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gordonwilliamsweb · 3 years

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A Covid Test Costing More Than a Tesla? It Happened in Texas.

When covid-19 struck last year, Travis Warner’s company became busier than ever. He installs internet and video systems, and with people suddenly working from home, service calls surged.

He and his employees took precautions like wearing masks and physically distancing, but visiting clients’ homes daily meant a high risk of covid exposure.

“It was just like dodging bullets every week,” Warner said.

In June 2020, an employee tested positive. That sent Warner and his wife on their own hunt for a test.

Because of limited testing availability at the time, they drove 30 minutes from their home in Dallas to a free-standing emergency room in Lewisville, Texas. They received PCR diagnostic tests and rapid antigen tests.

When all their results came back negative, it was a huge relief, Warner said. He eagerly got back to work.

Then the bill came.

The Patient: Travis Warner, 36, is self-employed and bought coverage from Molina Healthcare off the insurance marketplace.

Medical Service: Two covid tests: a diagnostic PCR test, which typically takes a few days to process and is quite accurate, and a rapid antigen test, which is less accurate but produces results in minutes.

Total Bill: $56,384, including $54,000 for the PCR test and the balance for the antigen test and an ER facility fee. Molina’s negotiated rate for both tests and the facility fee totaled $16,915.20, which the insurer paid in full.

Service Provider: SignatureCare Emergency Center in Lewisville, one of more than a dozen free-standing ERs the company owns across Texas.

What Gives: Throughout the pandemic, stories of shockingly high prices for covid tests have abounded. A recent report from an insurance trade association noted that “price gouging by certain providers continues to be a widespread problem.”

But Warner’s PCR bill of $54,000 is nearly eight times the most notable charge previously reported, at $7,000 — and his insurer paid more than double that highest reported charge. Health policy experts KHN interviewed called Warner’s bill “astronomical” and “one of the most egregious” they’d seen.

Yet it’s perfectly legal. For covid tests — like much else in American health care — there is no cap to what providers can charge, said Loren Adler, associate director of the USC-Brookings Schaeffer Initiative for Health Policy.

Covid testing has been in a special category, however. When the pandemic hit, lawmakers worried people might avoid necessary testing for fear of the cost. So they passed bills that required insurers to pay for covid tests without copays or cost sharing for the patient.

For in-network providers, insurers can negotiate prices for the tests, and for out-of-network providers, they’re generally required to pay whatever price the providers list publicly on their websites. The free-standing ER was out of network for Warner’s plan.

While the policy was intended to help patients, health experts say, it has unintentionally given providers leeway to charge arbitrary, sometimes absurd prices, knowing that insurers are required to pay and that patients, who won’t be billed, are unlikely to complain.

“People are going to charge what they think they can get away with,” said Niall Brennan, president and CEO of the Health Care Cost Institute, a nonprofit that studies health care prices. “Even a perfectly well-intentioned provision like this can be hijacked by certain unscrupulous providers for nefarious purposes.”

A report from KFF published earlier this year found that hospital charges for covid tests ranged from $20 to $1,419, not including physician or facility fees, which can often be higher than the cost of the tests themselves. About half the test charges were below $200, the report noted, but 1 in 5 were over $300.

“We observed a broad range of COVID-19 testing prices, even within the same hospital system,” the authors wrote.

Realistically, the cost of a covid test should be in the double digits, Brennan said. “Low triple digits if we’re being generous.”

Medicare pays $100 for a test, and at-home tests are sold for as little as $24 for an antigen test or $119 for a PCR test.

Warner’s charges were fully covered by his insurance.

But insurance policy premiums reflect how much is paid to providers. “If the insurance company is paying astronomical sums of money for your care, that means in turn that you are going to be paying higher premiums,” Adler said.

Taxpayers, who subsidize marketplace insurance plans, also face a greater burden when premiums increase. Even those with employer-sponsored health coverage feel the pain. Research shows that each increase of $1 in an employer’s health costs is associated with a 52-cent cut to an employee’s overall compensation.

Even before the pandemic, wide variability in the prices for common procedures like cesarean sections and blood tests had been driving up the cost of health care, Brennan said. These discrepancies “happen every single day, millions of times a day.”

Resolution: When Warner saw that his insurance company had paid the bill, he first thought: “At least I’m not liable for anything.”

But the absurdity of the $54,000 charge gnawed at him. His wife, who’d received the same tests the same day at the same place, was billed $2,000. She has a separate insurance policy, which settled the claim for less than $1,000.

Warner called his insurer to see if someone could explain the charge. After a game of phone tag with the ER and the ER’s billing firm, and several months of waiting, Warner received another letter from his insurer. It said they’d audited the claim and taken back the money they had paid the ER.

In a statement to KHN, a spokesperson for Molina Healthcare wrote, “This matter was a provider billing error which Molina identified and corrected.”

SignatureCare Emergency Centers, which issued the $54,000 charge, said it would not comment on a specific patient’s bill. However, in a statement, it said its billing error rate is less than 2% and that it has a “robust audit process” to flag errors. At the height of the pandemic, SignatureCare ERs faced “unprecedented demands” and processed thousands of records a day, the company said.

SignatureCare’s website now lists the charge for covid tests as $175.

The Takeaway: Covid testing should be free to consumers during the public health emergency (currently extended through mid-October, and likely to be renewed for an additional 90 days). Warner did his insurer a big favor by looking carefully at his bill, even though he didn’t owe anything.

Insurers are supposed to have systems that flag billing errors and prevent overpayment. This includes authorization requirements before services are rendered and audits after claims are filed.

But “there’s a question of how well they work,” Adler said. “In this case, it’s lucky [Warner] noticed.”

At least one estimate says 3% to 10% of health care spending in the U.S. is lost to overpayment, including cases of fraud, waste and abuse.

Unfortunately, that means the onus is often on the patient.

You should always read your bill carefully, experts say. If the cost seems inappropriate, call your insurer and ask them to double-check and explain it to you.

It’s not your job, experts agree, but in the long run, fewer overpayments will save money for you and others in the American health care system.

Bill of the Month is a crowdsourced investigation by KHN and NPR that dissects and explains medical bills. Do you have an interesting medical bill you want to share with us? Tell us about it!

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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This story can be republished for free (details).

A Covid Test Costing More Than a Tesla? It Happened in Texas. published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

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stephenmccull · 3 years

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A Covid Test Costing More Than a Tesla? It Happened in Texas.

When covid-19 struck last year, Travis Warner’s company became busier than ever. He installs internet and video systems, and with people suddenly working from home, service calls surged.

He and his employees took precautions like wearing masks and physically distancing, but visiting clients’ homes daily meant a high risk of covid exposure.

“It was just like dodging bullets every week,” Warner said.

In June 2020, an employee tested positive. That sent Warner and his wife on their own hunt for a test.

When all their results came back negative, it was a huge relief, Warner said. He eagerly got back to work.

Then the bill came.

The Patient: Travis Warner, 36, is self-employed and bought coverage from Molina Healthcare off the insurance marketplace.

Service Provider: SignatureCare Emergency Center in Lewisville, one of more than a dozen free-standing ERs the company owns across Texas.

“We observed a broad range of COVID-19 testing prices, even within the same hospital system,” the authors wrote.

Realistically, the cost of a covid test should be in the double digits, Brennan said. “Low triple digits if we’re being generous.”

Medicare pays $100 for a test, and at-home tests are sold for as little as $24 for an antigen test or $119 for a PCR test.

Warner’s charges were fully covered by his insurance.

Resolution: When Warner saw that his insurance company had paid the bill, he first thought: “At least I’m not liable for anything.”

In a statement to KHN, a spokesperson for Molina Healthcare wrote, “This matter was a provider billing error which Molina identified and corrected.”

SignatureCare’s website now lists the charge for covid tests as $175.

Insurers are supposed to have systems that flag billing errors and prevent overpayment. This includes authorization requirements before services are rendered and audits after claims are filed.

But “there’s a question of how well they work,” Adler said. “In this case, it’s lucky [Warner] noticed.”

At least one estimate says 3% to 10% of health care spending in the U.S. is lost to overpayment, including cases of fraud, waste and abuse.

Unfortunately, that means the onus is often on the patient.

You should always read your bill carefully, experts say. If the cost seems inappropriate, call your insurer and ask them to double-check and explain it to you.

It’s not your job, experts agree, but in the long run, fewer overpayments will save money for you and others in the American health care system.

Bill of the Month is a crowdsourced investigation by KHN and NPR that dissects and explains medical bills. Do you have an interesting medical bill you want to share with us? Tell us about it!

USE OUR CONTENT

This story can be republished for free (details).

A Covid Test Costing More Than a Tesla? It Happened in Texas. published first on https://smartdrinkingweb.weebly.com/

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patriotsnet · 3 years

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Why Republicans Are Wrong About Everything

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-republicans-are-wrong-about-everything/

Why Republicans Are Wrong About Everything

Why So Many Republicans Cling To Trump

Saagar Enjeti: Trump, GOP, On Wrong Side Of EVERYTHING Since Coronavirus Began

Ben Shapiro got part of it right. A toxic mix of status anxiety, persecution fears, and echoes of the Civil War helps explain why they follow Trump into the abyss.

On September 17, 1862, over 10,000 Confederate soldiers were killed, wounded, or went missing in a single day at the Battle of Antietam. Very few of them came from slave-owning families, so why did they agree to give their lives in defense of human bondage?

I was reminded of this question when I noticed that Politico Playbook had recruited conservative celebrity and author Ben Shapiro;to explain why the vast majority of House Republicans voted not to impeach President Trump on Wednesday for sending a murderous mob after them on January 6. Politico was slammed by liberals for opening its best-known section to a conservative whos been charged with being bigoted and intolerant. But Shapiros explanation of the rallying around Trump during his final days wasnt totally off base. He was on to something about how Republicans see the world.

With Trump leaving office within a week, defending his incitement of an insurrection doesnt seem to be in the long-term self-interest of Republican officeholders.;But the Civil War example helps explain why people sometimes do very self-destructive things out of spite or insecurity.

White supremacy was such a consensus view at the time that Lincoln felt compelled to defend it.

Like the rebels at Antietam, no one wants to die for nothing.

Support Nonprofit Journalism

Why Are Republicans So Mean

Let’s state right off-the-bat that conservatives indeed have much to offer. In fact, the very notion of conservatism itself keeps us grounded in tradition and prevents our society from spinning into the chaos of constant flux that would surely result if we were to impetuously pursue every new liberal idea to spring forth from our fertile minds. And conservatives admirably believe in America, established order, family, freedom, and success. This all sounds wonderful.

But when it comes to other people who happen to be different from the establishment, Republicans seem to be downright mean and nasty.

We are constantly reminded of the meanness of Republicans over and over again. One recent example is evident in the xenophobic remarks of the Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, who recently referred to Mexican and other immigrants as rapists and murderers.

Basic common sense, however, tells us that human beings are not any more or less violent based upon where on a map they happened to have been born. And the evidence in studies bears this out as well by indicating that immigrants are no more likely to be violent than members of the overall population. Makes sense.

But Republicans seem to harbor some sort of a fear of foreigners and an aversion against other kinds of people who are not part of the established in-group. Their view seems to be that these other people are not like us, they pose a threat to us , and thus automatically they should be regarded as enemies.

There Arent Real Forces Within The Gop Leading Change

There is some appetite for change within the GOP. In those 2024 polls, at least a third of Republicans either were supporting a GOP presidential candidate other than Trump or were undecided.;

In YouGov Blues polling, only about 40 percent of Republicans identified themselves as Trump Republicans. A recent survey from Fabrizio, Lee and Associates, a GOP-leaning firm that worked on Trumps presidential campaigns, found that about 40 percent of Republican voters didnt want Trump to continue to be a leader in the party. Those numbers dont necessarily mean that those voters want the GOP to change drastically. But there is a substantial number of Trump-skeptical/ready-to-move-on-from-Trump Republican voters. But that sentiment isnt really showing up in the Republican Partys actions during the last three months basically everything GOP officials in states and in Washington are doing lines up with the Trumpian approach. So what gives?;

related:Why The Recent Violence Against Asian Americans May Solidify Their Support Of Democrats Read more. »

It is hard to see Republicans changing course, even if a meaningful minority of voters in the party wants changes, without some elite institutions and powerful people in the party pushing a new vision. And its hard to see real anti-Trumpism forces emerging in the GOP right now.;

Don’t Miss: Republican Flag Pins

Reality Check : Biden Cant Be Fdr

Theres no question that Biden is swinging for the fences. Beyond the emerging bipartisan infrastructure bill, he has proposed a far-reaching series of programs that would collectively move the United States several steps closer to the kind of social democracy prevalent in most industrialized nations: free community college, big support for childcare and homebound seniors, a sharp increase in Medicaid, more people eligible for Medicare, a reinvigorated labor movement. It is why 100 days into the administration, NPR was asking a commonly heard question: Can Biden Join FDR and LBJ In The Democratic Party’s Pantheon?

But the FDR and LBJ examples show conclusively why visions of a transformational Biden agenda are so hard to turn into reality. In 1933, FDR had won a huge popular and electoral landslide, after which he had a three-to-one Democratic majority in the House and a 59-vote majority in the Senate. Similarly, LBJ in 1964 had won a massive popular and electoral vote landslide, along with a Senate with 69 Democrats and a House with 295. Last November, on the other hand, only 42,000 votes in three key states kept Trump from winning re-election. Democrats losses in the House whittled their margin down to mid-single digits. The Senate is 50-50.

Most Republicans Said That President Obama Should Be Impeached Because Of The 2012 Attack On The Us Consulate In Benghazi

Their own investigations, however, proved them wrong. Every Congressional inquiry, including those by the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee, concluded that the Obama administration did nothing wrong regarding Benghazi, that there was no stand down order given, and that neither the President nor anyone in his administration lied about it. Each and every Republican investigation has reached this same conclusion, but Republicans continue to exploit this tragedy for political gain.

You May Like: How Long Has Trump Been In Politics

Nominating Mitt Romney For President

Despite the failure to grab the Senate, the GOP was still riding strong anti-Obamacare sentiment and voter frustration over the slow recovery from the Great Recession. Much of this was fueled by the Tea Party movement, which added a rare Republican grassroots element to the GOP.

When you think about it now, all of that made former Mitt Romney an extremely odd choice for the Republican nomination for president in 2012. He embodied the establishment GOP in almost every way. Romney had years as a hedge fund manager at Bain Capital on his resume at a time when most Americans were still blaming Wall Street for the nation’s economic woes. Worst of all, his universal health coverage plan enacted while he was governor of Massachusetts looked eerily like Obamacare. In fact, “Romneycare” was seen as one of the models the crafters of the Affordable Care Act used when they wrote the law. If the GOP wanted to put up a candidate who invigorated its anti-Obamacare and increasingly anti-establishment base, they couldn’t have missed the mark much more than they did with Mitt Romney.

Bidens Bill Is More Popular

We live in the middle of an era of tremendous polarization, yet Joe Bidens American Rescue Plan is shockingly popular. Its one of the most popular, least polarizing pieces of legislation in recent memory. According to a recent Politico/Morning Consultpoll, 76 percent of voters support Bidens plan, including a majority of Republicans.

Its worth noting that most polls show that 70 percent or so of Republicans believe Joe Biden is an illegitimate president. Therefore, a large segment of people who think Biden stole the election also supports his COVID and economic recovery plans.

Obamas Recovery Act was never this popular. A January 2009 Gallup poll found that the public favored Obamas plan 52 percent to 38 percent.

These are good numbers but nowhere near the sky-high popularity of the Biden plan. At the time of this poll, Obamas approval rating was hovering around 70 percent. Bidens plan is more popular than he is Bidens job approval is 52.8 per FiveThirtyEight. That disparity is evidence of Bidens COVID plan’s political durability and the dangerous game Republicans are playing by opposing it. People who dont like Biden but like his plan are the exact people who the Republicans need to win over to take back Congress.

