10 October 20
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Frank Rich | Trump Is Flailing and Pence Did Nothing to Help
Frank Rich, New York Magazine
Rich writes: "The obfuscation around the severity of Donald Trump's illness since he contracted COVID-19 has brought renewed attention to Mike Pence."
What did Wednesday night’s debate show us about both Pence and Kamala Harris, and how will the debate, and Trump’s refusal this morning to take part in the next one, affect the campaign?
The debate will have a huge impact only if The Fly gets a Netflix deal. Despite a concerted media effort to hype the stakes of a face-off between the standbys for two septuagenarian presidential candidates, it was business as usual. Veep debates, like most veeps themselves, never move votes. Nothing happened last night to arrest the polling stampede toward Joe Biden in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s virus-spewing tantrum in the previous debate.
Trump’s refusal to participate in the next debate is another act of self-harm. Biden has all the leverage here. It is a completely reasonable position to all but MAGA death cultists that neither he nor the participating citizens in a town hall debate expose themselves to a COVID superspreader whose current medical condition is a state secret. And since it’s Trump who needs a debate to try to shake up a losing campaign, his decision to bail only hurts himself, not Biden. It makes him look like he is ducking questions and fearful of a format in which he can’t shout over everyone else. His promise that he will hold a rally instead — an implicit threat to infect even more people than he already has — is laughable. We’ll see if he flip-flops on this no-win stand as quickly as he did on his other politically self-immolating move of the week, pulling the plug on stimulus negotiations. The dexamethasone will have the final say.
As for Pence and Harris, it would be hard to claim we learned much new — unless you consider the possibility that Pence, too, is ill. His left eye looked infected and his energy was subdued. Certainly the chairman of the coronavirus task force is taking minimal precautions to preserve his own health. The day before the debate his press secretary, Katie Miller, mocked the Democrats for insisting on a plexiglass barrier onstage: “If Senator Harris wants to use a fortress around herself, have at it.” (A plexiglass barrier as a public-health precaution seems to be the only wall the Trump administration doesn’t want to build.) Given that Miller had herself battled COVID, this was a strange move, and sure enough, karma once again came home to roost. She had hardly made her taunt before the news arrived that her husband, Stephen Miller, the White House’s secretary of xenophobia, had tested positive. As if to further underline Pence’s devil-may-care attitude toward the pandemic, his wife, a.k.a. Mother, appeared onstage unmasked at the debate’s end. (Harris’s husband wore a mask.)
Pence had no good answers — and barely attempted any — to address the president’s catastrophic failure to confront, or at times even to acknowledge, a virus that has killed more than 210,000 Americans. He seemed to think that if he tossed out a hypothetical and hyperbolic death toll for the H1N1 outbreak during the Obama administration, somehow voters would ignore the growing COVID casualty rate afflicting Americans right now. What was also striking about Pence was his utter inability to deal with any women who are not Mother. He constantly interrupted Harris and the female moderator, Susan Page, when he was not mansplaining to them. If his goal was to make what is likely to be the largest gender gap in American electoral history even larger, mission accomplished!
Page was an embarrassingly inept moderator. She didn’t have a clue about how to get Pence to stop abusing the time limits, and she didn’t field follow-up queries when the candidates, more often than not Pence, ignored her questions entirely. But this was in one way a plus for Harris, since Page’s passivity allowed Pence’s condescension to play out in full view of those “suburban housewives” the Trump campaign ostensibly aspires to woo. Harris was shrewd to challenge Pence only glancingly and politely on his boorishness; if she’d turned up the tone a notch, she would have immediately been pilloried as an “angry” or “nasty” woman of color by the factotums of the white-supremacist party. Even so, there was plenty of sniping by the usual suspects, spewing the standard GOP boilerplate for targeting female politicians. “I don’t think she did a good job of making herself likable,” said Karl Rove on Fox News.
In terms of substance, Harris made the points she had to make about both the COVID debacle and Trump’s assault on the Affordable Care Act and its coverage of preexisting conditions. Pence didn’t and couldn’t address his administration’s four-year failure to offer its promised health-care plan. Harris, as many have noted, didn’t have an answer to the question about packing the court. If there is another debate, presumably Biden will have an answer by then. But even if he doesn’t, it makes no difference. This election is not going to be decided by voters’ views on packing the court or even on the attempted ramming through of Amy Coney Barrett.
