Good morning, everyone!
Evan Osnos of the New Yorker with a profile of the 2020 Democratic nominee for President of the United States, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr.
Biden’s conspicuous appetite for human connection was likely a big factor in his primary victory. Pete Buttigieg, one of his opponents, observed Biden backstage before a debate. “Some candidates would be talking to each other,” he told me. “Some candidates would be talking almost to themselves.” But Biden was kibbitzing with the stagehands or trying to buck up the newcomer candidates. “I think any human being who’s around is somebody that he’s equally happy to engage and talk to and listen to,” Buttigieg said.
Biden vacillates between embracing the image of a kindly grandfather and bridling at it. When, in 2015, the late-night host Stephen Colbert referred to him on the air as a “nice old man,” Biden called him the next day, Colbert told me: “He goes, ‘Listen, buddy, you call me a nice old man one more time and I will personally come down there and kick your ass.’ I laughed, and he laughed. I said, ‘Don’t worry. I won’t call you a nice old man, because clearly you’re not that nice.’ ”
Yes, it’s long. Very long. Read it.
Julian Zelizar of CNN with a reminder that The Damn Fool was impeached (seems like so long ago!). And that the impeachment should be a campaign issue.
The President continues to undermine our country for his own political benefit. Trump, who has ignored scientific expertise as Covid-19 ravages the nation, continues to repeat the claim that it will "go away" or "disappear." The quicker things can reopen and the more he can diminish the fallout, the better he will appear to voters -- or so he seems to think. He has also responded to the cries for criminal justice reform by tapping into the regrettable tradition of white backlash politics and railing against mostly peaceful protesters to stir up racial animosity. He is now issuing almost daily threats to our election, from attacking mail-in voting to making plans that could lead to voter suppression.
Over the last four years, Trump has repeatedly revealed himself to be a president who abuses his power at the expense of needed policy while straining democratic institutions to their breaking point. The Carter Center, which has been monitoring democratic elections overseas to ensure that they are impartial and credible, has now turned its attention to the United States. This isn't a proud moment in American history.
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Democrats don't need to focus on the impeachment for the next three months, but they should remind voters of what they uncovered last fall and reiterate what they did to check the President. Doing this will only reinforce Biden's campaign message that Trump must be stopped for the sake of our democracy.
And don’t forget...even at the time of the closing of the impeachment trial, the United States Senate (or most of its members, in any event) knew what was coming up.
I don’t know about bringing up the specific charges and events surrounding impeachment but certainly the broad pattern of behavior illustrated by Trump’s is fair game. I mean, certainly, Adam Schiff was not exactly Cassandra in that regard (well, there’s Susan “he learned his lesson” Collins and all).
Michael A. Cohen/Boston Globe
The ugly reality is that the current occupant of the White House holds his office, in part, because of Vladimir Putin’s efforts on his behalf. This original sin of Trump’s rise to power has permanently covered his presidency in an odor of illegitimacy — which the president has only made worse over the past four years.
At the heart of all the cheating and betrayal is a single goal: Trump’s aggrandizement. Indeed, it is the animating force of Trump’s presidency and of the Republican Party.
Just as Trump was venal enough to accept foreign interference in 2016 (even going so far as to publicly request that Moscow hack Clinton’s emails), he has been more than willing to use the awesome powers of the presidency for his personal financial and political interests.
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He has focused all of his policies — and virtually all of his presidential rhetoric — on satisfying the chauvinism and insecurities of his most fervent supporters. He does this not because he cares about them, but because of the psychological benefits he receives from their adulation. Indeed, just last week Trump spoke approvingly of QAnon supporters, not because he puts much stock in their insane conspiracy theories, but because, in his own words, “they like me very much.”
Ed Silverman of STATnews writes about the necessity of the Food and Drug Administration to push back on Trump’s claims about the “deep state” and the probable failure that FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn will do so.
As the Nov. 3 election nears, the Food and Drug Administration commissioner can expect intensifying pressure from President Trump to approve a vaccine or a drug to combat Covid-19. Desperate to win and angry at criticism of his handling of the pandemic, Trump twice this week complained that the “deep state” may cause a delay.
But on Saturday morning, Trump also singled out the FDA by tweeting, without evidence to support his claim, that the agency is “making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics.” To make sure the FDA head got the message, Trump tagged Hahn at the end of the tweet.
These sorts of self-serving remarks are terribly wrongheaded, because they continually raise the specter of political interference with a key agency during a severe public health crisis. Who would trust a vaccine that is being rushed out the door just so Trump can say he delivered what everyone wants as soon as possible? His tweets are about his re-election, not our well-being.
For Hahn, however, this creates a different kind of crisis, because the political appointee has to work harder than ever to ensure the FDA remains independent.
“One of the great things about FDA is that decisions are made by full-time civil servants without conflicts,” former FDA commissioner Robert Califf tweeted in response to Trump’s tweet.
But Hahn’s track record gives me pause, and I’m not so sure he can stand up to Trump.