Read Also: How Many States Are Controlled By Republicans

Times Republicans Were Wrong

It’s no secret that politicians tend to use exaggerated political rhetoric to get people to vote for them. In recent decades, Republicans have repeatedly made very ominous predictions about the horrors that will result from Democratic policies while painting a rosy picture of what will result from Republican policies. Now we have the luxury of looking back over the years to examine those predictions and policies. Below, you will find twenty-one examples of times Republicans were blatantly wrong.

Taking The Perspective Of Others Proved To Be Really Hard

Why both Democrats and Republicans are wrong on inflation

The divide in the United States is wide, and one indication of that is how difficult our question proved for many thoughtful citizens. A 77-year-old Republican woman from Pennsylvania was typical of the voters who struggled with this question, telling us, This is really hard for me to even try to think like a devilcrat!, I am sorry but I in all honesty cannot answer this question. I cannot even wrap my mind around any reason they would be good for this country.

Similarly, a 53-year-old Republican from Virginia said, I honestly cannot even pretend to be a Democrat and try to come up with anything positive at all, but, I guess they would vote Democrat because they are illegal immigrants and they are promised many benefits to voting for that party. Also, just to follow what others are doing. And third would be just because they hate Trump so much. The picture she paints of the typical Democratic voter being an immigrant, who goes along with their party or simply hates Trump will seem like a strange caricature to most Democratic voters. But her answer seems to lack the animus of many.;;

Democrats struggled just as much as Republicans. A 33-year-old woman from California told said, i really am going to have a hard time doing this but then offered that Republicans are morally right as in values, going to protect us from terrorest and immigrants, going to create jobs.

Don’t Miss: What Color Ties Do Republicans Wear

Reality Check #: The Electoral College And The Senate Are Profoundly Undemocraticand Were Stuck With Them

Because the Constitution set up a state-by-state system for picking presidents, the massive Democratic majorities we now see in California and New York often mislead us about the partys national electoral prospects. In 2016, Hillary Clintons 3-million-vote plurality came entirely from California. In 2020, Bidens 7-million-vote edge came entirely from California and New York. These are largely what election experts call wasted votesDemocratic votes that dont, ultimately, help the Democrat to win. That imbalance explains why Trump won the Electoral College in 2016 and came within a handful of votes in three states from doing the same last November, despite his decisive popular-vote losses.

The response from aggrieved Democrats? Abolish the Electoral College! In practice, theyd need to get two-thirds of the House and Senate, and three-fourths of the state legislatures, to ditch the process that gives Republicans their only plausible chance these days to win the White House. Shortly after the 2016 election, Gallup found that Republican support for abolishing the electoral college had dropped to 19 percent. The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, a state-by-state scheme to effectively abolish the Electoral College without changing the Constitution, hasnt seen support from a single red or purple state.

Surrendering Before The Battle

The midterm elections of 2014 gave the Republicans control of the Senate that they should have won in 2010. But even before the new members took their oaths of office, then-Senate Majority Leader-elect Mitch McConnell promised never to trigger a government shutdown. That effectively took the sharpest arrow out of the GOP’s congressional quiver, and again relieved the greatest pressure the Republicans could have exercised against Obama.

Don’t Miss: Did Donald Trump Say Republicans Are The Dumbest Group Of Voters

Unified Republican Opposition To Obama’s Policies Helped Them Retake Congress In 2010 Here’s Why It May Not Work Again

When the House of Representatives passed President Bidens COVID-relief plan last weekend, every single Republican voted against it. Earlier this week, Senator John Thune, Mitch McConnells deputy, predicted that every Republican Senator would vote against the Biden plan. Thunes reasoning was typically cynical. He said the Republicans wanted to:

make the Democrats own a piece of legislation that I think is going to have long-term adverse consequences.

This was the latest example of Republicans saying the quiet part out loud. Thune is admitting they are making a bet that the Biden plan wont work, and Republicans can reap the political rewards of a sub-standard economy in 2022. This is the same bet the Republicans made in 2009 when they decided to oppose Barack Obamas efforts to address the financial crisis.

Politically, the 2009 bet paid off. The Republicans rode a wave of economic discontent to control of the House and a massive set of wins down-ballot that would impact politics for more than a decade. But just because it worked then doesnt mean it will work now. The Republicans may be making a massive miscalculation by re-fighting the last war.

Republicans Said President Obama Would Raise Taxes Sky High

It never happened. Income taxes for over 95% of Americans remained the same or lower than they were before Obama was elected. The only people whose income taxes increased were those who make more than $400,000 per year, and their taxes rose only 3%. For most Americans, taxes are still lower now than they were under Reagan.

Read Also: Trump Quote In People Magazine 1998

Blowing The Midterm Elections

The 2008 elections gave Barack Obama a clear win in the presidential election and the Democrats a filibuster-proof supermajority in Congress. They proceeded to spend that political capital almost entirely on passing Obamacare in a lengthy process that included a number of unusual compromises with their own party members, like the “Cornhusker Kickback” and controversial legislative tricks like the “deemed as passed” maneuver. All of this took place even as the Affordable Care Act failed to gain majority support in the polls.

That set the stage for a strong Republican advantage going into the 2010 midterm elections. On paper, the GOP did score a resounding victory, picking up 63 seats in the House of Representatives and a net gain of six seats in the Senate.

But Republicans blew a solid chance to retake the Senate. They put up weak candidates in several winnable races. They included Sharon Angle in Nevada, who was seen as too radical and managed to lose to then-incumbent Harry Reid despite his very weak approval ratings in his home state. Arch-abortion opponent Ken Buck won the GOP nomination in Colorado, . The biggest mistake of all was Christine O’Donnell in Delaware. O’Donnell lost after she became infamous for her revelation that she had once experimented with witchcraft.

As a result, the Democrats kept control of the Senate and the Republicans lost a chance to force Obama into what could have been a series of advantageous compromises over the next six years.

The Gop Is A Grave Threat To American Democracy

Unless and until Republicans summon the wit and the will to salvage the party, ruin will follow.

About the author: Peter Wehner is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He writes widely on political, cultural, religious, and national-security issues, and he is the author of The Death of Politics: How to Heal Our Frayed Republic After Trump.

The hope of many conservative critics of Donald Trump was that soon after his defeat, and especially in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection, the Republican Party would snap back into its former shape. The Trump presidency would end up being no more than an ugly parenthesis. The GOP would distance itself from Trump and Trumpism, and become a normal party once again.

But that dream soon died. The Trump presidency might have been the first act in a longer and even darker political drama, in which the Republican Party is becoming more radicalized. How long this will last is an open question; whether it is happening is not.

To better grasp whats happening among 2020 Trump voters, I spoke with Sarah Longwell, a lifelong conservative and political strategist who is now the publisher of The Bulwark, a news and opinion website that is home to anti-Trump conservatives. She is also the founder of Republican Voters Against Trump, now the Republican Accountability Project.

Recommended Reading: Donald Trump People Magazine Article 1998

Prior To Going To War In Iraq Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld Optimistically Predicted The Iraq War Might Last Six Days Six Weeks I Doubt Six Months

What’s more, Vice-President Dick Cheney said we would be greeted as liberators by the Iraqi people after we overthrow Saddam.

They were both horribly wrong. Instead of six weeks or six months, the Iraq war lasted eight long and bloody years costing thousands of American lives. It led to an Iraqi civil war between the Sunnis and the Shiites that took hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. Many Iraqi militia groups were formed to fight against the U.S. forces that occupied Iraq. Whats more, Al Qaeda, which did not exist in Iraq before the war, used the turmoil in Iraq to establish a new foothold in that country.

The Iraq war was arguably the most tragic foreign policy blunder in US history.

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newstfionline · 3 years

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Wednesday, September 8, 2021

Trudeau is met with flying gravel at campaign stop (Washington Post) Hours after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau vowed that he “won’t back down” in the face of the “anti-vaxxer mobs,” protesters—many of them opposed to coronavirus vaccinations and public health measures—threw gravel at him at a campaign stop on Monday evening. The incident occurred while Trudeau was boarding his campaign bus after an event at a brewery in London, Ontario, a city some 120 miles southwest of Toronto. Videos posted to social media of the episode show protesters throwing gravel in the direction of the prime minister and some of the reporters traveling with him. It was the latest ugly scene in a 36-day federal election campaign that has not been short of them. Vandals have defaced candidate lawn signs with antisemitic graffiti. Candidates of all political stripes have reported being targeted with sexist and racist slurs.

Ida’s aftermath (1440) The death toll from Hurricane Ida rose to at least 60 over the holiday weekend, with more than half of the victims coming from the Northeast. At least 27 people were confirmed dead in New Jersey, 17 in New York, and five in Pennsylvania, with a number of isolated deaths reported up the Mid-Atlantic. As of this morning, 13 victims have been identified in Louisiana and two in Mississippi. Assessing the storm’s weeklong path of destruction from the Gulf to Massachusetts, analysts estimated Ida caused as much as $95B in total damage and economic loss. More than half a million customers remained without power in Louisiana, mostly in New Orleans and surrounding parishes, as of this morning. Out in the Atlantic, Hurricane Larry is expected to strengthen into a Category 4 storm, but is not currently projected to make US landfall.

Powerful earthquake near Mexico’s Acapulco kills at least 1 (AP) A powerful earthquake struck near the Pacific resort city of Acapulco on Tuesday night, killing at least one person and causing buildings to rock and sway in Mexico City hundreds of kilometers away. The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake had a preliminary magnitude of 7 and was centered 17 kilometers (about 10 miles) northeast of Acapulco. The mayor of Acapulco, Adela Román, said in statement to the television news outlet Milenio that “there is no really serious situation” so far and no reports of casualties. “There are nervous breakdowns; people are worried because there have been aftershocks,” she said, adding that there are “many gas leaks in many places” as well as some landslides and fallen walls.

El Salvador first country to make Bitcoin legal currency (BBC) From today, businesses in El Salvador will be obliged where possible to accept the controversial blockchain-backed currency as payment as the country has just become the first to make Bitcoin a legal tender. Millions of people are expected to download the government’s new digital wallet app which gives away $30 (€25) in Bitcoin to every citizen.

Bolsonaro’s Supporters Rally (Foreign Policy) Thousands of Brazilians took to the streets across the country today, answering—and protesting—a call by President Jair Bolsonaro for a popular show of force as corruption investigations, lagging poll numbers, and the reemergence of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, have weakened his position ahead of the October 2022 presidential election. A September 1 poll shows Lula trouncing Bolsonaro by double digits in a one-on-one matchup. Those election polls pair with recent polls showing more than 50 percent of Brazilians say the Bolsonaro government is bad or terrible, although those that say his administration is good or excellent has held steady at roughly 25 percent.

Venice prepares to charge tourists (Reuters) From a control room inside the police headquarters in Venice, Big Brother is watching you. To combat tourist overcrowding, officials are tracking every person who sets foot in the lagoon city. Using 468 CCTV cameras, optical sensors and a mobile phone-tracing system, they can tell residents from visitors, Italians from foreigners, where people are coming from, where they are heading and how fast they are moving. Every 15 minutes, authorities get a snapshot of how crowded the city is—alongside how many gondolas are sliding on the Canal Grande, whether boats are speeding and if the waters rise to dangerous levels. City authorities are preparing to demand that tourists pre-book their visit on an app and charge day-trippers between 3 and 10 euros to enter, depending on the time of the year. Airport-like turnstiles are being tested to control the flow of people and, should the numbers become overwhelming, stop new visitors from getting in. Potential visitors are sceptical. “It brings the wrong tone in me when I hear that I have to pay entrance just to see the buildings in the streets of the city” said Marc Schieber, a German national in Venice for the current film festival. “I think it is probably a new way to generate money.”

Lukashenko continues crackdown on opposition (NYT) Belarusian opposition leader Maria Kolesnikova was found guilty Monday of conspiracy to overthrow the government in Minsk and sentenced to 11 years in prison after a closed trial. Kolesnikova is one of the key opposition figures jailed in Belarus after protests ignited in August last year over presidential elections rejected by opposition activists as rigged. President Alexander Lukashenko, who has been in power since 1994, launched a violent crackdown on the protests, jailing hundreds of the regime’s opponents.

Myanmar resistance movement calls for nationwide uprising (AP) The main underground group coordinating resistance to Myanmar’s military government called for a nationwide uprising on Tuesday. The National Unity Government views itself as a shadow government composed of elected legislators who were barred from taking their seats when the military seized power in February. The group’s acting president Duwa Lashi La called for revolt “in every village, town and city in the entire country at the same time” and declared what he called a “state of emergency.” The country has been wracked by unrest since the military ousted the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi, with a low-level insurrection in many urban areas. There has been more serious combat in rural areas, especially in border regions where ethnic minority militias have been engaging in serious clashes with the government’s troops.

Forget Tiger Moms. Now China's 'Chicken Blood' Parents Are Pushing Kids To Succeed (NPR) They schedule their children's days in 15-minute increments. They scour online forums and swap tips on the most exclusive tutors and best sports coaches. Some even buy second homes next to the best public schools. Forget Tiger moms. These are China's jiwa or "chicken" parents, who are known for their attentive—some say obsessive—parenting style. The term is used to describe aggressive helicopter parenting, and comes from an unproven Chinese medicine treatment dating back to the 1950s, in which someone is injected with fresh chicken blood to stimulate energy. Jiwa parenting culture, a relatively new phenomenon, is now in the crosshairs of Chinese authorities. At a time when the government wants to see families having more children and raising more future workers, it fears that hyper-competitive parenting pressures—combined with the meteoric growth of China's private education sector, now worth billions—are deepening inequality and discouraging couples from having larger families, a priority of the country's new three-child policy. As more parents complain about the burnout brought on by jiwa culture, there's concern that the financial and emotional toll is making many reluctant to have a second, much less a third, child.

Singapore trials patrol robots to deter bad social behaviour (Reuters) Singapore has started trialing robots to patrol public areas and deter poor social behaviour in its latest effort to further augment its strong portfolio of surveillance tools. Ranked one of the safest countries in the world, Singapore has put two autonomous robots on trial to detect bad behaviour such as flouting of COVID-19 safety measures, smoking in prohibited areas and the improper parking of bicycles, Singapore’s Home Team Science and Technology Agency said in a statement on Sunday. It said the two patrol robots, named Xavier, are equipped with cameras that can detect bad social behaviour and trigger real-time alerts to the command and control centre. The agency said that during the three-week trial, the robots would be used for surveillance and displaying messages to educate the public on proper behaviour. Singapore’s home affairs minister, K Shanmugam, said in August the city-state aimed to have more than 200,000 police cameras by 2030, more than double the current number of cameras deployed.

3-year-old boy found after 3 days’ lost in Australian woods (AP) A 3-year-old boy wearing a sweat shirt and diapers was found sitting in a creek and cupping water in his hands to drink on Monday, three days after he was lost in rugged Australian woodland. Hundreds of people had been searching for Anthony “AJ” Elfalak, who has autism and is non-verbal, since he went missing from his family’s remote rural property near the village of Putty, north of Sydney, late Friday morning. His father, Anthony Elfalak, said AJ had been bitten by ants, had diaper rash and suffered abrasions. “It’s a miracle,” the father told reporters after he and his wife, Kelly Elfalak, were reunited with their son.

US-built databases a potential tool of Taliban repression (AP) Over two decades, the United States and its allies spent hundreds of millions of dollars building databases for the Afghan people. The nobly stated goal: Promote law and order and government accountability and modernize a war-ravaged land. But in the Taliban’s lightning seizure of power, most of that digital apparatus—including biometrics for verifying identities—apparently fell into Taliban hands. Built with few data-protection safeguards, it risks becoming the high-tech jackboots of a surveillance state. As the Taliban get their governing feet, there are worries it will be used for social control and to punish perceived foes. “It is a terrible irony,” said Frank Pasquale, Brooklyn Law School scholar of surveillance technologies. “It’s a real object lesson in ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions.’”

