The election was a necessity. We can not have free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.
- Abraham Lincoln, 11-10-1864, two days after his re-election
This week's featured post is "The Election: Worry or Don't Worry?".
This week everybody was talking about Trump's threat to the election
At 8:30 Thursday morning, the Bureau of Economic Analysis released its 2nd quarter GDP report, showing the economy contracting at a record pace. Sixteen minutes later, Trump tweeted:
With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???
Coincidence? Of course not. Again and again, Trump has shown that he would rather have us talking about some outrageous thing he said than about his failures in the real world.
And notice, of course, that Trump presents no plan for making things better. No plan for controlling the virus so that in-person voting will be safer, no safeguards to make mail-in voting more secure. No suggestion of when or how people could "properly, securely, and safely vote". The tweet is just pure disruption: undermine faith in what is going to happen, without offering any viable alternative.
Republicans in Congress tried to stay clear of this authoritarian overreach, but for the most part they didn't condemn it either. "I think delaying the election probably wouldn’t be a good idea," Lindsey Graham said. And Mitch McConnell commented:
Never in the history of the Congress, through wars, depressions and the Civil War have we ever not had a federally scheduled election on time, and we’ll find a way to do that again this Nov. 3.
To me, their message to Trump sounded more like "If you want to disrupt the election, leave me out of it" than "Don't you dare." I would have liked an elected Republican to react more like Federalist Society founder Steven Calabresi:
I am frankly appalled by the president’s recent tweet seeking to postpone the November election. Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion that President Trump is a fascist. But this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate. ... President Trump needs to be told by every Republican in Congress that he cannot postpone the federal election. Doing so would be illegal, unconstitutional and without precedent in American history. Anyone who says otherwise should never be elected to Congress again.
and the yuge GDP drop
OK, back to the GDP. The BEA report began:
Real gross domestic product (GDP) decreased at an annual rate of 32.9 percent in the second quarter of 2020
That 32.9% number was all over the media coverage of the report, but it's a crazy way to look at it. Nothing real fell by 32.9% in the 2nd quarter. NPR explains:
GDP swings are typically reported at an annual rate — as if they were to continue for a full year — which can be misleading in a volatile period like this. The overall economy in the second quarter was 9.5% smaller than during the same period a year ago.
To bring this idea home, imagine that you buy a $20,000 car today. So today you are spending at an annual rate of $7.3 million. But nothing in your box of receipts will ever add up to $7.3 million, because you're not going to buy a $20,000 car every day for a year.
All the same, though, what really happened is bad enough: In the 2nd quarter the economy was 9.5% smaller than it was the year before. In the whole history of quarterly GDP reports, there has never been one this bad. What this proves is that we're not having the "V-shaped recovery" that Trump has been predicting. People are still hurting, and jobs are hard to find. When Republicans in Congress went along with Democrats on the CARES Act in March, most of them were imagining that we'd be over the hump by now and well on our way back to normal.
Well, we're not. And Republicans have no idea what to do about it.
The White House’s strategy in the negotiations has shifted multiple times in the past few weeks. Democrats passed a $3 trillion package in May that included an extension of unemployment benefits, new stimulus checks, aid for states and localities, and various other programs. The White House expressed opposition to that bill but did not begin negotiations with Democrats until recently. It also took the White House much longer than expected to broker a unified Republican proposal with the Senate GOP after blowback on several of the White House’s ideas.
One special crisis: The federal eviction ban has lapsed, and estimates say Americans owe $21.5 billion in back rent. "In July alone, 21% of renters paid no rent, according to research firm Apartment List." Expect a wave of evictions, followed by an increase in homelessness. It's got to be much harder to protect yourself against Covid-19 if you're homeless, so this will directly affect the spread of the virus.
Trump and McConnell have been acting like they have all the time they want to figure this out. They don't. Bad stuff is already happening, and more is going to happen every day they delay.
Renters are just the first domino. If they can't pay, then landlords won't be able to pay their mortgages. And then banks will be insolvent, and we'll be in a credit crunch.
One odd wrinkle in the politics of this is that it's not clear who McConnell speaks for. Lindsey Graham has claimed that "Half the Republicans are going to vote no on any Phase 4 package." And Ron Johnson says: "I don't want to see any new authorization of money."
On the surface this looks weird, because the economic disaster these Republicans are courting is going to hurt Trump's re-election campaign.
What's going on here is that senators who aren't running this year are looking down the road, and already assuming a Trump loss in the fall. After the George W. Bush administration ended in disaster, Republicans quickly disavowed Bush and claimed that he was never really a conservative. The Tea Party movement of 2009 took aim at all the Republicans who went along with Bush on the $700 billion TARP bail-out bill in October of 2008.
Senators like Johnson and Ben Sasse are foreseeing a similar rebranding trick after Trump is gone. And they sense that Republicans who vote for a new stimulus now will be vulnerable once Biden is president and deficits become anathema again.
Michael Strain of the conservative American Enterprise Institute makes a good point about statistics: The bad 2nd-quarter numbers set the stage for 3rd-quarter numbers that will sound good, even if they're not.
