“Hackers from a foreign nation-state have breached multiple federal agencies, including the Treasury Department and the Commerce Department’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, in a months-long campaign that has stirred concerns of the highest levels of the federal government.
While the full scope and significance of the breaches remain unclear, their discovery prompted an emergency meeting Saturday of the White House’s National Security Council, according to a U.S. official who requested anonymity to discuss an ongoing incident. A second U.S. official said the attack is believed to be the work of the Russian government, a link also made in multiple news reports Sunday night.”
“Trump, it seems, isn’t the only dead-ender holding out more than a month after the election, refusing to acknowledge defeat. Even as Trump lost again in court on Friday, with the Supreme Court rejecting a long-shot effort to overturn the election, he remains a lodestar for denialists of the GOP.
In California, a Republican congressional candidate trounced in Democratic-heavy Los Angeles is still refusing to concede — while simultaneously announcing he’s running for governor. In Maryland, a congressional candidate beaten by more than 40 percentage points is still complaining about “irregularities” in her election. And in Tennessee, a House candidate defeated by more than 57 percentage points has reached out to the ubiquitous pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell to air her grievances about an election that no Republican had any chance of winning — but that she’s convinced she did.
The down-ballot parroting of Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud began right after the election. But in the weeks since, it has evolved into a self-sustaining phenomenon of its own. Republican candidates for House, legislative and gubernatorial races in more than half a dozen states are still refusing to concede.
Echoing the president, these candidates are an early sign of what Republicans say will be a sustained, post-Trump effort to tighten voting restrictions and to reverse measures implemented in many states to make voting easier. They also may mark the beginning of a Trump-inspired trend of candidates who never fold — they just fade away after weeks and months of unsubstantiated allegations of fraud.”
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“On Friday, after the Supreme Court’s rejection of an effort to overturn the presidential election, Webber suggested on Twitter that even the court’s action was a sign of something sinister.
“That’s how you know it’s deeper than anyone could have ever imagined,” he said.”
LC: This could lay the groundwork for further deterioration of democracy.
“Australia enjoyed plenty of advantages over the United States in containing Covid-19. It has no land borders to speak of. Its population density is very low (though the population is concentrated on the coasts). Its outbreak never got nearly as bad as the US’s did. On its worst days, Victoria saw about 700 new cases; Missouri, with (very roughly) a similar population and landmass, is currently averaging more than 3,000. Some of the Australian states also closed their borders to the others, which lowered the risk somebody might bring Covid-19 from one part of the country to another.
But the Australian epidemic has also mirrored America’s in important ways. Once the coronavirus arrived in the spring, the country went into lockdown. When cases abated, some of those restrictions were eased — and, before too long, Covid-19 cases were spiking again. Each state was responsible for its own response, with the federal government playing an advisory role outside of obviously national issues like foreign travel.
In the second wave, Victoria was by far the hardest-hit state. Its case numbers were dwarfing those in every other state including New South Wales, home to the country’s other great metropolis, Sydney.”
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“The state had gone into a stage 4 lockdown — most businesses closed, there was a nightly curfew, and residents were ordered to stay within five kilometers of their home — in August, and it was then extended in September, with the explicit goal of eventually reaching zero new cases.”
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“They treated the threats to public health and the economy as intertwined, which most experts agree they are. The Australian states that contained Covid-19 best also saw the strongest economic recoveries. Victoria, with the worst outbreak among the states, was lagging behind in consumer spending and business revenue.”
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““Without elimination, the third, fourth, or fifth wave is an inevitability. This will either involve more lockdowns or the government will lose the social license to do lockdowns and the virus will spread indiscriminately,” Duckett told me over email, perhaps unwittingly describing the very challenge before the United States during this winter surge. “A hard lockdown in the early stages of the virus gives a chance for elimination, and that gives the chance for business certainty and a full recovery.”
Melburnians are now enjoying the benefits of their sacrifices. Duckett said he had just gone to lunch with a few friends before responding to my email.
The US probably cannot achieve zero Covid-19 cases anytime soon. But it could embrace the spirit of the Victorian model: a clear goal, support for the proven mitigation strategies, and a commitment from the public.”
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“They expanded testing, including random pooled testing and testing for workers in essential industries and of people attending schools or other indoor events. They achieved 24-hour turnarounds for test results, so if a person tested positive, they could quickly isolate. Once cases reached zero, the state was planning to start testing sewage for Covid-19 to get a head start on any resurgence.”
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““A system that relies on self-isolation in which people are unable or refuse to self-isolate cannot succeed,” Duckett and Mackey wrote.
That probably sounds draconian to Americans. Certainly, the harshest lockdown measures taken in Victoria — requiring people to stay within a few miles of their house and stay inside completely at night — would be politically challenging in the US.
But Australians took it in stride because they knew the goal they were working toward.”
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“The government there made it easier for businesses and workers by providing subsidies to businesses to keep people employed and by increasing their unemployment benefits — the same policies that the US has let lapse and is now struggling to reinstitute even during this devastating winter wave.
