8.31 The L.N.U. Lightning Complex burned near a senior center in Napa County, California.8.31 Don Winslow: “How many times does a person have to lie to you before you stop listening to them?”
8.31 PJ O’Rourke: “When liberty grows we get increased individual enterprise and expansion of free markets. We create more goods, services, and benefits to society. The pie gets bigger. But politics is not about creating more goods, services, and benefits to society. Politics is about dividing them up. . . .Adam Smith pointed it out 244 years ago. Among free people, in a free market exchange of goods and services, everyone comes out ahead. Each person gives something he or she values less in return for something he or she values more. Both sides win. I’ve got the Grey Goose. You’ve got the Noilly Prat, the olives, and the crushed ice. Bottoms up! But in politics only one side can win. . . . Which is bad. But what’s worse is this means there have to be sides. Faction — angry partisan faction — isn’t a by-product of politics, it is politics. Politics cannot exist without faction. Politics cannot exist without people fighting each other. . . .Politics carves us up. Politics pits us against each other. Politics turns us into warring tribes.”
8.31 Biden: “Does anyone believe there will be less violence in America if Donald Trump is reelected?. . . [He] can’t stop the violence — because for years he has fomented it. . . [He] may believe mouthing the words ‘law and order’ makes him strong, but his failure to call on his own supporters to stop acting as an armed militia in this country shows how weak he is.”
8.31 Franklin Foer in The Atlantic: After a caravan of Donald Trump’s supporters descended on Portland, Oregon, this weekend, aching to grapple, he praised them as “great patriots.” In cheering them on, Trump is pointing them, and others like them, toward a specific target. What he seeks to eliminate is politics itself. Politics is such a ubiquitous term in the English language, such a seemingly fixed part of American life, that its existence is assumed and its definition rarely considered. Our concept of politics, descended from antiquity, is that society can peaceably settle its differences of opinion and interests. For politics to properly play its becalming role, citizens must agree on rules. Discussion, persuasion, and a willingness to accept temporary defeat are the political means by which a society adjudicates its inevitable conflicts. When a society discards politics, violence assumes its place. This threat is already evident in the deaths of two people protesting a police shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and that of a member of a right-wing group in Portland. Another president would make a show of easing tensions, but Trump deliberately escalates them.
8.31 Tom Seaver dies at 75
8.31 Trump: “Shooting the guy, shooting the guy in the back many times, I mean, couldn’t you have done something different? Couldn’t you have wrestled him? I mean, in the meantime, he might’ve been going for a weapon and there’s a whole big thing there. But they choke. Just like in a golf tournament, they miss a three-foot putt.” Ingraham: “You’re not comparing it to golf. Of course, that’s what the media will say.” Trump: “I’m saying people choke.”
8.31 Ingraham: Who do you think is pulling Biden’s strings? Is it former Obama officials? Trump: People that you’ve never heard of. People that are in the dark shadows. People that—Ingraham: What does that mean? That sounds like conspiracy theory. Dark shadows, what is that? Trump: No. People that you haven’t heard of. They’re people that are on the streets. They’re people that are controlling the streets. We had somebody get on a plane from a certain city this weekend, and in the plane it was almost completely loaded with thugs wearing these dark uniforms, black uniforms with gear and this and that. They’re on a plane. Ingraham: Where — where was this? Trump: I’ll tell you sometime, but it’s under investigation right now, but they came from a certain city, and this person was coming to the Republican National Convention, and there were like seven people on the plane like this person, and then a lot of people were on the plane to do big damage. Asked to clarify by reporters on Tuesday, Trump improvised a pathetically obvious lie, saying “a person” who was on the mythical plane ride “from Washington to wherever” told him about this occurrence, in which “the entire plane filled up with the looters, the anarchists, the rioters, people that obviously were looking for trouble.” Where does this fantasy come from? Ben Collins of NBC News tracked down the provenance of the story of the plane full of antifa thugs: It started as a Facebook post from a man in Idaho on June 1 warning that “At least a dozen males got off the plane in Boise from Seattle, dressed head to toe in black.” Which of course didn’t happen.
8.29 Chadwick Boseman dies at 43.8.27 In his review of Levon, by Sandra Tooze, in the Boston Globe, James Marcus mentions The Book of Levon.
8.27 Rudy Giuliani called Biden “a Trojan Horse with Bernie, AOC, Pelosi, Black Lives Matter and his party’s entire left wing hidden inside his body.”
8.27 Bought our house in Clifton Park.
8.26 California’s popular Squaw Valley Ski Resort will change its name because the word “squaw” is a derogatory term for Native American women, officials announced Tuesday.
