Crooked Media - What A Day: Wallace and vomit

To the great astonishment of all spectators, President Trump made Tuesday’s presidential debate the least watchable television experience since, well, the 2016 debates.
 

• Here’s what you may have been fortunate enough to miss: Trump repeatedly interrupted and spoke over both Joe Biden and hapless moderator Chris Wallace to drown out any substantive discussion of his failures with interjected lies and personal attacks. If we were to sum it up in five words, they’d be Joe Biden’s: “Will you shut up, man?” The night was so chaotic that the Commission on Presidential Debates has promised to add “additional tools to maintain order” in future debates. Mics that can be turned off? Stage trapdoor? Nickelodeon-style slime penalties? The American people demand answers.
   
• In the debate’s most horrific moment (and it’s a competitive field), Trump defied repeated prompts to condemn white supremacy. Instead, Trump told the violent, far-right Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” adding, “somebody’s got to do something about Antifa and the left.” The Proud Boys naturally celebrated his comments on social media, interpreting them as a greenlight to “go fuck them up.” Republicans attempting to sweep up the mess have weakly suggested that perhaps Trump misspoke; Trump himself cleared everything up today by falsely claiming total ignorance of the Proud Boys, and declining to denounce white supremacists again. 
   
• Minutes after that rock bottom debate moment, Trump dug out a sub-basement by encouraging his supporters to descend on polling places and “watch very carefully;” i.e., go hog wild with illegal voter intimidation. The remark was part of a larger cascade of lies about mail-in voting and postal workers dumping ballots in creeks, as Trump once again suggested that he would turn to the Supreme Court to help him win a contested election. If only some third party, maybe a moderator of some kind, could have told the millions of people watching that all of this was untrue. Ah, well. 

In the fleeting windows between interruptions, Joe Biden managed to turn in a good performance. 
 

• Biden brought up the immediate peril facing the Affordable Care Act within the crucial first half hour, and offered strong remarks regarding Trump’s pandemic response and fundamental incompetence, his terrible jobs record, and election integrity: “Show up and vote. You will determine the outcome of this election. Vote, vote, vote. If you’re able to vote early in your state, vote early. If you’re able to vote in person, vote in person. Vote whatever way is the best way for you...He cannot stop you from being able to determine the outcome of this election.”
   
• The viewers agreed. Polls found that Biden won the debate decisively, undecided voters thought Trump looked like an unhinged asshole (though they weren’t necessarily sold on voting for Biden either), and even ardent Trump supporters couldn’t help but notice that they were in hell. Hillary Clinton mopped the floor with Trump in the 2016 debates too, so, you know, look alive out there, but it was on Trump to bring up his poll numbers by appealing to voters outside of his rabid Fox News base, and he unequivocally blew it. 

That debate truly sucked, but nobody had any reason to expect otherwise: Trump acted no differently than he has on any given day of his presidency, and he never will. Take a moment to recall the most persuasive political ad ever made, and let the residual rage and nausea spur you into action. 34 days.

Can the biggest threat to the entire world bring the entire world together? in Missing America's penultimate episode,Ben Rhodes talks to former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd about the roadblocks to confronting climate change he faced from Rupert Murdoch and the fossil fuel industry, and activists from the Pacific Islands to Europe to the US about what needs to be done.

Check out the rest of the series if you haven’t yet, and subscribe to Missing America on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your pods →

The White House has blocked a CDC order to keep cruise ships docked through mid-February, because it might hurt Donald Trump’s chances of winning Florida. CDC Director Robert Redfield recommended extending the current “no-sail” policy which is set to expire today, but the proposal was overruled—the White House will instead let cruise ships sail after October 31, the date the industry had independently agreed to. The tourism industry has substantial political influence in Florida, so it’s not too difficult to puzzle this one out. Anyhow, here’s an enlightening read on how a single cruise ship spread coronavirus around the world, and here’s that Vote Save America link again. 

• Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett declined to pledge to recuse herself from 2020 election cases on her Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire. Finally, an election-meddling participant with a little honesty. 
   
• One other Barrett questionnaire fun fact: She once represented an affiliate of a former Iranian militant group that challenged its designation as a foreign terrorist organization. This did not come up in Barrett’s 2017 confirmation process, oddly enough. 
   
• In anticipation of Barrett’s lightning-fast confirmation, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer took control of the Senate floor on Tuesday to force a procedural vote on a bill that would prohibit the Justice Department from supporting a lawsuit aimed at striking down the ACA, in order to put Republican senators on the record in support of the challenge.
   
• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin met to negotiate a coronavirus stimulus package today but didn’t reach a deal. House Democrats have delayed a vote on a $2.2 trillion aid bill until at least Thursday.
   
• A judge has ordered Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron to release the grand-jury recordings from Breonna Taylor’s case by noon on Friday, after he sought a delay. 
   
• Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-NJ) has been receiving death threats from QAnon followers after the NRCC falsely accused him of “helping sexual predators hide in the shadows.” Who could possibly have seen this coming, except for all of the Republicans who planned for it and have refused to take the ad down? Here’s where to donate to Malinowski’s re-election campaign.
   
• The Trump campaign has been purging its website of any videos featuring Brad Parscale, after he was hospitalized for threatening to harm himself, and the campaign tried to blame it on Democrats. 
   
• Staff at a British wildlife park removed five parrots from public view because they kept swearing at visitors, as if that isn’t the whole point of parrots.  #LetThemCurse #NoBirdCensorship #FreeBird

We might be able to get a better hold on coronavirus by looking at the variable k: a measure that looks at whether the virus spreads steadily, or in large bursts. Up until now, we’ve been focused on R0, which defines a pathogen’s average contagiousness, but that average smooths out variability in the way a virus spreads. A growing number of studies suggest that a small percentage of infected people might account for a huge percentage of coronavirus transmission, while many people barely transmit it at all. That imbalance—overdispersion—means that a few early superspreading events (or lack thereof) can lead to dramatically different outcomes in otherwise similar countries, and underscores the need for cheap, rapid tests to find infection clusters quickly. It also underscores the absolute lunacy of President Trump continuing to hold packed superspreader rallies all over the country, including in Wisconsin this weekend, where coronavirus rates are already fully out of control.

If there is one thing that health experts agree on, it’s that the perfect diet doesn’t exist. 

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A federal appeals court has denied a request from Wisconsin’s GOP-controlled legislature to put a hold on its ruling allowing absentee ballots to be counted up to six days after November 3.

The Biden campaign raised $3.8 million in a single hour after Tuesday’s debate, breaking its own single-hour fundraising record, and saw nearly 100,000 people sign up to volunteer.

LeBron James’s effort to increase the number of poll workers in predominantly Black districts has signed up 10,000 volunteers.

(Opening trench coat) You wanna see Katie Porter almost make a big-deal pharmaceutical executive cry?