29 August 20
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Cops Have Long Encouraged Armed Right-Wing Counterprotesters Like the Teenage Shooter in Kenosha
Branko Marcetic, Jacobin
Marcetic writes: "Since the latest uprising for racial justice began, police throughout the country have been very friendly with cop-worshipping, armed right-wingers who have shown up on the streets across America to oppose protesters. The teenage shooter in Kenosha who killed two protesters this week wasn't the first and probably won't be the last."
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'Trump is increasingly isolated in the fight against the mail, with many in his party moving past his position.' (photo: Paul Ratje/AFP/Getty Images)
Ignoring FBI and Fellow Republicans, Trump Continues Assault on Mail-In Voting
Miles Parks, NPR
Parks writes: "In the face of contradictory messages coming from members of his own party, members of the U.S. intelligence community and even a member of his own family, President Trump continues his months-long campaign against efforts to expand voting by mail amid the coronavirus pandemic."
"The fraud and abuse will be an embarrassment to our Country," Trump tweeted Wednesday.
On Monday, he claimed without evidence that mail ballots may purposely be manipulated to be sent to Democratic areas and not Republican areas. And on Sunday, he decried a system of ballot return that the federal government calls "secure and convenient" in official documents.
The president has questioned the legitimacy of U.S. elections for years, although the reasons for his skepticism shift almost weekly. After the 2016 election, when he lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College, Trump baselessly claimed "millions and millions" of people voted illegally in person.
Since the pandemic took hold in the U.S. this spring, states across the country have expanded voting by mail in an effort to limit the number of people who crowd into polling places on Election Day. A Washington Post analysis estimates that at least 83% of Americans are eligible to vote by mail this fall.
Trump quickly started criticizing those efforts, although his reasons for opposing it continue to change.
In April, Trump said any expansion of mail ballots would lead to widespread fraud. In June, Attorney General William Barr argued people should need an excuse to vote by mail. Earlier this month, Trump said no-excuse absentee voting is fine but claimed the Postal Service couldn't handle the increase in election mail. As of this week, Trump seems to have backtracked on that claim, too, saying that the USPS can handle the increase in mail ballots but that elections offices can't.
"It's not the post office," Trump said, in an interview this week with The Washington Examiner. "No, it's the elections office. The post office — look, this is a con job. It's like the Russian hoax. The post office has run the way it's been run forever."
Whatever the reason, it's clear Trump is increasingly isolated in the fight against the mail, with many in his party moving past his position.
Mail-in ballots will 'work out just fine'
Many Republicans fear that Trump's language on voting by mail could harm their chances this fall. Initial data shows Democratic voters far outpacing Republicans when it comes to requesting an absentee ballot, including in battleground states.
In Florida, Democrats lead Republicans by more than 660,000 requests, according to data compiled by University of Florida political science professor Michael McDonald. In Pennsylvania, twice as many Democrats have requested ballots as Republicans. In North Carolina, triple the number of Democrats have asked for ballots.
Polling data tells a similar story: A Pew Research Center poll released this week found less than 20% of Trump supporters plan on voting by mail this fall, compared with almost 60% of voters who support former Vice President Joe Biden.
In Wisconsin, a recent Marquette Law School poll found that just 14% of voters planning to vote by absentee are Trump supporters.
All that puts local Republicans in a bind, considering in-person voting could be a dangerous proposition in some areas depending on the state of the pandemic, and mail-in voting has traditionally been a reliable turnout booster for Republicans in many states.
"We are hurting ourselves and putting ourselves at a disadvantage," said Rohn Bishop, a GOP county chairman in Fond du Lac, Wis. "Not a big disadvantage, but a disadvantage, and that's one of the reasons I push back against it because it is a legitimate way to vote."
Bishop called questions about ballot security when it comes to mail-in voting "conspiratorial hype."
"The system's pretty solid," Bishop said. "You have to sign the ballot, you need a witness, you can track your ballot."
Some of Trump's closest allies have recently endorsed voting by mail.
Trump's son Donald Trump Jr. urged voters to request an absentee or mail ballot in robocalls this week.
"Voting absentee is a safe and secure way to guarantee your voice is heard," Trump Jr. says in the call, which was first reported by Politico.
And Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., who delivered a keynote speech during the Republican convention, said in an interview with The Today Show that he was "very confident that we will have fair elections throughout this country."
"I'll tell you how I feel about it, and what I think most Americans believe, that this process of mail-in ballots will prove to work out just fine," Scott said. "I'm going to have confidence that all the moving pieces will actually fit together and we'll have a very strong, integrity-driven, character-driven election."
Law enforcement sees no fraud evidence
During an election security briefing Wednesday, FBI officials made what should have been an unremarkable statement: They've seen no evidence of any foreign plot to counterfeit or forge mail ballots.
Election officials scoffed at the concept when Attorney General William Barr mentioned it for the first time earlier this summer, but both the attorney general and Trump continued to repeat it as a potential reason not to expand mail voting over the past few months.
"MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS," tweeted Trump in June. "IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!"
The FBI, which is formally part of the Justice Department, said Wednesday that it has "no information about any nation state" engaging in any effort to undermine any aspect of mail voting and also noted how difficult any coordinated fraud scheme involving mail ballots would be to pull off because of the decentralized nature of U.S. elections and the numerous safeguards that are in place.
Regardless, election officials and experts worry that Trump's insistence on conspiracy theorizing about mail ballots and voting in general will affect the public's confidence in whatever result occurs in November.
"Any of these issues, when they get used for partisan political purposes, it's not good," said New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, a Democrat. "The inherent side effect is that it fosters distrust and it fosters a perception of unfairness."
Miles Taylor, a former Department of Homeland Security chief of staff during the Trump administration, told The Washington Post this week that Trump's language has effectively been an "open door" for foreign adversaries hoping to meddle in the race this fall.
In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, political scientist Rick Hasen argued that delegitimizing the results may actually be Trump's intention, with an eye toward contesting or casting doubt on a potential victory by his Democratic rival, Joe Biden.
"We cannot count on Mr. Trump to speak responsibly about the fairness of the 2020 vote count," Hasen wrote. "Indeed, he is one of the biggest threats to the integrity of the election."
Audrey DiMartinez, 57, and her granddaughter Eliysia Lever, 16, left, who came from Staten Island, listen to speakers at the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28. (photo: Evelyn Hockstein/WP)
At March on Washington, Black Americans Say Lines Are Blurred Between Now and 1963
Paul Duggan, Justin George, Michelle Boorstein and Sydney Trent, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "Clifton Price Jr., a child of Jim Crow Mississippi, rested on the seat of his walker Friday beside the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial. He had decided to join the March on Washington, 57 years after he was unable to attend the first one because he couldn't leave his job as a janitor."
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DACA recipients and their supporters at a rally. (photo: Sandy Huffaker/AFP/Getty Images)
DACA Recipients Challenge Latest Trump Administration Attempt to Gut Program
Priscilla Alvarez, CNN
Alvarez writes: "Participants in the Obama-era program shielding undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children from deportation are challenging the Trump administration's latest effort to limit the program, the first targeted challenge against the full set of new rules."
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'The mantle of QAnon has been taken up by a huge number of mostly right-wing Americans.' (photo: The Nation)
Is QAnon the Future of the Republican Party?
William Sommer and Ryan Grim, The Intercept
Excerpt: "QAnon is a far-ranging conspiracy theory that alleges, among other things, that a patriotic Trump supporter (or supporters) embedded in the highest levels of the U.S. government has been using internet forums to send coded messages to the American public about a secret plan to arrest and/or execute a global cabal of child-torturing, blood-drinking, Satan-worshipping pedophiles."
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'The agreement lists nine alternative policy proposals for communities, local governments and public institutions to adopt to achieve social and environmental justice across the region and 'alter the balance of power.'' (photo: Apib Comunicação/Flickr)
Latin America Unites to Fight Global Inequalities With Regional Ecosocial Pact
Kimberley Brown, Mongabay
Brown writes: "COVID-19 has made it hard to ignore the gaping social and economic inequalities and environmental destruction worldwide, particularly in the global south. That's why researchers and social movements across Latin America have joined forces to push for, and collaborate on, creating real systemic changes in the new Ecosocial Pact of the South."
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A firefighter in Winters, California. (photo: Noah Berger/AP)
Hurricane Laura and the Wildfires: This Is Climate Change
Rebecca Hersher, Nathan Rott and Lauren Sommer, NPR
Excerpt: "The upshot of climate change is that everyone alive is destined to experience unprecedented disasters."
The most powerful hurricanes, the most intense wildfires, the most prolonged heat waves and the most frequent outbreaks of new diseases are all in our future. Records will be broken, again and again.
But the predicted destruction is still shocking when it unfolds at the same time.
This week, Americans are living through concurrent disasters. In California, more than 200,000 people were under evacuation orders because of wildfires, and millions are breathing smoky air. On the Gulf Coast, people weathered a tropical storm at the beginning of the week. Two days later, about half a million were ordered to evacuate ahead of Hurricane Laura. We're six months into a global pandemic, and the Earth is on track to have one of its hottest years on record.
Climate scientist Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii says if our collective future were a movie, this week would be the trailer.
"There is not a single ending that is good," he says. "There's not going to be a happy ending to this movie."
Mora was an author of a study examining all the effects of climate change. The researchers concluded that concurrent disasters will get more and more common as the Earth gets hotter. That means we will live through more weeks like this one — when fires, floods, heat waves and disease outbreaks layer on top of one another.
"Keep in mind that all these things are related," Mora explains. "CO2 is increasing the temperature. As a result, the temperature is accelerating the evaporation of water. The evaporation of water leads to drought that in turn leads to heat waves and wildfires. In places that are humid, that evaporation — the same evaporation — leads to massive precipitation that is then commonly followed by floods."