Economists at JPMorgan Chase & Co. estimate that the June GDP is over five percentage points larger than the average in April, May, and June. So even if the economy does not grow at all in July, August and September, the third quarter is already set to outperform the second by a wide margin.
When a trillion dollars is going out the door, Trump just can't resist wetting his beak a little. His proposed plan includes money to remodel the FBI building near the Trump International Hotel in D.C. The original plan had the FBI headquarters moving to cheaper quarters in the suburbs, but then the D.C. site might be available for some competing hotel. Trump really doesn't want that to happen.
His plan also includes a bigger tax break for business restaurant spending -- another boost for Trump properties.
and the virus
The death rate continues to rise. The current 7-day moving average is 1,226 deaths a day.
The news continues to be bad for anyone hoping schools will reopen safely.
Central Junior High in Greenfield, Indiana couldn't get through its first day without an incident.
Just hours into the first day of classes on Thursday, a call from the county health department notified Greenfield Central Junior High School in Indiana that a student who had walked the halls and sat in various classrooms had tested positive for the coronavirus. Administrators began an emergency protocol, isolating the student and ordering everyone who had come into close contact with the person, including other students, to quarantine for 14 days.
... A New York Times analysis found that in many districts in the Sun Belt, at least 10 people infected with the coronavirus would be expected to arrive at a school of about 500 students and staff members during the first week if it reopened today.
A major outbreak happened at a Georgia YMCA camp.
A CDC report released Friday reveals that hundreds of campers at a north Georgia YMCA camp were infected with coronavirus in just days before the camp was shut down. ... According to the report, of the 597 residents who attended the camp, 344 were tested and 260 tested positive for the virus. The camp was only open for four days before being shut down because of the virus, and officials followed all recommended safety protocols. ...
The CDC said that what happened at High Harbor shows that earlier thinking that children might not be as susceptible to COVID-19 is wrong. According to the report, the age group with the most positive coronavirus tests was 6 - 10 years old.
Former presidential candidate Herman Cain died Thursday of complications from Covid-19. For a brief time in the 2012 cycle, as the slice of the Republican Party that would eventually become the Trump personality cult struggled against Mitt Romney, Cain was the front-runner for the Republican nomination.
With the virus being so ubiquitous, it's impossible to be confident in any contact-tracing. But Cain went to Trump's June 20 rally in Tulsa, where (like just about everybody else) he didn't wear a mask. He tested positive on June 29. (I haven't been able to determine whether that was when the test was given or the result reported.) He was hospitalized on July 1, and died July 30.
Trump began his July 30 briefing by blaming Cain's death on "the China virus". As usual, he takes no responsibility.
Here's the ad Trump should run:
and John Lewis' funeral
The funeral was held Thursday.
The presidential eulogies -- delivered by every living president but the one who couldn't be bothered to show up -- were not to be missed: Barack Obama (text, video), Bill Clinton, and even George W. Bush. Bush was never known for his eloquence, or for his camaraderie with the civil rights movement, but his speech embodied a basic decency that is has not been seen in the White House since the current president arrived.
and you also might be interested in ...
The federal storm troopers left Portland, and the situation calmed down almost immediately. It's almost like the feds never intended to preserve peace and order.
One of the demonstrators described the evolution of the protests like this:
We came out here in t-shirts and with hula-hoops and stuff, and they started gassing us. So we came back with respirators, and they started shooting us. So we came back with vests, and they started aiming for the head. So we started wearing helmets. And now they call us terrorists. Who’s escalating this? It’s not us.
The retail bankruptcies continue: Lord and Taylor, Men's Wearhouse.
Fascinating tweet-storm in which an ER doctor talks about a surgery patient who was refusing a Covid-19 test, and so couldn't be operated on. It's a story of the kind of compassionate interaction we all wish we could receive or were capable of giving others. The doctor listened, reassured, provided factual context, and got the patient's consent.
In a Fox News interview on July 19, Trump told Chris Wallace:
We’re signing a health-care plan within two weeks, a full and complete health-care plan.
Two weeks was up yesterday, and guess what? Nothing.
Trump usually expects nobody to be paying attention after two weeks, so "in two weeks" usually means "never". (Remember the news conference where Melania was going to produce all her citizenship documentation, proving that "She came in totally legally."? During the 2016 campaign he said that would happen "in a few weeks". It still hasn't.) But the Washington Post kept track this time, and published an article about all the other times Trump has promised a health-care plan.
In June 2019, Trump said in an interview with ABC News that he would announce a “phenomenal” new health-care plan “in about two months, maybe less.”
Two months later, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway told reporters that the president was preparing to introduce an elaborate plan to redesign the nation’s health-care system in a speech the following month. “We’re working every single day here,” Conway said last August. “I’ve already been in meetings this morning on the president’s health-care plan. It’s pretty impressive.”
No speech or plan came.
and let's close with some great video-editing
Nike ... well, they're a big corporation, and they've got some problems. But credit where it's due: If you want to make the case that people are people and sport is sport, you can't do a lot better than this video. I wonder how much tape they had to watch to find images that fit together this well.
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