Good morning, everyone!
Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post, citing a recent Marist poll, explains that Trump’s explicit racist appeals have now fallen on some deaf ears.
Whatever appeal Trump is making to Whites by embracing the Confederacy and otherwise flaunting his white-supremacist views (low-income housing will invade the suburbs!) has backfired. Between his appeals to bigotry and his incompetent handling of the coronavirus, he has ceded college-educated voters to the Democrats, lost White male college graduates almost entirely and made his problem with female voters worse. He has not gotten a boost among less-educated Whites; to the contrary, he has lost support from these voters, too.
Aside from Trump’s continuing slide (his deficit overall in the NPR/PBS/Marist poll went from eight to 11 points), the evidence of his negative impact on fellow Republicans is piling up. He is dragging the House down with him. Cook Political Report has shifted “ratings in 15 more districts, including 11 moves towards Democrats and four towards Republicans.” The Democrats are now favored to expand their lead. Now the Democrats are favored to win back the Senate. Both House and Senate Republicans may be damaged by Trump’s baseless attacks against voting by mail and his efforts to hobble the U.S. Postal Service. Democrats are organizing absentee-ballot mail drives and encouraging voters to return ballots early to avoid delays; Republicans insist on going to vote in person, which they might have difficulty doing (either because of their own health concerns or because of Election Day lines).
For now. We’ll see what happens down the road.
There is a ton of coverage of The Damn Fool’s attempts to sabotage the United States Postal Service on the wreck list and Greg provided plenty of coverage of those attempts in yesterday’s APR, so I won’t add much to that this morning.
I’ve been looking for a reason to drop Kyle Whitmire of AL.com into one of my pundit round-ups; I’ve enjoyed reading him for a couple of months now but, as a rule, his columns are very locally-focused and not quite as timely as I like. This time and this column on the Post Office seems as good a time and topic as any.
What’s criminal about this, aside from trying to fix an election, is just how many people depend on the postal service — for utility bills, credit card payments and prescription drugs, not to mention contactless shopping in a pandemic. The president has spent the last four years undermining federal institutions few people care about, like the EPA or the Department of Energy, but now he’s messing with one that, polling shows, most people genuinely like.
All because Trump sees killing vote-by-mail as his last-ditch reelection strategy.
Although Alabama does not have a pure vote-by-mail system, nor does it allow for no-excuse absentee voting, Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill has said fears of coronavirus will be accepted as a legitimate excuse to vote absentee.
Eric Levitz/New York
The most alarming aspect of the administration’s assault on mail-voting may be centered within the Postal Service itself — emphasis on may. That Donald Trump has obstructed funding for the USPS out of desire to restrict mail-in voting is now an uncontested fact. The motivations behind Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s recent reforms to his agency are more ambiguous. DeJoy, a former logistics executive and big-dollar Trump donor, took the reins of the Postal Service in May. Since then, he has restructured the agency in a manner that centralizes power around himself, and implemented a series of changes purportedly aimed at increasing the agency’s efficiency. Among these reforms was a prohibition on overtime pay, limitations on the use of mail sorting machines, and a requirement that letter carriers “leave mail behind when necessary to avoid extra trips or late delivery on routes,” according to the Washington Post. These policies have reportedly produced days-long delays in mail delivery in many parts of the country, as the elimination of overtime has reduced the agency’s man hours. Postal workers and their unions have warned that DeJoy’s rules are a recipe for disaster this fall, when many epidemiologists expect COVID cases to tick up — potentially limiting the USPS’s labor force, just as the presidential election raises the stakes of timely mail delivery to nothing less than America’s democratic integrity.
Speaking of the expected uptick or “second wave” of COVID-19 this coming fall, Kelly Servik writes for Science that the Southern Hemisphere, now experiencing winter time, has largely been spared flu outbreaks, thus, it is making any predictions for the coming winter here more difficult.
The prospect of a flu season during the coronavirus pandemic is chilling to health experts. Hospitals and clinics already under strain dread a pileup of new respiratory infections, including influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), another seasonal pathogen that can cause serious illness in young children and the elderly. In the United States, where some areas already face long waits for COVID-19 test results, the delays could grow as flu symptoms boost demand. “The need to try to rule out SARS-CoV-2 will be intense,” says Marc Lipsitch of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Because the Southern Hemisphere has largely been spared, researchers have little evidence about how COVID-19 might influence the course of a flu outbreak. One big concern is coinfection—people getting COVID-19 and flu at once, says Ian Barr, deputy director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza in Melbourne, Australia. “Two or three viruses infecting you are normally worse than one,” he says.
