TRUMP SAYS for some, Virus is Like the Sniffles. He Denies Virus Crisis in the Sunbelt.

Trump downplayed the danger of the coronavirus, claiming in an interview that aired Sunday that many cases are simply people who "have the sniffles."

NPR

"Many of those cases are young people that would heal in a day," Trump said in his interview with Fox News Sunday. "They have the sniffles, and we put it down as a test." He added that many of those sick "are going to get better very quickly."

More than 3.7 million coronavirus cases have been confirmed in the United States, and more than 140,000 Americans have died, according to Johns Hopkins University researchers.

• US deaths from the novel coronavirus topped 140,000 on Saturday, a tally shows
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• Coronavirus cases have continued to rise in 42 of 50 states over past two weeks
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• Tally also shows that America is losing about 5,000 people to virus every week  
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• Florida reported over 12,000 new cases of COVID-19 on Sunday, the fifth day in a row the state has announced over 10,000 new infections
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• At least 14 states have reported record coronavirus hospitalizations so far in July, including Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Florida, North Carolina, Nevada and Texas.
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Cases and hospitalizations are spiking in many parts of the United States. While the number of tests conducted has risen, new confirmed cases are rising at a faster rate than tests. But Trump again falsely asserted that testing is to blame for the spike in identified infections.

"Cases are up. Many of those cases shouldn't even be cases," Trump told interviewer Chris Wallace. "Cases are up because we have the best testing in the world. ... I'm glad we do [testing], but it really skews the numbers." He added: "We're creating trouble."

Trump defended his handling of the coronavirus pandemic including his statement that there were only embers of the virus popping up around the country. 'We have embers and we do have flames. Florida became more flame-like, but it's going to be under control.'

Told by Wallace that he could appear to be downplaying the coronavirus, Trump called it "serious" but added that the U.S. has one of the lowest mortality rates in the world. Many nations, including Italy and France, have higher case-fatality rates than the U.S., but many other countries, like Australia, have lower rates.

The president said he has a "great relationship" with Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease doctor on the White House's coronavirus task force. But Trump also said that Fauci is "a little bit of an alarmist" who has made a few mistakes.

Wallace reminded Trump that he has also said things that have not turned out to be true, like saying earlier this year that the virus will at some point "disappear."
"I'll be right eventually," the president responded.

On bases named after Confederate generals

Trump also controversially weighed in on matters of race in America.
Defending the Confederate flag, for example, he said that for many people, it's not a racist symbol and that he's not offended by it, and then he deflected.

"I'm not offended, either, by Black Lives Matter," Trump said. "That's freedom of speech." Trump, however, had called a proposed Black Lives Matter sign in New York City a "symbol of hate."

He also again spoke out against renaming military bases that are named after Confederate generals — despite the Army being open to that.

"I don't care what the military says," Trump said, adding: "What are we going to name it? You going to name it after the Rev. Al Sharpton?"

In the 1980s and 1990s, Sharpton was a controversial figure in New York City who spoke out against police violence. He has now become a prominent Black television personality on MSNBC.
But bringing up Sharpton was curious, considering that many would argue that renaming the bases isn't solely about race or even about race at all. After all, the generals those bases are named after fought against the United States.

On health care and the election

On policy, Trump boasted that he would be getting major initiatives put in place on health care and immigration within the next month.

"No one would have done what I'm going to do in the next four weeks," he said.
"We're signing a health care plan within two weeks, a full and complete health care plan," Trump claimed, despite not being able to pass a health care bill since taking office and despite there being no push for one in Congress at this point.

On the presidential election, Trump cast several aspersions on presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden's mental fitness, including: "Joe doesn't know he's alive, OK? Do the American people want that?" And if Biden wins, Trump claimed, "Religion will be gone."

Biden leads in polls against Trump, as Trump has fallen in polls during the pandemic and amid protests against racism. A majority of Americans say they disapprove of Trump's handling of both — which were key parts of the Fox interview.

Despite his current standing, many strategists expect a close election. But because of the pandemic, a close election may not be decided for days after Election Day because of mail-in ballots that have to be postmarked, not received, by Election Day.

Some 70% of Americans could cast ballots by mail this year, in part so they don't potentially expose themselves to the coronavirus by waiting in lines to vote in person. Trump has spoken out against mail-in voting, despite utilizing it himself in recent elections.

More Republicans are saying they'll vote in person than Democrats, which could show Trump leading in some places until mail-in votes come in post-Election Day. That's something Trump fears, and he's already casting doubt about its legitimacy.

"I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election. I really do," Trump claimed without evidence.
Asked if that means he's suggesting he might not accept the results of the election, Trump added: "I have to see."

JOHN LEWIS

John Lewis, Towering Figure of Civil Rights Era, Dies at 80

NY TIMES

• On the front lines of the bloody campaign to end Jim Crow laws, with injuries to prove it, Mr. Lewis was a stalwart of the civil rights movement.
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• In 1986, he was elected to the House, where he became known for his relentless pursuit of justice. Colleagues called him “the conscience of the Congress.”
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• He saw the demonstrations after the killing of George Floyd, the largest protest movement in American history, as a continuation of his life’s work.
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• Images of his beating at Selma shocked the nation and led to swift passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Representative John Lewis, a son of sharecroppers and an apostle of nonviolence who was bloodied at Selma and across the Jim Crow South in the historic struggle for racial equality, and who then carried a mantle of moral authority into Congress, died on Friday. He was 80.

