What A Day - Lost In Transition

Episode Date: November 12, 2020

The US is still in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the number of confirmed cases rising by 70 percent in the past two weeks. The CDC put out a new guidance that said face masks protect the person wearing the mask as well as the people around them—which is one more reason to keep wearing them. Republicans are still occupying an alternate reality where they largely refuse to acknowledge that Joe Biden has won the presidential election, even as Biden and his team of outside allies start preparing for the transition. Biden announced former White House ebola response coordinator Ron Klain as his Chief Of Staff, and we’re learning more about his plans to address the global climate crisis. And in headlines: a president’s ouster in Peru, TikTok asks for clarity on ban, and Ring recalls doorbells after they light on fire.

It's Thursday, November 12th. I'm Akilah Hughes. And I'm Gideon Rasnick, and this is What A Day, where we are making the bold observation that there are now two lame ducks named Donald. Yes, you're insulting a beloved Disney character, but I do see your point. I will be supporting the cartoon Donald Duck for president at some future time. Yeah, his no pants mandate is really popular. It's liberating, frankly. On today's show, the Biden transition continues and what outside allies are looking for.

Then some headlines. But first, the latest. America is still in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, with cases and deaths rising almost everywhere. In the past two weeks, the number of confirmed cases has increased by 70%. It was just Monday that we reported 10 million total cases over the course of the pandemic in America. And just days later, we've added a quarter million more. Across the country, more than 65,000 people are hospitalized, a record, and deaths are starting to trend above 1,400 per day, which means it's the worst we've experienced since the enormous

spikes in September, two weeks after Labor Day, and schools returning to class. Yeah, it is a very, very serious situation. And new daily cases are hitting records day after day as well. So where, when we look at this, is the pandemic hitting the most right now? Is that even the right question to pose? I mean, honestly, the whole country is a hotspot. So there are obviously places that do have it worse, but nowhere is necessarily doing like great right now. In North Dakota, which has seen a 55% rise in COVID-related deaths in the past week,

nurses who tested positive for the virus are still on the job because there are so many staffing shortages. Texas just became the first state to pass one million COVID infections. And in El Paso, there are refrigerated trucks on the street to hold the dead. So it's kind of like that devastating scene we saw in New York this past spring. Other states to continue watching are Illinois, which has seen a 60 percent increase in cases in just the past seven days, as well as Iowa, Wisconsin, Wyoming, you know, just to name a few, because again, cases are rising almost everywhere. Yeah, it's really devastating. And so what are the states actually doing about this so far? Has there been any new guidance for how to flatten the curve again?

I mean, of course, there's nothing from the lame ducks or loser in the White House, but the CDC did put out new guidance on masks that suggest that masks do also protect the person who is wearing the mask. The going wisdom before this was that masks only help the people exposed to you, which wasn't really an effective enough message for the more selfish among us. But now that masks have been confirmed to help the wearer as well, maybe we'll see less reluctance to mask mandates. In many locations, new rules have been put in place. New York, for example, is closing bars, restaurants and gyms at 10 p.m. each night to slow the spread. In Wisconsin, where Governor Tony Evers has warned that ICU beds will be at capacity within seven days if they don't stop the spread,

they are encouraging everyone to stay home unless they're essential workers or doing essential tasks. So it seems likely that we're all going to be trending towards more restrictions across the nation. So if you can, stay home and stay safe. And just one final bit on COVID. Moderna has moved their vaccine to an independent committee who will analyze its effectiveness. So things seem pretty good in vaccine world. Yeah, vaccine world is the world I want to live in for sure. Same. But let's turn now to the election in America. Republicans are still occupying an alternate reality where they largely refuse to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the presidential election, even as Biden, his team, and outside allies start to think through what his administration is going to look like. And the

political center of the universe has shifted to Georgia, where yesterday the Republican Secretary of State announced the details of a recount. So take us through what we've learned. Yeah, so Brad Raffensperger, this might be a name we hear a lot in the coming day, new character, if you will. He's the Secretary of State, and he acquiesced to a hand recount of the presidential race in Georgia, where Biden currently leads Trump by more than 14,000 votes. And this comes after a lot of pressure from the Trump campaign, as well as calls from the state's current two Republican senators for him to resign for no reason.

The baseless contention has been that some sort of fraud corrupted the election results here, which Raffensperger and others, of course, have found no evidence for. In fact, election officials in Georgia have been pointing out that this was actually a pretty successful elections process overall, despite the pandemic, despite the heated political environment, shall we say. But, you know, on the recount front, specifically, Raffensperger has said they're aiming to have that done by the formal deadline for certification in the state, which is November 20th. And the hand recount goes above and beyond the typical scan recount and will cost money and manpower to do to the point that the state is actually going to

push back local elections that were scheduled for next month to coincide with the January runoffs. It mostly seems like an attempt, honestly, to buy more time from the Trump campaign to keep disputing this stuff. It's not likely to make a substantive change in the results. In most recent examples, we have shift margins by a few hundred votes at the absolute most. And Raffensperger himself does not think the outcome is in doubt. Yeah, I mean, neither do I. Meanwhile, the rest of the reality-based world is preparing for the new incoming administration. So what's going on there? Well, first of all, not to keep talking about Georgia, but everyone is going to keep talking about Georgia for months now. It plays into the planning because the last other outstanding race

in Alaska for Senate got called yesterday for the incumbent Republican. So that means that the current Senate makeup is 50 Republicans, 48 Democrats. So there's reporting from the New York Times that the Biden team is essentially preparing for two possible realities we could live in next year. One, the good one, where Democrats win both runoffs and control the Senate via a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Harris and start churning out economic recovery packages, a government employment program, giving people jobs in testing and tracing, tax increases on corporations and the wealthy, the expansion of the Affordable Care Act, etc., and so forth. The other less desirable is where

