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Trump campaign videotaping Philly voters may be illegal “voter intimidation,” Pennsylvania AG says

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro warned that the Trump campaign’s latest tactic in Philadelphia may amount to illegal “voter intimidation.”

The Trump campaign began videotaping Philadelphia voters dropping off ballots at drop boxes earlier this month before filing a complaint to city officials alleging that a campaign employee had observed voters depositing multiple ballots at a time, according to The New York Times.

Trump campaign attorney Linda Kerns demanded that city officials turn over the names of all voters who used a drop box in front of Philadelphia’s City Hall on Oct. 14, as well as security footage from the area. She also demanded that the city place a monitor to watch every drop box “at all times.”

“This must be stopped,” she wrote in a letter, alleging that individuals dropping off multiple ballots “undermine the integrity of the voting process.”

Pennsylvania law allows authorized voters to drop off ballots if they are assisting someone who needs assistance or someone with a disability. 

City officials rejected the claims, arguing that the voters photographed by the campaign had not done anything wrong.

“Third party delivery is permitted in certain circumstances,” Benjamin Field, a deputy city solicitor and counsel to Philadelphia’s Board of Elections, said in a letter responding to Kerns.

“The board cannot agree with your conclusion on the basis of the information you provided. Nor can the board, in exercising its duties, assume that an individual is violating the election code when that person can act as an agent for a voter who required assistance,” he added, according to The Times.

A Trump campaign official acknowledged earlier this month to The Times that operatives would video record voters at drop boxes. The official claimed that the campaign was only focused on people dropping off large numbers of ballots.

“That assertion appears to have been false,” the outlet noted, citing examples from Kerns’ letter referring to voters who appeared to drop off two or three separate ballots.

“We believe these to be just the tip of the iceberg,” Kerns wrote. “Without reasonable checks, this behavior continues unabated and with impunity.”

The tactic may underscore a larger campaign tactic. The campaign plans to launch a massive poll watching operation led by controversial Philadelphia Republican operative Mike Roman, who has tried to sow doubt in the election, according to The Guardian.

“Roman previously ran a secretive operation for the billionaire brothers Charles G. and David H. Koch that surveilled and gathered information on liberal adversaries,” The Times reported.

Shapiro, a Democrat, told The Times that the tactic may amount to illegal voter intimidation.

“Pennsylvania law permits poll watchers to carry out very discrete and specific duties — videotaping voters at drop boxes is not one of them,” he said. “Our entire system of voting is built on your ballot being private and your choice to vote being a personal one. Depending on the circumstance, the act of photographing or recording a voter casting a ballot could be voter intimidation — which is illegal.”

The campaign claimed that it had the right to record outside of polling sites, but campaign operatives previously tried to record voters picking up mail-in ballots at a satellite election office before being thrown out by city officials.

A spokesperson for Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner told The Times that the office was “committed to investigating any and all allegations of voter intimidation and harassment” and expected “that any organized efforts from campaigns will fully comport with Pennsylvania law.”

The Trump campaign previously filed a lawsuit seeking to ban drop boxes in the state, but the effort was shot down by a federal judge.

“Similar material, photos and videos were provided by the Trump campaign during our case in federal court and were insufficient in providing proof of voter fraud or any legal basis to do away with drop boxes,” Shapiro told The Times. “Trump’s case was dismissed on all claims.”

Trump has particularly focused on Philadelphia, urging his supporters at the first presidential debate to “go to the polls and watch very carefully,” because “bad things happen in Philadelphia.”

Some supporters appear to have taken that call seriously. Officials in Florida are investigating an incident where two armed men claiming that they were hired by the Trump campaign set up a tent outside of a polling site this week. The campaign denied any involvement.

Minnesota has also launched an investigation after an out-of-state security firm sought to hire former U.S. Special Operations personnel to patrol polling places in the state.

State attorney generals have grown increasingly concerned that Trump’s rhetoric is encouraging his supporters to break the law.

“He wasn’t talking about poll watching,” Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford said last month. “He was talking about voter intimidation.”

What “civil” debate? The one I watched revealed Donald Trump as a cold-blooded psychopath

The word on the media reviews for Thursday night’s second — and blessedly last — debate of the presidential campaign is that it was civil.

“It was civil, calm, sedate, substantive (at times) and, almost, even normal,” Shane Goldmacher at the New York Times writes. 

“It came down to muting the president,” Robin Givhan of the Washington Post writes. “That’s what it took to stage a reasonably civil debate between President Trump and former vice president Joe Biden.”

Deirdre Walsh at NPR declared the Nashville debate ” a much different — and far more civil — night than the last encounter.”

I don’t know what debate these analysts were watching. Because the one I saw was between a normal politician, Joe Biden, and a man whose utter lack of empathy for any other human being is only matched by his baseless self-regard. The mute button only allowed Trump to speak at greater length, showcasing for all of America to see a textbook illustration of what sociopathy looks like. Afterwards, I wondered if Christian Bale had been watching, and if so, if he was worried that his star turn in “American Psycho” was too understated. 

I know we’ve all grown numb to Trump’s casual cruelty and his obvious inability to imagine that other people are fully real, but hot damn, it is incumbent on us who carry the dubious title of “journalist” not to let that numbness cloud our vision. There is something deeply wrong with that man. Anyone who listened — really listened — to him on Thursday night could see it. 

Trump’s sociopathic responses to human suffering started straightaway, when moderator Kristen Welker asked about future responses to the coronavirus, which has infected more than 8 million Americans and killed 223,000 as of Friday morning. Trump talked about the pandemic as if he were cheating at golf or trying to bully some hapless tenant into agreeing that there’s nothing wrong with brown water coming out of the faucet. 

“So as you know, 2.2 million people modeled out, were expected to die,” Trump started, in a tone so casual one would think he was talking about the weather. He went on to claim the U.S. is doing better than most of the world with controlling the pandemic. 

All of this is a lie, which is no surprise. That number of 2.2 fatalities was the absolute worst-case scenario, with no mitigation practices at all. It’s much lower than that, no thanks to Trump — who proceeded to hype the no-mitigation strategy for the rest of the debate, even scoffing at the idea of plexiglass barriers — but because state and local officials and the American people stepped up to save ourselves. 

Trump then proceeded to downplay the seriousness of the virus, bragging “I got better very fast” when he got COVID-19 and claiming that “99% of people recover.” In fact, the death rate right now is 2.6% of diagnosed cases, and an unknown number of those who survive will have long-term health effects. He then proceeded to whine like a fourth-grader, literally proclaiming, it’s “not my fault.”

Imagine how this felt for people who have had someone close to them die, or who have themselves survived a near-death experience with COVID-19. I’ve personally had multiple people in my life become ill with this virus, and was wracked with worry about losing one of them. Trump’s entire soulless diatribe, especially when he mentioned that his “young son” had the disease and “was fine,” was profoundly disturbing. The man has no empathy, not even for his own family. 

It went on like that all night. On every issue touching human suffering, Trump sounded like a callous jerk. 

On the subject of family separations and the 545 immigrant children who are still separated from their parents after Trump instituted the policy that ripped thousands of families apart?

“They are so well taken care of. They’re in facilities that were so clean,” Trump said dismissively, as if forcibly orphaned children should be grateful to be allowed to take a shower. 

He also took time to smear people who apply for legal immigration status, saying that only “those with the lowest IQ” show up to their mandatory court appointments.

In Trump’s world, only idiots and fools obey the law. In a 2016 debate with Hillary Clinton, he famously made a similar claim, saying that his long history of tax evasion makes him “smart”. This time around, there was more racism, along with the president’s bizarre and fascistic obsession with eugenics. 

When Welker asked the candidates to talk about the struggles of Black parents faced with the need to tell their kids that encounters with police can threat to their personal safety or their lives, Biden spoke empathetically about the difficulties of raising kids in a racist system. Trump just whined that he doesn’t get enough praise for his generosity to Black people. 

“I am the least racist person in this room,” Trump whined, adding that he “took care of Black colleges and universities,” in the same tone he probably uses when listing all the jewelry he’s purchased for wives irate about yet another infidelity. 

Biden was a welcome contrast all night, even when Trump was turning that sociopathic viciousness towards sneering at  the former veep’s well-documented famil struggles. Much has been said about Biden’s empathy and personal decency, but honestly, any human being without a severe personality disorder would come across as a mensch next to that sneering creep. 

It may be that the loud, chaotic and disruptive aspects of Trump’s personality are so annoying that they drown out what is actually most disturbing about the man, which is that he has no human feeling for other people. Or perhaps it’s because the ideology of American conservatism at this point is so cruel and unfeeling that Trump seems like a natural fit with the 21st-century Republican Party. Possibly it’s because the political culture of mandatory cynicism doesn’t allow people to admit that they’re weirded out by someone whose empathetic capacity is so busted.

Whatever the reason, it’s remarkable how so many people have grown accustomed to sitting through that man’s cold-blooded rants and callous affect and don’t seem disturbed by it, as long as the volume is kept at a reasonable level. 

But the truth is, without the yelling and headache-inducing interruptions, Trump’s ruthless attitude towards any human being besides himself came through with crystalline clarity. There’s nothing “civil” about a man who doesn’t care about human suffering and death, and is only upset by the fact that he’s not receiving the constant praise and flattery he believes is his due. 

Borat hilariously defends Rudy Giuliani after controversial scene

Rudy Giuliani has a surprising supporter after a compromising clip of him in “Borat 2″ was released — Borat himself.

In a video posted to Borat’s official Twitter account on Thursday night, star Sacha Baron Cohen suited up as his alter-ego and defended the former New York City mayor, albeit in his signature comical style.

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“I here to defend America’s mayor Rudolph Giuliani,” Borat said. “What was an innocent sexy-time encounter between a consenting man and my 15-year-old daughter has been turned into something disgusting by fake news media.”

Earlier this week, a compromising clip of Giuliani from the “Borat” sequel went viral on social media after he appeared to reach his hands into his pants in a hotel room with 24-year-old actor Maria Bakalova, who plays Borat’s daughter. Bakalova had posed as a conservative TV journalist who interviews Giuliani and invites him to her hotel room, where there were several hidden cameras from the “Borat” film crew. After Giuliani lays back in the bed and fiddles with his pants, Borat bursts into the room, saying “She’s 15. She’s too old for you.”

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In the new video, Borat added a cheeky warning to anyone who may misinterpret Giuliani’s intentions in the scene.

“I warn you, anyone else tries this and Rudolph will not hesitate to reach into his legal briefs and whip out his subpoenas,” he said.

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On Wednesday, Giuliani called the video a “complete fabrication” and said Cohen would be a “stone-cold liar” if he tried to allege that he was acting inappropriately in the scene.

“Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” is now available on Amazon Prime Video.

With “Letter to You,” Bruce Springsteen reminds us, brilliantly, that we’re all on borrowed time

With “Letter to You,” Bruce Springsteen provides fans with a powerful meditation on humanity’s transient, ephemeral nature and the inevitability of our own mortality.

Springsteen recorded the album live in his New Jersey home studio with the E Street Band, marking his first new studio recordings with his longtime backing group since 2014’s “High Hopes.” The LP’s live feel brings Springsteen’s songs brilliantly to life, with a fusillade of guitars and keyboards in such anthemic numbers as “Letter to You” and the album’s unforgettable closer “I’ll See You in My Dreams.”