Mr. Lewis, of Georgia, announced on Dec. 29 that he had Stage 4 pancreatic cancer and vowed to fight it with the same passion with which he had battled racial injustice. “I have been in some kind of fight — for freedom, equality, basic human rights — for nearly my entire life,” he said.

On the front lines of the bloody campaign to end Jim Crow laws, with blows to his body and a fractured skull to prove it, Mr. Lewis was a valiant stalwart of the civil rights movement and the last surviving speaker at the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963.

More than a half-century later, after the killing in May of George Floyd, a Black man in police custody in Minneapolis, Mr. Lewis welcomed the resulting global demonstrations against police killings of Black people and, more broadly, against systemic racism in many corners of society. He saw those protests as a continuation of his life’s work, though his illness had left him to watch from the sidelines. “It is so much more massive and all inclusive.” He added, “There will be no turning back.”

Mr. Lewis’s personal history paralleled that of the civil rights movement. He was among the original 13 Freedom Riders, the Black and white activists who challenged segregated interstate travel in the South in 1961. He was a founder and early leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which coordinated lunch-counter sit-ins. He helped organize the March on Washington, where Dr. King was the main speaker, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Mr. Lewis led demonstrations against racially segregated restrooms, hotels, restaurants, public parks and swimming pools, and he rose up against other indignities of second-class citizenship. At nearly every turn he was beaten, spat upon or burned with cigarettes. He was tormented by white mobs and absorbed body blows from law enforcement.

On March 7, 1965, he led one of the most famous marches in American history. In the vanguard of 600 people demanding the voting rights they had been denied, Mr. Lewis marched partway across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., into a waiting phalanx of state troopers in riot gear.Ordered to disperse, the protesters silently stood their ground. The troopers responded with tear gas and bullwhips and rubber tubing wrapped in barbed wire. In the melee, known as Bloody Sunday, a trooper cracked Mr. Lewis’s skull with a billy club, knocking him to the ground, then hit him again when he tried to get up.

Televised images of the beatings of Mr. Lewis and scores of others outraged the nation and galvanized support for the Voting Rights Act, which President Lyndon B. Johnson presented to a joint session of Congress eight days later and signed into law on Aug. 6. A milestone in the struggle for civil rights, the law struck down the literacy tests that Black people had been compelled to take before they could register to vote and replaced segregationist voting registrars with federal registrars to ensure that Black people were no longer denied the ballot.

Mr. Lewis, third from left, marching with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., right, from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., on March 21, 1961.Credit...William Lovelace/Daily Express, via Getty Images[/

Once registered, millions of African-Americans began transforming politics across the South. They gave Jimmy Carter, a son of Georgia, his margin of victory in the 1976 presidential election. (A popular poster proclaimed, “Hands that once picked cotton now can pick a President.”) And their voting power opened the door for Black people, including Mr. Lewis, to run for public office. Elected in 1986, he became the second African-American to be sent to Congress from Georgia since Reconstruction, representing a district that encompassed much of Atlanta.

While Mr. Lewis represented Atlanta, his natural constituency was disadvantaged people everywhere. Known less for sponsoring major legislation than for his relentless pursuit of justice, his colleagues called him “the conscience of the Congress.”

When the House voted in December 2019 to impeach President Trump, Mr. Lewis’s words rose above the rest. “When you see something that is not right, not just, not fair, you have a moral obligation to say something,” he said on the House floor. “To do something. Our children and their children will ask us, ‘What did you do? What did you say?’ For some, this vote may be hard. But we have a mission and a mandate to be on the right side of history.”

As a younger man, his words could be more militant. History remembers the March on Washington for Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, but Mr. Lewis startled and energized the crowd with his own passion.

“By the force of our demands, our determination and our numbers,” he told the cheering throng that August day, “we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces and put them together in the image of God and democracy. We must say: ‘Wake up, America. Wake up!’ For we cannot stop, and we will not and cannot be patient.”

His original text was more blunt. “We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did,” he had written. President John F. Kennedy’s civil rights bill was “too little, too late,” he had written, demanding, “Which side is the federal government on?”

But Dr. King and other elders — Mr. Lewis was just 23 — worried that those first-draft passages would offend the Kennedy administration, which they felt they could not alienate in their drive for federal action on civil rights. They told him to tone down the speech.

Still, the crowd, estimated at more than 200,000, roared with approval at his every utterance.

An earnest man who lacked the silver tongue of other civil rights orators, Mr. Lewis could be pugnacious, tenacious and single-minded, and he led with a force that commanded attention.

Mr. Lewis was arrested 40 times from 1960 to 1966. He was beaten senseless repeatedly by Southern policemen and freelance hoodlums. During the Freedom Rides in 1961, he was left unconscious in a pool of his own blood outside the Greyhound Bus Terminal in Montgomery, Ala., after he and others were attacked by hundreds of white people. He spent countless days and nights in county jails and 31 days in Mississippi’s notoriously brutal Parchman Penitentiary.

President Obama awarded Mr. Lewis the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, in 2011. In bestowing the honor in a White House ceremony, Mr. Obama said: “Generations from now, when parents teach their children what is meant by courage, the story of John Lewis will come to mind — an American who knew that change could not wait for some other person or some other time; whose life is a lesson in the fierce urgency of now.”

John Robert Lewis grew up with all the humiliations imposed by segregated rural Alabama. He was born on Feb. 21, 1940, to Eddie and Willie Mae (Carter) Lewis near the town of Troy on a sharecropping farm owned by a white man. After his parents bought their own farm — 110 acres for $300 — John, the third of 10 children, shared in the farm work, leaving school at harvest time to pick cotton, peanuts and corn. Their house had no plumbing or electricity. In the outhouse, they used the pages of an old Sears catalog as toilet paper.

