[y66]

From Matt Yglesias at Vox:

https://www.vox.com/...s-2020-election

Quote

Most of the people who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 tell pollsters they’re firmly backing his reelection this fall. But elections are won by margins. And the relatively small number of Trump voters — about 10 percent, according to the Cooperative Congressional Election Survey — who say they’re at least considering casting a vote for the Democratic nominee are a critical slice of the population to understand.

And a new study, provided to Vox by Tufts University political scientists Brian Schaffner and Laurel Bliss and Data for Progress executive director Sean McElwee, argues that climate change could be the key for Democrats hoping to woo these voters.

This is a matter that should be of some concern to Joe Biden in particular, as the wavering Trump voters are disproportionately young and the youth vote has not exactly been Biden’s strong suit. But while these voters take conservative positions on some issues, their ideas on climate are largely aligned with those of the Democratic Party base and with stances Biden himself has already taken.

Who the wavering Trump voters are

Trump voters who’ve lost confidence in the president are an electorally critical demographic, but it’s also a small group of people — just around 10 percent of the approximately 46 percent of voters who pulled the lever for Trump in 2016. The CCES is an ideal tool to study those voters because it’s a large survey, with 19,000 responses, that can still generate statistically useful information about small sub-groups.

The main takeaway is that those Trump voters who say they are likely to vote Democratic in 2020 (or aren’t sure) are much younger than the typical Trump voter. Over 20 percent of Trump backers in the youngest cohorts say they have doubts about 2020, but very few older Trump voters agree.

These wavering Trump voters, as you might expect, take a mix of liberal and conservative positions on various policy questions the CCES asks about.

Of course, it doesn’t matter whether a person has a left-leaning view on an issue if they don’t really prioritize it — so the authors ran the data through an algorithm designed to show which issues are strong statistical predictors of wavering. In other words, what are the issues on which giving some liberal answers means you’re likely considering voting for a Democrat in 2020?

What the authors found is that climate and immigration stand head and shoulders above the rest.

But there’s a big difference between these two topics. On immigration, wavering Trump voters are fairly moderate, meaning they disagree with some of Trump’s positions but also disagree with some Democratic ones. On climate, by contrast, wavering Trump supporters are clearly aligned with Democrats.

Wavering Trump voters lean left on climate

The paper’s key finding is that on climate and environmental issues, wavering Trump voters — both those who say they’re likely to vote Democratic in 2020 and those who say they’re unsure — have views that fit comfortably with those of most rank-and-file Democrats as well as positions the Biden campaign has articulated.

Large majorities of wavering Trump voters believe in renewable energy mandates, think the EPA should regulate greenhouse gas emissions, oppose repealing the Clean Power Plan, and disagree with the US leaving the Paris climate agreement. Strengthening the Clean Air and Clean Water acts is a less popular idea, but one still favored by a majority of wavering Trump voters.

Wavering Trump voters oppose the president’s most extreme stances, like deporting so-called DREAMers and his ongoing efforts to slash legal immigration. But they don’t necessarily agree with Democrats’ broader skepticism of the immigration enforcement apparatus. That makes immigration a dicey issue to debate (though Biden could strengthen his position with swing voters by coming out in favor of increased US Border Patrol funding, albeit at the risk of annoying left-wing activists).

On climate, Biden’s on much firmer ground. And highlighting the climate issue would pair naturally with other potential Trump weak points — like the unprecedented increase in air pollution deaths on his watch, or the surprising depth of public support for stronger clean water rules — that have received scant media attention during the Trump years.

Of course, the immediate coronavirus crisis makes it hard to secure attention for anything else these days. But the practical and thematic linkages between the climate crisis and the pandemic are very real. We are witnessing before our eyes a live demonstration of the perils involved in ignoring scientific expertise when it happens to be inconvenient and the value of preparing in advance for potential problems in the future. Climate change is also likely to severely exacerbate the problem of mosquito-borne illness, as the bugs that carry Zika, dengue fever, chikungunya, and malaria expand their range.

