After 44 Years in the News Business, I'm Finally Free to Speak the Truth About Republicans
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=55039"><span class="small">Grant Segall, The Daily Beast</span></a>
Sunday, 12 July 2020 13:27
Segall writes: "Now that my 44 years on daily newspapers have ended, I'm finally free to admit my biases. I'm biased toward the facts. Toward compassion. Toward freedom. All basics of our business. All under attack by today's Republicans."
Donald Trump. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
After 44 Years in the News Business, I'm Finally Free to Speak the Truth About Republicans
By Grant Segall, The Daily Beast
12 July 20
While working at a daily newspaper, I was supposed to be “objective.” Then I was laid off. So here’s the real objective truth: Republicans are killing democracy.
ow that my 44 years on daily newspapers have ended, I’m finally free to admit my biases.
I’m biased toward the facts. Toward compassion. Toward freedom. All basics of our business. All under attack by today’s Republicans.
We reporters pride ourselves on open minds. We’re fiercely independent. We defy sources and editors alike. We try to look past party labels to individuals’ merits. Some of my colleagues at the Cleveland Plain Dealer wouldn’t even vote in Ohio’s primary because of having to declare their parties. So I wasn’t surprised to see a 2017 study in ScienceAdvances showing little bias in our rates of response to news pitches from the two parties.
Still, the same study showed that journalists (not to be confused with media moguls) tilted left personally. It seems that liberals often become reporters, and maybe journalists become liberals.
During my career, mostly with the PD and Local 1 of The NewsGuild, I’ve watched inmates and spouses cry at a marriage seminar in prison. I’ve watched migrant workers uprooting trees that few U.S. citizens would lug.
I’ve interviewed people wounded by National Guardsmen at Kent State in 1970 when they were in college. I’ve interviewed one of the Little Rock Nine who desegregated Central High School in 1957. I’ve interviewed parents who lost Marine children in Iraq. One couple later lost their only other child to cancer, but gained a grandchild on Mother’s Day through surrogacy.
I’ve learned to empathize with people of all kinds, from Daniel Ellsberg to Geraldo Rivera, from a Palestinian refugee to Soviet Jewish ones. During Solidarity’s rise in Cold War Poland, a Holocaust refugee told me, “I hope blood runs in the streets of Poland.” I wrote, “Perhaps the cruelest trick of bigotry is to teach its victims to hate.”
I always wanted to write. At age 5, I was calling my scribbles a newspaper.
My parents were English majors. Dad’s law clients included a boosters’ club for Nelson Rockefeller. Mom observed the United Nations for the League of Women Voters, which champions non-partisan research. I grew up mildly liberal but not at all radical. I believed in facts, laws, empathy, and the Fourth Estate’s vital role in sharing them all.
I started my career four years after Watergate. By then, the typical town was down to one paper, which strove for balance, partly to justify its monopoly. If both sides were offended equally, we reporters figured we’d done our job right. At least once that I recall, the side I secretly favored was the more offended.
We spent hours checking the facts. Sometimes common wisdom proved false. It turned out, for instance, that cuts in the top tax rate haven’t correlated with growth, let alone paid for themselves.
Sometimes seemingly false things proved true. In the 1990s, an editor told me to write how Cleveland’s always erratic weather had grown even weirder in the past couple years. I wrote a story packed with data proving him wrong. He was a good sport and ran it. Eventually, though, the mounting data proved him right.
In my early years, our two political parties disagreed mostly about policies, not facts. And both lied at times, mostly about scandals. But soon the party of Honest Abe began to lie far more systematically about candidates and issues. “Voodoo economics,” “yellowcake uranium,” “weapons of mass destruction” (as opposed to the U.S.’s far deadlier arms), birtherism, “death panels,” widespread “voter fraud” and “rampant” immigrant crime have been just a few of the elephants’ false memories. Meanwhile, the falsifiers have denounced anyone standing by the facts, such as scientists, social scientists, and journalists.
Over my objections, many journalists responded to the denunciations by growing vague and defensive. They’d try to make the two parties sound equal instead of giving them equal scrutiny. They’d write “A-said, B-said” instead of “A falsified, B debunked.” They’d draw false equivalence between fringe advocates of violence on the left and high-ranking ones on the right. They’d use the term “extremists” for progressives hoping to stretch the age ranges for Medicare or free public education and for right-wingers caging children and imprisoning debtors.
