Live-Blogging the…2nd? 3rd? 2020 Presidential Debate

This is Trump’s last chance to make a serious attempt before a broad audience to redeem his ugly, absurd, corrupt, and malignant Presidency. The only advantage that I can think of that Trump has going into tonight’s Debate is the fact that his microphone will cut out when he isn’t supposed to be talking.

10:36 pm: Trump claims with his usual vagueness that if Joe Biden becomes President, we will have the worst depression we have ever seen, or something. I’m sick of the Trump Presidency for a great many reasons, but I’m particularly tired of hearing Trump say that he has been “the greatest President in history for (whatever)” and that whoever he is currently confronting has been “the worst when it comes to (something)” and that a President Biden would bring us to “(some bad, bad thing) like you’ve never seen.” I look forward to our now-inevitable deliverance from the vague and histrionic extremes in rhetoric.

10:32 pm: Vice President Biden speaks with more passion, intensity, and concreteness of focus than either candidate has talked about anything else this evening when referring to his expensive living in a “fence line community” in Delaware near to many refining plants, and the long-term effects of aerosolized pollutants on the residents of those communities.

10:31 pm: Trump brags about working with the governments of Russia and Saudi Arabia to keep the price of oil high, as if that serves the bottom line of Americans.

10:26 pm: Trump claims that Vice President Biden’s climate change mitigation plan was written by “the Squad” of 4 Progressive freshmen Congresswomen. Vice President Biden’s climate change mitigation plan was produced through a compromise between the Biden Campaign and the Progressives, including the Squad as well as 2-time Progressive Presidential prospect Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

10:18 pm: Trump claims, with great drama, that he has done more for Black Americans than any President since Abraham Lincoln. So, move over, Ulysses S. Grant, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Barack Obama; the best friend of the Black Community is the man who has encouraged police to rough-up their suspects and demanded that athletes who silently and peacefully protest racial injustice be summarily fired.

10:14 pm: Trump claims, twice, that President Obama (and by implication, Vice President Biden) failed to pass criminal justice reform in President Obama’s 2nd term. It’s as frustrating as when Trump claimed in Debate 1 that President Obama failed to fill a lot of Federal Court vacancies. In both instances, a wholly Republican Congress refused to give President Obama a political win.

10:07 pm: Trump, retorting to Vice President Biden’s claim that migrants who don’t fear incarceration or arbitrary deportation keep their court dates because they want to remain in the United States legally, says that migrants who keep their court-dates–who follow the law–are “low IQ.”

10:06 pm: Vice President Biden commits to getting a law passed by Congress that will create a path to citizenship for 11 million immigrants not currently in the country legally, without costly and traumatizing detentions and deportations.

10:02 pm: Vice President Biden calls Trump’s detention and separation of migrant families at the United States-Mexico border a violation of what Americans are about as a country.

9:56 pm: Trump is back to arguing with the moderator again. He was doing well for the better part of an hour.

9:46 pm: Trump gets a question about the Amy Coney Barrett nomination to the Supreme Court and the impending California v. Texas case that could rule the 2010 Affordable Care Act unconstitutional and deprive 22 million Americans of their existing health insurance. Trump claims that removing the individual mandate penalty from the Affordable Care Act somehow improved health care, claims that he will provide statutory protections for preexisting conditions although he is currently asking the Supreme Court to strike that down, and accuses Vice President Biden of trying to socialize the United States health care system even though Biden explicitly opposed “Medicare for All”. Unsettlingly, Trump also claims that we shouldn’t be concerned about the loss of the Affordable Care Act because 80 million “successful” Americans have employer-provided health insurance.

Vice President Biden reminds viewers that 10 million Americans just lost their employer-provided health insurance because of how badly the Trump Administration has flubbed the handling of the COVID pandemic and the economic recovery.

9:29 pm: Trump goes for broke: He claims, repetitively, that Vice President Biden “took money from Russia.” No particulars and no context are provided, other than that Trump claims that Joe Biden was Vice President when he supposedly received all this unspecified money from Russia.

Vice President Biden counters that he has never taken a cent of foreign money. He refers to the bombshell New York Times story of Trump’s previously undisclosed bank account in China and the $200,000 in taxes paid to China–in sum, apparently far more than he has paid to the Federal Government after expensing post-2008 real estate losses.

9:40 pm: Trump tries to bring up “a very strong email” alleging Vice President Biden trying to solicit bribes from foreign governments. It’s vague, characteristically Trump, and it feels contrived and desperate even by his recent standard.

9:25 pm: Trump loses his cool for the first time when Vice President Biden’s far superior fundraising take–now more than twice Trump’s–comes to the fore.

9:21 pm: Vice President Biden admonishes Trump for throwing schoolchildren, teachers, and retail workers and retail customers to the wolves in encouraging everyone to return to normal business during a 3rd wave outbreak of a pandemic virus this fall and winter.

9:11 pm: Vice President Biden warns Americans that “we’re going to have a dark winter” with COVID; Trump insists that we are not going to have a dark winter with COVID. Is anyone actually reassured by Trump’s optimism?

9:08 pm: Vice President Biden reminds the audience that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has projected that almost 200,000 more Americans will die of COVID by the end of the year–but that that death toll could be halved if all Americans would wear face masks over that time period–and reminds viewers that Trump and his Administration and Campaign flout not wearing masks.

9:07 pm: Trump acknowledges that the SARS-CoV-2 virus “is a worldwide problem.” It would really be great if Trump hadn’t withdrawn the United States from the World Health Organization as a means of casting blame.

9:05 pm: Trump gets the first question, which is about how he will handle the COVID pandemic if reelected. We might as well just put a fork in his Presidency.

9:04 pm: Trump walks out, not wearing a mask to begin with. Vice President Biden walks out and takes his mask off after moving away from others.

Live-Blogging the October 7, 2020 Vice Presidential Debate

Starting at 9:00 pm Eastern Standard Time, the 2020 Vice Presidential Debate will give Vice President Mike Pence an opportunity to sanitize Donald Trump’s viciousness, pettiness, ignorance, cruelty, and questionable sanity with a varnish of pious obscurantism, and Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) an opportunity to bring her skills as a public prosecutor against a corrupt and criminally negligent Administration–hopefully without exciting the reactive resentment that attached so easily to a woman who recently dared to run for the Presidency in her own right.

10:33 pm: The Vice Presidential Debate ends without Vice President Pence promising that there would be a peaceful transfer of power if (when) Trump loses the upcoming Presidential Election.

10:27 pm: Vice President Pence launches into a conspiracy theory that the FBI investigation into several members of the 2016 Trump Campaign (Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, Carter Page) was politically motivated, rather than directed by actual contacts between those members of the Trump Campaign and Russian or Ukrainian Oligarchs or Russian Government officials.

I will give Vice President Pence this much: He can pass Trump’s crazy and self-serving ideas off as if they were conclusions that a reasonable person could hold. But a fanatic by definition is unreasonable, and Vice President Pence is fanatically loyal to the dangerously intemperate and incompetent Donald Trump, and Vice President Pence would not be the first fanatic to have good manners.

10:15 pm: Vice President Pence is asked if justice was done in the Breonna Taylor verdict. He doesn’t answer the question; he does say that the George Floyd murder at the hands of police in Minneapolis was unjustified, then he leapfrogs into talking about rioting and looting, as if anyone defended rioting and looting as a matter of principle and policy during this Election cycle.

Senator Harris condemns Trump’s statement following the July 2017 Charlottesville White supremacist rally that there were “Fine people on both sides” between Neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan on the one side and anti-racist protesters on the other hand.

10:06 pm: A debate ensues over whether Republicans are packing the Courts by stalling Democratic Federal Court nominations or Democrats are planning to pack the Supreme Court when…they have not committed to any plan to pack the Supreme Court. It’s a debate between a hypothetical and a fact.

(In the event of Joe Biden’s Presidential Inauguration, if there are 51 Democratic Senators, the Supreme Court will almost certainly be expanded.)

10:03 pm: Vice President Pence is asked about Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett, who would bring the Conservative alignment on the Supreme Court to 6 out of 9 Justices, thereby very credibly raising the prospect of the Roe v. Wade decision being overturned–and what States like his native Indiana would do if they were in control of abortion policy. Vice President Pence avails himself of that time to cheer Trump for assassinating the Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, and speaks approvingly of Judge Barrett’s academic credentials–running over his time without saying anything about what will happen to abortion access in Red States if Roe v. Wade is overturned.

