Good morning to everyone!
It’s too early to be ranting and raving around here like a madman, so I will offer this about my view of yesterday’s spat over news reporter’s coverage of the RNC and the habitual violations of the Hatch Act on the second night.
It wasn’t only Tim Alberta complaining about some of the reactions that reporters were receiving to their unsolicited opinions that people really don’t care about violations of the Hatch Act.
Yes, we know that Trump voters don’t care. And yes, we know that criminal activity is of such a wide and deep scale in this White House that violations of the Hatch Act are, relatively speaking, “petty violations” for this White House. And some even go so far to say that if violations of the Hatch Act can’t be enforced, then we shouldn’t talk about it. But still…
Nicolle Wallace and Kimberly Atkins of course explained the importance of Hatch ASct violations precisely.
I didn’t have a real problem with reporters that, for example, wanted to give Melania Trump some low-key compliments for her night two speech at the RNC, as Doreen St. Felix does for the New Yorker.
You know the thing about Melania by now. Profundity is wrung from her vapidity, messages decoded from the tea leaves of her rote silence. Belief in her moral grain, faith in the fable in which she is the innocent immigrant who has tumbled into an accursed set of circumstances, is, for some, the last thing standing in the way of full-on nihilism. The story of her R.N.C. address, then, is less about what streamed from the teleprompter than the trap it laid for the D.C. press. Already, the Washington Post has noted that Melania’s speech “emphasized her empathy, which only highlighted the president’s lack of it.”
Groping in the dark banality of the address, one can agree that Melania did provide a superficial counter to her husband. But one gets the sense that Melania Trump does not appreciate the custodial role. Generally emotionless throughout her twenty-six-minute address, she offered a careful appraisal of the state of the nation, admitting the “harsh reality” of “racial unrest in our country,” and extending sympathy to Americans who have lost loved ones and livelihoods to the pandemic. She also freely recalled her childhood in the Communist state of Slovenia, and even spoke, notionally, of Islam, all while her husband maintains his Muslim ban. The exploitative speech, like the Convention as a whole, was tasked with conjuring an alternative interpretation of Trumpian fascism. As she has before, Melania claimed her husband’s incivility to be a form of passionate patriotism. At the same time, she acted as a kind of quiet, maternal foil to the rest of the R.N.C.’s overactive bombast, with its vision of a world in which covid-19 has been vanquished and the economy is roaring. Her delivery was shy, and the words did not seem fully processed or digested by their speaker. Still, it was by far Melania’s best political performance since her entrance into public life.
Jonathan Chait of New York magazine tries to explain why there seems to be “no controlling legal authority” when Republicans routinely violate ethics, norms, and the law.
...The second night of the Republican convention was a festival of massive lawbreaking. In open violation of the Hatch Act, President Trump turned the White House into a convention stage. He even held an immigration ceremony on camera, and had his secretary of State deliver a speech in explicit violation of State Department regulations. The White House might as well have been surrounded by yellow police tape. Had Al Gore tried it in 2000, he might have spent the night in jail.
Instead, the blatant violation was met with resignation. “Nobody outside of the Beltway really cares,” sneers Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. There is a controlling legal authority — they just don’t care.
Does the Hatch Act matter? Everybody in government thought it did, at least a little, right until the Trump administration. Government officials used to take pains to avoid using their offices for campaign purposes. Two former officials wrote about the hassle they would go through to avoid a small breach. The purpose of this restriction is clear enough: Control of the federal government is not supposed to grant the in party advantages (or at least not excessive advantages) over the opposition. Joe Biden can’t hold campaign events in the East Wing, so why can Trump?
Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post writes about the legacy of Senior Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway and the Beltway press that enabled her and this Administration.
Leaking and lying. Lying and leaking. It’s been the Kellyanne way, and the news media has largely gone along for the ride: Giving her airtime on news shows, failing to forcefully call her out for her continued violations of the Hatch Act, and offering kid-glove treatment in exchange for her inside information.
Perhaps more than any other Trump official, she has undermined the entire notion that truthful information should be expected from the White House and that public officials at the highest level should be held accountable for their words and deeds.
“She has been an innovator in shamelessness, a true entrepreneurial spirit, and that is saying something in this group,” as Jack Holmes, Esquire’s politics editor, put it.
Now that Conway — scheduled to speak Wednesday evening as part of the Republican National Convention — is finally on her way out, we can start to get a full picture of just what a dire influence she’s been.
It was all quite plain, though, from the beginning
It worked, is all that I will say!
Helen Branswell and Kate Sheridan of STATnews write about the alarming decision of the Centers for Disease Control to to recommend that those who knowingly come in contact with persons that test positive for COVID-19 and even possible asymptomatics should not be tested.
Critics see this as the latest in a string of events where the Trump administration has overridden its science agencies in a bid to boost the president’s public standing and re-election chances. They fear these brazen political incursions into public health policy are setting the stage for a premature approval of one or several Covid-19 vaccines before the election — and before ongoing clinical trials have gathered enough evidence to prove they work.
