220,000 Dead Later, White House Says COVID Won’t Be Contained
Everything you need to know for Monday, Oct. 26: Tillis says he delivered on promises + both-sidesing the end of democracy+ PFAS chemicals in NC drinking water
Monday, Oct. 26, 2020
8 days until the election.
1 day until the deadline for absentee ballot requests.
5 days until early voting ends (you can register when you vote at EV sites). Find your EV site here. Find out how long you’ll have to vote early in Wake County here and Durham County here.
86 days until the inauguration.
Today’s Video
ABOVE THE FOLD
—> Tillis Says He Delivered on Promises
The N&O did its obligatory pre-election profiles of Senate candidates Thom Tillis and Cal Cunningham yesterday. The Cunningham take is about as interesting as the man himself: He campaigned as a straight arrow compelled by duty but has been tarnished by a sex scandal that Team Tillis has become obsessed with, etc.
But the Tillis piece, though it treats him with undue credulity, deserves a closer look.
It begins with the episode last year in which Tillis flip-flopped on Trump’s border-wall funding.
Weeks later, after some North Carolina conservatives publicly called for a Republican challenger, Tillis changed his stance and voted along with Trump to move money from the military to the president’s long-promised physical border wall. …
Today, he blames Democrats and leader Chuck Schumer for making the issue a political one about border security, instead of, as Tillis saw it, a conversation about separation of powers. …
Tillis, who at times sought to distance himself from Trump’s controversial style, has fully backed and defended the president in the most high-profile battles since, including impeachment, the Supreme Court nomination of Amy Coney Barrett and his reelection bid.
A less-sanitized version of this story is that at a nadir of Trump’s presidency—after the midterm thumping—Tillis tried to show independence, got put in his place by the MAGA right, and has spent the last year-and-a-half wrapped around Trump’s leg.
He voted for the 2017 Trump tax cuts that slashed corporate tax rates and lowered individual rates, a bill that Republicans credit with helping boost the economic recovery but Democrats blast as having benefited the wealthiest in the country while adding to the deficit.
There’s no need to both-sides the tax bill when we have plenty of empirical data.
In the year following the tax cut, business investment increased—but not by nearly as much as the tax cut proponents’ predictions would have implied. Furthermore, a study by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) concluded that the relatively healthy business investment in 2018 was driven by strong aggregate demand in the economy—not the supply-side factors that tax cut proponents used to justify the tax cut. In other words, the increase in business investment from the relatively weak 2015-2016 period seems like another example of an economic indicator returning to more-normal levels.
Worse, business investment has slowed more recently. The most recent data show that private nonresidential investment actually declined in the second quarter of 2019, contributing to an overall slowdown in growth. Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell pointed to the “continued softness” expected in business investment and declining output in manufacturing sector as reasons for the Fed’s recent rate cut. Measures of the investments that companies are planning have also declined. As analysts at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center wrote recently, “This slowdown in business purchases of plant and equipment contrasts sharply with President Trump’s rosy forecast of a long-term investment boom that would lead to annual wage increases of $4,000 or more.” Moreover, investment in housing has declined every quarter since the passage of the tax legislation.
Back to Tillis:
Since early 2017, Tillis’ favorable rating has been below 40% and currently stands at 34%, the lowest in the Senate, according to Morning Consult, which tracks those ratings over time. Tillis won in 2014 with 49% of the vote. Tillis trailed in the majority of that year’s polls, too, though surveys showed an extremely tight race in the final weeks.
Throughout the three debates, Tillis worked to portray Cunningham as someone who would say anything to get elected and then do what Democratic leadership needs him to do. In the final weeks, he’s used the Cunningham scandal to say his challenger is not who he says he is.
And how’s that working out for him?
But despite concentrated Republican attacks over Cunningham’s extramarital affair, there’s little evidence that the trajectory of the race has changed — at least so far. On Oct. 2, Cunningham had a 67 in 100 shot of winning; today, Cunningham has a 67 in 100 chance, according to the Deluxe version of FiveThirtyEight’s Senate forecast.
