salon and publicly available court documents—which amounts to another $35,000 a month.

Miller has been distancing himself from Bannon and friends, telling Chuck Todd in an interview that “These allegations are very serious, and I hope that Steve [Bannon] has some good answers for the things that he's been accused of. It's not something that I worked on. I don't know anything about the financial dealings of this organization or how it worked. And I hope Steve has the opportunity to tell his side of the story.”

Miller’s years in the national spotlight has been marked by scandal and failing upward. After resigning from his White House position, CNN tapped him to become a political commentator for the news network. That relationship came to an end after court records—from an ongoing custody battle between Delgado and Miller—obtained by the news outlet The Splinter alleged that Miller had also had another extramarital affair. However, this other affair also came with the very disturbing allegations that Miller secretly “dosed” the woman with an abortion pill once he found out she was pregnant. 

At the same time, Miller got a job as the managing director at corporate advisory firm Teneo. After a particularly vociferous public attack against Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler, Miller left his position at Teneo, “by mutual consent.” But you don’t fall far when the corrupt are in power, and in June the Trump campaign rehired Miller as a senior adviser. Only the best people. 

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Because Donald Trump is a pouting incompetent manbaby, the United States will not be participating in a global COVID-19 vaccine development and distribution plan. That's it, that's the only reason. The Washington Post reports that the Trump administration won't be joining the 170-plus-nation drive to jointly develop, manufacture, and distribute an eventual COVID-19 vaccine because Donald Trump is still mad at the World Health Organization for not being racist enough against China, so that's that.

Instead, the Trump administration is simply presuming that this America will, for some reason, get the vaccine first, have no problems scaling up supply, and certainly won't have any particular reason to share that vaccine with anyone else—despite the U.S. lagging in its pandemic research, if anything. And if those presumptions don't work out? Oh well. Sucks to be us. It's narcissistic delusion as foreign policy, yet again, and Trump's team is more than happy to risk as many American lives as there are Americans if it makes Trump not scream at aides for a few fleeting minutes of the day.

The decision against participating in a worldwide pandemic vaccination plan is Insane. There's no downside to contributing to worldwide vaccination efforts during a pandemic, unless you are an absolute monster. It's not likely to dent drug company profits—in fact, ensuring wider distribution would seem to result in more cash to vaccine manufacturers, if anything. Conversely, distributing vaccines to poorer countries will be relatively inexpensive, and especially so when cynically weighed against the economic costs, to the United States, of letting the pandemic ravage unchecked.

So this is just another incident in which Trump's racism and delusions of persecution are erasing U.S. national interests, entirely, simply because he wants to and has fired anyone in government who might dare point out to him that he is a foam-brained jackass. Trump won't pay the price. He and his cronies will get a vaccine no matter which nation develops it, and at whatever price they ask. Everyone who is not them, however, is on their own.

Yesterday, we learned that Trump attorney general William Barr has pushed out another high-level oversight official within the Department of Justice, one who was dedicated to ensuring federal counterintelligence and national security probes remain within the bounds of the law—a strange move, on the eve of a presidential election. The position will now be filled with a political hire chosen by Barr.

Today, Barr released a memo restricting federal surveillance of political candidates and anyone on their campaigns, including "informal" advisers. Specifically, Barr ordered that all electronic surveillance related to possible foreign intelligence links to a campaign member be approved by himself, personally—and that investigators must "consider" warning the target that a foreign government may be targeting them.

It's clearly intended as a response to federal investigators surveilling Trump ex-campaign aide Carter Page during the last election. In practice, this means that Bill Barr, and Bill Barr alone, will be deciding which investigations of foreign election interference and possible criminal acts by campaigns can go forward, and which will be shut down.

After Barr jetted off to Europe in his own personal, hands-on attempt to discredit this nation's investigation of Russian election interference on behalf of Trump, there's little doubt as to just how Barr's new "policy" is going to go manifest itself in the closing weeks of the election.

