Crooked Media - What A Day: The New Yikeser

With a third coronavirus surge sweeping the country and just 15 days left until the election is over, there’s only one sensible thing for a struggling incumbent to do: Hop on a phone call with reporters and trash the nation’s top health official. 
 

• The U.S. now averages 55,000 new confirmed coronavirus cases per day, and 10 states reported their highest-ever single-day increases in cases on Friday. As the country rolls into what could very well be the darkest weeks of the pandemic, President Trump on Sunday mocked Joe Biden for trusting scientists, and today on a campaign call derided Dr. Anthony Fauci as “a disaster” whom he’d fire if not for the political fallout: “People are tired of hearing Fauci and these idiots, all these idiots who got it wrong.” (Never failing to put his weirdest foot forward, the president also attacked the country’s top epidemiologist for being bad at baseball.)
   
• Trump’s latest public display of animosity followed a candid 60 Minutes interview in which Fauci acknowledged that the White House had blocked him from appearing on “many, many, many shows” to talk about the pandemic, said he wasn’t at all surprised that Trump had contracted coronavirus, and described the harassment and death threats his family has endured since Trump and the right-wing media made him into an enemy. After guiding the country through health crises under six administrations, Fauci now requires a security detail when he and his wife go for a walk. 
   
• It’s difficult to fathom, but the White House may be less prepared to address the current crisis than it was back in March. The coronavirus task force has been in chaos since the arrival of non-epidemiologist/pseudoscience-peddler Scott Atlas, whom Trump recruited to transform the pandemic response into a Fox News echo chamber. Atlas has largely sidelined the other doctors on the task force while advocating for a herd immunity strategy, questioning the usefulness of social distancing and masks, and repeating the absurd claim that the pandemic is winding down. On Saturday, Twitter deleted a tweet from Atlas arguing that masks don’t work, for violating its misinformation policy. The White House pays him taxpayer dollars to say the same.

At a moment when Trump should be urging Americans to maintain distance and follow safety guidelines to minimize the harm ahead, he’s doing what some keen observers have called the Total Fucking Opposite.
 

• Addressing a dense crowd in Michigan at one of his daily superspreading rallies on Saturday, Trump falsely accused Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) of imposing an unnecessary lockdown in the state, and egged the crowd into a “lock her up” chant. Whitmer, the target of a foiled kidnapping plot by far-right anti-lockdown goons, denounced Trump for “inspiring and incentivizing and inciting this kind of domestic terrorism.” In response, the Trump campaign circled an “8645” emblem behind Whitmer in her Meet the Press appearance and accused her of “encouraging assassination attempts” against Trump. As any bartender can attest, 86-ing an unruly patron means ejecting them from the establishment and then murdering them in cold blood.
   
• The plots against Whitmer (and Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam) weren’t random: On Friday a man in Wichita, KS, was arrested for allegedly threatening to kidnap and kill Wichita’s Democratic Mayor Brandon Whipple over the city’s mask mandate. Trump has not only discouraged and politicized basic life-saving public health measures, he’s continuously incited threats against the health officials and elected Democrats who try to turn them into policy, with no apparent pushback from his Republican enablers. 
   

The Trump administration coronavirus strategy now openly consists of nothing but denial, debunked pseudoscience, and the total abandonment of Americans to unnecessary infections and deaths. We have just over two weeks to make sure that approach comes to a hard stop in January, and we cannot fuck this up.

Today in the October surprise that keeps not giving, DNI John Ratcliffe asserted that Hunter Biden’s emails weren’t part of a Russian disinformation campaign, while the FBI is actively investigating that. Which is the more damaging story, one wonders: Texts revealing that Joe Biden has been a loving father to a son struggling with addiction, or Trump’s politicization of the U.S. intelligence community? The New York Times reported over the weekend that New York Post staffers were so uncomfortable about the credibility of the Hunter Biden stories that they withheld their bylines, and Rudy Giuliani amazingly admitted that he chose the Post because “either nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out.” In fewer words, they would do journalism. It turns out Giuliani did try Fox News first, which—for presumably the first time in network history—turned the story down over credibility concerns.

• The Supreme Court has rejected Republican efforts to limit mail-in voting in Pennsylvania, in a 4-4 decision which a) is terrific news in and of itself and b) serves as a perfect illustration of what’s at stake if Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed. 
   
• The Court has also agreed to hear two key immigration cases regarding President Trump’s plan to redirect military funding towards the border wall, and his order requiring asylum-seekers to remain in Mexico while they await hearings.
   
• Trump has demanded that Thursday’s debate center on foreign policy, instead of the chosen subjects that include “the pandemic he mishandled,” “racial tensions he’s aggravated,” and “climate change and national security issues on which he’s a global embarrassment.”
   
• Pennsylvania election officials have been inundated with complaints from voters having trouble registering to vote or requesting a mail-in ballot, a story one simply loves to see on the day of Pennsylvania’s registration deadline. 
   
• A third sitting federal prosecutor has publicly denounced Attorney General Bill Barr. Seems like a lot, tbh!
   
• A federal appeals court has struck down Ghislaine Maxwell’s effort to block the release of her 2016 deposition in a civil lawsuit brought by Jeffrey Epstein victim Virginia Roberts Giuffre.
   
• Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) raised $2 million for his Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff by willfully mispronouncing Kamala Harris’s name at Trump’s Friday rally.
   
• Ronald Reagan’s Solicitor General Charles Fried wrote an op-ed arguing that Biden should expand the Supreme Court if necessary, and the famously un-radical Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) said he’s open to the idea, if Republicans confirm Amy Coney Barrett before the election.
   
• Come for the anecdote about Donald Trump ordering milkshakes in the middle of a highly classified briefing, stay for Joe Biden’s plan to rebuild the hollowed-out remains of the intelligence community.
   
• The New Yorker has suspended reporter Jeffrey Toobin for a Zoom Dick Incident, which, given the circumstances, should really be styled the Zoöm Dick Incident. 
   
• We bow before the patron saint of Boston early voting. 

President Trump and the Wisconsin GOP struck a deal with Foxconn for a factory that would create 13,000 jobs, which three years later still doesn’t exist. The Taiwanese electronics company was supposed to turn Mount Pleasant, WI, into a center of tech manufacturing, by building an enormous LCD factory in exchange for lucrative tax subsidies. That never happened: Foxconn built what amounts to an empty shell, creating a handful of jobs for people who have nothing to do—many of whom have since been laid off. State and local governments spent at least $400 million on the project, with nothing to show for it but some golf carts that employees would race around until the batteries died. The whole story is an utterly insane example of the reality behind Trump’s false promises to bring back manufacturing, and well-worth a read.

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A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to cut food stamp benefits for 700,000 unemployed Americans, calling the measure “arbitrary and capricious.” 

The North Carolina Court of Appeals has approved a deadline extension for mail-in ballots, and the state’s board of elections has issued new guidance on how voters can fix problems on their ballots.

Staggering numbers of Pennsylvanians volunteering to be poll workers have overwhelmed counties with a surplus.

Jim Obergefell and Rick Hodges, best known for being on opposing sides of the landmark SCOTUS marriage equality case Obergefell v. Hodges, have teamed up to oppose Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation.