Wakanda 4Ever

Homestretch:  The conventions are behind us but the virus is still here as are the racial justice demonstrations and their nefarious offspring, violence.  Trump hasn’t given up on trying to change the narrative on the virus to make it seem like he’s handled it swimmingly and that we’re lucky that “only” 187,000 have perished, the main reason that FDA head Steven Kahn, who last weekend exaggerated the benefits of convalescent plasma, is now talking about fast tracking the release of a virus before testing is complete.   However, Trump’s now pivoted his focus to hyping violence, blaming each and every demonstration that turns violent on those radical Democratic mayors and governors. A Black man being shot in the back seven times by police, he must have done something to deserve it; a Trump loving teen arrested for homicide after taking to the Kenosha, Wisconsin streets, shooting three and killing two protesters, well he was just there to protect the city.  Kellyanne Conway may finally be gone from the White House, not that anyone is convinced that she plans to parent forever, but her alternative facts mantra and the fruits of her hateful rhetoric remain. In one of her last official interviews, she said the quiet part out loud, that Trump views chaos in the streets as politically useful, sadly she’s probably right about that. Every time it looks like Portland, Oregon is starting to calm down, things take a turn for the worse. Remember those caravans of Latin American migrants who were supposedly planning to invade the US right before the 2018 election, well they never came, but a Trump Cruise Rally made up of pickup trucks with Trump banners, thin blue line signs and American flags did make its way into Portland on Saturday night and by the end of the night one person was dead.  Reports are that the dead man, a member of a far right group, may have been one of the people tossing bear mace, whatever that is, at demonstrators off one of those trucks.  It’s not clear if that’s what led to his shooting, it’s not even clear yet who shot him but as far as the Trump team goes, he, like the teen who killed two in Kenosha Wisconsin, is a hero. Yesterday during a press conference Ted Wheeler, Portland’s Mayor called out Trump saying "Do you seriously wonder, why this is the first time in decades that America has seen this level of violence? It's you who have created the hate and the division. It's you who have not found a way to say the names of Black people killed by police officers even as people in law enforcement have. And it's you who claimed that white supremacists are good people," adding "Your campaign of fear is as anti-democratic as anything you've done to create hate and vitriol in our beautiful country."  Trump of course responded by attacking the “wacky, do nothing” Mayor saying that Portland would never recover as it had a “fool for a Mayor.” Trump doesn’t really care much about what’s going on in Portland as Oregon is not a state that he has any chance of winning but pushing that violence is caused by radical Democrats is a narrative that suits his purpose, particularly in those swing states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan that he does care about.  To that end  Trump is planning to visit Kenosha, Wisconsin this week even though that city’s mayor and the state’s Democratic governor have asked him to reconsider over concerns that his presence will spur additional violence.  And despite the Republican party line that he’s hiding in his basement, Joe Biden is also planning to do some traveling this week, though he appears to be a bit more concerned about making sure that his visits don’t trigger more unrest.  He’s made it clear several times that while he’s all in on peaceful demonstrations, he’s against violence and looting.  That said, at least for now Trump appears to be winning the violence war, or at least that’s what we’re being told, there’s been few polls since his convention.  The bottom line is that Trump is the master at spinning and cares little if that spinning leads escalates out of control violence.  And one more thing, Trump daughter in law Lara, Eric’s wife, wants us to ignore Trump’s tweets and rhetoric, she advises that we instead focus on the wonderful things that he’s done, especially those great things that he’s done for women.  I guess we know who’s picking up the alternative facts crown.

 

Intelligence Wars:  Over the weekend John Ratcliffe, the former Congressman/Trump toady, who currently serves as the Director of National Intelligence announced that while he’ll still send Congress a written assessment of the threats being made against the upcoming election, he won’t meet with any of them, especially House Intel Chairman Adam Schiff and Speaker Pelosi because they’re all a bunch of Trump hating losers and leakers.  If that sounds outrageous and a dereliction of duty its because it is.  Sure there’s leaking but there’s always leaking, a good number of the stories that come out of the White House come from leakers who are also members of the Trump family so the leaking allegation holds little water, especially since Congressional members will still be provided with a written assessment.  Nevertheless, even Senator Marco Rubio, the new head of the Senate Intelligence Committee thinks that Ratcliffe is wrong, though he did manage to berate his House colleagues for being leakers, not that he would ever do anything like that. It turns out that Ratcliffe, whose nomination was pulled the first time he was proposed for the DNI spot over fears that he was too much of a Trump loyalist, is exactly that.  He’s figured out that it will be a whole lot easier for him to deflect concerns about ongoing Russian election interference while exaggerating Chinese and Iranian meddling if he isn’t forced to face a bunch of skeptical inquisitors.  In that regard, he has Senator Ron Johnson’s support, Johnson attacked Democrats’ concerns saying it’s their fault because they pushed that phony Russian election interference hoax, that’s the hoax that the Republican led Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed wasn’t a hoax two weeks ago in its final report.  

 

Heroes:  Sports are back. In exchange for returning to the playoffs the NBA players have gotten commitments from team owners to promote social justice and civic engagement and to use their arenas as safe polling places. That’s great, but in a rational world the government wouldn’t need the NBA to step into its shoes.  And sadly the world has lost a great actor and role model, Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman, whose performance in the groundbreaking action movie was even more impressive than anyone realized as he had been enduring chemo therapy and surgery during its filming.  May his memory be a blessing.              

 

 

On to November and Beyond

Law & Order:  During the four days of the Republican convention 3,688 people died from the coronavirus, that’s more people than died on 9.11; that puts the total number of US COVID deaths at over 180,000.  Nevertheless, most of those who attended Trump’s White House RNC event, the one that violated the Hatch Act, believe the whole coronavirus thing is yesterday’s news as none of them socially distanced and only a few wore masks.  A good number of those unmasked have preexisting conditions including Commerce Secretary/octogenarian Wilbur Ross, fresh from a recent hospital stay, Rudy Giuliani, a prostate cancer survivor who was sweating profusely and wiping his hands all over his current flame, and former baseball player/cancer survivor Darryl Strawberry.  Striving to join Tulsa fatality Herman Caine wherever it is that he’s still tweeting from, perhaps?   From what I understand, because to be honest I didn’t have the fortitude to sit through another night of lies and loathing, the event went off as planned.  Ivanka, who wants us to believe that all those COVID deaths sadden her father, said that he is the greatest while also repeatedly patting herself on the back, no surprise as she’s jockeying with her brother Don Jr to see which Trump gets to run for the roses in 2024 assuming Trump doesn’t pull off that reign extension thing that he keeps talking about. By the way, we probably shouldn’t assume that son Eric isn’t competing for that mantle too, he was caught on camera attending a Homeland Security Meeting with his father yesterday, maybe getting pointers on who to contact in Russia about Biden dirt?  Getting back to the speakers, Rudy trashed everyone’s favorite punching bag NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio for turning NYC into a lawless city, more than implying that Joe Biden would do the same to the rest of the country.  Fun fact, despite the current shooting spike in NYC, homicides are half of what they were during the last year of Rudy’s reign. Uber conservative hawk Senator Tom Cotton alleged that Biden was responsible for selling the US out to China and would hand off whatever hadn’t been handed off during the Obama/Biden regime on day one of his administration.  And of course everyone, most notably Trump himself blamed every Democrat ever born for every violent crime committed this year, ignoring that he is in charge and that much of the current wave of violence is attributable to the climate of hate that he’s fostered, the economy that he’s destroyed, his failure to control the pandemic and the widespread gun ownership that he’s done nothing to curb. There’s nothing funny about Trump, the most criminal president we’ve ever had going with the LAW & ORDER theme especially since, pushing that “the minorities are going to invade your suburbs” theme might actually win him enough votes in those key swing districts to win the electoral college. The road to election day, and beyond, is going to be very bumpy indeed.

The Democrats:  Speaker Pelosi suggested that Biden shouldn’t bother debating Trump since all Trump does is lie.  Appearing on a few news shows during the day, Biden said despite Pelosi’s advice, he plans to go forward with the debates and that in the absence of a fact checker, he’ll check the facts himself in real time. He also said that he’s going to hit the campaign trail after Labor Day, but that unlike Trump he plans to adhere to local virus control rules. VP candidate Kamala Harris showed why she was picked to join the ticket by offering a very effective prosecutorial pre-rebuttal of Trump’s acceptance speech yesterday afternoon slamming his handling of the “relentless” coronavirus pandemic as catastrophic, saying that you can’t “create a distraction and hope it will go away.”  She also called Trump petty and vindictive because he is.