One of Springsteen’s most inspired choices on “Letter to You” was the inclusion of a trio of his earliest songs, “If I Was the Priest,” “Janey Needs a Shooter,” and “Song for Orphans.” Likely composed in the days before he had a record contract — and certainly prior to the production of his debut album “Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ” (1973) — these tunes are mindful of Springsteen’s nascent days as a composer, when he often worked with a rhyming dictionary by his side.

With the E Street Band roaring into life behind these songs, Springsteen’s early compositions act like a time-capsule — especially “Janey Needs a Shooter,” brimming with the youthful energy and character sketches of “Blinded by the Light” and “Jungleland.” At the same time, recording the songs nearly 50 years after their original inspiration finds Springsteen lending the nuance and sagacity of his age to the flights of fancy that he imagined during his early twenties.

While “Letter to You” is chock-full of songs about life’s vicissitudes and the commonality of human experience, Springsteen offers clear commentary on the maladies of our times. Take “Rainmaker,” a song in which he explores our timeless susceptibility to conmen and snake-oil salesmen — people who prey on our sense of desperation and moral failings.

The Rainmaker, Springsteen reminds us, is that person who pits us against each other, confuses fact with fiction, and, when you’re not looking, takes everything you have and then some. “Rainmaker says white’s black and black’s white,” he sings, “Says night’s day and day’s night.” In so doing, Springsteen extols a shrewd diagnosis of our broken politics, a place where “sometimes folks need to believe in something so bad” that they’ll turn to anyone, even the most salacious and unqualified, as a salve for their pain.

Listen to our new podcast “Everything Fab Four,” here or wherever you get your podcasts. 

In this way, “Letter to You” offers a cautionary tale about the importance of living in the here and now, instead of turning a blind eye to the world’s con artists, and embracing our better angels instead. The album’s opening track makes this point with an unsubtle power: “One minute you’re here,” Springsteen sings, “next minute you’re gone.”

While it may be an instance of over-interpretation on my part, the album’s cover art — Danny Clinch’s evocative photograph of Springsteen standing across from the Dakota and facing the entrance of the Strawberry Fields Memorial — takes us back to a moment, 40 years ago this December, when the life of John Lennon was extinguished in the blink of an eye. We’re all — every one of us — living on borrowed time.

Susan Collins “grateful” for endorsement from anti-choice group pushing harmful conversion therapy

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, a self-avowed supporter of abortion rights and gay marriage, said she was “truly grateful” to receive an endorsement from a Christian group that opposes abortion and pushes the discredited and harmful practice of “conversion therapy” for LGBTQ people.

Collins, one of the most vulnerable Republican senators facing re-election next month, drew the backing of the Christian Civic League of Maine, a group that opposes abortion and has a decades-long history of opposing LGBTQ rights, according to the Maine Beacon.

The group said in its endorsement of Collins and President Donald Trump that it backed “candidates we believe will defend the unborn, religious freedom and parental rights.” The term “parental rights” is “essentially a euphemism for conversion therapy,” HuffPost noted, adding that the group’s website warns against “biology-deniers” passing laws that would ban “any discussion between your child and a licensed therapist that affirms your child’s biological reality.”

Carroll Conley, the group’s executive director, told Collins during an interview last week that the endorsement of was not a “casual” one. 

“We want you to know that our endorsement of Susan Collins is an enthusiastic endorsement,” Conley said.

“Let me thank you so much for the endorsement and tell you how truly grateful I am for your support, for the league’s support,” Collins responded. 

The Christian Civic League has an ugly history of anti-gay campaigns. The group successfully pushed referendums in 1998 and 2000 to deny anti-discrimination protections to the LGBTQ community before losing a similar referendum just five years later, according to The Beacon.

The group asked for “tips, rumors, speculation and facts” about the sexual orientation of lawmakers in an apparent effort to out gay officials in 2004. It also pushed anti-gay marriage referendums in 2009 and 2013.

“More recently, the League has targeted transgender children, launching online campaigns against school districts who put in place protections against discrimination in line with a 2014 court ruling protecting the rights of transgender Mainers,” The Beacon reported.

The group has also actively opposed abortion protections, as well as mandatory childhood vaccines, according to the report.

Collins, who has voted to confirm dozens of anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ judges nominated by Trump, has already lost the endorsements of advocacy groups this cycle.

“Embracing an extremist anti-LGBTQ group’s endorsement is nothing less than opportunistic in the waning days of this campaign,” Lucas Acosta, a spokesperson for the LGBTQ rights group Human Rights Campaign, said in a statement. “After years of being an independent voice for Mainers and advocating for the LGBTQ community, Collins has again chosen to pander to the far-right rather than stand by the principles she professed for years.”

The LGBTQ advocacy group EqualityMaine said on Twitter that Collins “isn’t even pretending to be a moderate anymore.”

“Susan Collins took the endorsement of the Christian Civic League, an organization that thinks it’s ok to torture LGBTQ children in misguided attempts to ‘fix’ them,” the group added.

The Planned Parenthood Action Fund, which has endorsed Collins in the past, has also thrown its support behind Democratic challenger Sara Gideon.

“I think it’s clear to all of us that Senator Collins has changed and she’s not the senator she once was,” Amy Cookson, the Maine spokesperson for Planned Parenthood Votes, told The Beacon, adding that Collins had voted with Trump 90% of the time.

“Despite what [Collins] says, her actions make it very clear that she can’t be trusted to protect our health and rights, including safe legal abortion,” Cookson said.

A Fox News reporter just debunked the latest conservative effort to smear Joe Biden

The latest conservative effort to smear Democratic presidential nominee has now been debunked by a reporter at Fox News.

On Thursday night, President Donald Trump invited Tony Bobulinski, an ex-business associate of Hunter Biden, to accuse Joe Biden of lying about his knowledge of his family’s overseas business dealings.

Part of his case against the Democratic nominee was a series of text messages in which Hunter Biden referred to consulting with someone known as “The Chairman” about an investment in a company called SinoHawk Holdings.

In Bobulinski’s telling, “The Chairman” referred directly to Joe Biden.

However, Fox News reporter Jacqui Heinrich combed through all of the texts and emails released by Bobulinski and determined that his claims about Biden being “The Chairman” were false.

“I completed searching all of Tony Bobulinski’s emails,” she wrote on Twitter. “They establish: the “Chairman” is China; NO ROLE for Joe Biden in emails/docs; Tony Bobulinski states himself there are NO OTHER MEMBERS besides Hunter Biden, Jim Biden, Rob Walker, James Gillar, and Bobulinski.”

Heinrich’s tweet came shortly after the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday night that corporate records it reviewed showed “no role for Joe Biden” in any of SinoHawk’s dealings.

Morning Joe mocks president’s debate performance: “Quaalude Trump is better than crystal meth Trump”

MSNBC’s John Heilemann said President Donald Trump at least seemed somewhat sedate during the last presidential debate before the Nov. 3 election.

The “Morning Joe” contributor said the president indulged in his grievances during his debate against Joe Biden, but he wondered whether most viewers understood the references he made to various Fox News storylines.

“I think quaalude Trump is better than crystal meth Trump, you know, from the last debate,” Heilemann said. “That was, like, an improvement, I think.”

“He needed one extra ‘lude to get him through the whole thing, and he wasn’t quite there,” Heilemann added. “Quaalude Trump was still not that great. Joe Biden, I think, you know, he’s best one-on-one. I think his previous best debate performance was one-on-one against Bernie Sanders. I thought Biden was clear, on point and making his arguments and did not tire, as he sometimes has in some of the debates. He was strong, I thought, throughout.”

Heilemann said the president failed to land many of his attacks simply because they were too far into the weeds for most viewers to understand.

“They brought their fact witness, Tony Bobulinsky or ‘Baba Booey’ or whoever, that guy, refused to take questions at the press conference, and it’s not that there were no facts. As it turns out after the Wall Street Journal debunked the story, but Donald Trump’s lack of preparation, guys, I think, came through. Those Hunter Biden hits are complicated, and Trump was not well versed in them, so it sounded to me like gobbledygook. It was just gibberish coming out of his mouth. The big guy, you’re the big guy, he said to Biden, you didn’t understand that unless you’re in the Fox News bubble already, you didn’t understand a lot of the things that Trump was trying to say.”

News flash: Trump behaves himself! But after that flaccid performance, it’s almost over

If you watched Donald Trump this past week, you might have expected him to show up for the final debate of the 2020 campaign on Thursday night as loaded for bear as he was in the first one. His rallies have been filled with scalding vitriol toward his political opponents and his Twitter feed has been nearly incoherent with rage. He seemed to be working himself up into a full-blown frenzy in anticipation of another Fight Club-style encounter with Joe Biden.

But Trump may have peaked a little early with his petulant interview with “60 Minutes” reporter Lesley Stahl on Wednesday and lost his mojo. He was so upset with Stahl’s questions that he suddenly ended the interview and flounced out of the room like a sullen teenager. The next day he followed through on his threat to release a White House recording of the interview, reportedly made for archival purposes. Trump described Stahl’s interview as a “vicious attempted ‘takeout'” and offered this summary on Twitter: “Watch her constant interruptions & anger. Compare my full, flowing and ‘magnificently brilliant’ answers to their ‘Q’s’.”

Since Trump apparently thought he’d done a great job with that dumpster fire of a first debate perhaps he thought releasing this interview would show him in the same light. It did. But it wasn’t a good one.

After having insulted the moderator, Kristen Welker of MSNBC, in the days leading up to the final debate, it looked like he was gearing up for another showdown. But by the time he got to Nashville for the debate at Belmont University, he frankly seemed to be somewhat spent.

It’s hard to know if all this was intentional as a sort of “tease” for the main event or if Trump just ran out of gas, but this debate was more or less civilized, at least in terms of his general demeanor. He was dour and hostile, of course, but he didn’t interrupt too much and generally followed the rules. (Naturally this meant that observers on Twitter and elsewhere complimented him for his “discipline.”)

The problem this time wasn’t that his feral personality was on display. The problem was that when you actually got to hear the two candidates answer questions about policy without all the theatrics, it’s clearer than ever that even after almost four years in office, Donald Trump still has no idea what he is doing. Even in his subdued state, he played his most obnoxious greatest hits without any awareness that they are stale, stupid and offensive.

Biden, on the other hand, was well-informed about policy, answered all the questions directly and showed himself to be a normal human being. After what we’ve been through with Trump, those banal qualities almost have a magical feeling to them.

As always, Trump lied extravagantly. As CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale put it:

Trump was, as usual, a serial liar. For a fact-checker, you’re kind of sitting there with Biden. Occasionally you’re like, “Oh, that’s wrong.” With Trump, you’re like the “I Love Lucy” episode in the chocolate factory. You don’t know which one to pick up because there’s just so much.

Trump continues to “downplay” the pandemic and that couldn’t be more objectionable than it is right now, as we face a surge in cases that may end being worse than the original surge last spring. He went into his usual litany of BS about closing the borders to China and the supposed 2 million deaths that he prevented by doing what he did. He claimed that Biden was itching to shut down the country, to which Biden retorted, “Shut down the virus, not the country.”

Needless to say, Trump tried to get the phony Hunter Biden scandal into the debate since that was the real reason he even bothered to show up. He wasn’t successful. None of it was intelligible and it all no doubt sounded like gobbledygook to anyone who isn’t steeped in Breitbart-esque arcana. (And yes, it’s exasperating for the most corrupt president in history to lob such accusations at anyone else.)

