Trump will lash out if he loses — but he and his fans will be bigger crybabies if they win

With poll numbers staying put and the odds of a Joe Biden win in Tuesday’s election looking good — possibly by a decisive margin — there’s mounting dread about how Donald Trump will behave after a defeat. After all, Trump is a sociopathic narcissist with the emotional control of a — well, I won’t insult toddlers with the comparison — and he lives in mortal terror of being viewed as a loser. He’s already made clear that he will refuses to concede, no matter what, and he’s grasping desperately for any way to get legal ballots thrown out so he can steal the election.

No wonder people are afraid Trump will go completely apes**t if his efforts to steal this fail and he actually loses. As Salon’s Matthew Rozsa recently explained in a popular piece, psychologists worry that the narcissistic injury to Trump will result in him lashing out “in his vindictive rage to punish an America which he may believe has consigned him to ‘loser’ status.”

On Friday, Ron Suskind of the New York Times published an article based on interviews with “some two dozen officials and aides, several of whom are still serving in the Trump administration,” who worried that “the president could use the power of the government” to lash out at enemies, try to steal the election or otherwise wreak havoc on the nation.

“Trump could do real damage to the country, his successor or presidential traditions,” Garrett Graff wrote Wednesday at Politico, adding that “there’s reason to wonder if a Trump transition might actually be the start of the wildest chapter of an already controversial presidency.”

“We May Need the Twenty-Fifth Amendment if Trump Loses,” blares a headline at the New Yorker.

Of course we should be worried that Trump, a vindictive man whose only true pleasures come from sadism, will abuse his power to punish Americans if he loses.

But let’s be honest: He’s also going to do that if he wins.

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Heads or tails, Trump will be angry at Americans for not worshipping him in the way he believes is his due, and the next two and a half months are going to be hell. Moreover, win or lose, Trump supporters will continue to believe they are victims of the “liberal elite” and the “deep state,” and will keep on being resentful, angry and aggrieved, stocking up on guns and screeching on social media about how poorly they believe they’re being treated.

But at least if Biden wins the election, there will be light at the end of the tunnel.

We know that Trump and his supporters will act this way because that’s how they’ve acted for the past four years. After all, it was less than a day after Trump’s inauguration that the grievance politics and play-acting began. Trump insisted — and pressured his supporters and press secretary into insisting — that his inauguration was way, way bigger than Barack Obama’s, and that all the photos showing otherwise were somehow “fake news.” He obsessed for months about how the election had been “rigged” against him — even though he won! — because Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.

Ever since then, the running theme of Trump’s presidency is that he’s a nonstop victim of shadowy liberal forces trying to take him down. Robert Mueller, Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, the media (especially female journalists), the “Democrat governors” and on and on: Trump’s conflicts are always about a conspiracy against him. They are never, ever his own fault for corruption, criminality, incompetence or just flat-out being the worst.

Trump even views the coronavirus, which is, you know, a virus with no real agency, as a plot to destroy him, as if all those people decided to get sick and die just to make him look bad.

Meanwhile, if there was one word to describe Trump’s supporters — who, let’s remember, were on the winning side in 2016 — it would be “bitter.” Turn on Fox News any random night, and it’s a full blown whine-fest about how alleged “elites” are trying to control them and ruin their lives. The fact that their party controls most state governments, the White House, the Senate and the federal courts never factors in. The narrative is one of perpetual victimhood.

Witness, for instance, this recent piece from National Review editor Rich Lowry, an alleged adult, entitled “The Only Middle Finger Available,” which argues that a Trump vote is “a gigantic rude gesture directed at the commanding heights of American culture.”

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Of course, Trump is quite literally the “commanding height” of American culture right now, not just because he’s the most powerful person in the world but because his severe personality disorders have made him a black hole of attention.

But in the warped imagination of Trump-loving conservatives, they’re perpetual losers, even and especially when they’re winning. So they always imagine they are justified in lashing out and punishing liberals. Winning elections doesn’t mean trying to govern, just amassing more power to act out their revenge fantasies.

This is why the debates over whether Trump is “really” a fascist are somewhat missing the point. In the political science terms of government organization, he is not a fascist dictator. But the rhetoric, ideology and affect of modern conservatism have tipped strongly toward authoritarianism in recent years.

In more normal historic condition, conservatism is inherently a protectionist ideology, an attempt to preserve the current social order, with all its hierarchies and inequalities. But modern right-wingers imagine themselves as having already lost nearly all of that. They claim to be trying to restoring the lost (and mostly imaginary) “greatness” of the past, a narrative that’s a lot closer to fascism than conservatism.

That’s why the Trumpian slogan is “Make America Great Again.” There was a tepid effort by the 2020 Trump campaign, after four years in power, to update that to “Keep America Great.” But that reboot pretty much fell to the wayside and the campaign reverted to MAGA sloganeering. Trumpism always requires imagining that its adherents are the underdogs struggling against an all-powerful elite. Admitting the fact that they’ve been in power for four years — and squandered every opportunity to do anything constructive — is not on the table.

Trump is likely to throw a massive tantrum if he loses this election, no doubt. But there’s also a possibility that the blow to his ego will be such that he and his supporters will slink away in shame, especially if the election is a rout.

In the face of real defeat, Trump’s “bunker boy” side tends to show itself. He’s already canceled his appearance at the election-night party at Trump International Hotel, suggesting his reaction to a possible defeat is to hide away in the White House.

If Trump wins by whatever means, however, we’re looking at another long four years of him whining, playing the victim and abusing his power of office to punish anyone who didn’t vote for him. His followers will go right along with it, nursing endless grievance because, while they control most of the power in Washington, they still have to put up with “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and women talking back to them on the internet. The right will never stop casting themselves as the wounded victims of any and all social change. The most we can hope for from this election is that they’re handed a humiliation so big that it stuns them into silence, at least temporarily.

The spooky possibility of thrift stores: Who’s getting rich from your secondhand stuff?

ATLANTA – On a sunny afternoon before Halloween, shoppers at Value Village Atlanta cruise the aisles, browsing for bargains. They hope to find a beaded gown befitting a Bride of Dracula or a fringed Elvis jumpsuit.  

Billed as a “Treasure Hunter’s Paradise,” the popular thrift store sits in the corner of the old Moreland Shopping Center. A sandwich board solicits donations to the American Kidney Fund, along with more signage for the charity in the windows.

But consumers and donors could be unaware that, unlike many thrift stores, sales from their secondhand goods go to a profitable business and not a charity.

The growth of for-profit thrift stores like Value Village Atlanta is expanding nationwide as many Americans use the extra time at home during the pandemic to clean out their closets, while others turn to thrift stores as they tighten their belts.

The surge in secondhand shopping opens opportunities for the public to be misled about how much money these for-profit retailers are making off the charities they brag about benefiting, according to charity watchdogs and regulators, as well as government records and other information gathered by InvestigateWest of the for-profit thrift store industry.

“They pay a very, very small percentage to the charities, while giving people a very different impression,” said Adele Meyer, executive director of the Association for Resale Professionals, the leading trade organization for secondhand stores. “It’s not clear to the public who’s benefiting.”

In November 2019, a Washington state Superior Court judge ruled that TVI Inc., also known as Savers, the largest for-profit thrift retailer in the world, had been deceiving consumers for years. A series of articles by InvestigateWest in 2015 exposed the practices of the Washington-based for-profit thrift chain, leading to actions by regulators in California, Illinois and Washington.

The company, which operates stores called Savers and Value Village, was sued by the Washington state Attorney General in 2017. The state charged the company with misleading consumers and donors into believing that all types of donations and purchases benefited charity, creating the impression that the company itself was a charity.

“Despite the fact that no portion of an in-store purchase benefits a charity partner, Value Village nevertheless advertises that store purchases benefit charities,” according to Washington state’s court filings.

And this pattern is being copied by other for-profit thrift-store chains around the nation.

Value for whom?

Value Village Atlanta is unaffiliated with the Washington state thrift chain and operates a dozen Georgia stores. It also owns and operates outlets in North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Missouri, either “directly or through affiliated companies,” according to the company’s posted privacy policy.

The company’s privacy policy says one of its missions is acquiring most of its goods from “companies that support charitable organizations.” But, mirroring arrangements at a growing number of regional for-profit thrift stores, donations come in directly from consumers either at the store or via home pickups and donation bins placed around the greater Atlanta area and beyond.

And the size of the store’s charitable contributions versus its revenues are not disclosed to the public. No signs alert shoppers or donors at the store that it is a for-profit corporation.

“Everything donated goes 100% to the American Kidney Services. And of everything sold, 95% goes to American Kidney Services,” said a manager of Value Village Atlanta, when asked how much of the store’s proceeds go to charity. The store itself is “all nonprofit,” she told a reporter who visited incognito in October 2018. A second journalist heard much the same when he visited the same store nearly a year later.

American Kidney Services’ mission, according to its IRS Form 990, is to “provide support to kidney disease sufferers through contributions to the American Kidney Fund, primarily through the sale of used clothing and household items donated by the general public.” The charity receives a failing score by nonprofit watchdog Charity Navigator.

American Kidney Services sent 18% of its revenues to the national American Kidney Fund in 2017, according to calculations based on its nonprofit 2017 tax return. The percentage is not revealed on the brightly colored donation bins dotting Atlanta streets.As with most other for-profit thrift stores and associated charities contacted by InvestigateWest for this article, American Kidney Services and Value Village Atlanta refused to be interviewed or provide relevant documentation.

InvestigateWest’s efforts to get information to more fully convey the position of the Value Village Atlanta and American Kidney Services, including numerous phone calls and emails to both entities, culminated with Kate Stutzman Harper, a spokeswoman for both entities, telling InvestigateWest that any further contact with the company or the charity would be reported to the local police as harassment.

The pitch to donors

A former telemarketer for a different retail chain, Carolina Value Village (at one time, but no longer affiliated with Value Village Atlanta), said that most solicited consumers are led to believe their donation is going entirely to charity, National Kidney Services, said Tina Quizon, whose minimum-wage job was to dispatch donation pickups from the Value Village offices in Charlotte, North Carolina.

“Donors are giving out of the kindness of their hearts and have no idea who they’re giving to,” Quizon told InvestigateWest. “And people are giving nice stuff, too.”

Quizon’s complaint to the state about workplace conditions, as well as consumer deception, became the subject of a local TV exposé on Charlotte’s WSOC in November 2018, in which reporter Paul Boyd concluded: “The money trail between the three organizations [charities NKS and NKF and the Carolina Value Village thrift stores] lacks transparency.” National Kidney Services also receives a failing score by Charity Navigator.

Carolina Value Village filed for bankruptcy in February 2019 but was still operating its six stores in the greater Charlotte area last month (September 2020).

Maria Stedry, an attorney for the charity National Kidney Services, with the Atlanta law firm Schulten, Ward, Turner and Weiss, told InvestigateWest in November 2019 that, while she did not represent the thrift stores, she did not think they’d provide further information about their financial arrangements or portions going to charity. “It’s their privilege to keep it confidential,” Stedry said.

The law firm is listed as a registered agent for many for-profit thrift stores, recycling companies, and their charities, in Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, Ohio and elsewhere.

Quizon, who left the company in August 2018, says hundreds of potential donors she talked to on her five-hour shifts likely thought that all of their donation was going to charity. She said that the company’s approved sales pitch never mentioned a for-profit company being involved.

InvestigateWest also found that for-profit thrift stores give consumers confused signals about their for-profit status. At stores InvestigateWest visited and contacted, even some store employees were, at best, themselves confused.

At the Carolina Value Village, a person answering the phone declared her store to be a nonprofit. A receptionist for Tennessee’s Southern Thrift Stores said those stores are charities. And when asked if the store was a nonprofit, a staffer at City Thrift in Lilburn, Georgia, answered, “I guess so.” A sales clerk at a City Thrift in Memphis asked about the portion of sales going to charity, said, “It all goes to the veterans.”

Some of these stores might use marketing to convey an aura of charity. For example, America’s Thrift Stores currently advertises, “Your donations and the resulting in-store purchases contribute to make wishes come true for Alabama children with life-threatening medical conditions.” Today, Make a Wish Alabama is paid a bulk rate but does not see a percentage of sales, according to the organization’s representatives.

King’s Home, a Christian-based organization in Alabama, was the main charity partner of America’s Thrift Stores until 2017.

“People just don’t know! They think the charities are making so much more than they really are. They even make it sound like a whole lot [in their marketing],” said Lew Burdette, King’s Home president.

King’s Home runs 22 shelters serving youth, women, and kids seeking refuge from domestic violence, homelessness, and other circumstances. Shortly after severing relations with America’s Thrift, King’s Home started its own chain of three thrift stores on a strictly nonprofit model, and Burdette reports they’re off to a good start.

America’s Thrift Stores did not return requests for comment.

Impact on other charities

“You can rest assured that your contributions are being put to good use because all of the proceeds from these [donated] items go directly to the National Kidney Foundation and its efforts to reduce the prevalence of chronic kidney disease in the United States,” advertises one National Kidney Services website.

“Such language is misleading to the public because it leads one to believe that any dollars that are raised through your donation would go directly to the nonprofit. Yet there’s money being made that is not going to the nonprofit from your donation,” said Kris Kewitsch, of the Minnesota-based Charities Review Council.

“They’re not being transparent by not telling the public what the real arrangement is,” she added. “There’s no clarity on the relationship between the stores and the nonprofit.”

Occasionally, savvy consumers catch on.

An acquaintance who had managed a for-profit thrift store told Rose Ackley of Columbus, Ohio, about the business model. Later Ackley got a call from someone claiming to represent the National Kidney Foundation, a noted charity. She agreed to donate several bags of accumulated goods.

When the truck rolled up to her door, it said “Ohio Thrift,” which is part of the for-profit chain Ackley’s acquaintance warned her about. She refused to make the donation.

That was 2007. Today Ackley continues to refuse to shop at the store as a matter of principle.

“If Goodwill and Salvation Army and other nonprofit stores had that money, a lot of people would be taken care of,” she said in an interview in 2019. “They help a lot of people.”

For-profit thrift stores like Value Village Atlanta and Carolina Value Village look superficially like Goodwill and Salvation Army, standards of the American secondhand market.

By contrast, these nonprofit stores usually return nearly all of their revenues to charitable causes after paying operating expenses. St. Vincent De Paul reports in its federal records that it returns 90% to its charitable mission. Goodwill returns 83%. Nonprofits are by law responsible for insuring that their assets go to charity and for filing detailed tax returns, which are open to public view.

The average donation to Goodwill—a few bags of goods—is worth about $45 or $50 to the thrift shop, according to Mark Kahrs, executive vice president of retail operations at Goodwill in St. Louis.

“That donation of your stuff is really worth something to a nonprofit,” Kahrs said. “You wouldn’t just write a $50 check without knowing it would really help someone.”

