Dear Commons Community,

The United States hit a grim milestone yesterday when Johns Hopkins University reported that 250,000  Americans have died from COVID-19.  This horrific statistic was reached following a stunning surge in cases in the past two months, with the country repeatedly shattering records for daily new case numbers and several states reporting record high hospitalization rates.

President Donald Trump’s unwavering insistence that the coronavirus is on its way out couldn’t be further from the truth. Less than two weeks after Trump lost his bid for a second term to President-elect Joe Biden, the U.S. surpassed 11 million cases ― about a fifth of all infections worldwide.   As reported by The Huffington Post:

“We’re still facing a very dark winter,” President-elect Biden warned Americans last week, predicting that the death toll will climb as people congregate indoors more and Trump finishes his final weeks in office while downplaying the severity of the disease, dismissing the need for masks and other basic safety measures, refusing to issue national guidelines, insisting that states reopen their economies, and blaming testing for the high rate of cases. 

The 250,000 dead-and-counting are the Trump administration’s legacy: America’s grim mortality statistics are the direct result of political decisions by the country’s leaders. Every non-political explanation has steadily fallen away as other countries proved this disease could be managed.

Singapore, South Korea and Hong Kong, among the most densely populated places in the world, have had vanishingly small outbreaks and are now returning to their pre-coronavirus activity. Within the United States, the severe initial outbreak in New York City seemed to indicate that density was to blame, but the country’s second densest city, San Francisco, had a much smaller outbreak. Caseloads have spiked in states that are heavily suburbanized and rural, including Idaho, North Dakota and Arkansas. 

And while America’s status as a transportation hub did indeed result in the early arrival of the virus, other countries even closer to the genesis of the outbreak in China have fared far better. Mongolia, which shares a border with China, hadn’t reported a single COVID-19 death by November. Vietnam, China’s neighbor to the south, had recorded just over 30 fatalities. Germany, Australia and Japan also host large numbers of international travelers, and all have had far less severe outbreaks than the United States.

Since the first confirmed case in late January, Trump has alternated between pretending the virus doesn’t exist, downplaying its significance and blaming others for its effects. While the country was under quarantine — an act of collective self-sacrifice unparalleled in post-World War II history — Trump did next to nothing to develop testing and contact tracing infrastructure.

The incoming Biden administration has its work cut out. Trump has spent most of his final year in office discrediting public health experts, refusing to wear a mask and holding large super-spreader events at the White House. He led by example, and America followed. Biden has vowed to deploy a national mask mandate, but how effective will that be when Trump has politicized safety measures and convinced so many Americans ― including state and local leaders ― that masks aren’t important?”

Hope for recovery in the U.S. now almost entirely hinges on the development and deployment of a coronavirus vaccine. There’s a lot of optimism around trials showing that Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are upward of 90% effective, and public health experts say that some people could receive them by the end of the year.

May God be with us!  Surely our president isn’t!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Tom Friedman had a column earlier this week asking “How Can We Trust This G.O.P. in Power Again?”  It is a good question given how members of the Republican Party leadership have caved into the Trump presidency and to its most recent questioning of a fraudulent 2020 election.  He opens his column with imagery of Lady Liberty just narrowly being hit and killed by a bus.

“To put my feelings in image form: It’s like Lady Liberty was walking across Fifth Avenue on Nov. 3 when out of nowhere a crazy guy driving a bus ran the red light. Lady Liberty leapt out of the way barely in time, and she’s now sitting on the curb, her heart pounding, just glad to be alive. But she knows — she knows — how narrowly she escaped, that this reckless driver never stops at red lights and is still out there, and, oh my God, lots of his passengers are still applauding the thrilling ride, even though deep down many know he’s a menace to the whole city.”

Friedman goes on to layout his central theme:

“Stop for a second and think about how awesome this election was. In the middle of an accelerating pandemic substantially more Americans voted than ever before in our history — Republicans, Democrats and independents. And it was their fellow citizens who operated the polling stations and conducted the count — many of them older Americans who volunteered for that duty knowing they could contract the coronavirus, as some did.

That’s why this was our greatest expression of American democratic vitality since Abraham Lincoln defeated Gen. George B. McClellan in 1864 — in the midst of a civil war. And that’s why Donald Trump’s efforts to soil this election, with his fraudulent claims of voting fraud, are so vile.

If Trump and his enablers had resisted for only a day or two, OK, no big deal. But the fact that they continue to do so, flailing for ways to overturn the will of the people, egged on by their media toadies — Lou Dobbs actually said on Fox Business that the G.O.P. should refuse to accept the election results that deny Trump “what is rightfully his” — raises this question:

How do you trust this version of the Republican Party to ever hold the White House again?”

He goes on to offer warnings to both parties and for Democrats:

“They need every American to believe that Democrats are for BOTH redividing the pie AND growing the pie, for both reforming police departments and strengthening law and order, for both saving lives in a pandemic and saving jobs, for both demanding equity in education and demanding excellence, for both strengthening safety nets and strengthening capitalism, for both celebrating diversity and celebrating patriotism, for both making college cheaper and making the work of noncollege-educated Americans more respected, for both building a high border wall and incorporating a big gate, for both high-fiving the people who start companies and supporting the people who regulate them.

And they need to demand less political correctness and offer more tolerance for those who want to change with the times but need to get there their own ways — without feeling shamed into it.”

He concludes:

“We need our next presidential election to be fought between a principled center-right Republican Party and a “both/and” Democratic Party. Great countries are led from a healthy center. Weak countries don’t have one.”

Mr. Friedman is more tolerant than I am.  I stopped trusting the G.O.P. during the last term of Barack Obama’s presidency when it blocked every legislative overture of the Democrats and basically stalled our government for four years.  It culminated in 2017 when Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republicans refused to consider Merrick Garland’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.  They blatantly put party over country.

Mr. Friedman’s entire column is below.

Tony

New York Times

How Can We Trust This G.O.P. in Power Again?

