Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[y66]

Representative John Lewis, an enormous figure in the fight for democracy in the U.S., died Friday. My thoughts on his importance are similar to what Adam Serwer wrote. The crucial thing to understand about the U.S. before the civil-rights movement — before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 — is that it could only tenuously be described as a democracy.

 

Democracies involve collective self-government, which is one of those things that seems fairly straightforward but gets quite complicated once you consider the details. At the very least, it requires that everyone in the republic participate as equals. Each part of that formula is necessarily contested. Who is “everyone”? What does it mean to “participate”? In what sense are they “equals”? And yet to exclude a large number of people from any role in public life, including the vote, based solely on their race goes well beyond a legitimate argument about what counts as democracy. And even when Black voting became possible, a system of apartheid in one part of the nation and various forms of discrimination elsewhere meant that there was no chance of political equality.

 

How exactly to characterize the pre-1965 U.S. is complicated. But that it fell well short of democracy isn’t complicated at all. One measure of the immense progress that Lewis and so many others achieved is that we can now argue about the extent to which the United States is currently a democracy — we can argue about “everyone” and “participate” and “equal” as theoretical and empirical questions. And, yes, we can argue about how seriously our democracy is backsliding. We have the civil-rights movement to thank for having something to backslide from.

 

Lewis dedicated his life to creating self-government. He was willing to die for it. Few have known political freedom as well as he did, since he was able to experience it as it was being denied, as it was being created and as it became a way of life. He understood and lived political action — his “good trouble” — throughout his life. I’m generous with the term “hero of the republic,” but if anyone deserved it, John Lewis did.

[PassedOut]

While people like Ben Stein and Rush Limbaugh make lots of money poking fun at right-wingers in the US, quite a few folks settle for just a comfortable living making fun of those same folks online: America's Last Line Of Defense

 

A couple of years ago, the Post ran a piece about one of them, the owner of the America's Last Line Of Defense site: ‘Nothing on this page is real’: How lies become truth in online America

 

In the last two years on his page, America’s Last Line of Defense, Blair had made up stories about California instituting sharia, former president Bill Clinton becoming a serial killer, undocumented immigrants defacing Mount Rushmore, and former president Barack Obama dodging the Vietnam draft when he was 9. “Share if you’re outraged!” his posts often read, and thousands of people on Facebook had clicked “like” and then “share,” most of whom did not recognize his posts as satire. Instead, Blair’s page had become one of the most popular on Facebook among Trump-supporting conservatives over 55.

 

“Nothing on this page is real,” read one of the 14 disclaimers on Blair’s site, and yet in the America of 2018 his stories had become real, reinforcing people’s biases, spreading onto Macedonian and Russian fake news sites, amassing an audience of as many 6 million visitors each month who thought his posts were factual. What Blair had first conceived of as an elaborate joke was beginning to reveal something darker. “No matter how racist, how bigoted, how offensive, how obviously fake we get, people keep coming back,” Blair once wrote, on his own personal Facebook page. “Where is the edge? Is there ever a point where people realize they’re being fed garbage and decide to return to reality?”

However funny this stuff might be, the blurring of the truth for the gullible portion of the US voting public contributes to the massive problems we face now. It's easy money, sure, but the folks who do this -- liberal and anti-Trump as they claim to be -- are con artists just as Trump is.

[cherdano]

He sounds like a political consultant, which is not a compliment from my point of view, and perhaps of greater consequence, might have something to do with losing an election. At no point does he concern himself with how to help the candidate, HC in 2016, clearly communicate her beliefs. The mechanical problem he cites is "for boring mechanical reasons, working-class people with low levels of social trust were much less likely to answer those phone polls than college-educated professionals.". This is condescending. Very condescending.

This guy is a political consultant. Literally.

 

And it's his job to analyse why some candidates win and why others lose. So when he comes up with an explanation that's different than yours, you might also weigh the option of perhaps considering his opinion seriously. Instead of brushing him off because his style ticks you off.

 

I think there is a lot of data and analysis behind everything he says. E.g. one of the main reasons pollsters got 2016 wrong to some extent is that non-college educated voters were underrepresented in their samples. Those who weighted to got a sample representing the expected share of college-educated voters did much better than those who did not.

 

And there is a lot (polls, political science literature, ...) indicating that the big "partisan" divide of our time is between voters who score high on "social trust" or (related) "openness to new experience", and those who don't. These phrases have precise meanings and if you want to understand what happened in 2016 in the US or with Brexit or with basically any other Western country in the last decade you'd go further by trying to understand these phrases plus the points David Shor is making rather than going on about HC not properly explaining her beliefs (which I, and seemingly every other WC commentator understood perfectly fine).

[kenberg]

This guy is a political consultant. Literally.

 

And it's his job to analyse why some candidates win and why others lose. So when he comes up with an explanation that's different than yours, you might also weigh the option of perhaps considering his opinion seriously. Instead of brushing him off because his style ticks you off.

 

I think there is a lot of data and analysis behind everything he says. E.g. one of the main reasons pollsters got 2016 wrong to some extent is that non-college educated voters were underrepresented in their samples. Those who weighted to got a sample representing the expected share of college-educated voters did much better than those who did not.

 

And there is a lot (polls, political science literature, ...) indicating that the big "partisan" divide of our time is between voters who score high on "social trust" or (related) "openness to new experience", and those who don't. These phrases have precise meanings and if you want to understand what happened in 2016 in the US or with Brexit or with basically any other Western country in the last decade you'd go further by trying to understand these phrases plus the points David Shor is making rather than going on about HC not properly explaining her beliefs (which I, and seemingly every other WC commentator understood perfectly fine).

 

I was not arguing that HC did not properly explain her views, I instead was referring to Shor's description of NC not explaining her view:

 

I've also fallen toward a consultant theory of change — or like, a process theory of change. So a lot of people on the left would say that the Hillary Clinton campaign largely ignored economic issues, and doubled down on social issues, because of the neoliberal ideology of the people who worked for her, and the fact that campaigning on progressive economic policy would threaten the material interests of her donors.<br style="color: rgb(28, 40, 55); background-color: rgb(243, 249, 246);"><br style="color: rgb(28, 40, 55); background-color: rgb(243, 249, 246);">But that's not what happened. The actual mechanical reason was that the Clinton campaign hired pollsters to test a bunch of different messages, and for boring mechanical reasons, working-class people with low levels of social trust were much less likely to answer those phone polls than college-educated professionals. And as a result, all of this cosmopolitan, socially liberal messaging did really well in their phone polls, even though it ultimately cost her a lot of votes. But the problem was mechanical, and less about the vulgar Marxist interests of all of the actors involved.