Pound-for-pound, a donation to a nonprofit goes much further, said Greg Rue, manager of thrift businesses for ARC’s Value Village, a Minnesota nonprofit with several stores. “If you brought in a pair of jeans as a donation to us, we might put it out on a rack for $5 or $10. So, we’d get a $5 or $10 profit that would come back to us. That same pair of jeans donated to a for-profit thrift store would also sell for $5 or $10 but the for-profit would give the charity far, far less… probably only pennies for that pair of jeans.”

Consumers can also deduct the fair-market value of their donation, though little of that value goes to charity, according to tax expert Philip Hackney, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and a former attorney for the chief counsel to the Internal Revenue Service.

“The for-profit has an opportunity to make a real profit off the way the tax code is written now,” Hackney told InvestigateWest. “I think there’s a legitimate question about whether these charities are operating exclusively for charitable purposes… [if they’re] providing the for-profit most of their take.”

America’s Thrift Stores is a private equity-owned, for-profit company that operates 18 stores in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee, and according to its own website, pays Make-A-Wish Alabama 3.5 cents per pound for clothing donated by the nonprofit, with a minimum annual guarantee of $650,000.

America’s Thrift Stores partnering charity, Make A Wish Foundation of Alabama, says the company does not pay the nonprofit for furniture. “This is made clear to our supporters and to America’s Thrift Stores donors through this website and our communication with external audiences,” said Tracy Smith, President and CEO of Make A Wish Foundation of Alabama.

Yet on its website, the thrift store directly solicits donations of “chairs, sofas, couches, loveseats, recliners, foot stools, storage dressers, armoires, bookcases, cabinets, entertainment centers, dining tables, kitchen tables, coffee tables, end tables, computer tables, nightstands and patio sets.”

Smaller nonprofit thrift stores competing with for-profits object to such business practices.

Tanya Mahrous Tobias, director and co-founder of Second Life Atlanta, a nonprofit thrift store dedicated to raising funds for animal rescues, feels that many charity shops like her own, which make up a large part of the Association of Resale Professionals’ membership, face unfair competition.

“We have to spend more money to keep our name top of mind because we don’t have fleets of trucks driving around the neighborhood or donation bins all over the place,” she said. “It’s misleading to the public for [for-profit thrift stores] to say they’re donating to certain charities and truly helping significantly,” noting that “nonprofit stores send much larger proceeds [from their profits] to charity.”

With most of the companies, public information does not mention what actually goes to charities. That’s because in most states there are few or no disclosure requirements. California is an exception, where records show that charities doing business with for-profit thrift stores are typically receiving significantly less than what charities make running their own thrift stores.

California state records show, for example, that in 2018, for-profit thrift stores purchasing donations from charities paid about 16% of their revenues to charities; those that received a fee or commission from charities received about 7.5% on average.

None of the 10 for-profit thrift store chains contacted by InvestigateWest agreed to provide financial statements showing their benefits to charities. However, in some cases, nonprofits have received amounts less than 3% of the for-profit stores’ revenues, as disclosed in contracts obtained by the Minnesota Attorney General for the Savers for-profit thrift chain, the nation’s largest.

“People are being misled into thinking that they’re giving to charity when there’s little charity being served,” said Daniel Borochoff, founder and board director of CharityWatch in Chicago, which monitors charity fundraising practices nationwide.

The thrift is in

Today, there are at least 500 for-profit thrift stores, owned by about 20 regional branded chains, operating in the United States and Canada, according to an InvestigateWest count.

With shopping malls and retail shops rapidly shutting down nationwide, thrift stores represent a bright spot among the generally declining brick-and-mortar retail industry.

Sales of secondhand goods are booming, growing about 3% each year, faster than conventional retail. And market researchers project this multibillion-dollar industry will grow exponentially: The business research firm IbisWorld found sales of $20.5 billion at 84,960 used goods stores in the United States in 2019, with online reselling also growing 13.7% each year.

“Thrift shopping is really trendy right now,” says Michael Becerra, marketing director for Sunshine Thrift Stores, based in Tampa. “We get a very diverse group with a lot of young people in college, or recent graduates, young families and parents, as well as low-income families who shop here because it’s the only way they’re affording shopping.”

Add to this mix “treasure-hunters and resellers looking for hidden gems at decent prices—a little bit of everything,” he says.

Still, as consumers head in droves to thrift for Halloween costumes, a leading national advocate for fundraising transparency said people should watch for misrepresentation, in both shopping and making donations.

“Being for profit is perfectly legal, but misrepresenting a business as a charity is not,” said Bennett Weiner, of the Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance.

This story was supported in part by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.

“Someone’s reading our texts”: Tucker Carlson, UPS and the non-stolen Biden documents

Fox News personality Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson is being widely mocked after regaling viewers of his top-rated cable news program on Wednesday with a bizarre, evidence-free tale of deep state-style espionage directed against him by unknown forces who allegedly stole a sheaf of top-secret documents with “damning” information about the Biden family, as it was in transit to him via UPS.

Carlson can now rest assured: On Thursday morning a UPS spokesperson reported that the company had found the missing contents.

“After an extensive search, we have found the contents of the package and are arranging for its return,” the spokesperson said by email. “UPS will always focus first on our customers, and will never stop working to solve issues and make things right. We work hard to ensure every package is delivered, including essential goods, precious family belongings and critical healthcare.”

Carlson, however, immediately denied the claim in a text message to me as “not true.” I sent him a screenshot of the email and followed up, but he has not replied.

Carlson told his audience Wednesday that a producer in New York had received the documents Monday from an unnamed source, and overnighted them to Los Angeles with a popular commercial shipper, later revealed to be UPS. But Carlson said that UPS informed them Tuesday morning that “the package had been opened and the contents were missing — the documents had disappeared.”

UPS did not offer any details about what had happened to the package.

Carlson, however, had implied that the snafu had been a plot to steal the Biden documents before he could broadcast them to the world. Though the host was widely mocked for claiming to have lost history-shaping documents without having them copied first, he actually never said that.

When I asked him about that in a text later that night, he told me that “of course” he had made other copies.

“Hi, Tucker, it’s Roger,” I wrote. “Did you make copies of those documents? Or did anyone take photos?”

“Of course,” Carlson replied. “The point is, someone’s reading our texts,” he said, suggesting that the package was intercepted because his communications were being monitored.

This struck me as a wild claim. Carlson and I have no rapport; I have his phone number because he called me once in July about a story I was doing. We have spoken only that one time. When I then asked if he would be willing to share the copies of the documents with me, he replied, “Which Roger is this?”

Notorious GOP trickster Roger Stone later said in a text that, while his relationship with Carlson goes back 30 years, he had played no role thus far in the Hunter Biden smear fiasco.

Stone did acknowledge to Salon that he had sent Carlson a “congratulatory text” following Carlson’s Monday night interview with Tony Bobulinski, a former Hunter Biden associate who claims to have damaging information about the family. In July, President Trump commuted Stone’s sentence on seven felony counts.

Republican operatives and Trump allies have spent nearly two years trying to make corruption allegations against Hunter Biden and his father stick with the American public. They appear to have failed in that regard: A recent poll shows that Americans find Biden more honest than Trump by a margin of 54% to 37%.

In fact, probably the most tangible result of the effort so far has been its spectacular, history-making backfire last year, when the plot led directly to Trump’s impeachment by the House of Representatives.

The second wave of attacks this year does not appear much more successful. Trump’s supposed personal attorney, former LifeLock spokesperson Rudy Giuliani, distributed contents to journalists of what he claims are the contents of Hunter Biden’s old laptop. The FBI has reportedly now opened an investigation into those contents as being part of a possible Russian intelligence operation designed to influence the 2020 election.

Both writers credited the New York Post’s original article about the Hunter Biden laptop had previously worked at Fox News, Carlson’s network, which rejected Giuliani’s pitch on the laptop, citing credibility issues. One of those writers, a former associate producer for Trump “pillow-talk” confidant Sean Hannity, had posted Instagram photos of herself with former Trum campaign CEO and White House strategist Steve Bannon, who shared a middleman role with Giuliani in the laptop’s origin story.

That same writer has also posed for photos with Roger Stone.

Watch the “Tucker Carlson Tonight” clip about the UPS saga here.

Wait a minute… is Tucker Carlson suggesting that he's the victim of some Deep State operation to protect the Bidens and that they stole his "confidential documents" on Hunter? pic.twitter.com/EluFYTi1lM

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) October 29, 2020

Vote suppression is what Republicans do best — but 2020 is their masterwork

I have written many times about the ongoing vote suppression schemes by the Republican Party and traced the argument that undergirds it all the way back to the founders, one of whom, John Jay, had a favorite maxim: “Those who own the country ought to govern it.” Those who believe they “own” the country have wanted to keep the right to vote to themselves from the very beginning and the fight for universal suffrage has never stopped.

Since the civil rights movement finally ended Jim Crow and secured the right to vote for Black citizens throughout the country, the Republican coalition of conservative (mostly) white people who seek to retain their privilege as a higher caste is the faction that seeks to restrict the franchise. It isn’t as easy to do that as it used to be.

As far back as the 1980s, Republicans put together a legal strategy and formed a network of lawyers devoted to suppressing the vote of racial and ethnic minorities as much as possible. They sought to restrict immigration and end birthright citizenship because they believe these people will threaten their “ownership” by voting for the Democratic Party. They went from state to state to try to pass voter ID laws and in recent years they have marshaled the forces of the Department of Justice and the federal judiciary to make voting as difficult as possible.

Much of this has been justified by a supposed need to stop rampant voter fraud, which is nonexistent on any systematic scale. To the extent it happens at all, it’s usually Republicans who profit from it. These are all solutions in search of a problem which only serve one purpose: preventing Democrats, mostly people of color, from voting.

In 2013 when the Supreme Court decided in Shelby v. Holder to gut the Voting Rights Act, ruling that the country “has changed” and Congress should pass new laws to reflect “current conditions,” it was clear that the court under Chief Justice John Roberts was sending a signal to the conservative judiciary that voting rights were back on the agenda, big time.

After all that, it’s a bit much to see establishment Republicans express shock at what’s happening in this election. Politico reports:

“What we have seen this year which is completely unprecedented … is a concerted national Republican effort across the country in every one of the states that has had a legal battle to make it harder for citizens to vote,” said Trevor Potter, a former chair of the Federal Election Commission who served as general counsel to Republican John McCain’s two presidential campaigns. “There just has been this unrelenting Republican attack on making it easier to vote.”

No kidding.

Nonetheless, I must at least agree that throughout these last few decades of challenges to voting rights, Republicans have always at least upheld the pretense that they were operating in good faith. It was never believable, but the charade of concern about voter fraud or illegal immigrants voting was the tribute o hypocrisy that vice paid to virtue. They acknowledged, however spuriously, that vote suppression for the express purpose of stealing elections was undemocratic.

As with everything else in the Trump era, such adherence to old-fashioned notions of right and wrong are no longer operative. In this election we are seeing a vote suppression effort of unprecedented scale, with no serious attempt to justify it other than an exercise of sheer partisan power.

The Republican standard-bearer has such a big mouth and is so crudely dishonest that they really have little choice in the matter. He openly declared that if he loses it can only be because the election was rigged by the Democrats and he seized upon mail-in voting during the pandemic as the method by which they would do it. Of course he said the same thing in 2016 without even that much explanation, so it’s clear that this is just his all-purpose excuse for any possible defeat. Donald Trump can’t lose, according to him; he can only be cheated out of his win. The effect of this self-serving propaganda has been to make Republicans hold out for Election Day while Democrats have been voting early in large numbers, many of them by mail.

The Republican lawyers and operatives who have fanned out to all the swing states are following Trump’s lead. As Chris Hayes spelled out on MSNBC on Thursday night, they are filing hundreds of lawsuits, challenging voting laws and procedures all over the country to restrict the ability to vote and disqualify legal ballots based upon a variety of contrived rationales.

In one case, Justice Brett Kavanaugh even backed up Donald Trump’s inane demand that the vote count itself must stop on election night so as to avoid the “suspicion of impropriety” if votes counted later should “flip the results,” which is a ridiculous way to frame the legal issue:

Repeat after me: "All votes have never been counted on election night." These graphs show the number of votes that were counted and reported in 2016 after Wednesday morning following E-Day. Even "quick count" states had work to do. pic.twitter.com/3sSpbwNgkF

— Charles Stewart III (@cstewartiii) October 29, 2020

None of this has anything to do with fraud. They can’t possibly know that fraud will have taken place ahead of time. These challenges are solely based upon the assumption that most of these ballots will be votes for Joe Biden and other Democrats. They’re not even trying to hide it.

The Supreme Court has so far kept to the federalist rationale that has always held (with the notable exception of the Bush v Gore decision) that election laws are the purview of the states, with Roberts joining the three liberals (and newly seated Justice Amy Coney Barrett not weighing, in but not recusing herself either.) On the other hand, Justices Neil Gorsuch, Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas, along with Kavanaugh, all appear to be ready to create a federal interest in deciding election cases out of whole cloth.

When Barrett joins post-election cases (as she almost surely will) it is highly likely that the court will vote to throw out massive numbers of ballots that arrive after Election Day — at least if Donald Trump is ahead in the count. Those will number in the tens of thousands, at least.

All this for that unfit reprobate. You’d think Republicans might be willing to sacrifice a few years in the wilderness just to get rid of Trump. But apparently not. Their party seems to be willing to completely delegitimize our democracy on every level on his behalf.

The best hope for saving the country from this disaster is for everyone to get their vote in on or before Election Day and for the media to refrain from naming a winner until the votes are counted. This year everyone will have to be patient and hope that all the legal firepower Republicans throw at us won’t be enough to overcome an insurmountable Biden win. It’s not right that Democrats have to jump through such hoops, particularly in the middle of a lethal pandemic, but the other side is ruthlessly focused on maintaining power by any means necessary and there simply isn’t any other choice.

COVID-19 is speeding up white flight: Now is the time to invest in affordable housing

The COVID-19 pandemic has effectively closed down large parts of the U.S. economy and fundamentally changed how Americans live their day to day lives. While a lot remains unclear about the long-term impact of COVID-19 — like the efficacy and access to a vaccine, the implications of shifting to more permanent remote work, and the prospect of permanent job losses — however, one thing is certain: There will be permanent changes to how people work and where they live. Some more than others.

Systemic inequities have particularly crippled Black and Latinx communities’ ability to weather this economic downturn. Decades of disinvestment, segregation and displacement have resulted in deep racial wealth divides between communities of color and their white counterparts. In cities struggling to provide affordable housing, COVID-19 could speed up displacement of communities of color. In areas where disinvestment has plagued communities of color for decades, COVID-19 will further erode the already fragile local economies. Nothing short of both public policy and private investments will ensure these communities aren’t insurmountably set back by COVID-19.

The pandemic has triggered the start of what might become a new round of “white flight” in some of the highest cost cities. Highways in the 1950s and 1960s allowed white families to flee integrated cities for new suburbs. Following white families’ departures, public and private investments in the cities faltered. Today, the agent of change is not the interstate highway system, but technological changes and a growing frustration with overcrowding and commuting. The pandemic has greased the wheels of a train that was already leaving the station. While companies and workers are rethinking the necessity of expensive office space, employees are reconsidering the need to live in some of the most expensive housing in the country.

