Category: Voter Turnout

Saturday Soother – Between the Conventions Edition, August 22, 2020

The Daily Escape:

Wildflowers on the Pacific Crest Trail, Mt. Rainier NP, WA – August 2020 photo by gregvalle_photography. The red flowers are Indian Paintbrushes, the purples are Lupines.

We’re now between conventions, so let’s wrap-up the Democrat’s: They had an interesting virtual convention, a great first-time effort that ended on an impressive note. Maybe Biden’s speech will be forgotten by next week, but he did a great job closing out four days of the Democrats exceeding expectations. He nailed the speech, both in tone and substance. Tough on Trump, whose name he never mentioned, but far more about hope, light and love.

Biden’s speech may have capped the night, but the testimonial by 13-year old Brayden Harrington, who shared how Biden helped him overcome his stutter stole people’s hearts:

“I’m just a regular kid, and in a short amount of time Joe Biden made me more confident about something that’s bothered me my whole life.”

What hasn’t been seen is the initial encounter between Biden and Brayden in NH during the Democratic primaries. Click on the link to view the video:

Clearly real, and not staged for the convention. And this tweet sums up the difference between the candidates:

Despite Trump’s warnings, the convention was a patriotic celebration of empathy and decency, along with some Trump mauling, all wrapped in a devastating indictment of Trump’s first term. Biden’s speech was so good that even FOX backtracked. Chris Wallace noted that Trump’s attempt to portray Biden as mentally impaired backfired badly: (brackets by Wrongo)

“Remember, Donald Trump has been talking for months about Joe Biden as [being] mentally shot, a captive of the left….I thought that he blew a hole, a big hole, in that characterization…[delivering] an enormously effective speech.”

The TV pundits were grating and unenlightening, as usual. The networks had trouble keeping up with the show. They had to sideline their analysts and just show the event, or risk missing something by trying to squeeze in bloviating commentary.

Julia Louis Dreyfus dunked on Trump with this:

“Joe Biden goes to church so regularly that he doesn’t need tear gas and heavily armed troops to get there.”

Moving on, in another example of privatization gone wrong, Alan Macleod of Mint Press has a shocking report on a privately-run, for-profit ICE detention center in Farmville, VA. The facility is run by Immigration Centers of America (ICA), which is owned by a group of Virginia investors. Macleod reports that 89% of the inmates have COVID: (Emphasis by Wrongo)

“….nearly 90% of the prison population at ICA has tested positive for COVID-19, accounting for around a quarter of all current detainee positive cases across the entire nationwide ICE prison network.”

Since the company began housing undocumented people for ICE in 2010, they have been the target of several lawsuits and an investigation by the Department of Homeland Security. Their mis-management borders on crimes against humanity. McLeod says ICA:

“…was also deporting coronavirus-positive immigrants back to their home countries, overwhelming their response systems. The Minister for Health for Guatemala, for example, noted that 75% of deportees on one flight arrived with COVID-19.”:

For Trump, the combination of massive COVID infections and immigrants in prison is good for a few laughs. Americans love putting people in prisons, but hate paying for it, so Republicans have dialed up the privatization, allowing private companies’ promise to fulfill our incarceration requirements on the cheap.

It’s the end of another rock ’em, sock ’em week. Bannon was arrested for mail fraud. Postmaster General DeJoy testified to the Senate, offering a pledge that the Postal Service would deploy:

“…processes and procedures to advance the election mail, in some cases ahead of first-class mail.”

Nothing backs his pledge to the Senate, and we will only learn if he fails or succeeds after the election, so beware!

Finally, CNN reports that Melania Trump doesn’t have plans to campaign with Herr Donald this fall.

Enough! It’s time to kick back, tune out, relax and forget about Bannon, Melania and Trump for a least a few minutes. It’s time for our Saturday Soother.

Today the Saturday coffee experience is on break, but out on the fields of Wrong, there are bushes to trim. Wrongo is starting day two of his annual late summer trimming extravaganza. Today, the various rose of sharon, wisteria and forsythia bushes are the hard targets of Wrongo, the trimmer.

