Do US drone kills need an oversight board? How would it work? (+video)
Should the US establish some sort of secret court to conduct judicial oversight of drone strikes used to kill terror suspects? That’s an idea that’s been discussed for some time in Congress and in Washington national security think tanks. It’s acquired new salience because of Thursday’s Senate…
After a decade of phenomenal ratings growth, America's leading conservative media brand faces a crisis of ideological identity
Recent headlines about Fox News have given liberals gleeful Schadenfreude: Dick "Landslide" Morris, gone. Ratings the lowest in since 2001. Roger Ailes practicing the kind of pre-emptive paranoia (buying up the domains for bizarre iterations of a biographer's name) that inevitably accompanies Nixonian delusions of infallibility and hubristic defeat.
To be sure, the departure of Sarah Palin generated a certain degree of wistful nostalgia: she was a bouffanted, bedazzled punching bag as much as she was a folksy aphorism-mangler, as well as a black hole for dropped "g's" and common sense.
Some observers have taken these events as proof of the ongoing GOP implosion and signals of their devolution from opposition party to regional grandstanders and designated spoilers. This theme has been echoing ever since the channel's election night coverage unfolded as an action movie-level collision between reality and Karl Rove's ample and admittedly daunting forehead.
But such prognostications suffer from buying into the logic that has until now been a part of the formula that made Fox such an overwhelming success: Fox = Republican party. The network's rating grew an astounding 570% from 1999 to 2009.
The marriage between the network and the party has been almost entirely beneficial to both entities. Working together – brazenly, even explicitly so – has been a force multiplier for the GOP brand and message. It's not really a surprise that as the linked swimmers have started to go against the current of history, their connection puts them both at risk of drowning.
On the surface, the question appears to be: who will let go first? Jettisoning Morris and Palin suggests that Fox is loosening its grip and attempting to edge away from the Tea Party-based ideological rigor that weighed down the GOP in 2012. But almost simultaneously, Republicans have been speaking publicly about breaking away from their dependence on the network. As one strategist told Buzzfeed:
"Fox is great. But those viewers already agree with us … How else are different demographics going to get to know you if you never reach out to them?"
No matter who may be trying to end the marriage first, extricating themselves from the relationship won't be graceful: the habits of mental cohabitation are too difficult to break. Witness the coverage of Benghazi, where conservative outrage on the channel remains strident and forceful and in harmony with Republican officials, despite the willingness of most of the country to move on to matters closer to home. It's a positive feedback loop that spirals into irrelevance: Republicans pursue a conspiracy that only Fox viewers believe, based on reports only Fox airs, and new information gets hammered into a shape that fits the existing narrative.
And then, there are topics such as Obama's reliance on drone strikes. Here, libertarians and Obama opponents might find common cause with liberal civil rights activists, but the network's coverage is hamstrung by its Republican-led Obamacentric myopia. Rather than attack the notion of drone strikes on American citizens as in and of itself an alarming escalation in the always-suspect "war on terror", Sean Hannity and other hosts decry "Democrat hypocrisy" on the matter. Here's Hannity a colorful, typical outburst:
"Democrats, specifically Barack Obama, spent the first four years of his presidency literally just butchering George Bush day in and day out. Remember Gitmo and the vicious attacks the left hurled at Republicans? Well, it sure seems as if the shoe is now on the other foot when word of a confidential Justice Department memo leaked out that concludes that the US government can order the killing of American citizens if they are believed to be 'senior operational leaders' of al-Qaida or 'an associated force'."
I can assure Sean that there are some liberals who have carried their protests against Bush's policies (if not their "literal butchering" of him) right through to protests against Obama's expansion of them. I share a masthead with one! There's another who has the show opposite you on MSNBC. She's probably not available to go on your show, granted, but booking one of the 24 congressional Democrats who've protested the administration policy might pay off with an expanded group of allies, if not viewership.
That is, if Hannity's and the other Fox personalities' rather sudden interest in extra-judicial executions stemmed from a genuine concern about civil rights issues and not blind rage at the ascension of a popular Democratic president, and at the movement of the country leftward at the same pace and with the same apparent inevitability as continental drift.
This rage unites Fox and the Republicans more firmly than any conscious strategy and lies at the heart of the problem facing them both: it's not that they work together so much as they have the same goals. To be sure, Ailes has always been conscious of ratings and he's a businessman at his core, but the ratings have been so good for so long that ideology has animated decisions about programming. This applies not just to Fox, but to an entire industry of self-consciously conservative news outlets whose allegiance to the same set of ideas is undoing their worth as both news outlets and party platforms.
When we think of conservative media, Fox has so dominated that it is a synecdoche for the enterprise – an attitude that extends to outlets that properly should be competitors. Bloggers and radio talk show hosts, emerging properties such as the Daily Caller and Breitbart, take their cues from and feed themselves Fox. Working not just in ideological concert but even in an institutionally orchestrated manner (remember the big Caller scoop about Obama's "other race" speech?), they dilute their individual credibility even as they successfully propagate the message.
There is such a thing as liberal bias in the mainstream media, but it has a different expression – it is less of a concerted effort – because there is something spooky and conspiratorial about the way conservatives regard the very idea of media, and perhaps information more broadly: it is not a neutral element, ever. Everything is evidence for or against an idea. And because there is broad agreement on what ideas are best, there is no incentive to compete in a marketplace of ideas and no comprehension of why that might be necessary and useful.
This socialist paradise is falling apart.
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2013
I can now listen to music that was never aimed at me, from a time and a place I have no connection with – and even nearly enjoy it
Just before Christmas, I saw the early-80s Boston hardcore band Mission of Burma in a Shoreditch cellar, playing to a crowd of young people barely born this century, typically too inarticulate to explain exactly what had led them to a room I expected to be peopled exclusively by nostalgic fortysomethings. Last week, I enjoyed Roscoe Mitchell, saxophonist of the 60s free-jazzers the Art Ensemble of Chicago, at another Dalston hangout, alongside 17-year-olds and septuagenarians. From where I am standing, the traditional demographics of music consumption seem to be dissolving. Although, admittedly, where I am standing is just by the gents' toilets in a succession of the hippest venues in western Europe.
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CD reissues of unknown gems, and the internet-driven mass availability of everything instantly, mean pop culture's past is growing more rapidly than its present. Our sassiest sons and daughters are beyond our command, foraging far from whatever is drip-fed to them by broadcast media, and digging all manner of cross-generational guff. Your 12-year-old niece thinks that Searching for Sugar Man bloke, who had been working as a builder since 1971 until some hipster doofus put him in an arthouse documentary, is exactly the same as Bob Dylan because she discovered them both, for better or worse, on the same illegal download site, free of any illuminating cultural context or critical commentary.