9:58 pm: Senator Harris: Trump has spoken to President Vladimir Putin of Russia 6 times since the shocking New York Times story that the Russian Government offered bounties to Taliban fighters for killing American soldiers and Marines in Afghanistan, and has not raised the subject with President Putin. Vice President Pence looks frustrated, and tries to speak on the subject, and Ms. Page stops him for trying to appropriate time from the Debate in violation of debate rules. It feels like a threshold has been reached; Ms. Page seems prepared to hold Vice President Pence to the rules.

9:51 pm: Senator Harris observes the “weird…obsession” of the Trump Administration with undoing policy achievements of the Obama-Biden Administration, observing the disaster caused by the Trump Administration removing the pandemic response unit from the National Security Council and the CDC liaison in China; Vice President Pence denies that the Administration did this, but for once, doesn’t start filibustering in defense.

Senator Harris notes that Trump’s steep tariffs on imports from China have cost American consumers billions of dollars and led to a manufacturing recession; Senator Harris calls Trump’s trade war with China “a failure”, and again, Vice President Pence doesn’t defend Trump’s record.

9:48 pm: Vice President Pence calls the USMCA trade agreement an Administration accomplishment, and observes that Senator Harris voted against that agreement: 48 minutes in, he makes his first point.

9:46 pm: Vice President Pence calls former Vice President Biden “a cheerleader for Communist China”. Vice President Pence’s statements tonight have mostly been trite and cliche-ridden.

9:43 pm: Vice President Pence gets a question about global warming; he says that the climate is changing and that the Administration will follow the science…and then tries to claim, again, that a President Biden will raise everyone’s taxes (that old Republican go-to), and doesn’t address global warming again.

9:41 pm: Senator Harris clarifies–twice–that a President Biden will not raise taxes on Americans earning less than $400,000 a year. Republicans, one notes, never commit not to cut taxes for anyone making more than any income, however-exhorbitant.

9:40 pm: For a man who claims that he cannot be alone with professional women due to loyalty to his wife, Vice President Pence sure interrupts and talks over them with an ease and comfort suggestive of experience; he interrupts Senator Harris and filibusters, he blows past his allocated time limit and filibusters.

9:38 pm: Vice President Pence claims that air and water pollution are currently at an all-time low; of course, he leaves out that this is due to the abrupt halt of economic activity in this country due to the uncontrolled domestic SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in this country.

9:35 pm: Vice President Pence interrupted Senator Harris and then filibustered; the moderator didn’t intervene and stop the interruption, in an unsettling allegory for last week’s Presidential Debate. Senator Harris, about to be cut off by the moderator, notes that she was interrupted by Vice President Pence and asks to get her time back; the moderator relents.

9:32 pm: Vice President Pence again tells us that something is “unconscionable”, in this case it’s to repeal Trump’s December 2017 tax cuts–the first tax cut passed by Congress that I have ever heard of that was manifestly unpopular with the public for giving so much money to the very rich. Obviously Vice President Pence doesn’t discuss Trump’s tweet earlier this week killing off negotiations on an additional emergency assistance/stimulus bill.

9:28 pm: Senator Harris can answer a debate question and raise and discuss an additional point in less time than it takes Vice President Pence to not answer the question he’s given.

9:25 pm: Senator Harris responds to another risible example of Vice President Pence’s stiff graciousness with reference to Trump paying $750 a year in taxes in the rare recent years that Trump has actually paid taxes.

Moderator Page’s question had been about whether the American people have the right to know about the status of a President’s health; Senator Harris had banked the time to launch into Trump’s tax avoidance by saying simply, “Yes.”

9:19 pm: Vice President Pence absolves himself of the need to answer the question actually given to him by the moderator, and says to Senator Harris, “That you would play politics with people’s health is unconscionable.” If Vice President Pence really believes that Senator Harris is playing politics with people’s health and finds it to be unconscionable, he must be profoundly disconnected from human emotion, because it very much feels like he’s just trying to score points.

Vice President Pence refers to the 2009 swine flu, calling that a failure to control a pandemic. He claims that 60 million Americans were infected at the time; what he doesn’t say is that the total number of American deaths that year was typical for an influenza season.

9:18 pm: Ms. Page asks Senator Harris if she would take a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine once it’s said to be ready. Senator Harris says, “If public health experts say that we should take it–if Dr. Fauci says that we should take it, I will take it; if Donald Trump says we should take it, I’m not taking it.”

9:14 pm: Vice President Pence is already flouting the Debate rules, talking over his allotted time with regularity and interrupting Senator Harris at will.

9:10 pm: Vice President Pence thanks the debate hosting venue and informs Senator Harris that “it’s an honor” to debate her. Vice President Pence seeks to varnish the Trump Administration’s vacant vulgarity with Midwestern nice. He claims that the Trump Administration was proactive in protecting the public from the SARS-CoV-2 virus because Trump barred (some) travel from China. This continues to be almost the only thing that Trump Administration officials say in Trump’s defense; the virus simply entered the United States from Italy and ran rampant in the New York Metropolitan Area, then spread from there to the rest of the country in large part because of the carelessness of State Republican officials.

9:07 pm: Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) opens with both barrels, calling the Trump Administration’s handling of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the COVID-19 respiratory illness pandemic “the worst failure in Presidential history.” Senator Harris notes that Trump and Vice President Pence were informed on January 28, 2020 of the highly contagious and deadly nature of this virus and illness and didn’t inform the public of these facts, and that “this Administration has forfeited their right to reelection because of this.”

9:05 pm: Plexiglass shields protect both candidates and the moderator Susan Page from any respiratory droplets that may carry the SARS-CoV-2 virus on the air. Ms. Page is very insistent at the outset that she will enforce the Debate rules out of sense of obligation to the voting public; this will be a welcome change from last week’s Presidential Debate, at which Trump’s behavior was outrageous, but then she is also working with 2 Vice Presidential candidates who probably intend to follow those rules.

Live-Blogging the September 29, 2020 Presidential Debate

You know that Donald Trump is going to use tonight to try to gamble for resurrection–he will try to make it look like Vice President Biden has forgotten something, or berate the Vice President to try to get him to stutter. Anything to get the American people’s attention off of his failure to address a 100-year pandemic or his decades of cheating on his taxes and incurring hundreds of millions of dollars in debt for his many poor investments.

10:36 pm: Trump calls on his supporters to go to polling places–Trump specifically refers to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania–and watch voters voting, ostensibly to look for voter fraud. He again claims that there are going to be lots of fraudulent Democratic ballots and that ballots for Trump have been thrown out already. Trump says that he has to wait and see if he will accept the outcome of the election.

Chris Wallace asks Vice President Biden if he will urge his supporters to remain calm and personally wait for all the votes to be counted before either declaring victory or conceding; Vice President Biden says, “Yes.”

10:30 pm: Trump…he rambles, he reminds us that he won the 2016 Presidential Election (Ugh. We know.), then he claims that jurisdictions administered by Democrats are somehow committing mail ballot fraud.

10:29 pm: “So: Vote. You have the power to determine what this country looks like for the next 4 years…” Vice President Biden makes a nod to Trump’s attempt to de-legitimize mail-balloting, then points out that Trump voted by mail.

10:27 pm: Vice President Biden says plainly, as he said during the Democratic Presidential Primary earlier in the year, that he doesn’t support the Green New Deal, rather, that he supports the Biden Plan–his own green infrastructure redevelopment plan. Trump crows–I believe for the 3rd time tonight–that Biden “just lost the radical/Socialist Left” because he expressed independence from them on a policy matter. Trump sounds obsequious to…someone in how eager he is to check that box rhetorically.

10:16 pm: Trump kind of admits that human industrial activity is facilitating global warming…and then says that he pulled the United States out of the Paris Climate Accords and froze President Obama’s vehicle fuel-efficiency standards because this would make cars cheaper to buy and “safer” (the latter claim which is absurd).

10:15 pm: Vice President Biden speaks of his deceased son Beau Biden’s Armed Forces service record, including a year tour in Iraq. He criticizes Trump for calling American men and women in the Armed Forces who died in combat “suckers” and “losers”.

