Good morning, all!
Former director of national intelligence Dan Coats writes for the New York Times that Congress should form a bipartisan commission to oversee the 2020 elections.
Our democracy’s enemies, foreign and domestic, want us to concede in advance that our voting systems are faulty or fraudulent; that sinister conspiracies have distorted the political will of the people; that our public discourse has been perverted by the news media and social networks riddled with prejudice, lies and ill will; that judicial institutions, law enforcement and even national security have been twisted, misused and misdirected to create anxiety and conflict, not justice and social peace.
If those are the results of this tumultuous election year, we are lost, no matter which candidate wins. No American, and certainly no American leader, should want such an outcome. Total destruction and sowing salt in the earth of American democracy is a catastrophe well beyond simple defeat and a poison for generations. An electoral victory on these terms would be no victory at all. The judgment of history, reflecting on the death of enlightened democracy, would be harsh.
The most urgent task American leaders face is to ensure that the election’s results are accepted as legitimate. Electoral legitimacy is the essential linchpin of our entire political culture. We should see the challenge clearly in advance and take immediate action to respond.
I mean, that sounds all well and good but with all due respect, Mr. Coats, we know full well who stands in the way of that...and it is not Speaker Pelosi. Go talk to Turtle McConnell and see how that works for you.
And for us.
Helaine Olen of the Washington Post writes about the incredible disappearing and boring federal regulation disappearing beneath the cover of chaos and drama.
A report published last week by the advocacy group Public Citizen found that, since the country began to shut down in mid-March, the Trump administration has done away with more than 30 government regulations and is in the process of unraveling 20 more. Those regulations have two things in common: First, they’ve almost absolutely nothing to do with the covid-19 pandemic. And, second, they are, in almost all cases, desired by business interests or otherwise sought out by Trump’s most conservative supporters.
So even as the Trump administration struggled to help states acquire emergency protective safety equipment for hospital workers, it did manage to finalize rules that allow truckers to spend more time on the road, despite safety concerns. And even as wildfires — worsened by climate change — burn out of control on the West Coast, Trump is continuing to roll back and weaken environmental regulations such as limits on mercury emissions from coal plants and mileage and emissions standards for cars and trucks. He also wants to restrict the environmental review process for federal infrastructure projects and weaken regulations restricting the flow of water from shower heads and dishwashers to save water. Trump rants about that latter rule a lot. “You take a shower, the water doesn’t come out,” he ridiculously claimed this past summer.
Daniel Cox and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux of FiveThirtyEight thinks that Democrats should do more to reach out to the religiously unaffiliated.
Right now, voters with no religious affiliation look like they might back Biden in record numbers. According to a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center in early August, 72 percent of nonreligious voters — a group that includes people who identify as atheists, agnostics and nothing in particular — are planning to support Biden. That’s 4 percentage points higher than the 68 percent who supported Hillary Clinton in 2016. And that’s a big deal, because despite being frequently overlooked, nonreligious people make up a sizable part of the electorate. An analysis of validated voters by Pew found that religiously unaffiliated voters accounted for one-quarter of the electorate in 2016, and 30 percent in 2018.
The unaffiliated are a key demographic for Democratic candidates in particular. More than one-third of the people who voted for Clinton in 2016 were religiously unaffiliated, making them just as electorally important for Democrats as white evangelical Protestants are for Republicans. Yet despite constantly hearing about the importance of white evangelical voters in an election cycle, Democratic politicians have been slow to embrace the growing number of nonreligious people who vote for them. Why?
In the past, the challenges of organizing the religiously unaffiliated have made it easy to understand why Democrats haven’t made a real effort to appeal to them more. As most don’t regularly gather like a church congregation, religiously unaffiliated Americans can be difficult to reach. A lack of institutional leadership also means there aren’t many prominent people or groups showing up to nudge politicians to pay attention to their issues. And despite rising tolerance for atheists and nonreligious people in American culture, overt appeals to the nonreligious still run the risk of turning off the majority of voters who are people of faith.
I have some thoughts about that last sentence but I’ll save them for the comments, if it comes up.
Elaine Godfrey of The Atlantic has a profile of progressive activist Sean McElwee.
