That didn’t last long. A dozen ICE officers in riot gear pepper sprayed the peaceful protesters, shoved their way through to the bus, grabbed the detainees, and forced their way back out again.
These were peaceful protesters and they were illegally and violently attacked by ICE. Where’s the law and order in that?
Well, they were in uniform, so it’s all ok, right? (/s)
So was antifa!/s
August 13, 2020 (Thursday)
Today was another one for the history books.
This morning, in an interview with Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo, Trump came out and said it: he wants to starve the United States Postal Service to destroy mail-in voting. Claiming that mail-in voting favors Democrats, he said: “Now they need that money in order to make the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots… Now, if we don’t make a deal, that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting, they just can’t have it.”
The president’s acknowledgement that he is deliberately sabotaging an institution established in the Constitution to steal the election provoked outrage. He is tampering with an election by attacking mail-in voting even as he and Melania Trump have requested mail-in ballots for themselves. And the USPS does not simply handle ballots, it also handles many aspects of our lives: packages, medicines, and so on—things vital to our economy and way of life. “When the president goes after the Postal Service, he’s going after an all-American, highly approved-by-the-public institution,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said.
The attack on the USPS dovetails with the push of the Trump administration to privatize the USPS, a push launched shortly after Trump took office. This week we learned that Trump’s new Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, retains at least $30 million in holdings of the company XPO Logistics, a private competitor to the USPS, and that on the same day in June that he got rid of a large number of shares of Amazon, he bought stock options at a lower price. Amazon would be hard hit by the disintegration of the USPS. “The idea that you can be a postmaster general and hold tens of millions in stocks in a postal service contractor is pretty shocking," said former director of the Office of Government Ethics Walter Shaub.
But the bottom line is that, until the Senate decides to do something about it, the House is powerless to fund the USPS to help it survive the economic crisis sparked by the coronavirus pandemic. In the $3 trillion Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions (HEROES) Act the House passed in May, there was a $25 billion support for the USPS. But the Senate declined to take up the HEROES Act. When the Republicans could not agree on a new measure at the end of July, the Democrats began to negotiate directly with the White House, which proposed a more limited, $1 trillion bill. Democrats suggested a compromise at $2 trillion, but the White House has refused to budge. With this stalemate, Congress has gone on vacation for the rest of the month, while negotiators continue to try to reach a deal.
Representative Ted Lieu (D-CA) noted that DeJoy’s new regulations are slowing the mail dramatically. He tweeted: “Here is the truth and I need you to spread it: the voters need to take control. Voters need to [vote by October 22] if using USPS.”
Other Democrats pushed back on Trump in their own way. In his interview, Trump said of New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat: “AOC was a poor student. I won’t say where she went to school, it doesn’t matter. This is not even a smart person, other than she’s got a good line of stuff. I mean she goes out and she yaps.” Ocasio-Cortez retorted: “Let’s make a deal, Mr. President. You release your college transcript, I’ll release mine, and we’ll see who was the better student. Loser has to fund the Post Office.”
The admission he is sabotaging the post office was not the only piece of news in Trump’s morning interview. He made it clear that he is eager to have Attorney General William Barr counter the story that Russia intervened in the 2016 election in Trump’s behalf. Trump wants Barr to reach a different conclusion based on a new Department of Justice investigation. When it became clear that the DOJ’s own inspector general would conclude that the FBI probe of certain of Trump’s campaign advisors was begun legitimately and without partisan bias—as he later did-- Barr launched his own, separate investigation, placing U.S. Attorney for the District of Connecticut John Durham in charge of it.
This morning, Trump indicated he has great hopes that the Durham investigation will establish that former FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper spied on his campaign and lied to Congress about it. “Bill Barr can go down as the greatest attorney general in the history of our country, or he can go down as an average guy,” Trump said, depending on whether or not he produced a report that, according to Trump, is not tainted with political correctness. “We’ll see what happens…. It goes all to Obama, and it goes right to Biden.”
The president’s campaign has also launched a full-fledged attack on Senator Kamala Harris, tapped yesterday by presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden as his running mate. Trump and his surrogates say it is an “open question” whether she is constitutionally eligible to be president. This is a lie. There is no question that she is a natural-born citizen; she was born in California. Trump supporters are trying to argue that because her parents were not citizens when she was born, she is not a natural-born citizen, and is therefore ineligible for the presidency.