This is most apparent in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since the pandemic, there has been an exodus of tech professionals from a metro area where even the wealthiest workers often found housing prices to be out of reach. Many of those workers now find employers willing to let them work remotely on a permanent basis. This resulted in a record high rental vacancy rate in the city, which jumped to 6.2% in May, up from 3.9% only three months ago. In San Francisco itself, rents are down 20% when compared with rent this time last year. This resulted in stalled construction for many new buildings as construction costs have not lowered with market rent.

The disruption of local housing and employment caused by the shift to remote work disproportionately impacts people of color. Lower-income families cannot benefit from lower rents on market-rate and luxury housing units. Iit is communities of color that continue to see the most severe impact to their income and who are more likely to report having trouble paying rent during this time. For many households of color there is little opportunity to move or retrain quickly if remote work indelibly alters the employment landscape of America’s cities.

In other high-cost cities, the pandemic is creating the perfect storm for further gentrification and displacement. Communities of color have historic and ongoing challenges attracting investments to spur economic activity. Investments have historically been aimed at attracting a wealthier, and often whiter, demographic. These new arrivals often fail to become a part of their community, instead displacing the people and institutions that existed for decades. Large scale displacement and gentrification was seen clearly in the aftermath of the 2008 housing crash and has the potential to be stronger following the pandemic. Increased and prolonged job loss among people of color could leave landlords eager to offload their buildings to developers who can withstand economic recessions.

New York City is a prime example. As the initial rush to the suburbs during the pandemic has started to ebb, higher-income renters and buyers are returning and taking advantage of high vacancy rates. In some cases major tech companies, that are reducing their footprint in California, are taking advantage of the pandemic-induced flight of commercial tenants to expand their presence in New York. This has implications for residential real estate as well. In some low-income communities of color, rents have risen 22% in the years leading up to the pandemic. These areas continue to see a slow ascent in rents that is not seen in more affluent areas.

Rent increases in already high-cost cities further strain households of color and fuel displacement. Eviction moratoriums, unevenly implemented by federal and local authorities, will expire as we enter the “recovery” phase of COVID-19. Similar to the housing crash of 2008, this recovery will not automatically account for inequities in communities of color. Rent increases will lead to further overcrowding, evictions, and homelessness in these areas as poverty becomes more concentrated. Developers will rapaciously invade communities of color to build housing for the wealthier, and whiter, families that are insulated from the worst impacts of COVID-19.

In both scenarios, communities of color in the high-cost metros will not fare well without significant interventions. State and local governments should seize the opportunity to acquire properties during the slow real estate market. There could be less expensive land and in some cases entitlements that municipalities can leverage to expand affordable housing and affordable commercial properties. The formation of community land trusts in areas prime for gentrification can be critical to preserving existing affordable housing and building wealth in communities of color. In addition to government efforts, it is incumbent on other anchor institutions such as banks, healthcare networks, and academic institutions to make similar investments in affordable housing. These investments will be most impactful if done in collaboration with community stakeholders who can ensure that interventions address the needs of communities of color.

While some cities have made eviction moratoriums permanent, there are other policy changes that are essential to helping the resilience of communities of color. Local policies that should be considered include programs that help business owners buy their buildings and down-payment support to help renters transition to homeownership. Similarly, there should be coordination with local lenders to help keep families in their homes and to buy up vacant homes to keep them out of the hands of investors using community land trusts or other mechanisms.. State and local governments can create laws that limit the real estate speculators and developers from driving up the cost of living by flipping homes and turning them into units. Policies expanding section 8 programs and rent control housing stock will help existing residents stay in communities that are ripe for gentrification. At the federal level, the passage of a fully funded version of the HEROES Act would offer broad support to renters and landlords.

We don’t know what the outcome of the COVID-19 means for homeowners and renters yet. But whether it be a new kind of white flight or rampant gentrification and displacement, we know that communities of color will bear the brunt of the costs. The time is now to consider how to change that narrative before it is written.

Donald Trump’s election mayhem is coming: Journalists must be ready to fight back

As it becomes blindingly obvious that Donald Trump is going to fight to throw out any ballot counted after midnight on Nov. 3, it is ever more urgent that journalists be prepared to explain to the public why there’s no practical, legal or moral rationale for his demands.

An important first step in this prebuttal will be to get Republican and Democratic election officials — particularly in swing states — on the record saying that there is nothing risky or dangerous about counting every legally submitted ballot, even if it takes a few days.

Trump’s claims that mail-in voting will be massively fraudulent, and that votes not counted by election night are somehow wildly more susceptible to cheating, are actually far beyond even Republican norms. They simply don’t make sense — and state election officials will tell reporters that, if they ask.

Credit for this idea belongs to Paul Bernstein, a former editor in the Washington Post’s Metro section. He wrote in an email:

It’s unavoidable that many Trump supporters will see a conspiracy if key states shift from red to blue once the mail ballots have been counted. But this paranoia may be less widespread if state election officials (especially Republican ones) make statements NOW, before any votes have been counted, vouching for the integrity of the vote-counting process. And they won’t issue such statements unless journalists press them on this point.

Trump, meanwhile, continues to say what were traditionally the quiet parts out loud: “Big problems and discrepancies with Mail In Ballots all over the USA. Must have final total on November 3rd,” he tweeted on Oct. 26. (Twitter flagged this as possibly misleading.)

In Nevada on Wednesday, he made it clear he expects the courts to stop the counts early. “I think on Tuesday we’re gonna over-perform, and we’ll see what happens at the end of the day,” he said. “Hopefully, it won’t go longer than that. Hopefully, the few states remaining that want to take a lot of time after Nov. 3 to count ballots — that won’t be allowed by the various courts, because as you know, we’re in courts on that.”

Whether the Supreme Court would help Trump shut down the vote count isn’t clear, although the elevation of Amy Coney Barrett certainly makes it more likely.

Even without her, the five right-wingers on the court this week barred Wisconsin from receiving and counting absentee ballots after Election Day, even if they were mailed before.

In an audible heard round the world, Justice Brett Kavanaugh expressed the perverse view that states announce winners on election night (they don’t) and that any votes counted afterwards would only destabilize the country. As Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern wrote, Kavanaugh’s opinion was “extraordinarily sloppy” and “riddled with errors.”

Rick Hasen of the UC Irvine School of Law wrote in a Washington Post op-ed: “Kavanaugh’s opinion advanced a controversial theory about near-absolute power of state legislatures to set rules in federal elections. It also was sloppy in talking about facts and the law, and it echoed Trump’s false talking points about the perils of voting by mail.”

Justice Elana Kagan, agog, responded in a footnote that will go down in history:

JUSTICE KAVANAUGH alleges that “suspicions of impropriety” will result if “absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the results of an election.” But there are no results to “flip” until all valid votes are counted. And nothing could be more “suspicio[us]” or “improp[er]” than refusing to tally votes once the clock strikes 12 on election night. To suggest otherwise, especially in these fractious times, is to disserve the electoral process.

Kavanaugh’s outrageous assertion suggests that if such a case gets to the high court, which appears relatively unlikely, the stage is set for a decision that would make the Bush v. Gore decision of 2000 look benign.

Then again, on Wednesday, Kavanaugh and Roberts joined the three liberal justices in allowing Pennsylvania and North Carolina to count absentee ballots for three and nine days after Election Day, respectively, as long as the ballots were mailed on time. In the Pennsylvania case, however, the three dissenting right-wingers noted that late ballots would be segregated, leaving open the possibility of a later challenge.

Pennsylvania is one of two key battleground states — the other being Wisconsin — where state laws don’t allow election officials to even begin processing absentee ballots until Election Day.

So much to prepare for

This is only one of the many things journalists should be doing prophylactically, to be proactive rather than reactive when things go wrong, which they almost inevitably will.

Jennifer Brandel, the CEO of a company called Hearken, which gives brilliant advice to news organizations about how to better engage their communities, sounded the alarm this week in a post on Medium. “In speaking to newsrooms recently,” she wrote, “we’ve been alarmed by, well, how unalarmed they are, and how uninformed they are about the threats.”

Brandel summarized the threats thusly:

Extended and widespread misinformation campaigns
Hundreds of decisions tied up in lawsuits
No clear winner for weeks/months for multiple races
Widespread political violence and unlawful militia activity
Extreme anxiety and emotional trauma inflicted on the American people
COVID super-spreading, with hospitals overwhelmed
Election system hacking and subterfuge
Widespread confusion and mistrust among the public
Executive orders that weaken the foundation of civil service and government
Stock market tumbles
The Supreme Court ultimately deciding the presidential election
Plus … new threats that have not even entered the public radar yet

Among the other useful advice for journalists: A reporters’ guide to covering the 2020 election from Pen America, which urges journalists to “repeatedly use denominators for readers to understand the scale of any given issue being reported.”

A group of communications scholars published a number of Recommendations for Media Covering the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election, among them that “centering voters and election administrators, highlighting everyday acts of civic duty, focusing on process and timelines, covering the polling places and workers that are doing it right, and revealing issues where people agree elevates the everyday citizen while demystifying institutions.”

And 13 tips for covering likely election scenarios from the American Press Institute include the advice: “When ballots are found in unusual places, explain that such cases are rare and that safeguards exist to protect votes.”

The overarching reality to keep in mind, however, is that this is not a normal election.

As I’ve been writing for some time now, Trump is not even trying to win — at least not in the normal manner, i.e., by getting the most votes.

His goal seems to be either to sow enough chaos to steal the election, or to lose while creating such a powerful narrative of victimization that his base sticks with him, giving him a lasting power center and source of personal revenue.

Either way, there will be any number of attempts to suppress, intimidate, leave uncounted or throw out potentially hundreds of thousands of lawfully submitted votes.

Reporters need to be ready to respond thoughtfully and effectively when the shit hits the fan, and that means as many prebuttals as possible.

This hidden doctrine could stymie climate action under the new Supreme Court

When Judge Amy Coney Barrett recently sat down before the Senate Judiciary Committee, she was prepared to say basically nothing. In today’s world of highly partisan appointees to the Supreme Court, nominees have learned to keep their opinions buttoned-up: Barrett’s favorite phrase during the hearings was “no hints, no previews, no forecasts.”

When it comes to climate change, however, what Barrett didn’t say may prove just as important as what she did. The judge, who is expected to be confirmed Monday in a full Senate vote, refused to acknowledge the science of global warming: In an exchange with Senator Kamala Harris of California, Barrett said that she didn’t want to weigh in on a “very contentious matter of public debate,” causing scientists everywhere to roll their eyes. But for those calling for action on global warming, the real concern about putting Barrett on the highest court isn’t her willingness to toe the Republican party line on climate vagueness. It’s how a right-leaning Supreme Court could be poised to strike down even the most bipartisan climate laws — thanks to a growing conservative movement to boost something known as the “nondelegation doctrine.”

“The idea is that Congress shouldn’t delegate too much power to the executive branch,” said Michael Gerrard, a professor of climate change law at Columbia University. “So Congress couldn’t just say, ‘EPA, we want you to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent and you figure it out.’ They have to give a whole lot of specific details on how this would work.”

There are two major paths to cutting down the country’s runaway carbon emissions. The first is through a president’s executive action, which President Barack Obama tried (and failed) to do in his second term. The other has much more potential but is exponentially more difficult: passing an actual climate bill through Congress. In all likelihood, that would take months of political wrangling, and would require Democrats to win back the Senate and either work around — or abolish — the filibuster.

But even if Congress manages to pass such landmark legislation, there might be a problem. According to the doctrine, Congress shouldn’t let other branches of government do its work: That is, it shouldn’t delegate power elsewhere. That all sounds well and good. But the problem, according to Julian Mortensen and Nicholas Bagley, law professors at the University of Michigan, is that almost all government activity in the country relies on Congress handing off tasks to other branches. Congress might pass a law, for example, requiring the EPA to set pollution standards that are “requisite to protect human health,” or telling the Justice Department to regulate drugs to protect “public safety.” It’s unreasonable to expect Capitol Hill to have the time, or the expertise, to get into the nitty-gritty of every single government regulation.

That’s partly why the principle hasn’t been used by the Supreme Court since 1935, when the court struck down two provisions of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal for awarding too much power to the White House. (Roosevelt, frustrated, then threatened to pack the court, and the justices eventually backed off.) Since then, the Supreme Court hasn’t invoked nondelegation in any major cases; in oral arguments in 2014, Justice Anthony Kennedy called it “moribund” — just about dead.

Now, however, with more and more constitutional “originalists” — those who think that the Constitution should be interpreted according to its meaning when ratified back in 1790 — creeping onto the Supreme Court, the tide is turning back towards the doctrine. “Five justices have announced explicitly, specifically, that they’re prepared to revisit the doctrine, and to police it more aggressively,” said Lisa Heinzerling, a professor of law at Georgetown University.

In 2015, Justice Clarence Thomas, for example, blasted the “vast and unaccountable administrative apparatus” in a dissent. In 2017, Justice Neil Gorsuch told the Federalist Society: “Our founders did not approve of lawmaking by bureaucrats by fiat.”

Barrett’s opinions on delegation remain murky, but she is both an originalist, like Scalia and a former member of the Federalist Society, which has zeroed in on the doctrine in recent years. And even without Barrett,the court has a majority ready to revive a principle that has been defunct for decades.

If that happens, environmental regulation could be the biggest loser. The overwhelming majority of laws designed to cut air pollution or clean up the country’s waters count on the EPA to determine what levels of toxins are unhealthy, or which technologies to use to cut dangerous emissions. With a majority of the Supreme Court adhering to this doctrine, that authority could be in jeopardy — and so could future laws to slash carbon dioxide emissions.

“They will be particularly looking for broad language authorizing agencies to act on important problems,” Heinzerling said. “And that looks a lot like climate to me.”

It’s hard to say exactly what test a new Supreme Court would use to determine if Congress is handing over too much power to agencies like the EPA. Some previous rulings — like the landmark case of Massachusetts v. EPA, in which the court found that the EPA had the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles — will probably be safe. New regulations on greenhouse gases, however, would be fair game. Previous opinions from Gorsuch and Kavanaugh made the case that Congress shouldn’t delegate “major” or “important” policy decisions to the executive branch. But what counts as a major decision? The “safe” level of choking particulate matter near a public school? How exactly public utilities should cut their greenhouse gas emissions to zero?

According to Gerrard, if a Democratically controlled Congress wants to pass legislation limiting global warming — such as Joe Biden’s proposed plan to eliminate carbon emissions from the electricity grid by 2035 — it will have to be extremely detailed and specific, to avoid court challenges. That means not just telling the EPA to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but also identifying specific pathways and technologies to do so.