Et Cetera: It looks like sports will be back on in a few days no thanks to either son in law Jared Kushner or  Trump who both weighed in with their own comments on the players’ response to racial injustice and the James Blake shooting.  When asked about the suspension of the basketball playoffs, Trump commented on the NBA’s TV ratings, saying that they are down because of their politics.  And the tone deaf Kushner who was being trashed on Twitter last night as the worst blind date ever by countless Jewish women who’d been set up with him back in his pre-Ivanka days, who inherited his fortune from his father and married a woman who similarly inherited hers, said that the players were "very fortunate" to be in a financial position to "take a night off from work."  VP Pence weighed in calling the player protests absurd and his spokesmen, Marc Short, called them silly. By the way according to his father James Blake, the now paralyzed Black man who was shot in the back seven times by the police is currently handcuffed to his bed.  Rittenhouse, the 17 year old high school drop-out/police obsessed Trump fan who traveled to Kenosha to “protect” the citizenry but who instead killed two peaceful protestors and shot another but was offered water by the police who initially seemed reluctant to even stop him is now facing homicide charges.  Sean Hannity’s lawyer is soliciting donations for his defense.  Who knows, by October maybe Rittenhouse will be standing alongside some of Trump’s pardon winners chanting lock her up at a Trump rally.  On the press front, it looks like the Trump team has had it with Washington Post journalist David Farenthold, after he published another one of his pieces looking into how much money the government has been spending at Trump branded resorts, White House spokesman Judd Deere accused the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist of interfering with the Trump businesses, blurting out that the administration is building a dossier on him. The fearless Farenthold responded by tweeting out a request for anyone with more details about that “dossier” to contact him, confidentially of course, with what they know.  And, not that anyone in Trump’s fan base cares, 100 former John McCain staffers and 30 former Mitt Romney aides came out against Trump yesterday, endorsing Biden. Lastly, Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe resigned this morning due to intestinal illness, very relatable because who doesn’t feel sick to their stomachs this morning?      

 

 

Storm Clouds Everywhere

Alternative Realities:  The Republicans went on with their convention last night. They continued to assert that Trump has brilliantly wrestled the coronavirus into submission, driving that point home by failing to adhere to social distancing and face masking precautions while talking about the pandemic in the past tense.  In an effort to lure white suburban women back into the fold, Trump rolled out some more of his women, including such Hatch Act violators as the soon to leave the White House Kellyanne Conway and Press Secretary Kayleigh “I’ll never lie to you” McEnany. He also gave a time slot to Kristi Noem, the South Dakota Governor/virus truther whose state’s Sturgis motorcycle rally is now seeding cases of COVID around the country as well as a few more people of color, including Jack Brewer, the former Eagles Football player recently charged with insider trading, because what’s another thief among friends. To be clear Trump’s Black “friends” wasn’t there to convince other Blacks that Trump is worthy of their votes, rather they were there to convince those key, on the fence white women that Trump isn’t quite the bigot that most know he is. VP Pence, who was later joined by Trump and Melania, delivered his nomination acceptance speech in front of an un-distanced, unmasked and largely untested audience at Baltimore’s Fort McHenry.  Of course Pence went all in on Trump’s LAW & ORDER message, attacking Joe Biden as a radical, police hater, that’s the same Joe Biden that the Republican party is also blaming for his earlier support for a “too harsh” crime bill.  While the Republican crowd was busy filling the air with lies and virus infused aerosol droplets, Hurricane Laura was slamming the gulf coast of Louisiana and Texas and outrage over the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin that was followed by the subsequent killing of two others by Kyle Rittenhouse, an assault rifle toting white 17 year old, was raining down on the rest of us.  As to Rittenhouse the demented Trump fanboy who had a front row seat at Trump’s January rally Des Moines Iowa, last night Fox pundit Tucker Carlson, defended his murderous actions saying “Kenosha has devolved into anarchy because the authorities in charge of the city abandoned it….so are we really surprised that looting and arson accelerated to murder? How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?”  For the record authorities didn’t abandon Kenosha, they were out in force, although they didn’t appear to view Rittenhouse as a threat even after he mowed down his victims.  Moreover saying Rittenhouse “had to” defend the city is a call out to white supremacists everywhere to grab your guns, the race war is on.  Compare Carlson’s call to arms to the emotional words delivered by LA Clippers coach Doc Rivers who said “All you hear is Donald Trump and all of them talking about fear. We're the ones getting killed. We're the ones getting shot. We're the ones that we're denied to live in certain communities. We've been hung. We've been shot. And all you do is keep hearing about fear….. It's amazing why we keep loving this country, and this country does not love us back. It's really so sad. Like, I should just be a coach. I'm so often reminded of my color. It's just really sad. We got to do better. But we got to demand better. It's funny. We protest. They send riot guards. They send people in riot outfits. They go up to Michigan with guns. They're spitting on cops. Nothing happens." In protest of the Kenosha shootings, a number of sports teams and leagues cancelled games yesterday in response to their players “had enough” message.  At least for now there will be no NBA basketball playoffs, no WNBA games and a few less baseball games. Beyond tweeting that he was sending the National Guard to maintain LAW & ORDER in Wisconsin, Trump and his acolytes had little to say about the shooting of Jacob Blake or the murders by Rittenhouse although local police appear to want us to be outraged over the fact that Blake admitted to having a knife in his car, as if that justified shooting him in the back seven times.  In contrast, both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris did speak to the Blake family and Biden released a video calling for the end of the needless violence but their statements were mostly drowned out by the RNC and the hurricane and given the tense climate and the message from the White house, the one amplified on Fox and abetted by Facebook where calls for white militias to come to Kenosha were posted, their statement probably isn’t going to accomplish much. Getting back to the RNC White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows says concerns about the Hatch Act violations are overblown because nobody outside of the Beltway cares if everyone in the White House is breaking the law and former DNI/Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, who in addition to insisting that his presence on team Trump is proof that Trump is a gay rights advocate, says that he watched Trump charm German Chancellor Angela Merkel, that’s the Merkel who barely hides her disdain for Trump. Maybe it’s fair to assume that Grenell’s not the best judge of character?    

Et Cetera:  Another former Homeland Security Official, lifelong Republican Elizabeth Neumann, who served as  Assistant Secretary for Threat Prevention and Security Policy,  has come out against Trump.  Saying that “We will continue to be less safe as long as Trump is in control,” she said she’ll be voting for the Biden ticket. In her statement she detailed how Trump ignored all warnings that the coronavirus pandemic was on its way, putting “his” precious economy and election prospects ahead of the nation’s health. That message is consistent with the additional details coming out about the CDC decision discouraging asymptomatic people from getting COVID tests even if they fear they’ve been exposed.  As suspected that decision was foisted upon spineless CDC leadership by the White House.  Governors Cuomo and Newsome are outraged by it, saying that it makes no sense, with Cuomo adding that its more of Trump’s policy of “ignoring the problem.  Virus guru Fauci also distanced himself from the decision, saying it was signed off on while he was under anesthesia having his vocal cord surgery. Trump’s newest doctor, radiologist Scott Atlas however is all in on it, because you know, that virus isn’t really a problem anyway, not when thousands of students are returning to schools, frat parties and team sports.  What you don’t know can’t kill you, Right?        

 

The New Jackie

RNC Night Two:  Last night Pam Bondi, the former Florida Attorney General who conveniently opted out of prosecuting the fraud that was Trump University after receiving a political contribution/pay off from Trump, attacked Joe Biden for colluding with Ukraine to enrich his son Hunter.  That she managed to do that with a straight face the very same week that we learned that simple son Eric, who also spoke last night, was dodging a New York State subpoena related to an investigation into the Trump organization’s financial doings was  beyond hypocritical but not surprising because the Trump set lies and says horrific things all the time.  Bondi’s performance was just the tip of last night’s very hypocritical iceberg.  Trump who hates immigrants, or at least those who don’t qualify for “genius” model visas, staged a citizenship ceremony for a crowd straight from Village People Central Casting Inc:  an Indian, a Muslim, an African, a Latin American, etc. While tens of thousands of other qualified applicants remain mired in COVID limbo because the Trump administration won’t let their citizenship ceremonies progress via Zoom, this group was move to the head of the pack for Trump’s reelection show optics.  Then again, who knows if their citizenship papers will stand up to any scrutiny as their ceremony was presided over by Chad Wolf, Trump’s Acting Head of Homeland Security, whose legitimacy to serve in his position is questionable which probably explains why Trump formally nominated him to serve as the permanent head of DHS yesterday. Back to the show, daughter Tiffany confirmed once and for all that she’s team Trump while also slamming the “biased” media and cancel culture, a bit ironic since one of her father’s planned speakers, so-called “angel” mom Mary Ann Mendoza had her time slot cancelled at the last minute after her tweet promoting the anti-Semitic  Protocol of the Elders of Zion trope went viral. Pulling an excuse from Trump’s book, Mendoza said that her retweeting of that old Jews control the world and are out to get you garbage was an inadvertent boo-boo, that she hadn’t read the whole thing that she retweeted but apparently she has a history of tweeting hate, a history that would have been disqualifying earlier had the Trump screeners not agreed with her sentiments. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo should have been cancelled too because diplomats aren’t supposed to appear at political events, or at least that’s what his legal beagles advised him, a message he passed on to all of his State Department denizens just a few months ago,  but he was there last night, well there virtually, appearing from Jerusalem with the awesome lights of the Dome of the Rock holy site serving as his backdrop as he touted Trump’s foreign affairs acumen and positioned himself for a run for the presidency in 2024. Did anyone think that he’d let Nikki Haley, one of his likely Republican competitors, appear at the convention without an appearance of his own legal or not.  And then there’s Melania, exquisitely coifed and wearing a Nazi chic military ensemble she gets points for acknowledging the traumatic impact of the coronavirus epidemic, that’s the epidemic that everyone else in Trump world either failed to mention or said was almost behind us, but she gave them back by bragging about the “legitimate” way that she “earned“ her citizenship, by pushing her Be Best crap and by saying that we deserve total honesty from our president, more than implying that her husband, the model of deception, rather than Joe Biden, was the guy to provide that. So basically, from my vantage point last night was a sh-t show but then again, Trump, who also used the stage to pardon someone Black while Kenosha, Wisconsin was erupting into flames over the police shooting, in the back, of another Black man, still alive but paralyzed and missing a few key organs, isn’t trying to get my vote, rather he’s going for those suburban white housewives and who knows, maybe this is what it takes to keep them on the Trump train.   