Trump does not deny calling American men and women who gave their lives in the Armed Forces suckers and losers. He does say that Vice President Biden’s son was discharged from the Armed Forces for a cocaine addiction. Vice President Biden says that Trump distorted what happened, but admits that Hunter did have a drug problem, which he has overcome and learned to manage. Vice President Biden says that he is proud of his son.

Chris Wallace says to Trump that he would like to have a debate about actual substantive issues.

10:09 pm: Chris Wallace asks Trump to condemn White Supremacist groups. Trump immediately points at Antifa and Left-wing radicals, claiming that he thinks that all of the extremist violence in this country comes from the Left. The quantifiable reality is that most of the extremist violence and the greater national security threat comes from Right-wing extremist groups: This is the assessment of Trump’s own national security establishment and FBI.

Trump doesn’t condemn White Supremacists.

10:00 pm: Vice President Biden speaks compellingly about the need of Americans to be more sensitive to each other. He says that Americans need to come together.

Trump says that Americans are divided because the Democrats are terrible at government.

9:56 pm: Vice President Biden says that peaceful protest is inherently legitimate, while violent protest is inherently illegitimate.

Trump demands that Vice President Biden tell him what he thinks of acts of arson by rioters. Vice President Biden calmly answers that arson is violent and thus illegitimate. It looks like Trump would really rather have this debate with an imaginary Democrat.

9:54 pm: Vice President Biden gets a few minutes to speak without obstruction, and he reminds Americans that in July 2017, Trump looked at Neo-Nazi and Ku Klux Klan agitators chanting anti-Semitic slogans on the University of Virginia-Charlottesville campus and the young anti-racist protesters arrayed against them–one of whom was killed by a White Supremacist at that rally–and said that there were “good people on both sides.” Vice President also reminds Americans that Trump tear-gassed a peaceful George Floyd protest in front of the White House for a Bible-toting photo op at an Episcopal Cathedral across Lafayette Square from the White House, which the Bishop o that cathedral called a disgrace.

9:50 pm: Trump makes a previously repudiated claim that Vice President Biden’s son Hunter received $3.5 million from the Mayor of Moscow. (The reality is that Trump’s leaked tax documents show that he has tried to secure business with the Mayor of Moscow.) Vice President Biden says that this isn’t true and that it has already been refuted, and Trump interrupts him repeatedly.

9:42 pm: Chris Wallace gets frustrated demanding that Trump say how much he paid in Federal income tax in for 2016 and 2017. Trump rambles on and on, and eventually claims that he paid millions in Federal income taxes for those 2 years. The New York Times has started a multi-part story involving obtained tax documentation that found that Trump paid $750 each in 2016 and 2017.

Trump claims that he will release his tax returns soon. Trump has been claiming this since he started his first Presidential run in 2015, and he has never done so. Vice President Biden asks Trump, “When?” and Trump doesn’t address an answer to Vice President Biden or to Chris Wallace.

9:37 pm: Vice President Biden says that he isn’t in favor of fully reopening schools because the Trump Administration has not presented an effective plan that includes adequate Federal funding to allow schools to reopen safely while observing social distancing, enforcing mask-wearing, and disinfecting the schools’ interior spaces. Vice President Biden says that he hasn’t seen the plan that would effectively allow this to happen safely.

9:36 pm: Amazing. Trump claims that he hasn’t enforced social distancing and mask-wearing at his rallies because that’s what his crowd size requires, that Vice President Biden would do the same if he could draw larger crowds for a rally, and he even says “Nobody cares” about social distancing and wearing masks at political functions.

9:30 pm: Chris Wallace points out to Trump that his own CDC Director and the chief of his vaccine program have said that a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine won’t be widely available until summer 2021. Trump said that he has spoken to several pharmaceutical executives and that he will see to it that a vaccine is made widely available in a matter of weeks. Trump contradicts the scientists who work for his Administration, and claims that only “politics” would prevent a virus from being available sooner than they had said it would!

Vice President Biden again addresses Americans directly: You know that you don’t trust Trump to deliver a rushed vaccine that is safe and effective.

9:25 pm: Vice President Biden addresses Americans at home, asking them how many of them have an empty seat at the table right now because of a loss due to the COVID-19 illness. He asks how many Americans weren’t able to say goodbye to a loved one who has died this year because it wasn’t safe to visit them or they were in intensive care at the time that they passed. Trump interrupts him to defend himself.

9:21 pm: “It is what it is because you are who you are.” Vice President Biden connects the death toll from the COVID-19 respiratory illness–over 206,000 dead in 7 months–to Trump’s lack of concern and engagement with the problem.

9:15 pm: Trump rambles on multiple instances, talking about the Socialist Left, calling Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) “Pocahontas”, and offering vague promises to provide Americans with a replacement for the Affordable Care Act. Trump repeatedly interrupts Vice President Biden in order to…state that the Federal individual mandate to buy health insurance was very unpopular. Trump ends with an uninspiring flourish, claiming that Joe Biden has done nothing in 47 years in government. That’s silly. I understand that Trump doesn’t know the nuances of his predecessors Administration, and he certainly didn’t care about the Violence Against Women Act, but he should be a fan of the 1994 Crime Bill.

9:10 pm: Vice President Biden draws first blood, making Trump angry and ramble a bit when connecting Judge Barrett’s Conservative credentials to the constitutional challenge to the Affordable Care Act, to over 200,000 Americans killed from the COVID pandemic. Trump gets mad and blames Vice President Biden for not keeping Chinese people out of the United States. SARS-CoV-2 is believed to have entered the human population in China in late 2019.

9:05 pm: Trump takes moderator Chris Wallace’s first question, specifically about why he should name Judge Amy Coney Barrett to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the United States Supreme Court. His answer is unusually sedate: He was elected President, Republicans were elected to a majority in the United States Senate. (He neglects to mention that both were elected by a minority, having gotten about the mid-40s in the popular vote.) The President has the duty and the privilege to nominate judges to the Federal Courts; the Senate as the duty and the privilege to hear and confirm those nominees to the Federal Courts, etc. In 2016 a Republican Senate declined to confirm a Democratic President’s nominee to the Supreme Court, as was its right. This year, there is a Republican President and Senate. And if he were President and Democrats controlled the Senate, they would stonewall his nomination to the Supreme Court on similar terms to what the Republican Senate did to President Barack Obama in 2016.

Note: Delay to Tonight’s Blog Entry (Which Will Not Be Live)

Due to a conflicting prior commitment, the Liberal Ironist will not be able to live-blog Night 4 of the 2020 Democratic National Convention. The Liberal Ironist will post a response blog after Night 4 of the DNC has concluded.

Live-Blogging Night 3 of the 2020 Democratic National Convention

What makes the 2020 Democratic National Convention original and remarkable? There have been so many features not only of “ordinary Americans” but of Americans who have not traditionally have been underrepresented or not represented–and of vulnerable Americans–that we have a national party convention with an unprecedented theme of people speaking from the heart. That’s the slightly unsettling effect of this year’s Democratic National Convention: It’s less of a pageant than these conventions always have been, and even the pageantry features less professional actors than would usually be the case. It’s an interesting change.

11:11 pm: In keeping with an informal tradition, following the conclusion of the Vice Presidential candidate’s speech, the Presidential candidate walks out to the stage to greet her.

11:08 pm: Senator Harris wisely gives a shout-out to the new generation (Millenials and Gen-Zers) of voters and politicians who have emerged since 2017 to take up the cause of social justice and accountable public service. Yes, more of that (and of them), please.

11:00 pm: Senator Harris observes that Black Americans and Latino Americans have disproportionately suffered illness and death from the COVID-19 illness due to institutional racism and the failure to provide public goods and health benefits to White and nonwhite Americans at a common rate. One effect of the brazen and constant racism of the Trump Administration is that it has swept away any cause for reservation that Democrats in politics may ever have had for speaking indirectly about the fatal effects of White racism in America.

10:59 pm: Senator Harris addresses herself to parents and teachers struggling with remote learning which Trump’s willful failure to contend with the present pandemic virus has made necessary: “you know that what we’re doing right now isn’t working.”

10:56 pm: Senator Harris attributes her decision to become an attorney, a district attorney, Attorney General of the Republic of California, and a U.S. Senator from California, to her belief “that public service is a noble calling, and that the fight for justice is a shared responsibility…”

10:53 pm: Senator Harris opens her acceptance speech with a reference to trailblazing and trend-setting women in public life. She ends the list with her mother, an immigrant from India, who had to raise Kamala and her sister as a single mother from the time that Senator Harris was 5 years old.