The hitch is that the more detailed the law, the harder it will be to get through Congress. “They’re scolding and hectoring Congress for not making the tough decisions, but at the same time they’re proposing to make it tougher to make the tough decisions,” Heinzerling told Grist. “It’s just insane what they’re suggesting. It’s a barely disguised hostility to an act of government.”

Atlantic City has a warning for the nation: Donald Trump brings ruin and despair

With just days to go before the general election the nation is amidst another wave of a once-in-a-century pandemic, with a president who has refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power, even if his opponent gets more votes.

How did New Jersey — my home state — go from being the “Crossroads of the American Revolution” to being implicated in our republic’s disease-ridden authoritarian dead-end?

Was our current national misery all presaged by Donald Trump’s spectacular collapse in Atlantic City, which is so evident years later in the hulking ruin of the vacant Trump Plaza at the heart of the iconic boardwalk?

If Trump tries to subvert democracy, will New Jersey — which Lincoln Steffens once described as “the traitor state” for its embrace of corporate trusts — be implicated for the way the state’s media and political elites indulged him?

We don’t know for sure just what will happen in Washington on Jan. 20, when either Trump or Joe Biden is sworn in as president. We do know what’s scheduled nine days later, when Trump’s original Atlantic City casino, the Plaza, is slated for implosion.

Atlantic City Mayor Marty Small is auctioning off for charity the chance to be the person who pushes the button that brings down the rotting structure that he says represents the devastation wrought on that community by Trump’s boom-and-bust.

“Donald Trump has an atrocious history here in Atlantic City,” said Small during a phone interview. “His properties started out as gems, and he let them fall into disrepair for the sake of making a dollar. He hurt so many little mom-and-pop shops and small businesses.”

Small then mentioned Trump’s “arrogance on the national stage, where he blatantly says he took advantage of the bankruptcy laws and made a lot of money in Atlantic City, and then just got out. I am just glad the American people are seeing who he truly is and that he only cares about himself. I look forward to Jan. 29.”

Small also noted Trump’s failure as president to coordinate a national pandemic response to a virus that has a disproportionate health impact on a community like Atlantic City, where two-thirds of the population are people of color.

Trump runs the table

Trump was awarded his first casino license in March 1982. By 1996, when he opened Trump’s World’s Fair, he would have four casinos and a track record for getting his way with New Jersey’s Casino Control Commission, the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority and the Division of Gaming Enforcement.

To find the roots of Trump’s Atlantic City ascension in the 1980s, we first must look back to 1973, when Brendan Byrne won the New Jersey governorship in the wave of Watergate voter anger, triggered by the abuses of the Nixon crew (which included dirty trickster and future Trump confidant Roger Stone). It didn’t hurt that Byrne’s name was mentioned on law enforcement surveillance tapes of the mafia, where the hard-charging former Essex County prosecutor was described as “the man the mob couldn’t buy.”

As the Washington Post recounted in Byrne’s 2018 obituary, he “cultivated a reputation as a no-nonsense, incorruptible public servant who put the interests of his state before himself … after an organized-crime figure he prosecuted in the 1960s, Simone ‘Sam the Plumber’ DeCavalcante, called him a ‘Boy Scout’ and added, ‘You can’t get to him. He can’t be bought.'”

Perhaps it is hard to imagine now, in the post-“Sopranos” craze and our social-media obsession with all things Jersey-mobster as a source of state pride, just how that mob taint kneecapped the state’s image in the 1950s and 1960s.

A two-part series that ran in the September editions of LIFE Magazine in 1967, headlined “The Brazen Empire of Organized Crime,” captured New Jersey as a place the Cosa Nostra had corrupted at every level.

According to LIFE’s reporting, the mafia owned politicians, judges and even a high-ranking New Jersey state trooper who was getting $7,000 a month in bribes.

Byrne, who had initially run on a commitment not to raise taxes, introduced and enacted the state’s first income tax after the state’s highest court ruled that New Jersey’s reliance on the local property tax to fund education was unconstitutional.

In 1977, when Byrne signed the law that legalized gambling in Atlantic City, he said he wanted to ensure that the resort not fall into the “filthy hands” of organized crime. And so, under his administration, the Casino Control Commission was created to do just that.

But as former Philadelphia Inquirer investigative journalist, David Cay Johnston noted in his seminal book, “Temple of Chance: How America Inc. Bought Out Murder Inc. to Win Control of the Casino Business,” as New Jersey was building its regulatory fortress against the mob, the gaming industry was undergoing a radical transformation — from being the dominion of the mafia to that of Wall Street.

“The individual gamblers and their underworld bankers who built Las Vegas, and who escaped both jail and hitmen, began selling out two decades ago, replaced by a new generation of owners: corporations specializing in the business of risk. In the casino industry, America Inc. bought out Murder Inc.,” wrote Johnston in his 1992 book, informed by his years covering Atlantic City and the roller-coaster machinations of a brash tycoon named Donald Trump.

As Trump’s gambling empire grew, built on massive debt and on what the New York Times has recently reported as a breathtaking level of tax avoidance, New Jersey’s elected politicians and gaming regulators saw his continued success as central to the state’s economic development.

As former New York Times reporter Timothy O’Brien wrote in his 2005 book, “TrumpNation, The Art of Being the Donald,” while Trump “wasn’t passionate about Atlantic City, the town was certainly passionate about him. Over the years, New Jersey regulators and law enforcement officials had gone out of their way to accommodate the developer, and he used that welcome mat to forge a hammerlock on Atlantic City gambling”:

Though no one was supposed to own more than three of Atlantic City’s twelve casinos, Donald at one point was permitted to have four (and he purchased a fifth that had closed, so he could have extra hotel rooms on the city’s cramped boardwalk). Though regulators were supposed to strictly monitor the financial well-being of casinos and their owners, Donald was consistently given extra latitude to work through mounting money woes that left him teetering on the brink of personal bankruptcy.

Over the years, O’Brien, along with Johnston and the Village Voice columnist Wayne Barrett (who died in 2017), wrote extensively about how New Jersey regulators let Trump slide on required disclosures of relationships with organized crime figures and convicted felons, which, as they noted, should have prevented him from getting a casino license.

All three journalists contrasted how New Jersey’s Casino Control Commission denied the Hilton chain a gaming license for a hotel that the chain had already built with the way the agency appeared to enable Trump.

Trump had only had his first Atlantic City gaming license for a few years and owned half of what was then called Harrah’s at Trump Plaza, when, in April 1985, he closed a deal with Barron Hilton to buy the 624-room Atlantic City Hilton Hotel, which had yet to open.

That February, the Casino Control Commission had rejected Hilton’s application for a gaming license, because of his relationship with a Hollywood-based labor lawyer with alleged mafia ties. Hilton denied any mob links but sold out to Trump.

In the New York Times’ account of the game-changing Hilton transaction, someone named “John Baron, a vice-president of the Trump Organization” was quoted; years later it became clear that there was no such person. Baron was a pseudonym Trump used when speaking to the press.

By contrast, in Barrett’s 1992 book, “Trump: The Deals and the Downfall,” he documented that Trump failed to disclose to the CCC his longtime alliance with attorney Roy Cohn, the former chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Cohn also represented Carmine Galante and “Fat Tony” Salerno, two suspected Mafia chieftains, according to CNBC.

In 1972, on behalf of Donald Trump and his father Fred, Cohn countersued the U.S. Department of Justice after the federal government sued the Trumps for race-based housing discrimination. Twenty months later, the Trumps reached a settlement which required they take out newspaper ads to inform prospective minority tenants that they were entitled under the law to an equal opportunity to rent a Trump apartment.

In the course of his career, Cohn was indicted four times on corruption charges. He was acquitted three times and the fourth case ended in a mistrial. In 1986, he was disbarred for unethical conduct.

In March 2016, Fast Company published an article entitled, “State Investigative Report on Trump Shows the Complexity of Alleged Mob Ties,” based on a 41-page 1992 investigative report produced by New Jersey’s Division of Gaming Enforcement, which offers a detailed account of the agency’s follow-up on 15 allegations contained in Barrett’s book.

While the article’s subtitle — “NJ Regulators Investigated Allegations and decided not to take further action and Trump may have even helped mob fighter in NYC” — suggests some ambiguity regarding Trump’s mafia links, the primary document from the DGE confirms that Trump failed to make several disclosures, any one of which could have disqualified him.

“A review of the Division’s report to the [Casino Control] Commission on the background of Donald Trump and Trump Plaza Corporation failed to reveal any background information regarding Roy Cohn,” the report stated.

The investigators noted that, back in 1981, the agency flagged Cohn’s defense of the Trumps in their DOJ racial discrimination suit, but noted Trump “failed to disclose” the litigation.

Similarly, the DGE concluded that Trump had failed to disclose litigation involving his employment, in 1980, of 200 undocumented Polish immigrants who had, according to the New York Times, “worked in 12-hour shifts, without gloves, hard hats or masks, to demolish the Bonwit Teller building on Fifth Avenue, where the 58-story, golden-hued Trump Tower now stands.”

Trump was accused of cheating the workers out of their pay and shortchanging payments into a union pension fund. He litigated the case all the way to 1998, when he settled it for $1.375 million. That settlement remained under seal until 2017, when Time Inc. and the Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press finally prevailed in their 2016 motion to have it unsealed.

Notably, there are the instances where the Casino Control Commission was fully aware that Trump had violated the rules but voted to retroactively sign off on it. One example came in 1991, when the commission voted 4-0 to allow Fred Trump “to serve as a source of financing for his son” after Fred bought $3.5 million worth of chips at the Trump Castle and never redeemed them, giving the casino a cash infusion.

O’Brien writes in TrumpNation that as “another big Castle payment approached in December 1990, promising to send Donald into personal and corporate bankruptcy,” his father Fred “flouted state casino regulations” with the multi-million-dollar chip purchase Donald “needed to get past the hump.”

The Casino Control Commission fined Trump’s casino $30,000.

“The regulators came up with easy devices to avoid ever asking questions that would require them to even consider revoking a license,” David Cay Johnston wrote in a recent email exchange. “When Trump became financially unstable — which means the state should receive the casinos and appoint a temporary overseer — he threatened to make them look bad for going after a job creator.”

Public service and private fortune

Former U.S. Sen. Robert Torricelli, a Democrat whose political ascendancy from the House of Representatives paralleled Trump’s rise in prominence, said that he and the developer “were social friends” who “spent time together” as Trump “became an important business, economic and political force in the state.”

In a recent telephone interview, Torricelli said he believed that Trump actually has deeper political roots in New Jersey than in New York, his native state. “I actually think Donald has more political relations in New Jersey than New York. He had political problems in New York because of his real estate development and [former New York City mayor] Ed Koch, primarily.”

Throughout his career, Torricelli was proud to block and tackle for Trump and the casino industry, which rewarded his advocacy with campaign donations.

Both Trump and Torricelli were fierce opponents of Native American gaming, arguing that it historically had been infiltrated by the mafia and would undermine “taxpaying businessmen” like Trump.

“The Indians don’t have to pay tax,” Trump told a House subcommittee in 1993. “Nobody’s more for the Indians than Donald Trump. …You ask about competing. I love to compete … but I like to compete on an equal footing. I’m competing and paying hundreds of millions of dollars in tax.”

In 1993, New Jersey Monthly reported that Torricelli had “emerged as one of Washington’s leading opponents of the spread of Indian casinos” and had “introduced legislation in Congress that will make it impossible for Indian casinos to open in New Jersey, unless the Indians wish to build in Atlantic City” — which was always unlikely.

According to the magazine, Torricelli argued the tribes “not only enjoy a competitive advantage over the Trumps of the world — tribes are not taxed on the profits from casinos — but also are not subject to the stringent background checks and audits to which Atlantic City casino owners must submit.”

In his 1996 Senate campaign, Torricelli likened his support to gaming to the way politicians from Texas embraced the oil industry. “It’s time in New Jersey that we all understand that the gaming industry, the people who work in the industry and the future of Atlantic City is critical to every person who lives in New Jersey,” Torricelli told an Atlantic City crowd, the New York Times reported.

In our interview, Torricelli said he had no regrets about his support for Trump and his Atlantic City interests over the years. “Donald Trump was a major employer in New Jersey, and enormous investor,” he said. “He made considerable business mistakes, but he also paid salaries that created a middle-class life for tens if not hundreds of thousands of people in New Jersey for many years.”

The former senator conceded that New Jersey’s oversight of Trump was too lax.

“Trump became the classic case of ‘too big to fail,'” said Torricelli. “His empire was never built on a firm financial ground. He was always problematic and the state always feared his failure and that created leverage [for Trump]. … They allowed him to self-destruct. It would have been a better favor to Donald Trump and the state of New Jersey had the regulations been stricter, and he certainly should not have been permitted to develop excess capacity, which weakened every other casino in Atlantic City.”

Torricelli likened Atlantic City to a “golden cow” that New Jersey took “for everything that it was worth and invested nothing back,” while “other states recognized the opportunity and ended up taking our gaming dollars, and tens of thousands of employees suffered, and the New Jersey budget suffered. It was a complete lack of leadership.”

Local knowledge

From the beginning, Trump had the benefit of his relationships with the McGahns of Atlantic County — a family of Democratic power brokers who championed bringing casino gambling to Atlantic City and were critical to Trump’s success in laying the foundations for his casino empire.

Patrick “Piano-Wire Paddy” McGahn was a local attorney and Korean War Marine Corps veteran, who helped Trump secure air rights along the crowded boardwalk and acted as Trump’s liaison with local politicians, according to Johnston’s book “Temple of Chance.”

His brother, Dr. Joseph Leo McGahn, was an obstetrician who, as a Democratic state senator, “paved the way for Atlantic City’s gambling industry in the 1970s,” according to his New York Times obituary. He served two terms in the State Senate, from 1972 to 1978, and “was the principal architect of the legislation that opened the gates for the casino industry, with its aim of economic revival for Atlantic City,” which supposedly included “the toughest casino regulations in the world.” He was an emergency room physician at the Atlantic City Medical Center until 1984, after which he became medical director at Resorts International in Atlantic City, retiring in 1989.

(Donald McGahn, Trump’s former White House counsel, was born in Atlantic City and is a nephew of the two McGahn brothers.)

There were also key figures, including a former governor and a former Atlantic County prosecutor, as well as some of the original state casino regulators, who would all lend their names and prestige to Trump’s enterprise.

In 2005, former Gov. Jim Florio joined the board of directors of Trump Entertainment Resorts Inc. (TER), where he served for two years, as Florio confirmed during a recent telephone interview.

The year before, Trump Hotels Casino Resorts (THCR) and its subsidiaries had filed for bankruptcy; and in 2005, “all existing debt and equity securities of THCR were exchanged for new securities of TER, pursuant to the Debtors’ Plan of Reorganization,” according to SEC documents.

Florio said he was approached by two lawyers who worked for Trump to add his name to the roster of directors. He was clear to distinguish that he had never “worked for” Trump directly, but rather had joined the board of directors of his publicly-traded company.

“That’s when I learned about him and that’s why nothing that’s happened has surprised me,” Florio said. “He’s a strange man that has all kind of head problems. It was a learning experience, and two years serving on his board taught me about him and a lot about the gaming industry.”

Also serving with Florio on the Trump Entertainment board was Don M. Thomas, who had served as a commissioner and acting chairman on the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority (from 1985 to 1987) and the Casino Control Commission (from 1980 to 1984). According to SEC filings, Thomas had previously served on the THCR board, Trump’s earlier corporate entity, since 1995.

Joseph A. Fusco was listed in the same filing as “the Executive Vice President of Government Relations & Regulatory Affairs of each of THCR, THCR Holdings and Trump AC since June 1996, and of TCS from July 1996 until December 2000.” Fusco had previously served as “Atlantic County Prosecutor, a Gubernatorial appointment from April 1981 to July 1985, and as Special Counsel for Licensing for the CCC from the inception of that agency in September 1977 to March 1981,” according to SEC filings.

When asked if he thought New Jersey should have any regrets for facilitating Trump’s global prominence, Florio said that, in his view, Trump “did not achieve success in New Jersey.” Based on his first-hand experience with Trump, the former governor said, he “was astounded” that Trump became president.

“He’s a self-promoter, and he would have promoted himself in any respect,” Florio said. “New Jersey paid a price for him coming to New Jersey. Retrospectively, it was not a good move for New Jersey.”

Florio, who served as New Jersey governor from 1990 to 1994, after eight terms in Congress representing Camden and the Philadelphia suburbs, said that New Jersey’s “biggest problem” with its gaming industry was self-inflicted: the Atlantic City market was oversaturated after regulators approved a dozen casinos at once.

“We had a study done when I was governor that said New Jersey only had room and capacity, at most, for nine casinos,” he said. “The hype just got out of proportion, and therefore they approved all those players to come in without thinking about what the market could sustain. So, in that respect, New Jersey was at fault.”

In retrospect, the most apt phrase to explain the Atlantic City chapter of Donald Trump’s career would be “regulatory capture,” defined by the Intelligent Economist as

a failure of normal government functions in which regulatory agencies become subservient to the industries they are meant to be monitoring and regulating. In these cases, the regulatory bodies end up furthering the (typically economically-motivated) goals and concerns of special interest groups, rather than the public — so the interests of the majority of society are neglected in favor of the wealthy.

Perhaps that sounds familiar to those who have paid attention to the Trump administration. Perhaps this election will ensure that Atlantic City’s fate will not become the nation’s.

Mark Meadows apparently used taxpayer funds to help wife’s friend raise campaign cash

White House chief of staff Mark Meadows appears to have tapped into federal resources to help a friend of his wife’s raise money for her campaign to fill his congressional seat, government records show.

The revelation sharpens questions that election law experts raised in Salon’s previous report on Meadows’ possible use of tens of thousands of dollars in campaign funds for personal expenses after announcing he would not seek re-election, a crime that earned prison time for former Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif.

As Salon previously reported, Meadows’ congressional campaign committee spent $312 on food and $15 for parking fees on Jan. 21 of this year at the Grove Park Inn & Resort in North Carolina. However, Meadows himself was in Washington that day, where he spoke with press during a break in President Trump’s Senate impeachment trial.

Meadows’ wife, Debbie, however, was on the last day of a four-day swing through Meadows’ former district in western North Carolina, holding a series of fundraisers for her friend, Lynda Bennett, a candidate for the seat that Meadows had recently announced he would leave.

A Bennett campaign invitation from the time says that Debbie Meadows and Bennett would visit North Asheville, Forest City, Waynesville, Rutherfordton, Biltmore Forest and Hendersonville, all communities in the district. On the 21st they hit Gregory’s Original in Rutherfordton, followed by a private event in Biltmore Forest and then the Hendersonville Country Club.

Curiously, the Bennett campaign’s Federal Election Commission filings disclose no lodging, meal, mileage or event expenses during Debbie Meadows’ junket, even though the Bennett campaign’s invite said that food and beverages would be served at all the events.

The Bennett campaign also received no contributions from anyone over those four days of a supposed fundraising trip, with the exception of Mark Kolokotrones, a California-based financier and Heritage Foundation member, who maxed out to Bennett’s primary and general election funds on Jan. 21.

Congressional records show that a field representative for Mark Meadows’ congressional office, Jordan Whisnant, reported $155.25 in auto mileage expenses for Jan. 17 through Jan. 22 — funds taken out of Meadows’ taxpayer-funded congressional Members’ Representational Allowance (MRA). Whisnant, a federal employee, logged a total of 310.5 miles over the five-day period of with Debbie Meadows’ district visit. Whisnant also charged a $21 meal on Jan. 22, the day after the tour ended.

“It’s a violation of both House Ethics and House Administration Committee rules to use MRA funds for campaign purposes,” Brett Kappel, a top government ethics expert and attorney at Harmon Curran, told Salon. “Obviously Meadows is now out of the reach of the House Ethics Committee, but his staffers (who are still manning the office for the 11th congressional district of North Carolina under the supervision of the Clerk of the House) could be on the hook if they knew about or participated in this misappropriation of congressional funds.”

The House Ethics Committee did not immediately reply to Salon’s request for comment.

Neither Mark nor Debbie Meadows personally contributed to Lynda Bennett’s campaign. But Debbie Meadows and Polly Jordan, the wife of Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican and friend of the Meadowses, held another round of events with Bennett in North Carolina in the first week of February. Whisnant logged another $125 in auto mileage around that time.

The Meadows campaign also paid aide Henry Mitchell more than $5,000 for “field representative mileage” in five installments between January and March — including $1,592 for that first week of February.

“There’s still campaign work that can be done as a campaign winds down. It’s not out of the ordinary to keep someone around to help out,” Libowitz said of those expenses. “But at 58 cents a mile, back-of-the-envelope math has it at 900 miles some weeks. That’s a ton of driving.”

It’s not clear why Mitchell was putting on so many miles, or where. Around that time, however, Bennett’s fundraising had flagged. At the same time, the Republican primary to replace Meadows had begun to grow chaotic, with Bennett facing a number of candidates, some to her right.

FEC filings show that as Bennett’s fundraising slipped, Meadows began channeling money to her campaign through two of his other groups: his leadership PAC, Your Voice Counts; and his PAC, the House Freedom Fund.

Your Voice Counts gave $848.56 to the Bennett campaign on Feb. 4, the day after the early February events featuring Debbie Meadows and Polly Jordan, according to federal filings, and an even $2,000 on April 15, two weeks after Meadows officially resigned from Congress to join the White House, records show.

The House Freedom Fund contributed significantly more money, funneling more than $100,000 to Bennett’s campaign — nearly 20% of her total fundraising haul, according to FEC records. Her bid for the House also received $22,600 from the Senate Conservatives Fund, former South Carolina senator Jim DeMint’s PAC.

The Meadows campaign itself reported giving $4,000 to Bennett’s campaign, half of it for the Republican primary and half for the general election. The donations came on March 5, the day after Trump announced Meadows would become White House chief of staff.

“Since the Meadows campaign maxed out to Bennett, if Meadows covered any additional expenses, they would add up to excessive in-kind contributions to the Bennett campaign,” Kappel told Salon. “But expenses to pay staff, consultants or vendors for work that was done for the Meadows committee — as opposed to the Bennett campaign — would be permissible.”

In the end, Meadows’ efforts were not enough for Bennett, who lost her June 23 primary to pro-Trump political newcomer Madison Cawthorn. That same day, however, the Meadows campaign — which had long since closed up shop, with Meadows three months into his White House tenure — reported a $2,300 payment to Henry Mitchell, the aforementioned field representative, for “management consulting.”

One week later, on the last day of the Meadows’ campaign’s official existence, it reported a $600 expense at a Safeway grocery store. Campaigns are prohibited by law from spending money on personal expenses, including meals and groceries.

***

Republican operatives in North Carolina speculated from the beginning that Meadows was trying to tip the scales in his district in Bennett’s favor, according to Politico, and observers have noted a number of coincidences. Bennett announced her candidacy on Dec. 19, 2019, just hours after Meadows first shared the news of his retirement — the day before the filing deadline to run for Congress, and two days after the deadline that prevents state officeholders from changing elections.

Further, the Meadows and Bennett campaigns, along with Right Women PAC, founded by Debbie Meadows, are the only three political committees in the U.S. to report payments to a company called Tower Digital. That company was founded by Meadows’ brother, who seems to have registered the Bennett campaign’s web domain name in October 2019, two months before Meadows announced he would not seek re-election.

Perhaps most telling, Debbie Meadows — who is believed to have a personal connection Trump after she stood by him in the wake of the “Access Hollywood” revelations in the waning days of the 2016 election — personally called the president to solicit his endorsement for Bennett, which he provided on June 4. Cawthorn’s primary victory was a rare loss for a Trump endorsee, and at least a minor black eye for the president.

Meadows seems to have moved on. His most recent filing shows that on Oct. 6, he gave $50,000 to his wife’s PAC, Right Women. She transferred $5,000 to Cawthorn’s campaign that same day.

The next day, however, Right Women spent $290 on food and beverage at the White House. On Sept. 4, the PAC dropped about twice that amount at the exclusive in-house restaurant. Normally the White House mess is strictly reserved for high-level officials such as cabinet members and other dignitaries, but the president’s chief of staff would have no problem getting in.

On Twitter, bots spread conspiracy theories and QAnon talking points

Americans who seek political insight and information on Twitter should know how much of what they are seeing is the result of automated propaganda campaigns.

Nearly four years after my collaborators and I revealed how automated Twitter accounts were distorting online election discussions in 2016, the situation appears to be no better. That’s despite the efforts of policymakers, technology companies and even the public to root out disinformation campaigns on social media.

In our latest study, we collected 240 million election-related tweets mentioning presidential candidates and election-related keywords, posted between June 20 and Sept. 9, 2020. We looked for activity from automated (or bot) accounts, and the spread of distorted or conspiracy theory narratives.

We learned that on Twitter, many conspiracy theories, including QAnon, may not be quite as popular among real people as media reports indicate. But automation can significantly increase the distribution of these ideas, inflating their power by reaching unsuspecting users who may be drawn in not by posts from their fellow humans, but from bots programmed to spread the word.

Bots amplify conspiracy theories

Typically, bots are created by people or groups who want to amplify certain ideas or points of view. We found that bots are roughly equally active in online discussions of both right-wing and left-wing perspectives, making up about 5% of the Twitter accounts active in those threads.

Bots appear to thrive in political groups discussing conspiracy theories, making up nearly 13% of the accounts tweeting or retweeting posts with conspiracy theory-related hashtags and keywords.

Then we looked more closely at three major categories of conspiracies. One was a category of alleged scandals described using the suffix “-gate,” such as “Pizzagate” and “Obamagate.” The second was COVID-19-related political conspiracies, such as biased claims that the virus was deliberately spread by China or that it could be spread via products imported from China. The third was the QAnon movement, which has been called a “collective delusion” and a “virtual cult.”

These three categories overlap: Accounts tweeting about material in one of them were likely to also tweet about material in at least one of the others.

The link to right-wing media

We found that the accounts that are prone to share conspiratorial narratives are significantly more likely than nonconspirator accounts to tweet links to, or retweet posts from, right-leaning media such as One America News Network, Infowars and Breitbart.

[Deep knowledge, daily. Sign up for The Conversation’s newsletter.]

Bots play an important role as well: More than 20% of the accounts sharing content from those hyperpartisan platforms are bots. And most of those accounts also distribute conspiracy-related content.

Twitter has recently tried to limit the spread of QAnon and other conspiracy theories on its site. But that may not be enough to stem the tide. To contribute to the global effort against social media manipulation, we have publicly released the dataset used in our work to assist future studies.

Emilio Ferrara, Associate Professor of Computer Science; USC Viterbi School of Engineering; Associate Professor of Communication, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism

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

Kavanaugh parrots Trump mail-in ballot lies as Supreme Court bars extension of Wisconsin deadline

The U.S. Supreme Court late Monday delivered a victory for the Republican Party by barring the crucial battleground state of Wisconsin from extending its Election Day deadline for the arrival of absentee ballots amid the pandemic, with Justice Brett Kavanaugh issuing an ominous concurring opinion that echoes President Donald Trump’s false narrative on mail-in voting.

The 5-3 decision along ideological lines — with the court’s five conservatives in the majority — blocked a request by Wisconsin Democrats and voting rights groups to revive a federal judge’s ruling from last month that would have allowed mail-in ballots to be counted if postmarked by Election Day and received by Nov. 9, a six-day extension of the current deadline of Nov. 3 at 8:00 pm.

Wisconsin Republicans quickly appealed the order, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit blocked the ruling earlier this month.

In raising alarm about the potential consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Wisconsin’s strict Election Day deadline as ongoing mail delays heighten fears that many ballots could arrive late, legal analysts pointed with particular dismay at the reasoning of Kavanaugh, characterizing the right-wing justice’s 18-page opinion (pdf) as a blaring signal of his willingness to abet a possible attempt by Trump to stop the counting of valid absentee ballots.

“For important reasons, most states, including Wisconsin, require absentee ballots to be received by Election Day, not just mailed by Election Day,” Kavanaugh wrote. “Those states want to avoid the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after Election Day and potentially flip the results of an election. And those states also want to be able to definitively announce the results of the election on Election Night, or as soon as possible thereafter.”

Kavanaugh is announcing to the world that if it will help Trump win he will join a decision to not count votes https://t.co/i385I4rHbY

— Adam Serwer 🍝 (@AdamSerwer) October 27, 2020

This is chilling, from Justice Kavanaugh in the Wisconsin voting rights case:

“If the apparent winner the morning after the election ends up losing due to late-arriving ballots, charges of a rigged election could explode.”

He’s down to steal this thing.

— Elie Honig (@eliehonig) October 27, 2020

Writing for Slate, court reporter Mark Joseph Stern argued that “it is genuinely alarming that the justice cast these aspersions on late-arriving ballots,” noting that at least 18 states and the District of Columbia count ballots that arrive after Election Day.

“And, in these states, there is no result to ‘flip’ because there is no result to overturn until all valid ballots are counted,” Stern wrote. “Further, George W. Bush’s 2000 election legal team — which included [newly confirmed Justice Amy Coney] Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Roberts — argued during that contested election that ballots arriving late and without postmarks, which were thought to benefit Bush, must be counted in Florida.”

“Whatever the reasons behind Kavanaugh’s performance on Monday,” Stern continued, “he has given the nation another legitimate reason to fear that this election may end with a Bush v. Gore–like disaster for American democracy, but even worse than the original.”

Just minutes after the Supreme Court issued its ruling Monday night, Trump falsely tweeted that there are “big problems and discrepancies with Mail In Ballots all over the USA.”

“Must have final total on November 3rd,” Trump added. Twitter flagged the president’s post as misleading and observers hastened to point out that the final vote count is never complete and final by Election Night.

Following the Supreme Court’s ruling and Trump’s tweet, Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., first vice chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, urged the public to “forget the polls” showing Democratic nominee Joe Biden with a lead over the incumbent president.

