Campaign 2020 - Today's Headlines - October 20th
Too many, too many...
Here are the Headlines - there are extracts below, as Comments.
Hundreds of 'Arizona Republicans for Biden' signs stolen, defaced in cities across the state
STUDY: Watching Only Fox News Makes You Less Informed Than Watching No News At All
Why Biden Will Need to Spend Big
Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say
Supreme Court Allows Extension for Mail-In Ballots in Pennsylvania
Rudy Giuliani Is My Father. Please, Everyone, Vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Hundreds of 'Arizona Republicans for Biden' signs stolen, defaced in cities across the state
A few hundred political yard signs with the message "Arizona Republicans for Biden" have been vandalized, removed or tampered with after they were placed in cities and towns across the state.
A defaced "Arizona Republicans for Biden" sign is placed on the corner of a Gilbert intersection.
Sara Fisk
The committee comprises more than 100 current and former Republican voters who plan to vote for former Vice President Joe Biden come November. Daniel Barker, a former Arizona Court of Appeals judge and president of the committee, founded the "mom-and-pop" group with his wife in late July.
Barker said he thinks Trump supporters are tampering with the yard signs. Initially, vandals covered the signs with Trump signs or removed them altogether. He highlighted particular problems in Gilbert, but said the issue has occurred across the southeast Valley and in Scottsdale, Peoria, Tucson and Yuma.
On Sept. 12, a yard sign at the corner of Gilbert and Elliot roads was defaced with two Trump reelection bumper stickers. The stickers were strategically placed over former Vice President Joe Biden's name, so the sign read "Arizona Republicans for Trump-Pence, Keep America Great 2020."
The committee has put up 1,000 yard signs and has seven electronic billboards with their simple message of support for Biden. Barker estimates that a few hundred of the signs they've put up have gone missing or were defaced. The group has had to replace signs in some locations multiple times.
"The total lack of respect for the democratic process — that's what's so discouraging," Barker said.
In Arizona, it is considered a class 2 misdemeanor "for any person to knowingly remove, alter, deface or cover any political sign." Accordingly, members of the committee have filed two police reports with the Gilbert Police Department.
There's more in the OA.
Apparently, respect for property covers only some property...
I would love to see some news stories aboiut sign defacers and stealers being shot by the homeowners who stay up at night to catch them. Maybe that will slow the criminals down a bit. At least it could lessen Trump voters by a few.
Stand Your Ground!
A friend of a friend of mine has a sign posted next to his Biden/Harris sign, it read. ''My 70 lb Pitbull can be from the front door to the sign in 2.5 seconds. Let the Lord be your guide.
LOL
Gee whiz, Bob, I was told just last month by a certain poster whose name rhymes with Pugsly, that my Biden/Harris sign wouldn't be defaced if I put it up next to my mailbox.....
... and we both know that no one on NT would ever be less than scrupulously honest...
STUDY: Watching Only Fox News Makes You Less Informed Than Watching No News At All
Media outlets such as Fox News and MSNBC have a negative impact on people’s current events knowledge while NPR and Sunday morning political talk shows are the most informative sources of news , according to Fairleigh Dickinson University’s newest PublicMind survey.
Researchers asked 1,185 random nationwide respondents what news sources they had consumed in the past week and then asked them questions about events in the U.S. and abroad.
On average, people correctly answered 1.6 of 5 questions about domestic affairs.
Because the aim of the study was to isolate the effects of each type of news source, they then controlled for variables such as other news sources, partisanship, education and other demographic factors.
In terms of international news, people correctly answered an average of 1.8 of 4 questions.
With all else being equal, people who watched no news were expected to answer 1.28 correctly; those watching only Sunday morning shows figured at 1.52; those watching only "The Daily Show " figured at 1.60; and those just listening to NPR were expected to correctly answer 1.97 international questions.
Those watching only MSNBC were expected to correctly answer only 1.23 out of 4, while viewers of only Fox News figured at 1.08. The study noted that the effects of Fox News, MSNBC and talk radio depended on the ideology of the consumer.
“Ideological news sources, like Fox and MSNBC, are really just talking to one audience,” Political scientist and poll analyst Dan Cassino said in a press release . “This is solid evidence that if you’re not in that audience, you’re not going to get anything out of watching them.”
Thus, those who watched no news—answering questions by guessing or relying on existing knowledge—fared much better than those who watched the most popular 24-hour cable news network (i.e. Fox News).
Cassino concluded that "the most popular of the national media sources—Fox, CNN , MSNBC—seem to be the least informative."