There are a few oddities about Barr's newest moves, and as usual they appear to be due to Barr's proximity to Trumpian conspiracy theories about the Russia investigation. Barr's demand that the campaign targets of a federal intelligence probe be warned of the danger is, bluntly, for show. If federal counterintelligence officials believe a campaign is the target of foreign agents—as both presidential campaigns were in 2016—candidates have long been alerted to those national security concerns. Barr's move is based on a Trump camp theory that federal officials were attempting to ensnare them in a trap based on their numerous contacts with Russian agents.

Also, it's not clear that Barr's new rules would even have affected the Page investigation, which is the outrage that the changes are supposedly based on. Page wasn't a member of the campaign when the FBI started surveilling him.

Also, Trump's team has just instituted a new policy in which Congress itself will no longer be briefed on emerging election-related intelligence concerns except in written reports. So Trump's allies are now suggesting that suspected allies of foreign intelligence operations be given more warning of the FBI's actions than Congress itself.

In a second memo, Barr created a brand new FBI office to "audit" the department's national security investigations. This would appear to be very similar to the task that was being performed by the career official Barr just removed.

At this point, it’s a timesaver to simply presume Barr is doing the most corrupt thing on behalf of Donald Trump and his attempts to discredit and bury the now-proven links between Russian election interference and members of Trump's campaign. Barr says the new office will ensure "rigorous and robust auditing." An alternative explanation is that Barr is yet again gutting oversight-related offices and replacing them with people and offices he can more reliably control.

The majority of what Barr has done in office has been blocking investigation and prosecution of Trump allies, removal of watchdogs and oversight officials whose work has come into conflict with Trump's needs, and pushing anti-Biden materials to Republican senators eager to pipeline the frothing work of pro-Russian Ukrainians and Rudy Giuliani into their own committee hearings. He doesn't have any pretense of integrity to fall back on.

If it looks crooked on Barr's part, you can bet it's meant to be crooked.

Unlawfully appointed acting Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Sec. Chad Wolf is now claiming that he had no clue the naturalization stunt he helped carry out would be used for last week’s Republican National Convention as part of its effort to reelect impeached president Donald Trump, telling ABC News’ Jon Karl that “[n]aturalization ceremonies are what the department does. We do hundreds if not thousands of them every year.”

Well, sure, when the administration isn’t trying to intentionally shut down U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). But Unlawful Chad really wants us to believe that he thought this naturalization ceremony was going to be no different than the thousands of other ceremonies USCIS has done, minus, you know, the taking place at the White House in front of cameras as the most anti-immigrant president in modern American history watches. 

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The fact is that this naturalization stunt was lies on top of lies, and you don’t have to take it from me—take it from some of these new Americans themselves. At least two told The Wall Street Journal that they weren’t informed prior to the ceremony that it would be broadcast as part of the convention, and say they found out only moments before they were sworn in as U.S. citizens by Unlawful Chad that Trump would also be there. 

This wasn’t the only incident where Trump’s campaign used people as human props: The New York Times also reported that a wedding planner turned Housing and Urban Development (HUD) official may have also tricked some New York City tenants into appearing in a video that was then shown at the convention. Nope, nothing indecent or deceitful here at all, folks. Carry on.

Well, since a nonpartisan government watchdog has said that Unlawful Chad was unlawfully installed as acting secretary, maybe he missed the ethics training that would have given him a clue that what he was doing was at the very least inappropriate. Others at the department apparently know it: As we’ve noted before, BuzzFeed News’ Hamed Aleaziz reported that in the time since the political stunt, DHS employees were emailed with “a ‘reminder’ about ‘partisan political activity’ and the rules under the … Hatch Act.” I hope someone copied Unlawful Chad on that email.

”Denying that awareness might offer some protection from questions about the Hatch Act, but it raises a number of additional questions,” Philip Bump wrote in The Washington Post. “One, for example: How much confidence might the American public have in the head of the Department of Homeland Security if he’s willing to violate the law to boost Trump’s reelection? How much confidence might they have if he’s willing to mislead reporters about why he does what he does?”

