The Postal Service: Fight Back But Don’t Panic

Posted on August 19, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 19, 2020

I must correct some misinformation in my post, “The Integrity of Our Election.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s email address on the official Senate website doesn’t work. If you want to tell him how you feel about Republican Senators sitting on their hands while Trump sabotages the Postal Service, the following links work:
Phone Number: 202-224-2541
Government Website: mcconnell.senate.gov
Contact: http://www.mcconnell.senate.gov/public/index.cfm
Campaign Website: http://www.teammitch.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/mitchmcconnell
Twitter: twitter.com/senatemajldr

Donald Trump’s attempt to, as Barack Obama put it, kneecap the Post Office is a critically important threat to our election, but in practical terms, it’s not as foreboding as it seems at first glance. As a matter of principle, this brazen attack on the Constitution must be stopped. Pay close attention when the Postmaster General, wealthy Trump donor Louis DeJoy testifies before the Senate and House over the next few days.

The outcome will turn on whether the hearings are legitimate bipartisan inquiries or more meaningless television spectacles. DeJoy wasn’t any more subtle than Trump when he warned that if universal mail-in balloting was adopted, the Post Office wouldn’t be able to deliver all the ballots in time to comply with State laws. If any Republican Senators are critical of the removal of high-speed sorting machines, canceling overtime, and the removal of mailboxes, it will mean that the public outcry has been heard. Whether those Senators are motivated by integrity or self-interest, it will be a costly political defeat for the president.

On the other hand, the specter of 150 million ballots inundating mail processing centers is just a bad dream. In a poll published yesterday, only 34% of likely voters said they would request mail-in ballots. In 2016, more than 136 million Americans voted in the presidential election. Even with a sizable increase in turnout this year, fewer than 50 million mail-in ballots would likely be requested. But many of them, considerably less than half would likely be returned to local Boards of Elections by mail.

Yesterday, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold said Colorado has successfully carried out mail-in voting for the last ten years without serious problems or any evidence of voter fraud. Colorado has secure drop boxes all over the state which Griswold estimated could handle up to 75% of the ballots cast. Thus, only a fourth would have to be processed by the Post Office. My own state, Maryland does the same thing. I cast my primary vote by delivering my ballot (no postage stamp necessary) to a drop box located outside the Board of Elections. Trump’s claim that the lack of an official postmark on a ballot would invalidate it is pure nonsense.

To put things in perspective, if a third of registered voters request mail-in ballots and two thirds of those use drop boxes to cast their votes, the Postal Service would have to deliver fewer than ten million ballots, nationwide. It processed more than fifty-seven million absentee ballots in 2016 with no reported problems, but that was before 95% of the high-speed sorters were removed by DeJoy. Note, too, that the Postal service handles over a billion Christmas cards and packages every year with negligible mishaps.

Trump is probably powerless to undermine the election, but that doesn’t mean a serious assault on our constitutionally mandated election process is not underway. Attempted murder is a felony even if the victim survives.

Like most things in Trumpworld, there are also serious ethical issues here. DeJoy’s multimillion-dollar stake in a firm that will profit from the Post Office’s demise is a clear conflict of interest. And there is Trump’s often stated desire to hurt Amazon which allegedly saves millions from having the post office do the final step in most of their deliveries, part of his vendetta against Jeff Bezos, who runs both Amazon and the Washington Post.

Nancy Pelosi said DeJoy’s announcement, yesterday, that changes in the mail processing procedures will be halted until after the election is “necessary but insufficient,” and she is correct. Nothing will stop Trump from creating chaos every way he can to discredit an election he fears he will lose. Pelosi and the states must choose their battles, and not react to every provocation. But this is the place to draw a line in the sand and defend it at all costs. The recent attempts to undermine the Post Office’s ability to process mail must not only be halted but reversed.

With at least twenty State Attorneys General suing the administration to restore full productivity at the Postal Service and two Congressional hearings coming up, we should know the outcome before voters lose confidence that their votes will be counted.

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The Integrity of Our Election

Posted on August 16, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 16, 2020

Until 2018, most Americans silently watched, cringing at the things Donald Trump said and did, but they were disturbed enough by then to vote Democrats back into the majority in the House. We have more and better reasons to be disturbed now, but this year we cannot wait until Election Day. The time to act is now.

It‘s impossible to overstate how important this is. It would be bad enough if the president had simply appointed a new Postmaster General charged with bankrupting the Postal Service, but he appointed a man with a huge financial stake in a company that would stand to make enormous windfall profits if the USPS were privatized. It’s no surprise that Louis DeJoy has a glaring conflict of interest – that’s the norm in the Trump administration from the president himself on down.