It is a follow-up to a 2011 survey of 612 New Jerseyans that found , among other things, that those who watched Fox News were 18 points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew their government than those who watch no news at all.
Someone posted a link to this yesterday. (Ozzwald, maybe??) I thought it deserved more attention.
It's not new, but I see no reason, and certainly no evidence, that things have improved...
I find it hard to believe that Fox News has not been banned in China. I can't open google, YouTube, Wikipedia, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Reuters, Time, but I can watch an American news station that posts vile lies about China. Strange.
They allow fiction.
Why Biden Will Need to Spend Big
So here’s what everyone should understand: Given the current and likely future state of the U.S. economy, it’s time to (a) spend a lot of money on the future and (b) not worry about where the money is coming from. For now, and for at least the next few years, large-scale deficit spending isn’t just OK, it’s the only responsible thing to do.
Today’s column will be about the economics; I’ll talk about the politics another day.
First things first: If Biden is inaugurated in January, he will inherit a nation still devastated by the coronavirus. Trump keeps saying that we’re “ rounding the corner ,” but the reality is that cases and hospitalizations are surging (and anyone expecting a lame-duck Trump administration to take effective action against the surge is living in a dream world.) And we won’t be able to have a full economic recovery as long as the pandemic is still raging.
What this means is that it will be crucial to provide another round of large-scale fiscal relief, especially aid to the unemployed and to cash-strapped state and local governments. The main purpose of this relief will be humanitarian — helping families pay the rent and keep food on the table, helping cities and towns avoid devastating cuts in essential services. But it will also help avoid a downward economic spiral, by heading off a potential collapse in consumer and local government spending.
The need for big spending will not, however, end with the pandemic. We also need to invest in our future. After years of public underspending , America desperately needs to upgrade its infrastructure. In particular, we should be investing heavily in the transition to an environmentally sustainable economy. And we should also do much more to help children grow up to be healthy, productive adults; America spends shamefully little on aid to families compared with other wealthy countries.
But how can we pay for all this investment? Bad question.
You sometimes hear people saying that the government should be run like a business. That’s a poor analogy in many ways. But for what it’s worth, think of what smart businesses do when they face great investment opportunities and have access to cheap capital: they raise a lot of money.
We’ve just seen that the U.S. government needs to invest large sums in the future. What about access to capital? The answer is that there’s a global savings glut — the sums individuals want to save persistently exceed the sums businesses are willing to invest. And this situation — private savings all dressed up with nowhere to go — translates into extremely low government borrowing costs. In February, before the coronavirus sent us into recession, the average interest rate on long-term inflation-protected U.S. bonds was minus 0.12 percent . Yes, it was less than zero.
Under these conditions it would actually be irresponsible for the federal government not to engage in large-scale borrowing to invest in the future.
But shouldn’t we be worrying about running up more government debt? No.
When a government can borrow at low interest rates, and in particular when the interest rate on debt is well below the economy’s long-run growth rate, debt just isn’t a major problem . It doesn’t pose any threat to the government’s solvency; it doesn’t in any meaningful way compete with private investment.
And just to be clear, I’m not pushing a radical, heterodox view here. At this point arguing for large-scale deficit spending and a relaxed attitude toward debt is entirely mainstream. You hear arguments along these lines from the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, centrist top economists from the Obama administration, and (discreetly) Jerome Powell , the chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Nonpartisan private-sector analysts are also remarkably high on the economics of Biden’s spending proposals. Moody’s Analytics predicts that real G.D.P. would be 4.5 percent higher under Biden’s plan than under a continuation of Trump policies; Goldman Sachs says 3.7 percent. Neither is worried about the effects on debt.
So there’s an overwhelming economic case for Biden — if he wins! — to go big on spending, first to get us through the pandemic he’ll inherit, then to build a better future. But will politics get in the way?
It’s a given that Republicans, who turned silent on deficits under Trump, will suddenly declare debt an existential threat with a Democrat in the White House. The real questions are whether centrists and the news media will buy into deficit hysteria, the way they did in the Obama years, and whether members of the Biden team will lose their nerve.
More on those risks in a future column.
Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say
More than 50 former intelligence officials signed a letter casting doubt on the provenance of a New York Post story on the former vice president's son.
More than 50 former senior intelligence officials have signed on to a letter outlining their belief that the recent disclosure of emails allegedly belonging to Joe Biden’s son “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
The letter, signed on Monday, centers around a batch of documents released by the New York Post last week that purport to tie the Democratic nominee to his son Hunter’s business dealings. Under the banner headline “Biden Secret E-mails,” the Post reported it was given a copy of Hunter Biden’s laptop hard drive by President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who said he got it from a Mac shop owner in Delaware who also alerted the FBI.
