Saturday Snippets is a regular weekend Daily Kos feature.
• Olivia Troye says she and other staffers discussed what would happen if Donald Trump refuses to leave office: In a CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer Friday, Troye, who worked on the coronavirus task force and says she is a lifelong Republican, left the administration, claiming in an scathing ad last week that Trump cares more about getting re-elected than about protecting people from getting Covid-19, which has killed well over 200,000 Americans. In discussion before she left her post, Troye told her colleagues to take seriously Trump’s comments about staying in office no matter the election outcome. "The president when he's joking, if he says that he's joking, he's telling you a half truth," Troye told Blitzer. "And in there is something fairly frightening and scary. What you see is what you get. You should trust that. He doesn't hide it." Troye also challenged statements by her former boss, retired Gen. Keith Kellogg, who said Tuesday during a press conference that Troye had been fired and he personally had escorted her out of the office. She said she hadn’t been fired but had resigned, and several colleagues had asked her to reconsider. "I'd love to see the video footage of this video tape where he supposedly escorted me out," Troye told Blitzer. "I know a lot of the Secret Service people on the campus, and I would love to see that footage."
• Early voting shows more Black people using vote-by-mail option: Nationwide, Black voters are the least likely to vote by mail. But in some places, especially in North Carolina, that tradition seems to be changing, at least for this election in the shadow of the coronavirus outbreak. There, according to the Associated Press, Black voters have cast 16.7% of the more than 173,000 ballots returned by mail so far. That’s up from 9% in 2016. Black voters make up 21% of the state’s registered voters. “They’re changing their dynamics,” said Michael Bitzer, a political scientist at Catawba College in North Carolina. “It seems like there’s a shift going on which will certainly help Democrats.” Perhaps. But mail-in votes in the state so far only amount to 5% of the total vote in 2016. And there’s another problem. While only 1.3% of white voters’ ballots are being returned for lack of the required witness information, that’s happened to 5% of Black voters’ ballots so far. Groups such as VoteBlackPac have pushed hard to get more Black citizens to vote by mail this year, and that means the process is new to many people. A lawsuit settled Tuesday with the North Carolina Alliance for Retired Americans requires counties to send an affidavit so any voter who hasn’t included witness information on their ballot can resolve the problem.
• Scientists find crows even smarter than they thought: Research released in Science indicates that crows and their raven and other corvid cousins ”can ponder the content of their own minds, a manifestation of higher intelligence and analytical thought long believed the sole province of humans and a few other higher mammals.” A second study into the neuroanatomy of pigeons and barn owls found aspects of their intelligence are probably the case for corvids as well. “Together, the two papers show that intelligence/consciousness are grounded in connectivity and activity patterns of neurons” in the most neuron-dense part of the bird brain, called the pallium, said neurobiologist Suzana Herculano-Houzel of Vanderbilt University, who wrote an analysis of the studies.
• Indigenous people offer prayers to southern resident orca captured a half century ago: Among the Lummi people of Washington state, orcas—killer whales—are known as “qwe’lhol’mechen,” meaning “our relatives who live under the sea.” At the Miami Seaquarium is one orca whom the Lummi call Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut but is known to visitors as Lolita. She was just 4 years old when she was captured in 1970 off Whidbey Island in Puget Sound, and she’s lived at the Seaquarium ever since, having survived longer than the other dozen southern resident orcas captured at the same time as her. Five of those died during the capture, and the other seven were sold to marine parks around the world, where they all eventually died. On Wednesday and Thursday Raynell Morris (Squil-le-he-le) and Ellie Kinley (Tah-Mahs) held ceremonies for Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut. “We felt it was critical … to give her prayer, love and support, to let her know she is not forgotten,” Morris said. Along with Samuel Tommie of the Seminole Tribe of Florida, the two boated to waters in view of the Miami Seaquarium, laid into the ocean a wreath of cedar brought from the Pacific Northwest, played a flute song, and drummed, calling her name across the water. “We promised when you hear a drum, it’s your heartbeat, it’s our heartbeat,” Morris called. Kinley has compared the capture of Sk’aliCh’elh-tenaut to the federal government’s efforts to assimilate American Indian children in boarding schools where they sought wipe out their Indianness. “She was taken from her family and her culture when she was just a child, like so many of our children were taken from us and placed in Indian boarding schools,” she said in July.
• Bill Murray gets a cease-and-desist letter from lawyer representing the Doobie Brothers: The lawyer, Peter T. Paterno, notes in the letter that in ads for Zero Hucks Given golf shirts, Murray keeps using “Listen to the Music,” a Doobie song written by Tom Johnston. “We understand that you’re running other ads using music from other of our clients. It seems the only other person who uses our clients’ music without permission more than you do is Donald Trump. This is the part where I’m supposed to cite the United States Copyright Act, excoriate you for not complying with some subparagraph that I’m too lazy to look up and threaten you with eternal damnation for doing so. But you already earned that with those Garfield movies. And you already know you can’t use music in ads without paying for it. We’d be almost OK with it if the shirts weren’t so damn ugly. But it is what it is. So in the immortal words of Jean Paul Sartre, “Au Revoir, Golfer. Et payez!”
• Trump regime makes its move to muck up the Tongass National Forest: For decades, environmental groups have pushed to ensure that the virtually untouched old growth temperate rainforest of the Tongass in southeast Alaska remains protected from logging and road building. The forest annually absorbs the carbon equivalent of taking 650,000 automobiles off the road, more than any other national forest, and is home to a broad range of wildlife. Native peoples in the region have been in the forefront of keeping “civilization” at bay. But Friday, after some two years of input and consultation and decades of arguing, the U.S. Department of Agriculture released its final environmental impact statement, one of the final steps in the process of exempting from the
“Roadless Rule” issued in 2001 by President Bill Clinton to prevent commercial
logging and other development in the 9.2 million acres of the Tongass. Alaska’s two senators and sole member of Congress, Republicans all, cheered the Trump move. But Andy Moderow, Alaska director of the Alaska Wilderness League, said in a
statement: "Why, with our climate in crisis and Alaska experiencing climate impacts more acutely than most, are we even discussing chopping down a natural climate solution and a regional economic powerhouse just to ship [timber] overseas? The timber industry is a relic of the past, and today, we should be focused on what kind of world we leave to our kids." After 30 days, the USDA will publish the record of decision after which a lawsuit can be expected to be filed by Earthjustice, which has long defended the Tongass.