As bad as that sounds, the reality is far worse. The pandemic has redefined the 2020 election along with almost everything else we do. Trump still refuses to take the basic actions recommended by his entire public health team. There is no national mask mandate, and virus testing is still far below the level required to control the spread of the virus.

If the nation’s anxiety level weren’t high enough, Trump turned up the amplitude by demanding businesses remain open and all schools begin in-person instruction by September, even in high infection areas, again contradicting his health advisors. It’s part of his cynical pretense that everything is normal to keep financial markets strong regardless of how many lives it costs.

Most Americans fear crowds despite the president’s false narrative. They don’t want to stand in long lines or be pressed into crowded voting places, especially if our changing climate throws us a major November storm. Forcing them to vote in person, especially those of limited resources, would depress the turnout in a way that everyone understands would be Trump’s best chance at re-election. Trump admitted on Fox Financial News that he is deliberately hamstringing the Postal System to prevent universal voting by mail, and his lackeys in the USPS warned almost every state that they might not be able to deliver all the ballots if everyone votes by mail.

None of the president’s staff deny that he is trying to rig the election. DeJoy even admitted removing high speed sorting machines and canceling all overtime for postal workers. In the wake of those actions, the Republicans in the Senate ran for cover to avoid being interviewed when Mitch McConnell adjourned the session without considering the House bill that would keep both the Post Office and struggling, out-of-work Americans afloat. It’s the most brazen power grab in American history, one that has the potential to destroy our two-party political system if it’s allowed to continue.

But we the people are not powerless to stop it. Like most of Trump’s actions, this one is a deliberate overreach of presidential power intended to intimidate the opposition. He has the legal right to refuse to negotiate but he cannot destroy the Postal system without the complicity of Senate Republicans, twenty-three of whom are on the ballot in November.

The truest definition of patriotism is putting the nation ahead of personal or political gain in times of crisis. That’s where we are now, folks. Whether you want Trump to be re-elected or defeated, that decision cannot come at the expense of the integrity of the election. Honest elections are probably the only things Washington’s Federalists and Jefferson’s Republicans agreed on except the need to be free of King George.

Every American who cares more about America than politics MUST act now. Let Mitch McConnell know you won’t tolerate inaction by Senate Republicans. They need every vote they can get, and they won’t ignore millions of emails. Take five minutes and email him at senator@mcconnell.senator.gov.

More importantly, the president cannot prevent every American from requesting a mail-in ballot in accordance with state laws. If every registered voter requests one at the earliest date allowed by state law and returns it immediately, the Postal Service is required by federal statute to deliver it even if it has to re-institute the Pony Express. The Constitution requires the Congress to adequately fund the Post Office. Knowing there will be in excess of 100 million ballots, USPS can easily plan for and process them if it is given the resources.

Most jurisdictions also provide drop boxes in which voters can deliver their ballots directly to their local Board of Elections, bypassing the mail entirely (and saving 55 cents per stamp.) If Trump gets away with cheating by suppressing the vote, we can blame him, but we’ll all have to live with knowledge that everyone who didn’t take action abetted his crime.

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The Most Serious Threat to Our Democracy Yet

Posted on August 14, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 14, 2020

I was a Never-Trumper long before he announced that he was running for president. Trump and I have the same Queens, New York pedigree, except that I wasn’t born to a wealthy, racist father. My father was a hard-working guy, a smart, decent man whose education was cut short by the Depression. While Fred Trump was getting rich cutting corners and denying decent housing to blacks, my father served in World War 2 and came home with neurological damage that led to a long, slow decline from Parkinsonism. He did his part to protect our democracy and raised his children to respect that above all else.

As the president’s niece, Mary Trump documents in her book, Donald Trump was raised with an entirely different set of values. Laws existed to be circumvented, morality was for chumps, and nothing mattered except making money. Lying, cheating, stealing, ripping off people who depended on him were just business, as long as he didn’t get caught. After he left his father’s house he was schooled by corrupt lawyers and criminals. Unlike the wild claims and accusations Trump throws around, all that is well-documented in places like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

That was the Donald Trump who was constantly in the face of everyone who grew up in New York, the Donald Trump I believed was not only unfit to be president, but a dangerous threat to our country. It wasn’t about politics. I would happily trade Trump for a conservative Republican, in the mold of compassionate conservatism, people like John Kasich, Larry Hogan, or Jeff Flake.

Despite my misgivings, when I began this blog shortly after Trump was inaugurated, I decided to wait and see if he was capable of growing into the job as Lyndon Johnson did. With an education rooted in scientific method, I put my bias aside and watched as objectively as I could. But it was clear from the start that Trump reveled in vulgarity, pandering, and flaunting every norm including laws, honesty, and common decency. I and others better qualified to evaluate such things, quickly noticed frightening parallels between Trump’s behavior and that of Adolf Hitler. We posted warning signs, things to look for that would signal our democracy was in jeopardy.