Before heading out, let’s take a few minutes to listen to “Songs My Mother Taught Me”, a song for voice and piano written in 1880 by Antonin Dvořák. Here it is sung in 2018 by Ernestina Jošt, a young Czech soprano unfamiliar to Wrongo. She is accompanied by the Gimnazija Kranj Symphony Orchestra:

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

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How Susan Collins Helped Wreck the Postal Service

The Daily Escape:

Old Post Office, Washington, DC – 1907 photo by Harris + Ewing via Shorpy. This building is now the Trump International Hotel.

(Update: still working on the problem with displaying comments)

Wrongo is going to talk about how Susan Collins wrecked the Post Office, but first, a little about the Democratic Convention and what comes next.

Biden is up in the polls, but there are 74 days until the election. There’s a lot of talk about how no one’s really in love with Biden (except for Jill). It would be great if the Dem’s Trump alternative was a young, smart, charismatic person who all of America loved. But we should remember that all of America didn’t love either JFK or Obama, the two smartest and most charismatic nominees of either Party in the past 60 years.

Obama’s speech on Wednesday night showed just how difficult it is to top charisma and smarts. To Wrongo, Obama gave the greatest speech of his life, making clear the gravity of the threat posed by Trump, and calling on non-voters to get in the game to help save our democracy.

So Biden isn’t charismatic. He may not be your cup of tea, but think about Trump as a tumor on America that must be removed. We don’t need to love the surgeon. We need him to do the job, and put us on the road to recovery.

Maybe 2016 was a correctable mistake. Maybe it was the beginning of the end of our Republic. If it isn’t to be the end, we need people to work for a November landslide.

Item two: Sen Susan Collins (R-ME), and her undermining of the Post Office.

Yesterday, Postmaster General DeJoy bowed to pressure, and said that he was halting further changes to the USPS until after the election. It seems he isn’t willing to roll back the removal of sorting machines and post boxes, or to reinstate overtime for postal carriers. This isn’t sitting well with Democrats, so we’ll see DeJoy at a hearing with the Senate on Friday, and with the House on Monday.

So far, the vast majority of Congressional Republicans have responded with near silence, except for a few, including Sen Collins who is in a close race to keep her Senate seat. She is currently trailing her Democratic opponent, Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon, by five points.

Collins sent a letter to DeJoy asking him to address the mail delivery delays across the nation:

“I share the goal of putting the USPS back on a financially sustainable path…However, this goal cannot be achieved by shortchanging service to the public.”

From the Washington Monthly:

“As it turns out, Collins is actually one of the members of Congress most responsible for the Postal Service’s devastation. Long before DeJoy started manipulating the USPS, Collins was at the forefront of a bill that crippled the agency’s finances.”

The back story is that in 2005, Collins sponsored and introduced the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act (PAEA), which required the USPS to pre-pay 50 years’ worth of health and retirement benefits for all of its employees. No other federal agency, or ANY private company is required to pre-fund their pension plan, and failing to pre-fund it doesn’t mean retirees won’t receive their pensions.

As Chair of the Senate oversight panel at the time, she shepherded the bill’s passage during a lame-duck session of Congress. It passed by a voice vote, without objection.

To meet the mandate for prefunding USPS’s health and retirement benefits, the measure required the Postal Service to place roughly $5.5 billion into the pension fund every year between 2007 and 2016, followed thereafter by sizable additional payments. This makes it impossible for the institution to run a profit.

The law also prohibited the agency from any new activities outside of delivering mail. This made it even harder for the USPS to turn a profit, at a time when delivery to homes was undergoing substantial disruption by the private sector.

Congress also told USPS that it can’t raise the rate for first class postage by more than the rate of inflation. The inability to raise first class rates in the face of declining volume has been catastrophic. The Postal Service currently has $160.9 billion in debt, of which $119.3 billion is the result of pre-funding retiree benefits.

Collins’s role in passing that law has become a campaign issue in Maine, as it should. USPS’s long-term problems will require repealing the PAEA’s prefunding mandate. Maine’s other Senator, Independent Angus King, has come out in favor of a repeal, while Collins has not.

It would be icing on the cake to find that Collins lost because the elderly Mainers were angry at not getting their prescriptions because she has hamstrung the Post Office.

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Night One of the Democratic Convention

The Daily Escape:

Morning mail, Tulare County, CA – 1938 photo by Dorothea Lange via Shorpy. Free home delivery began in 1863. Daily deliveries were common, though cutbacks reduced them during the Depression and World War II.

