The Commentariat -- Nov. 29, 2020
Late Morning Update:
The New York Times' live updates of Covid-19 developments Sunday are here.
Marie: I'm no fan of Fred Hiatt's but good for him for this: ~~~
~~~ Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post: "Let's say you're a Republican senator who ... [has] spent four years excusing and supporting a president who fawned over North Korea's odious dictator, encouraged China's ruling tyrant to build his concentration camps, took the word of Russia's strongman over U.S. intelligence agencies and celebrated the Saudi despot who orchestrated the dismemberment of a dissident journalist. And let's posit that, on top of all that, you've been a profile in cowardice as your president tried to nullify a democratic election here at home. Now the president-elect appoints a team of seasoned, moderate foreign policy experts who support democracy and American leadership in the world.... It shouldn't surprise us to see [Marco] Rubio [Fla.], along with Tom Cotton (Ark.), Josh Hawley (Mo.) and other Republican senators, disparaging the incoming Biden team.... But there is something particularly galling about this instant pivot to attack mode from senators who couldn't even bring themselves to acknowledge the results of the election.... Almost no Republicans on the national stage had the integrity or courage to offer backup for ... local officials ... [who] had the integrity and courage to resist Trump's pressure.... Instead..., Rubio is already suiting up for the politics of destruction...." ~~~
~~~ Brianna Keilar of CNN on Little Marco:
~~~~~~~~~~
Tal Axelrod of the Hill: "President-elect Joe Biden announced Saturday he is adding three new members to his transition team's coronavirus task force as the incoming administration focuses on preparation to tackle the coronavirus pandemic. The transition said in a statement that Jane Hopkins, Jill Jim and David Michaels are joining the team, which is co-chaired by David Kessler, former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and Marcella Nunez-Smith. The task force is charged with helping Biden, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and the transition cobble together a 'robust and aggressive response to contain the virus.'... Hopkins, a Sierra Leonean immigrant, has worked for more than 20 years as a bedside nurse and has a long history in union work.... Jim is the executive director at the Navajo Nation Department of Health and has worked for 18 years in nonprofit, state and federal agencies and tribal government.... Michaels is an epidemiologist and professor ... at George Washington University."
Jordan Williams of the Hill: "President-elect Joe Biden is reportedly eyeing Cindy McCain to serve as ambassador to the U.K., according to multiple reports citing The Times of London. McCain, the widow of the late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), has been a vocal critic of President Trump and endorsed Biden during his campaign. She is a known Anglophile, the Independent noted, and is thought to be a front-runner in return for helping Biden flip Arizona. 'It's hers if she wants it,' a source told the Times. 'She delivered Arizona. They know that.'"
David Sanger of the New York Times: "The assassination of the scientist who led Iran's pursuit of a nuclear weapon for the past two decades threatens to cripple President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s effort to revive the Iran nuclear deal before he can even begin his diplomacy with Tehran. And that may well have been a main goal of the operation. Intelligence officials say there is little doubt that Israel was behind the killing -- it had all the hallmarks of a precisely timed operation by Mossad, the country's spy agency. And the Israelis have done nothing to dispel that view.... 'There must be no return to the previous nuclear agreement,' [Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] declared shortly after it became clear that Mr. Biden -- who has proposed exactly that -- would be the next president."
The Last Days of the Kaiser
Incredible Shrinking Man lashes out at conspirators who downsized his desk. "Twenty Days of Fantasy & Failure." Philip Rucker, et al., of the Washington Post: "Sequestered in the White House and brooding out of public view after his election defeat, rageful and at times delirious in a torrent of private conversations, Trump was, in the telling of one close adviser, like 'Mad King George, muttering, "I won. I won. I won."' However cleareyed Trump's aides may have been about his loss to President-elect Joe Biden, many of them nonetheless indulged their boss and encouraged him to keep fighting with legal appeals.... Trump's allegations and the hostility of his rhetoric -- and his singular power to persuade and galvanize his followers --; generated extraordinary pressure on state and local election officials to embrace his fraud allegations and take steps to block certification of the results. When some of them refused, they accepted security details for protection from the threats they were receiving.... All the while, Trump largely abdicated the responsibilities of the job he was fighting so hard to keep.... The 20 days between the election on Nov. 3 and the greenlighting of Biden's transition exemplified some of the hallmarks of life in Trump's White House: a government paralyzed by the president's fragile emotional state; advisers nourishing his fables; expletive-laden feuds between factions of aides and advisers; and a pernicious blurring of truth and fantasy."