With Biden’s election, American democracy narrowly escaped disaster.

By Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion Columnist

Nov. 17, 2020

So how do I feel two weeks after our election? Awed and terrified. I am in awe at the expression of democracy that took place in America. It was our most impressive election since 1864 and maybe our most important since 1800. And yet, I am still terrified that, but for a few thousand votes in key states, how easily it could have been our last election.

To put my feelings in image form: It’s like Lady Liberty was walking across Fifth Avenue on Nov. 3 when out of nowhere a crazy guy driving a bus ran the red light. Lady Liberty leapt out of the way barely in time, and she’s now sitting on the curb, her heart pounding, just glad to be alive. But she knows — she knows — how narrowly she escaped, that this reckless driver never stops at red lights and is still out there, and, oh my God, lots of his passengers are still applauding the thrilling ride, even though deep down many know he’s a menace to the whole city.

Let’s unpack all of this. Stop for a second and think about how awesome this election was. In the middle of an accelerating pandemic substantially more Americans voted than ever before in our history — Republicans, Democrats and independents. And it was their fellow citizens who operated the polling stations and conducted the count — many of them older Americans who volunteered for that duty knowing they could contract the coronavirus, as some did.

That’s why this was our greatest expression of American democratic vitality since Abraham Lincoln defeated Gen. George B. McClellan in 1864 — in the midst of a civil war. And that’s why Donald Trump’s efforts to soil this election, with his fraudulent claims of voting fraud, are so vile.

If Trump and his enablers had resisted for only a day or two, OK, no big deal. But the fact that they continue to do so, flailing for ways to overturn the will of the people, egged on by their media toadies — Lou Dobbs actually said on Fox Business that the G.O.P. should refuse to accept the election results that deny Trump “what is rightfully his” — raises this question:

How do you trust this version of the Republican Party to ever hold the White House again?

Its members have sat mute while Trump, rather than using the federal bureaucracy to launch a war against our surging pandemic, has launched a war against his perceived enemies inside that federal bureaucracy — including the defense secretary, the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration and, on Tuesday, the most senior cybersecurity official responsible for protecting the presidential election — weakening it when we need it most.

Engineering Trump’s internal purge is 30-year-old Johnny McEntee, “a former college quarterback who was hustled out of the White House two years ago after a security clearance check turned up a prolific habit for online gambling,” but Trump later welcomed him back and installed him as personnel director for the entire U.S. government, The Washington Post reported.

That’s been obvious ever since this G.O.P. was the first party to conclude its presidential nominating convention without offering any platform. It declared that its platform was whatever its Dear Leader said it was. That is cultlike.

Are we just supposed to forget this G.O.P.’s behavior as soon as Trump leaves and let its leaders say: “Hey fellow Americans, Trump tried to overturn the election with baseless claims — and we went along for the ride — but he’s gone now, so you can trust us to do the right things again.”

That is why we are so very lucky that this election broke for Joe Biden. If this is how this Republican Party behaves when Trump loses, imagine how willing to tolerate his excesses it would have been had he won? Trump wouldn’t have stopped at any red lights ever again.

And the people who understood that best were democrats all over the world — particularly in Europe. Because they’ve watched Trump-like, right-wing populists in Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Russia and Belarus, as well as the Philippines, get themselves elected and then take control of their courts, media, internet and security institutions and use them to try to cripple their opponents and lock themselves into office indefinitely.

Democrats abroad feared that this same political virus would overtake America if Trump were re-elected and have a devastating effect.

They feared that the core democratic concept that America gifted to the world in 1800 — when John Adams lost his election to Thomas Jefferson and peacefully handed over the reins of power — was going to wither, undermining democracy movements across the globe. Every autocrat would have been emboldened to ignore red lights.

Seeing an American president actually try to undermine the results of a free and fair election “is a warning to democrats all over the world: Don’t play lightly with populists, they will not leave power easily the way Adams did when he lost to Jefferson,” the French foreign policy expert Dominique Moïsi remarked to me.

That is why Biden’s mission — and the mission of all decent conservatives — is not just to repair America. It is to marginalize this Trumpian version of the G.O.P. and help to nurture a healthy conservative party — one that brings conservative approaches to economic growth, infrastructure, social policy, education, regulation and climate change, but also cares about governing and therefore accepts compromises.

Democrats can’t summon a principled conservative party. That requires courageous conservatives. But Democrats do need to ask themselves why Trump remains so strong among white working-class voters without college degrees, and, in this last election, drew greater support from Black, Latino and white women voters.

There is a warning light flashing for Democrats from this election: They can’t rely on demographics. They need to make sure that every voter believes that the Democratic Party is a “both/and” party, not an “either/or” party. And they need to do it before a smarter, less crude Trump comes along to advance Trumpism.

They need every American to believe that Democrats are for BOTH redividing the pie AND growing the pie, for both reforming police departments and strengthening law and order, for both saving lives in a pandemic and saving jobs, for both demanding equity in education and demanding excellence, for both strengthening safety nets and strengthening capitalism, for both celebrating diversity and celebrating patriotism, for both making college cheaper and making the work of noncollege-educated Americans more respected, for both building a high border wall and incorporating a big gate, for both high-fiving the people who start companies and supporting the people who regulate them.

And they need to demand less political correctness and offer more tolerance for those who want to change with the times but need to get there their own ways — without feeling shamed into it.

We need our next presidential election to be fought between a principled center-right Republican Party and a “both/and” Democratic Party. Great countries are led from a healthy center. Weak countries don’t have one.

Dear Commons Community,

Patricia Cohen and Gillian Friedman have an article in today’s New York Times describing the toll that the coronavirus is taking on women especially those who are working mothers.

The article opens that “for millions of women, the coronavirus pandemic has delivered a rare and ruinous one-two-three punch.”

First, the parts of the economy that were smacked hardest and earliest by job losses were ones where women dominate — restaurants, retail businesses and health care.

