Minor Thoughts from me to you

Donald Trump’s hand-picked Attorney General is lying about a ballot fraud case in Texas. He falsely claimed that someone tried to submit 1,700 fake ballots. It was actually a case one person trying to get his hands on other people’s ballots. And Texas law enforcement was all over it, proving that we do have safeguards to detect and prevent fraud.

Barr gives false recounting of Texas voter fraud case in effort to cast doubt on mail-in voting

Alexander Mallin, for ABC News.

Twenty-eight-year-old Miguel Hernandez was eventually found guilty in the investigation for forging a voter's signature on a mail-in ballot he returned. Chatham described Hernandez as the "fall guy" in the scam, being paid by a still-unknown consultant to contact individuals who had received mail-in ballots and return them so they could potentially be tampered with.

"He violated the law but not for voting, it was for procuring mail-in ballots under false pretenses," Chatham said. "The other thing that Barr got very wrong about the case is that we knew about this thing before it even happened, and prevented any potentially fraudulent ballots from being cast."

"It was a tremendous success story for the office," Chatham added.

Barr's false description of the case comes as officials in the intelligence community are warning Russia is seeking to "amplify" concerns over the integrity of U.S. elections by promoting allegations that mail-in voting will result in rampant fraud.

Analysts with the Department of Homeland Security’s intelligence arm issued a bulletin to federal and state law enforcement partners Thursday after finding with “high confidence” that “Russian malign influence actors” have targeted the absentee voting process “by spreading disinformation” since at least March.

Despite evidence to the contrary, Mr. Trump continues to claim, on an almost daily basis, the mail-in ballots are are an invitation to fraud. He continually assets that 2020 will be the most fraudulent election ever, and that the only way America can trust the election results is to get rid of all of the mail-in ballots. He’s either lying about that or he’s ignorant. This 2-month old Washington Post analysis shows that mail-in ballot fraud is practically non-existent. Thanks to COVID-19, millions of ballots will be cast by mail this year—including my own. And we can be completely confident that the results reported will be accurate.

Analysis of mail-in ballots finds just 0.0025% rate of possible voter fraud

Elise Viebeck, for the Washington Post.

But a Washington Post analysis of data collected by three vote-by-mail states with help from the nonprofit Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) found that officials identified just 372 possible cases of double voting or voting on behalf of deceased people out of about 14.6 million votes cast by mail in the 2016 and 2018 general elections, or 0.0025 percent.

The figure reflects cases referred to law enforcement agencies in five elections held in Colorado, Oregon and Washington, where all voters proactively receive ballots in the mail for every election.

The minuscule rate of potentially fraudulent ballots in those states adds support to assertions by election officials nationwide that with the right safeguards, mail voting is a secure method for conducting elections this year amid the threat of the novel coronavirus — undercutting the president’s claims.

Until now, the polarized debate about ballot fraud has largely featured individual anecdotes from around the country of attempts to vote illegally. The voting figures from the three states examined by The Post provide a robust data set to measure the prevalence of possible fraud.

Current and former election officials in the three states said allegations that mail voting fosters widespread cheating are not only defied by the data, but also do not acknowledge the sophisticated and tightly controlled ways that voting operates in their jurisdictions, which have layers of security designed specifically to root out fraud and build confidence in the system.

“When I have the opportunity to give a tour of our facility to a skeptic of vote-by-mail or a skeptic of the process — someone concerned about fraud or security — they turn into believers,” said Julie Wise, elections director in King County, Wash., which includes Seattle and has operated a fully vote-by-mail system since 2009.

Donald Trump is incredibly petty. The State Department wanted to give a Finnish journalist an award for her courageous reports on Russian propaganda, including her criticisms of “President” Putin. Then they rescinded the award after discovering that she had also criticized Mr. Trump. So much for admiring courageous criticism of powerful people. And, of course, his government lied about what they had done and why.

Trump administration rescinded Courage Award for woman who criticized Trump

John Hudson, for the Washington Post.

