James.galbraith

Enlarge / A drive-through COVID-19 testing site operated by Omni Healthcare in Melbourne, Fla. on April 8. (credit: Paul Hennessy | Echoes Wire | Barcroft Media | Getty Images)

UPDATE, April 10: Late yesterday the administration reversed course on its controversial plan to pull federal funding from drive-through community-based COVID-19 testing centers in several states.

Instead, the states can choose whether to continue to receive federal funding and support or take over operations themselves, federal officials said.

After news about the potential closure of many of the 41 community-based testing centers circulated yesterday, a bipartisan group of members of Congress wrote to Alex Azar, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, asking the agency to continue funding the program.

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Pressed to produce evidence of fraud, Trump cited a “pants on fire” lie.

President Donald Trump was challenged on Wednesday to substantiate his claims about massive mail-in election fraud benefiting Democrats. The only thing he could come up with was a “pants on fire” falsehood.

The idea of more states moving toward a mail-in system ahead of November’s election is gaining steam amid the coronavirus pandemic. The dilemma Wisconsin voters faced on Tuesday between staying safe at home or heading to polling places to vote is one most states are interested in helping their citizens avoid. Trump, however, has other, more self-interested concerns.

Not only is the president leading Republican efforts to prevent federal funds from being used for mail-in efforts, but the briefing on Wednesday revealed he really doesn’t have any good reasons for his position.

Trump was pressed on the point during the White House coronavirus task force briefing by CNN’s Jim Acosta. Acosta referenced claims the president made the day before about why he thinks mail-in voting is bad — “You get thousands and thousands of people sitting in somebody’s living room, signing ballots all over the place,” Trump said — and asked him to back it up.

Acosta mentioned that five states (Utah, Colorado, Hawaii, Washington, and Oregon) already conduct all elections almost entirely by mail, and added, “You’ve been talking about voter fraud since the beginning of this administration. Where is the evidence?”

Suffice it to say, no evidence was forthcoming. Here’s a transcript of the first part of Trump’s response (emphasis mine):

I think there is a lot of evidence, but we’ll provide you with some. There’s evidence that’s being compiled just like it’s being compiled in the state of California, where they settled with Judicial Watch saying that a million people should not have been voting. You saw that? I am telling you, in California, in the great state of California, they settled and we could’ve gone a lot further. Judicial Watch settled where they agreed that a million people should not have voted, where they were 115 years old and lots of things and people were voting in their place.

Judicial Watch is a right-wing nonprofit led by staunch Trump loyalist Tom Fitton. The settlement Trump referred to is a January 2019 agreement between the organization and Los Angeles County that required the county to remove inactive registrations from the voter rolls. By definition, these people hadn’t voted — that’s why their registrations were inactive. Yet Trump has somehow spun this into an unfounded claim about a million people casting illegal ballots.

The briefing on Wednesday was not the first time Trump made this claim. He said the same thing last summer during an interview on Meet the Press. At that time, PolitiFact fact-checked Trump’s claim and rated it a “pants on fire” lie.

The PolitiFact piece quotes California Secretary of State Alex Padilla (D) as saying, “[n]o matter how much he repeats them, Trump’s lies about voter fraud are patently untrue. Specifically, the settlement with Judicial Watch, Los Angeles County, and the Secretary of State contains absolutely no admission to or evidence of ‘illegal votes.’”

The rest of Trump’s answer wasn’t any better

After citing a “pants on fire” lie, Trump referred to the aforementioned five states that already have robust mail-in voting systems and said, “every one of those states you have mentioned is a state that happens to be won by the Democrats.” That’s also not true. Utah, for instance, is a deep-red state.

Trump concluded by simply restating the unfounded allegations that Acosta asked him to substantiate, saying of mail-in voting, “thousands of votes are gathered. And they come in and they’re dumped in a location then all of the sudden you lose an election that you think you’re going to win. I won’t stand for it.” Ironically, the only instance of large-scale mail-in election fraud possibly swaying an election in recent history is a Republican scheme in North Carolina in 2018. Other states with mail-in systems, such as Oregon, have safeguards preventing that sort of fraud from happening.

After Wednesday’s briefing, Trump took to Twitter to try and make a distinction between absentee voting — which he apparently is fine with (he even voted absentee in Florida’s recent election) — and mail-in voting.

“Absentee Ballots are a great way to vote for the many senior citizens, military, and others who can’t get to the polls on Election Day. These ballots are very different from 100% Mail-In Voting, which is “RIPE for FRAUD,” and shouldn’t be allowed!” he wrote.

But this distinction doesn’t make sense. There’s no reason to think mail-in voting for in-state residents is any more susceptible to fraud than absentee voting for residents who are traveling or temporarily living elsewhere.

None of Trump’s claims about election fraud make sense — but he keeps making them anyway

The backdrop to all this is the coronavirus pandemic, which threatens to make it unsafe for people to go to the polls in November and has made mail-in voting an increasingly attractive option.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Thursday morning found that significant majorities of both Democrats (79 percent) and Republicans (65 percent) support a requiring for mail-in voting for November’s election, with 72 percent of US adults supporting it overall.

Trump, however, is convinced mail-in voting hurts Republicans in general and him in particular. He even came perilously close to admitting this in a tweet he posted on Wednesday in which he claimed the system “for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans.”

In fact, Republicans in mail-in states like Utah and Colorado have had a lot of success. But it’s been GOP orthodoxy for decades that anything driving up voter turnout is bad for the party. That belief is a big reason why Trump has been pushing bogus claims of election fraud for years and using them to argue on behalf of a voter ID system that would make it harder for poor people to vote.

The exchange with Acosta illustrated how flimsy these claims are while at the same time showing that even amid a deadly pandemic, Trump prioritizes his perceived political self-interest — even if it means that some people end up abstaining from voting for fear of getting sick.

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The administration’s policies have exacerbated the health conditions that are leading to more coronavirus fatalities among black Americans.

Trump administration officials — including President Donald Trump himself — have increasingly begun to recognize the fact that black Americans are dying of Covid-19 at a greater rate than Americans of other ethnicities. But in attempting to explain why, the president and top officials are taking a narrow view of the problem — and one that ignores the many ways the Trump administration has helped make black Americans uniquely vulnerable to the coronavirus.

“We’re seeing tremendous evidence that African Americans are affected at a far greater percentage number than other citizens of our country,” Trump said at his daily coronavirus press conference Tuesday. “But why is it that the African American community is so much, numerous times more than everybody else? We want to find the reason to it.”

Three administration officials — director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, and Surgeon General Jerome Adams — gave the same hypothesis for why this is Tuesday: That the health of black Americans is worse than the health of other Americans.

“One of the things we know, in the African American community, there is a higher incidence of hypertension, a higher incidence of diabetes, asthma, and many of the underlying conditions that we associate with a higher mortality rate,” Carson told Fox News’ Dana Perino’s Tuesday. “It is one of the reasons that we really need to concentrate seriously on this particular population when it comes to health in general. Because it will exacerbate anything that comes along, including something like this virus.”

Fauci gave the same assessment during the press conference, and added, “We’re very concerned about that. It’s very sad. It’s nothing we can do about it right now except to try and give them the best possible care to avoid those complications.”

In the immediate future, this is true. But there are things the Trump administration could do now — and could have done during its first three years in power — to broadly improve health outcomes for black Americans, and to reduce their risk of dying due to the virus.

Coronavirus outcomes are bad for black Americans — Trump could take some steps to improve them

As Fabiola Cineas has explained for Vox, black people in the US are dying due to the coronavirus at higher rates than others:

As of Tuesday, black people made up 33 percent of cases in Michigan and 40 percent of deaths, despite being just 14 percent of the state’s population. In Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, where blacks represent 26 percent of the population, they made up almost half of the county’s 945 cases and 81 percent of its 27 deaths, according to a ProPublica report. In Illinois, black people made up 42 percent of fatalities but make up only 14.6 percent of the state’s population. In Chicago, the data is even graver: Black people represented 68 percent of the city’s fatalities and more than 50 percent of cases but only make up 30 percent of the city’s total population.

In the South, the numbers are also grim. In Louisiana, black people accounted for more than 70 percent of deaths in a state population that is about 33 percent black. About 33 percent of the state’s 512 deaths as of Tuesday morning have occurred in Orleans Parish, where black people make up more than 60 percent of the population and where 29 percent of people live in poverty, according to 2018 census data. Louisiana’s first teen death — also one of the first teen deaths in the nation — was that of 17-year-old New Orleans resident Jaquan Anderson, an aspiring NFL player, according to local reports.

There are a few things the Trump administration could do right now to try to reduce these numbers.

The president has been hesitant to centralize the US’s coronavirus response, instead arguing that each state must look out for itself, and call upon the federal government only as a last resort. But taking a more active role in managing resource allocation and in data collection would allow the federal government to have a better and more granular understanding of how various populations are affected — and say, whether black Americans across economic groups are dying at higher rates, or those in select strata — and would allow it to send resources like masks and ventilators to states that have populations at greater risk of death.

States have already begun doing this themselves to some degree — Oregon sent New York equipment on Saturday, for instance — but the administration taking charge would allow for this redistribution of resources to be done more efficiently.

Such a strategy would also help ensure personal protective equipment is available to all of those who need it — certainly those in the healthcare sector, but also other essential workers, like employees of grocery stores. At least four grocery store workers have died due to Covid-19, and at least three of those workers were black.

Trump has spoken at a number of his press conference about his warm relationship with industry leaders, including those in the grocery sector, and could — if he has not already — work to leverage those relationships into advocating for greater protections for those workers like those some stores, including Walmart and Kroger, have begun to institute.

And while Trump does not have control over these companies, he could ensure greater protections for White House staff; for instance, a number of images have shown White House custodial workers cleaning the Brady Briefing Room where most of the president’s coronavirus daily press briefings are held. All of the photos show workers — most of whom appear black — doing the work with limited PPE; with gloves, but no smocks or masks.

Win McNamee/Getty Images

Policy-wise, the president could take a number of actions as well. He could endorse congressional efforts to ensure essential workers receive hazard pay — essential workers receiving higher wages while well could help making the choice easier of whether to work while feeling ill, potentially sickening others, or stay home. And he could also help expand access to healthcare — reopening the Obamacare exchange, dropping its support for Medicaid work requirements, and reversing plans to allow Medicaid spending caps.

Systematic racism and the ways Trump administration policies have affected black Americans are making them more vulnerable to Covid-19

Broadly, there are systematic problems underlying the issues Fauci and Carson identified Tuesday, something Adams — who is black — has spoken to.

“I’ve shared myself personally that I have high blood pressure,” Adams said Tuesday. “I have heart disease and spent a week in the ICU due to a heart condition, that I actually have asthma and I’m prediabetic, and so I represent that legacy of growing up poor and black in America.”