Most Democratic operatives seem skeptical of the political merits of the climate issue, but the evidence suggests that it — rather than the aberrant personality or corruption topics that often dominate negative media coverage of Trump — is one of the biggest drivers of doubts about the president among people who supported him in the past. Finding ways to inject the issue into both paid and earned media to remind waverers of the large climate stakes in the election could be a key way to turn those doubts into votes.

[Winstonm]

y66, on 2020-April-02, 10:49, said:

From Matt Yglesias at Vox:

https://www.vox.com/...s-2020-election

Two of the biggest presidential landslide victories were had by Democrat Lyndon Johnson and Republican Ronald Reagan. Hopefully, there are enough reasonable people left in the U.S. to once again create a tidal wave of disapproval for those trying to substitute their theocratic libertarian ideologies for actual governing.

[y66]

Winstonm, on 2020-April-02, 12:13, said:

Two of the biggest presidential landslide victories were had by Democrat Lyndon Johnson and Republican Ronald Reagan. Hopefully, there are enough reasonable people left in the U.S. to once again create a tidal wave of disapproval for those trying to substitute their theocratic libertarian ideologies for actual governing.

I will be very surprised if this is not the case though not for the first time unfortunately.

[johnu]

Stupidity can apparently be transmitted like a virus and is now running rampant in the White House:

Jared Kushner Ripped For Saying ‘Our Stockpile’ Isn’t Meant For States To Use

Quote

Jared Kushner, son-in-law of and adviser to President Donald Trump, declared on Thursday that the stockpiles of much-needed supplies governors were requesting to help with the coronavirus pandemic weren’t actually meant for the states.

“The notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile,” Kushner said. “It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use.”

At another point in the briefing, Kushner patted himself and the administration on the back, claiming, “We’ve done things that the federal government has never done before, quicker than they’ve ever done it before.”

Kushner also insisted that they had found supplies and distributed them “where we anticipate there will be needs.”

But his explanation about the federal stockpile and its purpose didn’t sit right with many ― and was at odds with the statement on the Strategic National Stockpile website:

“When state, local, tribal, and territorial responders request federal assistance to support their response efforts, the stockpile ensures that the right medicines and supplies get to those who need them most during an emergency.”

The website also noted that the stockpile could “resupply state and local public health agencies in a catastrophic health event.”

Twitter users were quick to school Kushner and wonder who the “our” in his statement referred to, if not the people of the United States:

[barmar]

johnu, on 2020-April-03, 03:57, said:

Stupidity can apparently be transmitted like a virus and is now running rampant in the White House:

No, that's a preexisting condition.

If it's not meant for the states, who does "our stockpile" refer to? We're just a collection of states, there's nothing else.

[y66]

From The Economy Is Ruined. It Didn’t Have to Be This Way by Derek Thompson at The Atlantic:

Quote

While it may be too late to reverse the millions of layoffs that have already happened, Congress still has a chance to stem the tide. This can start with building on to the emergency rescue package. The new law provides for more than $300 billion in loans to small- and medium-size companies through the Small Business Administration. These loans are designed to be forgiven if the companies borrowing money don’t fire their workers.

The government can immediately strengthen this program in two ways—with more marketing and more money. First, the administration should advertise the program, repeatedly, publicly urging companies to use government money to continue to pay their workers. The message should be: You have a patriotic and moral duty to hold on to your workers during this national crisis, and the government has a patriotic and moral duty to pay you to do it.

Second, Congress should return to session immediately to double the loan guarantees to more than $600 billion. That is approximately equal to 11 weeks of payroll for all companies with fewer than 500 employees in the United States.

Instead, we are already in danger of moving in the opposite direction. Instead of rushing a larger small-business bailout through Congress, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has criticized Democrats who are calling for follow-up legislation.