Mcelwee is tall—6 foot 2—with pale skin and the wardrobe of your typical hipster Millennial, including trendy glasses and snapback hats. Over the past six months, he’s sent me dozens of texts and emails airily predicting the outcomes of primary races, touting the accuracy of his polling, and dropping f-bombs and movie references like a good-natured, if somewhat self-satisfied, frat bro. “Weak tea,” he texted me simply, when I asked him to respond to some criticism. “Yeah, I’m good at politics,” he replied when I mentioned his accurate prediction in 2018 that Representative Eliot Engel of New York would be unseated in 2020. With this tendency toward smug irreverence, McElwee might seem like a good fit for the so-called Dirtbag Left, the contingent of pundits who have attracted fans by advocating for left-wing ideas using dark humor and dank memes. But that’s never really been his crowd.
McElwee has the zeal of a convert because he is one. After college, he started his career as an intern at the libertarian Reason Foundation and the Fox Business Network, but quickly became disillusioned with conservative politics. In 2014, he took a data-analyst job at Demos, and four years later, started Data for Progress as a side project, drawing on publicly available data to evaluate and explain the popularity of progressive policies. His firm partnered with YouGov to do polling on reparations, universal basic income, the Green New Deal, abolishing ICE—the gamut. They also tested progressive arguments for and Republican arguments against the policies, to show more nuanced results.
“The Venn diagram of people with a pretty radical analysis [of politics] who are devoted to operational electoral politics is pretty small,” Chris Hayes, the progressive commentator and MSNBC host, told me. McElwee “is in that space.”
I have some thoughts on Godfrey’s piece as well; somewhat along the lines of the FiveThirtyEight piece, actually.
This morning, Patricia Murphy posts her last column for Roll Call (she’s moving to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution) about Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
But the damage had been done. And I’m not talking about the damage to Pelosi, because everyone in Washington understands the speaker does not truly care what Jim Cramer or anyone calls her at the end of the day. The damage, really, was to Cramer himself, who suddenly sounded like a New York know-nothing. Because even among people who disagree mightily with Pelosi’s politics, you’ll never, ever hear “crazy” used as a word to describe her and the inch-by-inch work she does behind the scenes to extend her party’s power every day.
Instead, the words you’ll more often hear are “methodical,” “strategic” and “effective.” And those are the Republicans talking.
Among the Republicans with whom Pelosi has struck up an especially effective relationship is Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. The speaker and the secretary have negotiated government funding deals, the United States-Mexico-Canada trade agreement and every one of the COVID-19 relief packages to date — even though Pelosi and the president have not spoken in nearly a year.
Here it comes.
Caleb Ecarma of Vanity Fair writes about the Trumpian cancellation of Matt Drudge.
Matt Drudge has earned his place on the president’s hit list. He was a key player in helping the president win the 2016 Republican primary, and thus the presidency, and visited the White House early on—Trump once called him a “great gentleman” and treated his headlines like gospel. Why the fall from grace? The answer is fairly straightforward: In Trump’s simple mind, those who exclusively praise him are good, and those who don’t are bad, no matter their shared history. Drudge was one of the earliest major media figures to champion then candidate Trump in 2015 and acted as a de facto publicist on behalf of the campaign, according to former Trump campaign adviser Sam Nunberg, a claim he made in Matthew Lysiak’s biography The Drudge Revolution. However, last summer, cracks began to show in their symbiotic relationship as the Drudge Report’s top headline blared, “No New Wall At All!” The aggregation site, which regularly drives hundreds of millions of page views every month, hasn’t let up on the president since, following its initial shot with a jab over the expansion of big government policies “On Trump Watch”; a line on how Trump’s “trash talk” has hurt his favorability among suburban women; and a warning from farmers that the president's trade wars are “ruining our markets.”
Helen Branswell of STATnews chronicles the rapidly deteriorating reputation of the Centers of Disease Control. (And yesterday’s fiasco with Redfield and Trump didn’t help matters, to say the least.