10:47 pm: With the striking of a very large gavel, 2020 Democratic National Committee Chairman Congressman Bennie Thompson (D-MI) makes Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA)’s nomination as Joe Biden’s running mate official. Congressman Thompson is Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee; he seems to be skilled in the art of wielding a gavel to bring deliberations to a conclusion.

10:44 pm: “This Administration has shown that it will tear our democracy down, if that is what it takes to win. So, we have to get busy…” –President Obama

10:41 pm: President Obama recalls the recent passing of Congressman John Lewis (D-GA), a marcher with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. President Obama observes that Black Americans in the Jim Crow South had as much cause to be cynical about American constitutionalism and democracy as anyone, but that rather than be cynical about it, they took extraordinary measures in order to compel America to embody its principles more fully than it had before.

10:37 pm: President Obama addresses himself to undecided and uncommitted voters: Trump and the Republicans already know that they won’t win majority support from Americans, so they are counting on Americans’ cynicism to get them to sit out this election, and they are going to great lengths to inconvenience and burden voting in order to suppress turnout. President Obama urges Americans not to let these people take their democracy away from them.

10:31 pm: President Obama observes that Vice President Biden understands Americans’ loss of their livelihoods from his experience of his father’s loss of his job when Biden was a child, and that he understands the many Americans currently confronting the loss of a loved one from the deaths of his first wife and child in 1972 and the death of his son Beau, himself a rising star in Delaware politics, from brain cancer in 2015. President Obama remarks that Vice President Biden–and his running mate Senator Kamala Harris–understand Americans’ vulnerabilities and challenges because of experience, and care about addressing them.

10:29 pm: “Donald Trump hasn’t grown into the job, because he can’t–and the consequences of that failure are severe.” –former President Barack Obama says that Donald Trump has utterly disappointed the one hope that he had about him, specifically that he would come to take the Presidency seriously once he occupied that office.

10:23 pm: Former President Barack Obama is quoted as having said (at a rally in Wilmington, Delaware for then-Senate candidate Chris Coons on October 15, 2010) that choosing Senator Joseph Biden to be his running mate and become his Vice President was “the single best decision I have made.” I agree; Joseph Biden was an excellent Vice President, advisor to the President, and advocate for President Obama’s agenda.

10:20 pm: “Our economic system has been rigged to give bailouts to billionaires and a kick in the pants to everyone else.” –Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) Senator Warren recounts a compelling personal story about how her Aunt Bea’s willingness to move into her home for 16 years to care for he children was the only way that she was able to remain in the workforce. Senator Warren reminds us of how Americans are unable to attain their goals for education and work because the United States is benighted in its lack of readily-available or affordable child care for working parents.

10:15 pm: During an extended segment featuring small business owners trying to stay in business in the face of the brutal economic headwinds created by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, a farmer says of Trump and farming, “No, he has no idea about any of this stuff.”

10:06 pm: There is a genuinely provocative and effective video that features then-Senator Biden listening to the testimony of a woman victimized by domestic violence. People forget how Conservative the politics of the 1990s were–and in that toxic political environment, Senator Biden was able to pass the Violence Against Women Act, which is apparently too liberal for today’s Republicans, on a bipartisan basis in 1994.

10:02 pm: Women survivors of domestic violence and their advocates refer to their brutal experiences and to what they know, against the backdrop of the Violence Against Women Act–cosponsored by then-Senators Joe Biden (D-DE) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT)–which was renewed by the Democratic House of Representatives in April 2019 but allowed to languish without passage in the Republican Senate with no input from Trump; currently, the Violence Against Women Act has been allowed to lapse by Republicans and Trump.

9:59 pm: Speaker Pelosi gets right to what I want her to talk about: The House of Representatives passed a $3.4 trillion emergency economic and financial relief and stimulus bill, the HEROES Act, in mid-May…and have waited until now, mid-August, for Senate Republicans and Donald Trump to agree to any kind of a relief bill that they can even pass through the Congressional chamber they control. Speaker Pelosi can talk at length about Trump’s and the Republicans’ failure to govern, because the House of Representatives has passed scores of bills on which the Senate has simply failed to act, and for which Donald Trump has doubtlessly been characteristically been grateful for the opportunity to duck the question of whether he would support Progressive but popular legislation.

9:57 pm: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) gets her cue to speak at the same time that her speech is announced by voice-over. It’s not substance, but it’s fair to observe that the transition to a all-remote national party convention still isn’t seamless in its process.

9:52 pm: “Remember: Joe and Kamala can win the Election by 3 million votes and still lose. Take it from me.” –Secretary Clinton

9:48 pm: “…People who voted for Donald Trump asked, ‘What have we got to lose?’ Well, our health care, our jobs, our loved ones, our position in the world…and even our Post Office…” –Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

9:43 pm: Preceding former Secretary of State and 2-time Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s prime time speech is a fittingly long tribute to the many women in the Democratic Party who have risen to extraordinary public stature. The accession of so many women to politics, particularly in the wake of Trump’s grotesque Inauguration to the Presidency in January 2017, has done as much as anything to make the occupants of elected office around the country resemble this country more than they ever have before.

9:36 pm: Following the missive to Trump from the child of a deported mother is an appeal and a call to action from 3 women of different immigration status whose differing situations serve to highlight the irrationality and the cruelty of our slow-moving naturalization system and our increasingly restrictive immigration procedures and standards.

This is followed by a recording of a speech by former President Barack Obama celebrating the experiences, efforts, and contributions of immigrants in America. Of course President Obama set a great example for public service in high office, and stirred the base of the Republican Party into an ongoing frenzy of hate: This commonality of theme isn’t lost when it’s President Obama who is chosen to speak of the immigrant experience in Donald Trump’s America. The Republican Party of Donald Trump, after all, wages war not just against aspiring Americans but against millions of Americans that don’t fit meekly into its impoverished and narrow preconceptions about what an American should look like.

9:32 pm: A daughter of a veteran Marine–a former Trump voter–whose mother was deported to Mexico by Trump reads a letter to Donald Trump, interspersed towards the end with clips of Trump saying of illegal immigrants “I want to get these people out of here,” and “They’re animals!” It’s beyond my comprehension, frankly, how so many millions of Americans can be enthusiastic about the forced family separations and deportations of immigrants with extreme prejudice which seem to be Trump’s point of greatest pride from his time in the Presidency; it’s no easier for me to comprehend how so many millions more Americans can at least seem not to bear such animus towards immigrants in their hearts, but nonetheless care so little about them that they can see these family separations and prejudicial expulsions of so many immigrants who just want to live and peace and have a chance to work, and still support Donald Trump.

9:10 pm: Former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), whose husband, former NASA astronaut Mark Kelly, is currently running for United States Senate, felt that she had to end her political career prematurely after a mass shooter indiscriminately murdered and maimed attendees of one of her public events in January 2011 and critically wounded the Congresswoman. I haven’t seen Congresswoman Giffords give a public address of significant length since she sustained a serious head injury during that mass shooting. Tonight Congresswoman Giffords exhibited the damage that her injury did to her capacity to speak, though it is clear that Congresswoman Giffords knows what she wants to say. The extended speech by a public figure whose present reminds us of such an unpleasant (though in this country not uncommon) episode of mass murder, with no touches to hide the difficulty the former Congresswoman has with speaking, is another example of the consistency with which the 2020 Democratic National Convention has brought many of America’s serious problems to the fore.

Live-Blogging Night 2 of the 2020 Democratic National Convention

Last night, the production quality improved significantly from the start of the prime time block at 9:00 pm to First Lady Michelle Obama’s speech shortly before 11:00 pm. Let’s see if the Convention organizers and contributors hit their stride tonight. Presentation matters; we need to persuade a lot of Americans to support the party that will challenge Donald Trump’s incredibly destructive approach to the Presidency and government. Persuadable people will respond not only to the content of an appeal but also to the craft of it; in much of my observation, people are persuaded more by craft than by content.