The Trump administration rescinded an award recognizing the work of a journalist from Finland last year after discovering she had criticized President Trump in social media posts, then gave a false explanation for withdrawing the honor, according to a report by the State Department’s internal watchdog.

The report tracks how the discovery of the journalist’s remarks worried senior U.S. officials and prompted a decision to withdraw the honor to avoid a possible public relations debacle.

… According to the report, the journalist, Jessikka Aro, was selected for the State Department’s International Women of Courage Awards for her reporting on Russian propaganda activities dating back to 2014. Aro endured death threats and cyberattacks for her work, which helped expose Russian troll factories.

After she was informed of her selection and offered flight options, State Department interns discovered her Facebook and Twitter posts, including one from September 2018 in which she noted that “Trump constantly labels journalists as ‘enemy’ and ‘fake news,’ ” said the report. In another tweet, she noted that Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin would meet in Helsinki, where “Finnish people can protest them both. Sweet.”

… But the inspector general ultimately found that the decision to give her the award was not a mistake and was included in a memo approved by [Secretary of State] Pompeo.

The report also noted that the decision to withdraw the award stemmed from the discovery of the social media posts, despite public claims otherwise. “Every person OIG interviewed in connection with this matter acknowledged” that had her social media posts not been flagged, “Ms. Aro would have received the IWOC Award,” the report said.

Donald Trump keeps promising that a COVID-19 vaccine will be available before the election. When the medical community promises to take the time to ensure that the vaccine is safe, he claims that he is being attacked and sabotaged. The more Mr. Trump promises to rush the vaccine, the more he scares everyone else. Now, nearly half of Americans say that they won’t take the vaccine, because they don’t believe that it will be safe.

We need better leadership.

How Trump is undermining his own vaccine race - POLITICO

by Adam Cancryn

FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn spent weeks preparing a proposal to set more stringent standards for emergency authorization of a coronavirus vaccine, hoping to boost public trust in the government’s biggest public health decision in decades.

“Science will guide our decisions,” he pledged to a Senate panel on Wednesday. “FDA will not permit any pressure from anyone to change that.”

Hours later, President Donald Trump sought to do just that. Incensed over the prospect the new guidelines could slow the process, Trump blew up the FDA’s carefully laid plans – vowing to have final say over his administration’s procedures for authorizing a long-sought Covid-19 vaccine. The White House has since demanded that Hahn submit a fuller justification of his bid to set stricter standards, two administration officials said, a directive that could halt the proposal indefinitely.

Almost since the start of the coronavirus crisis, Trump has promised a vaccine is just around the corner, repeatedly contradicting his own experts on the timeline and the standards necessary for approval. The goal, he’s made clear, is a viable vaccine just before Election Day – the centerpiece of his own claims that the administration deserves an “A-plus” for its response to Covid-19.

But that single-minded pursuit has left a string of damaging episodes in its wake and hopelessly intertwined the delicate drug development process with Trump’s political aims, according to interviews with a dozen public health experts both inside and outside the administration.

“We shouldn’t even be having this discussion,” a former senior HHS official said of the struggle for control over the vaccine process. “There are experienced career scientists at FDA who make these judgments every day for public health. This shouldn’t even be a White House issue.”

The broader public’s faith in any eventual coronavirus vaccine, meanwhile, is in tatters. Just over half of Americans now say they would take a vaccine if it were available today, polling shows, a 21-point drop from earlier this year. That’s alarming from a public health point of view, since having fewer people take the vaccine dilutes its effectiveness.

Now, even as Trump’s top health advisers scramble to erect new safeguards, those involved in the process say they fear the damage is already done: Trump’s constant drumbeat for a vaccine by Nov. 3 has drowned out months of careful scientific work, reducing perhaps the most ambitious vaccine hunt in history to yet another presidential litmus test.

“It would help if Donald Trump stopped talking,” said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of the outside panel FDA has pledged to consult before authorizing a vaccine. “Every time he opens his mouth, most reasonable people feel they’re being sold something.”

Mr. Trump’s campaign continually posts doctored videos to lie about Mr. Biden. When caught, they sound like idiotic teenagers: “Can’t you take a joke, man?” And when Facebook or Twitter flag the videos as misleading, they use it as an opportunity to claim that everyone is biased against them. Lie, deflect, sow mistrust—it’s the Trump way.

