Sunday, November 01, 2020

Coronavirus News (307)

Biden’s space policy: One giant leap for climate change Biden’s pledge to rededicate the U.S. to combating climate change would mean a greater role for NASA’s Earth science research. ..........  the “sheer amount of experience, background, and temperament that Joe Biden possesses in dealing with international coalition and partnership arrangements.”  

Biden makes late push to flip the Senate The Democratic nominee is hitting Georgia and Iowa this week, while Jill Biden campaigned with the Democratic Senate candidate in Maine. ......... “If we win both of these Senate seats in Georgia, it's almost mathematically impossible for Mitch McConnell to remain majority leader.”  


Poll: Donald Trump set to win US presidency by electoral college landslide DONALD TRUMP is on course to win four more years in the White House with a one point lead in the popular win, the final Democracy Institute poll for the Sunday Express has found. ..........  The Democracy Institute/Sunday Express poll has throughout the campaign been one of the few to predict a Trump victory since March. This is because unlike other polls it only looks at people identifying as likely voters instead of just registered to vote and it has tried to identify the shy Trump vote. According to this latest poll almost eight in ten (79 percent) of Trump supporters would not admit it to friends and family compared to 21 percent of Biden supporters.


In the wilds of Arizona, a hunt for bipartisanship While their parties stage an epic clash, these Republicans and Democrats are joining together to promote deal-making through bonhomie. .........  in all spending nearly a full day getting to know each other out of sight of the cameras and the raucous debates back in Phoenix. .......... Democrats have a shot at taking control of the statehouse for the first time in more than half a century while sending two U.S. senators to Washington for the first time since the 1950s. ........... Arizona is on a path toward becoming another Colorado, which went from solidly red to solidly blue in a few election cycles. .........  "We don't have time to be ideological." ........ There is more goodwill in the hearts of individual politicians than in the collective atmosphere in which they operate. ..........  “As the inner suburbs turn purple and newer families are moving in, families who are more conservative are relocating out to the farther suburbs,” Archer explained. “Those areas are swiftly becoming more Republican.”  ........... “Sometimes it means a change in tone and a change in the way that you address an issue with the same principles. Some folks are here for show. You can sit here for a day or two and you can pick out who's trying to get recorded, or get their viral video, so they can make that a plank of their next campaign.” ..........  The challenge now, he said, is to find new ways to join forces with Democrats to overcome the extreme elements in both parties.  .........  Chávez credited bipartisanship with birthing some of the most far-reaching policies to benefit his constituents. He said Democrats and Republican worked together on the legislation that transformed his own life — the federal Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986. It was passed by a Democratic House and signed by Republican President Ronald Reagan. It gave his family a path to citizenship. .............  As for George Floyd, who died in police custody and set off nationwide protests, he said, “No one should die that way." “But we are sending a message to young black kids that that is a hero?" he asked. "It is not a hero. He had at least seven drug offenses. He held a gun to a pregnant woman's stomach. George Floyd died a long time ago because the system killed him. A lot of that was the community. A lot of that was his own decisions that he made. How about if we would have taken care of George Floyd when he started in the criminal justice system, making sure that he had the drug treatment?” ............. Alma, who at 14 was brutally attacked by police officers, worked with Ducey, the Republican governor, to secure $1 million for training police officers in deescalation tactics. .............  We've got 10 percent fringe right, we’ve got 10 percent fringe left. The 80 percent in the middle probably aren't that far apart on 90 percent of the things we are trying to solve.  


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‘You can certainly see how he could win’: Why Trump isn’t done yet Retain the Sun Belt and hold Pennsylvania: That, in a nutshell, is Trump's narrow path to four more years. ....... Trump himself has predicted that the election ultimately “will end up in the Supreme Court.”  ......  "Even though the national numbers are much worse than where we were against Hillary at this point, the battleground numbers are virtually the same," a Trump campaign adviser said.



‘She Kind of Reminds You of Margaret Thatcher’: Liz Cheney Prepares To Make Her Move Could the daughter of one of the more reviled leaders in recent GOP history become the face of the party as soon as next year?   

Warren will make case to be Biden's Treasury secretary Warren's move could set up a marquee fight over what will be one of the most consequential Cabinet roles in a Biden administration. .............  the job is appealing because it is a once-in-a lifetime opportunity to enact some of the “big structural change” she talked about during the presidential primary, rather than just pressuring Cabinet officials from her Senate perch. Much of her life’s work has revolved around the intricate rules and levers of power in the executive branch. ............ if Warren does not get the Treasury spot, she would likely want to stay in the Senate and push for a seat on the chamber’s influential Finance Committee, which oversees the agency. ........... “I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody,” James Carville said during Bill Clinton’s presidency.  

Biden is already forming a government. Here's what his Cabinet could look like. An array of officials, from progressives like Elizabeth Warren to establishment types like Susan Rice, are seen as likely for key posts...........  he has pledged would be “the most progressive administration since FDR.” ............  Think Susan Rice, but also Elizabeth Warren. Pete Buttigieg, but also Karen Bass. ........... It did not go unnoticed when Biden in April called corporate America “greedy as hell.” He has also proposed raising the corporate tax rate. ......... It’s totally about what do you do with the incredible hollowing out that Trump has done ... so many of the agencies just are empty, the career people have left. ........... One name often mentioned as a potential secretary of State is Rice, who was Obama’s national security adviser .............  “When [Biden] shows up on the first day, he’s not going to need to be told where the Situation Room is. He’s been in the Situation Room for hundreds of hours. So he’s going to come in as … the most experienced and qualified person in terms of federal experience of anybody in the history of the country.” ............ The prospects of Biden’s legislative agenda would rest heavily on whether Democrats win the Senate. ...........  Biden signaled an openness to ending the 60-vote filibuster rule, a practice President Barack Obama recently called a “Jim Crow relic.” “The filibuster is gone,” said Harry Reid, the influential former Senate majority leader and a friend of Biden. “It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when it’s going to go … Next year at this time, it will be gone.” ...........  it is not Biden "moving to the left," but "Biden, and all of us around him, recognizing this is going to be a very consequential presidency." ................ Roosevelt initially “was certainly not thought of as somebody on the left.” At first, he placed trust in the nation’s financial institutions, pursuing a working relationship with both populists and business interests early in his administration. It was only after businesses balked and the relationship deteriorated that Roosevelt changed course. Then and now, Reich sad, “America was ready and willing and eager to try almost anything.” 