None, is the answer. Now that Unlawful Chad’s finally been officially nominated to his job in a move designed to protect the many anti-immigrant policies put in place under his unlawful tenure, the Senate should give him the boot. Unlawful Chad is also facing repercussions elsewhere for his conduct. A number of House Democrats including Homeland Security Committee Chair Bennie Thompson have called for a federal investigation into his participation in the political stunt, asking the Office of Special Counsel “to investigate Mr. Wolf’s participation in this event to determine whether it violated the law.”

“On August 25, 2020, Mr. Wolf performed a naturalization ceremony on government property to be aired at the Republican National Convention for the apparent purpose of advancing the President’s reelection,” Thompson wrote in his letter. “This is an unprecedented politicization of the naturalization ceremony.” Relatedly, watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has also filed a complaint with the office.

“Thousands of Americans across the country saw this stunt and asked, ‘isn’t there a law against this?’ The answer is yes, there is, the Hatch Act,” CREW executive director Noah Bookbinder said in a statement. “The Hatch Act isn’t some nebulous, technical code buried deep in some federal manual, it’s the law meant to keep officials from using taxpayer dollars and the authorities of the federal government to keep themselves in power, as totalitarian regimes do.”

President Donald Trump on Monday likened police officers who commit acts of brutality to golfers who “choke” and miss a 3-foot putt, resisting the real-time efforts of a conservative cable news ally to steer him away from the comparison.

The remarks from the president came in an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, during which Trump lamented how law enforcement officers are “under siege” in the United States amid new scrutiny of racial injustice in policing.

“They can do 10,000 great acts, which is what they do, and one bad apple or a choker — you know, a choker. They choke,” Trump said, apparently making reference to the shooting of Jacob Blake by police in Kenosha, Wis.

Blake, a 29-year-old Black man, was shot in the back seven times by a white police officer on Aug. 23 as he leaned into his car. Three of Blake’s children were reportedly in the back seat of his SUV when their father was shot.

Blake survived the shooting, but family members have said he is paralyzed from the waist down.

“Shooting the guy in the back many times. I mean, couldn’t you have done something different? Couldn’t you have wrestled him?” Trump said Monday. “You know, I mean, in the meantime, he might’ve been going for a weapon. And, you know, there’s a whole big thing there.”

It was not clear whether Trump was specifically discussing Blake’s shooting or advancing unfounded speculation about the role of a weapon in that case.

The Wisconsin Department of Justice reported last week that its investigators “recovered a knife from the driver’s side floorboard” in Blake’s vehicle. But law enforcement have not said the knife or any other weapon was used in Blake’s encounter with police.

Nevertheless, Trump proceeded Monday to say of police officers: “They choke just like in a golf tournament. They miss a 3-foot putt.”

It was then that Ingraham interjected, telling the president: “You’re not comparing it to golf, because of course that’s what the media would say.”

“I’m saying people choke. People choke,” Trump responded. “And people are bad people. You have both. You have some bad people and you have — they choke.”

Trump’s comments are in keeping with other broad defenses of law enforcement he has issued this summer as the country has struggled with a racial reckoning sparked by the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May.

“We must remember that the overwhelming majority of police officers in this country — and that’s the overwhelming majority — are noble, courageous, and honorable,” Trump said in his Republican National Convention acceptance speech last week. “We have to give law enforcement, our police, back their power.”

The president echoed that rhetoric Monday, expressing sympathy for long-tenured police who respond disproportionately to perceived threats when they have a “quarter-of-a-second to make a decision.”

“If you don’t make the decision, and you’re wrong, you’re dead. People choke under those circumstances, and they make a bad decision. I’ve seen bad decisions of people that it looked bad, but probably it was a choke,” Trump said.

“But you also have bad police,” he added. “But you also — the vast, not only the vast majority — thousands and thousands of great acts and one bad one, and you make the evening news for weeks.”