Peter Baker & Kathleen Gray of the New York Times: "If the president hoped Republicans across the country would fall in line behind his false and farcical claims that the election was somehow rigged on a mammoth scale by a nefarious multinational conspiracy, he was in for a surprise. Republicans in Washington may have indulged Mr. Trump's fantastical assertions, but at the state and local level, Republicans played a critical role in resisting the mounting pressure from their own party to overturn the vote after Mr. Trump fell behind on Nov. 3.... In the end, the system [-- although vulnerable --] stood firm against the most intense assault from an aggrieved president in the nation's history because of a Republican city clerk in Michigan, a Republican secretary of state in Georgia, a Republican county supervisor in Arizona and Republican-appointed judges in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. They refuted conspiracy theories, certified results, dismissed lawsuits and repudiated a president of their own party, leaving him to thunder about a supposed plot that would have had to include people who had voted for him, donated to him or even been appointed by him." (Also linked yesterday afternoon.) ~~~
~~~ Marie: Pretty much what I wrote in a comment yesterday morning, albeit Baker & Gray do it with better words.
Marie (with a little help from my friends): Trump has not had time to take care of the nation's business because he was otherwise occupied designing his library. It's quite nice, although I'm pretty sure Trump will be adding plenty more faux gold finishes. While the lie-berry is not yet open, you can order Christmas presents (not "holiday gifts") from the grift shop. No money-back guarantees, but Trump assures us that mail orders, unlike mail-in ballots, are totally safe and will not be ripped off by criminal Democrat mail carriers. Thanks to RAS for the link. And do click on it. Whoever put this together did a great job.
Pennsylvania. Elise Viebeck of the Washington Post: "The Pennsylvania Supreme Court dismissed with prejudice a Republican lawsuit seeking to invalidate more than 2.5 million votes cast by mail in the general election, the latest in a string of legal defeats for the GOP as President Trump fails to undo his losses in key battleground states. Justices on the state high court ruled unanimously late Saturday that Republican petitioners waited too long to file their suit challenging Act 77, the 2019 law that established universal mail voting in Pennsylvania. Trump allies had asked the court to invalidate all votes cast by mail in the most recent election or direct the majority-Republican legislature to choose a slate of presidential electors. The ruling with prejudice means that the plaintiffs are barred from bringing another action on the same claim. The court's written order called the latter option 'extraordinary,' noting that it would disenfranchise 6.9 million voters.... Concurring [with the opinion,] Justice David N. Wecht noted that the GOP petitioners 'failed to allege that even a single mail-in ballot was fraudulently cast or counted.'" A Guardian story is here.
Donald Trump, White House TV Critic. Natalie Colarossi of Newsweek: In a tweet Saturday, Donald Trump wrote, "'@FoxNews daytime is virtually unwatchable, especially during the weekends. Watch@OANN ,@newsmax, or almost anything else. You won't have to suffer through endless interviews with Democrats, and even worse!.... Trump's [criticism of Fox 'News'] grew increasingly worse throughout the final months of his presidential campaign, as he slammed the network for showing what he called 'fake' polls that projected Democratic rival Joe Biden ahead in key swing states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin."
Andrew Solender of Forbes: "Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-Va.) pulled no punches against President Trump and his fellow Republicans in Congress in an interview with Forbes, accusing them of a 'massive grift' in refusing to acknowledge the results of the election and claiming Trump appeals to groups that are 'anti-Semitic' and 'anti-American.' Riggleman, one of just 10 GOP House members acknowledging Joe Biden's victory, said the Republican refusal to acknowledge the result is 'just money-making for the 2024 election' and 'completely unethical,' saying he's spoken to 30 or 40 GOP members of Congress who privately acknowledge the result despite public silence.... Riggleman was even harsher toward colleagues who are 'true believers' of Trump/s unfounded claims..., asserting it 'really speaks to where your intelligence level is ... to believe in that type of operation.'" (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)
It Takes a Crackpot. Will Sommer of the Daily Beast: "Former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne left behind a cloud of confusion when he resigned in 2019 from the internet retailer he'd founded after panicking investors with his bizarre claims that he had romanced a Russian agent at the behest of 'Men in Black' working for the United States government. Now he's back, with what he has described as his own personal 'army,' touting what he claims is proof that Democrats stole the election from Donald Trump. 'I've funded a team of hackers and cybersleuths, other people with odd skills,' Byrne said in a Tuesday interview at One America News, where OAN personality Chanel Rion praised Byrne as the head of an 'elite shadow cyber security team.'" (Also linked yesterday afternoon.)
