A special NYTimes/Opinion interactive, Nov. 2.

All 15 of our opinion columnists explain what the past four years have cost America, and what's at stake in this election.

By Dirk VanderHart @ opb.org, Nov. 2

Bracing for the possibility of political violence stemming from Tuesday’s election, Oregon Gov. Kate Brown is declaring a state of emergency in the Portland area and readying National Guard troops for potential deployment.

Brown announced Monday that she’d use her authority to declare an emergency from 5 p.m. Monday until 5 p.m. Wednesday. It’s the second time in two months that the governor has declared an emergency in preparation for possible violence.

The declaration allows Brown to rejigger the command structure among law enforcement entities responding to unrest in Portland. Rather than the Portland Police Bureau, which would typically take the lead, response will be co-managed by the Oregon State Police and Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office.

The arrangement is in part a way to allow law enforcement to use crowd control devices such as CS gas, a type of tear gas, which Portland police have been prohibited from using by Mayor Ted Wheeler [....]

When a Justice Department lawyer exposed the agency’s secret role in drug cases, leadership in the intelligence community retaliated.

By Ronan Farrow @ NewYorker.com, Oct. 30 online, audio version available, and Nov. 9 print

Before dawn on January 23, 2019, Mark McConnell arrived at the Key West headquarters of the military and civilian task force that monitors drugs headed to the United States from the Southern Hemisphere. McConnell, a prosecutor at the Department of Justice and a former marine, left his phone in a box designed to block electronic transmissions, and passed through a metal detector and a key-card-protected air lock to enter the building. On the second floor, he punched in the code for his office door, then locked it behind him. On a computer approved for the handling of classified information, he loaded a series of screenshots he had taken, showing entries in a database called Helios, which federal law enforcement uses to track drug smugglers. McConnell e-mailed the images to a classified government hotline for whistle-blowers. Then he printed backup copies and, following government procedures for handling classified information, sealed them in an envelope that he placed in another envelope, marked “secret.” He hid the material behind a piece of furniture.

McConnell had uncovered what he described as a “criminal conspiracy” perpetrated by the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. Every year, entries in the Helios database lead to hundreds of drug busts, which lead to prosecutions in American courts. The entries are typically submitted to Helios by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the F.B.I., and a division of the Department of Homeland Security. But McConnell had learned that more than a hundred entries in the database that were labelled as originating from F.B.I. investigations were actually from a secret C.I.A. surveillance program. He realized that C.I.A. officers and F.B.I. agents, in violation of federal law and Department of Justice guidelines, had concealed the information’s origins from federal prosecutors, leaving judges and defense lawyers in the dark. Critics call such concealment “intelligence laundering.” In the nineteen-seventies, [....]

By Burl Gilyard @ tcbmag.com, Nov. 1, with photos

Downtown Minneapolis has been largely abandoned since last spring. But on a Wednesday night in late August, a raucous round of looting and window smashing hit the Nicollet Mall like a handful of grenades. Amid the chaos, Brit’s Pub in the 1100 block was set ablaze.

“Looters got in and went through everything. Computers, TVs, broke everything, broke doors, got into the office … for a couple of hours they had a ball, and then decided to set the place on fire,” says Kam Talebi, CEO of Kaskaid Hospitality, which acquired Brit’s in 2019. Talebi says that the staff called 911 but got no response. “I just don’t think that the police had enough resources to deal with what was happening.”

The outbreak was fueled by false reports that Minneapolis police had shot a Black man on the mall. The man, a suspect in an earlier homicide, actually shot himself in the head as police approached. But the looters and window smashers were not interested in the details.

Talebi sounds unsure about Brit’s reopening. “We certainly will look to bring it back. I don’t know how long it’s going to take.” He speaks for many downtown business operators airing frustration with the double whammy of the Covid-19 pandemic and the growing perception of downtown as a lawless no-man’s-land in the city. “There’s no office [workers], there’s no shows, there’s no sports, and everybody fears coming downtown,” Talebi says. “So I’d like somebody to tell me why I should open up.”

Two weeks later, many downtown buildings’ windows were still boarded up, including the Nordstrom Rack at IDS Center, the first level of Target Corp.’s headquarters building, Foot Locker on Seventh Street, and the Caribou Coffee next to Brit’s. Some, like Nordstrom Rack, were open for business.

Taking a spin through the center city these days can be eerie and unsettling [....]

By  Rachael Bade @ WashingtonPost.com, Nov. 1

[....] even before the votes are counted Tuesday, the 100-member Congressional Progressive Caucus is divided over how to use its political clout, with some members advocating an aggressive approach — including voting more often as a bloc to wield power — and others urging a more pragmatic strategy.

The internal dispute is unnerving outside liberal groups — and privately even some inside the caucus — who fear that their shot at revolutionary change with a Democratic White House and Senate could slip away at the exact moment the party is in charge. In fact, many activists want the group to adopt hardball tactics and create the left’s version of the House Freedom Caucus, the conservative coalition that regularly undermined GOP leadership, opposed bipartisan bills in a bid to extract concessions and pushed the party to the right [....]

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the co-chair of the caucus, is pushing changes to the leadership structure of the group as well as other changes, including attendance and voting requirements. With Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), a co-chair, stepping down, Jayapal would be the sole leader next year [....] But in a conference call last week, some members of the caucus raised concerns about the proposed changes, fearing that they would force some members out. Pelosi ally Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) and Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) were among those urging caution [....]

Coronavirus victim's vote goes uncounted..Marvin Thielman, an 84-year-old retiree in Chilton, a town of about 4,000 people between Milwaukee and Green Bay, died of coronavirus this month after sending in his ballot by mail, according to state records and his family. Thielman was a strong supporter of President Donald Trump and made sure to fill out his ballot before he went to the hospital, his wife Mildred Thielman said.

...Putin laid bare the huge disconnect between autocrats and normal people -- the autocrats' ability to do things that simply don't occur to people with a sense of decency and a respect for norms and traditions. Autocrats are aware of the consequences they might face for the damage they do, but they believe they can avoid those consequences by staying in power, forever if necessary....