Trump often blames the federal government’s inability to provide states with badly needed resources on past presidents, saying he inherited a “broken system.” That is not true, but it is true he inherited the broken system of the legacy Adams is speaking of here, and has in many ways made it worse.

The administration has rolled back dozens of environmental regulations meant to ensure air and water quality remain conducive to good public health, and has recently proposed changes that would relax environmental review requirements for building things like pipelines while telling polluters not to worry about violations of emissions standards during the pandemic. And as Vox’s Matthew Yglesias has explained, these rules could be a factor in high black deaths in the US:

It is well known among people who study air pollution that African American neighborhoods are much more likely to have high levels of contamination — the result of a multifaceted historical process. The link between air pollution and Covid-19 fatality could be a partial explanation for why African Americans seem to be dying at a disproportionate rate. It could also partially explain why things got so bad in Italy, which has about double the concentration of air pollution in the United States.

This is also of note given Fauci and Carson cite asthma as an underlying condition that makes Covid-19 worse. Although scientists are still working to understand why black Americans are disproportionately affected by asthma, experts have noted environmental concerns, such as exposure to pollutants and allergens found in parts of cities typically inhabited by black Americans can trigger and aggravate asthma symptoms. Essentially, having access to clean air reduces asthma risk — and the administration could have done far more to reduce that risk.

Similarly, administration policies in housing have done little to help reduce asthma risk — a Department of Housing and Urban Development proposal rolled out in January would relax an Obama-era rule that required local governments to track and correct instances of bias in housing. Critics argue this rule would make it more difficult for black Americans to access fair housing and to leave areas with conditions that exacerbate conditions like asthma. And this is far from the first proposal housing advocates have argued disenfranchises black Americans and limits where they can live.

Policies such as these create greater Covid-19 risk, Cineas writes, because they make social distancing more difficult, as they restrict the ability of black Americans to find, rent, and buy places to live, leading to more multigenerational households. And, they increase both poverty and economic stress — home values in black neighborhoods remain lower than in neighborhoods that are predominantly white, making it difficult to leverage property to change one’s economic status, whether through renting, selling, or taking loans.

Much research has been done on the negative health effects of economic stress — and the Trump administration has arguably contributed to societal stress among black Americans as well, ending policies meant to ensure black Americans feel safer outside of their homes, from the Justice Department refusing to pursue new oversight of police departments accused of racial bias to the Department of Education discarding rules meant to ensure black students are not disciplined more harshly than white students.

Stress is an important thing to reduce because it is a factor in hypertension, another of the conditions Fauci and Carson noted is more common in black Americans and that can increase chances of morbidity with Covid-19. Other things that can cause the illness — as with diabetes — include a person’s diet, weight, and ability to exercise, and the ability to eat well and exercise can be limited by where that person lives.

Tuesday, Trump promised to do further study on how the coronavirus affects black Americans, and said more data will be available. But he would be wise to listen to something Fauci said that is something of a prescription for how his administration — and future ones — can better protect black Americans and other minorities from disproportionately falling victim to public health crises.

“Health disparities have always existed for the African American community,” Fauci added. “But here again with the crisis, now it’s shining a bright light on how unacceptable that is, because yet again, when you have a situation like the coronavirus, they are suffering disproportionately. ... So when all this is over and as we’ve said it will end, we will get over coronavirus, but there will still be health disparities which we really do need to address in the African American community.”

And eliminating those disparities will require addressing what Fauci called “some of the real weaknesses and foibles in our society.”

Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

The Senate sergeant at arms has warned offices that virtual conferencing platform Zoom poses a high risk to privacy and could leave their data and systems exposed, according to an internal memo obtained by POLITICO.

The sergeant at arms’ cybersecurity division wrote in an email to Senate offices Friday evening that Zoom and rival service MaestroConference have been “issued a high-risk notice” and pose the threat of “potential compromise of systems and loss of data, interruptions during a conference, and lack of privacy.”

The law enforcement chief urged lawmakers and their staff to instead use “preferred and supported video conferencing options” such as Skype for Business.

The Senate Rules Committee has also “instructed offices to only use Senate-supported technologies,” according to a panel spokesperson. Zoom is not among those supported services, they said.

Federal agencies can use a government-specific version of Zoom for some purposes, and the company has received at least eight federal purchase orders in the past three years. But two federal overseers, the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program and DHS' Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, advised agencies not to use Zoom’s free or commercial service in a statement Tuesday.

The Senate's move marks the latest blows to Zoom’s reputation on Capitol Hill, which has taken a hit amid a wave of damaging reports of data leaks, undisclosed data sharing and unwanted service interruptions.

The company has seen its usage soar as millions of Americans shift their daily routines online during the coronavirus outbreak. But Zoom’s newfound popularity has also triggered fresh scrutiny of its privacy and security practices, including state-level investigations and congressional calls for a federal probe.

To address criticisms, Zoom has tweaked its privacy policies and practices, and pledged to focus its efforts over the next three months on addressing concerns.

Zoom did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The office of the Sergeant at Arms could not be immediately reached for comment.

The Financial Times first reported that Senate offices had been urged not to use Zoom.

The Republican Party’s moves toward fascism continue with a new edict from the Trump White House to CNN. Team Trump is angry that the network has been cutting away from their daily, often two-hour-plus coronavirus briefings to fact-check things Trump has said. CNN is reporting that "Vice President" Mike Pence's office is now barring the administration's pandemic experts from appearing on the network until CNN agrees to instead televise the propaganda events in full.

CNN reports: "Pence's office, which is responsible for booking the officials on networks during the pandemic, said it will only allow experts such as Dr. Deborah Birx or Dr. Anthony Fauci to appear on CNN if the network televises the portion of the White House briefings that includes the vice president and other coronavirus task force members." But even that statement isn’t quite what it seems.

Despite the implication Pence is crudely attempting, that the network must not truly be interested in their "experts" if those portions of the daily briefings are cut away from, the effect of the demand is to disallow CNN's moves to cut away from the briefings for fact-checking and analysis of what Dear Leader has just ejaculated immediately after Trump finishes his opening remarks. If the network delays such fact-checking until after the full two-hour briefing, few viewers who watched Trump's opening remarks will still be around to hear it.

So either air our entire two-hour campaign event mostly or completely uninterrupted, Mike Pence is telling the "free" press, or we will withhold the experts most qualified to tell your viewers, during a national crisis, how to not die. That is not a free press. That is a press made to bend to the will of the state.

This would be another circumstance in which the major media outlets could do themselves and the public enormous good by banding together to do the right thing collectively, rather than allowing would-be authoritarians to alter the rules of our democracy on their own whim. The networks should not be covering Trump's portions of the briefings at all, unless something actually relevant is said; the danger to the public presented by Trump promoting unproven medicines, making false claims, attacking political enemies and otherwise misleading viewers overwhelms even the possibility, at this point, of him saying truthful things. Airing his false information is destructive.

The obvious answer, then, is to stop covering the events live—or, if they must be covered live because of the inherent cheapness of cable news, always looking for free content, comply with Dear Leader's butler's new demand that the networks not cut away from the events after Trump's speech by cutting away during Trump's portions with the same fact-checking the networks are finally, though sporadically and reluctantly, providing their viewers.

But this notion from Pence that either each day's two-hour praise session for Dear Leader is aired in full or the government will withhold top disease experts from the American public in retaliation—that cannot stand. Pence needs to pound sand on that one. He should be humiliated for the demand. He should be treated, if possible, even less seriously, though after three years of polishing an obvious idiot's authoritarian boots it is not as if there is any reputation there left to save.

Graphics by Anna Wiederkehr

Predictions of the coronavirus’s toll on the U.S. continue to fluctuate. Though some states report evidence of a flattening in the curve, others are just beginning to see COVID-19’s devastation. To get a better picture of how the pandemic will play out, we’re following a survey of infectious-disease researchers from institutions across the country. This is our fourth week tracking the survey, which captures experts’ thoughts on the current state of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as their estimates of its future trajectory and the uncertainty surrounding its future.

This week’s survey, taken on April 6 and 7, shows that experts expect about 660,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases on April 12, indicating that they see the coronavirus spread as likely slowing. However, they think hospitalizations are most likely to peak in May, with a 42 percent chance that they won’t peak until after June 1. The experts also believe that only 13 percent of all infections in the U.S. had been reported on April 5, implying that there could have been up to 20.2 million people currently infected at the time.

For most questions in the survey, respondents are asked to provide their best estimate, as well as a best-case and worst-case possibility. Asking a question in this way lets the survey organizers generate a consensus forecast, which is a tool that combines the uncertainty of each individual response to produce the most likely outcome according to all the experts, as well as a possible range of outcomes.

Here’s what the experts had to say this week.

What is the smallest, most likely and largest number of total cases that The COVID Tracking Project will report on April 12?

Among the experts, there was a large spread in the projected number of cases that will be reported on April 12, as well as in each expert’s uncertainty surrounding those estimates.

The individual expert uncertainties are also reflected in the consensus forecast, which projects anywhere between 500,000 and 1.2 million total cases reported on April 12, with 660,000 being the most likely number.

The experts have made these one-week projections in the past three surveys, and the actual recorded case counts have fallen comfortably within their confidence intervals.

Next week’s case estimates indicate that the experts think the spread of the virus is likely to slow in the U.S., although there’s no guarantee of that if the case count falls near the top end of next week’s range.

Of the next six months, which month will see the most COVID-19 hospitalizations in the U.S.?

Although the experts think the spread of COVID-19 is likely to slow down in the coming weeks, they still think hospitalizations are most likely to peak in May, and the expert consensus gives a 42 percent chance that hospitalizations won’t peak until after June 1.

This wide consensus distribution — with April, May and June each given a chance of more than 20 percent of containing the hospitalization peak — illustrates the uncertainty among the experts in assessing the trajectory of COVID-19.

“We can project how things will go if we continue the same physical distancing measures we have in place now,” said Mary Bushman, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics. “But the actual future trajectory depends massively on what society does going forward, and that is still unknown.”

When will the daily number of new hospital COVID-19 admissions in New York City drop below 200?

The last time new daily hospitalizations in New York City were below 200 was on March 15, according to the New York City Health Department, and as recently as April 3, there were more than 1,000 new hospitalizations in New York City.

And although new hospitalizations have been falling in recent days, experts think there’s a 2 in 3 chance that new daily hospitalizations won’t fall below 200 again until after May 1.

Bushman said new hospitalizations will probably peak in New York City before they peak in the rest of the country, but there’s no guarantee. “New York City is weeks into the surge of hospitalizations, whereas the rest of the country is only just starting or hasn’t started yet,” they said. “But if the city goes through periods of physical distancing interspersed with periods of relative normalcy, we could even see multiple peaks.”

Finally, the experts think that only 13 percent of all COVID-19 infections in the U.S. had been reported by April 5, and up to 20.2 million people may have been infected at the time.