 

What I got from this passage: Shor is discussing the reasons for HC's choices. I don't see him as disagreeing with the " largely ignored economic issues, and doubled down on social issues," but rather he is disagreeing with the "because". He disputes that it is because "of the neoliberal ideology of the people who worked for her" and rather gives the reason as "The actual mechanical reason was that the Clinton campaign hired pollsters to test a bunch of different messages, and for boring mechanical reasons, working-class people with low levels of social trust ..." and then something about vulgar Marxists not being to blame.

 

So I see this passage, and I think I am seeing it correctly as Shor giving his views as to why HC made the choices she did, I do not see him as disputing what her choices were, and it would appear (to me) that he thinks in this case her choice was a mistake. But not the fault of vulgar Marxists.

 

At any rate, I was not at all saying that HC was "not properly explaining her beliefs". I was writing about Shor, not HC..

[Winstonm]

Well, isn't that special

.

Ohio's top state lawmaker conspired to funnel tens of millions of dollars from the state's electric utility to his political allies in order to consolidate power over the state legislature and shepherd through a $1.5 billion bailout for the utility's nuclear power plants, federal prosecutors alleged on Tuesday.

 

The FBI arrested Ohio speaker Larry Household, a Republican, and four alleged co-conspirators and leveled charges of racketeering and bribery related to the scheme. At a press conference on Tuesday afternoon, U.S. Attorney David DeVillers called it "likely the largest bribery [and] money laundering scheme ever perpetrated against the people of the state of Ohio."

 

[johnu]

Trump Wishes Accused Sex Abuser Ghislaine Maxwell ‘Well’ At Coronavirus Briefing

 

On Tuesday, Trump held his first briefing on the coronavirus pandemic since April and was asked about Maxwell by New York Post reporter Steven Nelson.

 

“Ghislaine Maxwell is in prison so a lot of people want to know if she’s going to turn in powerful people,” Nelson said. “I know you talked in the past about Prince Andrew and you criticized Bill Clinton’s behavior. I’m wondering, do you feel that she’s going to turn in powerful men? How do you see that working out?”

 

Trump immediately responded: “I don’t know. I haven’t really been following it too much. I just wish her well, frankly. I’ve met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach.” He added that “they,” likely a reference to Maxwell and Epstein, “lived in Palm Beach.”

 

What does Maxwell know about the Manchurian President? Is a pardon in the works if Maxwell refuses to say anything about the Molester in Chief???

[y66]

From I Spoke to Anthony Fauci. He Says His Inbox Isn’t Pretty by Jennifer Senior at NYT:

 

Americans may have lost faith in their most cherished institutions — the presidency, Congress, the media, perhaps even democracy itself — but 65 percent of them still believe in Dr. Anthony Fauci.

 

This, in spite of the fact that he’s practically disappeared from network and cable television while the pandemic has whipped through the country with alarming speed (his message of sober realism does not, one suspects, align well with the wishful thinking of his boss).

 

This, in spite of the fact that the Trump White House waged a highly unusual campaign last week to undermine his credibility, with both named and unnamed administration officials dispatched to impale him like an hors d’oeuvre. Fauci has been the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, and he’s been the custodian of a jittery nation’s sanity since March 2020.

 

We had a chance to speak nine hours before the president’s first coronavirus news briefing since April. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.

 

Are you going to be at the press briefing this afternoon?

 

To be honest with you, I don’t know. They haven’t really said who’s going to be there. I would assume, but I don’t know as a fact if I am going to be there.

 

Have you spoken with the White House about it?

 

No. But that’s not unlike them all of a sudden, middle of the day, to say, “Be down there at five o’clock.” So I’m not too — what’s the right word? — surprised that I haven’t heard anything yet.

 

Interesting. That means you weren’t involved in the discussions about relaunching them.

 

No.

 

Do you think they’re a good idea?

 

You know, it depends on how it goes. If they stick to public health and don’t get diverted into other types of discussions, I think it could be productive.

 

Let’s get to the news. Our numbers are surging. And you’ve just told The Atlantic that we’ve got to do a reset, which, of course, makes perfect sense. But given the reluctance of some governors, businesses and citizens to abide by the basic rules of social distancing and mask wearing, is it possible to get this pandemic under control without a federal response?

 

It would be better if things were a little more uniform. It just seems that unfortunately, in some sectors, there’s this feeling that there’s opening the country on one end of the spectrum, and public health measures that suppress things and lock them down on the other.

 

They should not be opposing forces. The guidelines that we put out a couple of months ago, those should be followed and appreciated as the vehicle to open the country, as opposed to the obstacle to opening the country.

 

You said it would be nicer if some things were more uniform. Like what?

 

The fundamentals. Wear a mask. Avoid crowds. Close the bars. Bars are the hot spots — —

 

But Americans have already been told this, right? And we still don’t do those things. If you were an executive for the day, what lever would you pull?

 

But Jennifer, would you want me to say something that’s directly contrary to what the president is doing? That’s not helpful. Then all of a sudden you don’t hear from me for a while.

 

I definitely don’t want anyone weaponizing anything you’re saying.

 

I’ve just been doing this for so long, and I’m trying to do my best to get the message across without being overtly at odds, OK? The only thing I can do is to get out there with whatever notoriety or recognition I have and say, these are the four or five things. Please pay attention to them. And if we do that, I feel confident that we’ll turn this around.

 

What I’ve been trying to do is appeal to the younger generation. If you look at the age average of the new cases that are going on in the South, it’s about 10 to 15 years younger than what we previously saw.

 

So it’s clear what’s going on. Young people are saying to themselves: “Wait a minute. I’m young, I’m healthy. The chances of my getting seriously ill are very low. And in fact, it is about a 20 to 40 percent likelihood that I won’t have any symptoms at all. So why should I bother?”

 

What they’re missing is something fundamental: By getting infected themselves — even if they never get a symptom — they are part of the propagation of a pandemic. They are fueling the pandemic. We have to keep hammering that home, because, as much as they do that, they’re completely relinquishing their societal responsibility.

 

How much faith do you have in people to pivot and change their behaviors?