John was responsible for taking care of the chickens. He fed them and read to them from the Bible. He baptized them when they were born and staged elaborate funerals when they died.

“I was truly intent on saving the little birds’ souls,” he wrote in his memoir, “Walking With the Wind” (1998). “I could imagine that they were my congregation. And me, I was a preacher.”

His family called him “Preacher,” and becoming one seemed to be his destiny. He drew inspiration by listening to a young minister named Martin Luther King on the radio and reading about the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott. He finally wrote a letter to Dr. King, who sent him a round-trip bus ticket to visit him in Montgomery, in 1958. 

By then, Mr. Lewis had begun his studies at American Baptist Theological Seminary (now American Baptist College) in Nashville, where he worked as a dishwasher and janitor to pay for his education.

In Nashville, Mr. Lewis met many of the civil rights activists who would stage the lunch counter sit-ins, Freedom Rides and voter registration campaigns. They included the Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., who was one of the nation’s most prominent scholars of civil disobedience and who led workshops on Gandhi and nonviolence. He mentored a generation of civil rights organizers, including Mr. Lewis.

Mr. Lewis lost his family’s good will. When his parents learned that he had been arrested in Nashville, he wrote, they were ashamed. They had taught him as a child to accept the world as he found it. When he asked them about signs saying “Colored Only,” they told him, “That’s the way it is, don’t get in trouble.”

But as an adult, he said, after he met Dr. King and Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man was a flash point for the civil rights movement, he was inspired to “get into trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble.”

Getting into “good trouble” became his motto for life. A documentary film, “John Lewis: Good Trouble,” was released this month.

He put it this way on Twitter in 2018: “Do not get lost in a sea of despair. Be hopeful, be optimistic. Our struggle is not the struggle of a day, a week, a month, or a year, it is the struggle of a lifetime. Never, ever be afraid to make some noise and get in good trouble, necessary trouble.”

The new normal: Overwhelmed morgues, crowded hospitals, older Americans stuck at home. AN OVERVIEW

The panic and urgency that led most of the country to lock down in the spring is mostly absent this summer, giving way to a new desensitizing reality.

POLITICO

The daily death count is approaching 1,000. States are ordering body bags and refrigerated trucks. Patients are lined up along the walls in overcrowded hospitals. And the coronavirus is spreading north, gaining footholds in places like Illinois and Washington state that had hoped the worst was behind them.

Meanwhile the White House spent the week vacillating over whether it meant to attack its top infectious disease expert and prodding schools into reopening.

Six months into the worst pandemic in modern history, a disturbing new normal has settled over the country. Younger, healthier people are circulating in public spaces. Older adults are still quarantined. Millions of essential or blue-collar workers are still doing their jobs because they can't telecommute. Minorities carry a disproportionate share of the health burden and economic pain, and morgues struggle to keep up.

“I think the American public is accustomed to a medical system that is going to save them ... and to pills and potions that are basically going to come in and save the day,” said Charles Branas, chair of the epidemiology department at Columbia University. “We don’t have that right now and it is a challenging thing to sustain a non-pharmaceutical intervention.”

Even states that suffered the most during the spring and took early steps to contain the virus are seeing signs of a resurgence. In Louisiana, Gov. John Bel Edwards ordered bars to close again as Covid-19 hospitalizations reached levels not seen since early May. Washington state, the site of the country's first outbreak, is reporting more infections in July than at any point during the pandemic.

“This may be a surprise to many of us who had the sense that after we were over the original hump we’d be in safe territory,” Gov. Jay Insleee said Thursday. “Unfortunately, that is not the case.”

Officials in New York and New Jersey, once the epicenter of the pandemic, are concerned about the growing number of infections among young adults. In Florida and Arizona, the growing cases among those under 40 represented the first sign of trouble a month ago.

The self-comforting myth that the virus was largely being spread between younger people who are less vulnerable has been shattered over the last several weeks as infections in nursing homes surge and U.S. hospitalizations, which have increased 60 percent since the beginning of July, approach the highs seen in April.

“It was always bulls---,” said Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor University. “Maybe it starts with young people but once you start, there is accelerating transmission in the community and it’s only a matter of time before it spreads to everyone.”

“I expect the death toll will continue to rise,” said Justin Lessler, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. “We are still seeing a rise in cases and the deaths we’re seeing now are based on cases detected three or four weeks ago.”

Back then, the U.S. was averaging 50,000 cases per day. Now, we’re closer to 70,000.

Death isn’t the only consequence younger adults should be concerned with, said Natalie Dean, an assistant professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida. “We don't understand the long-term impacts,” she said. “Breathing difficulties or other neurological symptoms. And those people can infect others. Old people still need to go to the grocery store.”

There is some cause for optimism. Doctors are far better at treating the virus than they were in the spring and the country, as a whole, is doing a better job at protecting older and other vulnerable populations. Businesses like Walmart and Kroger this week mandated masks in their stores — and even conservative governors in Alabama, Arkansas, and Texas are mandating mask use and reimposing restrictions on businesses in an effort to flatten the curve.

One thing that is apparent is the pandemic has left America more bifurcated.

By the end of the month, the country will likely have recorded 4 million infections and nearly 150,000 deaths. Black and Hispanic Americans are hospitalized at five times and four times the rate of white one, respectively, according to the CDC. People of color are also more likely to have jobs that don’t allow them to work from home and where social distancing is a challenge. Nearly two-thirds of Hispanic people considered at high risk for coronavirus live with at least one person who is unable to work from home, compared to 47 percent of white Americans, according to a recent study.

