June 30, 2020

Trump's only campaign promise is to make bigotry safe again

“White power!” shouted the elderly man, raising his fist as he drove his golf cart past a group of demonstrators advocating racial justice. On Sunday, President Trump offered an “amen.”

A white couple stood outside their St. Louis mansion aiming deadly firearms — the man wielding a semiautomatic rifle, the woman waving a handgun — at Black Lives Matter protesters who were peacefully marching past. On Monday, Trump joined that hallelujah chorus, too.

In both cases, Trump offered his encouragement to white tribal fear and anger in the form of retweets on his Twitter feed. There’s plenty of bad news the president might want to overshadow: the explosion in covid-19 cases in Sun Belt states he pushed to reopen prematurely, for example, or the reports that Russia offered bounties for killing U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan. But why choose “white power” as the bright, shiny object he wants everyone to focus on? Why not some other, less incendiary bit of nonsense?

The logical conclusion is that, in his desperate campaign to win reelection, Trump has decided to position himself even more explicitly as the defender of whiteness and all its privileges. Certainly, in his ideologically flexible career, maintaining the primacy of whiteness is a rare constant.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-only-campaign-promise-is-to-make-bigotry-safe-again/2020/06/29/37752cc4-ba43-11ea-bdaf-a129f921026f_story.html

June 30, 2020

Trump shows us what 'unfit' means

President Trump’s record of failure — delaying his response to the coronavirus (and then undercutting health professionals’ advice, thereby allowing the pandemic to resurge); attempting to enlist foreign powers (certainly Ukraine and allegedly China) to further his own reelection; appointing a flock of utterly incompetent and ethically challenged advisers — is so damning that he will likely hold the distinction of being America’s worst president.

What has become apparent in recent months is that his character flaws are so profound that we could not have expected anything different and cannot expect a change for the better in his remaining time in office.

The latest Russia scandal illustrates the point. According to the New York Times, Trump did receive intelligence in his daily briefing about the bounty that Russia put on U.S. troops: “The intelligence was included months ago in Mr. Trump’s President’s Daily Brief document — a compilation of the government’s latest secrets and best insights about foreign policy and national security that is prepared for him to read. One of the officials said the item appeared in Mr. Trump’s brief in late February; the other cited Feb. 27, specifically.” (Trump and the White House have denied he was briefed on the matter.)

The Associated Press also reports that the White House knew in 2019 that “Russia was secretly offering bounties to the Taliban for the deaths of Americans, a full year earlier than has been previously reported” and that Trump was briefed once by former national security adviser John Bolton in March 2019 and again by his successor, Robert O’Brien (who denies doing so).

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/30/trump-shows-us-what-unfit-means/

June 30, 2020

Obamacare Versus the G.O.P. Zombies

Ten years of failed promises to come up with something better.

Covid-19 cases are surging in states that took Donald Trump’s advice and reopened for business too soon. This new surge — is it OK now to call it a second wave? — is, on average, hitting people younger than the initial surge in the Northeast did. Perhaps as a result, rising infections haven’t been reflected in a comparable rise in deaths, although that may be only a matter of time.

There is, however, growing evidence that even those who survive Covid-19 can suffer long-term adverse effects: scarred lungs, damaged hearts and perhaps neurological disorders.

And if the Trump administration gets its way, there may be another source of long-term damage: permanent inability to get health insurance.

Remarkably, last week the administration reaffirmed its support for a lawsuit seeking to overturn the Affordable Care Act, which would, among other things, eliminate protection for Americans with pre-existing medical conditions. If the suit were to succeed, having had Covid-19 would surely be one of the pre-existing conditions making health insurance hard, perhaps impossible, to get.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/29/opinion/obamacare-coronavirus-republicans.html

June 29, 2020

As Trump's corruption gets worse, some Democrats want a tougher response

The big revelations of the moment — the reports that Russia may have paid bounties for the killing of U.S. troops, and the news that a U.S. attorney was ousted after investigating Trump cronies — are a reminder that Trump has found a gaping hole in our system.