10:44 pm: A retrospective of Vice President Biden’s and late Senator John McCain (R-AZ)’s friendship is touching–and like so much of this years Democratic National Convention, it is an implicit rebuke to Trump. Donald Trump just decided at some point that he hated Senator McCain, a storied Republican figure. Trump tried to prevent the lowering of the flag on the White House grounds to half-staff following Senator McCain’s death; the White House arranged to have the U.S.S. John McCain moved in anticipation of Trump’s Japan trip so that our President wouldn’t see it. In Joseph Biden’s case, we see political adversaries treated not only with courtesy but with understanding and the possibility of a real bond; in Donald Trump’s case, a logical ally who won’t immediately do his bidding on command will be the target of his hatred and vindictiveness even after his death.

11:04 pm: “Hi, everyone, I’m Jill Biden’s husband…”

10:50 pm: Jill Biden is Dr. Jill Biden, having earned an Ed.D at age 55. She has been a teacher in various academic settings over the years. We have already had a First Lady who was a teacher; it’s interesting to imagine a First Lady who taught in very different settings and who attained a postgraduate degree past middle age.

10:42 pm: …As if to further corroborate the understanding that a Republican who cares about foreign policy is now a Democrat, former George W. Bush Administration Secretary of State Colin Powell offers an unreserved endorsement of Joe Biden for President. And you thought that the Republicans for Biden all spoke last night…

10:38 pm: Former Republican Nebraska Senator and Obama Secretary of Defense Charles Hagel says that Vice President Biden is ready to be President of the United States based on what he saw of him at foreign policy decision points during the Barack Obama Administration. He also concludes that Trump has “degraded” the international reputation of the United States. He can speak for the many former Republicans who care about United States foreign policy; you could seriously ask whether anyone who is still a Republican could be said to care about foreign policy.

10:35 pm: “Donald Trump inherited a growing economy and a more peaceful world–and like everything else he inherited, he bankrupted it.” –Former Massachusetts Senator and Secretary of State John Kerry

10:23 pm: Vice President Biden speaks by video conference with a diverse set of Americans who had narrow brushes with death due to congenital vascular defects, cancer, or neurological disease and who can attribute their survival to their availability of insurance. One of them was a lifelong Republican who survived throat cancer; another had lymphoma and had to receive her first round of chemotherapy in 2017, while Republicans in Congress were voting on their ill-fated initiative to gut the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010.

Donald Trump is still trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act by way of a ridiculously weak argument that Congress’s zeroing-out of the individual mandate penalty somehow made the Affordable Care Act unconstitutional in the abstract. This argument is on its way to the Supreme Court; while unlikely, if this argument were to prevail at the Supreme Court, tens of millions of Americans will either lose guaranteed health benefits at an affordable out-of-pocket insurance rate or even lose their access to health insurance altogether.

10:20 pm: Vice President Biden briefly accepts the Democratic Party’s nomination for President, then he and his wife Jill put on medical masks! What an interesting phenomenon, that just modeling good behavior in an uncertain time is inherently a challenge to Donald Trump, who makes the times even less certain for everyone and only models bad behavior.

10:16 pm: The parents of Matthew Shephard, a young gay man murdered a generation ago in a brutal religiously-inspired hate crime, cast Wyoming’s delegates for Vice President Biden.

10:13 pm: Vermont Senator and recent Presidential adversary Bernard Sanders stands with the Vermont delegation that casts votes both for his and for Vice President Biden’s Presidential candidacy. Senator Sanders, to his considerable credit, has learned the object lesson of 2016 and gives his support in word and deed to the Biden candidacy.

10:06 pm: “It seems that every time working people believe a promise from Donald Trump, they end up getting screwed…” The Ohio delegation drives home one of the most strategically important messages the Democratic Party can send in 2020: Donald Trump has been a disaster and a joke for the working-class voters who gave him a chance.

10:03 pm: Not all delegations’ representatives for this nominating roll call have utilized this opportunity to the same extent, but some of them–particularly those representing Western States–have taken the occasion to cast their State’s delegates from extraordinary vistas. This really plays-up the merits of remotely casting these votes. I wish that all delegations had cast their votes from an iconic locale within their State; that would have been a memorable moment.

9:54 pm: Former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg announces the cast of the vast majority of Indiana’s delegates’ votes for Vice President Biden. Just seeing Mayor Buttigieg speak for 1 minute makes me hope that he remains engaged, because he brings a certain set of qualities…what are they? Oh, that’s right, it consists of being intelligent, perceptive, honest, and less than middle-aged.

9:48 pm: The Delaware Democratic Nominating Delegation, in the spirit of recusal, passes on casting its delegates for a Democratic Presidential nominee–from the Wilmington Amtrak train station. Haah.

9:40 pm: Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), with all the sanctimony she can muster, doubles-down on both her authentic Leftism and her political irrelevance by reminding us of the evils of colonialism and misogyny before seconding a nomination of Senator Bernard Sanders (I-VT), who has already endorsed Vice President Biden for President and who spoke on his behalf last night.

9:30 pm: Former President Bill Clinton looks old for 73, but he still delivers a speech with extraordinary charisma. He puts his characteristic gift for delivering a message to good use, but in the past President Clinton has had to deliver complicated messages involving matters of policy or to cast the choice between a Democratic candidate and a Republican candidate in stark terms; this time, there is no nuance of policy or of different public personalities to get across, because there is only the dominant narrative to communicate: Donald Trump is abusing the extraordinary office with which he has been entrusted, while Vice President Biden can be trusted to lead that office based upon a record of public service.

Donald Trump flattens everything into general terms. It’s difficult to educate while engaged in political advocacy while Trump is President, because the people who you need to persuade to commit to remove Donald Trump from office have already heard about his failures and his privations. It isn’t clear what else needs to be said; the Democratic Party even has a platform while the Republican Party does not because Trump has made everything about himself.

9:28 pm: Former President Jimmy Carter, at age 95, comes out of a storied retirement to deliver a recorded message in endorsement of Vice President Biden’s Presidential candidacy. It pains me to think of such a well-intentioned public figure having to witness the depravities of a Donald Trump Presidency in his twilight years.

9:22 pm: “America: Donald Trump has quit on you.” Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) contrasts Trump shrugging at over 150,000 Americans dead due to the COVID-19 pandemic on his ostensible watch (over 170,000 Americans dead now, if you want to keep track), saying only “It is what it is,” with the leadership of Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt who felt the weight of their responsibility and who would never say “It is what it is” when it was a question of what they had done or of what they could do now. Senator Kennedy has a long shadow in the Democratic Party, and it falls on the Establishment and on Progressives alike.

9:25 pm: A message from Caroline Kennedy, a former U.S. Ambassador and daughter of President John F. Kennedy, and Jack Schlossberg, her son, continues to be sound politics. The strong analogue these days is not President Kennedy, of course, but the late Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), whose years of service in the United States Senate almost perfectly paralleled Joe Biden’s own.

9:18 pm: Sally Yates, a former United States Deputy Attorney General who was fired by Trump only days after his Inauguration for refusing to do his unethical bidding, speaks about Trump’s unsettling and frequently unlawful consolidation of power, contrasting this to Vice President Joe Biden’s decades-long record of ethical and reliable public service.

There is such loud ambient feedback while the former Deputy Attorney General is speaking that I can already see the Saturday Night Live bit now: A janitor just off to the right while Ms. Yates is speaking, dutifully cleaning the floor with a big vacuum cleaner or maybe even something larger all the while.

9:10 pm: The message is unified and consistent: Joe Biden is a professional who cares about people’s bottom line, who isn’t interested in playing games and who wants to know how people’s material needs can be met. The previous night’s various themes-criminal justice reform and the confrontation of institutionalized facets of racism, protecting and expanding the health care gains of the Affordable Care Act, aggressively fighting the SARS-CoV-2 virus rather than allowing it to run wild around the country with inadequate half-measures, addressing environmental degradation and global warming, and providing greater security for millions of financially vulnerable Americans–are sustained by these various freshmen Democratic officeholders with a deftness of collective delivery that may not be fully appreciated for the discipline it reflects.

9:00 pm: Many of the new (post-Trump Inauguration) generation of Democrats speak in a relay about the perspectives and concerns that inspired them to run for public office all across the country. The clip and the level of emotional engagement is already significantly better than at this point on Night 1.

