Joe Biden in Kenosha after talking to Jacob Blake and meeting his family – live
From me and Joan E Greve:
Donald Trump spoke to a packed crowd in Pennsylvania. He lied and misled supporters on the economy, on Joe Biden’s policy platforms, windmills, the news media, leftwing groups, and several other topics.
Joe Biden spoke to Jacob Blake by phone today as he visited Kenosha. The Democratic nominee met with several members of Blake’s family, and Blake himself called in to the meeting from his hospital bed, as the 29-year-old African American man continues to recover after being repeatedly shot in the back by a white police officer.
Biden struck an overall optimistic tone as he spoke at a community meeting in Kenosha, amid ongoing protests over the police shooting of Blake. Biden reflected on how far the country has come since the unrest of 1968, after Dr Martin Luther King was assassinated. “Don’t tell me things can’t change,” Biden said. But he added, “I made a mistake: I thought you could defeat hate. It only hides.”
Trump and his advisers tried to walk back his comments encouraging North Carolinians to vote twice in November. The White House claimed the president was only encouraging voters to ensure their mailed-in ballots are counted. But Trump said of voting by mail yesterday, “Let them send it in and let them go vote. And if the system is as good as they say it is then obviously they won’t be able to vote” in person.
US jobless claims fell to 881,000 last week, as concerns about unemployment linger. The figure represented a decrease from a week earlier, but 29 million Americans are still receiving unemployment benefits of some kind.
Facebook said it would restrict political ads in the final week before the presidential election. The social media giant said it would not accept any new political ads in the week leading up to 3 November, and the company pledged to flag any attempt by a campaign to declare premature victory.
The recent deadly protest in Portland, where a far-right supporter was killed, was just one of many organized in recent weeks with the help of a network of pro-Trump, pro-police and anti-Black Lives Matter activists in a local Facebook-powered pro-police network in Oregon.
That network’s ability to draw the support of far-right groups and more mainstream Republicans alike reveals an increasingly energized and militant grassroots Trumpist movement, which includes some members who are prepared to engage in violence, experts say.
The network is composed of like-minded activists in two overlapping groups, “Back the Blue PDX”, and “COPS NW”. Those activists are planning future events, and given the high tensions following the shooting death of one of its supporters – with the suspected shooter reportedly supportive of local leftwing anti-fascist groups – the prospect of more unrest is high.
That is especially true as the country enters the final stages of the presidential election with Donald Trump running on a law-and-order message, while inflaming racial tensions and offering support to his most extreme supporters, including those who engage in violence.
Working mostly on Facebook, the small group of local activists have helped stage a series of recent events in or near the Portland metro area.
Saturday’s “Trump cruise” saw a large number of participants stray from the highway-only protest route agreed with the Portland police bureau (PPB) and roll into the downtown area for a confrontation with leftwing protesters. There, reporters recorded rightwing protesters discharging pellet guns and Mace into the ranks of nearby protesters and media.
Soon after, in a nearby street, a man wearing a cap bearing the insignia of Patriot Prayer, a prominent far-right group, was shot dead.
In an email announcing a memorial event, James Buchal, a lawyer and chair of the Multnomah County Republican party, identified the dead man as Aaron J Danielson. The Oregonian reported on Monday that a PPB homicide investigation was focused on a BLM supporter and regular attendee of downtown protests in recent weeks.
Danielson’s death was highlighted by Trump who retweeted an account which had incorrectly identified the victim, adding “Rest in Peace Jay”. He also defended the use of paintball guns by his supporters in Portland.
Read the full report:
Speaking at a campaign event in Latrobe, Pennsylvania – to a packed crowd that isn’t remotely socially distanced – Trump has launched with a series of lies and misdirections.
To start, he told supporters, “We have record stock markets… Your stocks are going up, your 401Ks are through the roof. Had a little pause today.”
My colleagues reported on that “little pause” earlier:
Stock markets have lost some of their spectacular gains made over the past several months, as investors sold off high-flying tech companies and worried about the continuing crisis in the US jobs market.
In New York, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 808 points, or 2.78%, after passing 29,000 for the first time since February on Wednesday. The S&P 500 was down 3.5% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq fell 4.9%.
Both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq had set their latest record highs a day earlier, and the latter index is still up nearly 28% for the year. The S&P 500 had been up nine of the last 10 trading days and posted its fifth straight monthly gain in August.
Trump has also outright lied or misled supporters on his rival Joe Biden’s proposed policies on climate change, policing and gun control.