Dyjuan Tatro grew up in a poor neighborhood in Albany, N.Y., where gunshots were common and education inaccessible. Around 10th grade, Dyjuan dropped out and was selling drugs. A few years later, when he was 20, he was involved in a shooting and sentenced to prison for assault.

Thankfully, that was just the first chapter of Dyjuan’s story. While incarcerated, Dyjuan was able to access the education he had missed as a teenager. He was accepted to the Bard Prison Initiative’s postsecondary education program, where he joined BPI’s debate team — which drew national attention after defeating Harvard University. By the time Dyjuan got out of prison, he had finished a mathematics major and earned a bachelor’s degree from Bard College. Today, he works as a government affairs and advancement officer for BPI.

In America, individuals released from prison often return to crime. One study published in 2018, which analyzed data from 23 states, found that 37 percent of those released in 2012 returned to prison within three years. Of those released in 2010, 46 percent returned to prison within five years.

But the recidivism rate is far lower for prisoners who are able to get some postsecondary education while in prison. Fewer than 3 percent of graduates of BPI, which is based in New York, return to prison. In contrast, well over 30 percent of individuals released from the New York Department of Corrections and Community Supervision return to custody within just three years. Other colleges with similar postsecondary education programs for prisoners also boast lower recidivism statistics than their state averages.

Providing education to the incarcerated is a win-win — it reduces future crime rates and saves public funds that otherwise would be spent keeping people in jail or prison.

Unfortunately, however, Dyjuan’s ability to access a postsecondary education while incarcerated is far from typical. The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act rendered anyone behind bars ineligible to receive federal Pell Grants. These grants, which give impoverished students financial aid for postsecondary education, had long been a critical funding mechanism for in-prison college programs. The Pell Grant ban put a virtual end to postsecondary education for prisoners who weren’t able to take advantage of privately funded programs like Bard’s or who didn’t have greater familial financial support.

This situation remained largely unchanged until the announcement of the Department of Education’s Second Chance Pell Pilot Program in 2015. By expanding educational opportunities for some people behind bars, the program aimed to help individuals returning home acquire work, financially support their families and claim a second chance for a better life.

The Pell Pilot Program currently allows around 10,000 students at selected institutions to receive Pell Grant funding each year to attend classes. While better than nothing, there would be hundreds of thousands of individuals who would be eligible to receive Pell Grant funding if the ban was lifted.

While at least part of the improved recidivism rates depends on personal characteristics of the people who seek out educational opportunities, the findings of multiple studies that attempt to account for these differences reinforce the conclusion that investing in postsecondary education for prisoners is one of the smartest ways to increase safety in our communities.

This becomes all the more important given the changing composition of individuals behind bars. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ latest estimates, at the end of 2017 about 56 percent of state prisoners with over a yearlong sentence were serving time for a violent offense. (It’s important to note that what constitutes a violent offense varies from state to state and, in many cases, people may have been convicted of a “violent crime” without committing an act involving physical violence.) With growing efforts to reduce the sentences of people convicted of nonviolent crimes, more focus will have to be spent on rehabilitating those incarcerated for violent crimes. Luckily, accounts similar to Dyjuan’s show that postsecondary education is effective in transforming the skill sets and mindsets of all individuals, regardless of why they’re serving time.

Some may hesitate to restore incarcerated individuals’ access to postsecondary education given how difficult it may be for their own children or relatives to obtain a higher education. But those individuals should consider the following:

First, the incarcerated would have to meet the same eligibility requirements for Pell Grants as traditional students. Only the most impoverished individuals can access these grants; incarcerated students with personal or familial financial means would not qualify.

Second, failing to invest in postsecondary education for prisoners means a lost opportunity to save taxpayer dollars at a time when state and local budgets are reeling from lost revenue due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Incarcerating someone usually costs tens of thousands of dollars a year. If Pell Grant eligibility for prisoners was reinstated, according to a report by the Vera Institute of Justice and the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality, the savings to states is estimated to be approximately $365.8 million per year in incarceration costs alone. This is likely an underestimate, since it does not include other direct and indirect costs of crime or potential benefits of educating prisoners, such as increased economic output.