“We need overwhelming turnout to overcome a looming constitutional crisis,” Khanna said.

Wilbur Ross sat on board of Chinese joint venture — while running Trump’s trade war: report

On Thursday, Foreign Policy reported that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross remained on the board of a Chinese joint venture — even while he was tasked with overseeing President Donald Trump’s trade war.

“In Chinese corporate documents obtained by Foreign Policy, Ross is listed as serving on the board of a Chinese joint venture until January 2019 — nearly two years into his term as commerce secretary,” reported Isaac Stone Fish. “That joint venture, now called Huaneng Invesco WLR (Beijing) Investment Fund Management Co., is an investment partnership formed in September 2008 between Huaneng Capital Services, the U.S. management company Invesco, and a firm Ross founded, WL Ross & Co. Huaneng Capital Services is an arm of China Huaneng Group, a major state-owned power producer.”

This means he was on the board during the tariff fight between the U.S. and China in 2018, as Trump levied more and more taxes on importers bringing Chinese goods into the U.S., and China retaliated with tariffs of their own.

“The documents correspond to the information found on Chinese corporate data sites, such as Qichacha and Qixinbao, including the dates of board membership,” said the report. “The documents don’t say if Ross was paid for his board seat or whether there is any current financial relationship between Ross and the joint venture. It’s also unclear if Ross knew that he remained on the board seat: The more recent documents don’t include the signatures or seals of the individual board members. That Chinese documents state Ross was on the board of a Chinese joint venture until 2019 has not been previously reported.”

Ross, a billionaire financier, has come under fire for a series of revelations about investments that could conflict with his government duties.

Democrats have dreamed of Texas going blue. An election forecaster just called the race a “toss up”

With less than one week until Election Day and an unprecedented number of early votes already cast, President Donald Trump’s campaign appears to be faltering in more states. And the most consequential slip seems to be underway in the historically unassailable conservative stronghold of Texas — an electoral prize Democrats have eyed for years. On Wednesday, the influential Cook Political Report shifted the deep red state towards Democratic nominee Joe Biden, from “lean Republican” to “toss-up.”

While unprecedented, the shift should not come as a surprise given current polling in the state, as well as its leftward voting trends over the last few years, according to Cook’s analysis. Indeed, Texas Republicans themselves appear jittery about the prospect, going to lengths to try to skew the electorate in their favor. If Texas turns blue, it would seal a Biden victory and preclude a deluge of Republican litigation, which experts anticipate would follow a tight result.

“Recent polling in the state — both public and private — shows a 2-4 point race,” Cook election analyst Amy Walter writes. “That’s pretty much in line with the hotly contested 2018 Senate race in the state where [Republican] Sen. Ted Cruz narrowly defeated [Democrat] Rep. Beto O’Rourke 51% to 48%.”

The shift comes amid data that shows the Lone Star State far and away leads the nation in early voting. As of Oct. 28, Texas had already seen more than 8 million votes cast. That’s 90% of the state’s total 2016 electorate, according to statistics compiled by the U.S. Elections Project at the University of Florida. Walter points out that this fact, combined with an influx of new voters, “adds a level of uncertainty” to their typical electoral equation for the state.

Texas Republicans have indicated they share that unsteadiness.

“Governor Greg Abbott has gone to extreme lengths to suppress voting, canceling the plans of its most populous counties to offer convenient drop boxes for voters to return their ballots,” Corey Goldstone, spokesperson for the Campaign Legal Center, a group which advocates for fair elections, previously told Salon, referring to Abbott’s controversial rule still working its way through the courts. “Rather than letting the counties go through with their plans, the governor has insisted on only one dropbox per county. This is voter suppression in its simplest form.”

The Campaign Legal Center has sued the state over the rule.

Despite the dirty fight, Democratic leaders have pressed the Biden campaign and outside political groups to throw more resources at what once appeared a long-shot. O’Rourke argues that a Biden win in Texas obviates any debate about the national results, writing in a Washington Post op-ed earlier this month that the election would be decided “before Trump’s lawyers can get through the courtroom doors.”

“Thanks to Republican efforts to suppress voter turnout, Texas did not expand vote by mail in midst of a global pandemic. As a result, we will know the winner of the Texas presidential election on election night,” O’Rourke wrote. “If Texas turns blue that night and its 38 electoral votes go to Biden, then Trump would have no viable path to victory, and the election would be over that night before Trump’s lawyers can get through the courtroom doors to stop the vote counts in other states.”

If Biden takes Texas — along with other Democratic-favored states like Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico and Virginia — he could still afford to lose Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin combined. Trump, meanwhile, has no viable path to victory without Texas.

Indeed, Trump’s chances of winning Texas are now lower than other swing states, Cook says.

“At this point, Ohio and Maine’s 2nd District are probably the most promising for Trump, followed by Texas and Iowa,” Walter writes.

But even if Trump were to add those states to the ones he already has a lock on, he’d only have 188 electoral votes — still 82 shy of the magic 270. Of Cook’s toss-ups, the site gives Biden a slight lead in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina.

Trump now has 20 safe states worth a combined 125 electoral votes, Cook projects. Biden, on the other hand, has 24 states in his column, worth 290 electoral votes — 20 more than he needs.

With such a map, Trump would need to win all of Cook’s “toss up” states: Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Maine’s 2nd District, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas. He would then need to add at least two of the seven states which Cook ranks “lean Democrat”: Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Arizona poses the best opportunity, where Biden holds a small but steady 3-point lead Walter says. Still, Trump would need to eat into the former vice president’s appeal with key voters in suburban Phoenix, a narrow prospect in Walter’s view.

The Trump campaign has staged several rallies in Pennsylvania, which it sees as one bright spot on the map. FiveThirtyEight’s polling average of the state has tightened, but Biden still leads by 5 points. Walter’s analysis suggests that Biden has built on Clinton’s margins in the suburbs, while Trump has slipped in regions which delivered the state for him in 2016 by a razor-thin 44,292 votes.

Biden does not need to win Texas, though the possibility is no longer a stretch. In concluding, Walter notes that skepticism in the recent past appears to have led pollsters to underestimate that possibility: A Cook analysis of 2016 and 2018 polling errors found that polls in the American Southwest “undershot Democrats’ final margin in 17 of 19 cases, including by an average of 1.4 points in 2016 and 4.2 points in 2018.”

Clarence Thomas’ wife amplifies “unsubstantiated claims of corruption by Joe Biden”: report

When President George H.W. Bush, with the help of the U.S. Senate, replaced Justice Thurgood Marshall with Justice Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court in 1991, a common talking point among Republicans was that Bush showed his social conscience by picking another African-American. But Bush 41 replaced a liberal justice with one of the most far-right social conservatives the High Court has had in the last 30 years — and Justice Thomas’ wife, Republican activist Ginni Thomas, is equally far to the right. Recently, Ginny Thomas has been going out of her way to smear former Vice President Joe Biden, but according to the Associated Press, she hasn’t bothered to vet her information.

The AP’s Mark Sherman explains, “The wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is using her Facebook page to amplify unsubstantiated claims of corruption by Joe Biden. Ginni Thomas, a long-time conservative activist, asked her more than 10,000 followers Monday to consider sharing a link focused on alleged corruption by the Democratic nominee for president and his son, Hunter, as well as claims that social media companies are censoring reports about the Bidens.”

Ginni Thomas is not only far-right — she is also big on conspiracy theories. Sherman notes that on October 10, she posted, “More citizens should KNOW about the biggest scandal and the evidence now piling up! #ObamaGate.” And four days later on October 14, she went after Democratic billionaire George Soros — a favorite target of talk radio host Alex Jones and other conspiracy theorists — and posted, “Who is really running the Democrat Party? The Soros family.”

Last week, Sherman notes, she posted a video featuring Rudy Giuliani — President Donald Trump’s personal attorney and the former mayor of New York City — with the headline, “The Biden Crime Family: How They Made Millions.”

Sherman observes, “Other spouses of justices also have their own professional identities, but (Ginni) Thomas is the only one whose work involves partisan politics that sometimes butts up against her husband’s job. Clarence Thomas is the longest-serving current justice, having joined the Court in 1991, and he administered the oath at the swearing in of new Justice Amy Coney Barrett on Monday evening.”

Aides have intervened to stop Trump from calling up Bill Barr to demand Hunter Biden probe: report

Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani has been pressing for Attorney General Bill Barr to publicly announce a probe of Hunter Biden — but President Donald Trump’s aides are reportedly pushing the president against giving his attorney general direct orders to investigate his political rival’s son.

The Daily Beast reports that aides have intervened to stop Trump from calling up Barr and demanding a Hunter Biden investigation.

“According to two individuals with knowledge of the matter, the president has been counseled by some senior aides that he should avoid picking up the phone and telling Barr directly that the Justice Department needs to open a new investigation into the Bidens prior to the election, arguing that if such a call leaked, it would cause more political headaches than it’s worth,” the publication writes.

The president has reluctantly agreed to take this advice for the time being, one source tells The Daily Beast, and the president is believed to have so far restrained himself from talking directly with Barr about Hunter Biden.

Trump was impeached last year after he pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to publicly announce an investigation into the Bidens, and even went so far as to withhold military aid from the country during the pressure campaign.

Jerry Falwell Jr. sues Liberty University for “damage to his reputation”: report

Former Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. is suing the evangelical college for forcing him to resign in the wake of a stream of scandals, NBC News reports.

“We attempted to meet several times with the Liberty University Board of Trustees Executive Committee but were unsuccessful in doing so. Thus, we were forced to seek remedy for Mr. Falwell’s ongoing injuries and damage to his reputation through the court,” Falwell’s lawyer Robert Raskopf said in a statement.

Falwell made headlines after a former hotel pool attendant-turned-business partner, Giancarlo Granda, 29, told Reuters that he had an affair with Falwell’s wife, which started in 2012, when he was 20, and ended in 2018.

Commerce secretary was on board of Chinese joint venture while running Trump’s trade war: report

Ross, a billionaire financier, has come under fire for a series of revelations about investments that could conflict with his government duties.

Embattled Republican Sen. David Perdue pulls out of final debate in Georgia

On Thursday, Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) withdrew from the third and final debate of his Senate race.

His Democratic opponent, Jon Ossoff, condemned him over the news.

BREAKING: Senator Perdue just cancelled our final debate.

At last night's debate, millions saw that Perdue had no answers when I called him out on his record of blatant corruption, widespread disease, and economic devastation.

Shame on you, Senator.

— Jon Ossoff (@ossoff) October 29, 2020

According to Decision Desk HQ analyst Niles Francis, Perdue will instead travel to Rome, Georgia, at the same time that President Donald Trump will be holding a rally.

🚨 #BREAKING: GOP Sen. @Perduesenate has withdrawn from a @wsbtv #GASen debate. Scheduled for Sunday, it was set to be his third and final faceoff with his Dem rival, @ossoff. He will instead attend be in Rome, GA, where President Trump will be holding a rally. #gapol

— Niles Francis (@NilesGApol) October 29, 2020

The decision comes after the second debate produced viral clips of Ossoff condemning Perdue as a “crook.” It also comes after Fox News spent months speculating whether Biden would be brave enough to face presidential debates, only for Trump himself to pull out of one of them.

“City So Real” is the must-watch series about Chicago in all of its separate and unequal glory

A Chicagoan’s hometown pride is uniquely stalwart. No matter where we move to or how long we’re transplanted in that new place, many of us still defend the city’s grand institutions like the Cubs, deep dish pizza and hot dogs dressed with mustard, onions, celery salt, neon green relish, a pickle spear and fresh tomatoes. (Ketchup is for heathens.)

More than a few yearn for some part of that sweet home even if we’re glad to have left it and have no plans to return, informed by the knowledge that for all of the greatness life in that city grants to those living there, there’s even more we’re glad to have left behind.

Unless you understand all that, the specific appeal of the Nat Geo/Hulu series “City So Real” might escape you or any viewer who hasn’t lived there or a place like it – which is to say, a multicultural urban quilt comprised of worlds within neighborhoods, separate and unequal.

Documentary filmmaker Steve James examines city’s entrenched socioeconomic inequality in his extraordinary Starz series “America to Me,” although in that project James and his team filter the experience through a neighborhood high school that sits at the crossroads of a wealthy white area and a poorer Black neighborhood.

In contract, “City So Real” is a panoramic view designed to convey the massiveness of Chicago on a grand scale, and while the backbone of the plot is built around the 2019 mayoral election it’s also an experiential tour through an American city whose identity is changing even as many aspects of its identity remain unchanged.

This refers to the charming parts and the hideous ones. Chicago is the home to sports dynasties and longtime beloved losers, to a jewel of a skyline, to a lakefront that on a warm summer day glimmers with the glory of a sea. But it is also highly segregated, racist and an example of the widening chasm between rich and poor, exacerbated by political corruption that’s hastening gentrification and pushing long-term residents out of its heart.

James tells the story of Chicago as it is through the voices of the people who live there, bouncing between the North, South and West Sides – Lake Michigan is East – and following the parallel chronologies of the election and the murder of Laquan McDonald, a teenager shot 16 times by a Chicago police officer. A number of the 17 candidates seeking election lead their own subplots, but so do working people and power brokers.

The camera takes viewers into the fancy places and private dinners where longtime movers with the city’s vaunted political machine court the donor class and into neighborhoods where characters possessing big reputations but less sizable bank accounts do what they can to break into the game.

In this respect its five episodes behave as a case study in the dirtiness of politics and the undaunted hope of upstarts and longshots who do what they can to interrupt the cycle. Mayoral candidate Garry McCarthy describes the political process as “anointing” a mayor as opposed to electing one, invoking a famous phrase: The Chicago Way. He says this with a note of frustration even though as the former police superintendent fired for mishandling the McDonald case, he was a beneficiary of that way.

The eventual ascent of Lori Lightfoot to the Mayor’s office, depicted throughout the series, show that it’s possible to break into exclusive and exclusionary political systems – although the finale, which revisits many of the subjects seen in the first four episodes in the wake of the pandemic, shows the other side of being a politician who lacks deep connections.

Where “City So Real” comes alive is in the scenes that depict how similar a city’s population in when it comes to what we love about where we live – our devotion to sports teams, the social cohesion offered by our local gathering places. We see how similar Halloween looks like in mostly white Portage Park on the Northside and integrated but majority Black Hyde Park on the South Side and Pilsen, a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood on the lower West Side. The only difference is that all the children on the North Side are white, and the Hyde Park kids are Black. Pilsen, meanwhile, celebrates with a parade featuring indigenous dancers and Day of the Dead regalia.

These cinematic excursions running parallel to the dueling narratives of justice system corruption and the mayoral race allow “City So Real” to function as a chronicle of how America fails to process its race and class relations in general. But they can be incredibly depressing (if not at all surprising) to witness. For instance, while demonstrations surrounding the prosecution of Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke, the cop that fatally shot McDonald, encapsulate the furor of the city’s Black community, James talks to blissed-out North Siders who are barely even aware of who Laquan McDonald is or what happened. They smile kindly for the camera and admit they’re not really into news.