It’s fascinating, though, that both the Trump campaign and Republican senators on the ropes in their re-election bids, like Lindsey Graham, think that Barrett can push them over the top in November. The latest Fox News poll out this week, consistent with others, shows that by a two-to-one margin, Americans want Roe v. Wade upheld (61 to 28 percent) and Obamacare to remain as law (64 to 32 percent). Barrett’s own paper trail, no matter how hard she may try to fudge her record during a confirmation hearing, attests to her minority stand on both these issues. Senate Democrats on the Judiciary Committee should get out of the way and give Harris as much airtime as possible to prosecute the case.
But the most important finding in that new Fox poll — more important than its finding that Biden has doubled his national lead over Trump to ten points since last month — is that only 24 percent of Americans are confident that the virus is under control, down from 30 percent in September. And every hour, it seems, Trump comes up with another stunt to undermine that confidence, whether it’s lording his “miracle” cure over sick Americans who have no access to his (unproven) medication or threatening the integrity of the FDA vaccine-approval process. Not to mention that he has now forsaken epidemiology entirely to turn over national coronavirus policy to a radiologist and Fox News commentator, Scott Atlas, and his own medical care to an osteopathic spin doctor, Sean Conley, who is an even less practiced liar than Sean Spicer.
Republicans are clinging to the hope that this latest awful patch in the Trump narrative will pass without inflicting lasting harm, like the revelation of the Access Hollywood tape four years ago this week. But the Access Hollywood tape only killed Billy Bush’s career, not 210,000 Americans. There’s nothing that happened in last night’s debate or is likely to happen in any future debate that will blot out the pandemic’s continuing body count or Trump’s indelible behavior in the pre-Election Day countdown of his now stark-raving-mad presidency.
Back in the Watergate era, Americans were stunned when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein reported that Richard Nixon at his nadir was talking to the paintings on the White House walls. But at least that spectacle happened behind closed doors. Upon Trump’s return from Walter Reed, he stood gasping before the cameras on the Lincoln Balcony in full makeup, saluted into thin air, and held a pose that struck many as a cross between Benito Mussolini and Patti LuPone in Evita. If what we’re witnessing is what Trump calls “a blessing from God,” it will be more incumbent than ever on voters, not God, to save America.
ICE officer. (photo: ICE)
Officials Demand Investigation After ICE Agents Stop Black Jogger in Boston
N'dea Yancey-Bragg, USA TODAY
Yancey-Bragg writes: "Elected officials in Massachusetts are demanding an investigation after a Black man was stopped Tuesday by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents while on a run in Boston."
Bena Apreala, 29, told WBUR he was running a few miles from his home when two SUVs with tinted windows approached him. One of the cars blocked the sidewalk in front of him and the other pulled up beside him, Apreala told the station.
“These guys just hopped out in full camouflage uniforms with masks over their face, and stopped me, and told me to immediately identify (myself)," he said. “I was confused as to whether or not they were even legitimate authority.”
At least three men, who Apreala said were white, did not identify themselves as law enforcement, but Apreala noticed an ICE badge, according to WBUR. He told them that he was a U.S. citizen born in Boston and an officer replied that he matched the description of someone they had been investigating.
“They said that immigration isn’t the only thing that they investigate and proceeded to question me,” Apreala told WBUR.
Jogging while Black:Charges dropped against Black jogger mistakenly identified as a suspect in Texas
A spokesperson for the law enforcement agency told USA TODAY Friday that its officers were involved and identified themselves as "police/ICE."
The officers were "looking for a previously deported Haitian national with multiple criminal convictions and pending cocaine and fentanyl trafficking charges that may have been residing in the area,” the spokesperson said.
Apreala didn't have identification with him, but he gave the men his full name and address, WBUR reported. At that point he began recording the interaction taking video that would later be shared on Facebook by his wife.
