9.30 The Rangers buy out Henrik Lundqvist.
9.29 Yankees beat Shane Bieber, MLB’s best pitcher this summer, in playoff opener. Aaron Judge slugs a massive two-run homer four pitches into the game. New York Post: “Gerrit Cole would describe what LeMahieu and Judge did to begin this game as “a left jab and right hook.” That wobbled Bieber and the ace never recovered. LeMahieu, on a 2-0 count, familiarly darted a single to right field to open the game. Bieber tried to get ahead with a first pitch fastball away to Judge. But it leaked back toward the heart of the plate. Judge said, “That’s why I got out of bed this morning, to get that pitch.”
9.29 Robin Givhan in the Washington Post: Donald Trump came to heckle. He came to interrupt and to pontificate and to flail his arms, batting away questions and facts in a chaotic fury. He was a boor and a troll, holding up his stubby mitts in an angry pantomime as he tried to halt the words coming from former vice president Joe Biden’s mouth. Trump seemed to believe that with a single rude hand gesture, one that he regularly uses to assert his dominance, he could hold back the truth so he could be free to spin and hype and vent. It was an exhausting mess that spun beyond moderator Chris Wallace’s control and outside the bounds of anything that could reasonably be called a debate. It was a 90-minute display of a president’s testosterone-fueled, unmanaged rage and insecurity.
9.29 Biden: “Will you shut up, man?”
9.29 Aaron Blake in The Washington Post: Trump’s strategy was clear: to steamroll both Biden and debate moderator Chris Wallace, hoping to provoke a bad moment. It was the strategy of a challenger, more than of an incumbent, and seemed to reflect that Trump needs to change the race more than Biden does. Biden’s strategy was also clear: to stick to his talking points, try not to engage much, and deny Trump what he wanted. Biden lost his cool at a few points, including asking, “Will you shut up, man?” At another point: “It’s hard to get any word in with this clown — excuse me, this person.” At another: “Keep yapping, man.” At times, Biden was exasperated, and at other times, he dealt with the barrage effectively. At one point, Trump tried to cut in by saying, “Can I be honest?” Biden shot back: “Try and be honest.” But all told, Biden didn’t allow himself to be pulled off his game. And he avoided some of the lapses and uneasy moments that marked some of his Democratic debate performances. The debate wasn’t enlightening from a policy standpoint, mostly because Trump wanted a food fight. Biden didn’t give it to him, which reinforced the reality of who’s leading this race right now.
9.29 The Tampa Bay Lightning defeat the Dallas Stars 2-0, and win the Stanley Cup, four games to two.
9.28 David Frum in The Atlantic: [Trump’s] supporters, even those willing to be shameless, have been left to desperately contrive messages of their own. They are not doing a very good job, in part because they must worry about the line that Trump will eventually want them to take, when he finally announces a line. Not many days and hours remain, and Trump has abruptly lost almost any vestige of control over either the game or the clock.
9.28 Catherine Rampell in The Washington Post: Trump spent 87 times as much to allegedly pay off his porn-star mistress as he paid in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017, combined.
9.28 The New York Times: Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750. He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made. As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million. The tax returns that Mr. Trump has long fought to keep private tell a story fundamentally different from the one he has sold to the American public. His reports to the I.R.S. portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars a year yet racks up chronic losses that he aggressively employs to avoid paying taxes. Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.
9.28 NBC News: The head of a top U.S. government health agency gave a grim assessment of the coronavirus pandemic that contradicts that of President Donald Trump, saying “We’re nowhere near the end.” Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who has been rebuked by Trump for less-rosy assessments of the coronavirus recovery, also expressed concern that Trump’s late addition to the coronavirus task force, Dr. Scott Atlas, is sharing inaccurate information with the president. “Everything he says is false,” Redfield said in a telephone call Friday on a plane from Atlanta to Washington, NBC reported.
9.25 Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring, quoted in The Washington Post: “If there’s one thing that I’ve learned in suing Trump and his administration dozens of times, it’s that when he threatens to cross democratic boundaries and constitutional norms, he usually does — and when he denies it, it often turns out he was actually doing it all along.”
9.25 Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, quoted in The Washington Post: “Categorically and emphatically, when you have public officials casting doubt on the process, it’s incredibly corrosive. I cannot describe that with enough vehemence. It’s nearly a criminal or treasonous act. We hold a sacred trust, and it is our job to make people feel like they’re protected in their decision-making, as the authors of our future.”
9.25 Bill Galston, chair of the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies Program, quoted in The Washington Post: “For the first time in my life, and maybe for the first time since the Civil War, the fate of constitutional democracy in the United States is on the line, and it’s on the line because the president has put it there. It is a clear and present danger.”