“Biden’s plan is to appease the domestic terrorists and my plan is to arrest them and prosecute them,” Trump said. The president has repeatedly resisted condemning white supremacist and rightwing vigilantes.
Biden is polling ahead of Trump in Pennsylvania, where the former vice-president grew up.
Donald Trump has repeatedly denigrated service members, per a report from the Atlantic.
Among the assertions in Jeffrey Goldberg’s story: Trump, who blamed the rain for skipping a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, said: “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.”
“In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as ‘suckers’ for getting killed,” Goldberg writes.
Trump, in 2015, said of John McCain, who spent five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, “I like people who weren’t captured.”
From the Atlantic:
Trump remained fixated on McCain, one of the few prominent Republicans to continue criticizing him after he won the nomination. When McCain died, in August 2018, Trump told his senior staff, according to three sources with direct knowledge of this event, “We’re not going to support that loser’s funeral,” and he became furious, according to witnesses, when he saw flags lowered to half-staff. “What the fuck are we doing that for? Guy was a fucking loser,” the president told aides.
The White House has responded by calling the report “patently false”.
The Guardian has not independently verified the story, but it seems the AP has.
From Dominic Rushe and Graeme Wearden:
Stock markets have lost some of their spectacular gains made over the past several months, as investors sold off high-flying tech companies and worried about the continuing crisis in the US jobs market.
In New York, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 808 points, or 2.78%, after passing 29,000 for the first time since February on Wednesday. The S&P 500 was down 3.5% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq fell 4.9%.
Both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq had set their latest record highs a day earlier, and the latter index is still up nearly 28% for the year. The S&P 500 had been up nine of the last 10 trading days and posted its fifth straight monthly gain in August.
In London, the sell-off ended a rally on the FTSE 100, which closed 90 points lower at 5,850. The index is now down 22% for the year. Markets across Europe also ended the day lower.
Big tech companies have seen huge gains in their share price in recent months as investors bet the firms would continue posting huge profits even with many coronavirus restrictions still in place, as people might spend even more time online with their devices. Market watchers have questioned recently whether those gains were overdone.
Apple’s 8% share price fall knocked $180bn off its value. Other hot stocks fell further with Tesla dropping 9% and video conferencing company Zoom falling 10%.
In San Francisco, a group has strung hair dryers and curlers up on a tree in front of Nancy Pelosi’s house. A reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle has captured the scene:
Jessica Christian (@jachristian)
Protesters have gathered in front of Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home and are stringing up curlers and blow dryers on a tree after a video surfaced of Pelosi getting her hair done indoors/maskless at a SF salon @sfchroniclepic.twitter.com/v6KVORByaP
September 3, 2020
Republicans have lambasted the Democratic House speaker for visiting a hair salon in her home district, in violation of city guidelines designed to slow the spread of coronavirus. During a White House press conference today, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany played a video, on loop, of Pelosi not wearing a mask while at the salon. The House speaker briefly removed her face covering during a visit that she said she had been told was above board.
Protestors outside Pelosi’s home say they want to be able to get their hair and nails done as well. This week, some San Francisco hair salons and barbershops have been allowed to reopen for business outdoors.
Russia is boosting baseless allegations that voting by mail will lead to fraud – allegations that echo rhetoric from Donald Trump – per an intelligence bulletin obtained by ABC.
ABC reports:
Analysts with the Department of Homeland Security’s intelligence branch issued the warning on Thursday to federal and state law enforcement partners after finding with “high confidence” that “Russian malign influence actors” have targeted the absentee voting process “by spreading disinformation” since at least March.
“Russian state media and proxy websites in mid-August 2020 criticized the integrity of expanded and universal vote-by-mail, claiming ineligible voters could receive ballots due to out-of-date voter rolls, leaving a vast amount of ballots unaccounted for and vulnerable to tampering,” the bulletin notes.
“These websites also alleged that vote-by-mail processes would overburden the U.S. Postal Service and local boards of election,” it continues, “delaying vote tabulation and creating more opportunities for fraud and error.”
Trump has also sown distrust in the electoral system, falsely claiming that the mail-in voting system is rife with fraud.
Here’s my colleague Sam Levine’s explainer debunking misinformation about mail-in voting:
Democrats on the House oversight and reform committee have called for an investigation into possible Hatch Act violations during the Republican national convention.
During last week’s convention, several Republicans appeared to use their government positions for political gain, boosting the Trump campaign while in their official capacity. Trump also included a pardon and naturalization ceremony as part of the convention and used the White House as a backdrop for campaign events and speeches.