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I've spent this week listening to a new, commercially available, download of a previously unreleased 1975 album by a lost Chicago metal band called Medusa, rescued from mouldy master-tapes of the group's only session, found abandoned in the drummer's basement, where perhaps they should have stayed. I don't know if I really like First Step Beyond, but it's fascinating to my saturated palate because it shouldn't be here. First Step Beyond's decontextualised Neanderthal heaviness confuses itself and everyone who comes into contact with it, like a caveman in a Disney film who gets transported to 60s suburbia, takes a dump in Mom's Tupperware and wears her diaphragm as a hat. The fact remains, the instant availability of everything ever means I am consuming something that was never aimed at me, from a time and a place I have no connection with, and yet I am nearly enjoying it.
Not everyone is buying into the theory of the kaleidoscoping of culture. Last year I curated a selection of the 20 best standups working today for a show called The Alternative Comedy Experience. It aims to be an alternative to the more straightforward fare of shows such as Live at the Apollo, and is. I went for a meeting with the channel's marketing people, who had not watched any of the 12 episodes, but were principally, and understandably, concerned about how to sell this strange product to their target audience of 18- to 32-year-olds, whose loyalty to the channel encourages advertisers to fund it.
Identifying the youngest performers in the programme, marketing wondered if they could be profiled in info-outlets popular with 18- to 32-year-olds, their faces stamped on to hallucinogenic plant food tablets, or perhaps grafted on to the bodies of the stars of the pornographic films that all young people stream continuously to their mobile phones. When I was in a double act during the early 90s, when comedy was first the new rock'n'roll, our live audience was composed exclusively of children, which was a godsend, as the fact that their parents had to accompany them sometimes pushed our live crowds up into triple figures. Nonetheless I floated to marketing the idea that, in my more recent experience of comedy, the availability of clips of our show's quality turns on YouTube meant their audiences needn't, and didn't, follow delineated demographic lines. And I suggested that younger people might not necessarily be looking to consume product manufactured by content providers of solely their own age group. But talk soon moved on to the show's coruscating liberal satirist Paul Sinha's appearance on the daytime quiz show The Chase, and whether this could be a way of getting our programme profiled in Puzzler magazine.
Meanwhile, check me out! I've had my headphones on while writing this and I am coming round to First Step Beyond. Now I'm grooving my near 45-year-old ass around in my office chair to Medusa's nine-minute Transient Amplitude, which sounds like a thin no-budget Hawkwind with two bicycle lights replacing the psychedelic light show, and a dead frog on a string instead of a massive naked dancing woman. (Hawkwind, by the way, are a once-despised 70s group loved only by hippy grandads whom young people are now encouraged to admire as space-rock pioneers.)
Indeed, this Transient Amplitude growler makes me think these Medusa cats might be quite good after all. I don't know if I'm allowed to like them, but there doesn't seem to be anyone in any position of authority telling me I shouldn't, so I am going to anyway. The guitar is all over the place though, wandering randomly between the speaker channels, like marketing people searching for demographic certainties in an age where everything that ever was is suddenly available to everyone.
The Alternative Comedy Experience begins on Comedy Central on 5 February at 11pm
Campaigner Gareth Morgan claims domestic cats in New Zealand are a menace to wildlife, and should be more strictly controlled. Cat lover Tom Cox fights his feline friends' corner
Last week Gareth Morgan, an economist and conservation campaigner, called for cats to be confined or eradicated from his native New Zealand to protect the wildlife. Meanwhile, in the US, a study published this week in the journal Nature found cats are killing more birds and mammals than previously thought. Writer Tom Cox, who shares his home with four cats, and Morgan discuss whether it's time we learned to live without our feline friends. Emine Saner listens in.
Gareth Morgan: In New Zealand, our endemic species are in a spot of bother. Originally there were no predators here, but we now have an enormous number of species that were introduced when the settlers came – weasels, stoats, ferrets, rats, mice and cats and dogs. And increasing numbers of our endemic species are driven to extinction, particularly ground-restricted birds. We're having to move them to islands. I funded a project on the Antipodes Islands to get rid of all the mice. Next I'm looking at New Zealand's third largest island, Stewart Island, where the three species causing the bother there are feral cats, possums and rats. In the course of the research, I thought about the role of cats on the mainland. All I've done is try to raise awareness of it, and this thing has gone viral.
Tom Cox: It has. I've written a couple of cat books, and on my Facebook page I've had endless people sending me links to newsclips about you. I suppose I'm talking from the perspective of someone who lives in Britain, and we have very different wildlife here. The thought of keeping my own cats indoors – that feels like I'd be their prison officer. I don't think I could do that. But it does break my heart when one of my cats gets a bird, which is quite rare – as a preventative measure, I put bells on their collars. It seems like the majority of the cats that are killing birds here are stray, so a less extreme way to control this would be to encourage people to neuter their cats. There are a ridiculous amount of stray and unwanted cats in this country, because people have been unaware of what having a cat involves, or it's been an ill-thought-out birthday present. My 17-year-old rescue cat was originally dumped on the hard shoulder of the motorway in a plastic bag with several of his brothers and sisters.
Emine Saner: Do you think owning a cat should be made more difficult?
TC: All cats should be chipped. A cat licence could work, definitely.
ES: The study in the US published this week showed stray and feral cats were the bigger problem than domestic cats, although these contributed to the killing of birds and mammals, too. Gareth, are you concerned about domestic cats as well?
GM: For me, it's all cats. I would love New Zealand to have no predators at all. Well, that's a bit extreme – what I mean is no non-confined predators. I'm fine with dogs on leashes. I'm happy with cats as long as they're confined. Our cat population is exploding, and it is ferals and strays who are free to roam.
TC: It's that question about what nature is. You could say it's not natural for cats to be here killing so many birds, but that's part of nature in itself – the fact that, however many thousands of years ago, we realised cats were good at hunting rats and mice, and it's evolved into this thing where they're now wonderful companions to people. It's part of the question of what is natural.
ES: Cats are responsible for the deaths of wildlife all over the world. Do you think other countries should consider getting rid of their cats?
GM: That's not for me to say. That's a national conversation. I did this to spark the national conversation in New Zealand – I didn't expect it to go all around the world.
TC: Since you started this, have you found cat lovers in New Zealand to be very belligerent?