“This is a collective experience that grows more concerning each day. It is substituting potential partisan policy for good regulatory and public health science,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy.
“The two foundational organizations in this country for public health really have been the CDC and the FDA” — the Food and Drug Administration — and the credibility of both has just really been undercut,” Osterholm said.
Admiral Brett Giroir, assistant secretary of health and human services and the administration’s testing tsar, told reporters Wednesday that “all the docs” on the task force signed off on the new guidelines.
It quickly became apparent that was not true. When the guidance was finalized last Thursday, Fauci, a task force member and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was undergoing surgery to remove a polyp from his vocal cords.
Trust in government and public health is, of course, critical to any possible distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine.
Lavanya Vasudevan/Miami Herald
Researchers at more than a hundred institutions, including my own university, are rushing to develop brand-new COVID-19 vaccines at an unprecedented pace. Meanwhile, anti-vaccine opinions appear to be growing — and hardening. In a Yahoo News/YouGov poll conducted in late July, just 42 percent of Americans surveyed said they plan to get a COVID-19 vaccination when one becomes available. That’s down from 55 percent when the survey was first conducted in mid-May.
Those figures are deeply troubling. Most experts agree that 60 percent to 70 percent of the population must get vaccinated to achieve herd immunity, the point where so many people are immune to the virus that it is likely to stop circulating. If we don’t reach that threshold, the virus will likely continue to threaten millions, including those who cannot be vaccinated because of pre-existing health conditions. And as long as the virus is circulating, getting vaccinated is the only way to ensure you are immune. If so few people choose to get the vaccine, life may not return to normal for any of us.
I have studied “vaccine hesitancy” in several countries around the world, and my team’s research has shown that many people with concerns want to engage in honest and open conversation. They often say they do not have all the information they need to choose vaccines, and they often don’t know whether to trust information they find online. Many just need someone they trust to tell them the facts.
This is an easy one for me; I will not even consider taking a vaccine for COVID-19 until January 20, 2021, at the earliest.
I always love talking to you because you drop nine references in the conversation. You give me a reading list after from your citations. John Berger. Writing that down. One of the things that you’ve talked about that I hold on to is about diversity and inclusion. In many industries, especially the entertainment industry where I work, those are buzzwords. But I see them in the way that you taught me during our conversation for 13th. These are reform tactics, not change tactics. The diversity and inclusion office of the studio, of the university, of whatever organization, is not the quick fix.
Absolutely. Virtually every institution seized upon that term, “diversity.” And I always ask, “Well, where is justice here?” Are you simply going to ask those who have been marginalized or subjugated to come inside of the institution and participate in the same process that led precisely to their marginalization? Diversity and inclusion without substantive change, without radical change, accomplishes nothing.
“Justice” is the key word. How do we begin to transform the institutions themselves? How do we change this society? We don’t want to be participants in the exploitation of capitalism. We don’t want to be participants in the marginalization of immigrants. And so there has to be a way to think about the connection among all of these issues and how we can begin to imagine a very different kind of society. That is what “defund the police” means. That is what “abolish the police” means.
Finally today, I ran across this story by Daniela Blei of Atlas Obscura about an unusual museum in Germany.
LAST YEAR, URTE EVERT RECEIVED a 400-pound church bell imprinted with a small but unmistakable swastika, and she faced a conundrum. Evert is the director of the Citadel Museum in the Berlin suburb of Spandau, and the bronze bell—cast in 1934 for the ascendant Nazi regime—hung at the nearby Evangelical Church of Hakenfelde until the astonishingly recent date of 2017. Evert hoped to add the Nazi artifact to the museum’s permanent collection of toxic monuments: busts of militaristic Prussian rulers; statues of Aryan athletes and warriors; and an eight-ton granite head of Vladimir Lenin, which took two years of political and bureaucratic wrangling to dig out of the ground. But first, Evert had to weigh the risks of exhibiting a church bell installed during the Nazi period. What would the bell represent, and what could visitors learn from it? And could it become a kind of shrine for members of far-right or neo-Nazi groups?
Evert’s job at the Citadel Museum, which is housed in the former provisions depot of a Renaissance-era fortress, is to critically examine the culture of monuments. Rather than scrubbing the area of statues that symbolize racism, antisemitism, and other forms of violence and oppression, the museum aims to contextualize the past, putting uncomfortable realities on display in productive, educational, and sometimes challenging ways.
“Inside the museum, visitors confront at eye level statues and monuments that used to represent power,” Evert says. “You can touch everything. Nothing is put on a pedestal. You can talk about what makes you mad.” Since December, the Nazi church bell has been on permanent loan. It inspired a special exhibition on Spandau’s churches under National Socialism, a collaboration between college students and the museum.
Germany, at least, has reckoned with their past to an extent that they can try something like this; America has not, IMO...but still, I would rather not see some of the public monuments even to things like the Confederacy eradicated. Those monuments do say quite a bit about our country even if I don’t like the message and the story that they tell is important, IMO.
Everyone have a good morning!