9.25 Police have killed 1,010 Americans in the past year. Despite the unpredictable events that lead to fatal shootings, police nationwide have shot and killed almost the same number of people each year — nearly 1,000 — since The Washington Post began tracking these numbers in 2015.
9.23 Chief Justice John Roberts: “It has been said that Ruth wanted to be an opera virtuoso but became a rock star instead. She found her stage right behind me in our courtroom.”
9.24 The late Tom Wolfe, quoted in Air Mail: “Most American intellectuals think you can only be profound if you’re outraged. So they’re perpetually outraged. It’s rather amusing to watch. Wasn’t it Marshall McLuhan who said that moral outrage is a common strategy for endowing idiots with dignity?”
9.23 Three of the articles I wrote for the University of Illinois Alumni magazine received Honorable Mentions in the 2019 Folio Eddie Awards for Editorial Excellence competition. Who do I have to fuck for an Eddie?
9.22 Lebron James and Anthony Davis of the Lakers wear lace collars in honor of RBG.
9.22 Paul Waldman in the Washington Post: A long argument about process and rhetoric is just what Republicans want. It’s the only thing that will stop this controversy from making Trump’s defeat in November significantly more likely. Republicans are more than happy to waste time talking about Senate procedures and who said what four years ago, because for them this is about one thing: power. If you have it, you can withstand all the criticism in the world. Questions of power surround everything Republicans believe and know about the Supreme Court. Holding and enhancing the court’s conservative majority is about guaranteeing the privileges of the powerful and limiting the ability of those with less power — workers, minority groups, poor people — to receive the meaningful protections of the law. It’s about undermining government’s power to address societal problems. And, perhaps most of all, it’s about enabling the GOP to continue to hold political power despite enjoying the support of a minority of Americans.
9.20 Biden: “In the middle of the worst global health crisis in living memory, Donald Trump is before the Supreme Court trying to strip health-care coverage away from tens of millions of families. This took away the peace of mind of more than 100 million Americans with preexisting conditions. If he succeeds, insurers could once again discriminate or drop coverage completely for people living with preexisting conditions like asthma, diabetes, cancer and so many other problems. . . .If Donald Trump has his way, the complications from covid-19 … like lung scarring and heart damage, could become the next deniable preexisting condition.”
9.18 A week of getting ready for the Speechathon concludes
9.18 Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies at 87.
9.16 Steve Schmidt on MSNBC: “Bob Woodward induced a confession of the greatest lie in American history, bar none. There’s nothing that frankly comes even close. . . .It is a catastrophic leadership failure. But more than that, there’s no equivalent in the country’s history to it. It is the greatest malfeasance in the history of the United States.”
9.16 Max Boot in the Washington Post: Biden was vice president for eight years under a president who was also denounced by the right as a dangerous, un-American radical. Far from ushering in Bolshevism, the Obama-Biden administration presided over the longest economic expansion on record and falling crime rates. This year, by contrast, the Trump administration has seen the worst recession since the 1930s and a rising murder rate.Even if you differ with Biden on the issues, you have to admit he is no threat to our democracy. Trump is. He has called the election a hoax, encouraged supporters to vote twice, refused to say whether he will recognize the results, tried to blackmail Ukraine into helping him politically, and failed to combat Russian election attacks. It’s Orwellian to claim that only Trump can protect our democracy when he is the biggest threat to it.
9.11 Cassie Kozyrkov, chief decision scientist at Google, quoted in Quartz: If you could suggest one way to improve my team’s decision-making, we asked, without knowing much about our domain or industry specifically, what would you suggest? Her answer was to ask what she calls the “career-making question for data scientists,” which is “What would it take to change your mind?” Says Kozyrkov: “Most people don’t ask this question enough and you might be surprised how much your team’s decision-making improves when you start every decision with it. Coming up with an answer forces the team to confront their pre-existing opinions, identify the extent to which their mind is already set, understand how they navigate their context, clarify their assumptions, declare the information they need, and add structure to the decision process. It also adds a layer of protection against cognitive biases like confirmation bias.”