Trump Is Wasting Taxpayer Dollars as Fast as He Can. Simon Romero & Zolan Kanno-Youngs of the New York Times: "President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. has said he hopes to halt construction of the [U.S.-Mexican] border wall, but the outgoing administration is rushing to complete as much wall as possible in its last weeks in power, dynamiting through some of the border's most forbidding terrain. The breakneck pace at which construction is continuing all but assures that the wall, whatever Mr. Biden decides to do, is here to stay for the foreseeable future, establishing a contentious legacy for Mr. Trump in places that were crucial to his defeat."
Eric Tucker of the AP: "A former Trump campaign associate who was the target of a secret surveillance warrant during the FBI's Russia investigation says in a federal lawsuit that he was the victim of 'unlawful spying.' The suit from Carter Page alleges a series of omissions and errors made by FBI and Justice Department officials in applications they submitted in 2016 and 2017 to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to eavesdrop on Page on suspicion that he was an agent of Russia. 'Since not a single proven fact ever established complicity with Russia involving Dr. Page, there never was probable cause to seek or obtain the FISA Warrants targeting him on this basis,' the lawsuit says...."
Georgia Senate Races. Marty Johnson of the Hill: "Activist groups in Georgia that were the backbone of the effort to turn Georgia blue this election cycle haven't slowed down, their newest goal being to drive Georgians to the polls once again on Jan. 5 for the state's Senate runoff elections.... Nse Ufot, New Georgia Project's CEO, told The Hill the equation for success hasn't changed, that 'elections in Georgia are determined by who shows up, and whose votes get counted.... There's no world where a [12,670] vote difference, a 0.25 percent vote difference, would have resulted in a Biden victory, but for the work of groups like New Georgia Project and Fair Fight Action and the Georgia Coalition for the People's Agenda to protect the integrity of our elections,' Ufot said, referring to [Joe] Biden's tight margin of victory. 'We're talking about, you know, millions of text messages, millions of phone calls. We knocked on nearly half a million doors in the middle of a pandemic, millions of impressions with our digital ad content that was designed to neutralize the disinformation and misinformation that black voters and brown voters are subject to,' Ufot explained. 'And we're going to have to do it again.'" ~~~
~~~ Donald Judd & Ryan Nobles of CNN: "At a Saturday campaign stop in Marietta, Georgia, Republican National Committee Chair Ronna [Romney] McDaniel attempted to persuade Republicans to vote in the Georgia Senate runoff elections, even as voters expressed ambivalence about expanding 'money and work when it's already decided.' Incumbent Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler are facing tough reelection battles in two January runoff elections that could determine control of the US Senate. 'It's not decided. This is the key -- it's not decided,' McDaniel told a fiery crowd of Republicans who turned the RNC chair's meet-and-greet session Saturday into a public airing of grievances surrounding the November 3 election.... Donald Trump, who announced Thursday he'd travel to Georgia next week to campaign for Loeffler and Perdue, has leveled baseless claims of widespread fraud in Georgia, calling Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, 'the enemy of the people.' 'Well, I told (Sens. Loeffler and Perdue) today, I think you're dealing in a very fraudulent system. I'm very worried about that,' the President said during a news conference Thursday...."
Nicole Winfield of the AP: "Pope Francis raised 13 new cardinals to the highest rank in the Catholic hierarchy Saturday and immediately warned them not to use their titles for corrupt, personal gain, presiding over a ceremony marked from beginning to end by the coronavirus pandemic. Two new 'princes' of the church, from Brunei and the Philippines, didn't make it to Rome because of COVID-19 travel restrictions, though they were shown on giant screens watching it from home in the nearly empty St. Peter's Basilica. Throughout the socially distanced ceremony, which clocked in at an unusually quick 45 minutes, cardinals new and old wore protective masks. Most removed their masks when they approached a maskless Francis to receive their red hats, but Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the first African-American cardinal, kept his on. Gregory also was one of the only new cardinals who kept his mask on when the group paid a singing courtesy visit to retired Pope Benedict XVI."