Night one of the Democratic convention got off to a shaky start. As Wrongo thought might be the case, the first impression was of low energy, flatness, and of a too-slow pace. But the intimacy of not being in a big hall grew on Wrongo, and worked to give real emotional impact to some speeches, particularly by those who didn’t stand behind lecterns.

A few things stuck out as great. First, the use of Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising”. The 3:30 minute video montage worked to establish the theme of Monday night. With the video, the Dems offered the nation less identity politics and more of an American identity. That they were able to return to it to set up each new thematic segment worked particularly well.

Second, Kristin Urquiza nailed her shot. She had lost her father to Covid, and said:

“I’m one of the many who have lost a loved one to Covid…. My dad was a healthy 65-year-old….His only pre-existing condition was trusting Donald Trump — and for that he paid with his life.”

Being able to look directly into the camera and speak directly to us without the distractions in a stadium filled with drunken delegates made her attack on Trump’s failure to deal with the pandemic devastating.

Third, the Biden-Amtrak video. It also had an emotional point to make, showing Biden as a decent guy.

Finally, Michelle Obama was the star of the night. Her ability to connect with viewers was extraordinary and her takedown of Trump was one for the ages:

“So let me be as honest and clear as I possibly can. Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country. He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is.”

Her speech, which also wouldn’t have worked as well in a big hall, makes Wrongo think that our political culture has moved away from normal convention performances. She was eloquent in a personal and direct way that will set the bar for the rest of this convention, and beyond.

Axios says that 18.7 million people watched last night’s coverage between 10 and 11 p.m. on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC, Nielsen said. Four years ago, Democrats’ opening night drew just under 26 million viewers. However, the Biden campaign said that it tracked 10.2 million views on digital streams, taking the total to 28.9 million. Kind of an apples to oranges comparison.

From a campaign strategy perspective, this week, the Democrats will make their points about how no one is better off than they were four years ago.

They will finish just in time for the Republican convention that will be all Trump, all the time. Despite Trump’s efforts to paint Democrats as radical leftists and facists, the Democrats aren’t radical, and the Republicans really only have more Trump to offer America.

After a week of a soothing convention focused on everyday people, who will believe the GOP?

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Thoughts on Biden’s Election Strategy

The Daily Escape:

A “modern” equivalent of the pony express arrives at the post office in Pie Town, NM – 1940 photo by Russell Lee via Shorpy

(Wrongo is aware that blog comments aren’t working. We’re efforting a solution)

Wrongo is writing this Monday evening before the start of tonight’s Democratic convention. It will be interesting to see what happens. Are you planning to watch?

The Democrats are running against Trump and only secondarily, in favor of new policies. Their strategy harkens back to Ronald Reagan’s question of the American people in a presidential debate vs. Jimmy Carter in 1980, when Reagan asked: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

America’s answer in 1980 was no, it isn’t. Trump is probably the only incumbent president in this country’s history that thinks it will help him get re-elected if he makes America’s situation worse by deliberately creating chaos. From the Atlantic:

“Trump is systematically enlisting agencies, including the Postal Service, Census Bureau, Department of Justice, and Department of Homeland Security, that traditionally have been considered at least somewhat insulated from political machinations to reward his allies and punish those he considers his enemies. He is razing barriers between his personal and political interests and the core operations of the federal government to an extent that no president has previously attempted…”

While the post office dismantling is a threat to the election, it is also about the dismantling of the connective tissue of American society. There have been “privatize the post office” arguments for years. But Trump isn’t proposing legislation, he’s simply shutting down the post office before our eyes.

Today, unemployment stands at 10.2%, higher than during the peak of the 2008 financial crisis. The death toll from Covid-19 has passed 170,000, and it isn’t under control. Vast swaths of the US remain at varying levels of lockdown, while other parts of America are sending their kids back to school without social distancing. Trump has failed to manage the pandemic.

How should Biden communicate all this in a way that will get Americans to vote Democratic in huge numbers in November? Wrongo is reminded of the lyric from Simon and Garfunkel’s tune, “The Boxer”:

“All lies and jest, still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest”

So who is listening, and what will they think?

In reality, the US economy just contracted at the fastest quarterly rate on record. This leads the Democrats to say: We need to pump more money into the economy, extend and expand unemployment benefits, give money to the states to prevent massive budget cuts, expand health spending, and help the post office!