Viral Musings:  We’re up to around 178,000 COVID deaths and are supposed to be happy that the daily death count is trending downward but we are far from out of the woods as the number of new cases continues to be very high. The CDC has a solution for that, they’ve changed their recommendations about who should be tested saying that if you’ve been exposed to someone who’s COVID positive but are asymptomatic, there’s no need to get tested.  That new “advice” flies in the face of what we’ve been told because by now we know that asymptomatic people can be spreaders and that the only way to squelch the virus is to figure out who is doing the spreading. Most medical experts rightfully believe that these new recommendations are dangerous and will make it virtually impossible to do contact tracing but obviously they do have one very significant plus – they please Trump because as he’s told us repeatedly too much testing is the reason that our COVID count is so high.  Anyway there aren’t enough tests, especially quick ones, to go around though there must have been plenty available at the White House yesterday as the live audience and the pardon and citizenship winners weren’t adequately distanced and few, if any, were wearing masks, not even those saluting military guys that Trump had hanging out in dress uniform, part of his look at me, I’m the King, stage setting.  As to curing the virus, it turns out that  convalescent plasma is even further from being the miracle cure that Trump “announced” it was on Sunday.  Facing wilting criticism from the medical community, FDA Head Stephen Hahn admitted yesterday that he had overstated its benefits saying that he misspoke and should have said that “the data show a relative risk reduction not an absolute risk reduction," in other words that 35% improvement in survival he cited on Sunday, an inexcusable exaggeration.  Obviously Hahn is feeling the pressure to satisfy Trump who is desperate for a quick COVID cure, but Hahn’s misstatement is likely to have deadly consequences as it calls his and the FDA’s credibility into question. We all want a cure, and if we’re sick enough most of us will try anything but the equation for vaccination is different. A lot of people who otherwise would get vaccinated won’t jeopardize their health if they believe that the FDA is putting Trump’s political ambitions ahead of their health and if the FDA keeps on letting Trump and people like his trade advisor Peter Navarro make their decisions for them we will all be right to be concerned.  That’s the same Peter Navarro who is still pushing hydroxychloroquine and said yesterday that Melania is the Jackie Kennedy of her time. Hydroxychloroquine doesn’t cure or prevent COVID, Melania is not the new Jackie, and the Rose Garden looked far better before she added the concrete walkway and took away the trees.             

 

 

The Designated Fall Son

The Usual Suspects:  Not wanting to boost Trump’s ratings, I mostly avoided watching night one of the Republican convention which is only fair because from what I hear they mostly ignored the coronavirus, not all that surprising as according to a CBS/YouGov poll 57% of Republicans think that 177,000 is an acceptable death count.  Makes you wonder what they’ll think when the number reaches 250,000 or whether they, like Kellyanne and George Conway’s oldest daughter Claudia who is now claiming that she has been a victim of child abuse, hate their parents.  From the snippets of the convention that I did catch and from what I read, I understand that the Republicans rolled out some token minorities including their go to Black politician, Senator Tim Scott, presidential aspirant Nikki Haley, the Indian American former SC Governor/UN Ambassador who asserted that there is no discrimination in her American while also mentioning how she was discriminated against while growing up, and a number of the other usual suspects.  By suspects think current and future felons including the McCloskeys, the very litigious St Louis couple who in addition to threatening BLM protesters passing by their home with a rifle and a handgun, because doesn’t everyone stand on their balcony with guns, once destroyed a beehive producing honey for Rosh Hashanah at a neighboring synagogue because they could. There’s something particularly cringeworthy about giving gun wielding bullies air time on a day when another Black man was hospitalized, the victim of another police shooting while also saying that your party is the best option for Black voters, you know those people who are trying to “invade” the suburbs.  On the felon front, it looks like son Eric who is scheduled to speak tonight could be the family’s designated fall guy.  Yesterday, NY Attorney General Letitia James revealed that she’s been seeking testimony from Eric related to her investigation into whether Trump and the Trump Organization committed fraud by overstating the value of assets to obtain loans and tax benefits.  Apparently Eric agreed to meet with her team and then reneged asserting his “constitutional rights.”  Those are the rights you really worry about when you believe revealing what you know could result in a civil case becoming a criminal one. The timing of AG James’ announcement might raise eyes, but then again it’s not like the Republicans who have been going after Joe Biden’s son Hunter would ever do something like that?  On the “son” front Don Jr did speak last night and judging by the condition of his eyes he either has an advanced case of pink eye or has dipped into someone’s drug supply, similarly girlfriend Kim Guilfoyle who screamed her entire speech to an empty auditorium appeared to be under the influence of something, either that or hearing loss is another as yet unreported after effect of COVID. Tune in tonight, surely there will be more of the same including a speech by Melania, ones by both Eric and Tiffany and a totally norm busting presentation by Secretary of State Pompeo calling in from Israel.  

Postal Wars:  Postmaster General DeJoy was back on the hot seat yesterday, testifying in front of the House Oversight Committee.  Republicans complained about the Democrats complaints, accusing them of inventing a crisis where none existed  possibly because they  unlike their Democratic colleagues missed all the times that Trump said that he would be happy to defund the USPS if that’s what it took to upend voting by mail.  For his part DeJoy is either totally clueless, pretending to be so, or both.  He couldn’t answer some basic questions about postal rates and practices and kept blaming unknown officials at the Postal Service for the service cutbacks implemented under his watch.  At one point he even said that he didn’t want to know who had ordered the limits on overtime that he said he never approved, implying that if he didn’t know who, he couldn’t do anything about it.  He didn’t think that there was anything wrong with mail trucks going out empty as long as they were on time, mail delivery be damned. And as to those decommissioned sorters, he kept on insisting that they were due to be dismantled anyway, ignoring that a disproportionate number of them were taken out of service in blue leaning districts.  He’s not off the hook yet, but this is the Trump administration so he probably will get away with what he’s doing and despite Democratic efforts to extract promises about ensuring timely ballot delivery and the return of some of those sorters, questions remain besides it’s not like anything DeJoy said should be believed. On the voter fraud front, though Trump and his team are still pushing the narrative that mail-in voting will lead to widespread voter fraud, a Trump appointed Pennsylvania judge isn’t buying it. He put a halt to a Trump campaign lawsuit against some new mail-in friendly voting provisions after the Republican lawyers failed to provide him with any examples of voter fraud.  

Et Cetera;  Yesterday Liberty University’s Jerry Falwell Jr laid the blame for his scandalous behavior on his wife, saying that it resulted from severe emotional stress relating to her affair with their pool boy.  That’s the pool boy whose business he invested in a few years ago.  The pool boy also weighed in with some accusations of his own.  Suffice it to say all of their behavior violates those strict moral standards that students at Liberty U are expected to maintain.  Liberty U reports that Falwell has now resigned but late yesterday Falwell disputed their assertion.  Apparently he’s still working out the terms of his exit.  It’s fair to assume that he, like the indicted Steve Bannon, will not be speaking at the Republican convention this week but who knows, he’d fit right in.  Former Arizona  Senator Jeff Flake and former RNC Head/MSNBC pundit Michael Steele won’t be speaking either, the two have joined the growing list of former and current Republicans endorsing Joe Biden for president.   