Disease outbreaks are also more likely. The most recent U.S. National Climate Assessment warns that changing weather patterns make it more likely that insect-borne illnesses will affect the U.S. Climate change is also causing people and animals to move and come in contact with one another in new and dangerous ways.
If humans dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions immediately, scientists say it will help avoid the most catastrophic global warming scenarios. Worldwide emissions are still rising, and the United States is the planet's second-largest emitter.
Mora says helping people connect the dots between the current disasters and greenhouse gas emissions should be every scientist's priority. "That's the million-dollar question," he says. "How do we speak to people in a way that we get them to appreciate the significance of these problems?"
Hurricanes and climate change
Climate change is making the air and water hotter, and that means more power for hurricanes.
"Whenever you get ocean temperatures that are much above average, you're asking for trouble," meteorologist Jeff Masters explains. "And we've seen some of the warmest ocean temperatures on record for the Atlantic basin this year."
Hot water is like a battery charger for hurricanes. As a storm moves over hot water, like Hurricane Laura did this week, it captures moisture and energy very quickly. In recent years, scientists have seen evidence that global warming is already making storms more likely to grow large and powerful and more likely to intensify quickly.
That's an alarming trend. "We're not very good at forecasting rapid intensification," Masters says. "That's critical because that gives you less time to prepare if there's a storm rapidly intensifying right before landfall."
Scientists have also found that hurricanes are dropping more rain, which means more flooding. Flooding is consistently the most deadly and damaging effect of a hurricane. Studies show many people underestimate the flood risks from hurricanes. Just a few inches of moving water can make it impossible to stay on your feet or control your car.
Add all that to the current pandemic, and you get a dangerous situation, especially for people living in the path of the storm. As NPR has reported, safe options for people who evacuate this year could be limited because group shelters might accept fewer people in order to maintain social distancing.
Concurrent disasters are hitting the country as more people struggle to keep their homes during the economic crash. Andreanecia Morris, the executive director of the nonprofit HousingNOLA, says this week's hurricanes are especially risky to the many people in Louisiana who don't have secure places to live because they were evicted.
"People are becoming more vulnerable as this COVID crisis goes on," Morris says, as more people get laid off or run out of savings. "We have frankly been failing to serve the most vulnerable, and the people who have been made vulnerable by these cascading catastrophes."
Wildfires and Climate Change
The fingerprints of climate change are all over the Western wildfires, too.
There are nearly 100 large uncontained fires burning across the U.S. More than a million acres have burned in California alone — almost all in the last few weeks. The smoke has blanketed cities and cast a haze from coast to coast.
Wildfires, like hurricanes, are a natural occurrence. They existed long before humans started rapidly changing the climate and are a necessary process for many Western landscapes. But a growing body of scientific evidence shows that a warming climate has changed the status quo.
Fires are burning more frequently and intensely in places where they've always occurred, and they're creeping into places where they were previously rare.
Wildfires thrive on high heat, low humidity, strong winds and dry vegetation, all of which are more likely to occur in a warming climate, says Noah Diffenbaugh, a professor of earth system sciences at Stanford University.
Diffenbaugh was a co-author of a recent study that found climate change has doubled the number of days when conditions would support extreme fire in California. "And it's particularly increased the odds that those conditions occur broadly, simultaneously," Diffenbaugh says.
Take the fires currently burning across the West.
Two of the fire clusters in California are among the five largest wildfires in state history. The Pine Gulch Fire, chewing across the Western slope of the Colorado Rockies, is now largest fire in that state's history.
All occurred during a heat wave that broke temperature records from Texas to Washington state. Death Valley, Calif., reached 130 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature, if verified, that would rank as one of the hottest ever reliably recorded on the planet. At the same time, scientists are warning that Colorado and much of the Western U.S. may be in the early stages of a climate-fueled megadrought, the likes of which haven't been seen in the last 1,200 years.
"When you have warmer temperatures and you're lengthening the warm season, you're also lengthening the time when wildfires have a chance to start and grow," says Becky Bolinger, Colorado's assistant state climatologist.
The fire season is growing at a time when more people are in harm's way. Millions of houses in the Western U.S. have been built in fire-prone areas, many before building codes required fire-resistant roofs and siding. Many landscapes are also primed to burn because of overgrown brush and trees. For much of the last century, the U.S. Forest Service and other fire agencies extinguished wildfires, allowing vegetation to build up.
Experts say that living with both destructive wildfires and hurricanes will take more planning and preparation. Communities will have to strengthen existing homes and infrastructure, as well as improve evacuation and emergency plans. Some neighborhoods could prove too unsafe for residents at all.
How bad it eventually gets depends on how quickly the world can reduce carbon emissions. But the past weeks should make clear: "Climate change and its impacts are not the future," says Crystal Kolden, a fire scientist at the University of California, Merced. "They are now."
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