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Trump 2024? Presidential comebacks have mixed success

American author F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that “there are no second acts in American lives.”

Yet it’s already assumed Donald Trump will go on to a next act in one form or another.

Will he start his own media company? Serve as a GOP kingmaker?

There are even rumblings that he will decide to run again for president in 2024. Having served only one term, he is constitutionally eligible to try for another.

If he does decide to run again – and if he wins – he’ll be in rare company.

Only one American president has lost reelection and then won back his office: Grover Cleveland. In the American elections course that I teach, students learn details about the long-term political impacts of these comeback efforts, most of which are exercises in futility.

“Gone to the White House, ha ha ha”

The late 19th-century political environment resembled today’s in many ways: tight polarized elections, strong regional patterns in national voting, relatively high voter turnout and negative campaigning.

Cleveland, a Democrat, had been governor of New York for less than two years when his party nominated him for president in 1884. As governor, he had gained a reputation for fighting Tammany Hall corruption in New York City.

During the 1884 campaign, in which Cleveland ran against Republican James Blaine, a scandal erupted when a New York woman named Maria Halpin accused Cleveland of raping and impregnating her. She was eventually institutionalized and forced to give up her child for adoption. Cleveland disputed some of the details of the story, and his supporters countered jeers of “Ma, ma, where’s my pa?” with chants of “Gone to the White House, ha ha ha.”

Cleveland ended up winning the national popular vote by a slim margin – 48.85% to 48.28% – and won 219 electoral votes to Blaine’s 182. Cleveland’s base of support was in the South and in his home state of New York, while Blaine did well in the rest of the North. Voter turnout was high, estimated at 77.5% of the voting-age population.

During Cleveland’s term, tariffs became a divisive partisan issue in American politics. Republicans favored higher tariffs to protect Northern manufacturing interests, while Democrats like Cleveland generally wanted lower tariffs to help the South’s agricultural export-oriented interests and to lower prices for consumers.

Cleveland’s comeback

When Cleveland ran for reelection in 1888, he faced off against Republican Benjamin Harrison. Cleveland again won the national popular vote by a tight margin, but lost two states – Indiana and New York – that he had won in 1884. It was enough to flip the Electoral College and allow Harrison to be elected president.

After losing the election, Cleveland returned to work as an attorney in New York. Under President Harrison, Congress approved the McKinley Tariff and the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, each of which were strongly opposed by Cleveland.

In 1891, after two years of avoiding the public spotlight, Cleveland again became politically active and started to vocally oppose the economic policies of Harrison. Cleveland attracted some national attention that year with a public letter indicating his continuing support for the gold standard.

As Cleveland met with party leaders and made some public speeches in 1892, national Democratic support for his presidential nomination began to grow. By the time the Democratic National Convention met in June that year, support for Cleveland had become overwhelming, and he secured the nomination.

With Populist Party candidate James B. Weaver on the ballot pulling votes from both major party presidential candidates, Cleveland won the national popular vote for the third straight election, this time besting Harrison by a 46% to 43% margin and winning the Electoral College.

Try, try again

While Cleveland has, thus far, been the only U.S. president to lose reelection and then come back and win, other presidents have tried and failed.

In 1840, Democratic President Martin Van Buren lost reelection. He attempted to be renominated by his party in 1844, but Democrats instead chose James Polk. By 1848, Van Buren joined with a group of disaffected Democrats and anti-slavery activists to become the nominee of the Free Soil Party, which opposed the extension of legal slavery to U.S. territories. While Van Buren won 10% of the national popular vote and finished second in New York, Massachusetts and Vermont, he won no Electoral College votes.

Van Buren is the only president other than Cleveland to be renominated by his party, lose reelection and then appear again on ballots as a presidential candidate.

Three other presidents also made attempted comebacks to regain the presidency after leaving office.

In 1852, President Millard Fillmore, who had ascended to the presidency after the death of Zachary Taylor, made a halfhearted attempt to win the Whig Party nomination for a full term. When he failed, he came back four years later as the presidential candidate of the American Party, better known as the “Know Nothings,” a political movement to restrict Catholic immigration to the United States. Fillmore won over 21% of the national popular vote, the second-best performance by a third-party presidential candidate in American history and won Maryland’s electoral votes.

The best performance by a third-party presidential candidate in American history was also by a former president, Theodore Roosevelt. In 1912, he ran for the Republican presidential nomination against his more conservative protege, President William Howard Taft. When Roosevelt failed to get his party’s nomination that year, he ran as the Progressive Party candidate.

After being shot at a campaign rally during the month before the election and surviving, Roosevelt got 27% of the national popular vote and 88 electoral votes, finishing far ahead of Taft in both vote tallies – but well behind the winner, Woodrow Wilson.

The last American president to lose reelection and attempt to run for president again was Herbert Hoover, who was unsuccessful in both 1936 and 1940 at persuading other Republicans to let him lead the party again after he lost in a landslide in 1932.

Richard Nixon made a different kind of political comeback.

He lost the presidential election of 1960 while serving as Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president and then went on to lose the 1962 California gubernatorial election. After the two losses, Nixon famously told the press, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.” But the press did get another whack at Nixon when he ran for president a second time – and won – in 1968.

The last attempt at a political comeback by a defeated president was a very brief effort by Gerald Ford, who had lost reelection in 1976, to negotiate the possibility of being Ronald Reagan’s running mate during the 1980 Republican National Convention. The plan fell through, and Ford returned to private life.

Once out of office, most ex-presidents stay out of the spotlight and avoid criticizing their successor. Whether or not President Trump attempts a political comeback in 2024, it’s likely that he won’t stay mum over the next four years.

Robert Speel, Associate Professor of Political Science, Erie campus, Penn State

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Trump adviser welcomes killing loved ones with COVID as this may be “their final Thanksgiving”

In his latest anti-science appeal to Americans, White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Scott Atlas on Monday night called on families to ignore the guidance of public health experts who say the holiday season should not include indoor gatherings—suggesting to Fox News that families should take the risk even for elderly or sick relatives this Thanksgiving because they will no longer be alive next year.

“This kind of isolation is one of the unspoken tragedies of the elderly who are now being told, ‘Don’t see your family at Thanksgiving,'” Atlas, who has no public health expertise, told Fox host Martha MacCallum. “For many people this is their final Thanksgiving, believe it or not. What are we doing here?”

Stanford University, where Atlas was a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution before joining President Donald Trump’s coronavirus team, promptly distanced itself from the doctor’s comments, while political observers expressed shock on social media.

Talking Points Memo founder Josh Marshall wrote that for many Americans it will be their last Thanksgiving “because they’re attending Thanksgiving.”

Protecting the elderly from Covid-19 is one of the main reasons infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci and other officials have called on Americans to skip indoor family gatherings and traveling this year. Last week he advised Americans to wear face coverings at any gatherings they do have if they don’t know the Covid-19 status of all attendees. 

Meanwhile, Atlas has falsely stated that face masks don’t reduce transmission of Covid-19 and is a proponent of the U.S. government taking a “herd immunity”approach to the pandemic—encouraging people who are relatively young and healthy to go about their daily lives with no regard for mask-wearing, social distancing, or the existence of a virus that’s killed more than 246,000 people in the U.S. this year, while using unspecified methods to separate them from people who are elderly or at high risk for severe Covid-19 infections.  

The “herd immunity” approach, euphemistically rebranded as “focused protection” by some proponents, has been denounced as “fringe” by seasoned public health officials. 

On Sunday, Atlas also called on Michigan residents to “rise up” against public health guidance after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer announced that in-person learning, indoor dining, organized sports, and other activities would be shut down for three weeks to mitigate the spread of Covid-19.

“This guy is a public health menace and it needs to stop now,” tweeted one emergency room physician on Monday evening following Atlas’s comments about Thanksgiving. 

Trump is going overboard in his final days

Noxious a thought as it is, I was getting used to the idea that amid rapidly rising COVID-19 cases nationwide, Donald Trump just wanted to spend his last month playing golf and flailing about with unwarranted legal challenges to an election that he cannot overturn.

That he would be doing nothing about the biggest emergency facing the country has been insulting enough. It would seem from recent days that Trump’s only overt act was to take credit for private company scientists to be making great progress toward a vaccine against the coronavirus while ignoring 250,000 American deaths.

But come to find out, Trump has found a way to amuse himself with other actions to burnish his record, but that put the country more in peril. At the same time, it would put an incoming Joe Biden further in the hole.

Topping the list, of course, is refusing to allow any normal transition to proceed. That includes the necessary, non-partisan planning for the distribution of any emergent vaccine and refusing to help get a stimulus package through the lame-duck Congress.

With Trump having skipped five months’ worth of COVID-19 task force meetings, we should not be surprised now that public contagion hitting all the states is insufficient to hold his attention.

What are we seeing?

But we now have a list of other actions:

  • Having fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Trump apparently asked his new defense secretary and the military for plans to attack Iraq’s main nuclear development sites this week. It seems that there’s nothing like starting a war on your way out the door. Fortunately, even the new political appointee, Christopher Miller, talked him out of a direct attack.
  • Trump moved to withdraw a substantial number of the remaining U.S. troops from Afghanistan and to unilaterally reduce troops elsewhere over objections of the generals. It’s a move strictly political and not timed to meet conditions on the ground or in coordination with coalition partners.
  • Trump told his administration to move ahead on selling leases to oil companies in a last-minute push to achieve its long-sought goal of allowing oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. It’s a prize for Trump and an invite for environmental disaster for the rest of us.
  • Trump’s 30-year-old White House personnel manager, Johnny McEntee, himself someone who had been told to leave a White House job over his gambling habit, has been purging employees. He is warning federal workers not to cooperate with the Biden transition and threatening to oust people who show disloyalty by job hunting while Trump is still refusing to acknowledge defeat.

So Trump has been finding ways to stay busy outside of watching TV. Still, it’s anything but good for America.

We can expect more

More firings are expected, The Washington Post and others tell us, including perhaps the heads of the CIA and the FBI. The idea is Trump is taking his punishment out on those showing disloyalty – or enough gumption for following actual law not to undertake illegal or improper acts to advance the personal Trump agenda, including prosecuting political foes.

Whatever the actual motives these actions follow a long effort to hollow out federal agencies and threaten to destabilize broad swaths of the federal bureaucracy as Biden wants to harness the same agencies to overturn the effects of four years of official Trumpism.

This effort includes burying new Trump political loyalists into the bureaucracy in jobs that will become permanent as Biden overturns Trump executive orders to reclassify wide swaths of federal employees to strip Civil Service protections. Next step, naturally, will be the destruction of documents and experiential history that could prove helpful to an incoming administration.

The announcement of oil lease sales would steamroll over normal environmental oversight processes. Sale notices normally take a number of months, but time is short for Trump to brag that he brought energy independence to the country, going light on delivering a huge gift to the oil companies who will profit. What is not said is that those sales may still be subject to review by agencies in the Biden administration, once again creating an unnecessarily divisive, real-time policy clash.

Still, it is the actual potential for Trump to command the military to withdraw half of the remaining troops in a matter of a few weeks from Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia – over the objections of the Pentagon – and to launch a strike against Iran that should have us nervous. Not only would such a move at this moment start a new, open-ended escalation in the last days of a Trump administration, but it would also hamstring a Biden administration in seeking to re-do the Iran nuclear deal. That, of course, may be the real point here.

This is to say nothing of whether and to what degree Iran has or has not developed its nuclear assets. The general line seems that despite the U.S. walkaway from its own 2015 agreements, Iran has increased its nuclear work, but kept its reported total output under negotiated totals. Whatever our next step, we ought to be able to agree that it needs to be thought through.

What is so grotesque is the notion that a cornered Trump, feeling personal embarrassment at an election loss, is seeking to overturn as many tables as he can to stay in the spotlight and to pursue his own goals rather than look at the country’s needs.

Launching the military, ruining Alaskan waters and hollowing out the government in political purges over pique is not what we need from our government. We don’t want a president to preen over himself.

It’s reason enough that Trump should leave the White House.

A new beginning: We will survive our bad breakup with Donald Trump

The breakup of a relationship with a malignant narcissist is fraught with danger and uncertainty every step of the way. Such is the case with Donald Trump. Our breakup with him will be on center stage for the next 60 days. It has already proven to be grueling and disruptive and painful. Democracy feels like it is teetering. Republicans are silent and absent. Trump supporters are disappointed and unwilling to severe their cult-like bond with him.

But we will emerge from this bad breakup. We will survive. We will be stronger than before, especially if we take steps to minimize the damage and strengthen our healthy resolve.

As we have predicted, Trump’s election defeat has triggered tremendous embarrassment and humiliation for him. He is now throwing a big temper tantrum — what we call narcissistic rage. He is like a screaming, stomping petulant child. His self-image of grandiosity and superiority is melting away. He is desperately afraid that we will all see that the emperor has no clothes.

Trump is refusing to concede the election for fear that he will be perceived as a loser. He is filing frivolous and baseless lawsuits. He is pushing Republicans to manufacture voter fraud in certain states. He is ginning up his base to support his false and fake narratives of victory.    

Trump is now refusing to do his job. Yet playing golf on the weekends at taxpayers’ expense is acceptable because he can cheat and win. He cannot work because he is totally consumed with figuring out a way to hang onto power at any cost. He is a desperate and pathetic man. His loud bravado belies his personal and political weakness. He does not mind that his corruption and lack of moral compass are on full display.

President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team has been stopped cold in its tracks by a government employee who is showing fierce loyalty to the president. Trump is not allowing Biden to have access to intelligence briefings and coronavirus data. Trump is a bully who is acting as if the federal government were his own personal playground. He has no understanding that he is a public servant who holds office at the will of the people. And the people have spoken loud and clear at the ballot box.

Worse than defiance and obstructionism is Trump’s scorched earth mentality. Consistent with being a malignant narcissist, Trump believes that everyone and everything should go down with him. He will seek revenge and destroy people if he can. He will undermine democratic norms and institutions. He wants to make sure that the Biden administration starts out with a mountain of ashes rather than a unified and hearty country. He is ignoring the spike in COVID cases across the country and he does not care that 252,000 American souls (and counting) have perished under his direction. 

What we are seeing now is Trump’s psychopathology gone amok. He is not capable of reigning in the dysfunctional and destructive parts of his personality. His self-control is nil. The pressures and stress of losing this election have overwhelmed his psyche. He is agitated and hostile and flailing. His breakup with America is going poorly because he is an unhealthy man. This is not politics or love of country — this is one man’s psychopathology creating turmoil and havoc for millions of us. 

But we will survive this breakup. Trump has lost the election and he will be removed from office at noon on Jan. 20, 2021. His official voice will be retired. He will lose his bully pulpit. His pep rallies of misinformation and lies will come to a halt. Trump will slither away behind the scenes so that he does not have to show the face of defeat to the world. Fortunately, our Constitution provides the guardrail for ridding us of this failed and defeated leader.

The best way to survive this breakup is to invest energy and hope in our new president, Joe Biden. Biden is the father figure we need to confront the existential challenges we face. He is experienced and committed and wise. He has been a true public servant for over 40 years. He will address and fix the pandemic, the economic recession and the recent undermining of democratic institutions. Biden has the temperament, empathy, gravitas and skill to navigate this complicated and anxiety-producing time. 

Biden will be the anti-Trump in many important ways for the mental health of our country. There will not be an “alternative universe” of false narratives and self-aggrandizement. There will be a return to an emphasis on science and the truth. The Biden administration will be a corrective emotional experience for those of us who have been traumatized by Trump’s reign of terror for the past four years.

Many Americans will get closure from this breakup. For some, it will be the image of Trump walking out of the White House for the last time, or Biden placing his hand on the Bible at the inauguration. For others, it may take the legal, financial and social fallout that will come to Trump once he emerges from the protective bubble of the Oval Office.

Our successful breakup with Trump must be promoted by the media. Trump’s Twitter account should be suspended because of his corrosive and toxic propaganda. Media coverage of him must be curtailed. Fox News should dissociate from him. OAN and Newsmax ought to do the same. Trump’s attempts to establish a media presence must be thwarted. 

Donald Trump’s oxygen is attention from the public — he cannot maintain an influence in America without it. For our safety and well-being and sanity, we need Trump to vanish from our public consciousness. But he will not disappear voluntarily — we must force him out with clear intentions and firm boundaries.

Once Trump is removed, the tone and tenor of our country will change. We will adopt the mantra of unity, inclusiveness and honesty going forward. Racism, xenophobia, sexism and terrorism will be rejected without exception on a national level. It will be our new normal.

Trump’s supporters and sycophants have had a tight emotional and irrational bond with him, largely because of the phenomenon of collective narcissism. Their connection will be broken once Trump is removed from power. Their gradual deprogramming from their cult leader will take time. A return to political discourse with negotiation and compromise will eventually occur. 

Trump supporters are not the enemy. Their grievances and concerns merit attention. They want to be heard and valued. They want to count. Their sociocultural and economic issues must be addressed. Biden has already announced that he wants to be the president for all Americans. 

A bad breakup with Donald Trump was inevitable. Relationships with malignant narcissists always end badly with great angst. This is no exception.

We will survive this breakup. What now feels so confusing and frightening will soon lead to sunshine and a new beginning.