GM: That would be an understatement. I've been on television for the last two nights talking about the SPCA [New Zealand's Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals] – they've been doing trap-neuter-release of stray cats. They're euthanising fewer and fewer cats, and releasing more into the free-to-range environment, and they're building up the colonies. They say it doesn't matter because the cats are neutered, and my response is that they are not neutering enough to cap the population growth. I've offered them a $5 bounty per cat if they trap wandering cats and, if it is found to have no owner – if they're not chipped – then I want them to euthanise those cats, not release them into the wild.
TC: That word, euthanise, gives me a shiver. I'm thinking of a cat I had who turned into the most lovely, sunny creature. He had been in a rescue centre that was just about to euthanise him, and they had no justification for this apart from the fact he was feral. Within a few months he had become a loving domestic cat, and it's so awful to think that would have happened to him.
GM: The problem is that you get swamped with the numbers of cats, that's the issue. Let me put this another way – we do this with stray dogs, but not with cats. Why the discrimination? I think it comes down to the strength of the cat lobby.
TC: There's the cliche of the crazy cat lady, and people who don't like cats say cat-lovers are weirdos. That's not true – cat lovers are mostly people with a lot of compassion, but there is a minuscule percentage of people who are a little bit over-the-top about cats. I imagine that would be a challenge you might face, Gareth. Have you ever had a cat?
GM: Absolutely. We have cats in the family now – my daughter has one. But it is confined, and that's the issue, really.
ES: Could you see a point where cats become indoor-only pets?
TC: That's never the way I've lived with cats, apart from a short period when I lived in a flat in London. I didn't feel they were happy. Sometimes I feel, when I meet some people's indoor cats, they seem a bit dopey, like they're not properly having the life they should.
GM: I suppose I'd put it another way: do we wait until all our endemic species are extinct and then wonder what we've done? That's up for the public to decide. There is a trade-off here. I'm asking for them to be confined. We're at a tipping point in New Zealand. We have the highest rate of cat-ownership in the world – 48% of households have one or more cats. It's a different situation elsewhere, which is why I'm reluctant to translate the New Zealand experience anywhere else. What I'm advocating, policy-wise, for local councils is to trap [wandering] cats, and if they're chipped, they go back to the owner. Whether they fine the owner or not – that's none of my business. I'm not talking about any euthanasia of owned cats.
ES: But you have said that people shouldn't replace their cats when they die naturally?
GM: There are people who would find it far too hard to confine them, either physically, or they wouldn't feel right about it. In those instances, I'm saying make this cat your last, because you owe it to the New Zealand fauna not to let your cat roam.
TC: Even as someone who has had cats all his life, I could imagine making that decision, say if I lived in a different country or a different area of Britain where there was so much bird life. But I remember the old lady who lived across the road from me – you could see the companionship she had with her cat, and how much better it made her life. To say someone like that shouldn't have that companionship for the remaining years of her life, that's quite harsh.
ES: Do you think cats are being unfairly scapegoated? Isn't the bigger threat to wildlife human-made habitat destruction, pollution and so on?
TC: I'm sure we're far more responsible for harm to the world's wildlife than cats could ever be, even if it's just in the form of not having our cats neutered, and contributing to the amount of hungry stray cats who will kill wildlife. There is definitely a quite disturbing victimisation of cats in this country among those who hate them, which seems like a superstitious hangover from the days of torturing innocent women and their so-called "familiars" for alleged witchcraft. Maybe it's just all a manifestation of the worry people have that cats will one day take over the world.
• Gareth Morgan's website is garethsworld.com/catstogo. Tom Cox is the author of Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man, and Talk to the Tail: Adventures in Cat Ownership and Beyond (Simon & Schuster)
Harry J Enten: If the GOP has decided to embrace immigration reform to bolster its electoral chances with Hispanic voters, it should think again
Republicans may feel electoral pressure to vote for comprehensive immigration reform. They shouldn't – at least in the short term. Latino voters are Democrats, and Republicans would gain little even by making a 180-degree turn on immigration reform in the next 15 years. Here are five reasons why.
1. ¡es la economía, estúpido!
Latinos didn't vote for President Obama because Mitt Romney was seen as insensitive on immigration. According to a Fox Latino poll before the election, only 6% of Latinos said that immigration was the most important issue to their vote. A Latino Decisions (LD) election eve poll allowed multiple answers to issues that were important and, still, 65% did not say immigration was important to them.
Latinos instead cared about the economy. About 50% said the economy was the most important issue to their vote. By a 75% to 19% margin, Latinos are more likely to believe in a bigger government, with more services, to a smaller one. President Obama got 75% of the Latino vote in the LD election eve poll – a perfect match.
2. Latinos are liberal
Latinos have said openly they won't change their vote because of immigration policy. Only 31% of Latinos in the LD survey said they would be more likely to vote GOP, if the Republican party took a leadership role in immigration reform. A full 58% said they didn't know or it would have no effect, while 11% said it would actually make them less likely to vote Republican.
The reason is that Latinos are 9pt more likely to say they are liberal than the general population. Most of that has to do with the economy, but even on social issues, Latinos, especially second- and third-generation, are no more conservative than the general population. In fact, second- and third-generation Latinos are more likely to believe abortion should be legal and homosexuality accepted by society than the general population.
3. Even "Latino-friendly" GOP politicians never did that well
The best Republican performances among Latinos have still been a big bag of "meh". Ronald Reagan only got 37% of the Latino vote in 1984, despite winning 59% of the overall vote. Much has been made of George W Bush's exit performance with Latinos, but it's important to remember that pre-election polls showed Bush in the low 30s. In fact, a Latino-specific election day poll, with a high number of Latino voters, pegged Bush's Latino support at only 35%.
The "worst" Republican showings among Latinos haven't differed much. Bob Dole got 23% of the two-party vote in 1996, which is the same as Mitt Romney in 2012. This narrow band of difference tends to follow the voting patterns of African Americans and American Jews (staple demographic groups in the American electorate) in the past 30 years. We also haven't seen much movement among these groups – even with extensive voter outreach.
4. Demographics don't swing elections
Even if Republicans did bring up their percentage of the Latino vote, it wouldn't make a great difference nationwide. Say Mitt Romney won George W Bush's percentage of the Latino vote, he still would have lost the nationwide vote by 1.4pt. The reason is that the Latino vote still only makes up 9-10% of the vote in the national exit polls, and slightly less in most other surveys.
The rate of growth of the Latino vote nationwide has been relatively slow. A solid estimate matching past trends from David Broockman and Ethan Roeder put the Latino vote growing about 0.6pt as a portion of the electorate every presidential election through 2024. Obama's margin of victory would be just 0.7pt higher according to projected demographics for 2024. That puts an onus on Republicans to win more Latino votes, though it's not as large an imperative as one might assume.