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Coronavirus News (305)

‘A whole lot of hurt’: Fauci warns of covid-19 surge, offers blunt assessment of Trump’s response  the country is heading into a long and potentially deadly winter with an unprepared government unwilling to make tough choices. ......... with people congregating at home indoors. You could not possibly be positioned more poorly.” ..............  He has held maskless rallies with thousands of supporters, often in violation of local health mandates. ............ Fauci said he and Deborah Birx, coronavirus task force coordinator, no longer have regular access to the president and he has not spoken to Trump since early October. “The last time I spoke to the president was not about any policy; it was when he was recovering in Walter Reed, he called me up,” he said. Fauci said he phones into meetings of other staffers but largely avoids the West Wing because “of all the infections there.” ....................... Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist and Trump’s favored pandemic adviser, who advocates letting the virus spread among young healthy people and reopening the country without restrictions, is the only medical adviser the president regularly meets with. ........... Some White House advisers have been leery of a public fight with Fauci — knowing his popularity is higher than that of the president. But they’ve also grown frustrated by his media appearances and complain he is too focused on his personal reputation and is “not on the team” .............. The doctor has become loathed among many Trump supporters, and Fauci has told others that he has experienced a surge in harassment and threats. .......... 
raises questions about what happens after Election Day, during what is projected to be the worst stretch yet of the pandemic. The Trump administration will be in charge of managing the pandemic until at least Jan. 20, no matter who wins. ...............  While Atlas has publicly rebutted assertions that he promotes a herd immunity strategy, he recently endorsed the Great Barrington Declaration — a document named after the town in Massachusetts where it was unveiled on Oct. 4 at a libertarian think tank — that calls for allowing the coronavirus to spread freely at “natural” rates among healthy young people, while keeping most aspects of the economy up and running. “He insists he’s not somebody who’s pushing for herd immunity,” Fauci said of Atlas. “He says, ‘That’s not what I mean.’ [But] everything he says — when you put them together and stitch them together — everything is geared toward the concept of ‘it doesn’t make any difference if people get infected. It’s a waste of time. Masks don’t work. Who cares,’ and the only thing you need to do is protect the vulnerable, like people in the nursing homes,” Fauci said. .......................  Fauci said that many people who catch the virus recover “virologically” but will have chronic health problems. “The idea of this false narrative that if you don’t die, everything is hunky dory is just not the case,” he said. .................. applauded the substantial growth in expertise about how to treat covid-19 since last spring that has led to a dramatic reduction in death rates.   






Why Trump Can’t Afford to Lose The President has survived one impeachment, twenty-six accusations of sexual misconduct, and an estimated four thousand lawsuits. That run of good luck may well end, perhaps brutally, if Joe Biden wins. ...........  Given that more than a dozen investigations and civil suits involving Trump are currently under way, he could be looking at an endgame even more perilous than the one confronted by Nixon. .............  Trump has famously survived one impeachment, two divorces, six bankruptcies, twenty-six accusations of sexual misconduct, and an estimated four thousand lawsuits. ........ about nine hundred million dollars’ worth of Trump’s real-estate debt will come due within the next four years. At the same time, he is locked in a dispute with the Internal Revenue Service over a deduction that he has claimed on his income-tax forms; an adverse ruling could cost him an additional hundred million dollars. To pay off such debts, the President, whose net worth is estimated by Forbes to be two and a half billion dollars, could sell some of his most valuable real-estate assets—or, as he has in the past, find ways to stiff his creditors. ............ He has testily insisted that he won both Presidential debates, contrary to even his own family’s assessment of the first one. ............. I believe he’ll be prosecuted, because it seems almost undeniable how extensive and long his criminality is. If it doesn’t happen at the federal level, it has to happen at the state level.” She described the “narcissistic injury” that Trump will suffer if he is rejected at the polls. ................  the President is not just running for a second term—he is running from the law. .........  if Trump loses, “he’ll never, ever acknowledge it—he’ll leave the country.” ............. Trump could go “live in one of his buildings in another country,” adding, “He can do business from anywhere.” .......... in 2016, Trump in fact made plans to leave the United States right after the vote. .............. Trump’s posture, Scaramucci told me, was to shrug off the expected defeat. “It was, like, O.K., he did it for the publicity. And it was over. He was fine. It was a waste of time and money, but move on.” Scaramucci said that, if 2016 is any guide, Trump would treat a loss to Biden more matter-of-factly than many people expect: “He’ll go down easier than most people think. Nothing crushes this guy.” ............... The notion that a former American President would go into exile—like a disgraced king or a deposed despot—sounds almost absurd, even in this heightened moment ...........  Trump might well abscond to a foreign country that has no extradition treaty with the U.S. ......... Trump’s predicament “is that he hasn’t ruined our system enough.” ..............  One of Trump’s personal attorneys, the Supreme Court litigator William Consovoy, has initiated legal actions across the nation challenging mail-in voting, on behalf of the Republican Party, the Trump campaign, and a dark-money group that calls itself the Honest Elections Project. And a former Trump White House official, Mike Roman, who has made a career of whipping up fear about nonwhite voter fraud, has assumed the role of field general of a volunteer fleet of poll watchers who refer to themselves as the Army for Trump. .............. But if Trump loses by a landslide, Schwartz said, “he’ll have many fewer cards to play. He won’t be able to play the election-was-stolen-from-me card—and that’s a big one.” ............ Trump has provided insurance companies with inflated income statements, in effect keeping two sets of books: one stating losses, for the purpose of taxes, the other exaggerating profits, for business purposes.  .............. Trump writes little down, sends no e-mails or texts, and often makes his wishes known through indirect means. ............  “If he loses—if—we can expect that he’ll roll out pardons promiscuously, including to himself.” ...... “A self-pardon would be the ultimate act of constitutional onanism for a narcissistic President.” .........  “I believe he was right to offer the pardon but wrong not to ask for a signed confession that Nixon was guilty as charged. As a result, Nixon spent the rest of his life arguing that he had done nothing worse than any other President.” .............   “Trump 2.0 is what terrifies me—someone who says, ‘Oh, America is open to a strongman kind of government, but I can do it more competently.’ ” .........  the Trump News Network—a media platform on which he could continue to sound off and cash in ...........  Kushner, during that preëlection period, went so far as to make an offer to acquire the Weather Channel as a vehicle that could be converted into a pro-Trump network. ................ Trump could broadcast the show after spending the morning playing golf. Just as on “The Apprentice”—and in the White House—he could riff, with little or no preparation. ........... Trump has acknowledged that he’s not a book reader, and Schwartz has noted that, during the year and a half that they worked together on “The Art of the Deal,” he never saw a single book in Trump’s office or apartment. .............. Trump—whether inside the White House or out—will “continue to be a source of chaos and division in the nation.”   


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Coronavirus News (304)

 


A federal ban on evictions also ends after December, meaning workers who have a tough time paying rent could get kicked out. 

U.S. reports record 99,321 new coronavirus cases as scientists warn latest surge just beginning the pandemic worsens in nearly every corner of the nation. ........  “December’s probably going to be the toughest month.” ........ hospitalizations are also rising and deaths are gradually following ..........  the country is still grappling with its original wave of infections. ......... the U.S., unlike other countries, never reported an average of less than 20,000 daily Covid-19 cases at any point in the pandemic ........... continue wearing face masks, practice social distancing, wash their hands, avoid crowds and spend time outdoors over indoors as much as possible.  

A once restrained Fauci unleashes on White House coronavirus approach days before election "All the stars are aligned in the wrong place" as the country heads indoors in colder weather, Fauci told the newspaper in an interview late Friday -- a day when the US set a global record for the most daily cases and the nation surpassed 229,000 deaths. "You could not possibly be positioned more poorly." ............. "New interview. Lockdowns, facts, frauds ... if you can't handle truth, use a mask to cover your eyes and ears," Atlas tweeted Saturday, sharing the interview in which he also criticized public health experts. Atlas did not have clearance from the White House for the interview -- which RT said was done on White House property ...........  On Sunday, Atlas tweeted an apology for doing the interview with RT, saying he "was unaware they are a registered foreign agent." "I regret doing the interview and apologize for allowing myself to be taken advantage of. I especially apologize to the national security community who is working hard to defend us," Atlas said in the tweet. ...........  "It's unacceptable and breaking with all norms for Dr. Fauci, a senior member of the President's Coronavirus Taskforce and someone who has praised President Trump's actions throughout this pandemic, to choose three days before an election to play politics" ............. Biden's campaign, he was quoted as saying, "is taking it seriously from a public health perspective," while the Trump campaign is viewing the virus through the lens of "the economy and reopening the country." ...........  Not only is there not enough data yet to understand the long-term consequences on patients who have contracted the disease, but about 2.5% of people in the US who tested positive for Covid-19 have died from it ..........  "He's jealous of Covid's media coverage and now he's accusing doctors of profiting off this pandemic -- think about that," Obama said. "He cannot fathom, he does not understand the notion that somebody would risk their life to save others without trying to make a buck." ............ some of the areas where the President has held rallies have seen spikes in cases. He mocked Trump's "obsession" with crowd size in the midst of a pandemic.  