Trump and other government officials appeared to violate the Hatch Act, which prohibits government employees from participating in political activity while in their official capacity.
“We are alarmed that President Trump and some senior administration officials are actively undermining compliance with – and respect for – the law,” lawmakers wrote in a letter to the Office of Special Counsel, calling for an investigation.
Although the president and vice-president and except from the Hatch Act, other federal employees are not. During the RNC, acting homeland security secretary Chad Wolf appeared alongside Trump in a naturalization ceremony at the White House, and secretary of state Mike Pompeo delivered a convention speech from Jerusalem, where he was traveling on official business.
The Trump administration has identified dozens of major fossil fuel, energy and water projects that could be fast-tracked by expediting environmental reviews amid the pandemic, according to internal government documents.
At least 19 of the projects are from companies that have spent a total of $16m lobbying the interior department since early 2017, according to an analysis by the conservation group the Center for Western Priorities. ConocoPhillips spent $11.2m of that amount lobbying the department, including on plans to drill for oil and gas within the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, the group said.
Three of the companies that could potentially benefit have met with the interior secretary, David Bernhardt, personally. Another is the Garrison Diversion Conservancy District, which Bernhardt represented as a lawyer at the firm Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck. The district is seeking to divert water from the Missouri River to supply the Red River Valley in North Dakota, a project environmental advocates oppose.
The list was obtained with a public records request by the Center for Biological Diversity and first reported by the Associated Press. It was written in response to an executive order Donald Trump signed in June directing agencies to use emergency authority to speed energy and infrastructure projects during the economic downturn from the coronavirus pandemic.
The administration had already prioritized the approval of many of the projects on the list before the executive order. Agencies are trying to finalize unfinished business before 20 January, in case Trump does not win re-election.
A group of nearly 100 Republicans and independents will endorse Joe Biden over Donald Trump, Reuters reports.
The group is called “Republicans and Independents for Biden”, led by Christine Todd Whitman, the former governor of New Jersey.
From Reuters:
“Biden is a decent man, he’s a steady man,” Whitman told Reuters. “Trump is trying to paint the world of Joe Biden as horrific – but that’s Trump’s America now.”
She accused Trump of betraying conservative values by undermining the rule of law and national security, lying, dividing Americans along racial lines, and failing the country in his response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Weld, a former governor of Massachusetts, briefly and unsuccessfully challenged Trump in the 2020 Republican nominating contest. Another leading member of the group is Rick Snyder, a two-term governor of Michigan who left office in 2019.
Snyder decried what he called Trump’s divisive and bullying tactics, adding: “Having worked with Joe Biden and Donald Trump when I was Governor, I believe Biden is the clear choice to put our country back on a positive path.”
Whitman, who headed the Environmental Protection Agency under Republican President George W. Bush, said the group will target voters in a handful of battleground states, particularly suburban women and voters who do not like Trump but still hesitate to back Biden.
The group launches a website on Thursday and plans to campaign, buy advertisements and place opinion pieces in state and national media in support of Biden.
This group represents only the latest round of Republicans who’ve endorsed Biden over Trump. The Lincoln Project political action committee – led by disaffected Republicans – has been dispersing a steady stream of anti-Trump memes and ads.
During the Democratic national convention, several Republicans – including Whitman, former secretary of state Colin Powell and former Ohio governor John Kasich – spoke on behalf of Biden.
Leaks from former White House press secretary Sarah Sanders’ new memoir continue to cause controversy, in today’s case over a passage in which she calls Josh Raffel, a former aide to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, a “liberal, aggressive, foulmouthed Jew from New York City”.
The remark was reported by Jewish Insider.
The Guardian obtained its own copy, and can confirm that Sanders adds: “Despite our differences, I had grown to love Josh. He is one of the funniest people I know, intensely loyal, and probably the most talented communications strategist I’ve ever worked with. Nobody in the White House could work a story better than Josh, and he was always one of the first colleagues I turned to for help on the toughest assignments.”
Raffel told Jewish Insider Sanders “is a close friend”, but nonetheless Bend the Arc, a progressive Jewish group, said in a statement: “Joke or not, Sanders’ depiction of Raffel relies on antisemitic tropes of Jewish men as crude and perverted – and these tropes can fuel further antisemitic sentiment and even violence against Jews.