In other words, he was a slight favorite to win before the scandal broke and remains so today.
LOCAL & STATE
—> Climate Change Is Causing Heat Illness in North Carolina’s Rural Areas
Dangerous overheating is commonly associated with cities. But climate change is making heat illness a major threat to the state’s rural areas, too.
The Sandhills region sees a higher rate of heat illness per capita than any other part of the state, even though the Piedmont and coastal regions have higher total numbers of heat illness cases. …
Global warming will likely require residents of North Carolina’s Coastal Plain to purchase more energy to keep their homes cool. According to the N.C. Climate Science Report, the region’s annual average temperature was above the long-term 61-degree Fahrenheit average in 16 of the first 18 years of the 21st century.
—> Duke Researchers Find PFAS Chemicals in 1M Residents’ Water
PFAS chemicals—commonly known as “forever chemicals” because, well, they stick around forever—are contaminating the Haw River into the Cape Fear River, a source a drinking water for a million state residents, according to Duke researchers.
Heather Stapleton, a Duke environmental chemist, has been leading a team of researchers investigating PFAS in Pittsboro. During her Saturday presentation, Stapleton said the levels of some PFAS in 49 blood samples her team took from Pittsboro residents were very similar to those an N.C. State-led team took from Wilmington residents in 2017 and 2018 in the wake of revelations about the release of GenX by Chemours, a company spun off by the chemical giant DuPont. …
It is difficult to remove PFAS chemicals from raw drinking water, and Pittsboro is in the process of evaluating an array of options that would help it better remove the chemicals from the Haw’s water before passing it along to customers. Pittsboro is the only municipality that draws raw water directly from the Haw.
—> Duke and UNC Researchers Make a Living “Mini-Lung” to Fight COVID
What’s a mini-lung, you ask? Good question.
A new paper outlining research conducted by researchers at Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill shows how the team has created a “lab-grown living lung model” that mimics the tiny air sacs—alveoli—in the human lung, meaning researchers can now study how the disease affects lungs in a laboratory setting. …
According to the paper, the team developed the new model using “lung organoids” grown in alveolar epithelial type-2 cells (AT2s)—the same stem cells tasked with repairing the damage Covid-19 causes in the lungs. …
In a statement, the research team said the breakthrough would enable “high throughput science” in which “hundreds of experiments” can be employed to test drug candidates and study the cellular response to the virus.
RELATED: Despite identifying more than 100 COVID cases in two days, Elon University is continuing with in-person classes.
—> Former Durham Theology School Officials Charged in $12M Fraud Scheme
Former administrators of the Apex School of Theology officials have been indicted in a $12 million fraud scheme.
The employees worked at the school's satellite campus in Columbus, Georgia. The indictment, unsealed on Monday, alleges the defendants falsified student information in order to receive Federal Student Aid funding.
The indictment says the defendants defrauded the government of at least $12 million.
The indictment comes after the Department of Education cut off the school's access to student aid last year as it investigated discrepancies. That move resulted in a court battle, and the school has since shut down operations.
NATION & WORLD
—> How to Both Sides the End of Democracy
The Washington Post offered a case study in false equivalence yesterday, in a piece that looked at how liberals and conservatives are equally fearful about the aftermath of next Tuesday: conservatives, because something something socialism; liberals—everyone else, actually—because Trump has spent the last four years subverting democratic norms and acting like a minor-league authoritarian and is now threatening to cheat his way to reelection.
These two things are exactly the same.
One week before Americans choose their path forward, the quadrennial crossroads reeks of despair. In almost every generation, politicians pose certain elections as the most important of their time. But the 2020 vote is taking place with the country in a historically dark mood—low on hope, running on spiritual empty, convinced that the wrong outcome will bring disaster.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican political consultant who has been convening focus groups of undecided voters for seven presidential cycles. “Even the most balanced, mainstream people are talking about this election in language that is more caffeinated and cataclysmic than anything I’ve ever heard.
