Good morning, all!.
I’m subbing again this morning for Greg. He should be back on Wednesday.
Toluse Olorunnipa and Ashley Parker of the Washington Post on what The Damn Fool might possibly have been drinking last weekend at his Bedminster Club.
The president who pitched himself to voters as the consummate negotiator and ultimate dealmaker has repeatedly found his strategies flummoxed by the complexities and pressures of Washington lawmaking. In response, he has frequently relied on showmanship and pageantry to try to turn negotiating failures into victories.
“We’re going to be signing some bills in a little while that are going to be very important, and will take care of, pretty much, this entire situation,” Trump said Saturday from his club’s grand ballroom, surrounded by presidential seals, American flags and news cameras.
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Michael Steel, a Republican operative who worked for former House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), said Trump was effectively “giving up on the legislative process” and limiting his own ability to achieve more lasting influence.
“If you want to get big enduring substantial change, you have to go through Congress, as torturous as that process may be,” he said, adding: “I worry he’s drinking his own Kool-Aid, and that’s the problem.”
Charlotte Klein at Vanity Fair pretty much sums it up.
Yet much of what Trump announced on Saturday appears untenable, legally fraught, or limited in its impact on workers. “Even conservative groups have warned that suspending payroll tax collections is unlikely to translate into more money for workers,” writes the New York Times’ Jim Tankersley. “An executive action seeking to essentially create a new unemployment benefit out of thin air will almost certainly be challenged in court. And as Mr. Trump’s own aides concede, the orders will not provide any aid to small businesses, state and local governments or low- and middle-income workers.”
“If job growth slows further, and millions of unemployed Americans struggle to make ends meet, Tankersley added, “he will need to make the case for why the symbolism of acting alone won out over the farther-reaching effects of cutting a deal.”
Trump said that if reelected in November, he would extend the payroll tax deferral, “make permanent cuts to the payroll tax,” which funds Social Security and Medicare benefits, and find a way to “terminate” what is owed. That probably won’t happen—or shouldn’t, as it would undermine power vested in Congress to make laws about taxes and spending. “Major changes to the tax code fall entirely to Congress, so Trump alone cannot waive Americans’ tax debts or enact permanent changes to tax law,” the
Post notes.
And, as Gwen Guthrie already established back in 1986, “nothing from nothing leaves nothing.” (Bonus points if y’all know the song I’m referring to!)
Michael A. Cohen/Boston Globe
For Donald Trump’s reelection effort it’s “I got nothing.”
I’m not exaggerating. Trump’s campaign website features not one policy objective or proposal for a second term. Instead, it offers a litany of promises that the president has allegedly kept, including the boast that under Trump’s watch “U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth has soared” and “the unemployment rate has fallen to its lowest point in 50 years.”
I’m guessing the website hasn’t been updated in a few months.
When asked in June by Trump whisperer Sean Hannity about his second-term plans, the president drew a blank.
At least back in 2016, Trump had a platform, however awful: building a wall, banning Muslims from entering the country, and renegotiating trade deals. This time he’s not even wasting his time with (mostly) empty promises.
And it’s not just Trump who has no ideas. It’s his whole party.
In the midst of the worst public health and economic crisis since the 1930s, the GOP is largely sitting this one out. Senate Republicans, who have spent the past year and a half padding the federal bench with conservative judges and doing little else, haven’t even managed to bring the latest proposed round of coronavirus relief to a vote. Indeed, the Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell isn’t participating in the talks between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and White House officials.
So...The Damn Fool is about to lose his job, it looks like but...even then, the danger is not over.
And...he’s right...you KNOW he’s right...but still…
There were a few polls that dropped this weekend including a CBS News Battleground Tracker Poll that showed Biden +6 in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
And so Biden leads both Pennsylvania and Wisconsin today by six points in each. He's cutting into Mr. Trump's margins with the White, non-college voters who've been a key part of the Trump base. He's leading among independents — a group that went for Mr. Trump last time — and even peeling off a few Republicans who think things in the U.S. aren't going well.
I did see one poll result in FiveThirtyEight’s listing of Latest Polls that raised both eyebrows.
Biden...+10 in TEXAS?
I had to go and find that poll...and I think that I found it. And while that +10 is, more than likely, a national poll and not a poll simply of Texas, the Research Co. poll (B- grade at 538) is still quite interesting.
Only two criteria that I can see: Ethnic Origin and TV newswatching.