They’d lead a story with “Republican So-and-So denounced climate change as a hoax.” A few paragraphs later, they’d say, “Democrat So-and-So called it real.” Then they’d give equal time to a rare scientific dissenter and one of the throng of supporters. At long last they’d cite temperatures, ice thicknesses, and other proof. All the while, they’d call climate change a “theory” without explaining that word’s scientific meaning: an explanation of the facts.
In 2004, after George W. Bush’s second narrow win, a Plain Dealer colleague called a meeting to talk about how liberal journalists should try to understand conservatives better. I said we should also try to understand liberals, who keep trying to understand their foes without reciprocation.
By then, fact-checking columns were analyzing political rhetoric play by play, but seldom adding up the score. It took a 2013 George Mason University study to find that Republicans were three times likelier than Democrats to make claims that the Poynter Institute’s PolitiFact called “false” or “pants on fire.”
Now Donald Trump is accelerating his party’s plunge, fomenting violence by police and civilians, demanding jail for opponents, reaping foreign emoluments, insulting everyone from Mexicans to Gold Star parents to fellow Republicans, steering hush money, sacking watchdogs, seizing a church, subjecting peaceful protesters to attacks, plundering his so-called foundation, and calling journalists “enemies of the people” without the phrase’s original irony.
He has also spread myths ranging from inaugural downpours to oral disinfectants to murder by broadcaster. In the 17 months through May 29, he averaged 22 false or misleading claims per day, according to The Washington Post’s Fact Checker.
Some journalists have refused to circulate these claims, even with refutations. But most of us think presidential fictions are still news. even if the publicity inspires Trump’s flock.
We’re also leading more stories with the truth: not “So-and-So claimed...” but “So-and-So repeated the common falsehood...” Many even say “So-and-So lied.” But lies are conscious, and I’m not sure the Republicans know the truth anymore.
And we’re finally defending ourselves. My Local 1 of The Newspaper Guild printed T-shirts saying “Truth.” Cleveland’s chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists printed ones saying, “Friend of the People.”
Still, it’s hard to sell facts when roughly half the country won’t buy them. That’s part of why the number of editorial employees at American newspapers fell from more than 71,000 in 2008 to less than 35,000 in from 2008 through 2019, according to Pew. This year, during a pandemic aggravated by rejection of scientific facts, many more layoffs have followed, including mine.
Now I’m a freelancer, and I’m finally speaking up. Call me a militant moderate. I won’t just denounce extremists but their party, too. I won’t urge liberals to match the Republicans’ lies and hate, but I’ll urge all Americans to unite against the dividers.
Most pundits still champion bipartisanship and try to embody it by telling the parties, “Kids, I don’t care who started it.” But these kids aren’t wrestling over toys. They’re wrestling over democracy’s survival. And the Republicans have grown more partisan than ever, attacking bipartisan commissions, investigating independent investigators, barring testimony from the impeachment trial, anointing judges from the openly biased Federalist Society, closing urban polls and offering to hire 50,000 people to “watch” voters. If we ignore the parties’ differences today, we’re biased toward the middle. We’re refusing to swing the hose toward the fire.
Naturally, my words will be held against me and my trade. But Republicans condemn conciliatory words, too. It’s high time to speak up for the truth regardless. If we wait much longer, who will be left to write democracy’s obituary, and who will be free to read it?
Grant Segall is a national prizewinning journalist who spent 44 years on daily newspapers, mostly the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He has freelanced for The Washington Post, Time and other outlets and wrote John D. Rockefeller: Anointed with Oil for Oxford University Press. He tweets at @GrantSegall.
My Patient Caught Covid-19 Twice. So Long to Herd Immunity Hopes.
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=55038"><span class="small">D. Clay Ackerly, Vox</span></a>
Sunday, 12 July 2020 13:15
Ackerly writes: "'Wait. I can catch Covid twice?' my 50-year-old patient asked in disbelief. It was the beginning of July, and he had just tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, for a second time - three months after a previous infection."
Medical staff from myCovidMD provide free Covid-19 antibody testing in Inglewood, California on June 19, 2020. The unknowns of immune responses to the coronavirus currently outweigh the knowns. (photo: Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images)
My Patient Caught Covid-19 Twice. So Long to Herd Immunity Hopes.
By D. Clay Ackerly, Vox
12 July 20
Emerging cases of Covid-19 reinfection suggest herd immunity is wishful thinking.
ait. I can catch Covid twice?” my 50-year-old patient asked in disbelief. It was the beginning of July, and he had just tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, for a second time — three months after a previous infection.