5. Most Latino voters don't live in swing states
Most of the growth in the Latino vote is occurring in non-swing states. California and Texas are where most the Latino voters are and will continue to be. California will be blue for the foreseeable future, and Texas isn't going to turn blue for another decade and a half. Arizona is an intriguing state for Democrats, though the recent Republican turn of the white vote makes it a non-swing state.
The only swing states in which Latinos make up the same or a greater percentage of the electorate than nationally are Colorado, Florida, and Nevada. A modest improvement for Republicans in these states could make a difference in a close election. That's nothing to sneeze at, but the majority of swing states like Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia are more likely to be determined by African-American and non-Hispanic white voters.
All in all, Republican appeals to Latino voters are not likely to win the party many more votes in elections. That's the bad news for the party of Lincoln.
The good news for Republicans is that Latino voters are, and will continue to be, only a slowly growing portion of the American electorate. And by the time Latinos make up 15% or more of the electorate, in 30 to 40 years, most of them will be second-generation or beyond. As Jamelle Bouie points out, they are likely to assimilate in similar ways to Italian and Irish immigrants before them. When that happens, Latinos' stances on a whole range of issues will evolve.
© Guardian News and Media 2013
[Latino with an eyebrow raised via Shutterstock]
History should teach us that for today's technology titans, the only way is down.
Nothing lasts forever: if history has any lesson for us, it is this. It's a thought that comes from rereading Paul Kennedy's magisterial tome, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, in which he shows that none of the great nation-states or empires of history – Rome; imperial Spain in 1600; France in either its Bourbon or Bonapartist manifestations; the Dutch republic in 1700; Britain in its imperial glory – succeeded in maintaining its global ascendancy for long.
What has this got to do with technology? Well, it provides us with a useful way of thinking about two of the tech world's great powers. The first is Apple. The past week saw a veritable torrent of hysterical reaction to its quarterly results, coupled with fevered speculation about its future. The globe has been hypnotised for years by Apple's metamorphosis from a failing computer manufacturer into a corporate giant that, on some days, is now the most valuable company in the world, with bigger cash reserves than the annual GDP of some countries. But as with all inexorable growth curves, the question on every commentator's lips is: has Apple peaked?
If you think "hysterical" is a bit harsh, then ponder this. Although Apple did not sell the 50m iPhones that had been forecast for the quarter (it "only" shifted 47.8m) and sales of its Mac computers were down somewhat, nevertheless the quarterly results mean that in 2012 Apple earned more in the year than any other corporation, ever. And even the quarter's supposedly disappointing earnings of $13.1bn were the fourth largest of all time, according to the same metric. And the reaction of the stock market to this news? The share price dropped 10% in after-hours trading.
Then there's the social network Facebook with its billion users, which is likewise the focus of much hyperventilating comment. Recently, the Mark Zuckerberg empire launched its latest deadly weapon with the catchy name of Graph Search – as in "social graph". Facebook's new tool is just an algorithm that finds information from within one's network of friends and supplements the results with hits from Microsoft's Bing search engine, but to read some of the commentary on it you'd think that Zuckerberg & co had invented either a perpetual motion machine or a through-ticket to hell.
"Facebook's new search engine attempts to build walls around the internet and keep its horde within its gates," wrote the webmaster of a respected online magazine. "It's a nightmare and it will probably work."
Actually, it's Facebook's latest attempt to become the AOL de nos jours. And, in the end, it will fail for the same reason that AOL's attempt to corral users within its walled garden failed: the wider internet is just too diverse, innovative and interesting. But because Facebook looms so large in the public consciousness at the moment, it's difficult to keep it in perspective. Which is why Kennedy's book makes such salutary reading.
So what we need to remember as we wade through the current overheated commentary on Apple and Facebook is that nothing lasts forever. I have been in this racket long enough to remember a time when Microsoft was at least as dominant and scary as these two companies are now. Spool forward a couple of decades and Microsoft is still around, but actually it's an ailing giant – profitable but no longer innovative, trying (and so far failing) to get a foothold in the post-PC, mobile, cloud-based world.
Although the eclipsing of Apple and Facebook is inevitable, the timing and causes of their eventual declines will differ. Apple's current strength is that it actually makes things that people are desperate to buy and on which the company makes huge margins. The inexorable logic of the hardware business is that those margins will decline as the competition increases, so Apple will become less profitable over the longer term. What will determine its future is whether it can come up with new, market-creating products such as the iPod, iPhone and iPad.
Facebook, on the other hand, makes nothing. It just provides an online service that, for the moment, people seem to value. But in order to make money out of those users and satisfy the denizens of Wall Street, it has to become ever more intrusive and manipulative. It's condemned, in other words, to intrusive overstretch. Which is why, in the end, it will become a footnote in the history of the internet. Just like Microsoft, in fact. Sic transit gloria.
Can Republicans get their act together before Obama 'pulverizes' the right?
Perhaps trying to eke some mojo out of the city where the Democrats held their successful convention last year, the Republican National Committee came out of a three-day meeting in Charlotte, N.C., this week with a blueprint for what the dispirited party hopes is a way out of the post-election weeds…
The inauguration of a president is one of those spectacles of democracy that can make us remember we’re part of something big and enduring. So for a few hours this past Monday the pomp and circumstance inspired us to think that government of, by, and for the people really is just that, despite the predatory threats that stalk it.
But the mood didn’t last. Every now and then, as the cameras panned upward, the Capitol dome towering over the ceremony was a reminder of something the good feeling of the moment couldn’t erase. It’s the journalist’s curse to have a good time spoiled by the reality beyond the pageantry. Just a couple of days before the inaugural festivities, The New York Times published some superb investigative reporting by the team of Eric Lipton and Kevin Sack, and their revelations were hard to forget, even at a time of celebration.
The story told us of a pharmaceutical giant called Amgen and three senators so close to it they might as well be entries on its balance sheet: Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (KY), Democratic Senator Max Baucus (MT), chair of the Senate Finance Committee, and that powerful committee’s ranking Republican, Orrin Hatch (UT). A trio of perpetrators who treat the United States Treasury as if it were a cash-and-carry annex of corporate America.
The Times story described how Amgen got a huge hidden gift from unnamed members of Congress and their staffers. They slipped an eleventh hour loophole into the New Year’s Eve deal that kept the government from going over the fiscal cliff. When the sun rose in the morning, there it was, a richly embroidered loophole for Amgen that will cost taxpayers a cool half a billion dollars.