Trump's use of false content is often defended as humor. But his supporters aren't always in on the joke

Donie O’Sullivan, for CNN.

The video — which appears to show Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden sleeping as a TV news anchor repeats, "Wake up!" — was shared on Twitter by White House social media director Dan Scavino.

But the video was fake.

It was achieved by splicing together real footage of a 2011 interview between journalist Leyla Santiago, now of CNN, and entertainer and activist Harry Belafonte with footage of Biden looking down, his eyes appearing at least partially closed, to make it appear as if he were snoozing. An audio track of loud snoring was placed on the video to complete the effect.

When the video was fact-checked by news outlets, including CNN, and eventually labeled as "manipulated media" by Twitter, prominent Trump supporters complained that it was an obvious joke and a meme.

…The joke was lost on Chris, the Trump supporter in Bemidji, who apparently believed the video was real footage. He acknowledged, "I missed that one," when he was shown how the video had been manipulated.

…The dissemination of misleading videos about Biden by the Trump campaign in an effort to make the Democratic presidential nominee seem confused or senile has happened repeatedly.

On Tuesday, the campaign posted an eight-second video on Facebook that it titled "Joe Biden completely botches the Pledge of Allegiance." But Biden was not trying to recite the entire Pledge of Allegiance as the full version of the video shows. Facebook did not take any action against the video.

…Last week, Trump retweeted a video that was manipulated to make it appear as if Biden was dancing to the NWA song "F**k tha Police." He wasn't.

When false claims and doctored videos are fact-checked by Facebook or labeled as manipulated by Twitter, it is possible that they have already been viewed and shared for days.

And many of the Trump supporters who spoke to CNN in Bemidji said they simply do not trust the fact-checks that are deployed by Facebook.

Yesterday, Mr. Trump promised to send seniors $6.6 billion dollars using an existing program in an illegal way, paid for with funds that don’t exist. This is part of a healthcare plan that involves stealing credit from President Obama did and signing pointless, symbolic executive orders. The executive orders allow him to lie and claim that he’s actually done something, as long as you agree not to look behind the curtain. Another day, more proof that we elected a con man as President.

Trump Promises Drug Discount Cards as an Expensive Pre-election Gift

Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Margot Sanger-Katz, for the New York Times.

President Trump vowed on Thursday to send $200 discount cards for prescription drugs to 33 million older Americans, a $6.6 billion election-eve promise with dubious legal authority that he announced as part of a speech billed as presenting a long-awaited health care plan.

Mr. Trump made the announcement before an audience of health professionals in Charlotte, N.C., where he laid out what the White House called the America First health care plan. Though senior administration officials had previewed the speech, they had not mentioned the drug discount cards.

Mr. Trump’s broader plan is short on specifics, and its two core provisions are largely symbolic. The first is an executive order aimed at protecting people with pre-existing conditions — a provision already in the Affordable Care Act, which Mr. Trump is trying to overturn. The second — a push to end surprise medical billing — would require congressional action.

That left the drug discount cards as the major advance in Mr. Trump’s speech. It was not clear where the money for the cards would come from or whether the White House could legally issue them. But they amounted to a gift to a key constituency, offered weeks before Election Day.

A senior administration official said the discount cards would be authorized under a waiver program that allowed Medicare to test certain new policy ideas. The money would come from savings gleaned from the president’s directive this month that required Medicare to pay no more for prescription drugs than in other developed nations, the official said.

But that program has not yet been devised or enacted.

“Is the plan to borrow from potential future savings from a program that does not yet exist?” asked Rachel Sachs, an associate professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, who studies prescription drug policy.

The announcement came as a surprise because the White House had tried last month to strike a deal with the pharmaceutical industry on a broad effort to lower drug prices. But that deal collapsed after Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, insisted that the industry pay for such cards. The companies balked, fearing that they would be footing the bill for the “Trump cards” aimed at older American voters.