In the short clip, Apreala confirms with the three men that he was free to go and as he begins to leave one asks to see his arm.
“Do you have any tattoos on your left or right arm? So we can confirm and we’ll be out of here,” the man said.
“Am I free to go?” Apreala responded. “Do I have to show you? If I’m free to go, then I’m not showing you anything. Thank you. Have a great day, guys.”
As he walks away, he appears to tell onlookers "record this just in case."
Boston Mayor Marty Walsh said he spoke to Apreala and thanked him for sharing his experience on Wednesday. He called the video “extremely disturbing to watch."
“It violates someone’s rights just because of the color of their skin and it is unacceptable,” he said on Twitter.
U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley demanded an “immediate investigation” into the incident on Twitter. Pressley, Sens. Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren, and U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch sent a letter to ICE leadership question the legality of ICE’s actions and asking for more information.
The ACLU of Massachusetts is representing Apreala and said it will investigate the incident.
“This incident raises serious constitutional questions and is disturbing on a human level,” Rahsaan Hall, director of the Racial Justice Program at the ACLU of Massachusetts, said in a statement.
The incident is one of several this year deemed "jogging while Black" that have been recorded and shared on social media.
On Feb. 23 Ahmaud Arbery, was chased and killed by three white men as he jogged through a southern Georgia neighborhood. Mathias Ometu was mistakenly identified as a domestic violence suspect and arrested while he was out for a run in San Antonio, Texas, last month. Days later, Joseph Griffin was stopped and handcuffed by police in Deltona, Florida, who said he fit the description of a wanted burglar.
Polling site in Texas. (photo: Gabriel C. Perez/KUT)
Judge Blocks Order Limiting Texas Ballot Drop-Off Locations
Associated Press
Excerpt: "A federal judge in Texas on Friday halted Republican Gov. Greg Abbott's order that shuttered dozens of mail ballot drop-off sites weeks before November's election, authorizing only one for every county no matter the size."
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Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett and Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-ND. (photo: Tom Williams/Getty)
He Sought Asylum After MS-13 Tried to Kill Him. Amy Coney Barrett Sent Him Back Into Danger.
John Washington, The Intercept
Washington writes: "Amy Coney Barrett very well may play a key factor in the hyperpartisan realm of immigration law."
Barrett has a thin record on immigration but could play a key role in this hyperpartisan area of law on the Supreme Court.
n early March 2013, Gerson Alvarenga-Flores was in a taxi with three friends, on his way to a birthday party in a rural town outside of La Unión, El Salvador. Suddenly, two men with rifles appeared in the road ahead and signaled for the taxi to stop. The men were both members of the MS-13 gang. When the passengers refused to exit the taxi, the gang members began shooting.
Three of the passengers were shot: One was grazed by a bullet, another severely wounded — though he would survive — and a third killed on the spot. Alvarenga had remained in the taxi, which had started reversing away during the scramble. He was left without a scratch. He went to the police, who told him that “they couldn’t be responsible for what had happened or for our lives,” according to a transcript of his asylum hearing.
Soon after the attack, Alvarenga started receiving threats: The gang members didn’t want a witness to their murder left alive. On his way to classes at the university where he was studying systems engineering, the same gang members he had encountered stormed onto a bus to confront him, but he was able to jump off and, again, escape.
Alvarenga hid out for a couple of months, but soon realized he had no hope left for a life in El Salvador. He fled to the United States to ask for asylum.
His five-year search for protection would eventually be denied in 2018 by Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, then a judge on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, based on the technicality of minor discrepancies in Alvarenga’s story that a dissenting judge called “trivial.” After her decision was issued, Alvarenga was deported back to El Salvador, just before Christmas in 2018.
Now, Alvarenga hardly leaves his parents’ small property for fear he’ll be spotted and killed. “I can’t go anywhere, not even to the park. I can barely work,” he said. “This isn’t life.”
As the Senate confirmation hearing approaches, Barrett’s judicial record and past statements on hot-button legal issues like abortion and health care are being carefully picked apart, but her immigration record has come under less severe scrutiny. And, while as a 7th Circuit judge — nominated by President Donald Trump and confirmed by the Senate in 2017 — she only issued five immigration-related decisions, she very well may play a key factor in the hyperpartisan realm of immigration law.
