This has been an amazing, interesting week. Senator Kamala Harris, the first black/south asian woman ever, was chosen as Vice Presidential running mate to former VP Joe Biden. In the meanwhile Trump besides throwing racist jabs at both Harris and Biden seems to be hellbent on a plan to sabotage the post office in order to steal the election.
The first joint appearance by Biden and Harris was a serious sober moment with both of the delivering solid addresses which strongly reminded the nation of the calm competence we used to have in the Oval Office, contrasting greatly with the jittery beedy-eyed conspiratorial rantings of it’s current occupant.
Their presentation was a refreshing reminder of how a President is supposed to sound. How a President is supposed to act.
It’s just too bad we don’t have anything close to that kind of President now.
For her part, Senator Harris spent most of her statement blasting the disastrous bumbling of the CoronaVirus pandemic as perpetrated by Trump.
“This is a moment of real consequence for America. Everything we care about — our economy, our health, our children, the kind of country we live in — is all on the line,” she said.
Trump’s mismanagement of the pandemic, Harris said, had plunged the country into an economic crisis.
“And we’re experiencing a moral reckoning with racism and systemic injustice that has brought a new coalition of conscience to the streets of our country demanding change,” she continued.
“America is crying out for leadership,” she said. “Yet we have a president who cares more about himself than the people who elected him.”
Harris addition to the ticket appears to be helping the Biden campaign in key demographics.
The poll, conducted August 11-12, asked: “Are you more or less likely to consider voting for Biden with Kamala Harris as his running mate?” And among “all Americans,” 56% responded that it made “no difference” — while 22% said that it made them “more likely” to vote for Biden and 19% said that it made them “less likely” to vote for the former vice president.
Axios/SurveyMonkey broke the poll down by specific demographics, from “white men and women” to “black women.” Among black women — a crucial part of the Democratic base — 48% said that it made “no difference,” while 43% said that it made them “more likely” to vote for Biden and only 7% said that it made them “less likely” to vote for him.
The poll found that 59% of “white men and women” said that Biden’s Harris pick made “no difference,” while 23% said that it made them “less likely” to vote for Biden and 16% said that it made them “more likely” to vote for him.
Axios/SurveyMonkey divided Democrats into “moderate/conservative” and “liberal/very liberal” categories, and both were generally supportive of having Harris on the Democratic presidential ticket: 48% of “moderate/conservative” Democrats said that it made “no difference,” while 47% said they would be “more likely” to vote for Biden because of Harris and only 5% said they would be “less likely” to. And 56% of “liberal” or “very liberal” Democrats said it made “no difference,” while 40% went with “more likely” and only 4% went with “less likely.”
So, in other words, picking Harris as his running mate doesn’t appear to be hurting Biden with either the centrist Barack Obama/Bill Clinton/Kyrsten Sinema wing of the Democratic Party or the progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez/Pramila Jayapal wing of the Democratic Party.
So that’s a good thing. Generally though, Biden is well ahead of Trump in the polls.
“Look at the live interview polls (and all surveys, for that matter) taken this summer that asked about race for the presidency and the race for Congress. Counting each pollster only once in the average, former Vice President Joe Biden leads Trump by 10 points in these polls,” wrote Enten. “Democratic House candidates are ahead of the Republicans by 8 points on the generic congressional ballot in these same surveys.”
This, Enten argued, could be a big reason why the internal polls released by House Republicans in the past few weeks have generally omitted the presidential preferences of the respondents — a sign that these numbers could be even worse than the candidates’, which the GOP doesn’t want public.
“The fact that Biden’s lead is wider than the House Democrats’ edge is unusual. If it holds, it would be ahistoric,” wrote Enten. “You’d expect that Trump would be doing better than Republicans running in the House. The simple reason is that more Democrats (i.e. the majority party) have an incumbency advantage in the House, while Trump enjoys that same advantage for the presidency.”
All of this may be why Trump seems to be hell bent on sabotaging the Post Office to prevent mail-in ballots from being counted during a pandemic. He thinks the only way he can win is to suppress the vote.
President of the American Postal Workers Union Mark Dimondstein on Thursday called it “truly shameful” that President Donald Trump would “hold the post office hostage,” amid the coronavirus pandemic in an attempt to suppress and discourage Americans from voting.
“The cat’s out of the bag,” Dimondstein told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, referring to revelations earlier this week that — by his own admission — Trump said blocking a Democratic proposal for $25 billion of much-needed additional funding to the U.S. Postal Service would prevent widespread mail-in voting.