If Congress does not move quickly, more ghastly history-making awaits us. At the height of the Great Depression, in 1933, approximately 25 percent of Americans were out of work. In the past two weeks, 6 percent of Americans filed for jobless benefits. Today, we are dealing with a light-speed recession. But after two months of this, the word recession might not be sufficient.

[Winstonm]

barmar, on 2020-April-03, 08:21, said:

No, that's a preexisting condition.

If it's not meant for the states, who does "our stockpile" refer to? We're just a collection of states, there's nothing else.

I've thought about this lately, and it appears that Trump - and by extension his in-law - seem to believe that by winning the presidential election that they have won the U.S. lottery and thus the U.S. Treasury is theirs. To paraphrase: these victors are spoiled.

[Winstonm]

NYT editorial take on Kushmer.

Quote

[Jared]Kushner has succeeded at exactly three things in his life. He was born to the right parents, married well and learned how to influence his father-in-law. Most of his other endeavors — his biggest real estate deal, his foray into newspaper ownership, his attempt to broker a peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians — have been failures.

Now coronavirus is his big success? Seems a tad doubtful.

[johnu]

barmar, on 2020-April-03, 08:21, said:

No, that's a preexisting condition.

If it's not meant for the states, who does "our stockpile" refer to? We're just a collection of states, there's nothing else.

There are stupid leaders, and toadies. In a government after the fact coverup of the stupidity of Kushner, there is this:

The Trump administration just changed its description of the national stockpile to jibe with Jared Kushner’s controversial claim

Quote

The Trump administration on Friday changed its description of the Strategic National Stockpile on a government website after journalists noted that it contradicted a claim Jared Kushner had made about the program.

Quote

That language suddenly disappeared from the site Friday morning, as journalist Laura Bassett noted, and was replaced with something de-emphasizing the size of the stockpile and its role in helping states. The new description cast it as a “short-term stopgap.”

We have officially gone back in time to "1984"

[johnu]

Are there nothing but toadies and lackies in the so called leadership of the US?

Senators urge formal probe of Navy carrier commander's firing over coronavirus plea

Quote

A group of prominent Democratic senators formally requested on Friday that the Pentagon's independent Inspector General investigate the Navy's firing of the commander of the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, who called for stronger measures to halt a coronavirus outbreak on board.

Quote

In videos posted online, sailors on the Theodore Roosevelt applauded Crozier and hailed him as a hero, out to defend his crew - even at great personal cost to his career.

More than 100 personnel from the carrier have tested positive for the novel coronavirus so far, and that number is likely to increase given the close quarters under which they live and operate.

Thomas Modly is the man who fired Crozier.
From Wikipedia

Quote

Thomas B. Modly is an American con artist and government sellout who has served as Acting United States Secretary of the Navy since November 24, 2019.

This bio may have been recently edited

[Winstonm]

What was it Trump said? No one could have known? Except his own HHS guy, it seems.

The WaPo:

Quote

April 3, 2020 at 3:17 p.m. CDT
CNN scoops:

Two top administration officials last year listed the threat of a pandemic as an issue that greatly worried them, undercutting President Donald Trump's repeated claims that the coronavirus pandemic was an unforeseen problem.
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Tim Morrison, then a special assistant to the President and senior director for weapons of mass destruction and biodefense on the National Security Council, made the comments at the BioDefense Summit in April 2019.
“Of course, the thing that people ask: ‘What keeps you most up at night in the biodefense world?’ Pandemic flu, of course. I think everyone in this room probably shares that concern,” Azar said, before listing off efforts to mitigate the impact of flu outbreaks.

[johnu]

More corruption on the way from the Grifter in Chief???

Trump Org Reportedly Seeking Debt Help From Deutsche As Bank Is Probed By DOJ

What could possibly go wrong with the Manchurian President's government paid personal lawyer in charge of the DOJ?