When he absurdly accused Biden of taking half a billion dollars from China as vice president, the exchange that followed perfectly illustrated the difference between the two men. Here’s Biden:

My response is, look, there’s a reason why he’s bringing up all this malarkey. There’s a reason for it. He doesn’t want to talk about the substantive issues. It’s not about his family and my family. It’s about your family, and your family’s hurting badly. If you’re a middle-class family, you’re getting hurt badly right now. You’re sitting at the kitchen table this morning deciding, “Well, we can’t get new tires. They’re bald, because we have to wait another month or so.” Or, “Are we going to be able to pay the mortgage?” Or, “Who’s going to tell her she can’t go back to community college?” They’re the decisions you’re making, and the middle-class families like I grew up in Scranton and Claymont, they’re in trouble. We should be talking about your families, but that’s the last thing he wants to talk about.

Trump’s tone-deaf response?

That’s a typical political statement. “Let’s get off this China thing” and then he looks, “The family around the table, everything.” Just a typical politician when I see that. I’m not a typical politician. That’s why I got elected. “Let’s get off the subject of China.” “Let’s talk about sitting around the table.”

Come on, Joe. You could do better.

Trump’s smug cluelessness about the concerns of everyday people came through again in the discussion of race, when he once again insisted that the had “done more for African Americans than anyone since Abraham Lincoln,” adding that “there is no one in this room less racist than I am.” (Moderator Kristen Welker is Black.)

Trump preened about passing prison reform and blasted Joe Biden for a “super-predator” comment he never made — that was Hillary Clinton — and for supporting the now-infamous 1994 crime bill. This, coming from the man who took out that odious full-page newspaper ad demanding the death penalty for the Central Park Five, is bad enough. But as Biden pointed out, Trump’s been a big fan of putting more people in prison for a long time. This comes from “The America We Deserve,” Trump’s manifesto for his short-lived Reform Party presidential campaign in 2000:

We need to rethink prisons and punishment. The next time you hear someone saying there are too many people in prison, ask them how many thugs they’re willing to relocate to their neighborhood. The answer: None.

President Law and Order can’t have it both ways.

All in all, this was a fairly mundane affair by Trump standards. He managed to keep from turning it into a complete circus. But it may have actually hurt him with the voters. Instead of being shocked and appalled by the spectacle, they actually got to hear what he was saying. And that’s much, much worse.

He seemed to realize that once it was over:

That should make him president: Joe Biden shows up — and shows he’s learned the lesson of 2016

The bar was set so low — yet Donald Trump still failed to clear the mark. In his final debate performance of the 2020 campaign (and with any luck, his last one ever), the president fumbled the one attack line that his campaign had prepared against Joe Biden for years.

It was like he whiffed at tee-ball.  

The first time Trump tried to hit the former vice president over his son Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, the senior Biden defended Hunter with the compassion and empathy he so often conveys while recalling the loss of his other son, Beau Biden, or of his first wife and infant daughter in a 1972 car accident. Clearly hesitant to queue up another softball for his opponent, Trump was forced to tread lightly on Thursday night, even though his campaign has revved up its wild Biden-centric conspiracy theories through the right-wing media echo chamber. Indeed, it was Biden who baited Trump into bringing up Hunter first, illuminating what the Biden campaign — after prepping the nominee extensively for days — thinks of the Trump campaign’s last-minute gambit. 

“All of the emails … the horrible emails of the kind of money that you were raking in, you and your family,” Trump began. “And Joe, you were vice president when some of this was happening. And it should’ve never happened. I think you owe an explanation to the American people.”

It’s unclear how many viewers understood any of that. But apparently, when you launch your re-election campaign as soon as you take office, all you can really come up with is, Hey, let’s try “emails” all over again. Trump’s October surprise is no surprise at all. This was always his Plan A and Thursday’s performance proves that there was no plan B. As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte points out, this new fake Biden scandal, somehow involving China, is a continuation of the same effort to push a phony scandal in Ukraine that got Trump impeached: “[T]he only thing he knows how to do is cheat — and the only way he knows how to cheat is by threatening and blackmailing other people to do the work for him.” 

This entire concoction is several layers of stupid, as demonstrated to perfection by the pre-debate release of a Wall Street Journal editorial alleging that the former vice president allowed Hunter to sell access to him, followed by the post-debate debunking of those claims — by the Wall Street Journal’s news division. It would be comical if it weren’t so dangerous. 

All of this amounts to lukewarm leftovers from the election that shall forever haunt us: 2016.

Once again Trump attempted to troll his opponent with his debate guest list, this time including a former “business partner” of Hunter’s who has claimed that the pair were looking to make a deal in China in 2017 — when Joe Biden was a private citizen. After characterizing Biden as weak and senile for months, Trump now wants us to think he’s a powerful mob boss, with his fingers in financial pies around the globe. Although Trump called the latest allegations “damning,” Tony Bobulinski, Hunter Biden’s former business partner, has admitted that no Chinese deal was ever happened. To top it off, the New York Times has reported that during the time of these supposedly scandalous dealings, Donald Trump personally opened a secret bank account in China.

Even by the standards of Rudy Giuliani’s sleaze-mongering projects, this one was inept. Maybe Rudy farmed this particular operation out to Jacob Wohl. 

Hunter Biden’s alleged wrongdoing isn’t a real story, at least not yet. But this stuff is never about legitimate evidence. It’s about creating a distraction and allowing Trump to make egregious claims that the right-wing media regurgitates and amplifies with massive speculation of what might be there, not what can actually be proven or established. As with Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign, there isn’t time for an investigation. (You will notice that Trump has been in charge for nearly four years with the likes of FBI Director Christopher Wray and successive attorneys general Jeff Sessions, Matt Whitaker and Bill Barr at his disposal, and no charges have been filed against Clinton for anything at all). This is just another way to rile up the president’s shrinking base. The people who claim to want answers are also the same people who already believe they know the whole story. (Time for Trump supporters to yell “Fake news” followed by chants of, “Lock him up!”)

The incoherent saga of Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” is a bad story, badly told. And the Trump campaign didn’t even start peddling this nonsense until 50 million people had already voted. Trump’s team is beginning to craft exit strategies, and the president himself is visibly floundering.

To be fair — as if that were remotely necessary — there was a notable shift in Trump’s tenor to kick off the final debate. But trying to execute that elusive “presidential pivot” 12 days before Election Day can hardly be described as a success for an incumbent who is badly trailing in the polls. Considering that there has been essentially no change in public opinion on this race since the spring, even with everything that’s transpired, it’s preposterous to think that Trump’s lackluster performance can swing a significant number of votes in his favor. Yet another night full of unchecked lies from Trump is dangerous but it’s not nearly enough to change this race.

Of course, both Trump’s Department of Justice and the Republican Senate have found no discernible wrongdoing on Biden’s part to date. Trump fumbled his biggest political play before Election Day, but Biden also did something important. By simply ignoring the demands to answer the Trump campaign’s wild allegations, Biden shows he may know how to deal with the right-wing smear machine better than his eagerness to deal with Republicans in Congress conveys. 

Even beyond the personal attacks on his family and character, Biden has shown remarkable savvy by not caving in to pressure to appease conservatives in a manner that might deflate his base in the final days. For weeks, Biden has refused to outright reject expanding the Supreme Court, and has repeatedly reframed the discussion around Republicans’ remaking of the federal courts through obstruction. Looks like at least one candidate in this race isn’t stuck in 2016.

Stars of the final presidential debate: Biden laughing at Trump’s BS and the invisible mute button

America, we’re rounding the corner. It’s going away.

It could be 11 days, or a couple of weeks — a month or two, tops. The long and short of it is, Thursday’s presidential debate at Belmont University in Nashville marked the beginning of the end of what feels like a decades-long presidential campaign cycle.

Regardless of the ultimate outcome of the 2020 contest, this is the last time any of us will have to smooth out any internal clenching resulting from enduring Donald Trump in a nationally televised debate with anyone, let alone former Vice President Joe Biden.

Take that in for a moment. Let this be your centering “om.” Our votes may be suppressed, and the Russians may hit our ballot-counting systems with an aggressive cyberattack, but nobody can take that feeling of relief away from you, America. 

As was the case of the dumpster fire that came before, the second and final presidential debate probably didn’t change anyone’s mind save for the few Trump-leaning voters whose ballots were being held back on the condition that, ahem, he “act presidential” for once.

Oh, who are we kidding? Those people don’t exist.

Nonetheless, it must be noted that whatever voodoo Trump’s advisers cast on him that prevented him from behaving like a shaved yeti dosed with PCP obviously worked. From the beginning of the debate Trump treated the audience to a relatively calmer version of himself. He even addressed moderator Kristen Welker as she deserves to be addressed: like a human being worthy of respect. Fancy that.

Midway through the debate Trump even paused to compliment the NBC News White House correspondent’s performance:  “So far, I respect very much the way you’re handling this.”

Welker in turn behaved like the moderator audiences so desperately needed a couple of weeks ago when Trump routed Fox News’ Chris Wallace — someone with a firm hand who neither fed Trump’s malevolence by displaying signs of exasperation nor reacted to his weak attempts to curry favor. Trump is still the same bully who recently tweeted that Welker is “no good” and has “always been terrible & unfair, just like most of the Fake News,” after all. 

Good or insulting, nothing he says matters. The goal has always been to corral him from speaking out of turn, and Welker handily did this.

But then, Trump only deigned to respect Welker because it would benefit him. She is the second Black woman in history to moderate a presidential debate after former ABC News anchor Carole Simpson, who was in charge of refereeing the 1992 debate between George H.W. Bush, Ross Perot and Bill Clinton.

Moreover, recently Trump has engaged in a last-ditch effort to improve his numbers with voters of color. I’m guessing his debate preppers advised him that mounting an attack on a woman of color would be antithetical to that aim, to say nothing of his past behavior or actions he’s undertaken that actively harm Black Americans and other marginalized groups.  Plus, having been recently grilled to perfection by Welker’s NBC colleague Savannah Guthrie in a recent town hall,  maybe Trump decided to see what would happen if he didn’t poke the lioness for once.

There’s also the Commission on Presidential Debates’ declared commitment to mute the microphone on each contender during his opponent’s two minutes of response to Welker’s questions. That may have acted like a shock collar for Trump . . . for a time. Regardless of the reason for the president’s relative normalcy at the top of the debate, his uncharacteristic initial calm predictably caved to his combative nature. Welker was ready.

Although she didn’t do much in the way of fact checking — Wallace didn’t either during the first debate — Welker cut off Trump’s lie-filled rants and refused to give him room to steamroll Biden or disrespect her considerable efforts to keep the debate running smoothly. But she didn’t give Biden any more leeway than she afforded his opponent, either. The difference is that in large part Biden adhered to his time constraints, while Trump had to be herded back into compliance time and again.

As for the mute button, it is unclear as to whether it was put in use beyond its role as a behavioral deterrent. There were a few instances that it may have been put in play, but its absence was noticeable during Trump’s odd rants about China, the Biden family’s alleged corruption and his performance of his classic ditty of “Nobody has done more for the Black community than Donald Trump” which he chose to mash-up with “and if you look, with the exception of Abraham Lincoln I’m the least racist person in this room.”