Here the other data set that shows the other demographic data. I wish that I knew how to read polls a little better so...for those of you that do know how to read polls...have at it!
(I just noticed, right before this pundit round-up went to post, that more battleground polls have dropped this morning. In this set of polls, we have Biden +9 in Pennsylvania, +6 in Wisconsin, and +4 in Michigan...there may or may not be some repetition there but, certainly, the Michigan poll is new).
No one should be taking anything for granted when it comes for the 2020 election.
Yale University professor Jason Stanley writes for El País in English on what could make The Damn Fool an American fascist (but...he’s not there quite yet!)
Open racism is a characteristic feature of fascist political movements and parties. President Trump’s politics have always involved racism. Since 2015, he has demonized immigrants, and responded harshly to Black political protest. Trump has represented the drive to remove monuments to slavery’s defenders, including military bases named after them, as anti-American. Trump has made a conscious choice to wage his presidential campaign on fighting Black Lives Matter, a movement for racial justice. Most worrisomely, he has represented its supporters as terrorists.
And yet Trump is hardly the first president to appeal to racism in his political campaign. Connecting Black Americans to crime is a tactic so frequent in American presidential campaigns that not appealing to racial demagoguery must be considered the exception. Indeed, the current Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, has a very public history of thinly veiled racial demagoguery on crime. An American politician running a racist presidential campaign is hardly grounds for concern about shocking breaches of long-standing political norms. Racism is the norm in American presidential campaigns. To understand the source of current concern, one must dig deeper than racism.
A characteristic feature of fascist leaders is the way they alter reality to give their propaganda some semblance of truth. As Hannah Arendt writes, “[i]t was always a too little noted hallmark of fascist propaganda that it was not satisfied with lying but deliberately proposed to transform its lies into reality.” When Trump decided to send federal forces into Portland, the protests there and elsewhere had started to taper off – sending forces into Portland, and threatening to send them elsewhere, was a provocation intended to cause the very disorder that the forces were supposed to be there to prevent. This use of federal forces, to provoke disorder, has little precedent in US history.
I read that less as a slight on Joe Biden and more as a criticism of American politics on the right and left. Appealing to white voters through dog-whistling is, after all, pretty much an American tradition on both sides of the political aisle.
Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer on Joe Biden’s “Good Ol’ Boys” club and the search for a woman vice president (a search which should be mercifully be coming to an end at any moment).
At its worst, Team Biden looks like a country for old men. OK, to be more accurate: Old white men. Biden’s flexibility on ideas — his shift from 1970s Anti-Busing Guy to hero of gay marriage in the 2010s — is balanced by his rigid loyalty to friendships forged in times very different from our current moment. It’s gob-smacking that the search for a woman who will finally break the glass ceiling of holding national office is led by the 76-year-old lobbyist and ex-Connecticut senator Chris Dodd. Biden may have complete faith in his old friend, but Dodd should have lost the confidence of anyone who read about his 20th-century exploits with the late Sen. Ted Kennedy, which publicized the regrettable term “waitress sandwich” and was arguably criminal.
The involvement of old-timers like Dodd may explain the irony of a search for a woman vice president infected by structural sexism. How else to explain the painful trope that the seeming front-runner, California Sen. Kamala Harris, appears too “ambitious” (because now we want unambitious people a heartbeat from the presidency?). Why did Philly’s own Ed Rendell — a 76-year-old white man ... I’m sensing a trend — tell CNN that Harris “can rub people the wrong way?” Does the Biden Amtrak club car of septuagenarian advisers even know how bad this sounds?
My main takeaway from all of this VP drama: I suspect that “No Drama Obama” is a lot harder in practice than President Obama and his staff made it look.
For various reasons, I don’t surf over to read The New Republic very often but I loved Casey Taylor’s profile of the dangers facing yet another American institution during this Administration: The United States Postal Service.
...At the risk of oversimplifying a complex issue, that’s what is at stake. Besides its consistent reliability and storied history, the USPS is one of the last institutions that provide a gateway to a comfortable living for those with limited options. There are no degree or diploma requirements. Nearly 100,000 employees are veterans, and the ones I knew were comfortable in the work because it resembled the structure and management hierarchies they experienced in the military.
While the postal service may survive privatization in name, hundreds of thousands will lose the reliability of knowing that they have a career—an actual pathway to something like middle-class comfort—instead of just another temporary job that can be taken from under them at the whims of the profiteers. Its destruction would mean the end of a connected country—those gifts and packages to families in the rural corners of America, letters to incarcerated loved ones, and money orders for those without easy access to a bank. We’re going to kill one of the last good public institutions so that private enterprise can deliver a few more packages for less money while the rest of the country suffers, losing a massive piece of our essential sense of community.