 

It’s disconcerting when you see people are not listening. I could show you some of the emails and texts I get — everybody seems to have my cellphone number — that are pretty hostile about what I’m doing, as if I’m encroaching upon their individual liberties.

 

Can you read me one?

 

No.

 

Just trying to get a glimpse into your inbox.

 

It’s not good.

 

What do you think is the most effective way for you to communicate? Because you’re right: You can’t stand out there with a bullhorn and directly contradict the man you work for.

 

I’m a pretty good communicator. I have been doing that now with multiple outbreaks for about 40 years, dating back to the very early years of H.I.V., I’m just going to continue to use whatever bully pulpit I have. And, you know, just keep hacking at it.

 

Are you reaching out to individual governors?

 

The governors call me frequently. It’s not a rare situation where governors and senators get on the phone with me and in good faith ask, “What do you think I should be doing? What about this? What should I do about that?”

 

Have you spoken to Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia, who opposed a mandate to wear masks in Atlanta?

 

I haven’t specifically spoken to Kemp, no.

 

Has Joe Biden reached out to you? Or any of his folks?

 

No. I mean I think they know better. That I’m in a sensitive position.

 

Is there a time in recent American history when we as a nation would have been better able to get this pandemic under control?

 

In some respects, we are better off because of the technological advances. I mean, 20 years ago, we never would have been able to get candidate vaccines ready to go into Phase 3 trials literally within a few months of the discovery of the new virus. That is unprecedented.

 

But there was a time when there was much more faith and confidence in authority and in government. It’s very, very difficult to get the country to pull together in a real unified way. Maybe the last time that we ever did that was 9/11.

Is there anything about this virus, as a pathogen, that has surprised you?

 

Absolutely! You know, it’s extremely unique, and I think that is one of the reasons why there is such confusion and misunderstanding about the seriousness of it. Of all the viruses and outbreaks that I have been involved with over the last four decades, I have never seen a virus in which the spectrum of seriousness is so extreme. This disease goes from nothing to death! So that has really surprised me.

 

Is there nothing else like this in nature?

 

There are extreme differences in certain diseases, but none that have exploded into pandemic proportions.

 

You’ve said before that there could be some kind of vaccine by the end of the year. But at what point will most families be able to get a vaccination?

 

I think it’s going to be sometime in 2021. I don’t know whether that’s going to be the first quarter of 2021, the first half — it’s difficult to say.

 

But testing still isn’t up to scale, and personal protective equipment wasn’t distributed in a timely way. Given that, I fear that there will be many snafus.

 

We don’t think that’s going to happen, for the simple reason that the federal government has invested billions of dollars directly — directly — into the pharmaceutical companies that are making the vaccine. There are never any guarantees. But I would be surprised, given all the resources that the federal government has put into these companies. We are counting on them for delivery.

 

That is the one way in which you’re saying there has been a federalized response.

 

Right. There certainly has.

 

The president called you an alarmist in his interview with Chris Wallace. And I just want to know: Are you?

 

I characterize myself as a realist.

[y66]

As Trump Pushes Into Portland, His Campaign Ads Turn Darker by Maggie Haberman, Nick Corasaniti and Annie Karni at NYT

 

As President Trump deploys federal agents to Portland, Ore., and threatens to dispatch more to other cities, his re-election campaign is spending millions of dollars on several ominous television ads that promote fear and dovetail with his political message of “law and order.”

 

The influx of agents in Portland has led to scenes of confrontations and chaos that Mr. Trump and his White House aides have pointed to as they try to burnish a false narrative about Democratic elected officials allowing dangerous protesters to create widespread bedlam.

 

The Trump campaign is driving home that message with a new ad that tries to tie its dark portrayal of Democratic-led cities to Mr. Trump’s main rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr. — with exaggerated images intended to persuade viewers that lawless anarchy would prevail if Mr. Biden won the presidency. The ad simulates a break-in at the home of an older woman and ends with her being attacked while she waits on hold for a 911 call, as shadowy, dark intruders flicker in the background.

 

So far, the campaign has spent almost $20 million over the last 20 days on that ad and two other similar ones, more than Mr. Biden has spent on his total television budget in the same time frame, and a relatively large sum for this stage of the race. Though the ads predate the federal actions in Portland, they convey a common theme of lawlessness under Democratic leadership.

 

The focus of the Trump administration in recent days has been on Portland, where there have been nightly protests for weeks denouncing systemic racism in policing. In the last few days, federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Marshals, traveling in unmarked cars, have swooped protesters off the street without explaining why, in some cases detaining them and in other cases letting them go because they were not actually suspects. The protests have increased in size since the arrival of federal officials.

 

Mr. Trump’s deployment of federal law enforcement is highly unusual: He is acting in spite of local opposition — city leaders are not asking for help — and his actions go beyond emergency steps taken by some past American leaders like President George H.W. Bush, who sent troops to quell Los Angeles in 1992 at the request of California officials.

 

In Washington on Tuesday, Department of Homeland Security officials held a news conference for the first time to address the increased federal deployment in Portland, defending the tactics and training of the agents. Chad F. Wolf, the acting secretary, said a federal statute allowed the agents to move away from the courthouse that they had been told to defend, to investigate crimes against federal property and officers, even if it resulted in the detaining of a protester.

 

Another top official, Mark Morgan, disputed claims that the agents lacked adequate insignia, showing reporters a camouflaged ballistic vest labeled “POLICE.” Mr. Wolf also blamed local officials for the unrest in Portland. “I asked the mayor and governor, how long do you plan on having this continue?” Mr. Wolf said. “We stand ready. I’m ready to pull my officers out of there if the violence stops.”

 

The president has said he might next deploy federal agents to Chicago, and has listed other cities where similar enforcement could take place, including New York but also Philadelphia and Detroit, urban centers in two battleground states. White House officials said the deployments had grown out of meetings among administration officials after protests in Washington, D.C., in late May and early June.

 

The White House has defended the recent measures.

 

“By any objective standard, the violence, chaos and anarchy in Portland is unacceptable, yet Democrats continue to put politics above peace while this president seeks to restore law and order,” the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, said at a briefing on Tuesday morning. She listed an array of items she said protesters had hurled at law enforcement officers.

 

Trump administration officials and campaign aides have woven together the protests that began after the killing of George Floyd in May to try to bolster their claim that under Mr. Biden, the police would be “defunded.” While Mr. Biden has walked a careful line and said explicitly that he doesn’t support defunding police departments, the Trump campaign has continued to claim otherwise.