While there’s still much we don’t understand about immunity to this new illness, a small but growing number of cases like his suggest the answer is “yes.”
Covid-19 may also be much worse the second time around. During his first infection, my patient experienced a mild cough and sore throat. His second infection, in contrast, was marked by a high fever, shortness of breath, and hypoxia, resulting in multiple trips to the hospital.
Recent reports and conversations with physician colleagues suggest my patient is not alone. Two patients in New Jersey, for instance, appear to have contracted Covid-19 a second time almost two months after fully recovering from their first infection.
It is possible, but unlikely, that my patient had a single infection that lasted three months. Some Covid-19 patients (now dubbed “long haulers”) do appear to suffer persistent infections and symptoms.
My patient, however, cleared his infection — he had two negative PCR tests after his first infection — and felt healthy for nearly six weeks.
I believe it is far more likely that my patient fully recovered from his first infection, then caught Covid-19 a second time after being exposed to a young adult family member with the virus. He was unable to get an antibody test after his first infection, so we do not know whether his immune system mounted an effective antibody response or not.
Regardless, the limited research so far on recovered Covid-19 patients shows that not all patients develop antibodies after infection. Some patients, and particularly those who never develop symptoms, mount an antibody response immediately after infection only to have it wane quickly afterward — an issue of increasing scientific concern.
What’s more, repeat infections in a short time period are a feature of many viruses, including other coronaviruses. So if some Covid-19 patients are getting reinfected after a second exposure, it would not be particularly unusual.
In general, the unknowns of immune responses to SARS-CoV-2 currently outweigh the knowns. We do not know how much immunity to expect once someone is infected with the virus, we do not know how long that immunity may last, and we do not know how many antibodies are needed to mount an effective response. And although there is some hope regarding cellular immunity (including T-cell responses) in the absence of a durable antibody response, the early evidence of reinfections puts the effectiveness of these immune responses in question as well.
Also troubling is that my patient’s case, and others like his, may dim the hope for natural herd immunity. Herd immunity depends on the theory that our immune systems, once exposed to a pathogen, will collectively protect us as a community from reinfection and further spread.
There are several pathways out of this pandemic, including safe, effective, and available therapeutics and vaccines, as well as herd immunity (or some combination thereof).
Still, the dream of herd immunity, and the protection of a Covid-19 infection, or a positive antibody test, promise to provide, have taken hold among the public. As the collective reasoning has gone, the silver lining of surviving a Covid-19 infection (without debilitating side effects) is twofold: Survivors will not get infected again, nor will they pose a threat of passing the virus to their communities, workplaces, and loved ones.
While recent studies and reports have already questioned our ability to achieve herd immunity, our national discourse retains an implicit hope that herd immunity is possible. In recent weeks, leading medical experts have implied that the current surge in cases might lead to herd immunity by early 2021, and a July 6 opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal was similarly optimistic.
This wishful thinking is harmful. It risks incentivizing bad behavior. The rare but concerning “Covid parties,” where people are gathering to deliberately get infected with the virus, and large gatherings without masks, are considered by some to be the fastest way out of the pandemic, personally and as a community. Rather than trying to wish ourselves out of scientific realities, we must acknowledge the mounting evidence that challenges these ideas.
In my opinion, my patient’s experience serves as a warning sign on several fronts.
First, the trajectory of a moderate initial infection followed by a severe reinfection suggests that this novel coronavirus might share some tendencies of other viruses such as dengue fever, where you can suffer more severe illness each time you contract the disease.
Second, despite scientific hopes for either antibody-mediated or cellular immunity, the severity of my patient’s second bout with Covid-19 suggests that such responses may not be as robust as we hope.
Third, many people may let their guard down after being infected, because they believe they are either immune or incapable of contributing to community spread. As my patient’s case demonstrates, these assumptions risk both their own health and the health of those near them.
Last, if reinfection is possible on such a short timeline, there are implications for the efficacy and durability of vaccines developed to fight the disease.
I am aware that my patient represents a sample size of one, but taken together with other emerging examples, outlier stories like his are a warning sign of a potential pattern. If my patient is not, in fact, an exception, but instead proves the rule, then many people could catch Covid-19 more than once, and with unpredictable severity.