Haven’t Democrats learned not to take the Latinx vote for granted? Maybe they just like losing

The 2020 election has brought the diversity and complexity that characterizes the Latinx electorate into sharp relief. While Latinx voters helped deliver wins for President-elect Joe Biden in critical states like Arizona and Nevada, losses in Florida and Texas served as a reminder to white pundits that the Latinx vote is not a monolith. More importantly, however, it shows that the Latinx vote is not assured to Democrats, and that as the Latino electorate continues to grow, the failure to integrate, engage and specifically “reward” Latinx voters will be at the Democratic Party’s peril.  

As with previous cycles, well-paid political consultants scrambled in the late stages of campaigns to gain insights into the Latinx voter universe. During the get-out-the-vote efforts days before the election, candidates found themselves side-stepping to mariachis and folklórico dancers. Now that the election is over, media pundits continue to act like they know what they are talking about even when the actual vote shows how badly “Hispanic” voters were mischaracterized. Ultimately, the Latinx vote remains a mystical object, incomprehensible to them all. 

This should not have been the case in 2020 — especially when we’ve been talking about the magnitude of the Latino vote for several election cycles now. Yet this knowledge gap exists, and Democrats need a real long-term strategy if they want to mobilize this voting bloc that will become even more decisive in future elections.

For anyone wanting a lesson of what not to do, election night was instructive. With all eyes on Florida, political pundits tied themselves in knots to explain Trump’s victory throughout the night. Analysts were quick to blame Joe Biden’s defeat in Florida on Latinx voters. While it is true that many traditionally conservative Cuban voters voted for Trump, this view completely obscures the fact that Latinx voters overall broke for Biden in Florida by a 21-point margin. Further, that focus clouds the very real wins that happened elsewhere on the backs of Latinx voters. 

In Arizona, for example, movement organizations proved what effective organizing of Latinx and indigenous voters looks like, helping to deliver Democrats a second U.S. Senate seat and flip the state to Biden, only the second Democratic presidential nominee since 1948 to win the state. Concurrently, relatively small but growing Latinx voting blocs in the South and Midwest provided votes critical to making gains in states like Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Nebraska. 

Some may write off the pattern that we saw with Latinx voters this year as an anomaly. But for those closely following voter trends, we know that the growing Latinx electorate will have a key role in a winning Black-Latino coalition that is working to shift the political landscape on issues like access to quality health care, the economy, addressing racism and discrimination, and criminal justice reform, even in states where their voting percentage is modest.  

The postmortems on the presidential election have largely obscured the coalition of voters of color, young and old, that drove wins for Democrats up and down the ballot. Further, our political class has failed to provide viewers the nuanced storytelling necessary to explain why conservative Cubans unsurprisingly voted Republican, and why  a sizable minority of men of color voted to re-elect Trump. More importantly, these post-election narratives have refused to dissect why the majority of white voters, once again, failed to be persuaded by the Democrats’ exorbitant spending and outsized attention on them. 

So, in the face of two election cycles that demonstrate the growing consequence of the Latinx vote, the question must be asked: Why does our media and political elite still exhibit a fundamental knowledge gap and lack of focus when it comes to the rich diversity and multi-ethnic reality of the Latinx population in U.S. politics? One need only look at other major cultural, economic and social institutions to understand why the Latino vote is still a mystery for the Democratic Party and beyond. Latinos remain invisible in mass media and entertainment, and are significantly underrepresented in elected office, corporate America, philanthropy and academia. And this invisibility is directly tied to the lack of descriptive and substantive representation in American politics.   

For far too long, the failure of our nation’s political elite to fully recognize the power of nonwhite voters, nonwhite interests and nonwhite candidates has not just costing us time, money and, ultimately, elections. It’s now also cost us the unnecessary loss of American lives. 

Given the growth of Latinx voters in key states across the nation, it is no longer acceptable to ignore their power or the organizers who are delivering wins on the ground. If Democrats are to prevail in the future, now is the time to focus on a long-game strategy of real organizing and mobilization to not just win the next election, but to fundamentally shift the political landscape.

Kelly Loeffler’s disclosures appear to omit the holding company that operates her private jet

Sen. Kelly Loeffler, R-Ga., the unelected multimillionaire senator now heading for a runoff election in January, appears to have omitted a holding company from her federally mandated financial disclosures, which would violate Senate ethics rules and federal law.

The company, Descante Capital Holdings, was uncovered in Salon’s reporting on a private jet that Loeffler jointly purchased with her husband, Jerry Sprecher, who is chair of the New York Stock Exchange. Loeffler, who says she bought the plane shortly after her senate appointment last December, uses it for travel between Georgia and Washington, as well as for campaign junkets around the Peach State. She once used it for an 18-minute hop from a central Georgia town to Savannah.

A Loeffler staffer told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last February that the senator had paid for the airplane “out of her pocket,” but her financial disclosures suggest that isn’t true. Salon’s previous reporting found that not only is the plane jointly owned by Loeffler and Sprecher, but the couple may also have availed themselves of a Trump tax-law loophole to write off the $10 million purchase entirely. 

Individuals are not permitted to write off the purchase of a jet; only businesses can do that. Furthermore, Loeffler and Sprecher appear to have purposefully concealed the ownership arrangement, chartering the plane through a company called TVPX Aircraft Solutions, which provides an “owner trust” that offers its clients complete anonymity. The aircraft tracking site Flight Aware says that the jet is “not available for public tracking per request from the owner/operator.”

Salon uncovered this ownership structure for the plane through a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) lookup of certifications for a mandated two-year regulatory test, a matter of public record. The plane’s listed operator is not an individual, but a company: Descante Capital Holdings.

Loeffler’s financial disclosures list two companies using variations on that name. According to Loeffler’s personal comment on the form, they serve as holding companies for her primary residence — a $10.5 million Atlanta estate also called Descante.

Her disclosures also list a company called Descante Capital LLC, with a description of “family office,” whose purpose, according to Loeffler’s personal comment, is “administrative and organizational services.” Her comment, unlike the other two, does not specify a holding company.

Loeffler’s husband also owns a Fulton County jet hangar worth $1 million, which pulls in anywhere between $100,001 and $1 million annually in rent, according to the senator’s federal disclosures.

None of those filings, however, list any specifically called “Descante Capital Holdings” — which the FAA lists as the registered operator of Loeffler’s aircraft.

It is unclear whether the couple created a separate entity specifically to operate the jet, or where the apparent reporting error lies: It’s possible the FAA registration is incorrect, but it’s also possible that Loeffler’s omitted this information from her required Senate disclosures.

If Loeffler withheld an entity on those filings, or knowingly gave false information in them, it would amount to a violation of Senate ethics rules as well as a federal law which makes it a crime to “falsify any information” or “fail to file or report any information” that is required.

Violators “shall” be fined, imprisoned for up to a year or both, according to the statute.

Loeffler, who has circulated an article boasting that she and Sprecher are worth $800 million, has along with her husband developed a sharp monetary acumen from their years working at one of the world’s leading financial services providers.

Salon previously reported that Loeffler, as a senior executive at that company, had marketed a financial instrument involving an offshore holding arrangement that allowed some of the largest banks in the world to circumnavigate U.S. taxes.

While the senator’s financial disclosures, which only state ranges of values, do not provide enough detail to peg a net worth beyond $300 million, Forbes estimated in August that the couple could be worth anywhere between $800 million and $1 billion.

On Wednesday, Loeffler solicited campaign donations in a television interview given in the halls of the Senate, an apparent violation of Senate ethics rules and of the federal law that makes it a crime to solicit campaign contributions on federal property.

A Loeffler campaign spokesperson did not respond to multiple detailed questions for this article.

Fox News reporter calls out Rudy Giuliani after crazy press conference: “So much” was “not true”

In the wake of a press conference riddled with unsubstantiated claims headed by Rudy Giuliani and other members of President Trump’s effort to overturn the election results, Fox News reporter Kristin Fisher reiterated what many of the administration’s critics have been saying: there’s nothing there.

“That was certainly a colorful news conference from Rudy Giuliani, but it was light on facts. So much of what he said was simply not true, or has already been thrown out in court,” she said.

Fisher went on to say that Giuliani’s allegations of a “nationwide conspiracy” to hand the election to Joe Biden contained no “hard evidence,” adding that many of the things Giuliani says in public are different than what he’s said in court.

You can watch the video below via YouTube: 

Tucker Carlson calls out Trump lawyer’s voter fraud conspiracies: “She never sent us any evidence”

On Fox News Thursday night, Tucker Carlson — usually a staunch defender of President Donald Trump — scorned the performance of Sidney Powell, an attorney for the president’s campaign who alleged widespread voter fraud and conspiracy theories during a press conference earlier in the day.

“What Powell was describing would amount to the single greatest crime in American history,” said Carlson. “Millions of votes stolen in a day. Democracy destroyed. The end of our centuries-old system of self-government, not a small thing . . . We took Sidney Powell seriously, we have no intention of fighting her, we’ve always respected her work. We simply wanted to see the details. How could you not want to see them?”

“So we invited Sidney Powell on this show. We would have given her the whole hour. We would have given her the entire week, actually, and listened quietly the whole time,” said Carlson. “But she never sent us any evidence despite a lot of requests, polite requests, not a page. When we kept pressing she got angry and told us to stop contacting her. When we checked with others around the Trump campaign, people in positions of authority, they told us Powell has never given them any evidence either, nor did she provide any today at the press conference . . . She never demonstrated that a single actual vote was moved illegitimately by software from one candidate to another.”

You can watch the video below via Twitter: 

Senate GOP breaks 123-year tradition to pack courts with Trump’s judicial nominees in spite of loss

Senate Republicans have bucked a century-old tradition to continue to confirm President Donald Trump’s judges in spite of his election loss.

The Senate has confirmed six district court nominees since the election, including a 33-year-old attorney with little trial experience who was rated “not qualified” by the American Bar Association (ABA). The move broke a “123-year tradition against voting on judicial nominees of an outgoing president of the defeated party during a lame duck session,” according to Bloomberg Law.

Judicial nominees of presidents who lost their re-election or whose party was defeated have not been confirmed after an election since 1897, Russell Wheeler, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies judicial appointments, told the outlet. The lone exception was when the Senate confirmed future Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, who was then the chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee, to a circuit court in 1980.

The push comes as the Senate continues to stall on a coronavirus relief package despite the number of pandemic deaths rising to more than a quarter-million and massive spikes in cases across the country. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. to “finally come” to the negotiating table this week. The House passed a $3.4 trillion package back in May and a $2.2 trillion compromise offer last month. McConnell has refused to budge from his $500 billion offer, even though economists say the country needs at least 400% more in relief funding to get through the winter.

McConnell has vowed to continue to confirm judges, announcing plans to move forward with two nominations handed down since Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation.

“We’re going to run through the tape,” McConnell said in a radio interview after the Barrett vote. “We go through the end of the year, and so does the president.”

Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has suggested that the Senate may even confirm nominees in January — right up until President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated on Jan. 20.

Asked about the tradition of not confirming judges after election defeats by Bloomberg Law, a spokesperson for McConnell “pointed to Senate norms that Democrats have abandoned in the judicial nominations process.” Democrats eliminated the filibuster for lower court and executive nominees in 2013 before Republicans eliminated the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees in 2017 to push through the confirmation of Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, called for Senate Republicans to halt confirmations after Trump’s defeat, citing the longstanding tradition of not confirming judges after a president’s defeat.

Feinstein wrote a letter to Graham calling on him to respect “long and established tradition” and “accordingly cease to process judicial nominations and allow the Biden-Harris administration the opportunity to appoint judges after Inauguration Day.”

One of the four district court nominees approved this week was Kathryn Kimball Mizelle. She is an attorney at the law firm Jones Day, which is one of the firms involved in the Republican legal crusade challenging the results of the election.

Mizelle is also a member of the Federalist Society, the conservative dark money group which has steered and bankrolled Trump’s judicial appointments. She is also close to Justice Clarence Thomas, with whom she taught a course at the University of Florida, according to The Tampa Bay Times.

Prior to joining Jones Day, Mizelle worked as a lawyer in Trump’s Department of Justice. She supervised litigation from the agency’s Civil Rights Division and Civil Division, which rescinded protections for transgender students, dropped its opposition to racially discriminatory election policies and opposed policies expanding health care and education opportunities to people from disadvantaged backgrounds during her tenure, according to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

“It is deeply disturbing that someone like Ms. Mizelle – who was involved in many of the Trump administration’s most egregious civil rights rollbacks – would be rewarded for these actions with a lifetime appointment to the federal bench,” Vanita Gupta, the group’s president and CEO, said in a letter to senators ahead of the vote, describing Mizelle as an “ultraconservative ideologue” and a “Trump loyalist.”

The 33-year-old Washington attorney, the youngest Trump pick to be approved by the Senate yet, was confirmed in a 49-41 vote on Wednesday to a district court seat in Florida despite being rated “Not Qualified” by the ABA.

The ABA, which usually sets a 12-year threshold for a nominee to be rated as qualified, said in a September letter that Mizelle, who has little trial experience and was only admitted to the bar in 2012, “represents a rather marked departure from the 12 year minimum.”

She is the tenth Trump nominee rated “not qualified” to be confirmed by Senate Republicans.

Mizelle “is woefully unprepared and unqualified to serve as a federal judge,” Gupta wrote. “While this matters little to the Trump administration — which has spent the past four years attempting to lard the federal courts with young, right-wing extremists like Ms. Mizelle — her lack of experience should make her nomination a non-starter . . . Rather than processing judicial nominees, the Senate should be focused on addressing the many urgent challenges that are gripping our nation at this moment,” such as the “devastating health and economic impact of the COVID-19 crisis.”

Exclusive: Watchdog files complaint with SEC accusing GOP Sen. David Perdue of insider trading

A watchdog group filed a complaint on Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) alleging that Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., abused his office to enrich himself through insider trading.

The allegations stem from a Wednesday report in the Daily Beast, which described Perdue’s investment in a company that makes submarine parts. Perdue sold that investment for a healthy profit while he took the lead on a funding bill which eventually awarded lucrative defense contracts to the same company.

In 2019, shortly before he was appointed as the chair of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Seapower, Perdue invested $190,000 in BWX, one of only two or three companies contracted to make key parts for Virginia-class submarines. Perdue, the multimillionaire former CEO of Dollar General and a highly active stock trader, had never invested in the company before, according to the report.

Perdue then began work on the funding bill, which ultimately secured $4.7 billion of government funds for Virginia-class submarines. He was reportedly “hand-picked by party leadership to hammer out the final version of the bill between the House and Senate.”

BWX stock rose while Perdue pushed for the funding, and he sold his shares for tens of thousands of dollars in profit, according to his 2019 financial disclosure forms.

Perdue’s office told The Beast that his investment portfolio was managed by third-party advisers, and the senator does not make these trades himself. The explanation echoed the campaign’s response to a separate round of insider-trading accusations earlier this year.

“This has been asked and answered — Senator Perdue doesn’t manage his trades, they are handled by outside financial advisors without his prior input or approval,” a spokesperson told the outlet. “No amount of lies from liberal media outlets or Democratic political groups will change that fact.”

But Kedric Payne, senior director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, the nonpartisan group which advocates for transparency in politics, said the events showed why many lawmakers tend to avoid trades — even if they hand off responsibility to outside advisers.

“It is nearly impossible to make decisions affecting an industry and then receive a personal financial benefit without appearing to have a conflict of interest,” Payne told The Beast. “Even if officials rely on financial advisors to make trading decisions on their behalf, the perception of conflicts of interest remains, because the public does not know if there are winks and nods prompting the trades.”

“If you believe it is mere coincidence that Senator Perdue bought and sold stock in this company while he was drafting legislation to award it billions in federal contracts, I have a bridge to sell you,” Brad Woodhouse, president of the American Democracy Legal Fund, the group which filed the SEC complaint against Perdue, told Salon in a statement.

“Instead of using his chairmanship to strengthen the Navy and protect the brave men and women who serve in our armed forces, Senator Perdue used the position to make money for himself,” Woodhouse said. “The Securities and Exchange Commission must begin an immediate investigation into this clear case of insider trading by Senator Perdue.”

This is not the first time Perdue has come under scrutiny for allegations of insider trading. The Daily Beast reported in September that Perdue appeared to have capitalized on debit card regulations he had worked to weaken.

And this spring, Perdue, along with several other lawmakers, including fellow multimillionaire Georgia Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, was swept up in an insider trading scandal related to tens of thousands of dollars in stock purchases made on the day he received a private Senate briefing on the coronavirus pandemic in January.

The Department of Justice and the Senate both launched investigations into the trades in the spring, and Perdue was exonerated in September. Loeffler, his colleague, was cleared of the same allegations in May, shortly after her husband, the chair of the New York Stock Exchange, made a $1 million contribution to a pro-Trump super PAC.

Perdue and Loeffler both face runoff elections in January. The races will determine whether Democrats or Republicans will control the U.S. Senate.

How “Supernatural” reflects the American spirit and the monstrous darkness lurking underneath

In the beginning there was The WB, and there was UPN, and for five seasons at the former there was the pop culture phenomenon known as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." That seminal series leapt over to UPN where it would conclude its run in 2003.

Two seasons after "Buffy" left the air, "Supernatural" emerged on The WB, and became one of the few shows to cross over to The CW once The WB and UPN merged. The show's road officially ends there on Thursday night, bringing a close to a story that has run for 15 years.

Even so, "Supernatural" has earned far less cultural cred over the years despite lasting twice as long as "Buffy." Longevity does not guarantee cultural impact or appreciation, of course. Let's also acknowledge that that "Buffy" is personally beloved by a number of critics and scholars working today because it was a vanguard of television's golden age, and it dared to sculpt a goofy cult film adaptation into seven seasons' worth of grand and emotionally complex serialized stories on a pair of small, low-rated broadcast networks.

But shows like "Supernatural" don't last for as long as they do unless they speak to something essential about us, and what Sam and Dean Winchester (played by Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki) represent. "Supernatural" maintained the love of its varied fanbase for same key reasons American audiences have deemed "Law & Order" timeless. Its cases vary from week to week, with a few episodes here and there devoted to pushing its mythology forward.

The difference is that in its world, definitions of good and evil are fungible. Hell is chaos, but Heaven is a heartless place run by beings blindly following orders or defying them to take vengeance upon humanity. And in the cosmos' caste system, humans occupy a low rung.

This makes "Supernatural" a series that's as much about underdogs battling corrupt systems as it is about hunters confronting monsters. And in its divine justice system the perpetually screwed people are represented by two separate yet equally important men: Dean, a brawler with a winning sense of humor; and Sam, a college-educated adherent to reason. These are their stories.

"Supernatural" ends in a year that coincides with conversations about what it means to be American and confronting hard truths about this nation's soul. In their own way, that's precisely what Sam, Dean, and their Earth-bound angelic ally Castiel (Misha Collins) and a Nephilim ward named Jack (Alexander Calvert) have been doing all along.

Sure, it's a buddy series set in a monster-of-the-week format. But the genre drama's main strength rests in how it taps into the enduring power of American story at its best and worst, even as it subverts popular notions to which millions cling, insisting that they make our culture great.

Mind you, the completely mundane reason that "Supernatural" lasted as long as it has is that many of its devoted fans grew up with Sam and Dean. That alone insures its comfort TV status among a millennials and Xers for years to come.

"Supernatural" is a fan-powered endeavor, the type of show that lends itself more easily to recaps as opposed to analysis, and with good reason. On the simplest level, it caters to a shared love for popular culture, incorporating numerous nods at classic film and TV. It's a horror series and a Western, and from time to time it's mimicked reality series, game shows and other TV formats. One of its best episodes places Sam and Dean inside of a "Scooby-Doo" cartoon. 

Sam and Dean also represent the archetypical image of American muscle in every detail, a pair of flannel-clad guys roaring across America's highways in their father's 1967 Chevy Impala blasting hard rock. Even their resume is quintessentially American, in that they inherited the family business. In their case, that happens to be demon disposal.

Unlike Buffy Summers, our "Supernatural" heroes aren't underestimated when they walk into a room. The Winchesters are paragons of white American masculinity, played by heartthrob actors who aged along with their audience. Indeed, there's no getting around how white this show or its insistent colorblindness which, again, plays into a central tenet of the American story.

So, too, does its classic pairing of brains and brawn. Dean rarely sees a situation that can't be solved with firepower and fists. Sam attempted to run from his roots and attended Stanford. He would have gone to law school if destiny and Hell hadn't intervened, derailing his plans by pinning his girlfriend to the ceiling while immolating her, the same way demons killed Mama Winchester. Both have daddy issues at the beginning of the series and compete for the affections of their mother after she's resurrected in a later season. Family: it's a lot.

Series creator Eric Kripke originally shaped "Supernatural" as a drama about those emotional conflicts, much in the same way that "Buffy" is an extended metaphor for the horror of adolescence and early adulthood. Over its decade and a half of development "Supernatural" redefined what family means, with the series into an ensemble piece with Sam and Dean joined by Castiel and Jack.

And it is by no means a flawless show or consistent in quality. Entire seasons could be skipped without a neophyte missing a beat, since and many of its arcs recycle the same tensions between Sam and Dean, often treating Dean's rage as his superpower. Yet in the end redeems both of them, and Dean in particular, through a message that a hero's care is his strength, not his anger.

Taking all of this into account, it's no surprise that "Supernatural" appeals to both sides of the political spectrum, although it is particularly popular among Democrats. In the 2020 edition of E-Poll Market Research's annual list of top programs among viewers identifying as Democrats and Republicans, it tops the list of favorite broadcast TV series among Democrats, followed by "This Is Us." Among Republicans, it ranks sixth. ("This Is Us" is No. 1. )

As the presidential election heated up, Stacey Abrams thrilled its viewership by revealing that it is one of her favorite series, which, again, makes sense. For one thing, she's a romance novel author, and the show contains the same earmarks that enliven that genre, including lost love, thwarted ambition, rivalry and unrequited affection. Also, through its countless wades into the rich murk of urban legend, myth and magical lore "Supernatural" portrays a version of justice that's more reflective of reality. The good guys harbor no illusions about fairness and operate under the acceptance that whatever all-power entity may be watching over us is, in his better moods, absent. In the finale season, he's a petulant villain intent on erasing all of creation and starting over.

This contradicts the way most series that centralize a Judeo-Christian vision of cosmic order, with visions of benevolent angels ( a la "Highway to Heaven," which Sam and Dean reference time and again.) The God at the center of its universe first presents himself as a writer and later on, as he grows more callous, an entertainment generator, likening universes to shows he tires of and decides to cancel.

But "Supernatural" was never a religious tale. Based on the events of its penultimate episode, I would say it identifies, like most Americans, as spiritual, or perhaps aggressively humanist. 

Moreover, the closer a person looks at this series the more they may realize how much of a crossroads it is for modern sci-fi genre, whether in terms of its casting or the behind-the-scenes forces shaping it. Strands of DNA of "Buffy," "Battlestar Galactica" and "The X-Files" are part of "Supernatural," as is "The Magicians," whose creator Sera Gamble was the "Supernatural" showrunner for Seasons 6 and 7, and "The Boys," Kripke's current series.

After 15 seasons and 327 episodes, "Supernatural" ends as the longest-running genre series in all of American broadcast TV. That puts it in the same ranks as "CSI," "ER" and "Criminal Minds," each of which also lasted for 15 years. The only other currently airing live-action series that have lasted longer are "Grey's Anatomy" (17 seasons), "NCIS" (18), and "Law & Order: SVU" (22).  

All of these are procedural dramas, a durable format that in the right hands yields the kind of TV that a person can drop into whenever and regardless of how long they've been absent. This means that for entirely typical reasons "Supernatural" will remain in TV rotation for years to come via syndication and streaming services – it takes up a lot of real estate.

As for why people are destined to keep on returning to it, that merits deeper contemplation. Sam and Dean have matured and evolved along with the people watching them, and their separate journeys speak to the darkness hunkered down within each of us and our wider culture.

The American story insists we're a people uniquely capable of goodness, generosity and perseverance.  Lately the American reality demonstrates that as a nation the majority of us are only beginning to understand the monstrous darkness lurking underneath the thin skin of purported civility and claims of greatness. 

If there's a lesson in "Supernatural," perhaps it was right there in front of us, all along, insisting that whatever is corrupting this land has to be confronted, reckoned with and banished, and only then can we rest. Until then, like its unofficial theme song insists, we wayward folks have no other choice but to carry on.

The series finale of "Supernatural" airs Thursday, Nov. 19 at 9 p.m. on The CW, preceded by the finale special at 8 p.m. Past seasons and earlier episodes of the current 15th season are streaming on Netflix.

Twitter launches disappearing stories feature identical to every other social media sites’

Twitter has launched a new feature called “Fleets,” in which users can create posts which appear for only 24 hours before vanishing. The Fleets feature, which appears at the top of the Twitter user interface in a series of circles, is near-identical in appearance, execution and user interface to products of nearly all of Twitter’s competitors: Snapchat Stories, Instagram Stories, Facebook Stories, and even LinkedIn Stories are all fundamentally variations on the same idea. 

A reference to the word “fleeting,” Fleets allows users to post new text or video content or respond to existing content with the knowledge that what they post will disappear after 24 hours. Fleets cannot be liked or retweeted but, according to The Verge, Twitter does plan on eventually adding stickers and making it possible to live broadcast through fleets. These features would most likely help Twitter further compete with Instagram and Snapchat when it comes to allowing users to post temporary content.

The fact that all social media sites seem to heading towards a grand unified theory of stories is peculiar given the tech industry’s cultural penchant for radically new, so-called disruptive innovations. Indeed, reaction around the web homed in on this oddity, suggesting that the biggest tech companies are becoming more like soda brands in their tendency towards marketing variations on an identical product (e.g. the endless line of Dr. Pepper clones). Gizmodo’s Tom McKay castigated the derivative feature addition as “Coward mode” and noted that, according to TechCrunch, a hedge fund named Elliott Management Group that purchased a minority stake in Twitter earlier this year cited the lack of a story-like feature as proof that the company was insufficiently innovative.

“There’s a huge incentive for social platforms to encourage ephemeral content: engagement,” Rand Fishkin, the CEO & Co-Founder of SEOmoz, wrote to Salon. “If I know that my friends are posting things I can never access again in the future, I’m more likely to open the app and consume those things before they disappear. Since every social media app (Twitter, included) relies on daily and monthly active users for their ability to monetize and show growth to Wall Street, they’re all trying to copy Snapchat’s engagement hack.”

So are there business reasons why social media companies seem to be stuck in a rut when it comes to innovation? “Innovation tends to suffer when there’s only a few competitors and little risk of new entrants gaining footholds in a market,” Fishkin rued. “Facebook and Google’s near-monopolies in their segments have made this reality almost unavoidable.”

He added, “There’s also a lot of fear among them few big social platforms that experimental projects could lead to privacy problems, draw the ire of government regulators, drive away advertisers, or annoy users to the point of abandonment. Looking at how sensitive users are to any social platform changes, one can see how difficult it must be to design new features without angering/driving off an audience.”

Casey Newton of The Verge had a similar observation about the problem of a innovation rut, writing that Twitter’s Fleets have “disadvantages” including the fact that “the format is familiar is because it’s already everywhere; fleets have a lot of competition, and many of those competitors already have rich and compelling feature sets.” Newton also wrote that “Twitter’s historically glacial pace of iteration means it could take Fleets a long time to catch up — and competitors will be inventing new creative tools all the while.”

Business Insider concurred that the new feature “sparked some raised eyebrows,” although it added that in addition to it being similar to features on other platforms, it shares its name “with an enema brand.” The publication also pointed out that some Twitter users “wondered why Twitter decided to roll out Fleets instead of focusing on features users are demanding, such as an edit button.”

“Fleets are for sharing momentary thoughts – they help start conversations and only stick around for 24 hours,” Twitter’s design director Joshua Harris and product manager Sam Haveson explained in a blog post on Tuesday. “Through our tests in Brazil, Italy, India, and South Korea, we learned Fleets helped people feel more comfortable joining the conversation – we saw people with Fleets talk more on Twitter. Those new to Twitter found Fleets to be an easier way to share what’s on their mind.”

He added, “Because they disappear from view after a day, Fleets helped people feel more comfortable sharing personal and casual thoughts, opinions, and feelings.”

Trump called two GOP officials before they tried to rescind their votes to certify election results

President Donald Trump personally called two Republican election officials in Michigan before they attempted to rescind their votes to certify results from Wayne County.

Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, the two Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers, tried to block the results of the vote in Detroit for hours on Tuesday. Palmer, the panel’s Republican chair, said they would only back the certification of results in “communities other than Detroit,” which has the largest Black population in the state.

Members of the public and election officials from around the state excoriated the Republican duo as “racist” during the virtual meeting. Hours later, the two eventually agreed to vote with Democrats to certify the results.

But on Wednesday, Palmer and Hartmann issued a statement through a firm, which has worked for the Trump campaign, saying they “remain opposed to certification” after all. The duo claimed that they had only voted to certify the results following “hours of sustained pressure.”

The statement came after Trump called Palmer and Hartmann following the revised vote to “express gratitude for their support,” according to the Associated Press. Hours later, the pair issued a statement declaring that the vote “should not be certified.”

Palmer confirmed to The Washington Post that she “did receive a call from President Trump.”

“He was checking in to make sure I was safe after hearing the threats and doxxing that had occurred,” she said.

In their statement, Palmer and Hartmann said their decisions to change their votes followed “intimidation, deception and threats of violence.”

But Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s office said it was too late for the Republican officials to change their minds again.

“There is no legal mechanism for them to rescind their vote. Their job is done, and the next step in the process is for the Board of State Canvassers to meet and certify,” a spokesperson for Benson, a Democrat, told CBS News.

Palmer has argued that the result of the vote in Detroit should not be certified, because there were minor discrepancies between the number of people who signed in to vote and the number of ballots cast.

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan said during a press conference on Wednesday that the “idea that the out-of-balance precincts reflects any problem with the voting is utter nonsense.”

“At the end of the night, you add up the number of people who are reported in the poll book as having voted and the number of ballots” cast, he said, according to the Detroit Free Press. “If they’re off by one, that’s called out-of-balance precinct, which is what they were discussing yesterday” at the Wayne County board meeting.

Duggan explained that machines sometimes make scanning errors, but that “doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong.” Other times, voters may spoil their ballot and request a new one, but that is “not any indication of any voter fraud.”

There were only 357 out-of-balance counts of about 250,000 votes cast in the city, according to Duggan. 

“If the presidential election in Michigan was decided by 100 votes, it would have made sense in the canvass to audit those 357. It might have changed the outcome,” he said. “But Michigan was decided by 145,000 votes.”

Instead, Trump has falsely argued that the discrepancy showed there were “far more votes than people” in the city. Duggan accused Trump and his supporters of playing to “people’s worst racial prejudices” by targeting Detroit, where about 90% of residents are people of color.

Rev. Wendell Anthony, the president of the Detroit branch of the NAACP, who joined Duggan at the press conference, added the effort was part of a “pattern of racist attempts to disenfranchise Black voters” and “turn back the results,” according to The Free Press.

There has been no evidence of widespread fraud in Michigan. In fact, of at least 30 election lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign and Republican allies in six states, courts have not found a single instance of fraud, according to NBC News.

Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California Irvine School of Law, predicted that it would take a “court order to rescind a certification” in Wayne County. He noted that “the state has the power to certify the results” regardless.

“This is very dangerous for our democracy, as it is an attempt to thwart the will of the voters through political pressure from the president,” Hasen wrote. “Even though it is extremely unlikely to work, it is profoundly antidemocratic and a violation of the rule of law.”

A third COVID vaccine candidate, this one from Oxford University, clears a crucial hurdle

Oxford University and AstraZeneca announced on Thursday that their vaccine candidate produces a strong immune response in elderly patients and is safe, according to preliminary findings published in a prominent medical journal.

In an article posted in The Lancet, researchers at the university and pharmaceutical company said that their vaccine had been tested on 560 participants; 240 of them were above the age of 70. The vaccine is in Phase II/III of production, meaning the phase that a vaccine candidate enters after it has been found safe and potentially effective among a smaller group of participants and can be expanded to a comparatively larger group. Labelled as “ChAdOx1 nCoV-19,” the vaccine candidate is an “adenovirus-vectored vaccine,” meaning that it consists of engineered viruses that transport a virus’ gene (in this case from SARS-Cov-2, the virus which causes the COVID-19 disease) into our bodies. The goal of adenovirus-vectored vaccines is to convince the body that it has been infected so that it will be able to successfully fight real viruses if they enter the body. In the case of this potential vaccine, it would trick the body into making coronavirus spike proteins that will help it fight the virus.

Adenovirus-vectored vaccines are not without controversy. Indeed, the only adenovirus-vectored vaccine that is commercially used today is a rabies vaccine for wild animals. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also allows adenovirus vaccines for certain military personnel, but no version has been approved for the general public. The human body can become immune to the adenoviral vectors used in the vaccine, which makes booster shots more difficult. In addition, the vaccines may not work for people who have already been naturally exposed to the viruses in question.

As Axios reported, the next step for the vaccine candidate is to enter Phase III trials, in which the initial clinical group is expanded even further to a larger and more diverse group of participants. If the vaccine is established to be both safe and successful at fighting the virus at that point, it can then be considered for mass production and distribution.

“The robust antibody and T-cell responses seen in older people in our study are encouraging,” Oxford University’s Dr. Maheshi Ramasamy, a co-author of The Lancet study, told CBS News. “We hope that this means our vaccine will help to protect some of the most vulnerable people in society, but further research will be needed before we can be sure.”  

The news from the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine trials was not always promising. During Phase III trials of a different vaccine in September, a patient in the United Kingdom experienced a suspected adverse reaction serious enough to prompt the company to put a hold on its study. As Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), told CBS News at the time, “This particular candidate from the AstraZeneca company had a serious adverse event, which means you put the rest of the enrollment of individual volunteers on hold until you can work out precisely what went on.”

He added, “It’s really one of the safety valves that you have on clinical trials such as this, so it’s unfortunate that it happened. Hopefully, they’ll work it out and be able to proceed along with the remainder of the trial but you don’t know. They need to investigate it further.”

