Good morning, everyone and you know something?
This morning, there is no shortage of punditry on all of the evils that Donald Trump is doing to this country and you know what?
About a quarter of the way through this pundit round-up, I realized that I had no appetite for that type of story; I really didn’t.
Fortunately, there is usually something of a loosely defined theme of the punditry that I do choose and this morning, that theme seems to be concerned with the big mess that will remain when this Damn Fool is voted out of office.
It’s only a loose theme and granted; there are a couple of stories here that are Trump focused.
Joe Biden stands to become the first Democratic candidate since Al Gore to win the senior vote (age 65). Ella Nilsen of Vox looks at the where and why of the 2020 senor vote.
There are several possible reasons for the older voter exodus to Biden, and they can’t all be chalked up to the coronavirus pandemic.
Biden was already polling well with the group before the pandemic hit. While it’s true that seniors are especially vulnerable to the novel coronavirus, political science experts told Vox there’s much more at play.
Older voters have seen more presidents in action. The polls could be telling us that many voters over 65 just don’t like Trump’s extremely unconventional presidency, marked by a daily barrage of tweetstorms and increased political polarization.
“Part of why they turned away from Trump is there’s too much shaking up in Washington,” Murray said.
Trump isn’t getting much traction by painting the more moderate Biden — who is 77 and has a decades-long track record in public service — as a vessel for the “radical left,” experts say.
While Biden’s history of gaffes may provide fodder for the Trump campaign and political pundits alike, older voters may not care about it too much.
Michael Scherer of the Washington Post writes about the long-anticipated drop of Bloomberg Bucks.
Former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg plans to spend at least $100 million in Florida to help elect Democrat Joe Biden, a massive late-stage infusion of cash that could reshape the presidential contest in a costly toss-up state central to President Trump’s reelection hopes.
Bloomberg made the decision to focus his final election spending on Florida last week, after
news reports that Trump had considered spending as much as $100 million of his own money in the final weeks of the campaign, Bloomberg’s advisers said. Presented with several options on how to make good on an earlier promise to help elect Biden, Bloomberg decided that a narrow focus on Florida was the best use of his money.
The president’s campaign has long treated the state, which Trump now calls home, as a top priority, and his advisers remain confident in his chances given strong turnout in 2016 and 2018 that gave Republicans narrow winning margins in statewide contests.
Jonathan Lipman writes for the Philadelphia Inquirer writes about his experience as a COVID-19 “long-hauler.”
On all the charts we see on the news, each case of COVID-19 is marked as having one of two final results: recovered or dead. The reality is that there are likely hundreds of thousands of people in this country who are neither. We call ourselves the “long haulers.”
Long-haul COVID-19 is very real. CNN anchor Chris Cuomo described having it. Ed Yong at the Atlantic has written extensively about it. Mount Sinai Hospital in New York created a center to treat patients for it. But it’s a story that’s largely been drowned out by the very tragic stories of the dying and the inane shouting about when to reopen restaurants, whether to wear a mask, and whom to trust when it comes to vaccines and treatments.
Here’s what it feels like. My cough and fever disappeared after two weeks. But I was left unable to participate in my normal life. I woke up most days with severe pain in my limbs, like broken bones. I was so short of breath I could not make it up the two flights of stairs in the house without gasping. Severe headaches would come and go. Complex mental tasks were impossible. I’d find myself reading and re-reading the same email, unable to make sense of it.
Worst was the crushing fatigue. Every afternoon I would stagger to my couch and collapse asleep for hours in the middle of the day, regardless of what impact it had on my work or my family. I might feel better for a day or two, but I would inevitably crash again. I’d send hastily scribbled emails to cancel meetings before I passed out. The food I’d bought to cook my family for dinner rotted in the fridge.
Adam Serwer of The Atlantic writes about...Donald the Hawk.
During the 2016 campaign, some of Trump’s statements gave the impression that he might be opposed to expanding America’s military commitments abroad. This view was perhaps most memorably crystallized by the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s April 2016 op-ed, “Donald the Dove, Hillary the Hawk.” But Trump’s presidency has seen the steady expansion of American military involvement abroad, not retrenchment.
That record underscores the hypocrisy of the charges he lobbed at the Pentagon. In a country with a normal military budget, new wars might be necessary to fatten the pockets of defense contractors. But in America, our perpetual global war against terrorism will do. The forever war ensures a rising defense budget, no matter how peripherally related its line items are to actual conflict. Trump’s administration has overseen a rise in
military spending every year he has been in office, with fiscal year 2019 matching the Obama administration’s highest year. The leadership at the Trump Department of Defense, including Mark Esper, the current defense secretary, is
replete with former executives of companies such as Raytheon, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin. Defense contractors are not going hungry during the Trump administration, which has also given Palantir, owned by the Trump supporter Peter Thiel,
lucrative military contracts. Trump famously
dismissed restrictions on arms sales to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain over human-rights concerns, hardly the actions of someone trying to end war by starving evil defense contractors. Contrary to the president’s assertion, “the companies that make the bombs and make the planes” have had little to complain about during his administration.
Karen Klein of the Los Angeles Times writes on how last Wednesday, the Bay Area entered...the Twilight Zone.