With no certainty of personal immunity nor relief through herd immunity, the hard work of beating this pandemic together continues. Our efforts must go beyond simply waiting for effective treatments and vaccines. They must include continued prevention through the use of medically proven face masks, face shields, hand washing, and physical distancing, as well as wide-scale testing, tracing, and isolation of new cases.
This is a novel disease: Learning curves are steep, and we must pay attention to the inconvenient truths as they arise. Natural herd immunity is almost certainly beyond our grasp. We cannot place our hopes on it.
Sunday Song: Bob Dylan | The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=55040"><span class="small">David Simon, The New Yorker</span></a>
Sunday, 12 July 2020 13:15
Excerpt: "In February of 1963, twenty-four-year-old William Zantzinger, armed with a toy carnival cane and wrecked on whiskey, made a spectacle of himself at the Spinsters' Ball at the Emerson Hotel in Baltimore."
Bob Dylan. (photo: Kevin Winter/Getty)
Sunday Song: Bob Dylan | The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
By David Simon, The New Yorker
12 July 20
The article below by David Simon was originally published in the January 26, 2009 issue of the New Yorker.
n February of 1963, twenty-four-year-old William Zantzinger, armed with a toy carnival cane and wrecked on whiskey, made a spectacle of himself at the Spinsters’ Ball at the Emerson Hotel in Baltimore. He was a drunken country mouse in the big city, at a time when the notion of racial equality had barely shown itself in the neighborhood of his father’s tobacco farm. When the hotel’s black waitstaff was slow to serve Zantzinger another drink, he yelled racial epithets at Hattie Carroll, a barmaid and a fifty-one-year-old mother of eleven, and he rapped her on the shoulder with his cane. She became upset, then collapsed and died of a stroke.
Bob Dylan read about the case in the newspaper. He wrote the magnificent “Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” with the paper splayed on the table of a Seventh Avenue luncheonette. Zantzinger was then and forever after a master villain.
Twenty-five years later, I tried to interview him for a newspaper story. He was working in a real-estate office (there was an equal-housing sticker on the door), and I found Zantzinger a disappointing lump of a man, with small dark eyes and black hair thinning from behind. The eyes followed me angrily as I offered up my two-sides-to-every-story patter, trying to get him to talk.
“There was a girl come down here from Baltimore five years ago,” he said. “I didn’t talk to her. And one before that. I got nothing to say.”
I tried trashing Dylan: “That son of a bitch libelled you. You could’ve sued his ass for what he did.” Zantzinger smiled. “We were gonna sue him big time. Scared that boy good!” he said. “The song was a lie. Just a damned lie.”
He enjoyed talking about how his lawyer had fired shots across Dylan’s bow. Columbia Records was on the receiving end as well, Zantzinger said, adding that he dropped the idea of a lawsuit because, after being convicted of manslaughter and assault, he’d seen enough of courtrooms and controversy.
By then, too, there was little left of Zantzinger’s reputation. But even a dispassionate reading of the facts of the case leads one to conclude that Dylan took great liberties. Hattie Carroll was not “slain by a cane” that was “doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle,” as Dylan wrote. No physical injury was done to her, nor was there any evidence to suggest lethal intent. The medical examiner’s report—citing Carroll’s enlarged heart and severe hypertension—attributed her death as much to Zantzinger’s verbal abuse as to the tap of his cane. Nor did Zantzinger have “high office relations in the politics of Maryland” to influence the case, as Dylan implied.
Zantzinger ran through all of this. He knew the song and its equivocations. He knew precisely the historical role to which it had consigned him.
“He did some good stuff, I guess,” he said of Dylan. “The blowing-with-the-wind song, that one? But I’m probably not gonna be the best judge. I mean, for me, he’s not much of a singer.”
I told Zantzinger about a note I had found in the old homicide file: “Attached is correspondence from . . . a folksinger in New York who seeks information about the aforementioned case, which was investigated by your agency.” But Dylan’s letter wasn’t attached—snatched, perhaps, as a souvenir, from the police files. But the cover sheet, dated months after the release of “Hattie Carroll,” was telling. Dylan was apparently writing too late to improve his song’s accuracy; his letter was the reaction of a worried young man.
Zantzinger enjoyed that immensely. I told him that the Carroll children would not talk. He acknowledged that he had paid them money in an out-of-court settlement.
“I know that I caused that woman’s death,” he said. “I’m responsible. Me talking does nothing for that woman or her family. Just put this in your article: I admire and respect the Carroll family for their decision not to talk publicly. Like them, I think the best thing to do is let it rest.” When I got up to go, he extended his hand, and I took it. He stayed in his chair, and I saw myself out.