8.26 Sold our house in Briarcliff
8.25 Alyssa Rosenberg in The Washington Post: “ The first night of the GOP convention was, inevitably, a cocktail of kitsch spiked with dystopian fiction, an outsize slice of American cheese served up to a president in desperate need of comfort food. As an act of communication with the American public, it was a dishonest travesty. But as entertainment tailored for President Trump’s hardcore base, it was a brilliant act of fan service.”
8.25 Charles Lane in The Washington Post: In the United States, one of the most consequential cultural changes of our time may be the swift and seemingly accelerating decline of religious commitment.Historically, Americans have recorded relatively high levels of worship-service attendance and belief in God, as compared with their peers in advanced industrial societies such as Europe or Japan. The U.S. example seemed to show that faith could survive in an environment dominated by science and technology. A forthcoming book by University of Michigan political scientist Ronald F. Inglehart, however, suggests that the United States is now rapidly catching up with the trend toward secularization elsewhere. When asked to express the importance of God in their lives on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being “not at all important,” and 10 being “very important,” Americans rated Him at an average of 4.6 in 2017 — down from 8.2 in just over a decade, according to an excerpt of Inglehart’s book, “Religion’s Sudden Decline”. . . .A major source of this country’s relative social and political conservatism is, essentially, disappearing, with potentially far-reaching implications for everything from criminal justice to education to foreign policy. Increasingly, the two political parties are not characterized by their respective predominant religious groups, but by whether their adherents belong to any religion at all. Thirty-eight percent of Democrats say they regularly attend services; for Republicans, the figure is 54 percent The U.S. importance-of-God score started higher than others and had more room to fall. Still, Inglehart’s finding reinforces those the Pew Research Center published last October, showing that the share of Americans claiming “none” as their religious affiliation had grown from 16 percent to 26 percent since 2007. Fewer than half of Americans now attend services regularly — with only 35 percent of millennials going at least once a month.8.24 Not 24 hours before its quadrennial confab began, the Republican National Committee formally forbade any effort to articulate party principles or priorities for the next four years. For the first time since its founding more than 160 years ago, the GOP is not announcing a platform for a presidential election, and it has proclaimed that any attempt to adopt a new platform will be “ruled out of order.” “RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda,” reads a one-page RNC resolution. “The 2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention.”
8.22 Tapes made by Mary Trump capture Trump‘s sister discussing her brother. Maryanne Trump Barry: “All he wants to do is appeal to his base. He has no principles. None. None. And his base, I mean my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people. Not do this. . . . His goddamned tweet and lying, oh my God,” she said. “I’m talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy shit.”8.20 Biden: “While I’ll be a Democratic candidate, I will be an American president. I’ll work hard for those who didn’t support me, as hard for them as I did for those who did vote for me.”
8.20 Steve Bannon and three others were arrested on federal fraud charges, accused of stealing money donated to a “We Build The Wall” online crowdfunding campaign.
8.20 Barack Obama: :[T]his president and those in power — those who benefit from keeping things the way they are — they are counting on your cynicism. They know they can’t win you over with their policies. So they’re hoping to make it as hard as possible for you to vote, and to convince you that your vote doesn’t matter.That’s how they win. … That’s how a democracy withers, until it’s no democracy at all. We can’t let that happen. … Don’t let them take away your democracy.
8.18 Albany
8.17 Albany
8.17 During MSNBC’s analysis of the night, TV host Nicolle Wallace praised Michelle Obama‘s speech as “epic shade.” It “was the line that Donald Trump had about deaths, and every single death, every single American life lost in this pandemic is the destruction of an entire family unit. . . .For her to throw that back at him was elegant.”
8.17 Michelle Obama: “[H]e is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is.”
8.17 Michelle Obama at the DNC: “If you take one thing from my words tonight, it is this: If you think things cannot possibly get worse, trust me, they can; and they will if we don’t make a change in this election.”
8.17 Bernie Sanders at the DNC: “Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Trump golfs.”
8.17 John Kasich at the DNC: “This isn’t about Republican or Democrat. It’s about a person… who could work with everyone, Democrats and Republicans, to get things done. Donald Trump isn’t that person. Joe Biden is.”
8.17 Grieving daughter Kristin Urquiza at the DNC: “My dad was a healthy 65-year-old. His only preexisting condition was trusting Donald Trump, and for that, he paid with his life,”
8.17 Gov. Cuomo at the DNC: “We saw the failure of a government that tried to deny the virus, then tried to ignore it, and then tried to politicize it — the failed federal government that watched New York get ambushed by their negligence, and then watched New York suffer, but all through it learned absolutely nothing. . . .Donald Trump didn’t create the initial division. The division created Trump. He only made it worse.”