This is not the first hopeful news on the vaccine front to come this week. Both Pfizer and Moderna announced this week that they had progressed in developing their vaccine candidates, with Moderna saying there had been “94.5% vaccine efficacy” with its drug and Pfizer (which is working with the German company BioNTech SE) reporting similar results. Unlike the Oxford/AstraZeneca candidate, the Pfizer and Moderna candidates are in Phase III of their trials. In addition, rather than being adenovirus-vectored vaccines, they’re both mRNA (synthetic messenger RNA) vaccines. mRNA vaccines are a novel biotechnology which use a synthetic version of mRNA, or the part of a living creature’s DNA that tells cells which proteins to make so that they can remain healthy, to produce the proteins already found in a virus so that the body can more effectively combat it.

Poet Nikki Giovanni shares her wisdom about Biden, cowardly racism, and why love is a pineapple

How many people held up half-empty champagne glasses before midnight on December 31, 2019 to declare, “2020 is going to be my year!” – only to be hit with a financial crisis caused by an incompetent president who proudly ignored a virus that has turned into a pandemic causing over 250,000 American deaths and counting? Oh, and as always, there was some racism sprinkled on top that brought global protests after the deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.

Like many, I spent a lot of this time in quarantine confused, looking for answers, wondering what is the next step, not just for me, but for our country. And then I realized that all of the answers I needed were with the elders, as they have survived the struggles we are currently facing and more. Living icon and award-winning poet Nikki Giovanni explained overcoming struggle to me recently on “Salon Talks,” while introducing her 21st poetry collection, “Make Me Rain.”

“Make Me Rain,” Giovanni tells me, was inspired by Marvin Gaye and his1971 album “What’s Going On,” which was about the Vietnam War. “‘I’m just getting back because you knew I would,'” Giovanni said. “War is hell. He was taking it up. He dealt with the drugs. He dealt with the religion and how we have to find it. It’s a brilliant album.” The book is full of gems about Giovanni’s Black heritage, powerful stories, and most importantly the lessons we need in these dark times. 

You can watch my “Salon Talks” episode with Giovanni here, or read a Q&A of our conversation below to hear more about her legendary sit-down with James Baldwin and why it continues to resurface online, how she is handling the COVID-19 lockdown as an Appalachian, and why she knows we will be alright after the Trump administration leaves. And check out the end, where she reads a poem from the collection.

The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

The amazing Nikki Giovanni, you are one of my biggest inspirations. 2020 has been a pretty wild year. How have you been surviving COVID?

Well, I’ve been writing and I’m lucky to be a writer. My good friend Ashley Bryan, who’s 95, who is a painter as you know, he’s an illustrator, fell out of bed a couple of weeks ago and broke his wrist. I’ve been talking to him because . . . he says, “Darling, I can’t paint,” and I said, “But you can think about painting.” So, I’m doing fine, just keeping up with friends right now because I’m an old lady and they’re an old lady and they’re old men. You want to just keep track of everybody to see if they’re as okay as they can be. I think the difference, to be honest, is that I’ve always lived in the mountains. I was born in Knoxville, Tennessee and I’m here now in Blacksburg.

Appalachians are used to being alone. I think it’s these city people that are having a really, really crazy time because they’re used to being close to each other, they’re used to walking down the street and seeing people.

In my garden, my okra did not do well, I have to admit that. But my tomatoes came up. They were green and the groundhogs and I fought about the tomatoes. They mostly won. I would run out and I finally realized, when I make fried green tomatoes, so I just started running out and getting them a little bit ahead of the groundhog. That’s the kind of thing that country people do, if I can put it that way. I’ve been comfortable with doing that. I’ve got a couple of neighbors. One is 9, and one is 6. I have a fish pond, and they come over and watch me. Or sometimes, the 9-year-old is big enough now to feed the fish. So, she will feed the fish. Things work out, I think, pretty well. There’s no point in fighting the COVID because it will win.

Absolutely.

What you have to do is embrace it and find a way to get along, essentially to get along with it. I was very disappointed when Donald Trump caught the COVID, that he didn’t die, but you can’t have everything. You can’t have everything. A lot of people did die and I just was disappointed that he wasn’t one of them.

Let’s talk about that. We have a racist president, who has been very evil to this country and has put a whole lot of creative people in a bad place because of poor policy and the way he handled COVID. We’re having this conversation before the election. What do you think is going to happen?

Oh, it’s Biden. [Singing] I’m bidin’ my time because that’s the kind of gal I’m. When Southerners are fishing and Northerners are wishing, I’m bidin’ my time.

And Harris, too. Vote! I’ve been running around singing, if you call that singing.

The last time we spoke, you told me about your love for cooking and how for artists, cooking plays a role when it comes to ideas and creation. Has COVID forced you into creating brand-new recipes or coming up with anything special?

I really have been doing what a lot of my friends have been doing, which is cooking our grandmother’s recipes. I’m still working on it. I’m sure I said that to you last time. I’m still working on how to fix biscuits. My grandmother made the best biscuits in the world and she could roll them out, and then she would take a can. She drank beer, but not a lot, but she had cans, and she would take a can and cut them out. That’s how she made her biscuits. I can’t roll mine out. Mine get stuck. I don’t know what I do, but I can’t. I just can’t make biscuits. I miss grandmother. When I talk to my friends about this, they say, “Oh yeah, my grandmother could make . . . ” So, we’re all getting together. I guess one day, we’ll have to have a grandmother meal and everybody brings what their grandmother cooked best.

My grandma made the best fried crabs. And I don’t even think, if she came down from heaven and then talked me through the process, I couldn’t get them as good as she used to make them.

Oh yeah, no, you miss that, being with them and doing what they did. You do, you miss it. And so in talking to friends my age, we’re always talking about what we remembered and what makes us happy. I think that’s important.

Tell us about your new book “Make Me Rain.”

“Make Me Rain” is a shout-out to Marvin Gaye and a shout-out to “What’s Going On.” I think that’s a brilliant album. This is the best book I can do, but “What’s Going On” is a brilliant album. But if you recall, it’s dark because Marvin was upset about a lot of things. And ultimately he was murdered, as you know, by his father.

A friend of mine says to me, “You’re never unhappy.” And I said, “Well, yeah. I’m unhappy sometimes, but it is rare.” For the cover we ended up with a light blue, because that’s more me, and I’m looking up, whereas Marvin is kind of looking down and unhappy. I am looking up because I think that there’s always tomorrow.

When you listen to that album now, does it feel different than when you listened to that album when it first came out?

It’s still war, as I say. I thought it was incredibly brilliant then. And also because this “What’s Going On” was about the Vietnam War—”I’m just getting back because you knew I would.” War is hell. He was taking it up. He dealt with the drugs. He dealt with the religion and how we have to find it. It’s a brilliant album. Stevie Wonder has an incredible song, too. He did it with the Jackson Five because it’s the only thing the Jackson Five did together.

When and if we open up Broadway again, I would love to see “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg.” I have tickets to that. When you think about the music that came out of Detroit, it’s incredible. It was just incredible, what they had to say. Stevie has a new album out and I haven’t heard that, but listening to his older albums, listening to what he had to say about war and what he had to say about how we got along. And of course he had one of the nicest people on earth, Dizzy Gillespie, and Diz was a part of that album.

Stevie had something to say about war and how it was wrong, and it was really interesting. I’m sorry that the Jackson Five didn’t stay the Jackson Five and continued to make statements. The Jackson Five had something to say, and we lost something because Michael ended up dead, of course, trying to be something he could not possibly be. That’s too bad because he was really good. He has sold more, if that matters, records than anybody. But there’s more to life than selling records. It’s too bad that he couldn’t find happiness because he didn’t. I think it’s fair, and I didn’t know him, I just think it’s fair to say he was not happy. He was always looking for something else, for the next step. I don’t think he was satisfied.

Isn’t it amazing that 10, 20, 30, 40 years can go by and we’re still fighting war? We’re still talking about war and we still have to figure out ways to survive and create through war. What is the answer?

I wish I knew. Right now, we know that the answer is getting rid of Trump and his Nazis and his racists. That’ll be the beginning. And even though you could say, well, Biden is just another white guy and he might be, but at least he can put a sentence together. At least he has some kind of idea that we’re all Americans, and that’s one thing that has to be learned: We in this country are all Americans.

I’m always laughing, but if I were president, okay, the one thing that I would do is I would go to the United Nations and I’d have a big, long talk with them. I’d say that what we have to do now is start to refer to ourselves as earthlings because we live on this planet. As we are growing in this planet, as we are learning each other and as we are spending time in space and we are, we have to be prepared to explain who we are.

If you or I ran into a Martian – I don’t know what a Martian would look like – and the Martian said to either one of us, “Well, who are you?” I couldn’t say I’m a Tennessean, because they wouldn’t know what I’m talking about. I couldn’t even say I’m an American because they were like, “What’s that?” What I have to say is, “I’m an earthling. I’m from the third planet from yellow sun.” I think it’s time that we all got used to the idea that we share this earth and we are a part of this earth. I’m not being softhearted or I’m not trying to be anything. I’m just saying, it’s time that we got over this land and this religion and “This is the way I want you to act. If you don’t act that way, I’m going to kill you. I’m going to fight you. I want your oil or I want your whatever it is you have.” It’s time that we stop that.

A Martian would probably have a different name for earth. So if we’re identifying as an earthling, they might call it something else. They might not even call it the third planet from the sun because it’s based on their perspective and how they look at it. That would be a fun conversation. So, is this your 21st book of poetry?

I think so.

How has your creative process evolved over the years?

Well, I’m interested in a lot of things. My generation, of course, and I’m very fortunate, I think that I am a part of a great generation. I don’t think that I’m any different. I just think I’m a part of that generation. And our generation, my generation had the responsibility to get rid of segregation because that was just easy. You get rid of that, we know. I have a sign from the old L&N Railroad station, which you probably don’t know, but they used to be an L&N, Louisville and Nashville Railroad. And it said, “Restaurant, restroom, colored, white.” I was able to pick it up. I bought it because I do a lot of antiquing and I was able purchase that. See, that’s gone. That’s gone and I think we did a good job. Your generation, of course, has come up and is continuing to come up with no segregation.

You live in a non-segregated world. My generation should take responsibility, I suppose. We didn’t know how to teach you that because there is no segregation, that doesn’t mean that there’s no racism. We got rid of the segregation, but we can’t get rid of the racism. I’m doing music today and I don’t know why, but let’s call this song exactly what it is and what it is, is racism, is cowardly. And it’s time that we dealt with that. They want to say, “We’re superior. White people are superior.” Well, if you’re superior, then why do you have to run around in the middle of the night with your hood over your head to kill somebody? Why do you have death? That’s cowardly. And so we finally got it into their heads that we’re not, the Black Panthers did a lot, that we’re not afraid.

Now, all of a sudden, they’re running around still in groups. They do it in gangs and they’re still running around with their automobile in Charlottesville, running people down, or they’re going to churches where people welcome them and they pull out a gun and shoot seven of them. They put a bomb in a 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. They beat together. I mean, look at George Floyd. They stand there and murder him in broad daylight. That still is cowardly. We can’t get over it, most of the people. Not most. The people who have been murdered by those gangs, the white gangs, they are shot in the back. They are shot in the middle of the night. They’re shot in their bed and that’s cowardly.

I do feel like your generation gave us the tools to fight this battle, and that’s why I feel like we’re going to come out on the right side. At times, it’s really ugly, like when we see what happened to George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Sandra Bland and Michael Brown and Freddie Gray and the long list of people that have been on the wrong side of brutality, evil, hate and racism. But I do think as an artist, your generation laid the foundation to give us the tools to think and fight and read and write our way through these things.

You know what has been resurfacing on the internet a lot?

What?

Your 1971 conversation with James Baldwin. You talk to him about the expectations on Black men and women and the idea of a man bringing the best of himself home. “If you can lie to white people all day at work and give them your best, why can’t you lie to me? I want the best of you too,” you say. Do people often ask you about that conversation?

A lot. I get a lot. I don’t know why. I’m sorry Jimmy’s gone. I was surprised when people started asking me about it because I haven’t seen it in forever. It turned into a book and stuff but I haven’t read it. I thought that was a good point and what I liked most, as I remember it, was Jimmy’s face.

He’d never thought about it that way. He had never thought, “Oh, maybe she’s got a point. Maybe I shouldn’t go out in the day and smile at people who hate me and come back home because I’m so upset. And hit my child or hit my wife or not tell my mother, who was living with me also, that this was a good meal, that I really liked this pot roast,” whatever it is. Why are you lying to people who paid you and not giving the best, the love that we’re trying to give to you? So then women, because we are in a different spot and we can go back – sincerely, we can go back to slavery and you don’t have men hitting women in slavery. We’re not going to get that until we come into what is called freedom. So, you know something’s wrong with that. Something’s wrong with that.

I think it’s so powerful. I saw the interview many years ago when I was young, so I got a chance to learn from it early. Even now, I let people know my love and my energy and what I care about. I save that for my wife and my daughter. I’m not going out into the world and exhausting myself so I can just come home and be a bump on the log. I’m going to come home and I want to give them all of the experiences that I’ve had. I want to hear what they’ve been doing all day or what they have created or talked about or read about or learned about. I think we got to put more love home instead of just going out and just feeding the world that’s never going to feed us back, other than monetary gains. So definitely, thank you for that.

Thank you. I just think people hadn’t thought about it that way, that my responsibility here is to love the people who love me, not to waste my love on people who will always hate me. Or as I say to my writing classes, you always have to think of your audience. And your first audience is you because you’re the first person who reads your poem. You’re the first person who sees the painting that you’re doing. If you wanted to be an actor, you’re the first person who’s trying out for that role, you’re looking in a mirror and seeing how to work. Remember, you are your first audience, so the first person you have to please is you. It’s got to make you happy, and then you don’t mind sharing it with somebody else that you love. You’re not afraid to say, “Well, can you listen to this, honey?”

Because what she’s going to say is she thinks it’s wonderful, whether she doesn’t or not, because that’s her job. You know what’s good, so it’s no point in fooling around with any of that. And any, speaking out only as a woman, any woman is going to always say that if you love the man, you’ve got to tell him, “Oh, that’s great,” because he knows what he’s done that’s good. And he knows what he’s done that isn’t. So he’s not really asking you for that. He just wants you to listen. But we feel the same way. If I go and put makeup on my face and I say, “Well, how do you look?” “Oh, I really like that blue in your eyes or what you put on your eyebrows,” because I’ve looked at myself before you did. I know how it looks.

And so you’re here to say, “It’s going to be all right.” I was talking recently, one of the things that I really like about the ’20s and there’s a lot going on with the ’20s, you could study it forever. I like the fact that Edward VIII resigned his kingdom to come and be a part of the ’20s. We keep saying, “Oh, he just wanted to marry Wallis Simpson.” But she could have been his mistress. It didn’t matter. He wanted to be, which is why he came to America, he came to New York, he wanted to be a part of the Black Renaissance. That’s a part that the historians are now having, they’re having to deal with it. What I like about it, not Edward, but I’m saying this for Black men, because there was something called house parties. But you don’t remember because it was segregation.

After working in the fields all day and she was working also, he could come in, and it’s just one of my favorite songs, he could come in and he could say to her, “Put on your red dress, honey, because we’re going out tonight.” And it would make both of them. It would give something back to both of them. The whites have never understood why we’re still saying and why we still care about each other and what it is that we have given to each other, so that there are songs because the blues are not sad. You get sick of people saying, “Oh, the blues.” No. You don’t know anything about the blues because the blues are telling our story and telling each other. Fats Domino, “I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill.” It’s there. We’ve been talking to each other. We are fabulous people, and I think that it’s time that we started to talk to our audience, which is us.

You are so respected and celebrated from many different spaces. Knowing that you have so many Nikki Giovanni fans who just subscribe to everything you do, does thinking about that audience ever affect the way you create?

I don’t think so. I just think I try to do my best. I lived with my grandmother. My parents had a troubled marriage and I had to finally leave. I went to live with my grandmother. It’s so wonderful to watch my grandmother, and when I say my grandmother, but she was married to my grandfather. It was so wonderful to watch that love affair after all of those years, because I was 14. So my mother is in her 50s, whatever, 40, she was grown. They had three daughters.

I would wash the dishes in the old days. But after all of the girls, the three girls left home, they went to college and left home. Then grandmother would cook, but she said to grandpa, and his name was John Brown. She said, “I told John Brown, I don’t mind cooking, but I’m not going to wash the dishes.” So, that was that. John Brown knew he had to wash dishes. But when I came to live with them, now that’s going to be my job.

But he sat with me. And so the kitchen is one place, and he’s sitting there. I couldn’t see him, but I could wash the dishes. He would, every now and then he’d say, “You know, Nikki? I only wanted to kiss your grandmother.” And I don’t care where she was in the house, she could hear him say that. She’d say, “John Brown, if I had let you kiss me, you would have never married me.” I couldn’t understand it. I didn’t know that was a metaphor. What I learned about love is watching those two people.

And now they’re old people, still playing with each other, still saying, I care, still. I don’t know, we had separate bedrooms, probably hugging or snuggling, still wanting to make each other happy. Grandmother loved pineapple, which I, to this day, I just like pineapple. And grandpapa would go up to the market when pineapple came into season, he would come home and he couldn’t wait to get the house. We lived up, the way it is. And so by the time he got to the steps, he would, her name was Louvenia, he’d say, “Louvenia, they had pineapple.” You could hear in his voice, the love he had that, “I bought you pineapple.” It was just something. I said, “Well, that, that’s what love is.” That’s what love is.

