Good morning, everyone.
When I began this pundit round-up, I was ready to say some opening words blasting...not so much The Damn Fool...but the mainstream media for all of the gameplaying yesterday but you know what?
Stephen Taylor, writing for the Des Moines Register, captured the essence of what so many Americans feel, including myself.
This year sure has been a different one to say the least. In the first part of the year, things were okay because my Kansas City Chiefs were winning a Super Bowl championship, and a new type of virus was on the other side of the world.
But then schools closed and sports were shut down. Masks became a new accessory. School boards, teachers, administrators, and students face many challenges. Things have changed.
How would you answer the question “How are you doing today?” You'd say, "Okay," if you did not want to elaborate or list the things that are not okay.
I would probably give a short answer to the question how I am doing: “I am tired.”
That tiredness is not entirely due to a physical nature either. The last seven months have created a mental fatigue for me which unfortunately has no end in sight. We all have dealt with this virus in many ways. For me it has been pretty much a self-quarantine. And for those times when I venture out the mask is a constant companion. Attending various events is now based on location, amount of separation and even mask mandates.
Were I editing Mr. Taylor’s essay, I might have substituted “weary” for “tired.” Maybe not.
So yesterday, a Pulitzer-winning reporter for the New York Times trafficked in Russian propaganda published at another newspaper. Another media outfit complained that The Damn Fool answered more questions than Joe Biden (never mind the number of lies contained in those answers). NBC News decided that they want to give The Damn Fool competing media time with Joe Biden’s in spite of the fact that the scheduled second presidential debate was canceled because of the consequence of The Damn Fools own actions and lunacy.
I don’t want four more years of whatever the fu*k has passed for national governance of this country; the overwhelming majority of election polls indicate that tens of millions feel the same. The record-breaking lines at early voting sites all over the country indicate the same.
I don’t have any patience and tolerance for such obvious media games and strategies designed to prop this Damn Fool (the MSM’s cash cow) up.
But I’m not impatient or intolerant so much as I can say, with Mr. Stephen Taylor: “I am tired.”
Let’s go read more pundits.
Elie Mystal of The Nation on the horror show that a future Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett promises to be.
It’s not unusual for a judicial nominee to be evasive about how they would rule in an upcoming case about a “hot button” culture war issue. But Barrett was evasive about things that should never be up for debate. Senator Cory Booker asked her whether a president should commit to the peaceful transfer of power—Barrett wouldn’t answer. Senator Diane Feinstein asked her if a president could unilaterally delay a general election—Barrett wouldn’t answer. Senator Amy Klobuchar asked her if voter intimidation was illegal—Barrett wouldn’t answer. And when Klobuchar followed up with the actual federal statute prohibiting voter intimidation, Barrett still wouldn’t say that voter intimidation is illegal.
These were softball questions. It takes nothing for a nominee to support the basic concept of the rule of law. It takes nothing for a judge to say, “That statute, which you just read to me, is good law, Senator.” The fact that Barrett wouldn’t do so is probably why Trump is so eager to put her on the Supreme Court before the current election. Even among the set of craven bigots and torture apologists Trump has nominated to the federal courts, finding someone who won’t demand the peaceful transfer of power is rare. I can see why Trump likes Barrett. She’s exactly the kind of person he needs to help him steal the election, and her confirmation should be opposed on the basis of those non-answers alone.
But Barrett’s election dodges weren’t the only disqualifying parts of her performance. Her non-answers on other issues were equally extreme—and terrifying. She simply did a slightly better job muddying the waters when refusing to talk about her other positions. When not being coy about whether democracy should exist, Barrett attempted a number of legal sleights of hand to hide her true beliefs.
Zalman Rothschild writes for the Guardian that even with the limited data set that he worked with, judges do decide cases based on political preferences.
In reality, there is no dearth of data measuring the extent to which judges decide cases based on political preferences. Consider the recent spate of cases concerning religious institutions which challenged coronavirus-related lockdown orders as violations of religious freedom. Freedom of religion and the future supreme court are of particular importance: the survival of many recent progressive initiatives - including the Affordable Care Act’s mandate requiring employers to provide health insurance that covers contraception, and laws prohibiting discriminatory treatment of LGBTQ people, to list just two – will rest in no small measure on courts’ interpretation and application of the “free exercise” religion clause of the first amendment of the constitution. Findings from a survey I conducted suggest that the outcome in some subsets of religious freedom cases track political affiliation to a staggering degree.