[Winstonm]

guest columnist Alexandra Petri in the WaPo:

Quote

How lucky we are to have Jared Kushner!

How lucky we are! The man and the hour have met.

In crises, there come moments that cry out for leadership. If only the right person will rise to the call, then the course of history can be altered. Well, can there be any doubt that we have found that right person?

Into every age there comes this epoch-defining human being. The 19th century had Napoleon, the 18th, George Washington, the 20th, Einstein and Franklin Delano Roosevelt both. How lucky for the 21st century that we have someone who combines all their virtues and all their intellect and all their business acumen into a single slim body with a suit on it. And he’s barely 39 years old! And it just so happens, also, that he is the president’s son-in-law!

What are the odds?

We would be fortunate if into this generation had been born a person capable of solving the problem of peace in the Middle East, or the opioid crisis, or how to make government work in an age of pandemic — but what are the odds that we would have all three, and that they would turn out to be the same man? Truly the gods have blessed us. Truly this is a towering intellect.

The amazing thing, too, is that if you were to listen to him talk, you would not think that this was a man who knew anything about anything. Perhaps to really understand his brilliance you must be related to him. At least there was one person who always believed in Jared Kushner, and fortunately for him, that person was the president’s son-in-law, who through a strange coincidence was also himself.

Yes, thank heavens there was one person who always knew he could rise to any challenge, and that his mind was capable of absorbing any question, no matter how complex. Could Jared Kushner be the greatest genius who has ever lived? It’s a possibility that Jared Kushner cannot rule out. He has always basked in the serene confidence that he could do his own calculations and they would, in fact, be better than anyone else’s estimates. Just because they were different did not mean they were wrong. He is applying this approach now to a grave question: As Vanity Fair reported, he is “doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn’t need all the ventilators.” Thank goodness, because if someone is wrong about that, people will die.

Jared Kushner was wise enough to look at the problems that ultimately fall on a country’s government to solve, and think outside the box. Maybe, after all, the stockpile of ventilators and equipment was not for the states or the people who resided in them, but for some undefined “us” who was not the states! Maybe, after all, this is not a pandemic, in which people are dying, every day, but a good opportunity to teach recalcitrant states a lesson about leadership — and perhaps question the whole notion of whether we are a nation of states at all! Maybe, after all, this would be a good time to reframe governors seeking to save the lives of their citizens as freeloaders asking for some kind of handout! (”What you have all over the country is a lot of people are asking for things that they don’t necessarily need at the moment.") So many thoughts that would never have occurred to anyone else!

How fortunate we are to have someone leading us who is never in doubt and who always, as though by magic, alights on the one solution that has simultaneously never occurred to anyone and is absolutely correct. I am glad he does not combine humility with his other virtues, or he would have put someone else in charge, on the grounds that he could not possibly be the right person to solve every question. And then where would we be? Thank God that we elected a person who happened to know this wonderful man, whom otherwise no one would have elected or appointed to anything!

Thank you, Jared, for getting us to where we are now.

[hrothgar]

I am furious about the way that Trump and Kushner are using the powers of the government to grift off the pandemic.

What we are seeing now is a situation in which

1. The federal government is seizing PPE equipment that states have privately contracted for
2. They are then handing this equipment over to a "public / private" partnership being run by friends of Jared
3. Said partnership is then jacking the prices of the items up seven to ten fold and selling the equipment back to the state governments

I am opposed to the death penalty.

But in all seriousness, when this is over, Trump and his brood need to be taken out and publicly executed

[awm]

hrothgar, on 2020-April-04, 23:02, said:

I am furious about the way that Trump and Kushner are using the powers of the government to grift off the pandemic.

While I agree with you in principle, isn't this what America voted for when we chose Trump to be our president? It was widely known that he was a grifter at the time he was elected, with his fake university, casinos bailed out by his dad, multiple bankruptcies... at best he was a reality TV show host who pretended to be a successful businessman.