Then a second wave began taking out local and state government jobs, another area where women outnumber men.

The third blow has, for many, been the knockout: the closing of child care centers and the shift to remote schooling. That has saddled working mothers, much more than fathers, with overwhelming household responsibilities.

The article goes on to describe the personal stories of several women who are struggling to survive the pandemic.

It concludes that “the impact could stretch over generations, paring women’s retirement savings, and reducing future earnings of children now in low-income households.

“We are creating inequality 20 years down the line that is even greater than what we have today,” said Betsey Stevenson, a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan and the mother of a second grader and a sixth grader.  “This is how inequality begets inequality.”

The entire article is below!

Tony

———————————————————————————–

New York Times

Recession With a Difference: Women Face Special Burden

By Patricia Cohen

Nov. 17, 2020

For millions of working women, the coronavirus pandemic has delivered a rare and ruinous one-two-three punch.

First, the parts of the economy that were smacked hardest and earliest by job losses were ones where women dominate — restaurants, retail businesses and health care.

Then a second wave began taking out local and state government jobs, another area where women outnumber men.

The third blow has, for many, been the knockout: the closing of child care centers and the shift to remote schooling. That has saddled working mothers, much more than fathers, with overwhelming household responsibilities.

“We’ve never seen this before,” said Betsey Stevenson, a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan and the mother of a second grader and a sixth grader. Recessions usually start by gutting the manufacturing and construction industries, where men hold most of the jobs, she said.

The impact on the economic and social landscape is both immediate and enduring.

The triple punch is not just pushing women out of jobs they held, but also preventing many from seeking new ones. For an individual, it could limit prospects and earnings over a lifetime. Across a nation, it could stunt growth, robbing the economy of educated, experienced and dedicated workers.

Inequality in the home — in terms of household and child care responsibilities — influences inequality in the workplace, Misty L. Heggeness, a principal economist at the Census Bureau, concluded in a working paper on the pandemic’s impact for the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Without a more comprehensive system of support, she said, “mothers will forever be vulnerable to career scarring during any major crisis like this pandemic.”

The latest jobs report from the Labor Department showed that some of the damage was reversed last month as the service industry revived, nudging down the jobless rate for women to 6.5 percent, slightly below men’s. But there were still 4.5 million fewer women employed in October than there were a year ago, compared with 4.1 million men.

And according to the Census Bureau, a third of the working women 25 to 44 years old who are unemployed said the reason was child care demands. Only 12 percent of unemployed men cited those demands.

Laci Oyler has felt that pressure. Her husband, employed by a large printing company, was already working from home when the pandemic shuttered day care and schools in Milwaukee. But after two days of taking care of their two young sons, “he said, ‘Absolutely no way,’” Ms. Oyler explained. So she cut her weekly hours as a mental health counselor for Alverno College, a small Catholic institution, to five from 32.

In August, when she learned that public schools would continue to offer only online classes for the fall, Ms. Oyler decided she had little choice but to take an unpaid leave.

This month, she decided to resign.

“Work is so much more than what you’re taking home as payment,” Ms. Oyler said. “But when you look at that bottom line of risk versus reward, it doesn’t seem worth it,” she added, referring to the cost of child care combined with the possibility of coronavirus infection for her or her children.

As a licensed professional, Ms. Oyler does not expect to have difficulty returning to the work force when she is ready. But for most working women, dropping out to take care of children or other family members exacts a sizable toll, several studies have shown. Rejoining is hard, and if women do, they generally earn less and have less security. And the longer someone is out of work, the tougher it is to get back in.

Claudia Goldin, an economics professor at Harvard, said this was the first recession where the economy was so intertwined with the network of child care.

“During the Great Depression, no one cared about the care sector,” she said. “Women weren’t in the labor force, and they weren’t supposed to be.”

One reason that Congress started giving financial assistance to poor households headed by women in the 1930s, under a program originally titled Aid to Dependent Children, was so they could stay home with their children and not compete with men for jobs, Ms. Goldin said.

Only during World War II, when women were urgently needed in factories and offices to replace men who were in the military, did the government establish a far-reaching federally subsidized network of nurseries and child care centers in nearly every state. Once the war ended, so did the support.

“You cannot have a contented mother working in a war factory if she is worrying about her children, and you cannot have children running wild in the streets without a bad effect on the coming generations,” Senator Carl Hayden, an Arizona Democrat, testified in 1943.

Women make up roughly half of the country’s work force. They range from entry-level to professional, they live in urban, suburban and rural areas, and they often care for toddlers and teenagers. But the burdens of the pandemic-induced recession have fallen most heavily on low-income and minority women and single mothers.

Members of these overlapping groups often have the most unpredictable schedules, and the fewest benefits, and are least able to afford child care. They fill most of the essential jobs that cannot be done from home and, therefore, carry the most risk for exposure to the virus. At the same time, they make up a disproportionate share of the service industries that have lost the most jobs. The jobless rate is 9.2 percent for Black women and 9 percent for Hispanic women.

When the pandemic caused housecleaning jobs to dry up, Andrea Poe was able to find cleaning work at a resort in Orange Beach, Ala., about a 45-minute drive from Pensacola, Fla., where she and her 14-year-old daughter, Cheyenne Poe, had moved in with an older daughter, her fiancé and their five children.

The families were behind in the rent and threatened with eviction when Hurricane Sally ripped through the coast in September. To escape the floods, they piled into two cars, drove to Biloxi, Miss., and spent five nights in a Walmart parking lot.

Now Ms. Poe and Cheyenne, who has turned 15, are in Peoria, Ariz., living in a room in her mother’s trailer.

She said she was applying for jobs every day, so far without luck. And the bills keep coming. Ms. Poe has missed two consecutive loan payments on her car and worries that it will be repossessed.

“I’m just hoping my unemployment checks come through so my car doesn’t get taken away,” she said. “If I lose my car, I’ll never be able to get a job.”