… Mr. Trump has been promising since he ran for president in 2016 that he would put together a plan to lower costs, expand coverage and protect people with pre-existing conditions — the primary goals of the Affordable Care Act. But Republicans cannot seem to agree on a replacement.

In laying out his broader plan, the president promised to lower costs and offer “true health security for you and your loved ones.” Instead, that plan was mostly a laundry list of steps he had already taken to lower health care premiums and reduce the price of prescription drugs.

COVID-19 has completely disrupted life. We can't get back to normal until we actually do the long-term planning now to make life better 2 months from now. As a nation, we keep refusing to do that planning. And life continues to be awful. We need better leadership.

Why Zoom School Is So Awful for Parents and Kids

Dan Sinker, for Esquire:

The lesson we refuse to learn with COVID-19 is that decisions we make today have no bearing on right now, but have a huge effect in a few months. That’s why locking down in March reduced the number of deaths in May. Why opening bars in May brought deaths right back up in July. Why parties on Memorial Day left us with COVID numbers nearly twice as high on Labor Day, and why reopening in-person school in September will likely do exactly what you’d expect come November. The delay between action and reaction means we keep half assing our way through a pandemic that kicks our asses in return.

Making school work in September required vision, action, funding, and resolve on the part of people far above your teacher or school board member in the spring when everything shut down. None of it came. The entire point of the shutdowns was to buy time, to make plans, to lay a foundation for a return that would work. All that time got flushed away by a president more obsessed with hyping miracle cures than doing the hard, thankless work of grinding out a workable plan with scientists and educators and then funding it at a level that could make it actually feasible. That’s what happened in pretty much every other country on the planet. None of them are foolproof, but they've done better than just the state of Florida alone, which had more than 10,000 kids under 18 test positive since their aggressive push for schools to reopen last month.

Another story showing that Donald Trump is a con-man. He loves to promise largesse. It buffs his image and feeds his ego. But it often turns out to be a mirage. Either he doesn’t follow through or we later discover that his promise was just taking credit for something that he had nothing to do with. This story has a bit of both.

Funding promised by Trump for Kenosha can't be used to rebuild

None of the more than $40 million in federal help promised by President Donald Trump when he visited Kenosha earlier this month can actually be used to rebuild the community, according to Gov. Tony Evers and U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin.

And all but $1 million was already coming to the state, regardless of the damage done during protests that followed the shooting of a Black man, Jacob Blake, by a white Kenosha police officer, the officials wrote Trump.

…

But Baldwin and Evers wrote Thursday in a letter to the president that the $4 million for small businesses was already earmarked by the federal relief bill known as the CARES Act for coronavirus pandemic-related losses, and can’t be used for other purposes.

“It cannot be used for damages tied to the unrest,” Baldwin and Evers wrote.

Of the remaining federal funding allocated for Wisconsin, according to Baldwin’s office:

• $30.6 million is for the state’s crime victims fund in fiscal 2020, grants announced in April.
• $10.5 million comes from U.S. Department of Justice grants announced earlier this year to pay for costs associated with implementing body cameras, drug treatment, prosecutions, reducing violent crime, Operation Legend, and other programs.
• $1 million in new public safety funding has been allocated for the City of Kenosha, in a joint application with Kenosha County, for expenses incurred during the period of civil unrest. This funding is new but private businesses cannot use it to rebuild.

It sure is nice when you can use the Presidency to enrich yourself. The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold shares their latest data on how the Trump Organization is using the Secret Service to pad their own bottom line.

Trump’s businesses charged Secret Service more than $1.1 million, including for rooms in club shuttered for pandemic

President Trump’s luxury properties have charged the U.S. government more than $1.1 million in private transactions since Trump took office — including for room rentals at his Bedminster, N.J., club this spring while it was closed for the coronavirus pandemic, new documents show.

The documents, including receipts and invoices from Trump’s businesses, were released by the Secret Service after The Washington Post filed a public-records lawsuit. They added $188,000 in previously unknown charges to The Post’s running total of payments to Trump’s properties related to the presence of Secret Service agents.