Maybe Wednesday’s “Twilight Zone” scenario was what we needed to make us realize in a visceral way how bad it’s gotten. It’s gone beyond just distant reports of lost structures and multiple deaths — at least eight people have died in the recent Western wildfires so far, and others had to be rescued when they were cut off by flames. The blazes are so big that they can blanket us with ash, hundreds of miles away, and color our daily lives with sepia light.
Climate change scientists have been warning us for years about exactly the scenario we have today: Wildfires in the West probably wouldn’t be more numerous, or caused by anything different — lightning, arson, power lines or heedless people with pyrotechnics at a gender-reveal party. But they would be more catastrophic. There would be monsters among them. Monsters big enough to turn the Bay Area orange while we in Southern California were more of a sickly yellow.
That strange, colored light falls on a world distorted by the illness that surrounds us, a pandemic that limits our activities. Late Wednesday afternoon, my daughter and I went outside to view yet another salmon-colored sun in a yellow-gray sky. The street was empty, as it’s been so often in recent months. People are out only when they need to be.
COVID-19 lockdowns showed us for a while how much lighter our traffic could be, how we could reduce nonessential air travel, and thus reduce air pollution and quit adding to the loads of greenhouse gases that change our climate ever more. We have an economy to get started again, but could we give some thought to how we might do that without a return to spending hours sitting on choked freeways while our cars continue to spew pollutants into the air that we have too often turned yellow — sometimes from smog, sometimes from catastrophic wildfire?
Writing for the Guardian, Robert Reich states very plainly with regard to why the West Coast has received little federal help in fighting the wildfires.
...the president has said and done almost nothing. A month ago, Trump wanted to protect lives in Oregon and California from “rioters and looters”. He sent federal forces into the streets of Portland and threatened to send them to Oakland and Los Angeles.
Today, Portland is in danger of being burned and Oakland and Los Angeles are under health alerts. Trump will visit California on Monday, but he has said little.
One reason: these states voted against him in 2016 and he still bears a grudge.
He came close to rejecting California’s request for emergency funding.
“He told us to stop giving money to people whose houses had burned down because he was so rageful that people in the state of California didn’t support him,” said former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff Miles Taylor.
Another explanation for Trump’s silence is that the wildfires are tied to human-caused climate change, which Trump has done everything humanly possible to worsen.
Rachel Nuwer of Scientific American writes about some relatively new data showing the possible effects of conservative commentary on hurricane evacuations.
Whether partisan beliefs influence actual behavior, especially when the stakes are high, is also something surveys do not adequately capture. To test this question, Long and her colleagues turned to hurricane evacuation rates.
Three major hurricanes occurred in the U.S. 2017: Harvey, Irma and Maria. In the weeks between Harvey and Irma, Rush Limbaugh—the most popular radio host in the U.S., whose conservative talk show draws 15.5 million weekly listeners—said that the government and media were exaggerating Irma’s severity to advance a climate change agenda. “These storms, once they actually hit, are never as strong as they’re reported,” he told listeners. This message was amplified by other conservative pundits, such as Ann Coulter, and by several mainstream media outlets.
To test how much weight was given to these comments, Long and her colleagues used location data down to the level of neighborhood blocks from more than 2.7 million Florida and Texas residents’ smartphones. The information allowed them to estimate where individuals live based on the phones’ location at night. The researchers determined someone evacuated when a cell phone moved away from its typical nighttime location at least 24 hours before a storm’s landfall. They calculated evacuation rates for Hurricanes Harvey and Irma in in Texas and Florida, respectively, as well as for Hurricane Matthew, which hit Florida in 2016.
The Science Advances paper is titled “Political storms: Emergent partisan skepticism of hurricane risks.”
And now, Tropical Storm Sally is in the Gulf of Mexico and is projected to become a Category 1 hurricane...and is currently taking a very familiar path,
Roughly 10,000 people migrated to New Orleans from the Lake Charles, Louisiana area that was struck by Hurricane Laura and Stephanie Soileau writes for the New York Times that the Lake Charles area remains very much a disaster area that she has come to appreciate…and love.
Much of Southwest Louisiana is still uninhabitable. Its 200,000 residents are clearing fallen trees and power lines, tarping their roofs, scrambling for water to drink and food to eat and hotel vouchers and gas to get there. They’re filling out applications for FEMA aid and wading through the mud of insurance claims.
The high-drama images, the “disaster porn” — a casino boat lodged under the rickety I-10 bridge, toxic smoke pluming from a petrochemical plant, the fallen Confederate monument, a “skyscraper” (I mean, there’s really just the one) shredded by the gale — they don’t capture the real devastation, its pervasiveness and likely longevity.
I know you’re tired. We’re all tired. Every one of us is suffering our own losses, of every size and kind. This storm was, as one hurricane researcher said, “really, really bad instead of apocalyptic,” and in a year like this one, apocalyptic seems to be the threshold for newsworthiness.
Even in an ordinary year, an extraordinary hurricane holds this country’s attention for only so long. Two whole years after Hurricane Maria cut its brutal path through Puerto Rico in 2017, tens of thousands of survivors were “still living under leaky tarps,” The Times reported.
Everyone have a good morning!