Gillian Brassil of the New York Times: "Sarah Fuller became the first woman to play during a regular-season game in one of college football's Power 5 conferences by booting a kickoff on Saturday for Vanderbilt to start the second half against Missouri. Fuller, a senior and the starting goalkeeper for Vanderbilt's women's soccer team, was tapped to play football this week after every member of the Commodores' kicking squad was forced to stop practicing when at least one of them came into contact with someone who tested positive for the coronavirus. Fuller wore the No. 32 -- the same number she wears on her soccer jersey -- and a helmet with the phrase 'Play Like a Girl.'... Fuller is not the first woman to play college football in the top tier of Division I, the Football Bowl Subdivision...." MB: Playing a dangerous, violent sport seems a dubious feminist achievement; nonetheless, had I had Fuller's skills, I'm sure I would have done as she did.
Beyond the Beltway
Bryan Pietsch of the New York Times: "As mysteriously as it arrived, a metal monolith that was discovered last week by Utah public safety workers is now gone, officials said on Saturday. The three-sided metal structure was removed on Friday evening 'by an unknown party' from the public land it was found on, the federal Bureau of Land Management's Utah office said in a statement. The bureau said it had not removed the monolith.... 'IT'S GONE!' the Department of Public Safety said, reacting to the news in an Instagram post. 'Almost as quickly as it appeared it has now disappeared,' the department said, adding, 'I can only speculate' that aliens took it back, using the emoji for extraterrestrials."
News Lede
AP: "Black Friday online sales hit a new record this year as pandemic-wary Americans filled virtual carts instead of real ones. Consumers spent an estimated $9 billion on U.S. retail websites on Black Friday, according to Adobe Analytics, which tracks online shopping. That was a 22% increase over the previous record of $7.4 billion set in 2019. Meanwhile, traffic to physical stores plummeted as retailers tried to prevent crowds by cutting their hours and limiting doorbuster deals. U.S. store visits dropped by 52% on Black Friday, according to Sensormatic Solutions, a retail tracker. Traffic was slower in the Northeast and West than in the Midwest and South...."
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Reader Comments (9)
For someone overly obsessed with how he looks, why did Fatty decide to hold a press conference sitting at a night table? Did he just wake up and realize he’s a LOSER? And why slap a giant seal on that tiny table? I know he’s been completely taken with the trappings of the presidency, although not nearly so much with doing any actual work. His tightie whities probably have that seal on his fat ass. Is there a seal for one-term ex-president LOSERS? He can slap that on his golf cart as he drives around his empty courses yelling and screaming at his caddy while he cheats. (I’ll bet he cheats even when he’s playing by himself.)
Still, that image is pretty funny. He looks like a cartoon character, ranting and raving at his itty-bitty table. All he needs is steam coming out of his ears and that orange wig looking thing to be flipping up and down. Give him a big cowboy hat and a mustache and he’d look like Yo-Semite Sam. Or should that be Anti-Semite Sam?
No sermon. Just some thoughts about elites, superiority, condescension and the perils of "reaching out."
Thoughts but few answers. Maybe no answers at all.
I don't know how to get rid of hierarchy. the various ways people stack themselves bottom to top, and the perceptions that travel arm in arm with these arrangements.
There's Age, young to old. There's Virtue, bad to good. There's Money, poor to rich; Intelligence, dumb to smart; and Knowledge, from expertise to ignorance; and we seem to instinctively array each category on a scale of top to.bottom, up and down.
All that hierarchy ready to hand and I haven't even mentioned skin color.
It begins early. Parents and children. Teachers and students. Grades (designating both age-level and lavels of accomplishment). Bigger, faster, stronger. Leaders and followers. All those words that denote unequal relationships and all the envy, resentment and anger that seem to follow naturally in their wake.
The point. Both the hierarchy and the nasty feelings it evokes are givens of being alive. They will not go away.
So pretending there is no better or worse, higher or lower is a fool's errand. In one way or another, some people are always better than some others.
Hierarchy is not the problem, since it's everywhere. Anything, alive or dead, can be placed somewhere on a normal curve. Plants, animals, rocks.
The problem is the feelings that hierarchy breeds in people and what they learn to do about them.
We can start by making deliberate decisions about what we choose to think of in a hierarchical manner.
How about never race, and maybe never money?
Knowledge? OK. And virtue? Hell, yes. In that sense, there really are good and bad people.
I'll think some more about all this, especially about how best to prepare people to deal with hierarchy's obdurate reality, that thinking informed I'd hope by the wisdom that acconpanies the irony of age.
I'm getting really old, nearing the top of that chart, and I'm here to say it ain't all good.