I surveyed every merits-based federal court decision pertaining to a free exercise challenge to a stay-at-home order. The findings are staggering: 0% of Democrat-appointed judges have sided with a religious institution; the sizeable majority (64%) of Republican-appointed judges have sided with a religious institution; and 0% of Trump-appointed judges have ruled against religious institutions. In other words, all Trump-appointed judges have sided with religious institutions and all Democrat-appointed judges have sided with the state or city government. To be sure, my sample set – 81 judicial decisions – is not enormous. But the ability to predict to such a high degree the outcome of cases implicating the same free exercise question (in remarkably similar contexts) is illuminating. It suggests that Covid-19 has produced not only a partisan divide in the courts, but also that freedom of religion itself has become dramatically politicized.
Sheri Berman reviews, for Foreign Policy magazine, just how conservative dominance of the courts came to be.
Conservative domination of the courts is the culmination of a multipronged political strategy that began decades ago, when conservatives were in a situation similar to that facing liberals today.
The Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, from 1953 to 1969, was the most liberal in history, issuing decisions that reshaped U.S. society and revolutionized constitutional interpretation. The Warren court dramatically expanded civil and voting rights with decisions such as Brown v. Board of Education, Gomillion v. Lightfoot, and Loving v. Virginia; remade the relationship between church and state and between state and federal governments; transformed criminal law; affirmed a constitutionally protected right of privacy, laying the groundwork for the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, and more. Many of these decisions were taken, moreover, over the “strong and bitter objections of a majority of the American people.”
From the perspective of conservatives, the larger political context only made things worse. Despite conservative hopes that the New Deal would be rolled back after the war and Roosevelt’s death, much of it remained intact. Even President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, did not attack it head on, leading conservatives to charge him with being “a quisling in thrall to the Democrats” and a “socialist.” And during much of the 1960s Democrats controlled the presidency—enabling them to enact further transformative liberal reforms including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Great Society—as well as dominating state-level governments, holding governorships and legislative majorities in 40 percent of them, while the Republicans controlled fewer than 20 percent.
Mark Murray of NBC News reports that Biden has an 11-point lead in the newly released NBC/Wall Street Journal Poll.
WASHINGTON — Less than three weeks before Election Day, Joe Biden maintains a double-digit national lead over President Donald Trump, with 6 in 10 voters saying that the country is on the wrong track and that it is worse off than it was four years ago.
What's more, a majority of voters say they have major concerns that Trump will divide the country rather than unite it — the largest concern for either presidential candidate.
Those are the results of a new national
NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll — conducted after Trump returned to the White House from
his hospitalization for the coronavirus — which finds Biden ahead of Trump by 11 points among registered voters, 53 percent to 42 percent.
Nancy LeTourneau of
Washington Monthly says the Democratic prospects for redistricting look much brighter for 2020 as opposed to 2010.
With the election days away, the focus is on number one. The committee is targeting local elections in 13 states: Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Virginia and endorsed candidates in all of them, including three gubernatorial races and 17 state legislative chambers.
Breaking up Republican trifectas is a primary goal of these efforts, especially in states like Florida and Texas that are likely to gain congressional seats based on recent population estimates. According to Abby Springs from Progress Texas—a non-profit media organization promoting progressive messages and action—it would only take nine seats to give Democrats control of the Texas House. She identifies 22 opportunities.
Data guru Sam Wang has designed a model at Princeton Election Consortium that identifies the races where voters have the most leverage to prevent partisan gerrymandering in Texas, Minnesota, Kansas, Florida, and North Carolina. He points out that a few hundred voters mobilized in the right districts could make all the difference.
E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post writes about the future possibilities for Joe Biden, the radical moderate.
Understanding how the pieces of Biden’s strategy interact is the best way to square two seemingly contradictory facts: That Biden is running as a moderate, and that he has put forward the most progressive platform a Democrat has offered in years.
Biden is indeed a moderate to his bones and prides himself on working with Republicans. He knows that President Trump’s irresponsible and divisive presidency is encouraging relatively conservative voters to break ranks and back a Democrat — often, for the first time in their lives.