The number of new cases may be starting to slow for now, but there’s still a great deal of uncertainty in the overall trajectory of the COVID-19 pandemic.

CORRECTION (April 9, 2020, 1:37 p.m.): A previous version of the chart of case count forecasts in this article showed an incorrectly spaced y-axis. The chart has been updated to more clearly show that the scale is logarithmic and to correct the spacing between 50,000 and 100,000, and between 100,000 and 500,000.

As Sen. Mitch McConnell tries to jam through another $250 billion in emergency small business loans—something the banks have been raising hell about for nearly a week—many states are drowning in unemployment claims with clunky systems that can't meet the demands of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security stimulus bill. There's also Trump administration-created confusion surrounding the expansion of benefits to a new class of workers—those in the gig economy.

For example, in South Florida, hundreds of people have been lining up and risking exposure to the novel coronavirus to get paper applications for benefits because the state's notoriously and purposefully broken online system has failed. A long tweet thread from Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan's communications director details the numerous problems that state's system is experiencing under the load and highlights one key issue: the U.S. Department of Labor didn't even get guidance to the states on all the new provisions under the CARES act. That guidance still muddies the eligibility of gig workers despite Congress's clear intent to make them eligible, The New York Times reports.

Some states are turning gig workers away as a result of the inability of their systems to deal with the new category and the Labor Department's confusion. The Trump administration's guidance to states leaves out those who are theoretically available to work but have no customers to make offering rides, for example, available. It's also vague enough to seem to exclude workers who are at high risk if they contract the virus—older or with underlying health conditions—and who've decided to protect their health over exposing themselves, though it does create a specific eligibility for people with compromised immune systems. It's also vague around the ongoing eligibility of parents who can't work while their children are out of school, suggesting that they'll no longer be able to get benefits once when the school year ends. A Labor Department spokesperson told the Times that the situations in its guidance "are not exhaustive, and we expect many ride-share workers to be eligible," though the confusion could leave room for some (cough, cough Republican) states to interpret them in a way that leaves people out.

"We are already hearing reports from unemployment officials from around the country that it will likely take weeks to stand up a new program and disburse benefits to these newly eligible workers," Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner wrote to Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia last week. His colleague, Sen. Ron Wyden from Oregon, said in a statement Monday that he is "deeply concerned that the Trump administration’s guidance to states on administering expanded unemployment insurance weakens the program. […] It's critical that workers who are unemployed through no fault of their own don't fall through the cracks. Congress intended for these workers to be covered."

An expert on unemployment insurance, Maurice Emsellem, lays the blame in part on lawmakers for requiring that DOL use a more restrictive existing program, Disaster Unemployment Assistance, as the model for its rules on this one. But, he says of the DOL: "They have all the leeway in the world to waive those regulations if they wanted to. It's their regulations." At the very least, Democrats should insist on language in the next spending bill that makes clear their intent for contractors and gig workers to get this critical assistance.

Back in the bad old days before the internet, guys like me who wanted to research the radical right had to do the nitty-gritty work of collecting far-right published materials at gun shows and political meetups, and later militia recruitment meetings. Nowadays, thanks to Amazon, we can obtain all the same material with the click of a button.

This is not a good thing. As a recent investigation by ProPublica demonstrated in living color, Amazon’s relentless greed has created a whole new realm of recruitment for hateful fascist ideologies by letting any hatemonger publish anything he wants through Kindle Publishing, which will publish anyone or anything as an e-book and then market its paperback edition, too. Functionally speaking, Amazon has opened a portal to hell, and appears to have only a passing interest in closing it.

The investigation reveals how one of the country’s most notorious racists, Billy Roper—the erstwhile leader of White Revolution, a neo-Nazi group based in Arkansas—has managed to build a profitable career as a prolific (17 books uploaded since 2014) Kindle author, so much so that he now boasts he is “the most widely read living fiction author in the white nationalist movement.”

“My existence there has been beneficial in reaching people with my message and growing my organization,” Roper told ProPublica. “People can go to Amazon — which is mainstream and acceptable, there’s nothing radical about that — order a book, and in the privacy of their own home they can read the book without ever having to visit a white-nationalist website.”

“There is a lot of extremist content on Amazon,” J. M. Berger, a terrorism expert with the VOX-Pol research network, told ProPublica. “The platform has gone largely overlooked because, understandably, we think of books differently than other content. But these products are for sale and they’re being algorithmically pushed.”

As a researcher, I was struck early on, even during the 1990s, by how easy it was to use Amazon to access white supremacist and other extremist literature. For most of my years as a reporter, obtaining these materials entailed attending extremist events and gun shows, and scouring out-of-the-way bookstores’ shelves in order to be able to buy these books.

This included such urtexts for the radical right as The Protocols of the Seven Elders of Zion, the 1920s-era anti-Semitic hoax that helped inspire the Holocaust; and The Turner Diaries, the 1970s-penned blueprint for a white-supremacist race war that inspired the Oklahoma City bombing. Difficult to obtain except in far-right circles before Amazon, I was able to purchase my first copies of them in the late 1990s through the online bookseller. And literally anyone can do exactly the same, even today.

When I was conducting research for a recent report involving the hateful World Church of the Creator, I was able to turn to Amazon to obtain a number texts by its founder, Ben Klassen, which featured some of the most vile and hateful screeds ever committed to print. At the same time, I was able to pick up a formative text from the alt-right “black pill” contingent entitled Day of the Rope (inspired by The Turner Diaries) that was all about the need to kill race traitors and Jews.

The report explores how Amazon’s site algorithms can create an extremist feedback loop, one that leads someone curious about one extremist text even deeper down the hatemongering rabbit hole. The striking aspect of this algorithm is how closely it resembles the same tools used by YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms in creating a feedback loop that becomes a whole universe of online radicalization.

Like these platforms, Amazon typically has trotted out a libertarian laissez-faire argument for allowing any and all books to be sold on its website. And like these platforms, it’s been slow to recognize that such an approach opens the door wide for extremist hate and its attendant violence, as ProPublica found:

“As a bookseller, we believe that providing access to the written word is important,” an Amazon spokesperson said in a statement. “That includes books that some may find objectionable, though we have policies governing which books can be listed for sale. We invest significant time and resources to ensure our guidelines are followed, and remove products that do not adhere to our guidelines. We also promptly investigate any book when a concern is raised.”

However, the company at least appears to be making baby steps. As the report notes, it has made some extremist texts, such as James Mason’s Siege—a Turner Diaries for the 21st century, extremely popular with the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen set—no longer available. But a search for the book nonetheless takes a reader to a full page of books by seemingly acceptable fascist writers, mainly Julius Evola, a mid-century Italian “philosopher.”

Meanwhile, both of the books I obtained in late 2018 during my research are now no longer available. So there are signs, at least, that Amazon might finally ratchet the portal it opened a little bit tighter. Maybe someday, it will close it tight.

The person who wins the presidential election in 2020 will replace Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. If it’s Joe Biden, we will hold our ground with a 5-4 conservative majority, and the occasional victory from a wayward conservative (like Chief Justice John Roberts on the Affordable Care Act decision). Also, there’s a decent chance that one of the conservative justices will exit the court at some point in the next four years. A liberal majority could be in reach. 

If it’s Donald Trump, we’ll have a 6-3 conservative majority and the end of pretty much anything liberals value in America. 

Religious conservatives held their noses after their party nominated the most morally bankrupt man in America, all because of the Supreme Court. They get it. Too many “progressives” don’t, hence the simple equation: a vote against Joe Biden, or simply staying home, is a vote for Donald Trump to replace Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. 

Pretty cut-and-dry and simple, right? Biden wasn’t my guy. He was like 10th on my list. But my candidate lost, and it’s time to move on to the even bigger battle. Most people get this. Some people don’t. 

Apparently, being Green means allowing Trump to replace RBG, because nothing says “green” and “environmental” like a Supreme Court full of even more conservative judges. Climate change, fracking, environmental justice, handouts to the fossil fuel industry, kneecapping of the green energy economy … how can we handle all those issues with a 6-3 conservative court? The Green Party doesn’t care. Nor does Jill Stein.

If you read that tweet literally, she’s saying that Black voters were the “establishment” and did all the “sabotaging” of “progressives”—which apparently doesn’t include the Black community. But hey, she’s clearly all psyched about Trump replacing RBG.

Now there’s a #demexit hashtag on Twitter for all the people and Russian bots that want Trump to replace RBG to come together. We get gems like this:

You see, everyone should have served Sanders. He shouldn’t have to, you know, win more votes than the alternatives. Also, the DNC is all-powerful and mighty and controls all levers of power. (Reality: quite the opposite ...)

How ridiculous a human do you need to be to still claim there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans? We heard it in 2000: “There is no difference between George W. Bush an Al Gore.” Then we heard it in 2004, with John Kerry. 2008 was a respite, but funny enough, not because Barack Obama was a liberal champion. And then, of course, came 2016. 

And still, people are going to claim “no difference”? I have one difference: Joe Biden won’t put another Neil Gorsuch or Brett Kavanaugh on the court. There are others, too, amazingly. 

This notion that the DNC is this all-powerful being that decides these things is Trumpian/QAnon-level conspiracy theory mongering. They did nothing except organize the presidential debates. And nothing in those debates disadvantaged Sanders. Heck, Biden couldn’t even raise money! His campaign was perpetually broke, it had no field organization! And yet he won because Black voters rewarded him for his service to the first Black president. Right or wrong, that’s what happened, and the DNC literally had zero impact on that choice. 

I’ve written about a dozen pieces on Sanders’ 30% campaign, how it never worked to build a majority coalition, and thus how it was destined to lose. That wasn't imposed on Sanders by the DNC. 

But even more broadly speaking, Sanders won the ideological debate, and Biden is running a far more progressive campaign as a result—even endorsing key Sanders and Elizabeth Warren plans. The key in the future is to look at progressives who are working toward building a majority coalition, like Reps. Ayanna Pressley and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The party has moved dramatically leftward since the days of Howard Dean in the early-to-mid-2000s, when civil unions between gay couples were considered crazy, abortion rights were negotiable, and every Democrat was talking about how deeply to cut Social Security. 

Now, how seriously should we take these people who would rather Trump pick RBG’s replacement and give conservatives a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court? Let’s turn to Civiqs and look at Democratic numbers in Trump’s reelects:

For context, here are the exit poll results in 2016: 

So Biden is already running ahead of Hillary Clinton among Democrats. And even assuming that some of those never-Biden a-holes now call themselves “independent,” Biden is still running slightly ahead there too. Even if you throw in margin-of-error float between two different polls (making apples-to-apples comparisons impossible), that still means that on balance, little has changed since 2016. 

Does that mean that Biden is clear to go? Nope. He needs to make clear, in how he picks his VP (and maybe even early cabinet announcements) that he values and invites the party’s progressive wing to join his campaign. Even grabbing a few extra points among those Democrats and Independents in the “other” category could mean the different between victory and defeat. 