Trump brags that he’s an expert at creating chaos, sowing dissension, and generating rage so intense it blinds his opponents. In three-and-a-half years he has outdone himself with lies, absurd conspiracy theories, and bald-faced attempts to undermine the Constitution. He would turn back the clock to the era in which people like his corrupt father thrived. We warned in 2017 that he would stop at nothing to expand and hold on to his power, even at the expense of our democracy.

As the endgame for the 2020 election begins, Trump is at his immoral, conniving worst. The last two years have seen Trump-inspired attempts to suppress voting on an unprecedented scale, most notably in Georgia. Both parties agree, the lower the turnout on Election Day, the better it is for Republicans. The more Trump prevents people of color from voting, the greater his chances of re-election. Trailing badly in the polls, he decided to undermine the election rather than lose.

This isn’t just Trump being the immoral narcissist we knew him to be. This is a man willing to dismantle our Constitution for his own ends. The American Revolution was about escaping the financial and social tyranny of an autocratic king. The framers of our Constitution assured, as best they could, that an autocrat would never rule here. The keystone of the thing we call the American experiment in democracy is our elections. Discredit and undermine them, and our country will never be the same again.

Yesterday, Trump admitted to a world-wide television audience that he intends to hamstring the postal service, to assure that universal mail-in voting in the midst of a pandemic expected to claim a quarter of a million American lives by Election Day will be impossible. There is no greater existential threat to our nation.

For voters, there are two ways out of this mess. One is to raise our voices to tell Republican Senators who are on the ballot in November we will not tolerate the destruction of the Constitutionally mandated federal postal system. The other is something each of us can do. If every registered voter requests an absentee ballot today and mails it back by mid-October, Trump’ s attempt to rig the election will fail.

It’s a simple enough thing for every American who cares to do, and Trump is powerless to prevent it. We apparently can’t stop the cost of mailing a ballot to increase from twenty to fifty-five cents, but if you don’t care enough about our country to buy a stamp, don’t complain about the outcome.

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Kamala and Joe

Posted on August 13, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 13, 2020

Sometimes, starting out getting a thing wrong is the best way to get it right. For three months, I was certain the best running mate for Joe Biden was Amy Klobuchar. Her Midwest roots, centrist policies, and law enforcement background made her the obvious choice. When the pandemic struck, forcing major cities to shut down and throwing millions out of work, her straightforward, easygoing sincerity made her an even better choice.

Then, her own state sabotaged her when three Minneapolis police officers murdered an unarmed black civilian in plain view of anyone with a phone camera. From that moment on, the Black Lives Matter movement dominated the election cycle, making it inevitable that Biden would have to select a black woman as his running mate, and inspiring President Trump to order unidentified federal officers to attack peaceful civilian demonstrators and threaten to have a federal police force occupy cities controlled by Democrats. Klobuchar withdrew her name and advised Biden to choose a woman of color.

After that, my favorite was Susan Rice because I can’t resist an intellect as powerful as hers, despite the fact that her close ties to the Clintons and her involvement in the Benghazi debacle made her a lightning rod. That’s twice I was wrong, but no one had asked my advice. I had nothing against Kamala Harris, but I thought her aborted presidential campaign was too forced and staged, and lacked the likability that had drawn me to Klobuchar.

When Biden announced Harris as his choice, I accepted it as inescapable. I was ambivalent, waiting for their first appearance together. And wait we did, for three hours, as the event scheduled for 2 pm yesterday in Wilmington, didn’t get started until 5. We knew they both had to be at their best.

Biden spoke first, and did exactly what he had to. Fully aware of the right-wing spin that his life-long stuttering affliction is actually mental infirmity, he knows he must always speak at a measured pace. It’s a double whammy because when he restrains the passion he feels, he‘s criticized for not having enough fire in his belly. I thought he found the perfect balance, yesterday, pacing himself and never raising his voice, while letting his anger at the failures of the Trump administration and his compassion for its many victims come through clearly. His basically gentle nature, devoid of insults and name-calling served him well. He was the perfect Antitrump.

Harris watched from across the room, smiling like an excited school girl anticipating her first dance. When she took the podium, the sheer joy of the occasion shone on her face. In fifteen minutes, she showed several different aspects of who she is. Her emotional description of the relationship between Biden and his deceased son, Beau, was heartfelt and genuine in a way we never saw when she was a presidential candidate. Her pride in being the first non-white woman to stand for one of the two highest offices in the country was unmistakable. She was charismatic in a way that surprised and delighted my wife and me.