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Coronavirus News (303)

With Covid-19 Under Control, China’s Economy Surges Ahead Exports jumped and local governments engaged in a binge of debt-fueled construction projects. Even consumer spending is finally recovering.

Can Raphael Warnock Go From the Pulpit to the Senate? The pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Jr. once preached, is betting that Georgia is ready to send a religious progressive to Washington. ............  the South’s most prominent Black preacher ......... He castigated them for neglecting “the poorest of the poor” while providing for “the richest of the rich.” He accused them of distracting the country with bigotry and division. He took care to poke fun at himself when he got carried away by emotion. (“Y’all be careful,” he said. “It’s Sunday.”) And he called, as he so often has, for the expansion of the Affordable Care Act. “I’ve read the Gospels a few times, and Jesus spent a lot of time healing the sick,” he said. “Even those with pre-existing conditions.” .................  Dr. Warnock considers himself a disciple of the flesh-and-blood Dr. King, who was not only an avatar of nonviolence, but also a rabble-rousing champion of the poor. ........... the Savannah, Ga., housing project where he grew up with 11 brothers and sisters, and declares that children there today “have it harder now than I did back then. That’s got to change.” ............  his future vocation seemed so obvious in high school that his friends called him “Rev.” ........... Black liberation theology, a system Dr. Cone once described as “an interpretation of the Christian Gospel from the experience and perspectives and lives of people who are at the bottom in society — the lowest economic and racial groups.” ...............  He supports abortion rights and gay marriage  



Hearings Behind Them, Republicans Close In on Barrett Confirmation The Senate Judiciary Committee lined up a vote for Oct. 22 on Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court, as Democrats warned Republicans would rue the day. 

Startups, It’s Time to Think Like Camels — Not Unicorns  growth-at-all-costs methodology, which the Valley’s top players are exceptionally good at, only works in the strongest bull markets, in the most optimal conditions. ............ Camels are able to survive for long periods without sustenance, withstand the scorching desert heat, and adapt to extreme variations in climate. They survive and thrive in some of Earth’s harshest regions. ...............  three strategies: they execute balanced growth, they take a long-term outlook, and they weave diversification into the business model. ............ Right-pricing from the start. .......... Cost management through the life cycle. ......... Changing the trajectory. ......... camels don’t avoid growth or venture capital funding, but their scaling trajectory and associated burn rates will be less extreme. ......... Survival is often the primary strategy. This allows time to build the business model, find a product that resonates with the market, and develop an operation that can scale. Competition will exist. But the race is about who will survive the longest, not about who goes to market first. ................... Quizlet just raised a $30 million Series C round, which valued the company at $1 billion in May of this year. The company did not take any funding until 2015, when it raised a Series A for just $12 million after 10 years in business. ............ As we prepare for the tough challenges ahead, the answers won’t be found within Silicon Valley’s insular bubble, but by learning from camels at the Frontier, who have had the solution all along. 


To Foster Innovation, Cultivate a Culture of Intellectual Bravery   Intellectual bravery is a willingness to disagree, dissent, or challenge the status quo in a setting of social risk in which you could be embarrassed, marginalized, or punished in some way. When intellectual bravery disappears, organizations develop patterns of willful blindness. Bureaucracy buries boldness. Efficiency crushes creativity. From there, the status quo calcifies and stagnation sets in. ..............  Whether or not your company has a culture of intellectual bravery depends on your ability to establish a pattern of rewarded rather than punished vulnerability. ........... the team members didn’t seem worried about social risk and spoke up regardless of hierarchy and power with energy and enthusiasm. I watched a new team member push back on a senior leader’s suggestion. Another person asked a naive question. Another shared a mistake she had made and wanted to discuss. In short, the level of psychological safety in the room matched the level of personal exposure required to challenge the status quo. ..................  the team’s ability to maintain creative abrasion and constructive dissent without collapsing into debilitating tension, personal attacks, or silence. ............  assign specific members of your team to challenge a course of action or find flaws in a proposed decision ........... connect things that aren’t normally connected. Of course, you must manage the process carefully and discern when constructive dissent is giving way to destructive derailment. .............. Speaking first when you hold positional power softly censors your team. ........... Encouraging psychological safety isn’t easy; it requires a high level of emotional intelligence and a highly controlled ego. Arguably, a leader’s most important job — perhaps above that of creating a vision and setting strategy — is to nourish a context in which people are given air cover in exchange for candor. That’s how you create a culture of intellectual bravery. 

A Framework for Leaders Facing Difficult Decisions Many decision-making frameworks aim to help leaders use objective information to mitigate bias, operate under time pressure, or leverage data. But these frameworks tend to fall short when it comes to decisions based on subjective information sources that suggest conflicting courses of action. And most complex decisions fall into this category. ............ 

CDC study says tons of people catch COVID-19 in the one place that’s supposed to be safe 102 out of 191 people who came in contact with a sick person contracted COVID-19, with transmission likely occurring inside the home. ............ The novel coronavirus spreads with ease in indoor settings. ........... public health experts keep recommending the same measures that can reduce the risk of transmission, including face masks, social distancing, and frequent hand washing. ............. the most dangerous place for someone to be when it comes to coronavirus transmission is the home ......... People are unlikely to wear masks at home, and social distancing isn’t always possible. If one person in a household is infected, others are likely to get COVID-19 as well. One of the reasons that favor infection is the fact that a person can be contagious before the onset of symptoms, which might warn others that transmission is possible. ............... household COVID-19 transmission occurs rapidly, with secondary cases appearing even faster than expected. ......... COVID spreads very rapidly and very quickly inside a home.” .......... “Once it’s in your house, it’s very hard to keep from spreading, and you don’t know who in your home will be susceptible, and they’ll need to be hospitalized.” ............. young children and teenagers can infect other members of the family just like adults. .............. persons should self-isolate immediately at the onset of COVID-like symptoms, at the time of testing as a result of a high-risk exposure, or at the time of a positive test result, whichever comes first” .............  “Concurrent to isolation, all members of the household should wear a mask when in shared spaces in the household.” .........  researchers advise isolation inside the home whenever possible and avoiding contact with the outside world. ........... persons who suspect that they might have COVID-19 should isolate, stay at home, and use a separate bedroom and bathroom if feasible. Isolation should begin before seeking testing and before test results become available because delaying isolation until confirmation of infection could miss an opportunity to reduce transmission to others. .............. “If you or anyone in the family goes outside the bubble and does anything that’s risky — large groups, bars, not wearing your mask — they can come back into that bubble and put everyone in that bubble at risk”

As Washington delays stimulus, the Fed is running out of ways to help the economy  In the four-month March-through-June period as the pandemic began, the Fed’s balance sheet grew 66% to $7.13 trillion. 

