May 21, 2020

Republicans Have a New Plan to Thwart the Will of the People

A Missouri initiative would undo voters’ preference for nonpartisan legislative districts — and perhaps shift representation itself.

When Karl Rove laid out the Republican plan to win back power by weaponizing redistricting in a March 2010 op-ed, Democrats failed to pay proper attention.

The vision set forth — called Redmap, short for the Redistricting Majority Project — proved simple yet revolutionary: In most states, legislatures control the decennial redistricting that follows the census. So in November 2010, Republicans invested tens of millions of dollars in these ordinarily sleepy local races and swept elections.

Through gerrymandering, they drew themselves huge advantages in Congress and state capitals, firewalls that have allowed Republicans in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Michigan and elsewhere to survive wave elections in which Democratic state legislative candidates won hundreds of thousands more votes.

It’s a census-year election again, and this time both sides understand the stakes. Democrats know down-ballot elections this fall are the last opportunity to close the redistricting gap before next decade’s maps are drawn.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/opinion/missouri-republicans-gerrymander.html

May 21, 2020

Trump's entire reelection message amounts to an admission of failure

Given his monstrous narcissism and megalomania, it was only a matter of time until President Trump began campaigning for reelection on the notion that his own government has failed him.

Trump’s political advisers have hit on a new strategy to cope with the challenge of running for a second term amid the most severe public health and economic crises in modern times, the Associated Press reports.

That strategy is to run once again as an outsider, which requires using his own government as a foil. Trump advisers tell the AP that Trump will be positioned as the outsider relative to Joe Biden, which you can see in the new label that Trump propagandists have been applying to Biden: “swamp monster.”

But if you dig beneath the surface of this argument, it really amounts to an admission of failure on Trump’s part, if an unwitting one.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/21/trumps-entire-reelection-message-amounts-an-admission-failure/

May 21, 2020

One-fifth of Americans fear they can't pay June rent or mortgage, federal survey finds

Source: LA Times

More than half of California households have seen a loss of income due to the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. Census Bureau said Wednesday, based on a newly launched weekly survey.

Since March 13, 54.5% of California adults surveyed said they or another adult in their home had lost income, and an additional 40.8% expected their households to earn less from work over the next four weeks.

Nationally, more than a fifth of adults surveyed reported they had slight or no confidence in their ability to pay their rent or mortgage in June.

The findings come from the first release of data from a new weekly survey conducted by the bureau to try to gauge how the outbreak is affecting Americans. The 50-question survey asked about food security, ability to pay rent, access to a computer for school work and anxiety levels.

Read more: https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-05-20/one-fifth-of-americans-couldnt-pay-may-rent-or-mortgage-government-survey-finds

May 21, 2020

Pompeo's new acting inspector general is already creating a conflict of interest

On Friday, President Trump announced the firing of State Department Inspector General Steve Linick, based on the recommendation of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a move that surprised official Washington and infuriated Democrats. Now, there is additional concern about Linick’s replacement, Stephen Akard, who is already on the job — and is also keeping his existing State Department position, setting up a clear conflict of interest.

According to the law, the administration must notify Congress 30 days in advance before firing an inspector general. But multiple sources told me that Linick’s last day was Friday, the same day Congress learned about his ouster. Akard showed up at the office on Monday morning and immediately assumed the boss’s role. Yet Akard is keeping his job as the head of the State Department’s Office of Foreign Missions, a Senate-confirmed political appointee position he has held since September. Adding the inspector general’s job to his duties essentially means he will be overseeing himself.

“The independence of inspectors general is paramount. Embedding a political ally to serve as IG who is still working in the very agency they are supposed to oversee is very problematic and an affront to that independence,” Sen. Robert Menendez (N.J.), the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, told me. “I have trouble seeing how Ambassador Akard could fulfill those duties effectively given the circumstances and without stepping down from his current role.”

The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.

