Crooked Media - What A Day: Justice of the fleece

Republicans are hellbent on confirming Donald Trump’s as-yet-unnamed Supreme Court nominee before the election, threatening the health care coverage of millions of Americans and, poetically, their own Senate majority. “YOLO,” said the world's greatest deliberative body.
 

• Today the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg became the first woman, and the first Jewish American, to lie in state at the U.S. Capitol. (She was also, we will brashly assume, the first individual to be honored with ceremonial-push ups.) On Saturday President Trump will announce his nominee to replace her, flipping the bird to both Ginsburg’s dying wish and the will of most Americans.
   
• Trump has reportedly settled on Amy Coney Barrett for the nomination, so here’s a quick rundown. Barrett currently serves on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, where she was appointed by Trump in 2017. She has a track record of opposing abortion rights and easy access to birth control, and there’s little doubt that she would rule in favor of gutting Roe v. Wade, if not overturning it altogether. In 2017 Barrett wrote a law review article criticizing the 2012 SCOTUS decision that upheld key provisions of the Affordable Care Act, writing,“Chief Justice Roberts pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute.” The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the future of the ACA on November 10, and with Barrett on the bench, that future is not bright.  
   
• At stake in the coming battle over Barrett’s nomination is the possibility of an illegitimate far-right Supreme Court that would block and roll back progressive legislation for decades to come, barring reform of the Court itself. Not to mention the more immediate threat of Trump asking the newly-formed Roberts Six to throw out enough mail-in ballots to install him for a second term—a nightmare scenario we can circumvent by burying it under an undeniable mountain of votes.

Mitch McConnell has the Senate votes he needs to get this done, but a substantial majority of the American public is not on board.
 

• A new ABC News/Washington Post poll found that by a nearly 20-point margin, Americans believe that the next Supreme Court appointment should be left up to the winner of the election. Key swing voters aren’t crazy about what a 6-3 conservative Court would do, either: A majority of voters who switched from Barack Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016 are against overturning Roe, and polling has consistently found that the public, inexplicably, does not think it’s a good idea to dynamite people’s health insurance for no reason and with no replacement. 
   
• In a desperate attempt to paper over this wildly unpopular stunt, President Trump unveiled the “health care plan” that the White House has been promising every two weeks for the last 100 years, and which consists of: An executive order that Trump falsely claimed will protect people with pre-existing conditions (a guarantee which exists only as a provision of the law he’s asking the Supreme Court to strike down), and a vague promise to buy some votes send older Americans $200 towards the cost of prescription drugs, with unspecified funding. 

In the middle of a pandemic that the GOP president has allowed to sicken more than seven million Americans, Republicans in the Senate who’ve held up coronavirus relief for months are now moving as fast as they possibly can to make sure millions of Americans lose affordable access to health care. At the very least, we can make it the last thing these ghouls ever do → votesaveamerica.com/getmitch

With Friends Like These is back with a new season! With Friends Like These: Good Intentions Edition will dig into what makes us want to do good—and what doing good does to our brains. Host Ana Marie Cox will be exploring questions like, "Has the media's coverage of the Trump presidency, while good intentioned, caused more undue harm than good?" The first episode is out today. Subscribe to With Friends Like These wherever you get your podcasts →

So, about those nine discarded ballots in Pennsylvania that the Justice Department was loudly investigating for no particular reason: It appears they fell prey to Republicans’ own mail-in voting suppression efforts. A DOJ update made clear that the military ballots were cast without the secret envelopes that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled were required for absentee votes to be counted. The full story, then: The Trump campaign sued to have naked ballots thrown out to suppress votes for Joe Biden, the Completely Independent Justice Department announced a probe into a few Trump ballots that were thrown out as a result, and the Trump campaign used the announcement to falsely claim that Democrats were trying to steal the election. We recommend throwing one non-breakable thing across the room, and then making sure everyone in your network knows to spread the word about naked ballots.

• Tamika Palmer, Breonna Taylor’s mother, denounced Kentucky Attorney General David Cameron and the grand jury decision in Taylor’s case: “I was reassured Wednesday of why I had no faith in the legal system, in the police, in the law...The system as a whole has failed her.” The family’s attorneys have demanded that the grand jury details be made public. Cameron’s announcement of the limited indictments has fueled a wave of misinformation; these are some useful corrections to common lies or mistakes you might see in the wild. 
   
• In a revealing dichotomy of American mothers, Kyle Rittenhouse’s mother received a standing ovation at a GOP-sponsored event in Wisconsin on Thursday night. Rittenhouse’s lawyers said they intend to fight his extradition to Wisconsin.
   
• House Democrats are working on a new $2.4 trillion coronavirus stimulus proposal, in their latest bid to restart negotiations with the White House.
   
• Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has lifted all coronavirus restrictions on Florida bars and restaurants, like a big fucking idiot.
   
• Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) and his wife have tested positive for coronavirus. That marks the second infected governor in less than a week: Missouri Gov. Mike Parson (R), who has staunchly refused to issue a mask mandate, tested positive on Wednesday. 
   
• A federal judge dismissed a defamation suit against Tucker Carlson by ruling that Carlson’s Fox News show is obviously not a source of real news. Congratulations to Tucker Carlson, court-recognized liar.
   
• A very large rat has been awarded one of Britain’s highest animal honors. Congratulations again to Tucker Carlson. 

Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) has proposed a bill that would make it illegal to count votes 24 hours after polls have closed, just in case there was any residual uncertainty about Republicans’ willingness to go along with Donald Trump’s election-stealing schemes. Scott’s proposal would also prevent states from processing and counting mail-in ballots that arrive before Election Day until...Election Day. So, the bill would allow a less than 48-hour window to count every vote (with no extra funding to make that remotely possible), and absentee ballots arriving past that point would go straight into the trash. This legislation has no chance of passing in the House, but it’s a revealing (and nauseating) window into how far Trump’s allies are willing to go.

From the award-winning producers of The Jinx comes A Wilderness of Error, a new FX documentary series that explores the 50-year old case of Doctor Jeffrey MacDonald who was charged with the murders of his pregnant wife and two young daughters. To this day, MacDonald is in prison but maintains his innocence, claiming that a group of hippies imitating the Manson family committed the atrocities. 

Acclaimed filmmaker Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line) and Director Marc Smerling (The Jinx, Crimetown) re-investigate arguably one of the most famous true crime cases of the century in an attempt to answer questions such as:

• Were there mistakes made by the investigators?
• Were there witnesses overlooked?  
•  And ultimately, did the media shape public opinion to help convict an innocent man, or did Jeffrey MacDonald kill his family?

A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from ending the Census count at the end of the month.

The U.S. Postal Service will undo nearly all of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s most harmful policies and prioritize election mail, according to a leaked memo.

New York City has made its outdoor dining program permanent, in a move that will save lives, businesses, and sanity. 

NASA astronaut Kate Rubins plans to vote from space, and offered this useful perspective for any reluctant voters in your life: “It’s critical to participate in our democracy...I think it’s really important for everybody to vote, and if we can do it from space, then I believe folks can do it from the ground too.”