Millions poised to lose unemployment benefits in ‘enormous cliff’ at year’s end  

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Worried About Covid-19 in the Winter? Alaska Provides a Cautionary Tale The state is seeing record case numbers, adding to evidence that the virus is poised to thrive as the weather grows colder. ...........  winter could bring the most devastating phase of the pandemic. .......... the coronavirus is more virulent in colder weather and lower relative humidities ...........  some viruses persist longer in colder and drier conditions; that aerosolized viruses can remain more stable in cooler air; that viruses can replicate more swiftly in such conditions; and that human immune systems may respond differently depending on seasons. ............. “It’s going to be a very tough fall and winter for the entire world” ..............  One of the challenges that Dr. Zink has consistently faced is convincing residents to wear masks and stay distanced, two tools that public health experts have said can help reduce the spread of the virus. 


How to Keep the Coronavirus at Bay Indoors Tips for dodging the virus as Americans retreat from colder weather: Open the windows, buy an air filter — and forget the UV lights.

‘It Has Hit Us With a Vengeance’: Virus Surges Again Across the United States Unlike earlier outbreaks concentrated in the Northeast and South, the virus is simmering at a worrisome level in most regions.


How Data Science Can Win the Debate on Police Reform solving the problem starts with better data. ........ bringing academic rigor and science to what is often a very emotional debate .......... Last year alone, police were responsible for almost 2,000 known deaths in America. It’s a leading cause of death among young men, right after heart disease and cancer. ........... bias manifests at so many levels in the system. ............  we’re massively underestimating the problem because of data limitations and the poor quality of existing statistical analyses. ........... How do you quantify racism? ............. that entire source of bias that went into stopping someone in the first place. ............. What about the upfront work in hiring and training that would help root out bias in police departments? ................. we can dial back or eliminate many controversial aggressive tactics because their purported benefits just aren’t supported by the data. I’m thinking of things like police militarization and no-knock SWAT raids that the data shows seem to damage police from a public perception angle, but they don’t actually make officers safer, which was the promise going in. ................. the role of diversification, which is one of the oldest proposed hiring reforms in policing ...................  female officers use far less force. ........ the best evidence we have right now says diversification can help .............. a study in New York looking at stop-and-frisk during the mid-2000s, which was out of control in its volume during that period. Upwards of 90% of people being stopped on the street were found to be guilty of no crime, and the vast majority of these stops were of young Black and Latinx men. ..................  officers in many ways are like a lot of other bureaucrats that we’ve studied for a long time. They respond to incentives, they want a paycheck, they want to please their boss or at least not get in trouble. We can use some of those same managerial tools to change behavior. .................. we spent a substantial amount of time over the past year critiquing a study that was published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, one of the most prominent journals in the world. They claimed there was no racial bias in police shootings, and that study was recently retracted after a year of our critiques. The study was widely cited in the media and in Congressional hearings, but when you stripped away all the statistical jargon, it became clear that all it was really showing was that most people who get shot by police are white. ....................  Sunlight is the best disinfectant, so we need more transparency about civilian complaints and how allegations of officer misconduct are investigated. .............. We have 18,000 police departments in this country.

A Biden Landslide? Some Democrats Can’t Help Whispering Democrats are still haunted by the ghosts of 2016. But some are allowing themselves to contemplate a Biden victory big enough to reorder the nation’s politics. ......... Biden could pull off a landslide in November, achieving an ambitious and rare electoral blowout ........... Democrats see flipping states like Texas and Georgia as key to a possible landslide ....... a commanding victory that sweeps Democrats to control of the Senate as well would set the stage for a consequential presidency, not just one that evicts Mr. Trump. ......... “That the people want to address climate change in a big bold way. They want to address health care in a big bold way. And they want to address education in a big bold way.” ............  a huge Electoral College victory and help Democrats retake the Senate. ......... “Lincoln was not an abolitionist, F.D.R. not a socialist or trade unionist, and L.B.J. not a civil rights activist,” Mr. Shahid said. “Three of the most transformative presidents never fully embraced the movements of their time, and yet the movements won because they organized and shaped public opinion.”  





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Saturday, October 31, 2020

Coronavirus News (301)

Late Night Is Too Nervous to Believe in Biden-Leading Polls “It feels like we’re all Charlie Brown going to kick the football, but we know at the last second Lucy’s gonna give us coronavirus,” Stephen Colbert joked on Thursday. 

Lies, Damned Lies and Trump Rallies Who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes? ........ It’s not so much that Trump is lying more as that the lies have become qualitatively different — even more blatant, and increasingly untethered to any plausible political strategy. ............. What Trump has been revealing, more clearly than ever before, is that he has a totalitarian mind-set. ..........  almost his entire party, and tens of millions of voters, seem perfectly willing to follow him into the abyss. 

The Voting Suppression Tipping Point For years, Republicans have made it harder and harder for Americans to vote. Is that strategy backfiring? ........... Even before the coronavirus, the United States had made it harder to vote than any other affluent democracy 

Household spread of Covid-19 is common and quick, a new CDC study finds The person exposed or suspected of having Covid-19 should be isolated before getting tested and before test results come back to protect others in the home ......... persons who suspect that they might have COVID-19 should isolate, stay at home, and use a separate bedroom and bathroom if feasible .......... all members of the household should wear masks at all times in common spaces ........  Infection was quick: Over half of the people (53%) who lived with someone battling Covid-19 became infected within a week, researchers found. Some 75% of these secondary infections occurred within five days of the first symptoms in the initial patient. ........... fewer than one half of household members with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infections reported symptoms at the time infection was first detected ............ clusters of people who live close together are at highest risk of getting it from one another. If children are part of that household, they may show minimal symptoms but still be contagious." ......... and not play with other children -- even outside ........ Have everyone wash their hands at every opportunity. Clean and disinfect all those commonly shared surfaces -- don't forget the refrigerator and microwave handles! ........... Keep everyone as stress-free as possible -- a hard task for sure -- and focus on healthy eating, regular exercise and quality sleep. ............ If you tested positive but had no symptoms, you can stop isolating at home 10 days after the date you had your positive test  