The other Afghan women (New Yorker) Anand Gopal traveled to rural Afghanistan to meet women living under Taliban rule, whose voices are not often heard in international media. “Unlike in relatively liberal Kabul, visiting women in these hinterlands is not easy” since they don’t typically speak to unrelated men, Gopal writes. Many of those he interviewed seemed to prefer Taliban rule to the US-led occupation. “To locals, life under the coalition forces and their Afghan allies was pure hazard; even drinking tea in a sunlit field, or driving to your sister’s wedding, was a potentially deadly gamble,” Gopal writes. “What the Taliban offered over their rivals was a simple bargain: Obey us, and we will not kill you.”

Israel searches for 6 Palestinians after rare prison break (AP) Israel launched a massive manhunt in the country’s north and the occupied West Bank early Monday after six Palestinian prisoners tunneled out of their cell and escaped from a high-security facility in the biggest prison break of its kind in decades. The escape marks an embarrassing security breach just ahead of the Jewish New Year, when Israelis flock to the north to enjoy beaches, campsites and the Sea of Galilee. The prisoners appear to have gone into hiding and there was no indication Israeli authorities view them as an immediate threat. Israel’s Army Radio said 400 prisoners are being moved as a protective measure against any additional escape attempts. The radio said the prisoners escaped through a tunnel from the Gilboa prison, just north of the West Bank, which is supposed to be one of Israel’s most secure facilities.

Zuma on parole (BBC) Former South African president Jacob Zuma has been granted medical parole for an unknown illness. Zuma has been in hospital for the past month, where he has undergone surgery and will reportedly remain there until he has been discharged. The 79-year-old is serving a 15-month sentence for contempt of court at Estcourt Correctional Centre. Zuma turned himself in to the authorities in July after being sentenced for failing to attend an inquiry into corruption during his presidency. The unprecedented jailing resulted in violent protests and looting by his loyal body of supporters. He also faces a separate corruption trial, which is due to resume on 9 September. The Democratic Alliance party criticized the parole, saying it’s “entirely unlawful and makes a mockery” of prison regulations.

#headlines #news

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statetalks · 3 years

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What Will Happen If Republicans Win

So How Can Republicans Win Without Texas

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Lets take the 2016 map with Texas flipped as a starting point. Republicans were at 268 Electoral College votes, meaning that they would only need to flip one Democratic state to win the election. The simplest way to do that would be to target states like Minnesota , the only midwestern state the Republicans failed to pick up in 2016, minus solid blue Illinois. Lets flip Minnesota and see how the map looks then.

This is one way in which Republicans can win an election without Texas. The ten extra Electoral College votes from Minnesota push the Republicans to a victory, albeit by a small margin but a victory nonetheless. Of course, this begs the question, how realistic is this map? Well, Minnesota was by no means a comfortable victory for the Democrats in 2016; Clinton won the state by just one-and-a-half points or roughly 44,000 votes out of a total of 2.7 million votes cast. Its not unrealistic to think that, with some extra effort in campaigning, Republicans could flip the North Star State.

Republicans could also target Nevada , which was ranked as a lean-Democrat/battleground state in 2016. Clinton eventually won Nevada and its six Electoral College votes, but only by a margin of around 30,000 from just over a million cast. Heres how that map would look.

A smaller margin than if the Republicans flipped Minnesota, but a victory nonetheless.

All maps courtesy of 270towin.com

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READ MOREThe human cost of Biden’s travel banon India

“Hot vax summer is coming,” Insider proclaimed in March. “NYC singles ready for ‘slutty summer’ of casual sex,” screamed the New York Post. Clearly, many are ready to throw themselves back into the social melee. “Touch starvation” is real, and it can increase stress, depression, and anxiety. But after a year of such intense isolation, fear, suffering, and grief — and as the pandemic continues to rage across many parts of the world — the answer to how people will try to make up for lost time and lost touch is more complex than the orgiastic fantasy hawked by Suitsupply.

According to psychologist Amanda Gesselman, associate director for research at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute, the pandemic has motivated American singles to look for partners rather than casual sex. While “there will [certainly] be people having the time of their lives” when it’s safe to do so, Gesselman says, “we actually found that people are less interested in no-strings-attached sex than they used to be.” In a recent Kinsey Institute study on post-pandemic sex (conducted in partnership with Cosmopolitan and Esquire), which surveyed 2,000 Americans between the ages of 18 and 45, more than half — 52 percent — of singles said they want to find a committed relationship post-pandemic, while about only one in 10 said they’re looking for no-strings-attached sex.

“That was a bit lower than we expected, considering everyone’s locked up and has been for a year,” Gesselman says. That said, as most people have spent more than a year worrying about infection and thinking about how to protect themselves from germs, she reasons the mindset “might be extending to sex with unfamiliar partners.”

“WE ACTUALLY FOUND THAT PEOPLE ARE LESS INTERESTED IN NO-STRINGS-ATTACHED SEX THAN THEY USED TO BE”

Ilana Dunn, co-host of the dating podcast Seeing Other People, says she’s been hearing similar feedback from listeners and friends. “Everyone’s like, ‘Yeah, of course, I’m going to get really drunk and go wild for like, a week. Because we need to do that. But my goal is to find someone.’” In an Instagram poll that received more than 1,000 responses, Dunn says she was surprised to see 88 percent say that as people get vaccinated and the world opens up, they feel more inclined to look for something serious, while 52 percent said they’ll be open to hookups once they’re vaccinated.

Gesselman believes the pandemic has pushed many people to be more introspective about what they want in their lives, particularly younger adults. “When you’re in your mid-20s and you have your entire future ahead of you, and then you just sat through an entire year of social isolation and halted progress, it really makes you think about the things you want in your life,” she says. “I think a lot of people are thinking more towards what would make their future the best rather than what would be good short-term gratification.”

Meanwhile, condom companies are cautiously hopeful demand for their products will continue to grow along with the vaccinated portion of the US population. Male contraceptives saw a 2.5 percent uptick in sales at the beginning of April, according to Ken DeBaene, LifeStyles’ vice president of sales in the Americas, who says he’s “optimistic this is a return to more normalized consumption levels.” (Between late March and mid-April, the sexual wellness industry overall saw a 4 percent sales bump.) LifeStyles is looking at returns to employment in the hospitality and service industries, as well as colleges’ fall opening plans, to help anticipate demand, DeBaene added.

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At LOLA, a feminine care and sexual wellness company, chief marketing officer Monica Belsito says both “self-play and partner play” have been prevalent this year, with the brand seeing a 40 percent spike in lubricant sales and a record number of preorders for its new vibrator. However, as vaccinations of younger populations increase, the company “expects STI protection to steadily increase, creating a demand spike in condoms this summer and fall.”

Many people are also searching for a historical precedent that can shed light on what awaits us in the post-Covid recovery period, from the Roaring ’20s — when the nation indulged after the ravages of World War I and the 1918 pandemic — to 1967’s Summer of Love, when tens of thousands of young people gathered in San Francisco to listen to rock ’n’ roll, experiment with sex and drugs, and protest the Vietnam War.

“If you look at the middle to late 1960s as an opening up after a period of considerable repression in the ’50s, I think the parallel is not unreasonable,” says historian Dennis McNally, who also worked as a publicist for the Grateful Dead. However, he points to the FDA’s 1960 approval of the first birth control pill as a key influence in the sexual liberation movement that climaxed that summer. Even after seeing the hordes of spring breakers that descended upon Miami in March, before vaccines were widely available to younger adults, McNally isn’t convinced the vigilant “pandemic safety” mindset will be banished with vaccines. “The message of all of this is that reality is dangerous, which is a very repressive lesson, and it’s going to take a while, I think, to unlearn that lesson and be able to go out and relax,” he says.

As for the Roaring ’20s comparison often attributed to social epidemiologist Dr. Nicholas Christakis, the timeline he’s laid out doesn’t predict a pendulum swing away from the risk aversion of the present moment until 2024, when vaccines will have been distributed around the world and there’s been more of a recovery from some of the pandemic’s economic devastation. He sees this summer as having the potential to offer “a taste of the past and a hope for the future,” Christakis recently told NPR.

“PEOPLE GO ON A DATE AND NOBODY KNOWS HOW TO TALK ABOUT ANYTHING BESIDES COVID”

Gesselman and Dunn also cite lingering pandemic-induced social anxiety as another obstacle to a bacchanal this summer. “A lot of people didn’t date last year, and I keep hearing from our listeners that people go on a date and nobody knows how to talk about anything besides Covid, and it’s not leading to good date conversations,” Dunn says. And in Gesselman’s research, one of the top fears respondents have cited is not having the ability to protect their own mental health as they reemerge from quarantine. “It seems like people’s biggest concern is when life opens back up and they’re finally able to pursue these connections, ‘What if I get rejected or things go wrong? What happens if disappointment strikes?’” Gesselman says.

Elena, the college student who’s excited to get back to more carefree dating, is also wary of the expectations she and many of her peers are putting on this post-vaccine summer. “I do think people have very, very high expectations, because you kind of need to live your entire life that’s been put on hold for the past year all in this summer, and if they’re not met it’s going to be tough,” she says. “But I think for the most part, people are really down to do anything.”

Tushy is a bidet startup which aims to replace toilet paper, Tushy was founded by Miki Agrawal.

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differentnutpeace · 3 years

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'It's Not A Never Thing' — White, Rural Southerners Hesitant To Get COVID Vaccine

There are more than enough shots to go around in communities such as Hartsville, Tenn., the seat of Trousdale County, a quiet town tucked in the wooded hills northeast of Nashville. หวย บอล เกมส์ คาสิโนออนไลน์

It's a county that is nearly 90% white and where Donald Trump won nearly 75% of the votes in 2020. There was no special planning to reach underserved communities here, other than the inmates at the state prison, which experienced one of the nation's largest correctional facility outbreaks of COVID-19.

But now Tennessee, like much of the nation, is finding that rural, white residents need a little more coaxing to roll up their sleeves for the shot. This week, the state published results from a statewide survey, and a focus group of unvaccinated residents. More than 45% of white, rural conservatives said they were unwilling even to consider taking the vaccine.

"There's nothing inherently unique about living in a rural area that makes people balk at getting vaccinated. It's just that rural areas have a larger share of people in the most vaccine-resistant groups: Republicans and white evangelical Christians," says Drew Altman, president and CEO of the Kaiser Family Foundation.

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The foundation's latest survey data find that more rural residents have been fully vaccinated than urban dwellers. But this is likely because there haven't been the same long waits in rural areas to get the vaccine. And now the initial demand has tapered to a drip. Currently, the number of rural residents (21%) saying they'll never get the vaccine is twice the number (10%) in urban areas.

On a recent weekend in Hartsville, the local health department had trouble filling up even half the spots for a COVID-19 vaccination event at the high school. Down the street at the Piggly Wiggly grocery store, Cris Weske, 43, stopped in to buy a can of dipping tobacco. He says he isn't even tempted to get the COVID-19 vaccine, no matter how widely available it is.

"Somebody like me that's healthy, with a survival rate of 99%, I don't need it," he says. "I don't want to put that toxin — I'm kind of anti-vax, period."

Weske, who is wearing a "We the People" T-shirt, says the U.S. Constitution protects his choice to opt out of the massive nationwide vaccination effort.

Enlarge this image

Residents line up for COVID-19 vaccinations inside a Walgreens in Hartsville. The local pharmacy across the street also offers vaccinations, along with the public health department around the corner.

Blake Farmer/WPLN

Public health officials in Tennessee expected to face some reluctance when the COVID-19 vaccine finally arrived. But they were surprised to realize that the most stubborn group might be white, largely conservative residents in rural Tennessee.

National polling by NPR, PBS NewsHour and Marist finds that rural, white Republicans — particularly supporters of Trump's — are among the least likely to get a vaccine. The issue is evident in state-by-state vaccination rates, with Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi and Tennessee trailing the rest of the country. The White House has begun launching new initiatives targeting so-called red states, such as setting up partnerships with NASCAR, professional sports and even country music.

"We voted for Trump, but Trump's got nothing to do with us not taking the vaccine," says Hartsville's Cindi Kelton, 67, as she loads dog food and milk into her minivan outside the Piggly Wiggly. "We were planning on taking it — until our doctor passed away."

More scared of the vaccine than the virus

Her physician, Raymond Fuller of Gallatin, Tenn., died of COVID-19 in late January. It's unclear whether he had been vaccinated. Either way, Kelton worried the vaccine could have played a role despite how safe it has been shown to be in rigorous clinical trials.

Kelton has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and emphysema — lung diseases that put her at high risk of complications with COVID-19 — but maintains she's still more scared of the vaccine than the virus.

In many rural communities, scant attention has been paid to batting down rumors or answering vaccine questions. Public health officials in Tennessee and other Southern states have been far more focused on building trust with Black and immigrant groups concentrated in urban areas. And even their outreach in rural communities has targeted those traditionally underserved groups.

Enlarge this image

Cindi Kelton, 67, of Hartsville says she was planning to take the vaccine until her physician died of COVID-19 in January.

Blake Farmer/WPLN

But some leaders of rural communities are the ones actively sowing doubts. They include state legislators pushing anti-vaccine legislation and even a few pastors piping up on Sunday mornings. Greg Locke is an outspoken white preacher in Mount Juliet, Tenn., who peppers his sermons with mocking questions.

"People say, 'Well, what are you going to do when they make the vaccine mandatory?' " he asks an audience gathered without masks in late March. "I'm going to tell them to take a hike, like I've been telling them to take a hike. That's what I'm going to do."

Southern states, where vaccination rates are the lowest in the country, have frequently turned to ministers, seeing them as key allies who are trusted at the local level. But it's mostly Black churches, from Mississippi to Georgia, that have agreed to hold informational town halls or organize and host vaccine events.

In recent days, some key white evangelical leaders have stepped forward to advocate more loudly for vaccinations. Among them is J.D. Greear, president of the Southern Baptist Convention. But Greear pastors a church in Durham, N.C. — hardly a conservative stronghold. And the responses to Greear on social media were impassioned and even irate — exposing how divided many conservative churchgoers are.

The white Baptist pastors in Hartsville, when contacted for this story, declined to weigh in, saying they were leaving the decision entirely up to members of their congregations.

THE CORONAVIRUS CRISIS

'Love Your Neighbor' And Get The Shot: White Evangelical Leaders Push COVID Vaccines

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How Do You Reach Trump Voters Who Say They Don't Want The Vaccine? Try Doctors

"Wait and see"

Pastor Omaràn Lee, a hospital chaplain in Nashville, has been working with Black churches in Tennessee to promote vaccination. He says the concerns in Black congregations in his city aren't that different from what he hears from rural, white communities.

" 'We don't trust the government, and we don't trust Joe Biden' is what they say, right?" he says.

But Lee notes that, six months ago, Black communities were saying the same thing when Trump was in office. "Anytime you have a marginalized person, you have people who [feel] left out, they're going to be skeptical."

Skepticism about the vaccine, Lee says, can be overcome if there's an intentional effort to reach people where they are.

But in small towns such as Hartsville, there hasn't been much attention on the issue. People are less likely to hear the message from church leaders, and other communication can be more limited. There's not much in the way of local media providing information about how to sign up and where to go.

"I don't even have a computer. I'm old school," says Brenda Kelley, a 74-year-old widow who says she didn't even know she was eligible to get the vaccine yet, much less that tons of shots are available. The vaccination event at a nearby high school was advertised mostly on Facebook.

"Kinda scared to get it in a way, and in a way I want it," Kelley added. "And my children, neither of them want it. So I don't know."

Plus, Kelley has her own questions she'd like answered first — such as whether her diabetes, while elevating her risk of developing serious COVID-19, might also cause problems with the vaccine. Health officials say the vaccine is safe for people like her, but she wants to hear it from her doctor.