Picasso said that art is the lie that shows us the truth, and that’s how Dylan and his ballad should probably be judged. But to hold that standard to William Zantzinger, the man, who died earlier this month, at the age of sixty-nine, seems too crude a measure. In 1963, he was sentenced to six months in jail for Hattie Carroll’s death, on the same day as the March on Washington.
Zantzinger lived long enough to see Martin Luther King, Jr., honored with a national holiday and to know that this week Barack Obama would be inaugurated as President. We can imagine him galled at this outcome, a small-minded racist rightly defined by his ugliest moment. Perhaps that’s him, or perhaps he was more than that. At any rate, he knew his part and he played it to the end.
“The only question is when,” I wrote. Trump’s safest course of action, I said, would be to wait until after Election Day — Nov. 3, 2020 — to do the dirty deed, but cautioned, “Trump’s impulsiveness, however, is a wild card.” And faced with his longtime henchman heading to the hoosegow next week, Trump couldn’t hold off — so Stone was given clemency in the form of commutation of his prison sentence.
Stone is the first of Trump’s three felonious friends to escape a full measure of justice.
In the November column, I bet Trump would hit a trifecta with his felon allies. The play is underway.
Convicted felon Paul Manafort, jailed for tax evasion and bank fraud, was released from prison in May and granted confinement in his home in Northern Virginia because of the coronavirus pandemic. He is never, ever, cross my heart and hope to die, going back to prison as long as Trump is president.
Given that Stone and Manafort have been spared from life behind bars, it’s all but certain that convicted felon Michael Flynn will go footloose and fancy-free. If the federal courts balk at the Trump Justice Department’s extraordinary request to drop the case outright — a case it has already won, mind you — then there can be no doubt that Trump’s ex-national security adviser will be granted executive clemency, most likely an outright pardon.
What, after all, is presidential power to Donald Trump, except to be used as he sees fit?
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), angered by Trump’s decision, tweeted this morning, “Unprecedented, historic corruption: an American president commutes the sentence of a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president.”
Must have made Trump yawn.
Since entering office, Trump has demonstrated nothing but disregard for ethics and justice.
Against the advice of experienced, respected leaders in the Pentagon, Trump intervened in three cases involving war-crimes accusations, overturning decisions of military juries and issuing full pardons to two soldiers convicted of war crimes, as well as reversing disciplinary action against a third service member.
He got caught trying to bribe a foreign country to interfere in a U.S. election — specifically by offering desperately needed military assistance in exchange for that county pledging to publicly dig up dirt on an opponent — a blatant abuse of presidential power — and got away with it.
A nosy U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York is invading Trump’s business and financial affairs? Why, just sic Attorney General William P. Barr on him. Pressure now-former U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman to resign. Entice the federal prosecutor with other prominent government jobs. If that doesn’t work? Fire him — which Trump did.
Don’t care for independent inspectors general scouting our waste, fraud and abuse during the Reign of Trump? Purge and replace them with more pliant appointees. From April to May, five IGs were kicked out the door in six weeks. Because he wanted to.
None of this should come as a surprise.
What does the rule of law and the system of justice mean to Donald Trump, who thinks his presidency is uncheckable?
FOCUS: Bill Barr Is Running an October-Surprise Factory at Justice
Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=55034"><span class="small">Chris Smith, Vanity Fair</span></a>
Sunday, 12 July 2020 10:40
Smith writes: "Speculating on an October surprise has been a quadrennial media ritual, much like chatter about the possibility of a brokered convention. This year's version will be a Bill Barr production."
William Barr. (photo: Joshua Roberts/Reuters)
Bill Barr Is Running an October-Surprise Factory at Justice
By Chris Smith, Vanity Fair
12 July 20
The attorney general’s probe of the Russia probes will inevitably arrive in the midst of campaign season—just one small detail of the Justice Department’s ugly politicization under Barr.
he “October surprise” is the Bigfoot of presidential politics—much rumored, rarely seen. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s announcement, 12 days before election day 1972, that “peace is at hand” in the Vietnam War comes closest to fitting the profile of a late-breaking, calculated, election-influencing ploy, though President Richard Nixon hardly needed the help against Senator George McGovern. Ever since, speculating on an October surprise has been a quadrennial media ritual, much like chatter about the possibility of a brokered convention.