America and the Virus: ‘A Colossal Failure of Leadership’ In its destruction of American lives, treasure and well-being, this pandemic marks the greatest failure of U.S. governance since Vietnam. ......... “Of the more than 200,000 people who have died as of today, I don’t think that 50,000 would have died if it hadn’t been for the incompetence.” ............ As many Americans are dying every 10 days of Covid-19 as U.S. troops died during 19 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the economists David Cutler and Lawrence Summers estimate that the economic cost of the pandemic in the United States will be $16 trillion, or about $125,000 per American household — far more than the median family’s net worth. Then there’s an immeasurable cost in soft power as the United States is humbled before the world. ............  A 324-page study by Johns Hopkins found last October that the United States was the country best prepared for a pandemic. ..........   Trump argues that no one could have anticipated the pandemic, but it’s what Bush warned about, what Obama aides tried to tell their successors about, and what Joe Biden referred to in a blunt tweet in October 2019 lamenting Trump’s cuts to health security programs and adding: “We are not prepared for a pandemic.” ............. First, China initially covered up the scale of the outbreak. Second, even so, the United States and other countries had enough information to act as Taiwan did. The first two countries to impose travel restrictions on China were North Korea and the Marshall Islands, neither of which had inside information. ............... if Wuhan had been locked down just two weeks earlier, it’s conceivable that this entire global catastrophe could have been averted. ............. Sierra Leone in West Africa had effective tests before the United States did. .........  Japan is a densely populated country that did not test much and yet has only 2 percent as many deaths per capita as the United States. One reason is that Japanese have long embraced face masks ............... can be at least as effective as a vaccine in fighting the pandemic ........... Trump did almost everything wrong. He discouraged mask wearing. The administration never rolled out contact tracing, missed opportunities to isolate the infected and exposed, didn’t adequately protect nursing homes, issued advice that confused the issues more than clarified them, and handed responsibilities to states and localities that were unprepared to act ............  Trump’s missteps arose in part because he channeled an anti-intellectual current that runs deep in the United States, as he sidelined scientific experts and responded to the virus with a sunny optimism apparently meant to bolster the financial markets. ..................  if the United States had simply imposed the same lockdowns just two weeks earlier, 83 percent of the deaths in the early months could have been prevented. ......... A basic principle of public health is the primacy of accurate communications based on the best science. ............   “the President of the United States was likely the largest driver of the Covid-19 misinformation.” ........  You wouldn’t want an epidemiologist reviewing your M.R.I. scans, and it’s equally odd to have a radiologist managing a pandemic. ........... the right-wing website RedState denounced “the public health Gestapo” and called Dr. Anthony Fauci a “mask Nazi.” .......... A University of Chicago study found that watching the Sean Hannity program correlated to less social distancing, so watching Fox News may well have been lethal to some of its fans. .............. Americans have often pointed to the Soviet Union as a place where ideology trumped science, with disastrous results. ..........  Most striking, Trump still has never developed a comprehensive plan to fight Covid-19. His “strategy” was to downplay the virus and resist business closures, in an effort to keep the economy roaring — his best argument for re-election. ...........  More than 40 percent of adults reported in June that they were struggling with mental health ............ More than one-quarter of young adults said they have seriously contemplated suicide. ............ in what is arguably the richest country in the history of the world, political malpractice has resulted in a pandemic of infectious disease followed by pandemics of poverty, mental illness, addiction and hunger. .......  During World War II, American soldiers died at a rate of 9,200 a month, less than one-third the pace of deaths from this pandemic, but the United States responded with a massive mobilization. By 1945, a Ford assembly line was turning out one new B-24 bomber every hour. Yet today we can’t even churn out enough face masks; a poll of nurses in late July and early August found that one-third lacked enough N95 masks. .................  Instead of leading a war against the virus, Trump organized a surrender. He even held a super-spreader event at the White House, for Judge Amy Coney Barrett, and that’s why the White House recently had more new cases of Covid-19 than New Zealand, Taiwan and Vietnam combined. .............  if the U.S. had responded urgently and deftly enough to achieve Taiwan’s death rate, fewer than 100 Americans would have died from the virus. 



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Our opportunity to define the world we want to live in by Satya Nadella 
Er, Can I Ask a Few Questions About Abortion? You know who really reduced abortion numbers in the U.S.? President Obama, with the Affordable Care Act. .......... Jesus talks a great deal about helping the poor and healing the sick, so I could understand a religiously driven passion for public health or for universal health coverage, but he never evinced an interest in the unborn. ............. One particularly effective way to reduce abortions is to reduce unintended pregnancies through free access to long-acting reliable contraceptives. Partly because Obamacare covers contraception, the number of abortions in the United States has plunged to its lowest level since Roe v. Wade ............  the abortion extremism of the last few decades. ........ Wouldn’t we all be better off if “pro-life” became not just a zealous slogan but a compassionate way of life?

How Are Americans Catching the Virus? Increasingly, ‘They Have No Idea’ New outbreaks used to be traced back to crowded factories and rowdy bars. But now, the virus is so widespread not even health officials are able to keep up. ........... As the coronavirus soars across the country, charting a single-day record of 99,155 new cases on Friday and surpassing nine million cases nationwide, tracing the path of the pandemic in the United States is no longer simply challenging. It has become nearly impossible. ...........  many people are coming to a frightening conclusion: They have no idea where the virus is spreading. ........... “It’s just kind of everywhere,” said Crystal Watson, a senior scholar at the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who estimated that tracing coronavirus cases becomes difficult once the virus spreads to more than 10 cases per 100,000 people. ...............  In some of the hardest-hit spots in the United States, the virus is spreading at 10 to 20 times that rate, and even health officials have all but given up trying to figure out who is giving the virus to whom. .............  This time, the diffuse, chaotic spread is happening in many places at once. Infections are rising in 41 states, the country is recording an average of more than 79,000 new cases each day, and more Americans say they feel left to do their own lonely detective work. ............. once an area spins out of control, trying to trace back each chain of transmission can feel like scooping cupfuls of water from a flood. ........... Most people, they said, are catching the virus through family and friends. ..............  the process of tracking cases and notifying people who may have been exposed is a gold standard of disease prevention but impractical after a certain level of infection. ......... “People are realizing that you can get it anywhere” ...........  Did she pick up an infected apple at the grocery store and somehow touch her eye? Should she have been wearing a face shield, in addition to her mask? The possibilities feel endless. “It’s just out there,” she said.  

2016 Nonvoters, a Key Prize for Biden and Trump, Turn Out in Droves In Pennsylvania and other battlegrounds, both parties are succeeding in coaxing infrequent voters off the sidelines. The all-important question is who does it better.  

Student Voting Surges Despite Efforts to Suppress It The coronavirus pandemic and new requirements in Republican-led states created voting obstacles for college students this year. Yet youth participation appears to be on the rise.

U.S. Says Virus Can’t Be Controlled. China Aims to Prove It Wrong. China’s approach to keep Covid-19 at bay has helped restore confidence and allowed businesses to reopen. But it is a strategy steeped in authoritarianism......... China has effectively sealed off its borders from the outside world and doubled down on efforts to eradicate the virus. When a crop of cases emerge, the government swiftly shuts down vast areas and quickly tests millions of people, to help keep local transmissions near zero. ...............  the way to open the economy is to first safeguard public health. .........  people had largely grown accustomed to wearing masks on subways and buses, even though Hangzhou has not had a coronavirus case in months. .......... China now represents the extreme, Communist version of a highly managed, scientifically backed approach that has worked in South Korea, Japan, New Zealand, Taiwan and other democracies. ............. many people in China say they are relieved that the pandemic seems to be under control, especially as the United States and countries in Europe confront a crush of new cases. ........ “In China, a word from a superior can be heard immediately and implemented quickly,” Ms. Gao said. “It’s the difference between individualism and collectivism.” .............. The Chinese foreign ministry has said the pandemic has “torn the emperor’s new clothes” off American democracy. ...............  When a single asymptomatic case of the coronavirus was detected last week in Kashgar, in the western region of Xinjiang, the authorities rushed to lock down the city. Officials demanded that more than four million people undergo tests for the virus, eventually finding nearly 200 cases, largely asymptomatic.  