Amgen is the world’s largest biotechnology firm, a drug maker that sells a variety of medications. The little clause secretly sneaked into the fiscal cliff bill gives the company two more years of relief from Medicare cost controls for certain drugs used by patients who are on kidney dialysis, including a pill called Sensipar, manufactured by Amgen.
The provision didn’t mention Amgen by name, but according to reporters Lipton and Sack, the news that it had been tucked into the fiscal cliff deal “was so welcome, that the company’s chief executive quickly relayed it to investment analysts.” Tipping them off, it would seem, to a jackpot in the making.
Amgen has 74 lobbyists on its team in Washington and lobbied hard for that loophole, currying favor with friends at the White House and on Capitol Hill. The Times reporters traced its “deep financial and political ties” to Baucus, McConnell and Hatch, “who hold heavy sway over Medicare payment policy.”
All three have received hefty campaign donations from the company whose bottom line mysteriously just got padded at taxpayer expense. Since 2007, Amgen employees and its political action committee have contributed nearly $68,000 to Senator Baucus, $73,000 to Senator McConnell’s campaigns, and $59,000 to Senator Hatch.
And lo and behold, among those 74 Amgen lobbyists are the former chief of staff to Senator Baucus and the former chief of staff to Senator McConnell. You get the picture: Two guys nurtured at public expense, paid as public servants, disappear through the gold-plated revolving door of Congress and presto, return as money changers in the temple of crony capitalism.
Inside to welcome them is a current top aide to Senator Hatch, one who helped weave this lucrative loophole. He used to work as a health policy analyst for -- you guessed it -- Amgen.
So the trail winds deeper into the sordid swamp beneath that great Capitol dome, a sinkhole where shame has all but disappeared. As reporters Lipton and Sack remind us, just weeks before this backroom betrayal of the public interest by elected officials and the mercenaries they have mentored, Amgen pleaded guilty to fraud. Look it up: fraud means trickery, cheating and duplicity. Amgen agreed to pay $762 million in criminal and civil penalties; the company had been caught illegally marketing another one of its drugs.
The fact that their puppet master had been the subject of fines and a massive federal investigation mattered not to its servile pawns in the Senate, where pomp and circumstance are but masks for the brute power of money.
Rep. Peter Welch, Vermont’s Democratic congressman, has just introduced bipartisan legislation to repeal the half billion-dollar giveaway to Amgen. Its co-sponsors include Republican Rep. Richard Hanna of New York and Democrat Representatives Jim Cooper of Tennessee and Bruce Braley of Iowa.
The Amgen deal “confirms the American public’s worst suspicions of how Congress operates,” Representative Welch told us this week. “As the nation’s economy teetered on the edge of a Congressional-created fiscal cliff, lobbyists for a private, for-profit company seized an opportunity to feed at the public trough. It’s no wonder cockroaches and root canals are more popular than Congress.”
In his inaugural address, Barack Obama said the commitments we make to each other through Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security don’t make us a nation of takers. But the actions of Amgen and its cronies under the dome on Capitol Hill show who the real takers are — not those who look to government for support in old age and hard times but the ones at the top whose avarice and lust for profit compel them to take as much as they can from that government at the expense of everyone else.
Originally published by Moyers & Company on BillMoyers.com
["Bribe Money" on Shutterstock]
[Note: The headline of the piece originally said "half a million."]
During Tuesday night's debate, Donald Trump, who has gone pure fascist, once again escalated his efforts to scare people out of voting. He encouraged his followers to engage in voter intimidation under the guise of "poll watching," and told armed hate groups to "stand by." Trump also floated a number of baseless conspiracy theories about "voter fraud" that are clearly designed to discourage voting and rationalize legal efforts to stop votes from being counted.
Meanwhile, Trump's postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, is still slowing down the mail in what looks like a bid to make sure that many mail-in ballots miss election deadlines.
It's also clear that Trump, with the assistance of his principal stooge, Attorney General Bill Barr, plans to challenge vote-counting after Election Day, knowing full well that it may take a week or more to count all the mail-in ballots.
Trump can't win a free and fair election, and he knows it. So he's doing everything in his power to keep Americans from having one. As the New York Times reported on Thursday morning, Republicans, in their efforts to save Trump, are using every dirty trick in the book to stop people from voting.
Times are scary. It's understandable to feel demoralized, but it is more important than ever not to give into that feeling. Trump and Republicans want you to feel despair. Despair leads to inaction, which makes it a lot easier for Trump to pull this off.
Instead, it's time to get angry, and to use that anger to propel you into action. Trump may want to steal the election, but wanting isn't having. He can be defeated. He will likely be defeated — as long as everyone does their part to stop him.
With that in mind, here are five things you can do, starting today, to fight back and keep Trump from stealing this election.
1. Don't panic. Trump makes a lot of noise, but at heart, the man is a simpering coward and incompetent to boot, as his business record and pandemic management shows. While Trump has competent people working on his behalf, he is still the head of this effort and he is still an idiot who thought bleach injections sounded like a good idea.
"A lot of people don't have faith in the system for obvious reasons, but there is a constitutional process that will take place," regardless of what bad actors may insinuate, Sylvia Albert, the director of voting and elections at Common Cause, told Salon.
Trump is engaging in penny-ante stuff like tinkering with the mail because he can't do what the dictators he admires, like Russian President Vladimir Putin, do — which is simply fix to elections. His machinations may make voting more difficult, but he still won't be able to stop most people, if they stay focused.
As George Packer of The Atlantic notes, "For the election to succeed, we have to think and act as if it will succeed," adding, "Stealing an election remains extremely difficult, and almost impossible if the vote isn't close."
The good news is that Trump's efforts to use the courts to stop mail-in voting have been "uniformly unsuccessful," the Brennan Center explains.
Don't let Trump's chest-thumping discourage you. He isn't as powerful as he pretends to be. He is so incompetent that, like a villain in a James Bond movie, he's already revealed the details of his nefarious scheme to his opponents. Don't be afraid to vote, and don't allow other people in your life to be discouraged by fear.
2. Vote! Early and in person, if possible. "The most important thing voters can do right now is make a plan and make sure that their vote counts," Albert said, explaining that voters need to check their registration now and not wait until it's too late.
Democrats encouraged voters to apply for mail-in ballots early in the cycle, due to the pandemic. Trump has exploited that by threatening legal challenges to those ballots and slowing down the mail. So folks should consider voting early and in person, if that's an available option. If you wear a mask, voting early is relatively safe, since polling locations shouldn't be overly crowded.