When it was time to get serious, we saw the other Kamala Harris, the woman who is a brilliant prosecutor, who can argue a case coherently and logically in a way that anyone can understand. She laid out a tough indictment of the Trump administration, and most directly of the president himself.
She was entirely self-assured, completely on top of her game. She was so effective, I had a strange thought. Like the commercials that say, “I’m not a doctor, I just play one on TV,” I thought she couldn’t have done better if she were Meryl Streep playing herself.

I have never been so happy to have gotten something completely wrong. Harris is the perfect running mate for Biden, and in four years, she may stand alone as the only viable Democratic candidate for president. Except for dyed-in-the-wool racists, I can’t imagine anyone watching and hearing her and not entirely forgetting that she is Black or Indian or anything else. She will be a formidable running mate who will get under Donald Trump’s skin just by being herself and telling “her truths” as she likes to say.

Trump is absolutely incapable of dealing with a woman like Harris. The fumbling responses to her speech by his campaign, today, showed that despite knowing for weeks that she was Biden’s most likely choice, they still haven’t formulated a strategy for dealing with her. And when they come up with one, Trump will stay on script for perhaps thirty seconds, before his terror of facing off against a strong, competent black woman makes him lose control. It’s going to be great theater.

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Polling and Statistics

Posted on August 12, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 12, 2020

Any statistician or analyst will tell you that statistics can be a dangerous weapon in the hands of unscrupulous people. It’s almost a cliché that any analyst worth his salt can use the same data to support multiple mutually contradictory conclusions. (Full disclosure: I’ve been guilty of it myself on a number of occasions.)

Does that mean we can’t trust statistics? No. It means you should think before you draw any conclusions, something fewer and fewer Americans do these days. Gullibility about polls and statistics Is one symptom of the intellectual laziness that has made our nation susceptible to deceptive social media and political propaganda based on lies and distortions, both foreign and home-grown.

The first rule to keep in mind is that a trend cannot be inferred from one or two data points. Yesterday, the president offered as evidence that mail-in voting cannot be trusted, a claim that one state had mailed a ballot to a dog. In the early 1960’s when I was an undergraduate at Columbia, the Ivy League schools constantly tried to outprank each other. The hands down winner was a group of Princeton students who created an application for admission for a pet dog, complete with fake transcripts, awards, and letters of recommendation. Princeton accepted the dog. Even a school smart enough to have Albert Einstein on its faculty can be fooled.

Whether or not either story is true, they’re both irrelevant except for amusement. Highly unlikely events are not impossible, and they will occur in small numbers in all situations. The key is “small numbers.” They’re insignificant.

Another good rule is to apply common sense. Some polls are more reputable than others, and some well-intentioned pollsters make mistakes.

When George W. Bush was gearing up his re-election campaign in December of 2003, before cell phone directories were available, polls were conducted solely by interviewing people who had landlines and were willing to interrupt their dinners to answer phone calls. Many people questioned how such a polling universe could be representative of the entire population. I had an opportunity to put the question to Louis Harris, founder of the highly regarded Harris polling organization. He said, “Honestly, I have no idea why it works, but our results have been excellent.” It was an honest response, but not useful to someone looking for a reason to trust the results. That kind of conundrum plagues all polling. Sometimes pollsters are just lucky.

Rule three – before you believe the results of a poll or statistical conclusion, make sure you know the reputation of the reporting organization, who paid for the study, and what their biases might be. Ignore all social media polls. Major news organizations – NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX, CNN – all have very respectable pollsters. It’s the fringe services, PACs, and party organizations asking for money you need to watch out for.

Rule four – pay attention to the margin of error. For most people that goes in one ear and out the other. Projections based on statistics are imprecise by definition. The margin of error defines a range of values, all of which are equally likely to be the right answer. If someone reports that the president’s approval rating is 40% with a margin of error of 3%, the only reasonable inference is that the right number could be 37%, 43%, 41.2%, or any other number between 37% and 43%. That becomes very important when his approval rating appears to change from week to week. If his approval rating was 40% last week with a 3% margin of error, and 42% this week, that isn’t necessary an increase, because last week’s correct number might have been 43%. On the other hand, it could be an even larger increase than it appears.

As the election draws closer and we’re flooded with poll results about candidates, whether parents are willing to send their children to school during the pandemic, how likely we are to have a vaccine this year, or how many hurricanes we’re likely to see before the election, your best defense against being misled is to use your brain. Ignore everything you read on social media and ask yourself if what’s being reported makes sense. Think for yourself and don’t accept anything just because you see it on a screen.

