Good morning, everyone!
I remembered that Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times is originally from Oregon, so I wanted to read his “homeboy” viewpoint of the protests and federal crackdown in Portland.
I’ve watched them fire round after round of tear gas, along with occasional rubber bullets or other projectiles. They even repeatedly tear-gassed Portland’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, who has demanded that they go home, leaving him blinded and coughing on his own streets.
“They knocked the hell out of him,” President Trump boasted on Fox News. “That was the end of him.”
Trump is pretending that he is bringing law and order to chaotic streets, and now he has dispatched similar troops — what else can you call a militarized force like this but “troops”? — to Seattle, where that city’s mayor has also said they are unwanted. Yet if Trump is actually trying to establish order, he is stunningly incompetent. The ruthlessness of the federal forces has inflamed the protests, bringing huge throngs of Portlanders out to protect their city from those they see as jackbooted federal thugs.
“Their presence here escalates,” Kate Brown, Oregon’s governor, told me. “It throws gasoline on the fire.”
Chris McGreal of The Guardian writes about the fears of Portland’s African American community that the protests have become “coopted.”
But Portland has another reputation alongside its radical image. That of the whitest large city in America in a state with a constitution that once barred African Americans from living there. An 1850s law required black people to be “lashed” once a year to encourage them to leave Oregon, and members of the Ku Klux Klan largely controlled Portland city council between the world wars. Housing was effectively segregated in large parts of the city.
Many of today’s protesters say their support for racial justice in a city where the police department has a history of disproportionately killing African Americans is driven at least in part by an attempt to atone for Oregon’s racist past. But as Portland’s battles play out on the national stage, and Donald Trump stokes unrest for political advantage, some black leaders are asking whose interests the televised nightly confrontations really serve – and whether they are a continuation of white domination at the expense of black interests.
The president of the Portland branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), ED Mondainé, warned that the Black Lives Matter movement in the city is being coopted by “privileged white people” with other agendas. He said the confrontations with the federal officers sent by the president are little more than a “spectacle and a distraction that do nothing for the cause of black equality”.
Mondainé accused groups of young white people at the forefront of confronting federal officers of rising to Trump’s bait and using the campaign against racial injustice to provoke a fight in pursuit of other causes, such as anti-capitalism.
Ines Pohl of Deutsche Welle says that Trump’s reelection strategy is actually a simple, well-worn tactic: with a twist.
Other presidents, with George W. Bush being only the most recent example, have started wars in similar straits — wars unite the country and wartime presidents get reelected.
But Donald Trump has chosen a different path. He has taken every possible opportunity to turn the uncertainty many Americans now feel into fear. He perfidiously exploits the fissures that have existed in American society from the beginning, further fracturing the country.
With no concern for the grave consequences of his actions, he continues to stoke violence in order to later present himself as some kind of savior. He is doing so with the same political tactics that won him the White House in 2016. For Trump, it is always "the others" who pose the threat; "the others" who are to blame; and "the others" whom he, the strongman, has to protect his supporters from.
It is a very simple plan. Still, it seems to work in a country that has clearly lost its inner compass. And it certainly works with those who have traded in their American dream for anger, especially in a world in which the US role as the leading superpower is diminishing. And that message is also being clearly transported by the images that Trump is currently using to flood television screens in his most recent political coup.
Adam Nagourney of the New York Times on The Damn Fool’s policy and political failures with regard to handling the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mr. Trump’s attempt to downplay the coronavirus, or deride it as a threat exaggerated by his Democratic opponents and the media, has met the reality of rising caseloads, death counts and overwhelmed intensive care units in places like Texas, Arizona, Georgia and Florida, all states that he won in 2016 and that the Biden campaign had until now viewed as long shots.
The president’s handling of the virus is shaping up as not only a policy failure, but also a political one. Rather than strengthening his position against Mr. Biden, Mr. Trump’s response to the virus appears to have created a backlash among voters — one that has only elevated his opponent.
