Five Days Plus Litigation Time

Baby, It’s Cold Outside:  Trump has upped his game, now in addition to exposing his throngs of loyalists to the killer virus, he’s all in on sending them to the hospital with hypothermia.  On Tuesday night his cash strapped, logistically inept campaign team failed to adequately arrange bus transportation back to the parking lot area after his Omaha rally, leaving a crowd of his dedicated attendees freezing for hours. As Vanity Fair succinctly put it: “Donald Trump courts senior citizen vote by nearly freezing half a dozen to death.”  While Trump freezes and tells endless lies to audiences around the country, the press continues to criticize candidate Joe Biden for doing some of his campaigning from the safety of a Delaware podium.  Biden may be on to something though, staying in place and issuing pointed barbs at Trump’s lies, abject disregard for his fanbase, and virus stoking appears to be paying off or at least paying off so far.  Biden, who does plan to hit the road today continues to hold a steady,  statistically significant lead in the national polls and appears to be holding his own in the “blue wall” states where Hillary lost by very small margins. Moreover, if the polls are to be believed (2016 PTSD, means that I always have to say that) he is also leading, albeit by smaller margins, in some of the states like Iowa, North Carolina and Arizona that Trump won by more than just a Russian hair in 2016. Biden is also ahead in Florida, but Florida is Florida, the state’s Republican machine is powerful and efficient and it’s Trump “home” state so reduced Sunshine State expectations are in order. It’s hard to know what’s really happening in the previously reliably red Georgia and Texas but voter registration is way up in both states, a large number of the new voters are younger and more likely to lean blue and now, the Cook Political Report has joined NBC in moving Texas from lean Republican to toss-up.  On the Georgia front, if you have a chance check out last night’s Perdue-Ossoff Senate debate where Democrat wannabee Ossoff positively skewered incumbent Republican Perdue for his votes against the ACA and his cavalier attitude towards the pandemic. Polls show Ossoff and Biden up 1% over their respective opponents, in other words the outcome of both those races is far too close to project. 

The Third Branch: With the presidency and control of the Senate in jeopardy and the loss of even more ground in the House likely the Republicans are aggressively pushing for help from the courts because if you can’t win an election with actual votes the next best thing is going all in on voter suppression.  Yesterday, the Republican contingent took a hit when the Supreme Court ruled that North Carolina and Pennsylvania could accept and count ballots mailed on time but received a pre-determined number of days after November 3.  Newbie Justice Amy Coney Barrett didn’t participate in either decision.  To be clear, Judge Amy didn’t recuse herself, the Court reported that she didn’t weigh in because she hadn’t had the time to get up to speed on the two cases.  That’s significant, because a few of the Justices, including Gorsuch, Alito and Thomas said that they would be open to revisiting the cases after the election if those late ballots affect the outcome, and by affect the outcome, they probably mean if Biden wins as a result of those “late” ballots.  This time around Justice “Beer” Kavanaugh said nothing, but that could be because of all the criticism he received for the sloppy, inaccurate opinion he wrote in the case involving Wisconsin mail-in votes.  In that opinion Kavanaugh cited Vermont as an example of a state that hadn’t made any concessions to its “ordinary voter “rules to accommodate the pandemic.  Vermont’s Secretary of State sent Kavanaugh a letter chastising him for being wrong as the state has made some changes, and asked for a correction.  Last night Kavanaugh actually “tweaked” his opinion to reflect the Vermont criticism.  He didn’t change his decision or his view, he just kind of corrected one of his mistakes.  The bottom line, if the election is close, the Republicans will take to the courts and when they get to SCOTUS they are likely to find a receptive audience.  

Liars Lie: Justice Kavanaugh isn’t the only one who got caught “misrepresenting the facts.” It turns out that Director of National Intelligence Ratcliffe who got his job as a reward for being a total Trump fanboy,  was doing some prevaricating of his own last week when he asserted that the Iranians were doing devious things to our electoral process to hurt Trump.  That “hurt Trump” part was not in his script because there’s no evidence that it’s true, he just added it, off the cuff, during his remarks, catching the other security directors off guard.  As to one of those other security directors, the FBI Agents Association appears very concerned about those likely true rumors that Trump plans to cut FBI Director Wray after the election.  The group which represents more than 14,000 active and retired FBI Special Agents, took the unprecedented stop of sending letters to both Trump and  Biden in support of Wray. The letters urge both candidates to allow him to complete his statutorily-created, ten-year term for “the stability, credibility, and integrity of the Bureau.  Then there’s trusty son in law Jared Kushner, yesterday author Bob Woodward released another one of the interviews that he taped while writing his most recent book. In that interview, which took place back in April, Kushner bragged to Woodward that Trump had cut the doctors and scientists advising him on the then unfolding coronavirus pandemic out of the process because what’s the point in listening to medical experts anyway?  Kushner actually said that Trump was "getting the country back from the doctors" in a "negotiated settlement,” proclaiming that the US was moving swiftly through the "panic phase" and "pain phase" of the pandemic and that the country was at the "beginning of the comeback phase."  Kushner then said that there could still be a lot of pain ahead but at least we’ll be getting back to work.  Well, give him some credit, he was right about that pain part. The known coronavirus death count is now around 228,000 and those experts Kushner would prefer to ignore, are telling us to cancel holiday travel plans while warning of dire things to come.  Even the good news isn’t as good as it should be, it looks like the Regeneron mono-clonal antibodies really do help moderately ill individuals but though Trump benefited from them and likes to brag about his nonexistent role in their development, there’s not enough capacity to produce the amounts needed to help the ever growing masses of people contracting the virus because when more than 70,000 people  a day show up COVID positive, that’s a lot of people who might need those antibodies. One more thing that falls into the “are you nuts” lie category, last night pundit Tucker Carlson told his audience that he had personally seen really damning, authentic documents proving Biden family crimes but that he had express mailed them back to his office and that they had all “mysteriously” disappeared in transit.  Oh, and he didn’t make any copies or scan any part of those real authentic docs before sending them off.  Yup.        

Et Cetera: Yesterday, Miles Taylor, the former Chief of Staff at Homeland Security outed himself as Anonymous, the writer of the 2018 NY Times op-ed and follow-on book that trashed Trump.  Taylor, who left the government in 2019, is no innocent.  He participated in some really awful stuff while at Homeland, most notably the child separation policy and in his book he acknowledged that his problem was with Trump, the person, not with all of his policies.  Still he gets some, though not much credit, for coming forward but save the applause for people like the CIA whistleblower who came forward about Trump’s Ukraine quid pro quo and has had to live under strict security measures ever since as a result of threats against his life, threats that multiply every time Trump tweet attacks him and that were further fed by Senator Rand Paul who read his name out loud during the impeachment hearing.  And let’s not forget Alexander Vindman who was pushed out of the military or the fired former Ambassador to the Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch or virus guru Fauci who now has to travel with burly body guards.  And so on.