Love is not a paycheck coming in. Love is “I got you pineapple.” And she would just be, “Oh, thank you.” It just made her so happy. They were in love after all of these years. I thought, that’s what love is about.

On the topic of love, could you read a poem for us? Please.

I can. I wanted to read this particular poem because we forget that some of the people who were enslaved ran away. I’m living in Appalachia, the Appalachian Trail. You could see where the enslaved came up. But some of us stayed, and that’s why I wanted to share this poem with you. People acted like, well, maybe they were scared to leave. I don’t know what people think, but I know that they were not cowards. I know that they were not afraid. They stayed and they built the communities. They built the churches. They built the homes that we now live in. I thought somebody needs to say that these are great people.

We forget the strength of those who stayed behind. We sometimes don’t recognize what it took to build a church, a school, a store to sell the yams we picked from the ground. The tomatoes we carefully watched turn red on the vines, to seek the okra pods, as well as to pick our own cotton. We took pride in our work and lovingly encouraged our daughters to dream. We sent them, our daughters, to school, then to college, and they stayed to help others. 100 years is not so long, when we plant love with patience, when we find that song that gives us the strength to go on.

And I just like that because people forget, it took a lot to stay, not just Mississippi, but North Carolina. It took a lot to stay and say, “No, I’m going to build something. This is mine, and I’m going to build something and something’s going to come out of it.”

That’s so beautiful. The book is called “Make Me Rain,” out now and available wherever books are sold and also as an audio book.

Meet the anti-lockdown doctor that conservative pundits are flocking to

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, who teaches medicine at Stanford University and is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research, has become popular in conservative circles for challenging the extent of the coronavirus’ deadliness and the need for widespread lockdowns. Yet the advice issued in his popular articles are far outside the scientific mainstream from accepted public health policy, and scientists say that they may even be “dangerous.”

There was his interview last month with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, where he described a lockdown in Victoria and Melbourne, Australia as “nothing short of draconian.” In April he told a different Fox News host, Tucker Carlson, that the actual death rate from coronavirus infections is “likely orders of magnitude lower than the initial estimates,” adding that “per case, I don’t think it’s as deadly as people thought” and that “the World Health Organization put an estimate out that was, I think, initially 3.4 percent. It’s very unlikely it is anywhere near that. It’s much likely, much closer to the death rate that you see from the flu per case.”

Bhattacharya has also appeared on Spectator TV — an outlet considered the voice of the UK’s Conservative Party — saying, “What we need are new ideas for containing the damage of the virus, rather than trying to contain the general spread, which has been proved to be a poor strategy.” Carly Ortiz-Lytle, a writer for the right-leaning DC Examiner, tweeted this last week about one of his interviews: “Whether you disagree or agree with lockdowns, this is worth a watch. Dr Jay Bhattacharya explains creative alternatives to lockdown.”

Who is Bhattacharya, and what does he believe?

Bhattacharya codified his views in a document called the Great Barrington Declaration, which he co-signed with Harvard University’s Dr. Martin Kulldorff and Oxford University’s Dr. Sunetra Gupta. A manifesto of sorts, it claims that policymakers should implement a system called “Focused Protection” rather than major nationwide lockdowns. This would entail making sure that groups deemed most vulnerable to COVID-19, such as the elderly in nursing homes, receive extra care and protection, while at the same time easing lockdown policies to protect the physical and mental health of the rest of the population.

Bhattacharya and his co-authors also argue that herd immunity is attainable even without a vaccine and that it therefore makes sense from a public health perspective to allow people who are not vulnerable to “resume life as normal.” Yet recent studies suggest widespread herd immunity may not even be possible for COVID-19 given that infection appears to only confer transient immunity; even if herd immunity is possible it would partially rely on the widespread distribution of an effective vaccine.

In a panel presentation delivered last month at Hillsdale College Free Market Forum, Bhattacharya also claimed that the COVID-19 fatality rate is “much closer to 0.2 or 0.3 percent” than the accepted figure of 2-3 percent or higher, if you base the figure on seroprevalence — or, how many people have evidence in their bloodstream of having had COVID-19. He also reiterated that the disease is much more dangerous for the elderly and infirm than for children.

From a political standpoint, it is clear why these beliefs resonate with conservatives: they affirm the conspiratorial belief that the pandemic is being blown out of proportion. While Bhattacharya doesn’t claim to believe in any larger political agenda here, it is easy to see how someone who believes the pandemic has a conspiracy attached to it might latch onto Bhattacharya’s ideas as evidence of such a thing. As MedPage Today pointed out, the Great Barrington Declaration was sponsored by the libertarian, free-market think tank the American Institute for Economic Research, and many of the 8,000 signatures included on the document were later determined to be fake.

What does the science say? 

The science does not support Bhattacharya’s views, and multiple scientists Salon interviewed disagreed with the Great Barrington Hypothesis’ assertions.

“I think ‘case/fatality’ is a confusing issue,” Dr. Alfred Sommer, dean emeritus and professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told Salon by email. “The rates vary by disease and they way they are defined. ‘Case’ fatality is sometimes meant to mean the death rate among cases (e.g. people with some physical evidence of the disease – they are “sick”); in other instances it is more loosely the rate of death amongst all those who are infected. So what the ‘true’ rate is depends upon how people are defining and counting.”

He added, “When we compare this with past pandemics, the latter were generally basing their rates on deaths among those who were ill; there weren’t widespread sero-surveys for the rate of infection. Nor do we have such data for this pandemic – if you want to really know the fatality rate among all those infected, at a minimum you need to check the number infected in a random sample of the population – as far as I know that hasn’t been done anywhere (and certainly has not be done in the U.S.)”

Sommer is not alone in finding flaws in Bhattacharya’s reasoning. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told The Washington Post last month that “anybody who knows anything about epidemiology will tell you that [Bhattacharya’s co-authored paper] is nonsense and very dangerous, because … you will have killed a lot of people that would have been avoidable.”

National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins, who is most famous for helping to decode the human genome, likewise denounced the Great Barrington Declaration as “dangerous.”

In a memorandum released in the respected scientific journal The Lancet last month, a group of more than 30 scientists denounced the “so-called herd immunity approach, which suggests allowing a large uncontrolled outbreak in the low-risk population while protecting the vulnerable” as “a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence.” They concluded that “such a strategy would not end the COVID-19 pandemic but result in recurrent epidemics, as was the case with numerous infectious diseases before the advent of vaccination. It would also place an unacceptable burden on the economy and health-care workers, many of whom have died from COVID-19 or experienced trauma as a result of having to practise disaster medicine.”

Salon also reached out to Dr. Russell Medford, Chairman of the Center for Global Health Innovation and Global Health Crisis Coordination Center. 

“The full consequences of Dr. Bhattacharya’s strategy have not been addressed in his report,” Medford wrote to Salon. “For example, while age is a strong determinant for risk of serious illness and death from COVID-19, it is not the only determinant. Up to 40% of the US population has one or more underlying medical conditions (such heart disease, obesity, hypertension) that confers increased risk of serious consequences of COVID infection. How we identify and segregate such a large proportion of the population is not trivial and may not be achievable.”

He added, “Another example is that by defining a vulnerable population based exclusively on death rates, the report does not address the early, but growing, body of evidence that  COVID-19 can potentially result in significant prolonged illness and persistent symptoms, affecting the heart, lung and brain, even in young adults and persons with no underlying medical conditions who were not hospitalized.”

Bhattacharya is affiliated with the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank at the Stanford University campus that has produced a number of pundits who deny scientific facts about COVID-19. As physician Dr. Ashish K. Jha tweeted last week, Bhattacharya and Trump adviser Dr. Scott Atlas “shaped Trump’s plan on COVID. Let infections spike while ‘protecting the vulnerable’ with one caveat. There was no effort to protect the vulnerable. The effect? Deaths spiking across the nation.”

Salon reached out to Dr. Bhattacharya for comment; in an email, Bhattacharya reiterated the assertions in the Great Barrington Declaration. He argued that it “lists various sets of people harmed by lockdown, including the vulnerable urban poor and older people forced to live in multigenerational homes as a consequence of lockdown. There is also an enormous body of evidence that documents the psychological and health harms induced by lockdown, with the poor in every poor country on earth hit the hardest.” He also disagreed with the individual points made by some of the experts interviewed by Salon.

Trump’s Michigan con: His supporters are so blinded by racism they keep falling for it

If you want proof that Donald Trump is not an anomaly, but rather a symptom of the racism and anti-democratic yearning that define the modern Republican Party, look no further than what’s going on in Wayne County, Michigan. It’s the county that encompasses the majority-Black city of Detroit as well as many of its majority-white suburbs, and the normally staid process of certifying an election there has gone badly off the rails.

This situation starkly illustrates how Trump’s long-shot coup attempt — which is more a money-grabbing con job at this point — relies heavily on everyday Republicans being too blinded by their own racism and hatred for democracy to really grasp the ways Trump is using them, as he uses everyone. 

To recap what happened for those who didn’t get embroiled in the blow-by-blow drama of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers this week: On Tuesday, the board, which certifies local election results before sending them along to the state board, held a public meeting. By any reasonable measure, this should have been a quick vote to certify the results, as usually happens after such a clean and relatively smooth election. Instead, the two Republican members of the board — who are both white — refused to certify the vote count, angering and bewildering the two Democratic members, who are both Black. 

Their formal excuse for this refusal to was that the vote count apparently included a few minor mistakes and anomalies, of the sort that occur in any election, in the precinct counting reports. This would, at most, affect a few hundred votes in a county where Joe Biden won by 350,000 votes. 

The real reasons, of course, were racism and a desire to steal the election for Trump. The two Republicans, Monica Palmer and William Hartmann, were making a last-ditch attempt to keep the votes of Detroit, a city whose population is nearly 80% Black, out of the final Michigan vote count. It was a temper tantrum based on the longstanding, but usually better-concealed Republican belief that there’s something not quite right about letting Black people have the same right to vote as white people. 

After being the target of the wrath of the citizens of Wayne County for the next two hours, Palmer and Hartmann cracked and voted to certify the election. But after talking on the phone with Trump himself later on Tuesday night, the two circled around again, demanding a chance to rescind their votes. They are continuing to push baseless conspiracy theories clearly meant to imply that there’s something shady about the very concept of treating Detroit’s election the same way elections everywhere els are treated.

Sean Hannity, of course, protested on Fox News that it was a set of “truly vile smears” to suggest that racism was to blame for Republicans’ singling out Detroit’s election results for unnecessary delays. Of course, the racism here is self-evident. During deliberations, Palmer said, “I would be open to a motion to certify communities other than the city of Detroit.” In case there’s any lingering doubt, journalist Del Quentin Wilber was able to remove it with a cursory Facebook search: 

Trump’s efforts to steal this election are, it must be reiterated, a long shot. Democratic strategist Chris Marshall has argued otherwise here at Salon, suggesting that those of us who believe this are being too sanguine about the Republican eagerness to end democracy.

But the belief that Trump will fail is not based on any faith that Republicans will do the right thing. As this Wayne County situation shows, the entire Republican Party is rotten to the core, ready to throw out democracy rather than accept that people of color have equal rights to vote. Rather we are assuming, as has proven correct so far, that Trump and his minions are too disorganized and incompetent to pull off a coup, especially in the making-it-up-as-they-go-along fashion evident in the repeatedly failed lawsuits of the past couple of weeks. 

Indeed, the weirdest aspect of Trump’s ongoing litigation efforts is that the most immediate victims of his conspiracy are his fellow Republicans: They’re the fools who keep responding to Trump’s emails begging for cash. But the money Trump’s fans donate, believing it may help Trump’s electoral Hail Mary, is mostly going toward his “Save America” leadership PAC, not to his legal efforts. 

These “leadership PACs” rose up after the Supreme Court forcibly deregulated campaign finance law in Citizens United vs. FEC, and they are often total scams. The people who run them often treat them like slush funds, using them to pay for personal expenses and luxury vacations, as well as lining the pockets of various consultants. For instance, former Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin started a PAC in 2009, which she promised would be dedicated to funding Republican candidates. Palin raised millions of dollars for her PAC, but only gave 5% to 8% of the money to candidates in any given election cycle. Instead, most of the of the money was spent on travel, media and mailing groups whose job was to promote Palin’s brand under the umbrella of “fundraising.”

Trump will almost certainly find even more creative ways to pocket the money, probably by having his PAC hold “fundraising” events at Trump properties. His team of lawyers is getting whittled down quickly to Rudy Giuliani, who is trying to wet his own beak by demanding $20,000 a day to waste the court’s time with incoherent conspiracy theories. 

Who is bankrolling all this chicanery? Ordinary Republican voters, who foolishly open Trump fundraising emails and keep hitting that “donate” button. And their foolishness is driven by bone-deep racism.  

Trump and his allies haven’t been subtle about their race-baiting, repeatedly attacking Detroit, Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Atlanta, all cities where white residents are a minority. The lawsuits have targeted cities with large Black populations. These suits are failing in court, but succeeding at the main goal of stirring up racist hysterics in the GOP base and turning those hysterics into cash. 

Trump’s message to his voters is clear: The votes of people of color are inherently “corrupt” and shouldn’t be counted. Sadly, that’s a message that’s causing GOP wallets across the country to fly open. Republican racism is so strong it trumps the common-sense understanding that it’s unwise to hand over money to an obvious con artist like Trump. 

It might be funny to watch fools parted from their money like this, except for the fact that the very fabric of our democracy is being torn asunder. Fully half of Republicans reportedly believe that Trump “rightfully” won the election, which is to say, they’re embracing conspiracy theories that allow them to believe that white votes are the only legitimate votes. Trump will soon be leaving office and finding creative ways to pocket his PAC money, but the poison he’s pumped into the system by telling millions of white Americans that their racism is righteous will linger on for decades. 

Are you sure Trump’s plan to steal the election has failed? You shouldn’t be

Freddy’s dead. So we are assured in pop culture by everyone from Curtis Mayfield to the “Nightmare on Elm Street” film cycle (which I might remind you now consists of nine installments, with Freddy appearing and reappearing in all nine of them). Those assurances that Freddy, Jason and their ilk are dead never work out well in horror flicks, and I wouldn’t advise prematurely counting on them to work out in politics either. 

It’s the classic serial killer/horror flick mistake. The monster or the killer takes a blow to the head, a steep fall or a bullet to the gut. No one could survive that, right? No need to keep an eye on the dead monster — surely he isn’t going anywhere after that! No need to take the killer’s gun out of his dead hand now, right? It’s a done deal! No need to pump another round into the serial killer’s head after an epic fight we only miraculously survived just to be certain he can’t get up, amirite? Forget about it! Celebrate, good times, come on! 

I’m talking here about Donald Trump, rather obviously. He’s blowing through his legal options, to be sure, as one frivolous lawsuit after another falls to the traditional legal requirement that plaintiffs produce actual evidence to support their charges. Nevertheless, while Trump’s options are steadily being whittled down, there is one that remains and, despite what you have heard, is likely to remain even after all the rest have been dispatched. 

This fallback plan for Trump is the recently much-vaunted but now almost universally dismissed Electoral College strategy, which I call “Plan B” since it effectively aborts the democratic will of the people and more than 200 years of democratic consolidation in one fell swoop. Plan B involves state legislatures overriding the popular vote and choosing their own slates of electors to be substituted for the actual will of the voters in the actual election. People are usually shocked when they hear that state legislatures might be able to do this, but some legislatures did it in the early days of the republic, and in a concurring opinion on the 2000 Bush v. Gore decision, three Supreme Court justices, including Clarence Thomas, affirmed the validity of the concept. Many Republicans are talking up Plan B these days because apparently they haven’t heard the news that Freddy is definitively dead. 

Many of us first heard about Plan B in the context of the 2000 election, when whispers of the plan started emanating like sulfurous gas out of a Florida swamp, only to be quickly mooted by Gore’s decision to bow to what he saw as his duty to the greater good. After Gore’s patriotic, if misguided, self sacrifice to the Republican gods, Plan B was safely laid to rest, never to be heard of again. Until, that is, now — especially after the publication of Barton Gellman’s flashing red warning in the pages of the Atlantic in late September (“The Election That Could Break America”). 

Pre-election warnings aside, now that the networks have called the election for Biden, performative liberal triumphalism is everywhere, from Greg Sargent to Josh Marshall  to Scott Lemieux to Paul Waldman to Andrew Prokop and many more. Biden won, and it’s a deal that’s done. Forget about any fantastical Plan B Electoral College route for Trump to seize a second term. Can’t happen. Haven’t you heard? Trump’s losing every single frivolous lawsuit! They’re all a joke. They did a press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscape! Next to a dildo store! Why, they would have to go against the will of the people! It’s all a bunch of lies, and at the end of the day, it simply isn’t done. 

Call me a pessimist. A compulsive doom-scroller. A nervous nelly. A buzzkiller. A realist. Whatever. After decades as a Democratic strategist, working at the center of numerous national and statewide campaigns, I’ve simply seen too much not to be traumatized with the permanent scars of PTSD (Politically Traumatic Stress Disorder). 