McConnell and Trump say: This means we need to cut unemployment benefits, give more power to employers, and leave the states to fend for themselves. Also, people just need to get out more.

While the independent voter says: I just can’t see any difference between the parties. I really can’t.

Luckily, McClatchy reports that the number of undecideds in this cycle has shrunk dramatically. In October of 2016, 20% of voters were still undecided. Today that number is down to about 5%.

So, running against Trump and the Republicans is just about the only strategy Biden needs to employ. Trump on the other hand, is actually goading the country into responding to Reagan’s question by saying, “No, we’re not better off than we were four years ago”.

Trump thinks that his winning argument once again will be “I alone can fix it.” Wrongo doesn’t like his odds.

Some are saying that the 2020 election is a choice between the lesser of two evils. Some are saying they just won’t vote. Since there’s so much effort at voter suppression, voting must still be very important, so everyone should make certain that they get to vote.

The lesser evil shouldn’t even be a debate. We have seen the massive damage that Trump has foisted on the US, increasing in intensity in the past few months. His lack of leadership has led to those 170,000 COVID deaths. He is taking brazen steps to game the electoral process. Over the past 3 ½ years, we’ve watched solid public policy be dismantled and then, flat out wrecked.

A Biden regime will appoint departmental heads that will follow the law, and not terrorize minorities outright.

Finally, the lesser evil can potentially (not a guarantee) give Americans room to maneuver and to grow. The maximal evil is sure to kill us.

Let’s see what strategy the Democrats decide to follow.

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Monday Wake Up Call – Democratic National Convention edition, August 17, 2020

The Daily Escape:

Heceta Head Lighthouse, Florence, OR – photo by pnw_roaming

Wake up Monday convention watchers! The 2020 Democratic National Convention kicks off tonight not in Milwaukee, but almost entirely in cyberspace. The Dems will be staying physically distant. They’ve decided to go big, with a solution that looks more like the cheering fan screens courtside in Orlando’s NBA bubble than the typical milling around chaos of past national party conventions.

The plan is to broadcast to the nation hundreds of live video feeds from living rooms, national monuments and stages around the country. Sort of like New Year’s Eve on TV.

Not even the delegates will be attending the event in Milwaukee. Instead, they will “attend” the convention from their states, participating in virtual caucus meetings, voting to nominate Biden on Tuesday night. The roll-call vote of the states, often an hours-long ordeal, has been redesigned as a 30-minute, lightning round of all 57 states and territories with only some of the delegates broadcasting live.

The major thing Wrongo has noticed about virtual meetings is that they usually seem flat, largely unemotional by-the-numbers performances. Even the best lack the spontaneity of a live performance. Politicians are used to taking a beat between sentences, drawing in energy from the crowd. But at a virtual convention, all those pauses offer to a viewer is dead air in an empty space, whether it’s from Biden’s basement, or from Trump’s unfilled stadium in Tulsa.

They need to speak with high energy, and speak quickly, eliminating as many of those pauses as they can. Hopefully, internet coaches have been hard at work retraining them in how to communicate effectively in what’s now an Instagram and TikTok world of 15-second and 30-second bites.

So, hopefully it won’t be the equivalent of your family’s Zoom meeting.

Biden’s message will be that he can heal a fractured country. Making Kamala Harris his choice for VP, will be portrayed as a bridge to a future of a diversifying America. Her mixed heritage is more like America’s future than is Biden’s background, or that of Trump and Pence.

Axios points out that Harris’s Indian-American heritage may have value in swing states:

  • There are more than 4 million Indian Americans, and the population is growing quickly.
  • In the battleground states of Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Georgia and Texas, the number of eligible Asian American and Pacific Islander voters grew more than 117% between 2000 and 2018, to nearly 1.7 million.
  • Indian Americans represent the largest share of Asian Americans in each of those states.

The convention’s main events will run for just two hours each night, with speeches by Harris on Wednesday and Biden on Thursday. The overall production will rely on a fast-moving, video-heavy version of a convention including celebrity appearances and first-person stories by Americans who will say they have been hurt by the Trump presidency.