Women with more resources are in a better position, but they struggle in other ways.

When the pandemic ripped through Seattle and compelled Kenna Smith, 37, to work from home, she initially saw one upside — a chance to spend more time with her 3-year-old son.

“At first, I thought I’d just focus on my child,” said Ms. Smith, who had just started a branding and design company, Wildforth Creative. “It was fun for a while, but then the stress was intense.”

Like many families who were worried about the risk of infection or short of money and space, Ms. Smith and her husband let their son’s nanny go. Her husband, project manager for a general contractor, worked out of their bedroom.

“I’m not sure why it totally fell on me,” Ms. Smith said of child care. “I’m out in the living room, dining room area with a whole bunch of toys strewn about, with my laptop, trying to run my business.

“I was wanting to work and wanting my business to succeed so badly,” she said. “I didn’t realize. …” She paused, interrupted by a voice: “Mommy, I want some applesauce.”

The couple recently decided to hire a part-time nanny, concluding that despite the expense, it was the only way both could keep working. (Ms. Smith’s sister is also helping out.)

From 2015 until the pandemic, women’s increasing participation in the work force was a primary driver of the economy’s expansion, said Ms. Stevenson, the Michigan economist. “It’s why the economy grew the way it did, why employers could keep hiring month after month,” she said.

Since February, women’s participation in the labor force has been falling, with the biggest decreases among women without college degrees who have children.

Changes forced on women by the pandemic elicit a mixture of anxiety and hope.

Many women worry that the changes will sharply narrow women’s choices and push them unwillingly into the unpaid role of full-time homemaker.

And the impact could stretch over generations, paring women’s retirement savings, and reducing future earnings of children now in low-income households.

“We are creating inequality 20 years down the line that is even greater than we have today,” said Ms. Stevenson, who was a member of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. “This is how inequality begets inequality.”

Yet there is also the possibility that the mounting pressures could create momentum to complete the unfinished project of fully integrating women into the work force by providing a system of family support — like affordable child care and paid parental and sick leave.

“I think we’re really at a crossroads,” said Julie Kashen, director for women’s economic justice at the Century Foundation and one of the authors of a new report on the pandemic and working women. “We’ve never built a workplace that worked for people with caregiving responsibilities.”

Dear Commons Community,

Much of the presidential election news was in Georgia yesterday where a recount of the results was being completed and Republican Secretary of State and chief election official Brad Raffensperger said that he did not see anything that would changed the results. Raffensperger has been facing attacks from Republicans on his credibility and the integrity of Georgia’s 2020 presidential election after President-elect Joe Biden won the state.  In response,  Raffensperger says that President Donald Trump, who spent months discouraging supporters from voting by mail in the COVID-19 pandemic, has no one but himself to blame but himself for his poor performance in the state.

In an interview with WSB TV correspondent Justin Gray, Raffensperger pointed that around 24,000 Republicans who voted by mail in the state’s June 9 primary elections did not vote at all, either in-person or by mail, in the general — and said Trump’s attacks on mail voting are a reason why. 

The actual extent to which Trump’s rhetoric not only pushed his supporters away from voting by mail but discouraged them from casting a ballot altogether is unknown.  

Michael McDonald, a professor at the University of Florida who specializes in elections and voter turnout patterns and runs the US Elections Project, pointed out on Twitter Tuesday that an even higher number of Georgia Democrats who voted in the primaries stayed home for the general. 

Importantly, however, McDonald looked at the votes cast in the primary and not just mail votes. 

“Did Trump depress his own vote? Enough to change the outcome of the general election? That one would be tough to prove. I don’t think there are enough votes here to make the case,” McDonald wrote on Twitter.

While Trump outperformed the polls in many states, he lost the key battleground states of Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, in addition to Georgia. Trump was the first Republican presidential nominee to lose Georgia since George H.W. Bush in 1992. 

In the wake of Trump’s loss, Georgia’s two Republican US Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler claimed, without pointing out to any specific evidence, that Raffensperger had “failed to deliver an honest and transparent election.”

Raffensperger and Georgia’s GOP Governor Brian Kemp have both been criticized on Twitter by Trump, who falsely suggested that the consent decree that Georgia entered into to standardize its signature verification procedures is “unconstitutional,” and spread unfounded conspiracies attacking Dominion Voting Systems, the election technology vendor that provides Georgia’s ballot marking device voting machines. 

Raffenspeger also told the Washington Post that another top Trump ally, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, asked if he could disqualify all mail ballots cast in counties with high rates of signature mismatch on the outer envelopes containing mail ballots. 

But Graham strongly disputed Raffensperger’s account of the conversation, saying that he simply wanted to learn about Georgia’s signature matching procedures and that the notion he pressured Raffensperger to throw out ballots was “ridiculous.”

What is ridiculous is the way Trump and his sycophants like Lindsey Graham are dreaming up fantasies of voter fraud.

Thank you Mr. Raffensperger for putting your own personal integrity and that of your office ahead of party politics.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Thousands of people lined up in their cars in Dallas over the weekend to receive food from the North Texas Food Bank (NTFB) ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday next week. The organization told CBS News the food giveaway was its largest ever to date.

More than 6,000 cars and about 25,000 people were served by volunteers and staff of the food bank during the around five-hour event, Anna Kurian, NTFB’s Senior Director of Marketing and Communications, told CBS News in an email. 

The food bank distributed 600,000 pounds of food, including 7,280 turkeys, to families during the “Drive-Thru Mobile Pantry.” 

Footage of the event showed massive lines of cars waiting to pick up food and workers packing vehicles with boxes and bags of provisions. 

“I see blessings coming to us cause we all struggling,” resident Samantha Woods said while waiting in her car, according to CBS Dallas. “And I appreciate North Texas helping us out.” 

Long lines of cars are seen waiting to receive food during the event. Spectra/Fair Park First

Kurian said that most people in the line received one turkey, dry products, bread and fresh produce. Each person was given about 20 meals worth of food, she added.