Alvarenga’s story speaks not only to how Barrett might rule on such immigration cases, but to the systemic regulatory disaster of the U.S. asylum process itself: how it fails to protect the persecuted.
Whether Trump or Joe Biden wins the presidential election, a raft of immigration-related cases could reach the Supreme Court in the next four years. But four more years of Trump’s harsh policies would likely engender continued — and more consequential — legal challenges. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel at the American Immigration Council, told The Intercept that there are a number of “consequential immigration cases that could come before the Supreme Court,” including cases on the public charge rule — which serves to bar poor people from migrating to the U.S. — further attacks on asylum, and other changes to the regulatory system.
Considering her immigration-related decisions from the 7th Circuit, Michael Kagan, a law professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and author of “The Battle to Stay in America,” told The Intercept that Barrett’s stance was not necessarily anti-immigrant. “Some of her decisions would please the Trump administration and some would please immigration activists,” Kagan said. While Kagan detected “no bias for or against immigrants” — he called her ruling on the Alvarenga case “boilerplate” and “a pretty straightforward decision based on the rules” — the decision itself adhered to a system of laws whose gears are gummed up by more than a century of anti-immigrant vitriol.
(The White House did not respond to a request for comment about the Alvarenga case and Barrett’s immigration record.)
Barrett’s other immigration decisions on the 7th Circuit also point to a tight, textual analysis. She dissented from a ruling in which the majority blocked the Trump administration from wielding a “public charge” rule: the racist, classist, misogynist, centuries-old club the government has long wielded to keep out the immigrants it doesn’t want. Barrett even acknowledged in her dissent that some critics view the public charge rule as “too harsh.” Nonetheless, she would have upheld it.
In another case, however, she ruled against the Trump administration’s attempt to end the use of administrative closure, a tool judges can use to stop deportations in complicated or lengthy proceedings — especially when the immigrant may be eligible to stay legally if given enough time to process an application — and which also allows them to prioritize other cases.
For Alvarenga, that Barrett’s rulings are based strictly on the word of the law are little comfort. Under the law, she could have ruled differently — not only in his case itself, but also in a procedural matter that would have kept him safer upon deportation — but Barrett chose not to use her discretion, failing to take the dangers Alvarenga faced into account in her ruling. In Alvarenga’s eyes, Barrett had the last say in his case and failed to offer him protection. Now, he fears for his life.
“I followed the migration laws,” Alvarenga said. “I respect those laws. But the system, and those who apply the laws, they got it wrong.”
“It hurts to think about it,” Alvarenga said of the attack and ordeal that followed. “From one night to the next morning, my life was ruined.” He never was able to finish his degree. After fleeing, he spent more than two years in what he referred to as prison — a series of immigration detention centers in the United States — while fighting for asylum. His name was smeared in the local press when Salvadoran police, in cahoots with MS-13, issued an arrest warrant for him, triggering an Interpol red alert. His family, too, received death threats. His mother said there were “over two hundred calls” in the weeks following the attack, including demands for thousands of dollars, which they didn’t have.
The reason he ultimately lost his plea to stay in the U.S. goes back to the details of the attacks themselves. There were two minor inconsistencies between a written 2013 declaration about the attacks and Alvarenga’s version of events presented in person before the courts in 2017 — both related to vehicle doors. The first declaration, Alvarenga explained, was made over the phone while he was in immigration detention, where he couldn’t hear his attorney well and the line kept cutting out. Transcripts show that initial immigration judge would not allow him to explain the problems with the declaration in court — something Barrett could have interrogated but didn’t. His story, Alvarenga told me, has always been the same.
In the 2013 declaration, Alvarenga supposedly said that his friend José escaped from the front seat of the taxi and ran away, suffering only a graze wound. In his oral testimony in court, four years later, Alvarenga said that José was seated in the backseat with him and jumped out of the taxi from there. Likewise, the declaration said that, while riding to class, Alvarenga jumped out of the front of the bus to escape his would-be killers. But, in his in-court oral testimony, he said he escaped through the back door of the bus. He told me, again, that he had always maintained he had left out the back. “They got on in front,” he said, exasperated. “So how could I have gotten off in front? I couldn’t go through them.”