I’m old enough to remember when Ronald Reagan was finally going to be held accountable for desecrating our democracy (and theirs) in Nicaragua, only to see Oliver North made into an authoritarian superstar overnight instead. I remember in 2000 when Al Gore’s recount was suddenly and peremptorily halted in medias res by the Supreme Court in a shady decision that supposedly was for one-time use only but, Freddy-like, has come back to haunt us. 

I remember in 2002 when we all knew that the out-party never loses seats in a midterm election. I was deeply involved in the 2004 presidential election as a senior analyst for John Kerry’s pollster, Mark Mellman. I will never forget the election-night office party when Mellman called us from CBS News studios at around 7 p.m., after the early exit polls had come out, to thank and congratulate us all for our tireless effort in what, he was then able to announce, had been our successful effort at getting John Kerry elected president of the United States. Whoo-hoo! Oops. 

I watched Hillary Clinton go into the 2016 election as the prohibitive favorite only to find out that Prohibition was definitely over. I remember when we finally had Trump dead to rights attempting to use public funding to bribe and coerce a foreign leader into helping him cheat on a presidential election at the expense of our national security and our basic principles. Surely his impeachment and conviction were a foregone conclusion, I hoped, only to watch foregone become forgone. 

So please forgive me if my PTSD prevents me from celebrating Biden’s victory just yet. 

Nevertheless, despite history, we are deluged with numerous examples of the triumph of hope over experience. As we have recently been told in article after article, Republican legislators assure us, regarding the Plan B Electoral College route to Trumpian election theft, that they just wouldn’t go there! They would never, ever allow themselves to be thrown into that particular briar patch. That would be outrageous. It’s never been done before. It would violate state and federal law. For god sakes, man, get a grip — that would violate longstanding norms! 

But, like a blue mirage, when you examine these statements more closely, the much-touted Republican guarantees tend to evaporate into a vaporous cloud of conditions and hedges. A much cited AP article (“GOP leaders in 4 states quash dubious Trump bid on electors”) quoted by Scott Lemieux, for example, in his summary dismissal of the slightest possibility of Plan B (see his blog post, “Checkmate”) is illustrative of the genre. The star witness, both in this piece and others, is Jake Corman, the Pennsylvania Senate majority leader, who co-authored an op-ed with the majority leader of the state House of Representatives, Kerry Benninghoff (“Pennsylvania lawmakers have no role to play in deciding the presidential election”). In that op-ed, published a few weeks before the election, Corman and Benninghoff categorically state, “The Pennsylvania General Assembly does not have and will not have a hand in choosing the state’s presidential electors.” 

So, that’s that, isn’t it? Not so fast. That was then, in the before times, years ago, before the election happened. Everything seems different now. Once again, we’ve seen the abnormal gradually become quasi-normal. Now we have the unprecedented spectacle of a president rejecting the results of an election no matter what judges and election officials say, including Republican judges, Republican secretaries of state and relevant officials in his own administration. And now an entire (semi-loyal) political party, with precious few exceptions, abnormally backs up that abnormal president and his abnormal behavior. 

Listen to Corman now, in the post-election after times. Now, Corman uses qualifiers, like “Under the normal circumstances” the legislature plays no role (“No Voter fraud in Pa. election but concerns about ballots, process persist, Corman says”). But the current post-election circumstances aren’t necessarily “normal circumstances,” are they? We see what you did there, senator. 

And now Corman is deeply upset with the outrageous behavior of (Democratic) Secretary of State Kathy Broockvar, who had the gall to try to make sure people’s votes could be counted in the midst of a pandemic. It seems, says Corman, that Broockvar “fundamentally altered the manner in which Pennsylvania’s election is being conducted.” There’s a dog whistle for those with the ears to hear. That word “manner” may seem innocuous, but Corman’s word choice there is heavily freighted with dangerous significance. 

To understand why, recall what Article II of the U.S. Constitution, the very basis of Plan B, says, “Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors” (hysterical emphasis mine). Is it sheer coincidence that Corman now says, post-election, that this “manner” has been “fundamentally altered?” Gosh, I hope so. But I’m not betting the retirement account on it. 

Because according to a bogus legal doctrine being pushed by none other than Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch (full disclosure: I went to the same small high school as both or them and overlapped for a year with Kavanaugh), this Article II language, on their contrived theory, means that the state legislature and the state legislature alone makes the election rules, and any other — shall we say “alteration” — of the rules by any other political actor in the normal course of the governmental process is in strict violation of the United States Constitution. Given the prevailing, currently unusual circumstances, then, one might argue that the state legislatures have no real choice, after all, but to intervene and send their own slates of electors to the Electoral College. And it would be perfectly reasonable, would it not, if three of those state legislatures just so happened to judge that Trump is the rightful winner instead of Biden? 

So don’t expect to see Sen. Corman stand idly by while fundamental principles are being trampled fundamentally, nosirree Bob! “We will follow the law,” says Corman. And if the law, as interpreted and proclaimed by the United States Supreme Court — the supreme legal authority — says that state legislatures have the first, last, final and sole say-so when it comes to electors, then surely no one could object if Sen. Corman found himself duty-bound to bravely follow that law wherever Kavanaugh and Gorsuch and the rest of the hyper-partisan Republican extremists on the Court say it goes. After all, Corman has promised to do no less. 

In addition to Corman’s star turn, the AP article and many like it go on to make several pertinent observations, mostly based on various implications of state law and/or Congress’ Electoral Count Act of 1887. The legal issues quickly get far out in the weeds, but suffice it to say that liberals across the land see an open-and-shut case — several of them, in fact. 

For example, Trump continues his serial failure to demonstrate even a single instance of vote fraud in state courts across the land from Michigan to Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia. What’s more, some say, the Electoral Count Act of 1887 leaves the final say to Congress, not the Supreme Court. The Electoral Count Act, some note, privileges elector slates that are certified by governors (many of whom would be Democratic governors, it so happens, in the key swing states) as well as election rules that were set before the election. And the Electoral Count Act most clearly allows state legislatures a role when the election has “failed” (whatever that means) — a state of affairs which, many say, obviously does not obtain. 

Additionally, there are numerous arguments based on what philosophers call the argument from personal incredulity. Most of these arguments involve the naïve projection of the pundit’s own laudable personal honesty, decency and rationality onto Republican figures who manifestly share none of those traits. 

“I don’t think it will be successful. I think we are in the realm of fantasy here,” says electoral law expert Edward Foley. “No, the ‘Hail Mary’ plan for Trump isn’t going to work” says Greg Sargent, who bases most of his argument on the opinions of a Democratic state official in Pennsylvania and the fact that it seems to him “absurdly, monumentally implausible.” Paul Waldman says “it would take a partisan intervention so extraordinary, so unjustified, so appalling” that he thinks it beyond the pale. Andrew Prokop says “This assertion of power would be particularly mind-boggling. … Essentially, GOP legislators would have to claim that they can wipe out state laws,” the prospect of which boggles the mind far less when you consider that two Supreme Court justices have recently made that claim exactly. All those things — the Republican losses in state courts, the potential obstacles presented by the Election Count Act, the sheer audacity and indefensible nature of the idea — are favorable to the Democrats’ prospects. 

And they are all, most likely, completely irrelevant. 

They are irrelevant because the way Plan B could work out — and therefore likely would work out — is a three-step process. 

First Step: the Supreme Court takes up a case, almost any old voting case will do, and regardless of the facts of the case or the ultimate verdict, sets a precedent, stating the opinion that state legislatures, completely on their own, have plenary authority to pick their own electors, as supported by the plain language of Article II. 

Second Step: Three state legislatures decide to take the justices up on their kind offer and pick pro-Trump slates of electors. Greg Sargent finds this step utterly crazy in part because “numerous states…would all have to do this extraordinarily rogue act” (emphasis his). But let’s be clear on what “numerous” means here. It means “three.” Personally, given all the endless radicalism and insanity I have seen over the last four years and the last two weeks, I don’t find that very hard to imagine at all. 

Third Step? Game over. 

As law professor Neil H. Buchanan (recent co-author with the venerable professors Laurence Tribe and Michael Dorf) argues in a recent column (“Update on Trump’s Coup: Do Not Think That This Is Guaranteed to End Well”) in which he addresses the implications of the various state laws and congressional acts we have been considering, “All of those analyses, however, are based (as they should be) on existing law and precedent. Sarat and Edelman, for example, rely heavily on the Electoral Count Act of 1887. … Whereas the U.S. Supreme Court is highly unlikely to take a case in which Trump claims that 53 votes in Pennsylvania were illegal or that Arizona voters should not have been given Sharpies, the Court would be very likely to take up a case in which they could misconstrue the Constitution, overrule precedent, and announce that the legislatures-only theory is the law of the land. Several justices have already indicated as much.” 

The argument Kavanaugh has indicated he would make purports to bestow official Supreme Court-endorsed constitutional recognition upon state legislatures as having absolutely decisive unilateral power over election law — unilateral power over and above governors and secretaries of state and state courts and their rulings about state laws and over and above acts of Congress, all of which, according to the argument, come directly into conflict with the intent of the Founders as plainly delineated in the Constitution itself. That the argument is pitched at this level alone renders inoperative 95% of the arguments made for why Plan B allegedly could never work. The other 5% are based on purely pragmatic considerations, which means they are fundamentally empirical questions. We shall see. 

This essay should be taken as a warning, not a prophecy. I am not saying Trump is definitely going to succeed in such a Plan B effort, but I do think there is still abundant indication and ample reason to believe that Trump is going to try and see if Plan B can be made to work. I agree with Josh Marshall (no relation) who recently said, “Donald Trump doesn’t do strategy. He does impulse. The most defining pattern of his life is to respond to reverses by seeking to throw his adversaries off balance with an audaciously aggressive play and then work it for all its worth.” (“What’s Going On?”). I also agree with Paul Waldman that the extreme backlash Plan B is likely to evoke makes it that much less probable that the rest of the requisite Republican players would dare go down that path. 

But given how crazy today’s Republicans are, you’d have to be crazy to rule Plan B out entirely as a live possibility, as so many of my fellow liberals are doing. After all the other lawsuits have failed, Trump will find himself staring down a lifetime of irrelevance and lack of attention, with dwindling opportunities to cash in, and with the ominous threat of multiple lawsuits and maybe even jail time. 

In those circumstances, only a fool would trust that the forbearance, restraint and fundamental reasonableness of Donald Trump and the sycophantic cultists who populate his party will be sufficient to rule out availing themselves of the one remaining pathway they have to victory. They have the means, motive and opportunity, and they are unrestrained by principle. Therefore, the smart money says they may well try it. I fear they will choose to be legends. And if they try it, they will work it for all its worth, and, experience teaches us, the vast majority of the thoroughly corrupt, semi-loyal Republican Party will fall dutifully into line like good little authoritarians. 

I also agree with many legal commentators that the legislatures-alone argument is a weak one and perhaps the radical conservative majority on the Supreme Court will be reluctant to go out quite so far on such a weak limb. As Neil Buchanan notes, “there are plenty of instances in which the Constitution refers to the powers of a legislative body without actually giving that body absolute power” (“The Supreme Court Limbers Up to Aid and Abet Trump’s Coup”). 

Given the plenitude of such references, if the Kavanaugh/Gorsuch argument about state legislatures actually made sense then you could just as well argue that since “Article I, Section 8 tells us that ‘Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes … to borrow money … to regulate commerce …’ and so on” by the same rationale, Congress could claim a constitutional right to act alone and could pass such laws without bothering to submit them to the president for a possible veto or to the Supreme Court for review. No one thinks the Constitution says that, and likewise no one should think it says anything like that about state legislatures either. But that doesn’t mean the Republicans won’t say it means that and act like it means that. 

A couple things we have learned about the Republican Party over the years: It is radical and it is radically dishonest. Pretense is as good as principle in the Republican Party, and the possibilities are endless when one is not bound by the Principle of Non-Contradiction. Those folks can be persuaded that the most insane conspiracy theory imaginable is true, and they can make stuff up entirely out of whole cloth and believe it with every fiber of their being. For those reasons, I think it premature to categorically rule out the possibility that they will attempt Plan B. And I think it would be beyond foolish to be so overconfident that Biden has this thing in the bag that we did not use the intervening time to prepare to fight any outrageous attempt to implement a Plan B with every fiber of our being. 

Such a fight would start by putting maximum pressure on the relevant state legislatures and people like Sen. Corman to stand by their country over their party and would be followed, if necessary, by the greatest color revolution this world has ever seen. People get ready.

At bottom, what I’m saying is … the killer’s still lying just over yonder. We fought off almost all of his many weapons, but there is still a loaded gun in his presumptively dead hand. And I just can’t take my hyper-vigilant PTSD eyes off that gun. I say we work on getting that gun out of that hand before we relax. Meanwhile, all I’m hearing is people telling me to quit worrying about it because it’s all over now, and anyway, if worst comes to worst, we can always go hide over there in that garage. You know the one — it’s got all those chain saws hanging in the doorway. 

Make fun of the “Million MAGA March” all you want — white supremacy has not been defeated

In 1925, 50,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan marched on Washington, in what remains one of the largest marches in U.S. history. During the first decades of the 20th century, the Klan was one of the most powerful and influential civil society organizations in the country. Its members included doctors, lawyers and other members of the white professional class, including a future U.S. senator, a future Supreme Court justice and (according to various rumors) at least one future president. The Klan was and remains one of the largest terrorist organizations in American history.

Last Saturday, between 10,0000 to 15,000 supporters of Donald Trump, including right-wing street thugs, “militia” members, neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates, Klansmen, and other extremists gathered in Washington for the “Million MAGA March” in support of their soon-to-be deposed leader.

Trump’s acolytes at the Million MAGA March did not wear Klan hoods, robes, and other regalia — today’s “professional” white supremacists prefer tan khaki pants, golf shirts and MAGA hats — but they share the Klan’s core values and beliefs. Most central of those is the credo that America should be a country where white people are the dominant, most important, and most powerful group, accorded special rights and privileges. It should be no surprise that the Ku Klux Klan formally endorsed Donald Trump’s presidency in 2016.

On social media and elsewhere, the Million MAGA March was mocked as a “failure” and another sign that Trump’s base of support is weakening. Trump and his marchers were also deemed to be “losers”. Other observers perceived the low turnout at the march as evidence that right-wing political street gangs, QAnon conspiracists, white supremacist groups and other Trump cult members are now in “disarray” or experiencing “low morale” because of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.

For many people, it feels good to deride and lampoon Trump and his followers after their electoral defeat. Such emotions are understandable, given the immense pain that Trump and his movement have caused so many people these last four or so years.

Biden’s landslide victory also creates a communal feeling of joy — members of the “Resistance” feel reaffirmed in the righteousness of their struggle, knowing that they were in fact legion and not alone.

On the most basic level, Donald Trump and his followers are easy targets for Schadenfreude and other forms of mockery. Trump is a wannabe professional wrestling villain and fake billionaire, as well as a useful idiot for Vladimir Putin and other authoritarians. He is a man possessed by delusions of grandeur who lives in his own alternate reality. Trump’s rank-and-file followers are the very definition of the rabble the framers warned of more than 200 years ago, who do not realize that their leader is a thoroughly corrupt con man who feels only contempt for them.

That may all be true, but Trump’s power to inspire violence should never be underestimated. Last Saturday night following the MAGA march, Donald Trump’s political thugs provoked numerous confrontations with anti-fascists, Black Lives Matter supporters and others deemed to be “the enemy”. On Saturday, Trump exalted this lawbreaking and barbarism on Twitter:

ANTIFA SCUM ran for the hills today when they tried attacking the people at the Trump Rally, because those people aggressively fought back. Antifa waited until tonight, when 99% were gone, to attack innocent #MAGA People. DC Police, get going — do your job and don’t hold back!!!

In a fundraising email sent on Monday, Trump continued to cheer on violence by his followers:

The silent Fake News media is truly the Enemy of the People! They are ignoring the Radical Left ANTIFA SCUM assaulting Trump supporters, who are proudly (and peacefully!) showing support for their favorite President.

However, this doesn’t come as any surprise — this is what Biden’s America would look like.

The Left HATES YOU. They want to keep you DOWN and keep you SILENT because they are afraid of YOU and everything you stand for.

We can’t let them get away with this. It’s important that EVERY Patriot comes together at a time like this to send a united message that we will not stand for their radical actions any longer.

The Million MAGA March would end with 21 people arrested. Eight guns were confiscated by police. One man was hospitalized after being stabbed multiple times by right-wing street thugs. Two police officers were also treated for injuries.

This relatively minor outbreak of street violence at Trump’s MAGA march is but a preview of what will likely happen all across the country in the weeks before Trump is removed from office in January. Right-wing political violence will most certainly continue and escalate in response to Joe Biden’s presidency.

At NPR, Hannah Allam offers a specific warning:

Extremism analysts say the hastily organized attempt to gather the right under a single banner — for now it’s “Stop the Steal” — is a chilling reminder of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017. They say the thousands who showed up Saturday represent countless others who followed via social media, donated to travel funds or watched from home — on Fox News, for those with a foot still in reality, on InfoWars-style channels, for the fully inculcated.

Brian Levin, a California-based hate and extremism researcher, called the Million MAGA March the debut of the pro-Trump insurgency, a preview of the “multiheaded Hydra” of far-right opposition expected when President-elect Joe Biden takes office.