 

The most recent ad from the Trump campaign, depicting the break-in at a woman’s home, has a singular goal: terrifying the viewer into believing that claim.

 

The ad’s audio includes a news broadcast that talks about “Seattle’s pledge to defund its police department,” referring to another progressive city with which Mr. Trump has feuded.

 

The spot hews to Mr. Trump’s long-held preference for messages that promote fear and division, dating to the first ad of his 2016 presidential campaign, which depicted immigrants as criminals. The campaign has already spent nearly $550,000 on its new ad, which was released on Monday.

 

Describing his opponents as supporting violence while portraying police officers in glowing terms has been a mainstay of Mr. Trump’s public discourse since the late 1980s.

 

Protests around the country have been largely peaceful, with spikes of conflict usually arising in clashes with law enforcement. While polls show that a majority of voters support the Black Lives Matter movement, Mr. Trump and some of his advisers are counting on a backlash, so far nonexistent, with white voters in the fall that will boost the president’s numbers.

 

“Clearly what they’re looking to do here is scare the living hell out of seniors,” said Pia Carusone, a Democratic ad maker. But, she said, the new Trump ad falls short in the realm of believability. “You’re making the assumption that the voter that you’re hoping to convince is going to relate and think that this could happen. And then you have to make the leap to blame Biden or the Democrats or whoever. And I think it fails that first test.”

 

Stuart Stevens, a Republican strategist who now works with the anti-Trump group known as the Lincoln Project, said Mr. Trump’s team was focusing on an issue that doesn’t rank at the top of voter concerns.

 

“I’d bet a lot that the actress they hired for this is more worried about Covid-19 than a phony threat about cops,” Mr. Stevens said.

 

Of the $24 million the Trump campaign has spent over all on television ads over the past 20 days, roughly $20 million has gone to ads that focus solely on the issue of the police. About 70 percent of that $20 million has been spent on a singular ad that shows a split screen: One side depicts an empty 911 call center, with an answering service asking callers to select their emergency, and the other displays violent scenes from the protests.

 

The Trump digital apparatus has also been running a torrent of ads warning of a country in crisis: “Dangerous MOBS of far-left groups are running through our streets and causing absolute mayhem,” one ad with 308 variations reads. “They are DESTROYING our cities and rioting.”

 

The Trump team has spent at least $2 million in the past two months on Facebook ads with similar themes, according to Advertising Analytics, an ad tracking firm.

 

The ads are on a political track. But for former Homeland Security officials who served in the first year of the Trump administration, seeing images of federal forces on the streets of American cities was distressing.

 

“People like me, who served a long time, have to look very long and hard to figure out who these people are,” said Col. David Lapan, a retired Marine who served in the Trump administration in 2017 as a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security. “For the average citizen, it looks like the military is being used to suppress American citizens. Even if that’s not the case, and this is law enforcement, it creates the impression that the military is being used.”

 

In a statement on Tuesday evening, Mr. Biden drew a parallel with the largely peaceful protesters who were cleared from a park near the White House on June 1 by armed law enforcement officials using chemical irritants before Mr. Trump’s photo-op outside a historic church.

 

 

Protesters raised their cellphones and sang in front of the Multnomah County Justice Center in Portland on Monday. The demonstrations have grown in size since federal agents arrived.Credit...Mason Trinca for The New York Times

 

“They are brutally attacking peaceful protesters, including a U.S. Navy veteran,” Mr. Biden said of the force used in Portland. “Of course the U.S. government has the right and duty to protect federal property. The Obama-Biden administration protected federal property across the country without resorting to these egregious tactics — and without trying to stoke the fires of division in this country.” In response, Mr. Trump’s campaign accused Mr. Biden of attacking law enforcement officials.

 

Tom Ridge, the former governor of Pennsylvania who was the first person to serve as secretary of Homeland Security, also condemned Mr. Trump’s actions.

 

”The department was established to protect America from the ever-present threat of global terrorism,” Mr. Ridge, a Republican, told the radio host Michael Smerconish. “It was not established to be the president’s personal militia.”

 

Mr. Ridge said it would be a “cold day in hell” before he would have consented as a governor to what is taking place. “I wish the president would take a more collaborative approach toward fighting this lawlessness than the unilateral approach he’s taken,” he said.

[y66]

As tempting as it is to talk about President Donald Trump’s instinctive corruption or to analyze his enthusiasm for deploying federal law enforcement against the wishes of mayors and governors or to note his latest defiance of the courts and the Constitution or his recurring falsehoods about the pandemic or even to speculate about why he had warm words for someone accused of assisting a sexual predator, I can’t help it: I’m stuck on his inability to perform some of the more basic aspects of his job.

 

It’s now been four months since the CARES Act became law. And with deadlines closing in to renew expanded unemployment benefits and other relief, the White House and Senate Republicans appear to be somewhere between high-level bickering and full-out war with each other. While it’s fair to hold Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his colleagues responsible for some of the chaos, the truth is that there’s only one president — who normally could be expected to either take the lead or to play a coordinating role and forge necessary compromises.

 

Trump does neither. Instead, he plays “Donald from Queens,” the talk-radio caller shooting off about various topics and then failing to follow through. Since he’s also the president, however, many Republican senators quite sensibly aren’t thrilled about going on the record opposing him. So his proposals sort of hang out there — a payroll-tax holiday, a vague idea about infrastructure, a tax deduction for entertainment and dining expenses. None of these ideas has much support among congressional Republicans. Nor has Trump made any serious effort to sell them. But since he also doesn’t abandon them, they become obstacles to putting together any kind of legislative package.

 

It’s unlikely that Tuesday’s press conference helped matters. What Trump said about unemployment benefits was illustrative:

 

We want to have people go back and want to go back to work as opposed to be, sort of, forced into a position where they’re making more money than they expected to make. And the employers are having a hard time getting them back to work.

 

So that was a decision that was made. I was against that original decision, but they did that. It still worked out well because it gave people a lifeline, a real lifeline. Now we’re doing it again. They’re thinking about doing 70 percent of the amount. The amount would be the same, but doing it in a little bit smaller initial amounts so that people are going to want to go back to work, as opposed to making so much money that they really don’t have to.

 

But we were very generous with them. I think that it’s been a tremendously successful program.