But the consequences of coinfections with SARS-CoV-2 haven’t been thoroughly studied. In April, a team at Stanford University found that among 116 people in Northern California who tested positive for the coronavirus in March, 24 also tested positive for at least one other respiratory pathogen, most often rhinoviruses and enteroviruses that cause cold symptoms, as well as RSV. Only one of the patients had influenza, although there likely wasn’t much flu circulating so late in the U.S. season, says Stanford pathologist Benjamin Pinsky, a co-author. The study didn’t find a difference in outcomes between COVID-19 patients with and without other infections. But it was too small to draw broad conclusions.
Michael A. Cohen of the Boston Globe takes note of the unusual trajectory of Joe Biden’s candidacy.
It’s precisely because Biden is seen as a pragmatic moderate — and not a controversial liberal — that he was able to capture the nomination.
But since then, Biden has moved increasingly leftward. He is pushing for $4 billion in higher taxes; has rolled out a $2 trillion plan to fight climate change; has a $700 billion plan to invest in US manufacturing; and has even hinted that he would support an effort in the Senate to scrap the filibuster. He endorsed Elizabeth Warren’s bankruptcy reform plan and worked out a compact with Sanders to back a host of progressive policy priorities. If Biden follows through on his plans he would be, as Sanders has argued, one of the most progressive presidents in American history. Last week he recognized the changing face of the Democratic Party by selecting Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate — the first Black woman to appear on a major-party presidential ticket. Rather than expect Democrats to get in line behind him, Biden has spent the past several months getting himself in sync with them.
Biden’s untraditional approach is a reflection of the nation’s political polarization. Just as Republicans have moved increasingly rightward, Democrats have moved left. While once there were two distinct wings in each party — one moderate and one more ideological — the parties increasingly cater to their activist wings. Even Senate Democrats running in red states this cycle are toeing the more progressive party line. Most Democrats, for example, support a public option for health care, have prioritized addressing climate change, and are calling for gun control. A growing number back filibuster reform. A decade ago, when the moderate wing of the Democratic Party was more powerful, these positions would have been considered politically toxic. Now they are the norm.
Harry Enten writes for CNN that Trump is really losing and may, perhaps, be a historically weak candidate for Republicans...always have to add that disclaimer: for now.
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. Democratic House candidates are ahead of the Republicans by 8 points on the generic congressional ballot in these same surveys.
This goes in tandem with the fact that Republican candidates for the House
are less likely than Democratic candidates to release internal polls that include a presidential result. In theory, this would indicate that Trump is weak in their districts.
The fact that Biden's lead is wider than the House Democrats' edge is unusual. If it holds, it would be ahistoric.
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.
Historically, incumbents have done very well against challengers. We see that in races for all levels of office (e.g. House, Senate and president). Incumbent presidents have gone 10 for 13 in their bids for another term in the last 80 years. And even as the incumbency advantage has declined in the House, it's
still worth about 3 points.
Oh, I wasn’t aware that noted Professor Emeritus at Penn Adolph Reed was... canceled?
Do tell!
Michael Powell/New York Times
In late May, Professor Reed, now 73 and a professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania, was invited to speak to the Democratic Socialists of America’s New York City chapter. The match seemed a natural. Possessed of a barbed wit, the man who campaigned for Senator Bernie Sanders and skewered President Barack Obama as a man of “vacuous to repressive neoliberal politics” would address the D.S.A.’s largest chapter, the crucible that gave rise to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a new generation of leftist activism.
His chosen topic was unsparing: He planned to argue that the left’s intense focus on the disproportionate impact of the coronavirus on Black people undermined multiracial organizing, which he sees as key to health and economic justice.
Notices went up. Anger built. How could we invite a man to speak, members asked, who downplays racism in a time of plague and protest? To let him talk, the organization’s Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus stated, was “reactionary, class reductionist and at best, tone deaf.”
“We cannot be afraid to discuss race and racism because it could get mishandled by racists,” the caucus stated. “That’s cowardly and cedes power to the racial capitalists.”
Messy, messy, messy.
I’ve been reading Professor Reed on and off for over twenty years going back to the days when he was a professor at Northwestern and he used to snipe at a certain Illinois State Senator teaching constitutional law classes at the University of Chicago over in Hyde Park!
I have strongly agreed with some Reed’s analyses; I have vehemently disagreed with other of his analyses. I’ve always rather liked that he’s a provocative thinker.
Here’s my thing: There is a very wide and and very deep spectrum of Black intellectual thought on any number of issues.
There really is no such thing as a definitive “Black” point of view.