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Trump’s Sociopathic Lust for Power

Posted on August 9, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 9, 2020

Donald Trump has two outstanding skills, creating chaos and perceiving (and shamelessly exploiting) other people’s vulnerabilities. That makes it easy to get lost in the weeds of his relentless attacks. If we pay too much attention without filtering out the chaff, we’re trapped in a never-ending game of Whack A Mole. If we fail to pay attention we could wake up one day to discover the America we grew up in no longer exists. Our Constitution and values are being assailed on so many fronts simultaneously, it’s hard to know when to stand and fight.

I stepped back to clear my head for a few days. With the static gone, a pattern re-emerged, confirming what we already knew: our president doesn’t give a damn about average Americans, except inasmuch as it influences how they vote. It began when he announced his cabinet. For Secretary of Education he chose billionaire socialite and friend Betsy Devos, whose only interest in public education is replacing it with a system that prioritizes profit over quality education, as her dismal record with charter schools demonstrates.

Trump’s first Environmental Protection Administrator, Scott Pruitt redefined his agency’s role as ending activities that could prevent further deterioration of an already seriously ailing planet to enhance corporate profits. Pruitt resigned amid growing scandals around personal misuse of government funds. He was replaced by coal industry lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, who was supposed to end regulations that were allegedly killing coal mining, though even his best efforts couldn’t resuscitate an outmoded industry that has no viability in 21st century America.

Add to the list Secretary of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, whose long-time career goal was to undermine and privatize Social Security and Medicare. Both have been the subject of political gamesmanship since the passage of the Social Security Act. There’s no real evidence that the people who depend on those programs would benefit from privatization. The only people who clearly would are investors in the for-profit companies that were awarded the contracts.

Preventing a massive transfer of wealth through federal taxes that support so-called entitlements programs and increasing corporate profits are the only priorities of the Trump administration. That and the need to provide constant ego stroking for an insecure, narcissistic president who has no interest in governing.

All that was true before COVID-19 threw a serious monkey wrench into Trump’s re-election plans, which depended on sustaining a strong economy and a bull market. For seven months, there has been a virtually unanimous chorus of medical researchers and infectious disease experts warning of a pandemic that could only be halted by prudent testing, personal distancing, and masks. The chorus included our CDC and NIH, counterpart bodies in European and Asian countries, and the World Health Organization.

While no one got it exactly right for the first few months, American politics devolved into a polarized argument between two highly divergent points of view. Quarantine, isolation, and massive testing for the virus, which implied a temporary shutdown of much of our economy would save hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of American lives. But putting those lives at risk by keeping all businesses and schools operating, and denigrating the need to identify who was infected would keep the economy robust, improving Trump’s re-election chances.

Public health officials argued that that was a false choice, because keeping everything open would result in so much sickness and death that ultimately the economy would suffer far more harm than it would from a temporary shutdown. But with primaries and conventions looming, Trump’s best chance to win lay in gambling that a crash caused by re-opening could be held off until after the election.

It was Trump’s golden opportunity to demonstrate what he was made of and silence his critics, to govern and show empathy for average citizens, especially those of color. Instead, he contradicted his own COVID task force at every turn and refused to set up a central federal authority to help states manage the pandemic. When most Americans were unwilling the send their children to school with infections spreading, he threatened to bankrupt school systems that failed to re-open. And when it became clear that the only way to allow most Americans to vote safely in November was by mail, our president showed how venal he is.

Instead of assuring that the USPS had the resources it needed to process 150 million ballots, he appointed a new Postmaster General. Louis DeJoy, a wealthy Republican fundraiser, was tasked with crippling the postal system so it could be privatized. Not incidentally, that would likely create enough chaos that Americans would lose confidence in the election. Also not incidentally, DeJoy and his wife own a nearly $100 million stake in the companies best positioned to take over when the USPS fails.

Remember that pattern I mentioned? Greed, profit, and power at the cost of countless American lives, and very possibly, the integrity of our election process. Pure Donald Trump.

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Voting in a Pandemic

Posted on July 31, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 31, 2020

Americans who were fearful of Trump’s relentless attacks on the Constitution and the Rule of Law, myself among them, have waited for three-and-a-half years for the single act that would tell us how much of a danger he poses to our democracy. With ninety-five days to go until the election, he finally did it. His attempts to incarcerate immigrants and refugees, demonize nonwhite minorities, and destroy the health care of tens of millions of low and middle wage earners were cynical political actions designed as much as anything else, to discredit his predecessor, Barack Obama. They were immoral and insensitive, but they didn’t directly threaten the integrity of our democracy.

Yesterday, Trump did what every observer knew he eventually would if he was trailing in the polls. Following the script written by his fascist idols, he tweeted the idea of postponing November’s election. It’s ironic that the thing he is trying to change involves the one way in which we are most glaringly NOT a democracy – the election of a president. To me, democracy means every citizen has the right to cast the same equal vote, but the Electoral College does not treat all votes equally. The proof of that is the intensity of partisan arguements to retain or abolish it.

