Good morning, everyone!
Both David Boies and Theodore B. Olsen, writing for the Washington Post, state that The Damn Fool has no case.
It is clear to us, and by now to most Americans, that former vice president Biden won, including in the six states central to the challenges being mounted by President Trump’s lawyers.
The margins in those six states range from 10,000 votes in Arizona to more than 145,000 votes in Michigan. Evidence of systemic or widespread fraud or miscounting in those states has simply not been found, and recounts rarely, if ever, change the outcome of elections by more than a few hundred votes.
Trump would have to overturn the outcome in more than one of those states to change what is apparent as the clear result of the election. It is time to accept that Biden won the election and it is time to accept that result and come together as a nation.
We might not agree completely on the widespread use of mail-in ballots, or the expansion of the election from one day into several weeks, but these are matters largely left by the Constitution to individual states. Those issues can be addressed by the states and Congress, if appropriate, at some time in the future.
Torben Lütjen for Der Spiegel International states that the Trumpists were here long before Donald Trump and aren’t going anywhere.
Civil discourse, after all, has been in an advanced state of erosion for a long time, with violence-laden rhetoric having become the norm. The Republican base went feral both morally and intellectually long before Trump's arrival and they are well-nigh addicted to the soundbites and indignation of the kind mass-produced by Fox News and talk radio. Polarization is also the reason why their support for Trump never wavered: Conservative America saw his countless transgressions as mere trifles relative to what was at stake in the much larger battle for America's soul.
Many Republicans have a much more transactional relationship with the president than is widely believed. And not a few are well aware that Trump is a scoundrel, but at least he is their scoundrel. In the brutal, zero-sum game of American politics, they felt that withholding their support from Trump would only have helped their detested opponents. Given what is widely perceived as an existential conflict, most of the over 70 million Trump voters would have voted for whoever appeared at the top of the Republican ticket - just as Democrats would have voted for whoever was nominated as the Democratic candidate.
Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer says that we all better recognize.
So in 2020, the Black and brown women of the Peach State went to work. That included an Election Day “war room” where they dispatched some of the weapons that put their crusade over the top — thousands of hot pizzas and bottles of ice cold water, and video-gaming trucks, as well as spoken-word artists, stilt walkers, drag queens, anything that would keep Georgians amused and refreshed to stay on line as they waited to vote.
And the entertainment was just part of what will surely be remembered as one of the most successful get-out-the-vote campaigns in American history. “We anticipated the [BS],” Nse Ufot, the Abrams ally who took over her New Georgia Project which has registered tens of thousands of new voters across Georgia since 2014, told me. That means when they learned at 5 a.m. on Election Day that more than 100 polling places had been abruptly moved in the prior 48 hours, Ufot’s team immediately sent an army of volunteers wearing sandwich boards to the old locations, to convey the new information to any confused voters.
And every little bit helped in what was arguably the most stunning upset of 2020′s fraught presidential election, with Joe Biden riding that increased voter turnout to the brink of a narrow victory that would make him the first Democratic White House hopeful to carry the (former?) red state of Georgia since 1992. The efforts of activists such as Abrams, Ufot and dozens like them are also a reason the state’s two Democratic U.S. Senate candidates performed well enough to force a January runoff, which will give the party a chance — albeit an uphill one — to capture control of Congress to enact Biden’s agenda.
Molly Redden of HuffPost on one of the more unrecognized heroes (it seems to me, anyway) of the 2020 elections: the United States Postal Service.
As voting was underway, and in the tense days before Democrat Joe Biden was projected to win the presidential election on Saturday morning, overstated claims about the number of ballots that were stuck in the mail flew across social media.
An Election Day story and push alert from The New York Times suggested the USPS had lost track of 300,000 ballots at the very last minute. But in the days following, the agency confirmed to Sullivan, the judge, that it had delivered most of those ballots directly to local boards of elections.
On Thursday, a Washington Post story implied that mail delays caused thousands of ballots to arrive too late to be counted. The headline read, “USPS processed 150,000 ballots after Election Day, jeopardizing thousands of votes,” and the first sentence characterized those 150,000 ballots as being “caught” in the USPS system.
But the obvious implication — that the USPS had mishandled all 150,000 of those ballots — was simply not true. Of those 150,000 ballots, 95% were moving at normal delivery speeds. The reason they were still in the mail was because voters had mailed them only one or two days before Election Day. Those ballots weren’t “caught” or delayed — they were mailed late.
Ross Ramsey of the Texas Tribune on something unusual that happened in those border towns in the elections.
All but one of the Republicans running statewide campaigns in Texas this year beat their opponents by 8 to 11 percentage points. The one? President Donald Trump, who beat Joe Biden by 5.8 percentage points.
Statewide, Texas Republicans outperformed the leader of their ticket.
In several places along the Texas border, the opposite happened. Much has been written about Trump’s strong performance in the persistently blue counties on the Texas-Mexico border. His border supporters were numerous and enthusiastic. The New York Times sent reporters to Zapata County, which flipped from its customary spot on the Democratic side of the aisle to a seat on the Republican side. The Wall Street Journal went to Starr, where Trump improved dramatically on historical Republican results.
But it’s not like those blue counties switched sides altogether. Voters there supported Trump — in most cases that meant he still lost, but by less than in his first race in 2016 — but then many of them went back to voting more or less like they usually do.
Eli Lehrer of Washington Monthly with an interesting view on the circumstances in which Republicans can and, perhaps, should be brought into a Democratic Administration.