She said she spoke with a man named Manuel who had been hit hard by the pandemic — and was thankful for the NTFB’s efforts.

“He had some illnesses and is disabled, but was able to rely on his wife’s income to get by,” Kurian told CBS News. “With COVID, she was laid off from work and the family has seen their fair of struggles since. He shared that the food received was a true blessing because he had thought they would eat spaghetti for dinner on Thanksgiving, but was beyond thankful to be able to take home a turkey.”

The event was the “brainchild” of the CEO of MW Logistics, Mitchell Ward, who asked the NTFB if they could “come together to help feed folks in south Dallas,” Kurian said. She also emphasized the food bank had “a lot of community support.”

From March through September, the organization distributed over 63 million meals, a 45% increase compared to 2019, according to its website. It provided more than 60 million pounds of food within that time, marking a 72% increase from last year during the same period. 

Kurian said the food bank has seen an increase in need throughout every agency in its feeding network since the start of the pandemic, with at least 40% of the people “coming through the doors” being “new to them and due to COVID.”

“As long as jobs are unstable, we will continue to see an increased need,” Kurian said. “The good news is that there is a caring community that wants to ensure that we can help our neighbors.”

And the dramatic increase in people experiencing food insecurity amid the pandemic isn’t limited to Texas — it’s nationwide. 

A report from the Institute for Policy Research (IPR) at Northwestern University in June reported that food insecurity had doubled overall and tripled for families with kids as a result of the pandemic, relying on data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey.

In an interview with CBS News earlier this fall, IPR director and one of the authors of the report, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, said that she was “confident” that this pattern of rising food insecurity would “continue to hold.”

Kurian encouraged anyone not impacted and hoping to contribute to consider supporting the NTFB. “Your support will help put food on the table for our neighbors in need,” she said. 

This is a situation that is playing itself out all over the country.  It did not have to be so severe if government leaders had taken more decisive action with the coronavirus including passing a stimulus package.

Tony

David Perdue and Jon Ossoff

Dear Commons Community,

Senator David Perdue (R-Ga.) has declined an invitation to debate Democratic challenger Jon Ossoff ahead of January runoff elections for both of the state’s Senate seats. 

The Atlanta Press Club said Perdue, who is seeking a second term, will be “represented by an empty podium” at the Dec. 6 debate. Perdue’s decision to skip the debate was first reported by The New Yorker on Sunday.

“The Atlanta Press Club’s Loudermilk-Young Debate Series is disappointed that Sen. David Perdue has decided to not participate in his debate,” the press club said in a statement.

The statement continued: “Jon Ossoff has confirmed his participation, so according to our rules, we will proceed with the debate and Sen. Perdue will be represented by an empty podium. That is not our preference.”

Perdue’s campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Runoff elections for Perdue and Ossoff, as well as for Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) and Democrat Raphael Warnock, were scheduled for Jan. 5 after none of the candidates received at least 50% of the votes in their respective races this month.

The closely watched runoffs will determine whether Republicans maintain control of the Senate. If Democrats succeed in flipping both seats, the Senate would likely be split 50-50. Democratic Vice President-elect Kamala Harris would have the power to cast a tiebreaker vote.

Perdue declined an invitation to debate Ossoff just ahead of Election Day on Nov. 3, after a clip of Ossoff accusing Perdue during a previous debate of leveraging inside information to profit off the coronavirus pandemic went viral. (Perdue’s campaign has said a federal investigation into the matter cleared the senator of any wrongdoing.)

“Looks like Sen. David Perdue is too much of a coward to debate me again,” Ossoff tweeted Sunday. “Perdue can’t defend his lies about COVID-19, self-dealing stock trades, his bigotry, or his votes to take away Georgians’ health care. Senator, come on out and try to defend your record. I’m ready to go.”

A coward indeed!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said yesterday that U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham asked him whether he had the power to reject certain absentee ballots, a question he interpreted as a suggestion to toss out legally cast votes.

Raffensperger made the comments to The Washington Post, saying he’s faced rising pressure from fellow Republicans who want to see Democrat Joe Biden’s narrow lead in the state reversed. Nearly 5 million votes were cast in the presidential election in Georgia, and Biden was leading President Donald Trump by about 14,000 votes.

Raffensperger’s comments came as election officials across the state were working to complete a hand recount of votes in the presidential race. As reported by the Associated Press.

“When Georgia voters return an absentee ballot, they have to sign an oath on an outer envelope. County election office workers are required to ensure the signature matches the one on the absentee ballot application and the one in the voter registration system, Raffensperger said in a statement over the weekend.

Graham asked him whether political bias might have caused elections workers to accept ballots with nonmatching signatures and whether Raffensperger could throw out all absentee ballots in counties with higher rates of nonmatching signatures, the secretary of state told the newspaper.

When asked about the conversation with Raffensperger, Graham said that he was “trying to find out how the signature stuff worked.” He said Raffensperger “did a good job of explaining to me how they verify signatures.”

Asked about Raffensperger’s interpretation that he was suggesting that legally cast ballots should be thrown out, Graham said, “That’s ridiculous.”

County election officials around the state worked through the weekend on a hand tally of the votes in the presidential race as part of a legally mandated audit to ensure the new election machines counted the votes accurately.

Once the tally is complete and the results are certified, the losing campaign can request a recount, which would be done using scanners that read and tally the votes.

Election officials said Monday that the hand tally had turned up more than 2,500 votes in one county that weren’t previously counted but that that won’t alter the overall outcome of the race.

The unofficial breakdown of the votes those votes was 1,643 for Trump, 865 for Biden and 16 for Libertarian Jo Jorgensen, according to Gabriel Sterling, a top elections official.

“The reason you do an audit is to find this kind of thing,” Sterling said.

He said the issue appeared to be an isolated problem and that there were “no fundamental changes” in other counties.

