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Paul Krugman | Bidencare Would Be a Big Deal
Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Krugman writes: "On Monday morning America's most prominent beneficiary of socialized medicine, in the process of receiving expensive, taxpayer-financed care at a government-run hospital, was tweeting furiously."
One of President Trump’s manic missives particularly caught the eyes of health care experts: his exhortation to “PROTECT PREEXISTING CONDITIONS. VOTE!”
As always, it’s not clear whether Trump is merely being cynical or whether he is also genuinely ignorant.
He’s definitely lying when he claims to have a plan that’s better and cheaper than Obamacare. No such plan exists, and he has to know that.
Press secretary Kayleigh McEnany speaks last weekend at the White House, without a mask. (photo: Saul Loeb/AFP)
ALSO SEE: After Donald Trump's Deranged Balcony Address, We're All Gasping Together
The CDC Calls for Quarantining Even After a Negative Test. The White House Isn't Listening.
German Lopez, Vox
Lopez writes: "President Donald Trump's press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, on Monday revealed she was the latest top official in the White House's Covid-19 cluster to test positive for the coronavirus. She said in a statement that she 'will begin the quarantine process.'"
resident Donald Trump’s press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, on Monday revealed she was the latest top official in the White House’s Covid-19 cluster to test positive for the coronavirus. She said in a statement that she “will begin the quarantine process.”
But if McEnany had been following Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines, she would have quarantined days ago — when she found out she was a close contact for Hope Hicks, an aide to Trump who had already tested positive.
McEnany isn’t the only person in the federal government setting a poor example, with Republican policymakers ranging from Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) to Attorney General Bill Barr to Vice President Mike Pence saying they won’t quarantine despite potential close contact with at least one person who tested positive for the coronavirus. They’ve pointed to their lack of symptoms or negative tests, defying the CDC’s guidelines to quarantine or self-isolate regardless.
Now Pence is out on the campaign trail, with the vice presidential debate still scheduled for Wednesday. McEnany briefed reporters without a mask this weekend, possibly exposing them to the virus, too.
Even Trump, who’s now hospitalized with Covid-19, hasn’t taken the quarantine and isolation recommendations very seriously. On Sunday, he had his motorcade drive him by supporters outside Walter Reed medical center, where he’s staying — likely exposing his staff, including Secret Service agents in the car with Trump, to his own illness.
As Trump, Pence, and McEnany fail to take precautions, they set a poor example for the rest of the country at a time, experts say, the US needs better, steadier leadership on how to overcome the coronavirus.
What the CDC’s testing and quarantining guidelines say
The CDC is very clear about this: If a person comes into close contact with someone known to have a coronavirus infection, defined as being within 6 feet for at least 15 minutes, that person should get a test and quarantine for 14 days. The CDC says the person should self-isolate for the two full weeks even if they test negative and don’t develop symptoms.
The guidelines aren’t just out of an abundance of caution, but an acknowledgment of the reality with Covid-19. People can still spread the coronavirus without symptoms. And even if someone gets tested, tests can have significant rates of false negatives (with false positives possible but rare for some types of tests). So the agency encourages people to quarantine for the virus’s incubation period, regardless of test results or symptoms, to avoid spreading the disease further.
As the CDC cautions, “Because of the potential for asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic transmission, it is important that contacts of individuals with SARS-CoV-2 infection be quickly identified and tested. … A single negative test does not mean you will remain negative at any time point after that test.”
McEnany, apparently, didn’t seem to think she had to quarantine as long as she tested negative for the coronavirus. She said she had tested negative “consistently, including every day since Thursday.” Other officials are making the same mistake.
Biden may not fall under the quarantine guidelines — but he’s still taking a risk
During the 2020 presidential campaign, former Vice President Joe Biden, Trump’s Democratic challenger, has made it a point to draw a contrast with the president and his administration on Covid-19. He’s emphasized the science, calling for Trump to heed the CDC’s recommendations. He’s consistently worn a mask and scaled back campaign events, aiming to set an example on social distancing.
But Biden is now taking a risky approach, too.
The CDC’s quarantine recommendation could be taken to extend to Biden, since he sparred verbally with Trump at an indoor debate for more than 90 minutes on Tuesday, while neither of them wore a mask.
Biden, however, has continued campaigning. His team argued he didn’t come into close contact with Trump because the two men remained more than 6 feet apart.
“Vice President Biden and the president were never within what the CDC considers to be close contact, and we are following CDC guidance. The vice president tested negative twice Friday, our traveling staff tested negative on Friday, the VP tested negative again Sunday, our campaign events are socially distanced and everyone is wearing a mask,” T.J. Ducklo, a Biden campaign spokesperson, said in a statement. “Given all of those factors, we are comfortable that the vice president can continue to campaign safely.”
Still, this might be risky. The research on the coronavirus increasingly shows that 6 feet, while at least somewhat helpful and protective, isn’t a magical threshold, with airborne particles very likely able to carry the coronavirus even further. (The CDC on Monday acknowledged the possibility of longer-distance airborne transmission with an update to its “How COVID-19 Spreads” website.)
It’s this kind of uncertainty about the coronavirus that’s led some experts to call for even greater caution than the CDC’s guidelines recommend.