 

 

Family Feud

Weekend Recap:  Trump is still attacking mail-in voting, or at least mail- in voting by everyone who isn’t planning to vote for him.  Postmaster General DeJoy claims that all is fine at the USPS and that despite Trump’s assertions to the contrary that all of our trusty rain, sleet or snow mail couriers will be able to deliver each and every absentee ballot dropped in one of its blue boxes, assuming that you can find one and that it’s not crusted in those COVID germs that Trump says makes them dangerous to go near.  DeJoy also said that all of those sorters taken out of commission weren’t needed anyway, especially the ones in blue parts of the country that various local postal officials have been reassembling against orders because they feel that they really need them. Trump’s Aunt, Maryanne Trump Barry, inadvertently confirmed that Trump is the creepy, lying, SAT cheating, soulless idiot that his niece Mary says he is and Kellyanne Conway, the queen of alternative facts, is leaving the White House at the end of the month to save her family or what’s left of it. Trump wants us to know that convalescent plasma which has been in use since the early 1900s is the miracle cure for COVID that everyone wants it to be even though it’s not and he also implied that the reason we don’t have a COVID vaccine already is because deep forces at the FDA are slow walking the approval process in order to tank his reelection prospects.  The Republican convention starts tonight, every member of Trump’s family not named Mary or Maryanne will be speaking and Trump will be speaking every night.  Kellyanne Conway will be speaking too, as will Secretary of State Mike Pompeo who will be zooming in from Jerusalem even though traditionally the Secretary of State does not speak at partisan events such as conventions.  Both former UN Ambassador/SC Governor Nikki Haley and VP Pence will be speaking also as will South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, part of what may be a final bake off for the VP slot in the event that Trump decides to dump Pence to get some Kamala Harris offsetting estrogen on his ticket, a move that having Pompeo speak from the Holy Land might portend because Pompeo calling in from Jerusalem could offset the anger that the evangelicals would feel about losing Pence (and Mother) from the ticket.  As to the convention, last night the RNC announced that the party no longer is bothering with a platform because with Trump, who repeatedly says that he is deserving of at least two more terms, who needs a platform.  And of course the Republicans are holding many of the convention events at the White House despite the fact that doing so violates the Hatch Act, that’s the White House with the Melania supervised newly renovated Rose Garden that got trashed on Twitter over the weekend, something having to do with her replacing the beautiful crabapple trees with a concrete sidewalk. 

The Mail Blues:  Postmaster DeJoy testified in front of the somewhat friendly, Republican dominated Senate Homeland Committee on Friday.  He repeatedly made it clear that he’d only been on the job for two months and as such nothing that’s happened at the USPS is his fault.  Though he claimed that there had been no USPS service cuts, he also admitted that as a result of his mandate that trucks adhere to their schedules, many had been going out empty due to staff shortages that he attributed to coronavirus related absenteeism and summer holiday schedules. “Efficiency expert” DeJoy didn’t seem all that concerned that having the trucks adhere to a fixed schedule meant that stacks of letters and packages, including key drug deliveries, were left piling up in warehouses, because who cares about actually delivering mail as long as the trucks are on time?  He denied that there had been cutbacks in overtime and also refused to provide a lot of the back-up information that the Democratic members of the Homeland committee requested, possibly because leaked copies of some of that information, particularly data about the overtime cutbacks, reveal that he was lying.  For the most part, with the exception of “RINO” Mitt Romney, the Republican members of the committee were happy with his testimony, the Democrats who came armed with complaints from their constitutents not so much.  On Saturday, Speaker Pelosi’s House held a rare weekend session, passing, with the help of 26 Republicans, 27 if you count the Republican who voted “no” but meant to vote “yes,” a $25 billion USPS funding packages that called for DeJoy to rollback all of the service cuts that he denies having made. Curiously enough, NJ Republican Van Drew, the Congressman who switched to the Republican party this year and who is speaking at the RNC, voted for the package.  It’s unlikely that the Senate which is on holiday will even reconvene to vote on this legislation anytime soon if ever. Today DeJoy will be on the Hill for a House grilling; armed with proof that he prevaricated a lot on Friday, the House isn’t expected to treat him with kid gloves. 

People, Places, Things:  Trump niece Mary got tired of people claiming that she had made up parts of her book so she released some of the tapes of her conversations with her Aunt Maryanne.  It turns out that though she didn’t know it as it only takes one side to legally tape calls in NY the good judge, was the source of a lot of the information included in the book.  One particular conversation where she dissed Trump’s intellect, recounted that she had to pull strings to get into Fordham, arrange for him to get “help” with his SATS and then help him transfer to the University of Pennsylvania, not Wharton as Trump likes to say, is notable. She also mentions that he doesn’t really read, a statement that the very complicit abettor/Chief of Staff Mark Meadows called into question this weekend saying that Trump reads more than anyone he knows, that he reads so much and is “so well prepared that it causes me to have to read many times well into the night to keep catch up to him.”  Kellyanne wasn’t the only Conway to announce her departure from the scene, her husband George also announced his retreat from the very anti-Trump Lincoln Project; he did that with a lengthy series of tweets that made it clear that he still supports the Project’s efforts and still thinks that Trump is woefully incompetent and evil.  Both members of the Conway cult appear to be stepping back to save their fifteen year old daughter Claudia who appears to be teetering on the edge, she threatened to seek emancipation from them over the weekend and, sadly, that may be the least of her problems.  As to convalescent plasma, Trump’s first FDA Director Scott Gottlieb said it’s probably incrementally helpful to COVID patients and meets the criteria for an Emergency Use Authorization but that more “evidence generation” is needed and that it’s hardly a miracle cure.  He added that we need to keep FDA decisions with the FDA, his way of saying that Trump should not be forcing approval decisions to aid his campaign and certainly shouldn’t be rushing the approval of any vaccines. By the way neither vocally challenged virus guru Fauci nor Dr Debby, who wants us all to know that if we are willing to go to Starbucks we should be happy to vote in person, were present at Trump’s press conference but his Fox TV expert, radiologist Scott Atlas was.  On the international front, no comment from Trump condemning the poisoning of Vladimir Putin’s opponent Alexei Navalny, who was finally flown to Germany for treatment but only after most of the telltale signs of poison had probably left his body, but expect something to come out of Pompeo’s trip to Israel. Pompeo’s traveling squad includes son in law Jared who is probably there to convince the Israelis to enthusiastically back the sale of those stealthy bombers to the UAE, the planes that UAE wants as payment for their agreeing to recognize Israel, their new “peace partner.” Jared was out on the Sunday talk show circuit this weekend talking up his father in law and Middle East peace for fairly obvious reasons.     

Tune in tonight, or not, it’s going to be either very entertaining or sickening or both.

 

Bannon, Arrest, Yacht, Wall, Fraud 

A Perfect Score:  Joe Biden stuck the landing last night, delivering the speech of his life time, a pretty good performance for the guy that Trump, his family and the RNC continue to insist is sleepy and/or suffering from advanced dementia. Trump couldn’t have been pleased with all those Fox pundits who complimented Biden’s performance which likely explains why he assured Sean Hannity last night that he’ll be sending lots of sheriffs, law enforcement officers and US Attorneys to polling places far and wide, and by far and wide think key swing districts, to “prevent” voter fraud on election day and yes that’s as alarming as it sounds. Getting back to the Democratic convention, in addition to Biden’s acceptance speech, last night’s festivities included a wide cast: many of the other candidates who competed against Biden in the primary, some more John Legend, and Sarah Cooper, the comedienne who has grown famous with her spot-on Trump lip syncs.  She mocked Trump’s anti mail-in voting shtick while repeating the message that voting is the only way out of this mess. The night’s most heartwarming award went to 13-year old Brayden Harrington who described how Biden, a fellow stutterer, gave him encouragement and advice on how to overcome his speech impediment.  Can anyone imagine Trump, who gleefully makes fun of the disabled or even his daughter in law, Lara, who mocked Biden’s stutter on live TV earlier this year ever doing that?  Bonus points to Biden for including his whole family, not just the adorably relatable granddaughters but also his much attacked son Hunter who appeared with his sister Ashley alongside some heart wrenching film clips of their departed brother Beau.  And you have to hand it to Mike Bloomberg for trashing Trump with his blunt question “Would you rehire, or work for, someone who ran your business into the ground?  Senator/disabled veteran Tammy Duckworth didn’t mince words either, the coiner of Trump’s Cadet Bones Spurs nickname said we “have a coward in chief who won't stand up to Vladimir Putin, read his daily intelligence briefings or even publicly admonish adversaries for reportedly putting bounties on our troops heads," a sentiment that 70 former Republican security officials including former FBI Head William Webster, CIA Director Michael Hayden and Defense Secretary/Senator Chuck Hegel agree with; they published a letter yesterday saying that they’ll be voting for Joe.  Then there’s California’s Governor Gavin Newsom who facetimed in from the California fire zone, reminding everyone about the effects of global warming after Trump once again threatened to withhold disaster aid while blaming the Governor’s inadequate “sweeping” for the fires rampaging through his state.  The virtual convention ended with some fireworks and a clip of the appropriately face masked Joe and Jill Biden heading out into the night.      

