The same sort of conspiracy peddling that paid off politically in 2016 isn’t doing a thing against Joe now.
The New York Post alleges that, according to Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, had dropped off three laptops for repair in 2019 and had never picked them up again, and that the FBI subpoenaed the hard drives, but before turning them over the repairman had made a copy of the material on them, and he gave it to Giuliani, and it had incriminating material on it…
In 2016, many mainstream media outlets let themselves be used by Donald Trump and his henchmen (Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, etc.) to amplify nutso Hillary conspiracy stories. It helped put Trump in the White House, where he has violated the Constitution, his oath of office, and common decency pretty much every day since.
So far this time around, the media’s track record has been better. But it’s better because all the conspiracy-mongering has fallen flat. Prosecutor John Durham, who I really thought was going to do Bill Barr’s dirty work and try to rig the election by indicting a number of deep-staters with “ties” to the Obama administration, reportedly won’t issue a report until after the election, which means he has found nothing. And Wednesday morning we learned that another prosecutor set up by Barr to try to gin up a fake scandal has folded up his tent, too. He was investigating the “unmasking” “scandal,” but he too found nothing.
So they’re shooting blanks. But wait, here comes the New York Post to the rescue!
The real point, is to try to revive the old false conspiracy that Biden urged the firing of that Ukraine prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, because he was investigating Burisma.
It’s not true and it’s accepted as not true across the mainstream media. In the right-wing media, of course, it’s an article of faith, because they need to divert attention away from Trump’s obvious Ukraine corruption and toward this fantasy corruption on Biden’s part.
Every major paper, every fact-checker, every everything outside of Trumpland agrees on two points: one, that Biden put pressure on the Ukrainian government to fire Shokin because Shokin was seen as corrupt by every international organization (the IMF, for example), which wanted him out, and Obama deployed Biden to convey that message; two, that as far as is known, Shokin wasn’t even investigating Burisma at the time in question (2015). You can read this, or dozens of other sources.
So the whole idea that Biden did something corrupt with respect to Shokin is a desperate ploy from Trumpworld to be able to argue that Biden is the real bad actor. Why are they doing this? Let’s just take a second to remember what Trump said to Volodymyr Zelensky in that perfect phone call: “The other thing. There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great.”
That, of course, is illegal. He got impeached over it, and if we had an honest Senate, he’d have been removed from office.
But here we have Giuliani and Bannon trying, after every other effort has failed, to get the Burisma story back into the news cycle. And it’s possible they’re sitting on more info proving or appearing to prove that Biden did in fact discuss Hunter’s business dealings with him.
Hunter Biden seems like a mess of a human being with really terrible judgment, and Joe should have said to him: dude, no, stay out of Ukraine. But the idea that this amounts to corruption is a stretch. Biden’s been in public life for 50 years. No one has ever accused him of cupidity or venality. If he did discuss his son’s business dealings, it was probably to tell him to be careful.
Meanwhile, there’s Donald Trump, whom no one has ever accused of decency or generosity. He used his own charitable foundation to pay fines in Palm Beach and buy portraits of himself. And that ranks about 50th of the list of things Trump has done that are greedy, unethical, or possibly illegal. Every day, he’s making money from the Saudis or someone staying in his Washington hotel. Every day, he’s out there trying to steal the election. Every day, he corrupts the institutions he’s been put in charge of a little bit more. And, every day, dozens or hundreds of Americans are dying needless deaths because he panicked and didn’t know what to do. He lied, and his lies are killing people.
And we’re going to get excited over one meeting Biden may have had that even if it happened proves nothing? No. The story here, if there is one, is how Giuliani and Bannon got this.
Being “equally tough on Hillary” got us the most corrupt and anti-democratic president in our country’s history. We can’t be stupid enough to play that equivalency game a second time.
As ridiculous as it sounds, the story is still of note as news because of what its timing might mean.