Biden is sticking to the specifics of the CDC’s recommendations. At the very least, that’s better than some officials in the Trump administration are now doing. But it’s not the best example that the former vice president could set.
People in need of food wait in line at the Salvation Army in Chelsea, Massachusetts. (photo: David L. Ryan/Boston Globe)
Frida Berrigan | The Long Haul: Or Living Through Pandemic-Plus
Frida Berrigan, TomDispatch
Berrigan writes: "After all these months and 210,000 deaths, you'd think I'd be used to it all, but I'm not. It doesn't seem even a little normal yet. I'm still full of absences, missing so much I used to take for granted: hugs and handshakes, rooms crowded for funerals and weddings, potluck dinners and house parties."
After six months away with my children and grandchildren, I’m soon heading back to one of the safer places in pandemic America. I know this will sound strange, given that it once was a hub of death, but I’m talking about my hometown of New York City. What’s sad, however, is that, while I’ll be back in my apartment of 40 years, I already know that I won’t be back in my life of 40 years. How could I be? We’re now in another world in every imaginable sense and our former lives are undoubtedly unrecoverable.
At whatever age you may be -- I’m 76 -- and wherever you are, none of us can simply return to those previous existences (even if we never left them in the first place). We’re all having to learn how to live life as if from scratch. We’re in a pandemic world, with Covid-19 cases again rising in many states (as well as New York City) and an expected fall spike in the disease in a divided and over-armed America. We’re talking about the country in which, in an act that seems both unimaginably un-American and -- these days -- all-too-American, the mother of Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager who killed two Black Lives Matter protesters and wounded a third in Kenosha, Wisconsin, received a standing ovation from a Republican women’s meeting in that very state. Oh, yes, and the person who invited her to attend that event has been described as “associated with a variety of white supremacist figures and ideas, according to the Anti-Defamation League. She has defended Japanese internment and post-9/11 racial profiling of Muslims, the ADL says, and has called Black Lives Matter a terrorist organization and mocked [it] when its supporters got hit by cars.”
I may be old, but I know that in the America of Donald Trump, Amy Barrett, the Proud Boys, and Covid-19, my previous life has been hijacked and, even in New York City, I face a new and increasingly perilous land, one that regularly takes my breath away. As you’ll note today, it’s done the same to TomDispatch regular Frida Berrigan who unmasks a small corner of an unnerving new world in which each of us has to figure out how to survive, for better or worse, richer or poorer, in sickness and... well, what passes for health in a distinctly diseased democracy.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
fter all these months and 210,000 deaths, you’d think I’d be used to it all, but I’m not. It doesn’t seem even a little normal yet. I’m still full of absences, missing so much I used to take for granted: hugs and handshakes, rooms crowded for funerals and weddings, potluck dinners and house parties. I miss browsing the stacks at the library and the racks at the thrift shop. I miss going to our Unitarian Universalist congregation and the robust community connection we enjoyed every Sunday.
I should count myself lucky, of course, that such human encounters and quotidian pleasures are all that I miss. I have yet to lose friends or family to Covid-19, I haven’t lost my job, and our home is not in danger of foreclosure. Still, I’m at a loss to figure out how to go on.
But that’s the work, isn’t it? Going on somehow because, if the experts are on target -- and they’re hard to hear above the din of the bombast and threats of carnage coming out of Washington -- they say that things won’t get back to normal for a year or longer. They say this is the new normal: masks, distance, existential dread over every sore throat.
Another year... at least. How do I pace myself and my family for the long haul of the pandemic? How do we figure out how to mitigate our risks and still live lives of some sort? Who do we trust? Who do we listen to? And who do we call if a spiking fall or winter pandemic hits us directly?
I’m full of missing and longing, but the thing I miss most poignantly and sharply isn’t something (or someone) you could see or touch. What I miss is the privileged (and ultimately false) notion, almost an article of faith for white, middle-class people like me, that the future is predictable, that there is a “normal.” I miss good old-fashioned American optimism, that “aw shucks” sentiment that absolves and salves and says with a twang or lilt: It’ll be okay. They’ll figure it out. Things will get back to normal. This is only temporary.
Pandemic Plus
While most of the developed world has been dealing with the impact of the pandemic in a reasonable fashion -- caring for the sick, burying the dead, enforcing lockdowns and the sort of distancing and masking that seems so necessary -- it’s played out differently here in the good old U.S. of A. Here, we have a pandemic-plus -- plus a broken social safety net, a for-profit healthcare system, a war of disinformation, and that’s just to start down a list of add-on disasters.
In addition, parts of the United States have been beset by record wildfires, hurricanes, and deadly storms. So add on the impact of catastrophic climate change.
Here in the land of the fearful and the home of the riven, it’s been a pandemic plus poverty, plus staggering economic inequality, plus police violence, plus protest, plus white supremacy. It’s a nightmare, in other words and, despite those more than 210,000 dead Americans, it’s not slowing down. And no matter the facts on the ground, and the bodies below the ground, the president’s supporters regularly deny there’s the slightest need for masks, social distancing, shutdowns, or much of anything else. So, it’s a pandemic plus lunacy, too -- a politically manipulated lunacy spiced with violence and the threat of violence heading into an increasingly fraught election, which could even mean a pandemic plus autocracy or a chaotic American version of fascism. In other words, it’s a lot.
