“Tens of thousands of protesters demanding a new election gathered in Minsk, Belarus, and other cities around the country on Sunday in what some observers say may be the largest protests in the history of the former Soviet republic.
The demonstrations came a week after Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko — Europe’s longest-serving leader — plainly rigged national elections to remain in power. They also marked the eighth day of protests across the country against those results, a striking burst of energy against a repressive government that has resulted in thousands of Belarusians being detained and at least two deaths.”
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“Lukashenko intervened aggressively in the elections: He detained journalists and two of the top three opposition leaders running against him; he prohibited the third one from running altogether.
Lukashenko’s authoritarian handling of the election while the nation also faced serious economic and public health crises seems to have backfired, helping to ignite the protests.
Part of the dissident energy also seemed to be fueled by the meteoric rise of a 37-year-old stay-at-home-mom-turned-opposition leader, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who stepped into the race after her husband, a popular blogger, was arrested two days after he announced his candidacy for president. Tikhanovskaya has been forced to flee the country out of safety concerns, but protests have continued to gather momentum across the nation.”
“Imagine this election night scenario: With a decisive number of mail ballots yet to be tallied, President Donald Trump enjoys a narrow lead over Joe Biden. But before all the votes can be counted — a process that could take days — Trump declares victory, citing purported irregularities with mail-in votes.
You can even picture Trump insisting that the preliminary election night tally must stand as final with a tweet that reads similarly to this one he posted in November 2018, when Florida’s US Senate and gubernatorial elections were still undecided: “The Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged. An honest vote count is no longer possible-ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!””
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““You know, you could have a case where this election won’t be decided on the evening of November 3,” Trump told Axios’s Jonathan Swan in an interview that aired on HBO last week. Asked why that’s a problem — after all, there’s no rule that elections have to be decided on election night — Trump said, “lots of things will happen during that period of time; especially when you have tight margins, lots of things going to happen.”
Then, during a media availability on Sunday, Trump claimed that Democrats are using mail ballots to try and “steal an election.””
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“”None of the five states that hold their elections primarily by mail has had any voter fraud scandals since making that change. As the New York Times editorial board notes, “states that use vote-by-mail have encountered essentially zero fraud: Oregon, the pioneer in this area, has sent out more than 100 million mail-in ballots since 2000, and has documented only about a dozen cases of proven fraud.” Rounded to the seventh decimal point, that’s 0.0000001 percent of all votes cast. An exhaustive investigative journalism analysis of all known voter fraud cases identified only 491 cases of absentee ballot fraud from 2000 to 2012. As election law professor Richard L. Hasen notes, during that period “literally billions of votes were cast.” While mail ballots are more susceptible to fraud than in-person voting, it is still more likely for an American to be struck by lightning than to commit mail voting fraud.””
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“Trump has repeatedly cited episodes of attempted fraud on behalf of Republican Mark Harris in a North Carolina congressional race in 2018 and more recently in New Jersey as evidence there’s good reason to be worried. But as Berman explained to me, there’s an irony in Trump citing instances where attempted fraud was detected and ultimately unsuccessful.”
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“According to Emerson College polling conducted late last month, a whopping 76 percent of voters who plan to vote by mail plan to vote for Joe Biden. By contrast, 65 percent of those planning to vote in person say they’ll vote for Trump.”
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“A normal politician’s response to those numbers might be to work harder to appeal to voters who plan to vote by mail. Trump, however, is no normal politician.”
“The United States is becoming like Lebanon and other Middle East countries in two respects. First, our political differences are becoming so deep that our two parties now resemble religious sects in a zero-sum contest for power. They call theirs “Shiites and Sunnis and Maronites” or “Israelis and Palestinians.” We call ours “Democrats and Republicans,” but ours now behave just like rival tribes who believe they must rule or die.
And second, as in the Middle East, so increasingly in America: Everything is now politics — even the climate, even energy, even face masks in a pandemic.”
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“But a society, and certainly a democracy, eventually dies when everything becomes politics. Governance gets strangled by it. Indeed, it was reportedly the failure of the corrupt Lebanese courts to act as guardians of the common good and order the removal of the explosives from the port — as the port authorities had requested years ago — that paved the way for the explosion.