Levin said the loyalists who showed up in Washington are only the public face. The bigger concern, he said, are the extremists “whose names we don’t know yet,” plotting in the shadows.

“Irrespective of the crowd,” Levin said, “the fact that this is being organized shows that the hard, hard right is angling for some kind of activity to show that they have some potency.”

Biden defeated Donald Trump on Election Day by a historic margin. But Biden’s victory is but one battle in a very long war. To the immense shock and discomfort of many observers, Trump received more than 73 million votes, at least 10 million more in 2016.

Biden and the Democrats won this round, at least at the presidential level. But white supremacy in the form of Trumpism has not been vanquished, and its takeover of the Republican Party and the American conservative movement appears complete. If anything, American fascism and racial authoritarianism are now more powerful than at any time since the formal end of Jim and Jane Crow American apartheid in the 1960s.

For four years, white supremacists held power at the highest levels of the American government. For a movement which was isolated to the periphery of society in the post-civil rights era, that is a remarkable achievement.

The white supremacist policies put in place by the Trump regime impact every area of American life.

  • The Republican Party has made Jim Crow tactics and strategies, aimed at preventing Black people and other nonwhites from voting, a cornerstone of its electoral strategy.
  • White supremacist ideologues such as senior White House adviser Stephen Miller have implemented policies to restrict immigration from nonwhite countries to levels not seen since the 1920s.
  • The Trump regime unleashed ICE, the Border Patrol and other law enforcement agencies (as well as private “militias”) in a terror campaign against nonwhite communities.
  • Tens of thousands of nonwhite migrants, immigrants and refugees were confined in Trump’s concentration camps and other detention centers.
  • The people of Puerto Rico — who of course are U.S. citizens — were effectively left to die after Hurricane Maria. Trump obviously viewed that U.S. commonwealth and its Spanish-speaking citizens as less than, other and not quite American. 
  • Black and brown children were stolen from their families as a “deterrent” to migrants and refugees entering the U.S. More than 600 of those children may never be reunited with their families.
  • Civil rights laws and other protections designed to stop racial discrimination and other forms of unfair treatment have been rescinded.
  • Police thuggery and brutality has been encouraged, covered up or exonerated.
  • Muslims were banned from entering the United States.
  • DACA was overturned.
  • Trump and the Republicans have loaded the federal courts at every level with judges who oppose the idea that the state should intervene to protect the rights of nonwhite Americans and other marginalized groups.
  • Trump has used and continues to use stochastic terrorism to encourage violence by white supremacists and other right-wing extremist groups and individuals against nonwhite people, Muslims, Jews and other groups marked as “the enemy.”
  • Trump has repeatedly slurred Blacks, Latinos, and other nonwhites as being disease carriers, rapists, murders, thugs, traitors, criminals, not “patriotic” and disloyal.
  • Trump has repeatedly demeaned and insulted Black and brown women who dared to criticize him and his policies.
  • Trump threatened to unleash the military against Americans who protested against police violence and the murder of George Floyd.
  • Trump has effectively declared that teaching accurate and true history in America’s schools about the country’s origins in slavery and racism is a thought crime. The Trump regime has also terminated federal funding for training sessions about white privilege, racism and the societal value of diversity.
  • Trump has enacted policies that have worsened the racial wealth and income gap, as well as making economic inequality more extreme for the country as a whole.
  • The Trump regime’s sabotage of coronavirus relief efforts was also a function of animus and hostility toward nonwhite people, who have suffered disproportionately from the pandemic and are more likely to live in cities or states governed by Democrats.

During Trump’s time as president, white supremacists and the white right more broadly have been able to mainstream the false narrative that nonwhite people are “invading” Western nations, including the U.S., and “replacing” the current population (understood as predominantly white). This is part of a larger pattern where the language of “white nationalism” (verbiage developed by white supremacists to make their hate message more palatable for the public) has also been made more mainstream under the Trump regime.

In all, the Age of Trump has broadened the limits of approved public discourse in the United States. Racist and white supremacist ideas and language that not long ago were considered verboten are now increasingly acceptable.

White supremacy was not defeated in the 2020 election. In many ways, it scored a victory — perhaps most notably in how the appeal of Trumpism has now spread beyond his core base of white followers.

In a case of political Stockholm syndrome and identifying with one’s abuser, initial exit polls show that 26 percent of Donald Trump’s voters were non-white. His support also grew among women and the LGBTQ community. Such growing appeal does not make Trumpism less racist and white supremacist or less misogynistic. Rather, what this broadening base of support reveals is that many millions of Americans — of different backgrounds — are attracted to Trumpism’s core values of nationalism, militarism, nativism, misogyny, patriarchy, hypermasculinity, right-wing libertarianism, racism and Christian fascism.

As Daniel Martinez HoSang and Joseph E. Lowndes show in their compelling 2019 book “Producers, Parasites, Patriots: Race and the New Right-Wing Politics of Precarity,” white supremacy and American neofascism are more than skin deep.

Conservatism and racism have been the same thing in America since at least the 1960s. The Age of Trump has made that even more obvious. In that way, the Age of Trump has been a grand triumph for white supremacy: It has shown the Republican Party’s leaders that becoming an explicitly white racist organization is not an impediment to power. Indeed, it may even be a way to achieve and keep power in a country that, by many demographic measures, is becoming more racially diverse.

*  *  *

While many political observers and members of the press desperately hope otherwise, Trumpism has not shown itself to be a house of sand and mud that will collapse once Donald Trump leaves the White House. 

Fascism is not exclusively a European phenomenon, or some other type of “foreign” invention. Fascism’s American origins are the racial authoritarianism and violence of Jim and Jane Crow — and now a renewed and updated 21st-century commitment to white minority rule.

Furthermore, Trumpism is but one iteration of American neofascism. There will be others. Whatever its label and form, American neofascism has fully mated with the Republican Party, the right-wing media machine, right-wing Christian fundamentalists, and the agents of plutocracy and gangster capitalism. To wit: it drew at least 73 million people to vote for Donald Trump in the 2020 election.

Donald Trump is more than a man to his followers and cult members. He is a symbol and an idea — ideas cannot be exorcised or otherwise defeated in one electoral cycle. Moreover, the United States is a pathocracy. Sick societies produce sick political movements and leaders.

Many Americans, both experts on race as well as laypeople, have hoped that white racism in its various forms would slowly disappear from American life and politics through a process known as “generational replacement,” in which older people die and younger people with more liberal and progressive ideas replace them. Exit polling from the 2020 presidential election complicates that narrative: Young white men apparently supported Donald Trump by about 51% to 45%.

There is a deep yearning among many of America’s pundits, political reporters and other public voices on both the left and the right — loyal as they are to the civic religion of American exceptionalism — to throw the Age of Trump down the memory hole. They would like to declare premature victory and pronounce that Trumpism and its devotees are in “disarray” or have been decisively defeated. And of course, there is the naïve and enduring belief that Trump’s followers can somehow be reasoned with and then  convinced to reject authoritarianism and rejoin democratic society — if only their “pain” and “anger” is heard and acknowledged.

Such feelings and beliefs reflect the desperate yearning and compulsion to return to a pre-Trump state of “normal.” That will not be possible without a true reckoning with the Age of Trump, one that goes well beyond stories about personalities and the controversy of the day or week. Such a reckoning will demand that the country’s elites, especially its journalists, pundits and other political observers, focus on the force of ideas. American neofascism held power for (at least) four years. It will hold sway over the Republican Party and the American right for many more years, likely decades into the future.

1 in 10 Americans go hungry as Trump and McConnell work to overturn election results

Federal data shows nearly 11 percent of adults – including up to 14 percent of adults living with children — report their households do not have enough to eat. Hopes that Congress will pass another pandemic relief package before the end of the year are growing dim, as President Trump fixates attention on trying to overturn the election he lost. 

Economic recovery is slowing as the United States experiences a surge of COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations and deaths, threatening to send cities and states with high infection rates back into lockdown to prevent hospitals from becoming overwhelmed. The federal government estimates 10 million people – including 4 million children – will be pushed below the federal poverty line in late 2020 as unemployment benefits are set to expire in December without further relief from Congress.

However, Trump is now laser-focused on attempting to overturn the election, pushing disinformation and conspiracy theories as his campaign files failing lawsuits challenging the vote. Talks between the Trump administration and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on pandemic relief broke down last month, and administration officials have indicated they are unlikely to take the lead on negotiations now, leaving the job on the GOP side up to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, according to The Washington Post. McConnell attempted to normalize Trump’s unprecedented behavior, arguing before the Senate this week that Trump has the right to challenge the election in the courts.

Congress has failed to agree on pandemic relief since passing a $2.2 trillion package in the spring that provided stimulus checks starting at $1,200. With all eyes on two upcoming runoffs in Georgia that could wrest the Senate from his control, McConnell has said that passing another pandemic relief package before the end of the year is a priority. However, McConnell is pushing for a “highly targeted” stimulus package similar to a $500 billion proposal that Democrats rejected months ago, arguing it did not provide nearly enough economic relief.

Democrats are doubling down on their proposal, the HEROES Act, a $2.2 trillion package passed by the House earlier this year that includes another round of $1,200 checks to each individual, along with badly needed assistance for state and local governments. McConnell has consistently refused to take up the package in the Senate, where conservatives wary of social welfare spending rebelled against compromise measures offered by the Trump administration and moderates. Democrats already cut $1 trillion from the HEROES Act since the House originally passed the legislation in May.

Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other top Democrats are now demanding Republicans drop their support for Trump’s effort to overturn the election and pass pandemic relief.

To Senate Republicans:

Joe Biden will be the next President.

Kamala Harris will be the next VP.

It is past time to get to work for the American people.

Americans need help to fight the COVID crisis. We don’t have time for games.

We must pass the Heroes Act in the Senate.

— Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) November 12, 2020

“What are they thinking? People are suffering,” Pelosi said during a press conference on Thursday. “They seem to have a mental block to doing the right thing.”

Analysts say Senate Republicans are not likely to embrace a strong stimulus now that Pfizer has reported preliminary data showing that its COVID-19 vaccine is 90 percent effective. However, a trial for the vaccine is ongoing and has yet to be approved by federal regulators. Consumer advocates warned this week that Pfizer’s preliminary data does not show whether the vaccine is safe or whether it will effectively prevent COVID-19 in vulnerable populations.

On Tuesday, McConnell pointed out that unemployment has fallen to 6.9 percent as evidence that only a “highly targeted” stimulus is needed. However, unemployment could spike again if the third wave of COVID-19 forces even more parts of the country back into shutdown mode. On Wednesday, Illinois issued guidance urging people to stay home, and the city of Chicago will enter an official stay-at-home advisory beginning Monday. Other states and cities will likely follow. A record 153,000 new COVID-19 cases were reported in the U.S. on Thursday alone, and the U.S. has seen over one million new cases in the past 10 days, more than any other nation.

Despite the positive jobs report cited by McConnell, about 1 million people applied for unemployment insurance last week, more than any time during the Great Recession, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Many workers are exhausting their state unemployment benefits as the pandemic drags on – the number of state claims dropped by 436,000 last week – and federal emergency unemployment benefits will expire on December 26 without congressional action.

Meanwhile, the economy has not recovered from the damage caused earlier in the pandemic as what little support is left from the initial relief package dwindles — and lower-income households and households of color are suffering the most, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Nearly 80 million adults — about one in three — report not having enough money to cover basic expenses, such as food, rent and medical bills, including 40 percent of households with children.

Nearly one in six renters are behind on rent, including 26 percent of Black families and 18 percent of Latinx families, according to the Center’s analysis of federal data. Some federal protections for renters are in place, but Democrats want a tougher eviction moratorium passed with a stimulus. Attempts by landlords to evict their tenants have been reported across the country.

Nearly 24 million adults — 10.9 percent of the population — report that their household sometimes or often did not have enough to eat in the past week, according to data collected in mid-October. Between 8 and 14 percent of adults with children reported that their kids sometimes or often did not have enough to eat. Compare that to last year, when only 3.7 percent of adults reported their households going hungry during the entire course of 2019.

Rates of hunger are much higher among Black and Latino households, where workers are more likely to work in low-income industries that suffered massive job losses due to the pandemic. About 19 percent of Black households and 18 percent of Latinx households reported not having enough food to eat sometimes or often in the past seven days. The Trump administration was in court last month attempting to blockemergency food assistance for the nation’s poorest families.

Back on Capitol Hill, Democrats and Republicans remained deadlockedover pandemic relief on Thursday, with Democrats pushing their $2.2 trillion proposal and attacking Republicans for focusing on Trump’s efforts to reverse the election results, according to reports. McConnell said he wants Congress to pass another stimulus but continues to stand by his $500 billion offer.

“I gather [Pelosi] and the Democratic leader in the Senate still are looking at something dramatically larger,” McConnell said. “That’s not a place I think we’re willing to go.”

Copyright © Truthout. Reprinted without permission.

A new #Resistance hero emerges amid the Trump endgame: The dutiful civil servant

Donald Trump keeps spiking the ball in celebration of some supposed avenue to overturning the election result, only to be reminded that the game ended two weeks ago — and he lost. 

Late on Tuesday evening, the president tweeted: “Wow! Michigan just refused to certify the election results! Having courage is a beautiful thing. The USA stands proud!” Trump was responding to an effort by the two Republican members of the Wayne County Board of Canvassers not to certify the election results in Detroit, home to a majority Black population, while allowing votes from majority-white suburbs to be certified. The two Republicans forced a deadlock on the four-person panel, blocking the county-level certification of election results in the area for the first time in more than 100 years. By the time Trump sent his celebratory tweet, however, public pressure had already caused the pair to backtrack. 

“The Trump stain, the stain of racism that you, William Hartmann and Monica Palmer, have just covered yourself in, is going to follow you throughout history,” said Ned Staebler, CEO of Detroit business incubator TechTown. 

Staebler was one of several dozen people who called out the Republican commissioners during a Zoom meeting initially scheduled for 100 people, but which quickly filled up with 300 attendees. While Staebler’s speech went viral, the entire meeting is worth watching, not only to see citizens speak up for their community in the face of such blatant attempts at disenfranchisement, but because of the many first-hand accounts about Republican election observers in Michigan essentially spending the entire time trying to disrupt the election process and harass poll workers.

Curiously, there was no confirmation of anecdotes spread by the Trump campaign that Republican votes were altered. Hartmann and Palmer reversed their votes and certified the election results before the meeting was adjourned after three hours. Even the Republican Senate majority leader in Michigan, who has launched an investigation into the election, has already sworn off any suggestion that the state award its 16 electors to Trump, who lost the state to Joe Biden by more than 146,000 votes. 

“That’s not going to happen,” Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey told Bridge Michigan on Tuesday. 

The Michigan episode exposes how loyal some Trump supporters are when faced with even the slightest bit of scrutiny. To be sure, it’s beyond dismaying to watch one of only two major political parties in the nation use any means necessary to sow doubt about the integrity of our democracy. And while there’s no question our political situation has radically shifted for the worse, it’s also worth noting that, as damaging as the Trump era has been, the last two weeks have reintroduced the nation to a species many believed to have long gone extinct: Republicans in elected office, and even in the Trump administration, who act with integrity. 

Things would be undoubtedly worse right now if not for a handful of honest Republican election officials and dutiful civil servants. While the Trump campaign has relentlessly attempted to weaponize the government in a bid to stop Biden from receiving 270 certified Electoral College votes, a Republican like Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger stands as a lonely voice of integrity among elected leaders in the GOP. 

Raffensperger is being attacked by his own party for the sin of running a clean election. Georgia’s two Republican U.S. senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who both facing Jan. 5 runoffs against Democratic challengers, have demanded his resignation. Both Raffensperger and his wife have received death threats. Even after all of that, Raffensperger went public after Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a close Trump ally, pressured him to exclude legally cast absentee ballots in the middle of Georgia’s recount.

What Graham did would be a felony in Georgia, and likely also a felony under federal law, since it was done through an interstate communication. Yet Graham took to Twitter to laugh about his attempted election interference, admitting that he had also contacted officials in Arizona and Nevada. Arizona’s secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, blamed the violent threats she and her family have received on Trump and his allies in the Republican Party. 

The Trump campaign is attempting to throw out ballots cast in at least six states, often in the most populous counties where voters of color comprise the majority. It’s a transparent attempt to smear any votes not cast by rural and suburban voters as suspicious. Of course, if the Trump campaign were serious they’d also be seeking recounts in heavily red counties to scrounge up more votes. That suggests this entire charade isn’t intended to change the outcome of the election; it is intended to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt about the integrity of our democracy — and to generate “legal defense fund” donations to line the pockets of the man identified in previous legal cases as “Individual-1.” 

Trump has sought to undermine public confidence in the electoral process since 2012, when he baselessly alleged that voting machines changed votes for Mitt Romney to Barack Obama — a claim he resurfaced on Wednesday. The day before, he unceremoniously fired the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security via tweet. 

That was Chris Krebs, a highly regarded tech expert who had received bipartisan praise for his work in making sure the 2020 election was secure. His “Rumor Control” website meticulously tracked false claims undermining the elections and corrected them, no matter the source. Hours before he was fired, Krebs spread this message on Twitter: “Please don’t retweet wild and baseless claims about voting machines, even if they’re made by the president.” Don’t expect the usual suspects who decry “cancel culture” to utter a peep, even as Trump’s flunkies spread lies about Krebs’ job performance. 