Sure, there are lots of examples of presidents who speak in gibberish deliberately to avoid taking a position. That would be about the best case I could make for this answer. But Trump is in a situation where reaching a deal, and therefore reaching a unified Republican position, is urgent if he has any hope of boosting the economy in the run-up to the November election. That doesn't seem like a situation that calls for simply letting everyone else negotiate.

 

More likely, Trump just hasn’t paid much attention to the details. Which means no one is doing the work that only presidents can do for their party and for the nation. That’s not the only reason that the virus continues to spread and the economy remains precarious — but it sure isn’t helping.

[shyams]

I like the line in Jonathan Bernstein's Bloomberg article.

 

Instead, he plays “Donald from Queens,” the talk-radio caller shooting off about various topics and then failing to follow through.

[johnu]

Trump ‘Chaos & Violence’ Scare Ad Is Actually Just An Old Picture Of Ukraine

 

This image that President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign desperately wants you to believe is of anarchy in a “Democrat-run” U.S. city is ... actually a photo from 2014 of a pro-democracy protest in Ukraine.

Honestly I can understand the confusion. The Manchurian President is planning a major campaign trip to his core base in the Kremlin and got confused over which country he was representing. Perfectly understandable for Russia's most important asset.

[y66]

re: U.S. Homeland Security confirms three units sent paramilitary officers to Portland by Reuters.

 

This headline and others like it are grossly inaccurate & irresponsible.

 

Our officers are not "paramilitary." They are civilian law enforcement doing their job — enforcing federal law.

They are civilian law enforcement officers wearing military style uniforms who are unlawfully assaulting protesters and placing them in unmarked vans without probable cause as part of a campaign to divert attention from the Trump administration's massive failures to respond effectively to the health and economic crises engulfing the U.S.

[y66]

[y66]

God Help Us if Judy Shelton Joins the Fed by Steven Rattner at NYT

 

Having failed in past attempts to put unqualified ideologues on the Federal Reserve Board, President Trump is giving it another try — and is closer to victory than previously.

 

The nominee in question — Judy Shelton, known for taking long-discredited positions on the monetary system — makes Mr. Trump’s earlier rejected choices seem almost conventional. Among other heretical stances, she has supported the abolition of the Federal Reserve itself, putting her in a position to undermine the very institution she is being nominated to serve.

 

“Why do we need a central bank?” Ms. Shelton asked in a Wall Street Journal essay in 2009. She wants monetary policy set by the price of gold, a long-abandoned approach that would be akin to a Supreme Court justice embracing the Code of Hammurabi.

 

Regrettably, after much hesitation and with evident reluctance even from Republicans, the Senate Banking Committee voted Tuesday to advance Ms. Shelton’s nomination to the full Senate. We mustn’t let her nomination become overshadowed by the many other daunting challenges we face at the moment. When her name reaches the full Senate floor, four Republicans must find the courage to join the Democrats in voting no and rebuffing her appointment.

 

The Federal Reserve is an indispensable player in managing our economy. Period. It has also, commendably, remained largely free of partisanship. The nominees of past presidents, Democrats and Republicans alike, have chosen to work collegially and without personal agendas to fulfill its critical mission.

 

Now, as he has done so often elsewhere in the government, Mr. Trump is doing his best to politicize this remarkable institution.

 

For starters, had Ms. Shelton’s prescriptions been followed, the Fed’s response to the arrival of the virus would have been disastrously wrong instead of extraordinarily constructive.

 

Her view that interest rates should be “rules based” would have prevented the central bank’s emergency cuts.

 

Her past opposition to the Fed buying bonds to help stimulate the economy — as it did successfully during the 2008 financial crisis — would have prevented the central bank from standing up many of the rescue programs that are now helping to keep the economy afloat.

 

Her notion that the Fed must consult with Congress, rather than act independently as is considered the best practice among developed countries, would have introduced damaging delays, politics and, likely, policy misfires as ill-equipped members of Congress tried to grapple with the intricacies of monetary policy.

 

Then there’s the gold standard, a significant culprit in deepening the Great Depression and abandoned decades ago by every country in the world (including the United States in 1973). By rigidly fixing prices to a single commodity, a gold standard exaggerates economic swings, on balance for the worse.

 

Between 1880 and 1933, the United States experienced at least five full-fledged banking crises; in the past 87 years, we’ve had two. Though promoted as smoothing price movements, a gold standard in fact magnifies them, as a comparison of the pre-Depression period to the post-World War II era makes clear.

 

In a 2012 poll, not one of 40 prominent economists supported disinterring this misguided policy.

 

A few other weird ideas from Ms. Shelton: She has questioned the accuracy of government statistics. She wants a single currency for North America. (Does she not know how badly the euro has worked?)

 

On at least two existential issues, Ms. Shelton has shown a willingness to not let principles stand in the way of career advancement. Until her confirmation hearing, she backed getting rid of federal deposit insurance, a key protection for individual savers. Her long opposition to low-interest rates notwithstanding, last year she flip-flopped to Mr. Trump’s view that low rates are, in fact, a great idea.

 

Concern within the Senate Banking Committee was obvious during its protracted consideration. “Nobody wants anybody on the Federal Reserve that has a fatal attraction to nutty ideas,” John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, said in February. But then, like so many Republicans unwilling to cross a revengeful president, Mr. Kennedy capitulated.

 

To be sure, one iconoclastic and outspoken member of a seven-person board (who are part of a 12-member committee that sets interest rates) may not change the Fed’s decisions. But if Mr. Trump wins re-election, he will have the chance to nominate a new chair of the Fed when Jerome Powell’s term expires in 2022.

 

Although he appointed Mr. Powell to the chairmanship, at times since then the president has taken to Twitter and other forums to assail him for raising rates in December 2018 and for taking too long to lower them in 2019.

 

God help us if the next chair is Ms. Shelton or anyone else with her views. Senate Republicans must recognize this danger and show some backbone.

[y66]

With a fair amount of Republican infighting this week, there’s been more speculation than is really healthy about what will happen to the party should it do badly in the election three months from now. In part, this is simply what happens to members of a party when they’re losing, perhaps combined with frustration over a policy challenge they’re at a loss to address and, let’s not forget, the short tempers that many of us are feeling at this point in the pandemic.

 

But I don’t think it tells us much about how the party would deal with a loss along the lines that the polls are currently indicating — one that would be even larger than Barack Obama’s defeat of John McCain 12 years ago. To be clear: We don’t know the election outcome yet, and circumstances this year are certainly unusual. But it’s probably fair to say that President Donald Trump is an underdog at this point and that Democrats could quite possibly win in a landslide.