That was hilarious for a number of reasons, but not as much of a knee-slapper as Biden’s zinger response: “Abraham Lincoln here is one of the most racist presidents we’ve had in modern history.”

Notice that we’re not diving into the substance of the issues addressed during Thursday’s hour and a half, even though the debate actually did so this time around. Well, mostly Biden did. Both candidates spoke to topics of Welker’s choosing, including the administration’s pandemic response, environmental policy, race in America and national security. On Trump’s side of things the issues might as well have been China’s awfulness, Hunter Biden’s allegedly corrupt business dealings, Joe Biden’s many real estate properties (all two of them!) and bird murdering windmills.

Biden deflected Trump’s rambling by looking directly into the camera and asking the audience in so many words, “Aren’t you tired of this lethal malarkey? America, are you ready to calm the heck down? Come on, man.”

This aspect of the illusion of control resulted in the most effective television. Trump’s awareness of the mute button led him to visibly struggle against his tendency to speak out of turn, conveying his dismay in facial expressions that ranged from smug to angry Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade balloon.

On the right side of the split-screen, Biden mostly looked entertained by Trump’s wilder attempts to besmirch his reputation; when he wasn’t laughing he looked utterly amazed at witnessing the bull taking flight out of Trump’s mouth. Indeed, the event’s most edifying moments weren’t in what the candidates said but in the reaction shots caught on camera when they weren’t talking.

The fact checkers did their jobs on Twitter and news outlet live blogs, as they should. However, it is those contrasting images that told the viewers all they needed to know about the characters in contention here — that, and Welker’s inspired final question, in which she asked each man what their message to America would be on their respective inauguration days.

Biden responded to this hypothetical scenario with a message of unity, Trump with an insistence that Biden — who, remember, in this fantasy has already lost — would raise their taxes.

And you know what? Fine. Great. It’s all dandy because it leaves us with an impression of two clear winners: Welker and the American viewer. The former succeeded with skill, intelligence and fortitude; the latter simply by clearing this pointless hurdle and knowing that one day soon it will all disappear like magic. All that remains is to make it through this election with our sanity intact. Don’t let it dominate your life.

Trump says he saved 2 million lives from COVID. Really?

President Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed to have saved 2 million lives from COVID-19 through his actions to combat the disease.

Recently, he made the assertion during the NBC News town hall on Oct. 15 that replaced the second presidential debate.

“But we were expected to lose, if you look at the original charts from original doctors who are respected by everybody, 2,200,000 people,” Trump said. “We saved 2 million people,” he added.

He mentioned the same ballpark figure during a Sept. 15 ABC News town hall and posted a tweet about it on Oct. 13.

Others in the Trump administration have also pointed to the 2.2 million figure. Vice President Mike Pence referenced it during the vice presidential debate on Oct. 7. So did Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar during a Sept. 20 “Meet the Press” television interview.

Where did this number come from? And is there any truth to the idea that Trump is responsible for saving 2 million lives from COVID-19? Since Trump continues to use it to claim success, we decided to look into it.

What We Know About the ‘2 Million’

The White House and the Trump presidential campaign did not respond to our request for evidence supporting the idea that roughly 2 million lives were spared.

It appears to have first been mentioned by the president during a March 29 White House coronavirus task force press briefing, when Trump and Dr. Deborah Birx, task force coordinator, explained they were asking Americans to stay home from mid-March through the end of April, because mathematical models showed 1.6 million to 2.2 million people could die from COVID-19.

The warning stemmed from a paper authored by Neil Ferguson, an epidemiology professor at Imperial College London. He modeled how COVID-19 can spread through a population in different scenarios, including what would happen if no interventions were put in place and people continued to live their daily lives as normal.

In the paper, Ferguson wrote, “In total, in an unmitigated epidemic, we would predict approximately 510,000 deaths in [Great Britain] and 2.2 million in the US.”

Ferguson did not respond to our request to talk through the study with him. But in a July email interview with HuffPost, he said Trump’s boasting of saving 2.2 million lives isn’t true, because the pandemic isn’t over.

Andrea Bertozzi, a mathematics professor at UCLA, said it was important to remember the 2.2 million figure was derived from a modeling scenario that would almost certainly never happen — which is that neither the government nor individuals would change their behavior at all in light of COVID-19.

The study didn’t mean to say 2.2 million people were absolutely going to die, but rather to say, “Hold on, if we let this thing run its course, bad things could happen,” said Bertozzi. Indeed, the results from the study did cause government leaders in both the U.S. and the United Kingdom to implement social distancing measures.

Experts also pointed out that the U.S. has the highest COVID-19 death toll of any country in the world — more than 220,000 people — and among the highest death rates, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.

“I don’t think we can say we’ve prevented 2 million deaths, because people are still dying,” said Justin Lessler, an associate professor of epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

In some instances when using the 2 million estimate, Trump and others in his administration cited the China travel restrictions for saving lives, while other times they’ve credited locking down the economy. We’ll explore whether either statement holds water.

Did Travel Restrictions Do Anything?

Trump implemented travel restrictions for some people traveling from China beginning Feb. 2 and for Europe on March 11. But experts say and reports show the restrictions don’t appear to have had much effect because they were put in place too late and had too many holes.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the first cases of coronavirus in the U.S. arrived in mid-January. So, since the travel bans were put in place after COVID-19 was already spreading in the U.S., they weren’t effective, said Josh Michaud, associate director for global health policy at the KFF. (KHN is an editorially independent program of KFF.)

A May study supports that assessment. The researchers found the risk of transmission from domestic air travel exceeded that of international travel in mid-March.

Many individuals also still traveled into the U.S. after the bans, according to separate investigations by The New York Times and the Associated Press.

Based on all this, experts said there isn’t evidence to support the idea that the travel restrictions were the principal intervention to reduce the transmission of COVID-19.

What About Lockdowns?

On the other hand, the public health experts we talked to said multiple global and U.S.-focused studies show that lockdowns and implementing social distancing measures helped to contain the spread of the coronavirus and thus can be said to have prevented deaths.

However, Trump can’t take full credit for these so-called lockdown measures, which ranged from closing down all but essential businesses to implementing citywide curfews and statewide stay-at-home orders. On March 16, after being presented with the possibility of the national death tally rising to 2.2. million, the White House issued federal recommendations to limit activities that could transmit the COVID-19 virus. But these were just guidelines and were recommended to be in effect only through April 30.

Most credit for putting in place robust social distancing measures belongs to state and local government and public health officials, many of whom enacted stronger policies than those recommended by the White House, our experts said.

“I don’t think you can directly credit the federal government or the Trump administration with the shutdown orders,” said Lessler. “The way our system works is that the power for public health policy lies with the state. And each state was making its own individual decision.”

Some studies also explore the potential human costs of missed opportunities. If lockdowns had been implemented one or two weeks earlier than mid-March, for instance, which is when most of the U.S. started shutting down, researchers estimated that tens of thousands of American lives could have been saved. A model also shows that if almost everyone wore a mask in the U.S., tens of thousands of deaths from COVID-19 could have been prevented.

Despite these scientific findings, Trump started encouraging states — even those with high transmission rates — to open back up in May, after the White House’s recommendations to slow the spread of COVID-19 expired. He has also questioned the efficacy of masks, said he wouldn’t issue a national mask mandate and instead left mask mandate decisions up to states and local jurisdictions.

Our Ruling

President Trump is claiming that without his efforts, there would have been 2 million deaths in the U.S. from COVID-19.

But that 2 million number is taken from a model that shows what would happen without any mitigation measures — that is, if citizens had continued their daily lives as usual, and governments did nothing. Experts said that wouldn’t have happened in real life.

And while lockdowns and social distancing have indeed been proven to prevent COVID-19 illness and deaths, credit for that doesn’t go solely to Trump. The White House issued federal recommendations asking Americans to stay home, but much stronger social distancing measures were enforced by states.

Travel restrictions implemented by Trump perhaps helped hold down transmission in the context of broader efforts, but on their own, they don’t seem to have significantly reduced the transmission rate of the coronavirus.

We rate this claim Mostly False.

Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a national health policy news service. It is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.

Silencing the debate mic can’t stop Trump from short-circuiting the democratic process

New rules will mute the microphones of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden for parts of the next presidential debate, but it may not be enough to solve the problems that arose in the chaotic first presidential debate.

The candidates will still be able to hear each other, potentially interrupting their train of thought – and, as The New York Times reported, anything a candidate says while his own microphone is muted may still be picked up by the other candidate’s mic.

And in late September, after the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates promised to add “additional structure” to “ensure a more orderly discussion of the issues,” President Donald Trump said he would defy any new rules.

By promising to dominate rather than debate, Trump made clear that he would continue his signature strategy for campaigning and governing: undermining democratic institutions.

That leaves one big question: Is a debate even possible?

As a professor of political communication and former college debate coach, I’ve spent 20 years teaching students how to learn from presidential debates. I teach them that functional political debates, like healthy democracies, require participants who respect the process and follow mutually agreed-upon rules. The rules are often mundane – what the time limits are, whether candidates can directly question each other and when rebuttals are allowed – but they make it possible for political opponents to engage one another, answer tough questions and give voters a way to evaluate contrasting arguments.

Trump broke the rules, abused the process and treated the notion of democratic debate with disdain. This microphone change may not prevent him from doing so again.

Debates have a purpose

Scholars lament that televised presidential debates don’t follow academic debate rules, but they can serve important functions for the public.

They demonstrate candidates’ ability to react under pressure, address a broad range of policy questions and connect with voters. The Pew Research Center reports that in many election cycles, large majorities of voters have said the debates help them choose whom to support.

What happened on Sept. 29 achieved none of that.

Trump launched a 90-minute blitz of outbursts, interruptions and attacks, which was roundly denounced across the political spectrum. Moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News repeatedly inserted himself into the barrage of cross-talk, but was unsuccessful in his efforts to get Trump to abide by the rules.

Joe Biden expressed exasperation, using language unprecedented for a presidential debate, telling Trump to “shut up” and calling him a “clown.” Political scientist Jennifer Piscopo described the scene as one in which both candidates were “goading each other with performative masculinity.”

The Washington Post’s Jill Filipovic speculated that one reason the 2016 debates didn’t devolve into that level of chaos was that, as a woman, Hillary Clinton would have subjected herself to sexist criticisms if she had taken the bait.

https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/1311122721682710528
 
Sabotaging democracy

Can this be fixed with a simple technological adjustment, like cutting speakers’ mics? If only.

The problem is that Trump didn’t just speak too long or out of turn. He adopted an anti-democratic stance and sabotaged the entire process. Muting his mic wouldn’t force Trump to participate in the debate in good faith. Moreover, it would give him the opportunity to claim that he’s being censored by what he considers a hostile media establishment.

The televised presidential debates were designed to ensure that American voters could evaluate presidential and vice presidential candidates in a live, unscripted context – one that exposed them to questions from journalists and citizens and enabled them to engage one another on the issues.

They were not designed with a saboteur in mind. Trump’s response to these debates is emblematic of his approach to the presidency. He wants to command an audience, not respond to voters. What he values most of all is having the mic to himself.

Karrin Vasby Anderson, Professor of Communication Studies, Colorado State University

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

Republican Party has spent nearly $1 million making Sean Hannity’s book a bestseller

The Republican National Committee continues to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for copies of the latest book by Fox News personality Sean Hannity, which was published in August These efforts have helped boost the book up bestseller lists, according to recent Federal Election Commission filings.