“The movement of Covid into the South and West has finally caught up with Trump,” said Linda L. Fowler, a professor of government at Dartmouth College. “While the disease was decimating blue states, he was able to pretend it wasn’t happening. But now the context has changed considerably and his people are hurting, underscored by the sinking poll numbers, the problems for G.O.P. congressional candidates, and the fact that the party faithful was reluctant to attend the convention.”
The political perils of Mr. Trump’s course were driven home a few hours before he announced he was scrapping the Florida convention. A Quinnipiac poll found that Mr. Biden was now leading Mr. Trump in Florida by 13 percentage points, a stunning margin in a state that has become — since the recount in the 2000 presidential election between Al Gore and George W. Bush — Exhibit A of a nation where elections are decided by decimal points.
But that’s not only miscalculation that The Damn Fool made, according to polling results summarized by Peter Hamby of Vanity Fair.
Shortly after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, the Democratic research firm Avalanche went into nine battleground states—Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Georgia, North Carolina, Iowa, and Pennsylvania—to measure how segments of Americans were reacting to the protests. Unlike most pollsters at the time, Avalanche surveyed two large back-to-back samples of 6,986 registered and unregistered total voters—one on June 1 and a second on June 10 and 11—allowing it to track how sentiments changed during what might have been the most consequential chapter of the protests... It organized respondents into five segments: Vote Trump, Lean Trump, Mixed Feelings, Lean Biden, and Vote Biden.
Of course, it’s not simply a reflection on Donald Trump, but the entire Republican Party in the age of Trump, according to
Zack Beauchamp at
Vox. (Dr. Greg shared this link in the comments of yesterday’s APR: I think we should take another look at it.)
How could an American president start abusing federal authority in such a blatantly authoritarian fashion? How could he get one of the country’s two major parties to acquiesce to this, especially the party that claims to be for federalism and states’ rights? How could any of this be happening?
What we’re seeing, according to experts on comparative democracy and American politics, is our polarized political system reaching its breaking point — and our democracy buckling under the pressure of Trump’s authoritarian impulses and near-total control of the Republican Party.
There is no legitimate justification for deploying these federal troops over local objections. The protests in Portland are limited to a small area and are primarily peaceful protests rather than riots. The violence that does grow out of those protests, like the recent rise in gun violence in Chicago, is a quintessentially local issue; the federal government has no business getting involved absent local request.
But Trump is running a “law and order” reelection campaign that works by entrenching partisan divides and stoking racial resentment. His unprecedented deployment of federal law enforcement personnel is a means to that end; he gets away with it because American politics is so dangerously polarized that Republicans are willing to accept virtually anything if it’s done to Democrats.
For more supporting evidence of Beauchamp’s thesis, we need go no further than the 2020 battleground state of Arizona, writes Elaine Godfrey of The Atlantic.
One might think that, in its moment of peril, the Arizona GOP would attempt to win over moderates. Yet the person charged with shepherding the party to victory in this most crucial moment is the state GOP chairperson Kelli Ward, a pro-Trump zealot with a soft spot for conspiracy theories, a woman who is most famous for her failed primary challenge to Republican Senator John McCain in 2016. Just as polls show Arizonans—especially those in the suburbs—souring on Trump, the state party has veered sharply to the right.
Despite its history as the home of Barry Goldwater conservatism, the Grand Canyon State has been known, in recent years, for electing gentler establishment types such as McCain, Jeff Flake, and Jon Kyl. The 51-year-old Ward is a different sort of Republican. During her time as a state senator representing parts of the ultra-red La Paz and Mohave Counties in northwest Arizona, Ward paid a visit to Cliven Bundy’s Nevada ranch in solidarity with the rancher’s standoff against the Bureau of Land Management; suggested that the Affordable Care Act was part of a broader plot to push rural Americans into urban areas; and entertained constituent concerns about the chemtrail conspiracy theory, the idea that the government is using airplanes to poison American citizens. In 2016, during her Tea Party–style challenge to McCain, Ward defended Trump’s attacks on the senator’s experience as a prisoner of war. Later, in a primary bid against McSally, Ward made national headlines for suggesting that the McCain family had deliberately timed an announcement about the senator’s brain cancer to damage her campaign. (She lost both primary elections—badly.)