But no matter what Biden does, the Democratic electorate spoke: Biden is the nominee, and the victor gets to write his own script. There is only so much we can do to influence his decisions moving forward. 

What we can do is acknowledge that politics aren’t about what is ideal, but what is possible. And right now, protecting the liberal minority (and maybe even getting a majority!) is of utmost importance—perhaps the single most important thing we can do this election. 

P.S. Liberal Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is 81. So perhaps we should be talking about Trump’s potential 7-2 majority. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has now taken down language that pushed doctors to prescribe an unproven drug after a chorus of complaints from health professionals, and warnings that they were causing active harm. But that doesn’t seem to mean that the CDC under Trump worshiper Robert Redfield is ready to grow up and act like the CDC. Instead, it seems prepared to start spreading language much more harmful than just pushing a drug that makes money for Trump.

Multiple sources are reporting that the CDC is looking at language that will relax guidelines for those who know they have been exposed to someone with COVID-19. The new proposal would encourage people to return to work so long as they are asymptomatic—which means that the CDC is directly encouraging the behavior responsible for 80% of all cases of COVID-19.

As NBC reports, the current guidance calls for those who know they have been exposed to the novel coronavirus to practice self-isolation. But under the new guidelines, these same people would be sent right back to work even if they had direct contact with someone confirmed to have COVID-19, so long as they are asymptomatic and not running a fever. 

This draft proposal has apparently not been finalized, but it certainly fits with the way both Donald Trump and Fox News have been pumping a reduced number on the University of Washington IHME model as if it’s proof that America is over the hump and on the mend. Trump is not only shouting about a “light at the end of the tunnel,” he’s also using his daily press events to talk about “stabilization” and to talk about reducing the social distancing guidelines.

In discussions on the Today program on Wednesday morning, Dr. Deborah Birx all but stated that those guidelines were not going to be renewed at the end of the month, and conservative “newsman” Brit Hume has openly pondered whether the rules were needed in the first place.

So the CDC seems prepared to send asymptomatic workers back to work even though a study from China indicated just last week that 80% of all COVID-19 cases were spread by those who had few or no symptoms. The reason for this is exactly the kind of behavior that the CDC seems to be set to encourage: those who felt fine took fewer precautions about being around others, so they were much more likely to act as vectors in spreading the disease to others.

The CDC has already given proposed guidance to allow front-line medical workers to return to the job after exposure. Considering the difficult conditions at hospitals in the areas most under assault from COVID-19, relaxing the guidelines to allow doctors and nurses to get back on the line might be understandable. But general guidelines that say those with a known exposure can leave isolation not only promotes the kind of spread demonstrated in China—it’s the exact opposite of the tactics that proved successful in South Korea and elsewhere.

Good news, everyone! Fox News declared that the battle against the virus has been won, and we can soon revert back to normal. Related: inside-the-bubble conservatives are getting the message. 

Republican faith in their leadership took a bit of a dive after even Fox News had to admit that this coronavirus thing was a problem—with the “completely satisfied” moving from a high of 54% back in early March, down to 39% just a couple of days ago (while only 14% of Republicans ever acknowledged the disaster that the federal response has been from the very beginning). But thanks to conservative media and a new barrage of “the war is over” coverage, those “completely satisfied” are moving back up.

Of course, the battle is nowhere near won, as we’re still weeks away from even peaking in our current hotspots, much less emerging ones in Georgia, Indiana, Florida, and elsewhere. And yet, we’re already at 2,000 daily dead. 

Independent voters certainly don’t share that conservative optimism: 

Summing up the numbers, 54% of independents are unsatisfied, while just 44% are satisfied—numbers unchanged since the impeached president declared a national emergency over the pandemic. (Democrats, of course, have the clearest view of reality at 90% unsatisfied.)

Meanwhile, Republicans will be watching this kind of shit in the days to come, so expect more Republicans to decide the government did a great job: 

Because, you know, a virus that killed 2,000 yesterday and will kill even more today, and tomorrow, and the next day, for months to come, might not be “that dangerous in the first place.” 

It is breathtaking how ill-served conservatives have been by the the very same media bubble they created to protect them from reality. 

Rep. Katie Porter has been all business since being elected to office. Today, Rep. Porter released a report showing that in spite of growing concerns and warnings about the potential oncoming pandemic threat of the COVID-19 virus from top officials and experts, Donald Trump not only did nothing about it, he allowed ramped up exportation of much-needed medical supplies. The report, titled “EVERYONE BUT US,” charges Donald Trump with misapplying and mismanaging our nation’s medical supplies in the months leading up to our current crisis.

Rep. Porter, like many Democratic officials, has long pleaded with Trump to use the powers afforded him under the Defense Production Act (DPA) to ramp up production and supply chains for much-needed medical supplies. These essential medical supplies were needed weeks ago at the front lines of the battle to save lives. Trump has instead been stingy in his application of the DPA, trying to gaslight away the death count under his watch.

But while Trump’s incompetence and criminal negligence has been well covered, Porter’s team has analyzed “previously unreported government trade data” that paints an even darker picture of how complicit in our country’s misery Donald Trump is. According to the report, the United States was not simply ill-prepared for the coming pandemic—they were actively making big money depleting our medical resources, making us even less prepared: “The value of U.S. ventilator exports jumped 22.7% percent from January to February.”

And it wasn’t only ventilators. Porter says her team “found that in February 2020, the value of U.S. mask exports to China was 1,094% higher than the 2019 monthly average.” Think about that every time you read a pick-me-up story of some designer creating PPE masks for ER staff, or some grade-school kid donating their mask. And to be clear, during this same time the U.S. imported fewer PPE and cleaning supplies, as well as fewer ventilators.

It is clear that one of the fundamental tragic flaws of conservatism in America is how shortsighted its greed for money and power is. By not being more serious in January and February, and even in March, the Trump administration and the Republican power apparatus in general has worsened the economic problems we now face, and will continue to face in the not so distant future. What this report shows is that this short-sightedness is pathological in nature, like a fish with a seven-second memory, wondering why it keeps getting hooked in the mouth every time a worm miraculously appears from the sky.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday directed Republicans to "fight very hard" against efforts to expand mail-in voting amid the coronavirus pandemic, suggesting that such a shift in ballot-casting practices would yield unfavorable electoral results for the GOP.

"Republicans should fight very hard when it comes to statewide mail-in voting. Democrats are clamoring for it," Trump wrote on Twitter. "Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn't work out well for Republicans."

The president's social media post comes amid escalating anxiety among national Democrats, election officials and voting rights activists regarding the coronavirus' effects on upcoming state primaries and November's general election.

In-person voting has been complicated by the deadly outbreak, with Americans suddenly endangered at polling places by the rapid spread of a highly infectious disease, and forced to defy federal guidelines and local stay-at-home orders in order to cast ballots.

Although more than a dozen states have delayed their primary contests as a result of the public health crisis, Wisconsin controversially forged ahead with its election Tuesday after the state Supreme Court blocked Democratic Gov. Tony Evers' last-minute executive order postponing in-person voting.

The U.S. Supreme Court's conservative majority similarly blocked a court order Monday that extended the period to return absentee ballots in Wisconsin's primary.

The president fiercely criticized mail-in voting as "horrible" and "corrupt" during the White House coronavirus task force's daily news conference Tuesday, but also conceded that he voted by mail in Florida's primary last month.

Trump offered no legitimate explanation for the discrepancy between his position on mail-in voting and his personal voting habits, but insisted "there's a big difference between somebody that's out of state and does a ballot, and everything's sealed, certified and everything else."

In other instances of mail-in voting, however, "you get thousands and thousands of people sitting in somebody's living room, signing ballots all over the place," Trump claimed.

"You look at what they do, where they grab thousands of mail-in ballots and they dump it. I'll tell you what — and I don't have to tell you, you can look at the statistics — there's a lot of dishonesty going along with mail-in voting, mail-in ballots," he continued, adding: "I think if you vote, you should go."

The president's advice to vote in person contradicts his administration's social-distancing guidance, which recommends Americans maintain at least 6 feet of separation; avoid gatherings of more than 10 people; work or attend school from home whenever possible; and abstain from eating or drinking at bars, restaurants and food courts.

Although election experts acknowledge there are slightly higher levels of voter fraud perpetrated through mail-in voting than in-person voting, they agree overall cases of election fraud are rare and that local officials can implement measures to thwart such activity.

Congressional Democrats have pushed for more federal funding to facilitate vote-by-mail capabilities, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) predicted last week the country would "probably be moving to vote by mail" for the remainder of the 2020 election season.

The $2 trillion coronavirus relief package, which Congress passed and the president signed last month, provides the U.S. Postal Service with a $10 billion loan from the Treasury Department but does not wipe out its $11 billion debt or dole out the $25 billion appropriation Democrats had sought to help keep the federal carrier from going bankrupt.

The stimulus measure also includes $400 million in election security grants to help states "prevent, prepare for, and respond to coronavirus."

Former Vice President Joe Biden, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, said Monday the outbreak might force changes to the way voting is conducted, but argued the general election in the fall should not be delayed.

"I'd much prefer to have on — you know, in-person voting, but it depends. It depends on the state of play," he said. "But we cannot, we cannot delay or postpone a constitutionally required November election."

Roughly 57.2 million Americans participated in the 2016 election via early, absentee or mail-in voting, including active duty military who live either overseas or in the U.S. outside their home voting jurisdiction. That total represented 2 in 5 of all ballots cast.

The number of warnings that the Trump White House ignored when it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic can seem almost as overwhelming as the disease itself. Again and again Donald Trump was provided with a heads up that the threat of a major, deadly, disruptive pandemic was very real, and that prompt action was needed to secure the nation. Again and again he blew off those warnings.

But not it seems that Trump may have been warned even earlier than anyone suspected. Because while the official story of the 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak begins in December, when whistleblower doctors in the region first signaled that they were seeing patients in their emergency rooms with a SARS-like illness, it seems that the intelligence community was warning of an outbreak in November.

Earlier stories had indicated that the intelligence community believed that China was underplaying both the number of cases and deaths in the 2019 novel coronavirus outbreak. But the information reported by ABC News indicates that an intelligence report from the National Center for Medical Intelligence, said that a mysterious illness was sweeping the Wuhan area a month before the official timeline of the 2019 outbreak.

If true, this would paint a very different picture of the outbreak, creating a situation in which Chinese officials were engaged in covering up the outbreak and altering the numbers much earlier than had been previously known. It would also seem to contradict early reports from a group of whistleblowing doctors who were locked up for reporting initial cases of COVID-19 in late December. This group included Dr. Li Wenliang, who later died from the disease and has been regarded as a hero for bringing the world’s attention to the coronavirus outbreak.

