Campaign 2020 - - October 21st

USA Today Boosts Biden In Paper’s First-Ever Presidential Endorsement

Let’s not get serious

Today's column   was about the case for large-scale deficit spending if we get a Democratic president and Senate. As I said in the column, it was mainly about the economics; the political discussion will come later, maybe Friday, depending on how many outrageous and horrible things happen over the next couple of days. But I thought I could use this newsletter to get a bit ahead of the curve.

So let me tell you what worries me about the prospects for doing the right thing economically.

One possibility is that Trump beats the odds and wins, or at least gets within stealing range. If that happens, however, macroeconomics is going to be the least of our problems.

Another, more likely possibility is that Republicans hold the Senate. In that case the G.O.P. will simply sabotage Biden every way it can. I know that sounds harsh, but does anyone really doubt it?

But even if Democrats take both the White House and the Senate, they’ll face a problem: the Very Serious People will surely reappear!

Who are the VSPs? I think I stole the term from the blogger Atrios , who used it to describe all the influential people who thought it was sensible to support the Iraq War because all the other influential people were supporting it. In economics, the VSPs became critically important — and destructive — in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

There's more about the terrible, terrible VSPs, in the OA. Click on the headline.

5 Points On The Fight Over Open Carry At Michigan Polling Places

Michigan’s secretary of state announced recently that openly carrying firearms at polling places is prohibited. The ban is the latest development in a long-running debate over open carry in the state. But whether the order will be enforced is another question entirely. Here are five points on state officials’ attempt to keep armed Michiganders from intimidating voters, and the genesis of the months-long fight.

Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, has jurisdiction over the state’s elections, and it was in this context that she  issued a state-wide ban  on Friday: “The presence of firearms at the polling place, clerk’s office(s), or absent voter counting board may cause disruption, fear, or intimidation for voters, election workers, and others present,” she wrote. 

The rule came a week after the FBI interrupted an  alleged plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) . At least some of the alleged plotters had  participated in protests  that involved entering the Michigan State Capitol while armed last spring. Those protests rekindled a debate around open carry in the state. 

But the question of whether the ban on open carry at the polls would be enforced has hung over Benson’s announcement. In September, two gun violence prevention groups  published a report  arguing that while Michigan and several other states currently did not prohibit carrying guns at polling places, they did have the constitutional authority to do so. 

“If a line is crossed and if anyone becomes disruptive or in other ways tries to intimidate citizens from casting their vote that myself, the attorney general and local law enforcement across the state will be prepared to step in and protect the voters,” Benson  told reporters earlier this month .  “I would be very concerned about that if anyone does that, and we’re going to be looking at what the law does and does not allow.”

The backlash from conservative sheriffs and other interest groups was almost immediate. 

“There’s nothing in the law that gives police the authority to enforce these rules,”  said  Robert Stevenson, director of the Michigan Association of Chiefs of Police. “The feedback I’ve been getting from our police agencies is that they’re uncomfortable trying to enforce something they clearly don’t have the authority to enforce.”

Matt Saxton, CEO and executive director of the Michigan Sheriffs Association,  called the order  “a solution in search of a problem” and said it put law enforcement in the middle of a contentious political issue.

And the National Rifle Association’s lobbying division, the Institute for Legislative Action, said Benson’s order was “simply the latest scheme to inconvenience law-abiding citizens and erode their right to self-defense, while doing nothing to improve public safety.” 

“No we’re not going to enforce it,” Livingston County Sheriff Mike Murphy  told WXYZ  Monday. (The sheriff  acknowledged separately , “I don’t get what good comes out of open carrying at a poll, quite frankly.”) 

Still, it’s hardly the case that all or even most sheriffs have spoken out against the rule. The top cop in Wayne County, Michigan’s largest and home to Detroit,  said Monday that  “until such time as a court of appropriate jurisdiction tells me that plan is unlawful, it is my plan to enforce.”

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has said she’ll enforce the secretary of state’s order.  “I’m very hopeful that law enforcement will agree” that the rule ought to be enforced, she said in a  recent interview  with Showtime’s The Circus.

Pressed on the pushback from law enforcement, Nessel offered a  more forceful line : “If you have a county sheriff that seems to be sympathetic to any of these organizations and we think they’re not going to enforce the laws, then we’ll get somebody else who will, the Michigan State Police.” 

(“I won’t get into speculation about enforcement action, but the Michigan State Police does have statewide jurisdiction,” an MSP spokesperson  told The Detroit News .) 

The recent debate over guns in Michigan goes back a few months to a series of protests held at the state’s capitol building over COVID-19 orders. At one point, armed protesters stormed the capitol and stood over legislators as they worked, moving some lawmakers to don bulletproof vests. 