County election board Chairman Tom Rees said it appears the ballots were cast during in-person early voting but election officials weren’t sure how they were missed.

The county elections office suffered several setbacks, including a top official being infected by the coronavirus, and it seems proper procedures weren’t followed when the results were tabulated by machine, Sterling said. But the county had the paper ballots and caught the problem during the hand tally, he said.

Trump, who has made unfounded claims of voting irregularities and fraud, and his campaign have repeatedly taken to social media to criticize Raffensperger and the way the state’s hand tally was being conducted. The secretary of state has responded in social media posts of his own disputing their claims.

Raffensperger told the Post that he and his wife have received death threats in recent days.

“Other than getting you angry, it’s also very disillusioning,” he said.

County election officials were instructed to complete the count by 11:59 p.m. Wednesday. The deadline for the state to certify election results is Friday.

The hand tally appeared to go smoothly in most places, and the vast majority of the state’s 159 counties had completed their work by Monday, Sterling said. What remained was mostly data entry and quality control measures before submitting results to the secretary of state, he said. State election officials have said they wouldn’t release any results from the tally until the whole process is complete.

Raffensperger’s office has consistently said it’s likely the results will differ slightly from those previously reported by the counties but that the difference is not expected to change the outcome. The tally resulting from the audit is what will be certified, election officials have said.”

As a side note, the Associated Press has not declared a winner in Georgia, where Biden leads Trump by 0.3 percentage points. There is no mandatory recount law in Georgia, but state law provides that option to a trailing candidate if the margin is less than 0.5 percentage points. It is AP’s practice not to call a race that is – or is likely to become – subject to a recount.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top infectious disease expert on the White House’s coronavirus task force, applauded early data from biotechnology company Moderna and pharmaceutical company Pfizer that show their respective coronavirus vaccines are highly effective.

“The data are striking,” Fauci told NBC’s “Today” about the Moderna data, released this morning. “They’re really quite impressive.  … Now we have two vaccines that are really quite effective. So I think this is a really strong step forward to where we want to be about getting control of this outbreak.”

Fauci said he expects the Food and Drug Administration to grant emergency use authorizations for the vaccines. “Doses could be available to high-risk individuals by the end of December,” he told NBC. 

For the second time this month, there’s promising news from a COVID-19 vaccine candidate: Moderna said its shots provide strong protection, a dash of hope against the grim backdrop of coronavirus surges in the U.S. and around the world.

Moderna said its vaccine appears to be 94.5% effective, according to preliminary data from the company’s still ongoing study.

A week ago, competitor Pfizer Inc. announced its own COVID-19 vaccine appeared similarly effective — news that puts both companies on track to seek permission within weeks for emergency use in the U.S.

The U.S. has passed 11 million coronavirus cases, with more than 1 million of them added in a week, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

In the week of Nov. 8 to Nov. 14, the U.S. added 1,041,075 coronavirus cases, a new record high. The country recorded 7,723 new deaths in the week.

“Record cases over the past week will be record hospitalizations soon,” U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams warned in a tweet. He urged Americans to wear masks when outside the home and limit social interactions to ease the burden on hospitals.

The vaccine announcements are surely good news.  The fact that Anthony Fauci is positive about them gives us all hope that we may be nearing an end to this pandemic sometime in 2021.

Tony

At 7:27 p.m. EST on Sunday, Nov. 15, 2020, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon “Resilience” spacecraft lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Aboard are astronauts Michael Hopkins, Shannon Walker, and Victor Glover of NASA and Soichi Noguchi of JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency). The four are on the way to the International Space Station for a six-month science mission.

Dear Commons Community,

SpaceX launched four astronauts to the International Space Station yesterday on the first full-fledged taxi flight for NASA by a private company.

The Falcon rocket thundered into the night from Kennedy Space Center with three Americans and one Japanese. The Dragon capsule on top — named Resilience by its crew in light of this year’s many challenges, most notably COVID-19 — reached orbit nine minutes later. It is due to reach the space station late tonight and remain there until spring. As reported by the Associated Press.

“By working together through these difficult times, you’ve inspired the nation, the world, and in no small part the name of this incredible vehicle, Resilience,” Commander Mike Hopkins said right before liftoff.

Once reaching orbit, he radioed: “That was one heck of a ride.”

Sidelined by the coronavirus himself, SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk was forced to monitor the action from afar. He tweeted that he “most likely” had a moderate case of COVID-19. NASA policy at Kennedy Space Center requires anyone testing positive for coronavirus to quarantine and remain isolated.

Sunday’s launch follows by just a few months SpaceX’s two-pilot test flight. It kicks off what NASA hopes will be a long series of crew rotations between the U.S. and the space station, after years of delay. More people means more science research at the orbiting lab, according to officials.

At Kennedy, he was replaced by SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell. She wouldn’t give Musk’s whereabouts, but said he was “tied in very closely to the launch.”

“I have a series of texts to prove it,” Shotwell told reporters.

The flight to the space station — 27 1/2 hours door to door — should be entirely automated, although the crew can take control if needed. SpaceX had to deal with pressure pump spikes once the capsule reached orbit, but quickly resolved the issue.

With COVID-19 still surging, NASA continued the safety precautions put in place for SpaceX’s crew launch in May. The astronauts went into quarantine with their families in October. All launch personnel wore masks, and the number of guests at Kennedy was limited. Even the two astronauts on the first SpaceX crew flight stayed behind at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Vice President Mike Pence, chairman of the National Space Council, joined NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine to watch the launch.

“I didn’t start breathing until about a minute after it took off,” Pence said during a stop at SpaceX Launch Control to congratulate the workers.

Outside the space center gates, spectators crowded into nearby beaches and towns. NASA worried a weekend liftoff — coupled with a dramatic nighttime launch — could lead to a superspreader event. They urged the crowds to wear masks and maintain safe distances. Similar pleas for SpaceX’s first crew launch on May 30 went unheeded.