While the letter’s signatories presented no new evidence, they said their national security experience had made them “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case” and cited several elements of the story that suggested the Kremlin’s hand at work.
"all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation"
Nick Shapiro, a former top aide under CIA director John Brennan, provided POLITICO with the letter on Monday. He noted that “the IC leaders who have signed this letter worked for the past four presidents, including Trump. The real power here however is the number of former, working-level IC officers who want the American people to know that once again the Russians are interfering."
The former Trump administration officials who signed the letter include Russ Travers, who served as National Counterterrorism Center acting director; Glenn Gerstell, the former NSA general counsel; Rick Ledgett, the former deputy NSA director; Marc Polymeropoulos, a retired CIA senior operations officer; and Cynthia Strand, who served as the CIA’s deputy assistant director for global issues. Former CIA directors or acting directors Brennan, Leon Panetta, Gen. Michael Hayden, John McLaughlin and Michael Morell also signed the letter, along with more than three dozen other intelligence veterans. Several of the former officials on the list have endorsed Biden.
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said on Monday that the information on Biden’s laptop “is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign,” though the FBI is reportedly conducting an ongoing investigation into whether Russia was involved.
The New York Times raised questions on Sunday about the rigor of the Post’s reporting process, revealing that several of its reporters had refused to put their name on the Biden stories because they were concerned about the authenticity of the materials. The Post stood by its reporting, saying it was vetted before publication.
But the release of the material, which POLITICO has not independently verified, has drawn comparisons to 2016, when Russian hackers dumped troves of emails from Democrats onto the internet — producing few damaging revelations but fueling accusations of corruption by Trump. While there has been no immediate indication of Russian involvement in the release of emails the Post obtained, its general thrust mirrors a narrative that U.S. intelligence agencies have described as part of an active Russian disinformation effort aimed at denigrating Biden’s candidacy.
“We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement,” the letter reads. But, it continues, “there are a number of factors that make us suspicious of Russian involvement.”
“Such an operation would be consistent with Russian objectives, as outlined publicly and recently by the Intelligence Community, to create political chaos in the United States and to deepen political divisions here but also to undermine the candidacy of former Vice President Biden and thereby help the candidacy of President Trump,” the letter reads.
National Counterintelligence and Security Center Director Bill Evanina said in August that Russia has been trying to denigrate Biden’s campaign, specifically through a Ukrainian lawmaker named Andriy Derkach who has met with Giuliani at least twice to discuss corruption accusations against Biden. Derkach was sanctioned by the Treasury Department last month for allegedly acting as a Russian agent and interfering in the 2020 election.
Giuliani brushed off concerns about Derkach in an interview with The Daily Beast this week, saying “the chance that Derkach is a Russian spy is no better than 50/50.” And he told The Wall Street Journal of the purported Biden email trove: “Could it be hacked? I don’t know. I don’t think so. If it was hacked, it’s for real. If it was hacked. I didn’t hack it. I have every right to use it.”
The former officials said Derkach’s relationship with Giuliani and fixation on the Bidens, along with Russia’s reported hack on Burisma — the Ukrainian energy company that gave Hunter Biden a board seat and is at the center of Trump and his allies’ corruption allegations — “is consistent with” a Russian operation.
“For the Russians at this point, with Trump down in the polls, there is incentive for Moscow to pull out the stops to do anything possible to help Trump win and/or to weaken Biden should he win,” the letter says. “A ‘laptop op’ fits the bill, as the publication of the emails are clearly designed to discredit Biden.”
Top Biden advisers who staffed him during his vice presidency, citing their own recollections as well as a review of Biden’s official schedules, have sharply rejected suggestions that Biden ever met with a representative of Burisma in 2015 or has otherwise been involved in Hunter Biden’s business interests.
"Investigations by the press, during impeachment, and even by two Republican-led Senate committees whose work was decried as 'not legitimate' and political by a GOP colleague have all reached the same conclusion: that Joe Biden carried out official U.S. policy toward Ukraine and engaged in no wrongdoing,” Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said last week. “Trump administration officials have attested to these facts under oath.”
So of course this Russian disinformation is the centerpiece of Trump/Republican communication.
Figures...
The problem is that the Trumpians BELIEVE any lies and fake news that benefit Trump's chances for re-election.
Kinda makes it hard for sane people, doesn't it?