"It's not a never thing," she concludes. Just a "wait and see."

This story comes from NPR's health reporting partnership with Nashville Public Radio and Kaiser Health News.

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billyagogo · 4 years

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The Color of His Presidency

New Post has been published on https://newsprofixpro.com/moxie/2021/02/11/the-color-of-his-presidency/

The Color of His Presidency

Photo: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

A few weeks ago, the liberal comedian Bill Maher and conservative strategist and pundit Bill Kristol had a brief spat on Maher’s HBO show, putatively over what instigated the tea party but ultimately over the psychic wound that has divided red America and blue America in the Obama years. The rise of the tea party, explained Maher in a let’s-get-real moment, closing his eyes for a second the way one does when saying something everybody knows but nobody wants to say, “was about a black president.” Both Maher and Kristol carry themselves with a weary cynicism that allows them to jovially spar with ideological rivals, but all of a sudden they both grew earnest and angry. Kristol interjected, shouting, “That’s bullshit! That is total bullshit!” After momentarily sputtering, Kristol recovered his calm, but his rare indignation remained, and there was no trace of the smirk he usually wears to distance himself slightly from his talking points. He almost pleaded to Maher, “Even you don’t believe that!”

“I totally believe that,” Maher responded, which is no doubt true, because every Obama supporter believes deep down, or sometimes right on the surface, that the furious opposition marshaled against the first black president is a reaction to his race. Likewise, every Obama opponent believes with equal fervor that this is not only false but a smear concocted willfully to silence them.

This bitter, irreconcilable enmity is not the racial harmony the optimists imagined the cultural breakthrough of an African- American president would usher in. On the other hand, it’s not exactly the sort of racial strife the pessimists, hardened by racial animosity, envisioned either, the splitting of white and black America into worlds of mutual incomprehension—as in the cases of the O. J. Simpson trial, the L.A. riots, or Bernhard Goetz.

The Simpson episode actually provides a useful comparison. The racial divide was what made the episode so depressing: Blacks saw one thing, whites something completely different. Indeed, when Simpson was acquitted in 1995 of murder charges, whites across parties reacted in nearly equal measure: 56 percent of white Republicans objected to the verdict, as did 52 percent of white Democrats. Two decades later, the trial of George Zimmerman produced a very different reaction. This case also hinged on race—Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teen from his neighborhood in Florida, and was acquitted of all charges. But here the gap in disapproval over the verdict between white Democrats and white Republicans was not 4 points but 43. Americans had split once again into mutually uncomprehending racial camps, but this time along political lines, not by race itself.

A different, unexpected racial argument has taken shape. Race, always the deepest and most volatile fault line in American history, has now become the primal grievance in our politics, the source of a narrative of persecution each side uses to make sense of the world. Liberals dwell in a world of paranoia of a white racism that has seeped out of American history in the Obama years and lurks everywhere, mostly undetectable. Conservatives dwell in a paranoia of their own, in which racism is used as a cudgel to delegitimize their core beliefs. And the horrible thing is that both of these forms of paranoia are right.

If you set out to write a classic history of the Obama era, once you had described the historically significant fact of Obama’s election, race would almost disappear from the narrative. The thumbnail sketch of every president’s tenure from Harry Truman through Bill Clinton prominently includes racial conflagrations—desegregation fights over the military and schools, protests over civil-rights legislation, high-profile White House involvement in the expansion or rollback of busing and affirmative action. The policy landscape of the Obama era looks more like it did during the Progressive Era and the New Deal, when Americans fought bitterly over regulation and the scope of government. The racial-policy agenda of the Obama administration has been nearly nonexistent.

But if you instead set out to write a social history of the Obama years, one that captured the day-to-day experience of political life, you would find that race has saturated everything as perhaps never before. Hardly a day goes by without a volley and counter-volley of accusations of racial insensitivity and racial hypersensitivity. And even when the red and blue tribes are not waging their endless war of mutual victimization, the subject of race courses through everything else: debt, health care, unemployment. Whereas the great themes of the Bush years revolved around foreign policy and a cultural divide over what or who constituted “real” America, the Obama years have been defined by a bitter disagreement over the size of government, which quickly reduces to an argument over whether the recipients of big-government largesse deserve it. There is no separating this discussion from one’s sympathies or prejudices toward, and identification with, black America.

It was immediately clear, from his triumphal introduction at the 2004 Democratic National Convention through the giddy early days of his audacious campaign, that Obama had reordered the political landscape. And though it is hard to remember now, his supporters initially saw this transformation as one that promised a “post-racial” politics. He attracted staggering crowds, boasted of his ability to win over Republicans, and made good on this boast by attracting independent voters in Iowa and other famously white locales.

Of course, this was always a fantasy. It was hardly a surprise when George Packer, reporting for The New Yorker, ventured to Kentucky and found white voters confessing that they would vote for a Democrat, but not Obama, simply because of his skin color. (As one said: “Race. I really don’t want an African-American as president. Race.”) Packer’s report conveys the revelatory dismay with which his news struck. “Obama has a serious political problem,” he wrote. “Until now, he and his supporters have either denied it or blamed it on his opponents.” Reported anecdotes of similar flavor have since grown familiar enough to have receded into the political backdrop. One Louisiana man told NPR a few weeks ago that he would never support Senator Mary Landrieu after her vote for Obamacare. After ticking off the familiar talking points against the health-care law—it would kill jobs and so on—he arrived at the nub of the matter: “I don’t vote for black people.” (Never mind that Landrieu is white.)

We now know that the fact of Obama’s presidency—that a black man is our commander-in-chief, that a black family lives in the White House, that he was elected by a disproportionately high black vote—has affected not just the few Americans willing to share their racism with reporters but all Americans, across the political spectrum. Social scientists have long used a basic survey to measure what they call “racial resentment.” It doesn’t measure hatred of minorities or support for segregation, but rather a person’s level of broad sympathy for African-Americans (asking, for instance, if you believe that “blacks have gotten less than they deserve” or whether “it’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough”). Obviously, the racially conservative view—that blacks are owed no extra support from the government—has for decades corresponded more closely with conservatism writ large and thus with the Republican Party. The same is true with the racially liberal view and the Democratic Party: Many of the Americans who support government programs that disproportionately offer blacks a leg up are Democrats. But when the political scientists Michael Tesler and David Sears peered into the data in 2009, they noticed that the election of Obama has made views on race matter far more than ever.

By the outset of Obama’s presidency, they found, the gap in approval of the president between those with strongly liberal views on race and those with strongly conservative views on race was at least twice as large as it had been under any of the previous four administrations. As Tesler delved further into the numbers, he saw that race was bleeding into everything. People’s views on race predicted their views on health-care reform far more closely in 2009 than they did in 1993, when the president trying to reform health care was Bill Clinton. Tesler called what he saw unfurling before him a “hyperracialized era.”

In recent history, racial liberals have sometimes had conservative views on other matters, and racial conservatives have sometimes had liberal views. Consider another measure, called “anti-black affect,” a kind of thermometer that registers coldness toward African-Americans. Prior to 2009, anti-black affect did not predict an individual’s political identification (when factoring out that person’s economic, moral, and foreign-policy conservatism). Since Obama has taken office, the correlation between anti-black affect and Republican partisanship has shot up. Even people’s beliefs about whether the unemployment rate was rising or falling in 2012—which, in previous years, had stood independent of racial baggage—were now closely linked with their racial beliefs.

Racial conservatism and conservatism used to be similar things; now they are the same thing. This is also true with racial liberalism and liberalism. The mental chasm lying between red and blue America is, at bottom, an irreconcilable difference over the definition of racial justice. You can find this dispute erupting everywhere. A recent poll found a nearly 40-point partisan gap on the question of whether 12 Years a Slave deserved Best Picture.

In 1981, Lee Atwater, a South Carolina native working for the Reagan administration, gave an interview to Alexander Lamis, a political scientist at Case Western Reserve University. In it, Atwater described the process by which the conservative message evolved from explicitly racist appeals to implicitly racialized appeals to white economic self-interest:

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things, and a by-product of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites … ‘We want to cut this’ is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than ‘nigger, nigger.’ ”

Atwater went on to run George H.W. Bush’s presidential campaign against Michael Dukakis in 1988, where he flamboyantly vowed to make Willie Horton, a murderer furloughed by Dukakis who subsequently raped a woman, “his running mate.” Atwater died three years later of a brain tumor, and his confessional quote to Lamis attracted scarcely any attention for years. In 2005, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert picked out the quote, which had appeared in two books by Lamis. In the ensuing years, liberal columnists and authors have recirculated Atwater’s words with increasing frequency, and they have attained the significance of a Rosetta stone.

A long line of social-science research bears out the general point that Atwater made. People have an elemental awareness of race, and we relentlessly process political appeals, even those that do not mention race, in racial terms.

In the 1970s and 1980s, liberals understood a certain chunk of the Republican agenda as a coded appeal—a “dog whistle”—to white racism. The political power of cracking down on crack, or exposing welfare queens, lay in its explosive racial subtext. (Regarding Willie Horton, an unnamed Republican operative put it more bluntly: “It’s a wonderful mix of liberalism and a big black rapist.”) This is what Paul Krugman was referring to in his recent Times op-ed titled “That Old-Time Whistle.” When the House Budget Committee releases a report on the failure of the War on Poverty and Paul Ryan speaks of a “culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working,” you can conclude that the policy report is mere pretext to smuggle in the hidden racial appeal.

Once you start looking for racial subtexts embedded within the Republican agenda, they turn up everywhere. And not always as subtexts. In response to their defeats in 2008 and 2012, Republican governors and state legislators in a host of swing states have enacted laws, ostensibly designed to prevent voter fraud, whose actual impact will be to reduce the proportion of votes cast by minorities. A paper found that states were far more likely to enact restrictive voting laws if minority turnout in their state had recently increased.

It is likewise hard to imagine the mostly southern states that have refused free federal money to cover the uninsured in their states doing so outside of the racial context—nearly all-white Republican governments are willing and even eager to deny medical care to disproportionately black constituents. The most famous ad for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign depicted an elderly white man, with a narrator warning bluntly about Medicare cuts: “Now the money you paid for your guaranteed health care is going to a massive new government program that’s not for you.”

Yet here is the point where, for all its breadth and analytic power, the liberal racial analysis collapses onto itself. It may be true that, at the level of electoral campaign messaging, conservatism and white racial resentment are functionally identical. It would follow that any conservative argument is an appeal to white racism. That is, indeed, the all-but-explicit conclusion of the ubiquitous Atwater Rosetta-stone confession: Republican politics is fundamentally racist, and even its use of the most abstract economic appeal is a sinister, coded missive.

Impressive though the historical, sociological, and psychological evidence undergirding this analysis may be, it also happens to be completely insane. Whatever Lee Atwater said, or meant to say, advocating tax cuts is not in any meaningful sense racist.

One of the greatest triumphs of liberal politics over the past 50 years has been to completely stigmatize open racial discrimination in public life, a lesson that has been driven home over decades by everybody from Jimmy the Greek to Paula Deen. This achievement has run headlong into an increasing liberal tendency to define conservatism as a form of covert racial discrimination. If conservatism is inextricably entangled with racism, and racism must be extinguished, then the scope for legitimate opposition to Obama shrinks to an uncomfortably small space.

The racial debate of the Obama years emits some of the poisonous waft of the debates over communism during the McCarthy years. It defies rational resolution in part because it is about secret motives and concealed evil.

On September 9, 2009, the president delivered a State of the Union–style speech on health care before Congress. After a summer of angry tea-party town-hall meetings, Republicans had whipped themselves into a feisty mood. At one point, Obama assured the audience that his health-care law would not cover illegal immigrants. (This was true.) Joe Wilson, the Republican representing South Carolina’s Second District, screamed, “You lie!”

Over the next few days, several liberals stated what many more believed. “I think it’s based on racism,” offered Jimmy Carter at a public forum. “There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president.” Maureen Dowd likewise concluded, “What I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy! … Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.”

Assailing Wilson’s motives on the basis of a word he did not say is, to say the least, a loose basis by which to indict his motives. It is certainly true that screaming a rebuke to a black president is the sort of thing a racist Republican would do. On the other hand, it’s also the sort of thing a rude or drunk or angry or unusually partisan Republican would do.

One way to isolate the independent variable, and thus to separate out the racism in the outburst, is to compare the treatment of Obama with that of the last Democratic president. Obama has never been called “boy” by a major Republican figure, but Bill Clinton was, by Emmett Tyrrell, editor of the American Spectator and author of a presidential biography titled Boy Clinton. Here are some other things that happened during the Clinton years: North Carolina senator Jesse Helms said, “Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here. He’d better have a bodyguard.” The Wall Street Journal editorial page and other conservative organs speculated that Clinton may have had his aide Vince Foster murdered and had sanctioned a cocaine-smuggling operation out of an airport in Arkansas. Now, imagine if Obama had been called “boy” in the title of a biography, been subjected to threats of mob violence from a notorious former segregationist turned senator, or accused in a major newspaper of running coke. (And also impeached.) How easy would it be to argue that Republicans would never do such things to a white president?

Yet many, many liberals believe that only race can explain the ferocity of Republican opposition to Obama. It thus follows that anything Republicans say about Obama that could be explained by racism is probably racism. And since racists wouldn’t like anything Obama does, that renders just about any criticism of Obama—which is to say, nearly everything Republicans say about Obama—presumptively racist.

Does this sound like an exaggeration? Bill O’Reilly’s aggressive (and aggressively dumb) Super Bowl interview with the president included the question “Why do you feel it’s necessary to fundamentally transform the nation that has afforded you so much opportunity?” Salon’s Joan Walsh asserted, “O’Reilly and Ailes and their viewers see this president as unqualified and ungrateful, an affirmative-action baby who won’t thank us for all we’ve done for him and his cohort. The question was, of course, deeply condescending and borderline racist.” Yes, it’s possible that O’Reilly implied that the United States afforded Obama special opportunity owing to the color of his skin. But it’s at least as possible, and consistent with O’Reilly’s beliefs, that he merely believes the United States offers everybody opportunity.

Esquire columnist Charles Pierce has accused Times columnist David Brooks of criticizing Obama because he wants Obama to be an “anodyne black man” who would “lose, nobly, and then the country could go back to its rightful owners.” Timothy Noah, then at Slate, argued in 2008 that calling Obama “skinny” flirted with racism. (“When white people are invited to think about Obama’s physical appearance, the principal attribute they’re likely to dwell on is his dark skin. Consequently, any reference to Obama’s other physical attributes can’t help coming off as a coy walk around the barn.”) Though the term elitist has been attached to candidates of both parties for decades (and to John Kerry during his 2004 presidential campaign), the writer David Shipler has called it racist when deployed against Obama. (“ ‘Elitist’ is another word for ‘arrogant,’ which is another word for ‘uppity,’ that old calumny applied to blacks who stood up for themselves.”)

MSNBC has spent the entire Obama presidency engaged in a nearly nonstop ideological stop-and-frisk operation. When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell chided Obama for playing too much golf, Lawrence O’Donnell accused him of “trying to align … the lifestyle of Tiger Woods with Barack Obama.” (McConnell had not mentioned Tiger Woods; it was O’Donnell who made the leap.) After Arizona governor Jan Brewer confronted Obama at an airport tarmac, Jonathan Capehart concluded, “A lot of people saw it as her wagging her finger at this president who’s also black, who should not be there.” Martin Bashir hung a monologue around his contention that Republicans were using the initialism IRS as a code that meant “nigger.” Chris Matthews calls Republicans racist so often it is hard to even keep track.

Few liberals acknowledge that the ability to label a person racist represents, in 21st-century America, real and frequently terrifying power. Conservatives feel that dread viscerally. Though the liberal analytic method begins with a sound grasp of the broad connection between conservatism and white racial resentment, it almost always devolves into an open-ended license to target opponents on the basis of their ideological profile. The power is rife with abuse.