Another Plot Twist:  Next week we get the Republican Convention.  Their speaker list is still in flux, Senate Majority Leader McConnell who early yesterday said he’d be too busy traveling Kentucky to appear has now found some time in his schedule and will be delivering some taped remarks.  Maybe he’s filling the Tuesday night slot that had originally been allocated to Steve Bannon, Trump’s one time strategist who was arrested yesterday for defrauding contributors to the “We Build the Wall Campaign,” a go fund me type organization that raised around $30 million to help build Trump’s Mexico wall. Though Bannon and his We Build the Wall cronies repeatedly promised that 100% of the funds raised would go to wall building, they diverted millions to each other to pay for things like fancy boats, plastic surgery and personal expenses.  Not only does the Federal indictment document the illegal payments but it also provides names and account numbers, text exchanges and proof that Bannon and company knew they were being investigated because someone at one of the banks gave them a heads up. Because you can’t make this stuff up, anti-immigrant, America first Bannon was hauled off of a Chinese billionaire’s yacht by the Postal Inspection Service under the direction of Acting US Attorney Audrey Strauss from the Southern District of New York.  Strauss is the interim replacement for Geoffrey Berman, the US Attorney that Trump and his Attorney General/toady Bill Barr fired not too long ago in what was likely an attempt to avoid just this kind of thing.  As expected Trump distanced himself from both Bannon and the project, saying that the whole situation was sad, that he never talks with Bannon anymore and that he always thought that the We Build the Wall Campaign was questionable. Of course there are lots of pictures that indicate otherwise, including a few of Don Jr with two members of the We Build the Wall team at the Mexico border and a few others of We Build the Wall members at the White House. By the way in addition to Bannon the We Build the Wall board includes Education Secretary Betsy DeVos brother/soldier for hire Erik Prince, former baseball player/sports commentator/white supremacist Curt Schilling, and one time head of Trump’s election fraud commission Kris Kobach. There’s a good chance that Bannon who, after posting $5 million in bail and handing over his passport, dismissed the charges as just another attempt by those nefarious anti-wall forces to disrupt wall construction, may conclude that turning on one or more of his partners and/or a Trump or two is a better option than spending years in prison. Then again, its fair to assume that a pardon could be in the offing especially if he’s really got dirt on Don or Don Jr. 

Et Cetera:  A Federal judge struck down Trump’s request to block the release of his financials to Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance.  Of course, Trump’s lawyers followed up by requesting a stay so though those financials are getting closer, Vance will still have to wait.  Virus guru Tony Fauci had vocal cord surgery yesterday.  It turns out that his increasingly raspy voice was due to further aggravation of a polyp that had been detected a while back, one that he’d put off treating in order to work on the virus fight.  Unfortunately as a result of the surgery he will be out of commission for a bit which may mean that truth will be in even shorter supply.  As to truth, those hospital statistics that were previously collected and reported on by the CDC but then were mysteriously moved to HHS, yesterday it was reported that the responsibility for them is being moved back to the CDC because HHS was finding the data collection and by collection think manipulation too challenging. On the USPS front, the stories about late deliveries of medicines and even one about thousands of baby chicks shipped to US farmers dying en route to their destinations continue to mount, nevertheless Postmaster General DeJoy says that he’s not going to reinstate any discontinued services or replace any dismantled equipment, he’s just not going to make things worse in the run up to the election.  He also says that all bets are off after November because then he does plan to move forward with making the USPS more efficient, and by efficient he means charge more for mail and slow down service to far away destinations like rural parts of the country, Alaska, Hawaii and inner cities.  

Get out your bingo card, it’s Friday things always happen on Friday and Rudy says he’s got something to announce soon.  Or then again not.

 

 

Pioneer

Vote or Else:  Kamala Harris, or Pioneer as the Secret Service now calls her, accepted her nomination last night, introducing herself by talking about her  background and vision for America.  Her speech which capped a night that also included addresses from Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senator Elizabeth Warren, one time presidential candidate/Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former Congresswoman/shooting survivor Gabby Giffords, was impressive but the award for the night goes to Barack Obama, who did the heavy lifting, calling Trump out as a one man reality show who hasn’t grown into his job because he can’t, pointing out the damage he’s done to the country’s reputation, the unnecessarily high coronavirus death rate and the sad state of the economy.  He made it clear that the only way out of this mess is for all of us to vote as if our futures depend upon it because our futures and the future of our Democracy really do depend on it. Of course, he also fully endorsed his “brother” Biden, talking about his empathy, decency, and work ethic, a not so subtle comparison to Trump’s laziness,  and, naturally he fully endorsed Harris.  Obama’s message hit home with at least one watcher, Trump.  The one man reality show spent the night tweet attacking Obama, in all caps of course, going with some of his favorite themes:  “HE SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN AND GOT CAUGHT” and “WHY DID HE REFUSE TO ENDORSE SLOW JOE UNTIL IT WAS ALL OVER, AND EVEN THEN WAS VERY LATE? WHY DID HE TRY TO GET HIM NOT TO RUN?” As to that spying accusation, as one tweeter accurately pointed out, the target of the spying was the Russians, catching all those Trumpsters on those “taped” calls was not expected.  As to those Russians, it appears that Vladimir Putin, Trump’s hero is up to his old tricks again.  His opponent Alexey Navalny, was poisoned again yesterday, and is now on a ventilator in a Siberian hospital, perhaps one of those US made ventilators that Trump sent to the motherland to help with their coronavirus problem? Does anyone doubt that the increasingly desperate Trump would do the same to some of his opponents if he could get away with it. For now he’ll have to settle for reveling in the support of the Q Anon crowd, that’s the group that believes that Trump will save the country, or at least his base, from those radical Democratic pedophiles holed up in pizza parlors everywhere. When asked about them, Trump said that, despite FBI warnings that extreme groups like Q Anon represent terrorism threats, he welcomes their support because he’s heard that they really like him and you know anyone who supports Trump gets “liked” back.  Similarly he’s all in on Laura Loomer, the outspoken self-described “proud” Islamophobe who just won the Republican party primary to run for Congress from his Palm Beach district.  Loomer who is expected to lose against her Democratic rival incumbent Congresswoman Lois Frankel is so racist that she’s banned from virtually every mainstream social media site.  In other words, she’s Trump’s kind of woman.  Trump isn’t just supporting Q Anon and hate filled, fringe candidates, yesterday he “cancelled” the Goodyear Tire Company, tweeting “Don’t buy GOODYEAR TIRES” after he learned that they’d banned employees from wearing MAGA hats at their plants, that the ban wasn’t specific to MAGA stuff was irrelevant, Trump who sees everything through his personal lens assumed that they were specifically targeting him. Goodyear’s stock dropped a few percent yesterday, a short term win for Trump, but in the long term his impetuous tweet attack could cost him the state of Ohio, where those tires, which are on his armor plated cars, are manufactured. Those MAGA caps, the ones that Trump wants worn everywhere, they are manufactured in China. 

Postal Wars:  The war over the USPS is still on.  Postmaster General DeJoy has hired a public relations firm to help him navigate all the bad press associated with the dismantling of sorters, the cutting of overtime hours, and the removal of blue boxes.  Apparently, the reputation gurus are helping him prepare for his testimony to Congress and are also working on some public service announcements intended to reassure voters that their ballots will be reach their destination, well at least someday.  To be clear, it doesn’t appear that he’s restoring any services, he’s just working on optics. As to those hearings, apparently Trump is really angry with Senate Leader Mitch McConnell because the Senate’s USPS hearing will take place in the run up to his RNC convention rather than during the DNC.  As to funding the USPS, Speaker Pelosi plans to introduce legislation shortly but she’ll have to pass it without the support of her Republican colleagues, reports are that they are already whipping their contingent to vote against any funding package. 

Et Cetera: Miles Taylor, the former Homeland Security Chief of Staff who revealed some of the evil shenanigans going on in Trumpland while endorsing Joe Biden this week, reports that the White House is currently trying to dig up dirt on him.  He says that he can handle that and also says that he expects that more of his former colleagues will be speaking out soon.  Time will tell if he’s right about that but at least one former Republican Congressman stepped up yesterday, Pennsylvania’s Charlie Dent, a frequent Trump critic, is now team Biden.

 

 

Calamari

Zooming On:  Apparently calamari is big in Rhode Island which must explain why a chef stood by with a heaping plate of it as Rhode Island Democratic leader John McNamara announced his state’s delegate votes during last night’s presidential nomination roll call.  In addition to the calamari, a diverse group of Democrats were featured prominently during the roll call including Congresswoman Alessandria Ocasio Cortez who used her meager minute to second the nomination of Bernie Sanders, the only other Democratic candidate nominated last night, the parents of Matthew Shephard, the Wyoming college student who was beaten to death for being gay in 1998, Khizr Khan, the Virginia Gold Star father who schooled Trump in the Constitution in 2016 and Florida dad Fred Guttenberg who lost his daughter to the gun massacre at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School  Like the rest of last night’s virtual convention, the nomination process went off without a hitch, impressive given that it spanned all the states and territories.  In a sweet touch the process was initiated by New York security guard Jacquelyn Brittan, her reward for having expressed her love to Biden during his elevator ride to the NY Times editors’ office for his interview for the odd primary endorsement that ultimately went to Senators Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar, not that it did either much good.  Former president Bill Clinton spoke, effectively skewering Trump for his chaotic response to the coronavirus.  Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter spoke too, with the former president saying “We deserve a person with integrity and judgment, someone who is honest and fair, someone who is committed to what is best for the American people,”  by that he meant Biden not the current liar in chief.  The Republican contingent was represented by one time Secretary of State Colin Powell who endorsed Biden and Cindy McCain who didn’t but did narrate a tribute to Joe and her husband John’s long term, across the aisle friendship.  Jill Biden spoke too, she was humble, a bit nervous and very impressive, unlikely we’ll ever see her in a jacket emblazoned with the words “I really don’t care, do u.” And unlike Melania, she didn’t swat her husband away when he embraced her at the end of her speech. Sally Yates, the onetime acting Attorney General who was summarily fired after she refused to implement Trump’s Muslim ban also spoke, she accused Trump of fawning over Putin an accusation that was documented during the day after the Senate Intelligence Committee released some of the love letters that Trump had written Putin over the years, including one where Trump told Putin that he was “a big fan of his” and another where he hand wrote a promise that his Miss Universe contest would have “the world’s most beautiful women,” hint, hint.