Live-Blogging Night 1 of the 2020 Democratic National Convention

The 2020 Democratic National Convention opens at an extraordinarily dark time in this country. We’ve elected a President who has an entrepreneurial spirit about encouraging depravity in Americans, the worst pandemic in 100 years rages unchecked, and we face what may be the worst economic crisis we’ve confronted since the 1929 Stock Market Crash. Now, Donald Trump–having already been impeached by the Democratic House of Representatives for illegally withholding Congressionally-appropriated military aid in an attempt to suborn the President of Ukraine to assist in fabricating an investigation into the man who is now the Democratic candidate for President–is overseeing an astonishing contraction of the facilities and services offered by the United States Postal Service in the hope of suppressing enough votes cast by mail in order to get a second term that he must know the American people intend to deny him. It feels like we need to be rid of Donald Trump just so that we can live without a feeling of being continually sickened.

11:00 pm: “We’ve got to vote early–in person, if we can–we’ve got to request our absentee ballots as soon as possible–tonight, if we can–and we’ve got to send them back as fast as we can–and we’ve got to follow-up to make sure they were received…” First Lady Michelle Obama urges total tactical rigor, dexterity, and tenacity as Americans who will vote to remove Donald Trump from office ensure that their votes are cast, delivered, and counted as soon and as surely as possible.

10:58 pm: First Lady Michelle Obama reminds us that Vice President Biden comprehends loss from a succession of harsh experience–watching his father lose his job, losing his wife and his very young daughter in a car accident in late 1972, losing his son Beau (himself a rising star in Delaware politics) to cancer while Vice President.

10:48 pm: “As I’ve said before, being President doesn’t change who you are; it reveals who you are.” First Lady Michelle Obama warns us that a Presidential Election can also reveal who we are. I fully agree; the election and reelection of Barack Obama as President revealed a strength of our typical character–while the reality that in a contest between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a “businessman” who has never been much more than a criminal thug in Donald Trump, Secretary Clinton could get little more than 48% of the nationwide popular vote and Trump could actually get as much as 46% of that popular vote reveals a country that I for one hadn’t realized had catastrophically lost its way.

“Do I still believe that going high can work when the other side is going so low? My answer: Going high is the only thing that works, because when we go low…we just become part of the noise that’s drowning-out everything else…” First Lady Michelle Obama urges Americans to be separate from the cacophony of mean-spiritedness that is disorienting Americans in the midst of multiple emergencies of historic proportion.

10:43 pm: To borrow the immortal words of President Lyndon Johnson, I’m really glad that Senator Sanders is inside the tent pissing out instead of outside of the tent pissing in.

10:40 pm: Senator Sanders graciously (and accurately) supports Joseph Biden as the President who will begin the Progressive policy work that would be needed for the Left to achieve the transformation of America into a fundamentally more humane and equitable country. It isn’t an equivocation; it’s a pragmatic accommodation, and it’s encouraging to see Senator Sanders exhort Progressives to make that pragmatic accommodation.

10:37 pm: “…This election is about protecting our democracy. Under this President, the unthinkable has become normal…” Senator Sanders observes that Trump has tear-gassed peaceful and law-abiding protesters unnecessarily and even insisted that he wouldn’t leave office after his term has ended. Senator Sanders expresses that he takes much of this personally, as he recognizes a prospective authoritarian when he sees him, and in Trump he sees a man who assaults American democracy itself.

Senator Sanders also observes that Trump is so lacking in a sense of accountability that he avoids taking action to protect American lives from an historic contagion: “Nero fiddled while Rome burned; Trump golfs…”

10:35 pm: Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is speaking for Vice President Biden’s candidacy. That warrants a banner itself.

10:33 pm: There is a charming segment about then-Senator Biden commuting on the Amtrak Northeast Corridor trains from Delaware to Washington, DC and back, and getting to know the train crews and the passengers.

Who doesn’t like Amtrak? Even Republicans appreciate Amtrak.

10:23 pm: Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) very tactfully says that she felt assured on the day that she ended her 2020 Democratic Presidential bid, as that was the day that she knew she would endorse Vice President Joe Biden for President. Senator Klobuchar–who was certainly on Vice President Biden’s short list if not on his short short list for a running mate–offers an introduction for each of the other Democrats who ran for President this year–of which there were many.

Several of the former Democratic Presidential hopefuls who speak–Senator Corey Booker (D-NJ), Washington Governor Jay Carney, Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA), Congressman Beto O’Rourke–seem to upstage Vice President Biden a bit in terms of screen presence, but this could be the rare year when Biden’s mildness is reassuring and taken for a token of his authenticity and his genuineness.

What the hell am I saying?! No one believes this; Vice President Biden had better hit a grand slam with his acceptance speech on Thursday night, because we urgently need him to do his part to wake desensitized Americans up.

10:16 pm: Senator Douglas Jones (D-AL) (just look at that extraordinary designation for 21st century politician–“Senator Douglas Jones, Democrat of Alabama”) offers a message that affirms our common humanity.

Douglas Jones has as much right to deliver such a message as anyone. He was the United States Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama who prosecuted the 2 Klu Klux Klan terrorists who murdered 4 children in the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. Senator Jones has had an interesting political career where more than once he has forced Alabamians to reckon with their inherited demons–and prevailed.

10:08 pm: A series of well-known Republican public figures offer their endorsements for Joe Biden for President–Christine Todd Whitman, former Governor of New Jersey and President George W. Bush’s first EPA Director; Meg Whitman, famous tech CEO, former Republican California gubernatorial candidate and donor; Susan Molinari, former Republican Congresswoman from New York City; John Kasich, former Republican Congressman, FOX News personality, and Republican Governor of Ohio. Governor Kasich, of course, was a very serious Republican Presidential prospect in 2016, so for him to speak for Vice President Biden’s Presidential candidacy at this Convention is a significant moral victory for the Biden-Harris ticket.

All deliver a variation of a singular message: I don’t recognize the Republican Party anymore, and I believe that we all know that what Donald Trump is doing is profoundly wrong.

10:03 pm: “Hello, America, I’m Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer–or as Donald Trump likes to call me, ‘that woman from Michigan.'” Governor Whitmer delivers a well-placed message: President Obama and Vice President Biden saved the Detroit automakers and many thousands of jobs in Michigan and throughout the Midwestern States after inheriting the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Our needs will drive their policies, “not politics or ego…” This is the message that has to bind the other messages–racial justice, confronting the SARS-CoV-2 virus as the historic public health emergency it is, contending with the problem of global warming, crafting public policies that encourage the creation of jobs with benefits–specifically, that we need Presidential leadership comported and conducted out of regard for all Americans and for what is supposed to be best for the country rather than for a transitory partisan hit.

9:59 pm: Ugh, rustic music…

9:57 pm: Maine House Speaker Sarah Gideon, a Democrat running for United States Senate, introduces herself and says little more before introducing a country music singer for an interlude. We’ll certainly hear more from her in 2021, after she ends Senator Collins’ political career and assumes a seat in the Senate.

9:50 pm: An Arizona woman gives an account of her father, who trusted Trump’s account in April and May that the worst of the virus was already over, went out to a karaoke bar shortly after Republican Arizona Governor Doug Ducey reopened the State for normal business activity, developed the COVID-19 illness several weeks later, was hospitalized in intensive care and put on a ventilator, and died after 5 days of isolation. She says that before his death, her father said that he felt “betrayed”. This is a story that has played-out many times in this country where millions remain in denial about the seriousness of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and which will play-out many times more this year and at least into early next due to Trump’s scary unwillingness to take responsibility for modeling cautious behavior and attentiveness to public health guidance even though he’s encouraging those who trust him the most to pointlessly endanger their lives.

9:45 pm: “Donald Trump didn’t create the division; the division created Donald Trump–and he made it worse.” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is the right person to deliver a message of Donald Trump’s betrayal of his duty to protect this country due to his constant pursuit of conflict between Americans. Governor Cuomo has consistently conducted himself as the Governor for all New Yorkers rather than the leader of the Democratic base in New York. He proved this most compellingly in the way he personally addressed New Yorkers during the darkest days of New York’s contention with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, in late spring. Many Republicans acknowledged at that time that they trusted what Governor Cuomo had to say about what was known about the virus, and about the seriousness of the problem, and about what could be done to halt its spread and to care for the sick and to care for those who were trapped at home and dispossessed of their livelihoods.

Governor Cuomo has been the best Convention speaker thus far. He can certainly consider himself nationally established now.