By February, conservative rage against MSNBC had reached a boiling point. During the Super Bowl, General Mills ran a commercial depicting an adorable multiracial family bonding over a birth announcement and a bowl of Cheerios. The Cheerios ad was not especially groundbreaking or remarkable. A recent Chevy ad, to take just one other example, features a procession of families, some multiracial or gay, and declares, “While what it means to be a family hasn’t changed, what a family looks like has.” This schmaltzy, feel-good fare expresses the modern American creed, where patriotic tableaux meld old-generation standby images—American soldiers in World War II, small towns, American flags flapping in the breeze—with civil-rights protesters.

What made the Cheerios ad notable was that MSNBC, through its official Twitter account, announced, “Maybe the right wing will hate it, but everyone else will go awww.” It was undeniably true that some elements of the right wing would object to the ad—similar previous ads have provoked angry racist reactions. Still, Republicans felt attacked, and not unreasonably. The enraged chairman of the Republican National Committee declared a boycott on any appearances on the network, and MSNBC quickly apologized and deleted the offending tweet.

Why did this particular tweet, of all things, make Republicans snap? It exposed a sense in which their entire party is being written out of the American civic religion. The inscription of the civil-rights story into the fabric of American history—the elevation of Rosa Parks to a new Paul Revere, Martin Luther King to the pantheon of the Founding Fathers—has, by implication, cast Barack Obama as the contemporary protagonist and Republicans as the villains. The Obama campaign gave its supporters the thrill of historic accomplishment, the sense that they were undertaking something more grand than a campaign, something that would reverberate forever. But in Obama they had not just the material for future Americana stock footage but a live partisan figure. How did they think his presidency would work out?

Even the transformation of the civil-rights struggles of a half-century ago into our shared national heritage rests on more politically awkward underpinnings than we like to admit. As much as our museums and children’s history books and Black History Month celebrations and corporate advertisements sandblast away the rough ideological edges of the civil-rights story, its underlying cast remains. John Lewis is not only a young hero who can be seen in grainy black-and-white footage enduring savage beatings at the hands of white supremacists. He is also a current Democratic member of Congress who, in 2010, reprised his iconic role by marching past screaming right-wing demonstrators while preparing to cast a vote for Obamacare. And, more to the point, the political forces behind segregation did not disappear into thin air. The lineal descendants of the segregationists, and in some cases the segregationists themselves, moved into the Republican Party and its unofficial media outlets, which specialize in stoking fears of black Americans among their audience. (Like when Rush Limbaugh seized on a minor fight between two schoolkids in Illinois to announce, “In Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering.”)

The unresolved tension here concerns the very legitimacy of the contemporary Republican Party. It resembles, in milder form, the sorts of aftershocks that follow a democratic revolution, when the allies of the deposed junta—or ex-Communists in post–Iron Curtain Eastern Europe, or, closer to the bone, white conservatives in post-apartheid South Africa—attempt to reenter a newly democratized polity. South Africa famously created a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, but that was easy—once democracy was in place, the basic shape of the polity was a foregone conclusion. In the United States, the partisan contest still runs very close; the character of our government is very much up for grabs.

And the truth is almost too brutal to be acknowledged. A few months ago, three University of Rochester political scientists—Avidit Acharya, Matthew Blackwell, and Maya Sen—published an astonishing study. They discovered that a strong link exists between the proportion of slaves residing in a southern county in 1860 and the racial conservatism (and voting habits) of its white residents today. The more slave-intensive a southern county was 150 years ago, the more conservative and Republican its contemporary white residents. The authors tested their findings against every plausible control factor—for instance, whether the results could be explained simply by population density—but the correlation held. Higher levels of slave ownership in 1860 made white Southerners more opposed to affirmative action, score higher on the anti-black-affect scale, and more hostile to Democrats.

The authors suggest that the economic shock of emancipation, which suddenly raised wages among the black labor pool, caused whites in the most slave-intensive counties to “promote local anti-black sentiment by encouraging violence towards blacks, racist norms and cultural beliefs,” which “produced racially hostile attitudes that have been passed down from parents to children.” The scale of the effect they found is staggering. Whites from southern areas with very low rates of slave ownership exhibit attitudes similar to whites in the North—an enormous difference, given that Obama won only 27 percent of the white vote in the South in 2012, as opposed to 46 percent of the white vote outside the South.

The Rochester study should, among other things, settle a very old and deep argument about the roots of America’s unique hostility to the welfare state. Few industrialized economies provide as stingy aid to the poor as the United States; in none of them is the principle of universal health insurance even contested by a major conservative party. Conservatives have long celebrated America’s unique strand of anti-statism as the product of our religiosity, or the tradition of English liberty, or the searing experience of the tea tax. But the factor that stands above all the rest is slavery.

And yet—as vital as this revelation may be for understanding conservatism, it still should not be used to dismiss the beliefs of individual conservatives. Individual arguments need and deserve to be assessed on their own terms, not as the visible tip of a submerged agenda; ideas can’t be defined solely by their past associations and uses.

Liberals experience the limits of historically determined analysis in other realms, like when the conversation changes to anti-Semitism. Here is an equally charged argument in which conservatives dwell on the deep, pernicious power of anti-Semitism hiding its ugly face beneath the veneer of legitimate criticism of Israel. When, during his confirmation hearings last year for Defense secretary, Chuck Hagel came under attack for having once said “the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here,” conservatives were outraged. (The Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens: “The word ‘intimidates’ ascribes to the so-called Jewish lobby powers that are at once vast, invisible and malevolent.”) Liberals were outraged by the outrage: The blog Think Progress assembled a list of writers denouncing the accusations as a “neocon smear.” The liberal understanding of anti-Semitism is an inversion of conservative thinking about race. Liberals recognize the existence of the malady and genuinely abhor it; they also understand it as mostly a distant, theoretical problem, and one defined primarily as a personal animosity rather than something that bleeds into politics. Their interest in the topic consists almost entirely of indignation against its use as slander to circumscribe the policy debate.

One of the central conceits of modern conservatism is a claim to have achieved an almost Zenlike state of color-blindness. (Stephen Colbert’s parodic conservative talking head boasts he cannot see race at all.) The truth is that conservatives are fixated on race, in a mystified, aggrieved, angry way that lends their claims of race neutrality a comic whiff of let-me-tell-you-again-how-I’m-over-my-ex. But while a certain portion of the party may indeed be forwarding and sending emails of racist jokes of the sort that got a federal judge in trouble, a much larger portion is consumed not with traditional racial victimization—the blacks are coming to get us—but a kind of ideological victimization. Conservatives are fervent believers in their own racial innocence.

This explains Paul Ryan’s almost laughable response to accusations of racial insensitivity over his recent comments. “This has nothing to do whatsoever with race,” he insisted. “It never even occurred to me. This has nothing to do with race whatsoever.” Why would anybody understand a reference to “inner cities” as racially fraught?

And so just as liberals begin with a sound analysis of Republican racial animosity and overextend this into paranoia, conservatives take the very real circumstance of their occasional victimization and run with it. They are not merely wounded by the real drumbeat of spurious accusations they endure; this is the only context in which they appear able to understand racism. One can read conservative news sites devotedly for years without coming across a non-ironic reference to racism as an extant social phenomenon, as opposed to a smear against them. Facts like the persistence of hiring discrimination (experiments routinely show fake résumés with black-sounding names receive fewer callbacks than ones with white-sounding names) do not exist in this world.

Conservatives likewise believe that race has been Obama’s most devious political weapon. Race consciousness, the theory goes, benefits Democrats but not Republicans. “By huge margins,” argues Quin Hillyer in National Review, “blacks vote in racial blocs more often than whites do.” Obama’s race, conservatives believe, lent him an advantage even among white voters. (As 2012 candidate Michele Bachmann put it in real-talk mode, “There was a cachet about having an African-American president because of guilt.”)

As a corollary, conservatives believe that the true heir to the civil-rights movement and its ideals is the modern Republican Party (the one containing all the former segregationists). A whole subgenre of conservative “history” is devoted to rebutting the standard historical narrative that the civil-rights movement drove conservative whites out of the Democratic Party. The ritual of right-wing African-Americans’ appearing before tea-party activists to absolve them of racism has drawn liberal snickers, but the psychological distress on display here runs much deeper. Glenn Beck’s “I Have a Dream” rally, the Republican habit of likening Obama and his policies either to slavery or to segregation (at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference alone, both Ralph Reed and Bobby Jindal compared the Obama administration to George Wallace)—these are expressions not of a political tactic but a genuine obsession.

This fervent scrubbing away of the historical stain of racism represents, on one level, a genuine and heartening development, a necessary historical step in the full banishment of white supremacy from public life. On another level, it is itself a kind of racial resentment, a new stage in the long belief by conservative whites that the liberal push for racial equality has been at their expense. The spread of racial resentment on the right in the Obama years is an aggregate sociological reality. It is also a liberal excuse to smear individual conservatives. Understanding the mutual racial-ideological loathing of the Obama era requires understanding how all the foregoing can be true at once.

In February 2007, with the Obama cultural phenomenon already well under way, Joe Biden—being a rival candidate at the time, but also being Joe Biden—attempted a compliment. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

It was a cringe-worthy moment, but Obama brushed it off graciously. “He called me,” said Obama. “I told him [the call] wasn’t necessary. We have got more important things to worry about.”

This has been Obama’s M.O.: focus on “the more important things.” He’s had to deal explicitly with race in a few excruciating instances, like the 2009 “beer summit” with the black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, a friend of Obama’s, and James Crowley, the police sergeant responsible for Gates��s controversial arrest. (Obama’s response to the incident was telling: He positioned himself not as an ally of Gates but as a mediator between the two, as equally capable of relating to the white man’s perspective as the black man’s.) After the Zimmerman shooting, he observed that if he had had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin. In almost every instance when his blackness has come to the center of public events, however, he has refused to impute racism to his critics.

This has not made an impression upon the critics. In fact, many conservatives believe he accuses them of racism all the time, even when he is doing the opposite. When asked recently if racism explained his sagging approval ratings, Obama replied, “There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black president. Now, the flip side of it is there are some black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a black president.” Conservatives exploded in indignation, quoting the first sentence without mentioning the second. Here was yet another case of Obama playing the race card, his most cruel and most unanswerable weapon.

I recently asked Jonah Goldberg, a longtime columnist for National Review, why conservatives believed that Obama himself (as opposed to his less reticent allies) implied that they were racially motivated. He told me something that made a certain amount of sense. A few days before Obama’s inaugural address, at a time when his every utterance commanded massive news coverage, the president-elect gave a speech in Philadelphia calling for “a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation, but in our own lives—from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry—an appeal not to our easy instincts but to our better angels.”

What struck Goldberg was Obama’s juxtaposition of “ideology and small thinking”—terms he has always associated with his Republican opponents—with “prejudice and bigotry.” He was not explicitly calling them the same thing, but he was treating them as tantamount. “That feeds into the MSNBC style of argument about Obama’s opponents,” Goldberg told me, “that there must be a more interesting explanation for their motives.”

It’s unlikely that Obama is deliberately plotting to associate his opponents with white supremacy in a kind of reverse-Atwater maneuver. But Obama almost surely believes his race helped trigger the maniacal ferocity of his opponents. (If not, he would be one of the few Obama voters who don’t.) And it’s not hard to imagine that Obama’s constant, public frustration with the irrationality pervading the Republican Party subconsciously expresses his suspicions.

Obama is attempting to navigate the fraught, everywhere-and-yet-nowhere racial obsession that surrounds him. It’s a weird moment, but also a temporary one. The passing from the scene of the nation’s first black president in three years, and the near-certain election of its 44th nonblack one, will likely ease the mutual suspicion. In the long run, generational changes grind inexorably away. The rising cohort of Americans holds far more liberal views than their parents and grandparents on race, and everything else (though of course what you think about “race” and what you think about “everything else” are now interchangeable). We are living through the angry pangs of a new nation not yet fully born.

The Color of His Presidency

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Who Is Winning Democrats Or Republicans

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Who Is Winning Democrats Or Republicans

Democrats Lose Senate Seat In Alabama

Spending bill: A win for Democrats or the GOP?

Democratic Senator Doug Jones has lost his race in Alabama, CBS News projects. Jones’ loss is expected, but it means the Democrats need another seat to take back control of the Senate. Democrats have picked up one seat so far, in Colorado.;

Many consider Jones’ tenure as a senator from ruby-red Alabama to be a fluke. He won the seat in a 2017 special election to fill the vacancy left by Jeff Sessions, who became Mr. Trump’s first attorney general. Jones narrowly defeated Republican candidate Roy Moore, who faced multiple allegations of sexual misconduct with underage girls. This year, Jones was less fortunate with his opponent. He was defeated by Tommy Tuberville, the well-known, beloved former coach of the Auburn University football team.;

Meanwhile, CBS News projects Republican Senator John Cornyn won his reelection race in Texas, defeating Democrat MJ Hegar.

Quiz: Let Us Predict Whether Youre A Democrat Or A Republican

Tell us a few details about you and well guess which political party you belong to. It shouldnt be that simple, right? Were all complex people with a multiplicity of identities and values. But the reality is that in America today, how you answer a handful of questions is very likely to determine how you vote.

This quiz, based on recent surveys with more than 140,000 responses, presents a series of yes-or-no questions to predict whether someone is more likely to identify as a Democrat or a Republican. It captures divisions that should make you worried about the future of American democracy.

We wont collect your answers.

The first question is the most important: Its about race. Asking whether someone is black, Hispanic or Asian cleaves the electorate into two groups. Those who answer yes lean Democratic; the others are split roughly evenly between the parties. Among those who are not black, Hispanic or Asian , the second most important question is whether the person considers religion important. If they answer yes, they are probably Republican.

Its not just race and religion, though. Party allegiances are now also tied to education, gender and age. Americans have sorted themselves more completely and rigidly than any time in recent history.

How demographics predict party affiliation

The group most likely to be Democrats are black women older than about 30.

Meeting in the Middle

Reliable Republicans

Cal Cunningham Concedes North Carolina Senate Race

Democrat Cal Cunningham conceded in the;North Carolina;Senate race on Tuesday, saying in a statement that he had called Republican incumbent Senator Thom Tillis to congratulate him on his victory.

“I just called Senator Tillis to congratulate him on winning re-election;to a second term in the U.S. Senate and wished him and his family the best in their continued service in the months and years ahead,” Cunningham said. “The voters have spoken and I respect their decision.”

CBS News projects that Tillis has won the race, after Cunningham’s concession. Tillis led Cunningham by nearly 100,000 votes as of Tuesday. The presidential race in North Carolina is still too close to call, although President Trump is currently in the lead. The full results of the election in North Carolina are unlikely to be known until later this week, as the deadline in the state to receive absentee ballots postmarked by Election Day is November 12.

Read Also: Did Trump Say That Republicans Are The Dumbest Group Of Voters

Joe Biden The Current Vp

Biden, for the most part, has been content to let his boss hog the limelight. He has made his fair share of effort staying under the public spotlight. His approval ratings have waned in public as well as in Democrat circles as well, owing to his diminished role in the Vice President role.

Compared to the invisible Dick Cheney, Joe Bidens mark on US politics is muted.

Reality Check 1: Biden Cant Be Fdr

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Pelosi Says American People Have Made Their Choice Clear In Voting For Biden

;In a letter to her Democratic colleagues in the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi expressed confidence that Biden would be elected president, even though several states have yet to be called.

“The American people have made their choice clear at the ballot box, and are sending Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to the White House,” Pelosi said.

She also praised House Democrats for keeping their majority, saying that the House will “now have the opportunity to deliver extraordinary progress.” However, she only obliquely referenced the heavy losses by several freshmen Democrats who had flipped red seats.