Russia, Russia, Russia: While the convention dominated the evening airwaves, the really big stories of the day concerned the Russia investigation and the Post office.  On the Russian front, the Republican led Senate Intelligence Committee released their final report. In addition to those Trump/Putin missives, the report confirmed Special Counsel Mueller’s findings while providing some additional details that even the Mueller team hadn’t uncovered.  It said that the Russian government disrupted the 2016 election to help Trump become president, that Russian intelligence services viewed members of the Trump campaign as easily manipulated, and that some of Trump’s advisers were eager for their help.  Most notably the report revealed that US intelligence viewed Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort as a grave intelligence threat, that Manafort’s Ukrainian/Russian partner Konstantin Kilimnik was and is a Russian intelligence officer linked to the Russian GRU’s election interference efforts, that Trump lied about his conversations with Roger Stone about the WikiLeaks DNC email dumps and that the Senate Committee had made criminal referrals of Donald Jr, Jared Kushner, Steve Bannon, Betsy DeVos brother/soldier for hire Erik Prince and former campaign/Agriculture official Sam Clovis to federal prosecutors in 2019, passing along their suspicions that the men may have “misled the committee” during their testimony. Immediately after the report was released Florida Senator Mario Rubio who replaced North Carolina Senator/accused insider trader Richard Burr as the Intelligence Committee’s chairman, tried to walk back the conclusions that he’d signed on to and to no one’s surprise Attorney General Barr’s Justice Department is apparently too busy trying to prove that the Russian investigation was inappropriately initiated to do anything about any of those criminal referrals.  It turns out that lying is bad only when done by people not trying to cover up for Trump.

Going Postal:  Trump’s still out there asserting that mail-in voting will result in the most fraudulent and inaccurate election in history, claims that sadly are causing a lot of voters to lose confidence in the whole election process. In response to the huge pushback and alarm expressed by lots of Democrats and even a few vulnerable Red state Republicans, Trump’s handpicked Postmaster General DeJoy has put a hold on making anymore changes to USPS service, a nice gesture but one that doesn’t rollback the removal of all the sorters or boxes that already have been taken out of service and that so far at least hasn’t resulted in the reinstatement of any of the members of the post office management team who were fired two weeks ago in one of those Trumpian Friday night massacres.  DeJoy who is scheduled to appear before the Democratic chaired House Oversight Committee next week is now scheduled to appear before the Senate on Friday, providing some preemptive testimony  to the more friendly Republican led Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee; that’s the committee chaired by Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, the Trump toady who’s currently spending most of his time investigating and tweeting accusations against Hunter and Joe Biden based on information provided to him by those sketchy Ukrainian/Russian sources that the FBI doesn’t want him talking to.  The post office story is likely to have legs, twenty State Attorney Generals are suing over service cuts and Democratic Congressmen Ted Lieu and Hakeem Jeffries, frequent thorns in Trump’s side, have requested that the FBI open an investigation. Sadly, the Ukraine story is likely to have legs too as Johnson is like a dog with a bone, one dipped in Trump steak sauce with a Rudy Giuliani treat on the side.

Et Cetera: Yesterday Trump followed through with the pardon that he had dangled on Monday night.  No he didn’t pardon Roger Stone or Paul Manafort yet, instead he pardoned Susan B Anthony to commemorate yesterday’s 100^th anniversary of the passage of the 19^th Amendment that granted women, or at least white women, the right to vote.  An effort to win votes from those suburban housewives? As to good old Roger who so far has only had his sentence commuted, earlier this week he dropped his felony conviction appeal, an indication perhaps that he expects to get a pardon someday too.  Lying for Trump has its rewards.

 

 

It is What It is

The Zoom Convention:  No wild cheering from the crowd largely because there was no crowd.  That said, the opening night of the Democrat’s virtual convention worked, the technical screw ups that we’ve grown used to during these days of COVID were largely missing and Michele Obama’s keynote speech was riveting.  She oozed genuine sincerity, concern and condemnation as she told us that “we have to vote for Joe Biden because our lives depend on it.”  She also said that she knows what the job of president requires, that Joe’s got what it takes but that Trump has shown us that he’s the “wrong president for our country,” that “he’s sown chaos, division and a total lack of empathy,” adding “it is what it is.”  Her speech ran about 18 minutes, surely Melania’s people are mining it right now trying to find something to crib.  Some Republican commentators pointed to Michele’s failure to say anything about VP candidate Kamala as evidence that she’s not a fan, but that omission, like her mention of “only” 150,000 COVID fatalities was due to the speech being pre-taped before Kamala’s selection was announced.  Among the other speakers, and there were many, Bernie Sanders stood out. As the Democratic runner up he got more speaking time than many others and used it to make it very clear to his base that he fully endorses Biden, that our democracy depends on his victory, and that while the two may differ on some policies, he believes that he’s used his influence to push Biden leftward, amusing because in his speech John Kasich, the Republican former Governor of Ohio said that he knows Joe Biden, believes he’s a moderate and trusts him because no one tells Joe what to do.  In this bizarre and frightening election year, Joe Biden is the man you want him to be, a man for all seasons, who despite his imperfections has been anointed to get us out of the viral hell that we’re living in.  Many of the other speakers, including three other Republicans including former NJ Governor Christine Todd Whitman, former Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman and former Staten Island Congresswoman Susan Molinari as well as the very Democratic current NY Governor Andrew Cuomo also focused on Trump’s abject failures particularly with regard to the coronavirus, with Cuomo saying that COVID was the symptom, while Trumpism was the disease, a point driven home by Arizonan Kristen Urquiza who said that her father who died of COVID had no pre-existing conditions other than his trust in Trump, a trust that cost him his life after Arizona opened up too early largely because its governor was all in on pleasing Trump.

Homeland: The unnamed former or current Congressman who Kasich said would endorse Biden didn’t emerge yesterday but Miles Taylor did.  Taylor, the former Chief of Staff at the Department of Homeland Security, came forward to “attest that the country is less secure as a direct result” of Trump’s actions, that Trump governs by whim, political calculation and self-interest.”  Among other things he said that Trump was all in on dividing families and caging kids and he confirmed that Trump didn’t want to send any aid to California when wildfires were raging because why should he care or do anything for a bunch of Democrats.  Taylor added that things will only get worse if Trump is reelected.  Of course, when asked about that, son in law Jared smirked and dismissed Taylor and his statement saying that he’s a “nice kid” but just “wasn’t up to the task” and anyway he worked at Homeland back before it actually built any of Trump’s wall, that’s the wall that still hasn’t been built unless you think the four miles of new wall counts. Also on the Homeland front, on Friday the Government Accountability Office reported that its two top officials, Acting Secretary Chad Wolf and his Deputy Ken Cuccinelli, the guys who’ve been throwing tear gas pellets at protestors, are illegally serving in their positions since their appointments violate the laws governing who can fill Senate-confirmed posts.  Add that to the list of things that Trump will do his best to finesse.       

Counterprogramming: Trump was busy yesterday, he wasn’t dealing with the virus or mourning his brother whose funeral service he now says will be held at the White House; instead he was traveling around the country to swing states.  During his travels he again attacked the election process saying that “the only way we lose is if the election is rigged.”  That’s the election that he’s trying to steal by diminishing the USPS’s capabilities. He also managed to throw out a comment about recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, pointing out that while the Jews don’t sufficiently appreciate what he’s done, i.e. they mostly don’t vote for him, the evangelicals, who do, love it.  On the post office front, Trump appears to now realize that while toying with the mail might be an effective way to disrupt mail-in voting it’s not all that popular with his base so during the day he actually tweeted out “SAVE THE POST OFFICE” as if he wasn’t he one trying to destroy it.  The next week or so should prove interesting as Postmaster General DeJoy has agreed to show up and testify before Congress where, among other things, he will be asked about his conversations with Trump about cutting service, those are the conversations that likely took place during a meeting that Trump first said didn’t happen but then said was only an opportunity for him to congratulate DeJoy on the position he’d already held for months.  It looks like there is now a bipartisan effort underway to provide some additional USPS funding, whether that amount will be the $25 billion requested in the House virus relief legislation or the $10 billion that Senate Majority Leader McConnell is now proposing is unclear.  It’s also unclear whether it will be done via standalone legislation or as part of that much delayed relief package, the one that’s is likely to include $400 or so of supplemental unemployment insurance, the payment that ran out at the end of July, that Trump said he’d fund but really didn’t.  In any case, it might be too late to do much if anything about those mail sorters that have been destroyed. 