This image is clickable

Some of the men present that day  were later charged  in connection with the plot to kidnap the governor. In response to the protest, one Democratic legislator showed up to work a few days later with  her own armed security . 

The state is one in a  handful  to allow guns in its capitol, and so far not even the packed display was enough to change that: The Michigan State Capitol Commission last month  rejected proposals  to ban guns in the capitol. Democratic legislators have  proposed firearms ban as well , but the Republicans in charge of both legislative chambers appear  unlikely to budge  on the matter. 

The showdown over guns at polling places follows a tumultuous year for state-local law enforcement relationships in Michigan, where the Democratic-led state government’s COVID-19 public health orders have sometimes been met with open defiance from county sheriffs. 

The most public example is Barry County Sheriff Dar Leaf, who spoke out against the state’s stay-at-home orders at crowded public rallies, at one point  sharing the stage  with a man who would later face state terrorism charges in connection with the alleged plot to kidnap the governor. 

After the FBI announced that the alleged plot had been disrupted, Leaf defended the plotters,  saying ,  “a lot of people are angry with the governor and they want her arrested.” 

Leaf, as HuffPost  reported , is affiliated with the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, an organization that  holds  that “the power of the sheriff even supersedes the powers of the President” and urges sheriffs to ignore what they consider unconstitutional orders from state and federal government,  especially those  concerning guns. 

I saw an interview with one of the Sheriffs..He might as well have been one of the groups that were arrested for threatening Whitmer.

It will be interesting if the State Police have to enforce the mandate.

This is the $64 question...

If Trump says he won't leave, what will the Secret Service do? If the Secret Service sides with Trump, what will.........

I would think that once Biden is inaugurated, the SS are obligated to protect the POTUS first before anyone else. That means if trmp is regarded as threat by not leaving, they can take him out of the WH by force

That's what should happen. But since nothing about this Administration is as it should be...... 

I trust the Secret Service to do their jobs

White House Tells Judge Trump's Tweets Were Bullshit

The White House has, in a way, complied with a   federal judge’s order   to get clarification from President Trump himself on whether he intended to declassify some of the most sought after documents in his government when he tweeted that he... declassified said documents. As of today, the administration’s position is that was all some bullshit referring to some other bullshit.

On Tuesday, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows filed a   sworn statement   with the federal court overseeing an emergency request in a Freedom of Information Act case seeking the release of unredacted documents relating to the Russia investigation—documents like the full   Mueller report . The DOJ is very much opposed to declassifying these docs for reporters and the public to comb through, and last week, lawyers for the department   claimed in court   that the position of the White House Counsel’s Office is Trump did not intend to declassify documents with a sloppy tweet earlier this month. That wasn’t good enough for the judge, and he ordered the DOJ to get an official declaration from the president explaining his intent. In the absence of a direct statement, the judge allowed for DOJ lawyers to file the statement on his behalf as long as they spoke with Trump directly on the matter.

While Mark Meadows is neither a lawyer at the DOJ nor President Trump himself, the chief of staff’s   statement   appears to be all we’re getting for now. In it, Meadows writes, “The President indicated to me that his statements on Twitter were not self-executing declassification orders and do not require the declassification or release of any particular documents.”

Let’s go back to Trump’s original tweets from the week of his hospitalization with covid-19. In one   tweet , he wrote: “I have fully authorized the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the single greatest political CRIME in American History, the Russia Hoax. Likewise, the Hillary Clinton Email Scandal. No redactions!” Okay, yup, that’s pretty clear. He has already ordered total declassification, all documents, no redactions—check, check, and check. In the second   tweet , he wrote: “All Russia Hoax Scandal information was Declassified by me long ago. Unfortunately for our Country, people have acted very slowly, especially since it is perhaps the biggest political crime in the history of our Country. Act!!!”

So, why aren’t the documents already in circulation if they’ve already been declassified and no further declassification is needed? Meadows says that Trump was referring “to the authorization he had provided to the Attorney General to declassify documents as part of his   ongoing review   of intelligence activities relating to the 2016 Presidential election and certain related matters.”

Authorizing one person to declassify documents as they see fit does not sound like a “total declassification” to me, but I’m not a judge. On the other hand, U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton is a judge, and according to   CNN , he expects to see the DOJ at a court hearing on Wednesday. If Judge Walton isn’t happy, we could get a nice flood of documents gift-wrapped with a tweet.

FLOTUS Skips Trump Rally Due To Lingering COVID Symptoms

First lady Melania Trump, who contracted COVID-19 several weeks ago, pulled out of her husband’s campaign rally scheduled for Tuesday evening in Pennsylvania due to remaining symptoms of the virus.