Now, 2 1/2 years into his tenure, the storied agency finds itself in new and treacherous waters, its reputation stained, and the morale of its staff at a historic low, current and former CDC insiders told STAT. Many say Redfield is not doing enough to safeguard the reputation of the CDC and the integrity of its work, and that he is failing to successfully fend off political interference that is eroding Americans’ trust in the organization.
“I find it concerning that the CDC director has not been outspoken when there have been instances of clear political interference in the interpretation of science,” said Richard Besser, a former acting CDC director and now president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
Former CDC staffers, a number of whom exchange worried emails bemoaning the state of the agency, are deeply alarmed but wary of speaking out. One former official said current staff are in a quandary over what to do. “Even if you got a dozen of them to resign at the same time, it’s a one-day story,” said the former official.
Others were willing to speak publicly.
“I think [Redfield]’s not showing the kind of leadership in defense of the institution and in defense of science that I would hope to see,” said Mark Rosenberg, who was the first director of CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.
Anthony Flint of the Boston Globe writes that with the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a renaissance, of sorts, in… signage
If the coronavirus pandemic has changed virtually all aspects of everyday life, add to that one more: the way we navigate our physical surroundings on a daily basis, now guided by a plethora of signs, advisories, and directional instructions.
Stickers on the floor indicate the appropriate social distance between customers, choreographing where to stand, like marks for actors on a theater stage. Entering a building requires advanced understanding and constant vigilance once inside, limiting any thoughts of meandering. This new adornment of buildings and parks and public space is oddly analog, pointing the way with largely printed material — an old-school respite from the phone and computer screens that are so central to the rest of the day.
The Angry Grammarian of the Philadelphia Inquirer writes an interesting column on word usage of the presidential candidates (this column has a few surprises in it!).
...As anyone whose high school English papers were marked up in red pen with the words run-on can tell you, longer sentences aren’t necessarily smarter.
And just because you use bigger words doesn’t prove you know what those words mean. Merriam-Webster tracks when lookups of certain words increase. Earlier this month, Biden’s use of foment (“[Trump] can’t stop the violence because for years he’s fomented it”) and obsequious (“What is he so afraid of Vladimir Putin of? … It’s almost obsequious”) caused lookups of both words to spike. Biden is typically thought of as a plainspoken orator, yet when he uses $10 words like foment and obsequious, people expand their vocabularies.
On the other hand, when lookups of Trump’s words spike, it’s often because he’s misused them. Some of Merriam-Webster’s Trump-induced jumps over the last year have included per capita (“And you know, when you say per capita, there’s many per capitas,” he remarked about COVID testing); sarcastic (in regard to his comments about using bleach to kill coronavirus, “I was asking a question sarcastically to reporters like you just to see what would happen”); lynch (on his impeachment: “All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here — a lynching”); and coup (“what is taking place is not an impeachment, it is a COUP”).
This last piece from the South China Morning Post team of Eduardo Baptista, Linda Lew, Simone McCarthy, and and Peter Langan is a looooooong but rather interesting piece on...virus labs, specifically labs that handle highly communicable viruses such s Ebola and COVID-19.
The word “virus” is usually associated with “disease”, or pathogens such as HIV, Ebola, Zika and influenza, according to the 2017 report “The Good That Viruses Do”, published in the Annual Review of Virology. “However, as we are now finding out, not all viruses are detrimental to human health,” write the authors Mario Mietzsch and Mavis Agbandje-McKenna, virologists at the University of Florida.
Good viruses are not what brought Kurth into virology. As a 21-year-old biology undergraduate, he backpacked through East Africa and became infected with parasitic lungworms. That saw him hospitalised for three months. The episode hooked Kurth on the study of parasites, and later viruses, and eventually of BSL-4 pathogens such as Ebola.
Public health officials and virologists have warned for decades about the growing risk from outbreaks of unknown and harmful viruses. Some point to the doubling of the global human population to 7.8 billion since the 1960s as one reason for that escalating threat.
“We are densely packed, we’re exploiting pristine environments, we are creating and driving the ecologic pressure that is creating the risks that are driving the risk at the animal/human species barrier,” said Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, at a press briefing on August 10. “We live on a planet in which we’re adding a billion people a decade.”
Everyone have a good morning!