Eric Levitz of New York magazine with even more supporting evidence: congressional Republicans simply quit on further legislation to provide COVID-19 emergency relief to suffering Americans.
If it wasn’t clear in March that the U.S. was in for a prolonged period of high unemployment, it has been since mid-June, when new COVID cases began climbing across the Sun Belt. But even if we postulate that it was reasonable for the GOP to wait until the last possible minute before extending benefits, there would be no excuse for the party’s failure to have a relief bill ready to go just in case. Even the most bullish economic forecasters didn’t rule out the persistence of double-digit unemployment this August as a significant possibility. So why then did McConnell wait until federal unemployment benefits were about to expire to start crafting another stimulus package? And why did Republicans fail to rally behind his outline this week, forcing the majority leader to abandon the bill’s rollout on Thursday morning?
The answer to both questions appears to be this: Many congressional Republicans earnestly believe that the reason unemployment is high — in the middle of an uncontained pandemic that is killing 1,000 Americans a day — is that the excessive generosity of federal benefits has rendered the unemployed unwilling to work.
Nor will complete future relief and immunity from the coronavirus be achieved when a COVID-19 vaccine arrives, according to Sarah Zhang at The Atlantic.
Biologically, a vaccine against the COVID-19 virus is unlikely to offer complete protection. Logistically, manufacturers will have to make hundreds of millions of doses while relying, perhaps, on technology never before used in vaccines and competing for basic supplies such as glass vials. Then the federal government will have to allocate doses, perhaps through a patchwork of state and local health departments with no existing infrastructure for vaccinating adults at scale. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has led vaccine distribution efforts in the past, has been strikingly absent in discussions so far—a worrying sign that the leadership failures that have characterized the American pandemic could also hamper this process. To complicate it all, 20 percent of Americans already say they will refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine, and with another 31 percent unsure, reaching herd immunity could be that much more difficult.
The good news, because it is worth saying, is that experts think there will be a COVID-19 vaccine. The virus that causes COVID-19 does not seem to be an outlier like HIV. Scientists have gone from discovery of the virus to more than 165 candidate vaccines in record time, with 27 vaccines already in human trials. Human trials consist of at least three phases: Phase 1 for safety, Phase 2 for efficacy and dosing, and Phase 3 for efficacy in a huge group of tens of thousands of people. At least six COVID-19 vaccines are in or about to enter Phase 3 trials, which will take several more months.
Republican political failures have opened the door for presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden to run on a very liberal policy platform, according to Michael A. Cohen of the Boston Globe.
...Biden is not a socialist. He’s not a radical. But he is running on the most liberal policy platform of any Democratic candidate in modern American history. And if he wins the presidency, it could usher in a period of progressive victories unlike anything since the Great Society of the 1960s.
Yet, with the public focused on the coronavirus and the election becoming a referendum on Donald Trump, little attention is being paid to the progressive moment that might be right around the corner.
Take for example this rarely discussed but remarkable Biden proposal: raising taxes by $4 trillion. Virtually all of those higher taxes will be levied against the wealthiest Americans, and Biden says he wants to use the proceeds to address income inequality among other priorities. Not long ago, Republicans accused Democrats of wanting to raise taxes even when they didn’t. This year Biden is on the record about it and it’s barely talked about — even though a tax hike can be pushed though the Senate with a simple majority via the budget reconciliation process, making his sweeping campaign proposal a very attainable policy if the Democrats retake that chamber.
Finally, today...I now know that The Apocalypse has arrived!
But...I’m not fooled!
I’m willing to bet that no one can sit in that chair BUT her.
Have a good morning!