Judge Thomas Durkin, in his dissenting opinion to the appeal, saw the inconsistencies that came up in his court appearance as “trivial when considered in relation to Alvarenga’s broader story.” Still, these kinds of immaterial consistencies can be grounds for asylum denial, according to the 2005 REAL ID Act. The law, purportedly meant to deter terrorists from abusing the asylum system, not only required evidence to support claims, but allowed for judges to deny claims based on even minor discrepancies in an applicant’s testimony. Reichlin-Melnick gave the example of an asylum-seeker stating they were beaten “a few times” and then later specifying that they were beaten a dozen times — a difference that could be grounds for denial.
Kagan, the law professor, said Barrett’s rulings were by the book. In the immigration court system, appellate judges defer to immigration judges’ decisions unless the facts “compel” the judge to reverse the decision. “The court of appeals are not supposed to reverse a decision just because they have a hunch that it was a wrong decision,” Kagan said. There are also no explicit requirements to take into account cultural differences or the effects of trauma. “Good judges should take all these things into account,” Reichlin-Melnick said. “But not all judges are good judges.”
Despite the constraints, judges have ample room for discretion, leading, for instance, to Durkin’s dissent in the Alvarenga case. By law, judges should also consider the “totality of the circumstances,” which entail the conditions of confinement, the fallibility of human memory — especially in regard to trauma — and the time between the act and the testimony. “Human beings are not automatons,” Reichlin-Melnick said. “Memory is fallible.”
About his time in detention, Alvarenga said: “It was a totalitarian space. You have to do everything they tell you. For a human being, that’s hard. I couldn’t sleep, I didn’t feel good. Psychologically, it was so hard. You even lose your sense of time.” He went for long periods, he told me, without even seeing the sun.
For advocates, however, adding insult to injury can come from a simple failure to acknowledge the circumstances of a case, even as part of a by-the-book decision against an asylum-seeker. As she ruled against Alvarenga, for instance, Barrett didn’t mention any of the context stacked against people like him: from the trauma of the initial incidents to navigating the labyrinth of immigration court to the cruelties of detention, all done outside of native languages. Barrett offered no comment on how any of that might have resulted in those discrepant details.
Then there was a small piece of her final ruling that Alvarenga saw as disdain for his experience — an unnecessary swipe, apart from the decision to deport him, but casting a pall over that ruling nonetheless.
In Barrett’s decision, there is a footnote on page 2: Alvarenga, still scared for his life, had asked for his name to be redacted in the published record of his case — something the 7th Circuit has granted in similar cases. It would have brought a small measure of insurance; upon deportation, he didn’t want the gangs or the corrupt local police in El Salvador to realize he was being sent back. He didn’t want to be a target again. Barrett refused his request.
The radio host Rush Limbaugh introducing President Trump at a campaign rally in 2018. (photo: Jeff Roberson/AP
Talk Radio Is Turning Millions of Americans Into Conservatives
Paul Matzko, The New York Times
Matzko writes: "At least 15 million Americans every week tune into one of the top 15 talk radio programs. They are not monolithically conservative, but they are overwhelmingly so."
The medium is at the heart of Trumpism.
t least 15 million Americans every week tune into one of the top 15 talk radio programs. They are not monolithically conservative, but they are overwhelmingly so. A dozen of the top 15 shows feature conservative or libertarian hosts — with devoted followings like Rush Limbaugh’s “Dittoheads” or Michael Savage’s “Savage Nation” — and only one leans left.
Talk radio may face an aging audience, a decline in ad revenue and competition from new mass media forms like podcasts, but there are still millions of Americans whose politics are shaped by what they listen to on talk radio all day, every day. Fox News gets more of the attention for shaping conservative opinion and for its influence on the Trump administration, but we shouldn’t overlook the power of conservative talk radio.