First Lady Melania Trump addresses the
Republican National Convention from the
Rose Garden at the White House on
August 25, 2020.
Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images

“Mrs. Trump continues to feel better every day following her recovery from COVID-19, but with a lingering cough, and out of an abundance of caution, she will not be traveling today,” Stephanie Grisham, the First Lady’s spokesperson, told   NBC News .

Trump and the President were slated to appear together at the rally together in Erie, Pennsylvania.

There are millions of idiots ready to risk their lives for the joy of hearing their Lord.

Not her...

"If there is another tick down, it's a total bloodbath": How Trump's self-destructive candidacy could blow up the electoral map
Democrats’ massive fundraising, downballot energy, and seniors turning against Trump signal a potential blue-wave election with unexpected flips. As one South Carolina strategist says, “Biden supporters in red states are hopeful.

BY CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POST/GETTY IMAGES

In 2008,   Barack Obama ’s campaign was gifted an election-night surprise on its way to 365 electoral votes: It won Indiana. The state hadn’t voted for a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson’s landslide, and just four years earlier,   George W. Bush   crushed   John Kerry   in Indiana by 21 points. But in the wake of the economic crash, Democrats were surfing a wave, and Obama eked out a narrow 28,391-vote win over John McCain in the Hoosier State. It was a holy-shit moment, both for the national media and Obama high command, neither of which had identified Indiana as a key battleground heading into Election Day. The win didn’t come out of nowhere, exactly: Obama had plowed resources into registering new voters there during his primary fight with   Hillary Clinton;   the polls were always close; and corners of Indiana shared media markets with the more competitive states of Michigan and Ohio. But the polling was also spotty, and McCain led by a final average of 1.4 points.

The Obama campaign looked to other states, like North Carolina and Virginia, to carve a new path to 270. When Indiana landed in its column, it was an unexpected treat, a crisp $20 bill found in its pocket. The state decisively tipped back to Republicans in a big way four years later. But there’s a lesson in that fluke Indiana win, too, as Democrats head into the final two weeks of an election in which   Joe Biden   continues to gain strength against a stalled-out   Donald Trump:   Even as the two campaigns and the political media focus their attention on certain core battleground states, weird things tend to happen at the margins in wave elections, outside the agreed-upon field of view. And 2020 is shaping up to be a wave of seismic proportions. As veteran election handicapper   Stuart Rothenberg   told me back in 2018, “The thing about wave elections is that they manifest themselves in places you didn’t think were competitive.”

A slew of political fundamentals—fundraising, explosive early-vote numbers, late-spending decisions, candidate travel, surging downballot Democrats, the Republican rush to confirm a new Supreme Court justice, and the ugly fact that Trump is dueling with George H. W. Bush for the title of most unpopular incumbent since World War II—point to what’s coming. If the polls are correct, the president is about to get   schlonged , bigly. “Trump right now is just so vulnerable to a complete collapse,” said one respected Democratic number-cruncher working with a variety of outside groups. “He is so close to the edge in all of these states, if there is another tick down, it’s a total bloodbath.” Trump only narrowly won the 2016 race, within the margin of error in a handful of swing states. Since then the president’s support among his strongest demographics, including working-class white women, white men, and even white evangelicals, has deteriorated. Every election since 2017, every swing state poll and every fundraising quarter have favored Democrats, with independents and college-educated women rejecting Trump by powerful margins. Trump was already on thin ice. But if there’s a blue wave, it won’t just be because the coalition that powered Democrats in 2018 showed up again in a big way. It’s also that seniors have abandoned Trump for Biden during the coronavirus pandemic, a well-reported phenomenon but one that still seems curiously underplayed in the preelection narrative. By building a coalition of suburbanites, college-educated voters, and seniors—voters who actually vote— Biden isn’t just on the cusp of denying Trump a second term. He’s obliterating the voting base that’s undergirded the Republican Party for the last 30 years. “If you were going to concoct a Molotov cocktail to toss and blow apart a party’s key coalitions, right now the GOP is dealing with it,” said Ohio-based Republican consultant   Nick Everhart.  

Recent polls from CNN and NBC showed Biden with a more-than-20-point lead among voters over the age of 65. Democrats haven’t won that age group since the 2000 election, and seniors became a reliable voting bloc for Republicans during the Obama era. Trump won seniors by nine points over Clinton in 2016. Today Biden is winning seniors in the aging upper Midwest—Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania—by healthy margins. In the Sunbelt states—Georgia, Texas, and Arizona—Trump is still winning the olds, but his edge has diminished since 2016. Biden, his fellow senior citizen, is chewing into Republican margins. In Florida, where the old vote is crucial, Trump defeated Clinton by 17 points among seniors last time. Today, thanks to COVID-19 and the president’s hapless response to it, Biden is either winning or tied with Trump among Florida seniors, depending on the poll.  