The Supreme Court answered this question definitively in the 1898 United States v. Wong Kim Ark decision. The Supreme Court evaluated the Fourteenth Amendment’s first clause, which says that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The justices decided the clause established that anyone born on U.S. soil is an American citizen regardless of the nationality of their parents.
The rather tortured argument the Trump campaign is making is that the words “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” excludes babies born to foreign-born parents because the parents retain some legal ties to their former countries and are therefore not fully subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, so their babies must not be, either. This is hogwash. The distinction made in the Fourteenth relates to certain Native American tribes in this era, whose members were certainly born in America, but did not acknowledge the jurisdiction of the federal government and therefore should not, lawmakers thought, be accorded the right to vote. (The next section of the amendment names Indians explicitly, saying “Indians not taxed” should not be counted toward congressional representation.)
What’s going on with these blatant attacks on American democracy?
The Biden campaign pushed back on Trump’s attack on the USPS, saying: “This is an assault on our democracy and economy by a desperate man who’s terrified that the American people will force him to confront what he’s done everything in his power to escape for months – responsibility for his own actions.”
There is something to the idea that the president is desperate. Trump’s former lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen today released the introduction to his forthcoming book. It’s a doozy. Cohen claims Trump colluded with the Russians in 2016 to get a “major real estate deal in Moscow…. I know because I personally ran that deal and kept Trump and his children closely informed of all updates, even as the candidate blatantly lied to the American people saying, ‘there’s no Russian collusion, I have no dealings with Russia…there’s no Russia.’”
Cohen says he set up a secret back channel to Vladimir Putin, “stiffed contractors on [Trump’s] behalf, ripped off his business partners, lied to his wife Melania to hide his sexual infidelities, and bullied and screamed at anyone who threatened Trump’s path to power. From golden showers in a sex club in Vegas, to tax fraud, to deals with corrupt officials from the former Soviet Union, to catch and kill conspiracies to silence Trump’s clandestine lovers, I wasn’t just a witness to the president’s rise—I was an active and eager participant.”
Cohen’s book, Disloyal, is due out in September.
Sadly, this is pretty much every damned day now. There will be many in our grandchildren’s generation who will not believe that any of this was real, it is just too incredible and, honestly, too stupid, to be true. And yet, here we are…
I feel like I should say something about history here, but am not sure what, tho. 
Yep, life here in the stupid timeline is… stupid. 
I am hearing my future grandkids now. “Damn, gramps, y’all were dumb!”
I think this must be one of those droll historian’s jokes, because every day is for the history books.
It is not.
Not really, no. That’s not how history writing works…
Dozens of post boxes were removed from Portland and Eugene (Oregon) over the past couple of days. USPS spokesperson said it was because of low mail volume, but residents have also observed neighborhood outbound mail slots being locked shut.
Confusing history with journalling. A common enough mistake. 
To be fair, some journals had impact on history, and some on how we perceive it.
Klemperer’s, for example.
Even though I didn’t read it all, it had an impact on how German history is read today.
August 14, 2020 (Friday)
Today’s big story was the administration’s assault on the United States Postal Service. Yesterday, the president said outright that he opposed relief funding for the cash-strapped institution because he wanted to stop mail-in voting, even though he and his wife Melania have both applied for mail-in ballots. Slowing down or stopping the mail will create chaos around the election, and will likely mean ballots will not be counted. It will also funnel voters back to polling places, although the pandemic means there are far fewer of them than usual.
Once at polling places, many voters will cast their ballots on voting machines that are vulnerable to hacking. New machines, rolled out after 2016 and designed to keep cyberhackers at bay, proved “extremely unsafe, especially in close elections,” according to Alex Halderman, a computer scientist from the University of Michigan who, along with six colleagues, studied them. At least 18% of the country’s districts will vote on the new machines, including districts in Pennsylvania, which Trump needs to win but where Biden is up by double digits.
“There are strong security reasons to prefer hand-marked paper ballots,” Halderman told Joseph Marks of the Washington Post.
A bipartisan organization of state secretaries of state—the people in charge of elections—wrote to Trump’s new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy on August 7 to ask for a meeting to discuss his recent changes to the USPS and to explore how those changes would affect the election. In a delay that observers say is “unusual,” he has declined to answer. The USPS recently sent letters to 46 states and Washington, D.C. to say that it cannot guarantee that it will be able to deliver mail-in ballots on time. The letters were prepared before DeJoy took office, suggesting that he knew the USPS should be ramping up its capacity, not decreasing it.