The Office of Foreign Missions has the job of supporting more than 800 U.S. embassies and consular offices around the world and over 100,000 diplomatic staff serving abroad, as well as dealing with foreign diplomats inside the United States. Before he joined State, Akard served as chief of staff at the Indiana Economic Development Corporation under then-Gov. Mike Pence. A former career foreign service officer, in 2018 he withdrew his nomination to be director general of the Foreign Service, following criticism that he was not senior enough for that role.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/20/pompeos-new-acting-inspector-general-is-already-creating-conflict-interest/

May 21, 2020

Texas's Republican leaders are fighting to keep voting unsafe

THE NOVEL coronavirus does not just threaten Americans’ lives; it threatens their democracy. The pandemic will deter people from showing up to vote in person. If Americans feel as though they must choose between voting and their safety, the legitimacy of the November presidential election will be in doubt. Some state leaders are trying to head off this disastrous scenario. Others, including those in Texas, are encouraging it.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) is fighting to keep tight limits on who qualifies for an absentee ballot in his state. Several states conduct nearly all voting via absentee ballot, and most others allow people to obtain mail-in ballots without providing a reason. Texas is one of the handful of laggard states that still require excuses, such as illness. Leaders of other states in this category, such as Delaware, have announced that voters can use fear of covid-19 as a valid reason to get mail-in ballots. That is the least states can do to give their voters a fair shot at having their voices heard. Yet Mr. Paxton is fighting in court to prevent Texans from having that option.

Mr. Paxton’s excuse is that Texas state law strictly limits absentee voting, even during a pandemic. The law requires voters under 65 to have a “sickness or physical condition” that could result in injury to their health if they attempted to vote in person. Yet Texans suing for access to absentee ballots point out that lack of immunity to covid-19 is a physical condition that makes polling places dangerous for them. Moreover, Texas’s language is little different from that of states that have moved to be more helpful to voters. Unlike leaders elsewhere, Mr.?Paxton chose to read his state’s statute as narrowly as possible, rather than adopting plausible alternative readings that would give voters needed choice.

Voting advocates on Tuesday won a victory against Mr. Paxton in federal court on a separate argument — about whether limiting mail-in ballots for those under 65 is unconstitutional age discrimination. The issue, which will no doubt be litigated further, would have been moot if Mr. Paxton had not taken such a narrow view of the law at the outset.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/texass-republican-leaders-are-fighting-to-keep-voting-unsafe/2020/05/20/af7bf938-9a0d-11ea-a282-386f56d579e6_story.html

May 21, 2020

Trump's signal is his noise. Stop trying to distinguish between the two.

Stop trying to distinguish between the signal and the noise emanating from President Trump and his party. The noise is the signal. And it’s the sort of clamor that despotic leaders use to sow confusion, division and distraction.

Trump clearly knows that accurate, meaningful information is his enemy. Too many voters whose support he needs have decided that his epic mishandling of the covid-19 crisis has made both the pandemic and its economic consequences worse than they had to be.

As a result, chaos and mystification are his only friends. He wants the electorate and the media to focus on absolutely anything except the virus’s death toll and rising unemployment. Thus his targeting of former president Barack Obama on the basis of an entirely false narrative about the Michael Flynn case and his claim to be taking hydroxychloroquine, a drug whose use health experts declare unproven against the novel coronavirus — and potentially dangerous.

And on Wednesday came the ultimate subject changer, as Trump’s supine Republican allies on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee subpoenaed documents concerning the work of former vice president Joe Biden’s son Hunter for a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-signal-is-his-noise-stop-trying-to-distinguish-between-the-two/2020/05/20/c8764552-9ad4-11ea-89fd-28fb313d1886_story.html

May 21, 2020

I believe in American exceptionalism. That's what makes this crisis so hard to accept.

I believe in American exceptionalism and think those who don’t must be so blinded by their own prejudices that they can’t see the facts right in front of them. The United States’ military might and economic prowess remain unrivaled. America’s cultural influence and soft power remain enormous, even with the most inward-looking president in over a century sitting in the White House. It should also surprise no one that a country born in the Age of Enlightenment would thrive so mightily in science, medicine and technology.

From Benjamin Franklin’s experiments with electricity to Steve Jobs’s creation of the iPhone, American inventors have fashioned brave new worlds, then wiped clean the boundaries of those ages, before imagining new ones in a blink of the eye — whether it was American visionaries flying across the windy shores of Kitty Hawk or Air Force pilots learning how to guide their spaceships onto the surface of the moon.

Immigrants traveling to our shores have also been pivotal in shaping American exceptionalism, inventing the telephone, the television and the Internet technology that now defines our daily existence. It was also an immigrant from Germany who visited FDR’s White House and pushed the wartime president to launch the Manhattan Project. In so doing, Albert Einstein helped America and its allies win the Second World War.