 

“The unequal toll on people of color has been devastating and tragic,” said John Auerbach, president and CEO of the Trust for America’s Health. "It’s related to overcrowded, segregated housing and limited job opportunities.”

States are once again begging for federal help with testing, which has slowed to a crawl in parts of the country, and there remains no national strategy for contact tracing.

“The messaging has been horrendous,” said Irwin Redlener, founding director for the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University. “People heard that we are reopening and they interpreted it as we are back to normal, which gave license to a lot of people to go back to bars, parties and beaches and many of these places became the venue for the new resurgence of outbreaks.”

U.S. Reports More Than 70,000 New Coronavirus Cases for the Second Time. UPDATES

With case counts rising, U.S. leaders push stricter measures.

Across the United States, leaders grappling with surging caseloads and a rising death toll on Friday introduced new measures intended to curb the coronavirus outbreak’s severity, some in places where the virus had looked to be in retreat.

For the second time, more than 70,000 coronavirus cases were announced in the United States, according to a New York Times database. A day earlier, the country set a record with 75,600 new cases, the 11th time in the past month that the daily record had been broken.

The outbreak is so widespread that 18 states have been placed in a so-called red zone because they have more than 100 new cases per 100,000 people per week, according to an unpublished report distributed this week by the White House coronavirus task force, which urged many states to take stricter steps to contain the spread.

The states — Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Utah — constitute more than a third of the country.

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced new rules on Friday that would force many of the state’s districts to teach remotely when school starts next month and require most of its more than six million students to wear masks when they do attend class. This week, the state also announced a sweeping rollback of plans to reopen businesses.

More than 10,100 cases were announced on Friday in California, the state’s second-highest daily total yet.

In Florida, where more than 11,400 cases and more than 125 deaths were reported on Friday, some localities added curfews. With its hospitals reaching capacity, Broward County imposed a curfew from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. beginning Friday. Curfews were also imposed in the city of Miami Beach and the rest of Miami-Dade County.

Noting the rise in cases, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin testified before a House committee that he thought Congress should consider automatically forgiving all small loans that had been given to businesses through the Paycheck Protection Program.

The record for U.S. daily cases has more than doubled since June 24, when the country registered 37,014 cases, after a lull in the outbreak that kept the previous record, 36,738, standing for two months. Daily virus fatalities had decreased slightly until last week, when they began rising again.

N.Y.C. will ease some outdoor restrictions, but many indoor activities, like malls and museums, will stay closed.

New York City will enter a limited version of its fourth phase of reopening next week, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said Friday.

Starting Monday, outdoor venues like zoos and botanical gardens will be allowed to operate at a limited capacity, Mr. Cuomo said. But citing rising case numbers in other large states, like Texas and Arizona, he said stringent limits would remain on indoor activities.

Malls, museums and cultural institutions, for example, will stay closed. Indoor dining will also remain on hold.

“The second wave is going to be the confluence of the lack of compliance and the local governments’ lack of enforcement, plus the viral spread coming back from the other states,” Mr. Cuomo said. “It is going to happen.”

Mr. Cuomo said the state would revisit the city’s relatively curtailed Phase 4 as the “facts change.”

The rest of New York State, which has already moved into Phase 4, does not have the same limitations on indoor businesses. But New York City will be allowed to have groups of up to 50 people, as well as indoor religious gatherings operating with capacity constraints. Outdoor film productions and professional sports events without audiences can also resume.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Has Cancer Again, Says She Will Remain On The Court

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says that her cancer has returned and that chemotherapy is yielding positive results. In a statement, she said that her most recent scan, on July 7, "indicated significant reduction of the liver lesions and no new disease."

In the statement, Ginsburg said she began a course of chemotherapy on May 19 after a periodic scan in February, followed by a biopsy, revealed lesions on her liver. She said her recent hospitalizations to remove gallstones and to treat an infection were unrelated to the recurrence of the cancer.

The statement added: "I am tolerating chemotherapy well and am encouraged by the success of my current treatment. I will continue bi-weekly chemotherapy to keep my cancer at bay, and am able to maintain an active daily routine. Throughout, I have kept up with opinion writing and all other Court work. I have often said I would remain a member of the Court as long as I can do the job full steam. I remain fully able to do that."

Those who have seen Ginsburg in recent months say that she is cheerful and fully engaged and that while she seemed to lose some weight during the initial phase of the lockdown, she has been gaining back those pounds of late.

That said, this is her fifth bout with cancer in 21 years and the third bout in the last 19 months. Her surgeries and treatments over the years for colon and pancreatic cancer have likely contributed to some of the gut problems, unrelated to her cancer, that pop up from time to time.

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In Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear said 36 new virus cases were traced to a single football team in a news conference Friday. The governor, a Democrat, said team members were not wearing masks in a weight room and as a result 18 players, three coaches and 15 family members were sickened.

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Lowe’s and Home Depot on Friday became the latest retailers that will begin requiring all their customers to wear masks. Lowe’s said the new policy would take effect on Monday, adding that it would supply masks to any customer who needed one. Home Depot’s mask requirement will start Wednesday. The company said children and customers with medical conditions would not be required to wear facial coverings.

If Trump’s numbers don’t improve, some surprising states could come into play

The Electoral College: The Fringe of the Map Expands

SABATO'S CRYSTAL BALL

Trump’s position has been perilously weak for a month and a half.

— With Joe Biden’s national lead around eight to 10 points, there is a possibility that he could compete for some usually Republican states.