The chills we felt reading Trump’s tweet were offset by sighs of relief as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy quickly summoned reporters to remind them that setting the time and manner of federal elections is delegated strictly to the Congress. An 1845 federal law states “that the electors of President and Vice President shall be appointed … on the Tuesday next after the first Monday in the month of November,” unless a state requires additional time to count its votes. An act passed by both houses of Congress is required to change that.

Whether McConnell and McCarthy were drawing a line in the sand they would not allow Trump to cross or simply bowing to the reality that the House would only consider such a change in the event of a dire emergency, both wasted no time in speaking out publicly against the President. But neither McConnell nor McCarthy addressed voter suppression tactics or Trump’s claims that mail-in voting would result in massive fraud and invalidate the election. They were also silent about Trump’s pet Postmaster General who is quietly adding regulations and procedures designed to slow mail processing to the point where we are likely to see huge delays in counting on Election Day.

Trump’s chief talent is creating chaos. Toss a grenade into the process, then walk in and re-arrange the pieces in the way most favorable to him. He’s been successful doing that in business – it’s the only way he knows how to compete. Fairness, honesty, and adherence to laws are not part of his lexicon. That’s why it’s crucial to maintain our perspective for the next three months.

We cannot react every time Trump says or does something outrageous, as he surely will on a daily basis. If we focus on one tree at a time, he’ll burn the entire forest down before we even smell smoke. We also have to be clear about what the issues really are. Rescheduling an election is not inherently bad or immoral. Parliamentary governments do it whenever they think it’s to their advantage, but that’s the point. Ours is not a parliamentary government. The framers of our constitution created a republic with a legislature whose power was theoretically equal to the executive’s.

We should also be clear about mail-in voting. Trump’s claim that it will lead to massive fraud is absurd. Absentee voting, which is identical, has existed since the Civil War. In 155 years, there has never been a serious case of voter fraud when ballots were cast by mail.

That is not to say there won’t be problems. Mail-in voting requires creating massive databases, something that almost never comes off without a hitch the first time. My own state, Maryland, had problems during this year’s primary – both my wife’s ballot and mine were lost in the ether. But their database enabled the Board of Elections to track the ballots sent to every registered voter. A week prior to the submission deadline, they emailed every “delinquent” voter. When we were notified, we drove to the Board’s offices wearing masks, picked up new ballots, filled them out, and dropped them in a collection bin outside the office.

By November, Maryland will have had nine months to gestate the process, and other states will have the benefit of our experience. Will everything go smoothly? We don’t know, but like everything else about living in a pandemic, if our election process is to survive it must adapt. In the unlikely event that there are attempts to rig the election, they will most likely come from the side that is best known for voter suppression.

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Baseball vs COVID-19 – the Virus is Winning

Posted on July 27, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 27, 2020

We all knew this would happen. Even virus deniers and conspiracy theorists, deep down at some level had to know. You can describe America’s determination to push forward with professional sports seasons as heroic, courageous, innovative, even altruistic if you imagine team owners and players are putting themselves at risk to serve some higher purpose – the morale of millions who’ve been trapped indoors with little to distract them. Or, you can view it as Donald Trump does – about money and re-opening American businesses at any cost.

As a nation, we’re like spoiled children. We want what we want and we throw tantrums if we don’t get it. Describing the experiment of going ahead with baseball in spite of COVID-19, Thomas Boswell wrote: “In this, we see Americans’ national tendency toward willful ignorance being played out on a small, crystal-clear stage…”. Is that American exceptionalism or a dangerous combination of arrogance and ignorance?

The major league baseball season is four days old, and several teams have multiple players who tested positive and will therefore have to work through the league protocol of remaining isolated on a special “injured list” until they have two lab-sanctioned negative tests separated by at least twenty-four hours. The worst case so far is the Miami Marlins, who spent their three-week training camp in Miami. Coincidence? Bad luck? Since the Marlins virtually lived in the visitors’ clubhouse in Philadelphia all week, both they and the Phillies canceled their next game – the Phillies, so they could sterilize their clubhouse, and the Marlins, because they have no idea how many more players will turn out to be infected when test results are known.

We don’t know how many games the Marlins will have to cancel – at the moment, it’s two and counting. The elephant in the room that no one is mentioning is that with a sixty game schedule, Miami might wind up canceling its entire season. Boswell thinks Major League Baseball should stop before teams are overwhelmed by community transmission. He likewise thinks both the National Football League and the NCAA should cancel their seasons.