Et Cetera:   Trump plans to give his convention acceptance speech from the White House, his campaign has also applied for a permit to shoot celebratory fireworks off nearby because who doesn’t need more explosives right about now.  In addition, we learned yesterday that the St. Louis couple who waved firearms at some Black Lives Matter protesters will appear to express their undying support to their great leader. Of course they will. For what it’s worth two new polls were released yesterday: a scary one from CNN showing the spread between the candidates tightening with the Biden/Harris ticket leading the Trump/Pence 50% to 46% while another from the  Washington Post and ABC showing Biden/Harris with 53% to Trump/Pence’s 41%.  COVID, flu, hurricanes, school re-openings and election season. The next few months are going to be very, very trying.  Hold on tight.

 

 

Please Mr. Postman

Viral Musings:  The US COVID death count is up to 170,000 with more than 1000 people dying daily but Jared Kushner, who now counts epidemiology and disease control among his ever expanding skill set, says not to worry because we are still below the high of 2500 daily deaths. Kushner also said that he is totally comfortable sending his kids back to school, private school of course, because it’s not like COVID is as deadly as the flu. He has a point in that so far fewer children have died from COVID than typically die from the annual flu, however he forgot, or more likely, conveniently ignored that illness among the young is on an upswing and that teachers, staff, parents and grandparents catch the coronavirus from their disease carrying kids but then again Kushner isn’t really good with details. That’s the same Kushner whose mass coronavirus testing plan was shelved in the Spring because only people in blue states were dying.  In contrast, Mitt Romney the only  Republican in office who frequently speaks out against Trump, and someone who knows a thing or two about crisis management, said that  “we really have not distinguished ourselves in a positive way by how we responded to the crisis …. the proof of the pudding of that is simply that we have 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of the world’s deaths due to covid-19.”  Separately former Ohio Governor John Kasich, another Republican not happy with Trump’s performance, who will be speaking at the virtual Democrat convention that kicks off tonight, teased that a prominent Republican congressman will be endorsing Joe Biden this morning, later clarifying that he was talking about a former Congressman.  It’s not clear who that will be but among some lesser Republican names making the rounds on Twitter are two “prominent” ones, former Speakers Paul Ryan and John Boehner,  though that’s just idle speculation so we’ll have to wait to see.  Getting back to COVID apparently there’s a new cure out there or so says Mike Lindell, AKA the Pillow Man, and HUD Secretary Ben Carson.  Both are now pushing oleandrin, an extract from the Oleander plant, as a miracle treatment that cures COVID in two days. Trump is all in and according to Axios is pushing the FDA to approve its use.  Would it surprise you to learn that the Pillow Man has bought an interest in a company that produces the extract?  Suffice it to say that while Oleander can be poisonous in large doses, there’s no evidence that it’s a COVID cure.  

Deliver De Letter:  To the dismay of Jared Kushner who wanted to hype the UAE-Israel peace initiative all weekend the post office saga, together with the totally false but racist assertion that Kamala Harris isn’t American enough to run for VP,  overwhelmed the news cycle and the Sunday morning news shows. While pictures of decommissioned blue USPS boxes being loaded onto lorries for their trips to oblivion and reports of mail sorting machines being dissembled and thrown into junk piles went viral, Trump continued to question how an election relying on mail-in ballots, which he continues to distinguish from absentee ballots, can be legitimate.  It’s growing increasingly clear that his strategy is to sow as much fear and distrust into the electoral process as possible, laying the groundwork for him to question any outcome that doesn’t involve him emerging as the victor.  Whether that’s because he truly believes he’ll lose both the vote count and the more important electoral college, wants to have an excuse in place if he does, or more menacingly, just wants to declare victory on election night whether or not he has the votes to do so is up for debate, but the bottom line is that November is not going to be pleasant, and that’s an understatement. Because this is the Trump administration where few plans are really ever well thought out, it appears that the nefarious minds responsible for undercutting the USPS failed to take into account its popularity and the number of people around the country who rely on their daily mail delivery for life saving drugs so in addition to those viral pictures of decommissioned blue boxes floating around this weekend, there were also countless stories about veterans, diabetics, cancer patients and the elderly not getting their much needed prescriptions in a timely matter. It takes a lot to inflame West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin, the Democrat who most frequently votes with the Republicans, but even he’s furious and vocal about it, because so many of his largely rural constituents rely on mail for everything. Speaker Pelosi has taken the unusual step of calling the House back into session to pass some legislation intended to prevent any more USPS service cuts and House Oversight Chair Carolyn Maloney scheduled and then moved up a hearing on the subject “inviting” Postmaster General/Trump donor Louis DeJoy and USPS Chairman/Mitch McConnell buddy Robert Duncan to testify next week where, in addition to being asked to address all the overtime and equipment cuts, they are likely to be asked about those letters that were sent to 46 states telling them to expect ballot delivery delays. Of course, this being the Trump administration there’s no guarantee that either DeJoy or Duncan will show, nor is there any indication that the Democrats can do anything more than send threatening tweets and hold hearings.  Similarly there’s no indication that Senate Leader McConnell plans on bringing the Senate back to address the situation and anyway the Ron Johnson chaired Senate Homeland Committee, the committee responsible for the USPS, is far too busy investigating the Bidens’ Ukraine connections to focus on trivial things like mail.  By the way, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows insists that concerns about the Postal Service are overblown and that all of these service changes were planned long ago.  He also says that “everyone” knows that voter fraud is a real concern even though, aside from that Republican scheme to harvest North Carolina absentee ballots that was caught last year, there’s no evidence of voter fraud, remember Trump’s election fraud commission, it was disbanded without proving anything. Meadows cites that lack of evidence as proof that the fraud doers are just really good at committing fraud, an argument that is like saying that Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster are real and hang out together nightly, we just don’t have the video, yet.

Et Cetera:  After Trump said that he wants to meet Putin in New York before the election, his national security advisor Robert O’Brien said that he has no plans to do so which either means that Trump has no plans for a meeting or hasn’t kept O’Brien in the loop. Trump also said that he’s open to pardoning Edward Snowden, the NSA leaker who has been living in Moscow for the past few years, a decision that would likely enrage the intelligence community since several of their colleagues were outed by Snowden’s leaks but that would be in keeping with Trump’s war against the “deep state.”  As to that “deep state” on Friday, the Justice Department announced that Kevin Clinesmith, an FBI lawyer involved in the preparation of one of the FISA applications related to the investigation into Carter Page, will admit that he altered an email from the CIA that was used to justify the application while trying to clarify facts related to whether or not Page had also ever worked as a CIA source.  Those who believe that the Russia investigation was a witch hunt point to Clinesmith’s admission as proof, others say not so much, just a bad act by a corner cutting lawyer. The bigger concern is whether US Attorney John Durham, whose report AG Barr continues to dangle, will claim that this one action means that the whole Russia investigation wasn’t properly predicated.  And in between golf games, a visit to his critically ill now deceased brother, and press conferences, Trump who insists that he will win in New York State in November retweeted a message calling for Democratic run cities to be “left to rot.”  That ought to guarantee that imaginary New York victory, right?  

   

 
The Birther is Back

The Quiet Parts:  We’ve gotten to the point in the 2020 election cycle where people are saying a lot of the quiet parts out loud.  Yesterday Trump admitted to Fox Business News that the reason he is blocking additional funding and election assistance for the Postal Service is to sabotage mail-in voting.  Referencing the Democrat’s version of the still unresolved next coronavirus relief bill, he said “they want $25 billion — billion — for the post office. Now they need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots, but if they don't get those two items, that means you can't have universal mail-in voting." Even Larry Kudlow, Trump’s frequently inarticulate and economy ignorant economic advisor is in on the Post Office/voter suppression connection, yesterday during an appearance on CNBC when discussing the status of the negotiations over the aid legislation he said “So much of the Democratic asks are really liberal left wish lists — voting rights and aid to aliens and so forth.” It’s not just voting rights, in reference to the much awaited, or at least awaited by Trump’s fanbase, US Attorney John Durham report on the origins of the Russia investigation, Trump said that FBI Director Wray, who he and his Senate cronies most notably Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson have been pressuring to release Russia related documents that Wray wants kept secret to protect sources and methods, “was put in his job for a good reason” and that he’s either going to turn out one way or another” then  adding that Attorney General Barr “has a chance to be the greatest of all time. But if he wants to be politically correct, he’ll be just another guy.”  Barr clearly got that message, last night he told Fox’s Sean Hannity that there will be “developments” on the Durham Report today, nothing “earth shattering” but the “story of what happened in 2016 and 2017 will be out before the election.”  That’s the story that was already covered thoroughly in the Mueller Report that Barr sat on and then obfuscated with his inaccurate summary.  Keeping with the say what you’re thinking theme of the day, yesterday at Trump’s daily press conference/political rally HuffPost’s Washington correspondent, SV Date’, posed a question that should have been asked months, if not years ago, asking Trump “After three and one half years do you regret all the lying you’ve done to the American people.”  A stunned Trump responded “What?” to which Date’ went back with “All the lying, all the dishonesties.” Trump then asked “That who has done” and Date’ responded “You have done.” Trump then quickly called on another reporter.  Unfortunately that reporter did not stick with the same line of questioning.  As to SV Date’, it’s fair to assume that he won’t be picked on ever again, he’ll be lucky to keep his White House press credentials.

