Week 186: August 9-15

2020 Election

Biden picked Kamala Harris as his running mate this week. By Thursday Trump was questioning her citizenship and her right to stand as vice president.

On Thursday Trump said about voting by mail: “They need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Mr. Trump said Thursday morning in an interview on Fox Business, referring to Democratic demands. “If they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not equipped to have it.”

On Wednesday Trump continued to push a campaign theme of protecting “suburban housewives” from Democrat policies: “They’re going to destroy suburbia. And just so you understand, 30+% of people living in suburbia are minorities — African American, Asian American, Hispanic American,” Trump said during the press conference. “The number’s even higher; they say 35, but I like to cut it a little lower.”

On Thursday this was the reporting: Officials have repeatedly said that the agency is equipped to handle a surge in mail-in voting, with Mr. DeJoy telling a board meeting last Friday that the Postal Service “has ample capacity to deliver all election mail securely and on time in accordance with our delivery standards.”

Yet by Friday the New York Times reported: In letters sent in July to all 50 states and the District of Columbia, Thomas J. Marshall, the general counsel for the Postal Service, told most of them that “certain deadlines for requesting and casting mail-in ballots are incongruous with the Postal Service’s delivery standards.”… Mr. Marshall urged those with tight schedules to require that residents request ballots at least 15 days before an election — rather than the shorter periods currently allowed under the laws of many states.

“This mismatch creates a risk that ballots requested near the deadline under state law will not be returned by mail in time to be counted,” Mr. Marshall wrote.
…Mail operations in several battleground states were hit hard by the cuts. On the list for removal were 24 delivery bar code sorters in Ohio, 11 in Detroit, 11 in Florida, nine in Wisconsin, eight in Philadelphia and five in Arizona.

In Russia News

On Wednesday Pompeo revealed: “If the Russians are offering money to kill Americans or, for that matter, other Westerners as well, there will be an enormous price to pay. That’s what I shared with Foreign Minister Lavrov,”

Trump’s Job Approval: 41.7%

COVID-19 Cases / Deaths: 5,285,546 / 167,546