 

What would happen next?

 

After a round of recriminations, the next two years are reasonably predictable: Republicans would react to unified Democratic government exactly the way they did in 1993 and 2009 — and arguably in 1977 and 1961 as well. They’d mount as much obstruction as they could in Congress, while charging the incoming administration with malfeasance. Outside of Washington, expect more Tea Party-type rallies, blaming Democrats for the high levels of unemployment they inherited and claiming their plans are socialist overreach. Expect partisans to rile up resentment the way they did in those years as well (Kevin Drum had an excellent item on this back in the Tea Party days). There might be some talk about the long-term demographic challenges the party faces, but most will soon conclude that their main mistake was not being conservative enough. There will be no serious discussions within the party of the real problem: They can’t govern.

 

(Want to make the case that Democrats reacted that way in 2017? Fair enough! I could point to some important differences, but there are clear similarities, certainly when it comes to legislative strategy.)

 

The reason this is easy to predict is because, as the party sees it, the Bob Dole Republicans in 1993-1994 and the Mitch McConnell Republicans in 2009-2010 were totally successful. Compromise is a trap, in this view; the way to recover is to oppose the Democrats flat-out.

 

Whether that accurately reflects history is a more complicated question. Bill Clinton’s presidency was badly harmed by his own mistakes in the transition and honeymoon periods, and he didn’t really get the hang of the office for at least a year. The 2010 case is more complicated, but sharply rising unemployment in the early months of Obama’s presidency was surely a major factor in Democratic midterm losses. Some would argue, too, that Democrats did a poor job of choosing popular policies with clear pay-offs to voters. It’s not clear what Republican opposition added to that.

 

But what matters is what lessons politicians learn from history, not whether those lessons are accurate. And that means the opportunity for Republicans to start changing things isn’t going to be created by a blowout in 2020; it’s going to take either Democrats holding their majorities in 2022, or winning another presidential election, or perhaps both. Even then there’s no guarantee that the party will be able to think rationally about what’s happened.

 

The unfortunate truth is that the dysfunctions that define the current Republican Party make it very difficult for them to govern competently, but don’t do much to prevent them from taking advantage of opportunities when things go wrong with Democrats in office. My guess is that this situation is not all that likely to change going forward. The problems in the party didn’t start with Trump, and they aren’t going to go away if Trump is defeated.

[y66]

From Michael Cohen Ordered Released From Prison Again by Rebecca Davis O'Brien at WSJ:

 

A federal judge ordered Michael Cohen released from prison again, saying the Justice Department had retaliated against President Trump’s former lawyer by revoking his home confinement earlier this month after Mr. Cohen declined to give up his rights to publish a book and speak with the media.

 

Mr. Cohen will be released from federal prison in Otisville, N.Y., Friday midday, U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein ruled, after he chided federal prosecutors and the Bureau of Prisons for their handling of the matter.

 

This will be Mr. Cohen’s second return home from Otisville: In May, about a year into a three-year sentence, he was released to home confinement due to concerns about the coronavirus. But on July 9, Mr. Cohen, 53 years old, was taken back into custody, after a dispute over an agreement the government had asked him to sign that would have restricted him from working on a book he plans to publish about his work for Mr. Trump.

 

Earlier this week, Mr. Cohen filed a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court, accusing Attorney General William Barr and federal prisons officials of sending him back to prison in retaliation for his book plans.

 

In a declaration filed as part of that lawsuit, Mr. Cohen said he hadn’t refused to sign the agreement, but rather had his lawyers ask questions about it. The clause in question also would have prohibited Mr. Cohen from engaging with the media.

 

In Thursday’s hearing, Judge Hellerstein said he had “never seen such a clause” in his 21 years as a judge, saying it was clearly an effort by the Bureau of Prisons “to stop the exercise of First Amendment rights.”

 

Judge Hellerstein added that, despite his injunction, Mr. Cohen “remains a prisoner” and there would be limits on his freedoms: Social media is OK, but no news conferences from his home or communications with felons. He said the government and Mr. Cohen’s lawyers should negotiate the parameters of Mr. Cohen’s book work.

 

Mr. Cohen was convicted in 2018 on charges including campaign-finance violations related to his involvement in making hush-money payments to women who alleged they had affairs with Mr. Trump. He also pleaded guilty to tax crimes and making false statements.

[y66]

Fascism was never about actual people and their predicaments but about a glorious imaginary collective that had died but would be reborn. In the 1920s and 1930s, the idea was everywhere the same: At some point in the past, the nation or the race had been greater, purer, more beautiful. That ancient perfection could be seen in ruins, poems, monuments. Then, so the story went, another group, some inferior race, some cabal had come along and inexplicably ruined the people’s destiny. If only that group could be removed, then the race could be restored, made great again.

 

In U.S. President Donald Trump’s adoration of Confederate statues and in his mobilization of state power to protect monuments, it is easy to see a similar style. The specifics of the present, the plights of individual Americans, are irrelevant, beside the point. The death of George Floyd matters only insofar as it can trigger a desire to dominate. It is a prompt to a certain narrative in which, in the end, white Americans are the true victims and the U.S. president is the greatest victim of all. The deaths of tens of thousands of Americans from the coronavirus is neither here nor there. Here too the president is victim-in-chief, with a mandate to lead the people into myth. What matters is Americans’ ability, through the medium of metal and concrete, to see their way back to a past when they were great.

 

Consider what would have happened had the president expressed as much concern for people in February and March as for statues in June and July. There was no call earlier this year for haste, for sudden action, for interagency cooperation, for an expansion of the role of the federal government to defeat a pandemic. On the contrary: The states were told to deal with the coronavirus themselves, and individuals were left to sort through the confusion and contradictions of statements from the White House. But when statues are threatened, then, it seems, exceptional action is called for. What if all the men (and, yes, they are nearly always men) swinging batons now had been passing out masks a few months ago?

 

Who are the miniature stormtroopers now appearing in Portland and soon in other cities? That the men in mismatched shoes and ill-fitting uniforms lack identification and insignia recalls virtually every authoritarian regime. It is a basic feature of a state under the rule of law that a citizen can recognize legal authority and tell the police from the thugs. It is the nightmare moment of repression to be seized by unknown men. When the government itself elides the distinction between those who protect the law and those who break it, when it makes itself into a paramilitary wearing the wrong kind of camouflage, it invites others to do the same. It is not so hard, after all, to rent a van, play dress up, and start hurting people. When citizens do not know whether they are being intimidated by governmental or nongovernmental forces, the situation is rife for the kind of escalation that fascists liked.

