Music: Pasteur Lappe — ‘The Sekele Movement’
Biden fires an early warning shot at Wall Street
CNN reports: Elizabeth Warren’s fingerprints are all over the Biden transition, much to Wall Street’s dismay. President-elect Joe Biden’s agency review teams include several people who share Warren’s reputation for being tough on the financial industry. It’s more evidence of the influence of Warren, a fierce opponent of big banks and the excesses of Wall Street — as well as an early signal that Wall Street will be under much greater scrutiny, especially compared to four years of President Donald…
Trump’s racist appeals powered a White evangelical tsunami
Dana Milbank writes: As partisans and analysts puzzle over the higher-than-expected turnout for President Trump (nearly 6 million fewer votes than for President-elect Joe Biden, but still high), they are poring over groups and subgroups: White, non-college-educated men. Suburban women. Young Black men. But much of the Trump 2020 phenomenon can be explained by a far simpler way of looking at the electorate: There are White evangelical Christians — and there is everybody else. White evangelicals are only 15 percent…
Firing Christopher Krebs crosses a line — even for Trump
Garrett M Graff writes: Within minutes of Donald Trump tweeting that he had fired Christopher Krebs as the director of the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity agency Tuesday night, Twitter slapped on a warning label that the accompanying claim about electoral fraud “is disputed.” The disinformation warning was, in some ways, a fitting denouement to a two-week-long battle between Krebs, the head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and his boss in the Oval Office. Ultimately, Krebs’ mission to…
‘Confusion and chaos’: Republicans denounce Trump’s latest purge
Politico reports: Sen. Shelley Moore Capito was scheduled to speak with the government’s top cybersecurity official on Wednesday. But the night before, Christopher Krebs was cast out of a job. “I was going to tell him thank you for a good job” helping to secure the 2020 election, Capito (R-W.Va.) said after checking her schedule to see if the call was still on. “I’m still going to tell him that — just not today.” President Donald Trump on Tuesday evening…
The disturbing GOP attempt to block certification of Biden’s Michigan win
Vox reports: Republican officials in Wayne County, Michigan, made a stunning move to block the certification of their presidential election results Tuesday — but backed down a few hours later amid intense criticism. Wayne County is the largest county in the state, it includes the city of Detroit (where the vast majority of the population is Black), and it votes heavily for Democrats. As with all Michigan counties, its election results go to a bipartisan board of canvassers for certification…
Trump campaign officials started pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state long before the election
ProPublica reports: Long before Republican senators began publicly denouncing how Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger handled the voting there, he withstood pressure from the campaign of Donald Trump to endorse the president for reelection. Raffensperger, a Republican, declined an offer in January to serve as an honorary co-chair of the Trump campaign in Georgia, according to emails reviewed by ProPublica. He later rejected GOP requests to support Trump publicly, he and his staff said in interviews. Raffensperger said he…
What human hair reveals about death’s seasonality
Max G. Levy writes: Each wave of Edith Howard Cook’s reddish-blonde hair tells a story. One segment may chronicle an unusually damp San Francisco summer; another may recall a dry December. But read in their entirety, the strands reveal the season in 1876 when 2-year-old Edith passed away. Archaeologist Jelmer Eerkens helped identify Edith after a construction crew discovered her remains in a backyard in 2016. “I have kids myself,” says Eerkens, an archaeologist at the University of California, Davis….
Music: Pasteur Lappe — ‘Na Real Sekele Fo’ Ya’
As Covid surges, American hospitals don’t have enough staff
The Atlantic reports: The reports have come in from all across the country: Hospitals are filling up, especially in the Midwest, and they are running out of the staff they need to take care of patients. Last week, the United States broke its record from April for the number of hospitalized COVID-19 patients, blowing past 60,000 all the way to 73,000, according to data compiled by the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. Now new data released by the Department…
Immunity to the coronavirus may last years, new data hint
The New York Times reports: How long might immunity to the coronavirus last? Years, maybe even decades, according to a new study — the most hopeful answer yet to a question that has shadowed plans for widespread vaccination. Eight months after infection, most people who have recovered still have enough immune cells to fend off the virus and prevent illness, the new data show. A slow rate of decline in the short term suggests, happily, that these cells may persist…
Gobal warming by the numbers because this week the reality is too much
Bill McKibben writes: Sometimes the human trauma of the climate crisis is too painful to recite, and this is one of those times: the busiest hurricane season ever recorded is continuing on into the late fall, with consequences so horrifying one can hardly stand to look. Right now, Hurricane Iota is mashing Central America; it will likely be a few days before we know the precise results. So let’s talk about what has already happened in Honduras, when Hurricane Eta…
Trump fires director of DHS agency who had rejected President’s election conspiracy theories
CNN reports: President Donald Trump on Tuesday fired the Department of Homeland Security official who had rejected Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud. Trump announced on Twitter he was firing Chris Krebs, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and directly tied it to Krebs’ statement that said there “is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” “The recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of…
Trump ‘suppressed’ his own voting base by opposing absentee ballots, says Georgia’s secretary of state
WSB-TV reports: Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has started firing back after more than a week of criticism from President Donald Trump. Raffensperger says it was the president’s own attacks on absentee ballots that cost him the election in Georgia. “He would have won by 10,000 votes. He actually suppressed, depressed his own voting base,” Raffensperger said. The Secretary of State said some 24,500 Georgia Republicans who voted absentee in the June primary, didn’t vote in the general election. Raffensperger…
In the Trump era, Real Clear Politics changed its tone, and funding sources
The New York Times reports: For three days after every major news organization declared Joseph R. Biden Jr. the victor of the presidential election, one widely read political site maintained that Pennsylvania was still too close to call. The delay was welcome news to allies of President Trump like Rudolph W. Giuliani and friendly outlets like The Gateway Pundit, which misrepresented the site’s decision in their efforts to spread false claims that Mr. Biden’s lead was unraveling. That site, Real…
Music: Marcos Valle & Moska — ‘Samba de Verão’