“In such a crazy year, we have finally some great news,” said Sophia Giallanza, who came from Miami with her husband and son to see their first launch. “So it’s really wonderful.”

The three-men, one-woman crew led by Hopkins, an Air Force colonel, named their capsule Resilience in a nod not only to the pandemic, but also racial injustice and contentious politics. It’s about as diverse as space crews come, including physicist Shannon Walker, Navy Cmdr. Victor Glover, the first Black astronaut on a long-term space station mission, and Japan’s Soichi Noguchi, who became the first person in almost 40 years to launch on three types of spacecraft.

They rode out to the launch pad in Teslas — another Musk company — after exchanging high-fives and hand embraces with their children and spouses, who huddled at the open car windows.

Besides its sleek design and high-tech features, the Dragon capsule is quite spacious — it can carry up to seven people. Previous space capsules have launched with no more than three. The extra room in this newest capsule was used for science experiments and supplies.

The four astronauts will be joining two Russians and one American who flew to the space station last month from Kazakhstan. The orbiting outpost soared over the launch site a mere half-minute before liftoff.

The first-stage booster is expected to be recycled by SpaceX for the next crew launch. That’s currently targeted for the end of March, which would set up the newly launched astronauts for a return to Earth in April.

In the next 15 months, SpaceX should be flying roughly seven Dragon missions for NASA, both crew and cargo, Shotwell said.

While Bridenstine noted it was a beautiful launch, he stressed: “This is a six-month mission and it’s the first of many.”

“When you’re flying into space, there’s always risk and we will always be diligent,” he added.

SpaceX and NASA wanted the booster recovered so badly that they delayed the launch attempt by a day, to give the floating platform time to reach its position in the Atlantic over the weekend following rough seas.

Boeing, NASA’s other contracted crew transporter, is trailing by a year. A repeat of last December’s software-plagued test flight without a crew is off until sometime early next year, with the first astronaut flight of the Starliner capsule not expected before summer.

NASA turned to private companies to haul cargo and crew to the space station, after the shuttle fleet retired in 2011. SpaceX qualified for both. With Kennedy back in astronaut-launching action, NASA can stop buying seats on Russian Soyuz rockets. The last one cost $90 million.

The commander of SpaceX’s first crew, Doug Hurley, noted it’s not just about saving money or easing the training burdens for crews.

“Bottom line: I think it’s just better for us to be flying from the United States if we can do that,” he told The Associated Press last week.

Congratulations to Space-X!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Michelle Goldberg in yesterday’s New York Times had a column speculating on how Donald Trump’s post-presidency might unfurl.  She reviews his appeal in the Republican Party and what it might mean for him politically.  She describes his various legal entanglements and although he might pardon himself before he leaves office, he will not be able to escape Cyrus Vance, New York City’s experienced and capable district attorney.  She also considers his sizeable financial liabilities which might be upward of $500 million.  She talks about his interest in establishing a new media outlet that would compete with Rupert Murdoch and Fox News.  She concludes that Trump is the con man:

“[who] is in for years of scandals and humiliations. We will doubtlessly find out more about official misdeeds he tried to keep secret as president. Republicans who hope to succeed him will have reason to start painting him as a loser instead of a savior. He’ll have to devote much of his energy to trying to stay out of prison.

Below is the entire column.

Insightful!

Tony

New York Times

The Post-Presidency of a Con Man

By Michelle Goldberg

Opinion Columnist

Nov. 13, 2020

It’s hard to tell whether Donald Trump is attempting a coup or throwing a tantrum.

Crying voter fraud, his administration has refused to begin a presidential transition despite his decisive electoral defeat. Some Republicans have floated the idea of getting legislatures in states that Joe Biden won to disregard vote totals and instead appoint pro-Trump electors to the Electoral College. The president has decapitated the Pentagon, putting fanatical loyalists in some of its highest ranks. Anthony Tata, who called Barack Obama a “terrorist leader” and tweeted a lurid fantasy about the execution of the former C.I.A. director John Brennan, is now the Pentagon’s policy chief. This is all supremely alarming.

But there’s cause for comfort, of a sort, in signs that the president is preparing for life outside the White House in exactly the way one would expect — by initiating new grifts. Trump has been sending out frantic fund-raising requests to “defend the election,” but as The New York Times reports, most of the money is actually going to a PAC, Save America, that “will be used to underwrite Mr. Trump’s post-presidential activities.” Axios reports that Trump is considering starting a digital media company to undermine Fox News, which he now regards as disloyal.

These moves suggest that while Trump may be willing to torch American democracy to salve his wounded ego, at least part of him is getting ready to leave office.

When he finally does, some political observers and Republican professionals assume he’ll remain a political kingmaker, and will be a favorite for the party’s nomination in 2024. The Times reported, “Allies imagined other Republicans making a pilgrimage to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida seeking his blessing.” Senator Marco Rubio told The Daily Beast’s Sam Brodey, “If he runs in 2024, he’ll certainly be the front-runner, and then he’ll probably be the nominee.”

Maybe. There’s no doubt that Trump has a cultlike hold on his millions of worshipers, and a unique ability to command public attention. But there are reasons to think that when he is finally ejected from the White House, he will become a significantly diminished figure.

Once Trump is no longer president, he is likely to be consumed by lawsuits and criminal investigations. Hundreds of millions of dollars in debt will come due. Lobbyists and foreign dignitaries won’t have much of a reason to patronize Mar-a-Lago or his Washington hotel. Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch could complete the transition from Trump’s enabler to his enemy. And, after four years of cartoonish self-abasement, Republicans with presidential aspirations will have an incentive to help take him down.

“His whole life he’s been involved in a bunch of litigation,” said the superstar liberal attorney Roberta Kaplan. But post-presidency, “I have to assume that, given the amount of civil litigation and potential criminal exposure, it’s going to be at a completely new dimension.”