We re-litigated this when the Mueller investigation found that Trump had been fully aware that Russian interests helped him to get elected and covered it up (putting his personal interests ahead of the national interests) and most people didn't care... and then we re-litigated it again when Trump put his personal interests ahead of the US national interests in Ukraine, and the majority of the Senate determined that this was okay.

Now if your argument is that a large number of US voters are idiots, or that the US political system is broken in the sense that it allows a minority of the country to select a grifter as president and gives that president almost unlimited power (unless two-thirds of the Senate can be convinced to remove him)... I can certainly agree with you on that. But I really think America "got what it voted for" when it comes to Trump. The situation with Kushner and the coronavirus is hardly surprising to me (didn't they do the same thing with China, and the Middle East, and Ukraine... why would we expect anything different just because of the magnitude of the crisis?)

[hrothgar]

awm, on 2020-April-05, 01:22, said:

Now if your argument is that a large number of US voters are idiots, or that the US political system is broken in the sense that it allows a minority of the country to select a grifter as president and gives that president almost unlimited power

My argument is, very much, that large numbers of the US voters are idiots (and I do think that the US political system is broken)

There needs to some kind consequences to constrain some future Trump / Kushner from completely reprehensible behaviour.

To me, profiteering on medical supplies during a pandemic is almost as low as it gets.

[cherdano]

hrothgar, on 2020-April-04, 23:02, said:

1. The federal government is seizing PPE equipment that states have privately contracted for
2. They are then handing this equipment over to a "public / private" partnership being run by friends of Jared
3. Said partnership is then jacking the prices of the items up seven to ten fold and selling the equipment back to the state governments

[citation needed]

[y66]

From In the American South, a Perfect Storm Is Gathering by Margaret Renkl at NYT:

Quote

NASHVILLE — On March 22, when Nashville’s mayor John Cooper closed nonessential businesses here, it was a terrible blow to companies and shops still reeling from the tornado that tore through Middle Tennessee on Super Tuesday. Small businesses struggle in the best of times, and a one-two punch like that — a natural disaster followed by a lethal pandemic — will almost certainly force some of them to close for good.

But it had to be done. Nashville’s courts and schools were already closed, but the crowds on Lower Broadway, the heart of Nashville’s tourist district, showed no sign of dissipating. “Downtown Nashville is undefeated,” tweeted a visitor posting a video of music fans crowded onto a dance floor. Even after the Nashville Board of Health voted unanimously to shut the honky-tonks down, several bar owners said they would not comply unless ordered to do so by the governor of Tennessee.

Such orders have been slow in coming here, and in nearly every other state in the American South. Tennessee governor Bill Lee was slow to end the legislative session and send members of the Tennessee General Assembly home to their districts, slow to close public schools, slow to suspend church services, slow to shutter restaurants and gyms.

Many city charters in Tennessee prevent local leaders from issuing their own orders, and mayors begging for a statewide directive got none. Chaz Molder, mayor of Columbia, Tenn., urgently called on Mr. Lee to issue a statewide stay-at-home order: “One state, one response,” he wrote on Twitter. But in a conference call on March 16, Mr. Lee told local leaders around the state that mandates weren’t necessary to enforce social-distancing guidelines: “We’re not issuing orders, we’re issuing guidance and strong suggestions,” Mr. Lee said. “We don’t have to mandate people not do certain behavior because Tennesseans follow suggestions.”

As it turns out, they don’t. Last week I arrived to pick up a to-go order I’d paid for on the phone and that the owner had promised to put directly into the trunk of my car. But where I expected to find a deserted parking lot, it was business as usual on a sunny spring Saturday. Nashville has received hundreds of reports of similar violations.

Joelle Herr, owner of The Bookshop in East Nashville, which closed more than two weeks ago, wrote on Facebook about her “fury, despair and helplessness” at watching other businesses carry on as if nothing had changed. “It’s frustrating when you feel like you’re one of only a few doing the right thing (and at a great cost to my small business!) and those doing the wrong thing are the ones with the greater impact — an impact that is going to be devastating.”