“Though it was a challenging election, all of our candidates both Frontline and Red to Blue made us proud,” Pelosi said.

Georgia Election Official Says Ossoff Is On Pace To Win Avoid Runoff

A top Georgia election official said Democrat Jon Ossoff, who leads Republican;David Perdue, is on pace to win by a great enough margin to avoid a recount as the state looks to finish counting most outstanding absentee ballots by 1 p.m. EST Wednesday.

Gabriel Sterling, Georgias voting system implementation manager, said more than 60,470 absentee ballots remain uncounted, mostly in Democratic-leaning counties in the metro Atlanta area.

It makes it look like Jon Ossoff will likely have a margin outside of the half a percent to avoid a recount, Sterling said. And obviously, Rev.;Warnock is ahead of him right now. So, if Ossoff avoids that recount so does Rev. Warnock.

Under Georgia law, a recount can be requseted by a campaign;when an election is decided by less than 0.5 percentage points.

Ossoff leads;Perdue by 17,567 votes in a race the Associated Press says is still too early to call. Ossoff’s current lead is 0.4 percentage points. Raphael Warnock, who leads Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler by more than 54,729 votes, is the projected winner in his race. He leads Loeffler by 1.24 percentage points.

Sterling said the Georgia secretary of states office requested all counties get their ballots tallied by 1 p.m., and he believes most will be able to do so. The bulk of uncounted absentee ballots are those that arrived on Election Day, he said.

;Joey Garrison

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Iowa And Montana Senate Races Toss

With polls closing at 10 p.m. ET, CBS News estimates the closely-watched Iowa and Montana Senate races are both toss-ups. If the Democratic candidates defeated the Republican incumbents, it would bring Democrats closer to gaining the majority in the Senate.

In Iowa, Republican Senator Joni Ernst is being challenged by Democrat Theresa Greenfield in an unexpectedly close race. Mr. Trump won Iowa by 10 percentage points in 2016, raising concerns among Republicans about the tightness of a race Ernst was initially expected to win. Greenfield has raised far more than Ernst $28.7 million in the third quarter and she could end up outspending Ernst by more than $25 million by Election Day. ;

In Montana, first-term Republican Senator Steve Daines faces a challenge from the two-term governor of his state, Steve Bullock. Like Hickenlooper, Bullock briefly ran for president before ending his bid and entering the Senate race in March 2020. Bullock won reelection in Montana as a Democrat in 2016 even as Donald Trump won the state by about 20 points.

Meanwhile, the South Carolina Senate race has gone from a “toss-up” to “likely Republican.”

Jon Ossoff Wins In Georgia Ensuring Democrats Will Control The Senate

Winning U.S. Senate an essential piece of presidential election

Democrats took control of the Senate on Wednesday with a pair of historic victories in Georgias runoff elections, assuring slim majorities in both chambers of Congress for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and delivering an emphatic, final rebuke to President Trump in his last days in office.

The Rev. Raphael Warnock defeated Senator Kelly Loeffler, becoming the first Black Democrat elected to the Senate from the South. And Jon Ossoff, the 33-year-old head of a video production company who has never held public office, defeated David Perdue, who recently completed his first full term as senator.

Both Democrats now lead their defeated Republican opponents by margins that are larger than the threshold required to trigger a recount under Georgia law.

The Democrats twin victories will reshape the balance of power in Washington. Though they will have the thinnest of advantages in the House and Senate, where Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will break 50-50 ties, Democrats will control the committees and the legislation and nominations brought to the floor. That advantage will pave the way for at least some elements of Mr. Bidens agenda.

The political fallout of Mr. Trumps tenure is now clear: His single term in the White House will conclude with Republicans having lost the presidency, the House and the Senate on his watch.

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Georgia Senate Runoffs: The Final Battles For Control Of The Us Senate

The results of Georgias January 5 Senate races will help define Bidens presidency.

On January 5, control of the US Senate will be decided in two Georgia runoff elections. If Democrats win both races, both parties will have 50 senators each, with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris serving as the tie-breaker in any party-line votes.

If just one of the two Republican incumbents can hold onto their seats, however, the GOP will keep control of the Senate.

In the first race, Republican Sen. David Perdue is facing off against Jon Ossoff, perhapsbest known for his failed attempt to flip Georgias Sixth Congressional District in 2017 . In the second race, Rev. Raphael Warnock is challenging Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler. Warnock is the senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, renowned as the place where Martin Luther King Jr. preached in the 1960s.

Its difficult to predict how runoffs and special elections will go. But though Republicans are favored, the races could be tight, as Voxs Ella Nilsen reported:

ButPerdue and Loeffler have struggled to clearly articulate the stakes of losing the Senate to Georgians as President Donald Trump has continued to falsely insist that he won the presidential race. Its hard to tell your supporters that youre the only thing standing between them and radical socialism if you cant admit that Trump lost.

Follow along below for Voxs election coverage, including breaking news updates, analysis, explainers, and more.

Georgia’s First Black Senator

A pastor who spent the past 15 years leading the Atlanta church where Martin Luther King Jr. preached, Raphael Warnock, defeated Republican incumbent Kelly Loeffler, US media predicted.

With the win, Warnock has become the first Black senator in his state’s history.

He acknowledged his improbable victory in a message to supporters early Wednesday, citing his family’s experience with poverty.

“The other day, because this is America, the 82-year-old hands that used to pick somebody else’s cotton picked her youngest son to be a United States senator,” he said, referring to his mother.

“Tonight, we proved with hope, hard work and the people by our side, anything is possible.”

Loeffler refused to concede in a brief message to supporters shortly after midnight.

“We’ve got some work to do here. This is a game of inches. We’re going to win this election,” the 50-year-old former businesswoman insisted, despite having no path to victory.

Also Check: How Many Registered Republicans Are In The United States

Poking That Dog With A Stick

This is not a situation open to easy reform; nor would all want to reform it. Parties try to become strong, and remain strong, for perfectly understandable political reasons. Strong parties can be a boon, though the balance of benefit to risk is better in a system designed with them in mind. And American society is divided in ways it was not before; its partisan politics are in part a cause of thatbut in part, too, a consequence of it.

An electoral system that has its thumb on the scales, though, is harder to defend. And measures to redress that electoral bias through greater proportionality in the voting system might also help with the broader issues of political division. Systems with elements of proportional representation, such as that sought by reformers of the electoral college or House districts, not only provide bulwarks against charges of illegitimacy. They also have a tendency towards consensus of the sort the founders wanted. There is a reason why, when choosing their own constitutions, no other country has for long survived with a replica of the American modeland why when guiding the design of constitutions for others, as they did in post-war Germany and Japan, Americans have always suggested solutions quite unlike the one under which they live.

Dig deeper

Which Party Is The Party Of The 1 Percent

First, both parties receive substantial support. Much of it comes from registered voters who make $100K+ annually. However, Democrats actually come out ahead when it comes to fundraising for campaigns. In many cases, Democrats have been able to raise twice as much in private political contributions. But what about outside of politicians? Does that mean Democrats are the wealthier party? Which American families are wealthier? Republicans or Democrats?

Honestly, it is probably Republicans. When it comes down to it, the richest families in America tend to donate to Republican candidates. Forbes reported out of the 50 richest families in the United States, 28 donate to Republican candidates. Another seven donate to Democrats. Additionally, 15 of the richest families in the U.S. donate to both parties.

Also Check: Can Republicans Vote In California Democratic Primary

Black Voters And Faith Leaders Rejoice At Warnocks Historic Win: I Think It Speaks Volumes

ATLANTA Michael Simmons, 63, has not missed voting in a major election since 1976. The most important for him was 2008, when he cast a ballot for President Barack Obama. But his votes in Novembers general election and the Senate runoffs on Tuesday were ranked closely behind.

The Rev. Raphael Warnocks success in the Senate runoffs sent a jolt of jubilation through much of Georgias African-American community, as they saw a Black man taking an office that had been held by segregationists when he was born. There was also a level of pride in having an emissary of the Black church serve in the highest levels of government.

I never would have thunk put that down, thunk! Id see this happen, said Mr. Simmons, a manager at a nonprofit organization in downtown Atlanta. Personally, I dont expect the world to change because we have a Black man in the Senate, but we can see progress.

The office of the nonprofit where Mr. Simmons works is just a few blocks from Ebenezer Baptist Church, the renowned congregation that Mr. Warnock leads. Mr. Simmons often saw Mr. Warnock walking around the neighborhood.

The win carried enormous significance for him: This was a place where for many years we got the short end of the stick, Mr. Simmons, who grew up in Alabama and moved to Atlanta after college, said.

Is Virginia A Democratic Or Republican State

4.3/5VirginiaRepublicanstateRepublicanVirginiastateDemocratic

Of the state’s eleven seats in the House of Representatives, Democrats hold seven and Republicans hold four. The state is widely considered blue-leaning, a trend which moves parallel with the growth of the Washington D.C. and Richmond suburbs.

Furthermore, is Virginia a swing state? Election analytics website FiveThirtyEight identifies the states of Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin as “perennial” swing states that have regularly seen close contests over the last few presidential campaigns.

Besides, what political party is Virginia?

Virginia recognizes only two political parties: Democrats and Republicans.

Was Virginia always a democratic state?

Since the 2012 Virginia elections, Virginia has always voted for the Democratic statewide candidate. Since the 1851 Virginia gubernational election, the first gubernatorial election in Virginia in which the governor was elected by direct popular vote, 34 Virginia Governors have been Democrats.

Don’t Miss: Are Republicans More Racist Than Democrats

Key Races That Could Determine The Senate Majority

To take the majority, Democrats would have to net three seats, should Biden win the presidency, or four seats, if Mr. Trump wins reelection, because it’s the vice president who breaks ties in the Senate. The current balance of the Republican-controlled Senate is 53 to 47.

Here is a rundown of the key Senate races in this year’s election:

Doug Collins Concedes To Kelly Loeffler In Georgia Senate Race

Who is Winning US Election 2020 | Full 360 Analysis | Analysts, Democrats, Republicans on NewsX

Republican Congressman Doug Collins has conceded to Senator Kelly Loeffler, who has advanced to a runoff election in the Georgia Senate race along with Democrat Raphael Warnock. The runoff election will be held in early January.

I just called and congratulated her on making the runoff. She has my support and endorsement. I look forward to all Republicans coming together. Raphael Warnock would be a disaster for Georgia and America.

Doug Collins

Read Also: Will Any Republicans Vote For Impeachment

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newstfionline · 6 years

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‘We Are All Accumulating Mountains of Things’

By Alana Semuels, The Atlantic, Aug. 21, 2018

It’s easier than ever to buy things online. It’s so easy that Ryan Cassata sometimes does it in his sleep. Cassata, a 24-year-old singer/songwriter and actor from Los Angeles, recently got a notification from Amazon that a package had been shipped to his apartment, but he didn’t remember buying anything. When he logged onto his account and saw that a fanny pack and some socks were on the way, he remembered: A few nights back, he had woken up in the middle of the night to browse--and apparently shop on--Amazon.

He shops when he’s awake, too, buying little gadgets like an onion chopper, discounted staples like a 240-pack of gum, and decorations like a Himalayan salt lamp. The other day, he almost bought a pizza pool float, until he remembered that he doesn’t have a pool. “I don’t really need most of the stuff,” he tells me.

Thanks to a perfect storm of factors, Americans are amassing a lot of stuff. Before the advent of the internet, we had to set aside time to go browse the aisles of a physical store, which was only open a certain number of hours a day. Now, we can shop from anywhere, anytime--while we’re at work, or exercising, or even sleeping. We can tell Alexa we need new underwear, and in a few days, it will arrive on our doorstep. And because of the globalization of manufacturing, that underwear is cheaper than ever before--so cheap that we add it to our online shopping carts without a second thought. “There’s no reason not to shop--because clothing is so cheap, you feel like, ‘why not?’ There’s nothing lost in terms of the hit on your bank account,” Elizabeth Cline, the author of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, told me.

Shopping online also feels good. Humans get a dopamine hit from buying stuff, according to research by Ann-Christine Duhaime, a professor of neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School. “As a general rule, your brain tweaks you to want more, more, more--indeed, more than those around you--both of ‘stuff’ and of stimulation and novelty,” Duhaime wrote in a Harvard Business Review essay last year. Online shopping allows us to get that dopamine hit, and then also experience delayed gratification when the order arrives a few days later, which may make it more physiologically rewarding than shopping in stores.

Sites like Amazon have made it especially easy to shop. In 1999, the Seattle retailer patented a one-click buying process, which allows customers to purchase something without entering their shipping address or credit card info. It launched its Prime program in 2005, and now more than 100 million people have signed on to pay $119 a year for “free” two-day shipping. As a result, most other major retailers offer free shipping too. Returning stuff is a little more difficult--shoppers usually have to print a label and then go to the post office or a UPS or FedEx site to return packages. Many wait too long, or decide the hassle isn’t worth it because the stuff was cheap anyway. A recent NPR/Marist poll found that nine in 10 consumers rarely or never return stuff they’ve bought online.

Justine Montoya, a caregiver in Los Angeles, buys all sorts of stuff online--baby formula, clothes, household goods. She estimates that she shops online twice a week. “It’s just so easy--you click a button, and it’s on its way,” she told me.

In the last few months alone, I bought an $18 smart watch from Wish.com that I will probably never use, a second Kindle because it was on sale and I am worried my first Kindle is going to die soon, an electric space heater I no longer need, and a pair of wireless earbuds that I had hoped would allow me to charge my iPhone and listen to music at the same time, but that instead just fall out of my ears whenever I put them on. I also bought, on Amazon, a (used) book about hiking in the Sierras for $1.99, only to find the exact same book in a box of my stuff in my parents’ basement. I didn’t return any of it.

In 2017, Americans spent $240 billion--twice as much as they’d spent in 2002--on goods like jewelry, watches, books, luggage, and telephones and related communication equipment, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which adjusted those numbers for inflation. Over that time, the population grew just 13 percent. Spending on personal care products also doubled over that time period. Americans spent, on average, $971.87 on clothes last year, buying nearly 66 garments, according to the American Apparel and Footwear Association. That’s 20 percent more money than they spent in 2000. The average American bought 7.4 pairs of shoes last year, up from 6.6 pairs in 2000.

All told, “we are all accumulating mountains of things,” said Mark A. Cohen, the director of retail studies at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business. He sometimes asks his students to count the number of things they have on them in class, and once they start counting up gadgets and cords and accessories, they end up near 50. “Americans have become a society of hoarders,” Cohen said. Montoya said she has more stuff now that she has started shopping online: “It’s easier to accumulate more, and it’s easier to spend more.”

At the same time we are amassing all this stuff, Americans are taking up more space. Last year, the average size of a single-family house in America was 2,426 square feet, a 23 percent increase in size from two decades ago, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. The number of self-storage units is rapidly increasing too: There are around 52,000 such facilities nationally; two decades ago, there were half that number.

Of course, not everyone is a part of this hoarding revolution. There are people who can’t or don’t shop online, because they don’t have credit cards or because they are barely making ends meet. Only about 29 percent of households with incomes under $25,000 are members of Amazon Prime, according to Kantar Consulting. Some people are embracing the zero waste movement, or have followed the example of the author Ann Patchett, who published a widely-circulated op-ed in The New York Times about how she resolved to stop shopping for a year. When she ceased buying things like lip gloss and lotion and hair products, she started finding half-used versions of them under the sink, and realized she hadn’t needed new things after all. “The things we buy and buy and buy are like a thick coat of Vaseline smeared on glass,” she wrote. “We can see some shapes out there, light and dark, but in our constant craving for what we may still want, we miss life’s details.”