“Seniors are a good strength to have because they’re big in terms of expansion,” Biden pollster   John Anzalone   told me. “The six core battleground states are older than people realize. Certainly people think of Arizona and Florida as having big senior populations, but so does the upper Midwest. Even when you expand into Iowa, you‘re still looking at a lot of senior voters.” The shift among seniors is not just an interesting cross-tab—it’s a wholesale realignment of the Democratic electorate. It puts Iowa and Ohio firmly back on the electoral map, diminishes Trump’s support everywhere else, and even makes states like Kansas and Missouri—which have only been lightly polled but have plenty of suburbanites and aging voters—look like tempting flips for optimists tinkering with the 270toWin map.

There's lots more in the Original Article .

Sure looks like the right's antifa boogeyman doesn't exist
Court documents show that almost none of the people arrested during protests against police brutality have any connection to left-wing radicals

An exhaustive  investigation   by the Associated Press has revealed that of the hundreds of people arrested during the ongoing protests against police brutality, almost none have had any links to the organizing tactic known as antifa, which the president has repeatedly insisted is a concerted left-wing group. In the thousands of pages reviewed by the AP, antifa is reportedly mentioned just once: in a Boston case that says a member of the FBI Gang Task Force was investigating “suspected ANTIFA activity associated with the protests.” The majority of those arrested—on charges ranging from arson to civil disorder—have been working alone, with no links to any radical far-left organization, as both   Donald Trump   and Attorney General   William Barr   have repeatedly asserted.

William Barr, U.S. attorney general, arrives
for the announcement of U.S. President Donald
Trump's nominee for associate justice of the U.S.
Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., on
Saturday, Sept. 26, 2020.
Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images

As recently as during last week’s NBC town hall, Trump brought up alleged antifa violence when   pressed   on the proliferation of the right-wing conspiracy group QAnon. Though he claimed to “denounce white supremacy,” he quickly pivoted to asking why moderator   Savannah Guthrie   hadn’t mentioned “people on the left that are burning down our cities.” Since the beginning of the protests early this year, Trump has consistently targeted blue states as hubs of so-called anarchist activity, writing in a   memo   sent out last month that “anarchy has recently beset some of our states and cities.” He continued with a threat: “My administration will not allow federal tax dollars to fund cities that allow themselves to deteriorate into lawless zones.”

According to the AP, several of those who have been arrested “are not from the Democratic-led cities that Trump has likened to ‘war zones’ but from the suburbs the Republican president has claimed to have ‘saved.’” In late August, when protests began in Kenosha, Wisconsin, after   Jacob   Blake , an unarmed Black man, was shot in the back by police, Trump blamed the violence on “ domestic terror ” while lending support to   Kyle Rittenhouse , the 17-year-old charged with the deaths of two protestors. Rittenhouse was from Illinois and had driven to Kenosha following a mass Facebook call to action by the right-wing militia group known as the Kenosha Guard.

The AP reported that, along with little mention of antifa in court documents, “more than 40% of those facing federal charges are white” and a majority are under 30; they were arrested in cities ranging from “Portland, Oregon, to Minneapolis, Boston, and New York.” FBI director   Christopher   Wray   has   labeled   far-right extremists “a domestic terror threat.” Testifying in front of the House Homeland Security Committee last month, Wray said, “Within the domestic terrorism bucket, racially motivated violent extremism is, I think, the biggest bucket within that larger group.” He continued, “within the racially motivated violent extremist bucket, people subscribing to some kind of white supremacist-type ideology is certainly the biggest chunk of that.”

Even in the face of irrefutable evidence, Trump’s allies, and Barr in particular, have continued in their hunt for radical left-wing violence. In a June   interview   with Fox News, Barr said of antifa, “There appear to be sources of funding, and we are looking into the sources of funding.” And in an interview with   Wolf Blitzer   in September he   doubled   down on his allegations, saying, “I’ve talked to every police chief in every city where there has been major violence and they all have identified antifa as the ramrod for the violence.” A July   investigation   by The Intercept found that law enforcement disproportionately focused on antifa even when they knew that far-right extremists were a legitimate threat.

No problem. They'll just SHOUT LOUDER!

The AP reported that, along with little mention of antifa in court documents, “more than 40% of those facing federal charges are white” and a majority are under 30; they were arrested in cities ranging from “Portland, Oregon, to Minneapolis, Boston, and New York.”

Just kinda punches ya in the face, doesn't it?

And of course, this factual report will make no difference to the TrumpTrueBelievers. They will continue to complain about antifa violence. Loudly.