9:39 pm: House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) introduces himself, and is then directed by his film crew to start over from the beginning…but we heard and saw Congressman Clyburn loud and clear the first time. You’ve got to tighten this ship, ladies and gentlemen.

Congressman Clyburn has an accent that is a bit thick for those used to “broadcast TV accent,” but he knows how to deliver a speech with a crucial combination of gravitas and lack of pretension.

The predominant theme of racial justice has been gaining a sense of narrative grandeur as it is sustained from speaker to speaker. Congressman Clyburn represents the South Carolina-6th, and can speak with a legitimate partiality to the legacy of African slavery and both institutional and criminal White supremacy on his community and others.

9:26 pm: Philonese Floyd, brother of George Floyd, who was a victim of a very public police homicide that occurred not 3 months ago and changed the face of this country, speaks with a passion that is earnestly needed at this point without the dramatic affirmation of a live audience.

9:24 pm: I feel wrong for focusing so much on cosmetics (the truly petty side of the already-impoverished armchair industry of punditry) but Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington, DC has trouble with her prime time speech. Preparing the Party’s national figures for national exposure should be–someone’s job. No, this isn’t a groundbreaking insight–so why does it feel unaddressed by Night 1 of the Democratic National Convention?

Mayor Bowser’s speech addresses racialized policing, police brutality, and Donald Trump’s deliberate alienation and physical abuse of peaceful protesters, by the way. Few people could bear witness to such pressing problems at a national party convention as authoritatively as the Mayor of Washington, DC in Donald Trump’s America–but I don’t think that the speech itself will receive much substantive attention because the format itself doesn’t lend itself to the gravitas associated with national party conventions.

9:22 pm: One of the many contributors speaking from the comfort of his own home makes an excellent observation: Donald Trump isn’t even running on a platform. The Republicans are so bankrupt of policy ideas at this point (or so afraid of alienating Donald Trump by standing for something besides his momentary convenience) that they haven’t bothered to publish a party platform. This is a good point, and it should be made on Night 1, and the guy bringing this up even speaks well…but without a prepared speech and a suit to sport and a podium on a stage at the center of a stadium or theater full of people…this comes off as less than even a conversation. The fault doesn’t lie with the message or with the messenger; it’s the medium that’s lacking.

9:18 pm: Hmm. Country music. OK, this is going to take some patience.

9:15 pm: The 2020 Democratic National Convention opens with a check-in with 4 Americans from all over. The adolescent girl speaks with more eloquence and self-assurance than the adults.

Live-Blogging the 2018 State of the Union Address

10:18 pm: Trump tells us it was important for him to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.  The Liberal Ironist is having a hard time unseeing a common theme of racial conquest in so many passages of this speech.

10:15 pm: Why is the maintenance of a terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba such a source of concern for either party?  Do Republicans really think that suspected terrorists can’t be as securely held or as effectively interrogated anywhere else?  Do Democrats really think that detainees will only have their rights at risk in military confinement at Guantanamo Bay, or that a detention facility there can’t be well-run or legitimate?

10:07 pm: Trump Russia and China competitors that challenge our values (as surprisingly measured a criticism of China as it is frank about Russia).  Trump calls for ending sequestration’s caps on Defense spending.  Congress certainly should end the spending caps on Defense, but it should end the spending caps on non-defense Federal programs as well; they wouldn’t raise Federal spending much, and Trump has never really contended with what so many of those artificially-constrained programs do for Americans.

10:03 pm: Trump talks about opiate addiction.  His most-animated line, of course, is for punishing drug dealers–as if this were a new or controversial approach.  There isn’t discussion of much else, given Trump’s voiced certitude that we can fix the opiate-abuse epidemic.  Trump can make the Liberal Ironist miss even George W. Bush.

10:00 pm: Trump calls-out “chain migration” to the United States for special criticism, saying that immigrants shouldn’t be able to sponsor anyone outside of their nuclear family for lawful immigration to the United States: Boos from the chamber.  I don’t think Trump’s immigration “compromise” has good prospects in either chamber of Congress.

9:58 pm: Trump proffers his “compromise” immigration proposal that was recently estimated to propose reducing legal immigration to the United States by as much as 44% on a yearly basis; Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) frowns and shakes her head.

9:55 pm: Trump acknowledges ICE Agent Celestino Martinez for his role in anti-gang operations.  Trump affirms ICE’s work in deporting “thousands and thousands and thousands” of gang members.

I guess no one has succeeded in explaining to Trump that deported gang members reenter the United States easily (and no, they don’t have to walk across the Southern Border to reenter the country unnoticed).

9:48 pm: Trump gets boos (as he should) for decrying illegal immigration by focusing on a pair of minors murdered by MS-13 gang members.  (I guess Trump thinks that American minors have never been killed by gang members who were native-born Americans, which would be an odd belief.)

9:47 pm: Trump gives his support to paid family leave.  Here’s a rare example of a simple proposal that Trump hasn’t found a way to completely ruin yet.

9:46 pm: Trump promises a $1.5 trillion infrastructure plan.  He doesn’t say that the Federal Government is only going to put-up $200 billion for this plan, and that…someone else is supposed to pay the other $1.3 trillion for new infrastructure construction.  I won’t spare more words on such hooey; show us the money.

We want the money, Lebowski!

9:44 pm: Trump laments, as he should, that it can take 10 years to approve the building of a road in America today.

PROVIDE MORE FEDERAL FUNDING FOR INFRASTRUCTURE.  YOU CAN’T CUT BACK ON FUNDING!

9:42 pm: Trump promises to lower prescription drug prices in the United States.  No discussion of how it would be done; Congress is going to figure it out.

9:38 pm: Trump approaches a few favorable siting decisions by manufacturers, including auto manufacturers, in the South and the Midwest as evidence that the trend  towards deindustrialization in the American heartland is being reversed.  Does this mean that Wal*Mart’s decision to close 63 Sam’s Club stores is ravaging American retail employment?

9:33 pm: Trump ticks off a lot of Culture War bullshit: Support the police without qualification; stand for the National Anthem (both of are just a cynical code for swipes at the Black Lives Matter movement); “we’re appointing judges that apply the law” ( he just means Originalists, and the cameras cut to a remarkably stoic Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch); and finally, an invocation of “religious freedom” which would be fine if it weren’t largely cover for Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ campaign to allow employers to deny their female employees access to contraceptives and to fire their gay employees on the pretext of their religion.

Attorney General Sessions must have watched Philadelphia and felt terrible for the old homophobic partners at that law firm given how they were treated by the justice system…

9:30 pm: Trump makes a shout-out to the young boy Preston Sharp, who started a nationwide campaign to plant flags and flowers on veterans’ graves for Veterans’ Day.

9:29 pm: Trump peaches unity among Americans by loudly intoning “IN GOD WE TRUST” into his microphone.

9:24 pm: Trump notes that under the Republican tax cut bill, owners of their own businesses (“pass-through” entities) cam now deduct 20% of their total income, and that is a real stimulus to small businesses in this country–but like nearly all individual tax relief in the Republican tax cut bill, that measure is temporary while the corporate tax cuts are permanent.

9:23 pm: Trump celebrates the zeroing-out of the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate penalty as the removal of a “cruel” tax cut that punished Americans making under $50,000 a year.  Those Americans could obtain subsidized health insurance; now the cost of insurance premiums on the individual market risks rising, and many Americans, due to vague information or disinformation, may not realize that the benefits provided by the Affordable Care Act remain the law of the land because Republicans couldn’t get their limited-government hatchet job done.

9:20 pm: “We have enacted the biggest tax cuts, and reforms, in history.”  Those claims are both false; 1986 constituted a more radical tax reform, and even President Obama oversaw a more-significant and broad-based tax cut than the Republicans’ in 2017.

9:18 pm: Trump focuses on the one substantive claim he can currently make in his favor: He hasn’t upset the longest economic recovery in history, yet.

9:15 pm: Trump starts with a safe minimal consensus: It was a bad thing when House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-LA) was shot during the Republican practice for the Congressional baseball game, it was some fine work by the Capital Police that saved him and other members of Congress from their attacker, and we should try to achieve comity at other times besides moments of tragedy and crisis.

9:14 pm: Trump stiffly white-knuckling the delivery of a speech in which he says nice things about many people and (thus far) broadcasts enmity towards none, like a non-practicing alcoholic.