But most Americans are not curtailing their shopping habits. And as consumers demand cheaper clothing, electronics, and other goods, manufacturers are spending less to make them, which sometimes means they fall apart more quickly. The share of large household appliances that had to be replaced within five years grew to 13 percent in 2013, up from seven percent in 2004. Cheap clothes might lose their shape after a wash or two, or get holes after a few tumbles in the dryer; electronics become obsolete quickly and need to be replaced. While some of this stuff can be recycled or resold, often, it ends up in landfills. In 2015, the most recent year for which data is available, Americans put 16 million tons of textiles in the municipal waste stream, a 68 percent increased from 2000. We tossed 34.5 million tons of plastics, a 35 percent increase from 2000, according to data from the Environmental Protection Agency. Over that same time period, the population grew just 14 percent.

“Sometimes, people sit down and cry when they see the amount of garbage we produce in a day,” said Robert Reed, a spokesman for Recology, which handles recycling for West Coast cities like San Francisco. Centered in America’s tech capital, Recology has seen an increase in discarded electronics, including products with lithium batteries, Reed told me. In 2016, a lithium battery fire burnt down a waste management facility in San Mateo.

The 16,000 students who live in dorms at Michigan State University left behind 147,946 pounds of goods like clothing, towels, and appliances when they moved out this year, a 40 percent increase from 2016, according to Kat Cooper, a spokeswoman. The university packs up these goods and donates to them to its surplus store, so that incoming students can buy used, rather than new, stuff. In recent years, dorm cleaners have been finding so many packages of unopened food and toiletries that the university started a program to get students to donate leftover food and toiletries to local organizations like food banks when they move out. This year, it collected 900 pounds of personal care items and 4,000 pounds of nonperishable food items to donate. Pomona College has seen the volume of packages delivered grow by 325 percent in the last 12 years, according to Patricia Vest, a spokeswoman; it, too, asks students to donate unused goods to a resale program. This year, it diverted 42 tons of clothes, furniture, and office supplies.

The Internet has also made it easier to recycle some of the stuff Americans buy and no longer want. Online consignment shops like thredUP and Poshmark help people buy and sell clothes from their closets. Secondhand stores like Goodwill have moved online, too, selling the growing pile of goods they get on the Internet.

But the ability to easily get rid of stuff may be making people feel a little better about buying things they don’t need, and motivating them to buy even more. On a recent weekday, I stopped by the massive warehouse where workers from Goodwill of San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin sort donations to Bay Area stores. Some of the stuff that’s been donated has never been used. Near the front of the warehouse stands a rack of clothes with their original tags on--a $245 blue Nicole Miller cocktail dress, $88 Kit and Ace pants, a pale green J. Jill blouse. “We are seeing items that have been barely used or not used, because when people shop online, it’s a lot of work to return it,” William Rogers, the president of the Goodwill, told me. Rogers himself is guilty--when we met at the warehouse, he dropped off four wall sconces he’d bought a year ago on Amazon. He had tried to put them up, decided they didn’t look good, and brought them to donate.

Secondhand shops can’t resell all of the donations they get. Cline estimates that 85 percent of the clothing that is donated to secondhand stores ends up in landfills every year. Just nine percent of plastic that ends up in the municipal waste stream gets recycled, according to the EPA, and only 15 percent of textiles get recycled. It can be difficult to take apart clothes and re-use the fabrics, Cline said, so lots of clothing in the waste stream gets sent to the developing world, used for rags, or sent to a landfill.

Fifty years ago, the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick coined a phrase for these “useless objects” that accumulate in a house: “kipple.” In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which served as the basis for the movie Blade Runner, he theorized that “the entire universe is moving toward a state of total, absolute kippleization.” Kipple reproduced, Dick wrote, when nobody was around. The ubiquity of mobile devices and the ease of online shopping have made Dick’s prediction come true, with one small tweak: Our kipple does not just multiply on its own, every time we turn away. We grow it ourselves, buying more and more of it, because we can.

#consumerism #shopping #shopping online #online shopping

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techcrunchappcom · 4 years

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New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/its-a-big-big-swing-trump-loses-ground-with-whitevoters-politico/

'It's a big, big swing': Trump loses ground with white voters - POLITICO

Just a handful of states could decide who becomes the next president. POLITICO reporters from across the country break down what it will take for Donald Trump and Joe Biden to win over the most critical voters.

In 2016, white voters cast over 80 percent of the vote in each of the three states, according to exit polls.

“It’s a big, big swing,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion. “What [Biden’s] doing among whites is more than offsetting the slippage among nonwhites … The recipe is very different this time, right now anyway, in terms of white voters.”

It’s possible the focus on Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s replacement will help Trump, reminding voters who have drifted away from him what they cared about in 2016. Four years ago, one in five voters — many of them white, social conservatives — said Supreme Court appointments were the most important factor in their vote.

But Trump is working from a disadvantage this year. There are relatively few undecided voters left to persuade. Democrats are also highly energized about the Supreme Court. And Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the court one month before the midterm elections two year ago did nothing to stop Democrats from steamrolling Trump and the GOP.

The erosion of Trump’s white support — and its significance to the November outcome — was never more obvious than in Trump’s messaging in recent days. Last week, he called for the creation of a commission to promote “patriotic education,” while dismissing “critical race theory” and the 1619 project of The New York Times Magazine. At a rally in Mosinee, Wis., he lit into Kamala Harris — the first major party woman of color vice presidential nominee — lamenting the possibility of her becoming president “through the back door.”

On Friday, he released a TV ad in Minnesota and Michigan lashing into Biden for supporting increased refugee admissions, including from “the most unstable, vulnerable, dangerous parts of the world.” Then, before an overwhelmingly white crowd in Bemidji, Minn., Trump mocked Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) — the first Somali-American in Congress and a former refugee — and said Biden would “turn Minnesota into a refugee camp.”

He praised Minnesotans for their “good genes.”

But Trump’s rhetoric does not appear to be resonating with white America to the degree it did in 2016. That year, whites cast nearly three-quarters of the vote nationally, and Trump won those voters by about 15 percentage points, according to Pew Research. Four years later, Biden has torn into that advantage, though to what degree is uncertain. The latest Morning Consult poll showed Trump now beating Biden among white likely voters nationally by just 5 percentage points. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll on Sunday put Trump up among white voters by 9 percentage points, while a PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll on Friday showed Biden and Trump essentially tied with white voters.

Anywhere in that range is a problem for Trump. It is a major reason why Biden, despite underperforming with voters of color, is still running ahead nationally.

“Suburban whites are pretty much gone” for Trump, said Ed Rendell, the former Pennsylvania governor and former chair of the Democratic National Committee. And Biden is far less objectionable to many working-class whites than Clinton, a more polarizing nominee whose favorability ratings were lower than Biden’s.

“If Trump loses Pennsylvania by 4 or 5 points,” Rendell said, “then the suburbs and the working-class whites, that accounts for the loss.”

Trump is doing better with whites in some states than others. In North Carolina, he is drawing noncollege-educated white voters at about the same levels he was in 2016. But in other states, including some with sizable populations of people of color, he is underperforming with whites. In Florida, Trump is running ahead of Biden with white voters 56 percent to 39 percent, according to a Monmouth University poll. But that is far short of the 32 percentage-point margin he posted in 2016. In Arizona, he has seen his 14-point edge with white voters in 2016 cut as well.

It wasn’t always clear Trump would have any problem with white voters — or that he would be making gains with people of color. Even in the midterm elections, when suburbanites recoiled from Trump and Democrats retook the House, Republicans carried the white vote nationally by about 10 percentage points.

But white voters have not proved immune to the damage inflicted on Trump by the coronavirus and its resulting economic wreckage, which have been a drag on Trump’s reelection campaign since spring. In particular, the pandemic appears to have hurt Trump with seniors, including older white voters concerned about both their retirement accounts and their health.

“It’s these older white voters that I think are the ones that are moving” away from Trump, said Jeff Link, a veteran Iowa-based Democratic strategist who has studied voters who turned from Barack Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016. “The older people are like, ‘What the f— is this guy doing?’”

Earlier this year, Trump appeared to have an opening to recapture white support. Following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis — and the ensuing protests across the country — Trump pivoted to a law-and-order campaign, with overt appeals to suburban whites. But the effort has largely fallen flat, with numerous polls suggesting the turmoil was doing little to improve Trump’s prospects.

And the issue that motivated many white voters in 2016 — immigration, amplified by Trump’s promise to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border — has all but fallen out of view. During his successful presidential campaign, 13 percent of voters ranked immigration as the most important issue facing the country. Last month, immigration barely registered at 2 percent in Gallup’s survey of the most important problems facing the country.

Pat McCrory, the former Republican governor of North Carolina, said he has been “very surprised” that the Trump campaign has not leaned more heavily into immigration, particularly around Biden’s past statements about health care for undocumented immigrants.

But with the coronavirus and months of civil unrest on the electorate’s mind, “the two moving factors [in the election] may be the violence and the virus: The two V’s. Both parties are throwing ads and mail out on those two issues.” McCrory said, “There does seem to be a little flip” between Biden and Trump, with Biden courting working-class whites and Trump “actually trying to go after the Black vote, and the Hispanic vote.”

Appearing at a town hall last week in his childhood home of Scranton, Pa., a city that is more than 80 percent white, Biden cited his “Scranton roots” in an appeal to the working class, saying he was accustomed to people deriding those “who look at us and think that we’re suckers, look at us and they think that we don’t — we’re not equivalent to them.”

Not only do public safety-based appeals appear to be faltering for Trump, white voters “still really care about pocketbook issues, and that is the underlying issue that drives their vote,” said Zak Williams, a Democratic mail strategist based in Duluth, Minn., near where Biden campaigned Friday.

“College-educated white voters were the first group that moved away from him,” Williams said, and now Trump is “starting to drive away noncollege-educated white voters,” too.

At the center of Trump’s reelection math has always been the expectation that he could turn out more white, noncollege-educated voters in 2020 than he did in 2016, squeezing more juice from a diminishing base. Nick Trainer, the Trump campaign’s director of battleground strategy, said “the vast majority of polls are oversampling Democrats and are relying on an outdated sampling formula.”

Your guide to the year-round campaign cycle.

Trainer acknowledged Trump “has room to improve his numbers with certain voters, including suburban women and voters who disliked both candidate Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016.” However, he said “sustained preelection attacks on issues we know these voters care about will hurt Joe Biden and boost President Trump.”

Even if the result is a margin of victory with noncollege-educated white voters that is smaller than it was four years ago, Trump will almost certainly carry that group. And if he can turn them out in greater numbers, he could shift the electorate toward him in several predominantly white states. Republicans and Democrats alike estimate there are hundreds of thousands of unregistered, noncollege-educated whites in key swing states that Trump could still pick up.

That fight for those voters was on display in Minnesota on Friday, where Trump and Biden appeared not in the Minneapolis-St. Paul suburbs, but in more culturally conservative, northern reaches of the state. Republicans there and in some of the whitest counties in the country say they haven’t seen any falloff for Trump, and many of them suspect that polls are still underrepresenting his support.

Stephanie Soucek, chair of the Republican Party in Wisconsin’s Door County said she sees more Trump signs in her county than she did in 2016. Jack Brill, acting chair of the local Republican Party in Sarasota County, Fla., said “the base in Sarasota County is as strong as ever.”

In Duluth, the target of much attention from the Trump campaign, the city’s former mayor, Gary Doty, acknowledged that the president may have shed some support among some white women because of “the way he presents himself. He’s sometimes crude and rude, and I don’t care for that style.”

However, he said, “I think there’s this silent group of people” who support Trump and will turn out for him.

Doty said that after he endorsed Trump recently, “people that wouldn’t talk to me about politics … after they heard I had supported the Trump ticket, would come say, ‘Hey, I’m for him, too.'”

#ground #loses #swing #trump #voters #white #Politics

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differentnutpeace · 3 years

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Few Facts, Millions Of Clicks: Fearmongering Vaccine Stories Go Viral Online

The odds of dying after getting a COVID-19 vaccine are virtually nonexistent.

According to recent data from the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention, you're three times more likely to get struck by lightning. หวย บอล เกมส์ คาสิโนออนไลน์

But you might not know that from looking at your social media feed.

A new NPR analysis finds that articles connecting vaccines and death have been among the most highly engaged with content online this year, going viral in a way that could hinder people's ability to judge the true risk in getting a shot.

The findings also illustrate a broader trend in online misinformation: With social media platforms making more of an effort to take down patently false health claims, bad actors are turning to cherry-picked truths to drive misleading narratives.

Experts say these storylines are much harder for companies to moderate, though they can have the same net effect of creating a distorted and false view of the world.

"It's a really insidious problem," said Deen Freelon, a communications professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "The social media companies have taken a hard line against disinformation; they have not taken a similarly hard line against fallacies."

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To date, the CDC's reporting system has not received evidence linking any deaths directly to vaccines.

And yet, on almost half of all the days so far in 2021, a story about someone dying after receiving a vaccine shot has been among the most popular vaccine-related articles on social media, according to data from the media intelligence company NewsWhip.

That includes the year's most popular vaccine story: a South Florida Sun Sentinel article, which was republished in the Chicago Tribune, about a doctor who died a few weeks after receiving the vaccine.

The story explicitly notes there has been no link found between the shot and his death, but it has received almost 5 million interactions on Facebook and Twitter nonetheless.

"This problem is not theoretical. It's not hypothetical," said Sarah Roberts, an information studies professor at UCLA. "This thorny issue directly lands in this gray area of an emergent information crisis that has really clear real-world implications."

Few deaths, many clicks

By just about any metric, it's clear stories linking deaths to vaccines have spread in such a way that wildly overstates real numbers.

Among the more than 85 million people in the U.S. who have now received at least one vaccination shot, less than .0018% of shot recipients have died sometime afterward.

Even that small number includes people who were vaccinated while also suffering from other health conditions.

Whether they have a vaccine or not, roughly 8,000 people die in the U.S. every day. And as more people get vaccinated, more vaccinated people will continue to die from unrelated causes, which the pharmaceutical company Pfizer alluded to in a statement earlier this year.

"It is important to note that serious adverse events, including deaths that are unrelated to the vaccine, are unfortunately likely to occur at a similar rate as they would in the general population," the statement said.

But UNC-Chapel Hill's Freelon said when it comes to conspiratorial thinking, stats and nuance often don't matter as much as tragic stories.

"This is something that we see repeatedly with human cognition," Freelon said. "It's the emphasis on the breathless anecdote and then the discounting of statistics that are much more representative."

The largest spike in death-related stories came at a critical time in the vaccine rollout.

In January, as the average number of shots administered quadrupled and people frantically searched for information as they considered whether to be vaccinated, it was also the time people were most likely to encounter a story linking a death to vaccination, according to the NPR analysis.

A worker prepares to give a COVID-19 vaccine last week at the Dignity Health Sports Park in Carson, Calif.

Brittany Murray/MediaNews Group/Long Beach Press-Telegram via Getty Images

Every day from Jan. 7 through Jan. 20, at least one story linking a vaccine to a death was among the 10 most-engaged-with stories about vaccines.

NPR analyzed NewsWhip's data by looking at each day's most-engaged-with stories that included the word "vaccine" in the headline, summary or metadata.

Engagement encompasses how many times an article was shared, commented on or liked across Facebook, Pinterest and much of Twitter.

On some days, such as Jan. 16 and 17, and March 11 and 12, 25% or more of the top vaccine stories on social media were about a person who died after being vaccinated.

This is not because many more people died during these periods; rather it's the result of multiple news outlets writing articles about the same small number of deaths and reaching a larger audience.

On March 11 for instance, all six of the stories in the top 20 most-engaged-with vaccine stories were about the same Utah woman who died four days after receiving her second vaccine dose.

One Facebook page with 20,000 followers posted a link to the article, with the caption "I'll pass on the vaccinations. I could care less of anyone's opinion ... this is horrifically sad."

Another page, with 10,000 followers, posted it saying, "[V]ery concerned about those getting the poke."

A few days later, however, the Utah Office of the Medical Examiner issued a statement saying that "there have been NO DEATHS caused by the Covid-19 vaccines to date in Utah."