This year’s version will be a Bill Barr production. In May 2019, the attorney general brought in John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, to examine the origins of the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Robert Mueller’s report documented ample reasons for the FBI to have opened a probe; Michael Horowitz, the Department of Justice inspector general, declared that the investigation was justified, though he identified FBI procedural errors. None of which seems to have shaken Barr’s longstanding view that the whole Russia thing was a politically motivated conspiracy, so he assigned Durham to find the real facts.
Perhaps new revelations exist. Perhaps the right’s feverish wish to see former FBI director James Comey indicted will finally be granted. Whatever Durham has found now seems likely to be unveiled—coincidentally, of course—in the run-up to this November’s presidential vote. “The DOJ inspector general identified mistakes in the revised applications for surveillance warrants, so an agent or attorney who was involved in that probably needs a good lawyer,” says Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor who has followed the Russia case closely. “Based on what we know now, the Comey stuff is pretty weak, for a lot of reasons. I’ve seen some creative thinking by right-wingers that the memos Comey wrote about his meetings with Trump that ended up leaking are government property, so Comey should be prosecuted for theft. You’re never going to get a conviction on that. If he writes up his fantasy football draft on the office computer, is that government property? Come on.”
Even if Durham’s work does not result in major criminal prosecutions, he and Barr are expected to issue a report asserting their conclusions—something that would break with DOJ precedent, but be completely in character with Barr’s politicization of the department. The attorney general’s attempt to intervene in the sentencing of Roger Stone and Barr’s firing of U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman, head of the Southern District of New York, are only his latest high-profile moves to bend Justice in Trump’s favor.
“Barr has a quite inappropriate policy of regularly having people he especially trusts for some reason handling special issues,” says Donald Ayer, who was a deputy attorney general under President George H.W. Bush, a job in which Ayer supervised Barr, who was then head of the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel. “He has people come in and second-guess the career lawyers and sometimes decide they’ve really screwed up. Having somebody higher up look at a case and say, ‘No, I don’t think so,’ that’s fine. But having recurrent ad hoc processes, new review levels that didn’t exist before, that’s a problem. For instance, there’s a person or a group of people who are receiving whatever intake there is from Rudy Giuliani, instead of whoever normally takes such complaints or information. I have not spoken with anyone who is in the department now. But I have spoken with a couple of people who have been there recently, and been in positions to know, who have said that morale is just horrible. That’s p
Erica Newland joined the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel as an attorney adviser in 2016, during the Obama administration, and left in November 2018, when Jeff Sessions was still attorney general. Things have not improved under Barr. “OLC seems to have abandoned any pretense of impartiality or any pretense of a commitment to the rule-of-law notion that you have to treat like cases alike,” Newland says. “I was really surprised to see the strong language in the June 26 executive order on monuments. It sounded more like a barn burner political speech rather than something with the imprimatur of the country’s top lawyers. I think there has been a radical reorientation of what the office’s purpose is and what the purpose of the attorneys who work there is. Bill Barr has articulated a view of the president as king, and so loyalty is to this president rather than to the Constitution, which is the oath we all take. Phenomenon number two is a culture of fear that has permeated the department since Trump came into office. Fear of the president’s tweets—people saw Bruce Ohr and Andy McCabe having their professional lives destroyed, and that had a strong silencing effect.”
A last-minute rescue of Trump’s reelection chances would far outstrip all of Barr’s previous actions. But even without knowing the results of the Durham investigation, the damage already done to the DOJ’s credibility has been deep and wide.
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ow that my 44 years on daily newspapers have ended, I’m finally free to admit my biases.
ait. I can catch Covid twice?” my 50-year-old patient asked in disbelief. It was the beginning of July, and he had just tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes 
n February of 1963, twenty-four-year-old William Zantzinger, armed with a toy carnival cane and wrecked on whiskey, made a spectacle of himself at the Spinsters’ Ball at the Emerson Hotel in Baltimore. He was a drunken country mouse in the big city, at a time when the notion of racial equality had barely shown itself in the neighborhood of his father’s tobacco farm. When the hotel’s black waitstaff was slow to serve Zantzinger another drink, he yelled racial epithets at Hattie Carroll, a barmaid and a fifty-one-year-old mother of eleven, and he rapped her on the shoulder with his cane. She became upset, then collapsed and died of a stroke.
he “October surprise” is the Bigfoot of presidential politics—much rumored, rarely seen. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s 