8.16 The FDA granted emergency authorization for a saliva-based virus test, developed by Yale and the NBA
8.14 Fareek Zakaria in the Post: With rock-bottom interest rates, countries that issue debt in their own currencies, such as Britain, the United States and Japan, have a golden opportunity to spend money at little cost. Right now, the U.S. Treasury can issue 30-year bonds on which it pays less than 1.5 percent interest. Democratic and Republican negotiators are apart by about $1 trillion, so that works out to annual interest payments of under $15 billion — less than 0.5 percent of last year’s federal budget. The F-35 fighter aircraft program costs more than breaking this gridlock and providing relief to the entire American economy. Furthermore, after accounting for inflation, bondholders will likely be paying the U.S. government for the honor of lending it money. We have been here before. In 2009, hundreds of distinguished economists, dozens of Republican leaders such as then-Rep. Paul D. Ryan, and influential public interest groups argued that the stimulus bill and Federal Reserve actions would cause hyperinflation, economic collapse and the decline of the dollar. In fact, the opposite happened. The United States chugged along to its longest peacetime recovery on record, the dollar soared, American banks emerged stronger than all the rest, and the U.S. stock market outperformed the world. Undeterred by their record of failure, many of the same voices are at it again, saying that this time all the things they wrongly predicted in 2009 really will happen.
8.14 Dolly Parton, in an interview with Billboard: “I understand people having to make themselves known and felt and seen. And of course Black lives matter. Do we think our little white asses are the only ones that matter? No! . . . .I do believe we all have a right to be exactly who we are, and it is not my place to judge. All these good Christian people that are supposed to be such good Christian people, the last thing we’re supposed to do is judge one another. God is the judge, not us. I just try to be myself. I just try to let everybody else be themselves.”
8.14 Albany
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8.13 Ronald Brownstein in The Atlantic: By selecting Harris, Biden has positioned the Democratic Party for a profound generational and demographic transition, and he’s addressed the fundamental incongruity of his candidacy: the inherent strain of a nearly 78-year-old white man leading a political coalition that relies on big margins among young voters, people of color, and women. Biden represents the Democratic Party of his post–World War II coming-of-age: a coalition centered on blue-collar white people who worked with their hands, mostly in smaller industrial cities such as Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he was born. From almost every angle, Harris embodies the Democratic Party of the 21st century: a biracial child of immigrants (who is herself in an interracial marriage) who rose to political prominence from a base in San Francisco, a diverse, globalized hub of the emerging information economy. Many obstacles still prevent women and people of color from achieving power in the Democratic Party’s leadership commensurate with their influence in its voting base. But Harris makes the concept of Biden as a bridge more concrete—and potentially more attractive to younger nonwhite voters displaying lagging enthusiasm for him—by embodying the other side of that span: a party that potentially makes more room at the table for people who look like her. “I think Kamala Harris has the potential to activate a voter that otherwise has not seen themself reflected in the Democratic Party,” says Terrance Woodbury, an African-American Democratic consultant who studies younger voters.
8.11 Biden picks Kamala Harris. Obvious match from the beginning.
8.11 Big 10 and PAC 10 cancel football seasons
8.6 Ibram X. Kendi in The Atlantic: If the heartbeat of racism is denial, the heartbeat of anti-racism is confession. To be anti-racist is to admit when we’ve done wrong, so we can begin to do right.We are living in a time when we can all do right. Most of us know racism is a big problem. But will we resign ourselves to the idea that the problem is too massive to solve? Or will we use this momentum to propel ourselves forward, toward eliminating racist policies and building equity and justice for all? We have an opportunity for sweeping change, for radical transformation, but we must seize it. Not tomorrow. Not years from today. But now.
8.5 Pete Hamill dies at 85
8.5 Dana Milbank in the Washington Post: Previous Trump chiefs of staff Reince Priebus, John Kelly and (to a lesser extent) Mick Mulvaney tried to temper the president’s wildest instincts. Under Mark Meadows, Trump seems to have no guardrails: tear-gassing peaceful demonstrators for a photo op, embracing Confederate generals and flag, proposing delaying the election and sabotaging the post office’s ability to handle mail-in ballots, disparaging the late John Lewis while voicing sympathy for accused sex criminal Ghislaine Maxwell, hiring a senior campaign adviser who argued that he’d like to see Trump be “a tad bit more of a fascist” (as the Daily Beast’s Scott Bixby reported), appointing a conspiracy theorist to a top Pentagon position after the Senate declined to confirm him, and promising a health-care plan that never materializes. Now, The Post reports, White House decision-making meetings on the pandemic are “led by Trump son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.” Trump has been publicly trashing task force coordinator Deborah Birx, again contradicting his team about hydroxychloroquine, and touting the advice of a “doctor” who warns of “demon sperm” and “alien DNA.”
8.5 Albany
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8.3 Albany
8.3 Trump on Axios: “They are dying. That’s true. And you — it is what it is. But that doesn’t mean we aren’t doing everything we can. It’s under control as much as you can control it.”