We should give baseball the benefit of the doubt. Nice try, and all that. MLB even won praise from Anthony Fauci, who threw the first ceremonial pitch in Washington, for their carefully thought out protocols. But the Canadian government didn’t buy it. Canada, which has combated the pandemic far more successfully than the United States, had closed its border with the U. S. on March 21st. It wasn’t a big surprise when the Canadian government ruled that games could not be played in Toronto. Toronto settled on Buffalo as its home field this year. Most Americans just shrugged and moved on.

Of course, this isn’t really about baseball or football. Sports is a metaphor for American business. No one wants to see our economy descend into another Great Depression, but the question must be asked: if Donald Trump weren’t in a desperate fight for re-election that depended on rocket-like recovery in the financial markets, might cooler heads have prevailed?

Trump wanted America to believe it had a simple binary choice between the economy and the health of countless citizens. That was a false choice from get-go. The majority of economists argued that if ignoring the virus to open businesses accelerated the spread, as almost every public health official predicted, the overall harm to the economy would be devastating.

The baseball experiment was necessary to awaken the country to the reality that it still hasn’t accepted the truth about COVID-19. Professional baseball players are healthy, fit, and young (27 on average.) If athletes like them, following strict rules of social distancing and avoiding all risky situations can’t make it work, how can the rest of us?

Will they succeed? We don’t know yet. Baseball has taken every reasonable precaution, although we already see big holes in its recovery plan in the event the virus continues to spread. They’re dealing with the same reality as the rest of us. Reliable COVID tests return results after multiple days, while quick turnaround tests have unacceptably high false results. Consider the case of the Nationals’ Juan Soto.

His positive test finding last Thursday was the result of a test administered two days earlier. He was immediately given three quick turnaround tests, all of which were negative, but not reliable enough to meet the league standard. Now, four days later, we still don’t know the result of the sanctioned follow-up tests.

What a mess! I don’t envy Nationals’ management or the league. But one thing seems certain. Regardless of pressure from Trump and his base, if baseball can’t make this work, American business will have no choice but to remain in partial shutdown.

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Can Baseball Save Our Sanity?

Posted on July 23, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 23, 2020

In today’s Washington Post, sports columnist Thomas Boswell wrote, “If MLB stays virus-lucky, the World Series may end a week before the election — and my head may not explode listening to two parties fight for months over the seven U.S. voters who are still undecided.” I couldn’t agree more. It wouldn’t be the first time the mindless distraction of baseball saved my sanity. 

Americans are so desperate for a diversion, even football fans are eager to watch baseball. People who have always claimed to hate baseball can’t wait for it to start, tonight. Partly, it’s a reaction to the coronavirus, a small sign that American life might return to normal one day. But as Boswell indicated, this year’s presidential campaign is going to be brutal. We may all need someplace to escape for a few hours.  

We’ve never had a president with a lust for power like Donald Trump or one who was as completely lacking in empathy. We’ve already had a taste of the kind of campaign ads he will run – dystopian views of a failed America based on blatant lies and debunked conspiracy theories, not to mention charges of a rigged election and threats to ignore the outcome if he loses.  We’re going to have to endure outrageous, violent spectacles this year provoked by a president who has frequently demonstrated that no tactic is beneath him. We’re all going to need an occasional time out.  

This season will be difficult for baseball, too, as it attempts to set a workable standard for professional sports in the time of the pandemic. With Americans mourning the loss of so many loved ones and so many jobs to the virus, baseball can provide a psychological lift that eases their passage. Millions of people will tune in just to see if it works, but there’s a hidden danger there. If baseball gets better television ratings than the president, he might write an executive order trying to shut it down. 

On the other hand, Trump might take a hint from baseball. He might decide that computer-generated crowd noise (which was less awful than I expected) could compensate for low decibel levels at his poorly attended rallies. Likewise, the cardboard cutouts of fans at Dodger Stadium (which are completely ridiculous) might spare him future embarrassments like the of two out of three empty seats in Tulsa. The idea of fake crowds fits in perfectly with his agenda. 

In addition to having empty stadia, baseball has modified itself considerably to adapt to the virus. The season will be only sixty games instead of 162. The rules of the game have changed – pitchers won’t bat and if games are tied after nine innings, each new half-inning will begin with a free runner at second base to avoid having players on the field longer than necessary. Rules of behavior have changed too – no high fives, no spitting, no hugging after big hits, tossing balls touched by multiple players out of the game, and no nose-to-nose jawboning with umpires.  

To me, the most impressive change was permitting players to choose not to play out of concern for the coronavirus without loss of pay. It’s a business model that should be applied to other people our society depends on. With the president insisting that all schools open on time and many school systems planning normal classroom instruction, wouldn’t it be nice if we found a way to do that for teachers and other school staff? We need sports to preserve our emotional well-being in a time of great stress. We need teachers to assure the survival of the next generation – keeping them alive and healthy has to be at least as important as keeping athletes healthy. 