Still, it’s also the fall and, after this endless summer, my three kids have started school again -- sort of. They are in first, third, and eighth grade. Right now, there’s more coaching around masks and distancing than instruction in math and the ABCs. Still, the teachers are working hard to make this happen and my kids are so happy to be away from us that they don’t even seem to mind those masks, or the shields around their desks, or the regimented way lunch and recess have to happen. Over the whole experiment, of course, hangs an unnerving reality (or do I mean unreality?): that in-person schooling could dissolve in an errant cough, a spiking fever, and a few microscopic germs catapulting through the air. In fact, that’s already been happening in other areas of Connecticut where I live.
After all these months of lockdown, my husband and I automatically wear masks everywhere, arranging the odd outdoor gathering of a handful of friends and trying to imagine how any of this will work in winter, no less long term. Still, bit by bit, we’re doing our best to quilt together an understanding of how to live in the midst of such a pandemic -- and that’s important because it’s so obvious that there’s going to be no quick fix in the chaotic new world we’ve been plunged into.
Seven months in, I’m finally realizing what so many marginalized people have always known: we’re on our own. It came to me like a klaxon call, a scream from the depths of my own body, all at once. I still whisper it, with sorrow and wonder: we are on our own.
It’s as if our small city of New London and the state of Connecticut had been untethered from the federal government and, despite the crazy game of telephone that passes for federal public-healthcare policy, are faring better than most due to a mixture of our state’s reputation as the “Land of Steady Habits,” our small-city web of mutual aid, and our own family’s blend of abundance and austerity. Still, the fact that, relatively speaking, we’re doing okay doesn’t make the realization that we’re on our own any less stark or troubling.
It’s not complicated, really. You can’t beat a pandemic with a mixture of personal responsibility and family creativity. Science, policy, and a national plan are what’s needed. My own vision for such a plan in response to Covid-19 would be the passage of a universal basic income, robust worker protections, and Medicare for all. But that's just me... well, actually, it's probably the secret dream of the majority of Americans and it’s certainly the opposite of the position of Trump and his ilk. It says that we really all are in this together and we better start acting like it. We need to take care of one another to survive.
In spite of it all, I’m doing my best to manage this new normal by focusing on what I actually can do. At least I can feed people.
Our city was poor even before the state ordered a lockdown in mid-March and few had the extra money to panic-buy. So the food justice organization I work for started planting extra carrots, peas, and collards back in March. We built public garden boxes and painted signs telling people to harvest for free. We distributed soil and seeds to people all over the city and gave them some gardening 101 guidance.
And now, as October begins, we’re still finishing harvesting all that food and distributing it every week. On Fridays, I also help pack boxes of milk and eggs, meat and vegetables, which we then deliver to more than 100 families. The rhythm involved in harvesting the produce and packing the boxes, each an immersive physical task, helps banish my darker thoughts, at least for a while.
“We Are Going to Be in Very Good Shape”
The president held a news conference on March 30th. Of course, that’s ancient history now, separated as it is from the present by long months of deaths and hospitalizations, layoffs and political in-fighting. The CEOs of Honeywell, Jockey, MyPillow, United Technologies, and other companies were gathered alongside administration officials that day. It should have been a briefing on where we Americans were a month into what was clearly going to be a long slog. Above all, it should have honored those who had already died. Instead -- no surprise looking back from our present nightmarish vantage point -- it proved to be an extended advertisement for those companies and a chance for their CEOs to spout patriotic pablum and trade compliments with the commander-in-chief.
I was crying a lot then. When the president said, “We have to get our country back to where it was and maybe beyond,” I began to sob and dry heave. After I finally wiped away the tears and blew my nose, I checked out the website of a company that makes homeopathic remedies. A friend had sent me a list of ones doctors were supposedly using to treat coronavirus symptoms in Germany, Italy, and China.
“Get these if you can,” she texted. It wasn’t science. I admit it. It was desperation. As one of millions of Americans on state insurance with no primary-care doctor or bespoke concierge service, I feared the worst.
As the CEO from MyPillow was telling the American people to use the time of the shutdown to “get back in the Word, read our Bibles,” I made my own faith gesture and pressed the buy button. When the order arrived, it was full of tiny, archaic vials labelled with names like Belladonna and Drosera. Even now, when I feel anxious and cloudy, I rummage through that box of vials and read the names like incantations. Better that than heeding the president’s assertion on that long-gone day that “we are going to be in very good shape.”
A Handful of Chickens
We are not in very good shape and it’s getting worse every day. As the November election looms and Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death (as well as the grim Republican response to it) casts an ever more massive shadow over the country, the subtext of the administration’s message -- however convoluted its delivery -- is simple enough: you’re on your own. Over the last half-year, whether discussing the pandemic or the vote to come, Donald Trump has made one bizarre, bombastic, patently untrue assertion after another. In the process, he’s vacillated between a caricature of a dictator from some long-lost Isabel Allende novel and of an insecure middle manager (The Office’s Michael Scott on steroids).