News broke today that DeJoy was named to the finance team of the Republican National Committee in 2017 (along with Elliott Broidy, Michael Cohen, and Gordon Sondland, if anyone can remember back to the days of impeachment), suggesting his partisanship makes him a poor fit for what is supposed to be a nonpartisan office.
In June, USPS officials told union officials that management was getting rid of 671 sorting machines, about 10% of the machines in the country. The sorters were the kind that handled letters and postcards, not magazines and large envelopes. The argument for getting rid of them is that people write fewer letters these days, but of course we are all expecting a huge influx of mail-in ballots that those machines would handle. Many of the removed sorters were in states that are political battlegrounds: Ohio lost 24 sorters, Detroit lost 11, Florida lost 11, Wisconsin lost 9, Philadelphia lost 8 and Arizona lost 5.
Similarly, the USPS removed letter boxes today in what it said were routine reassignments. The outcry was great enough that it has announced it will not remove any more until after the election. The removal of the boxes may indeed be routine, but David Becker, executive director of the nonprofit, nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research told Washington Post reporter Jacob Bogage, “Given the other things that are going on, it’s okay to ask questions…. The high-speed sorters that are getting deactivated, the loss of overtime, the delays in mail we’re seeing right now, all of this should cause some concern and warrants questions.”
Today, Inspector General for the USPS Tammy L. Whitcomb announced that, at the request of Democrats, she is opening an investigation into “all recent staffing and policy changes put in place” by DeJoy. She will also be looking into DeJoy’s compliance with ethics rules, related to his huge financial stake in private competitors to the USPS.
The other big story is that the Government Accountability Office, the main audit institution in the federal government, concluded today that the two top officials at the Department of Homeland Security are not legally in their positions.
The acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, and his top deputy, Ken Cuccinelli, were never confirmed for their positions, although those positions require Senate confirmation. Instead, they were moved into their jobs through the lines of succession in the department, but those lines were altered by the previous DHS secretary, Kevin McAleenen, who himself was placed into position improperly. According to the GAO, McAleenen did not have authority to move Wolf, who had Senate confirmation for a different position, into the directorship. Cuccinelli, who currently holds the title “Senior Official Performing the Duties of Deputy Secretary,” has never been confirmed for anything.
Democrats called for Wolf and Cuccinelli to step down, but DHS spokesman Nathaniel Madden said “We wholeheartedly disagree with the GAO’s baseless report and plan to issue a formal response to this shortly.”
Trump’s handling of DHS is problematic. DHS is a new agency, established after 9-11, and it is staffed with political appointees who report to the president. Trump has increasingly refused to go through normal nominations processes, aware that at least some of his appointees could not make it through even this Republican Senate. Moreover, leaving his appointees in limbo gives Trump more control over them. “I like ‘acting,’” he told reporters last year. “It gives you great, great flexibility.”
Trump has made little effort to fill positions at DHS with qualified people. Within DHS are the agencies that oversee immigration: U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). None of them has a leader that has been confirmed by the Senate. Trump’s sway over DHS means the agency is currently operating, as DHS’s first secretary Tom Ridge said, like “the president’s personal militia.” It was Wolf, of course, who oversaw the recent deployment of federal officers to Portland, Oregon.
In legal news, in a case stemming from U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation of the FBI investigation of ties between the Trump campaign and Russia in 2016, a former FBI lawyer intends to plead guilty to falsifying a document. Kevin Clinesmith was the root of the most serious mishandling of the wiretapping of former Trump advisor Carter Page. When it was time for the FBI to apply for a renewal of the request to surveil Page, Clinesmith was asked to find out if Page had ever been an informant for the CIA. When asked, a CIA colleague appears to have identified Page’s role with the agency as something other than a “source,” but wrote an email about it that simply sent Clinesmith to documents to check. Clinesmith altered his CIA colleague’s email with the words “not a ‘source.’” The FBI relied on his representation to write the application renewal to wiretap Page.
Clinesmith resigned over the issue last year. He maintains that he changed the wording to reflect what he understood to be true, and other evidence suggested he never tried to hide the original email from his colleagues. Still, he altered a document, and Page’s relationship with the CIA was not accurately represented to the judges who approved the wiretapping. The Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz, called out this issue in his report on the FBI handling of the Russia investigation, although he concluded that the FBI opened the investigation properly and without political bias.