As cases dwindled, the lockdown measures were relaxed in a clear, tiered fashion. The extreme travel restrictions were the first to go. Schools and businesses could reopen with spacing. Masks continued to be required indoors and on public transportation. Eventually, all restrictions except for international quarantine could be lifted.
Things could still go wrong for Victoria and the rest of Australia. The state has started prioritizing having “normal” conditions for the Christmas shopping season over maintaining zero new cases. But it is easier to focus on reopening when community spread is eliminated — rather than pushing forward with reopening in spite of sustained spread, as the US has done.”
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“I don’t believe it was impossible for America to execute a similar strategy to the one that has succeeded in Victoria. Polls showed most Americans did support wearing masks and other mitigation measures, even if there was some divide among partisans. They worried that social distancing would be relaxed too quickly, not too slowly, much like the Australians did.
The problem, or one of them, is that the US just never set a clear goal for Covid-19 suppression. It was understandably hard to ask people in Wisconsin to abide by social distancing restrictions back when they thought the coronavirus was just a New York City problem — and when they didn’t know what the plan was.
Today, of course, the pandemic is a very real problem for every American. So as we try to bring the winter wave under control, we might benefit from taking a lesson from the Aussies and coming up with a specific objective that all of us, together, can work toward.”
“you have a situation in which large swaths of the country genuinely believe that the Democratic Party is a front for a pedophile ring…I was talking to a volunteer who was going door-to-door in Philadelphia in low-income African American communities, and was getting questions about QAnon conspiracy theories.”
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“If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work.”
“Again and again over the last four years, the Trump administration has made it harder for Americans — and people abroad — to get basic reproductive health care.
In 2017, the administration reimposed and broadened a rule, sometimes called the Mexico City policy, barring health organizations around the world that get US aid from providing or even discussing abortions. The result was a reduction in access to abortion, as well as services like contraception and prenatal care.
The same year, Trump’s Health and Human Services Department issued rules weakening an Obama-era mandate requiring employers to offer insurance that covers birth control, allowing them to claim an exemption if they had a religious or moral objection. Those rules have been tied up by lawsuits, but just won a major victory at the Supreme Court in July.
And in 2019, the Trump administration finalized what reproductive health advocates call a “domestic gag rule,” barring health care providers that get federal family planning funds under the Title X program from performing or referring for abortions. As a result, hundreds of clinics have exited the program, cutting its ability to provide birth control services in half.
These actions have had a real and serious impact on patients, only compounded by a pandemic that has made it even harder for many Americans, especially low-income people of color, to access reproductive health care.
But there is likely an end in sight for many of the Trump administration’s policies: Since they were enacted by executive action, they can be undone by President-elect Joe Biden when he takes office, without any help from Congress.
“I graduated college in 1985 with $18,000 in student loans (about $42,500 in 2019 dollars), and then diligently paid them off over the next 10 years. As a father, I saved enough for my daughter’s education to assure that she could graduate college 100 percent debt-free. I’m not rich. I didn’t always make the best financial choices. But I worked hard, played by the rules, and made good on my debts. I could be the poster child for those claiming student loan forgiveness is “unfair.”
But you know what’s really unfair? The huge advantage I enjoyed graduating into the 1985 job market.”
“The Russian military operations in August inside the U.S. economic zone off the coast of Alaska were the latest in a series of escalated encounters across the North Pacific and the Arctic, where the retreat of polar ice continues to draw new commercial and military traffic. This year, the Russian military has driven a new nuclear-powered icebreaker straight to the North Pole, dropped paratroopers into a high-Arctic archipelago to perform a mock battle and repeatedly flown bombers to the edge of U.S. airspace.
As seas warmed by climate change open new opportunities for oil exploration and trade routes, the U.S. Coast Guard now finds itself monitoring a range of new activity: cruise ships promising a voyage through waters few have ever seen, research vessels trying to understand the changing landscape, tankers carrying new gas riches, and shipping vessels testing new passageways that sailors of centuries past could only dream of.
Russia’s operations in the Arctic have meant a growing military presence at America’s northern door. Rear Adm. Matthew T. Bell Jr., the commander of the Coast Guard district that oversees Alaska, said it was not a surprise to see Russian forces operating in the Bering Sea over the summer, but “the surprise was how aggressive they got on our side of the maritime boundary line.”
In the air, U.S. jets in Alaska typically scramble to intercept about a half-dozen approaching Russian aircraft a year, outliers on the long-range nuclear bomber patrols that Russia resumed in 2007. But this year that number has risen to 14 — on pace to set a record since the Cold War era. In the most recent case, last month, the United States responded to the approach of two Russian bombers and two Russian fighters that came within 30 nautical miles of Alaskan shores.”
“While wildfires are a common occurrence in the Golden State, 2020 is wrapping up to be the harshest in modern history, a result of a mix of climate change, poor forest management, and citizens’ insistence on moving into wooded areas prone to fires.