9:11 pm: “A new tide of optimism was already sweeping across our great land…”  Yes, that was optimism that Trump would stop spreading gratuitous falsehoods about Inauguration crowd sizes and millions of “illegal immigrants” voting; a year later, such wishful thinking has disappeared.

9:08 pm: The Democratic side of the aisle stands for Trump, but does not clap for him…Oh, there’s Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), who represents one of Trump’s best States, clapping a little bit.

9:06 pm: Ah, there he is.

9:02 pm: What a strange Cabinet.  We’re lucky that General James Mattis is the Secretary of Defense and General H.R. McMaster is the National Security Advisor, but the Liberal Ironist notes a certain absence-of-mind in Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, with their storied lack of professional experience in those high appointed positions, walking down the aisle into the House Chamber almost abreast.

Live-Blogging the Third 2016 Presidential Debate

This is it–by which I don’t mean “It all comes down to this,” but rather, “You’re already looking at the election, folks: An increasingly-surreal, indeed improbable succession of humiliations for Donald Trump as he is revealed to be an even more depraved human being than all but the most-creative of us had imagined.”  (Maybe this is why Stephen King of all people seems to be horrified that millions of people have already supported Donald Trump for President.)  I know I could draw the wrath of…Whatever from High Atop the Thing, but after those 4 days that shook the world that opened on a Friday with the release of a 2005 hot mic video in which Trump bragged about being able to force himself on women, which featured an alternately tense and morally-obscene Second Debate performance on a Sunday and closed on a Monday with Trump threatening to turn his voters against elected Republicans who didn’t support him, tonight’s final Debate of the 2016 Presidential Election is more likely to serve as an effective public flogging than as a source of edification for the voting public…Oh, and there’s the dozen women who have accused Donald Trump of forcing himself of them over the years, often with details.  Don’t worry; the Christian Right will vote for him.

10:28 pm: The last question is about the national debt, “which hasn’t been asked about before tonight,” Chris Wallace notes in an aside.

Secretary Clinton promises to “go where the money is”–to raise taxes on the rich.  Trump proposes a large upper-income tax cut, which Secretary Clinton notes would greatly contribute to the national debt.

Trump calls the Affordable Care Act a big contributor to the national debt; Secretary Clinton clarifies that the Affordable Care Act cut Medicare spending, and that repealing the Affordable Care Act would compound Medicare’s structural budgetary insolvency.

10:19 pm: FOX News moderator Chris Wallace refers to Trump’s previous Debate comment that “Aleppo has fallen” to the Assad Regime; Wallace corrects Trump, noting that Aleppo is divided between the Assad Regime and many Syrian rebel factions and still very hotly-contested.

I think Chris Wallace might be the agent of an Establishment Republican stealth operation to undermine Trump on front of this election’s last truly national audience.

10:05 pm: Again, Trump has his “Colonel Jessup, did you order the code red?” moment, acknowledging that he doesn’t pay Federal income tax due to extremely favorable Federal tax treatment of real estate tax returns.  Secretary Clinton gets off what is likely to be the zinger of the night: “Half of illegal immigrants pay Federal income taxes–which means that half of illegal immigrants pay more Federal income tax than a billionaire!”

9:55 pm: Secretary Clinton speaks eloquently on the abuse that women–all women–have had to confront from bad-mannered men.  She speaks with rare fervor for this debate and manages to narrate the subject of Trump’s alleged mistreatment of women entirely in her favor…if that were necessary.

9:52 pm: Trump categorically denies that he groped any of his dozen accusers.  He suggests that they are paid agents of the Clinton campaign…and then accuses President Obama and Secretary Clinton of paying agents provocateurs to start violence at his rallies!  He even comes up with uncorroborated details.  That’s an odd claim to just toss out in the middle of the Debate.

9:40 pm: Trump actually defends his loose talk of mid-summer that the United States’ wealthier allies should pay more for their own defense; it’s really a terrible and potentially-damaging argument.  If Trump actually won the election he would walk into a diplomatic quagmire as he promised–publicly–to compel our many allies to carry their weight in the common defense.

9:30 pm: A friend watching the Debate notes that, while Secretary Clinton leans too hard on concerns about apparent Russian governments, and Trump actually misses an opportunity to criticize Clinton for sounding like a conspiracy theorist.  Clinton makes the best of her misstep by focusing on Russian aggression, a subject where Trump is very weak with the hawks in his own party.

9:23 pm: Secretary Clinton goes in hard against Donald Trump on immigration: She notes that Trump’s combination of a proposed “deportation force” and zero-tolerance policy towards illegal immigrants, along with fringe proposals to rescind birthright citizenship would precede the deportation of 15 million people from the United States.  Trump just flubs this subject completely: This is not the right venue to warn us that America is being “overrun.”

9:20 pm: Trump equates illegal immigration with heroin-smuggling in New Hampshire.  This is difficult to comment on, people.

9:15 pm: Oh, that’s interesting: Trump answers a question on abortion by referring to “partial-birth” abortion as “rip(ping) the baby out of the womb.”  Clinton refers to this as “empty rhetoric”; she should have called it “hyperbolic violent imagery.”

9:12 pm: Clinton and Trump both affirm that they take the Second Amendment seriously.

9:05 pm: The first question is about the Supreme Court: The next President will likely appoint 2, maybe 3 Supreme Court Justices.  What kind of judges will you appoint, and how will this reflect your views on the Constitution?

Clinton and Trump both give safe answers: Clinton focuses on judicial principle, while Trump mentions having a list of candidate appointees and a Pro-Life judicial litmus test.

Live-Blogging the Second 2016 Presidential Debate

Well, this was promising to be a make-or-break moment for Donald Trump before Friday’s revelation of a 2005 hot mic video of the Republican Presidential candidate bragging to Billy Bush about being able to grope women because he’s a celebrity.  Now that we have heard from the Donald that he intends to make an issue of the former President Clinton’s affairs, I think this is a break-or-break moment for Trump.

10:30 pm: To make his case for trade protection, Trump says that China is dumping steel in the United States to put American steel companies out of business; Secretary Clinton says that Trump has bought that steel himself to build his buildings.  That’s a relatively mild takedown of Trump tonight, and Trump lets it go unanswered.

10:11 pm: “Why can’t we do something secretly, where we knock-out their leadership?”
–Donald Trump

You mean like when President Obama and Secretary Clinton oversaw the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011? What were you doing around that time, Donald?

9:54 pm: I’m sorry, I can hardly do this because I can’t focus on what’s being said.  Donald Trump has rambled through a number of responses.  I think the most-unbelievable was when he was asked what he would do about Islamophobia due to fears of terrorism and religious bigotry.  In response, Trump said that Muslims need to do more to report on what other Muslims are doing.  He also averred, when asked, on whether he would ban Muslims from entering the United States as he had previously promised, that it would simply be necessary to subject them to “extreme vetting.”  Secretary Clinton expresses horror at the idea of an ideological test for suspect populations trying to enter the United States.  Live by the bigotry, die by the bigotry.

9:25 pm: Trump gets the first (though weakest) applause of the night by asserting that Secretary Clinton is glad that he isn’t President because she would be in jail.  In response to this, Anderson Cooper asks the audience not to applaud.  “You’re just wasting time.”  Take that, undecided voters!

9:20 pm: Donald Trump just threatened to use the Department of Justice against Secretary Clinton of he became President.  He just threatened to appoint a special prosecutor to go after his politics opponent.  “A vote for Donald Trump is a vote for an arbitrarily-prosecutorial government.”  What a catastrophe this debate is for him.

9:16 pm: Donald Trump brings up President Clinton’s affairs and accuses Secretary Clinton of vilifying the womem he had affairs with.  Clinton responds with, “When they go low, you go high.”  She brilliantly moves on to Trump’s vicious comments about racial and religious minorities, saying that this is about the way Donald Trump bullies anyone who he considers vulnerable.

9:09 pm: This is a town hall debate: Undecided voters ask their questions.  Anderson Cooper asks the second question, regarding the creepy boasts he made about groping women.  Cooper asks Trump if he has actually sexually assaulted women.  Donald Trump doesn’t actually answer the question.  We just saw the election decided, just now.

9:00 pm: (A friend watching the debate stage before the candidates come out): “Anderson Cooper always looks disgusted.”