First of all, the Trump campaign is in trouble. Polls show the president down by significant numbers, and the voters he has been trying to suppress are turning out in droves. Today Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, a Republican, issued a statement saying he “cannot support Donald Trump for President,” and the Biden campaign announced that it raised an eye-popping $383 million in September alone, a historic record which comes on top of the historic record of $364.5 million it set in August. This means Biden has $432 million on hand for the last month of the election. Dumping a story like this Hunter Biden fiction in a tabloid, which has wide reach among low-information voters, is a cheap fix for the Trump campaign. It might shore him up among those who will never see the wide debunking of the story.
Second, though, the timing of the story suggests it was designed to distract from the third and final day of Amy Coney Barrett’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in her hearing for confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court. The hearings have not been going particularly well for the Republicans. They have the votes to confirm her, and confirm her they will, but her insistence that she is an “originalist,” along with her refusal to answer any questions on topics relevant to the present, including on racial prejudice, climate change, voter suppression, and so on, have made her extremism clear.
Democrats have hammered home that putting Barrett on the court at this moment is an extraordinary power grab, and voters seem to agree. Turning attention away from the hearings would be useful for the Republicans when voters are on their way to the polls.
And yet, Republicans are determined to force her appointment through, even though it threatens to delegitimize the Supreme Court.
As Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, illustrated in careful detail at the Barrett hearings yesterday, it is no accident that Barrett’s nomination has the support of secret dark money donors. She will be the key vote to having a solid pro-corporate Supreme Court.
The Trump administration has made it clear that it favors private interests over public ones, combatting regulation and welfare programs, as well as calling for private companies to take over public enterprises like the United States Postal Service.
The administration has backed pro-corporate judges whose nominations are bolstered by tens of millions of dollars worth of political advertising paid for by dark money. Trump's Supreme Court appointees have joined other Republican justices on the court, where they consistently prop up business interests—such as with the 2010 Citizens United decision allowing unlimited corporate money in elections—and attack voting rights, as in 2013 with the Shelby v. Holder decision gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
In 2014, New York Times journalist Linda Greenhouse wrote that it is “impossible to avoid the conclusion that the Republican-appointed majority is committed to harnessing the Supreme Court to an ideological agenda.” That ideological agenda has profound implications for our society as we know it, beginning with the Affordable Care Act, which the court is slated to take up on November 10, just a week after the election. But it is not just our healthcare that is at stake. At risk is the whole infrastructure of laws protecting our civil rights, as well as our democracy.
The Supreme Court put on hold a lower-court order that said the count should continue until the end of the month, because of delays brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.
The court did not provide a reason, which is common in disposing of the kind of emergency application filed by the administration,” Robert Barnes and Tara Bahrampour report. “This summer, the president said he intended to break with the past and present to Congress census data that did not include undocumented immigrants. Two weeks later, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said he was ending the count early — by the end of September — to meet a Dec. 31 deadline. It is unclear how many Americans are left to be counted. … Plaintiffs, including the National Urban League, several jurisdictions and other groups, contend that a shortened timeline would result in an undercount of harder-to-count populations, including immigrants, minorities and lower-income groups, depriving them of funding and representation."
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent: “The harms caused by rushing this year’s census count are irreparable. And respondents will suffer their lasting impact for at least the next 10 years."
The number of new unemployment claims jumped last week. States across the country processed 898,000 new unemployment claims, up more than 50,000 from the previous week, the largest increase in first time jobless applications in recent weeks. (Eli Rosenberg)
First Lady Melania Trump, 50, revealed that their son Barron, 14, tested positive after she and the 74-year-old president had, but they've all since tested negative. “Luckily he is a strong teenager and exhibited no symptoms,” she wrote in an essay published Wednesday by the White House. “I was very fortunate as my diagnosis came with minimal symptoms, though they hit me all at once and it seemed to be a roller coaster of symptoms in the days after. I experienced body aches, a cough and headaches, and felt extremely tired most of the time. I chose to go a more natural route in terms of medicine, opting more for vitamins and healthy food."
‘Politics, far more than science, shaped school district decision-making.’