If a president refuses to cooperate with congressional oversight in just about every conceivable way — and if that president has the near-total backing of a party that controls one chamber of Congress — any such scrutiny can basically be ground to a halt, with no repercussions.

But a group of House Democrats is now calling on its chamber to get a lot tougher in this regard.
This group of Democrats — which is led by Rep. Ted Lieu of California and includes other high-profile lawmakers on the Judiciary Committee — is introducing a resolution Monday that, if successful, would dramatically increase the House’s ability to compel compliance with oversight.

This resolution would create a new, modernized mechanism by which the House could seek to levy stiff fines on officials who defy subpoenas for testimony or documents. It would in effect bring into the 21st century a power that Congress has used only rarely in the past — the power to enforce its own subpoenas.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/29/trumps-corruption-gets-worse-some-democrats-want-tougher-response/

June 29, 2020

Millions of homeowners face flood risks without realizing it, and climate change is making it worse

Source: Washington Post

When Hurricane Harvey struck Southeast Texas in 2017, it provided a real-life stress test of the plans for flood risk in a highly vulnerable region. Southeast Texas failed that test. More than half of the homes engulfed by floodwaters were located outside city- and federally designated 100-year floodplains.

That storm led to a whole-scale rethinking of zoning regulations in the Houston area, and it highlighted the gaping flaws in the country’s system of analyzing and communicating flood risks to property owners and prospective buyers.

Now, an exhaustive report out Monday shows that nationally, there are at least 6 million households that are unaware they’re living in homes that have a 1 percent chance of flooding in each year — putting them within a “100-year” flood zone. This is nearly 70 percent more homes at substantial risk of flooding than are within the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Special Flood Hazard Areas, a designation that determines eligibility for the National Flood Insurance Program.

This count is set to grow substantially in coming decades due to the effects of climate change, including sea level rise, which will make hurricane storm surges more damaging, as well as precipitation extremes.


Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/06/29/flood-risk-climate-change/

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This report is not very surprising. Florida is going to pay dearly for electing Republicans who have ignored science for the past several decades.

June 29, 2020

How Michael Flynn's Defense Team Found Powerful Allies

A lawyer for the former national security adviser turned to the attorney general for help, and he delivered, months before a pair of appellate judges handed Mr. Flynn another legal victory.

Sidney Powell, a firebrand lawyer whose pugnacious Fox News appearances had earned her numerous private phone conversations with President Trump, sent a letter last year to Attorney General William P. Barr about her soon-to-be new client, Michael T. Flynn.

Asking for “utmost confidentiality,” Ms. Powell told Mr. Barr that the case against Mr. Flynn, the president’s former national security adviser who had pleaded guilty to lying to the F.B.I., smacked of “corruption of our beloved government institutions for what appears to be political purposes.” She asked the attorney general to appoint an outsider to review the case, confident that such scrutiny would justify ending it.

Mr. Barr did what she wanted. He appointed a U.S. attorney six months later to scour the Flynn case file with a skeptical eye for documents that could be turned over as helpful to the defense. Ultimately, Mr. Barr directed the department to drop the charge, one of his numerous steps undercutting the work of the Russia investigation and the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.

The private correspondence between Ms. Powell and Mr. Barr, disclosed in a little-noticed court filing last fall, was the first step toward a once-obscure lawyer and a powerful attorney general finding common cause in a battle to dismantle the legacy of the investigations into President Trump and his allies.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/28/us/politics/michael-flynn-sidney-powell.html

June 29, 2020

Spies and Commandos Warned Months Ago of Russian Bounties on U.S. Troops

Source: New York Times

The recovery of large amounts of American cash at a Taliban outpost in Afghanistan helped tip off U.S. officials.

United States intelligence officers and Special Operations forces in Afghanistan alerted their superiors as early as January to a suspected Russian plot to pay bounties to the Taliban to kill American troops in Afghanistan, according to officials briefed on the matter.

The crucial information that led the spies and commandos to focus on the bounties included the recovery of a large amount of American cash from a raid on a Taliban outpost that prompted suspicions. Interrogations of captured militants and criminals played a central role in making the intelligence community confident in its assessment that the Russians had offered and paid bounties in 2019, another official has said.