As the West Stumbles, ‘Helmsman’ Xi Pushes an Ambitious Plan for China China’s leader emerged from a key Communist Party meeting newly emboldened, outlining a road map for the country for years to come. Some have warned of overreach. ............ the committee’s 200 or so voting members praised the country’s “major strategic achievement” in largely stifling the outbreak. .......... Party propaganda has asserted that China’s success in extinguishing Covid-19 infections shows its overall “institutional superiority,” and Beijing has promised to share a potential vaccine for the coronavirus. ..........  Chinese military moves have rattled neighbors. ....... “I cannot think of any serious country — with a big economy or even some with small economies — that does not have some concerns about China and Chinese behavior.” ..........  his highly personalized rule could last another decade or more. ......... “The dominant tone is that China has major opportunities for growth, for managing the process of decoupling in its own favor, and for setting the terms for the next stage of globalization” ............... as infections multiplied, Mr. Xi faced a sharp surge of public anger. ........ In the coming years, China should “make major breakthroughs in crucial, core technologies,” the Central Committee said, “entering the front ranks of innovative countries.” 



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When Libertarianism Goes Bad Liberty doesn’t mean freedom to infect other people. ...... Rural white states imagined themselves immune.  .......  the most dangerous places in America may be the Dakotas. ....... Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, has gone full Trump — questioning the usefulness of masks and encouraging potential super-spreader events. (The Sturgis motorcycle rally, which drew almost a half-million bikers to her state, may have played a key role in setting off the viral surge.)  

How to Reopen the American Mind In the midst of an existential crisis for higher education, is it even reasonable to expect the humanities to survive?

America and the Virus: ‘A Colossal Failure of Leadership’ In its destruction of American lives, treasure and well-being, this pandemic marks the greatest failure of U.S. governance since Vietnam.