Got it from a Mac shop owner? Is that legal? I can see the FBI obtaining a copy of the hard drive if there was a question of illegalities, but why Rudy? He doesn't work in any official law enforcement capacity, he is simply trmp's personal attorney
Anyway....it's the NY Post....they like to tell stories
It's a reprint from The Onion.
You're pulling my leg.
It's a close contest, between The Onion and the NY Post, to see which contains the most nonsense...
Supreme Court Allows Extension for Mail-In Ballots in Pennsylvania
Order provides win for Democrats in battleground state
A voter with an early ballot at a
Philadelphia polling location on Saturday.
MARK MAKELA/GETTY IMAGES
Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s three liberal members to leave intact a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision extending by three days the time for receipt of absentee ballots and allowing those with illegible postmarks to be counted if received by the deadline.
The court’s four more conservative justices would have granted requests by the state Republican Party and two leading GOP state senators to block the state court’s ruling.
The high court, down to eight members following the death last month of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg , issued no opinions explaining its reasons. When the Supreme Court divides evenly on a case, the lower-court decision on appeal remains intact.
Chief Justice Roberts was joined by Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh indicated that they would have granted the Republican request.
“Huge win for Pennsylvania. Trump’s losing streak continues, this time in SCOTUS,” tweeted state Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat. “Now let’s have an election.”
Representatives of the Republican lawmakers and the state Republican Party couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
Pennsylvania is among the most hotly disputed states in the coming presidential election. It narrowly awarded its 20 electoral votes to President Trump in 2016, but recent polls have shown Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden ahead in the state. Democrats have turned heavily to absentee ballots in response to the pandemic, so the extension could help Mr. Biden if ballots delayed in the mailstream tilt his way.
President Trump has said he expects the Supreme Court to help decide the presidential election, and pushed to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett, his nominee to replace Justice Ginsburg, in time to participate. Mr. Trump’s two previous appointees, Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, voted for the Republican request to cancel the deadline extension. Judge Barrett, questioned at her confirmation hearing last week by Democratic senators, said she would consider whether to recuse herself from an election case involving Mr. Trump should one arise.
There is more in the OA.
So the vote of the SCOTUS was along partisan lines except for Roberts who is obviiously an honest Justice not influenced by politics. It will change when Amy is seated - for damn sure.
If the Dems win big... big enough to pack the Court if they wish... it will be interesting to see what the Originalists do...
Maybe the “originalists”(the lefts new buzzword) will evolve into liberal justices And rule the Constitution, being a living document and all with no fixed meaning, only allows 9 justices now.
and liberals can’t honestly complain. Not that that would stop them.
and maybe since they, like their liberal brethren, no longer have to worry about the text of the constitution when ruling, will declare the presidential term is now six years and the election is null.
youd think, after their trump meltdown, progressives would wake up to the fact that textualist justices are what stand between an actual functioning republic and a banana republic run by a dictator, but apparently they haven’t learned their lesson.
Think of the future, for once, and imagine a president who actually acts like the dictator you claim Trump is, with a court packed with sycophants willing to do whatever the president wants because the constitution is worth no more than toilet paper to a judge who believes in the living constitution...
Rudy Giuliani Is My Father. Please, Everyone, Vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
I may not be able to change my father’s mind, but together, we can vote this toxic administration out of office.
To anyone who feels overwhelmed or apathetic about this election, there is nothing I relate to more than desperation to escape corrosive political discourse. As a child, I saw firsthand the kind of cruel, selfish politics that Donald Trump has now inflicted on our country. It made me want to run as far away from them as possible. But trust me when I tell you: Running away does not solve the problem. We have to stand and fight. The only way to end this nightmare is to vote. There is hope on the horizon, but we’ll only grasp it if we elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris .
Around the age of 12, I would occasionally get into debates with my father, probably before I was emotionally equipped to handle such carnage. It was disheartening to feel how little power I had to change his mind, no matter how logical and above-my-pay-grade my arguments were. He always found a way to justify his party line, whatever it was at the time. Even though he was considered socially moderate for a Republican back in the day, we still often butted heads. When I tried to explain my belief that you don’t get to be considered benevolent on LGBTQ+ rights just because you have gay friends but don’t support gay marriage, I distinctly remember him firing back with an intensity fit for an opposing politican rather than one’s child. To be clear, I’m not sharing this anecdote to complain or criticize. I had an extremely privileged childhood and am grateful for everything I was given, including real-world lessons and complicated experiences like these. The point is to illustrate one of the many reasons I have a fraught relationship with politics, like so many of us do.