Republicans hold the majority in the Senate, and the administration relies on executive actions and negotiations with McConnell, which good luck on that point. And in any scenario, one of the policy areas where reporting suggests that Biden and his team have started to map things out in a new and interesting way is climate change. That's right. Yeah. The president elect, thankfully, seems extremely focused on this and has been discussing it in conversations with foreign leaders. It's been a really weird side by side to see leaders in other countries talking about Biden as the next president. They plan to work with him on specific issues like climate change while Republicans here continue to deny reality. But that's life. Anyway, there was a story in the Washington Post about how Biden wants to use as much executive authority as possible to address the global climate crisis. That would involve using departments throughout the administration to tackle climate change in

different ways, whether that's through regulatory policies at the Treasury Department, electric vehicles through the Department of Transportation, or the creation of a White House National Climate Council. They also want to immediately act to incentivize other countries to amp up their actions before the U.N. climate talks next year. If we do a good job, maybe they will as well. And in addition to Biden's own team, there are allies on the outside beginning to address some of these central questions and give suggestions. Senator Elizabeth Warren, for example, wrote an op-ed for The Post advising that the incoming administration declare the climate crisis a national emergency from the jump and do other big things like cancel a chunk of student loan debt and raise the minimum wage for federal contractors to $15 an hour. All things, she says, the administration has legal authority to do by themselves. I sure hope that

they do it. The other thing that people are interested in is the personnel of this incoming administration. Last night, Biden announced one new name, Ron Klain, as his chief of staff. Klain has done a lot in his career, but one of the more notable roles, given the pandemic, was his job as White House Ebola response coordinator during the Obama administration. We're not going to get into all the names being floated, but there was an interesting proposal from the Sunrise Movement yesterday. So let's talk about that. Yeah, again, on the personnel question, we're probably going to have to wait and see how the Senate shakes out because, you know, they could block these appointments. But the Sunrise Movement and Justice Democrats put out this proposal yesterday that they're calling the climate mandate,

urging the Biden administration to create a new office of climate mobilization that would coordinate across the federal government. In addition, they had this kind of wish list of sorts of potential cabinet appointments, including California Representative Barbara Lee as Secretary of State, Warren at Treasury, Representative Rashida Tlaib at HUD, and Senator Bernie Sanders at the Department of Labor. And Sanders, for what it's worth, seemed to confirm in an interview that he'd take the job if he was asked. So while this is a wish list, it's interesting to keep an eye on because these various groups that helped turn out voters for Biden are going to be looking for accountability and a seat at the table as they get the ball rolling on this new administration.

And then one other example we saw of this just yesterday, the Human Rights Campaign put out a blueprint for LGBTQ policy in the Biden administration. It includes barring discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity that's based on that Supreme Court decision earlier this year. Also rescinding the Trump administration ban on service in the military for the trans community and ending the prohibition on blood donations by gay and bisexual men, among other things. So we'll continue to keep track of the transition team's plans and what outside allies are pushing for. But that is the latest for now. It's Thursday WOD Squad.

And today we're talking about a great animal rescue. Last week, a former bird clinic employee named Ariel Cordova Rojas spotted a very sick swan in New York's Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. Cordova Rojas knew she wanted to get treatment for the swan, but it weighed 17 pounds and couldn't walk or fly. So in an epic story detailed by the New York Times, she wrapped it in her jacket and proceeded to carry it 23 miles to her old bird clinic via foot, car, and subway.

It's an inspiring tale of love for nature and public transportation, so we encourage you to check it out. But Giddy, my question for you. Have you had any memorable encounters with wild animals? I think I had a somewhat recent run-in with a squirrel that I did not enjoy. I was sitting in the park under a tree and there were these little like pellet things that kept hitting my head over and over like they were it's like little pods or something i'm not going to say that they're like

peas because that's that's not there's that doesn't exist in that capacity but it was like little like things that were getting chomped on. And I looked up and this fucking squirrel was running from branch to branch and eating every single one. And then like literally throwing the trash on my head. That's hilarious. Honestly, do you think that that's like some reincarnated person that just has it out for you? Like, that's pretty wild. Maybe I was a little upset at the notion that I could have offended this guy

while he was enjoying a copious lunch. But, you know, I hope it's settled now. I don't want him to come back after me again because he'd get a little bit aggressive. Yeah, that was pretty wild. But same question for you, Akilah. What's your bad encounter with wild animals? Bad or good?