— Our current ratings represent something of a hedge between a Trump comeback and Biden maintaining or expanding his large national lead.

The Electoral College fringe expands

We are now about six weeks into a downturn in Donald Trump’s polling numbers.

It’s worth thinking about the ramifications of this change if it endures.

In the RealClearPolitics average of national approval polling, Trump went from about early December to late May without ever dipping below -10 in net approval (approval minus disapproval). He has spent every day since June 1 at or below -10 net approval, and he’s currently at about -15.
Joe Biden’s national polling lead over Trump during May was in the four-to-six-point range. That was a decent lead, but not one that suggested Biden was a towering favorite, particularly because Trump was able to win in 2016 without winning the popular vote. But since early June, Biden’s lead has ballooned to the eight-to-10-point range. He has also enjoyed healthy leads in many polls of the most important swing states, like Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

The bottom line here is that the nation is in a state of terrible crisis, and the public has, at least for now, judged the president’s responses to both coronavirus and protests of racial inequalities in policing to be lacking.

In an ABC News/Ipsos poll released Friday, 67% of respondents disapproved of Trump’s handling of coronavirus and of race relations.

2020 is shaping up to be a bad year in American history, which Republican lobbyist Bruce Mehlman illustrates in his latest look at the political environment. It is not the kind of year when one wants to be an incumbent running for reelection, and a majority of the public appears to believe that this president is not meeting the moment.

A few weeks into the public health crisis, we explored the possibility of Trump being the second iteration of Jimmy Carter, whose reelection bid fell apart among myriad crises in 1980. Since then, the Trump-as-Carter scenario has grown even more plausible.


There is time for the situation to change — as we wrote a few weeks ago, we want to see where things stand after the conventions, around Labor Day. But Trump is extremely unlikely to win if the polls continue to look the way they do now. And if these numbers represent a new normal, we need to account for the possibility that this election won’t be particularly close, and that new states may come into play. In other words, if the national picture remains bleak for Trump, then the slippage he’s seen from earlier this year wouldn’t just be limited to a handful of swing states.

Over the past few weeks, there have been some interesting little nuggets here and there about the map expanding into red turf. The very well-sourced New York Times trio of Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Martin, and Alexander Burns recently reported that internal Republican data showed Trump with only a small lead in Montana and trailing in Kansas, two states that Trump carried by about 20 points apiece in 2016 (both have competitive Senate races, too).

Enterprising members of the #ElectionTwitter community spearheaded a fundraising campaign to poll under-polled states: Public Policy Polling, the Democratic pollster, stepped up and polled Alaska and Montana on their behalf, with the money raised going to charity. Trump was up 48%-45% in Alaska and 51%-42% in Montana. (The #ElectionTwitter polling project remains underway, and we have supported them and we encourage others to as well at their GoFundMe page.)
Democratic pollster Garin-Hart-Yang had Biden up two points in Missouri, a 19-point Trump state; an earlier poll for Missouri Scout conducted by Remington Research, a GOP firm, had Trump up eight. On Monday, polling from Saint Louis University/YouGov had Trump up by a similar 50%-43% margin.


A UtahPolicy.com/KUTV 2 News poll of Utah had Trump up just 44%-41% there in late May, although the pollster (Y2 Analytics) later re-weighted the poll by education, which suggested a lead for Trump more in the six-to-10-point range, depending on which weighting was used (the Y2 post includes a thoughtful discussion of education weighting, an important factor in polling and something that might have contributed to some Democratic bias in state polls in 2016).
One other caveat comes from friend of the Crystal Ball Dan Guild, who has noticed that in the last three elections, some summer polling has seriously overstated eventual November Democratic performance in red states. That may be a factor now.

But Trump’s position is weak enough in mid-July that we have to concede there are some signs of competitiveness in states that were not competitive in 2016. This sort of thing can happen when the overall election is tilted toward one side over the other, which is the state of play at the moment and the advantage Biden currently holds.

Our current electoral map represents something of a hedge between Trump cutting markedly into Biden’s lead versus Biden maintaining his current edge or even expanding it.
In the former scenario, all of these states we’ve moved into Likely Republican would move back into the Safe Republican camp, and states like Michigan and Pennsylvania (which we rate as Leans Democratic) as well as Toss-ups like Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, and Wisconsin could all be on the razor’s edge. These six states remain the core battlegrounds that seem likeliest, collectively, to decide the election.

In the latter scenario, where Biden continues to do very well, most or all of those core battleground states would be more like Leans Democratic (or even Likely, at least in some cases); Leans Republican states like Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, and Texas would be more like Toss-ups; and some of the states we’ve flagged in today’s update could be in play.

As it stands now, our ratings account for both of these scenarios.
We think we’ll get more clarity about which scenario is more likely following the conventions — whatever the conventions actually look like. Even with 2020’s scaled down, undramatic, and overshadowed conventions, voters and media see them as departure points into the general election. Casting a ballot is no longer just on the distant horizon. It’s a reality that will firm up people’s choices — and our ratings.

Twitter hack: accounts of prominent figures, including Biden, Musk, Obama, Gates and Kanye compromised

Accounts of Uber and Apple also appear to have been hacked as part of scam instructing followers to transfer cryptocurrency

Twitter suffered a major security breach on Wednesday that saw hackers take control of the accounts of major public figures and corporations, including Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Apple.

The company confirmed the breach Wednesday evening, more than six hours after the hack began, and attributed it to a “coordinated social engineering attack” on its own employees that enabled the hackers to access “internal systems and tools”. Twitter said it was “looking into what other malicious activity they may have conducted or information they may have accessed” in addition to using the compromised accounts to send tweets.