At the same time, he and his advisers recognize that rising economic inequality, the decline in well-paying manufacturing jobs, the weakening of unions and growing regional disparities require robust government intervention to create a more just form of capitalism. They also see how economic and racial injustices aggravate each other.
What allows Biden to be both a moderate and an economic reformer is that it is no longer radical to acknowledge the high costs of inequality, and Biden’s objectives are thoroughly mainstream.
But remember what Berman says: None of this can even be achieved without winning political power first.
Charles Piller of Science magazine has reporting that suggests that Dr. Deborah Birx is, in large part, behind the undermining of the Centers for Disease Control in the middle of a pandemic.
When Birx, a physician with a background in HIV/AIDS research, was named coordinator of the task force in February, she was widely praised as a tough, indefatigable manager and a voice of data-driven reason. But some of her actions have undermined the effectiveness of the world’s preeminent public health agency, according to a Science investigation. Interviews with nine current CDC employees, several of them senior agency leaders, and 20 former agency leaders and public health experts—as well as a review of more than 100 official emails, memos, and other documents—suggest Birx’s hospital data takeover fits a pattern in which she opposed CDC guidance, sometimes promoting President Donald Trump’s policies or views against scientific consensus.
The agency’s loss of control over hospital data is emblematic of its decline in nine short months. Since the pandemic began, CDC has foundered (see sidebar, below). It has committed unforced errors, such as shipping out faulty coronavirus tests, and has been squelched or ignored amid continual political interference.
CDC employees with whom Science spoke—who requested anonymity because they fear retaliation—along with other public health leaders, say Birx’s actions, abetted by a chaotic White House command structure and weak leadership from CDC Director Robert Redfield, have contributed to what amounts to an existential crisis for the agency. And her disrespect for CDC has sent morale plummeting, senior officials say. During a May task force meeting, The Washington Post reported, Birx said: “There is nothing from the CDC that I can trust.”
Erin Banco, Aswain Suebsaeng, and Sam Stein of Daily Beast report that Drs. Fauci, Birx, and Robert Redfield are now trying the best that they can.
But as they’ve slipped away from the limelight, the trio and others have been more adamant in holding their ground on policy disputes. And for those who have been in the bureaucratic trenches at the intersection of politics and health policy, it’s been something of a pleasant surprise to see the absence of acquiescence.
“I have a lot of respect for Deborah Birx and I think she does have an understanding of what needs to be done. I think she does do her best to go out and explain those messages. Because the science is not that complicated anymore,” said Andy Slavitt, Obama’s former director of the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services. “I suspect she feels like it’s important for her to be there and she views herself as a public-health warrior. But I think there is a limited amount that they can do without the support of their boss. So they got to make do with the person who sits in the Oval Office. I think she’s facing those very consequences but she’s doing what maybe the most productive thing she can.”
Fewer people on the task force have been more openly defiant of Trump in recent days than Fauci. The revered infectious-disease expert has not shied away from issuing dire warnings about the current course the disease is taking. But he’s also been far more willing to dispense with the type of diplomatic niceties that marked his public utterances about the president and the White House during the pandemic’s early months.
Jenice Armstrong of the Philadelphia Inquirer writes on the disgusting racist incident that happened to Gisele Barreto-Fetterman, the wife of Pennsylvania Lt. Governor John Fetterman.
Here’s the thing: I’ve never met Barreto Fetterman. I’ve mostly only seen her in photos with Lt. Gov. John Fetterman.
But I am sure about this: She was singled out because she’s a woman of color.
It started on Sunday after Barreto Fetterman slipped away from her home in Braddock without her security detail to buy fresh kiwi on sale at a nearby Aldi’s store. As she waited in line to make her purchase, an older woman approached and began saying things like “There’s that N-word that Fetterman married. You don’t belong here."
She followed Barreto Fetterman to her car. Then, the vile verbal assailant leaned in the direction of Barreto Fetterman’s car window and said, “You’re a n—.” Barreto Fetterman captured the last seconds of the ugly encounter on video.
Barreto Fetterman, who was born in Brazil and was undocumented before becoming an American citizen in 2009, was understandably shaken. Anyone would have been.
Everyone have a good morning!