In another case stemming from 2016 that got a lot of traction when it was announced, a federal appeals court today ruled that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton does not have to give another deposition about her emails. Judicial Watch, a rightwing organization founded in 1994 that has frequently targeted the Clintons with lawsuits which are usually thrown out of court, wanted to depose Clinton on the subject. She argued they were harassing her. The court noted that the email issue had already been thoroughly investigated by Congress, the FBI, the State Department Inspector General, and another lawsuit and concluded she did not have to testify again. Last year, the State Department concluded that “there was no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.”
Finally, in all the political craziness, the devastating storm that hit the middle of the country on Monday has gotten less attention than it should have. The storm was a “derecho,” and brought wind over 100 miles an hour. Iowa appears to have lost 43% of its corn and soybean crops; 15 tornadoes in Illinois left 800,000 people without power. In Iowa, four days later, 250,000 are still without power, and roads remained blocked.
Well, yes, they do have an impact on history, especially when they are used as a primary source.
My larger point is that history is not merely a record of events or every thing that happened in the past, it’s the interpretation of events to make meaning about the past, via argues about events in the past.
yes, because someone went and read that document, put it into conversation with others, and argued how and why it was historically relevant. This stuff doesn’t just happen to be meaningful, it’s made to be meaningful by our interpretation of the past and material/textual culture made at the time.
The one she just posted (August 15th) is the scariest one yet. It made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.
August 15, 2020 (Saturday)
America needs at least two healthy political parties, and right now, with Republicans attacking the legitimacy of the Democrats, we are in danger of having none.
For the past generation, Republicans have tried to delegitimize the Democrats. Calling their opponents “socialists,” Republicans have suppressed Democratic voters and gerrymandered congressional districts to shut Democrats out of the government. When voters elected Democrat Barack Obama president, Republican lawmakers vowed not to work with him, and scrapped the norms of our system to slash his power. Now, with Trump trying to steal a presidential election and Republican lawmakers looking the other way, we are on the verge of becoming a one-party state.
The Republican assault on the legitimacy of the Democrats is a profound assault on American democracy, which since 1800 has depended on a party system for stability. Political parties provide an organized way to oppose the existing government’s policies or leaders and to keep them more or less honest, as every move of ruling lawmakers comes under scrutiny.
The Founders hated the idea of parties, and hoped that all Americans would unite under a single virtuous leader, who ruled for the good of all and whose citizens recognized his policies as beneficial and disinterested.
They put George Washington in charge, as virtuous a leader as they could imagine. And yet, almost immediately, Americans began to divide into two political camps. The Democratic-Republicans organized under Thomas Jefferson to oppose the policies of Washington’s Federalists. As the Federalists flexed the muscles of the new government, Jefferson and his friends attacked them as monarchists.
It turned out that, even with a leader as dedicated to the good of the nation as Washington was, government policies inevitably sparked disagreement.
What the Founders discovered is that competing political parties are vital to a democracy. Opposition leaders act as watchdogs to keep leaders accountable to the people. An opposition party also stabilizes the government. It enables people who don’t agree with the leaders currently in charge to envision putting their own ideas into practice. They can continue to support the government even if they disagree with its current lawmakers, knowing that, if they can garner enough support, they can win control of the government and enact policies they prefer. This is precisely what Jefferson did in 1800.
That election was crucial to the success of our democratic government because it proved that our government could change hands peacefully.
Now, that hallmark of American democracy, the peaceful transfer of power from one party to another, is under assault. Republicans under Donald Trump are indicating they will not consider a Democratic win legitimate, and will fight to keep Trump in office no matter what the voters say.
If we manage to fend off this specific attack on our democracy, the larger Republican assault on the legitimacy of the Democrats must also be defeated.
The attempt to turn us into a one-party state undermines the system that has stabilized our democracy for more than two centuries. If opponents of a regime have no hope of regaining control of the government through an election and the peaceful transfer of power, they will work to undermine the system piecemeal, through individual acts of resistance. Those in power retaliate with arrests and violence. Trying to shore up their power, they declare that anyone voicing any opposition to the government is a traitor, and act accordingly.
These days, it appears that some of the president’s supporters are comfortable with such an outcome. But the thrill of “owning the libs” will be brief.
Without a watchdog over ruling lawmakers, they invariably become more and more corrupt, and without an opposition that has a chance of regaining power, there will be no way to stop them. Right now, Republican leaders still need votes. But eliminate the Democrats, and they will no longer need loyal voters.
They will be able to act however they wish.
Wait until you read about Trump’s threats to (and ability to) suspend the Constitution with “secret” presidential powers:
Well that was a fucking terrifying read. So that’s what he means when he talks about “secret powers.” Shit.