This is forfeited money that could otherwise be available for investing in other taxpayer priorities. A 2016 brief by the Department of Education found that while per capita spending on corrections increased by almost half from the late 1990s to the early 2010s, the amount of state and local postsecondary education funding per full-time student plummeted.

On account of the potential cost-savings and public safety benefits, it is clear that federal policymakers of both parties should support reinstating Pell Grants. State policymakers, too, should look for ways to expand educational offerings within state and local correctional systems.

Luckily, lawmakers are beginning to introduce legislation to support these goals. A repeal of the Pell Grant ban was included in an appropriations “minibus” bill passed out of the House at the end of July; it currently is waiting for action by the Senate. If successful, this measure promises a new era of learning — and safety.

Dyjuan’s story doesn’t have to be an exception. By investing in postsecondary education, we can turn incarceration into a better tool for preventing crime and equip more individuals to become productive members of society.

President Donald Trump said Monday that the nation must restore “patriotic education” in schools as a way to calm unrest in cities and counter “lies” about racism in the United States.

Trump blamed violent protests in Portland, Ore., and other cities in recent months on “left-wing indoctrination” in schools and universities, while accusing his Democratic presidential challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, of giving “moral aid and comfort” to vandals.

“Many young Americans have been fed lies about America being a wicked nation plagued by racism,” Trump said during a news conference. “Indeed, Joe Biden and his party spent their entire convention spreading this hateful and destructive message while refusing to say one word about the violence.”

Trump’s solution: Children must be taught that America is “an exceptional, free and just nation, worth defending, preserving and protecting,” he said.

Democrats are unable, he said, to control a “radical left, crazy movement."

“The only path to unity is to rebuild a shared national identity focused on common American values and virtues of which we have plenty,” he said. “This includes restoring patriotic education in our nation's schools, where they are trying to change everything that we have learned.”

Key context: “Teach American Exceptionalism” is one of two education goals listed on Trump’s second-term “Fighting for You!” agenda released ahead of the president's acceptance of his party's nomination during the Republican National Convention last week.

Decisions about curriculum are made at the state and local level, and Trump's second-term agenda does not detail his path for achieving that education focus.

Shortly before becoming a candidate in 2015, Trump decried the idea of American exceptionalism. But the GOP 2016 platform, which will remain in place for 2020, describes the concept as “the notion that our ideas and principles as a nation give us a unique place of moral leadership in the world.”

Biden’s response: “I urge the President to join me in saying that while peaceful protest is a right — a necessity — violence is wrong, period," Biden said in a statement responding to Trump's remarks. "No matter who does it, no matter what political affiliation they have. Period. If Donald Trump can't say that, then he is unfit to be President, and his preference for more violence — not less — is clear.”

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Remember White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows when he was in the House Freedom Caucus and trying to oust then-House Speaker John Boehner? That led to Boehner's assessments of the Freedom Caucus: “They can’t tell you what they’re for. They can tell you everything they’re against. They’re anarchists. They want total chaos. Tear it all down and start over. That’s where their mindset is.” And on Meadows: “He’s an idiot. I can’t tell you what makes him tick.” Now that Meadows is in the White House and has apparently taken over coronavirus policy, he's an absolute danger to, well, everything.

It was Meadows who blew up negotiations with House Democrats for the next coronavirus relief package, having taken the reins from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who had been willing to work with Democrats to save the economy. The effort then was apparently to allow Trump to come up with his "executive orders" to make it look like he was sweeping in to save the day, though none of what are actually just memorandums are really doing much of anything. That doesn't matter to Trump or to Meadows, who is now blaming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for refusing to go along with his efforts to blow everything up.