For those who already applied for a mail-in ballot, this switch can feel fraught. The good news is that many states have what is called "in-person absentee voting," where people can turn in their mail-in ballots at early voting locations. A group called The Early Vote has an Instagram page up explaining, state by state, how early voting and in-person absentee voting works. Check out their page and then follow up with your local election office to see how you can vote.
The sooner you get your vote in, the safer it is!
3. Volunteer to get out the vote — and consider focusing your efforts on Florida. After voting, the most important thing you can do is help other people vote. Join a phone or text bank effort to get out the vote. If you live in a swing state, connect with local organizations that have voting turnout efforts. Or connect with a campaign you support — they all love phone bank volunteers, and it's something you can do from home with a cell phone.
One great way to help is to sign up through Vote Save America, which is run by the crew at the podcast Pod Save America. Their Adopt a State program connects volunteers to efforts in specific states to get out the vote, allowing people to focus on swing states in particular.
But I'd like to specifically recommend that you adopt Florida. Unlike other swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, Florida starts certifying mail-in ballots 22 days before the election, meaning there's a strong chance that state's results will be tabulated and announced on election night. If Trump loses Florida (and the state gets called early), that will gut his entire plan to pretend he won prematurely and fight to stop counting the vote in swing states. (Realistically, if Trump loses Florida it's probably the harbinger of a Biden landslide and we can all go to bed.)
4. Volunteer to be an election protector. Volunteers are needed to make sure everyone who wants to vote gets to vote, without being intimidated. Common Cause has a nonpartisan election protection program and needs volunteers to man phone lines and work as poll watchers. Much of the work can be done from home.
Another option is to sign up with the Frontline Election Defenders, a group set up by an alliance of progressive organizations, including the Working Families Party and the Movement for Black Lives Electoral Justice Project.
If you are a military veteran, have legal training or have professional skills in de-escalation, such as social work or psychological training, let these groups know. They might have special use for your skills in the coming weeks.
5. Prepare yourself now for the post-election fight for all votes to be counted. It's tough to say what the situation will look like after Election Day. Organizers for progressive or election integrity groups are planning for a broad spectrum of possibilities, and the situation is very fluid. It might be that Trump's noise-making amounts to nothing and Joe Biden is certified the winner quickly. Or it might be that there's a fight to count votes in the swing states. What exactly will happen, much less the when and where, is simply unknowable.
With all that said, it's good to start planning right now to be ready to spring into action if protesters or volunteers are needed to protect the vote-counting after Election Day. This is especially true if you live in or near a blue city in a swing state, such as Detroit, Miami, Milwaukee or Philadelphia, that could become the center of Republican efforts to interfere with vote-counting. Or if you live in a state like Pennsylvania, where Republicans are exploring the possibility of using false accusations of "fraud" to decertify the vote count, and might need to be overwhelmed with nonviolent protests to change their minds.
The No. 1 thing you can do to prepare is connect with groups, through social media or emails lists, such as Color of Change, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, MoveOn, People's Action or the Working Families Party. Look into local social justice organizations if you live in a swing state. Mobilization of protesters will likely happen through social media, and knowing who to turn to if things get hairy will be crucial for moving fast and putting bodies where they need to be to protect the vote.
Whatever happens, the most important thing to understand is the power of nonviolent direct action. Trump and his minions want violence so they can blame the left, play the victim and, most importantly, declare that they're ones who will maintain "law and order" and are therefore justified in their efforts to steal the election. The best way to defeat that strategy is offer the public a clear contrast between the peaceful supporters of democracy and the violent right-wing goons that Trump is encouraging.
The good news is that experts believe it's still unlikely that it will come to protests in the streets. The decentralized election system is simply too hard for Trump to control, especially since he's so lazy and incompetent. His legal efforts to keep people from using mail-in ballots are failing. Mostly, what he has is a big microphone and a deep desire to scare people out of voting.
Donald Trump is trying to terrify Americans out of holding an election, and into allowing him to hold onto power by illegitimate means. But this is still a democracy — and we can keep it, as long as we stay resolved and refuse to let his ugly bluster scare us into letting it go.
Consuming the wrong news can kill you. That’s the fundamental insight of a powerful new study about the impact of watching either Sean Hannity’s news show Hannity or Tucker Carlson’s Tucker Carlson Tonight on Fox News: one saved lives, and the other resulted in more deaths, due to how each of these hosts covered COVID-19.
This research illustrates the danger of falling for health-related misinformation due to dangerous judgment errors known as cognitive biases. These mental blindspots impact all areas of our life, from health to politics and even shopping, as a survey by a comparison purchasing website reveals. We need to be wary of cognitive biases in order to make wise decisions about our health and our politics to survive and thrive in this pandemic.
Hannity and Tucker Carlson Tonight are the top two US cable news shows, both on Fox News. Hannity and Carlson share very similar ideological profiles, and have similar viewership demographics, older adults who lean conservative.
One notable difference, however, relates to how both approached coverage of COVID-19, especially in February and early March 2020. Researchers at the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics at University of Chicago decided to study the health consequences of this difference.
Carlson took the threat of COVID-19 seriously early onward, more so than most media figures - on the right or left. Already on January 28, way earlier than most mainstream media venues, Carlson spent a significant part of his show highlighting the serious dangers of a global pandemic. He continued his warnings throughout February. On February 25, Carlson told his viewers: "In this country, more than a million would die.”
By contrast, Hannity was one of the more extreme Fox News hosts in downplaying COVID-19, frequently comparing it to the flu. On February 27, he said "And today, thankfully, zero people in the United States of America have died from the coronavirus. Zero. Now, let's put this in perspective. In 2017, 61,000 people in this country died from influenza, the flu. Common flu." Moreover, Hannity explicitly politicized COVID-19, claiming that “[Democrats] are now using the natural fear of a virus as a political weapon. And we have all the evidence to prove it, a shameful politicizing, weaponizing of, yes, the coronavirus.”
However, after President Donald Trump declared COVID-19 a national emergency in mid-March, Hannity - and other Fox News hosts - changed their tune to align more with Carlson’s, acknowledging the serious dangers of the virus.
The Becker Friedman Institute researchers investigated whether the difference in coverage impacted behaviors. They conducted a nationally representative survey of over 1,000 people who watch Fox News at least once a week, evaluating both viewership and behavior changes in response to the pandemic, such as social distancing, improving hygiene, and so on.
Next, the study compared behavior changes to viewing patterns. The researchers found that “viewers of Hannity changed their behavior five days later than viewers of other shows (p < 0.001), while viewers of Tucker Carlson Tonight changed their behavior three days earlier than viewers of other shows (p < 0.01); the difference in coefficients is also highly statistically significant (p < 0.01).”