This week the RNC reported $492,308 in expenditures on “donor mementos” at book retailers, all of it spent on Sept. 16. Salon has confirmed that at least $159,000 of that amount went for bulk retail purchases of Hannity’s book, “Live Free or Die,” which have been offered to GOP donors who gave $75 or more.

Additionally, a retail representative told Salon that the RNC placed at least one more recent order for the book, on Oct. 22: an additional 1,500 copies for $26,100. That purchase will not appear in public filings until after the election.

While the RNC did not send Salon the data it originally promised, evidence suggests that all of the $492,308 in expenditures went to Hannity’s book. Combined with August receipts, it is possible that the RNC has spent more than $900,000 on Hannity’s book over the last three months.

Outside of Hannity and Donald Trump Jr.’s recent book, “Liberal Privilege,” the RNC has not recently promoted any other such deals. Both landing pages (here and here) are hosted by WinRed, the Republican online fundraising platform, and a WinRed representative told Salon that the platform only recently hosted the Hannity and Trump Jr. books. Other books were available for separate purchase on the GOP store, according to both GOP and WinRed representatives.

Further, an RNC spokesperson told Salon in an email that none of the Sept. 16 purchases were for Trump Jr.’s book — which would appear to narrow the options to Hannity.

“The RNC appears to be personally enriching Hannity while he dedicates airtime to promoting Trump,” said Brett Kappel, campaign finance and government ethics expert at the law firm Harmon Curran.

Hannity, a close confidant and informal adviser to President Trump, also styles himself as a prime-time journalist who hosts an influential news and opinion program on Fox News, which experts say raises new ethical questions.

“President Trump and his campaign have had an interesting relationship with books,” Jordan Libowitz, head of communications at the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told Salon.

“Whereas President Obama’s book recommendations are all books he read that he liked, President Trump often takes to Twitter to recommend books that say nice things about him, creating an incentive for books by reporters that play to his ego,” Libowitz said. “This was taken to a whole new level when the RNC emailed an ad for Hannity’s new book to the Trump campaign’s list and offered signed copies in exchange for donations. Spending thousands on Don Jr.’s book plays into the general grift of campaign funds by the Trump family, but this is something new: a campaign essentially putting a major reporter on the payroll.”

“The RNC regularly uses new books as part of our record-breaking fundraising efforts as we work to deliver victories across the country in November,” an RNC spokesperson told Salon in an email. “We have netted a significant amount off of book promotions and have more resources, not less, because we have incorporated them into our fundraising efforts.”

The GOP has altogether poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the purchases, propelling both Hannity’s and Donald Trump Jr.’s books to exalted positions on a number of bestseller lists.

Hannity’s book hit No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list in August, and debuted at No. 2 on Amazon’s overall bestseller list, hitting No. 1 in a few sub-categories such as “political commentary” and “elections.” Barnes & Noble — where the RNC placed tens of thousands of dollars in orders — ranked Hannity’s book third upon debut.

“Live Free or Die” went to press for a fourth printing, and currently ranks at No. 444 on Amazon.

It is less clear, however, how the RNC secured copies of Trump Jr.’s book, “Liberal Privilege.” The president’s eldest son, who self-published his second book, at first eschewed traditional retailers and only sold copies through his own website and Amazon.

“While I was offered a generous book deal by my previous publishers, I turned it down and decided to self-publish,” Trump Jr. said in July, in a statement sent by the RNC to The Hill. “The RNC was able to raise almost a million dollars from their fundraising campaign with my first book, ‘Triggered.’ I look forward to helping them fundraise once again for the benefit of the Republican Party.”

By self-publishing, Trump Jr. trades the distribution, marketing and publicity support afforded by a top publisher for a more lucrative royalty haul.

As the New York Times reported last month, Trump Jr.’s distribution plan appeared to avoid traditional retailers almost entirely:

Unlike Mr. Hannity’s book, “Liberal Privilege” will not be in bookstores. A person with knowledge of the project said that it will be $29.99 on Mr. Trump’s website, where presales are being handled, and on Amazon, along with an e-book and an audiobook narrated by Kimberly Guilfoyle, a senior campaign adviser and Mr. Trump’s girlfriend. It’s unclear if any major retailers will carry the book, though managers at some traditional distribution channels said last week that they hadn’t heard anything about it. ReaderLink, a company that supplies books to more than 80,000 stores, including big-box chains like Walmart and Target, said it had no plans to distribute it.

It’s possible that the entire $405,000 that the RNC itemized to book retailers in August went toward Hannity’s book, and given that the committee says that it has not purchased Trump Jr.’s book, the same appears true of September’s $492,000.

The RNC did not report payments to Trump Jr. in August, so it might have fulfilled its preorder promise through Amazon. The committee’s August filings reveal an unusually large $126,423 expenditure to Amazon on Aug. 10, for “office supplies.”

Trump Jr.’s book has branched out to some traditional retailers since its Sept. 1 debut. “Liberal Privilege” currently ranks at No. 3,080 in Amazon books overall, a steep drop from eighth place in early September.

RNC press secretary Mandi Merritt told the New York Times that signed copies of “Triggered,” which Trump Jr. published with Center Street, an imprint of Hachette, raised nearly $1 million for the party. As mentioned above, Trump Jr. claims turned down the publisher’s offer for his second book.

 

Poll shows most who voted third-party in 2016 are supporting Biden over Trump in 2020

Millions of Americans voted for third-party candidates in 2016, but a new poll released Thursday shows that a large majority of those who rejected the United States’ two major political parties four years ago are not planning to do so in 2020, with Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden holding a substantial advantage over Republican incumbent President Donald Trump among that voting bloc. 

Between October 16-18, Morning Consult Political Intelligence surveyed 359 likely voters who opted for candidates other than Trump or Hillary Clinton in 2016 and found that 53% are supporting Biden in this year’s election, while just 21% are backing Trump. 

Another 14% said they will vote third-party again, and 12% remain undecided. 

graph1.png

According to monthly averages of daily polling conducted by Morning Consult, Biden’s popularity among likely voters who eschewed both major-party nominees four years ago has improved throughout the year. 

From May to October, the percentage of those who voted third-party in 2016 but said they will back Biden this year increased from 42% to 50%, while Trump’s standing among the group during the same time period stagnated at around 20%.

Of the Americans who hold unfavorable views of both of 2020’s presidential nominees, 18% supported third-party candidates four years ago.

Yet Biden’s favorability has improved among this group in the past six months, with the latest poll showing that 49% of likely voters who picked third-party candidates in 2016 view him positively, compared with 47% who view him negatively. 

Over the same time period, Trump has remained overwhelmingly unpopular among this slice of the electorate, with roughly one-quarter expressing favorable views and three-quarters holding unfavorable views of the president. 

graph2.png

In 2016, 6% of U.S. voters cast a ballot for a third-party candidate, and their combined share of the vote was larger than Trump’s slim margins of victory in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. 

Four years later, far fewer voters—just 2% nationwide—say they are interested in voting for someone other than Biden or Trump in this year’s contest. 

graph3.png

The voters who intend to vote third-party in 2020 tend to be politically unaffiliated and are disproportionately young, with 41% falling between the ages of 18 and 34.

More identify as liberal or moderate than conservative, the majority are white, nearly half earn less than $50,000 per year, and they are more likely to consider the economy and healthcare as top priorities. 

How Donald Trump threatens the retirement of every American worker

Tom Michels worked 31 years at LTV’s iron ore mine in northern Minnesota — and had already started making retirement plans — when the company’s bankruptcy wiped out his job and most of his hard-earned pension.

Michels took a series of odd jobs to make ends meet until he became eligible for the Social Security benefits that now enable the 71-year-old to buy food, cover health care costs and even travel a little with his wife, Vicky.

Yet because of Donald Trump, Michels’ retirement hangs by a thread. If Trump destroys Social Security, as he threatened to do, Michels and millions of other Americans will be cast into poverty with little hope of ever bouncing back.

Some will have no choice but to return to the workforce and toil until they die. Others, too frail to work and lacking other resources to pay mounting bills, would lose everything they spent their lifetimes building.

“I hate to even think about what’s going to happen if he’s reelected,” observed Michels, a former member of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 4108 whose income, without Social Security, would fall to just several hundred dollars a month.

“Social Security is not an entitlement. It’s something we bought and paid for. Every hour we worked, we were paying for Social Security,” Michels said, adding Trump has no right to deprive retirees of benefits they earned.

Because of the country’s aging population, in 2021 Social Security will spend more money on benefits for retirees than it takes in through workers’ payroll taxes. Many beneficiaries already struggle because payment amounts set by the government fail to keep up with health care costs.

But instead of shoring up this popular and essential program, Trump wants to kill it.

He repeatedly proposed cutting Social Security Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income, which provide crucial assistance to Americans no longer able to provide for themselves and their families.

This past winter, just as the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Trump expressed his desire to take up so-called entitlement reform if reelected. Astute retirees like Michels understand that is code for cutting programs like Social Security and Medicare.

Then, in August, Trump proposed eliminating payroll taxes under the guise of leaving a few more dollars in the paychecks of Americans struggling to weather the COVID-19 recession.

However, payroll taxes fund Social Security, and cutting off that revenue stream would destroy the program within just a few years. Trump tried to dupe Americans into thinking that abolishing the payroll tax would be good for them.

“It sounded attractive, the way he put it,” noted Michels, who is also the president of the Steelworkers Organization of Active Retirees (SOAR) Chapter 33-4. “But in reality, it’s not very attractive. There’d be nothing left.”

Trump’s attacks on Social Security come as Americans depend on the program more than ever.

Greedy corporations no longer provide the pension programs that once supported retirees through their golden years. Even employers that promised pensions, like those employing Michels and fellow SOAR activist Scott Marshall, often abandon their obligations through bankruptcies or other sneaky maneuvers.

Marshall worked for a glass company, a rail car manufacturer, a steelmaker and a paper mill, each offering pension plans.

“They all shut down before I could qualify for a pension,” explained Marshall, who lives in Chicago. “Social Security is the only retirement income I have.”

Marshall, a vice president of SOAR, noted that another 1.3 million Americans belong to multiemployer pension plans facing insolvencybecause of investment losses, industry consolidation and other factors over which workers had no control.

The Democratic-controlled House passed a commonsense bill, the Butch Lewis Act, in 2019 that would make low-interest loans to these struggling plans and ensure they continue meeting their obligations to members. But Trump and his Senate Republican cronies refuse to support the measure, even though some of the troubled plans will run out of money in just a few years.

The uncertain future of these plans makes members’ Social Security benefits all the more important.

During his 2016 campaign, Trump promised to protect Social Security. If that were truly his goal, he would ensure that millionaires and billionaires, like himself, finally begin contributing their fair share to the program.

Americans pay 6.2 percent of their wages to Social Security. But the government only applies the tax to the first $137,700 of a person’s income. That means millionaires and billionaires pay nothing on most of their fortunes and effectively slide by on a tax rate far below the 6.2 percent ordinary citizens pay.

Abolishing the income cap would ensure the long-term viability of Social Security. And that would only be fair because, as Marshall noted, workers created the wealth that America’s rich enjoy. They earned dignified retirements in return.