Persuasion My pro-Trump friends and readers complain that the mainstream media are biased against Trump, and thus they tune us out for being unfair and piling on. ........ the more urgently we shout, the less we’re heard .......... I understand why people like Mary voted for Trump. The loss of well-paying jobs devastated places like my hometown, Yamhill, Ore. Mary spent seven years homeless, lost four relatives to suicide, and herself once put a gun to her own head, before she pulled herself together with the help of a local church. Trump talked about bringing jobs back and helping ordinary workers — so she voted for the first time in her life, for Trump. ............  his highest presidential approval numbers after being impeached ..........  Trump is a charlatan who preys on my friends who trust him. Trump’s own sister has said he is a liar with “no principles,” and his former chief of staff Gen. John Kelly reportedly referred to him as “the most flawed person” he has known. .......... he has exploited my friends and then betrayed them with his policies. ............. I’m a great believer in community, in the idea that what makes countries strong is “social capital” — the web of relationships, beliefs, trust, decency and identity that make a society work. Trump has taken this social fabric and acted as the Great Unraveler. ...............  He is what Proverbs 6:19 calls “a person who stirs up conflict in the community.” .................   great nations more often rot from within than suffer defeat from outside .............  I see Trump as not just a phony but also a threat. He has left the United States a more turbulent and divided nation, one close to war with itself. .................  Today the greatest threat I perceive to America’s national security isn’t from Qaeda terrorists, Russian cyberattacks or Chinese missiles. As I see it, it’s from Trump’s re-election. ...............  Jani, a committed Christian, has worried about Democrats and abortion. But this time she will vote for Biden because she’s appalled at Trump’s policies toward migrants, Black Lives Matter and health care, and because “God cares about oppression, justice, the voiceless.” 
Innocence  I didn’t think that enough of us would indulge a would-be leader as proudly hateful, patently fraudulent and flamboyantly dishonest as Donald Trump. ......... Some 46 percent of the Americans who cast ballots for president in 2016 picked him, and as he moved into the White House and proceeded to soil it, most of those Americans stood by him solidly enough that Republicans in Congress didn’t dare to cross him and in fact went to great, conscience-immolating lengths to prop him up. ........... In him we forgave florid cruelty, overt racism, rampant corruption, exultant indecency, the coddling of murderous despots, the alienation of true friends, the alienation of truth itself, the disparagement of invaluable institutions, the degradation of essential democratic traditions..............  In a sane and civil country, of the kind I long thought I lived in, his favorability ratings would have fallen to negative integers, a mathematical impossibility but a moral imperative. In this one, they never changed all that much. ............. I’m not saying that support for him is spun entirely of malice or bias. Keen economic anxiety and profound political estrangement are why many voters turned to him ................  He tapped into more cynicism and nihilism than this land of boundless tomorrows was supposed to contain. ...........  Trump didn’t draw out anything that wasn’t already there, burbling beneath the surface.  
Imagination all the attention sucked up by this black hole of a president has been its own sort of loss ........  Trump is a narcissistic philistine, and he bent American culture toward him. ............ I’ve no doubt that great work was created over the past four years, but I missed much of it, because I was too busy staring in incredulous horror at my phone. ......... “More political books have sold across all formats during this presidential term than at any point in NPD BookScan history” ..........  “Fiction lost out to nonfiction since 2015,” said NPD’s Kristen McLean. The decline in fiction sales began before this presidency, but during the past four years it accelerated. “Trump taking up space in our brain and crowding out our ability to think about anything else is definitely, I think, part of the phenomenon” ............  “Right now it’s all about, ‘How will this end?’” ............  “The daily clown show cuts into television’s bandwidth, both figuratively and literally, occupying space in the national conversation, and therefore our brains, that might be instead filled with, among many other things, the heir to ‘The Sopranos.’” ............. when politics are so alarming that the rest of the world seems to recede, it creates cultural claustrophobia .......... The outrage Trump sparks leaves less room for many other things — joy, creativity, reflection ............ The problem is the president, not how his victims respond to him. ............ the unprecedented progressive mobilization of the past four years ............ After four years of “This is not normal!” .......... Living in Trump’s panic-inducing eternal present is bad for art, but it’s also bad for imagination more broadly, including the imagination needed to conceive a future in which Trumpism is unthinkable. If people no longer had to throw themselves in front of the bulldozer of this presidency, there would be more energy for progress and for pleasure. Trump has blocked out the sun. 
Pax Americana America in the 2020s will remain a deeply polarized nation, rife with crazy conspiracy theories and, quite possibly, plagued by right-wing terrorism. .......... For almost 70 years America played a special role in the world, one that no nation had ever played before. We’ve now lost that role, and I don’t see how we can ever get it back. .............. And sometimes it seemed as if one of our main goals was to make the world safe for multinational corporations. ......... The Pax Americana arguably dated from the enactment of the Marshall Plan in 1948; that is, from the moment when a conquering nation chose to help its defeated foes rebuild rather than demanding that they pay tribute. ...........  What, for example, is the point of a rules-based trading system when the system’s creator and erstwhile guardian imposes tariffs based on transparently bad-faith arguments — such as the claim that imports of aluminum from Canada (!) threaten national security? ............. Is America still the leader of the free world when top officials seem friendlier to nations like Hungary, where democracy has effectively collapsed — or even to murderous autocracies like Saudi Arabia — than to longstanding democratic allies? .............. We’ll start following trade rules; we’ll rejoin the Paris climate accord and rescind plans to withdraw from the World Health Organization. .........  everyone will remember that we’re a country that elected someone like Donald Trump, and could do it again. ........... the great danger, if America turns protectionist, wouldn’t be retaliation, it would be emulation ........... There will be more economic and military bullying of small countries by their larger neighbors. There will be more blatant election-rigging in nominally democratic nations. 
Faith Trump’s Presidency Smashed the ‘Decency Floor’ ............  No other modern presidential candidate had talked and behaved that way. ............  And then, just when you thought the country would rise up in moral revulsion … nothing happened. Trump’s behavior got worse and worse and worse … and nothing happened. He was defying moral gravity. ......... He created more scandals than I expected … and he just kept going. One of the oft-repeated phrases about Trump during these years was: There is no bottom. ........... We’ve long had polarization, but we now have in America a crisis of legitimacy, which is a different creature. It’s the obliteration of other citizens, an assumption that the institutions, like election systems, are fundamentally frauds and are rigged. This is what Trump is exploiting now. ............ In 1997, 64 percent of Americans had a good or great deal of trust in the wisdom of their fellow citizens in making political decisions. Today only a third of Americans have a great or good deal of trust in the ability of their fellow citizens to make competent political decisions. ........ a lot of people on the hard left and the hard right now consider politics a war of all against all, where the ends justify any means. ............ Over the past four years we’ve poured out an hourly flow of anti-Trump diatribes and in almost every case they rise to the top of the charts — most liked, most retweeted, most read. ................... Even when justified, permanent indignation is not a healthy emotional state. We’ve become a little addicted to our own umbrage, addicted to that easy feeling of moral superiority, addicted to the easy affirmation bath we get when we repeat what we all believe. Trump-bashing has become a business model. .............  the awareness that our basic standards of decency are more fragile than we thought; the awareness that any year, some new leader may come along and bring us back to a world of no bottom.
Generosity  “moral cynicism,” or the notion that laws and informal rules weren’t really and truly binding ..............  It is cliché at this point to note that Trump has laid waste to our norms and customs, and in so doing, eroded our trust in institutions whose reputations were already in sharp decline (the media and federal government instantly come to mind), as well as our trust in our fellow Americans. .............. As a nation, we’ve lost our sense of altruistic and moral purpose, a collective will to do what is decent and right and, as sociologists like to say, “other-regarding.” Instead, we’ve been living in a state benumbed and a benumbed state, in which nihilism prevails and corruption oozes from the very top. .................  we’re enacting the zero-sum values of reality television. .......... Trump has normalized selfishness. ............ we, an extravagantly wealthy nation, suffer from an extravagant number of deaths. ......... the rich were profiting shamelessly from deregulation and small-government reforms at around the same time the epidemic of mass incarceration began. ..........  the nation spun off a breakaway republic of the 1 percent. ........... Moral cynicism “taps the darker side of human nature” .............  the importance of community culture in defining neighborhoods. 
Naivete The founders of this country worried obsessively about the rise of a demagogue, and the power of foreign influence on our democracy. ........... America did the unthinkable, shocking itself and the world: It put the most powerful country in the world under the control of a lying, grifting, shady carnival ­­­­­conductor. He had no experience in governance and no expertise. His entire life was a game of smoke and mirrors, double talk and double-dealing. ...............  Even Trump, not a student of history or much else, didn’t seem to grasp the awesome power he possessed until he systematically started to test all the fences supposedly restraining him, only to realize that the only thing holding many of them up was customs and conventions. Most could be run through or pushed down. .................. We didn’t believe that in this era we could have a president who could be so regressive on issues of white supremacy, white nationalism and xenophobia. ............  “Nixon believed in a hierarchy of races, with whites and Asians much higher up than people of African descent and Latinos. And he had convinced himself that it wasn’t racist to think Black people, as a group, were inferior to whites, so long as he held them in paternalistic regard.” ............. what Trump delivered: a generational retreat into darkness. .......... that the most qualified woman to ever run would defeat the least qualified man to do so 
Our Word Tuesday’s election will be seen globally as a referendum on the durability of democracy. If American democracy, long a beacon, cannot self-correct, then all democracies are at risk. ........... The presidency and dishonesty have become synonymous. ............  Hence the talk in European capitals of the need to “contain” the United States, a verb once reserved for the Soviet Union...............  Allies believe a second Trump term could lead to the United States’ leaving NATO, following the decision to leave the World Health Organization. Departure from the World Trade Organization is also possible. Trump has yet to encounter a multilateral organization he does not want dead. ..............   The United States has become a values-free international actor under a president who has led a values-free life. ..............  Over the past four years, America has come close to exiting the global community of democracies. Trump is far more comfortable with autocrats like Putin and Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia than with a democratic leader like Merkel. (She has, for the president, the added drawback of being a woman.) ............ Human rights have all but disappeared from the American agenda. This has been evident in the brutality at the Mexican border. ..............  Trump has severed America from the idea of America. ........... In the European Union the realization that it may now stand alone against Russia, China and the United States in embodying liberal democratic principles and the defense of human rights has come as a painful, if galvanizing, shock. ..............  the damage is deep; the old status quo will not return. ........... A second Trump term of erratic American belligerence meeting growing Chinese assertiveness would be pregnant with the possibility of violence.