Natalya Ortolano of STATnews with a reminder that it is hurricane season and plans for evacuating nursing homes in event of a weather emergency have become enormously complicated in the age of COVID-19.
This year, evacuations may be really, really, really awful — facilities will have to account for Covid-19 during a hurricane evacuation. And that means a host of new issues to consider, according to facility managers and state officials.
Nursing homes are already short on personal protective equipment for workers and residents — an issue that will only worsen during an evacuation where it will be nearly impossible to adhere to social distancing guidelines while moving and evacuating patients. Some nursing homes have started to move their Covid-19-positive residents into a single facility, leaving caregivers concerned about where so many residents will go — especially considering hospitals in the southeastern area like Mississippi and Louisiana are reaching capacity.
Temporary shelters, too — like the Houston Astrodome, used to shelter evacuees after Hurricane Harvey, or the Houston Convention Center, where many rode out Katrina — may also be a no-go during Covid-19, since large congregations indoors clearly escalate the risk of a major Covid-19 outbreak.
Derisme, the health worker union vice president, said he’s especially concerned about how and whether nursing homes will take into account caregivers’ own health risks. Staffers with serious illnesses or other underlying health conditions, for example, might need to be given priority for tasks that limit their exposure.
Jessica Glenza of the Guardian reports that America’s hospitals could be facing shortages of personal protective gear and other vital hospital equipment for years to come.
Officials said logistical challenges continue seven months after the coronavirus reached the United States, as the flu season approaches and as some state emergency management agencies prepare for a fall surge in Covid-19 cases.
Although disarray is not as widespread as it was this spring, hospitals said rolling shortages of supplies range from specialized beds to disposable isolation gowns to thermometers.
“A few weeks ago, we were having a very difficult time getting the sanitary wipes. You just couldn’t get them,” said Dr Bernard Klein, chief executive of Providence Holy Cross medical center in Mission Hills near Los Angeles. “We actually had to manufacture our own.”
This same dynamic has played out across a number of critical supplies in his hospital. First masks, then isolation gowns, and now a specialized bed that allows nurses to turn Covid-19 patients on their bellies – equipment that helps workers with what can otherwise be a six-person job.
Glen Carey of Bloomberg (through MSN) on what Middle East policy generally may look like under a Biden Administration with a special focus on the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
The former vice president has described the kingdom as a “pariah” and threatened to stop the arms sales that make Saudi Arabia the U.S.’s top purchaser of weapons. He’s also signaled more willingness to engage with Iran, the kingdom’s archrival, and he’d probably work for a negotiated two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while essentially abandoning the Trump administration’s widely-panned efforts.
All that means if Trump loses in November, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman “will need to decide if he is willing to roll out the red carpet for Biden and offer compromises on issues that the U.S. cares about either domestically or regionally,” said Ayham Kamel, the head of Middle East and North Africa at the Eurasia Group consultancy. “Saudi-U.S. cooperation will depend on efforts by both sides to define a new equilibrium in their relationship.”
A Saudi official who asked not to be identified said that the kingdom has good relations with Trump, as was the case with his predecessors, and will continue to work closely with future presidents to strengthen relations between the two nations. Saudi Arabia’s relations have been a constant over the past 75 years under both Republican and Democratic administrations, the official said.
Finally this morning, a thought from the conclusion of an essay by Professor Donald Earl Collins at NBC News on the joy and pain (“sunshine and rain...”) of being Black in America.
Quite simply, there is no American joy, no American culture, without Black joy, and no Black joy without Black pain from and resistance to American racism and exploitation.
Through 150 years of Jim Crow and Black migration, the civil rights movement, the last half-century of the elusion and illusion of the American Dream and now Black Lives Matter, the joy of Blackness has blessed the U.S. and the world many times over — with blues, ragtime and jazz; bebop and hip-hop; swing and rap; country and rock; and enough dance moves to keep Prince and Michael Jackson occupied in the afterlife for eternity.
But it has blessed us also with the subtext of subversion: of resistance as joy, and of the joy in resisting through Black existence. No amount of white cultural appropriation could destroy, or even truly appropriate, the joy inherent to or infused in Black cultural production.
Everyone have a good morning!