But instead of providing for ordinary Americans, Trump gives handouts to the 1-percenters. While demanding cuts in the Social Security programs protecting disabled and ill workers, he signed the 2017 tax giveaway for millionaires and corporations.

“I know people who voted for Trump originally and are now backing off of him for just that reason,” Marshall said. “They totally get what he’s trying to do to Social Security. They’re not going to put up with that.”

After losing their livelihoods and pensions, Michels said, he and his colleagues looked in vain for jobs providing wages and working conditions comparable to what the USW ensured they received at LTV.

Only when they became eligible for Social Security did most of his coworkers regain a measure of financial stability. If Trump strips that away now, Michels said, many LTV retirees would be unable even to afford health care.

“It would be devastating,” he said.

Joe Biden just wiped the floor with Trump

In the second and final one-on-one presidential debate of the 2020 race, President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden both turned in stronger performances than they had in their first, thanks in part to the impressive moderation of NBC News reporter Kristen Welker. Trump, perhaps because of new rules and advice he’d received, was much less inclined to interrupt Biden and marginally less combative. Biden, perhaps because he wasn’t interrupted constantly, was able to get to many of his key talking point and directly connect with voters on matters that are important to them.

Though Trump occasionally had a strong or persuasive moment, Biden was undoubtedly the clear victor of the debate. He cleaned the president’s clock.

That claim is not a mere reflection of personal taste, but a judgment about how each candidate talked about issues that matter to people. Over and over, Biden made substantive points about public policy, taking the overwhelmingly popular side in these disputes. Trump would often simply flail in response or back himself into a corner with an unpopular stance.

For instance, on the minimum wage, Trump clearly opposed raising it as Biden has proposed, saying “that’s not helping.” He said it should be a “state option.”

This is a problem for Trump. Pew Research has found that 67 percent of Americans support raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, including 43 percent of Republicans. His stance also undercuts the appeal he had for many GOP voter in 2016, based around his image as an unorthodox Republican who actually cared about working men and women.

Trump also said he wanted the Supreme Court to get rid of Obamacare, a view opposed by 58 percent of Americans, including 66 percent of independents, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Trump says he wants to replace Obamacare with a new law, but he hasn’t presented one in four years. And according to Gallup, voters trust Biden more on health care by a 13-point margin.

On a related issue, the coronavirus pandemic, Trump was likewise walking on thin ice. His approval rating on handling of the crisis is under water, with around 40 percent of Americans approving of his response and around 58 percent disapproving. But Trump did little to change anyone’s mind on the matter and continued to insist that it’s not that big a deal. At one point he, said Americans are “learning to live with it,” an opening Biden dove into with a brutal rejoinder:

And when Biden pushed Trump on not taking responsibility for his own performance on the pandemic, Trump gave a response that would have seemed too absurd for parody:

And Biden pointed out that Trump has yet to get another bill passed for COVID relief, another overwhelmingly popular idea. When Trump blamed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for the delay, Biden rightly pointed out that the House had already passed the massive HEROES Act, and Senate Republicans oppose it. Trump trotted out his usual attack on HEROES, calling it a bailout for blue states. But Biden used this opportunity to call for uniting the country rather than dividing, a point that is likely to be more popular than Trump blaming Democrats for wanting too much stimulus money.

Biden also expertly used a discussion of immigration to call out the Trump administration’s horrendous immigration policies, which have been highlighted in recent days with reports that more than 500 children who were separated from their parents by the president’s agencies have yet to be reunited years later. Biden called the policy “criminal” and spoke passionately about the abuse the children suffered. Here, too, Biden was on strong ground — 66 percent of people opposed Trump’s family separation policy, according to one poll. Biden also defended more humane practices of releasing undocumented migrants while they await hearings.

And when Trump hit back at Biden, his answers were inconsistent and hazy. He repeatedly asked Biden who built the cages that Trump infamously put children in, correctly implying that they were constructed under the Obama administration. But though this is a popular right-wing gotcha line, it’s hard to see it being persuasive with voters. People who are unsettled by the inhumane treatment of migrants are unlikely to be convinced by this claim that Biden would be more harsh on immigrants. And it’s hard to understand the point Trump was trying to make with it, given that his other argument was that Biden and Obama were too lenient with immigrants. Without a clear point to make, Trump just comes off as argumentative and a bully.

The exchange also led Trump into one of the most despicable lines of the night, when he attacked the immigrants who show up for trial dates as having low IQs:

Later, Biden excelled when he talked about investing and green energy to combat climate change. He focused on the fact that these investments can support new jobs and that both labor groups and environmental organizations support his plan. Trump tried to fearmonger about the threat reducing reliance on fossil fuels poses to American industry, but the fact is that most Americans are concerned about climate change and want politicians to take strong action to counter it. Talking about the transition away from fossil fuels is a positive, enthusiastic way as Biden did makes for a powerful message on this point.

Trump’s strongest moments came when he was hitting Biden on his support for the 1990s crimes bill, which many now argue was far too punitive. And the president also had a relatively effective line in response to any of Biden’s proposals, arguing that Biden never got them done in his decades in government. But he probably overused this attack line and had no substantive response to Biden’s point that he has gotten things done but wants to do more, and that he has previously been stymied by GOP opposition.

One part of the debate without a clear “winner” came when the candidates delved into dueling accusations of corruption. Trump fanned the flames of unclear allegations about Biden’s son, Hunter, that have taken off in right-wing circles in recent days. Biden hit back by pointing to the New York Times’ reporting on Trump’s taxes, particularly the fact that it was recently revealed he had a secret Chinese bank account. Arguably, Biden got the better of this dispute, as he focused on the fact that Trump hasn’t released his taxes — which Americans want to see — while Trump went off listing a series of fringe allegations that few people outside of the Fox News universe will understand. But even if you argue that this segment of the debate was a “draw” with both candidates coming out looking sullied, that’s probably still good for Biden, who is leading in the polls.

After this dispute, Biden pivoted away from the attacks and spoke directly to the American people.

“There’s a reason why he’s bringing up all this malarkey,” Biden said. “It’s not about his family and my family. It’s about your family. And your family is hurting badly. If you’re a middle-class family, you’re getting hurt badly right now.”

He added: “We should be talking about your families, but that’s the last thing he wants to talk about.”

It was an effective moment. Trump seemed to realize this, too, because he tried to undercut it with a harsh reply. He dismissed Biden’s plea as pure pandering, saying that he sounded like a “politician.”

Perhaps that reply was a good one for some viewers. But there’s a reason to think it wasn’t. Throughout the rest of the debate, Biden was consistently talking about popular policies and ideas that will make families’ lives better. Trump was rambling and often dismissing these ideas, while providing few alternatives. So if they were listening to the rest of the debate, many voters will probably think Biden was sincere.

Rick Santorum brags about Trump after final debate: “We’re not keeping kids in cages anymore”

CNN conservative pundit Rick Santorum praised President Donald Trump’s debate performance on Thursday despite the president’s defense of a child separation policy for immigrants.

Following the final 2020 presidential debate, Van Jones expressed disgust at a “lack of humanity” from Trump, who claimed that immigrant children in “cages” are “so well taken care of.”

“Number one, we’re not keeping kids in cages anymore!” Santorum fired back.

“Where are their parents?” Jones asked.

“He very effectively said, ‘Who built the cages?'” Santorum said of Trump.

“And who used the cages?” Jones demanded to know. “Who used them in horrific, barbaric ways that are a stench in the nostrils of God?”

But Santorum argued that the “horrific” conditions were created by the Obama administration.

“The people who built the cages probably wouldn’t have built them again today,” he opined.

“I know a lot more about this than you do, Senator,” Jones said. “Those children are still in very nasty situations.”

Watch the video below from CNN.

Scoop: Rudy Giuliani declined offer of compromising Hunter Biden emails and images in May 2019

Rudy Giuliani, the personal attorney for President Donald Trump, was approached by someone offering allegedly compromising emails and images belonging to Hunter Biden in spring 2019, according to two individuals familiar with the meeting.

Giuliani was approached with the offer while at a lunch in New York City in late May of last year, according to the sources. The content included emails, as well as allegedly salacious video. The offer was declined, one of the individuals said, amid credibility questions. 

The content was rejected a year and a half before Giuliani received a hard drive in September 2020 containing what he alleges — without providing evidence — are emails and images pulled from Hunter Biden’s hard drive.

Giuliani has not said when exactly he was first offered compromising content belonging to Biden. But the timing of the alleged lunch meeting — and Giuliani’s apparent suspicions about the credibility of the content dangled in front of him — raise significant questions about the former mayor’s intent when he opted to distribute strikingly similar content to news outlets earlier this month.

In a text to Salon, Giuliani said he had “no such recollection” of the meeting. “I don’t remember anyone remotely like that,” he added.

The alleged meeting also complicates key elements of the already hazy cover story Giuliani spun to journalists about how he first came into the alleged Hunter Biden hard drive. The New York Post covered some of the unverified contents in a dubious report last week after Fox News declined to do so over credibility concerns.

The newly revealed meeting also aligns with key aspects of new report from Time, in which two individuals alleged that emails and photos said to belong to Hunter Biden had been for sale for as much as $5 million on the Ukrainian black market while Giuliani and associates attempted to dig up dirt in the foreign country.

Giuliani’s efforts to smear the Bidens with baseless allegations about business dealings in Ukraine led directly to his client’s impeachment last year. Those accusations have been repeatedly debunked, and journalists quickly pointed out major errors and holes in The Post’s report. The FBI has since opened an investigation into the story as part of a possible Russian disinformation operation, according to multiple reports.

The Trump administration also recently sanctioned one of Giuliani’s key Ukrainian sources as an “active Russian agent” seeking to influence the 2020 election. The timeline of those efforts happens to align with key developments in the story of the alleged laptop. According to the Trump-supporting Delaware computer repairman who claimed that he gave a copy of the hard drive to Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert Costello, in September, a man calling himself Hunter Biden dropped off three laptops at his store in April 2019. The repairman told reporters that a medical condition had prevented him from identifying the man.

Around this time, Giuliani associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman had been making trips to Ukraine, where they carried out work on behalf of Giuliani — and, by extension, the president, whom Giuliani says he was defending. This work included a meeting in Kiev in mid-May 2019 where Parnas, at the direction of Giuliani, told a top Ukrainian official that “the United States would freeze aid” if the incoming administration did not announce an investigation into the Bidens, according to Parnas’ lawyer in The New York Times.

The official confirmed that he had met with the duo in Kiev at the time but denied that Parnas had discussed the issue of aid. That month, compromising content on Biden was circulating in the country, according to Time. Giuliani was allegedly offered the content at lunch in New York City around the same time — and declined — which Salon first revealed. (An individual familiar with the meeting told Salon one concern was that the content might have included inauthentic material.)

In September, the emails were going for $5 million, but a person targeted for the sale declined mostly because he could not verify the authenticity, according to Time. “I walked away from it, because it smelled awful,” the individual told the magazine. He claimed that the seller was looking to get it into the hands of Trump allies in the U.S.

According to Salon interviews with individuals familiar with the case and multiple reports, Giuliani’s business dealings abroad have been under investigation over the course of the past year as part of a federal probe led by the FBI and the Southern District of New York — the very office he once led.

That probe grew out of the arrest last October of Parnas and Fruman, who were first booked on unrelated campaign finance charges at Dulles International Airport outside Washington as they waited to board a flight to Vienna, Austria. The duo were cuffed one day after they met Giuliani for drinks at Trump’s D.C. hotel — just as impeachment hearings heated up in Congress.

