--American Heritage Dictionary
Monitoring major news sites this past week or two yielded an increasing number of stories and opinion pieces warning about ways the Apprentice Dictator is trying to steal the election and stay in power. Clearly he would try, but he's so ineffective at anything else that it seemed more a case of a media firestorm feeding on itself. Until Friday.
Analysts say the structure centralizes power around DeJoy...,and de-emphasizes decades of institutional postal knowledge. All told, 33 staffers included in the old postal hierarchy either kept their jobs or were reassigned in the restructuring, with five more staffers joining the leadership from other roles.
And if there was any doubt about the reason, the Postal Service announced it was raising the rates on mail-in ballots, tripling them. A rate raise has to go through the Postal Commission and probable court challenges, so that even if it doesn't go into effect, it will create chaos in the system and confusion for mail-in voters. DeJoy had already slowed mail delivery and caused confusion within the Postal Service with earlier efforts.
Meanwhile the Republican National Committee is suing a number of states to prevent mail-in ballots, and though the suits are often of comic opera quality, they also add to the chaos. And reportedly Homegrown Hitler is considering (i.e. threatening) some sort of executive action to curtail mail-in voting.
These efforts and their results, plus other methods of confusing and limiting in-person voting by Democrats, could make come true what otherwise seems like an overblown scare headline scenario outlined by the New York Times:
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| Florida 2000 |
“The possibility of an ugly November — and perhaps even December and January — has emerged more starkly in recent days as President Trump complains that the election will be rigged and Democrats accuse him of trying to make that a self-fulfilling prophesy.”
This is what the White House is concentrating on, as hundreds of thousands of Americans suffer and die from Covid, and hundreds of millions suffer the effects of the Covid Crisis, which the White House has decided to ignore.
This in the same week in which the White House refused to deal with Democrats to prevent the economy from collapsing and even more people suffering by re-instituting expanded unemployment payments and protecting renters. Democrats also want to fund the states' efforts to deal as effectively as they can without a unified federal effort to deal with the covid crisis, and fund the Post Office and other efforts to insure voters' ability to participate in a safe election. Instead the Apprentice Dictator dictated so-called executive orders which were either deceptive and meaningless, or illegal, unconstitutional and unlikely to offer any real relief, while threatening Social Security and Medicare by cutting the payroll taxes that partially fund them.
The surest way to defeat these White House and Republican efforts to subvert the election is for Joe Biden and Democratic congressional candidates to end Election Day with unbeatable leads by virtue of in-person voting and whatever other votes are counted when the day's counts are announced. I still think this is possible and maybe even likely to happen. But it is also far from certain.
What becomes very clear now, if it hasn't been before, is that this is not politics as usual, or even politics at all. It is a series of attacks on constitutional forms that fully qualifies as a slow motion coup d' 'etat. If Trump retains power under these conditions, the United States would de facto and without question be governed by a dictatorship.
So add that to possible treason in the past and still ongoing collusion with Russia and other foreign interests in perverting an American election, and rampant corruption--just last week, when it was suggested that Trump might make his acceptance speech from the White House--already flirting with legal violations as well as ethical norms--his company just happen to triple the room rates at his Washington hotel for the week he would make this speech. If these efforts at a slow motion coup are unsuccessful, then those responsible for it must be held to account to the full extent of the law.
Cancel College (Are You Listening, HSU?)
Cancel College is the title of a piece in the Atlantic, subtitled Reopening universities will accomplish little and endanger many, by contributing writer Yascha Mounk:
Noting that many colleges will be bringing students back in the next few weeks, "if colleges go ahead, they will endanger the lives of students, staff, faculty, and those who live in the surrounding communities. Reopening colleges is the wrong thing to do." Noting that many universities have come up with innovative plans to respond to the Covid crisis dangers, But these plans all founder on the same basic problem: Most college students are at an age when the urge to socialize is especially strong. Whatever the rules may say, young people will have parties, hook up, and leave campus to have fun."
"And the consequences if—or rather when—the coronavirus starts to spread will probably be disastrous. As a Harvard University official told MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell back in March, “The dorms are cruise ships.” Even if sophisticated testing uncovers a case of COVID-19 within a few days of a student contracting it, that student is likely to have come into contact with dozens of others in the intervening days."
And here is the point I've been trying to make about Humboldt State University (where, by the way, there will be no testing) importing up to a thousand students into the city of Arcata, with a non-student population of perhaps 7,000:
"If colleges reopen, kids from parts of the country with high case counts will, inevitably, travel to parts of the country with low case counts—and bring their home-state problems with them. This is why the biggest threat posed by reopening colleges is not to students, faculty, or staff, but to the surrounding community."
All this, despite the fact that there will be only a few in-person classes any of them can attend. The California State system is entirely virtual this fall semester--only cash-strapped HSU sought and received permission for a few labs and other in-person classes. Still, most of these students can do most or all of their classwork from hundreds of miles away. They just wouldn't be paying for dorm rooms.
So it is astounding to me that this is not a local issue. No public official to my knowledge has questioned it. The local media, such as it is, has not raised it in any significant way. Public Health and government have nothing to say about it, but then, they are never asked.
It is somewhat similar in other places, while the questions of whether and how to reopen K-12 schools has been thoroughly debated and commented upon by public officials.
Meanwhile, HSU students are already arriving. I've seen clusters greeting one another on the street, none wearing masks and with no physical distancing. What could possibly go wrong?
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