“For a healthy politics to flourish it needs reference points outside itself — reference points of truth and a conception of the common good,” explained the Hebrew University religious philosopher Moshe Halbertal. “When everything becomes political, that is the end of politics.”
To put it differently, when everything is politics, it means that everything is just about power. There is no center, there are only sides; there’s no truth, there are only versions; there are no facts, there’s only a contest of wills.
If you believe that climate change is real, it must be because someone paid you off with a research grant. If you believe the president committed an impeachable offense trying to enlist the president of Ukraine to undermine Joe Biden, it’s only because you want power for your party.
Illiberal populists like Trump — or Bibi Netanyahu in Israel, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey and Vladimir Putin in Russia — deliberately try to undermine the guardians of facts and the common good. Their message to their people is: “Don’t believe the courts, the independent civil servants or the fake news generators — only trust me, my words and my decisions. It’s a jungle out there. My critics are killers (which is what Trump called his press corps on Friday), and only I can protect our tribe from theirs. It’s rule or die.””
“Analyzing Pew polls conducted from October of last year through June 2020, the center found that “those who rely most on social media for political news stand apart from other news consumers in a number of ways. These U.S. adults, for instance, tend to be less likely than other news consumers to closely follow major news stories, such as the coronavirus outbreak and the 2020 presidential election. And, perhaps tied to that, this group also tends to be less knowledgeable about these topics.””
“The filibuster, which in its current form prevents a vote on legislation without 60 votes to cut off debate, was first used in 1837 during the controversy over the Second Bank of the United States, and it has been deployed many times since for reasons having nothing to do with government-enforced white supremacy.
It is true that segregationists used the filibuster to oppose civil rights legislation in the 1950s and ’60s. Most famously, Sen. Strom Thurmond, then a Democrat representing South Carolina, spoke for more than 24 hours to impede passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which aimed to protect the voting rights of African Americans in the South. Southern legislators—including Sen. Robert Byrd (D–W.Va.), an ardent defender of Senate traditions—also used the filibuster in an unsuccessful attempt to block the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned segregation in public schools and racial discrimination in voting requirements, employment, and places of public accommodation.
But that is just a snapshot of the filibuster’s potential uses, which can be either malign or beneficial, depending on the target and one’s view of the legislation’s merits. Just as the principle of federalism does not qualify as a “Jim Crow relic” simply because segregationists invoked it, the filibuster cannot be deemed irredeemable simply because they found it useful. Like other restraints on the majority’s will—including those mandated by the Constitution, such as requiring bicameral approval of legislation and the president’s assent in the absence of a congressional supermajority—the filibuster is an ideologically neutral obstacle that makes it harder to pass laws. Whether you think its net impact is good or bad is apt to depend not only on which party happens to be in power but also on your general view of the work that Congress does.
The filibuster was not part of the original constitutional design. It arose from a rule change that Vice President Aaron Burr urged in 1805. As George Washington University political scientist Sarah Binder explained during a 2010 Senate hearing, Burr thought the chamber’s rule book was cluttered with unnecessary provisions, including what was known as the “previous question” motion, which it turned out could be used to close debate with a simple majority. Unlike the Senate, the House of Representatives retained that rule.
“Today, we know that a simple majority in the House can use the rule to cut off debate,” Binder said. “But in 1805, neither chamber used the rule that way. Majorities were still experimenting with it. And so when Aaron Burr said, ‘Get rid of the previous question motion,’ the Senate didn’t think twice. When they met in 1806, they dropped the motion from the Senate rule book.” In other words, “the filibuster was created by mistake.””
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“In 1917, Woodrow Wilson, outraged by Republican senators’ filibustering of his proposal to arm merchant ships as a deterrent to German U-boats, demanded reform to disempower this “little group of willful men.” The Senate responded by adopting Rule 22, which empowered a two-thirds majority to cut off debate—a compromise between Democrats who favored a simple-majority rule and Republicans who resisted any change. In 1975, the Senate reduced the majority required for cloture from two-thirds to three-fifths, or from from 67 to 60 votes in a chamber with 100 members.”
“Floyd is ordered from the vehicle, as are the other two passengers, who are told to wait next to a nearby wall. During this time the officers appear to be interested only in asserting control over the situation, constantly ordering Floyd’s compliance but not really explaining what’s happening. Lane even demands “Stop resisting!” when Floyd is being handcuffed, even though it does not appear that Floyd is resisting at that point.