The next month, with his former associates under indictment, Giuliani registered a new company, Giuliani Media, ahead of a dirt-digging trip to Ukraine to film a documentary on the Bidens with a One America News (OAN) production crew. While there, he interviewed Andriy Derkach, whom the Trump administration recently sanctioned after accusing the Ukrainian lawmaker of running a “covert influence campaign” directed at the 2020 U.S. presidential election since late 2019.

The FBI reportedly subpoenaed the alleged Hunter Biden laptop in December 2019, the same month that OAN aired the Giuliani documentary. Giuliani, who was embarrassed this week by political prankster Sacha Baron Cohen in a tawdry hotel scene with an actress posing as a young Eastern European journalist, later aired his own interview with Derkach.

Around that time, Giuliani confirmed to Salon that a strange text accidentally sent to this reporter in October had in fact been a password. When asked what the password protected, Giuliani said that it unlocked top-secret “files” that would one day spur Biden’s downfall.

Giuliani did not reply to Salon’s text messages seeking additional comment for this article.

Steele dossier claimed Trump’s “corrupt” ties to China were “more extensive” than his ties to Moscow

President Donald Trump has sought to smear his Democratic challenger as “Beijing Biden” on the campaign trail. But the latest in a series of bombshell articles drawn from the president’s tax returns from the New York Times may have undermined his line of argument. On Tuesday, the paper revealed that Trump owns a bank account in China, where he has chased development deals for years — a pursuit which appears to have followed him into the White House.

The report was part of the newspaper’s broader investigative series on Trump’s finances, a picture of which remain incomplete to the American public. A Trump Organization attorney told The Times that the president had opened the account “to pay the local taxes.” “No deals, transactions or other business activities ever materialized and, since 2015, the office has remained inactive,” the lawyer added.

Those claims echo the president’s insistent denials about his business ties to Russia.

“So I tweeted out that I have no dealings with Russia. I have no deals that could happen in Russia, because we’ve stayed away, and I have no loans with Russia,” Trump said at a January 2017 press conference.

“I have very little debt,” the president continued. “I have very low debt, but I have no loans with Russia at all.”

Trump, at the time president-elect, went on to emphasize that he has “no deals,” “no loans” and “no dealings” with Moscow. 

“We could make deals in Russia very easily if we wanted to. I just don’t want to, because I think that would be a conflict,” he said. “So I have no loans, no dealings and no current pending deals.”

(This claim was was later revealed to be untrue after BuzzFeed News reported that Trump had pursued a Trump Tower Moscow project as a presidential candidate. The project failed, but the reasons remain unclear.)

Trump had called that press conference to dispel an explosive report about a dossier of opposition research, which alleged extensive financial and business ties to Russia, as well as election coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Compiled by the former British spy Christopher Steele, the dossier also indicated that Russian President Vladimir Putin may have compromising blackmail on Trump, in the form of a salacious video that quickly became known as the “pee tape.”

The Steele Dossier, which South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham had advised colleague John McCain to give to the FBI, proved politically divisive. Most of its specific allegations have been impossible to prove or disprove, though its general arc of Russian election influence has endured.

It also included short passages about Trump’s relationship with China, which did not receive as much attention. In the dossier, Steele wrote that the Trump campaign was “relatively relaxed” about the alleged ties between Trump and Russia, because they “deflected media and the Democrats’ attention away from Trump’s business dealings in China and other emerging markets. Unlike in Russia, these were substantial and involved the payment of large bribes and kickbacks which, were they to become public, would be potentially very damaging to their campaign.”

A source “close to Trump and [his former campaign manager Paul] Manafort” told Steele that “Republican campaign team happy to have Russia as media bogeyman to mask more extensive corrupt business ties to China and other emerging countries,” according to the dossier.

The Times article contains several potentially damaging reports.

The Trump company that controls the Chinese bank account spiked in 2017, the president’s first year in office, to around $17.5 million — more than the previous five years’ combined, according to The Times. The president withdrew $15.1 million from the company’s account that year, reporting it in his financial disclosure as “management fees and other contract payments.”

Trump had sought trademarks in Hong Kong and mainland China since 2006, not always successfully; his daughter, Ivanka, scored a number of Chinese trademarks for her personal brand after she joined the administration in 2017.

Weeks before the 2016 Republican National Convention, a Chinese couple from Vancouver bought 11 condos in Trump’s Las Vegas tower totaling $3.1 million through a shell company. FBI agents later inquired about the shell company with the owner of a Vegas-based financial firm, whose address had been wrongfully used in the deal, per The Times.

Further, Ivanka and her husband, senior White House adviser Jared Kushner, had previously lived in a Trump penthouse in Manhattan which Trump sold to a Chinese-American businesswoman for $15.8 million. The Times reported that the president’s taxes show a capital gain of at least $5.6 million from that sale, in his first year as president. The woman reportedly has ties to Chinese officials.

Still, Trump has sought to associate Biden with China in a negative light, calling Biden “China’s puppet” and promoting baseless claims about his son Hunter’s business dealings with the country, which have found foothold among a number of campaign surrogates. But Biden’s financial disclosures and tax returns, which the former vice president released voluntarily, show no financial or business relationships with China.

“I’ll bet you Hunter is a middle-man. He’s like a vacuum cleaner. He follows his father around collecting money,” Trump said at a recent event. “What a disgrace. It’s a crime family.”

Fox News host Tucker Carlson criticized for “dangerously and dishonestly” targeting a journalist

On Wednesday night, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson brought on a guest, Darren Beattie — a former speechwriter for the president — to slam NBC News reporter Brandy Zadrozny for her story on harassment campaigns that Donald Trump supporters have conducted online. And NBC News, in an official statement issued on Thursday, struck out to “vigorously” defend Zadrozny.

NBC News said, “Over the past several years, journalists from news organizations around the world have put themselves at risk in order to shine a light in the dark corners of society and the internet — specifically, in the realm of conspiracy theories and online extremism. Last night on Fox News Channel, Tucker Carlson dangerously and dishonestly targeted one of those journalists: Brandy Zadrozny. Brandy represents the best of investigative journalism and of NBC News. She is relentlessly well-researched and sophisticated in her understanding of disinformation and conspiracy theories on the internet and within some social media communities.”

NBC News went on to say, “Fox News has chosen to smear Brandy. In doing so, they have shamefully encouraged harassment and worse. Fortunately, any effort to intimidate Brandy is doomed to failure. NBC News couldn’t be prouder of Brandy, and we will continue to vigorously support her work.”

Beattie left the White House in 2018 after CNN reported that in 2016, he had attended an event that included white nationalists. The former Trump speechwriter has accused Zadrozny of using “data search engines to dox the personal information of anonymous Trump supporters online.” But Ben Collins, one of Zadrozny’s colleagues at NBC News, tweeted that Beattie seriously distorted Zadrozny’s reporting.

On Wednesday night, Collins tweeted, “Tucker Carlson is devoting an entire segment to attacking my colleague, Brandy Zadrozny, for doing actual reporting, like using public records to confirm identities of people who create harassment campaigns. It’s disgraceful. She’s the best reporter I know. I’m with her 1000%.”

Collins, in a Twitter thread, went on to say, “That was a hideously unethical segment by Tucker Carlson, framing using basic reporting tools like public records searches as some sort of evil act. To do it to a mom, and one of the best people I know, is disgusting. I won’t forget it.”

Ivanka Trump is the “de facto head” of an “eleventh-hour” effort to win back suburban women: report

Suburban women used to be a major asset for the Republican Party. Former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge performed much better in the Philadelphia suburbs during the 1990s than he did in Philadelphia Proper; suburban women, from Orange County to La Jolla to Glendale and Burbank, played an important prominent role in many GOP victories back when California was still a red state. But during the Trump era, many suburban women have been leaning Democrat — and the GOP’s problems with suburban women are the focus of new articles by The Atlantic and Politico, which reports that President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign is hoping that his daughter, White House Senior Adviser Ivanka Trump, can win over suburban women for the president.

Journalist Elaine Godfrey, in The Atlantic, discusses a new generation of suburban female activists —who, she stresses, are working hard to get Trump voted out of office. In her article, headlined “Revenge of the Wine Moms,” Godfrey explains, “These women aren’t just expressing their outrage by voting in high-stakes national elections; they’re funneling their energy toward a collection of smaller targets, including statehouse races, local party organizations and school boards. And all of this activism has the potential to shape American politics in a much more significant way than their biennial votes.”

However, Godfrey wonders how long this “zealous engagement” of suburban women will last. Godfrey asks, “Is America entering a new age of activism — or is all of this just a Trump-era blip?”

Godfrey notes that in Ohio, one group of anti-Trump suburban female activists is GrassRoots Resistance, which was formed in late 2016 after Trump won the election. That anti-Trump group has since “grown to 150 members,” according to Godfrey.

“They’ve channeled their energies toward fundraising and door-knocking for candidates, and they’ve given themselves hand cramps writing hundreds upon hundreds of get-out-the-vote postcards,” Godfrey says of GRR. “For many of the GRR women, the group served as a kind of gateway drug, introducing them to other political projects of varying magnitude. A handful of members joined — and remade — the Ward 17 Club; others signed up for the League of Women Voters.”

Godfrey also points out that “some on the political left have dismissed these women, many of them white, as ‘wine moms’ or ‘MSNBC moms’ — silly, unprincipled newcomers to the political scene who are more interested in watching Rachel Maddow with a glass of pinot in hand than agitating for systemic change. Black women in particular have been organizing for decades, forming the backbone of the Democratic Party. Where were the wine moms in 2016, leftists wonder, when 53% of white women supported Donald Trump?”

But the Atlantic journalist adds, “What the critics may be missing, though, is the scope of these women’s influence — and their role in strengthening the Democratic Party’s infrastructure. Despite the fact that most Democrats are concentrated in urban areas, resistance groups have sprung up all over the country, from the Arizona desert to rural Pennsylvania.”

In the 2018 midterms, suburban women played a major role in the blue wave that gave Democrats a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives — and journalist Anita Kumar, in Politico, reports that President Trump’s reelection campaign is hoping that Ivanka Trump will be able to help the GOP win back some of the suburban women who have been voting Democrat.

“In the past six weeks, Trump has made personal appeals for her father at 17 campaign stops, engaging in intimate question-and-answer sessions where she tells stories about the president,” Kumar explains. “She’s made stops at local businesses to pose with children in Halloween costumes. She’s bought cider and doughnuts. She’s rolled out bread for baking. It’s the traditional politicking that is hard to imagine coming from any other Trump family member, let alone President Donald Trump himself.”

Ivanka Trump has had a softer, very different tone from her father or her combative, snarky brother, Donald Trump, Jr. — who is wildly popular with the president’s far-right MAGA base but repulses moderates. 

“(Ivanka’s) brothers, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, and her sister-in-law, Lara Trump, are mostly sent out to throw red meat to Trump’s conservative base,” Kumar observes. “So, Ivanka Trump has become the de facto head of the eleventh-hour campaign to appeal to swing voters — specifically, the white college-educated women who helped propel the president’s come-from-behind victory in 2016.”

Ivanka Trump has been campaigning for her father in a long list of battleground states, from Arizona to Pennsylvania to Florida. But Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University in New Jersey, has her doubts about how effective it will be with the suburban women President Trump has been alienating.