In Bedminster this spring, the records show, Trump’s club charged the Secret Service more than $21,800 to rent a cottage and other rooms while the club was closed and otherwise off-limits to guests. The documents don’t give a reason for these rentals. Trump didn’t visit the club while it was closed, but his eldest daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her family reportedly visited at least once.

In case you’re new to this entire story. And, note, it doesn’t need to be this way. The Trump Organization could easily provide rooms to the Secret Service at no-cost or a truly nominal cost. But they don’t. And that’s a deliberate decision to siphon money from the taxpayers to Donald Trump’s own pockets.

When Trump and his family members visit Trump properties, aides and Secret Service agents follow. When those federal employees rent rooms, Trump’s businesses get the revenue. Taxpayers foot the bill.

The bills are usually paid in private, with no public disclosure. The government has not disclosed how much it has paid the Trump Organization in total. Instead, The Post has tried to create an accounting of these payments, one receipt at a time, using public-records requests and lawsuits.

“The waste inherent in this is appalling,” Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president at the watchdog group Public Citizen, said of the Trump Organization’s charges. Gilbert said the costs were especially galling during a pandemic that has brought economic ruin and stretched federal budgets. “They’re nickel-and-diming the American people. At a moment when every penny counts.”

The White House and the Secret Service both declined to comment for this story. The Trump Organization did not respond to emailed questions.

Before he took office, Trump said he would be “completely isolating” himself from his business interests. He didn’t. Instead, Trump has visited his properties 274 times, according to a Post tally, in addition to promoting those properties on Twitter, encouraging his vice president visit them and briefly choosing one of them to host a summit of world leaders.

This must be some of that endless winning and good dealmaking that Donald Trump promised us. Agreeing to buy ventilators for 4x the list price—a ventilator design that the U.S. government funded a decade ago as a low-cost option.

The Trump Administration Is Backing Out of a $647 Million Ventilator Deal After ProPublica Investigated The Price

The federal government is backing out of a controversial $646.7 million deal to buy ventilators from Royal Philips N.V., acting before the company had delivered a third of the order.

…

This week, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform’s Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy announced it is expanding its probe to look at other coronavirus-related deals negotiated by Peter Navarro, the president’s trade adviser, who served as the point man on the Philips deal.

In addition, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversaw the Philips contract, confirmed that the deal is the subject of an internal investigation and legal review.

…

The congressional investigation determined that the deal would have resulted in the U.S. overpaying for the ventilators by as much as $500 million, thanks to “inept contract management and incompetent negotiating by the Trump Administration.”

ProPublica first wrote about the U.S. government’s relationship with Philips in March, detailing how a decade ago government planners had paid Philips millions of dollars to develop a low-cost ventilator that could be stockpiled and deployed if ever there were a pandemic. The U.S. ordered 10,000 once the company received clearance from the Food and Drug Administration.

But when COVID-19 cases overwhelmed hospitals in New York in the spring, Philips hadn’t delivered any. Instead, ProPublica found, Philips was selling a commercial version of that ventilator — manufactured at its Pennsylvania factory — overseas at far higher prices.

Rather than force production of low-cost ventilators, a White House team led by Navarro cut a new deal for more ventilators, agreeing to pay more than four times the price.

ProPublica in April revealed that this new deal boosted the price of what appeared to be similar ventilators from $3,280 each under the Obama administration deal to $15,000 under the Trump administration. Neither Philips nor HHS would explain how the two models were different.

In its investigation of the deal, the House subcommittee asked Philips to turn over a trove of records and discovered that the more expensive ventilators were “functionally identical” to the cheaper ones.

Navarro and his team “appeared gullible” and there was no evidence that they even tried to negotiate a lower price, the House investigators found.

The U.S. government paid the highest price for the ventilators among American buyers, the investigators found. The company’s records show that Philips had sold more than 5,000 of that model at far lower prices before May 27.

…

As coronavirus sweeps the globe, there is not a single Trilogy Evo Universal ventilator — developed with government funds — in the U.S. stockpile. Meanwhile, Royal Philips N.V. has sold higher-priced versions to clients around the world.