The report would also contradict not just the World Health Organization’s models and estimates for the timeline of coronavirus, but numerous scientific papers that have traced back initial cases and set the first human to human transmission of the disease around December 1. The idea that the novel coronavirus was circulating widely in Hubei province as early as November would not just completely rewrite the early history of the disease, and not just a complete revision of the pandemic’s growth and spread, it would absolutely mandate an overhaul of everything from transmission rate to fatality … all of which makes the intelligence reports very, very difficult to accept at face value.

China absolutely covered up the initial cases of COVID-19. It absolutely cost the world time that might have been spent planning and reacting to the outbreak. It almost certainly underplayed the impact of the epidemic in Hubei province, including greatly under-counting the number of deaths both from coronavirus and the associated strain on the healthcare system. However, setting the clock on the outbreak back by not just a month, but the months that would be required to have an outbreak “sweeping Wuhan” in November, deserves to be looked on at least as skeptically as any number out of China.

That said, it appears that this report integrated sources on the ground in China with analysis of what was going on in Chinese government communications and even satellite imagery. The people in the National Center for Medical Intelligence certainly thought they were seeing something of significance. Something worth a warning to the White House.

At the end of November, they handed over that warning, indicating that an outbreak was underway of a killer disease, and that this outbreak “could be a cataclysmic event.” And the response to that report was … nothing. Just like it would be to every warning that came after.

The report may or may not show that the COVID-19 outbreak began sooner than we knew. It absolutely shows that the White House was already practiced at ignoring dire warnings.

Universal vote-by-mail is the only way to ensure free and fair elections in November.

Update, May 4: New research from a group of political scientists affirms that mail-in voting in Colorado raised turnout more than 10 points among the most vulnerable demographics, including low-income voters, and benefited Republicans and Democrats equally. It’s powerful support for the argument that mail-in voting should be universally accessible for the November elections. The following piece, making that argument, was originally published on April 8, 2020.

The political climate in the US is tumultuous. The Covid-19 pandemic hangs over everything even as a dozen other issues — an oil crisis, a divided Democratic Party, and a corrupt, impeached president — compete for our scant remaining attention.

Into that muddle, I would like to introduce what I hope is a note of clarity, a fixed point around which all Americans of good faith ought to be able to rally.

To wit: Americans need to have safe, free, and fair federal elections in November.

The date of the election is in law and can’t be changed without an act of Congress. The country is in a fragile, distrustful place already, and a chaotic election viewed by large swathes of the population as illegitimate could tip it over into a full-fledged constitutional crisis or even violence. This is a make-or-break issue for the country.

There is no way to stop Trump from characterizing the election as compromised; he accuses opponents of fraud in all elections, whether he wins or not. He has already tried to cheat in the 2020 election — got impeached for it just a couple of months/centuries ago — and will undoubtedly continue trying, even as he ramps up accusations against Democrats. He assumes Democrats will do the exact same thing: cheat and accuse him of cheating.

His tweet in early April captured his argument succinctly:

And where Trump goes, right-wing state media, led by Fox, dutifully follow. They will back him up with conspiracy theories about voter fraud that at least some large part of the core conservative base will believe.

But what happens around the margins matters. Committed partisans will line up the same way regardless of the fact that voting is not partisan (Utah, a red state, has a 100 percent vote-by-mail system.) But that leaves a large, fuzzy, semi-engaged class of voters whose opinion of the election will be shaped by their personal experience and the signals they receive from trusted sources about the validity of the process.

The best way for Democrats to ensure that November’s elections are viewed as free and fair amid a coronavirus pandemic is to make them so. The best way to make them so, in the time remaining, is to implement universal access to postage-paid mail-in ballots with extended deadlines, serviced by a funded and functional Postal Service. (This is not the only reform needed, but it is the backbone.)

The only way for Democrats to secure that policy is to make it non-negotiable bottom line — a condition of voting through any further stimulus bills. This would be a tough political strategy to follow through on, running counter to national Democrats’ institutional timidity and fears about holding up cash and unemployment for those who really need it. They would be attacked ruthlessly by the right and mau-maued endlessly by the centrist pundits whose opinions they so prize.

But it is the right thing to do on the merits, so they should do it, and defend it without apology. This ought to be a messaging war they can win. If not, what good are they?

It might seem obvious to say that free and fair elections are important in a democracy. But this year, they are by no means assured.

Without reform, elections will be an entirely foreseeable disaster

Experts say social distancing could last six months or more, and even after that, it’s possible that the virus could periodically return in various cities or regions, occasioning new stay-at-home orders. Even South Korea and Singapore, places where the virus response has been considered exemplary, which thought they might be reaching the far end, are now reinstituting social distancing measures. Without a vaccine, there is no certain plan, anywhere in the world, for how to emerge on the other side of this thing.

Compared to those two countries, the US’s response has been a fiasco. The US has more than 12,000 reported deaths, the third-highest count in the world after Italy and Spain. The US is woefully behind in testing and tracking, the two key tools for bringing the virus under control. And there is still no coherent federal plan to secure needed medical supplies, ramp up testing, or bring social distancing to a safe end.

It may simply not be safe to go out and vote in person, among crowds of other people, in November.

Unless changes are made, the elections will thrust a choice upon millions of Americans, especially those from the most vulnerable populations (the elderly, people of color, people with chronic medical conditions): vote and put your safety at risk, or skip voting to stay safe.

No democracy worth the name can allow that to happen.

Republicans have recently become convinced that voting by mail is corrupt and a partisan issue

Voting by mail is not designed to give one party or the other an advantage. “It’s not partisan,” says Amber McReynolds, CEO for the National Vote At Home Institute, “it’s about making sure every voter can vote in a secure, effective, and safe way.” (More on this below.)

Nonetheless, it is clear that someone or some organization on the right has recently been working to convince Republicans otherwise.

When Democrats suggested voting reform for the phase 3 stimulus bill, Trump warned of “levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

In a recent interview discussing Georgia’s upcoming primary election, state House Speaker David Ralston conceded that, if every voter got a mail-in absentee ballot, it “will certainly drive up turnout,” but that would be “extremely devastating to Republicans and conservatives in Georgia.”

Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander contended that forcing voters to risk their lives is preferable to voting by mail. “Around the world we’ve had people in new democracies go to vote when their lives were at risk because the right to vote was so precious,” said the mordant lawmaker. “Most Americans would be very skeptical of significant changes in our ability to go cast a ballot in person, certainly at this point.”

The House’s foremost Trump supplicant, Thomas Massie, even tweeted that “universal vote by mail would be the end of our republic as we know it.”

The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel reports several more examples of Republicans across the country attacking mail-in voting — mainly, it seems, because groups they view as liberal, including Democrats, support it.

When pressed, conservatives will generally say that they oppose mail-in voting because of the potential for fraud. But it’s clear that what they really fear is more people (the wrong people) voting.

Both fears are misplaced.

Voting by mail is not partisan

The US Election Assistance Commission releases a yearly Election Administration and Voting Survey (EAVS). The 2018 edition reports on the state of mail-in voting and early voting:

All states allow for some form of by-mail voting and in-person early voting for at least some segments of their domestic civilian population, although how that happens in practice varies widely. Three states [Colorado, Oregon, and Washington] administer their elections entirely by mail and four states have all-by-mail voting in select local jurisdictions. About one-quarter of states require in-person early voters to provide an excuse. Almost one-third of states have vote centers or allow voters to cast ballots at any polling place in their jurisdiction.

As the 2017 EAVS report showed, the percentage of Americans early, absentee, or mail voting doubled from 24.9 million in 2004 to 57.2 million in 2016, to roughly two out of every five ballots cast.

EAVS

By 2018, the percentage voting by mail reached almost 26 percent, more than one out of every four American voters.

EAVS

The trend is particularly pronounced in the West, where 68 percent of voters voted by mail in 2018.

Analysts expected those numbers to rise in 2020. Since 2018, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Virginia have moved to no-excuse absentee ballots, California has shifted to 100 percent mail-in voting for over half its population, and Hawaii has gone 100 percent. Gerry Langeler, director of communications and research at the National Vote at Home Institute, told me that, in the absence of the virus, they were expecting mail-in voting numbers to hit the mid-70s in the West and around 30 percent nationally in 2020. (Now, with the virus, no one knows for sure.)

That’s almost a third of the population, and not all in blue states. Utah has a 100 percent mail-in voting system. Counties had to opt in; the final county did so last year. (This Washington Monthly story recounts the patient expansion.)

“Being a very red state,” Utah director of elections Justin Lee told Weigel, “we haven’t seen anything that helps one party over another at all.”

Red Nebraska allows any county with 10,000 residents or less to shift to mail-in voting. “Rural parts of the country benefit tremendously from this kind of system,” says McReynolds; it can save rural residents from long drives to polling places. In the 2018 election, statewide voter turnout in Nebraska averaged 58 percent; turnout in the four counties with mail-in voting averaged 71 percent.

In red North Dakota, 31 of 53 counties have shifted to mail-in voting. Even red Texas allows no-excuse access to mail-in absentee ballots ... for voters 65 and older. (Like Medicare, but for accessible voting!)

Another fan: Donald Trump, who voted absentee in Florida a few weeks ago.

Mail-in voting has increased turnout in those red states just as it has in blue states, and there is no evidence that it has increased turnout disproportionately among Democratic voters.

Rather, vote-by-mail primarily seems to increase turnout among low-propensity voters without strong partisan attachments (unaffiliated voters, or UAFs).

It was long conventional wisdom in US politics that UAFs tended to vote Democratic when they showed up, because UAFs tend to be clustered in vulnerable populations. But as long-time political strategist and analyst Celinda Lake says, “that can include people of color in inner cities, but it can also include white people in trailer parks in North Carolina.” It was Trump himself, she says, who overturned the conventional wisdom.

In 2016, increased turnout brought UAFs off the sidelines into his camp, not Clinton’s. The same could happen in 2020. After all, the group among which mail-in voting seems to most increase turnout is voters 65 and older. That is not exactly a stalwart Democratic demographic.

There’s just no evidence that mail-in voting disproportionately benefits Democrats. A February 2020 survey of 12,000 non-voters by the Knight Foundation concluded that, “if they all voted in 2020, non-voters would add an almost equal share of votes to Democratic and Republican candidates.”

Regardless, that shouldn’t be the point. “This intertwining of election policies and procedures with partisan outcomes not helpful to anybody,” says McReynolds. “It’s who votes, not who wins.”

With mail-in voting, more people vote. And they love it. Rozan Mitchell, previously election director of Salt Lake County, told the Monthly: “I didn’t realize how important that was to some people, that they could take that ballot they got in the mail, sit down at the kitchen table, and really study out the issues. I feel like vote-by-mail voters are much more informed than the average voter who would just show up on Election Day.”

No county or state that has adopted mail-in voting, red or blue, wants to go back.