David Ewing Duncan of Vanity Fair writes about USPS Expedited to Street/Afternoon Sortation (ESAS) program.
Called the Expedited to Street/Afternoon Sortation (ESAS) program, the initiative, launched by the post office on July 25, focuses on more than 1,200 zip codes zones around the country. A description of the new plan, outlined in the trade publication Postal Times, caught McKean’s eye because of the way it would shake up long-standing procedures. According to McKean, these include how mail carriers have typically started their day by prioritizing the delivery of important pieces—first-class letters, payments, packages, bills, and, yes, vote-by-mail applications and mail-in ballots—before they head out on their routes. Then, after they return from their rounds, they process less-critical mail, which is typically delivered the next day. Under the ESAS plan, however, certain post offices have begun testing the practice of leaving all sorting until the afternoon—a change that postal officials said was intended to get mail carriers out on the street faster.
The real impact, according to McKean, could be delays in mail delivery in some areas of one to several days—a critical lag during a presidential contest in which ballots in many states must be received by election day. Such delays had also alarmed the president of the American Postal Workers Union, Mark Dimondstein, who told The Intercept, “These are changes aimed at changing the entire culture of USPS. The culture I grew up with, and of generations before me, is that you never leave mail behind. You serve the customer, you get mail to the customer. Prompt, reliable, and efficient.” Another postal workers’ union, the National Association of Letter Carriers, filed an official grievance that claims the ESAS program violates labor agreements that don’t allow post office management to make unilateral changes like this, as well as standards about how mail is sorted and prioritized by postal carriers.
The Washington Post team of Lisa Rein, Michael Scherer, Jacob Bogage, and Josh Dawsey with more on the shenanigans at the United States Postal Service.
DeJoy’s short tenure leading the Postal Service has quickly engulfed an apolitical corner of the government first led by Benjamin Franklin in a controversy that’s fueling alarm over the reliability of vital services and the integrity of voting in November.
People familiar with his rocky 69 days in the job say DeJoy came into office not adequately focused on the two biggest challenges facing the post office — the pandemic and the upcoming election. Instead, he absorbed himself with making long-term changes that Republicans have long sought to run the money-losing agency more like a business, while also addressing one of President Trump’s obsessions: what the Postal Service charges Amazon for the “last mile” delivery of packages.
A longtime logistics executive and GOP fundraiser, DeJoy was hired after a methodical campaign by Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to ensure a Republican takeover of the agency’s Board of Governors, depleted for years and with no members when Trump took office. The president has long fixated on the Postal Service, complaining without evidence that it gives preferential treatment and money-losing terms to Amazon, a concern that associates say is rooted in his dislike of coverage in The Washington Post, owned by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.
2020.
And...as if COVID-19, murder hornets, and double hurricanes isn’t enough...
David Blight writes for the New York Times about President Barack Obama’s jeremiad last Wednesday night at the Democratic National Convention.
Although we are often reminded that many theories of American exceptionalism do not hold up to scrutiny, the jeremiad provides a ritual of return to the hope invested in the Declaration of Independence and the 14th and 19th Amendments, the G.I. Bill, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Clean Air Act, the Americans With Disabilities Act. As Mr. Bercovitch wrote, “The remedy for American abuses was the American promise, and the failure of that promise meant the failure of history itself.”
Such was Mr. Obama’s warning delivered at the Democratic convention. Mr. Obama has always been at heart a healer, a reconciler eager to find common ground with people who hated him for ideological, political and racial reasons. It is a primary reason for his political success and status today as the most admired political figure in our culture.
Sometimes his opponents despise his talent for reminding them that they ought to be better. But Mr. Obama seems to have finally given up on saving Republicans from their moral rot. Indeed, although he has always been a practicing Democrat, this week he truly became a Democrat.
In spite of everything, Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer writes about the audacity of the Democratic National Convention to see empathy and hope and to beam it into our living rooms.
For a nation that’s spent much of 2020 in quarantine, Tuesday’s travelogue of 50 states (and seven other jurisdictions) opened up a spacious, diverse America with pride, possibility, and a not fully quenched thirst for justice that played out on fruited plains, majestic purple mountains, and shining seasides.
This American odyssey began in the footsteps of the recently departed civil rights hero John Lewis at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and didn’t end until it reached a platform at Biden’s beloved Amtrak station in Wilmington. In between, the roll call of the states walked the fine line between our yearning for the pre-pandemic normalcy that was epitomized by that steaming pile of fried squid on a Narragansett Bay beach and reminders that our national journey is far from finished.
More than any political convention in my lifetime, the 2020 virtual DNC hung on a theme that could be summed up in one word: Empathy. The empathy and ability to relate to everyday folks that have defined Biden’s 50 years in the public eye, the empathy that is so lacking in a president unable to acknowledge the enormity of 170,000 coronavirus dead, the empathy that was beamed into your living room Tuesday night from a windswept Montana prairie and a Mississippi HBCU.