9.10 Diana Rigg dies at 82
9.10 Max Boot in the Washington Post: “In a way, Woodward’s book is almost reassuring. It shows that Trump was not entirely delusional. He actually realized that the coronavirus was far more threatening than the flu. He just chose to deceive the American public by playing down the disease at least 108 times. His explanation: He is “a cheerleader for this country,” and he didn’t want to cause “panic” or a “frenzy.” That’s pretty rich given how hard he has worked to generate panic about exaggerated threats such as refugee “caravans” and antifa goon squads. Trump is more often a doomsayer than a cheerleader. On Thursday, for example, he tweeted: “If I don’t win, America’s Suburbs will be OVERRUN with Low Income Projects, Anarchists, Agitators, Looters and, of course, ‘Friendly Protesters.’ ” So why lie to play down a genuine threat while hyping largely imaginary threats? That is the biggest mystery of Trump’s catastrophic covid-19 response. He would have been far better off leveling with the public. Not only would this have saved countless lives, it also might have saved the Trump presidency. But he just couldn’t break the mendacious habits of a lifetime. No doubt he imagined he could bluff and spin his way through the pandemic the way he had done with countless crises in the past, from corporate bankruptcies to his impeachment. He did not seem to realize that a virus could not be banished with happy talk. Whatever Trump’s motivation, his falsehoods are criminal and inexcusable. On second thought, that he knew better actually makes it worse. Trump is like the captain of a ship who knows it is about to hit an iceberg but doesn’t tell the passengers to make for the lifeboats.
9.9 Biden: “His failures not only cost lives — it sent our economy into tailspin that cost millions more in American livelihoods. It’s beyond despicable. It’s a dereliction of duty. It’s a disgrace.”
9.9 Washington Post: President Trump’s head popped up during his top-secret intelligence briefing in the Oval Office on Jan. 28 when the discussion turned to the coronavirus outbreak in China.“This will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency,” national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien told Trump, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward. “This is going to be the roughest thing you face.” Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser, agreed. He told the president that after reaching contacts in China, it was evident that the world faced a health emergency on par with the flu pandemic of 1918, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide. Ten days later, Trump called Woodward and revealed that he thought the situation was far more dire than what he had been saying publicly. “You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump said in a Feb. 7 call. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flu. This is deadly stuff.” At that time, Trump was telling the nation that the virus was no worse than a seasonal flu, predicting it would soon disappear and insisting that the U.S. government had it totally under control. It would be several weeks before he would publicly acknowledge that the virus was no ordinary flu and that it could be transmitted through the air. Trump admitted to Woodward on March 19 that he deliberately minimized the danger. “I wanted to always play it down,” the president said.
9.8 Benjamin L. Ginsberg in The Washington Post: “The president’s rhetoric has put my party in the position of a firefighter who deliberately sets fires to look like a hero putting them out.”
9.8 The Justice Department intervened in the defamation lawsuit brought by E. Jean Carroll, moving the matter to federal court and signaling it wants to make the U.S. government — rather than Trump himself — the defendant in the case. In filings in federal court in Manhattan, the Justice Department asserted that Trump was “acting within the scope of his office as President of the United States” when he denied during interviews in 2019 that he had raped journalist E. Jean Carroll more than two decades ago in a New York City department store. Carroll sued Trump over that denial in November. The maneuver removes the case — at least for now — from state court in New York, where a judge last month had rejected Trump’s bid for a delay and put Carroll’s team back on course to seek a DNA sample and an under-oath interview from the president. It also means that Justice Department lawyers will be essentially aiding Trump’s defense, and taxpayers could be on the hook for any potential damages, if the U.S. government is allowed to stand in for Trump. Winning damages against the government, though, would be more unlikely than in a suit against Trump, as the notion of “sovereign immunity” gives the government and its employees broad protection from lawsuits. Said Roberta Kaplan, Carroll’s lawyer: “Even in today’s world, that argument is shocking. It offends me as a lawyer, and offends me even more as a citizen. Trump’s effort to wield the power of the government to evade responsibility for his private misconduct is without precedent, and shows even more starkly how far he is willing to go to prevent the truth from coming out.”
9.4 So long, Phil Lentz
9.3 President Trump called U.S. soldiers injured or killed in war “losers,” questioned the country’s reverence for them and expressed confusion over why anyone would choose to serve, according to a new report that the White House has called “patently false.”The report, published late Thursday by the Atlantic, cites four unnamed people with firsthand knowledge of Trump’s comments. It says Trump disparaged the military service of the late former president George H.W. Bush, objected to wounded veterans being involved in a military parade, and canceled a visit to Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018 because he didn’t care about honoring those killed in war.
9.2 After Trump moved to slash federal funding from several cities his administration labeled as “anarchist jurisdictions” late Wednesday, specifically singling out New York, Gov. Cuomo shot back. The commander in chief, he said, was “persona non grata” in their shared hometown.“He can’t have enough bodyguards to walk through New York City,” Cuomo told reporters during a conference call on Wednesday evening. “Forget bodyguards. He better have an army if he thinks he’s going to walk down the streets in New York.”
9.1 Heather Souvaine Horn in The New Republic: Monday brought news that the agency is weakening a 2015 regulation that required coal plants to keep arsenic and mercury out of wastewater that could contaminate nearby water sources. . . . What politician in their right mind is pro-arsenic?