Voting by mail is not corrupt

Trump keeps saying that voting by mail makes cheating easy. That is false. In fact, it makes cheating incredibly difficult. Phil Keisling, the former Oregon secretary of state who introduced that state’s mail-in voting system, explains why:

Mail-based voting systems today are far less risky than most polling place elections, precisely because they distribute ballots (and electoral risk) in such a decentralized way. To have any reasonable chance of success, an organized effort to defraud a mail-based system and its safeguards must involve hundreds (if not thousands) of separate acts, all of them individual felonies, that must both occur and go undetected to have any chance of success.

Contrast that to the risks inherent in polling place elections that increasingly rely on direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting systems and proprietary software systems that both record and tally votes. A single successful software hack potentially could affect thousands of votes. It’s the difference between “retail” fraud and “wholesale” fraud.

Vote-by-mail makes wholesale fraud all but impossible. Voters hand mark paper ballots and receive a stub with a code that allows them to track their ballot as it proceeds through the system and ensure that it is properly tallied. It is a trackable paper system — just what election security experts recommend. (As long as it is done well, of course; design matters.)

Because this system doesn’t take place in a private polling booth, people tend to imagine lurid scenarios whereby abusive husbands, controlling pastors, or other bad actors control or otherwise influence other people’s votes. So it’s important to note is that in well-designed mail-in voting systems, anyone who wants to can, any time before election day, go to a polling place, report that their vote was coerced (or just mistaken), and request a replacement ballot. There are mechanisms in place to record and track any such problems, but they just don’t seem to happen on any appreciable scale. (Here the conservative Heritage Foundation struggles to build a pair of dubiously sourced stories from 20 years ago into a case that mail-in voting causes fraud; you can decide whether it’s convincing.)

Scott Olson/Getty Images

The only serious modern case of election chicanery associated with mail-in voting was perpetrated by, you guessed it, Republicans. As the New York Times reported, Republican nominee Mark Harris contracted with operative L. McCrae Dowless Jr. in a scheme so blatant even his son thought he should step down over it. And it wasn’t voter fraud, it was GOP operatives defrauding voters, mishandling absentee ballots in an election they were supposed to be fairly administering. And they were caught!

This isn’t the place to completely rehash the case for vote-by-mail; I explained it more fully in a post from 2017 and another from 2018. Suffice it to say, mail-in voting systems have a well-established record, are used regularly by tens of millions of Americans without incident, consistently boost turnout, and are enduringly popular where they have been implemented.

And there is simply no other way to ensure everyone access to voting without forcing them into crowded polling places.

Democrats should go to the mat for voting reform

Democrats have limited leverage in Washington, DC, right now, but they do have some.

It’s clear by now that the $2 trillion recovery package that Congress passed last week is simply not going to be enough. Unemployment is skyrocketing to its highest levels ever, GDP is falling faster than it ever has, and the virus hasn’t even arrived in many places in earnest. There will be much more economic pain and dislocation ahead, and demand for Congress to do more. Already talk of a phase 4 stimulus has begun.

Democrats don’t seem to have internalized this, but Republicans need the next stimulus bill more than they do. Trump can spin every day from his press briefings, and he has a massive media machine that will work to shield him from accountability, but hundreds of thousands of deaths and a historic depression are what they are. Political science shows that voters tend to hold the party in power responsible for their circumstances, especially in the run-up to an election. (Though as political scientist Larry Bartels, the source of much of that research, told me, “no one really knows whether past experience is relevant in our current circumstances.”)

If there’s no additional stimulus after phase 3, the suffering will be vast and unrelenting and Republicans are likely to catch the brunt of the blame. They know this. So whether they admit it or not, they need to pass another stimulus bill.

Democrats control the House of Representatives, so no bill passes unless they agree. That gives them leverage.

I wrote a long post about some of the things that ought to be included in such a bill (or bills), focusing on long-term investments to accelerate the shift to clean energy. But if I had to pick one issue that Democrats should absolutely insist on — one package of reforms without which they should refuse to pass a bill — it would be voting reform.

Vote-by-mail is not a silver bullet or the only voting reform needed. Senators Amy Klobuchar and Ron Wyden have introduced a bill with a package of emergency voting reforms. The Defending Democracy Program has a good list of reforms, including curbside voting (for those with no permanent address) and a number of security measures like post-election audits. The Brennan Center for Justice has its own list, with considerable overlap. (Lake also emphasized same-day registration, a reform many states, including Utah, have used to boost turnout.

But most reformers agree that universal mail-in voting is the core of a safe and secure election system. It’s the simplest and most reliable way to ensure that everyone can participate, especially at a time when going to the polls could be dangerous. Democrats should insist on it.

Holding the line will require unusual spine from Democrats

As Axios documents, there are various voting reforms being contemplated in various states in response to the novel coronavirus — and many more states are likely to get in on the action. But the basic security of federal elections cannot be left entirely to state governments.

Republicans claim to oppose the Klobuchar/Wyden bill because of federalism. States are in charge of election law, they say; no “one size fits all” approach will work. But the bill, like the voting reform bill from House Democrats last month, doesn’t dictate specific procedures or staffing, it simply imposes a few baseline conditions that must be met for the election to count as free and fair. One is universal access to mail-in voting.

Regardless, Republicans are likely to fight federal voting reform with everything they have, if only because they instinctively fight everything Democrats want these days. And as usual, they will have a coordinated media machine behind them to attack and browbeat their opponents. They will accuse Democrats of trying to rig elections. They will accuse Democrats of “playing politics,” holding up needed stimulus for unrelated partisan reasons. They will spin the mainstream media into presenting the whole thing as a political squabble rather than a fight over basic voting rights.

All of that is as predictable as the sun rising.

The phase 3 stimulus fight did not offer much reason to hope that Democrats are willing to stand up to that kind of (by now, numbingly familiar) bullying. When they pushed back on the ludicrous corporate giveaway the Republican Senate put forward, conservatives immediately drove “Democrats delay recovery” headlines into the media and Democrats immediately started sweating. They let DC media get to them — and conservatives find it trivially easy to manipulate DC media. (Trump himself has literally mocked reporters for being such suckers for every “new tone.”)

Still, the stakes are too high this time. The more chaos and uncertainty there is as November approaches, the more opportunities there will be for cheating and the less the American public will trust election results.

If the country wants to conduct free and fair elections, it needs to start preparing now. Procedures need to be put in place; people need to be hired; the Postal Service needs to be bulked up. (The Center for Civic Design has a great tool kit for scaling up mail-in voting; the National Vote at Home Institute has detailed plan for taking mail-in voting national by November; the National Task Force on Election Crises has its own set of Covid-19 related suggestions, also featuring universal mail-in voting.)

Democrats need to prepare themselves for the fight of their lives. Any pro-social policy will be wrested from the hands of recalcitrant Republicans in the Senate through political force. It will be a fight, a game of chicken, not the collaborative bipartisan process of Democratic reveries. They will need a thick skin and uncharacteristic unity. But they have some power if they are willing to use it.

If Democrats don’t get a fair shot at competing in November — in a political system already so heavily tilted against democracy and against Democrats — all their dreams of action on climate change, health care, and immigration reform will come to nothing, and the country they were elected to serve could very well come apart at the seams.

They must hold the line on free and fair elections.

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Preliminary data suggests fine particulates can explain variances in Covid-19 death rates and racial disparities.

Air pollution from very small particles kills millions of people around the world each year and has been rising in the Trump era, leading to an annual increase of nearly 10,000 deaths in the US. Some of this has been due to wildfires, but some of it is related to ongoing deregulatory efforts by the Trump administration. President Trump has a number of initiatives in the works — from narrowing the range of science regulators are allowed to consider to making cars less fuel efficient — that are designed to exacerbate the problem. And while a growing body of literature links particulate pollution to a wide range of cognitive impairments, what we know about how air pollution kills people is largely through cardiovascular and respiratory distress.

Since these health problems are also thought to increase the risk that a coronavirus infection will lead to a fatal case of Covid-19, a team of researchers at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health investigated whether places with more air pollution also see a greater lethality of Covid-19 cases.

Their preliminary finding, based on data through April 4, is that yes, air pollution makes Covid-19 much more deadly.

If that finding holds up as more data comes in, it could help us understand why death rates vary so widely among countries, and explain the stark racial disparities in Covid-19 lethality that appear to be emerging in the United States.

Counties with more air pollution see higher Covid-19 fatality rates

Danielle Braun, Francesca Dominici, Rachel Nethery, Ben Sabath, and Xiao Wu used a pretty standard research design looking at long-term air pollution levels as recorded in about 3,000 American counties that cover approximately 98 percent of the population.

They then looked at county-level Covid-19 deaths, adjusting for hospital beds available, smoking and obesity rates, and standard demographic factors. All else being equal, they found that an increase of one microgram of fine particulates per cubic meter is associated with a 15 percent increase in the Covid-19 death rate. That’s about 20 times the statistical association between fine particulate exposure and increases in the normal all-cause mortality rate, reflecting the commonsense view that coming down with Covid-19 greatly elevates the importance of your baseline respiratory and cardiovascular health.

It is well known among people who study air pollution that African American neighborhoods are much more likely to have high levels of contamination — the result of a multifaceted historical process. The link between air pollution and Covid-19 fatality could be a partial explanation for why African Americans seem to be dying at a disproportionate rate. It could also partially explain why things got so bad in Italy, which has about double the concentration of air pollution in the United States.

In policy terms, we cannot cope with the pandemic by going back in time to reduce background levels of air pollution. But we can use the data to spot and help the most vulnerable.

But right now, this is the type of study — based on statistical analysis rather than a controlled experiment — the Trump administration wants to exclude from regulatory analysis. It is also moving to suspend enforcement of clean air rules, allegedly as part of the response to the public health emergency. But this is exactly backwards. As the study’s authors write, their work “underscores the importance of continuing to enforce existing air pollution regulations to protect human health both during and after the Covid-19 crisis.”

Donald Trump told FOX News host Sean Hannity on Tuesday night that the ventilator situation is in “great shape,” citing a report from Hannity’s show.

Said Trump: “In fact, I just saw your show and a couple of other people just reported back to me that everyone is in great shape from the standpoint of ventilators which are very hard because they are expensive and big and they are very high tech. But they are very hard to get and we are building thousands of them, and we have that in good shape.”

But evidence suggests that the ventilator situation in the hardest hit areas is still dire.

Politico reports: “California is loaning 500 ventilators to states like New York where the coronavirus is exacting a deeper toll, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Monday. The act of generosity completes a bi-coastal aid package after both Washington and Oregon lent medical supplies to New York, which is battling the nation’s worst outbreak. Ventilators from California will flow into the Strategic National Stockpile. Oregon announced Saturday it was sending 140 ventilators to New York, while Washington said Sunday it was returning more than 400 of the machines.”

Trump also puffed up his relationship with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has been praised for his response to the crisis. Trump also praised New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, but attacked other governors, calling them “animals” and saying they’ve done a “poor job.”