In recent years, many presidential efforts to “reach out” have involved appointing a few tokens who don’t share the president’s party affiliation in technocratic roles overseeing sizeable parts of the federal apparatus. Both Barack Obama and George W. Bush had kept one member of their predecessor’s cabinet and even Donald Trump promoted an Obama administration holdover—VA official David Shulkin—to serve as his first Secretary of Veterans Affairs. And, while some cabinet appointees not from the president’s party such as Obama’s first Secretary of Transportation, Ray LaHood, a longtime Republican congressman and Kennedy-Johnson Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon, a veteran Eisenhower official, have served ably, not all have. Many recent other-party appointees in cabinet-level jobs had short, stormy tenures like those of Shulkin under Trump, Obama Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, and first-ever Secretary of Energy James Schlesinger under Jimmy Carter who had been Defense Secretary and CIA Director under Republicans.
On the other hand, people of another party with “soft” power but small or no formal roles have a far better and more consistent record of accomplishment. War Democrat George Bancroft helped Abraham Lincoln with key speeches and appeals while Franklin Roosevelt relied on a Republican who challenged him for the presidency, Wendell Wilkie, to build the World War II alliance with the United Kingdom. As Ambassador to the United Nations, Democrat Jeane Kirkpatrick shaped Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy more than anyone else than while former Republican President Herbert Hoover took on a formal role advising Harry Truman on how to remake the federal bureaucracy following the end of World War II. Richard Nixon’s decision to solidify and expand many Great Society programs rather than eliminating them happened while Daniel Patrick Moynihan served as a top domestic policy aide. Finally, Bill Clinton’s return to the center and political success following a rough first two years in office can be credited in part to (mostly) Republican fixer Dick Morris.
Such advisors offer an obvious political advantage for a president relative to a showy cabinet appointee: They have little or no formal power—many never even had paid jobs–and they mostly do not face Senate confirmation. Thus, if it doesn’t work out, they’re lower profile and easier to dismiss. Obama faced embarrassment and delay when he offered the Commerce Department to his Republican colleague, Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, who accepted and then changed his mind before confirmation hearings saying he couldn’t abide Obama’s big-spending ways. Less high-profile advisors are freer to offer a genuine outside view than would the token secretary in the peer-pressure packed cabinet meeting.
Meh.
James Ball/Columbia Journalism Review
News organizations have performed tens of thousands of fact checks of Trump, his officials, and elected representatives of both parties. They have hired specialist online misinformation reporters, explaining to mainstream audiences how images can be manipulated, old social media posts faked, of the dangers of “bot” armies and hacking, and even of next-generation risks such as deepfakes. The specter of foreign interference, especially from Russia, has been constant.
Much of this work has been world-class, produced by journalists at the top of their trade. And all of it has failed. Because it is built on a foundation of mistrust, all it has done is has taught people how to pick holes in the arguments of their opponents, to question their motivations, or even—in the case of social media bots—their very existence.
The result is a maelstrom of mutual distrust. This might be most apparent in the attitude of Trump’s base towards mainstream journalists, but it permeates the entire political spectrum. Neither mistrust nor misinformation are problems of only one political group.
Zeynep Tufekci of The Atlantic affirms that while there is quite a bit of good news on the COVI-19 front, for now...buckle up and buckle down.
It’s time to buckle up and lock ourselves down again, and to do so with fresh vigilance. Remember: We are barely nine or 10 months into this pandemic, and we have not experienced a full-blown fall or winter season. Everything that we may have done somewhat cautiously—and gotten away with—in summer may carry a higher risk now, because the conditions are different and the case baseline is much higher.
When community transmission is this high, every kind of exposure is more dangerous. A gym class is more likely to have someone who is infectious. Workplaces will have more cases, meaning more employees will unknowingly bring the virus home. More people at the grocery store will be positive. A casual gathering of friends may be harder to hold outdoors. Even transmission from surfaces may pose a higher risk now, because lower humidity levels may improve the survivability of the virus.
Plus, the holidays are upon us, which means a spike in gatherings of people who do not otherwise see one another. Such get-togethers, especially if they are multigenerational, can spark more outbreaks. I take no joy in saying this, but all of this means that any gathering outside one’s existing quarantine pod should be avoided for now—especially if it is indoors. Think of it as a postponement and plan to hold it later. Better a late Christmas than an early medical catastrophe. Pods should not expand unless absolutely necessary. Order takeout instead of dining indoors. Make game night virtual. Shop in bulk, so you can do fewer trips to the store. It’s not the right time for wedding receptions or birthday parties.
Finally today, Science Daily reports that tropical weather systems are beginning to last longer once they make landfall.
The scientists analyzed North Atlantic hurricanes that made landfall over the past half a century. They found that during the course of the first day after landfall, hurricanes weakened almost twice as slowly now than they did 50 years ago.
"When we plotted the data, we could clearly see that the amount of time it took for a hurricane to weaken was increasing with the years. But it wasn't a straight line -- it was undulating -- and we found that these ups and downs matched the same ups and downs seen in sea surface temperature," said Lin Li, first author and PhD student in the OIST Fluid Mechanics Unit.
The scientists tested the link between warmer sea surface temperature and slower weakening past landfall by creating computer simulations of four different hurricanes and setting different temperatures for the surface of the sea.
Once each virtual hurricane reached category 4 strength, the scientists simulated landfall by cutting off the supply of moisture from beneath.
Everyone have a good morning!