Putting a sharper point on this notion of several disparate Americas contained in one city James contrasts two barbershop experiences: Sideline Studio in the South Shore Community versus Joe’s Street in largely white Bridgeport.

At Sideline customers have loud, impassioned discussions about systemic racism, and its owner even slaps an incredibly offensive and incendiary label on a customer who is waiting to get a cut. But everyone takes everything in stride – the man, a post office worker chided for working within the same system that has its boot on the neck of Black people nationwide, sits down in the shop owner’s chair and gets his head done up right.

Then we cut to Joe’s Street, where the regulars aren’t bothered about anything and only obliquely reference minorities. Later on in the post-COVID episode of “City So Real,” in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, one of Joe’s genial regulars gruffly offers he’s not surprised by the riots, since that’s what always happens “when one of ‘them'” gets killed. Moments later another customer pops off with a rant that skips coded language and leaps straight to the epithets. (It bears mentioning since he’s filming this exchange that James is white.)

This approach could make “City So Real” seem scattershot to viewers accustomed to concise, narrow and linear stories meant to evoke a city. This isn’t entirely off base, and there are corners of this series in which the filmmaker’s sweeping ambition to encapsulate as much of Chicago in all its beauty and blight gets the better of him. On the other hand, by apportioning as much grandeur and artistry to the green weeds in blank lots in poorer neighborhoods as he does to the grand architecture of Gold Coast area buildings, James creates in this series the feel of an honest romantic letter to a difficult mate.

“City So Real” gets its title from a quote uttered by Tim Tuten, one of the owners of The Hideout bar, the quintessential local place situated in the North Branch Industrial Corridor, close to the wealthy neighborhood of Lincoln Park. The Hideout is a piece of local history that dates back to the late 1800s, and Tuten proudly claims it was writer Nelson Algren’s bar of choice.

In one of his definitive works, “Chicago: City on the Make,” the author likens his love for the place to “loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”

Now that the Hideout is threatened by the 50-acre, multibillion dollar construction called Lincoln Yards which is set to be located directly across the street, we see Tuten and his wife Katie head into a public hearing in the hopes of dissuading the city from approving the permits required to construct it. Pointing to a city hall mural featuring the elegant metal and glass skyline towering over the squatter brick buildings of old Chicago, Tuten admits, “We know that we are going against the captains of industry. But we know that in Chicago, Never a city so real, alright? . . . We fight above our weight class in Chicago.”

That declaration’s poetry is beyond compare. Chicago being what it is, Tuten’s underdog optimism soon crashes into the city’s big shouldered machinery. “I presume this is going to pass,” says another voice in the city council chamber, “because anybody who has $5 billion to throw around will get their way.”

This, too, is the reality of Chicago.

City So Real” premieres all five episodes Thursday, Oct. 29 at 7 p.m. ET on Nat Geo. The full series will be available to stream on Hulu Friday, Oct. 30.

How a misconception about coronavirus immunity is causing thousand of needless deaths

The popular conception of a “vaccine” is that it is an inoculation that makes you immune to a pathogen — if not for life, at least for a very long time. On that principal, much of the world’s hope for a return to a pre-pandemic normalcy has rested on a vaccine for the novel coronavirus, the cause of COVID-19.

Yet that common conception of how vaccines work, it turns out, isn’t entirely accurate. The reason relates to two concepts — “transient immunity” and “durable immunity.” Understanding these are the key to understanding how the pandemic will finally end.

First, a brief primer on the most common misconception about immunity: the idea that once you’ve contracted a virus, or once you’ve been vaccinated against it, you can no longer get said virus. Neither of those are necessarily true: there are viruses which people can contract multiple times, because the body’s immune system essentially “forgets” how to create immunity to it after a period of time. Likewise, there are vaccines which only confer short-term immunity, and for which we have to get re-vaccinated for periodically.

Currently, we don’t know for certain which category the novel coronavirus falls into — although mounting evidence suggests that immunity against it won’t last. Indeed, there are multiple cases of patients who have contracted the virus multiple times within a few months. While they could be outliers with poor immune systems, the more cases of re-infection that emerge suggest not.

But there’s one more catch: Vaccines can actually confer different types of immunity than infections can — say, long-term as opposed to short-term.

From a global public health standpoint, you can see how returning to any sense of normalcy depends on our understanding of coronavirus immunity. In other words, does coronavirus immunity last a lifetime, a year, or as short as a few months? Do those who have been infected already need a vaccine, or are they already immune?

It doesn’t help that the science is constantly shifting on this, and month-to-month, scientific studies have slightly different conclusions. As Salon has previously reported, the data and research currently suggests that immunity isn’t lifelong like the measles. However, it’s hard to know how long immunity lasts because it’s such a new virus, but here is everything that scientists currently know.

First, let’s talk about immunity

There are myriad ways the human body can fight off a viral infection. Dr. Charles Chiu, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of California–San Francisco, pointed Salon to three specific ones: passive immunity, neutralizing antibody immunity, and active immunity.

“The idea is that with any viral infection, including an infection from the novel SARS-CoV-2, is that patients who have intact or healthy immune systems will mount an immune response,” Dr. Charles Chiu, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of California–San Francisco, told Salon. This, he said, is known as “passive immunity.”

“That’s really antibody-centered,” Chiu said. “The idea is that the B cells, which are white blood cells in your blood, will react to the virus, and will produce antibodies.”

These antibodies, Chiu said, can be used one of two different ways. One way is that the antibodies will be “neutralizing” and bind to the virus. Hence, the name, these antibodies will “neutralize,” or inactivate, the coronavirus. This is called “neutralizing antibody immunity.”

“The idea is that if you’re immune, if there’s a next time and you are reinfected, then those antibodies are already circulating and present in your blood and they will neutralize the virus immediately,” Chiu explained. “So you will, you’ll be less likely or you will not be reinfected.”

However, not all antibodies are neutralizing. Chiu pointed to HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) as an example of a virus that creates antibodies that aren’t neutralizing.

“You will make antibodies in response to a viral infection, but you may not necessarily make neutralizing antibodies that will prevent you from getting reinfected,” Chiu noted.

Then, there’s “active immunity,” which is another type of immune response that’s mediated by another type of white blood cells, T cells.

“T cells will actively react to [the virus], they’re memory T cells that sort of remember when you’ve been infected before,” Chiu said. “If you get exposed again, those T cells will then kick in and help to prevent you from getting reinfected.”

Understanding “durable” and “transient” immunity

Immunologists are trying to figure out whether novel coronavirus infection confers durable immunity or transient immunity. These terms refer to the strength and period of the type of immunity. For example, if the antibodies made due to a viral infection are durable, that means immunity is long-lasting. If they’re transient, that means they only last a short while.

As mentioned above, mounting evidence suggests that immunity to the novel coronavirus is transient. But just how transient? We don’t know, but there is more evidence every week. In September, researchers published a study in the scientific journal Nature Medicine suggesting that people who contract the novel coronavirus and then become immune may stay that way for up to twelve months, based on studying four different seasonal coronaviruses.

However, as Chiu noted there are a couple of differences between the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and the seasonal ones. One is that they’ve been around longer, meaning they’re more diverse because they’ve had more time to mutate.

“It hasn’t had the time to mutate widely and to become very divergent,” Chiu said. “And what that means is that it’s possible that vaccines that are directed specifically against SARS-CoV-2 are more likely to be durable; they’re more likely to last longer and be effective longer, perhaps because there’s less divergence within this particular strain versus the other seasonal coronaviruses.”

What does this mean for COVID-19?

There have been several studies on antibodies and SARS-CoV-2. In one study, researchers tracked COVID-19 patients over time and found that the amount of their antibodies peaked following the onset of symptoms and then began to decline. For some study participants, the antibodies were almost all undetectable within three months. A more recent study of patients in Britain showed a similar trend. But as Nature explained in an article, it could just take minute numbers of antibodies to prevent a reinfection and fight off the coronavirus again.

Most importantly, however, vaccines can confer different types of immunity than actually contracting the virus. Indeed, immunologists note that a vaccine could have durable immunity even if the natural response is transient.

“The vaccine doesn’t have to mimic or mirror the natural infection,” Shane Crotty, a virologist at the La Jolla Institute for Immunology, told the New York Times.

Immunologists have been pointing to the human papillomavirus (HPV) as an example of a virus that has a poor immune response and weak antibodies, but a durable vaccine immune response that lasts for at least a decade.

Considering that the coronavirus likely has transient immunity, this would make it harder for countries and cities to achieve herd immunity through letting the virus spread.

“It really depends on how transient it is, and how rapidly we can really ramp up to be able to vaccinate a sufficient proportion of the population to develop herd immunity,” Chiu said, adding that vaccine hesitancy is another barrier if the coronavirus vaccine requires multiple doses to be effective. “We already have issues right now with adherence to the flu vaccine, and there’s no reason to think that it’s going to be different.”

That means that humanity’s best bet for achieving durable immunity is still through a vaccine. Relying on a strategy of waiting for herd immunity to be achieved is “flawed,” according to a paper by a group of researchers published in The Lancet.

“There is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection, and the endemic transmission that would be the consequence of waning immunity would present a risk to vulnerable populations for the indefinite future,” the researchers wrote. “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.”

In other words, political leaders who have pinned hopes of defeating the virus on achieving herd immunity will not only fail, but will needlessly kill their citizens in the process. President Donald Trump as well as UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson have both touted a strategy of achieving herd immunity through deliberate public health inaction in order to let the virus run its course through citizens.

Facebook under fire for boosting right-wing news sources and throttling progressive alternatives

Facebook is under fire once again for allegedly being biased toward conservative media outlets — only this time, it is also being accused of throttling left-wing media outlets in the process.

When tweaking its newsfeed algorithm in late 2017, Facebook bowed to pressure from policy executives who were concerned that the new changes would hurt right-wing media outlets on the site like the Daily Wire, according to a report earlier this month by The Wall Street Journal. As a result, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg approved of plans for the company to tweak its newsfeed algorithm in such a way that left-leaning sites like Mother Jones were allegedly disproportionately affected.

“We did not make changes with the intent of impacting individual publishers,” a Facebook spokesperson told Salon. “We only made updates after they were reviewed by many different teams across many disciplines to ensure the rationale was clear and consistent and could be explained to all publishers.” Both NBC News and Recode reported at the time that the 2018 algorithm change prioritized content from friends and family and targeted all public pages, although the news industry inevitably took a major hit.

Yet the Journal report cited anonymous internal sources who specifically mentioned Mother Jones as an example of a “left-leaning site” that was “affected more than previously planned.”

Mother Jones Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery was outraged at the Journal’s report, however, tweeting that “it’s not an unintentional by product of [re-]working. It’s an INTENTIONAL change to hurt shops that do serious investigative journalism.” She then posted a link to the top-performing links by U.S. Facebook pages on Oct. 16, a list that included Trump-supporting conservatives like Dan Bongino, Fox News, Breitbart, Franklin Graham and Trump himself.

The top-performing link posts by U.S. Facebook pages in the last 24 hours are from:

1. Dan Bongino
2. Dan Bongino
3. Fox News
4. Fox News
5. Dan Bongino
6. Donald J. Trump
7. Franklin Graham
8. Breitbart
9. Dan Bongino
10. The Dodo

— Facebook's Top 10 (@FacebooksTop10) October 16, 2020

Jeffery also pointed out that the algorithm changes cost Mother Jones “something like $400,000 to $600,000 a year. That’s big for a news org our size.”

She added, “This year, we’ve done everything we can to not lay people off. But it’s meant pay cuts for our higher paid employees, loss of 401K match.”

While a Facebook spokesman told the Journal that “we did not make changes with the intent of impacting individual publishers,” the site was also reported to have argued that Courier Newsroom is not a real news outlet. Courier Newsroom is a group of eight progressive local-news sites that is partially owned by left-wing donors who have ties to the Democratic Party. The company subsequent implemented a policy blocking what they described as partisan-backed sites from Facebook News, limiting their advertising and restricting their access to Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.

This is not the first time that Facebook has been accusing of having a bias toward right-wing media sources. BuzzFeed News reported in August that a senior engineer was allegedly fired for collecting internal evidence that the company expressed bias toward major right-wing accounts by helping them remove fact-checks regardless of whether they were actually posting inaccurate material. Although Facebook denied that the employee was terminated for speaking out, other Facebook employees countered that assertion. In addition, a journalist at one of Facebook’s American fact-checking partners claim that right-wing sites are more likely than their left-wing counterparts to call Facebook and complain of being censored if they are fact-checked.

“I think Facebook is a bit afraid of them because of the Trump administration,” the journalist added.

That same month, the Tech Transparency Project released a report revealing that Instagram hashtags which were critical of Biden appeared next to his name during generic Instagram searches for his surname, but that the same types of searches for Trump concealed hashtags that were critical of him. Facebook, which owns Instagram, attributed this to a “bug.”

“Instagram’s ‘bug’ claims do not pass the smell test,” Michelle Kuppersmith, the executive director of Campaign for Accountability (of which TTP is a part), told Salon at the time. “Our review found that 10 out of 10 popular Trump campaign hashtags were protected, while 10 out of 10 equivalent Biden campaign hashtags were not, allowing misinformation. That does not appear to be random bug.”

She added, “Likewise, it’s unclear how a bug could explain the hashtag for #bradparscale, the Trump campaign manager. In late June, related hashtags were blocked for #bradparscale. However, immediately after his demotion, his hashtags were unblocked. Why did the ‘bug’ turn off when his campaign position changed?”

Zuckerberg has developed close ties with prominent conservatives including President Donald Trump’s senior adviser Jared Kushner and Daily Wire co-founder and Trump supporter Ben Shapiro, and has hired right-wingers like PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and former deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush Joel Kaplan to powerful positions in his company. He has also reportedly told his staff – many of whom are left-leaning and have protested Facebook for not doing more to stop Trump from spreading misinformation — that their user base is more conservative. Controversially, Zuckerberg has even refused to remove posts by Trump that some employees claim violate the company’s rules, and is reported to have privately met with the president last year. More recently The Markup reported that between July 1, 2020, and Oct. 13, 2020, Facebook required Biden’s campaign to pay on average nearly $2.50 more for every thousand impressions than Trump. (Earlier this month the company did limit the spread of a dubious New York Post story smearing Trump’s election opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden.

Trump campaign working with police union to recruit ex-cops as “poll challengers”: report

The Minneapolis police union is helping the Trump campaign recruit retired officers as “poll challengers” to patrol voting locations in “rough neighborhoods,” The Minneapolis Star Tribune reports.

Minneapolis Police Federation President Lt. Bob Kroll passed on a request from the campaign to members, asking them to “share” and “[write] me if you are willing to assist,” according to a copy of the email obtained by the outlet.

The request seeking 20 to 30 former officers to serve as “poll challengers” in “problem” areas came from William Willingham, a senior legal adviser director of Election Day operations for the Trump campaign.