“Rather than naming them tonight, I won’t bother,” Trump said. “We’ve gotten along very well with de Blasio, I think we’ve gotten along very well with Andrew.”

Of others, he said “it wouldn’t matter what you did, you could give ’em ten times more than they asked, if the newspapers called and wanted a quote, they’d give you a bad quote, because that’s the way they are. They’re political animals.”

Trump also talked about opening up the country: “I’d love to open with a big bang, one beautiful country and just open. We’re looking at two concepts. We’re looking at the concept where you open up sections and we’re also looking at the concept where you open up everything.”

The full interview:

The post Trump Tells Sean Hannity He Knows Ventilator Situation is in ‘Great Shape’ Because Hannity’s Show Just Said So: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday affirmed Texas' right to ban nearly all abortions during the coronavirus pandemic, in what it described as a "drastic and extraordinary" move based on arguments that states can limit constitutional rights during emergencies.

A divided three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out a lower court ruling blocking the ban — one of a series of recent abortion curbs enacted by conservative-led states on the grounds abortion is not a medically necessary procedure. The order builds on a temporary stay of the District Court ruling that the 5th Circuit issued on March 31.

Similar abortion bans have been blocked by courts in Oklahoma, Ohio and Alabama. Ones in other states including Kentucky and Indiana have not been challenged in court.

Precedent "allows the state to restrict, for example, one’s right to peaceably assemble, to publicly worship, to travel, and even to leave one’s home" in a public health or other emergency, wrote Judges Jennifer Walker Elrod and Kyle Duncan, both Republican appointees. "The right to abortion is no exception."

The judges added that a U.S. District Court judge was "wrong" to have "usurped the state’s authority to craft emergency health measures" when he temporarily blocked the ban on March 30 while legal arguments played out.

Judge James Dennis, a Clinton appointee, dissented. “In a time where panic and fear already consume our daily lives, the majority’s opinion inflicts further panic and fear on women in Texas by depriving them, without justification, of their constitutional rights,” he wrote.

The merits of the Texas law will be argued before District Court Judge Lee Yeakel on April 13.

Attorneys representing Planned Parenthood’s Texas affiliate earlier Tuesday said they would ask the Supreme Court this week to intervene in the case, arguing that “patients will suffer irreparable harm” by being forced to travel long distances during the pandemic. The attorneys are now exploring their options.

“This is not the last word — we will take every legal action necessary to fight this abuse of emergency powers," said Nancy Northup, the president of the Center for Reproductive Rights.

Texas has argued that abortions could be suspended to conserve scarce medical equipment for treating coronavirus patients. Abortion providers in the state countered that the most common method early in pregnancy — administering medication abortion — requires no medical gear, and that creating a weeks- or months-long delay would force the patient to seek a surgical abortion or give birth, both of which would consume more medical resources.

“Even in a national emergency, courts need to look at whether state actions are actually furthering safety and public health enough to justify infringing on constitutional rights,” said Molly Duane, a staff attorney with the Center for Reproductive Rights. “People don’t stop needing abortions just because there’s a pandemic and constitutional rights don’t cease to exist just because there’s a pandemic.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said the court upholding the state ban "ensures that hospital beds remain available for coronavirus patients and personal protective equipment reaches the hardworking medical professionals who need it the most during this crisis."

House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff accused President Donald Trump's top intelligence official Tuesday of undermining "critical intelligence functions" by keeping Congress in the dark about organizational changes he's been implementing.

"This effort appears to be proceeding despite the Coronavirus pandemic and amid indications ... of political interference in the production and dissemination of intelligence," Schiff wrote in a four-page letter to acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell.

Schiff emphasized that under Grenell's management, every Senate-appointed official in the DNI's hierarchy had been removed. And Congress, he said, had not been consulted about the intelligence or national security implications of the changes.

"President Trump did not nominate you for confirmation as permanent DNI," Schiff wrote, "and it would be inappropriate for you to pursue any additional leadership, organizational or staffing changes to ODNI during your temporary tenure."

Grenell, however, sniped at Schiff in a tweet after the California Democrat's letter began circulating, saying, “His letter was sent to the press before it was sent to me.”

"These press leaks politicizing the intelligence community must stop,” he added.

A House Intel Committee aide disputed Grenell's claim, emphasizing that the letter was sent to his office at 1:14 p.m. and shared with the press 14 minutes later.

Grenell, who Trump installed as acting DNI last month to replace the previous temporary head Joseph Maguire, was moved to the position after a stint as U.S. ambassador to Germany. Democrats raised concerns at the time that Grenell, who has limited national security experience, was being installed in the high-level intelligence post because of his loyalty to Trump. Schiff is demanding that Grenell produce by April 16 a detailed written explanation of all of his organizational changes.

In his letter, Schiff also sounds the alarm on Trump's abrupt removal of intelligence community watchdog Michael Atkinson, whose handling of a whistleblower report related to Trump's conduct toward Ukraine led the House to impeach him last fall. He is asking Grenell to indicate whether he ever exercised his authority to prevent Atkinson from completing any of his unfinished work before Trump placed him on administrative leave and initiated his firing.

Atkinson had been the last remaining Senate-confirmed official in office of the intelligence director. The last Senate-confirmed DNI, Dan Coats, departed in August. The agency's general counsel, Jason Klitenic, left for a private-sector role earlier this year. And Trump also removed the acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Russell Travers, in recent weeks.

“Well, the cases really didn’t build up for a while.”

On February 23, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro addressed a memo to President Donald Trump warning that as many as 2 million Americans could die from the coronavirus. Trump wants you to believe it was never brought to his attention.

That memo and another similarly dire memo Navarro authored in January were published on Monday by Axios. Asked about them during the latest White House coronavirus task force briefing, Trump played dumb.

“I didn’t see ’em, but I heard some memos talking about pandemic [sic],” Trump said on Tuesday. “I didn’t see ’em, I didn’t look for ’em either. But that was about the same time as I felt that we should do it, that was about the same time that we closed it down.”

It’s true that by February 23, Trump had restricted travel from China. But the virus was already spreading within the United States. And Trump’s public statements belie the revisionist history he’s now offering about how he took the coronavirus seriously from the beginning.

For instance, during a news conference on February 26, Trump said, “when you have 15 [coronavirus cases], and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”

But instead of going down “close to zero,” the United States now has nearly 400,000 cases less than two months out from Trump uttering those words. During Tuesday’s briefing, a reporter pressed him on this point.

“When Peter Navarro did circulate those memos, you were still downplaying the threat of coronavirus in the US,” the reporter said. “You were saying things like, ‘I think it’s a problem that is going to go away within a couple of days —’”

“Which I’m right about,” Trump interjected.

The reporter continued: “You said ‘within a couple of days the cases will be down to zero.’”

Given the current magnitude of coronavirus cases in the US, you might think Trump’s comment about coronavirus going away on its own would be too much even for him to try and defend. You’d be wrong.

“Well, the cases really didn’t build up for a while,” Trump replied.

Trump later claimed that even if he had read the memo, it wouldn’t have made any difference because “I basically did what the memo said.” But he didn’t.

Navarro’s memo recommended significant immediate federal investment in personal protection equipment (PPE) for health care workers. But federal agencies largely held off on such expenditures until mid-March, when the crisis was already spinning out of control. Trump’s line on that point has been that states should’ve done more to help themselves.

If Trump really didn’t learn of Navarro’s memo until media reports about it in recent days, it’s an indictment of his administration — after all, you’d expect a top official’s conclusion that as many as 2 million Americans could die from a deadly disease would be worth bringing to his attention. But if he did see it and not only didn’t act but told the public that the coronavirus would go away “like a miracle” as he did on February 27, then in some ways that’s even worse.

What we do know is that, for whatever reason, Trump was indulging in wishful thinking during a critical period in which more proactive measures could’ve saved lives. And as a result, the goalposts have now moved to a point where Trump is preparing to tout as many as 100,000 American deaths as a win.

The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.

Well, here's something we didn't know was part of the $2 trillion federal relief package: a provision that makes it possible for some of that relief money to be directed toward religious institutions, according to NPR.

That's right, churches and other faith-based organizations have been designated within the legislation as "businesses," making them eligible to receive a portion of the $350 billion dedicated to helping small businesses weather tough economic times. Those are taxpayer dollars, folks, going to help faith-based organizations pay their pastors and utility bills.

"Faith-based organizations are eligible to receive SBA loans regardless of whether they provide secular social services," the SBA said in a statement. "No otherwise eligible organization will be disqualified from receiving a loan because of the religious nature, religious identity, or religious speech of the organization."

This seems a pretty clear-cut flouting of the Constitution. The First Amendment reads, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." 

"The government cannot directly fund inherently religious activities," Alison Gill, legal and policy vice president of American Atheists, told NPR. "It can't spend government tax dollars on prayer, on promoting religion [or] proselytization. That directly contradicts the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. This is the most drastic attack on church-state separation we have ever seen."

But religious advocates say the Supreme Court has been increasingly willing to look the other way on direct funding of religious entities. "In the last 15 years, the Court has moved increasingly in a permissive direction," says John Inazu, who specializes in religion and law at Washington University in St. Louis' School of Law.

The SBA appears to be headed in that direction too, saying that some of its own regulations "impermissibly exclude" religious organizations. 

"Because those regulations bar the participation of a class of potential recipients based solely on their religious status, SBA will decline to enforce these subsections and will propose amendments to conform those regulations to the Constitution," the SBA said. 

Wow. That seems like a pretty major policy change.

Republican speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly Robin Vos was on site at a drive-thru voting station today. He was dressed for the apocalypse, but clearly knew he needed to get out in front of a camera or two since he’s been a driving force of voter suppression and is an owner in this farce of an election day.

Hundreds of thousands of voters trying to vote absentee in order to both protect themselves from the COVID-19 pandemic and help protect the public in general will be disenfranchised during this statewide election. Speaker Vos has fought hard to make this so, realizing along with many of his fellow GOP that Gov. Scott Walker’s fate in 2018 will be shared by more Wisconsin Republicans if citizens are allowed to vote en mass. 

But one thing craven bottom dwellers like Vos lack is any sense of shame. So, when asked about what he would say to the hundreds of thousands of voters being disenfranchised by this undemocratic position, Speaker Vos—dressed in a full medical protective gear—said without irony: “You are incredibly safe to go out.” Vos looks like he’s gearing up for surgery, or as an extra on ER.

You’ll notice how Vos says you can get yourself an emailed ballot so “you can fill it out and send it back in.”  That would be something, if it were true. Which it’s not.

But, remember, to be safe, just go on down and find the people wearing the outbreak hazmat outfits, and cast your vote—unless they’ve messed up your name on the roll, then you can hang around for a long time while they decide whether or not to let you vote.