 

Fascists thrived in crises and indeed sought them out. The unforgettable example is the Reichstag fire, which Adolf Hitler recognized right away as his great opportunity. As the German parliament burned, the Nazis mischaracterized the event, speaking of a vast left-wing conspiracy to destroy the country, the race, and so on. Something not so dissimilar is taking place now, as Attorney General William Barr and acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf rationalize the use of force against Americans on the basis of a dark fairy tale about what the protests mean. The Nazis claimed that their main rival, the Social Democrats, were ultimately to be blamed for a terrorist act; Trump’s fundraising messages say the same about his own political rivals. By deliberately provoking protesters, Trump and his allies are working to create their own Reichstag moment. The difference this time, of course, is that everyone knows that this is what is going on.

 

After the Reichstag fire, the Nazis began to establish concentration camps. Like the U.S. detention centers for migrants, they were based on the premise that a territorial space could be excluded from the rule of law. The very first assignment of the SS was to serve as guards in the new concentration camps. This was the formative experience that made what followed possible. When Americans consider their own detention centers, which hold more people than the Nazi concentration camp system in the 1930s, they should pay special attention to the people these centers employ. It appears that some of the men taking part in the “special response teams” in Portland come from U.S. Border Patrol. It would be interesting to know how many of them already served inside detention centers.

 

When we use German terms for Nazi history, events and people seem dark and distant. Einsatzgruppen summons a notion of pure evil or perhaps an image of a death pit. But the term just means “deployment groups”; indeed the structure of these units in certain ways recalls that of the special response teams. The Einsatzgruppen were drawn from various units, deployed far from home, and asked to perform special tasks. Like the special response teams, the Einsatzgruppen had an unclear legal status. Their chain of command led through an ideological and party leadership that melded loosely, and only at the top, with the state. It is an awkward similarity that the Department of Homeland Security is directed by a myth-besotted ideologue who was never confirmed by the U.S. Senate. The people beating Americans are unaccountable to them.

Americans have been wrong to think themselves exceptional, and have much to learn about democracy, including from others who have fought harder and longer.

 

All of this is a dry run for November. Republics do not usually collapse because one day one man declares a revolution. They collapse because men inside the regime look for loopholes in the law—as can be seen very clearly in the formation of these deployment groups—and then seek to expand the loopholes until the law itself has no meaning. A crisis is found and expanded until the leader (which is all the word Führer means) can claim that a state of emergency is necessary. Friendly lawyers and judges find some provision of some law that seems to justify this, making the idea of law itself all the less credible. The men who have already learned by running the camps that exception is now the rule thrive as agents of chaos. Elections are of course held, as they were in Nazi Germany, but with the violent men in the mismatched uniforms standing by. The outcome is known in advance.

 

It can happen in the United States, and some of it has already happened, but the rest of it need not. Major elements of the state, such as the armed forces, cannot be expected to follow Trump, Barr, and Wolf into their half-grown fascism. Hitler had the armed forces tamed within four years; Trump cannot say the same. Even if some police officers do seem primed for the kind of racial war that the Nazis saw as their task, most find such an idea abhorrent, and the institution is highly decentralized and not under Trump’s control. Unlike Hitler, Trump is personally lazy and careless with institutions. He is at Hitler’s level in the imaginative use of language to create enemies. Yet he has no grand violent project for America; the state is weaker than it was four years ago, both at home and abroad. Everyone around the world knows that the United States is weaker, and some Americans have grasped this as well. This is a profound difference with fascism: Italy and Germany radiated strength and indeed seemed stronger than they were.

 

Trump cannot take fascism all the way, not because he has any virtues but because he has too many vices. He is highly skilled at creating division, as the fascists were, but less good at supplying an ideal for which risks are to be taken and sacrifices made. His ultimate idea is not racial struggle but personal fulfilment. His administration needs enough fascism to get by, enough to weaken the state and society so that the people Trump admires, be they in the Kremlin or in his circle, can stay out of prison and do well for themselves. Oligarchs are good at destroying democracies but not at imagining or building anything new. There is easily enough malice and neglect in the Trump administration to pervert a republic but not enough energy and purpose to build a fascist empire.

Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and the author of On Tyranny and The Road to Unfreedom.

[y66]

(July 19) Last night I was tear gassed by a federal occupying force I saw throw canisters of poison, without warning, into a nonviolent crowd, including elders, the vulnerable. We can't wait for November to drive secret police from Portland! Democracy is slipping away in front of our tear-gassed eyes.

Multnomah County Commissioner Sharon Meieran sets up shelter beds inside the Oregon Convention Center to increase space for safely sheltering homeless people during the pandemic. Credit: Motoya Nakamura

[johnu]

AOC Gave The Most Important Feminist Speech In A Generation

 

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) took to the floor of Congress on Thursday and gave one of the most bracing, empowering and feminist political speeches in a generation.

 

Her words came in response to the rage-filled mutterings of Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Fla.). But it would be a mistake to view what happened as simply the next stage in some typical political squabble or beef. Or, as some have attempted to argue, political opportunism.

 

The Democratic congresswoman from New York did so much more than deliver the proverbial “clapback.” This wasn’t simply a viral moment. Ocasio-Cortez offered an eloquent and expert dismantling of the playbook that men have used to keep women in their place for centuries.

Manchurian President Stooge Ted yahoo gets exposed and dismantled by AOC. Her speech on the House floor is a bright light in the dark and murky right fringe government world of COVID-19 deniers, Russian co-conspirators, bigots and racists, and facist actions by pseudo government security forces.

[y66]

What were senate republicans doing all throughout May and June?

WaPo: McConnell says stimulus deal could take ‘a few weeks,’ putting millions with expiring jobless aid in limbo

Contemplating the ifs?

[Winstonm]

Donald Trump really doesn't care about you.

 

 

The school attended by President Donald Trump's youngest son, Barron, will not fully open for in-person instruction when classes resume, officials announced in a letter to parents.

 

St. Andrew's Episcopal School, a private kindergarten-through-12th-grade school in Potomac, Maryland, a Washington suburb, will provide either online-only "distance learning" or a hybrid model of students "learning both on and off campus," according to the letter Thursday from Head of School Robert Kosasky. A final decision will be announced the week of Aug. 10.