“If you are a believer in climate change, reelecting Trump is literally the end of the world. If taxes are your issue, you think a Biden victory will bankrupt you. If your top concern is health care, you think a Biden loss will kill you.”
It is a fact that climate change poses an existential threat to the planet. It is a fact that eliminating the Affordable Care Act will cause millions of people to lose health insurance. It is not a fact—it is not supported in any way by facts to suggest—that raising marginal tax rates on the rich will result in a wave of bankruptcies. So why are giving these things equal weight?
But now, the worry on the right that a Democratic win would plunge the nation into catastrophic socialism and the fear on the left that a Trump victory would produce a turn toward totalitarianism have created “a perilous moment—the idea that if the other side wins, we’re in for it,” said Peter Stearns, a historian of emotions at George Mason University.
Yes, yes, everyone is equally paranoid for equally reasonable reasons.
From rumors of civil war to threats of voter intimidation, Americans’ concerns about the election and its aftermath have arisen as once-fringe ideas have leached into the mainstream. One-third of Republican voters said in a Daily Kos/Civiqs poll this fall that they think there’s truth to the QAnon fantasy of a deep state elite that secretly controls the government. The FBI concluded in May that QAnon and similar “political conspiracy theories very likely will [foster] increasing political tensions and . . . criminal or violent acts.”
Americans are especially susceptible to a dark, pessimistic view of the country right now because several powerful forces are undermining institutions that people have trusted for centuries, according to scholars who have studied the shift in popular attitudes:
A populist president with a showman’s predilection for apocalyptic language. A flowering of unfounded beliefs, such as QAnon, “fake news” and fear of rampaging immigrants. A revolution in technology and media that has significantly altered how Americans consume news and learn about politics.
And how do we both-sides all of that?
Biden this month warned that “the country is in a dangerous place. Our trust in each other is ebbing. Hope seems elusive. Too many Americans see our public life . . . as an occasion for total, unrelenting partisan warfare.”
After Trump repeatedly suggested that he might refuse to accept the results of the election, Biden last month expressed concern about “whether [Trump] generates some kind of response in a way that unsettles the society or causes some kind of violence.”
—> The Brief: 3 Stories to Read Today
The Senate will confirm Amy Coney Barrett tonight. “Senators voted around 1:30 p.m. in a rare Sunday session, 51 to 48, to advance her nomination to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The final confirmation vote for Barrett is expected Monday night, putting her in position for a first full day as a justice as early as Tuesday and as the court continues to hear election-related legal challenges ahead of Nov. 3. ‘We made an important contribution to the future of this country,’ Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Sunday, praising Barrett as a ‘stellar nominee’ in every respect. ‘A lot of what we’ve done over the last four years will be undone sooner or later by the next election. They won’t be able to do much about this for a long time to come.’”
The White House tried to cover-up the COVID outbreak among Mike Pence’s associates. “Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, portrayed an outbreak among Vice President Mike Pence’s close advisers as a matter of medical privacy that White House officials were right to try to keep from the public.”
Joe Biden will end the campaign more popular than he began it, somehow. “Democrats spurned him in the early primary season contests and worried throughout the fall in a general election that began with Biden under fire for campaigning mostly from his basement. Party factions feared Biden would fail to shore up the Democratic base or that he had lost a step because of his age. Allies fretted he would stumble in debates with President Trump and that his gaffes would give ample material to his tenacious opponent. But the circumstances of this campaign—a pandemic and an economic collapse costing millions of jobs and making even the still-employed feel vulnerable—have pushed the race in the direction of Biden’s strong suits and against his deficits, shining a bright light on his empathy and sober experience and casting his flaws into the shadows. He has emerged with more Americans viewing him favorably now than at this time last year.”
—> The Roundup
Javanka threatened to sue the Lincoln Project over a Times Square billboard. The Lincoln Project slapped back hard.
Nancy Pelosi will seek another term as speaker, surprising no one.
Jay-Z is getting in the (legal) weed business.
How the Epoch Times became a right-wing misinformation machine.
Mike Huckabee, funny guy, confesses to felony voter fraud.
Thanks for reading. I’ll see you tomorrow.