Those first-person stories can easily be the most compelling memory that we take from the convention. Remember that at the 2016 Democratic convention Khizr Khan, the father of Humayun Khan, an Army captain killed in Iraq, grabbed national attention for a speech denouncing Trump over a plan to ban Muslims from the US.

To capture any potentially viral programmed (or unprogrammed) moments, the show’s producers plan to clip and post segments of the event on social media in near-real time, so supporters can share segments from the beginning of a speech before it’s even over. The length of a typical speech, about 10 minutes in a normal year, has also been brought down to three minutes or less for many speakers.

The goal is to keep people’s attention while still getting Biden’s message across.

But Biden will also sell himself as a bridge to the recent past, where character and restraint were hallmarks of the presidency, ideas that will sound like indictments of Trump. After listening to Trump’s bloviating for the past 3 ½ years, where many of his speeches turn into hours-long performances similar to Fidel Castro’s in the 1960s, shorter speeches and a constantly changing lineup may keep viewers watching.  Also, shorter pieces are instantly tweetable, a good thing in 2020.

It’s also a perfect opportunity to pitch some simple graphics to show how much worse off Americans have been in the Trump era. Simple side by side data showing how stark the differences are may be very useful.

Perhaps the Dems can capitalize on their non-traditional approach to focus the voting public on their message, and to get a bounce in public opinion and voter engagement.

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Trump’s Dismantle the Post Office Plan

The Daily Escape:

Motorcycle postman, Washington, DC – 1912 photo by Harris & Ewing via Shorpy

The WaPo reported that while speaking on Thursday to Fox Business Network, Trump confirmed that he opposes funding for mail-in balloting in order to make it more difficult to expand voting by mail:

“Now they need that money in order to make the post office work, so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots….But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not equipped to have it.”

It gets worse. Salon reports that mail sorting equipment is being removed from Iowa’s Postal Service offices. This was confirmed to Salon by Kimberly Karol, the head of the Iowa Postal Workers Union: (brackets by Wrongo)

“[we are losing] the sorting equipment that we use to process mail for delivery….that also hinders our ability to process mail in the way that we had in the past.”

New Postmaster General DeJoy has also made a proposal to nearly triple the postage costs to states for mail-in ballots.

It’s time for the press and the Democrats to stop pussy-footing around about what’s going on here: Trump is saying out loud that he plans to steal the election. He’s certain that if people are actually able to cast their ballots he will lose, so he’s going to try to destroy the post office.

The Democrat’s strategy has been to move as many votes as possible to “vote by mail” in order to cut down on the hours-long lines on Election Day that are caused by states gaming the election by having fewer polling places and voting machines. Not standing in long lines might also save a few lives in a time of pandemic.

Trump wants to sabotage their strategy, and so far the Dems are behaving as if not much is happening. They are basically hoping Biden’s inroads with Trump’s 2016 voters will be enough to override the weakening of voting rights in the past four years.

The NYT’s Jamelle Bouie observes that Trump’s best chance of remaining in office is to have a nominal lead on Election Day and let the Republican Courts have a shot at Trump v. Biden:

“There’s no mystery about what President Trump intends to do if he holds a lead on election night in November. He’s practically broadcasting it.

First, he’ll claim victory. Then, having spent most of the year denouncing vote-by-mail as corrupt, fraudulent and prone to abuse, he’ll demand that authorities stop counting mail-in and absentee ballots. He’ll have teams of lawyers challenging counts and ballots across the country.”

In other words, if Trump is leading on election night, there’s a good chance he’ll try to disrupt and delegitimize the counting process. That way, if Biden pulls ahead in the days (or weeks) after voting ends, Trump will have given himself a basis to reject the outcome as “election fraud.”

The only way to prevent this scenario from getting the oxygen it needs, is to deliver an election night lead to Biden.

That means people either vote in person, or they physically drop their mail-in ballot in an official ballot “drop box”. Either will protect your vote from the president’s attempt to undermine the election for his benefit. If you care about the outcome on Election Day, do one or the other.

We’re living in a time where whistleblowers are fired, the Postal Service and our voting rights are being dismantled, and the Republican Senate looks the other way.

Wrongo said that we should talk further about the concept of criminal negligence. When you have authority, like Trump, DeJoy and the Republicans, if you do something a reasonable person should know would cause harm, you are responsible for causing that harm. Presidential power comes with duties to the country, and Trump’s broadly responsible both for the welfare of the American people, and for the consequences of his actions.