The hack unfolded over the course of several hours, and in the course of halting it, Twitter stopped all verified accounts from tweeting at all – an unprecedented measure. The company had restored most accounts by Wednesday evening, but warned that it “may take further actions”. The company said that it had also locked the compromised accounts and “taken steps to limit access to internal systems and tools” while it continues its investigation.

The compromised accounts, which count tens of millions of followers, sent a series of tweets proposing a classic bitcoin scam: followers were told that if they transferred cryptocurrency to a specific bitcoin wallet, they would receive double the money in return.

Twitter has said it is looking into the possible hacking of the accounts of Joe Biden and other prominent figures. Photograph: Twitter

Other compromised accounts include those of Kanye West, Michael Bloomberg, Uber, and a number of cryptocurrency exchanges or organizations.

The messages included the address of a bitcoin wallet whose balance grew rapidly to more than 11 BTC (more than $100,000) as the scam spread. Tweets with similar messages were repeatedly deleted and re-posted by some of the compromised accounts over the course of Wednesday afternoon.

While the motives and source of the attack are not yet known, the coordinated hijacking of the verified communications streams of world leaders, celebrities and major corporate accounts was a frightening prospect. Twitter has become a de facto wire service for the world and is used for official communications by governments during emergencies; a hack on the scale of Wednesday’s attack could have been more disruptive or even dangerous.

“The amount of damage this could cause is very high,” said Douglas Schmidt, a computer science professor at Vanderbilt University. “These people could hold information gleaned from the hack for ransom in the future.”

N.Y.P.D. Says It Used Restraint During Protests. Here’s What the Videos Show.

NY TIMES

At the height of the recent Black Lives Matter marches in New York City, the police were repeatedly recorded using force against protesters. The department said it exercised restraint. This is what the videos show.

It was two hours after curfew on the sixth night of protests against police brutality in New York City.

An officer in Brooklyn pushed a protester so hard that she fell backward on the pavement. Then he shoved someone on a bicycle and picked up and body-slammed a third person into the street.

Nearby, a man fell running from the police. Officers swarmed him and beat him with batons. A commanding officer, in his white-shirted uniform, joined the fray and stepped on the man’s neck.

All of it was caught on video. In fact, the New York Times found more than 60 videos that show the police using force on protesters during the first 10 days of demonstrations in the city after the death of George Floyd.

A review of the videos, shot by protesters and journalists, suggests that many of the police attacks, often led by high-ranking officers, were not warranted.

A video of five or 10 or 30 seconds does not tell the whole story, of course. It does not depict what happened before the camera started rolling. It is unclear from the videos, for instance, what the officers’ intentions were or why protesters were being arrested or told to move.

But the Police Department’s patrol guide says officers may use “only the reasonable force necessary to gain control or custody of a subject.” Force, policing experts say, must be proportionate to the threat or resistance at hand at the moment it is applied.

In instance after instance, the police are seen using force on people who do not appear to be resisting arrest or posing an immediate threat to anyone.

Punches, tackles, beatings and shoves.

Officers attacked people who had their hands up.

They hit people who were walking away from them.

They grabbed people from behind.

And they repeatedly pummeled people who were already on the ground.

Police Commissioner Dermot F. Shea has maintained that misconduct during the protests was confined to “isolated cases” and that officers were confronted with violence by protesters.

He noted that during the first week of demonstrations, people looted businesses, burned police cars and attacked officers with bricks, bottles and in one case a fire extinguisher. The unrest prompted Mayor Bill de Blasio to impose an 8 p.m. curfew.

Yet for just about each viral moment that emerged from the protests — officers violently shoving a woman to the ground or beating a cyclist who seemed to be doing nothing more than trying to cross the street — The Times turned up multiple examples of similar behavior.

The police responded to words with punches and pepper spray.

Officers charged into peaceful crowds and pushed people to the ground.

Sometimes, they appeared to lash out at random.

Devora Kaye, the Police Department’s assistant commissioner for public information, declined repeated requests to review the full set of videos provided by The Times and to explain the use of force in them.

She reiterated that “isolated incidents” of misconduct were being addressed, noted that four officers had already been disciplined, and said that the department’s Internal Affairs Bureau was investigating 51 cases of use of force during the protests.

“The N.Y.P.D. has zero tolerance for inappropriate or excessive use of force,” she wrote, “but it is also critical to review the totality of the circumstances that lead to interactions where force is used.”

The police said that nearly 400 officers were injured during the protests, and that 132 of the more than 2,500 people arrested reported injuries, but that they did not have records of injured people who were not arrested. Protesters have described and documented at least five broken or fractured bones and four concussions.

The Police Benevolent Association, the union that represents most N.Y.P.D. officers, declined to comment on the videos.

The episodes in the videos The Times reviewed were spread across 15 neighborhoods in three boroughs. Several videos each were taken June 3 in Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn and on June 4 in Mott Haven in the Bronx, when officers “kettled” protesters into tight spaces and then beat them with batons.

Philip M. Stinson, a Bowling Green State University criminologist and former police officer who studies the use of force by the police, offered a blunt assessment of the behavior shown in these videos. “A lot of this was ‘street justice,’” he said, “gratuitous acts of extrajudicial violence doled out by police officers on the street to teach somebody a lesson.”

Sometimes, the police went after people already in custody.

Sometimes officers went after people they did not appear interested in arresting at all.