Conservatism Republicans, like the Federalist Party of yore, will consolidate power in the judiciary. Apart from that, they will have spent the past four years squandering their reputation, forsaking their principles, and trashing the kind of political culture they once claimed to hold dear. As victories go, the word Pyrrhic comes to mind. .................  Hemingway’s great line about how one goes bankrupt — “gradually, then suddenly” — seems apt. .............  Every time Trump lied, broke a promise, humiliated a subordinate, insulted a stranger, bullied an ally, tweeted something vile, said something idiotic, threatened to blow up NATO, and otherwise violated moral, political and institutional norms, his appeal among the Republican base didn’t decline. It rose. ...............  Conservatives used to admire Edmund Burke. Not anymore, insofar as Burke stood for the importance of manners and morals to the health of the state. Conservatives used to admire Milton Friedman. Not anymore, insofar as Friedman stood for free trade, sound money and a balanced budget. Conservatives used to admire Scoop Jackson. Not anymore, insofar as the Washington state Democrat was a champion of the idea that human rights should stand at the center of U.S. foreign policy. Conservatives used to admire Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Not anymore, insofar as both Reagan and Bush believed in humane immigration reform, international coalition building, standing up to Russian tyrants and, when possible, making deals with Democrats. ........................  At its principled best, conservatism holds that liberal ends — the right of the individual to enjoy the maximum degree of freedom compatible with the right of his neighbor to do the same — are best secured by conservative means. Those means are the practices, beliefs and institutions that, for the most part, lie outside the state: stable families, religious communities, voluntary associations, productive businesses, the habits of a free mind. Ultimately, the goal of conservative politics is to produce competent citizens capable of responsible self-government. ..............  Trump may defy the odds again and win. ........ As for the Republican Party, Trump’s re-election would make it the most potent force for anti-liberalism in the Western world today.
A Female President  One of my clearest memories of election night in 2016 is running into women who were going to watch the results with their daughters, so they’d get to share the experience of seeing Hillary Clinton elected president ............  she lost to one of the most awful candidates in American history. A man whose personal relationships with women seemed to hark back to the 1950s, if not the cave. ........... brought more women into the world of American politics. A record number ran for office in 2018, and a record number won. ............ A record 60 filed to run for one of the 35 Senate seats up for election this fall. Nearly half are still in the running; 20 have already won primaries. ......... you can’t help but fantasize about Amy McGrath knocking out Mitch McConnell in Kentucky. ......... We seem to be seeing more and more female candidates with résumés that include time in the armed forces. 
Our Illusions  Trump is transgressive, yes. But his transgressions are less a novel assault on American institutions than they are a stark recapitulation of past failure and catastrophe. ....... What is terrible about Trump is also terrible about the United States. Everything we’ve seen in the last four years — the nativism, the racism, the corruption, the wanton exploitation of the weak and unconcealed contempt for the vulnerable — is as much a part of the American story as our highest ideals and aspirations. The line to Trump runs through the whole of American history, from the white man’s democracy of Andrew Jackson to the populist racism of George Wallace, from native expropriation to Chinese exclusion. ........... There is very little about Donald Trump or his policies that doesn’t have a direct antecedent in the American past. ............ the president’s racism harkens right back to the first decades of the 20th century, when white supremacy was ascendant and the nation’s political elites, including presidents like Woodrow Wilson, were preoccupied with segregation and exclusion for the sake of preserving an “Anglo-Saxon” nation. ............. men like James Polk, who — decades removed from planter-politicians like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe — bought and sold human beings from the White House. ............. Trump does nothing more than embody Nixon’s quip to David Frost that “when the president does it … that means that it is not illegal.”  ....... Trump has helped bring ugly forces out into the open, giving aid and comfort to assorted racists and white nationalists. Yet it’s also true that these groups and individuals have always been with us .............  an administration that has embraced the worst aspects of our political culture and merged them into a potent brew of destruction, lawlessness and authoritarianism. ...................  the exclamation point on our consistent failure to live up to our own self-image. 
Allies  the damage has been profound, but, I’d argue, the cancer has not yet metastasized into the bones and lymph nodes of our nation ........... Four more years of a president without shame, backed by a party without spine, amplified by a TV network without integrity, and the cancer will be in the bones of every institution that has made America America. ........... if the message broadcast by the Statue of Liberty shifts from “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” to “get the hell off my lawn” .............. unlike any other great power that had come to impact their lives, our purpose was different. .............. historically “America’s intent, if not always its practice, has been to exhort not extort other nations; to export not exploit; to collaborate not dominate; and to strengthen a global system of rules and norms, not overturn it in order to focus exclusively on its own enrichment. ........... China’s “economy grew at almost 5 percent, without monetizing debt, while all major economies contracted. China produces more than it consumes and runs a balance of payments surplus, unlike the U.S. and many Western nations.” Even Tesla’s best-selling Model 3 car, he wrote, “may soon be made entirely in China.” 
Pride  We were the winners, the good guys. We had swagger and vitality and an endless sense of possibility. .......... America wasn’t perfect, God knows. I was raised here in the heart of the white patriarchy, where the Washington Monument was an apt symbol. .................. we don’t even know if the president will use the Supreme Court, midwifed by Mitch McConnell, to purloin the election. .......... In 2015, Donald Trump was agonizing over whether to go for the role as the president in “Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!” or to run for the actual presidency. ................ I have seen a lot of Republicans use bigotry to lure racists, scare Americans and win the White House. But with Trump, it is more blatant because he cuts out the middleman. ............... a soulless, rapacious Silicon Valley that keeps torquing up the algorithm for conflict and conspiracy .............. Social media and the former reality star have entwined to make cruelty and fake news central elements of the nation’s discourse. ...........  “What we have lost is the sense that we are one nation, all in this together. Donald Trump is the first president in our history who has sought to divide us rather than unite us. We will heal once he leaves, but the scar will endure.” ............ The president’s spiral into lawlessness is too repellent — and frightening — to allow levity. ......... it was “as though Trump blew up the science lab, exposing the raw nerve of America’s stream of consciousness.” ...........  the nest of vipers that is this White House ......... “Never has the expression ‘Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty’ been more resonant. ............  Even if Joe Biden wins, it’s not going to be easy to restore what has been lost, or to forge a new American identity. ............... Fortunately, the younger generation is more tolerant, open and committed to justice. 
A Reckoning  The political apocalypse of 2016, when Donald Trump improbably vanquished the establishment of both parties .......... when the failures in both parties and every faction were laid bare. .............  the way that center-left and center-right visions of post-Cold War “openness,” to free trade or low-skilled immigration or ever-greater-integration with the People’s Republic of China, simultaneously failed to achieve their geopolitical goals and hollowed out communities across the American heartland, creating a deadly, demagogy-ready vacuum where work and church and family used to be. ..........  For the left, the revelat ions were about how its own victories within the Democratic coalition, the triumph of social liberalism over cultural conservatism, had forged a party that no longer connected with a lot of white, working-class voters .............  The major centrist project of the Trump era wasn’t a sustained reassessment of where its leaders had gone wrong; it was the hysterical overhyping of the Russia investigation, in a paranoid style that made seedy Trumpian malfeasance out to be a vast Kremlin conspiracy, the casus belli of a new Cold War. ............  His management of the pandemic has been a case study in what you might call state-incapacity libertarianism, his handling of racial protest was deliberately polarizing rather than unifying (and not even successfully polarizing, since it left the majority on the other side), and his early push for sweeping Covid relief spending gave way to indifference and distraction as the autumn phase of legislation stalled.
Apathy   a boorish TV businessman, a B-list personality with a taste for the tabloid, announced one of those publicity-stunt bids for the presidency you usually hear about only in jokey montages at the end of the local news. ......... maybe it was cosmic retribution for our decadence .......  The more we look, the more he turns us off; the more he turns us off, the more we look. By the time of his inauguration, Trump was already one of the most covered, most discussed, most famous living human beings of all time. .................  Now you hear from him anywhere, everywhere, at any time. He’s there on every screen and status update, in every conversation, dream, nightmare. As subtext, he lurks within the arts, in sports, in the weather reports, in houses of worship. ............. Even now, on the precipice of an election that may finally offer an exit from this infinite loop, the end of having to think about Trump seems nowhere close. ..........  Two-thirds of Americans report feeling “worn out” by the news. ........   With nearly every tweet, Trump gave us a new 10-car pileup from which we couldn’t look away. But in the process of making us look at him, Trump forced many of us to actually look for the first time. By turning us into a nation of rubbernecks, he has pushed us to reckon with why things are crashing in the first place and to examine the faulty infrastructure of our democracy. ............ Trump got us to recognize a truth long ignored in American politics: that a competent government is important. American greatness and American goodness can never again be taken for granted. His inept reign has proved that the country cannot run on autopilot, and there is no longer any basis for the lazy idea that America will always, in some automatic and reflexive way, “work things out.” ............ It is now tragically clear what happens if the federal government is left to wither, if expertise and experience is undermined and overruled, and if honesty, decency, integrity and fairness are abandoned by public officials: People die, people lose their jobs, hate and mistrust fester, long-term problems become sudden emergencies, and the country steadily loses unity and moral standing. .................  The midterm elections of 2010 and 2014 and the presidential races of 2012 and 2016 were low-engagement, low-turnout affairs. You might even say that American political life in the past decade has been determined more by the inaction of those who didn’t participate than by the actions of those who did. ............ From Day 1, there was nothing quiet or incremental about Trump. He attacked American institutions frontally and clamorously, shocked us into realizing their fragility and compelled us to stand up against his wrecking ball. ..........  When Trump attacked the media, people subscribed in droves. ......... For the first time, more Americans now favor expanding immigration instead of restricting it, and a majority of Americans say they support Black Lives Matter. .........  In 2018, a wave of candidates across the country, a lot of them women and people of color, ran for office for the first time. Nearly 120 million Americans voted that year, the highest turnout for the midterms in more than 100 years. This year’s vote could shatter all records. .............   Would Democrats be talking about far-reaching reforms for our democracy — eliminating the Electoral College, expanding the Supreme Court, statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico — if we weren’t shocked by the dreadful chief executive this broken system has given us?   




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