Tweet heavy because Trump is probably still speaking. But he gave what was a terrible speech, as in boring.
Will this mess of a convention make a difference? Nope. Will the violence in American cities? Maybe. How about white militia violence? Perhaps.
And now we move to the home stretch, and wait for the polling.
Obviously, we’ll have more formal pieces tomorrow. For now, they are selling incompetence and corruption. We’ll see who’s buying.
And on we go.
Kamala Harris and Mike Pence. The light and the dark, and Harris is the light.
Windsor Mann/USA Today:
Pence and Republicans used to be pro-life. Now they are pro-afterlife.
Trump has converted evangelists for Christ into evangelists for him, just as he has turned the GOP into a personality cult.
Donald Trump picked Pence as his running mate in 2016 to reassure evangelical Christians, whose votes he needed, and GOP donors, whose money he needed. But Pence serves little purpose now. He barely mentioned religion in his speech last night. Instead of revering God, he praised Trump.
Trump has converted evangelists for Christ into evangelists for him, just as he has turned the GOP into a personality cult. Today’s theocrats are as untethered from theology as Republicans are from ideas. Instead of producing a platform this year, the GOP issued a resolution. It reads in part: “The Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the president’s America-first agenda.”
Meanwhile, Mike Pence drew 6 million fewer people than Harris. That doesn’t matter because conventions don’t matter. But what happens from now on does.
Gallup has a list of what’s important, and the pandemic is top of the list. The economy? Not so much.
It’s not 2016. It’s not even 2008.
NPR:
More Than 550,000 Primary Absentee Ballots Rejected In 2020, Far Outpacing 2016
An extraordinarily high number of ballots — more than 550,000 — have been rejected in this year's presidential primaries, according to a new analysis by NPR.
That's far more than the 318,728 ballots rejected in the 2016 general election and has raised alarms about what might happen in November when tens of millions of more voters are expected to cast their ballots by mail, many for the first time.
Stu is right. Conventions don’t matter like they used to.
Axios:
The day sports stopped
Why it matters: Many NBA players decided to participate in the "bubble" because it offered a platform to bring awareness to social justice issues. That was enough, in their minds, to offset any concerns about sports being a distraction.
- But after the Blake shooting video surfaced, players began to question whether the anthem kneeling, "Black Lives Matter" T-shirts and pre-approved jersey causes were making a difference.
- Now, they've gone off script. And in doing so, they've taken the conversation about sports' role in society to a place it's never quite been before.
Charlie Sykes/Bulwark:
The Right’s Continuing Glorification of Violence
The warning signs have been there. We shouldn’t be surprised.
We can’t say that we weren’t warned.
Less than a week before the 2016 election, Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic published a chilling prediction. The Trump campaign, they wrote “has provided a baseline undemocratic ideation to hundreds of millions of people and also provided a platform through which extremists, both violent and non-violent, can recruit and cultivate.” If their analysis of the process of violent radicalization was correct, they said, “the result will be blood.”
That was of course, before Trump became president, with his rhetoric about caravans and immigrants “invading the country,” and “infesting,” cities. It was before Trump’s reference to the white nationalists in Charlottesville as “very fine people,” and his presidential suggestion that minority members of Congress go back to where they came from. It was before he retweeted hoax videos of Muslims attacking white teenagers, and it was years before he laughed at the suggestion that Hispanic immigrants be shot. Just this week, Trump was continuing to share tweets from British extremist Katie Hopkins who has compared immigrants to “cockroaches,” and called for a “final solution” to the Muslim problem.
As Wittes and Jurecic had foreseen, there has, in fact, been a notable rise in hate crimes. So far this year alone, FBI Director Christopher Wray told the Senate Judiciary Committee, there have been arrests in 90 cases of domestic terrorism and the majority of those cases “are moti
Politico:
Intel officials contradict Trump on voting by mail
The officials said they had seen no signs that foreign countries were looking to undermine mail-in ballots, in a break with the president and attorney general.
The intelligence community has seen no evidence that foreign powers intend to manipulate mail-in voting in the 2020 election, senior Trump administration officials said Wednesday, undercutting a claim by President Donald Trump that such fraud “will be the scandal of our times.”
“We have no information or intelligence that any nation-state threat actor is engaging in any activity to undermine the mail-in vote or ballots,” said a top official with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, who joined other senior intel community officials from the Department of Homeland Security and FBI to brief media on the status of foreign election threats. They spoke with reporters on condition they not be named.
Craig Spencer/Atlantic:
I Learned the Hard Way That a ‘Breakthrough’ Treatment Isn’t Innocuous
The FDA’s emergency authorization of plasma treatments for COVID-19 prioritizes politics over science.
In 2014, I spent 19 days being treated for Ebola in a New York City hospital. I had contracted the virus while treating patients in Guinea, and as no definitive treatments existed at the time, I received convalescent plasma based on its historically therapeutic role. After receiving plasma, however, I struggled to breathe, and my condition deteriorated. Thankfully I recovered, but my story shows that convalescent plasma isn’t innocuous.