On March 30, when Mr. Lee issued an executive order shutting down nonessential businesses, he stopped short of requiring Tennesseans to stay home. “It is deeply important that we protect personal liberties,” he said, ignoring tens of thousands of health professionals who argued that nothing less than a stay-at-home order would save this state from disaster. And not just this state.

Out of fear of what Tennessee’s delays might mean for their own populations, Fort Campbell, a U.S. Army base that straddles the Tennessee-Kentucky border, restricted travel to Nashville. And Andy Beshear, the Democratic governor of Kentucky, urged his citizens not to enter Tennessee: “We have taken very aggressive steps to try to stop or limit the spread of the coronavirus to try to protect our people,” Mr. Beshear said. “But our neighbors from the south, in many instances, are not. If you ultimately go down over that border and go to a restaurant or something that’s not open in Kentucky, what you do is you bring the coronavirus back here.”

Kentucky, which not only elected a Democratic governor but also expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, is an outlier in the South. Most Southern states, like Tennessee, did not expand Medicaid, and in those states a perfect storm has gathered force. What does it mean to live though a pandemic in a place with a high number of uninsured citizens, where many counties don’t have a single hospital, and where the governor delayed requiring folks to stay home? Across the South, we are about to find out.

Finally, on April 2, Mr. Lee acknowledged epidemiological reality and issued a stay-at-home order. The rest of the red-state governors will also capitulate to reality before this is all over. But the time for decisive action has long since passed, and their delays, like the president’s, will end up costing thousands of lives.

Viruses are not partisan. Science itself is not partisan. Nevertheless, Covid-19 has become a partisan issue here in the South because our governors have followed the lead of both the president, who spent crucial early weeks denying the severity of the crisis, and Fox News, which downplayed concerns about the pandemic as Democratic hysteria. That’s why every governor who has issued a deeply belated shelter-in-place order is a Republican.

In that March 16 conference call with mayors and county leaders around Tennessee, Mr. Lee offered some advice: “I want to encourage you to pray. I want you to pray for your citizens that are affected by economic downturns, by the sickness sweeping through the state. I want you to know that you’re being prayed for as leaders in your community that you will have wisdom and discernment.”

I, too, pray for my fellow Tennesseans. I pray for the success of researchers racing for a vaccine. I pray for the safety of every medical team working to save lives. But I also pray for our leaders to lead, to put the safety of their citizens far, far above partisan pandering. And when the entire medical community — people who are putting their very lives on the line for us — are begging for help, the answer isn’t prayer alone. It’s also action.

[hrothgar]

cherdano, on 2020-April-05, 03:27, said:

[citation needed]

https://talkingpoint...s-and-hospitals

Plus the president's own press conferences describing the distribution system that has been set up

(Here in Massachusetts the confiscations are getting a lot of coverage because Bob Kraft - the owner of the NE Patriots - "snuck" a jumbo jet into China, loaded it up with PPE equipment, and then ran it directly back to Boston. This was done at the request of Massachusetts Republican governor who wanted to bypass the Fed's who had been confiscating other orders)

[y66]

From wikipedia:

Quote

In Understanding Media (1964), Marshall McLuhan describes the "content" of a medium as a juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind. This means that people tend to focus on the obvious, which is the content, to provide us valuable information, but in the process, we largely miss the structural changes in our affairs that are introduced subtly, or over long periods of time. As society's values, norms, and ways of doing things change because of the technology, it is then we realize the social implications of the medium. These range from cultural or religious issues and historical precedents, through interplay with existing conditions, to the secondary or tertiary effects in a cascade of interactions that we are not aware of.

Except for the "introduced subtly" and "then we realize" parts, he has a point. Nobody gets this more than Trump.