I mean, I've had so many. You know, when I lived in Orlando, we had lizards that would just be in the house all of a sudden. And then we all were like all hands on deck with brooms trying to like get it out the door. They have really big birds there. They're scary. There's like these cranes that are just in the parking lot of everywhere. And they'll just like walk up to your window and you're like, I guess I'm going to knock it out of the car. But for sure, the most formative one was the raccoons that tunneled into my house.

I lived in Kentucky and we literally had to move. Like it was the craziest experience of my life. I still dislike raccoons to this day. So like you guys can be mad at me, but their hands are weird and they literally use them to tunnel into the home and then had babies in the wall. Those babies died. The house smelled like death and we moved away so i gotta say that's definitely i don't i don't want that to get beat is all i can say no that should never in the history of the rest of civilization get beat so did somebody move into that house and was it it like a, hey, just so you know, dead, dead baby raccoons in the wall?

Honestly, I think the bank was just like, you know what, we'll just like gut it. Like, they just gutted the whole house. So I'm not even sure someone lives there now. This was like more than a decade ago. But yeah, it was really disgusting. And I couldn't recommend it less. That's insane. Nature legitimately took over. They won. That's a W for nature. They found a way. And just like that, we've checked our temps.

Stay safe. Hopefully all of your animal encounters are good and we will be back with some headlines. Headlines. Daily protests in Peru are ramping up this week after the country's president was ousted by their Congress on Monday. Newly ex-president Martin Vizcarra was extremely popular and was known for his strict anti-corruption efforts, including investigating high-ranking leaders and trying to get rid of parliamentary immunity. Even as he was being pushed out, he pointed out that at least 68 of the lawmakers

voting to impeach him were being investigated for crimes like money laundering and homicide. Congress used the argument that Vizcarra needed to go because of quote, permanent moral incapacity. The next day, the head of Congress, Manuel Moreno, was sworn in as the country's new president, sparking more protests at the Capitol. Demonstrators and critics are calling the move by Congress a coup and view the new president and government as illegitimate. Today is the deadline that Trump set for TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, to divest from the app in the U.S., but the app claims the Trump administration has gone dark and they don't know what's going on.

In case you forgot, Trump previously threatened to ban TikTok to coerce its Chinese parent company to sell its assets to American companies. In September, TikTok reached a deal to bring on Oracle and Walmart as investors, which Trump tentatively approved, but the company says it still hasn't gotten the official green light from the Trump administration. The app asked a federal appeals court to extend today's deadline, seeing as they haven't heard from the government in weeks, probably because Trump moved on from TikTok and is now focused on rogue mailmen who saw ghosts casting ballots or something. If TikTok doesn't get the extension and the deal isn't finalized, the government could theoretically sue to ban the app from the country, which Biden would have to reverse on day one to hold on to support from Zoomers and me.

Yeah, that's right. Joe, listen up. The unblinking robot eye that watches over wealthy people's houses ring doorbells are being recalled after 23 reports of them lighting on fire. The recall applies to 350,000 second-generation Ring doorbells, and it was announced on Tuesday. Basically, people were using their own long screws from home to install the doorbells and ramming them into the battery. The recall consists of revised instructions that say,

please do not do that. Ring has also faced criticism for a pilot program approved last week in Jackson, Mississippi, that will let police there tap into some doorbell cameras to monitor places where a crime has been reported. Ring parent company Amazon made it clear this program is happening without their input, and privacy advocates say it undermines civil liberties and pits neighbors against each other. Personally, I keep my Ring camera pointed into my apartment, so I'm encouraged to behave myself at all times. Oh man, weird feed. The company we all look to for tips on personal styling, UPS, will no longer ban drivers from having beards or natural black hairstyles.

Be right back, calling UPS to complain that we all ordered this like 50 years ago. It's arriving very late. And also, I'm not sure if this makes sense, but the box is really wet. New UPS guidelines permit a bunch of what it calls natural hairstyles, including afros, braids, twists, and knots. UPS has always had strict appearance standards, and it actually got in trouble for them as recently as 2018 when the company paid $4.9 million to settle a lawsuit that said that banning beards and long hair was religious discrimination. It is, and not just because many gods have both of them. This week's policy shift comes as UPS hired its first female CEO, who also added unconscious bias, diversity, and inclusion training.

UPS also got rid of dress code rules that varied by gender, like ones regulating the length of shorts. In other words, UPS employees can now dress the same whether they're the king of queens or the queen of queens. Dress like Lea Ramani. It's your choice. And those are the headlines. That's all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, behave yourself in front of your ring doorbell and tell your friends to listen.

And if you're into reading and not just frantic, unread emails from TikTok to Trump like me, one of these also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Akilah Hughes. I'm Gideon Resnick. And check out the King of Queens on TBS. They are not paying us to say that, but if you want to just flip on over there and look at it, that'd be cool with us. Yeah, if you got that channel, let it ride, my man. I'm not going to stop you. What a day is a production of Crooked Media. It's recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis. Sonia Tan is our assistant producer. Our head writer is John Milstein and our executive producers are Katie Long, Akilah Hughes, and me. Our theme music is by Colin Gilliard and Kashaka.