Critical medical information, public health guidelines, and the disbursement of necessary protective equipment have all been thoroughly messed up and politicized in ways that are harmful today and could be devastating for years to come. As Peter Baker of the New York Times reported in September, so many of us are indeed confused:
“With Mr. Trump saying one thing and his health advisors saying another, many Americans have been left to figure out on their own whom to believe, with past polls sharing that they have more faith in the experts than their president.”
That’s me! I do have faith in the experts. I’m wearing a mask and digging into the idea that mask wearing is going to be a part of our lives for at least the next year or so. In other words, the new normal will be ever more of the same, which means careful, awkward, tentative engagement with a wildly unpredictable world full of pathogens and unmasked “patriots.” The new normal will mean trading in the old sock masks my mother-in-law fashioned for us and investing in more high tech and effective masks. Beyond that, my answer to all this couldn’t be more feeble. It’s taking care of my backyard chickens and my front-yard garden and adding strands to our small web of mutual aid.
This spring and summer, I dug up more of my lawn to plant carrots, sweet potatoes, and squash in an ever larger garden, while learning how to store rainwater from the gutters of our roof in big barrels. I joked with my friends about growing rice -- and might even try it next year. I acquired a chicken coop, built a rudimentary run, and ordered six beautiful chickens from a farm in a quiet corner of Connecticut: two Golden Copper Marans, two Black Marans, and two Easter Eggers. The kids named them after characters in the Harry Potter series, which they’ve all but memorized during the shutdown. One chicken ran away and one died, but I love everything about taking care of them and harvesting the perfect magical protein orbs they produce with religious regularity.
These things bring me pleasure and a feeling of accomplishment, while leaving me with a set of tasks that I have to complete even when I feel despondent and overwhelmed. That’s all to the good, but a handful of chickens and a few collard plants don’t add up to self-sufficiency. They are not a bulwark against national insanity and ineptitude. They will not solve the problem of Donald Trump and Company.
Still, in bad, bad times, at least they keep me going and let’s face it, all of us -- at least those of us who survive Covid-19 -- are in it for the long haul.
Frida Berrigan is the author of It Runs In The Family: On Being Raised by Radicals and Growing into Rebellious Motherhood. She is a TomDispatch regular and writes the Little Insurrections column for WagingNonviolence.Org. She has three children and lives in New London, Connecticut, where she is a gardener and community organizer.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Amy Coney Barrett in the Rose Garden at the White House on 26 September. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty)
Leader of 'Hate Group' Attended White House Amy Coney Barrett Event
Emily Holden, Guardian UK
Holden writes: "The head of a conservative Christian non-profit organization that has been designated an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) attended the White House event announcing Donald Trump's nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett for the supreme court."
The exclusive Rose Garden gathering on 26 September is under scrutiny as multiple people who were there, including the president, have contracted Covid-19.
Michael Farris, who is CEO and general counsel for the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), is seen in videos speaking closely with the Republican senator Mike Lee, who has since tested positive for the coronavirus along with a number of other attendees. Farris also spoke with the Louisiana Republican congressman Mike Johnson, the head of the conservative Republican study committee who, before his election to Congress, was senior attorney and spokesman for ADF.
ADF said that despite Farris’s attendance, he “has never met Amy Coney Barrett in any capacity”.
Barrett’s historical ties to the group were already known. In 2017, during a confirmation hearing for her federal court position, senators questioned Barrett about her paid position as a speaker at a training program for Christian law school students, called the Blackstone Legal Fellowship, which is run by ADF. She was paid five times by the group, starting in 2011.
Barrett said in that hearing that she knew of the program through colleagues who taught for it and students who participated, and she did not initially know it was run by ADF.
“I’m invited to give a lot of talks as a law professor. I don’t know what all of ADF’s policy positions are, and it has not been my practice to investigate all of the policy positions of a group that invites me to speak,” Barrett told the then Democratic senator Al Franken.
At the time, ADF was co-counsel on a supreme court lawsuit alongside WilmerHale, a respected law firm.
“They wouldn’t be co-counsel with ADF if it were a hate group. I assure you they wouldn’t be co-counsel with the KKK,” Barrett said.
Farris posted pictures of himself at the event to Facebook and later linked to a C-Span video showing him speaking with Lee while neither wore a mask.
“In the Rose Garden for the official announcement of the Supreme Court nomination,” he wrote. “Please pray for rapid confirmation and a career marked with courage.” He has since said he is quarantining because of the news that Lee was diagnosed with Covid-19.
Also at the White House event was the Republican senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who in 2013 taught for the Blackstone Legal Fellowship.
Farris’s appearance at the high-profile event follows the news that Barrett signed off on an advertisement in 2006 that called for the overturning of Roe v Wade, and called the landmark abortion rights decision “barbaric” and a “raw exercise of judicial power”.
The SPLC says ADF was “founded by some 30 leaders of the Christian right” and is a “legal advocacy and training group that has supported the recriminalization of sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ adults in the US and criminalization abroad; has defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people abroad; and claims that a ‘homosexual agenda’ will destroy Christianity and society”.