Kaplan is pursuing three high-profile lawsuits against Trump, including the writer E. Jean Carroll’s defamation case. Carroll, you might remember, accused Trump of raping her in a department store dressing room during the 1990s. Trump called her a liar, and she’s suing him for damaging her reputation.

Under Attorney General Bill Barr, the Department of Justice has tried to shut down the suit, arguing that Trump was acting in his official capacity when he said Carroll had made up the story to sell books. In October a judge rejected the department’s theory, but had Trump been re-elected, Kaplan expected an appeal.

Once Biden is president, Kaplan told me, “it’s hard for me to imagine that the D.O.J. won’t change its position.” So the case is likely to proceed. Kaplan expects it to go into discovery shortly after Biden’s inauguration. She anticipates deposing Trump and collecting his D.N.A. to compare with male D.N.A. found on the dress Carroll was wearing at the time of the alleged attack.

If Kaplan and Carroll prevail at trial, it would be a high-profile legal validation of Carroll’s claims. Her suit has not, so far, been a major news story — there’s too much else going on. But a verdict in her favor could be the #MeToo version of the civil judgment against O.J. Simpson — not justice, exactly, but a powerful rejection of impunity.

Carroll’s suit is not the only one that could force Trump to answer for his predatory history with women. The former “Apprentice” contestant Summer Zervos, who says Trump groped and kissed her against her will, is, like Carroll, suing for defamation because Trump called her a liar. (Her lawyer is Beth Wilkinson, who defended Brett Kavanaugh when he was accused of sexual assault during his Supreme Court confirmation fight.)

In addition to Carroll, Kaplan is representing Mary Trump, the president’s niece, who is suing Trump, his sister and his late brother Robert’s estate for fraud and civil conspiracy, saying they cheated her out of an inheritance. And she’s representing a group of people who are suing Trump and his three oldest children for enticing them to invest in an alleged pyramid scheme, run by a telecommunications company called ACN, which sold clunky videophones.

The plaintiffs are poor and working class, including a hospice caregiver who paid thousands of dollars to ACN because she trusted Trump’s fulsome endorsements, having no idea that ACN was paying Trump millions. As with the other suits, there is obviously no guarantee of success. But Trump’s alleged involvement in a multilevel marketing scheme that traded on a false image of his business acumen will be a minor subplot over the next few years.

The writer E. Jean Carroll, left foreground, who has accused President Trump of raping her during the 1990s and is suing him for defamation, in October. Credit…John Minchillo/Associated Press

It’s too much to expect any sudden exposure of Trump. There will be no cathartic moment when everyone realizes that the emperor was always naked. But the question isn’t whether Trump’s support will evaporate. It’s whether it will erode, especially once he loses the ability to make Republican dreams come true.

Besides, the threats to Trump are not only to his reputation, such as it is. In Bob Woodward’s book “Fear,” he wrote that Trump’s former lawyer John Dowd implored the president not to testify in Robert Mueller’s probe because he believed him to be an inveterate liar. (Dowd has denied this.) Should Trump face depositions in these civil cases, however, he’ll have no choice about submitting to interviews.

Andrew Weissmann, Mueller’s former deputy, told me he expects Trump to pardon himself for any federal crimes he might have committed. That would mean that even if a Biden Department of Justice wanted to take the extraordinary step of prosecuting a former president, it would also have to litigate the constitutionality of self-pardons, a complicated, time-consuming process.

But he might face state charges that he can’t pardon his way out of. The New York State attorney general, Letitia James, has a civil investigation into possible financial chicanery by the Trump Organization. Trump is under criminal investigation by Manhattan’s district attorney, Cyrus Vance. While the scope of the inquiry is unknown, his office’s filings suggest Vance could be looking at tax fraud, insurance fraud and falsification of business records.

The “Manhattan D.A.’s office is a really good office, and they’ve done a lot of white-collar cases,” said Weissmann. “If they were to prove — this is now hypothetical — but if they were to prove tens of millions of dollars in tax fraud or bank fraud, people go to jail for that.”

Let’s say Trump, ever the escape artist, avoids prison, setting himself up as the warlord of MAGA-world at Mar-a-Lago. His post-presidency still won’t be easy. As The Times has reported, he’s personally on the hook for $421 million in debt, most of it coming due in the next four years. If a long fight with the I.R.S. goes against him, he could owe at least $100 million more.

“Mr. Trump still has assets to sell,” The Times reported. “But doing so could take its own toll, both financial and to Mr. Trump’s desire to always be seen as a winner.”

Trump is already trying to profit off his avid base, and he will surely continue. But it’s an open question whether, without the intoxicating aura of presidential power, he can sustain their devotion. There are several examples of once-formidable right-wing leaders reduced to footnotes after leaving office.

As Republican House majority leader, Tom DeLay was frequently described as the most powerful man in Congress. Then, in 2005, he was indicted on a charge of campaign money laundering. Though his 2010 conviction was eventually overturned on appeal, the last time he had any significant public profile was when he appeared on “Dancing With the Stars” in 2009.

Sarah Palin, too, was once a Republican icon; in many ways she presaged Trump. “Win or Lose, Many See Palin as Future of Party,” said a New York Times headline just before the 2008 election. It quoted the right-wing activist Brent Bozell: “Conservatives have been looking for leadership, and she has proved that she can electrify the grass roots like few people have in the last 20 years.”

But since resigning as Alaska’s governor in 2009, Palin has lost her luster. Once a likely presidential prospect, she recently made headlines for wearing a pink and purple bear costume on the Fox reality show “The Masked Singer.”

Trump is in for years of scandals and humiliations. We will doubtlessly find out more about official misdeeds he tried to keep secret as president. Republicans who hope to succeed him will have reason to start painting him as a loser instead of a savior. He’ll have to devote much of his energy to trying to stay out of prison.

After all that, could he be back in 2024? Of course. Trump is, if nothing else, relentless. But this election was just the latest reminder that he is far from invincible. When he is no longer in office, there will be many more.