Did these behavior changes lead to health consequences? Indeed.
The paper compared the popularity of each show in specific counties to data on COVID-19 infections and deaths. Controlling for a wide variety of potential confounding variables, the study found that areas of the country where Hannity is more popular had more cases and deaths two weeks later, the time that it would take for the virus to start manifesting itself.
Here’s what the paper found: “Effects on cases start to rise in late February and peak in mid-to-late March before starting to decline, consistent with the convergence in coronavirus coverage between Hannity and Carlson. A one standard deviation greater viewership difference is associated with approximately 2 percent more cases on March 7 (p < 0.01), 5 percent more cases on March 14 (p < 0.01), and 11 percent more cases on March 21 (p < 0.01)... Deaths follow a similar trajectory on a two-week lag.”
The authors concluded that “Our findings indicate that provision of misinformation in the early stages of a pandemic can have important consequences for health outcomes.”
It’s critically important to recognize that the study’s authors did not seek to score any ideological points, given the broadly similar ideological profiles of the two hosts. The researchers simply explored the impact of accurate and inaccurate information about COVID-19 on the viewership. Clearly, the false information had deadly consequences.
Such outcomes stem from excessive trust that our minds tend to give those we see as having authority, such as media figures that we follow. This excessive trust - and consequent obedience - is called the “authority bias.”
When Hannity told his audience to ignore concerns about COVID-19, he led many to delay taking necessary safety measures by five days compared to the average Fox News consumer, with corresponding infection and death outcomes. By contrast, Carlson telling his audience to protect themselves led to them changing their behavior three days earlier.
A related mental pattern is called “emotional contagion,” where we are unwittingly infected with the emotions of those we see as leaders. Emotions can motivate action even in the absence of formal authority, and are particularly important for those with informal authority, including thought leaders like Carlson and Hannity.
Thus, Hannity telling his audience that Democrats used anxiety of the virus as a political weapon led his audience to reject fears around the pandemic, even though fear of the virus and consequent behavioral changes was the right response to COVID-19. Carlson’s highlighting of the deadly nature of this illness motivated his audience to take actions.
Authority bias and emotional contagion facilitate the spread of misinformation and its deadly consequences, at least when we don’t take the steps necessary to figure out the facts. Such steps can range from following best fact-checking practices to getting your information from news sources that commit publicly to being held accountable for truthfulness. Remember, the more important and impactful such information may be for your life, the more important it is to take the time to evaluate it accurately to help you make the best decisions.
Donald Trump went into the first debate with a gargantuan challenge: He had to do something that turned around his sagging poll numbers to bring in voters, some of whom he lost to Joe Biden and desperately needs.
This article was originally published at The Signorile Report
Joe Biden’s challenge was simply surviving the onslaught, intact. He more than achieved that while Trump more than failed at his challenge. Trump alienated everyone with his ugly interruptions and meltdowns — even though most of his own supporters will vote for him nonetheless.
Trump thinks he did really well, even as many Republican leaders and Fox News pundits do not — which could change his mind over the next few days as Trump injects himself with Fox News opinions in the way he urged people to mainline bleach to cure coronavirus. He might try to modify his approach — just as he was forced to try to walk back his promotion of white supremacy but ultimately still failed to condemn it — but we know that won’t go far. Trump doesn’t have much knowledge, and has accomplished nothing. He simply can’t have a traditional debate.
And the Commission on Presidential Debates said it will make “structural” changes to the next debates so there is more ability to control Trump’s temper tantrums. There’s even talk of having the ability to shut the mic off.
Trump’s team is already balking at this, claiming it’s changing the rules midstream. I doubt they’ll agree to it. So the commission will either do very little to make changes, or Trump will back out, having an excuse and claiming it was all “rigged.” It’s something he’d rather do — even though he told himself after the debate that he did a great job — because his heart wasn’t in this and it’s definitely not in doing two more debates.
Trump used to love debates — back in 2016 when he berated his GOP opponents (all of whom were pretty feeble) with twisted lies and insulting nicknames in the primaries, and got a lot of laughs from his fans. He went into the general election debates with that same attitude, taunting Hillary Clinton, and trying to whip up his base into humiliating her. Clinton won all the debates hands down. But for Trump, who had little to lose (he wasn’t president then, obviously, as he is now), and was closer with her in the polls than he is with Biden, there was a confidence and a bravado at those debates that was lacking in his first debate with Biden.
Yes, he was raging mad and out-of-control at this first debate with Biden, but, as I noted on my SiriusXM show yesterday, that’s different than the at-ease kind of contempt, hateful sarcasm and mockery he engages in at his rallies, always getting a hideous laugh from the crowd. He went into this debate with enormous pressure and he is very scared. So much is on the line. The possibility of investigations of his businesses, ramifications for him and his family — even prison — loom.
Unlike his rallies, the goal of this debate wasn’t to whip up a crowd of cult-followers, but rather to take down this person, Joe Biden, who Trump truly doesn’t understand. He can’t get through his head why Biden is beating him — seeing Biden as dull and lackluster — because he doesn’t grasp how much people despise him and want stability in government and true leadership.
More than that, Biden’s decency and empathy — his humanness — are kryptonite to Trump, sending him into a haze of defensiveness. So Trump went into the debate determined to engage in a blistering assault, hoping he could throw Biden off and make him unable to use his kryptonite. It didn’t work — and only brought Trump down further because he didn’t even entertain his hard-core fan base (no matter how much they’ll try to tell you otherwise) and just turned off everyone.
He truly seemed weak, overcompensating with yelling and crosstalk, and it was clear the anger was an expression of his desperation. He didn’t want to be there and he doesn’t want to do more debates.
So Trump’s campaign is likely looking for a reason to drop out of further debates even as Biden said he’s ready to continue on. But it really won’t matter, because people were so disgusted with this first debate that many won’t watch another. The vast majority of voters — more than 90% of voters — have made up their minds. Anyone who hadn’t, probably either decided after the first debate — for Biden — or, if still undecided, isn’t going to be changed by debates. It will have to be something else that makes them decide.
We’re less than four weeks from the election, and Trump missed a big opportunity to turn things around — and that’s hurting the GOP in Senate races and in the House too. A Quinnipiac University poll of South Carolina has Trump and Biden tied, and Senator Lindsey Graham tied with his challenger, Jaime Harrison. Alaska is tied between Trump and Biden in one poll, and Texas is now a battleground along with Arizona. Ohio and Iowa are now in the toss-up category, when Trump won them handily in 2016.
We have to just keep pushing forward, not take anything for granted, and try to get the biggest wins possible. That goes for the presidency as well as Congress, particularly with Trump trying to steal the election.