Not funding vote by mail is broadly harmful to the people, and to the Constitution.

Now, it’s unlikely that this will be resolved before November. Pelosi and Schumer are 100% right to hold out for a comprehensive stimulus bill that includes funding for vote-by-mail.

Even if they succeed, we’ll need two things: Massive voter turnout, and a long memory that deals with all of this once Trump is out of power.

This is where we are. One of our two major political parties is in open opposition to voting rights: They’re trying to stop people who don’t vote Republican from voting at all.

It’s just another national disgrace that’s happening silently in the year of the Great Pandemic.

Resist! And never forget.

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The Coming Eviction Tsunami

The Daily Escape:

Sunset, Northern CO near WY border – 2020 photo by Maxwell_hau5_caffy. Note the beetle kill.

On Monday, the Republicans released their latest coronavirus stimulus package, the so-called HEALS Act. HEALS stands for Health, Economic Assistance, Liability Protection and Schools.

We know that it drastically reduces unemployment assistance, but it also doesn’t include an extension of the federal eviction moratorium. Last Friday, the federal moratorium on evictions in properties with federally backed mortgages and for tenants who receive government-assisted housing expired.

They should have called it the Republican HEELS Act.

Since Republicans want to cut the amount of federal enhanced unemployment insurance from $600/week to $200/week, it’s likely that many fewer Americans will be able to make their rent payments.

Housing advocates had been pushing for at least $100 billion in rental assistance, as well as a uniform, nationwide eviction moratorium. According to the COVID-19 Eviction Defense Project, we may be looking at something like 19 to 23 million, or 1 in 5 people living in renter households could be at risk of eviction by October.

But that may be optimistic. CNBC published this map of potential evictions by state, based on an analysis by global advisory firm Stout Sirius Ross. It shows the percentage of renters in each state that could face eviction:

For example, 59% of renters in West Virginia (highest) are at risk of eviction, compared to 22% in Vermont (lowest).

The average number for the US is about 43% of tenants are at risk of eviction. That equates to 17.6 million households. The study estimates that there will be 11.9 million eviction filings in the next four months. They think that there will be two million evictions filed in both August and September, leaving 8 million for October and November.

Let’s have a thought experiment. The study assumes that there will be two million evictions filed in both August and September, and another four million in each of the following two months.  Let’s stipulate that each household averages 2.5 humans.

August: 2 million evictions equals 5 million homeless

September: 2 million evictions equals 5 million homeless

October: 4 million evictions equals 10 million more homeless

That totals 20 million people who are casting about for shelter as the cold weather hits the US, with another 10 million to come in November, for 30 million total.

This is an apocalypse.

An important consideration is that perhaps as many as 7 million of them may be registered voters who will be disenfranchised in November, since they no longer live at the address where they are registered.

Think about what’s coming from this change to the Republican bill: Millions of people will be realizing that they have absolutely nothing left to lose, people who feel as though there’s no way out. Then they find they are suddenly ineligible to vote.

2020 has forced our eyes open. All generations that are younger than the Boomers already feel as though any opportunity they had for a sound future has been stolen. In the midst of a global pandemic, they’ve seen Washington deny them healthcare, a safety net, and fritter away most of the societal stability they had.

So where are we heading?

If evictions occur on a grand scale, we’ll be in uncharted waters. It’s not just people being thrown out on the street, there’s no one else moving in. Residential landlords with no tenants face a dilemma, the same situation that has already affected commercial landlords: Few tenants and those who remain are looking for lower rents. When residential properties in the cities become vacant because of eviction or other reasons, and nobody is around to move in, what happens?

Squatting is likely. Carving residences into smaller and smaller units was common during the Depression, and that’s likely to happen again. Our biggest problem is that there is no obvious way to get America off the current Road to Ruin. DC is a disaster on all fronts.

Once the pandemic emergency is past, we will understand the extent to which the rich and politically well-connected have been taken care of, while the poor have largely been destroyed.

We’ve learned beyond a shadow of a doubt how political action, including $multi-trillion bailouts can be mobilized quickly for the right class of people, while helping the rest of us can be dismissed out of hand.

Same old story in America.

What can/should Biden do to change this?