Along those lines, we Nationals fans will miss long time star and general class act, Ryan Zimmerman, who has opted to sit out the season.  And when they open the season against the Yankees, tonight, they will be without their young superstar Juan Soto, who won the hearts of every mother in America (along with everyone else who watched him) last year. Soto tested positive for COVID-19 and will miss at least two weeks, perhaps the entire season.  

That’s what Boswell meant by “virus-lucky.” If baseball loses too many Sotos, it may turn out to be just a painful reminder of everything else we’ll be dealing with this year. On the other hand, there may be a way to turn this to our advantage. Let’s start a campaign to convince the president that if big-egoed athletes can sit out the virus, it would be best for the country if he did too. I’d even be willing to double his salary.

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(Mis)trust and Verify

Posted on July 20, 2020 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 20, 2020

You don’t hear people say it much nowadays, but there was a time, thanks to Alan Barth and Phil Graham of The Washington Post, when people referred to today’s news as the first draft of history. If you read something in one of the major dailies (The Post, NY or LA Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe) or you heard it from Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow, or Tom Brokaw, you simply believed it. Every media outlet had an editorial board, but they usually took pains to separate news from opinion. It helped that most bylines came from respected outlets like the Associated Press, United Press, or Reuters.

Cable networks and satellite communications brought the news directly into our living rooms while it was happening. Will you ever forget Bernard Shaw hiding under a desk in Baghdad’s International Hotel when Iraqi security forces came banging on the door, or Wolf Blitzer standing on a rooftop in Israel pointing out scud missiles descending on Tel Aviv? The news had finally come of age. We were watching live what our kids would see in their history books.

Except, it hasn’t turned out that way. The proliferation of alleged news networks, the internet, social media, and blogs changed everything. What passes for news these days may have begun as facts, opinions, propaganda, or conspiracy theories before it was extruded and spun through dozens of opposing points of view. Most of us have our own pet news sources, smugly convinced that ours tell the truth.

It was Trump senior advisor Kelly Ann Conway who first publicly used the phrases “fake news” and “alternate facts,” but she was merely putting names to the brainchild of Fox News founder Roger Ailes. If you believe Gabriel Sherman’s The Loudest Voice in the Room, Ailes was responsible for changing what we used to take as news into a chaos of conflicting versions. He conceived of Fox News as alternate facts before Kelly Ann Conway ever framed it in those words. He didn’t worry about fact checking because his creation wasn’t about facts; it was about pushing a populist point of view aimed at a silent majority of people angry with the establishment.

That’s today’s journalism. Try recording thirty minutes of news from each of your favorite networks. Compare them later. If your job was to distill the truth of the day’s events from them, what would you do?

Ailes not only invented Fox News, but in a sense, he also invented the current incarnation of Donald Trump. Fox News and Trump have been perfect symbionts for most of the last five years. These days many of us select our friends based on which news network they watch, and that may be a critical issue as the election approaches.

As Trump’s lies and distortions about COVID-19 caused his poll numbers to plummet, he decided to re-focus his election campaign on a fictitious narrative of current events. He began by characterizing the Black Lives Matter movement as the work of anarchists and Marxists, supported by Attorney General Bill Barr’s nightmare fairy tale of Antifa. He extended it to Portland, Oregon last week, and today we’re told that he plans to occupy other major cities (all run by Democrats) with federal troops to create a vision of a nation desperately fighting against an underground left-wing insurrection.

It’s all fantasy, complete nonsense. But Trump understands television and the media. He knows how to turn peaceful demonstrations into riots and mayhem, stoking people’s anger and frustration and labeling them thugs and criminals. Once that happens, the first casualty is truth. No matter what you see on your favorite news source you’re only getting a narrow view, often tinged by politics or deep pocket sponsors.

Trump knows only one way to win – create confusion and then claim his truth is the only one, but you don’t have to believe it. When the virus exploded in Seattle and weeks later, BLM protestors established their autonomous zone, I called my friends there to get an unfiltered view of reality. When people were dying by the thousands in New York, when California closed down, when Florida’s mishandling of the virus made it the world’s disease epicenter, and last week in Portland, I did the same thing. What I consistently learned firsthand from people I trusted bore little resemblance to what I saw and heard on the “news.”

We’re going to be battered by craziness for the next three months. When you find your head spinning, check the facts out for yourself. If you don’t know someone in Chicago you surely know someone who does. Call them when Trump’s Storm Troopers try to occupy it to drive out the Marxists. Watch, listen, mistrust, and verify for yourself.

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