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Verizon is canceling many home-Internet installations and repairs during the pandemic, and some customers are being given appointment dates in November when they try to schedule an installation.

The November appointment dates appear to be placeholders that will eventually be replaced by earlier dates. But Verizon is sending mixed messages to customers about when appointments will actually happen and about whether technicians are allowed to enter their homes.

As of yesterday, a Verizon FAQ said, "At this time, our technicians will not be able to enter your home or business to install new services or to do repair work," according to an Internet Archive capture of the page. The FAQ also said that customers who aren't eligible for self-installs "may proceed with placing an order for a technician-required installation" and "will receive notification to select an installation date when we resume operations."

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Donald Trump has realized something: the term “inspector general” (IG) is just fancy phrasing for “someone who is sure to catch him doing something unethical, illegal, or both, and then say something about it.” The whole idea of an independent watchdog—who’s supposed to police the federal government with something called integrity—is anathema to Trump. 

Thus Trump's ouster Tuesday of the Pentagon's inspector general, who coincidentally had also been charged with leading a new oversight panel for the $2 trillion in taxpayer funding allocated for pandemic relief. It's just the latest installment of Trump carrying out a system-wide cleansing of the very people who are tasked with rooting out corruption and making sure government fulfills its mandate to the people. Trump doesn’t want any functional entity looking over his shoulder as he directs where that giant pool of money goes. 

Acting Pentagon inspector general Glenn Fine was set to oversee the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, the group that had been formed to monitor the massive influx of coronavirus relief funds. Now Trump has tapped EPA inspector general Sean O'Donnell to replace Fine as top watchdog at the Pentagon in addition to continuing his work at the EPA. In other words, O'Donnell will be dividing his time between two massive agencies. 

It appears Fine was a particular threat to Trump because he built a reputation for exercising aggressive independence while serving as the Justice Department's IG and investigating the FBI's post-9/11 surveillance programs. Fine will now return to his previous post as principal deputy inspector general of the Pentagon.

But when it comes to IGs, Trump's been on a tear lately. On Friday, he axed Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community IG who committed the cardinal sin of informing Congress about the Ukraine-related whistleblower complaint. House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff said Tuesday that his panel is now investigating Atkinson's ouster.

Trump also spent Tuesday morning on the war path against the Health and Human Services IG who had the audacity to issue a report Monday on the "unprecedented" challenges hospitals are facing in securing supplies to battle the novel coronavirus. Christi Grimm, the principal deputy inspector general whose name is attached to that report, is surely trying to save lives by detailing the deadly inefficiencies of the federal government's response. So instead of asking the federal government for an assessment of its own work, Grimm went straight to the hospitals to ascertain whether they were actually getting the resources they needed. Big mistake. Trump dismissed the report as "Another Fake Dossier!”

So much for trying to save lives—Trump is offended. And surely he's searching for a way to muzzle Grimm, because retribution is among his chief priorities during a global pandemic.

Last year, before the COVID-19 pandemic created quarantines, surging unemployment and packed hospitals, I interviewed Dr. Anthony Fauci. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is now essentially omnipresent as part of the White House coronavirus task force. But in the spring of 2019, with COVID-19 nowhere on the horizon, he still had the time to speak with me for over an hour about vaccines. Recently, I was plumbing through my archives and found an excerpt of the interview that stopped me in my tracks.

At the time, with cases of measles on the rise, the anti-vaccination movement was one of the biggest ongoing public health stories. We spent most of the interview talking about vaccine safety for a video series I was making for The Washington Post. But at one point in our chat, I asked him, “What’s the thing that keeps you up at night?”

I don’t know what I assumed Fauci would say, but his response couldn’t have been more prescient.

“Well, I always say something semi-facetious when people ask me that. We worry about so many things when we’re awake that we’re so tired that nothing keeps us up at night. But notwithstanding that, the thing I’m most concerned about as an infectious disease physician and as a public health person is the emergence of a new virus that the body doesn’t have any background experience with, that is very transmissible, highly transmissible from person to person, and has a high degree of morbidity and mortality.

Now what I’ve essentially done is paint the picture of a pandemic influenza. Now it doesn’t have to be influenza. It could be something like SARS. SARS was really quite scary. Thankfully, it kind of burned itself out by good public health measures. But the thing that worries most of us in the field of public health is a respiratory illness that can spread even before someone is so sick that you want to keep them in bed. And that’s really the difference.”

At the time, I didn’t find this quote particularly earth-shattering. It seemed like a reasonable concern, but not newsworthy. After all, Americans have lived through multiple pandemic scares — SARS, MERS, swine flu — and we largely dodged each bullet. This part of the interview was off-topic for the series I was making, and I left it on the cutting room floor.

Reading the transcript almost a year later, I am struck by how clearly Fauci described this current pandemic. Our nation’s top public health officials have known that this outbreak, or something like it, was a serious possibility, and they haven’t been keeping this information to themselves. But it’s hard to find the collective will to prepare for — and stop — a theoretical threat. COVID-19 may be unprecedented, but it wasn’t unpredictable.

Kayleigh McEnany has a storied record of defending some of Trump’s most egregious excesses.

As someone who has gone on cable news a lot to share pro-Trump takes that get attention for the wrong reasons, Kayleigh McEnany, formerly a spokesperson for the Trump 2020 campaign, should be a natural as President Trump’s next press secretary.

News that McEnany is to become Trump’s fourth press secretary was first reported by CNN on Tuesday. She will replace Stephanie Grisham, who finishes her nine-month stint in the role without ever having held a press briefing but with many Fox News appearances under her belt.

That didn’t happen by accident: Trump reportedly wants his press secretaries to primarily serve as cable news surrogates for him. But the timing of McEnany joining the White House has brought recent comments she’s made about the coronavirus under renewed criticism.

“We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here”

Like many other people in the orbit of the president, including Trump himself, McEnany spent much of the period between January and March downplaying the coronavirus — including as late as March 11, the same day the NBA suspended play after a player tested positive for the virus, becoming one of more than 1,200 people who had tested positive in the US at that point.

At that time, Trump was still planning to hold political rallies even though National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Dr. Anthony Fauci had already recommended large gatherings not be held, saying during congressional testimony that “anything that has large crowds is something that would give a risk to spread.”

During an interview on Fox Business in which host Stuart Varney grilled McEnany about the wisdom of proceeding with rallies despite Fauci’s advice, McEnany suggested that the president — who once claimed windmills cause cancer — knew better than one of the nation’s top public health experts.

“The president is the best authority on this issue,” she said.

But even more egregious in hindsight were comments McEnany made on Trish Regan’s Fox Business show on February 25. (Regan lost her show two weeks later following a rant where she dismissed the growing pandemic as a “coronavirus impeachment scam.”)

“We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here,” McEnany said, adding, “Isn’t it refreshing when contrasting [the Trump administration’s public health efforts] with the awful presidency of President Obama.”

The clip of McEnany saying “we will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here” was recently posted to Twitter by CNN editor Andrew Kaczynski. McEnany responded with a mix of deflection, Trump praise, and attacks on the press — a combination the president seems to be a big fan of.

When McEnany made those comments on February 25, the US had fewer than 20 non-cruise-ship-related coronavirus cases. Sadly, in hindsight, they stand out as egregiously inaccurate. Since then, hundreds of thousands of Americans have been infected, and more than 12,200 have died.

Trump expects his press secretaries to be blindly loyal. Getting things wrong seems to be no problem as long as it advances Trump’s interests.

When she starts at the White House, McEnany will be far from the only Trump administration official who has gone viral due to inaccurate statements about the coronavirus.

As I detailed last week, 10 million unemployment claims ago, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross claimed the coronavirus “will help to accelerate the return of jobs to North America.” In late February, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said the coronavirus was “contained” and urged investors to “buy the dip” just ahead of the Dow dropping precipitously. On March 6, White House senior counselor Kellyanne Conway indignantly told reporters at the White House that the coronavirus was being “contained.”

But McEnany surpasses all three officials in her longstanding commitment to boosting Trump’s message of the day. Her history of shilling for Trump goes all the way to 2012, when she amplified the racist conspiracy theories about then-President Obama’s birth certificate that Trump rode to political prominence.

In October 2016, McEnany also went to extreme lengths to defend Trump following the release of the Access Hollywood hot mic recording in which he can be heard bragging about groping women, arguing that Trump’s comment about how “when you’re a star, they let you do it” is actually evidence he sought consent before touching them. She’s also defended everything from Trump’s false claim about Obama founding ISIS to his refusal to divest from his business interests upon taking office.

These defenses of the president have been widely ridiculed outside the MAGA echo chamber. But as Sean Spicer taught us on the very first day of Trump’s presidency when he trumpeted blatant lies about the size of Trump’s inaugural crowd size, the job of being Trump’s press secretary is all about being willing to say whatever the boss thinks is necessary to win the moment. And in that respect, McEnany has already demonstrated she’s up to the task.

The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.

Donald Trump’s “acting” Navy Secretary Thomas Modly has now resigned, according to reporting by The Wall Street Journal, amid growing calls for his removal by lawmakers and retired military officials.

Calls for Modly’s resignation mounted in the wake of Modly’s firing of USS Theodore Roosevelt Capt. Brett Crozier, and a subsequent address to the ship’s crew in which Modly demeaned and insulted Crozier while justifying his own decision. Modly issued an apology for those remarks afterwards.

Capt. Crozier was removed by Modly for authoring a four-page letter urgently requesting quarantine quarters for his coronavirus-infected crew, a letter that was obtained by the press but which ran contrary to Trump administration efforts to downplay the impact and severity of the emerging pandemic. Modly had stated in remarks to an interviewer that he had removed Crozier to avoid Trump’s own intervention; Modly’s predecessor, Richard Spencer, was removed amid the scandal of Trump reaching down through the chain of command to pardon Navy war criminal Edward Gallagher.

Enlarge / Sure, the locker's locked for now. The companion app and the user's personal data, on the other hand... (credit: Tapplock)

A padlock—whether it uses a combination, a key, or "smart" tech—has exactly one job: to keep your stuff safe so other people can't get it. Tapplock, Inc., based in Canada, produces such a product. The company's locks unlock with a fingerprint or an app connected by Bluetooth to your phone. Unfortunately, the Federal Trade Commission said, the locks are full of both digital and physical vulnerabilities that leave users' stuff, and data, at risk.

The FTC's complaint (PDF) against Tapplock, released Monday, basically alleges that the company misrepresented itself, because it marketed its products as secure and tested when they were neither. A product—any product—simply being kind of crappy doesn't necessarily fall under the FTC's purview. Saying untrue things about your product in your advertisement or privacy policy, however, will make the commission very unhappy with you indeed.

"We allege that Tapplock promised that its Internet-connected locks were secure, but in fact the company failed to even test if that claim was true," Andrew Smith, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a written statement. "Tech companies should remember the basics—when you promise security, you need to deliver security."

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