ADF disputes those charges on its website, saying: “Neither ADF nor ADF International are litigating any cases or pursuing any legislation that supports the criminalization of homosexuality. SPLC’s mischaracterizations center on three past matters. Our limited engagement in these matters was based on our belief that marriage between one man and one woman is the best institution for human flourishing.”
Jeremy Tedesco, senior vice-president of communications at ADF, said: “Once a respected civil rights organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center has destroyed its own credibility because of its blatant partisan agenda and discredited fundraising scheme.”
He called ADF “among the largest and most effective legal advocacy organizations dedicated to protecting the religious freedom and free speech rights of all Americans” and said it had had 11 supreme court victories since 2011.
ADF reportedly received more than $55m in contributions in 2018 and claims to have more than 3,400 affiliated attorneys and judges worldwide, the Guardian has previously reported. It has brought some of the most consequential cases of the last decade on contraceptive and gay rights before the supreme court, including the case of a baker in Colorado who refused to make a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.
When Barrett was confirmed to the seventh circuit appeals court in 2017, 27 LGBTQ+ groups opposed her based on past comments and her affiliation with ADF, which they called “arguably the most extreme anti-LGBT legal organization in the United States”.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick of Texas, left, Gov. Greg Abbott, and House Speaker Dennis Bonnen, right, attend a news conference where they provided an update to Texas's response to Covid-19 in Austin on Sept. 17, 2020. (photo: Eric Gay/AP)
Texas Voter Suppression Tactics Recall the Jim Crow Era
Sharon Lerner, The Intercept
Lerner writes: "Pam Johnson Gaskin learned early last week that the election administrator in Fort Bend County, Texas, had decided to add four locations where voters can hand-deliver their absentee ballots, several of which were going to be outside to minimize voters' chances of being exposed to the coronavirus."
“I was like, Oh thank you, Jesus. Protesting does work!” said Gaskin, who lives in the eastern part of the county and had spent the previous several days advocating for the additional drop-off sites.
But by Thursday afternoon, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott had invalidated the county’s decision, issuing a statewide proclamation that limits all 254 counties in the state to only a single site where absentee ballots could be dropped off. By the end of the day, the League of Women Voters of Texas, the National League of United Latin American Citizens, and the League of United Latin American Citizens, had sued the governor over the change, charging that it puts an unreasonable burden on voters during the pandemic. “They will have to travel further distances, face longer waits, and risk exposure to COVID-19, in order to use the single ballot return location in their county,” according to the suit.
Gaskin agrees, and she worries about the elderly and people with disabilities who will be dropping off the ballots. With confidence in the U.S. Postal Service undermined by the Trump administration, many Texas residents fear mailing their ballots. But because some counties measure more than 6,000 square miles, a single delivery location would leave some voters having to drive well more than an hour to deliver them.
In Gaskin’s county, which is 855 square miles and has more than 811,000 residents, the only drop-off site is an old Walmart building that has been converted into offices. Rather than having several outdoor drop-off locations allowing voters maximal social distancing and minimal driving, people trying to deliver their ballots in this one location must drive there, show a photo ID, have their temperature checked, and go inside the building.
“This is also where people come in to go to the health department and — who knows? — some of them may be sick,” said Gaskin. “You’re putting an unfair burden on the disabled and the elderly.”
Abbott’s proclamation about the ballot drop-off locations is widely seen as voter suppression — “yet another thinly disguised attempt to stymie the vote,” as the state chapter of the ACLU put it. It’s clear that the most populous counties, which tend to vote Democratic, will be hardest hit. Travis County, where Hillary Clinton received 66 percent of the vote in 2016, had just opened four drive-thru locations where voters could hand-deliver their ballots when Abbott announced his order. Now those sites, which were designed to minimize voters’ health risks, won’t be able to open. And Harris County, which contains Houston and is the most populous in the state, has to reverse its plan to let voters return their ballots at 11 locations.
“There’s no legitimate reason to close satellite drop-off locations,” Wesley Story, communications associate at Progress Texas, said of the governor’s decision. “This is a blatant attempt by Gov. Abbott to suppress voters because the Texas GOP is afraid of the ballot box.”
The change in handling absentee ballots during the pandemic is one of a string of recent decisions that has left some Texans feeling both physically threatened and concerned that their votes will not be counted. Biden has a shot at winning this traditionally red state, but the outcome of the presidential race clearly hinges on turnout.
Over the past several months, as Covid-19 rates have soared throughout Texas, Abbott and the state’s Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, have fought against efforts to expand mail-in voting during the pandemic. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Texas Democrats’ argument that people concerned about contracting the coronavirus at polling places should be allowed to vote by mail. Texas is one of five states where voters concerned about coronavirus exposure will not be allowed to vote by mail.
At the same time, Texas has been engaged in a legal fight over “straight-ticket voting,” a practice that Paxton opposes and many Democrats in the state support. In 2019, the state also banned temporary and mobile voting sites, a change cheered by Republican lawmakers and expected to depress turnout near college campuses and residents of senior centers.
Mask-Free Voting
In a state where more than 788,000 people have already tested positive for the coronavirus and 16,000 have died of Covid-19, the pandemic has immeasurably raised the stakes of the fight over voter access. Although Abbott issued a state-wide mask mandate in July, his order specifically exempted polling places. During the primary held later that month, some poll workers left their polling site in Collin County after Republican workers refused to wear masks.