Armed with this information, military and intelligence officials have been reviewing American and other coalition combat casualties over the past 18 months to determine whether any were victims of the plot, and they believed at least one U.S. troop death was the result of the bounties, two officials said. Four Americans were killed in combat in early 2020, but the Taliban have not attacked American positions since a February agreement to end the long-running war in Afghanistan.

The details added to the picture of the classified intelligence assessment, which The New York Times reported Friday has been under discussion inside the Trump administration since at least March, and emerged as the White House confronted a growing chorus of criticism on Sunday over its apparent failure to authorize a response to Russia.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/28/us/politics/russian-bounties-warnings-trump.html

June 29, 2020

The virus that shut down the world

Not long ago, to step through the lushly planted Green Wall at Singapore’s Changi Airport was to walk into an ever-more-globally connected future.

Millions of passengers each month rushed to and from destinations throughout the world via the most advanced travel experience on Earth — traversing Changi’s new $1 billion terminal meant checking in, dropping bags and boarding flights with just the touch of a few buttons.

Long layover? Good problem. You could linger at the airport’s Changi Jewel, with its jungle canopy and 131-foot Rain Vortex, the world’s tallest indoor waterfall. Wander up to a rooftop swimming pool and plane spot. Or leave the airport for a free tour of the ethereal towers of the city-state at the center of the world’s financial and trade systems.

But like fire through Notre Dame, the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has now silenced this cathedral of interconnectedness — turning Changi into an emblem of what analysts say could now be a lost decade of travel, trade, investment and migration as decades of globalization give way to a new era of global distancing.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/coronavirus-pandemic-globalization/

June 28, 2020

The data is in: Fox News may have kept millions from taking the coronavirus threat seriously

It’s another one of those Trump Era realities best described as unsurprising but nevertheless shocking.

Three serious research efforts have put numerical weight — yes, data-driven evidence — behind what many suspected all along: Americans who relied on Fox News, or similar right-wing sources, were duped as the coronavirus began its deadly spread.

Dangerously duped.

The studies “paint a picture of a media ecosystem that amplifies misinformation, entertains conspiracy theories and discourages audiences from taking concrete steps to protect themselves and others,” wrote my colleague Christopher Ingraham in an analysis last week.

Here’s the reality, now backed by numbers:

Those who relied on mainstream sources — the network evening newscasts or national newspapers that President Trump constantly blasts as “fake news” — got an accurate assessment of the pandemic’s risks. Those were the news consumers who were more likely to respond accordingly, protecting themselves and others against the disease that has now killed more than 123,000 in the United States with no end in sight.

Those who relied on Fox or, say, radio personality Rush Limbaugh, came to believe that vitamin C was a possible remedy, that the Chinese government created the virus in a lab, and that government health agencies were exaggerating the dangers in the hopes of damaging Trump politically, a survey showed.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/media/the-data-is-in-fox-news-may-have-kept-millions-from-taking-the-coronavirus-threat-seriously/2020/06/26/60d88aa2-b7c3-11ea-a8da-693df3d7674a_story.html

June 28, 2020

Gunmen wound Mexico City police chief in brazen attack that kills three

Source: LA Times

Heavily armed gunmen shot and wounded Mexico City’s police chief Friday in a brazen attack that left three people dead and signaled an alarming advance of organized crime on the nation’s capital, which has been shielded from the country’s worst violence.

Security Secretary Omar García Harfuch, who was being treated in a hospital after being struck by three bullets, tweeted that the Jalisco New Generation cartel, one of Mexico’s most powerful criminal groups, was responsible for the early-morning ambush in one of the nation’s poshest neighborhoods.

García was traveling in an SUV with his security detail at 6:30 a.m. when a large construction truck carrying gunmen armed with high-caliber rifles and grenades blocked its path and opened fire, according to Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum, who said 12 people had been arrested in connection with the attack.

Two of those killed worked for García. The third was a 26-year-old woman driving to the quesadilla stall where she worked.

Read more: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-06-26/gunmen-wound-mexico-city-police-chief-in-brazen-attack-that-left-three-dead