Pelosi has already compromised more than necessary, coming down to $2 trillion from the $3 trillion the House had passed back in May for a relief package. The ensuing three and a half months of rampaging coronavirus and economic fallout argues for at least double that original amount, but the severity of the cliff millions of Americans were falling off with slashed unemployment insurance and an end to the eviction moratorium drove her to compromise. Meadows, however, is not someone who will compromise and who is an actual, malevolent force for doing absolutely nothing. Because if the government doesn't step in to help people, they'll have no choice but to either go back out in to the workforce (if they can find jobs) or starve. That's not an exaggeration. The administration is slapping restrictions on food aid, making states return to "normal" in providing SNAP benefits.

He's doing what Trump wants on economic policy, and he's got an ally in the new quack in the White House, Scott Atlas. The Washington Post reports that "Atlas meets with Trump almost every day, far more than any other health official, and inside the White House is viewed as aligned with the president and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on how to handle the outbreak, according to three senior administration officials." We already know that what Atlas wants, and Trump along with him, is a "herd immunity" policy, throwing the entire nation to the wolves.

Not providing expanded universal income, not providing aid to state and local government, cutting down on food, allowing people to be evicted, forcing schools to reopen, all of that is part and parcel of Trump's reelection campaign. He's bored with coronavirus. He wants to declare victory and move on. However many people die.

Donald Trump gave another campaign monologue attacking opponent Joe Biden from the White House press room this evening. In it, Trump confirmed one of Biden's central claims: Donald Trump is incapable of denouncing violence by his own supporters.

Trump first defended a caravan of Trump supporters who drove through Portland firing paintballs and pepper spray at protestors. "That was a peaceful protest, and paint is a defensive mechanism, paint is not bullets. Your supporters, and they are your supporters, shot a young gentleman, and killed him, not with paint but with a bullet, and I think it's disgraceful. These people, they protested peacefully, they went in very peacefully ..."

Trump went on to also defend Kenosha murderer Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot three people, killing two, after answering a far-right call for armed "security" against protesters. Trump suggested Rittenhouse, a devoted Trump fan, was "attacked" and was "trying to get away" when he opened fire on those who attempted to stop him after Rittenhouse had already shot a protester in the head, killing him.

"He was trying to get away from them, I guess, it looks like. And he fell. And then they very violently attacked him."

Biden had previously called Donald Trump "too weak" to denounce violence by his supporters. Trump, a sociopath and malignant narcissist whose only measure of the world is who "supports" him and who does not, proved his point multiple times within the span of minutes.

It just keeps going. Yet again, Trump's attorney general, William Barr, has without warning removed a high-level Justice Department official and replaced that person with a new political hire. ABC News reports that Barr has removed Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brad Wiegmann, a career employee in the National Security Division.

Wiegmann's office "helps ensure federal counterterrorism and counterintelligence activities are legal," in ABC's phrasing—an oversight office reining in other government departments that attempt to overstep their legal bounds. Now he's been booted, replaced by new political appointee Kellen Dwyer.

While there's a lot of hemming and hawing about Barr having the legal ability to do such things if and when he wants to, replacing yet another Justice Department official just before the November elections—and one tasked with counterintelligence investigations, no less—is another bizarre move that just happens to be the thing you'd do if you were trying to 1) protect Donald Trump from government investigations or 2) force government investigations against Trump's opponents.

The Trump-Barr purge of government officials has focused heavily on oversight officials, many of whom were investigating whether individual actions by Trump or one of his allies broke federal laws. The removal of a career oversight official who acted as legal roadblock to what national security and counterintelligence officials could do is therefore extra alarming given Barr's amply reported personal interest in probes of Joe Biden and of U.S. law enforcement officials who investigated the Trump campaign's ties to Russia.

It's not a given that Barr's act is intended to facilitate corruption. It's just very, very, very consistent with an existing pattern of removing oversight officials in positions to identify and call out that corruption.

If Trump loses the election, how many federal investigations will a reformed government have to undertake just to get to the bottom of half of Team Trump's strange and unexplained actions?