“Poll Challengers do not ‘stop’ people, per se, but act as our eyes and ears in the field and call our hotline to document fraud,” Willingham wrote in an email to Kroll. “We don’t necessarily want our Poll Challengers to look intimidating, they cannot carry a weapon in the polls due to state law . . . We just want people who won’t be afraid in rough neighborhoods or intimidating situations.”

Kroll previously spoke on stage at a Trump rally and has echoed the president’s rhetoric about Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the death of George Floyd in police custody.

Minneapolis City Council Member Jeremiah Ellison, the son of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, said the email was “incredibly inappropriate.”

“To the extent that Bob Kroll wants to participate in a voter intimidation campaign, the city will take that very seriously,” he told The Star Tribune. “There’s the clear dog whistle of ‘rough area,’ and we need people who aren’t ‘easily intimidated’ and people who aren’t scared.”

Minnesota law allows poll challengers to “challenge” another voter’s eligibility “if and only if they have personal knowledge of that voter’s ineligibility.”

“Suspicion is not a basis for making a challenge,” the secretary of state’s office says on its website. “The challenger must personally know that a specific person is not eligible to vote for a specific reason.”

The request to the police union came after Keith Ellison launched an investigation into an out-of-state security firm that put out a call recruiting former U.S. Special Operations personnel as armed guards to “make sure that the antifas don’t try to destroy the election sites.”

“Minnesota and federal law are clear: No one may interfere with or intimidate a voter at a polling place, and no one may operate private armed forces in our state,” Keith Ellison said in a statement. “The presence of private ‘security’ at polling places would violate these laws. It would make no one safer and is not needed or wanted by anyone who runs elections or enforces the law.”

The Trump campaign denied any involvement with that effort or with armed guards who set up watch outside of a Florida polling place last week.

But the Trump campaign and Republican National Committee have long worked to recruit some 50,000 “poll watchers” after a federal court lifted a decades-long ban imposed on the national GOP after repeated instances of voter intimidation.

Republican officials said about 3,000 people have already volunteered to take part in the effort in Minnesota, according to The Star Tribune.

The efforts have sparked concerns about the potential of voter intimidation, particularly after Donald Trump Jr. filmed a campaign ad urging supporters to join an “Army for Trump’s Election security operation” to prevent the “radical left” from trying to “steal this election from my father.”

Kristen Clarke, the head of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said the statements show that “intimidation is now public and planned.”

“Not only is the sitting president purportedly amassing an ‘Army’ of amateur provocateurs to fan out across the country, but we’re also seeing misinformation campaigns, disinformation campaigns and ‘lone wolf’ intimidation efforts by armed militias,” Clarke wrote in a USA Today op-ed.

Clarke’s group has recruited 23,000 legal volunteers to assist voters who report voter intimidation at their nonpartisan hotline at 866-OUR-VOTE.

“While these incidents are deeply troubling and demonstrate a rising pattern of voter intimidation, it is vital that we do not allow them to succeed by cowering in fear,” she wrote. “There will undoubtedly be scattered incidents of attempted voter intimidation between now and Election Day — but we can fight back.”

Susan Collins still won’t say if she’s voting for Donald Trump with less than a week until election

Embattled Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine refused to tell voters during her final debate with Democratic challenger Sara Gideon on Wednesday whether she would vote for President Donald Trump in this year’s election.

After Gideon pointed out that Collins still had not committed to voting for the president, whose approval rating in the state has been deeply underwater, the debate moderator asked the three-term incumbent directly if she believed Trump deserved another term.

“I’m not getting into presidential politics,” Collins replied, adding that she would be able to work well with either Trump or Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

Instead, Collins made the case for Republicans to retain control of the Senate.

“What I don’t want to see is one-party control in Washington,” she said, “because I think that would lead to a far-left agenda being pushed through the Congress.”

Collins earlier refused to disclose whether she voted for Trump in the state’s primary election earlier this year. The senator did not vote for Trump in 2016. She wrote in another candidate, calling the president “cruel” and “unsuitable for office.”

“My conclusion about Mr. Trump’s unsuitability for office is based on his disregard for the precept of treating others with respect, an idea that should transcend politics,” Collins wrote in a 2016 op-ed explaining her decision.

“Instead, he opts to mock the vulnerable and inflame prejudices by attacking ethnic and religious minorities,” she said, hitting Trump for a “constant stream of cruel comments and his inability to admit error or apologize.”

Election forecasters have recently shifted the pivotal race, which could determine whether Democrats flip control of the Senate, in Gideon’s favor. By Tuesday, Maine voters had already cast about 400,000 votes, and the state’s ranked-choice system may play a pivotal role in the senate race, which is expected to be tight despite Gideon’s steady lead all year.

Under a ranked voting system, voters can select candidates in order of preference. If no candidate takes a majority of first-place votes, then a set of calculations kicks in to eliminate low-performing candidates and redistribute votes.

A new poll suggests that the system appears likely to benefit Gideon, as voters who prefer third-party candidates are more likely to list Democrats as their second choice. The state’s Green Party candidate has outperformed the conservative independent candidate, suggesting that more of the third-party vote would fall to the liberal Gideon.

That poll shows Gideon up by a margin of 46% to 45%. But the Democrat makes more gains when second- and third-choice votes of third-party supporters are reallocated, finishing with 51% of the total versus 49% for Collins. The survey also shows Biden enjoying a comfortable 13-point lead over Trump.

The debate took place just days after Collins voted against the last-minute confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. Gideon, the speaker of the Maine House of Representatives, has repeatedly linked Collins to Trump, as well as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who pushed Barrett through the confirmation process in a presidential election year after blocking Merrick Garland’s nomination four years prior. Collins claims she did not object based on Barrett’s qualifications but rather out of fairness for Garland.

On Wednesday, Collins insisted that despite Trump’s appointment of three highly conservative justices, which shifted the balance of the court for perhaps decades, she does not believe that Roe v. Wade or a decision reaffirming it are at risk.

“I think it is extremely unlikely that the Supreme Court would act to overturn both of those precedents,” Collins said.

Collins has seen her support erode following her critical vote to confirm another Trump nominee to the high court, Brett Kavanaugh despite allegations of sexual assault. The critical vote fractured Collins’ support among women in her state and sparked a massive national crowdfunding campaign to back the Democrat who would become her opponent.

Gideon, who has worked to expand access to reproductive care, pointed out that Collins had previously voted for Barrett’s lifetime appointment to a federal appeals court despite her public criticism of Roe.

“So I would ask you: If reproductive choice is important to you, who do you want representing you in the Senate and making decisions about the judiciary and Roe v. Wade?” Gideon said.

“The tide has turned on Senator Susan Collins, who was so popular in Maine that she won nearly 70% of the vote the last time she ran,” Quinnipiac University Polling Analyst Mary Snow wrote last month. “Likely voters are sending the message that there’s no ‘middle of the road’ when it comes to President Trump.”

Unsettling “Madre” plays with perception of madness to examine a woman “clinging to the impossible”

“Madre” is Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s feature length drama, an extension from his Oscar-nominated short of the same name. The first 15 minutes of the film recreate the short, an intense, single-take scene in which Elena (Marta Nieto) in Spain receives a call from her 6-year-old son who is alone on a beach in France and in danger.

The new film cuts to 10 years later to explore the lasting impact that earlier episode had on Elena. She is now managing a bar/restaurant on the very French beach where her son disappeared. She is no longer with Ramon (Raúl Prieto), her son’s father, but she is now with Joseba (Alex Brendemühl), a Spaniard who sees her when he can. Joseba takes care of the despondent Elena whom locals refer to as “the crazy woman” because of her despair at losing her son.

But one day, Elena spies Jean (Jules Porier), a teenager, and becomes fixated on him. Is he her son all grown up? Jean strikes up a conversation with Elena at her bar, and they become “friends.” It is perhaps an inappropriate relationship, but it does allow Elena to work out some of her grief. “Madre” is captivating as the drama plays out, and Elena grapples with her feelings for Jean.

Sorogoyen chatted with Salon, with the assistance of Carlos Gutiérrez of Cinema Tropical about his feature film.

You based the feature on the short, which stemmed from a real incident that happened to a friend of yours. Most folks would expect the feature to be Elena looking for her son, but you cut to 10 years later to show the impact of her losing her son. Can you discuss why you took this approach?

We did it for several reasons. One was because of the type of film we wanted to make. My cowriter, Isabel Peña, and I had made a couple of thrillers — “The Realm” and “May God Save Us” — which were based more on the plot than on characters. We wanted to do something different. We have the impression that when you work on a thriller or a suspense film, you are more tied to the plot. Another reason was that the easiest would have been to play with what the audience expected. For me, as an audience member, when I encounter something I’m not expecting, that is always something positive. It would be normal to narrate precisely if she would find her son or not. But there are millions of films that have been made like that, and we thought it was boring to go that route. There are some very good films with that theme that we couldn’t beat, and there’s a lot of bad films that because they follow that need to go to a safe space, become commonplace, and we were not interested in that either.

The third reason was we wanted to do a freer film and talk about characters and the subject matter itself. We thought that talking about this woman who stays in the same place waiting, most likely in vain, for her son to appear was more interesting. We wanted to talk about her loss, but focusing on years later, rather than at the time when she still was hopeful to find that person. The most normal was that she wouldn’t find her son, but nevertheless she’s clinging to an impossible. And that’s where the love story emerges. I also think it has to do with light. We wanted to make a film that even if it is unsettling, it starts in a dark place and goes into the light; it becomes more luminous. That’s where the character of Jean comes in. It would be more complicated to make a thriller where a boy has disappeared unless he appears at the end, but we were not interested in that.

Elena makes a series of increasingly bad decisions, like getting in a car with three guys, or storming Jean’s family’s house. What decisions did you make regarding her character, her mindset, and her behavior?

It is always better to see someone who makes bad decisions, although I have issues with the term “bad” — “questionable” decisions is better. I don’t agree her decisions are bad. We wanted to discuss her behavior and how people judge her. And it’s very likely that she would be judged for what she’s gone through, rather than for what she’s doing. People might think that because she had a tragedy, that she’s crazy. We were interested in talking about the stigmatization of madness, of how we quickly characterize someone as crazy, when actually she’s hurt.

I might agree that when she storms the house that it is a bad decision, but it was the best thing she could do — she did it out of love, and the family didn’t know what was going on. But, the sequence in the car wasn’t a bad decision, but things turned badly. It’s that morality I have an issue with — not going into a car with three guys who you’re having a good time with, but rather we wanted to show the audience the morality of what is good or bad beyond the action itself.

“Madre” opens with an unbroken sequence (which was same as the short), and you have many tracking shots throughout the film. The camera is a voyeur and eavesdropper throughout the film. Can you talk about your visual approach to the material?

It was a fun and interesting process how to visually incorporate a short into another story and does not feel imposed, based on the fact that both films were shot in two different moments and the story itself is about a disruption. Something very tragic happens to her, and it is very radical, and it happens in the first minutes of the film. I came up with shooting scenes in a similar way to the short, where the character of Jean is present, that is, that the memory of Elena’s son is also present. For scenes with Jean, we used a Steadicam — the same way as the short — and it’s choreographed with some gentle movements, like a dance, versus when Jean was not in the scene. We shot those sequences with practically no camera movement. We used a fixed camera with a tripod, and pan shots, symbolizing, in a way death, or rather the living death that this woman is experiencing. We used angular shots. When Jean is there there’s more movement, like in the short film. Jean’s scenes all have tracking shots with maybe a few small inserts.

The short is full of ambiguity; it prompts viewers to consider what may or may not be happening. The feature, likewise, is full of ambiguity. There are multiple ways to read various scenes and situations. Can you talk about playing with reality and perception?

Making a film of this kind gave us a chance to play with ambiguity. We didn’t want to explain everything. In a conventional thriller, that is harder to do. The biggest ambiguity is that we never learn what happened to the kid in “Madre,” and that generates an interesting mystery. This type of mystery has to be organic, otherwise is worthless. So, it makes sense that she doesn’t talk about what she knows — which is not too much — and obviously she won’t also talk about what she doesn’t know. We found it very potent and tragic that the mother doesn’t know what has happened to her son, which is actually what happens in 95% of the cases of people who disappear. And that’s the horrible aspect of it, that you don’t know what happened, and that’s a very powerful sensation because you can’t say goodbye or have closure, unlike when someone dies. We wanted to transpose that to the small details, like the love story between Jean and Elena. We always get asked, “What do they both feel for each other?” We found it boring and fake to put that into words. That continues with the sense of mystery that I think makes the film more interesting.

It is facile to project Elena’s relationship with Jean as simple surrogacy/substitute son. He represents more to her, and she is very important in his life. What observations do you have about the nature of their relationship?

There’s certainly surrogacy, the wish that she wants him to be her son despite the fact that he is not, but also there’s some charm between them, and obviously eroticism as well, but we wanted to keep it subtle. I find it very interesting that each viewer has his own interpretation and projects differently. Some say they are in love, they have a romantic story, and they consummate their love in the last sequence. There are other viewers that say the opposite, that is a silly thing and impossible, and that she only wants to take care of him. But we wanted to leave it open because that’s how it works in love stories; someone falls in love, and that romance can have lots of eroticism, none, or can be intermittent.

What about Elena’s boyfriend, Joseba, or even her ex, Ramón who shows up in one pivotal scene, which is my favorite? In their interactions with her, they handle her with kid gloves.

I love that scene too, it’s my favorite scene. They are certainly both very different relationships. Ramón’s story is told very little and is surrounded by mystery because it’s marked by tragedy. That’s why it’s a very important scene, because we want to show that they have already said everything, and they had not seen each other for a long time. He is a key character for Elena because he gives her the chance to forgive.

The relationship with Joseba, was also very important to us. It was key for Elena to have a partner. Isabel and I wanted to shape this character as an older man, a kind of doctor who can help Elena heal. Some viewers judge him badly, but others think he’s a great guy who has infinite love for her and is only there to take care of her. To the people who say he’s caring, I remind them he is a bit controlling. To the people who see him badly, I say that he’s taking care of her.

There are several moments where Elena is referred to as crazy. Can you talk about walking that fine line?

It was a tightrope. We were attracted to the fact that as society we easily use those words — “you’re crazy,” “she’s crazy” — but it is a very serious illness, and we don’t take it very lightly. So, this woman is and has been unstable. My opinion is that we don’t see that because it was years before. But it might be this is the first time that she’s feeling things she’s never experienced before, and those are positive changes for someone who has been so hurt. She has received a lot of care from Joseba, but she’s now feeling something else. She’s actually probably more stable these days. She probably didn’t have deep personal connections before and suddenly she now wants to have a deep relationship. We wanted to navigate these issues with respect and care and honesty. It was important for us not to treat Elena as a crazy person, because once you cross that line, you lose the justification for any action, because you can then do anything you want.

“Madre” is available in virtual theaters and streaming on Oct. 30.