That is the conclusion of fascinating new research from political scientists Michael Hartney and Leslie Finger at Boston College and the University of Texas. They analyzed reopening plans for 10,000 public school districts and discovered that the percentage of students attending classes in-person this fall was strongly correlated with the share of the vote that Trump received in the surrounding county in 2016. (Antonia Farzan)
Democratic enthusiasm nationwide is propelling an enormous wave of early voting.
“Roughly 15 million Americans have already voted in the fall election, reflecting an extraordinary level of participation despite barriers erected by the coronavirus pandemic — and setting a trajectory that could result in the majority of voters casting ballots before Election Day for the first time in U.S. history,” Amy Gardner and Elise Viebeck report. “In Georgia this week, voters waited as long as 11 hours to cast their ballots on the first day of early voting. In North Carolina, nearly 1 in 5 of roughly 500,000 who have returned mail ballots so far did not vote in the last presidential election. In Michigan, more than 1 million people — roughly one-fourth of total turnout in 2016 — have already voted. The picture is so stark that election officials around the country are reporting record early turnout, much of it in person, meaning that more results could be available on election night than previously thought.
“So far, much of the early voting appears to be driven by heightened enthusiasm among Democrats. Of the roughly 3.5 million voters who have cast ballots in six states that provide partisan breakdowns, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by roughly 2 to 1, according to a Washington Post analysis of data in Florida, Iowa, Maine, Kentucky, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Additionally, those who have voted include disproportionate numbers of Black voters and women, according to state data — groups that favor Biden over Trump in recent polls.”
- “With millions of mailed ballots already pouring in, early holiday shopping and mega retail events like Amazon’s Prime Day threaten to expose vulnerabilities inside the nation’s mail service, which already is dragging from skyrocketing package volumes,” Jacob Bogage and Abha Bhattarai report. (Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon, owns The Post).
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At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Black and Latino New Yorkers died from the virus at rates much higher than their representation in the general population. Experts at first theorized that members of these groups worked jobs that put them at greater risk, or that they were more likely to have pervasive chronic illnesses, such as hypertension, diabetes, and kidney disease.
Now researchers and community leaders are assessing another, more nebulous, cause of the disparate death rates: how long it took people to come to the hospital.
“There are a lot of reasons, but one that has been under-studied is access to care,” said Dr. Max O’Donnell, a critical care physician at the Columbia University Medical Center and one of the co-authors of a study in The Lancet on the link between the race or ethnicity of COVID-19 patients and the time it took them to receive care. “How people have access to primary care doctors or have health insurance or mistrust the medical system are all part of the puzzle.”
O’Donnell and his team found a striking variation by race how long it took the sickest New Yorkers to be admitted to hospitals: for white patients, the median delay was three days of symptoms; for Latinos and Hispanics, it was five days; and for African Americans, it was seven days—or more than twice as long as whites.
O’Donnell said other research has concluded that patients who delay care have worse outcomes, though it will take further research to determine how much worse. In the meantime, he said, although “we don't have the body of literature to make certain claims … [that] can't prevent us from trying to deliver better care … and improve access.”
“You have a double burden when you're not feeling well and you're frightened, and you’re a person of color,” Dr. Carol Horowitz of Mt. Sinai Hospital, Harlem, said. “As a white professional, I just go in and I kind of expect I'm going to be treated at least okay. But there are a lot of people who don't have that expectation, and they can feel like crap—and feel like they’re going to be treated like crap.”
While it’s hard to say just how many people died from delaying care, one consequence of coming to the hospital as soon as possible is clear, co-author O’Donnell said: the limited assortment of treatments that doctors now have works a lot better when administered early in the course of illness.
“Folks are really confused, because the message has been, ‘Stay home, self-quarantine, and monitor your symptoms,’” Blackwell said, “and now they want to switch the message to say, ‘Don't delay. Go for care.’”
If, in fact, “hospitals are set up and ready for people to come in without delay and receive care,” she said, “that would be ideal.”
But she said in addition to stockpiling steroids, plasma and personal protective gear, the healthcare system also needs to build up trust and respect from its most vulnerable patients, so they can feel safe seeking help.