Suppressing Blue Votes: Getting back to voter suppression and the post office, yesterday Vice reported that Postmaster General/Trump donor Louis DeJoy has been removing mail sorting machines from facilities around the country without any official explanation or reason given and that “in many cases, these are the same machines that would be tasked with sorting ballots.”  Similarly, the Postal Service is also removing mail boxes something that will conveniently make it more difficult to actually mail those mail in ballots that Trump who will be voting by absentee ballot in the upcoming Florida primary hates so much. By the way Trump votes as a Floridian, listing Mar a Lago as his primary residence even though Mar a Lago is not a residence, it’s a Country Club and that in order to win certain concessions from local authorities, years ago Trump promised that no one would use Mar a Lago as a permanent residence. Though historically Republican voters have been bigger users of mail in ballots than Democratic voters, the party and Trump are so fearful that easing mail in voter procedures will so benefit the Democratic party they they’ve been running around the country suing individual states to limit the liberalization of mail in procedures.  Though they’ve frequently been successful, yesterday the Republican machine was handed two defeats: the Supreme Court rejected GOP efforts to tighten Rhode Island mail in voter rules, allowing the state to eliminate requirements that voters have their ballot signatures witnessed by two people or a notary public.  In Pennsylvania, a key battleground state that Trump won in 2016 but where he’s lagging right now, a federal judge told the Trump campaign and the Republican Party that they must produce evidence they have of that vote-by-mail fraud they claim is prevalent in the state by Friday.  That might prove a bit challenging as those claims of massive voter fraud in postal voting are false.  The good news is that the Democratic voting rights effort is making some progress, the bad news is that the battle over mail in vote rights is playing out across the country on a state by state basis and the Republicans are very good at this kind of suppressive stuff.  And in case anyone cares, Maine’s Senator Susan Collins, that great defender of liberal Democracy, is on the case, yesterday she “wrote” one of her letters asking Postmaster General DeJoy to better explain his actions.  

The Race and Race Baiting:  Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his VP partner Kamala Harris called for state governors around the country to mandate the wearing of face masks for three months, something that they and most of the scientific community believe would save 40,000 lives.  Trump, of course, responded by incorrectly saying that Biden’s and Harris’ plan included a presidential mandate to wear masks, something he doesn’t believe a president could do, funny given how he’s comfortable doing almost everything else by executive edict.  To no one’s surprise Trump has latched on to the birther argument against Kamala, claiming that since her parents were immigrants, she isn’t legally qualified to run for VP, saying “I heard it today that she doesn’t meet the requirements, I have no idea if that’s right, I would have thought, I would have assumed, that the Democrats would have checked that out before she gets chosen to run for vice president.” Trump at his slimy and racist worse. Let’s put it to bed right now,  Kamala Harris is a US born citizen and qualified to run.  Period, end of story.

Et Cetera:  Yesterday, when asked about Kanye West’s statement that he talks with him almost daily and that the two of them met last week in Colorado to discuss Kanye’s spoiler run for the presidency, Jared Kushner said, oh no, they only met for a "friendly discussion" about policy, one that “wasn't necessarily focused on Kanye’s presidential campaign.”  Jared probably would have preferred to only discuss yesterday’s Trump announcement that the UAE and Israel plans to normalize relations in exchange for Israel suspending annexation of occupied West Bank territory, a notable agreement if it comes to fruition, one that under normal times would have received the lion’s share of yesterday’s news.  Then again these are not normal times.

 

Rebuild America

Counterprogramming:  Trump can’t be happy, the Biden/Harris show is eating into the airing of his afternoon virus show. Yesterday the Democratic duo showed up together during Trump’s favorite early evening time slot for their first joint appearance, socially distanced of course, promising to rebuild the America that Trump failed to make great again.  After thanking Biden for bringing her on to his team, Harris lit into Trump’s multiple failure especially his disastrous inability to deal with the virus, easy to do because that failure is so blatantly obvious.  For his part Biden made it clear that he’ll always have her back, a good thing because the Republican smear machine was out in full force yesterday.  Their messaging was inconsistent, everything from her being a left wing radical to a shill for the banking industry. Trump called her a liar, because we all know he would never tolerate lying, while also saying that Biden’s selection of a female running mate was an insult to all men.  Son Eric liked a tweet calling Kamala a “whorendous pick” while also going with another one of his frequent “where’s Hunter” tweets as if that’s what we all care about right now.  And because some racist lies never die, Newsweek actually published a piece suggesting that because Kamala’s parents were immigrants, she might not be eligible to be on the ticket. Who thinks a similar claim would be made against a son or daughter of Norwegian immigrants?  Sticking with the racist theme Trump reupped his warning to suburban moms that a vote for Joe and Kamala would make the suburbs unlivable and by unlivable he means more integrated.  Apparently Trump still lives in the 1950s. On the virus front, Trump has installed a new expert, Scott Atlas, a radiologist rather than an infectious disease expert and of course a frequent Fox guests.  Unlike Dr Debby and Virus Guru Fauci, Atlas shares Trump’s views that kids don’t get COVID, that all schools should fully open and that football games should be mandated.  Apparently Atlas is all in on achieving herd immunity, because who really cares if, absent a reasonably effective vaccine,  another million or two of us would have to die for that to even come close to happening.  By the way, though daily new virus counts may be down a little, it’s hard to know for sure since national testing is also down.  Yesterday’s death count was up to 1485, bringing the total to more than 158,000 or 200,000 if the NY Times is right about the number of unexplained deaths that should be attributed to the virus. And those high schools in suburban Atlanta that have been opening without social distancing or facemasks, things aren’t going all that well for them, more than a 1000 students and faculty have now been put in quarantine. None of that is a problem though for Georgia Governor Kemp who remains against mandating face coverings in schools. 

 Politics Unusual:  Though a few, very few, Republicans including Adam Kinzinger and Steve Scalise seem fairly distressed about the specter of a Q Anon conspiracy theorist/bigot joining their Congressional ranks, Trump’s all in.  Yesterday while his campaign attacked Kinzinger for speaking out Trump congratulated Marjorie Greene, the winner of the Georgia Republican runoff who is likely to cruise to victory in November in her very red, gerrymandered district, tweeting “Congratulations to future Republican Star Marjorie Taylor Greene on a big Congressional primary win in Georgia against a very tough and smart opponent. Marjorie is strong on everything and never gives up - a real WINNER.”  In addition to being prolific haters, the Q Anon folks believe that the Democrats are all pedophiles, they are into things like storming pizza parlors to save children from predators like Hillary Clinton and John Podesta while also believing that only their great Q, who some of them believe is Trump, can save them. That last part explains why Trump is so friendly to the Q Anon crowd, look closely and you’ll see their banners at his events, a few of them were prominently displayed at son Don Jr’s recent boaters for Trump flotilla. On the legislative front, Speaker Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Mnuchin finally spoke yesterday.  That’s the good news, the bad news is that they are still waving fingers at each other and though Pelosi has offered to meet Mnuchin in the middle, shaving a billion dollars off of her aid package, Mnuchin hasn’t moved, which might be because Chief of Staff Meadows who never met anything worth funding is holding him back. The Democrats still want to do “crazy” things like help out the cash strapped states and make sure the Postal Service has the funding it needs to do its job.  As to that $400 supplemental unemployment amount that Trump promised to provide by executive action, those checks won’t be in the mail anytime soon.  First of all, as expected by everyone not named Trump, the states, both Republican and Democrat, are making it clear that they don’t have the resources to provide the 25% share that Trump said that they had to fund.  Trump now appears to be saying that they can get $300 even without funding the additional $100 but, in addition to being only one half of what people had been receiving, the payment mechanism for the distribution would require the states to get new computer programs up and running, something that few if any of them have the capability to do quickly.

 Et Cetera:  It’s increasingly likely that the Michael Fynn case isn’t  going away anytime soon as the full bench of the DC Circuit Court looks likely to block AG Barr’s efforts to dismiss the criminal charges against the former national security advisor, sending the case back to Judge Emmet Sullivan who wants to get a better understanding of why Barr is seeking to drop the charges despite Flynn’s guilty plea, as if he and we don’t know why.