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Monday Wake Up Call, Portland Edition — July 27, 2020

The Daily Escape:

Paradise Pass with Crested Butte in the distance, CO – 2020 photo by glacticspark

The second biggest story of the summer is the widespread support of the protesters, those people of all races and ages, who took to the streets to say something about racism in America. Portland is and seems likely to remain the epicenter of the Trump administration’s law and order response.

America’s First Amendment rights are under attack in Portland by Trump’s paramilitaries every day. How can that be? Few have heard of US Code 1357. It allows immigration officers to operate within 100 miles of any external US border. Hence Trump could call out border troops to DC, Portland, or Chicago.

USC 1357 gives DHS jurisdiction over about two-thirds of the US population. They can enter any building that isn’t a dwelling within 25 miles of the border without a warrant.

The regulation was adopted by the US Department of Justice in 1953. At the time, there were fewer than 1,100 Border Patrol agents nationwide; today, there are over 21,000.

These problems are compounded by a lack of personnel oversight by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and the DHS. The CBP consistently fails to hold its agents accountable for abuses.

Portland has protests on most days of the year. It’s part of the DNA of the city. Now, it’s looking like Trump’s paramilitaries are trying to foment violence and create a backlash among the protesters. The NYT reports on how these troops were the instigators of recent violence: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“After flooding the streets around the federal courthouse in Portland with tear gas during Friday’s early morning hours, dozens of federal officers in camouflage and tactical gear stood in formation around the front of the building.

Then…the officers started advancing….they continued to fire flash grenades and welt-inducing marble-size balls filled with caustic chemicals. They moved down Main Street and continued up the hill, where one of the agents announced over a loudspeaker: “This is an unlawful assembly.”

By the time the security forces halted their advance, the federal courthouse they had been sent to protect was out of sight — two blocks behind them.”

What’s the end game for Trump in Portland?  His paramilitaries aren’t going to murder groups of protesters in cold blood, so what are they going to do? Have nightly tear gassing until the November election?

Trump’s paramilitaries are saying to Portland: “We wouldn’t have to violate your Constitutional rights if you didn’t insist on exercising them.”

There is libertarian support for ending the Trump paramilitary presence in Portland. Libertarians acknowledge that there is no police power in the Constitution. Policing is left to the states. To the extent the President can send federal officers into Portland or other cities, it should be limited to protecting federal property, not moving into crowds that are two blocks away.

The libertarian argument would say that the people of Portland and other cities have the right to decide who they want to elect to City Hall and how much funding they want to provide for their police. The federal government should only be brought in to defend federal property if the local police are unwilling or unable to do so.

Ironically, during the Obama administration, the GOP thought that the “arming up” of America’s internal security forces like the CPB was a risk to THEM. Now, when it’s impacting Democratic-voting cities, they’re all for it.

Trump’s election chances seem to depend on whether he’s Nixon reborn in 2020. Nixon ran on law and order and against violent demonstrations, largely by students who were against the Vietnam War. Protests never spread as broadly as this in the 1960s. To a great degree, the Vietnam protests were by white college age youth. That isn’t true of today’s protesters.

Trump’s law and order gambit is that Antifa Marxists will take over our cities and then, our suburbs. He’s clinging to the idea that there is an equivalent of the “silent majority” of 1968 still out there to elect him.

But Vanity Fair reported some new polling on the response to Trump’s anti-BLM efforts. If those polls are correct, the silent majority of 2020 is firmly on the side of Biden when it comes to issues of race and justice. Nixon’s ghost seems to have left the building.

Time to wake up America! People in Portland are not afraid of the protesters. They know that their safety isn’t in question. There’s no doubt this is a protest against the government, not their fellow citizens.

To help you wake up listen to Peter Green, guitarist of Fleetwood Mac who died this week, play “Albatross” from 1969’s “The Pious Bird of Good Omen”:

This reminds Wrongo of Santo and Johnny’s “Sleepwalk” from 1959.

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – July 26, 2020

Possibly lost in the “Terrorist Antifa Moms” news out of Portland last week was the thought that we continually say things like this:

  • Another new low for Trump.
  • How dare he?
  • Trump flaunts the Constitution.

In the past, other presidents have used governmental authority for political ends, but no other president has used a combination of the FBI/DHS/ATF and private mercenaries to literally beat down our First Amendment rights. Who’s stepping forward to stop him?