Even when there was an occasional flash of connection in these disagreements with my dad, it felt like nothing changed for the better, so I would retreat again until another issue I couldn’t stay silent on surfaced. Over the years other subjects like racial sensitivity (or lack thereof), sexism, policing, and the social safety net have all risen to this boiling point in me. It felt important to speak my mind, and I’m glad we at least managed to communicate at all. But the chasm was painful nonetheless, and has gotten exponentially more so in Trump’s era of chest-thumping partisan tribalism. I imagine many Americans can relate to the helpless feeling this confrontation cycle created in me, but we are not helpless. I may not be able to change my father’s mind, but together, we can vote this toxic administration out of office.
Rudy Giuliani with Caroline
CARMEN VALDES/GETTY IMAGES
His administration asked the Supreme Court to let businesses fire people for being gay or trans, pushed a regulation to let health care providers refuse services to people who are LGTBQ+, and banned trans people from serving their country in the military.
Women, immigrants, people with disabilities, and people of color are all also under attack by Trump’s inhumane policies—and by his judicial appointments, including, probably, Amy Coney Barrett . Trump’s administration has torn families apart in more ways than I even imagined were possible, from ripping children from their parents at the border to mishandling the coronavirus, which has resulted in over 215,000 in the U.S. dying, many thousands of them without their loved ones near. Faced with preventable deaths during a pandemic that Trump downplayed and ignored, rhetoric that has fed deep-seated, systemic racism, and chaos in the White House, it’s no surprise that so many Americans feel as hopeless and overwhelmed as I did growing up. But if we refuse to face our political reality, we don’t stand a chance of changing it.
In 2016, I realized I needed to speak out in a more substantial way than just debating my dad in private (especially since I wasn’t getting anywhere with that), so I publicly supported Hillary Clinton and began canvassing for congressional candidates. If the unrelenting deluge of devastating news makes you think I’m crazy for having hope, please remember that making us feel powerless is a tactic politicians use to make us think our voices and votes don’t matter. But they do. It’s taken persistence and nerve to find my voice in politics, and I’m using it now to ask you to stand with me in the fight to end Donald Trump’s reign of terror.
If being the daughter of a polarizing mayor who became the president’s personal bulldog has taught me anything, it is that corruption starts with “yes-men” and women, the cronies who create an echo chamber of lies and subservience to maintain their proximity to power. We’ve seen this ad nauseam with Trump and his cadre of high-level sycophants (the ones who weren’t convicted, anyway).
What inspires me most about Vice President Biden is that he is not afraid to surround himself with people who disagree with him. Choosing Senator Harris, who challenged him in the primary, speaks volumes about what an inclusive president he will be. Biden is willing to incorporate the views of progressive-movement leaders like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on issues like universal health care, student debt relief, prison reform, and police reform. And he is capable of reaching across the aisle to find moments of bipartisanship. The very notion of “bipartisanship” may seem painfully ludicrous right now, but we need a path out of impenetrable gridlock and vicious sniping. In Joe Biden, we’ll have a leader who prioritizes common ground and civility over alienation, bullying, and scorched-earth tactics.
Speaking of scorched earth, I know many people feel paralyzed by climate despair. I do too, but something still can and must be done. As climate change begins to encroach on our everyday lives, it is clear that our planet cannot survive four more years of this administration’s environmental assault. This monumental challenge requires scientifically literate leadership and immediate action. Joe Biden has laid out an aggressive series of plans to restore the environmental regulations that Trump gutted on behalf of his corporate polluting friends. Biden has a transformational clean-energy policy that he will bring to Congress within his first 100 days in office, and perhaps most crucially, he brings a desire and capability to reunite the major nations of the world in forging a path toward a global green future.
I fully understand that some of you want a nominee who is more progressive. For others the idea of voting for a Democrat of any kind may be a hurdle. Now I have another confession to make. Biden wasn’t my first choice when the primaries started. But I know what is at stake, and Joe Biden will be everyone’s president if elected. If you are planning to cast a symbolic vote or abstain from voting altogether, please reconsider. It is more important than ever to avoid complacency. This election is far from over, and if 2020 has taught us anything, it’s that anything can happen.
We are hanging by a single, slipping finger on a cliff’s edge, and the fall will be fatal. If we remove ourselves from the fight, our country will be in freefall. Alternatively, we can hang on, elect a compassionate and decent president, and claw our way back onto the ledge. If I, after decades of despair over politics, can engage in our democracy to meet this critical moment, I know you can too.
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