Mr. Stinson said that in some of the videos, the police used force permissibly. He saw nothing inappropriate, for example, in this widely viewed video of officers using batons on people who appeared to be trying to evade arrest.

Scott Hechinger, a public defender for nearly a decade in Brooklyn, said he found it striking that being filmed by crowds of protesters did not seem to inhibit some officers’ conduct.

“That the police were able and willing to perform such brazen violence when surrounded by cellphone cameras and when the whole world was watching at this moment more than any other, underscores how police feel and know they will never be held to account in any meaningful way even for the most egregious acts of violence,” Mr. Hechinger said.

Many of the videos show violence led by officers in white shirts, signaling a rank of lieutenant or higher.

In Manhattan on June 2, one commander shoved a protester and another pulled her down by the hair.

A civil rights lawyer with the legal aid group the Bronx Defenders, Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, said  “The primary question is whether the force is reasonable, but you have to remember, if they’re not arresting someone, they shouldn’t be using any force,” Ms. Borchetta said.

At several protests, the police used bicycles as weapons.

Two officers lift their bicycles and push them repeatedly into a group of people, knocking one person over.

More often, they used their hands.

he protests, and the outcry over the policing of them, have already led to changes. State legislators overturned a law that kept police discipline records secret and New York City cut its police budget and broadened a ban on chokeholds. Last week, New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, called for an independent commission to permanently oversee the Police Department.

But acts of force by the police are still being caught on video, more than six weeks into the protests.

Axel Hernandez, a high school teacher in New York City who on June 3 filmed an officer throwing someone down by the neck, said he felt it was important to continue to keep watch over the police.

“Part of the reason we’re out here is because they were on George Floyd’s neck,” said Mr. Hernandez, 30. “This is exactly why we are protesting in the first place.”

See the full set of videos at NY TIMES

The Times sought and verified videos of police use of force at protests in New York City from May 28 to June 6. The following videos were compiled from Times reporting and lists shared by T. Greg Doucette, Corin Faife, a crowd-sourced effort started on Reddit and public responses to requests by the New York attorney general’s office and the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board. Some are being made public for the first time. These videos are not an exhaustive accounting of police behavior at the protests. They have been edited for length and in some cases slowed down or annotated for clarity but are otherwise unaltered.

RESIGN!

In Some Countries, Normal Life Is Back. Not Here.

Trump’s incompetence has wrecked us. Where are the calls for him to resign?

NY TIMES, MICHELLE GOLDBERG

If you’re lucky enough to live in New Zealand, the coronavirus nightmare has been mostly over since June. After more than two weeks with no new cases, the government lifted almost all restrictions that month. The borders are still shut, but inside the country, normal life returned.

It’s coming back elsewhere too. Taiwan, where most days this month no new cases have been reported, just held the Taipei Film Festival, and a recent baseball game drew 10,000 spectators. Italy was once the epicenter of Europe’s outbreak and remains in a state of emergency, but with just a few hundred new cases a day in the whole country, bars are open and tourists have started returning, though of course Americans remain banned. According to The New York Times’s figures, there were 321 new cases in all of Canada last Friday.

And America? We had 68,241. As of last week, the worst per capita outbreak on the planet was in Arizona, followed by Florida. The world is closed to us; American passports were once coveted, but now only a few dozen nations will let us in. Lawrence O. Gostin, professor of global health law at Georgetown, told me he doesn’t expect American life to feel truly normal before summer 2022. Two years of our lives, stolen by Donald Trump.

As our country plunges into a black hole of unchecked illness, death and pariahdom, the administration is waging a PR war on its own top disease expert, Anthony Fauci, trying to convince news outlets that he can’t be trusted. “The move to treat Dr. Fauci as if he were a warring political rival comes as he has grown increasingly vocal in his concerns about the national surge in coronavirus cases,” reported The Times.

 

Trump has also undercut the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, retweeting the conspiratorial ramblings of the former game show host Chuck Woolery: “The most outrageous lies are the ones about Covid-19. Everyone is lying. The C.D.C., media, Democrats, our doctors, not all but most, that we are told to trust.” There are now so many stories of Trump fans dying after blithely exposing themselves to the virus that they’ve become a macabre cliché.

Lawrence O. Gostin, professor of global health law at Georgetown, expects some semblance of normality to return to the United States only by summer 2022.Credit...Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Gostin was part of the international panel that put together the Global Health Security Index, a report, released last year, that evaluated the pandemic readiness of every nation on earth. No country, they found, was as prepared as the United States. But the coronavirus, he said, has shown us that “health system capacity alone is almost useless unless you have a government that can unleash that capacity promptly and consistently.”

America has long fancied itself a swaggering colossus. It will likely emerge from this calamity humbled and decrepit.

Not all experts are as pessimistic as Gostin. Andy Slavitt, a senior health official in the Obama administration, has argued that with better tests, therapies and an eventual vaccine, life could broadly improve as soon as next year.

 

Others caution against making predictions. “We want to be able to give some assurance of, ‘Life will not always be this way, and it will be over soon,’ but we don’t know when that will be,” said Nicolette Louissaint, president of Healthcare Ready, an organization established after Hurricane Katrina to strengthen the health care supply chain for disasters.

But we know that the C.D.C. forecasts total deaths from Covid-19 to rise to as many as 160,000 just by the end of the month. Many times that number will have long-term medical complications, and a record 5.4 million people lost their health insurance between February and May. A generation of American kids will have their educations derailed, and many parents who don’t lose their jobs due to the economic crisis will see their careers ruined by the demands of child care.

The country’s international humiliation is total; historians may argue about when the American century began, but I doubt they’ll disagree about when it ended.