Without a principled Congress, nothing will stop him. The Republican Party steadfastly remains unshocked by his behavior. The Democratic Party can hold all the hearings it wants. It will never make a dent in Trump’s behavior. The current national dumpster fire is 100% owned by the GOP.

From Trump’s perspective, he’s doing exactly what he’s certain that he can get away with as President. He’s moved the goalposts, because our system wasn’t designed to hold back a President without principles. On to cartoons.

Protection of your Constitutional rights is now in the hands of Portland’s mothers:

Here’s the true cognitive test for Americans:

Who’s behind these secret police masks?

Do Americans understand how close we are to Trump declaring Martial Law?

Can Trump win on this debate question?

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Trump’s Portland Playbook

The Daily Escape:

Storm near Mesa Verde, CO – photo by mayaxs

It’s once again getting difficult to write about this stuff. Trump is willing to deploy a secret army to protect buildings, but he won’t take responsibility to protect human beings from a pandemic that is killing Americans at the equivalent of three jumbo jet crashes a day.

Let’s focus on the conflict between the First Amendment and the Second Amendment that’s been playing out on our streets since the murder of George Floyd in May. Early in the COVID pandemic, armed protestors carried their long guns into the Lansing, MI state capitol demanding an end to the shutdown. They also stood around in Richmond, VA and in both cases, law enforcement kept their distance, bending over backwards to avoid creating a confrontation.

When unarmed protestors showed up in most American cities after Floyd’s murder, law enforcement more or less did whatever they wanted to them. The sustained brutality of the police against unarmed protestors (there are more than 800 video-recorded incidents of police violence) is prima-facie evidence supporting the protestors’ message.

There are political ramifications and lessons to be learned from the reactions of both groups of protestors and local and federal authorities.

Carrying guns into a legislature completely undermined whatever goals the protestors in Lansing and Richmond were trying to accomplish. The response from most Americans was to ridicule them. The police believed that the armed protestors weren’t going to use their weapons. They knew that letting them yell and march around would placate them. Law enforcement was pretty sure they wouldn’t be back in larger numbers the next day.

On the other hand, the unarmed protestors inspired by George Floyd’s death started a national conversation about the role and conduct of the police. The BLM protestors turned out in the hundreds of thousands, every day, and theirs was largely an anti-police message.

Carrying arms would have certainly undermined their message. Armed anti-police protestors would have credibly shown (to the eyes of most Americans) that a violent police response was probably appropriate. Unarmed protestors have a moral weight that is completely lacking in the messaging of the armed anti-shutdown protesters.

More importantly, the BLM protestors are targeting their message at people who will vote in November.

The sustained, mostly non-violent nature of the protests in the face of an often-brutal police response (and now in Portland, a similar response by federal secret police) gives the protestors political power. Right now, a majority of the rest of the country is on the side of the Portland protestors. This is the exact opposite of the public’s response to the armed protestors.

Another factor is that Rep. John Lewis’s death reminded us of the 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Think about how different things would be today if those marchers had been armed. There would have been even greater state-sanctioned violence; and most of America at the time would have seen it as justified. It was those unforgettable and unforgivable images of brutal police violence against unarmed and peaceful marchers that shocked the nation and government enough to change the law.

Lasting change only comes through voting, and putting pressure on elected officials to sanction bad actors and change laws that enable bad behavior. That only happens if the protestors gain and keep credibility with voters.

Isn’t it sad that Trump sees two monsters, civil unrest, and the pandemic, and chooses to say that fighting the pandemic is up to the states, but graffiti on federal courthouses is the hill he’s willing to die on? This is the fallout:

A bunch of people in Portland have sprayed graffiti on buildings, broken windows, and started fires, which, to be clear, is wrong and should be punished. Trump’s response was to send in the feds, in force.

Trump’s play is to use federal law enforcement to prod the protestors into more unrest and property damage. He will continue calling peaceful protesters rioters and anarchists. He will try to paint Biden and the Democrats as enablers of the downfall of American society.

This old storyline has worked in the past. Portland is the test of Trump’s playbook. Protestors have to remain mostly peaceful in the face of threats and physical violence by the Federales.

That must be the BLM playbook.

It’s not going to be pretty. People will get hurt.

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