That this type of humor was welcome in the Trump White House speaks volumes about the degree to which the Trump administration and the Republican party have fully embraced antisemitism – from Trump’s own references to Jews as ‘disloyal’ and ‘brutal killers’ to Stephen Miller’s record of sharing Nazi propaganda, to the Republican party’s inclusion of antisemitic conspiracy theorists like Marjorie Taylor Greene in Georgia, and Laura Loomer in Florida.”
Here’s our story on the book, which concerned an anecdote about Kim Jong-un, an apparent wink and some boorish behaviour from the president:
That’s it from me for today. My west coast colleague Maanvi Singh will take over the blog for the next few hours.
Here’s where the day stands so far:
Joe Biden spoke to Jacob Blake by phone today as he visited Kenosha. The Democratic nominee met with several members of Blake’s family, and Blake himself called in to the meeting from his hospital bed, as the 29-year-old African American man continues to recover after being repeatedly shot in the back by a white police officer.
Biden struck an overall optimistic tone as he spoke at a community meeting in Kenosha, amid ongoing protests over the police shooting of Blake. Biden reflected on how far the country has come since the unrest of 1968, after Dr Martin Luther King was assassinated. “Don’t tell me things can’t change,” Biden said. But he added, “I made a mistake: I thought you could defeat hate. It only hides.”
Trump and his advisers tried to walk back his comments encouraging North Carolinians to vote twice in November. The White House claimed the president was only encouraging voters to ensure their mailed-in ballots are counted. But Trump said of voting by mail yesterday, “Let them send it in and let them go vote. And if the system is as good as they say it is then obviously they won’t be able to vote” in person.
US jobless claims fell to 881,000 last week, as concerns about unemployment linger. The figure represented a decrease from a week earlier, but 29 million Americans are still receiving unemployment benefits of some kind.
Facebook said it would restrict political ads in the final week before the presidential election. The social media giant said it would not accept any new political ads in the week leading up to 3 November, and the company pledged to flag any attempt by a campaign to declare premature victory.
Maanvi will have more coming up, so stay tuned.
A new series of battleground state polls shows Joe Biden is pulling ahead in Pennsylvania, while he and Trump remain virtually tied in Florida and North Carolina.
According to a new Quinnipiac University poll, Biden is eight points ahead of the president among Pennsylvania’s likely voters, 52%-44%.
That number should help to calm some Democrats after a separate Monmouth University poll of Pennsylvania released yesterday showed Biden with a one- to three-point lead among the swing state’s likely voters, depending on the level of turnout.
But the Quinnipiac University poll also found a very tight race in Florida, with Biden leading by three points among likely voters in a survey with a 2.8-point margin of error.
A separate Monmouth University poll showed a similarly close race in North Carolina. Biden leads Trump there by 2 points, which is well within the poll’s margin of error.
MonmouthPoll (@MonmouthPoll)
NORTH CAROLINA VOTER POLL: #GeneralElection (RV)
PRESIDENT 47% @JoeBiden 45% @realDonaldTrump
US SENATE 46% @CalforNC Cunningham 45% @ThomTillis
The polls add to the overall evidence that last month’s party conventions don’t seem to have moved the needle all that much, and Biden has maintained his national advantage in the race.
However, Biden and Trump are still running neck and neck in several swing states, which will ultimately tip the balance of the Electoral College and determine the winner of the presidential race.
Wisconsin’s Democratic governor said he urged Joe Biden not to visit Kenosha today, as protests continue over the police shooting of Jacob Blake.
According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Tony Evers told reporters in a press call that he “made his position clear” to Biden, but the Democratic nominee chose to come to Kenosha anyway.
“Candidates can make their own decisions,” Evers said. “I would prefer that no one be here.”
Biden said yesterday that he had received “overwhelming requests” from Democratic leaders to go to Kenosha, but some local officials publicly said they would prefer neither presidential nominee visit at this time.
Evers previously sent a letter to Trump, who visited the city on Tuesday, similarly discouraging him from coming.
“I am concerned your presence will only hinder our healing,” Evers said in the letter. “I am concerned your presence will only delay our work to overcome division and move forward together.”
During his community meeting in Kenosha, Joe Biden pledged to “go down fighting for racial equality”, saying he is “optimistic” about the opportunity for change.
“I really am optimistic,” Biden said. “I promise you, win or lose, I’m going to go down fighting. I’m going to go down fighting for racial equality, equity across the board.”
The Democratic presidential nominee, who is leading national polls by about seven points right now, added, “This is something worth losing over, but we’re not going to lose.”