For every loyalist Trump has installed in the government — like GSA administrator Emily Miller, whose refusal to allow for the formal Biden transition to commence ma cause delays in the next administration’s COVID response plan, or Trey Trainor, the Federal Elections Commission chairman who floats baseless election conspiracy theories contrived by a Trump lawyer who thinks the Federal Reserve is deliberately sabotaging the economy to enrich George Soros — there are noble public servants like Krebs, willing to sacrifice their positions to speak truth to power. 

To sustain a functioning democracy, however, it takes more than a few voices of courage to fend off creeping authoritarianism. Election after election, the most marginalized have shown up to vote for Democrats, who think it suffices to say, “History will be ashamed of you!” seemingly forgetting that history is written by the victors. Democrats gave George W. Bush and his administration a pass and now the GOP is happy to broil the surplus population even as they’ve wrested control of the judicial branch for the next 30 or 40 years. Republicans need to be held accountable for their bad behavior, or they will go even further the next time. It would be a grave mistake for Joe Biden to discourage investigations into Trump and his people in the interests of “unity.” There must be real consequence for open racism and attempted disenfranchisement, if Democrats hope to hold onto the voters who delivered victories for Biden in so many crucial states.

Trump campaign officials started pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state long before the election

Long before Republican senators began publicly denouncing how Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger handled the voting there, he withstood pressure from the campaign of Donald Trump to endorse the president for reelection.

Raffensperger, a Republican, declined an offer in January to serve as an honorary co-chair of the Trump campaign in Georgia, according to emails reviewed by ProPublica. He later rejected GOP requests to support Trump publicly, he and his staff said in interviews. Raffensperger said he believed that, because he was overseeing the election, it would be a conflict of interest for him to take sides. Around the country, most secretaries of state remain officially neutral in elections.

The attacks on his job performance are “clear retaliation,” Raffensperger said. “They thought Georgia was a layup shot Republican win. It is not the job of the secretary of state’s office to deliver a win — it is the sole responsibility of the Georgia Republican Party to get out the vote and get its voters to the polls. That is not the job of the secretary of state’s office.”

Leading the push for Raffensperger’s endorsement was Billy Kirkland, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign who was a key manager of its Georgia operations. Kirkland burst uninvited into a meeting in Raffensperger’s office in the late spring that was supposed to be about election procedures and demanded that the secretary of state endorse Trump, according to Raffensperger and two of his staffers.

When reached by phone, Kirkland directed the request for comment to the Trump campaign, which did not respond. The White House and the Georgia Republican Party also did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Joe Biden has been projected as the winner of the presidential election in Georgia by a margin of roughly 14,000 votes. The state is now conducting a hand recount at the Trump campaign’s request. Raffensperger’s office has said that the recount won’t swing enough votes to tip the state into Trump’s column.

As the Georgia results have become increasingly clear, Republicans have unleashed intense criticism on the secretary of state’s office, accusing it without evidence of mismanaging the election and allowing Biden to carry the state by fraudulent means. Georgia’s U.S. senators, Republicans David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, both of whom failed to win majorities for reelection on Nov. 3 and face Democratic opponents in January runoffs, called for Raffensperger’s resignation. All of the Republicans representing Georgia in Congress also signed a letter sent to Raffensperger’s office from the personal email account of the chief of staff to U.S. Rep. Earl “Buddy” Carter, criticizing the office for a series of supposed irregularities.

Rep. Doug Collins, who recently lost a bid for Loeffler’s Senate seat, has been particularly vocal. On Monday, Collins tweeted, “In a year of political division in Georgia, few things have unified Republicans and Democrats — one of them is Brad Raffensperger’s incompetence as Secretary of State.” Raffensperger has reserved some of his sharpest responses for Collins, calling him a “failed candidate” and a “liar” on social media.

On Monday, The Washington Post reported that Lindsey Graham, a Republican senator from South Carolina, had phoned Raffensperger to see if the secretary of state had the authority to toss out legally cast ballots. Graham has said that he was simply asking how the process works. Two members of Raffensperger’s staff who were on the call told ProPublica that the secretary of state’s account was accurate and that they were appalled by Graham’s request.

Raffensperger said that the Trump campaign “scapegoated” him. Its contention that he ineffectively managed the election amounts to “hot air and hyperbole,” he said. “In Georgia, it is not new to see failed candidates claim fraud or suppression. At the end of the day, the Trump campaign’s messaging didn’t resonate with 50% plus one of the voters.”

The campaign’s formal efforts to gain the secretary of state’s endorsement began on Jan. 10, when Kirkland emailed Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs, assuming that Raffensperger would welcome the opportunity to serve in an unofficial role. “We are getting ready to release the campaign’s statewide leadership team and wanted to make sure you were good to be listed as an honorary co-chair?” he wrote, according to an email obtained by ProPublica. At the direction of Raffensperger, Fuchs declined.

“It is our standard practice not to endorse any candidate. This policy is not directed at any specific candidate, but all candidates, as the Secretary oversees elections and the implementation of new voting machines here in Georgia,” she wrote.

Kirkland has a long history in Georgia Republican politics. He has also worked for the Trump White House — first in the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs and then for Vice President Mike Pence. He left the White House in the fall of 2019 to become a Georgia-based senior adviser to the Trump campaign. He also serves as a senior adviser to Pence’s leadership PAC. FEC filings show that Kirkland is paid for consulting by the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee. Loeffler hired Kirkland to be her campaign manager in January.

It’s not unusual for candidates to ask for the endorsement of state elected officials, including secretaries of state, said veteran Republican elections attorney Ben Ginsberg. “But usually, campaigns accept the answer they are given if they know how to behave,” Ginsberg said.

The Trump campaign did not accept Raffensperger’s refusal. After Raffensperger announced that his office would mail absentee ballot applications to every registered voter in the state ahead of its June primary, a move opposed by the Trump campaign, the executive director of the Georgia Republican Party, Stewart Bragg, requested a meeting. He told Raffensperger’s staff that he wanted to discuss election law and outstanding public records requests for voter data filed by the party.

Kirkland crashed the meeting shortly after it began. “A lot of people have noticed you didn’t endorse,” he said, according to two staffers. Raffensperger again made clear that any endorsements were against office policy, he told ProPublica.

Raffensperger had to leave the meeting early for another event. When the meeting came to a close, one of his staffers offered to continue the conversations at a later date and asked if there was any additional publicly available voter data that the party needed. “We’ll see how helpful you are in November,” Kirkland said, before leaving the office and slamming the door behind him, according to the staffers.

Trump has repeatedly and baselessly questioned the Georgia results on Twitter, accusing both the secretary of state’s office and Republican Gov. Brian Kemp — a Trump loyalist who, unlike Raffensperger, did agree to be an honorary campaign co-chair — of coordinating with activist and former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams to make Georgia’s elections less secure.

“The Consent Decree signed by the Georgia Secretary of State, with the approval of Governor @BrianKempGA, at the urging of @staceyabrams, makes it impossible to check & match signatures on ballots and envelopes, etc. They knew they were going to cheat. Must expose real signatures!” Trump tweeted over the weekend.

Nothing about the consent decree — which was aimed at addressing the disparity in signature matches among racial groups — prevents clerks from verifying signatures. Raffensperger said his office has repeatedly and publicly explained the process for signature matches, and he laughed at the idea that he would coordinate with Abrams, who has criticized his office over issues such as long lines at the polls in minority neighborhoods in prior elections.

Trump and the Republican legislators have pressed their allegations even as the National Republican Senatorial Committee has distributed talking points implicitly acknowledging that Biden won the election, according to an internal memo obtained by ProPublica. That message contrasts with what Trump, his campaign and his administration are telling supporters.

The memo was circulated last week among Georgia field staff, who are preparing for two runoff elections in January that will determine which party controls the upper chamber. It contains a series of “key” talking points directed at prospective voters. One says that the Democratic candidates, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, “are funded by out of state liberals because they’ll be a rubber stamp for their radical agenda to defund the police, open our borders, and pack the courts.” Another states that, should Warnock and Ossoff get elected, “Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi will have the votes they need to transform our country into a socialist state.”

The talking points omit any mention of Biden, but none of the outcomes outlined by the NRSC, which did not respond to requests for comment, would be possible with a Republican president.

Raffensperger expressed frustration at the lack of action by Republicans from the White House down to proactively address issues of election integrity. “If Trump and Collins were concerned about voter fraud, they would have proposed and passed legislation to fix it.” Instead, he said, “they did nothing, absolutely nothing.”

The brief, confused life of a super PAC scam that tried to pose as a breast cancer charity

A new super PAC created to take money from donors in the name of fighting breast cancer asked the Federal Elections Commission on Tuesday to terminate its registration after Salon asked its founder questions about the purpose and intent behind the group.

The organization, called the American Breast Cancer Society, registered as a super PAC in a filing published Monday on the FEC website. Salon’s investigation, however, uncovered signs that the group is what campaign finance watchdogs know as a “scam PAC” — a fundraising vehicle that presents itself to donors as a charity but intends to keep most of the money it attracts from donors, or pay it out to affiliated contractors.

Such “scam PACs” exploit an ill-defined space between federal campaign finance and state charity laws: Political action committees operate outside of laws regulating charities, which, in exchange for tax-exempt status, must meet certain requirements — such as officially registering with state governments, publicly disclosing their executives, accounting for their expenses and so on.

“It is a way for them to get around the charity laws — that’s exactly what they’re doing,” Stuart Discount, chief executive of the Professional Association for Customer Engagement, a trade association for direct marketers, told Reuters for a special report on scam PACs published in January.

But scam PACs do not operate like political action committees, either. Instead of political advocacy, they solicit money ostensibly for charitable causes — military veterans, children in poverty, cancer victims and the like.

Super PACs can raise and spend unlimited amounts of money, with little transparency or regulatory oversight. There can be big money involved: Federal prosecutors indicted two brothers in 2018 for operating a network of right-wing scam PACs with names like Americans for Law Enforcement PAC, Protect our Future PAC, Life and Liberty PAC and Republican Majority Campaign PAC, which over the course of 10 years bilked unwitting donors out of $50 million.

The indictment claimed that “less than 1% of all donor money to the PACs was spent on political contributions during the relevant time period.” The rest went to fundraising efforts and into the two men’s pockets, resulting in a $1.2 million fine.

The American Breast Cancer Society (ABCS) PAC was evidently named to sound strikingly similar to existing cancer charities such as the American Breast Cancer Foundation and the American Cancer Society. Unwitting donors could easily mistake the group for a legitimate charity.

The group’s statement of organization to the FEC lists Isaac Grant Howard as its treasurer. The PAC’s address is a virtual mailbox in Boise, Idaho, and the listed phone number is not publicly linked with anyone.

Howard initially told Salon in a phone interview that he had poor cell-phone reception, saying he would go to another location in his home and call back. When he did not, Salon emailed a list of specific questions about the PAC, after which Howard called.

In that conversation, Howard said he had no firm plans for political advocacy, and struggled to justify the organization’s purpose.

He explained that he chose to go with a PAC not because he wanted to skirt laws governing charities, but because he believed cancer charities should not exist. “Every time I turn on the news I see a breast cancer scam charity,” he said. “I don’t believe there’s any need for more charities.” Later in the conversation he claimed, “We want to make charities go away,” saying that “no one who has cancer should be a charity case.”

In response to direct questions about whether his group intended to prey on people whose lives had been affected by a devastating and often deadly disease, Howard insisted that the American Breast Cancer Society was on the up-and-up.

“Cancer is not a joke,” he continued. “It’s not funny. But as a PAC, we will be supporting legislation to make the law change. If politicians don’t want to get on board, then they won’t be getting any support from us,” he said.

“We’re not here to give money to people,” he added. Howard could not say what legal changes he was advocating, however, and when pressed could not name one legislator or piece of legislation.

He said that the end goal, however, was simple: To make cancer treatment free. “I believe that the government should support it, not a myriad of charities where things are slipping through the cracks,” Howard said. “I just want people to get cancer treatment for free.”

When asked if the group was actually advocating for Medicare for All, Howard said that was exactly what they were doing. He had chosen to focus on one disease because “we have to start somewhere.”

Asked why the PAC had registered a virtual address in Garden City, Idaho, Howard — who lives in Florida — responded that he was about to move. He would not say where, other than it was not Idaho. He did not explain why he did not wait until he had a fixed address to register a PAC with the federal government.

“We’re just a startup,” Howard said. “We’ll figure the rest out later.”

Later that afternoon, the American Breast Cancer Society filed a miscellaneous report with the FEC.

“This committee has raised or spent $0.00 in Activity,” the filing said. “We would like to terminate IMMEDIATELY.”

Trump’s Capitol death grip worsens COVID surge

In Iowa, nearly 40% of nursing homes say they don’t have a one-week supply of all personal protective equipment types, or PPE. About 40% of the doctors polled in New Yorksay the wait to obtain PPE is running at least a month. And in a national survey of nurses, only 18% of those working in hospitals say their facilities have made any preparations for surge capacity and planning.

The statistical evidence is overwhelming: Americans are on the front edge of a surge in COVID-19 cases that will strain hospitals and care facilities like nothing the country has yet experienced. But from all indications, the efforts to meet that crisis will be hampered by slow-reaction planning and, significantly, inadequate protection.

“We’re going into a very dark winter,” President-elect Joe Biden said Monday, renewing his call for Americans to follow COVID-19 safety practices and asking the Trump administration to allow Biden’s team access to critical health agencies and information. “Things are going to get much tougher before they get easier.”

Almost 10 months after the first confirmed COVID case in the U.S., the scope of the problem is again worth considering. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) COVID-19 Tracker on Nov. 16, the total of those infected since Jan. 21 had surged to nearly 11 million, with 245,470 deaths reported. Over the previous seven days alone, the number of new cases was 1.07 million.

You don’t need a map to see where it’s all going. In the absence of federal leadership from Trump’s team, and with large scale efforts to control COVID-19 left largely to state and local governing bodies, the U.S. has never fully escaped the grip of the virus. Now, what physicians and epidemiologists have long predicted is coming to pass: Colder weather and the traditional flu season are combining to rapidly escalate the spread of disease.

* * *

That escalation hits hardest in two ways. The first, to put it bluntly, is the body count. The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation is now projecting that U.S. deaths from the coronavirus will total 438,941 by March 1, 2021, about six weeks after Biden is sworn into office. That would be more Americans than died in World War II, or more than double the total of deaths from the Vietnam War, Korean War, World War I, the 9/11 terrorist attacks and Pearl Harbor combined.

The second area of impact is frightening in its own right. Health experts and policymakers alike agree that this new surge in viral load will buckle the nation’s care systems, which in some areas are already near or at capacity in their intensive care units. Very simply, hospitals and clinics are going to run out of room – fast.

The mayor of Tulsa recently announced that regional hospitals were being pressed into service after his city ran out of ICU beds. Officials in El Paso, meanwhile, continue to bring in mobile morgue units and hire inmates to help move bodies to those holding areas. Wisconsin used the state fairgrounds to open a field hospital after facilities around the state said they’d reached ICU capacity.

Even with adequate bed space, though, the lack of PPE is an ongoing concern to doctors and nurses alike. A survey by the Medical Society of the State of New York, for example, found that nearly two-thirds of responding doctors said they at least sometimes find it hard to obtain PPE, and a third of them said access and affordability issues are affecting their ability to care for patients. That’s basic protective gear.

“In California, it’s improved dramatically, (but) that is based on state action,” said Dr. Jeanne Noble, who directs the COVID response unit at the University of California, San Francisco, hospital’s emergency department. “It hasn’t improved throughout the country. There are still places that don’t have enough PPE.”

That was underscored dramatically by a recent survey of more than 15,000 registered nurses by National Nurses United, the union that represents them. (Disclosure: The union is a financial supporter of this site.) More than 80% of the nurses who responded said they had reused at least one type of PPE that was designed for a single use, and one-fifth of nurses in hospitals said their employer had recently limited the use of N95 respirator masks, the gold standard for safety among medical workers.

Just 16.5% of RNs in hospitals said they have universal PPE — that is, protective gear (including eyewear) that is to be used at all times — in their emergency departments, where patients may not be screened for the virus before receiving care.

“More than 240 registered nurses have died from COVID-19,” said Bonnie Castillo, executive director of the union. “Nurses need PPE now to do their jobs safely.”

* * *

Biden has said that his administration will invoke the Defense Production Act in order to ramp up U.S. manufacturing of PPE, a step that Trump has largely avoided and one that could get badly needed supplies to hospitals and clinics, including those that lack the buying power of the largest health industry chains.

That help would be particularly felt in America’s nursing homes, which have suffered tremendously from lack of PPE supply. A study by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group found that in late August, 20% of nursing facilities had less than a one-week supply of one or more types of PPE, which constitutes a critical shortage by industry standards.

Still, Biden does not take office for two months. And the intervening weeks could be dire ones.

“[In the spring], we in a 24-hour period burned through what we had prognosticated was a six month supply of N95s,” Dr. Noble said. “That’s how hard it is to predict. There are finite reserves. The devil will be in the details.”