Voting rights advocates fear the phenomenon will be repeated in November, when the state and country may be experiencing a second wave of coronavirus infections. Trump, whose July 29 rally at an oil rig in Midland, Texas, was attended by many maskless supporters, has widely mocked the use of face coverings and social distancing to stop the spread of the virus. He did not wear a mask publicly on his last visit to the state. And it’s unclear whether the fact that Trump has contracted the coronavirus will diminish the disdain his supporters in Texas feel for wearing masks.
In the southernmost points of Texas where Danny Diaz works, people viscerally understand the life-and-death consequences of the changes to the rules around voting. Diaz, an organizer with LUPE, lives in Hidalgo County, where the death rate from Covid-19 is more than 10 times the national average. In nearby Starr County, where more than 99 percent of residents are Latino and 65 percent live in poverty, one in 17 people have already contracted the virus.
“Everyone has been affected here,” said Diaz, who was sick with Covid-19 for a month this summer and has had several people close to him die of the disease, including his uncle and the father of a close friend.
“A lot of people are concerned about voting in these locations, Diaz said of the four counties where he works: Starr, Willacy, Hidalgo, and Cameron. “People don’t want to go out. We know it’s so easy to contract the virus.”
Well-grounded fears about contagion have also led to a shortage of poll workers, Diaz said, since many of the people who usually do the job are elderly. He and his colleagues are now in the process of trying to recruit young people, who may be less concerned about contracting the virus, to replace them.
Locals are also worried about another provision of the proclamation Abbott issued last week, which allows poll watchers “to observe any activity conducted at the early voting clerk’s office location related to the in-person delivery of a marked mail ballot.” The provision seems to be a direct response to a comment Trump made during his debate with Joe Biden last week urging his supporters “to go into the polls and watch very carefully.” One Republican state senator has already made it clear he thinks the restriction on the number of ballot drop-off locations will make it easier for poll watchers to “observe” the voting process.
Diaz fears that, emboldened by both Trump and Abbot, the poll watchers who respond to the recent call will increase the bullying of Biden supporters that he’s witnessed at “Trump train rallies” over the past several weeks. “We don’t have a heavy Republican presence living here. These are people from different parts of the state who come to McAllen and other places with vehicles, honking their horns,” he said. “And if you have a Biden sticker, they’re bullying you. I’m afraid that attitude, the way they behave, their rudeness — all that energy is going to go into this poll watching.”
The fears and uncertainty have inspired Diaz and other voting rights advocates to throw themselves into ensuring that votes are cast and counted throughout Texas, where early voting begins on October 13. In Waco, Linda Jann Lewis, a former county elections administrator who now works with the NAACP, sent a letter with important voting information to residents of several primarily Black precincts in McLennan County, where she lives.
Even before the pandemic, McLennan was facing voter access challenges. The district saw its polling places reduced by 51 percent between 2012 and 2018, according to a report of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. Statewide, Texas saw 750 polling places close during this period, a change that disproportionately affected communities of color, according to the report.
Since then, McLennan has grown further — and lost more polling places. “Now we have just 32 for a registered voter population of 143,000,” said Lewis, who fears the turnout on Election Day may lead to long lines. Others in her district seem to share her concern. Lewis has gotten a flurry of calls in response to her mailing.
“The first I got was from a Black man who said, ‘I’m 69 years old. And I can vote by mail, but I don’t trust these SOBs, and I’m going to vote early in person if I have to crawl in there,’” she said.
Lewis had to explain that there was only one location in McLennan County where he could drop off his ballot in person. “It’s in the basement of a building with a horribly constructed handicap access,” she said. “It’s perilous. But that’s where you should go.”
Even successful delivery of a ballot won’t ensure that his vote will be counted. Each absentee ballot can be challenged on several grounds, including if the signature on it doesn’t perfectly match the signature on the application for the ballot. Research shows that white people are much more likely to have their absentee ballots counted, with Black voters accounting for only 10 percent of absentee ballots, but 18 percent of rejected ones, and Hispanic voters accounting for 12 percent of absentee votes and 36 percent of rejections.
The uphill battle to secure the fundamental democratic right to vote in Texas reminds Gaskin, in Fort Bend, of another era. “We are going back to the days when I went to a segregated high school and had 15 pages missing from my geometry book because they didn’t buy new books for the colored school,” said Gaskin, who is 73.
To Gaskin, who was 9 years old when her parents deemed her old enough to leaflet on her own and in college when the Voting Rights Act passed, the current obstacles to voting in Texas are just another bump in this long road. “All it is is a return to trying to make things so difficult that you just throw your hands up and say, ‘I give. I’m not going to do this. OK, Mr. White Man. Have it your way,’” she said.
But Gaskin is not prepared to concede. Instead, she has joined a group that will be distributing water, rain ponchos, portable chairs, sandwiches, and snacks to voters throughout Texas on Election Day. “If you have to get off the line to go to the bathroom, we’re going to stand in your place,” said Gaskin, who is prepared to work as long and hard as necessary to make sure that everyone gets to vote. “We’ll stand in line till we drop dead.”