As a person of the left side of the political spectrum, I disagree with Thomas Sowell or Shelby Steele or John McWhorter most of the time (although I do like McWhorter when he stays close to linguistics topics). But I wouldn’t deny those academics their space on that spectrum. The same goes for Black scholars on the Left.
And then...Black popular culture and thought is a whole and entire other 300 or 400-level class. (That’s also the class where you will usually find out that, generally speaking, Black people tend to not to like their intellectual classes!)
Ultimately, my pet peeve is when a book or two or an academic or two is cited as being a definitive portrait of most or all Black people.
Chile, Black folks are some complicated people!
Democratic appointed Secretaries of Agriculture Dan Glickman and Tom Vilsack write for the Chicago Tribune that perhaps the Black Lives Matter movement can learn some lessons from the political organization and efforts of Black farmers.
The legacy of slavery agriculture shattered the ambitions and dreams and trampled the rights of Black, Hispanic and Native American farmers, sowing seeds of today’s racial animus. But as the country became less rural, their plight was eclipsed by the attention given to the civil rights movement flourishing in urban America. And reports from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (in 1965 and 1982) of structural racism in USDA’s farm programs generated little remedial action; the majority of American agriculture likewise turned a blind eye to the plight of Black farmers.
We didn’t. And there were groups of African American farmers who strongly organized efforts to highlight and pressure Congress, USDA officials and others in the executive branch to resolve these cases, which no doubt highlighted the issues in the media and helped facilitate our actions. By the time we completed our terms as secretaries of agriculture — begun during President Bill Clinton’s administration and concluded with President Barack Obama’s — we presided over the largest civil rights settlement in U.S. history, settling discrimination claims from thousands of farmers of color, as well as claims from hundreds of USDA employees.
The agreements, and supporting policies we implemented, were not perfect — critics from both sides were plenty, many faulting us for not going far enough while others charged the settlements were too generous. But we took action, we heard and validated the grievances and historic wrongs — and we learned lessons applicable to today’s racial reckoning.
***
Lesson three: Understand that structural and cultural change has to be an all-fronts effort. We recognized that structural change would not sustain itself unless we addressed the cultural defects that gave rise to and nourished the discrimination against Black, Hispanic and Native American farmers.
Rainer Sollich of Deutsche Welle on what the Israeli-UAE agreement means for the Middle East.
Although the deal that Abu Dhabi agreed to requires a suspension of Israel's annexation plans in the occupied territories, it does nothing to end them — as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately pointed out after the agreement was signed.
Still, the question remains of whether the UAE could have done more for its "Palestinian brothers" as it negotiated the deal with Israel and the US. It seems apparent that it just didn't matter that much to them. The UAE has other strategic interests and solidarity with the Palestinians was never anything more than hypocritical posturing anyhow.
That is unfair and no doubt bitter for the Palestinians, but it is simply part of an unstoppable trend in the region. These days, it is not Israel, but rather Iran — and increasingly Turkey — that most leaders view as a dangerous "invader." Therefore, it has become a top priority to keep both adversaries at bay. In this regard, Israel has also become an attractive and natural partner — especially when it comes to Iran. Israel is at the cutting edge, both militarily and technologically, and it rightly views Iran, and its allies in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Gaza, as the biggest threat to Israeli national security.
Finally this morning, Patrick Gathara of AlJazeera on what a Trump victory in the 2020 presidential election might mean for democracy on the African continent.
US commitment to democracy in Africa has waxed and waned in the 60 years since most African countries gained independence. The cold war that dominated the first half of that era meant that democracy and good governance played second fiddle to US needs for strategic allies.
Murderous kleptocratic dictators like Mobutu Sese Seko of what was then known as Zaire curried American favour so long as they were willing to stand with what was ironically called the "free world". The demise of the Soviet Union in 1991 provided a brief respite during which the US played a major role in supporting the push for greater democracy and greater respect for human rights. In countries like Kenya, multiparty systems and term limits were introduced following pressure from both within and without, with the US particularly working in concert with local activists.
However, by the end of the decade, from Rwanda to Uganda to Ethiopia, the US was already showing a familiar preference for strongmen with a distaste for democratic limitations. The 9/11 attacks and the subsequent Global War on Terror at the dawn of the new millennium reinforced the fact that African lives and freedoms were expendable when the US felt it was in its interest. In return for turning a blind eye to atrocities, the US could gain reliable allies that would allow it to establish military bases, carry out attacks on those it termed terrorists, as well as murder, disappear and torture African civilians with impunity.
Everyone have a good morning!