 

Trump has threatened to withhold federal funding from schools that don't reopen for full-time, on-campus instruction, despite surging cases of COVID-19 across the nation. Earlier this month, Trump blasted school reopening guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as "expensive" and "very tough." The CDC issued revised guidelines Friday and touted the "importance of reopening schools this fall."

Many school officials, teachers and parents fear that filling classrooms with returning children will put not only the students at risk of contracting the coronavirus, but also will endanger teachers, staff, community members and children's families.

 

Bold my emphasis

This is the same old story from the new Republican party - take care of the elite/wealthy, and everyone else can go to hell.

 

[Winstonm]

When a right-winger is martyred for the cause, we should salute here in the WC, don'tcha think?

 

 

According to KFOR News 4, William Welch, a man in Ponca City, Oklahoma, has been arrested after an altercation in Casey's General Store, a local convenience store, which started when an employee told him he couldn't use a refill cup due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

"I looked at my cashier because I saw the cup sitting there. I said remember we can't have refill mugs because of COVID-19," said the employee, Stacy Orange. "By then, he's already telling me to F off."

 

On a 911 call to the Ponca City Police, Orange said, "There's a guy in here calling me n***** and stuff. He's calling me c***, n*****, b****, and flipping me off. His last comment was 'you should hang just like the rest of the n******.'"

 

Orange added that she is scared to go back to work after the incident.

 

According to Ponca City Police Detective Kevin Jeffries, "We charged him with outraging public decency because it was in the public and we had witnesses."

 

Welch was released on $5,000 bond pending trial. He refused to provide comment to KFOR, and reportedly slammed a door in a correspondent's face.

 

 

 

 

Good thing they had witnesses for an outraging public decency charge - but what about a hate crime?

[johnu]

‘Shameful’ And ‘A Sign Of Weakness’ – Why Right-Wingers Are ‘Least Likely To Wear Face Masks’

 

I have previously posted that right wingers were causing COVID-19 spread by refusing to wear masks.

 

“Our data show that right-wing leaning people intend to wear a face mask less than left-wing leaning people. Interestingly, this difference is particularly strong in US counties where wearing a face mask is not mandatory. In counties where wearing a face mask is mandatory, left-leaning people are still more likely than right-leaning people to wear a face mask, but the difference across the political divide is much smaller, and almost non-existent.

 

“In sum, making it mandatory to wear a face mask has a greater effect on right-leaning people, compared to left-leaning people, who wear a face mask relatively independently of whether it is mandatory or not.”

 

The researchers also found that men are less likely wear face masks than women, and more inclined to see wearing one as “shameful” and a “sign of weakness”. People are much more likely to wear face masks if they rely on reasoning instead of emotion, they also say.

 

The refusal to even partially try to stop the COVID-19 pandemic in the US by the Typhoid Donald in Chief by actively sabotaging public health measures by his own administration and the stooge behavior of most of his Republican sycophant governors in refusing to order statewide mask wearing measures and shutdown orders has allowed the Trump epidemic to run out of control in the US.

 

Many epidemiologists and epidemic specialists predicted exactly the disaster scenario the US is facing today because of the complete lack of a national policy. Predictably, several regions were hit hard the earliest, and other regions were initially spared but went on with business as usual. Then the first hit regions are starting to recover, and other regions are now getting hit hard. And if the current regions that are inundated with COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths manage to get things under control, you can expect different regions to get hard, some for a 2nd time.

[y66]

A ‘Wall of Vets’ Joins the Front Lines of Portland Protests by Mike Baker at NYT

 

PORTLAND, Ore. — A week after federal officers in Portland, Ore., brutally struck a Navy veteran who said he had approached them simply to ask a question, a group of military veterans on Friday joined the front lines of the city’s growing protests.

 

Duston Obermeyer, a Marine Corps veteran, said he and other veterans were there to make sure federal officers did not infringe on the free speech of protesters, who numbered in the thousands.

 

“Our veterans are here specifically to support the rights of the protesters to protest,” said Mr. Obermeyer, who said he had deployed three times during a decade in the Marines.

 

The group of vets lined up in front of a fence erected outside the federal courthouse. They stayed together until a cloud of tear gas scattered much of the crowd.

 

While President Trump and the Department of Homeland Security have repeatedly labeled the protesters in Portland as “violent anarchists,” demonstrators have banded together in groups. A “Wall of Moms” has grown to include hundreds of women in yellow shirts linking arms. A “Wall of Dads” in orange shirts has included some with leaf blowers used to push tear gas away from the crowds. Many nurses on Saturday showed up in blue scrubs.

 

Local officials have demanded that federal agents leave the city, saying their presence has inflamed tensions and their tactics have been outrageous. One of those concerning cases was that of Christopher J. David, a Navy veteran who said he went to the protests for the first time last weekend to ask officers whether they felt their actions violated the Constitution.

 

As he stood still in front of the officers, one began hitting him with a baton. Mr. David said the attack broke his fingers.

 

Mr. Obermeyer cited that case as one of the motivations of the “Wall of Vets.”

 

Another veteran, Clint Hall, said he came out to support the Black Lives Matter movement. Carrying a “Disabled Veterans 4 BLM” sign, the Army veteran said the federal presence in the city had simply increased the tension.

 

“Things were getting better, and then they came here and made it worse,” Mr. Hall said. “Enough is enough.”

 

After suffering through the tear gas that was shot into the crowd, Mr. Hall said that the tear gas was so strong that it was leaving burns on his skin. He said it felt worse than the tear gas he recalled from his time in the Army.

 

“This response from the feds is over the top,” he said.

[Winstonm]

This is the president. Sad.

 

Many years ago, Harvard psychologist David McClelland showed that individuals who actually are high-achieving are quick to call on expertise—they don’t go down in flames trying to prove their prowess in areas in which they lack skill. Rather, they are quick to call on expertise to move their projects forward.

 

Dr. Mary Trump’s book details how “I alone can fix it” is a statement 70 years in the making, not an odd choice of words in a single speech. Donald Trump’s bravado requires the diminishment of all others, including experts. Marginalizing Drs. Fauci, Birx, and Redfield, he creates space for his own position as in the new CDC guidelines that prioritize opening schools over the safety of the students, teachers, and staff within them.