The worse things becomes for Trump, the more dangerous he will be and the more he’ll try to subvert the election. So, we have to remain alert, and be ready for anything.
So what was happening while we were distracted by Trump’s debate performance?
First of all, his tax returns, publicized by the New York Times since Sunday, have taken a back seat to his support for the white supremacist gang the Proud Boys and his attacks on a peaceful election.
Second, coronavirus news is not getting the airtime it should. More than a million people around the world have died of Covid-19, including more than 205,000 Americans. Florida is seeing a surge in new cases since Governor Ron DeSantis signed an executive order allowing restaurants and bars to reopen. The Midwest is also in a surge, with record numbers of new cases in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Kansas. Wisconsin hospitals are nearing capacity and South Dakota has the highest rate of spread in the country. Experts worry about a dramatic rise in cases as cold weather settles in.
Third, Brad Parscale, Trump’s former campaign manager, left the Trump campaign today after his involuntary hospitalization for psychiatric evaluation over the weekend after threats to self-harm. He cited his need “to focus on my family and get help dealing with the overwhelming stress.” Parscale knows the secrets of the Trump campaign since the heady days of 2016, and the family is reportedly worried he will begin to cooperate with law enforcement about possible campaign finance violations. Campaign staff is scrubbing his presence from the campaign’s website.
These three big stories are on the back burner because last night Trump told white supremacist thugs to “Stand Back and Stand By” before saying that “somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left,” a statement observers note sounds much like a precursor to calling them to action against those he perceives to be enemies.
He also called for “poll watchers” to prevent fraudulent ballots and warned that Democrats are going to steal the election from him. He said he expects the election results will take “months” as the campaign challenges mail-in ballots, and that he hopes the case will end up in the Supreme Court.
Today, it feels like Trump’s embrace of white supremacist gangs and his open declaration that he is planning an assault on our democratic process was a turning point for the campaign, and for the nation.
The president reportedly is happy with the way the evening went, believing his supporters love to see him go on the attack. Today he has complained that he “was debating two people last night,” but that he had won and it was “fun.”
&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fbillmoyers.com%2Fstory%2Fthe-debate-heard-round-the-world%2FTrump’s team is dutifully echoing his talking points. Campaign spokeswoman Thea McDonald told the Washington Post that “Poll watchers are critical to ensuring the fairness of any election, and President Trump’s volunteer poll watchers will be trained to ensure all rules are applied equally, all valid ballots are counted, and all Democrat rule breaking is called out…. And if fouls are called, the Trump campaign will go to court to enforce the laws, as rightfully written by state legislatures, to protect every voter’s right to vote. President Trump and his team will be ready to make sure polls are run correctly, securely, and transparently as we work to deliver the free and fair election Americans deserve.”
This high-minded language is a weird echo of the language white supremacists used in the American South after the Civil War, as they drove Black voters and white Republicans from the polls and turned the region into a one-party state for generations.
Neo-Nazis and right-wing thugs are thrilled they have a fellow traveler in the White House. “I got shivers,” Andrew Anglin, the founder of the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer, wrote Wednesday. “I still have shivers. He is telling the people to stand by. As in: Get ready for war.”
But not everyone was thrilled with Trump’s performance. Focus groups of women were turned off by his bullying, and his male supporters thought he interrupted too much. An adviser called it “a disaster.” Politico’s chief political correspondent Tim Alberta thought Trump looked exhausted and “behaved like cornered prey.” The Commission on Presidential Debates is reworking its rules to try to prevent another spectacle like last night. Foreign observers were “aghast,” according to an AP report; Kenyan commentator Patrick Gathara wrote: “This debate would be sheer comedy if it wasn’t such a pitiful and tragic advertisement for U.S. dysfunction.”
Even within the White House people were dismayed. “It’s nuts…” “total lunacy,” an official and a staffer told Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman. A prominent Republican added: “Trump didn’t win over any voters, and he pissed off a lot of people.”
&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fbillmoyers.com%2Fstory%2Fthe-debate-heard-round-the-world%2FTrump’s people are trying to walk back Trump’s support for the Proud Boys. They are also trying to convince him to temper his future performances. Dana Bash from CNN reported today that “A source familiar with the president’s debate prep tells CNN that they wanted him to be aggressive, but not act like Jason from Friday the 13th.” Republican lawmakers were largely silent today about Trump’s performance, although Susan Collins (R-ME) agreed that Trump should have condemned white supremacist gangs after she first tried to blame both sides for the debacle.
&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fbillmoyers.com%2Fstory%2Fthe-debate-heard-round-the-world%2FAt his rally tonight in Minnesota, Trump said Biden is cancelling the next two debates, although Biden has said he’ll be there. Trump is also talking about getting rid of a term limit on the presidency and serving another 8, 12, or 16 years.
&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fbillmoyers.com%2Fstory%2Fthe-debate-heard-round-the-world%2FAmericans who care about our electoral process are now trying to prepare for crisis at the polls. “This is a blatant attempt at voter intimidation,” said Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, a Democrat. “It’s very important to be clear about that. It’s illegal. It is a crime to engage in voter intimidation or election interference.” Several state attorneys general say they will arrest anyone who tries to intimidate voters.
Perhaps most important today was the news that the FBI’s Dallas Field Office yesterday released an intelligence report warning that a “violent extremist threat” is imminent, and that the period between now and the inauguration next January is a “potential flashpoint.” That threat comes not from the “left,” as Trump charges, but from the right-wing gangs that Trump is encouraging, including the Boogaloos, a staunchly anti-government group that is working to bring about a race war to speed up the collapse of the government. The report, which was obtained exclusively by The Nation, is titled “Boogaloo Adherents Likely Increasing Anti-Government Violent Rhetoric and Activities, Increasing Domestic Violent Extremist Threat in the FBI Dallas Area of Responsibility.” The report warns that there is “increased ‘patrolling’ or attendance at events” that serve the Boogaloo’s cause, including “otherwise peaceful and lawful protests.”
Today a federal judge in Montana rejected the attempts of the Trump campaign to stop the state from expanding mail-in voting. He permitted the new system to go into place, and called the idea of widespread voter fraud “fiction.”
President Donald Trump claimed victory in the first presidential debate, citing "polls etc." -- and he was quickly met with ridicule.
The president has drawn widespread condemnation for refusing to disavow his white supremacist followers and strongly negative reviews for his abrasive behavior during his debate with Joe Biden, but Trump disagreed.
"I won the debate big, based on compilation of polls etc.," Trump claimed. "Thank you!"
Other Twitter users weren't so sure.
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