Unfortunately, California seems hellbent on prohibiting market solutions from fixing that third problem. The state’s insurance commissioner has announced that the state is mandating that companies that provide fire insurance cannot drop coverage of properties within the areas affected by wildfires. This is the second year in a row he has done so.
This counterintuitive announcement by Commissioner Ricardo Lara is the result of a state law passed in 2018 that forbids insurance companies from canceling or refusing to renew policies of a residential property for a year after a declaration of emergency on the basis of the property being in an area in which a wildfire has occurred. Lara was actually the primary sponsor of the bill when he was a state senator, so while his hands are technically tied here, he’s directly responsible for this legal state of affairs.”
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“The marketplace has efficient tools for discouraging building homes in dangerous environments. When insurance companies refuse to insure people who live in places prone to fire, flooding, or other natural disasters, the market is sending consumers a very important message: “It’s not safe to live here. If you make the decision to ignore this warning, we’re not going to be fiscally responsible for your choices.”
Lara’s law subverts these market signals and turns insurance into, essentially, a form of state-enforced financial subsidy. The consequences for bad outcomes are both likely and well-known. Requiring insurance companies to continue covering these properties will encourage people to continue to live and build in places where it’s dangerous. Again, 31 people died as a result of these fires, and Lara’s primary interest is making sure that homeowners apparently don’t learn anything.”
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“People who decide to move to or live in areas that are at risk of wildfire should be free to do so, but it’s not the role of the government to shield them from an appropriate market assessment of the risks of doing so. California’s actions are actually fostering dangerous housing choices—ones which may lead to more deaths down the line—by getting in the way of very important market signals.”
“To the extent that exit polls can be believed, Trump got a thumping 45 percent of Florida’s Latino vote, an 11-point improvement over his 2016 performance. This is squarely because 58 percent of the Sunshine State’s sizeable Cuban American community in the populous Miami-Dade County voted for him, an improvement of four points from last time. This cut Joe Biden’s overall county-wide lead to merely seven points, in contrast to Hillary Clinton’s 30-point one.
Why did Biden lose ground with these groups? One reason is that Trump successfully associated Biden with socialism, and raised the specter that the Democrat would turn America into the countries they’d escaped. In one masterstroke of microtargeting, Trump invited Fabiana Rosales, the wife of an imprisoned Venezuelan opposition leader, to the White House and then used the video with her to woo the community. Meanwhile, Biden took the Latino vote for granted and did little to refute this branding, even as political commentators like Linda Chavez, a conservative who opposed Trump, were sounding the alarm telling him to wake up. Biden could have also done more to point out that Trump had rejected half the asylum petitions of Cubans and Senate Republicans five times in 18 months spurned efforts to extend the Temporary Protected Status for undocumented Venezuelans. If these communities had been more aware of Trump’s record, they might have been less inclined to support him in such numbers. It was missed opportunity on Biden’s part.”
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“By contrast, the states where Latinos came through in decisive numbers for Biden—and against Trump—were Colorado, Nevada, and Arizona. Colorado was an early win for the vice president. Nevada was a squeaker. And Arizona has yet to even be called by The New York Times. In all three, preliminary reports suggest upwards of 70 percent of Hispanics voted for Biden. Why in such large numbers? Because unlike Florida, Hispanics in these states tend to come from Mexico or Central America. And unlike Texas, they tend to be immigrants or first-generation. Hence Trump’s rhetoric and policies directly threatened them, especially in Arizona, which has long been Ground Zero for the restrictionist movement and where Trump’s interior enforcement policies have hit the Hispanic community hard.”
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“Trump had plenty of restrictionist plans ready to go for his second term, he simply chose to de-emphasize them on the stump. Top aide Stephen Miller had already cued up a series of executive orders to further limit grants of asylum, punish and outlaw “sanctuary cities,” expand the travel ban to include more countries, require even more extreme vetting for visa applicants, and impose new limits on work visas. As if that wasn’t ambitious enough, he was also planning to act on a perennial item on the ultra restrictionist wish list by using an executive order to end birthright citizenship, forcing the matter to the Supreme Court.
But he didn’t campaign on those plans. In fact, he barely mentioned them. This was in sharp contrast to his first campaign”
“The share of third-party/independent presidential voters plummeted by nearly four percentage points since 2016, from 5.7 to 1.8, while Joe Biden exceeded Hillary Clinton’s haul nationally by 2.6 percentage points and climbing steadily, as the populous blue states continue to pad his lead.
So while Michigan, for example, was delivering essentially the same results for Trump as four years ago, the Great Lakes State was subtracting 3.6 percentage points from third-party candidates, and adding 3.2 to Biden”
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“Arizona has a similar story: down a combined 4.6 for the marginal names, up 4.3 for the Democrat; 92 percent E.V. All over the country, the president was able to bring out more of his voters, but with only a handful of exceptions was unable to expand on his core share of support by persuading fence-sitters to choose the Republican side.”
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“There were 7.8 million third-party voters last time, and just 2.7 million this time, so any strong lean by the remaining 5 million-plus was always going to dwarf whatever impact partisans may attribute to “spoilers.””