Floyd does completely panic when the cops attempt to put him in the back of a police SUV. He keeps telling them he’s claustrophobic, but they keep pushing him to get into the back of the SUV. He screams that he’s going to die, and he even tells them that he had COVID-19 (an autopsy on Floyd would verify this claim). He starts repeating that he “can’t breathe” while he’s in the back of the car before he manages to struggle his way out of the SUV somehow (even in the footage, it’s not clear how) and ends up on the ground next to it.
And that’s where Officer Derek Chauvin, who had arrived on the scene with fellow Officer Tou Thao, ends up kneeling on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes, ultimately killing the man. On the video you can hear bystanders begging Chauvin to let him up or check Floyd’s pulse, telling him, “He’s not responsive!”
Lane asks the woman who was in the car with Floyd if he’s drunk and why he’s “being all squirrelly” with his responses. She’s savvy enough not to point out that Lane had pointed a gun directly at his head and was talking to Floyd as though he were a carjacker, not a police officer. She suggests to Lane that Floyd has mental health issues.
A subsequent autopsy would show that Floyd had meth, fentanyl, and cannabinoids in his bloodstream. But none of that justifies the police aggression captured on camera. Floyd is panicking and at points resistant, especially when he’s put in the police SUV, but at no point does he engage in threats, exhibit any threatening mannerisms, or act violently.
The officers’ encounter with Floyd is precisely why police reformers talk about the importance of de-escalation training. The stressfulness of this entire encounter is ratcheted up every step of the way by the officers, even though the crime for which Floyd was being arrested was not violent and his responses to the police were not violent. The violence in this encounter came entirely from one direction: the police.
It’s easy to say after the fact that the encounter could have and should have been handled differently given the fatal outcome. But now that the body camera footage has made its way into the public domain, it’s even more clear that none of Floyd’s responses to the officers merited their aggression. The Minneapolis Police Department was right to fire them all. Chauvin has since been charged with second-degree murder and the other three with aiding and abetting second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.”
“More than one-in-five Texans who are tested for coronavirus are positive, the worst statewide rate in the country. But the number of people getting tests has plummeted in the last two weeks, which could understate how widespread the virus really is as schools reopen and hospitalizations and deaths remain near record highs.”
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“Public health experts say a number of factors may have depressed demand for tests, including long wait times and changing rules for who is eligible and the effects of Tropical Storm Hanna, which battered the southern part of the state late last month and disrupted services near the border with Mexico.
But the biggest reason may be an apparent false sense of security. The drop off in testing coincides with a decline in infections after Abbott ordered people to wear masks, reimposed seating limits in restaurants and closed down bars again. That worries disease trackers who suspect any positive news will breed complacency and make people willing to ignore the possibility they could be infected without showing symptoms. Without widespread testing, new Covid spikes could pop up and go unnoticed.”
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“Texas’s drop in testing is part of a larger nationwide trend that’s seen the average number of coronavirus tests fall from more than 800,000 a day in late July to roughly 700,000 over the last week.”
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“But the testing problems aren’t all linked to Texans’ behavior. There also are questions about flaws in the state’s data collection that may have distorted who was sick and where. Texas at the end of July had 1 million completed tests whose results had not been assigned to a particular county. Officials are now sorting through the backlog, which could have had the effect of making the tested population appear smaller than it really was.”
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“Abbot said testing numbers should rebound in the coming days. There will be a surge in Houston, the governor said, where he aims to test an additional 50,000 people over a 10-day stretch.”
“After months of casting suspicion on the whole concept of mail-in voting, the president is suddenly behind it… for states where he has a stronghold. “In Florida I encourage all to request a Ballot & Vote by Mail!” Donald Trump tweeted on Tuesday afternoon. “Whether you call it Vote by Mail or Absentee Voting, in Florida the election system is Safe and Secure, Tried and True,” the president opined on social media.
Meanwhile, his campaign is suing to stop the state of Nevada from expanding its mail-in voting protocol.”
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“Nevada went for Clinton in 2016, and Florida went for Trump, so that might be one clue. The president has also criticized the prospect of expanding mail-in ballot access in California, a reliably blue state.”