The conservatism of talk radio only partly overlaps with institutional conservatism, that of right-wing Washington think tanks, magazines and the Republican Party itself. By the early 2000s, it had embraced a version of conservatism that is less focused on free markets and small government and more focused on ethnonationalism and populism. It is, in short, the core of Trumpism — now and in the future, with or without a President Trump.
Indian Muslims in an argument with a group of Indian policemen after they were removed from a protest site at Shaheen Bagh on March 24, 2020, in Delhi, India. (photo: Yawar Nazir/Getty)
Arundhati Roy | India's Hindu Right Are Willing to Bury Democracy
Arundhati Roy, Jacobin
Roy writes: "In mid-September, reports came in of a nineteen-year-old Dalit girl who was gang-raped, mutilated, and left for dead by dominant-caste men in her village in Hathras, Uttar Pradesh."
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North Atlantic right whale. (photo: NOAA)
Scientists and Conservationists Warn Whales Face 'Real and Imminent' Extinction Risk
Helen Briggs, BBC
Briggs writes: "They say more than half of all species are of conservation concern, with two on the 'knife-edge' of extinction."
Lack of action over polluted and over-exploited seas means that many will be declared extinct within our lifetimes, the letter says.
Even large iconic whales are not safe.
"Let this be a historic moment when realising that whales are in danger sparks a powerful wave of action from everyone: regulators, scientists, politicians and the public to save our oceans," said Mark Simmonds.
The visiting research fellow at the University of Bristol, UK, and senior marine scientist with Humane Society International, has coordinated the letter, which has been signed by experts across the world.
Growing threats
"Save the whales" was a familiar green slogan in the 1970s and 1980s, part of a movement that helped bring an end to commercial whaling.
While stricken populations in most parts of the world have had a chance to recover from organised hunting, they are now facing myriad threats from human actions, including plastic pollution, loss of habitat and prey, climate change and collisions with ships.
By far the biggest threat is becoming accidently captured in fishing equipment and nets, which kills an estimated 300,000 whales, dolphins and porpoises a year.
Hundreds of scientists have expressed the same concern - that we are moving closer to a number of preventable extinctions. And unless we act now, future generations will be denied the chance to experience these intelligent social and inspiring creatures.
They point to the decline of the North Atlantic right whale, of which only a few hundred individuals remain, and the vaquita, a porpoise found in the Gulf of California, which may be down to the last 10 of its kind.
And they say it is almost inevitable that these two species will follow the Chinese river dolphin down the path to extinction. The dolphin, also known as the baiji, was once a common sight in the Yangtze River but is now thought to have died out.
The letter, which has been signed by experts in the UK, US, Mexico, South Africa and Brazil, among others, points out that these "dramatic" declines could have been avoided, but that the political will has been lacking.
Dr Susan Lieberman of the Wildlife Conservation Society said she signed the letter to help scientists raise these issues more widely.
"It is critical that governments develop, fund, and implement additional needed actions to better protect and save these iconic species - so they don't end going the way of the baiji," she told BBC News.
The scientists say that more than half of the 90 living species of whales, dolphins and porpoises, are of conservation concern, and the trend of acting "too little, too late" must end.
They are calling on countries with whales, dolphins and porpoises (cetaceans) in their waters to act to monitor threats and do more to protect them.
Sarah Dolman of Whale and Dolphin Conservation, UK, said accidental capture in fishing gear, known as bycatch, is an issue around UK waters, causing the deaths of thousands of cetaceans and other animals, including seals and birds, a year.
These include harbour porpoises and common dolphins, and increasing numbers of minke and humpback whales off the coast of Scotland.
She said entanglement in fishing nets was a "horrible way to die" with some animals surviving with broken teeth or beaks, or losing their young.
She told BBC News: "We have a long way to go before we can be confident the fish we are eating is not causing bycatch of protected species like whales and dolphins."
The letter is part of a growing movement by scientists and conservationists to raise awareness of the threats faced by whales and their smaller relatives, the dolphins and porpoises.
The matter was discussed in September at a meeting of the scientific conservation committee of the International Whaling Commission, which has a core mission to prevent extinctions.
Members have set up an "extinction initiative" to work out how many extinctions we may be facing and what more we can do to prevent them.
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