In one of the news stories that was shared with anti-vaccine messages, the actual text of the article described how the father of the woman who died still decided to get the shot himself.

Exploiting the gray areas

The difficulty in moderating these sorts of stories comes from their truthfulness. A woman did die four days after receiving the vaccine in Utah. But there wasn't any causal relationship, according to the state's medical examiner.

Social media companies have made it clear that when it comes to sharing true-but-misleading information, they don't want to wade in.

"Content can't always be clearly divided into helpful and harmful," Kang-Xing Jin, Facebook head of health, wrote in a recent San Francisco Chronicle op-ed. "It's hard to draw the line on posts that contain people's personal experiences with vaccines."

But peddlers of misinformation, and even American adversaries, have discovered this gap in content moderation.

Russian state media such as RT and Sputnik News shared more than 100 stories linking the Pfizer vaccine to subsequent deaths of recipients, according to a recent report by the Alliance for Securing Democracy.

It's a phenomenon dubbed "lying through truth" by Bret Schafer, who wrote the report.

"The [social media] platforms look at an individual tweet from RT saying 23 people died in a nursing home after taking the Pfizer vaccine, and they can't do anything about it because it is technically true, while being wildly misleading," Schafer said. "That seems to be the new strategy."

On Thursday, the CEOs of Facebook, Twitter and Google will appear at a U.S. House hearing centered around misinformation that spreads on their platforms.

In his opening remarks, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will tell lawmakers about the myriad ways the company is fighting to "keep harmful misinformation about Covid-19 from spreading," but the statement focuses only on false claims and makes no mention of these sorts of gray areas.

About 30% of Americans continue to express some hesitancy around getting a COVID-19 vaccine, according to a recent NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.

Ann Bostrom, an expert on risk perception at the University of Washington, said many of these people are judging the situation incorrectly.

For people to calculate correctly the real risk involved in getting a shot, she said, they need to consider the hundreds of thousands who have died because they were not vaccinated against COVID-19, not just a random headline.

"We rarely get the contextual information we need," Bostrom said. "And it's really hard to judge the importance of something without that information."

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billyagogo · 4 years

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The Color of His Presidency

New Post has been published on https://newsprofixpro.com/moxie/2021/01/26/the-color-of-his-presidency/

The Color of His Presidency

Photo: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

It was a cringe-worthy moment, but Obama brushed it off graciously. “He called me,” said Obama. “I told him [the call] wasn’t necessary. We have got more important things to worry about.”

This has been Obama’s M.O.: focus on “the more important things.” He’s had to deal explicitly with race in a few excruciating instances, like the 2009 “beer summit” with the black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, a friend of Obama’s, and James Crowley, the police sergeant responsible for Gates’s controversial arrest. (Obama’s response to the incident was telling: He positioned himself not as an ally of Gates but as a mediator between the two, as equally capable of relating to the white man’s perspective as the black man’s.) After the Zimmerman shooting, he observed that if he had had a son, he would look like Trayvon Martin. In almost every instance when his blackness has come to the center of public events, however, he has refused to impute racism to his critics.

The Color of His Presidency

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warninggraphiccontent · 5 years

Text

6 September 2019

That was the week that was

Finding a single data visualisation to summarise this week was tricky, but I think this works:

Knowing we were in for A Bit Of A Week didn't make the resignations, whip withdrawals and defections, decisions to stand down, loss of majority, votes, defeats and god knows what else any less dramatic. And, with a possible (probable? likely? definite?) election to look forward to (if that is indeed the right phrase), there's still much more to come. At least there'll be charts.

Speaking of charts and busy weeks... our Performance Tracker team published a concern rating for public services before Wednesday's Spending Round (yes, there was a Spending Round this week) and our Parliamentary Monitor team published a mini-Monitor. They'll soon have a FULL SESSION of data to analyse. (In the meantime, here's some more on how much we're all watching parliament at the moment.)

Oh, and Data Bites was great - watch it back here. Put 2 October in your diaries for the next one, everything else permitting...

Have a good weekend

Gavin

Today's links:

Graphic content

Politics! *jazz hands*

A look ahead to the week... (me for IfG)

Ministerial resignations (Aron for IfG - and here from Marcus)

Composition of the Commons (Aron for IfG)

MPs standing down (IfG)

Commons defeats (Alice for IfG)

Results of the votes (and here, and here - Marcus for IfG)

Brexit votes chart (UK in a Changing Europe)

Historic majorities (me for IfG)

Boris Johnson faces electoral gamble despite poll lead* (FT)

Election dates (IfG)

Could Britain really hold an election on a Monday?* (New Statesman)

Parliamentary Monitor 2019: Snapshot (Institute for Government - and this from Joe)

Which public services face the biggest pressures ahead of the spending round?(Institute for Government - and this from Martin)

How often do ministers change jobs? (BBC News)

Few believe the Government's explanation of why Parliament is to be suspended (Ipsos MORI)

The cost of Brexit (Mona Chalabi)

This is the Irish border (The Guardian)

Europe

How Europe changed since 1900 (University of Wageningen’s 'Historic Land Dynamics Assessment’ research via Max Roser)

Why Germany’s bond market is increasingly hard to trade* (FT)

Here's how party landscape in #Brandenburg and #Saxony has changed over the past 6 years since AfD first contested elections (via Julia Schulte-Cloos)

Brandenburg projection (ZDF Heute via Alberto Nardelli)

America’s gun problem, explained (Vox)

More and deadlier: Mass shooting trends in America* (Washington Post)

Socially liberal companies really do contribute more to Democrats* (The Economist)

As Rising Heat Bakes U.S. Cities, The Poor Often Feel It Most (NPR)

Everything else

How Not To Plan a Workforce (Rory, via Marcus)

The commuting gap: women are more likely than men to leave their job over a long commute (ONS)

Why the Periodic Table of Elements Is More Important Than Ever (Bloomberg)

744 years of British economic history in 1 minute 44 seconds (Andrew Sissons)

Gender-neutral bathrooms can save women from waiting forever in line (The Guardian)

Some quotes and notes from reading Mary Spear's 1969 #dataviz book Practical Charting Techniques (via Xan Gregg)

Meta data

Personal data

Consent Is Not an Ethical Rubber Stamp (Slate)

Fitbit, mass shootings and terrible ideas (Peter Wells)

Your mental health for sale (Privacy International)

Business customer attitudes towards data privacy and data sharing (HMRC)

Google accused of secretly feeding personal data to advertisers* (FT)

Facial recognition

Beyond face value: public attitudes to facial recognition technology (Ada Lovelace Institute)

Police use of automated facial recognition: a justified privacy intrusion(Panopticon)

Chinese deepfake app Zao sparks privacy row after going viral (The Guardian)

Politics

GE2019 Election Tech Handbook (Newspeak House)

Both The Telegraph and The Sun have issued clarifications regarding their coverage of the recent ComRes poll (via Anthony B. Masters)

UK Statistics Authority Statement on the future of the RPI (UKSA)

Everything else

Data Bites #5: Getting things done with data in government (Institute for Government)

Can the Innovation Strategy deliver a lasting legacy for government? (Civil Service World)

'The Great Hack' only scratched the surface of where big data could lead us(Penguin Books)

GDS takes GOV.UK open source code and makes it private...but why?(Diginomica)

Take part in our data ethics survey (ODI)

GDP-arrrrrrgggghhh! A no-deal Brexit: So what are you going to do with all that lovely data? (The Register)

Data Foundry: Data collections from the National Library of Scotland

What Statistics Can and Can’t Tell Us About Ourselves* (The New Yorker)

Why we haven’t made a trustmark for technology (Doteveryone)

We’re in a Data Literacy Crisis. Could Librarians Be the Superheroes We Need?(Fortune)

Opportunities

JOB: We're hiring: Apply to be our new algorithms investigative journalist(Bureau of Investigative Journalism)

JOB: Research Consultant/Analyst (Deltapoll)

JOB: Data Visualisation Scientist (ONS)

JOB: Head of Evidence and Data (The Centre for Homelessness Impact)

EVENT: 21st century common sense: Using collective intelligence to tackle complex social challenges (Nesta)

And finally...

Food and drink

Burgundy wine investors have beaten the stockmarket* (The Economist)

Pret A Manger locations overlaid on to Brexit voting patterns (Ian Warren)

I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of The Great British Bake Off and then asked it to write an episode (Keaton Patti)

Everything else

Jacob Rees-Mogg, 1 (via everyone)

Jacob Rees-Mogg, 2 (Phillip Dyte)

Britons make worst tourists, say Britons (and Spaniards and Germans)(YouGov)

Simulated Enigma machine (Observable)

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theliberaltony · 4 years

Link

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.

Poll(s) of the week

Last week, President Trump sparked a firestorm by calling for the postponement of the November election as the country prepares to vote amid the coronavirus pandemic. And although the president cannot actually delay the vote — Congress determines the federal election date — this hasn’t stopped Trump from repeatedly casting doubt on the election results and exacerbating Americans’ already-flagging confidence in the integrity of the electoral process.

But so far, Trump’s idea of postponing the election isn’t very popular. Three new polls this week found that Americans strongly oppose postponing the election, even in the face of a public health crisis. Reuters/Ipsos found that 66 percent of registered voters opposed a delay, while just 23 percent supported it (11 percent weren’t sure). The Economist/YouGov found that 66 percent of adults opposed postponement, compared to just 15 percent who backed it (19 percent weren’t sure). Politico/Morning Consult also asked voters how they felt about delaying the election, giving them three choices: Postpone the election, hold the election as scheduled but with mostly in-person voting, or hold the election as scheduled but with most Americans voting by mail. It also found that most opposed postponing: Just 7 percent backed delaying the election, down from 16 percent in April when the pollster last asked about this, while 86 percent of respondents said the election should stay on schedule, one way or another.

However, as with most issues in American politics, there were notable partisan splits, although the polls disagreed as to just how far apart Democrats and Republicans were on the issue. In the Reuters/Ipsos poll, for instance, 79 percent of Democrats opposed a delay compared to only 51 percent of Republicans. Whereas in that Economist/YouGov poll, the gap was smaller: Seventy-seven percent of Democrats opposed a delay, versus 59 percent of Republicans. Politico/Morning Consult found an even smaller partisan divide, with 93 percent of Democrats saying the election should be held as scheduled, compared to 82 percent of Republicans. It’s worth noting that the Politico/Morning Consult survey offered respondents three options, which might have affected the partisan breakdown to some extent, as some Republicans might prefer postponement to a largely vote-by-mail election.

Americans were also split on Trump’s motivation for suggesting a delay to the election. Among Republicans in that Reuters/Ipsos poll, 41 percent said Trump’s tweet was driven by a fear of voter fraud, and 21 percent said Trump wanted to protect Americans from getting the coronavirus at polling places. Only 17 percent of Republicans said he was trying to either distract the country from the pandemic or give himself a better shot at victory (another 16 percent weren’t sure of his motivations). Conversely, a whopping 63 percent of Democrats said Trump wanted a delay to the election to improve his chances of winning, while another 19 percent thought he wanted to distract the country. Just 10 percent of Democrats thought Trump’s main motivation was either a fear of voter fraud or a desire to protect Americans from contracting the virus.

Politico/Morning Consult’s question on postponing the election also offered some insight into how respondents want Americans to cast their ballots. The share who desired a predominantly vote-by-mail election hadn’t really changed since April, but the share who preferred mostly in-person balloting shot up to 34 percent from just 19 percent in the spring — a shift largely driven by Republicans and independents. Fifty-five percent of Republicans said they wanted most voters to physically go to the polls, up from 32 percent in April, as did 30 percent of independents, a share that had doubled from 15 percent in April. However, only slightly more Democrats wanted mostly in-person voting than they did in the spring (18 percent versus 10 percent). As for mail-in voting, there was one notable development: Fewer Republicans supported it. The share of Republicans who said they wanted an on-schedule, mostly vote-by-mail election slid from 38 percent in April to 27 percent in August.

And that shift in Republican attitudes in the Politico/Morning Consult survey reveals how Trump’s call to postpone the election could gain traction if he keeps trumpeting it. After all, the president has repeatedly denounced voting by mail, and correspondingly, we’ve seen the share of Republicans who want a mostly vote-by-mail election decrease.

For now, though, the thought of postponing the election is very unpopular. And it probably doesn’t help the president that most Republican elites view the idea as a non-starter. But if the president keeps pushing the issue, don’t count out more Republican voters supporting a delay.

Other polling bites

The coronavirus threat has influenced attitudes toward schools reopening, and a poll from Gallup conducted in mid-to-late July found that a majority of parents of K-12 schoolchildren wanted some form of distance learning for their children. Thirty-six percent preferred a mixed approach involving some in-person and remote learning, while 28 percent wanted full-time remote learning. Just 36 percent wanted full-time in-person schooling this fall. These views represented a major shift from late May and early June, when Gallup found that a majority of parents preferred full-time in-person schooling for their children in the fall.

Teachers are struggling with how they feel about in-person and distance learning, too. An NPR/Ipsos poll conducted in late July found that 66 percent of K-12 teachers preferred fall classes to be remote, while 34 percent preferred a return to in-person learning. Eighty-two percent of teachers said they’re concerned about returning to in-person teaching, but 84 percent also said they’re worried that distance learning will cause some students to fall behind. And only 37 percent said their school district has provided them with enough training to teach in the fall while the pandemic is going on.

A new survey from NBC News/SurveyMonkey found that Americans trusted Trump significantly less on the coronavirus than they trusted their state’s governor, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fifty-eight percent said they don’t trust what the president has said about the pandemic, while just 31 percent said they do. Unsurprisingly, 93 percent of Democrats said they didn’t trust what Trump had said about the coronavirus, as did 66 percent of independents. Meanwhile, 69 percent of Republicans said they trusted what Trump had to say on the coronavirus, and 22 percent said they didn’t.

Gallup recently found that public approval of the U.S. Supreme Court is at its highest level since 2009. Overall, 58 percent of Americans approve of the court’s job performance, similar to the 61 percent approval it enjoyed 11 years ago. Attitudes toward the court also differ little by party, as 60 percent of Republicans and 56 percent of Democrats approved of its performance. This is a stark departure from the partisan differences in public approval of the court roughly a year ago.

Sports leagues have had mixed success restarting play in the age of the coronavirus, and a new survey from Morning Consult found that most fans of football — both professional and college — don’t think the sport should return as scheduled. Only 32 percent of NFL fans thought the season should be played as planned, 33 percent said it should be postponed, and 18 percent said it should be canceled (17 percent weren’t sure). College football fans were even more pessimistic: Just 30 percent thought the season should go ahead as planned, 34 percent said it should be postponed, and 24 percent preferred cancellation.

The social media platform TikTok could be banned by the U.S. government, so YouGov polled Americans about how they viewed a potential ban. The survey found that 35 percent either “strongly” or “somewhat” supported a ban, while 33 percent either “somewhat” or “strongly” opposed one. Another 15 percent said they didn’t know, and 17 percent said they were unfamiliar with TikTok. Adults under the age of 25 — the app’s most active users — were most likely to oppose a ban: Forty-four percent opposed a ban, while 34 percent supported one.

Trump approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker, 41.3 percent of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing as president, while 54.7 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -13.5 points). At this time last week, 40.6 percent approved and 55.1 percent disapproved (a net approval rating of -14.5 points). One month ago, Trump had an approval rating of 40.7 percent and a disapproval rating of 55.9 percent, for a net approval rating of -15.2 points.

Generic ballot

In our average of polls of the generic congressional ballot, Democrats currently lead by 7.8 percentage points (48.2 percent to 40.5 percent). A week ago, Democrats led Republicans by 8.3 points (49.1 percent to 40.8 percent). At this time last month, voters preferred Democrats by 8.8 points (49.2 percent to 40.4 percent).

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Geoffrey Skelley

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