Watched "HillBilly Elegy" last night and was extremely moved and troubled. This is a Ron Howard film based on J.D. Vance's book of the same title. Reading some reviews this morning except for a few showed me many just didn't "get it" or refused to see the underbelly of the problem. But then I found a New Yorker review of Vance's book by Josh Rothman that brought to light the enigma of this resistance of many who refuse to fully understand what the film was portraying. If any of you have seen the film would like very much your take on it.
"Often, after a way of talking has obviously outlived its usefulness, a period of inarticulateness ensues; it's not yet clear how we should talk going forward. “Hillbilly Elegy” doesn't provide us with a new way of talking about poverty in post-globalization America. It does, however, suggest that it's our collective job to figure one out. As individuals, we must stop thinking about American poverty in an imaginary way; we must abandon the terms of the argument we’ve been having—terms designed to harness our feelings of blame and resentment for political ends, and to make us feel either falsely blameless or absurdly self-determining. “I don’t know what the answer is, precisely, but I know it starts when we stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what we can do to make things better,” Vance writes. “We hillbillies need to wake the hell up.” As do the rest of us." –-Josh Rothman
@Ken: Just read your comments and they correspond beautifully with much of what the film, the book, and Rothman are portraying. I especially liked this:
"It begins early. Parents and children. Teachers and students. Grades (designating both age-level and lavels of accomplishment). Bigger, faster, stronger. Leaders and followers. All those words that denote unequal relationships and all the envy, resentment and anger that seem to follow naturally in their wake."
@Ken Winkes: Last Thursday or Friday, I was watching some show and when it went to its first commercial break, I switched to "PBS News Hour." Instead of their regular new show, they had very brief vignettes about people who had died of Covid-19. These were all kinds of people, a few of them remarkably accomplished, but most just beloved by whoever it was who wrote in about them. What struck me was that there was no hierarchy. No matter how these people (and there must have been at least 100 featured) had spent their lives, no matter what levels of education or wealth or social status they might have attained, they all had spent their lives well, in the views of their loved ones. I don't know what I was watching before it went to break, but I couldn't tear myself away from those vignettes of lives well-lived. If we all looked at people the way PBS did, instead of "assessing" strangers based on the way they speak or dress or otherwise present themselves, we'd be a lot better off.
@Akhilleus: I read your comment about the "night table" in the middle of the night, and I laughed out loud. I'm still laughing. Thank you.
The Supreme Court will hear arguments (well, arguments from one side, a racist harangue from the other) on Monday, on the question of who gets counted in the US Census.
Racist-in-Chief, in this pernicious plan (you’re forgiven if you ask “Which pernicious plan?”; there are so many) demands that his requirement not to count undocumented immigrants prevail, despite being thoroughly and quite clearly unconstitutional. Two lower courts have already told fat boy to tell his story walkin’.
We shall now see how these so-called originalists rule. Will they abide by what a lower court called a “not close and not complicated” decision to respect the constitution, or will they tie themselves in knots to find a way to side with racial enmity and political skullduggery? The Trump plan will provide an instant exchange of political power, further advancing confederate schemes, which will be hard for the hyper-partisan far right justices to ignore.
My guess is that some of the justices will harken back to the fact that millions of blacks were not counted as a whole person, way back when, and that in the 1790 census (and for almost 100 years after) Native Americans were not counted at all. They may use that as a way to go along with the racists’ plan. “Well, ‘originally’ certain population groups were excluded, so it’s A-OK to exclude population groups today.”
There will be dozens of attacks on the American Experiment and democracy brought to the attention of the future Nuremberg Trial defendants on this court in the hopes of ratfucking America.
This will just be one of those.
Marie,
Yes, while death is the great leveler, in life we do have a choice about how we view other people.
The problem lies in the choices society provides and enforces, which like our economic arrangements are mostly hierarchical and which I have long heretically thought are also a matter of choice, were we to find the will to choose.
But it's tough.
Read Dr. Suess' "Bartholomew and the Oobleck" to my six year old grandson yesterday. He was rapt, as he always is when being read to.
But I couldn't help but think how differently the story must have been received by the two of us.
He was focussed on Bartholomew and on what would happen next.
I was thinking of the egotistical, thoroughly mad king whose position and power allowed him to magically bend reality into an unanticipated awfulness and wondering when little Harlan would first stumble into the world of allegory.
And, of course, I was wondering what the good Dr. Seuss would have thought of our own mad king.
But I didn't wonder long. I think we know.