Crooked Media - What A Day: Give earpiece a chance

The tension is palpable, the pundits are abuzz, and Facebook is blanketed with conspiracy theories about Joe Biden’s ear holes: We have arrived at the first 2020 presidential debate. 
 

• The first of three presidential debates will take place in Cleveland, OH, tonight at 9 p.m. ET, moderated by Fox News anchor Chris Wallace. Wallace has selected six general topics: the candidates' records, the Supreme Court, the coronavirus, the economy, race and violence in cities, and election integrity. “Race and violence” plays straight into Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric, and the total exclusion of climate change seems like malpractice at best, but at least Wallace has also promised not to fact-check any of Trump’s lies.
   
• Even with the benefit of those outrageous gifts, the Trump team seems, uh, less than confident about his readiness. Following Trump’s repeated attempts to manage expectations by baselessly suggesting that Biden would be on some kind of debate-enhancement drug, the Trump campaign today floated the dumb, recycled rumor that Biden would be wearing a secret earpiece (presumably because his Antifa-controlled brain implant is on the fritz). That conspiracy theory has proliferated unchecked on Facebook, and was even featured on the platform’s news tab. Another beautiful day in Zuckerberg’s Hellworld Funhouse!
   
• Trump would of course rather talk about drug tests and earpieces than the fact that coronavirus cases are on the rise in half the country, he’s rushing to seat a Supreme Court nominee before the election in the hope that she’ll vote to illegitimately install him as president and/or strike down the Affordable Care Act, and his corrupt tax evasion and vast, mysterious debts are now front page news. That’s all likely to come up tonight anyway (in spite of the Trump campaign’s reported demand that Chris Wallace not utter the number of coronavirus deaths), and Biden and Kamala Harris have each released their 2019 tax returns in anticipation. 

“But will the debates even matter this year,” you ask?
 

• Impossible to know! It’s true that polling has remained incredibly consistent since Biden emerged as the Democratic nominee. Biden heads into the debates with a consistent lead (two new Pennsylvania polls show him nine points ahead there), and if the pandemic, economic crisis, nationwide protests, and DNC Rhode Island Calamari Guy haven’t reshaped the race, it’s hard to imagine that a few debates will have an earth-shattering impact.
   
• On the other hand, they don’t need to be earth-shattering. Trump has spent his whole campaign trying to paint Biden as a dementia-addled invalid hiding in his basement, and their direct confrontation will provide incontrovertible proof to the contrary. Polls suggest that most voters have already made up their minds, but the ones who haven’t largely don’t know much about Biden’s platform, and the debates are a huge opportunity to inform them. 

We’ll have a recap of the night in Wednesday’s What A Day, and you can watch along with us for real-time commentary, fact-checking, and borderline-fireable jokes (if we can keep up with John Kerry) in the Crooked Groupthread→ 

Once more for the people in the back: The first 2020 presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is TODAY, September 29th at 9pm Eastern/6pm Pacific. Watch with us live on crooked.com/debate—we’ll be streaming the whole thing along with our Groupthread, where we and other familiar faces from the Crooked Media family will be breaking down what’s happening and giving our live commentary. Watch with us at crooked.com/debate→

The White House put enormous pressure on the CDC to downplay the risk of sending kids back to school. Trump administration officials, including Dr. Deborah Birx, repeatedly leaned on CDC officials to provide data that could illustrate a decline in cases and low risk of infection or death for school-age children—“a snazzy, easy-to-read document” to back up Trump’s demands that schools reopen before the election. Other members of the coronavirus task force were told to go around the CDC to find alternative data to support the White House’s position. Recent data shows that coronavirus cases, hospitalizations, and deaths have increased at a faster rate among children and teenagers, and it goes without saying that the Trump administration trying to circumvent science to put kids in danger for political gain should be an unrecoverable scandal.

• Global coronavirus deaths have surpassed one million, and that wrenching number is still likely a significant undercount.
   
• Kentucky Attorney General David Cameron has agreed to release the grand jury records in Breonna Taylor’s case, after a grand juror filed a motion for their release. Cameron acknowledged that he never asked the jury to consider homicide charges against the officers. 
   
• DNI John Ratcliffe has declassified a Russian intelligence assessment suggesting that Hillary Clinton hatched a plan to tie President Trump to 2016 Russian election interference (a claim the U.S. intelligence community says we have no reason to believe) on the day of a presidential debate. A reminder that Trump’s political appointees, who are supposed to run the federal government, are now spreading election propaganda on his behalf.
   
• New interviews with immigrant women who were pressured into unnecessary surgeries at a Georgia ICE facility revealed awful details about their treatment. In some cases Dr. Mahendra Amin listed symptoms that the women hadn’t experienced or reported in order to justify surgery, even while addressing medical issues that had nothing to do with gynecology. 
   
• President Trump mocks his Christian supporters in private, according to former White House aides, and unsurprisingly. Trump reportedly also made this sweet comment to Michael Cohen when he learned that Barron had a playdate with a Jewish girl: “Great, I’m going to lose another one of my kids to your people.”
   
• New York City voters have been receiving absentee ballots with the wrong names and address on the ballot envelopes, which sure seems bad. Those voters will all be sent a second ballot, along with a letter explaining what happened.  
   
• A new study from South Korea found that 90 percent of recovered coronavirus patients reported experiencing lingering side effects. Your periodic reminder that fatality rates, bad as they are, don’t tell the whole story. 
   
• Federal Judge Emmett Sullivan suggested he’s not ready to throw out the case against Michael Flynn, during a hearing at which Flynn’s attorney admitted to personally updating Trump and White House lawyers on the case.
   
• New York City’s coronavirus positivity rate has shot up to over three percent, partially as a result of new outbreaks in some Hasidic communities. If the city’s positivity rate stays that high for the next seven days, public schools will automatically close.
   
• Meanwhile, test positivity in Florida, which just flung open all business at full capacity, is now at nearly seven percent.
   
• Sarah Palin is jonesing for some attention, if anyone would like to charitably gawk. 

The second installment of the New York Times report on Donald Trump’s tax returns outlines how The Apprentice temporarily rescued Trump from financial ruin. After burning through the cash his father gave him and somehow managing to lose money as a casino owner, Trump netted some $197 million from the show itself, and another $230 million through the various endorsements, hotel deals, and scams he secured through his resulting fame. Trump then borrowed from his more lucrative ventures to buy and prop up his many money-losing golf resorts, at the same time that Apprentice ratings and his licensing deals were in decline. That brilliant move helped land him in the financial hole where he once again resides, at great risk to our national security.

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MIT researchers say the compact fusion reactor they’re building is likely to work, which could be a huge step forward in the fight against climate change.

A federal appeals court has upheld a six-day extension for counting absentee ballots in Wisconsin.

Some U.S. Postal Service employees have been quietly resisting Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s harmful policies. 

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has signed a law allowing California to develop its own line of affordable generic drugs.