Police officers detain a person as Israelis protest against legislation banning them from holding demonstrations more than 1 km from their homes. (photo: Reuters)
Netanyahu Is Turning the Security Forces Used on Palestinians Against Israelis
Lily Galili, Middle East Eye
Galili writes: "Israelis who follow the routine life of Palestinians under occupation are familiar with the long list of Israeli lawyers available for legal emergencies. Several human rights associations have gained decades of expertise in dealing with military courts and other organs of occupation."
Failing to quash protests through lockdown restrictions, the prime minister has encouraged security forces to look to Palestine for inspiration
The difference now is that a similar list is provided to Israeli protesters, victims of unprecedented police brutality on the Israeli side of the Green Line that divides it with the West Bank.
There is certainly no comparison between life under 50 years of occupation and in the so-called “only democracy in the Middle East”. Not even the excessive force used against the mass anti-government demonstrations sweeping across Israel. The only analogy are the mechanisms of rule acquired over decades of occupation that Israel’s rulers are now beginning to apply on citizens who defy them.
Certain elements of similarity cannot go unnoticed. On the ground, this brutal use of force seems mostly arbitrary - the security forces’ response to the overt will of the politicians who want the protests stifled.
Public Security Minister Amir Ohana, a close Netanyahu ally known as “Bibi’s bulldog”, is on a mission to please his boss, and in turn high-ranking police officers seek to please their minister, waiting for the coveted promotion to police commissioner, a position vacant for over two years.
Meanwhile, policemen sent out to the streets implement what they rightfully perceive as the prevailing sentiment of the organisation they serve.
They have a metaphoric “license to kill”. In other words, the voices of their masters are translated into action. That is what bleeding and perplexed victims of this policy feel, and what former state prosecutor Eran Shendar said on Channel 12 TV a day after he attended a demonstration that turned into a confrontation with the police.
This is also the personal experience of Gaby Lasky, a prominent human rights lawyer known for her work with Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line.
“I have been dealing with protest-related detentions and arrests for many years now, and it has never been as bad as now, obviously navigated by higher echelons,” she tells Middle East Eye.
“For the first time, people get restriction orders just for attending a demonstration or sent to home arrest. I just represented a woman severely attacked in a Tel Aviv demonstration. She was summoned to testify and instead found herself interrogated as a ‘material witness’ under suspicion. These are certainly new phenomena, all about intimidation and deterrence.”
Big mistake
A funny thing happened to Netanyahu on his way to kill the protest that has for weeks raged outside his Jerusalem residence.
In a cynical legal act, supported by his Blue and White coalition partners, he managed to restrict people from protesting more than 1km from their homes, citing coronavirus.
Big mistake. Instead of 15,000 protestors on his doorstep once a week, he now gets over 100,000 in dozens of demonstrations scattered all over the country - a show of dissent way more impressive and harder to handle.
And the public perception has been dreadful. Now, millions of angry Israelis, having been kept in controversial lockdown, see this latest pandemic restriction as a purely political and selfish move.
There is another twist in the story. Along with the traditional “Bibi go home” signs and slogans against corruption, a new intriguing poster was waved for the first time. It simply said: “You are messing with the wrong generation.” “You” meaning Netanyahu; “the wrong generation” meaning millennials.
This is the generation traditionally missing from old school political protest. Occupation, Palestinians and even corruption were not enough to take them to the streets. Then came coronavirus, the scandalous way it has been handled by the Israeli government and the lockdown imposed on them so Netanyahu can flatten the curve of the protests.
That was one step too far for a generation often labelled as indifferent and self-centred. The government has a new opponent fuelled by rage and despair, a new component in the intricate game between the citizens and the ruling establishment.
The civil ground is shaking while cracks in the fragile political structure of the worst Israeli government ever turn into deep holes.
Asaf Zamir, the tourism minister belonging to the Blue and White party, resigned. Rumours in political corridors says others might follow. The blame game over who is responsible for the dismantlement of the government is in full motion, even before it actually happens.
November is around the corner, marking the opening of Netanyahu’s trial. The prime minister, indicted on charges of bribery and breach of trust, faces two options: preserve his malfunctioning coalition or risk another round of elections.
Election concerns
At this point, Netanyahu seems to be preparing for both options by targeting two main fronts: Yisrael Beiteinu, the party led by Avigdor Lieberman popular among Israelis originating from the former Soviet Union; and Yamina, the ultra-nationalist party led by Naftali Bennett. Both men were once Netnayhau’s defence minister, and are now in opposition.
The prime minister is posting an avalanche of self-serving messages to Facebook, appealing to Lieberman’s Russian-speaking community, even at the risk of offending the ultra-Orthodox Israelis on whom Netanyahu relies and who are traditionally opposed to the Russians.
For the moment though, Bennett presents a much bigger menace.
He is gaining popularity by demonstrating commitment to the fight against Covid-19 only, forsaking all other divisive issues. In a Channel 13 public opinion poll published on 7 September, he reached the dramatic peak of 21 Knesset seats, compared to the six he holds in parliament now.
Last week, the first small anti-Netanyahu demonstrations popped up in illegal settlements in the West Bank, places full of right-wing voters historically supportive of the premier.