The psychological consequences alone will be incalculable. Even before the coronavirus, researchers spoke of loneliness as its own epidemic in America. A March article in the medical journal JAMA Psychiatry attributed 162,000 deaths a year to the fallout of social isolation. Now people are being told that they can socialize only under the most stringent conditions. Much of what makes life sweet is lost to us, not for days or weeks, but months or years.

“We’re going to stagger out of it; we’re not going to snap back,” Gostin said of the pandemic. He added, “It’s going to take several years for us to be able to come out of all of the trauma that we’ve had.”

Yet somehow there’s no drumbeat of calls for the president’s resignation. People seem to feel too helpless. 

Protesters can make demands of governors and mayors, especially Democratic ones, because at the local level small-d democratic accountability still exists. Nationally such responsiveness is gone; no one expects the president to do his job, or to be held to account when he doesn’t. That’s how you know the country was broken before coronavirus ever arrived.

This suffering, your suffering, wasn’t inevitable. The coronavirus is a natural disaster. The Republican Party’s death-cult fealty to Trump is wholly man-made.

What ‘black-on-black crime’ miss about race and gun deaths: suicide

WASHINGTON POST

My social media timelines of late have been filled with outrage over the police killings of unarmed black citizens, but after a violent Fourth of July weekend around the nation that left several children dead, I noticed an uptick in snarky posts asking: “What about black-on-black crime? Why aren’t you protesting about that?”

Long before the March for Our Lives and the Black Lives Matter movement dominated the headlines in recent years, African Americans were marching in crime-ridden neighborhoods to protest the killings. Davon McNeal, an 11-year-old fatally shot in Washington, D.C., on July 4, had just left an anti-violence community event when he was hit by a bullet. The event was put together by his mother, Crystal McNeal, who works as a “violence interrupter,” a job that has been created in several urban areas with a goal to mediate neighborhood disputes in an attempt to break the cycle of retaliatory killings. Black citizens have formed hundreds of such organizations to save teens so often caught up in that world. Black artists have written songs and made movies, urging youths to stop the violence.

Many black people, desperate to stem the homicide rate that spiraled in the ’90s, even supported the Clinton crime bill, although some now criticize it as having hurt the black community more than it helped. A Gallup survey in 1994 found that nonwhite citizens favored it to a greater degree than white citizens, 58 percent compared with 49 percent.

As a group, African Americans are consistently more likely to be concerned about crime than white Americans. They also are the staunchest supporters of tougher gun-control laws, with 72 percent saying that controlling gun ownership is more important than protecting gun rights, compared with 40 percent of white people.

 White men, in fact, are the demographic most likely to oppose gun-control laws of any kind, although statistics show that they might benefit most from them.

That’s because the majority of the gun deaths in the United States are not homicides but suicides, and white men account for 74 percent of them. More than 288,000 white males fatally shot themselves between 1999 and 2018, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

Having access to a gun substantially increases the risk of death by suicide. In other words, if white men didn’t have so many guns, they would be much less likely to die.

Despite the evidence, 60 percent of white Americans say gun ownership does more to protect people from crime than to put their personal safety at risk (35 percent), according to Pew. Black people by a similar margin (56 percent to 37 percent) say that gun ownership does more to endanger people’s personal safety.

 While most violent crime has fallen dramatically since the early 1990s, gun violence began rising again in recent years. In 2018, the most recent year for complete data, more than 22,000 Americans intentionally killed themselves with a gun, and about 11,000 people were gun homicide victims. 

Efforts to reduce firearm deaths have been hindered not by community indifference but by a Congress afraid to cross the National Rifle Association and gun rights supporters. Federally funded research into gun violence solutions ground to a halt after lawmakers passed the Dickey Amendment in 1996. The provision, pushed by the NRA, cut funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s study of the issue out of fear that it would be seen as federal agencies advocating for gun control. Republicans and some otherwise liberal Democrats fear offending white voters in swing states more concerned with protecting Second Amendment rights than saving lives, including their own.

Suicide affects white males in nearly every age group, with numbers beginning to rise in the late teen years and peaking in the mid- to late 50s. But the rate remains high even among men in their 70s and 80s. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention says that suicide most often is the result of treatable mental health issues and is related to brain functions that affect decision-making and behavioral control. As with the homicide rate, however, the reasons behind suicide are more complicated than a single issue. Trauma, substance use — or even chronic physical pain — can contribute” to someone taking their life, the AFSP said.

Similarly, research has found that many young black men — the group most likely to be perpetrators and victims of gun homicides — suffer from a condition similar to PTSD, brought on by repeated exposure to violence, extreme poverty, high unemployment, drug and alcohol abuse and other social ills that create a sense of hopelessness. A 2017 report in the Guardian newspaper found that much of America’s gun homicide problem “happens in a relatively small number of predictable places, often driven by predictable groups of high-risk people, and its burden is anything but random.”

With so much media focus on urban homicides, suicide, which kills twice as many people, gets comparatively less coverage. Some argue that suicide is a private matter that doesn’t affect the broader community. The result of such historically lopsided coverage is that the public face of gun violence in this country is that of a young black man rather than a middle-aged white one.

When white men respond to their life circumstances with gun violence, it’s treated as a public health problem, brought on by mental illness and stress. When black men do, it’s portrayed almost solely as a criminal issue, caused by lawlessness and moral failing. The multiplier in both epidemics is lawmakers’ blind devotion to the NRA. Zealously protecting their right to bear arms has come at a huge cost, and as quiet as it is kept, it’s not just the black community that is paying.