Walsh told Politico, “The reality is that women voters are looking at the substance of what’s happened. It’s kind of late, three weeks out, to try suddenly to be having a different tone and tenor. I don’t think she alone can make up for what these women have been seeing the last four years.”

“Sorry”: Fox News host corrects Trump adviser’s attempt to discredit debate moderator Kristen Welker

Fox News host Bill Hemmer on Thursday called out Trump campaign adviser Mercedes Schlapp after she labeled NBC correspondent Kristen Welker as an “activist.”

Just hours before the final presidential debate of 2020, Hemmer asked Schlapp if President Donald Trump’s strategy is to attack Welker, who is scheduled to moderate the event.

“We’ll see what happens,” Schlapp replied. “But we know about the moderator. She’s a bit of an activist and we want a fair debate.”

Hemmer interrupted: “Sorry, she’s a reporter. She’s not an activist.”

“Well, she worked for NBC and she worked for MSNBC, which I would say is not necessarily fair and balanced,” Schlapp replied.

She covers the White House,” Hemmer pointed out.

“Yes, she does,” Schlapp agreed. “But she’s been highly critical of the president.”

You can watch the video below via YouTube: 

Trump may fire Bill Barr and FBI director for not aiding his campaign by investigating Biden: report

President Donald Trump has repeatedly discussed firing FBI Director Christopher Wray after the election — and officials are concerned he may also oust Attorney General Bill Barr, according to The Washington Post.

Trump has been unhappy that Wray and Barr have not publicly announced an investigation into Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, his son Hunter Biden, or his associates, aides told the outlet. The president is “increasingly frustrated” that the two officials have “not delivered his campaign the kind of last-minute boost that the FBI provided in 2016,” the sources said.

“Trump wants official action similar to the announcement made 11 days before the last presidential election by then-FBI Director James B. Comey” when he informed Congress that the FBI had reopened its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, according to the report.

Polls showed that Comey’s announcement was a major factor in Clinton’s 2016 election loss.

Trump appointed Wray in 2017 after firing Comey. The administration reportedly pressured then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to write a letter citing Comey’s handling of the Clinton probe for his dismissal, though draft documents showed that Trump wanted him fired for pursuing the investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia.

Trump called on Barr to “act fast” and “appoint somebody” to investigate the Biden’s before the election during a Tuesday interview with Fox News.

Trump’s comments came in response to a dubious New York Post story fed by Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and former adviser Steve Bannon that raised questions about emails purportedly found on a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, which he allegedly left at a Delaware repair shop. Numerous intelligence experts have alleged that the story is part of a Russian disinformation plot.

Trump’s comments came on Fox News, which itself reportedly refused to publish the story.

“There are many, many red flags in that New York Post investigation,” NPR noted this week. “Even if Russia can’t be positively connected to this information, the story of how Trump associates Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani came into a copy of this computer hard drive has not been verified and seems suspect. And if that story could be verified, the NY Post did no forensic work to convince consumers that the emails and photos that are the basis for their report have not been altered.”

The FBI has tried to distance itself from Republican outcry about the report, telling Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, that it had “nothing to add” after Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe dismissed allegations that it was part of a Russian disinformation plot.

Assistant FBI Director Jill Tyson also noted in the letter to Johnson that Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz had been highly critical of Comey’s pre-election announcement.

The FBI “can neither confirm nor deny the existence of any ongoing investigation or persons or entities under investigation, including to members of Congress,” she wrote. “As the inspector general firmly reminded the Department and the FBI in recent years, this policy is designed to preserve the integrity of all Justice Department investigations and the department’s ability to effectively administer justice without political or other undue outside influences.”

The president, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and top Trump aide Dan Scavino have all repeatedly criticized Wray, whom Trump views as “one of his worst personnel picks,” according to The Washington Post.

Trump has also grown increasingly critical of Barr after he told Republican lawmakers that the much-hyped investigation by U.S. Attorney John Durham into the origins of the Russia probe would not be completed before the election.

“I’m not happy, with all of the evidence I had, I can tell you that. I am not happy,” Trump said in an interview last week when asked if he would keep Barr for a potential second term.

Trump had told allies that he believed Barr and Durham would deliver “scalps.” Now, he complains that “they aren’t doing sh*t,” according to the Post.

Some administration officials have grown concerned that Barr “could become a casualty” of Trump’s desire to fire Wray. Others suggested his decision may hinge on the result of the election and whether Republicans keep control of the Senate.

“Trump often complains about members of his Cabinet and contemplates dismissing them, without doing so,” The Post added. “And Trump’s decision to fire Comey in early 2017 only fueled further problems for the president.”

Former U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance noted that Trump’s desire for a public announcement of a Biden investigation is what got him impeached last year.

“Maybe if the Senate convicted Trump after he was impeached for withholding aid from Ukraine to get them to announce an investigation into Biden, Trump wouldn’t be around to threaten the FBI Director’s job for not announcing an investigation into Biden,” she tweeted.

“That is corrupt,” former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti added. “Period.”

How to vote safely in person

Fear of coronavirus transmission and reports of vast reductions in the number of polling locations have driven a disproportionate number of Americans to opt for mail-in voting this year. Still, a recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll and a Citizen Data poll say only 35 percent of Americans plan to vote by mail — implying that a large percentage of voters will still show up in person.

For many Americans, especially those who fall into the high-risk category of having more severe symptoms of COVID-19, it has been months since they’ve been inside a room with strangers, some of whom could harbor coronavirus, and not know it. Certainly, the anxiety and concerns around voting in person are valid. At the same time, the coronavirus has become weaponized by the GOP and used as a tool of voter suppression. As Trump continues to attack mail-in voting and spread lies about its legitimacy, you may be wondering if there is any real risk to vote in person — or if the fear is overblown.

“I do think it’s safe to vote in person,” Dean Blumberg, an associate professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of California–Davis, told Salon. “I think for most voting situations, the interactions that you’re going to have with people where you’re not gonna be socially distanced will be brief, and then wearing a mask when you are close to other people provides an extra layer of protection for when you have to be close to other people.”

The Centers for Disease and Control (CDC) lists on its website a compilation suggested guidelines for polling stations to follow for in-person voting. This includes, but is not limited to, providing alcohol-based hand sanitizer with at least 60 percent alcohol at each step in the voting process, encouraging poll workers to wash their hands frequently, recommending and reinforcing face masks for both poll workers and voters, social distancing, and to have clearly mark points of entry and exit “to avoid bottlenecks.” Frequently touched surfaces, such as door handles, registration pens and clipboards, should be disinfected frequently, too, according to the guidelines. The U. S. Election Assistance Commission has also created a guide for election officials to clean and sanitize voting equipment as well as make sure that poll workers practice good hygiene.

“I think that with their recommendations around cleaning, disinfection, mask wearing and physical distancing, there are really reduced risks to people who are voting in person,” Dr. Annabelle de St. Maurice, an infection-prevention specialist at the University of California-Los Angeles, told Salon.

The greatest risk, de  St. Maurice said, is not when you’re actually voting in the polling place, but when you’re waiting in line.

“If that line is indoors, that’s probably the scenario where people might be closer together, and waiting in line for a long amount of time,” she said. “But I think if people can maintain a physical distance, if everyone is wearing a mask, and if ventilation is increased, meaning that people are maybe outdoors or there’s adequate ventilation in the polling place, those risks are really reduced.”

Blumberg said for situations where you have to break social distancing, like when you’re grabbing a ballot from the poll worker, that exchange will be so brief that the risk is low of getting infected even if one of you is asymptomatic—assuming you’re both wearing masks.

“If you’re having these brief interactions, or you’re just coming up to somebody and taking a ballot from them or handing the ballot to them that’s, that’s so brief, that the risk is there but it’s very low for transmission under those circumstances,” Blumberg said.

Exposure to the coronavirus isn’t a black-and-white situation, scientists say. Specifically, being exposed to the coronavirus is not the sole risk, but rather how much of the virus one encounters. Those who inhale more viral particles, either because they’re not masked or are in the presence of an infected person longer, are at higher risk.

For this reason, public health officials recommend wearing masks, staying at least six feet apart and avoiding crowds to reduce the amount of the coronavirus you come up against. 

As far as surface contact is concerned, the CDC states that surfaces are no longer believed to be the main source of transmission, and that one is more likely to get infected via respiratory droplets from person-to-person contact.

Yet Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association and former Maryland Secretary of Health and Mental Hygiene, told Salon by email that people do need to be cautious about touching voting machines.

“Any surface can get infected,” Benjamin wrote to Salon, including a link to a website about healthy voting. “So they need to continually clean them and you should either wash your hands afterward or use hand sanitizer. Avoid touching your face, mouth or eyes until you clean your hands. Also bring your own pen or pencil with eraser depending on the way the ballots are marked.”

However, Dr. Russell Medford, Chairman of the Center for Global Health Innovation and Global Health Crisis Coordination Center, wrote to Salon that voters should take special precautions—like wearing gloves.

“I suspect that each voting jurisdiction will have mitigation programs in place: social distancing, masks, gloves, frequent machine cleaning,” Medford explained. “Personally, I would make sure I wear gloves when I ‘punch’ my votes into any machine.”

At the same time, as Dr. Monica Gandhi, infectious disease doctor and professor of medicine at the University of California — San Francisco, wrote to Salon, “the surface issue is essentially going away ,as we realized that the main route of spread is asymptomatic transmission – people are not worried about surfaces/fomites anymore.” She pointed specifically to a recent article in the scientific journal The Lancet on how concerns about people being infected through fomites (meaning objects or materials likely to carry infections) has been “exaggerated.”

Blumberg agreed.

“The issue of touching stuff and potentially getting infected by touching an infected surface then touching your eyes, your nose, your mouth, that’s a theoretical risk, but we know that the vast majority of transmission is via the respiratory route,” Blumberg told Salon. “And that’s why social distancing and masking are the primary things that people can do to prevent themselves from getting infected; there’s very little if any transmission from contacting surfaces.”

Indeed, the most effective way to reduce transmission in polling stations will come from the physical mitigation strategies, like wearing masks and social distancing. There have been several studies that show wearing masks can reduce the risk of transmission, even when someone in a group of people is infected. A peer-reviewed study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal examined the case of a man who flew from China to Toronto and then tested positive for COVID-19. He had a dry cough on the flight, but wore a mask. All 25 people closest to him tested negative for COVID-19.

Another simulation showed that when at a minimum 80 percent of a population is masked, the risk of transmission is greatly reduced.

According to CDC guidelines, poll workers are encouraged to reinforce the use of masks among voters. In the state of California, poll workers will have extra masks for voters who show up without a mask. However, in parts of the country that have been resistant to wearing masks it’s possible that some people will show up and vote without wearing masks. If this happens while voting, Blumberg said to give that person without a mask a “wide berth.”

“Maybe there’s just one or two people and you can avoid them,” Blumberg said.

But what if you’re in a high-risk category, and more likely to have more severe symptoms if infected with COVID-19?

“Anybody who’s at risk for more severe disease, then they should make sure to follow all the appropriate precautions, but I would still encourage them to vote even if they’re older and they have underlying conditions, I’d still encourage them to vote,” Blumberg said. “Voting is the cornerstone of our democracy, and so we really want to encourage everybody, I would encourage everybody to vote.”