“Now, they need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said during a Fox Business interview Thursday morning, adding that by withholding the requested funding, mail-in voting would be crippled because the current mail service is “not equipped” to handle the increase in mailed ballots. Democratic lawmakers have pushed back in recent weeks of cost-cutting policy changes that some say have delayed election mail.
Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden called the move, “Pure Trump,” adding that his opponent “doesn’t want an election.”
Interfering with the mail is, of course, a federal crime under 18 U.S. Code § 1701.
Whoever knowingly and willfully obstructs or retards the passage of the mail, or any carrier or conveyance carrying the mail, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both.
And the Postal Services Inspector General has taken up interest in the case. Ironically, it's likely that this strategy will massively backfire on Trump.
The most likely scenario is that the backlash forces Trump to back down. If not, this is the kind of thing that might eventually penetrate the media bubble Trump’s die-hard supporters inhabit. When important mail stops showing up in a timely fashion like it used to, it’s hard not to notice.
That isn’t to suggest that this will finally be the thing that craters Trump’s support. We’re too polarized, and most of Trump’s supporters have been exposed to years of right-wing propaganda about Democrats supposedly committing widespread fraud to steal elections. But it doesn’t have to. A decline of just a couple of percentage points in Trump’s share of the vote might be the difference between a modest defeat and a crushing loss that reverberates up and down the ballot.
Of course, Trump has two other gambits in play which are intended to bring down Biden approval numbers. He has Bill Barr and John Durham’s investigation into the Russia investigation which he hopes will finally prove his “campaign was spied on” at long last.
“We are gonna proceed with this investigation and not put it on hold right now during election season,” Barr said Wednesday on an interview on “The Buck Sexton Show.”
“We’re all aware of the calendar and we’re not going to do anything for the purposes of affecting an election, but we are trying to get some things accomplished before the election,” he said.
He declined to answer Sexton’s question about if the probe is in its final stages, but promised that “people will be held accountable” if prosecutor John Durham finds that any criminal laws were violated.
[...]
Witnesses who sat for interviews with Durham told CNN that they sensed investigators were under pressure to deliver findings before the election.
Since we are less than 90 days to the election, the normal DOJ rules are that they should do nothing that could potentially impact the vote. Comey was faced with this test, and chose to fail it because of internal FBI pressures. Bill Barr is planning on failing this test for partisan political reasons. Former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith has agreed this week to plead guilty on one count of making a false statement in the Carter Page case.
A former FBI lawyer will plead guilty to making a false statement in the first criminal case arising from U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation into the probe of ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign.
The case against Kevin Clinesmith is likely to be cheered by President Donald Trump and his supporters as they look to the Durham investigation to lift Trump’s wobbly reelection prospects and to expose what they see as wrongdoing as the FBI opened an investigation into whether the Trump campaign was coordinating with the Kremlin to sway the outcome of the 2016 election.
[...]
The Durham investigation, which is also examining the intelligence community’s assessment about Russian election interference, has caused deep concern among Democrats, who view it as a politically charged exercise meant to relitigate an already closed investigation and fear criminal charges or public reports issued so close to
the 2020 election could be timed to affect November’s vote.
Yeah, ya think? Clinesmith is being charged for changing a statement that Page had been an informant for the CIA to claim that he was “Not” a former CIA informant while compiling rationales for the fourth iteration of Page’s FISA warrant. Three previous warrants had already been approved, and it is true that in years previous when Page had been targeted for recruitment by Russia’s SVR intelligence unit he had worked in coordination with the FBI and CIA, it’s also true that he told the Russians they were being targeted by the FBI. so they consequently fled the country and only one of them was subsequently arrested and prosecuted.
It’s likely Clinesmith might get as much time as the Russian spy Evgeny Buryakov did for trying to recruit Page.
There’s also the point that the first warrant for Page wasn’t approved until after he had been dismissed by the Trump campaign — so Trump’s campaign wasn’t “spied on”. And since Russia had previously tried to recruit Page, it made sense to surveil him to see if they were trying to do it again, it’s just that Russia lost interest in him once he was no longer part of the Trump campaign anymore.
Trump’s second gambit is his attack on Hunter and Joe Biden which has been fostered by Russia-friendly Ukrainians and fed directly into the U.S. Senate by three different channels of Russia disinformation. Sen. Ron Johnson has specifically said he think “his probe will help Trump win.”
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said this week that his investigation into Vice President Joe Biden “would certainly help Donald Trump win reelection,” as the probe continues to face down widespread allegations that it is laundering Russian disinformation.
“The more that we expose of the corruption of the transition process between Obama and Trump, the more that we expose of the corruption of those agencies, I would think it would certainly help Donald Trump win reelection and would certainly be pretty good evidence about not voting for Vice President Biden,” Johnson said in an appearance on a Minneapolis radio station.