Protesters there demanded a “leader with a different set of values”. They mean Bennett.
“I don’t think Netanyahu is aiming at early elections I strongly oppose in the midst of biological warfare,” Uzi Dayan, an MP from Netanyahu’s Likud party, tells MEE.
“Unfortunately, I cannot say we won’t get there. You do not threaten Likud with elections in Israel. The political right bloc is just getting stronger in the polls, though not thanks to Likud but rather thanks to the growth of Yamina.”
Strangely enough, over a short period Bennett has become double jeopardy, for both the right and those to the left. Likud is deeply concerned by his growing popularity and Netanyahu factors it in, weighing the pros and cons of early elections.
Bennett’s dilemma is even more acute to the left. The “Just not Bibi” camp mainly aims at getting rid of Netanyahu, regardless of who replaces him.
The other anti-Netanyahu camp has a more ambivalent approach. What if we get rid of Netanyahu and get in return the far-right Bennett?
For the time being, that prospect remains an unresolved issue among citizens who have been turned into subjects as part of a dysfunctional system former prime minister Ehud Barak nicknamed “democraship” - a strange hybridisation of flawed democracy and dictatorship.
A firefighter works against the Lake Hughes fire in Angeles National Forest on Wednesday, Aug. 12, 2020, north of Santa Clarita, California. (photo: Ringo H. W. Chiu/AP)
Scientists Didn't Expect Wildfires This Terrible for Another 30 Years
Kate Yoder, Grist
Yoder writes: "This year has been hell on earth, in more ways than one. Catastrophic blazes have spanned the planet from Australia to the Arctic, and wildfires have torched large swaths of the western United States, all fulfilling forecasts much faster than scientists had predicted. It's as if the wildfires of 2050 are already here."
his year has been hell on earth, in more ways than one. Catastrophic blazes have spanned the planet from Australia to the Arctic, and wildfires have torched large swaths of the western United States, all fulfilling forecasts much faster than scientists had predicted. It’s as if the wildfires of 2050 are already here.California’s wildfire season is far from over, and it has already scorched 4 million acres of land, more than twice the previous record. A spokesperson for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection called the milestone “unfathomable.” It echoes the disaster in Australia earlier this year, which researchers called “a fiery wake-up call for climate science.”
People are breaking out new terminology to describe the disaster. On Monday, the August Complex fires — a collection in northern California that recently merged — scorched 1 million acres, becoming the state’s first gigafire in modern history. And you thought megafires (which burn more than 100,000 acres) were bad.
Scientists didn’t predict fires of this scale until between 2040 and 2060, said Matthew Hurteau, an associate professor at the University of New Mexico who studies fire in the Sierra Nevada mountain range.
Climate scientists’ predictions tend to be pretty conservative, so the record-breaking fire season could force a reckoning. After all, if this is what fires look like now — thanks to the future showing up 30 years early — it’s time to rethink forecasts. The blazes are already changing some projections for California, Hurteau said.
So why were the estimates so far off? One explanation is that scientists work with data that already exists, and the evidence simply didn’t support the prospect of such gigafires, until now. That’s not to say that scientists thought it was out of the question.
“What comes out of the peer review process is reined in from what some of us think is going to happen,” Hurteau said. “Everybody I know who works on climate-related stuff has had conversations about how we think it’s worse than our research shows.”
Contrary to claims that they are “alarmist,” scientists actually tend to underestimate the effects of the climate crisis. A 2012 paper, for instance, found that scientists’ projections downplayed the risks of the potential disintegration of the West Antarctic ice sheet. The authors suggested that this tendency to underestimate future changes comes out of pressure to appear balanced and objective.
Wildfires are hard to predict, from the conditions that fan their flames to how and where they’ll ignite. Peering into the crystal ball is already hard enough without having to account for complicated factors like rainfall, wind speed, land cover, and local topography.
Hurteau thinks there’s “a clear climate signal” in the destructive fires we’ve seen across the globe in recent years. When the atmosphere warms, he explained, it sucks moisture out of the land, drying out trees and shrubs and making them more flammable. Of course, forest management is also a factor. Before settlers took over the Western U.S. and started suppressing fires, indigenous peoples used small burns to prevent runaway fires.
“When you take that buildup of fuel and then you make it more available to burn by turning up the thermostat and drying it out more, that’s the recipe for big fires,” Hurteau said.
What’s different, and what he finds especially worrying, is that some fires in California are burning through areas that just burned a couple of years ago, such as the LNU Lightning Complex, a series of fires that scorched much of Wine Country in northern California this fall. “Basically, fire having just occurred within the recent past may not be as much of an impediment to subsequent fires occurring as we thought it might,” Hurteau said.
To make fires less destructive, Hurteau suggests that local governments need to change codes to make buildings less like fuel for flames. Mandating that roofs are made with flame-resistant materials can prevent homes from combusting when embers land on them. And especially in drought-ridden places like California, Hurteau said, “we’ve got to get managed fire back into these ecosystems.”
Then, of course, there’s the matter of global greenhouse gas emissions. “I hope that people are starting to wake up to the fact that we’ve got a period of time when we need to act pretty quickly,” he said.
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