The ProPublica investigative team of Michael Grabell and Bernice Yeung report that meatpacking businesses have been warned for years that a pandemic was on the way and did little or nothing to heed those warnings. Pushing fair use on this one...this is a long and detailed investigative report.
...a ProPublica investigation has found that for more than a dozen years, critical businesses like meatpackers have been warned that a pandemic was coming. With eerie prescience, infectious disease experts and emergency planners had modeled scenarios in which a highly contagious virus would cause rampant absenteeism at processing plants, leading to food shortages and potential closures. The experts had repeatedly urged companies and government agencies to prepare for exactly the things that Smithfield’s CEO now claims were unrealistic.
“It was an unmitigated disaster for food processors, and it didn’t have to be,” said John Hoffman, who developed emergency planning for the food and agriculture sector at the Department of Homeland Security during the George W. Bush administration. “There are things that could have happened in a pandemic that would have been novel, but this has unfolded pretty much as the pandemic plan has suggested it would.”
Instead, the industry repeatedly expressed confidence in its ability to handle a pandemic, and when asked to plan, relied on a wait-and-see approach, records and interviews show.
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Nearly 15 years ago, the White House summoned the leaders of the food and agriculture industry, along with executives from other business sectors, to work with government officials to come up with a plan to sustain the nation’s critical services in a pandemic.
The Bush administration warned businesses that as many as 40% of their workers might be absent due to illness, quarantine or fear. Social distancing would be necessary in manufacturing plants, it said, even if it affected business operations. And government modeling showed that such high absenteeism would cut food production in half.
Elizabeth Svoboda, writing for the Washington Post, speculates on whether...we are simply getting used to COVID-19 in our daily lives and adapting.
...Thousands of us are less afraid than we were at the pandemic’s outset, even though in many parts of the country mounting case counts have increased the danger of getting the virus. We’re swarming the beaches and boardwalks, often without masks. We’re crowding into restaurants we haven’t visited for months. And some of us are gathering in large groups for raucous parties — even in covid-19 hot spots such as Miami, Houston and northern Georgia.
Given the public health costs of this kind of mental adaptation, psychologists and risk analysts say, there’s a strong case for pushing back against our own flawed risk assessments — and for putting up policy guardrails that protect us from our increasing numbness to the virus’s danger.
Social scientists have long known that we perceive risks that are acute, such as an impending tsunami, differently than chronic, ever-present threats like car accidents. Part of what’s happening is that covid-19 — which we initially saw as a terrifying acute threat — is morphing into more of a chronic one in our minds. That shift likely dulls our perception of the danger, risk perception expert Dale Griffin said.
David Dodwell of the South China Morning Post reports on a newly released Liverpool University study that matches previous studies showing that female-led countries did a better job in handling COVID-19 outbreaks in their countries than males.
The Liverpool study challenges a widespread conventional wisdom that women leaders are more risk averse: “While women leaders were risk averse with regard to lives, they were prepared to take significant risks with their economies by locking down early,” Garikipati said. “Risk aversion may manifest differently in different domains, with women leaders being significantly more risk averse in the domain of human life, but more risk taking in the domain of the economy.”
Drawing on the pandemic as “a unique global experiment in national crisis management”, these studies seem to agree that male leaders have in general served their countries less well during the pandemic. And with examples such as Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Boris Johnson, the view seems hard to challenge.
Remember the testosterone-heavy Bolsonaro dismissing Covid-19 as “
a little flu” or a “little cold”? Or Johnson so keen to demonstrate cavalier machismo that he “
shook hands with everybody” at a hospital with coronavirus patients?
In contrast, the steadiest and most trustworthy leaders in recent months have clearly been Angela Merkel of Germany and Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand – and their steadiness has been rewarded with thousands of saved lives.
Finally this morning, Roman Dobrokhotov of AlJazeera writes that the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny fits a rather interesting pattern.
Russian activist and founder of the media outlet Mediazona, Petr Verzilov said that all of this reminded him of what he went through when he was allegedly poisoned two years ago.
"Everything begins with a place which can be easily controlled, in the case of Navalny, this was the airport; in my case - the court," he told me. On September 11, 2018, Verzilov spent the whole day in court, where his girlfriend Nika Nikulshina was being tried for running onto the pitch wearing a police uniform during the World Cup. At 6pm, they headed home, where Verzilov had a nap. A couple of hours later, when he tried to go out, he felt sick; his eyesight, speech and movement started deteriorating and he eventually slipped into delirium, unable to recognise his own girlfriend.
In the hospital, the same scene played out - a great number of security personnel preventing relatives and associates from seeing him. The Russian doctors also did not find any toxin in his blood and delayed his transfer abroad. He arrived in Germany for treatment on September 15. By then, his body is thought to have gotten rid of the poison, which made identifying it very difficult. German doctors hypothesised that hyoscine may have been used to poison Verzilov, as it is known to cause symptoms similar to those he displayed.
Everyone have a good morning!
(We will be OK.)