Our country’s pioneering spirit has also extended to medicine, whether through the creation of lifesaving vaccines, the development of blood transfusions or miraculous breakthroughs in the field of organ transplants. In one survey after another, America’s doctors are viewed as the best in the world, and our universities remain unrivaled. Since 1950, approximately half of all Nobel Prizes awarded in the science fields have been given to Americans.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/i-believe-in-american-exceptionalism-thats-what-makes-this-crisis-so-hard-to-accept/2020/05/20/3e62a5c2-9ab1-11ea-89fd-28fb313d1886_story.html

May 21, 2020

Growing Drug Tolerance Drives Trump To Buy Black-Tar Hydroxychloroquine Off Dealer

WASHINGTON—Explaining that the 800 mg tablets he’s been crushing up and snorting were no longer doing the trick, President Donald Trump was reportedly driven to buy black-tar hydroxychloroquine off a drug dealer in a D.C. metro station Tuesday due to his growing tolerance for the prescription medicine.

“Come on, Randy, man, don’t give me those baby hydroxies—I need that pure shit,” said the pallid, twitching commander in chief as he frantically scratched at his rash-covered body, begging the peddler to sell him some of the sticky, highly concentrated form of the anti-malarial medication in a dark corner of D.C.’s McPherson Square Metro Station.

“I went through 30 or 40 pills this morning and I’m not even having any heart palpitations or dizziness. The stuff is like baby aspirin. Come on, man, I’ve maxed out all my prescriptions and I’m fuckin’ jonesin’ for a big hit of that sweet Roxy. I can handle it, I swear.”

At press time, the drug dealer had knocked President Trump unconscious and thrown his body on the train tracks.

https://www.theonion.com/growing-drug-tolerance-drives-trump-to-buy-black-tar-hy-1843548243

May 21, 2020

Nation's Politicians, Law Enforcement, Corporate Executives Marvel At Utopia They're Living In

NEW YORK—Expressing disbelief that they were so fortunate to experience a true golden age of prosperity and technological wonder, the nation’s politicians, law enforcement officers, and executives marveled Wednesday at the futuristic utopia they get to live in.

“To think that I have all this at my fingertips, whether it’s automated high-volume stock trading or unlimited surveillance footage of my employees, it’s like something out of a science fiction paradise,” said pharmaceutical executive Ron Pollard, who claimed previous generations of police officers, elected officials, and business leaders could never comprehend the world of unlimited possibilities that has been created for them, where they are free to do whatever they want all the time.

“Walking through these plants staffed entirely by hyper-efficient robots, facial recognition cameras, maybe even luxury space travel, it’s almost like I’m living in a dream. There’s massive unemployment, and yet the stock market is surging. We’ve finally achieved a perfect society. It’s simply breathtaking to watch law enforcement arresting citizens for just going about their daily lives. Corporate lobbyists write up laws that only benefit the wealthy and elite. It’s like a never-ending dream. If Rockefeller or Henry Frick could see this sublime world, they would weep with joy. I don’t even need to employ a servant anymore when gig workers, that I can summon with the touch of a button, can do so much more at fraction of the cost.”

Pollard added that with the rapid advancements of the past few decades he expected his children would inherit a world that, for them, would be even more unrestrained and full of possibilities.

https://www.theonion.com/nation-s-politicians-law-enforcement-corporate-execut-1843568548

May 20, 2020

The post-American world is now on full display

The annual meeting of the World Health Assembly — the general assembly of the World Health Organization — is normally not something that attracts major attention outside the circle of those directly concerned.

But the meeting this week was very different. Here, the post-American world was on full display as it has seldom been seen before. It is not that the United States has ceased to exist — far from it. But it has left behind any ambition of global leadership and any function as a global inspiration.

And that is very new. Tragically so.

The first prominent speaker on the virtual meeting, with audience members throughout the world, was Chinese President Xi Jinping. It was a polished, confident and probably effective performance. His speech contained four messages: China has mastered the crisis and has put it behind itself; China is ready to help the rest of the world, notably Africa; China stands for transparency, including a review on what happened once we all have put the crisis begin us; and a vaccine has to be seen as a global public good available to all.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/19/post-american-world-is-now-full-display/

Trump and the Republicans have ceded world leadership to China, much to the delight of our adversaries. Bunch of fucking traitorous assholes.