Johnson has been publicizing long-discredited allegations surrounding Biden’s role in U.S. foreign policy towards Ukraine, and has also been probing alleged anti-Trump political maneuvering in the Obama-era intelligence community.
Andrew Bates, a Biden campaign spokesman, told TPM in a statement that “Johnson has directly participated in a foreign attack on our democracy.”
“This damning acknowledgment totally exposes that Ron Johnson’s disgraceful conduct is the definition of malfeasance,” Bates added. “It is beyond time for him to end this embarrassing and deeply unethical charade once and for all — as a number of his Senate Republican colleagues have long wanted.”
So far this probe has been meeting resistance by the FBI and also by the CIA who refused to provide a briefing to the Senate intended to provide dirt on Biden.
Both of these options are rather desperate and pathetic, not likely to produce a genuine bombshell that blows up the Biden/Harris campaign, not when it’s been revealed that Trump filed fraudulent reports on the value of his Ireland and Scotland golf courses with the US office of Government Ethics, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t going to stop trying.
They’re willing to stop at nothing.
Here are the remaining events for this week:
August 8th —
- Trump claims he’s “the Last Person” Russia wants in office. [Not according to your own DNI, the House, the Senate, the CIA, the NSA, the DOJ and the FBI.] Trump complains loudly about a long list of nonsense about ballot harvesting, vote by mail and Dems trying to steal the 2020 election, then he runs away when he’s asked why he keeps lying about Veterans Choice which was signed by Obama in 2014 and he signs a flurry of executive orders for Covid. One provides student loan relief, another provides $300 of unemployment if the state pays another $100, a third would defer the payroll tax, and the last allows HHS to “study” the issue of evictions.
- Der Speigel described Trump as a “first-degree mass murderer” and the world’s most successful “bioterrorist.”
- Joe Arpaio loses his bid to become Sheriff again: “Last time I run for office.” [Let’s all hope so.]
- Harley Davidson, sponsor of the Stugis rally, doesn’t send any of its employees due to Covid-19. [Good decision.]
- GOP donors are abandoning Trump for fear his re-election is doomed.
- Intel officials altered their finding that Russia supports Trump in 2020 to avoid his anger.
August 9th —
August 10th —
August 11th —
August 12th —
August 13th —
- Weekly jobless claims drop below 1 Million for the first time in 5 months.
- Office of Special Counsel says Trump can give his RNC speech from the WH. [But of course, they do.]
- Trump hurls new insults at Harris calling her a “mad woman.” He also admits that he’s blocking funds from the USPS to hamper mail-in voting. He announces that the UAE and Israel have established full diplomatic ties. He gives Barr an ultimatum “you could be the greatest AG, or just some average guy.” He claims Biden would lock people up in their basements for months on end. [If it kills the pandemic, do it.] He gets asked by a WH correspondent if he “apologies for all the lies he’s stated” but he couldn’t come up with a lie to justify his 20,000 lies.
- Desantis compares re-opening schools in his Covid-ravaged state to the mission to kill Osama bin Laden. [They are similar, in that people are going to end up dead.] Then he gets roasted on twitter.
- SCOTUS allows Rhode Island to move forward with efforts to make voting easier during the pandemic.
- Biden camp states that Trump sabotaging of the USPS is a “desperate man’s assault on democracy.”
- Barr states that the Durham probe is “trying to get some things out before the election." [Even though DOJ protocol is not to release or do anything that could affect an election during its last 90 days.]
- A James Woods fantasy caused Qanon Republican candidate Marjorie Taylor Green to declare “Democrats are “wiping out men.”
- Maddow reports shocking details of Trump's sabotage of the USPS: “It gets worse by the hour.”
- The forward for Michael Cohen’s book is released and it contains allegations of deviant sex including “golden showers in a Vegas club, to tax fraud, to deals with corrupt officials from the former Soviet Union, to catch and kill conspiracies, to silencing Trump’s clandestine lovers, I wasn’t just a witness to the president’s rise—I was an active and eager participant,”
- Pompeo threatens Russia with “enormous price to pay” for Taliban bounties while Trump still ignores and denies them.
- Paul Waldman writes for the WaPo that Trump is trying to “murder a national treasure” by undermining the Post office.
- CNN’s April Ryan says that Trump calls Kamala Harris “nasty" because he's afraid of being confronted by strong black women.
- Rick Wilson: “Only conspiracy crazed boomer rubes will support the GOP now.”
- SCOTUS is quietly using a “shadow docket” to tackles rules about voting and Covid-19.
August 14th —
August 15th —
